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“We didn’t order pizzas.” He half-turned to look around the suite. “Anyone order pizzas from room service?”
With the chorus of “Nos” he looked back at the waiter, who said, “Well, somebody paid.”
“Not us,” Kaiser said. “Better check again with the kitchen.”
He shut the door, the waiter trundled back toward the elevator, and Letty and Cartwright stepped back inside 824.
Cartwright: “She was nailing down the room number.”
Bunker: “Yes. I believe they’ll be coming. We should get ready.”
“We should get ready to move, is what we should do,” Letty said. “How in the heck did they find us so fast?”
“GRU can be good,” Cartwright said. “Especially on the operational level, and with computerized stuff. If they had some names, and got into the reservation system...”
“The names aren’t in the reservation system...”
“Something is,” Cartwright said. “If they looked at hotels where blocks of rooms were all reserved at the same time, on very short notice, and then looked at who made the reservations, and it turned out to be some bland corporate name with nothing behind it... then they send in a woman to check it out... People in this hotel know there are a bunch of computer freaks up here.”
When Nowak called back,Letty told her what had happened, that the Russians would be coming, and they’d be moving if the FBI couldn’t come in with SWAT.
“Sovern wants to make a big move—out of town, up to the Santa Ynez Valley. He says there’s a motel there that’ll be mostly empty, they’ve got good wi-fi, and it’s easy to protect,” Letty told Nowak.
“Maybe you won’t have to do that,” Nowak said. “We talked about the other options. We don’t want the FBI to become officially involved, because then it’s the U.S. government protecting the train hack. We don’t want a big gunfight inside the hotel, because then the LAPDandthe FBI will be involved.”
“So we move? You’re good with that?” Letty asked.
“I’d suggest another option, if you’re sure they’ve located you,” Nowak said. “You have a phone number for Tom Boyadjian that you got from Martin and Lawrence. Call him. The FBI seized his computers and his personal iPhone, but the phones you took from Martin and Lawrence have four numbers for him. He may still answer one of them. You simply tell him to stay away. Tell him if the Russians show up there, you’ll kill them, that you’ve got the weapons to do it.”
“He’ll never admit...”
“You don’t need him to admit anything. You need him to keep the Russians out of your hair.”
Letty looked at Kaiser and Cartwright, who looked at each other and back at Letty and simultaneously shrugged.
“Maybe... worth a try,” Letty said.
“Try it,” Nowak said, and she hung up.
Kaiser: “It may be worth a try,but we should keep packing up anyway. I took a look at satellite images of the motel Sovern is talking about, up at Santa Ynez. It’s a fort, if we need a fort. A lot better and simpler than this place.”
“Okay. I’ll call,” Letty said.
“If he asks who we are, tell him Celeres Services,” Cartwright said. “That’s what I’m going to call my security company when I quit the government job. Might as well start piling up some cred.”
“Celeres Services...”
Letty had stored Boyadjian’s phone numbers in the “Notes” section of the NSA’s burner phone. The first number she called rang for a while and was neither answered nor switched to a voicemail. The second one did the same thing. The third one rang twice, then a man answered with “Yes?”
“Tom Boyadjian?”
“Who is this?”
Letty took that as a “yes.”
“We’re with Celeres Services. We’ve been hired to protect a group of people at a Los Angeles hotel. We think you are aware of this location. We want to tell you that if you try to interfere with us, if your clients try to interfere with this, there’ll be a bloodbath. We’re heavily armed, we have fully automatic weapons, registeredwith the ATF. We’re authorized to possess them, and we know how to use them. Stay away.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the man said.
