Dark Time: Mortal Path (25 page)

As she held the shard, marveling at it, she felt a feather-light touch on her shoulder. Yanmeng’s touch. He was remote viewing her, and she knew everything would be all right. He would send help. All she had to do was make it through the storm alive, even if she had a terrible case of onion breath.

She wasn’t going to have to eat the bald man.

M
aliha was back in North Carolina, skulking in the line of trees that ringed the two-acre lawn of Diane Harvey’s pretentious home. It was around 11 P.M. The landscaping provided plenty of cover as Maliha, dressed in black, moved toward the house. The burglar alarm was child’s play. She picked the lock on a basement door, went inside, and clipped the telephone wire. Not sufficient these days. She had to locate Diane’s cell phone. Walking through the darkened house, she approached the master bedroom on the second floor. The door was open and she could hear water running. Diane was taking a shower.

Maliha searched the bedroom, listening to Diane sing “Wild Thing” at the top of her voice. She found a Blackberry and tossed it out the second-story window. A gun found in a desk drawer went into her waist pack.

The bedroom was large, with a reading area that held a comfortable chair, a good lamp, and a set of bookshelves. Nearby was a desk with a computer with a screensaver that flashed close-ups of flowers, one after the other. Maliha inserted a CD that Amaro had given her and installed a program on the computer.

Then she sat in the chair, flipped on the lamp so she could be seen clearly, and waited. She had a busy night ahead of her, with travel back to Chicago and a task to do there, and she hoped Diane wasn’t the type who drained all the hot water from the tank when she took a shower.

Maliha had some doubts about this venture. As far as she was concerned, PharmBots was off the hook for the murder of the coders. If they’d been planning to use Nando and Hairy as scapegoats for their own negligence, then it was much better to have live scapegoats. If the coders turned up dead, PharmBots would just look like it was covering its tracks clumsily, which would have been true.

Maliha could have walked away from the story of the lawsuit over Karen Dearborn’s death in the hospital. There must be hundreds of thousands of other individual needs that went unmet, and Maliha wasn’t expecting a boost toward redemption from this one. She hadn’t intervened before Karen died.

The manufacturing flaw had been quietly repaired, so the pill robot wasn’t menacing anyone else.

83 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

The murder investigation had shifted elsewhere.

Why this one, then? For the warm fuzzies?

Pictures from the Dearborn photo album played in a slideshow in Maliha’s mind. The happy couple at their wedding, husband Sean patting his wife’s pregnant belly, a lock of baby Karen’s fine reddish hair taped next to a picture of her in the hospital. Years of learning to walk, going to school. An obituary clipped from the newspaper:
Local teacher dies after truck crosses median
. Then the discovery of Karen’s heart problems the doctors were working on.

If only she’d had another year,
the doctors had said.
Another year and she would have been a
normal girl.

Diane wailed away in the shower, reaching a crescendo, and then the water was turned off.

Okay, admit it. Warm fuzzies all the way.

Diane came out of the bathroom naked and nearly jumped to the ceiling.

“Jesus Christ! What are you doing in here? I’m calling the police.”

“You can try to call the police, but you won’t get far.”

Diane lunged toward her nightstand and pressed the emergency alarm button that sat there. It failed to light up, even though she pressed it a number of times.

“Surprise. Alarm’s off.”

Diane retrieved a bathrobe from a hook over the door and sat down in the desk chair. Maliha saw her eyes scanning the room, looking for the missing Blackberry. Then she edged closer to the computer, probably thinking about getting a message off to someone. It wouldn’t work, thanks to Amaro’s program.

No programs could execute other than ones he’d specified, and the computer could reach websites he’d allowed. All the paths of communication had been shut down for Diane, and there was no way Maliha would let her leave the room.

“What is it that you want?” Diane’s voice was tight with anger and a tinge of fear.

Maliha pulled a mini-CD from her pack. “On this disk there are records of the illegal purchase of twenty-two Peruvian artifacts, the Moche pots on display in your office. Names, dates, places of purchase. Verifiable information. You didn’t vet anything for legal importation. The U.S. National Stolen Property Act frowns on that.”

Diane said nothing.

“I’ll destroy all this information if you’ll do a couple of things for me. I have an offer that expires in about”—she looked at her watch—“twenty minutes.”

“Such as?”

“First, pay the hospital bills for Karen Dearborn.”

Diane shook her head. “I won’t do that. It would be an admission of some level of guilt.”

“Then you’re not going to like number two. Settle the lawsuit outside of court. Pay Samantha Dearborn five million dollars and everything will go away. This disk and all your headaches. It’s not like that’s going to bring Karen Dearborn back, but at least the mother will get an apology.”

“You’re crazy! I can’t do that! PharmBots…”

“Who said anything about PharmBots? I’m talking about paying from your personal account. I know you’ve got the money.”

“No. I won’t do that. You can leave now, I’m not talking about this anymore.”

Maliha stood up. “You’ll be spending years in federal prison, but it’s your choice.” She was halfway to the door of the bedroom when Diane spoke.

“Wait. Everything goes away? The Moche pots? The lawsuits against both PharmBots and the hospital? No publicity? The woman will sign a non-disclosure statement?”

Maliha nodded. “She’s a practical woman with a crippling debt. Good for your company, good for the hospital, good for Karen’s mother. And it keeps you out of jail.”

“Why doesn’t the hospital have to pay half? Blame hasn’t been assigned.”

“I’m blaming you. You’re vulnerable, Diane.” She waved the mini-CD containing the incriminating evidence in her direction. Maliha hadn’t mentioned the memos Amaro had concerning the PharmBots plot to place all the blame on the dead coders. That was her backup plan. Besides, Diane must have known that the same theft of information that covered the Moche pots also had damaging information about the lawsuits. Maliha had the winning hand.

“This is blackmail.”

84 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

Maliha nodded solemnly. “In a good cause. Karen’s mom didn’t have anything to do with planning this, by the way. It’s all between you and me.”

Diane frowned. She was clearly weighing the benefit of letting the hospital off the hook, as far as future marketing to that and other hospitals was concerned.

“What guarantee do I have that you won’t blackmail me in the future? I’m sure you have copies of that disk.”

“Of course I have copies. You have no guarantee except my word.”

“This isn’t going to surface in one of your stupid books, is it?”

“No, it’s too mundane for one of my plots. Transfer the money now. I have a Swiss bank account number you can use.” It was a virtual account number, one that would be translated by the Swiss bank to her real account number.

“No way. This is going too fast. I don’t have any written guarantees the suits will be dropped. I don’t have the Dearborn woman’s non-disclosure.”

“Is that all that’s holding us up? I’ve got the documents right here.” Maliha pulled a roll of papers out of her waist pack. She hadn’t planned to give them up unless she had to.

Diane took the papers and switched on a desk lamp, then started going over them. Maliha watched the woman’s right hand inch toward the desk drawer. She was going for the gun.

“Are you looking for this?” Maliha pulled the gun from her pack. Diane yanked the desk drawer open and scowled when she saw that her gun was missing.

She went back to reading the documents in the light of the desk lamp. When she sat back in her chair, Maliha could see that the agreement looked all right to her. It should. It was drawn up by one of the highest-paid attorneys in the country, Maliha’s.

“I’d like to have my legal staff go over this.”

“I’d like to have a lot of things. The offer’s about to expire.” Maliha put her finger into the center hole of the mini-CD and twirled it around.

Diane hesitated, then made a decision. “All right. Tell me what to do.”

Maliha had Diane log on and visit the Swiss website to enter the virtual account number, then Diane’s banking information and password, and the amount. Maliha made a point of politely looking away while Diane entered her personal information, but she did count the zeros on the amount.

A screen came up that said validation of the account numbers was complete, with a notice: Click the Enter button to confirm and begin the transaction. Click Cancel to stop. Warning: Once confirmed, the transaction cannot be halted or canceled. If you should confirm in error, contact the owner of the destination account to inquire about a reversal.

Diane stared at the screen, her cursor poised over the ENTER key.

“No. No, I don’t trust you. It’s not as if you’ve given me any reason to. You’re trying to push me into acting before I think the whole thing through. Why is there an expiration on the offer? We can talk this over in my office in the morning, and get my personal and corporate attorneys involved. The lawsuit is a corporate matter, so the funds should come out of the corporate kitty. I still think the hospital should fork over half. Their reputation’s on the line, too.”

She canceled the transaction.

“You’re willing to have your smuggling activities discussed in front of all those people?”

“No reason to. As you’ve pointed out, I have the signed agreement in my hands.” She opened a desk drawer and put the papers inside with a satisfied look on her face. “If you try to raise the smuggling issue, you’re admitting to blackmail. You’ve done yourself in, Ms. Know-it-All Winters. If that’s even your real name.”

Maliha pulled a knife from its sheath. “I thought there was a good chance of this. I can take those papers back.”

“You’ll have to come through me. I know self-defense.”

Maliha kept herself from laughing. Instead she sheathed the knife and took out her cell phone. She had another deadly weapon in mind: Amaro.

“You have everything you need?” she asked.

85 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

“Yeah. It’s a go, then?”

“Go.” She disconnected the call.

Diane stood up, a petite woman quivering with anger in her voluminous bathrobe. “Go. Get out of my house. That disk’s useless to you. You can’t blackmail me.”

Maliha stalled for a minute, using a verbal boxing match to keep Diane huffy.

“Turn around.”

Frowning, Diane turned. Then her eyes grew wide. “What the hell is going on here?”

Transaction complete. US$5,000,000 transferred. Please print a receipt for your records.

“Your computer’s been hacked. Everything you entered tonight was collected with a keystroke recorder and fired off instantly to my trusty computer expert. I installed a program that took control of your computer remotely. While you’ve been railing at me, your money was zinging along the wire to Switzerland. You did the right thing for Karen and her mother.”

“You can’t do that! You can’t take my money without my approval!”

“But you did approve. Your cursor clicked Enter. Of course, you didn’t have your hand on the mouse at the time.”

Enraged, Diane shoved the computer and monitor from her desk. The monitor burst and sent a shower of glass over the carpet.

“The maid’s not going to like that. By the way, you should get dressed.” Maliha checked her watch again. “The FBI will be arriving very soon. They’ve just served a warrant at your place of business to confiscate the stolen antiquities. The FBI Art Theft Team already has all your records.”

Diane’s face grew red. “You bitch! You fucking bitch! I’ll sue you! You can’t blackmail me. I want my money back now.”

“What money? By now all records of your transaction have already been wiped out. No one can follow the money trail because there isn’t any. What blackmail? The Black Ghost was never here.”

Maliha turned on her heel and left, with Diane’s eyes stabbing her in the back.

A few minutes later, in the taxi on the way to the airport, Maliha squirmed, squeezed her eyes shut, bit her lip, and struggled to keep from outright groaning as a single figure left fiery tracks across her body.

The taxi driver, hearing muffled sounds from the backseat, asked if she was all right.

A gasp of pain escaped her, and she stretched it out. “I’mmmm fine.” He shrugged and stopped looking in the rearview mirror. He cracked his window a bit, probably figuring that she had a monumental case of gas.

The lurch through time was dizzying and left her panting. She held up a newspaper a previous passenger had left in the taxi to block the driver’s view of her face as the reaction passed. She had been rewarded with a small upward nudge of the “good” pan on the scale. The only thing she could figure out was that, without her action tonight, Samantha Dearborn would have continued a spiral of grief and hopelessness and taken her own life.

Straightening up in the airport restroom, Maliha noticed that the movement of the scale had cost her more years. Barely discernible crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes were starting to make themselves known. Studying her face in the mirror, she figured the cost to be about three years. She’d left home with the physical appearance of a woman in her mid-twenties; she was going back to Chicago as a woman in her late twenties.