Vangelis Kinkedes was the night shift supervisor at the NUC field office on North Kennesaw. He was an avocado-shaped second-generation Greek with droopy bloodhound eyes and bad skin. He was up to his ears in grease from a souvlaki pita when Bock appeared at the glass doors of the office and slipped his ID card through the reader. Bock was wearing all black and looked bone weary.
“Tony, hey, Tony, what the fuck you doing here at this hour? And what’s with the ninja suit?”
Bock slumped into the padded chair in front of his computer station, reached down into his pack, and pulled out a six-pack of Rolling Rock, peeled one off and tossed it across to Vangelis.
“The AC is out at my flat. Too damn hot to sleep. I have a bunch of reports to key in. I figured I’d get them done here, where it’s cool. Is it just you and me, or is everybody out on a call?”
“We got two trucks out, on account of the heat. Everybody has their AC on—”
“Except me.”
Vangelis grinned at him over the top of his Rolling Rock. “Except you. We got rolling brownouts and people calling in all over the place. You want to post on as R2R? I’ll put you down for double OT. We could really use you.”
“Works for me,” said Bock, typing in his password and looking at the system entry screen. He was concerned about having to log in with his own ID, but he had no choice.
Chu had him by the throat.
I chose you when I saw what you did for a living. You can go into any house in the city and no one will pay any attention to you. That is why I chose you. I have studied the Niceville Utility computer. I know that you can disable his home climate-control system from the head office. Then you will arrange to take the service call—
How?
That’s your problem. You will go to Deitz’s house and you will search his home office and you will find a way to copy the hard drive on his home computer—
Why can’t you do that from—
Because he never goes online with that computer. I need what’s on his hard drive—
Why?
To complete my dossier. Deitz was in trouble with the federal government. What he did was bad enough to force him to resign from the FBI. I also believe that he betrayed four men who were conspiring with him, and these four men went to jail in his place. It would be useful to know the names of these men, in order to persuade Mr. Deitz that his interests may best be served by cooperating with me.
What did he do?
I believe the details will be on his computer or on files in his home office. I want to complete my dossier on him. I wish to possess the whole story of all his crimes. I want the names of those four men.
Why?
As I have said. To complete my files. Deitz plans to leave the country and go to live in Dubai. He’s rich but he needs to be much richer if he is to live safely in Dubai. So he is stealing all he can—
Did he rob that bank in Gracie?
No.
Do you know who did?
I could find out, if I cared. I have cloned his BlackBerry. I infer from what I hear and see that Deitz is dealing with someone over an item taken from the bank during the robbery, an item belonging to Slipstream Dynamics, an item he has promised to deliver to a man named Mr. Dak. But I am concentrating only on Byron Deitz. If I have all the details of his betrayals, including the full story of his dismissal from the FBI, the names of those four men, it will help me control him. With a complete dossier, I can compel him to give me a large share of BD Securicom. Then as the co-owner of a security corporation I will qualify for a green card.
What if he just has you killed instead?
The game is worth the risk. He will know I have taken steps to protect myself.
You’re nuts.
No. I am angry. He is a very bad man. I wish to own him. I wish him to know that I own him. So. You will go there on a service call as I have planned and you will find some way to gain access to his records and his personal computer—
It’s not necessary—you said so yourself—you said you had enough to break him already.
I wish to complete my dossier. You will assist.
I can’t—
Yes. You can, and you will.
Chu had him, and that was that.
But, if he did this thing right, no one would ever connect him to the stunt, and he’d be free of Andy Chu. And after eight years he knew the NUC system as well as anyone in the commission.
Besides, playing at Jason Bourne again was going some distance to restoring his shredded ego.
“Good,” said Vangelis, turning to his screen and typing Bock’s name in on the R2R list—short for Ready to Roll. Over his shoulder he asked Bock about how things had gone at family court on Friday.
“I got screwed blue by the judge,” said Bock, feeling the burn again in his lower belly. “Lost custody, lost access, got a no-go order, plus in front of everybody he as good as calls me a cockroach and says he’s going to be keeping his eye on me. My head almost exploded.”
“That’s the way it always goes,” said Vangelis, whose domestic situation was no better than Bock’s. “The broads always win. Ask my bitch wife. Whole game is rigged. Bitches. All of them, all ages. The young ones are only BITs.”
“BITs?”
“Bitches in Training,” he said, which always got him a laugh. “What did that rocker dude say—Mick Jagger, I think, about giving away a house?”
“Keith Richards. He said, ‘Forget marriage. Next time I’m just going to find a woman I hate and give her a house.’ ”
“That’s it. Who was the judge?”
“Monroe. Teddy Monroe.”
“Jeez. He’s a hard guy. You lip off at him? I mean, after he calls you a cockroach?”
“I gave him some edge. You know, in a cold kind of way. Told him that with all due respect I felt he had crossed a line and the way he was talking to me was bringing justice into disrepudiation. I said I was an honest citizen and as such I deserved a basic level of respect.”
Vangelis swiveled around in his chair.
“No shit. You said that?”
“Couldn’t just lay there like a punk, all those people watching. You gotta stand up. It’s like Glenn Beck says. Respectful resistance. Question with boldness. That’s what America’s all about.”
Vangelis was duly impressed, and they tossed around a few more dumb-ass clichés about dozer-dyke broads and cold-assed effin cees.
After a while they gradually settled down to the plodding pace of the graveyard shift in America’s heartland, the only light in the electric glow of computer screens and the beep of phones ringing in empty offices.
Back in familiar surroundings, Bock felt his nerves begin to settle. He logged on to a website for streaming audio and found some classical music—Ofra Harnoy doing Vivaldi cello sonatas—and his panic and his shame and his dread of Andy Chu and his fear of the immediate future ebbed slowly away.
Back at his flat over Mrs. Kinnear’s garage his phone was registering a fifth call from an unknown number. Every time his phone rang Mrs. Kinnear’s little dog would throw a hysterical rang and run around the backyard yapping like a castrated hyena and Mrs. Kinnear would shuffle to the screen door in her house smock and her rabbit-ear slippers and scream at it to shut the hell up, and then shuffle back to her movie—Gigi—and her bucket of Zinfandel and when she did she’d always let the screen door slam, which drove her neighbors nuts.
After eight rings, the line would switch over to voice mail and the machine delivered Christian Bock’s recorded voice, pretty wise-ass, saying, “This is a machine, you know what to do” and then the beep. No message was left.