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“Sooner than later would be best.”

“I’ll call Roger right after you leave.”

Downstairs I retrieved the gun-toting briefcase and made a call from my cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Molayo, that you?”

“Mr. Charming. What can I do for you?”

“Do you eat lunch?”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“Then why do I have your number?”

Unable to come up with a good answer, she asked, “Where would you like to eat?”

“There’s a great steak restaurant I know in Beverly Hills.”

“What time?”

“I have a three o’clock, so how about noon?”

“Give me the numbers and I’ll meet you there.”

“No. I’ll meet you at your desk in the North Tower.”

“A gentleman,” she said in what sounded like rare appreciation.

6.

I MADE THE date with Molayo at around 10:45. From the lobby level I took an elevator down to sublevel three of hospital parking and lay out in the cramped back seat of my Bug.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. In other words, California don’t mean a thing to me. I don’t get my kicks surfing, sunbathing, jogging, hiking, or waking up early to suffer through yogic asanas.

I had recently downloaded a book to my cell phone reader. The concept of the nonfiction tome was that the virtual map of human intelligence was of a complex fractal nature; that is, rather than three or four types of measurable intelligence, the human mind was made up of sixteen, and maybe more, ways of understanding and thinking about… things. There was creativity in many forms, communication skills that were both physical and interpretive, straightforward physical intelligence that worked in anything from rendering to sport. There was even an attempt by this author to rate and rank charisma, under the banner of communication.

Lying down in the back seat of the vintage Bug, reading from my cell phone, I dozed off now and then. While I was passing through a nap, there came the sound of a small metal clank somewhere on the outside of the old VW.

I was immediately awake.

Lying there stock-still in the back seat, dressed in the dark clothes of my profession, I was swathed in underground darkness and probably not immediately noticeable because I wasn’t moving at all. A shadow inside the gloom moved back and forth past the windshield. Then there came another clank. I considered reaching for the pistol but decided that whoever it was messing around could also have been armed.

The unknown person fooled around a little more, doing something at the front of the Bug, and then he—I assumed it was a man—walked away.

I didn’t think that he’d planted a bomb because neither the front nor the back hood had been raised, and he hadn’t tried to open the car doors. It was possible that he’d attached an IED with a movement detonation sensor to set it off. But that possibility seemed a bit farfetched.

So, I counted four minutes on my cell phone and then, carefully, climbed out of the car.

The device was easy to find, attached by some kind of adhesive to the inside of the front bumper. I recognized the instrument type. German made, it was pretty sophisticated, using a radio system, possibly communicating with a satellite transmitter. Either that or some computer platform that used the Internet to go anywhere. Whatever system it was, they could monitor the movements of my rented car from as far away as Timbuktu.

Using my pocketknife, I pried the flat metal disk off the bumper and reattached it to an uninhabited Rolls-Royce a few rows away. Then I took the elevator up to the eighth floor and made my way to Molayo’s desk.

“Right on time,” the Philippine beauty said as she stood.

She wore a dress made from a thick pine-green fabric that had runs here and there and sported an enticing, uneven hem; her heels looked expensive and her reddish-brown bag, probably a one-off, gave her the carefree look of somebody who lived off a trust fund.