Jason Drucklow through a back door into the nearly infinite vaults of the NSA, a chambered sea flooded with archived phone calls and text messages and emails and video from uncounted sources. Like a scuba diver, swimming down through murky strata, past coral reefs of secrets big and small, a treasure of submerged wonders to be explored, perhaps the very truth of creation waiting below in one watery abyss or another, though at the moment seeking only ordinary traffic-cam video…
The first of the two pertinent street cameras, beyond the east end of the alleyway, which should have captured Larkin arriving at his office building, is apparently malfunctioning. It currently offers no real-time image of Beverly Hills in all its legendary elegance, only a blank screen.
When Jason sources the archived video, he first specifies 7:00 A.M. of this same day. And then 6:30. And then 6:00. But the camera continues to offer nothing. Only when he jumps all the way to 5:00 A.M. is he rewarded with a view of the street from north to south.
Dawn still perhaps an hour in the future. The lamplit avenue quiet in the last of the night. A street-sweeping truck swirling out a thin low sluice of water, whirling it away with whatever dead leaves and litter. A delivery van headed south to north. A police car on patrol from north to south.
Jason fast-forwards to the sudden appearance of a pedestrian at 5:11, when a flare of light is followed by a blank screen. He scans backward to the moment when the figure emerges from the mouth of the alley, then plays the video at normal speed.
Lamplight offers far less clarity than the sun, but Jason is certain this is a woman who approaches. She raises both arms, and only at the muzzle flash does he realize she holds a firearm in a two-hand grip. The screen goes blank the instant after the flash. She’s a superb marksman. Jason keeps up with current events, and he realizes who she must be.
He sources the traffic cam on the avenue past the west end of the alley and soon discovers that she blew out this camera—again with one shot—less than three minutes before she wrecked the one on the parallel street to the east. The light this time is marginally better, and the extreme length of the pistol barrel suggests it is fitted with a sound suppressor.
There will be no video of Randall Larkin arriving at the east end of the alleyway in his Mercedes or leaving at the west end. The likelihood is that he was kidnapped and driven away by Jane Hawk.
Jason is excited that a chase is on, the woman on the run and the hunter in pursuit from the comfort of his apartment. He has no doubt that he will find the Mercedes soon, the kidnapper and the kidnapped soon thereafter.