Beating the Babushka (10 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

When Sally was five her parents died in a car accident on the outskirts of Tokyo. They were both killed instantly in a head-on collision with a truck driven by a yakuza, a member of the Japanese mob. Sally’s father had been a colonel in the U.S. Army, a special investigator looking into yakuza weapons smuggling. There were rumors the car accident had been an assassination.

Sally’s mom was Japanese and beautiful. You could see her in the shape of Sally’s green eyes and the tone of her complexion, the luster of her black hair. Her dad was American of Irish descent and gave Sally his freckles and his laugh, a raucous bark only heard on rare occasions.

Sally had no other relatives, so when her nanny Li Mei adopted her, there was no one to object. Li Mei had left her home in Hong Kong for Japan many years before, for reasons she kept to herself, but she felt it was best to return to old family and friends. Upon arriving in Hong Kong, the first thing she did was enroll Sally in school. It was a private and very exclusive school, yet there was no tuition. In fact, the school paid Li Mei handsomely in exchange for Sally’s attendance.

The school was run by the Triads, whose absolute control of organized crime in Asia was under constant threat. That was the reason for founding the school, to protect their interests.

By the time she was twelve, Sally could speak English, Japanese, and Chinese with no discernible accent. She could swear in all three like a sailor, since her classes emphasized colloquial sayings and street slang as much as formal speech. And, like most children, Sally knew basic arithmetic.

Sally also knew how to make poison from common household plants. She could hit a man in the eye with a throwing knife from almost thirty feet away, or crush his windpipe with two fingers and a sudden jab to the throat. She could disguise herself as any age, gender, or nationality, or become invisible, blending into the shadows like a wraith.

Sally was an excellent student. The men who ran the Triads watched her progress very closely. Then one day, in return for her loyalty, they decided to betray Sally. No one ever said life in the Triads was fair.

They never lived long enough to regret their mistake.

Sally left her past on the far side of an ocean and moved to San Francisco. As far as anyone knew, she was a martial arts instructor who lived modestly in a converted loft above a grocery in the heart of Chinatown. She kept to herself, but a few people knew who she had been and what she was capable of doing. One of them was Cape.

As he trudged up three flights to her loft, Cape tried to keep his breathing shallow. The stairs were killing him. The bandages wrapped around his ribs were too tight, rubbing against the wound. With each step he felt the scar being carved deeper into his skin. Amazing how one little gunshot wound could make you feel your age.

The sliding wooden door was already open. Stepping inside, Cape called out Sally’s name, scanning the vast open space.

The right wall was covered entirely in mirrors with a bar at waist height, giving the first impression of a dance studio. That image was shattered by the facing wall, filled with racks holding a dizzying variety of training weapons—wooden swords, bamboo poles, throwing stars, sparring pads for hands and feet.

In the center of the room, three heavy bags were suspended from the exposed beams overhead. Above those were nylon ropes arranged in a complicated web, used for climbing and balance training. Cape glanced into the rafters and saw her, but only because he knew where to look.

Sally was directly above him, hanging upside down from one of the ropes, watching Cape with a disgusted look on her face. She shook her head sadly.

“Pitiful.”

“What?” asked Cape defensively.

“You were a sitting duck.”

“You’re the one in the vulnerable position.”

“Really?” Sally looked as relaxed upside down as most people do sitting on a couch.

“Absolutely. The door was unlocked, and you’re hanging upside down. Unarmed.”

“I knew it was you.”

“What if it wasn’t?”

“Had it been someone else, I would have been somewhere else.”

“You sound like a fortune cookie,” replied Cape. “How did you know it was me?”

“Your footsteps—no two sets are alike. You’re favoring your left side, by the way.”

“Suppose I was a foot impersonator?”

Sally barked out a laugh. “Suppose you were?”

“Well, I could have a gun.”

“You do have a gun,” replied Sally. “It’s in a holster in the small of your back, under your jacket.”

Cape frowned. “I need a new tailor.”

Sally wrinkled her nose. “Guns.”

“I’m aware of your views on firearms. Those of us lacking your talents need—”

“To compensate?”

“Precisely.”

“Is that why men always carry guns?”

“If it weren’t for guns we’d be scratching ourselves all the time.”

“Men do that anyway.”

“But my original point remains, that you were vulnerable.”

Sally snorted. “So shoot me.”

“That’s a helluva dare.”

“No, I insist,” said Sally. “I want you to shoot me.”

“It might make a mess.”

“I have a woman that cleans every Saturday.”

“It would be awfully loud in this enclosed space.”

“Trust me,” said Sally, swinging slowly back and forth.

Cape shrugged, then drew his gun as quickly as he could. He didn’t intend to pull the trigger but thought he might prove a point. The gun had barely cleared the leather holster when he felt the knife at his throat. He hadn’t looked down as he drew, but he did blink, and in that instant Sally had disappeared. As he felt the cold tanto blade press against his neck, Cape realized he never even heard her hit the floor.

“Your quarry is never where you think it is,” said Sally, standing on her toes to whisper in his ear. “So strike where it will be next.”

Cape lowered his gun. “Was that Confucius?”

“No, a teacher I had in Hong Kong.”

“I don’t skate to where the puck is,” replied Cape. “I skate to where the puck is going.”

“Who said that?”

“Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player.”

Sally nodded. “He would have done well at my school.”

She took a step back so Cape could turn and face her. The knife had vanished somewhere within the folds of black cotton wrapped around her diminutive body. Just over five feet tall, she looked about as dangerous as a dandelion.

“Was that the lesson for the day, sensei?” asked Cape, bowing. “What do I owe you?”

“No charge for remedial students.” Sally returned the bow.

They moved to a small alcove off the main room, where a traditional Japanese tea sat ready. They both sat on tatami mats, Sally looking infinitely more comfortable than Cape. He told her about his visit from the Russians and his fun at the beach. When he was finished, Sally frowned.

“The Russian mob.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not the Russian tourism council,” said Cape.

“You must be a detective.”

“You’ve dealt with them before, I take it.”

Sally sipped some of her tea. “Once, in Hong Kong. They’re crude, but thorough.”

“Thorough.”

Sally nodded. “Very.”

“Swell.” Cape touched his side.

“What does your client have to say about all this?”

“Grace says she doesn’t know what’s going on. Right now I’m inclined to believe her.”

“Grace? Your client’s a she?”

Cape sighed.

Sally looked at him and shook her head. “Are you trying to help her, or save her?”

Cape held up his hand in warning. “I already got an earful from Beau and Linda.”

“They’re your friends—you should listen to them.”

“I’ve learned from my mistakes,” said Cape in a tired voice. “I am a changed man.”

Sally snorted. “Men don’t change,” she said. “And your taste in women is atrocious.”

“We just have different tastes,” replied Cape. “Any other advice? Want to lecture me on the proper technique for cunnilingus?”

Sally snorted again. “There is no technique, you testosterone-soaked buffoon. There is only desire. If you enjoy it, then she’ll enjoy it.”

“You know, this has been a really great visit. First you establish that you can kick my ass, now you’re lecturing me on bedroom etiquette. You sure know how to make a man feel welcome. Are you going to kick me in the nuts on my way out?”

Sally laughed and held her hands up.

“I forget sometimes how sensitive you are.”

“Only during the weeks when people are trying to kill me.”

Sally’s expression changed. “Murder is rarely personal for people like this—they just want you out of the way.”

“I think I made it personal when they came to my office.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“Always.”

“I’d get out of town until you know what’s going on.”

“Way ahead of you,” replied Cape. “I’m taking the red-eye to New York.”

“Want company?”

Cape nodded. “That would be great.”

“You need a place to stay until the flight?” asked Sally. “I don’t have any classes today.”

Cape shook his head. “I have one more stop to make before heading to the airport.”

Sally raised her eyebrows.

“I’m going to visit the Sloth,” said Cape.

“You’ve got some strange friends,” said Sally. She set down her tea and walked silently back to the large room, where she jumped into the air, grabbed a rope, and disappeared. Cape shook his head and smiled.

“I’ll take them any way I can get them,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-four

Cape thought Linda’s hair seemed happy to see him, but he couldn’t say the same for Linda.

She was standing at the bottom of the steps leading to the Sloth’s house, a small Victorian directly across from Golden Gate Park. Her hands were on her hips, which was never a good sign. “You’re late,” she said sternly as he walked up the driveway.

Cape glanced at his wrist and realized he wasn’t wearing a watch. This was clearly an argument he could not win.

“You’re right,” he said a little too quickly. “I’m an inconsiderate asshole. Anything else?” Linda’s hair swayed back and forth, which Cape chose to interpret as acceptance of his apology. Her frown, however, said he wasn’t out of the woods yet. “You’ve probably got plenty of other things to do, and I should have more respect for the value of your time,” he added.

Linda’s eyes narrowed.

“I have brought dishonor to the institution of friendship,” intoned Cape solemnly, his hand over his heart, “and I swear that from this day—”

Linda’s right hand shot out in warning as her hair moved into fighting position.

“Enough,” she said. “Another forced platitude and I might gag.”

“So I’m forgiven?”

“No, but I’m exhausted,” she replied. “Let’s go inside.”

One step over the threshold made it clear that someone unusual lived in the house. The large living room was directly off the front entrance, overlooked by an open kitchen that sat behind a short counter. Despite the size of the room, the furniture did not fill the space in any traditional, decorative fashion. Instead, small islands of chairs and tables were arranged by function. A small couch and chairs were clustered tightly around a television, VCR, and DVD player, everything within easy reach. A few feet away a chair, reading lamp, and desk were surrounded by a semi-circle of bookshelves. Half a dozen such groupings dotted the carpet, each a small shrine to a very specific activity, each within a few feet of the next. And in the center of them all was mission control.

An elaborate array of four plasma screens perched above a large curving desk, below which sat four servers, each the size of a small refrigerator and capable of storing untold amounts of data. Cables of every color snaked their way through a hole cut into the center of the floor. Arranged between the monitors was a plethora of peripheral devices, most of them unavailable from your local computer store. Cape thought he recognized one or two from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but Captain Kirk was nowhere in sight. Instead, sitting behind the desk with a bland expression on his face, was the Sloth.

When he was a child, the Sloth was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that put his world in slow motion. It could take him an hour to walk across the room, almost five minutes to finish a sentence. The doctors said there was nothing they could do. He moved within his own time frame. The other kids were unkind, as kids always are, and gave him a nickname after the slowest-moving mammal on the planet. But the Sloth didn’t care—or no one could tell if he did.

Years later, the Sloth came into contact with his first computer, and the machine revealed that his physical curse came with a hidden blessing. While his body moved like a glacier, his mind could travel faster and farther than a beam of light. The Sloth saw patterns in data streams invisible to anyone else. He could hear music in numbers and equations that baffled mathematicians for years. He was, quite simply, a genius in the truest sense of the word.

As Cape stepped closer, the Sloth looked up from his keyboard and smiled, an expression that would have looked pained on anyone else. The pale eyes were watery behind glasses, but the warmth in his gaze was unmistakable. It had been the Sloth’s sister that Cape found on his first investigation, an incident that forever changed the trajectory of both men’s lives. Cape started working with the Sloth while still a reporter, and Linda worked so closely with him that Cape never saw the Sloth without Linda at his side—interpreting for him, doing field work, or simply keeping him company.

His keyboard was a liquid-crystal pad set into the table. As Cape watched, its surface rippled with light. Words and symbols scrolled past, fleeting glimpses of thoughts that were literally at the Sloth’s fingertips. The keyboard was activated by touch, the sensitivity so high you could trigger it by exhaling. For the Sloth, it required a little more effort than that. As his hand twitched spasmodically across the surface, words appeared in glowing rows on the screens in front of Cape.

I FOUND SOMETHING.

“What do you mean, you found something? I just called this morning.” Cape turned from the Sloth to Linda. Talking to them together was almost like communicating with a single person, half the conversation verbal and the other half subtitles.

“While you kept us waiting,” replied Linda, “we were hard at work.” Her hair nodded in agreement.

Cape said nothing as more words flashed onto the screen.

DIDN’T FIND MUCH…TOO EARLY.

The Sloth’s hand moved sideways, conjuring a new set of words on the next screen.

EMPIRE PICTURES. FOR SALE.

“How can you know that?” asked Cape.

“It’s called reverse trend analysis,” said Linda. “Sort of a quantitative approach to rumor mongering.”

“In English, please,” said Cape.

Linda huffed. “You know how the news is always describing the latest trends. Bell-bottoms make a comeback. All-starch diet the new craze—pretzels the key to longevity. Fashion, cars, whatever?”

“Sure.”

“Well, they don’t just pitch trends arbitrarily based on some editor’s opinion,” explained Linda. “They track them—or, in most cases—they pay some consultant who tracks them.”

“How?”

“That’s what’s interesting. The most common method involves measuring column inches in newspapers and magazines across the country. That’s the amount of space given to a particular story.”

“Got it,” said Cape. “So if short skirts are getting progressively more space in the newspaper’s fashion section, then the trend analysts say there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing a lot of short skirts next season.”

“Right.” Linda nodded. “You add up all the space given to a specific topic in each publication you’re tracking, then sort it by subject matter. More space over time means a trend.”

“Sounds tedious.”

“It used to be,” agreed Linda. “That’s why consultants charged ridiculous fees to wade through all those papers with a ruler, adding things up. But now that everything’s online, all you need are the right software filters.”

Cape looked over at the Sloth. “And I imagine you’ve written your own.”

Linda walked over to stand directly behind the Sloth. “Sloth wrote a program this morning that scanned for any mentions of Empire across two hundred different publications currently online. He also scanned for mentions of the top ten media companies and expanded that search to five hundred publications.”

“Over what period of time?”

“The past six months,” replied Linda.

“That’s got to be an insane amount of reading,” said Cape. “Or filtering.”

“Not really,” said Linda, her hair bobbing with excitement. “Because there’s another filter to screen for stories related to Empire’s business model—words like ‘film critics,’ ‘art films,’ ‘asteroid’—that sort of thing. Then Sloth added a final filter to track the smallest articles related to the topic.”

“Smallest?” asked Cape. “I thought you were looking for the largest.”

Linda shook her head. “That’s for trends—we’re looking for rumors. Sloth reasoned that a rumor would get the least amount of space, because the editor would have little to go on—other than one source, and that might be unsubstantiated. A small mention in the back of
Variety
or
The New York Times
, for example.”

“Then what?”

“We looked for recurring mentions, but always on a small scale,” said Linda. “Under the assumption that a series of small articles might constitute a leak about an actual event. It hasn’t been substantiated, or announced, so it’s still only a rumor.”

“So it gets printed in a few different publications, but never gets a lot of space,” said Cape.

“That’s the theory, anyway.”

“Okay,” he said. “What did you find?”

“Multiple mentions over the past two months that a major media company was looking to buy another movie studio,” said Linda. “The last two specifically describe the acquisition as a mid-sized studio capable of producing both small films with critical appeal and commercially viable movies—they need the balance to hedge the purchase price against changes in the marketplace.”

“That could fit Empire’s profile,” Cape said. “But which media company are we talking about?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Linda, putting her hands on top of her head and waving them back and forth like ears. “Think of a massive entertainment conglomerate.”

“What are you supposed to be?” asked Cape. “The Easter Bunny?”

Linda dropped her hands. “A mouse. I’m talking theme parks, cartoons…ring a bell?”

“Oh, that media company,” said Cape. “Didn’t they buy a studio last year?”

“The year before, and they said at the time it was their first major acquisition in the film industry. Their first, not their last.”

Cape frowned. “They don’t strike me as the kind of company that would be too happy about negative publicity.”

“You mean like drug smuggling on the set of one of their movies?”

“Yeah,” said Cape. “Could screw up the whole deal and maybe cost the Berman brothers a lot of money.”

The Sloth’s right hand jumped like a frog.

SOUNDS LIKE A MOTIVE.

“As good as any,” said Cape. “What’s your confidence level?”

HARD TO SAY…EDUCATED GUESS
UNTIL I CAN ACCESS THEIR FILES DIRECTLY.

“You can do that?”

The Sloth smiled slowly, his mouth a little lopsided on the left, as if that side were struggling to catch up.

“Is it legal?”

The Sloth blinked, as if the concept of legality were new to him.

“Forget I asked,” said Cape. “Just let me know what you find.”

He turned to Linda, then back to the frail genius next to him. “And thanks.”

The screen lit up again, words dissolving and forming anew.

THE GIRL.

“Who?” asked Cape. “My client?”

IS IT PERSONAL?

Cape gave Linda a warning glance. “For her, or me? She knew the murder victim, if that’s what you mean.”

Sloth made no reply, and the words sat unblinking on the screen for several seconds until they changed again.

DON’T GET HURT.

Cape smiled and squeezed the Sloth’s shoulder. “Thanks, old friend. Anything else?”

It seemed to Cape that a playful smile appeared briefly at the corner of the Sloth’s mouth, then disappeared. He turned his head slowly, one degree at a time, glancing over at Linda. The words changed again.

BUY A WATCH.

Cape looked over at Linda, who was smiling broadly.

“That’s next on my list,” said Cape as he headed for the door. “Going to the airport now—after all, I don’t want to be late for my plane.”