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“That’s fine. Start now. Don’t screw me, but don’t worry if it goes a few days.”
“All right. We’ll be up there in a couple hours. Barry might have to find a babysitter. I think this is girls’ night out for his wife...”
Back at home, Step sat at the kitchen table and told Victoria all about it, as she drank a glass of green juice the consistency of snot; watching her do it made him shudder.
When he’d finished telling the story, she said, “Not the GRU. If they wanted the chips, they would have shown up and taken them. All of them. At noon. And they would have shaken your hand on the way out. But it really doesn’t sound like the train nerds. What it sounds like is some kind of semiprofessional hijack team. Mightnot even have known what they were stealing. People like that work the port. That’s where the whole ‘It fell off a truck’ joke comes from.”
“That could be,” Step agreed. “But... we did Delph, and then we did that couple who engineered the train hack and then the boys over at Ventura got hit, almost instantly, and now somebody’s fuckin’ with the port... To me, it feels like there’s a string there. Should we pull it?”
“As long as you keep a plane on the runway at Santa Monica.”
“Yeah. Yeah, there’s that. I’d hate to go back to Moscow, after this.” He waved his arms, meaning the house, the pool, the town, and the United States of America. “Doesn’t get better than this.”
“Could get a lot worse, though, even here in the USA,” Victoria said. “Way worse, like, dead.”
Sixteen
Letty called Able, identified herself and asked, “You gone?”
“No, I’m home. I gotta do some things here. Then I might take off,” Able said.
“We’re coming over,” Letty said. “We need to show you some computer things.”
“Computer things... like what?”
“If we knew that, we wouldn’t have to show you,” Letty said. “Paul thinks they could be a big deal, but he’s software, not hardware.”
“You sure nobody’s tracking you?” Able asked.
“Maybe ninety percent sure... no way to be a hundred percent,” Letty said.
“Do some countersurveillance stuff,” Able said. “You can look it up on Google under countersurveillance technique for cars.”
“Okay,” Letty said. She was looking at Cartwright, who rolled her eyes. “We’ll do that.”
When she got off the phone, Cartwright said, “Google, my ass. Why don’t I drive? I do countersurveillance and it might not be a bad idea.”
“Okay with me, as long as you don’t wreck my truck,” Baxter said. Baxter had known all about the Intel chips, but Letty had lied to Able about it, because they needed to talk to Able again.
They worked their way to the 405, curling up and down side streets on the way. Once on the freeway, Cartwright put the pedal to the metal, pushing the truck to a hundred miles an hour, weaving through the evening traffic. “What are we doing here?” Baxter asked, lifting his feet to place them on the dashboard.
“Bracing yourself won’t help, if we hit somebody,” Cartwright said. “The airbag will blow your feet up over your ears and dislocate your hip joints. Anyway, we’re not being followed, but we might as well make sure we don’t have a drone above us. A drone with a video transmitter won’t make more than fifty or sixty miles an hour, and if one was up there, it won’t be able to reacquire us after we’ve lost it.”
Baxter took his feet down. “So we’re clean?”
“Unless somebody stuck location transmitters under the truck when you weren’t looking,” Cartwright said.
“Seriously unlikely,” Letty said.
“I agree. The biggest problem will come at this Able guy’s place,” Cartwright said. “I’ll want to get out a few blocks away, and have you guys wait until I’m in place, to see if anything moves when you show up.”
“There’s a handy alley and banana tree...” Letty said. She told Cartwright about watching Able’s house from behind the tree.
“Sounds good,” Cartwright said. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll run more countersurveillance on the way over...”
On the way to West Hollywood, Baxter said he was becoming reluctant to further expose Ordinary People to possible attacks by the Russians. The hackers, he said, were basically his people and if he hadn’t been picked up by the NSA, he might have been doing what they were doing.
“Probably too late to back out,” Cartwright said. “Listen, from what you’ve told me, you were originally sent out here to find out if Ordinary People were going to take out a municipal gas system?”
