Chapter Twenty-Eight

M

aliha was back in North Carolina, skulking in the line of trees that ringed the two-acre lawn of Diane Harvey’s pretentious home. It was around 11 P.M. The landscaping provided plenty of cover as Maliha, dressed in black, moved toward the house. The burglar alarm was child’s play. She picked the lock on a basement door, went inside, and clipped the telephone wire. Not sufficient these days. She had to locate Diane’s cell phone. Walking through the darkened house, she approached the master bedroom on the second floor. The door was open and she could hear water running. Diane was taking a shower.

Maliha searched the bedroom, listening to Diane sing “Wild Thing” at the top of her voice. She found a Blackberry and tossed it out the second-story window. A gun found in a desk drawer went into her waist pack.

The bedroom was large, with a reading area that held a comfortable chair, a good lamp, and a set of bookshelves. Nearby was a desk with a computer with a screensaver that flashed close-ups of flowers, one after the other. Maliha inserted a CD that Amaro had given her and installed a program on the computer. Then she sat in the chair, flipped on the lamp so she could be seen clearly, and waited. She had a busy night ahead of her, with travel back to Chicago and a task to do there, and she hoped Diane wasn’t the type who drained all the hot water from the tank when she took a shower.

Maliha had some doubts about this venture. As far as she was concerned, PharmBots was off the hook for the murder of the coders. If they’d been planning to use Nando and Hairy as scapegoats for their own negligence, then it was much better to have live scapegoats. If the coders turned up dead, PharmBots would just look like it was covering its tracks clumsily, which would have been true.

Maliha could have walked away from the story of the lawsuit over Karen Dearborn’s death in the hospital. There must be hundreds of thousands of other individual needs that went unmet, and Maliha wasn’t expecting a boost toward redemption from this one. She hadn’t intervened before Karen died.

The manufacturing flaw had been quietly repaired, so the pill robot wasn’t menacing anyone else. The murder investigation had shifted elsewhere.

Why this one, then? For the warm fuzzies?

Pictures from the Dearborn photo album played in a slideshow in Maliha’s mind. The happy couple at their wedding, husband Sean patting his wife’s pregnant belly, a lock of baby Karen’s fine reddish hair taped next to a picture of her in the hospital. Years of learning to walk, going to school. An obituary clipped from the newspaper: Local teacher dies after truck crosses median. Then the discovery of Karen’s heart problems the doctors were working on.

If only she’d had another year, the doctors had said. Another year and she would have been a normal girl.

Diane wailed away in the shower, reaching a crescendo, and then the water was turned off.

Okay, admit it. Warm fuzzies all the way.

Diane came out of the bathroom naked and nearly jumped to the ceiling.

“Jesus Christ! What are you doing in here? I’m calling the police.”

“You can try to call the police, but you won’t get far.”

Diane lunged toward her nightstand and pressed the emergency alarm button that sat there. It failed to light up, even though she pressed it a number of times.

“Surprise. Alarm’s off.”

Diane retrieved a bathrobe from a hook over the door and sat down in the desk chair. Maliha saw her eyes scanning the room, looking for the missing Blackberry. Then she edged closer to the computer, probably thinking about getting a message off to someone. It wouldn’t work, thanks to Amaro’s program. No programs could execute other than ones he’d specified, and the computer could reach websites he’d allowed. All the paths of communication had been shut down for Diane, and there was no way Maliha would let her leave the room.

“What is it that you want?” Diane’s voice was tight with anger and a tinge of fear.

Maliha pulled a mini-CD from her pack. “On this disk there are records of the illegal purchase of twenty-two Peruvian artifacts, the Moche pots on display in your office. Names, dates, places of purchase. Verifiable information. You didn’t vet anything for legal importation. The U.S. National Stolen Property Act frowns on that.”

Diane said nothing.

“I’ll destroy all this information if you’ll do a couple of things for me. I have an offer that expires in about”—she looked at her watch—“twenty minutes.”

“Such as?”

“First, pay the hospital bills for Karen Dearborn.”

Diane shook her head. “I won’t do that. It would be an admission of some level of guilt.”

“Then you’re not going to like number two. Settle the lawsuit outside of court. Pay Samantha Dearborn five million dollars and everything will go away. This disk and all your headaches. It’s not like that’s going to bring Karen Dearborn back, but at least the mother will get an apology.”

“You’re crazy! I can’t do that! PharmBots…”

“Who said anything about PharmBots? I’m talking about paying from your personal account. I know you’ve got the money.”

“No. I won’t do that. You can leave now, I’m not talking about this anymore.”

Maliha stood up. “You’ll be spending years in federal prison, but it’s your choice.” She was halfway to the door of the bedroom when Diane spoke.

“Wait. Everything goes away? The Moche pots? The lawsuits against both PharmBots and the hospital? No publicity? The woman will sign a non-disclosure statement?”

Maliha nodded. “She’s a practical woman with a crippling debt. Good for your company, good for the hospital, good for Karen’s mother. And it keeps you out of jail.”

“Why doesn’t the hospital have to pay half? Blame hasn’t been assigned.”

“I’m blaming you. You’re vulnerable, Diane.” She waved the mini-CD containing the incriminating evidence in her direction. Maliha hadn’t mentioned the memos Amaro had concerning the PharmBots plot to place all the blame on the dead coders. That was her backup plan. Besides, Diane must have known that the same theft of information that covered the Moche pots also had damaging information about the lawsuits. Maliha had the winning hand.

“This is blackmail.”

Maliha nodded solemnly. “In a good cause. Karen’s mom didn’t have anything to do with planning this, by the way. It’s all between you and me.”

Diane frowned. She was clearly weighing the benefit of letting the hospital off the hook, as far as future marketing to that and other hospitals was concerned.

“What guarantee do I have that you won’t blackmail me in the future? I’m sure you have copies of that disk.”

“Of course I have copies. You have no guarantee except my word.”

“This isn’t going to surface in one of your stupid books, is it?”

“No, it’s too mundane for one of my plots. Transfer the money now. I have a Swiss bank account number you can use.” It was a virtual account number, one that would be translated by the Swiss bank to her real account number.

“No way. This is going too fast. I don’t have any written guarantees the suits will be dropped. I don’t have the Dearborn woman’s non-disclosure.”

“Is that all that’s holding us up? I’ve got the documents right here.” Maliha pulled a roll of papers out of her waist pack. She hadn’t planned to give them up unless she had to.

Diane took the papers and switched on a desk lamp, then started going over them. Maliha watched the woman’s right hand inch toward the desk drawer. She was going for the gun.

“Are you looking for this?” Maliha pulled the gun from her pack. Diane yanked the desk drawer open and scowled when she saw that her gun was missing.

She went back to reading the documents in the light of the desk lamp. When she sat back in her chair, Maliha could see that the agreement looked all right to her. It should. It was drawn up by one of the highest-paid attorneys in the country, Maliha’s.

“I’d like to have my legal staff go over this.”

“I’d like to have a lot of things. The offer’s about to expire.” Maliha put her finger into the center hole of the mini-CD and twirled it around.

Diane hesitated, then made a decision. “All right. Tell me what to do.”

Maliha had Diane log on and visit the Swiss website to enter the virtual account number, then Diane’s banking information and password, and the amount. Maliha made a point of politely looking away while Diane entered her personal information, but she did count the zeros on the amount.

A screen came up that said validation of the account numbers was complete, with a notice:

Diane stared at the screen, her cursor poised over the ENTER key.

“No. No, I don’t trust you. It’s not as if you’ve given me any reason to. You’re trying to push me into acting before I think the whole thing through. Why is there an expiration on the offer? We can talk this over in my office in the morning, and get my personal and corporate attorneys involved. The lawsuit is a corporate matter, so the funds should come out of the corporate kitty. I still think the hospital should fork over half. Their reputation’s on the line, too.”

She canceled the transaction.

“You’re willing to have your smuggling activities discussed in front of all those people?”

“No reason to. As you’ve pointed out, I have the signed agreement in my hands.” She opened a desk drawer and put the papers inside with a satisfied look on her face. “If you try to raise the smuggling issue, you’re admitting to blackmail. You’ve done yourself in, Ms. Know-it-All Winters. If that’s even your real name.”

Maliha pulled a knife from its sheath. “I thought there was a good chance of this. I can take those papers back.”

“You’ll have to come through me. I know self-defense.”

Maliha kept herself from laughing. Instead she sheathed the knife and took out her cell phone. She had another deadly weapon in mind: Amaro.

“You have everything you need?” she asked.

“Yeah. It’s a go, then?”

“Go.” She disconnected the call.

Diane stood up, a petite woman quivering with anger in her voluminous bathrobe. “Go. Get out of my house. That disk’s useless to you. You can’t blackmail me.”

Maliha stalled for a minute, using a verbal boxing match to keep Diane huffy.

“Turn around.”

Frowning, Diane turned. Then her eyes grew wide. “What the hell is going on here?”

Transaction complete. US$5,000,000 transferred. Please print a receipt for your records.

“Your computer’s been hacked. Everything you entered tonight was collected with a keystroke recorder and fired off instantly to my trusty computer expert. I installed a program that took control of your computer remotely. While you’ve been railing at me, your money was zinging along the wire to Switzerland. You did the right thing for Karen and her mother.”

“You can’t do that! You can’t take my money without my approval!”

“But you did approve. Your cursor clicked Enter. Of course, you didn’t have your hand on the mouse at the time.”

Enraged, Diane shoved the computer and monitor from her desk. The monitor burst and sent a shower of glass over the carpet.

“The maid’s not going to like that. By the way, you should get dressed.” Maliha checked her watch again. “The FBI will be arriving very soon. They’ve just served a warrant at your place of business to confiscate the stolen antiquities. The FBI Art Theft Team already has all your records.”

Diane’s face grew red. “You bitch! You fucking bitch! I’ll sue you! You can’t blackmail me. I want my money back now.”

“What money? By now all records of your transaction have already been wiped out. No one can follow the money trail because there isn’t any. What blackmail? The Black Ghost was never here.”

Maliha turned on her heel and left, with Diane’s eyes stabbing her in the back.

A few minutes later, in the taxi on the way to the airport, Maliha squirmed, squeezed her eyes shut, bit her lip, and struggled to keep from outright groaning as a single figure left fiery tracks across her body. The taxi driver, hearing muffled sounds from the backseat, asked if she was all right.

A gasp of pain escaped her, and she stretched it out. “I’mmmm fine.” He shrugged and stopped looking in the rearview mirror. He cracked his window a bit, probably figuring that she had a monumental case of gas.

The lurch through time was dizzying and left her panting. She held up a newspaper a previous passenger had left in the taxi to block the driver’s view of her face as the reaction passed. She had been rewarded with a small upward nudge of the “good” pan on the scale. The only thing she could figure out was that, without her action tonight, Samantha Dearborn would have continued a spiral of grief and hopelessness and taken her own life.

Straightening up in the airport restroom, Maliha noticed that the movement of the scale had cost her more years. Barely discernible crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes were starting to make themselves known. Studying her face in the mirror, she figured the cost to be about three years. She’d left home with the physical appearance of a woman in her mid-twenties; she was going back to Chicago as a woman in her late twenties.

Samantha and Karen were worth it.

 

B

ack in Chicago, Maliha was wearing white out of season. She told herself, though, that any season was okay for a wedding gown.

She’d carried it in a duffel bag and taken a taxi to an all-night restaurant within a mile of her destination. She ran the rest of the way with the bag slung over her back, moving along in the still hours before dawn.

Outside the home of Edward Rupert, CFO of ShaleTech, she disengaged the alarm and went in a back window. Amaro’s information was accurate. Edward went to bed—alone—at 10 P.M. on weeknights. On the weekends, he was a man about town, enjoying his bachelor status and drawing women with a display of free spending.

Edward was also, according to anecdotes, a man who believed in the supernatural. Maliha was about to take a page from A Christmas Carol and visit him as a ghost.

Edward had been engaged to a woman named Caroline Martin. His third marriage, her first. She was twenty-five years old and a teller at the bank he frequented. The ring was bought, the date was set. Caroline began to feel tired, weak, and bruise easily. A skin rash and an odd shortness of breath sent her to the doctor. The diagnosis was AML, acute myeloid leukemia. Caroline didn’t respond to aggressive treatment and died four months after her first visit to the doctor. It would have been a tragic love story, the kind that sends women reaching for the tissue box, except that Edward had taken back his ring and turned his back on her. Caroline, a woman with no living family, had died holding a nurse’s hand instead of her beloved’s.

He couldn’t spare a mere four months of his life to see her through to the end.

Maliha put on the wedding gown and slipped a two-carat diamond solitaire on her left ring finger. Edward’s bedroom was on the first floor. His snores greeted her as she pushed open the door. She unplugged the lamp by his bed, then went up to him and whispered in his ear.

“Edward, darling, why did you do it?”

He brushed at his ear and turned over. She went around to the other side of the bed, stroked his arm, and repeated her question a little louder. He sat up suddenly, but Maliha was across the room by then, standing in front of a window. The moonlight streaming in outlined her body and kept her face in the shadows.

Edward saw Caroline standing there in a wedding gown.

“Mother of God. It can’t be!” He reached over to turn on the lamp.

Gotcha.

Maliha glided away from the window. “When’s the wedding, Edward?” she murmured. “Isn’t it almost time?”

“Keep away from me!”

Maliha shined a pale light downward, illuminating her gown in an eerie way, with deep shadows on the full skirt. Then she flicked off the light, moved faster than a human could to the other side of the room, and turned the flashlight on again.

Edward’s head swiveled to follow her. To him, it looked like she disappeared from one spot and reappeared in another. She waved her hand in the beam of the light, so he could see the diamond ring.

“You made me give it back to you. That wasn’t nice. It made me feel bad and I was already sick. I came back for my ring.”

She moved again. Edward’s face, lit by the moonlight, was a mask of fear.

“And I came back to ask why you left me, Edward,” she said.

“I…I…” His voice was nowhere to be found.

She moved close and brushed the edge of the bed with her gown. He cowered back from her against the headboard, holding the blanket up in front of him.

She had him going now. She took a running leap toward the bed, let her foot drag across the covers and landed soundlessly on the other side.

A wordless moan rose from Edward’s shaking mass. It was time to get tough.

She threw back her head and screamed for all she was worth. When the sound died away, she spoke. “I was scared when you left me, but you didn’t care.”

“I cared. I still care.” It was a small, frightened voice, a child talking about the monsters under the bed, a nightmare come to life in his own bedroom.

“I don’t believe that.” She appeared on the other side of the room.

“Yes, yes, I care. I shouldn’t have left you. That was wrong of me.”

“Then why did you do it? It must have been what happened at work. It was too much stress for you, my poor Edward.”

He seized on the idea. “That’s it. It was problems at work. I never would have left you if it wasn’t for problems at work.”

“Poor thing. What problems? Why didn’t you let me help?”

“I couldn’t tell you, Caroline. I couldn’t tell anyone.”

“You could tell me anything, you know that. You can tell me now. Was it about money?” She moved and ran her fingers across the blanket where his feet were. He pulled them up like a turtle retracting its feet into the shell. “That’s what you did for the company. Take care of all the money.”

“The company was in trouble,” he blurted. “We were about to default on loans, and Shale wanted to hide it. So we could get more loans.”

“He made you do it, didn’t he? He’s the one who’s responsible.”

In the next few minutes, she found out the extent of the financial trouble ShaleTech was in, and the reason why Shale was eager to conceal the problems and fend off creditors for a little longer. He had a project, something called Caesar, spelled CESR. It was supposed to make the company whole again, with money beyond their dreams for new development, and no one would have been the wiser about the temporary double set of books.

Edward had come through with the goods, and she decided to let him off the hook a little. “I’m glad we had this talk. I feel better now.”

She made her way to the door.

“I did love you, Caroline honey. I really did. I was weak. I didn’t know what to do around a dying person.”

It had the ring of truth to it. She checked his aura. There was genuine sorrow, and deep shame for the way he’d acted.

“I loved you, Caroline.” The moonlight showed the gleam of tears on his cheeks. “Please forgive me.”

She came back over to the bed, caressed his cheek, and kissed him lightly on the forehead. She’d gotten what she needed, and in some measure, so had Edward.

Maliha stuffed the wedding gown back into the duffel bag, slipped on the clothing she’d worn to Edward’s house, and ran back to the restaurant. It had started to rain, and by the time she reached the place, she was tempted to go inside and pass the time until the rain let up. She thought she’d feel too out of place carrying the duffel bag, though, and she didn’t want to leave it outside in the rain to be ruined.

No telling when I’ll need a wedding gown again.

At the door to her building, Arnie accepted the duffel bag without comment. She told him there was a wedding gown in it that needed cleaning. He nodded and said he’d take care of it.

“You look a little tired, Ms. Winters. It must have been a very long walk this evening.”

“Very.” When he said it, she noticed that she was a little tired.

Feeling my age.

“You get some rest, and take care now. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to my favorite resident.”

She was in the elevator halfway up to her floor when she realized he’d meant it. She’d just processed the look in his eyes. He really did care about her.

For money or for real? You be the judge.