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Ten
Letty took out the burner phone given to her by Delores Nowak, punched through to the secret cache, and called the number for the LAPD tracking cameras. A man answered, asked for her identification code. She’d stored the code with the phone number, a string of twelve letters and numbers. She recited the code and the man asked for the license plate number.
She read the plate off the screen on the back of the camera, and the man said, “Wait one.” A minute later said, “We got it. Blue van heading west on Santa Monica Boulevard...”
“I need to know where it goes,” Letty said. “Where it stops.”
“I’ve got some other things going on right now, but I’ll call you back as soon as it stops,” the man said. “By the way, the van’s legal owner is a Loren Barron, he’s thirty-four, six feet five inches tall, a hundred ninety pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. Residence is listed as 1450 Josie Avenue, Long Beach, California. All of that isfrom his registration and driver’s license. I can get more biography if you need it.”
“That’s our guy,” Letty said. “Give us everything you can find or send us links.”
“Will do. I’ll get back as soon as he stops somewhere. If he’s going to Long Beach, that could be a while.”
“If we’re goingto watch him, he’ll know the truck,” Baxter said.
“You’re right. Maybe the NSA has enough clout to get us a Hertz.”
She called Delores Nowak, who went away for a few minutes, then called back to say that a Chevy Equinox was waiting at a Hertz agency on Westwood Boulevard. They drove over, parked the truck in the street, and while Letty got the car, Baxter disappeared into the Panda Express next door, emerging ten minutes later with a sack full of Chinese food.
“Eat it out here, outside,” Letty told him. “I’m not sitting in a car for six hours if it’s stinking of chow mein or whatever it is.”
“The only problem with Panda Express is, they don’t have donuts,” Baxter said, as he stuffed his face with chicken fried rice and orange chicken. “I’m still gonna feel snacky.”
“That’s not possible. You’re stuffing fifteen hundred calories in your face right now,” Letty said.
“STFU,” Baxter said.
The NSA tracker called back: “They took Santa Monica Boulevard west then southwest, onto Sepulveda. They stopped somewhere on a block on Sepulveda Boulevard—we had them through one camera, but not through the next, and haven’t seen them since. They might have gone down a side street, though, but that’s the area they’re in. Sorry I can’t be more help.”
Letty wrote down the address, and the man added, “Barron has, or had, a secret clearance from the military. According to the clearance, he’s worked for Oracle, for the Democratic Party, and for the U.S. Navy, doing database security work. He has a PhD in computer and mathematical sciences from Caltech and has taught occasional seminars there. We didn’t see anything that suggested he had a wife, so we don’t know who the woman is who was with him.”
When the call ended, Baxter said, “We don’t know where he is exactly. Want to go look anyway?”
“Yes. We need to see who he talks to,” Letty said. “Especially since they’re looking at your SlapBack program. Could be more OPs.”
“I wonder if they’ll try to hold up SlapBack—use my stuff as ransomware?” Baxter said. “They’re supposed to get us another ten thousand if the code works—and it will—but if they know how to handle a Bitcoin transfer, they could get a hell of a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars out of SlapBack.”
They left the truck on the street and drove the Equinox to the stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard where the LAPD cameras had lost the blue van. They found the van quickly enough, at a white single-family home with green shutters and no door on the front of the house, where one would normally be. What should have been a front yard was cracked unpainted concrete, with space for three or four cars, though none were parked on it.
A closed, rust-colored metal gate on the left side of the house led to a side yard, where the home’s entrance must be. Baxter, who was driving, spotted the van and pointed: “Is that it? Behind the rusty gate?”
“Go by again.” They turned around and cruised past the house again. The gate concealed the van from the bottom of the backwindow down, but it looked the same. “There might be a hundred like it... but it’s exactly the same color. Wish we could see the plate.”
Baxter pointed to a side street. “I could grab a parking spot, or at least drop you off. If you walked down the sidewalk, you could peek over the top of the gate. As long as they didn’t come out of the house at exactly the wrong time, you could get away with it.”
“Good. Drop me,” Letty said.
Baxter dropped her on the side street. There was no parking and he said he’d keep driving around the block until he found her at the street corner. From the drop spot, Letty walked around the corner and down Sepulveda. The houses were old and jammed close together. If she saw somebody before they saw her, she might be able to get behind a neighboring house...
But that wasn’t necessary. She approached the gate from the extreme left side and peeked over it. “Gotcha,” she muttered.
Baxter was coming down the side street as she got to the corner. “That’s it,” she said when she got in the Equinox. “How lucky was that?”
“Let’s find a place to watch,” Baxter said. After they circled the block a few times—the van never moved—they lucked into a space on Sepulveda that was being vacated by an elderly Range Rover. After parking, Baxter got out of the driver’s seat and climbed into the back, where he could stretch out, but still see the house.
And hundreds of passing LA cars. “It seems like half the cars are Teslas,” he said. “Some of them are truly ugly.”
“They don’t burn gas,” Letty said. “Saves the whales.”
