The Gatekeeper, page 4
Radiant.
Dez circles the Ferrari, fingers snugged into the back pockets of his jeans for fear he’ll leave smudges. He whistles, high-low.
She says, “Two-fifty GT Berlinetta. The fifty-nine.”
“Explains the shorter wheelbase. Lovely sled, this.”
She uses a fob to unlock the car. “You know your classics.”
He climbs in on the passenger side, longing to be in the other seat but knowing better than to dare ask. “I know beauty when I see it.”
He shouldn’t be flirting with her. Absolutely should not.
Can’t help it.
She pulls out quickly onto the streets and heads toward the ocean. The classic Ferrari is proof of a higher being. Dez grins like a kid at Disneyland.
The woman says, “Desmond Aloysius Limerick.”
“And you are?”
“Petra Alexandris. Chief legal counsel, Triton Expediters. You met my father, Constantine Alexandris. He founded the company.”
“Heard of it,” he says. “Big military contractor.”
“That’s a bit of an understatement. What do you do, Mr. Limerick?”
“Dez, to me friends. Retired.”
She smiles at him from behind her stylish sunglasses. “Retired at what? Thirty-five?”
“Aye.”
“From what?”
“This an’ that. Odd jobs. Was a line cook at a beach shack in Trinidad for a while. Quite liked that.”
“Uh-huh,” she says. “Why did you get involved in my kidnapping, Mr. Limerick?”
He shrugs. Los Angeles whisks past the windshield.
“As opposed to what?”
CHAPTER 9
The house is in Malibu Colony Beach. It’s alabaster white. It stands on stilts and, when the tide is in, it juts out over the water from a cliff face, hovering above the Pacific as if an island unto itself. With the tide in, a clear glass floor in the living room creates the illusion of walking on water. All of the west-, north-, and south-facing walls are glass. The house is three stories tall, with a greater dining room and a lesser dining room, about a dozen bedrooms, give or take, and an office that is hardwired, lashed-up to give Petra real-time financial information on four continents. The place has an industrial kitchen for a staff of three or four, although she assures him she has a staff of only one man. There’s a six-car garage, a dock and boathouse, plus an outdoor kitchen with barbecues and smokers and a fridge and freezer and a wet bar.
Petra shows him around the ground floor.
“Bloody amazing.”
“It’s not a museum. You don’t have to whisper. Do you like tequila?”
“Dunno. Never tried it.”
She pours him two fingers, and the same for herself. She shows him the bottle, thinking the label will be familiar and will impress him. He says, “Looks posh.”
“It is.”
“Cheers.” He sips. He winces.
She grins mischievously. “You don’t like it?”
He croaks, “Don’t think anyone living in a wildfire state should serve butane.”
She laughs, and it’s musical. She stands bolt upright and removes her ankle boots by raising one leg behind her, bending at the knee, whisking off the boot with her hand, switching her glass to her other hand, and repeating. Her upper body barely moves throughout. Takes years of yoga or ballet to be that flexible, Dez thinks.
“Alonzo Diaz runs the household. He keeps beer in the fridge. Kitchen’s that way. I’ll be out on the deck. Join me.”
Dez stops to adjust his bootlaces so that he can watch as she inputs a code on a ten-key pad before stepping onto the deck. She’d used a code after parking, to get into the house, too. Different pad, same code.
He finds the industrial kitchen so spotless it could double as an emergency room. A young man is cutting red and yellow bell peppers. It’s the same guy who walked past Dez in the lobby of Triton Expediters and handed him Petra’s card. He’s thin, handsome, and Latino. His hair is moussed and slicked back. He’s added an apron to his ensemble. Dez thinks he couldn’t look that sophisticated on his best day, and his best day wouldn’t involve an apron.
Dez says, “Cheers.”
The man eyes him with nothing but unexpurgated suspicion.
“Herself said you’ve beer…?”
The guy pauses, then nods toward the refrigerator. He never stops cutting the peppers.
Dez finds a beer, uses the trick of snapping off the cap by placing it against the edge of the counter and popping it with the butt of his hand. Dez hunts around for a garbage can and throws away the cap, rather than leaving it for the staff to clean up.
“Ta, then.”
Chop chop chop. The guy never stops staring, never stops cutting. Dez nods and backs out of the kitchen.
He ambles back the way he came, taking in the art and the blond-wood floors, for sure, but also the placement of the cameras and air-pressure monitors. Whoever installed this security lash-up did right by Petra Alexandris. He finds her out on the deck, watching surfers. She leans back on a chaise longue, barefoot, legs crossed at the ankles, two fingers of the tequila resting on the arm of the chair. Dez drags over a second lounger and joins her. It’s a glorious day but, then again, it’s LA. Most of them are, if you get out from under the umbrella of smog.
“You met Alonzo?”
“We hit it off.” Dez takes a slug from the bottle. “Best mates.”
“Our lawyers spoke to the Hotel Tremaine,” she says. “Triton Expediters does a lot of business there. We’ve covered the damages. Your belongings and your guitar are being delivered here within the hour.”
“Ta,” he says, and sips the cold Mexican beer. A little sweet for his taste, but fine.
“I have international resources. I’ve asked everyone who owes me a favor, and everyone who’d like to owe me a favor, to find out who you are, Mr. Limerick.”
Dez says, “Dez.”
“Dez.” She concedes. “What will my contacts find?”
“Did I mention a little beach diner in Trinidad?”
“Remind me not to play poker with you.”
He laughs. “I’m no big mystery. Honest. Just a bloke likes to play music an’ doesn’t mind getting paid for it.”
They sip their drinks and enjoy the day.
“I reached out to a man who is a captain in the U.S. Navy,” she says, addressing the ocean, not Dez. “He drives a destroyer. We dated awhile. I gave him your name.”
Dez sips beer. “He get back to you, your captain?”
“He did not.” She digs a slim cell phone out of the back pocket of her matchsticks. Dez doesn’t know if they give out awards for jeans that do their job well, but if they do, Petra’s jeans would be in the running, worldwide. He drags his eyes off her frame. Not without some difficulty. She thumbs her phone awake. Hands it to him.
“He got back to me.”
Dez reads a name. Gerald Lighthouse. Below which are two words.
Trust him.
“Do you know who Gerald Lighthouse is?”
“Think he was an actor. Was in that thing, with the actress. Them two tykes. Big car chase?”
She says, “Gerald Lighthouse is the U.S. secretary of the Navy.”
Dez hands the phone back. “So, not the actor?”
She smiles. She sips her drink.
They sit and enjoy the view awhile.
At some point, Dez says, “You’re calm.”
“I find this place calming.”
“No, I mean you were almost abducted at gunpoint last night. Handled it well. Still are.”
“Do you know how old I was when I was first kidnapped?”
He shakes his head.
“Twelve. It happened again the week I turned twenty-one. We have K&R insurance. You know…?”
He nods. Kidnap-and-ransom.
“Triton deals with military contracts all over the planet. First-, second-, and third-world contracts. I’ve lived under the threat of kidnapping all my life. It’s partly why I love this house. It’s secure and safe.”
“This your place or the company’s?”
“My father’s, but his second wife died here. Heart attack. He never comes here anymore.”
“She wasn’t your mum?”
She sips tequila. “No, they split up when I was eight. They were … incendiary. Both alpha-Greeks. It was every bit as dramatic as you imagine.”
Dez says, “Who were them fellas last night? And why didn’t you want to have this conversation with your man Guerrero?”
“Not sure. The first part, I mean. It all happened so damn fast! As for the second part…” She pauses, eyes on the roiling Pacific. “I just wanted to thank you in private.”
“Trust Guerrero, do you?”
Petra studies him awhile. Surfers ride frothy curls, and gulls ride thermals. He can see a paraglider, far in the distance.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you staged that bit of legerdemain with your man Alonzo to slip me a note and to distract Guerrero. Because one of his men betrayed you last night, and I’m bettin’ Guerrero handpicks the lads on your security detail.”
Petra goes back to watching the ocean and sipping tequila. Dez lets the moment ride out. She’ll answer the primary question or she won’t, and if she doesn’t, that’s an answer in and of itself.
“The second time I was kidnapped, when I was twenty-one.… God, I just realized that will be fifteen years ago next month.” She shakes her head in wonderment. “The second time I was kidnapped, they held me for a little over ninety seconds and they got a little less than one block away before my security detail overwhelmed them. Vincent Guerrero was leading the team that day. He’s a former Marine. He killed the men who tried to take me. He saved my life.”
And there it is: the nonanswer that serves as an answer in and of itself. Dez finishes his beer. He watches the paraglider. He or she seems to handle the rig well. Dez has done that, but carrying ten kilos of high explosives. He suspects the experience here would be different. He’s in no hurry. He’s sitting outside a stunning home, with a gorgeous view, sipping decent beer, and he’s chatting up a woman of beauty and class. His plans for the day had involved a breakfast burrito and buying toilet paper for his bedsitter so, on the whole, this is better.
“Were you a soldier, Dez?”
“Me? That’d be a laugh. Frightened of me own shadow.”
She says, “Were you a cop?”
“I find law and order to be overrated concepts.”
“Vincent tried to do a background check on you already. He found nothing. Including no criminal record. But you’re trained. You know how to fight men with guns.”
“I do know how to fight men with guns,” he says. “Quickly.”
“Where did you learn to do all that?”
Dez thinks about another in a long line of coy replies but there’s … something going on here. He can’t quite put his finger on it. Petra Alexandris isn’t being nosy. She isn’t being a spoiled rich girl, used to getting her way. She’s not being pushy.
He thinks she’s trying to figure out a way to ask for help. He thinks she’s vastly inexperienced at doing that. Dez finds himself wanting to help her.
“Was a gatekeeper.”
“What’s that?”
He’s already regretting the honesty. He sips his beer, watching the ocean. She waits, eyes on him, her lean body unmoving. Dez has no idea how many people Petra Alexandris has deposed, but he gets the sense that she could outwait him unto death. He sighs. “Had a job opening doors that others couldn’t. Me mates called it the gatekeeper. I know, sounds silly.”
“I think of gatekeepers as people who guard gates. Not people who open them.”
“Aye, but the trick isn’t opening doors. Any half-wit can do that. It’s about keeping ’em open. Closing ’em when needed. Controlling who goes through and who doesn’t. Owning ’em. For as long as needed.”
“Which doors?”
He shrugs. “Them what needs a bit of egressin’.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
He grins at her. “Nah.”
Petra nods toward his forearm and says, “Janus.” She pronounces it ya-noosh.
Dez turns over his right arm, examines the tattoo of the two-faced Roman god. It’s his only visible tattoo when he’s wearing a shirt. He tips his empty bottle toward the tat. “Patron god o’ beginnings an’ gates. Transitions an’ time. Duality an’ doors. Passages an’ endings. Mate of mine.”
“So you open doors that can’t be opened?”
“No. I used to open doors that couldn’t be opened. Now I play guitar. Also, for a while, small engine repair.”
She says, “And a line cook in Trinidad.”
“Jack-of-all-trades,” he says. “Master o’ none.”
Petra sips her drink and watches the ocean, and Dez does, too. Something like five quiet minutes pass.
When she speaks again, she says, “Something’s going on with my company. With Triton Expediters. Something my father doesn’t want me to know about. I began investigating, behind his back. I think…”
She pauses. She drains the tequila. She squints out at the ocean again.
“I need help. And everyone I know today is associated with my company. I have no idea who to trust.”
“What sort of help?”
Petra rises fluidly, all core muscle and gymnast’s balance. She snags her empty glass and his empty bottle en passant, pads barefoot back toward the house.
“I need some doors opened.”
CHAPTER 10
Six months ago, Dez had fallen for every lovely fable doled out by the California tourism industry. But now he’s been here a bit more than two months and doubts he’ll be here two more. He’s passing through, trying to figure out what life is like for a retired bloke with a bit of coin saved up.
He has a friend, an Ethiopian, Ephrem Kebede, living in Torrance. Ephrem has a garage, focusing on German automobiles. Dez has been staying in a room behind the garage, helping a bit with the car repair work. There’s a gym nearby he can hit on the cheap. It’s worked out fine. But now he’s agreed to look into this mess for Petra Alexandris. She’s offered him a detached guest room in a stucco cottage to the south of the great house for the duration of his efforts to help her root out the mystery of her company, and to figure out who sent armed men to her suite at the Tremaine. He accepts, and she writes down the eight-digit code for the property’s wall-mounted keypads that will get him in and out without alerting police or Triton Security personnel. The cottage beats the ever-loving hell out of a room behind a garage in Torrance.
She says, “I’ll pay you.”
He says, “Then we’re in agreement on that.” Only an idiot fights someone else’s battles for free.
She has calls to make to Asia, something about providing funding for a copper mine but the details go over Dez’s head, so he moves his duffel bag and his guitar to the cottage, which has a view of the ocean and also of the big house. He marvels at it all, then catches a Lyft to the shop in Torrance.
He lets Ephrem Kebede know he’s got a gig. Then he grabs the rest of his gear. Including a locking metal tool kit. Also a tablet computer, which is housed in a ruggedized rubber case, surrounded by leather, and showing the nicks and scratches of several violent incidents. Dez kisses the leather exterior but doesn’t realize it. He’ll tell anyone who asks that he isn’t superstitious. Most superstitious people think the same.
Two locked metal boxes hide under the single bed. One belongs to his friend Ephrem Kebede. One belongs to Dez. Ephrem has offered him the use of anything he wants in the first box, because Ephrem knows that Dez knows how to use them.
He uses his thumb pads to spin six locking dials. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is Ephrem’s PAMAS G1, 9mm, and five nine-cartridge magazines. The gun is an inelegant, clunky L-shaped chunk of iron, but it’s been well cared for, oiled and cleaned lovingly. Under it is a militärische schutzhülle quick-draw holster.
Dez sets them both aside and draws back more oilcloth, two layers of it, one flap gingerly folded outside the box, over Dez’s knee, the other flap folded the opposite direction, to reveal a FAMAS G2 bullpup rifle. It features the modified 30-round mag. It’s 750 millimeters long, weighs 4,170 grams when empty, and has a muzzle velocity of 925 millimeters per second, and Dez has memorized all this because—like his friend—Dez has handled this particular assault rifle, and others identical to it, for most of his adult life. It’s an extension of his body. It fits him and Dez fits it, and they’ve seen each other through a lot.
He closes Ephrem’s box and opens the one that belongs to him. That box includes a variety of technical equipment he used when he was a gatekeeper. Some of the equipment he earned. Some of it he invented. Some he still owns the patents for. He’s still a little shocked that he told Petra about being a ’keeper. He hasn’t spoken about that life since he retired.
Within the lockbox is a 290-millimeter fixed-blade knife, made by Coltellerie Maserin, black-coated steel in an olive drab nylon sheath, lying cuddled in black foam. Next to that is a folding Raptor blade, with its steel cutting surface that glides into the anodized aluminum handle. It comes with a belt clip, and the belt clip hides an array of lockpicks.
Dez doesn’t figure he’ll need any of Ephrem Kebede’s firepower, not today, but it’s a comfort to know it’s available should that change. He takes his knives.
Ephrem has a thirty-year-old Jeep that a customer had brought in for repairs three months ago but never showed up to claim. Dez borrows it off his friend, and now he has wheels.
Next, he makes a phone call to Triton Expediters and asks for Major Vincent Guerrero. The young intern who’d distracted Guerrero in the lobby, when Alonzo slipped Dez a note, had called him Major. Petra had said he’d been a Marine. Dez bandies Petra’s name about and gets an appointment for 6 p.m.
Perfect.
He heads to the offices of Triton Expediters.
