Conspiracy

130

Ball leaned forward from the taxi’s rear seat.

“Could you turn that up, please?” he asked the cabdriver.

The man, a dark-skinned Latino, flicked the radio’s volume up a notch.

“… the President is expected to meet the governor tomorrow eve ning. The next day, he’ll attend ceremonies at the Ronald Reagan Library, where among other guests at the nonpartisan event will be the man the opposition party seems to be leaning toward as his next opponent, Senator Gideon McSweeney… ”

“That’s fine,” said Ball, leaning back in the seat.

At least he knew where McSweeney would be tomorrow.

There was no question of getting him there, though; the security around the President would be too great.

When would he do it?

As soon as possible. The longer he waited, the better the odds would be that they would get him before he got McSweeney.

And he was going to get McSweeney.

checking into the hotel presented Ball with another dilemma. He’d need a credit card. He didn’t want to use his own, and was leery about using Amanda Rauci’s as well.

Someone was bound to be looking for her by now.

The fact that Ball had arrived before the hotel’s 4:00 p.m. check-in time gave him a brief reprieve. He told the young woman that he would check in later if he could leave his bag.

After she took it he walked back out into the lobby lounge area and sat down to think.

There were Web sites and criminal rings where you could buy credit card numbers, but obtaining the cards themselves required you to meet someone in person. There must be a hundred black-market dealers in LA, but they’d never trust him enough to deal with him, not quickly anyway. And finding them would be next to impossible: if he went down to South Central and just started asking around, he’d be rolled inside of an hour.

Maybe the solution wasn’t to stay anywhere. He needed to use a computer, and there was a business center in the hotel; he’d give them a false room number. Beyond that, what did he need?

A shower would be nice.

And sleep.

There was too much to do to sleep.

Ball had just decided to use Amanda Rauci’s credit card again when a better solution fell literally into his lap — a woman passing nearby dropped her purse on the floor. Ball got up and gave it up for her. There wasn’t time to take the card from her wallet — she would have seen — but now that he had the idea, all he to do was find the opportunity.

Opportunity presented itself about a half hour later, at a hotel restaurant across the street. Ball positioned himself in the bar near the cash register, planning to swipe a card off an unattended tray after the cashier had run up the charges. But as Ball ordered a beer he noticed that the bartender and some of the waitstaff stowed their pocketbooks on a shelf next to the bar. He slipped his hand down and took out the bartender’s wallet as she poured the beer at the far end of the bar.

Ball slid a ten across the bar and smiled at the woman’s joke about it being a little early for anything stronger. Then he went to the men’s room. The purse he’d picked had six different credit cards; he took the one that looked least worn from swipe machines. Returning the wallet was easy; the bartender had gone into the other room to help set up for dinner.

Ball sat down and finished his drink, sipping slowly as he planned out what he needed to do next.