The Gatekeeper, page 10
The information he shares is so crazy, Dez is forced to believe it’s true.
CHAPTER 26
Midday Friday, Petra Alexandris’s house staff, Alonzo, returns to the Malibu Colony house and spots Dez, leaning against the garage and checking scores on his mobile. Alonzo is just back from a rehearsal. He is a dancer, as Dez suspected when they met; Petra confirmed it. Singer, too. He’s done some off-Broadway road shows and his career is on an uptick. His deal with Petra is: He runs her household until his agent calls. Then he’s out the door in a nanosecond. She’s agreed, and Dez can see why. Theirs may be an employee/employer relationship, but they’ve become family.
Alonzo looks a wreck. He’s wearing an old, stretched-out T-shirt and gym shorts and sneakers, and it looks like rehearsal kicked his arse. He looked as willow slim when they met but Dez gets a look at the corded muscles of his legs and sees that’s an illusion. Like with most dancers, the man’s tightly kitted together.
“Well, well, well.”
Dez says, “Look what I found in the guest cottage.” He’s carrying a soccer ball. He lets it drop and knees it in the direction of Alonzo.
Who deftly stops it with a side foot and boots it back. Alonzo’s smiling now, but he looks a little confused.
Dez stops it with his thigh, dribbles the ball a bit with his boot. “Do us a favor, mate. See that power pole, behind ye and to the right, twenty meters?”
He sends the ball back. Alonzo stops it, dances around it a bit, his eyes sweeping behind him.
“Yeah?”
“Surveillance camera, fifteen meters up.”
Alonzo’s smile evaporates a little. He lets the ball escape his dribbling, retrieves it, glances at the power pole. Spots it.
“Dios.”
“Got that right. Found more. Vincent Guerrero. The whole feckin’ house’s under twenty-four-seven surveillance. Inside and out. Can’t use house phones or mobiles, either. Internet’s the same. It’s all monitored, mate.”
They pass the ball back and forth. Two guys, just horsing around in the alley leading to the six-car garage of the estate. Alonzo is trying to keep up the easy smile. “Does she know?”
“Not yet.” Dez stops the ball with a deft knee. “I don’t trust Guerrero. She does. Puts me in a bind.”
Alonzo’s turn to stop the ball and kick it back.
“Do us a favor? Ask herself to meet me, sharpish, yeah?” Dez heels it back.
“Where?”
“Dunno Los Angeles all that well. Need it to be open. Public-like. A place she won’t raise suspicions.”
“The Getty.” Alonzo doesn’t hesitate. “It’s perfect. She’s a big donor. She goes there to clear her head a couple times a month.”
“Done.” Dez slices the ball back and Alonzo catches it in his hands. He’s skilled. Dez outlines the steps he wants Petra to take to avoid detection. Alonzo writes none of it down but doesn’t need to.
Dez steps closer and offers a hand. They turn it into a handshake–chest bump hug. “Owe you, mate.”
“Do right by her.”
Dez turns and walks back toward the stolen F-250 Super Duty with its new paint job and new plates.
CHAPTER 27
Petra Alexandris drives downtown and meets a girlfriend for coffee, leaves her car, and the girlfriend gives her a lift to the Getty. She’s left her mobile in her glove box. Catching an Uber would’ve left a credit card trail. Dez had explained all this tradecraft nonsense to Alonzo, feeling foolish, melodramatic spy-craft, this, but he knows for a fact that Petra’s under surveillance.
The J. Paul Getty Museum is perched on a hill with a sweeping view of Los Angeles and the ocean. It’s easy enough to go there just to enjoy the view and the architecture, never mind the actual collection, which is world-class. Dez has visited it twice since hitting town.
Her hair is scraped back in a ponytail. She’s wearing jeans and short suede boots with Spanish heels and, as usual, a man’s white dress shirt. Dez wonders what kind of mutant power she’s got. It’s basics, yeah? Trousers, shirt, and boots. Dez wears the same, but he looks like a right thug. Petra looks like the raw energy and edgy sexiness of California rolled up into one person. If you could bottle that …
Petra air-kisses him, a long-fingered, pianist’s hand on his beefy shoulder. They walk the grounds a bit. “Why are we meeting here?”
“Your lad Guerrero. The whole house in Malibu is under computer surveillance. He’s been watching you. Live video streaming. Monitoring your phones an’ internet. I’ve disabled it.”
Petra pauses and squeezes the bridge of her nose, as if to fend off a migraine. Dez waits.
“That’s…” But she gets no further. She has no words.
Another minute passes. She composes herself. “Okay. This other thing. How bad is it?”
“Pretty fecking bad. Sorry.”
“You’ve slept with me, Desmond. You can swear in front of me.”
“Sister Agnes would’ve approved of neither.” He points to a stone bench, a bit separated from the tourists.
They sit. “Start at the beginning,” she says. “Details matter. Impressions as well as facts.”
Dez is reminded that she’s a world-class lawyer.
“Ever hear of the State of Jefferson?”
She frowns. “The idea’s been around for decades. Take the rural counties of Northern California and the rural counties of Eastern and Southern Oregon, and split them off into the fifty-first state. It’d be an ultraconservative enclave on the West Coast. Capital would be … Yreka, maybe? Or Roseville? I forget.”
“Good marks t’you. The State of Lexington is similar. Only it’s the arid parts of Central California. Oregon’s not involved.”
Petra nods. “Well, that’d be pretty dumb. The money in California is in the major cities, the high-tech corridor, and the agriculture sector. You’re talking about the part of California that has none of the above. They’d be giving up more than they’d be gaining.”
“Not how they see it. They’d be gaining independence.”
“From what?”
“From Sacramento. From Democrats. From Congress. From atheists and Jews and people o’ color and the LGBTQ lot.”
“Fanciful.” Petra has reached for her cell phone three times while they’ve talked, and three times remembered it’s in the glove box of her car. She’s like a smoker with no smokes. She’d planned to watch the dollar versus the Turkish lira today, because she’s hoping to bankroll Ankara for a new antimissile system. “I’m guessing the State of Lexington is named for Lexington and Concord. The first battles of the Revolutionary War. What does any of this have to do with Triton Expediters?”
“Say you wanted to create a new state run by White Aryans. What would you need?”
She decides to play along. “I don’t know. A constitution. A state assembly, or legislature. Infrastructure, I suppose. An economic plan. Interstate trade deals.”
Dez says, “Probably, sure, but you’d also need law enforcement and a national guard, yeah? And you’d need some walking-around money. Say, one point three billion dollars. For starters.”
Any lightness in her tone evaporates. Her eyes go flinty.
Dez waits.
“You’re joking.”
“Spoke to one of the arseholes in this Aryan bunch. He says a largish sector of the U.S. military is getting its waterfowl in a linear formation. Getting ready to help create the State of Lexington. Got the personnel. Got the funding. Waiting for the go-sign.”
“That’s … Dez, that’s insane!”
“I know.”
“That couldn’t happen!”
“I know. It’s bonkers. But there you go. If they weren’t nuts, they wouldn’t be white supremacists.”
“Nuts or not, law enforcement would swat this stupid rebellion in about three minutes. I’m telling you, if that’s what’s really behind the attack on me, then we’re fine. We tell Admiral Lighthouse. We’ll alert the governor and the police. We’ll alert the FBI. This thing goes away between news cycles.”
Dez nods. “Yeah. That’s almost, to the pound sterling, what I’d pay for it all, too.”
She inhales, lets it out. “Whew. But these fools really believe they could split off from California?”
Dez shrugs.
“Well, they get points for thinking big. Even if they are living in fantasyland.”
“S’pose you’re right.”
She studies him, cocks an eyebrow. “But…?”
Again he shrugs. “Dunno. Feels like I’m not seeing the whole board. Feels like there are chess pieces moving about in the dark.”
Petra takes his hand. “Hey. A revolt against Sacramento just might be the best-case scenario we could have hoped for. We call Gerald Lighthouse. You tell him what you know. Easy.”
Dez squeezes her hand. She has long, strong hands, muscles delineated in her wrist and forearm; hands honed playing tennis and racquetball. But her hand looks comical inside his. She reaches over with her free hand and teases his unruly, wavy hair.
She sighs. “I’ve been trying to figure out what’s behind all this for weeks now. Ever since I spotted the missing money. I haven’t breathed normally in so long, I feel like I forgot how. Come on. I know a place we can call the admiral.”
CHAPTER 28
Petra uses Dez’s phone to text a girlfriend who is a pilot for United. She texts back from London: Back on Tuesday—mi casa su casa. The pilot keeps a bungalow in Venice, and Dez drives them there in the stolen F-250.
The place is small, a 1930s stucco cottage with a terra-cotta roof and a postage-stamp-sized garden, hidden down a backstreet and overlooking one of the many canals. Dez parks a block away; old habit. In front of the cottage, he peers at the store-bought security lash-up as Petra tries to remember the password to deactivate the friend’s alarm. Dez reaches out to the ten-key pad, holds down the seven and the nine for three seconds, then taps five five five.
The door clacks open. Dez shakes his head sadly. “Shoddy, that.”
Petra laughs. “Gatekeeper?”
He shrugs. “Force of habit.”
Inside, the place has hardwood floors and arched, cutout stucco doorways with no doors between rooms. It’s tiny, fit for a single person, but spotless and well aired-out. Still using Dez’s phone, Petra texts Admiral Gerald Lighthouse in Washington. Not his secretary, not his aide, not his office. She has his personal phone. She reads his return text. “He’s at the Capitol. Appropriations Committee. This’ll take hours.”
Dez steps into the tiny kitchen. “There’s wine.”
“Let’s.”
He opens and pours two glasses of a pinot grigio so colorless it looks like tap water, and so tasty that Petra groans a little, eyelids fluttering.
“How long a wait?” Dez asks.
She grins at him, slips out of her booties. “You’re not good at downtime, are you, chef?”
“Never have been.”
“What do you do when you’re not playing guitar or rescuing women in hotels?”
“Laundry, mostly.”
She takes his glass, sets both of them down, and begins unbuttoning her starched white shirt.
“Want to kill some time?”
* * *
Petra and the pilot, apparently, are very good friends, Dez thinks.
Petra makes love like it’s a time trial, all energy and passion. Dez rolls out from under her at one point, leans up on one elbow, and says, “Slow down. It’s the journey, not the destination.”
She pushes him back down. “The destination’s pretty damn important, chef.”
* * *
They’re lying there, drenched in sweat, naked. Dez is still breathing heavy from their lovemaking. Out of absolutely nowhere, Petra laughs. “You are by far the most bowlegged man I’ve ever slept with.”
“You’re not the first to observe that,” he murmurs.
“If your knees touched, you’d be six-two.”
It’s his turn to laugh. She’s not wrong.
“Your accent. Is that what they call Cockney?”
“It is not.”
“What is it then?”
He thinks about it awhile. “Dunno, really. Grew up loads of places. Liverpool, Ireland, Scotland, couple others. I sound like a Geordie to some; sound Irish to others. Total mutt, me.”
She ponders that. Everything in Petra’s life revolves around her Greek American heritage, her family, her father, the Alexandris company. To not know your own history … She can’t imagine it.
* * *
Later, she gets up to quick-shower away her sweat, then lies back down next to him. Dez is now in his boxers, Petra in her once-pressed white shirt. Her razor-straight, pitch-black hair is a mess and looks spectacularly sexy. On the way back from the shower, she retrieves the pinot grigio.
She feels the tension in the corded muscles of his shoulder. “What?” she says, smiling over at him.
Dez has one forearm the size of cordwood behind his head. He’s staring at the popcorn ceiling.
“What?” she pushes.
“I sort of understand wanting to start your own state. I realize there’d be pushback. But an armed cohort, pullin’ off a kidnapping in a fancy hotel? A jailbreak that involved shooting cops an’ soldiers? Seems overkill.”
They lie like that, thinking about it.
Dez ruminates. “You’d need a constitution. You’d need a legislature or assembly. Infrastructure. An economic plan. Interstate trade deals. Law enforcement. National guard. Walking-around money…”
She says, “What else would you need?”
“A capital.”
She thinks about it. He can practically see her drawing a geographic map of Central California against the backdrop of the off-white ceiling. She puts one arm behind her head, unconsciously mimicking him.
“Santa Margarita?” she says. “Paso Robles? Atascadero? What else is up there?”
“How about a server farm adjacent to a nuclear power plant?”
“Triton has a server farm up there.”
“Aye. Saw it on that big map in the lobby of your headquarters.”
She looks at him, a vertical crease of worry returning to the space between her brows.
“A Triton facility?”
“Said it yourself: Triton’s a multinational corporation, love. But if it were a country, it’d have—”
“One of the ten largest economies on Earth.” She gets up on one elbow, brushes hair away from her eyes, and studies his.
“Dez? What the hell?”
She’s looming over him. He looks up, almost straight up, into her mahogany brown eyes. “You’re missing a bit north of a billion dollars, yeah? What if it isn’t missing? What if it’s being repurposed? Within Triton?”
He can see the blood drain from Petra’s face.
“What if your own company is behind this fecking mess?”
CHAPTER 29
Later, Petra hears Dez puttering around in the tiny kitchen, through the hobbit stucco cutout door. “Jennai told me her coffee machine is broken, so—”
She smells coffee. Dez has found two cups and is sniffing a half-pint of half-and-half from the fridge.
“Want some?”
“She said her machine was broken.”
Dez says, “Was. Fixed.”
“How?”
He pours two cups. “Are you interested in the forensic mechanics of coffee machines?”
“No.”
“Then drink up and riddle me this: If Triton is involved in this shite—sorry—who could pull it off?”
Petra doctors her coffee. “My father could. I could. But this isn’t possible. Triton is not part of this.”
“Sure, are ye?”
Her eyes say no. “Absolutely.”
“Humor me.”
She uses both hands, alternating, to smooth her hair back and re-create her ponytail. “My father and I could. The CFO, Colin Frye, could. In theory? The chief technical officer, Brittany Kinney. She controls the computers that track the company’s flow of money.”
“What’s a CFO?”
She looks at him over the rim of her cup. She says, “C. F. O.,” but slower.
Dez blinks.
“Chief financial officer. How do you not know that?”
“Never worked anywhere that had a chief financial officer.” He shrugs. “Never worked anywhere that had, y’know, finances t’speak of.”
Petra releases her breath, realizing she’s keyed up. Sex should do the opposite but it never has for her. “Sorry.”
“So you four could’ve pulled off this caper?”
“Maybe. There could be others, if they were acting together. But again: It’s not really possible. We’re talking hypotheticals.”
“Let’s chat with your mate Lighthouse, yeah? Lay it out for him. If it’s a lark, well, no harm no foul.”
Petra agrees.
They sip their coffee and wait for Dez’s phone to chirp back. As they wait, Petra uses it to check a dozen or more websites. Her thumb fairly flies across the screen.
Five minutes later, Admiral Lighthouse lets them know he’s free, via text. Petra calls. The secretary of the Navy tells them he’s just stepped out of Committee; he’s in the House.
“This isn’t a secure line. Desmond Limerick is with me. We’re on speakerphone.”
“Mr. Limerick. Did you find something?”
Dez steps closer to his phone in Petra’s hand. “Aye. Sailor. Petty Officer Tom Polhaus. Assigned to Joint Base McKinzie-Clark, whatever the hell that is. Says a bunch of Nazi types swiped a huge amount of money and plan to break away from California.”
He pauses.
Lighthouse says, “That’s insane.”
“Well, yeah. Nazis, them. Insanity is the baseline, innit.”
“It would never work. Nothing like it is even remotely possible.”
“Petra says the same, sir, an’ she’s smarter’n me. I buy stupid by the pint. But now you know what I know, so me part in it’s done.”
