I felt a shocking chill and a sensation of falling. I gripped the armrest and tried not to move or speak or cry out. That was Joe’s voice. I couldn’t be mistaken. My Joe.
“I’m here, Chief,” said the girl at the coffee table. She got up from her chair, leaned over her colleague’s shoulder, and waved her hand at his computer screen.
“OK. Good. I’m still in the lobby,” said the voice of the man I’d loved for years, the man who’d promised to love me through sickness and health, the father of my baby. He said, “What’s going on?”
“They’re both in there. W
e’ve got action,” said Bud.
“Any talk about that plane from Beijing?” Joe asked.
The girl said, “Nothing yet. They’re all about each other, Chief.”
“OK. I’m coming up.”
“Copy,” said Bud.
And then, at 6:23 on the nose, Jad’s picture dissolved into static.
I was falling again, but my mind stayed in gear.
Sometime between the time the Internet feed went down and when Liam Dugan, the head of hotel security, showed us the dead housekeeper in the closet, a total of four people had been murdered.
Jad was saying to Cindy, “The two dead kids. Bud and Chrissy could be their real nicknames. If you run their pictures again with those names, maybe someone will come forward. You heard ‘Joe’ ask about an airplane from Beijing?
“Three days later, an airplane from China was blown to hell over Route 101. Maybe Bud and Chrissy were killed because they knew about the plane. I wish I didn’t, but I know it, too. And now so do you,” Jad said.
He said to Cindy, “Someone should put it out there that there was foreknowledge of that plane crash, don’t you think? But it can’t be me.
“And now say good-bye to the video.”
“Wait,” Cindy said. “Play the last minute again.”
Jad sighed, then reversed the footage and ran it forward. I heard Joe ask about an airplane from Beijing. Joe knew about that plane. Joe knew.
Jad closed down the video and dragged the file to an icon labeled DESTROY. Software flames consumed the files.
The videos might be permanently destroyed, but they were part of me now.
I couldn’t forget them if I tried.
CHAPTER 74
THE WIND HAD picked up during our fifteen-minute meeting in the parking lot, whipping the young trees standing in their concrete planters on the sidewalk as traffic illuminated the six-lane Embarcadero.
It looked like any normal summer evening in San Francisco, but nothing would ever be normal for me again.
Joe had prior knowledge of a plane crash that was shaping up to be one of the worst air disasters on record.
Cindy and I got out of the backseat of her car. Jad told Cindy that his phone number was now a nonworking number, and that no offense, he would stand there and watch us leave so that we couldn’t follow him.
We all shook hands, and Cindy wished Jad good luck. I wondered if Jad’s superiors actually believed his recording equipment had failed. Or if they were following him even now, watching Cindy and me as we climbed back into her car.
Cindy was practically bug-eyed as she drove us away from the parking lot.
“Check me on this,” she said to me. “The dead kids were taping Chan and Muller. They were told to hit the kill switch, and they did. During the blackout, someone came in and shot them and maybe killed Chan, too, right? That guy talking to them…?”
“That was Joe.”