The Traveler Page 7

  Chapter 7

  The four cars didn't turn off the freeway, but Michael drove as if they were still chasing him. Gabriel followed the Mercedes up a steep canyon road where elaborate mansions jutted out into the air, their foundations supported by thin metal pylons. After several quick turns, they ended up in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Michael turned off the road and stopped in the parking lot of a boarded-up church. Empty bottles and beer cans were scattered across the asphalt.

  Gabriel pulled off his motorcycle helmet as his brother got out of the car. Michael looked tired and angry.

  "It's the Tabula," Gabriel said. "They knew Mother was dying and that we'd go to the hospice. They waited on the boulevard and decided to capture you first."

  "Those people don't exist. They never did."

  "Come on, Michael. I saw those men try to force you off the road."

  "You don't understand." Michael took a few steps across the parking lot and kicked an empty can. "Remember when I bought that first building on Melrose Avenue

  ? Where do you think I got the money?"

  "You said it came from investors on the East Coast."

  "It was from people who don't like to pay income taxes. They've got a lot of cash that can't be put into bank accounts. Most of the financing came from a mob guy in Philadelphia named Vincent Torrelli."

  "Why would you do business with someone like that?"

  "What was I supposed to do?" Michael looked defiant. "The bank refused to give me a loan. I wasn't using my real name. So I took the cash from Torrelli and bought the building. A year ago, I was watching the news and saw that Torrelli got killed outside a casino in Atlantic City. When I didn't hear from his family or his friends, I stopped sending the rent money to a post office box in Philadelphia. Vincent had a lot of secrets. I figure that he hadn't told people about his Los Angeles investments."

  "And now they've found out?"

  "I think that's what happened. It's not Travelers and all those other crazy stories Mom told us. It's just some mob guys trying to get their money back."

  Gabriel returned to his motorcycle. If he looked east, he could see the San Fernando Valley. Distorted by the lens of dirty air, the valley streetlights glowed with a dull orange color. At that moment, all he wanted to do was jump on his bike and ride off to the desert, to some lonely place where he could see the stars as his headlight beam skittered across a dirt road. Lost. Get lost. He would give anything to lose his past, the feeling that he was captive in an enormous prison.

  "I'm sorry," Michael said. "Things were finally moving in the right direction. Now it's all screwed up."

  Gabriel looked at his brother. Once, when they were living in Texas, their mother had been so distracted that she had forgotten about Christmas. There was nothing in the house on Christmas Eve, but the next morning Michael showed up with a pine tree and some video games he had shoplifted from an electronics store. No matter what happened, they would always be brothers—the two of them against the world.

  "Forget about these people, Michael. Let's get out of Los Angeles." "Give me a day or so. Maybe I can make a deal. Until then, we'll check into a motel. It's not safe to go home."

  ***

  GABRIEL AND MICHAEL spent the night at a motel north of the city. The rooms were five hundred yards from the Ventura Freeway and the sound of the passing cars pushed through the windows. When Gabriel woke up at four o'clock in the morning, he heard Michael in the bathroom talking on his cell phone. "I do have a choice," Michael whispered. "You make it sound like there's no choice at all."

  In the morning, Michael stayed in bed with the covers pulled over his head. Gabriel left the room, walked to a nearby restaurant, and bought some muffins and coffee. The newspaper in the rack had a photograph of two men running from a wall of flame with a headline that proclaimed HIGH WINDS FAN SOUTHLAND FIRES.

  Back in the room, Michael had gotten up and taken a shower. He was polishing his shoes with a damp towel. "Someone is coming here to see me. I think he can solve the problem."

  "Who is it?"

  "His real name is Frank Salazar, but everyone calls him Mr. Bubble. When he was growing up in East Los Angeles, he ran a bubble machine at a dance club."

  While Michael watched the financial news on television Gabriel lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. Closing his eyes, he put himself and his motorcycle on the top half of the highway that ran up the mountain to Angeles Crest. He was downshifting, leaning into each turn as the green world slipped past him. Michael stayed on his feet, pacing back and forth on the narrow strip of carpet in front of the television.

  Someone knocked. Michael peered through the curtains and then opened the door. A huge Samoan with a broad face and bushy black hair stood in the hallway. He wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over a T-shirt and made no attempt to hide the shoulder holster holding a .45 automatic.

  "Hey, Deek. Where's your boss?"

  "Down in dah car. Gotta check dis out first."

  The Samoan came in and inspected the bathroom and the closet. He slipped his massive hands beneath the bedsheets and picked up the cushions on the chairs. Michael kept smiling as if nothing was unusual. "No weapons, Deek. You know I don't carry anything."

  "Safety is dah first priority. Dat's what Mr. Bubble say all day long."

  After searching the brothers, Deek left and returned a minute later with a bald Latino bodyguard and an elderly man wearing large tinted glasses and a turquoise golfing shirt. Mr. Bubble had liver spots on his skin, and a pink surgical scar was visible near his neck. "Wait outside," he told the two bodyguards, then closed the door.

  Mr. Bubble shook Michael's hand. "Good to see you." He had a soft, wispy voice. "Who's your friend?"

  "This is my brother, Gabriel."

  "Family is good. Always stick with your family." Mr. Bubble went over and shook Gabriel's hand. "You've got a smart brother. Maybe a little too smart this time."

  Mr. Bubble settled himself in the chair next to the television set. Michael sat on the corner of the bed and faced him. Ever since they had run away from the farm in South Dakota, Gabriel had watched his brother convince strangers that they had to buy something or become part of his plan. Mr. Bubble was going to be a hard sell. You could barely see his eyes behind the tinted lenses and he had a slight smile on his lips as if he were about to watch a comedy show.

  "Did you talk to your friends in Philadelphia?" Michael asked.

  "It will take some time to set that up. I'll protect you and your brother for a few days until the problem is solved. We'll give the Melrose building to the Torrelli family. As payment, I'll take your share of the Fairfax property."

  "That's too much for one favor," Michael said. "Then I won't own anything."

  "You made a mistake, Michael. And now some people want to kill you. One way or another, the problem has to be solved." "That may be true, but—"

  "Safety is the first priority. You lose control of two office buildings, but you're still alive." Still smiling, Mr. Bubble leaned back in his chair. "Consider this a learning opportunity"

  Chapter 8

  Maya retrieved the video camera and tripod from the Hotel Kampa but left her suitcase and clothes in the room. On the train to Germany, she carefully searched the video equipment but couldn't find any tracer beads. It was clear that her citizen life was over. After the Tabula found the dead taxi driver, they would hunt her down and kill her on sight. She knew that it would be difficult to hide. The Tabula had probably taken her photograph numerous times during her years in London. They might also have her fingerprints, a voice scan, and a DNA sample from the tissues she tossed into the rubbish bin at the office.

  When she reached Munich, she approached a Pakistani woman in the train station and got the address of an Islamic clothing store. Maya was tempted to cover herself completely with the blue burqa worn by Afghani women, but the bulky clothing made it difficult to handle weapons. She ended up buying a black chador to cover her Western clothes and so
me dark sunglasses. Back at the train station, she destroyed her British identification and used a backup passport to become Gretchen Voss, a medical student with a German father and an Iranian mother.

  Air travel was dangerous so she took a train to Paris, went to the Gallieni Metro station, and got on the daily charter bus that traveled to England. The bus was filled with Senegalese immigrant workers and North African families carrying bags of old clothes. When the bus reached the English Channel everyone got out and wandered around the enormous ferryboat. Maya watched British tourists buy duty-free liquor, pump coins into slot machines, and stare at a comedy on a television screen. Life was normal—almost boring—when you were a citizen. They didn't seem to realize, or care, that they were being monitored by the Vast Machine.

  There were four million closed-circuit television cameras in Britain, about one camera for every fifteen people. Thorn once told her that an average person working in London would be photographed by three hundred different surveillance cameras during the day. When the cameras first appeared, the government put up posters telling everyone that they were SECURE BENEATH THE WATCHFUL EYES. Under the shield of new antiterrorism laws, every industrial country was following the British example.

  Maya wondered if citizens made a deliberate choice to ignore the intrusion. Most of them truly believed that the cameras protected them from criminals and terrorists. They assumed that they were still anonymous whenever they walked down the street. Only a few people understood the power of the new facial-scanning programs. The moment your face was photographed by a surveillance camera, it could be transformed into a head shot with a consistent size, contrast, and brightness that could be matched against a driver's license or passport photograph.

  The scanner programs identified individual faces, but the gov ernment could also use the cameras to detect unusual behavior. These so-called Shadow programs were already being used in London, Las Vegas, and Chicago. The computer analyzed one-second images taken by the cameras and alerted the police if someone left a package in front of a public building or parked a car on the shoulder of a highway. Shadow noticed anyone who strolled through the city observing the world instead of trudging to work. The French had a name for these curious people-flâneurs-but as far as the Vast Machine was concerned, any pedestrian who lingered on street corners or paused at construction sites was instantly suspicious. Within a few seconds, images of these people would be highlighted in color and sent to the police.

  Unlike the British government, the Tabula weren't encumbered by regulations or civil servants. Their organization was relatively small and well financed. Their computer center in London could hack into any surveillance camera system and sort through the images with a powerful scanning program. Fortunately, there were so many surveillance cameras in North America and Europe that the Tabula were overwhelmed with data. Even if they got an exact match to one of their stored images, they couldn't respond fast enough to arrive at a particular train station or hotel lobby. Never stop, Thorn had told her. They can't catch you if you keep moving.

  The danger came from any habitual action that showed a Harlequin taking a daily, predictable route to some location. The facial scanner would eventually discover the pattern and then the Tabula could set up their ambush. Thorn had always been wary of situations he called "channels" or "box canyons." A channel was when you had to travel one particular way and the authorities were watching. Box canyons were channels that led to a place with no way out—such as an airplane or an immigration interrogation room. The Tabula had the advantage of money and technology. The Harlequins had survived because of courage and their ability to cultivate randomness.

  When Maya reached London, she took the Underground to the Highbury and Islington station, but didn't return to her flat. Instead she went up the road to a takeout restaurant called Hurry Curry.

  She gave the delivery boy an exterior door key and asked him to wait two hours, then place a chicken dinner inside her entryway. As it began to get dark, she climbed onto the roof of the Highbury Barn, a pub across the street from her building. Concealed behind an air vent, she watched people stopping to buy wine at the off-license shop on the ground floor of her building. Citizens hurried home carrying briefcases and shopping bags. A white delivery van was parked near the entrance to her flat, but no one was in the front seat.

  The Indian boy from Hurry Curry appeared at exactly seven thirty. The moment he unlocked the door that led upstairs to her flat, two men jumped out of the white van and shoved him into the entryway. Perhaps they'd kill the boy or maybe they'd just ask questions and let him live. Maya didn't really care. She was sliding back into Harlequin mentality: no compassion, no attachments, no mercy.

  She spent the night at a flat in East London that her father had purchased many years ago. Her mother had lived there, concealed within the East Asian community, until she died from a heart attack when Maya was fourteen. The three-room flat was on the top floor of a shabby building just off Brick Lane

  . A Bengali travel agency was on the ground floor and some of the men who worked there would arrange work permits and identity cards for a price.

  East London had always been outside the walls of the city, a convenient place to do or buy something illegal. For hundreds of years it had been one of the worst slums in the world, the hunting ground for Jack the Ripper. Now crowds of American tourists were led around on nightly Ripper walks, the Old Truman Brewery had become an outdoor pub, and the glass towers of the Bishop's Gate office complex thrust itself into the heart of the old neighborhood.

  What used to be a warren of dark passageways was now dotted with art galleries and trendy restaurants, but if you knew where to look you could still find a wide range of products that helped you avoid the scrutiny of the Vast Machine. Every weekend peddlers appeared on upper Brick Lane

  near Cheshire Street

  . The peddlers sold stiletto knives and brass knuckles for street fighting, pirated videos, and SIM chips for cell phones. For a few extra pounds, they would activate the chip with a credit card attached to a shell corporation. Although the authorities had the technology to listen to phone calls, they couldn't trace them back to cell phone owners. The Vast Machine could easily monitor citizens with permanent addresses and bank accounts. Harlequins living off the Grid used an endless supply of disposable phones and identity cards. Almost everything except their swords could be used a few times and tossed away like a candy wrapper.

  Maya called her employer at the design studio and explained that her father had cancer and she was going to have to quit work to take care of him. Ned Clark, one of the photographers who worked for the studio, gave her the name of a homeopathic doctor, and then asked if she had tax problems.

  "No. Why do you ask?"

  "A man from Inland Revenue was in the office asking about you. He talked to the people in accounting and requested information about your tax payments, phone numbers, and addresses."

  "And they told him?"

  "Well, of course. He's from the government." Clark lowered his voice. "If you've got a place in Switzerland, I'd go there right now. To hell with the bastards. Who wants to pay taxes anyway?"

  Maya didn't know if the man from Inland Revenue was a real government employee or just a Tabula mercenary with a fake ID. Either way, they were searching for her. Back at the flat, Maya found the key to a storage locker in a Brixton warehouse. She had gone to the locker with her father when she was a little girl, but hadn't visited it for many years. After watching the warehouse for a few hours, she entered the building, showed her key to the clerk, and was allowed to take an elevator up to the third floor. The locker was a windowless room about the size of a walk-in closet. People stored wine in the warehouse and it was kept fairly cold with air-conditioning units. Maya switched on the overhead lightbulb, locked the door, and began to search through the boxes.

  When she was growing up, her father helped her obtain fourteen passports from several different countries. Harlequins acquired t
he birth certificates of people who had died in car accidents, then used the certificates to apply for legal identification. Unfortunately, most of these fake documents had become obsolete now that the government was gathering biometric information—face scans, iris patterns, and fingerprints—then placing the information on a digital chip attached to each citizen's passport or national ID. When the chip was read by a scanner, the data was compared with the information stored on Britain's National Identity Register. On international flights to America, the passport data had to match the iris and fingerprint scans taken at the airport.

  Both the United States and Australia were issuing passports with radio frequency ID chips embedded in the covers. These new passports were convenient for immigration officials, but they also gave the Tabula a powerful tool for hunting down their enemies. A machine called a "skimmer" could read the information on a passport hidden inside a coat pocket or purse. Skimmers were installed in elevators or bus stops, any location where people lingered for a brief amount of time. While a citizen was thinking about lunch, the skimmer was downloading a wide variety of personal information. The skimmer might search for names that suggested a certain race, religion, or ethnicity. It would find out the citizen's age, address, and fingerprint data—as well as where he had traveled in recent years.

  The new technology forced Maya to rely on three "facer" passports that matched three different versions of her biometric data. It was still possible to fool the Vast Machine, but you had to be clever and resourceful.

  The first thing to disguise was your appearance. Recognition systems focused on the nodal points that comprised each unique human face. The computer analyzed a person's nodal points and transformed them into a string of numbers to create a face print. Tinted contact lenses and different-colored wigs could change your superficial appearance, but only special drugs could defeat the scanners. Maya would have to use steroids to puff up her skin and lips or tranquilizers to relax the skin and make her look older. The drugs had to be injected into her cheeks and forehead before arriv ing at an airport with scanners. Each of her three facer passports used different doses of drugs and a different sequence of injections.