Crystal Whisperer (Spotless Series #3) Page 5

  Upon seeing me, he quickly sipped the last drop of his coffee and threw the paper cup in a nearby trash can. “Do you feel better?”

  “I guess. March, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  His eyebrows drew together in a watchful expression, but he let me continue.

  “Right before the helicopter, I was . . . I needed to know if Alex had anything to do with all this, Dries in the news, getting exposed like that.” I took a gulp of air. “I knew it might not be such a great idea, so I set up all those proxies so he wouldn’t be able to track me, and I used his Yaycupid address so the messages would be relayed by their servers. I’m sorry, I—”

  “You contacted him.” For an instant, his defenses crashed down, shock and hurt plain for me to see in his wide eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “Behind my back.”

  He might as well have reached inside my rib cage and squeezed my heart directly with those three little words. There was no mistaking the anger hardening his voice as the cold mask fell back in place on his face. Trust in exchange for control: that was the name of the game, and it was difficult for March to envision a relationship any other way.

  In truth, he himself wasn’t above all reproach when it came to dissimulation, and deep down, he knew that he didn’t need a subservient girlfriend who would turn him from a control freak into a complete tyrant. That was the theory. The reality was that I had broken his trust and, in doing so, reminded him that, indeed, he could not control me at all times. Add to that some degree of jealousy and territoriality because no guy ever wants to see the ex back in the picture, and there was an easy recipe for disaster.

  I searched his gaze pleadingly. “I’m really sorry. I knew if I asked, you’d say no.”

  “And so you did it behind my back,” he repeated, looking straight past me.

  A tiny “Yes” whistled out of my throat.

  He crossed his arms. “So was it worth it? Did you perhaps extort some sort of decisive intel from him?”

  Choosing to ignore the undercurrent of irony, I answered in a steady voice. “He didn’t say much. I think he was just playing with me.”

  A flicker of concern softened his eyes. “Playing with you?”

  “I thought I was safe and he could see the proxies relaying my connection. But then he asked if I was in Cape Saint Francis, and he told me that there would be a purge and that I should get away.” I shivered at the memory of that particular fear. Like standing right in front of the eye of Sauron.

  “Go on,” March said, glancing at me before focusing back on the trail in an elaborate display of indifference.

  “That’s when I saw the helicopter, and at first I thought . . . you know . . . it was like he could see me, and he knew what was going to happen.” I wrapped my arms around myself. “But it doesn’t make any sense, since you’re telling me those guys were Lions. I think he tried to freak me out, and it worked, because he’s good at it.”

  He still wasn’t looking at me. There was a twitch in his jaw, as if his molars were grinding together. His eyes were set on the dark, flat line of the horizon where it met a bluish, starless sky. “They were coming from the east. Supposing they took off from a base in the Jeffreys Bay area, it would have taken them about twelve minutes to reach Saint Francis. Meaning they were on their way before you even messaged Mr. Morgan. That’s a spectacularly lucky guess on his part.”

  I shook my head. “March, I honestly think he was trying to be creepy. I mean, he could have learned about your place somehow, and maybe he even suspected that the Lions would go after Dries’s disciples, but he couldn’t have known the exact time and location. It’s not like they take their phone to warn the CIA of those things, right?” I reasoned.

  “It depends.”

  My jaw went slack. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind. Mr. Morgan and his dubious sense of humor are the least of our problems right now.”

  I straightened up. “So you won’t tell me anything?”

  He looked at me at last—but only to flash me the cold-killer stare, complete with slanted eyes and all. “You’re not off of the hook yet. If our circumstances were any different, I’d put you in the trunk.”

  “But you’ll just be mad at me instead,” I said softly.

  “Not mad. Disappointed.”

  I flinched. Time to try the big sad eyes. I looked up at him and flashed him my wounded-kitten look. All fuzz and heartbreak. “Will it help if I put myself in the trunk?”

  “No.”

  I followed him back to the hangar with a despondent sigh. When we entered Pieter’s office, he appeared to be done and ready to hand the SUV’s keys to their new owner. Before he could do so, a flashy green smartphone started rattling on his desk.

  Pieter frowned at the caller ID but took the call nonetheless. “Thank you for calling Kromrivier Deluxe Garage. What’s broken?”

  He listened to the voice on the other end of the line and stared at me, his brow slowly rising until it became clear it would take off soon. “Um, yeah . . . she”—God. That brow was reaching even higher. I didn’t even think it was physiologically possible—“she’s . . . here.”

  And he handed me the phone.

  Oooh, the look March sent my way. The way his nostrils flared. One-way ticket to the trunk!

  “I have no idea what this is about; March, I swear, this time I didn’t do anything!”

  Pieter’s eyebrows landed back, but his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You don’t know any guy named Colin?”

  5

  The Legend

  Never let him forget that there are literally billions of guys out there waiting for you, including your ex.

  —Aurelia Nichols & Jillie Bean, 101 Tips to Lock Him Down

  I knew a guy named Colin.

  Colin Jeon. Twenty-seven. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, genius hacker, slow runner, and who had therefore traded a 197-year prison sentence for lifelong slavery in the service of the US government. He and I had met during the Ruby case and teamed up to recover my boss’s money. We had sort of hit it off, being both innocent nerds lost to a spiral of crime. I was well aware that, even restrained by the tight leash the NSA kept him on, Colin was capable of many wonderful and illegal things. I simply hadn’t expected him to call Pieter’s phone. To talk to me.

  The youthful and frantic voice on the other end of the line was, indeed, unmistakable. “Are you okay? Like, not horribly maimed or anything like that?”

  March took the phone from me before I could answer. “How did you get this number?”

  Whatever Colin said, March didn’t like it; he shut down the phone and removed the battery, handing them both back to Pieter. Less than five seconds after he had done so, a cheerful ringtone chimed from Pieter’s computer. He jumped on the mouse to close the Skype window which had just popped up with a bubbly sound effect. He clicked over and over, to no avail. “Fokken witchcraft!” he hissed under his breath.

  The accepted terminology was backdoor rather than witchcraft, because Pieter was probably of those unsuspecting souls who clicked on random ads when browsing PornHub, but the result was the same: the mouse no longer obeyed him, and the pointer moved of its own accord to launch a Skype call.

  A familiar face appeared on-screen: a young Asian guy sitting behind a cluttered desk and wearing a pink Krang T-shirt. He brushed away a lock of jet-black hair curtaining his glasses. “Please listen to me. Sir, I swear I’m just trying to help! We shut down the feed; we’re covering you!”

  March’s eyes turned to slits. “Who’s we, Mr. Jeon?”

  Colin gulped down in visible fear. “I didn’t really get the details, but Hendry thinks you’re going to kill his grandma if he sells you out. So we told Morgan we’d lost the signal. Because of a Vista upgrade. He actually bought it, but he sounded ready to kill someone.”

  I raised my palms in the air in a virtual effort to contain the flood of information pouring from that screen. Alex knew about t
he cleaning up, and he had watched us trying to escape? NSA bigwig Hendry was siding with March because of past threats against Hendry’s grandma and her Chihuahua? The NSA used Windows Vista to run ECHELON? “Stop! Start again. Start with what you said about Alex,” I said.

  Colin gaped like a fish before he resumed speaking in a somewhat more composed voice. “So Morgan used his ID to request an emergency satellite tracking. I was there. I was with Hendry in his office, so we checked the coordinates before approving them, and then Hendry goes like, ‘Fuck! It’s the South African’s house!’”

  My legs still held me up, but I was reeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach. Pieter seemed completely lost but displayed a suitable amount of shock, while on his desk, March’s hand curled into a fist. “Keep going.”

  “We watched, because we were wondering what the hell Morgan wanted with you. And after, I don’t know, three minutes, we see a Tiger on-screen, and your house goes boom!” Colin concluded, with an eloquent gesture of his open arms.

  “You said you shut down the satellite signal?” March asked, ice crackling in his voice.

  “Right after you made them blow up their own Jeep. Morgan requested cross tracking and asked us to calculate all potential escape routes. Hendry said something smelled off, and he told me to stall. So I jammed the signal and bullshitted Morgan. And after he gave up, I tried to locate you and see if you were still alive.” Colin paused, drew a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice held the reverence of a man beholding one of the rarest Crime Pokémons in the world. “I’m your biggest fan, sir; please don’t shoot me with a bazooka.”

  “We’ll see about that,” March said coolly. Not that he meant it. I suspected he was in fact secretly flattered by Colin’s awed terror and intended to cultivate his legend. Even now that he had retired from wet jobs to pursue a legitimate career as a “security consultant,” March remained a mythical beast for those privy to the worst details of his résumé—kinda like Judge Doom but without the weird eyes and shitty toupee.

  “So . . .” I ventured, before Colin had a chance to further digress and ask whether it was true that March had once put a Russian mobster’s hand in a blender. “I guess you’ve seen the news too?”

  He refocused instantly. “I know—that plane completely disintegrated! This is insane! Did you see the pics?”

  “I have. And we will get to that part,” March said. “But I’m more interested in what you can tell us about the prime suspect.”

  Colin fidgeted in his seat. “Sir, with all due respect . . . you know that man better than I do.”

  March’s fingers drummed against Pieter’s mouse pad. “Please spare me this, Mr. Jeon. Did Mr. Morgan leak the video?”

  This time Colin’s gaze set on me, nervous and sympathetic at once. “He got a green light. But I don’t know about the satellite tracking. I think Morgan did that alone.”

  March crossed his arms. “I see . . . Mr. Jeon, you mentioned the pictures of the wreckage. I assumed you’ve accessed the early reports as well?”

  “Yeah. Signs of a sudden decompression between twenty and twenty five thousand feet, fuselage integrity got badly compromised, and wham! Confetti everywhere,” Colin said, counting each step on his fingers.

  Behind us, Pieter went to fix himself a cup of coffee; we had lost him at the nerd rant. I shrugged. “Tell us something we don’t already know.”

  A smug grin tugged at the corner of Colin’s lips. “Did you notice anything about the wreckage pics?”

  Above me, March sighed. “No. Did you?”

  “There’s nothing left of the roof. The largest fragment they found so far is half an inch long,” Colin explained.

  March raised an eyebrow. “Did you expect it to resist that kind of crash?”

  “Actually yes,” Colin said. “Let me show you something.”

  On the screen, a video popped up. March and I watched in mild confusion as a busty blonde proceeded to tell us about the miracle of Ceraglass®, a revolutionary transparent ceramic. Super light yet hard enough to resist depleted uranium ammo, with awesome bending strength and ultrasonic velocity, and a mind-blowing 98 percent transparency index—which the girl demonstrated by strutting naked behind a transparent wall—Ceraglass® was going to change our lives and step in everywhere glass and thermoplastic couldn’t do the job. Also, Michael Cera had nothing to do with any of this: the guilty party was a company called Novensia, whose marketing department was apparently fearless.

  Colin stopped the video with a self-satisfied nod.

  I was starting to see his point. “That’s what the roof was made of?”

  “Yup.”

  I replayed the last frame of the commercial that showed a recap of the material’s physical properties. “It’s very resistant, and it bends easily enough, especially for a ceramic compound, so there should be significant pieces of the sky roof left in the wreckage. It’s a little weird that it shattered that bad.”

  “Correct. And the rest of the wreckage doesn’t look like the result of one single device exploding in the cabin either; it’s like . . . like the whole thing disintegrated in a matter of seconds, from nose to tail.”

  “What is your own theory?” March inquired.

  Colin rubbed his palms together nervously before he hunched to hammer at his keyboard. Another window appeared, this time with a 3D model of the AirBW 850. He slammed a key to rotate the camera angle, and several glowing tooltips popped up, connecting barely recognizable fragments to their theoretical location on the hull.

  “I’m no flight engineer or anything, so take that with a grain of salt, but if I was a truther holding on to my tinfoil hat, I’d say that the so-called invulnerable sky roof was a shitty idea, and maybe it was faulty, brittle or something. It took a hit, came apart, and at three hundred and fifty miles per hour, that completely shredded the rest of the fuselage. If I’m right, then my bet is the Men in Black want me to look at the big bad terrorist, so I won’t be looking at the worst industrial screw-up since radium face cream.”

  March crossed his arms, his mouth a thin line as he gazed at the screen. “The CIA doesn’t work overtime to cover up industrial mishaps. If they suspected no foul play, they’d have let the press go after the manufacturer already. They wouldn’t step in at all.”

  “What if they’re just using the whole thing to take Dries down?” I ventured. “It could be more than just Alex’s vendetta; maybe Dries did something that really pissed them off this time.”

  Colin’s embarrassed shrug was self-explanatory: my genitor dragged the kind of unfortunate reputation that made it difficult for anyone to believe him innocent of anything.

  After several seconds of silence, March’s attention returned to Colin. “We won’t hold you any longer, Mr. Jeon. Thank you for your assistance. Have an excellent evening.”

  Colin’s mouth formed an O of surprise at this abrupt dismissal. The word wait was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could protest, March had shut down Pieter’s computer.

  I huffed. “That was rough.”

  “I was civil—”

  “He tried to save our lives, and you tossed him like a Kleenex.”

  “I don’t fully trust him,” March countered.

  “You don’t fully trust anyone.”

  I wished he would have said I was the exception, but March looked past my shoulder and remained silent.

  Now back with a mug of creamy coffee, Pieter stared at March, doubt and admiration written all over his face. “Bra . . . I always figured you did gas stations and grocery stores. But CIA and all that shit?”

  I shook my head in compete disbelief. “You thought he robbed gas stations? With an armored pickup and a grenade launcher?”

  He gave a half shrug. “Wel, dis Suid-Afrika.” Well, this is South Africa.

  We were all set. Pieter had given March a fierce bro hug, a thermos of coffee, and chocolate rusks for the road—although I entertained no hope whatsoever that I’d be granted permission
to eat those in the car. My seat belt was properly fastened; March was behind the wheel, grinding a couple of mints between his molars. At last, the engine started.

  Our destination? I had no idea, because I had been the recipient of a cold shoulder for the past hour. I craned my neck to sneak one last peek at the busted pickup truck behind us. “What will he do with your car?”

  The cold shoulder demanded that he neither smiled nor looked at me and that I be left hanging for a minimum of forty seconds before any kind of vocal stimulus prompted an answer—if any. I knew from prior experience that March wasn’t the type to explode with rage and simply be done. Equally certain was the fact that snark would get me nowhere as long as he was pissed. Which left me with a single option: as we progressed down the trail, I gazed at the gravel illuminated by the lights and waited.

  “He’ll take some parts and scrap the rest. I trust him to make it disappear,” March eventually said, his voice cool and remote.

  Forty-eight seconds. Still pissed. On my left, I caught rustling in the tall grass, and a dark shape galloped away, barely outlined by the lights. “What was that?”

  Forty-two seconds and another mint later, he answered. “A bushbuck. They tend to be nocturnal.”

  His lips remained set in a hard line. An ache settled in my chest as I kept thinking about the pickup and, even more so, about the little cubicle house. Thank God Gerald had been moved to March’s new place in New York and escaped being burned to a crisp. I didn’t like that orange tree, its passive-aggressive game, always popping horribly disfigured oranges to bring March down. But I knew March liked Gerald more than he’d ever admit. Just as he liked his cubicle house and cared about its destruction underneath that layer of indifference.

  It wasn’t the first time that the notion nagged at me: guys like him had a completely different relationship to places and objects. They were trained to develop no attachment to those. Everything that makes our lives anchors us, whether we like it or not; it meant nothing to them, and if it did, they’d bury the feeling and move on.