Страница 26 из 71
I kept walking. The light was fading from the sky, and it wasn’t yet five o’clock. At this time of year, almost no one left work before nightfall. In the dark, I might be able to drag him behind his car, depending on where he was parked. But unless it were especially late and deserted, there was a worrisome chance that the person whose car was parked next to us might choose just that moment to head home, too. Plus, even the relatively clueless tend to be somewhat vigilant in parking lots at night. I could overcome that with Ja
Morning offered the opposite range of risks and benefits. On the one hand, people arriving at work are distracted by thoughts of the morning meeting, the day’s tasks, what messages might be waiting for them. And parking lots aren’t threatening in the morning, so no one pays any attention to their surroundings in them, anyway. But unless Ja
I walked another mile or so down East Bayshore, getting a feel for the area, its rhythms and rituals, what fit in and what might seem subtly out of place. My sense was that the neighborhood was transitional-office buildings on the south end, a new IKEA and shopping mall at the other, a trailer park and long-term storage facilities in between. Blending wasn’t the problem here. The problem was access, and control.
I thought about using light disguise to enter Ja
I walked back to the Mercedes, cutting once again through the parking lot on the way. Ja
I drove back to Ja
Sleep. I needed to get up early tomorrow to make sure I could catch Ja
I stopped at a phone booth in a gas station and checked the Yellow Pages, where I found a hotel called the Stanford Park. Menlo Park, the next town over. I called and was glad to hear they had a vacancy, a king room with a fireplace. No smoking, the clerk said apologetically, perhaps in response to the Japanese accent I was using. No problem, I assured him. No smoking was fine. It was only available for two nights? That would be fine, too. I didn’t plan to be in town any longer than that.
I purged the car nav system before checking into the hotel, then had an excellent di
I asked one of the employees, a pretty woman named Cynthia, about Internet access. She directed me to the public library, less than a quarter mile away. I strolled over and checked the bulletin boards. Nothing.
The last thing I did before falling into an exhausted sleep was fire up my old cell phone and check its voice-mail account. There was a message from Delilah. “Don’t push me away like this,” she said. “Call me, please.”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had to stay focused. I had to be who I always was.
15
I GOT UP at five o’clock the next morning, showered, shaved, fueled up on eggs and coffee in the hotel’s restaurant, and went out. Unlikely that Ja
I drove by Ja
While I waited, listening to a woman named Alisa Clancy on a radio show called Morning Cup of Jazz, I wondered who Ja
One thing I didn’t ask, though nor could I deny it, was whether he had a family. Of course he did. The house was too big, and too suburban, for anyone to live in it alone. And his car, a Volvo S80, had kids written all over it. But the less I knew about all that, the better. It’s one thing to recognize something intellectually. It’s quite another to see it-no, watch it-with your own eyes. The last time I’d gotten too close to the family of a target, in Manila, I’d frozen and damn near died. In unguarded moments, I still thought of the little boy whose father I’d taken. I wasn’t going to go through that again.
I waited. No one disturbed me. I had to leave the engine off because if the car were ru
At just past seven-thirty, someone on a bicycle came down Christopher and made a left onto OPM. He was wearing a white helmet and a fluorescent-yellow windbreaker, something designed both for warmth and to be visible to cars. I eased down in the seat a bit and watched through the windshield, thinking it was someone out for his morning exercise. But as he got closer, I realized Christ, that might be him. I’d been so fixated on the Volvo I was waiting for that it took me a moment to adjust. He passed me, not even giving the Mercedes a second look. I was going only on a bunch of out-of-date photos, but the shape of the face, the glasses…I was pretty sure it was Ja