Final Victim

Chapter 18

She waited, standing in the tropical sun next to her rental car, which was parked outside the Foley D. Knight International Airport in Tampa. Malavida's call came at exactly twelve noon, as promised. Her cellphone rang once and she flipped it open.

"Yeah?"

"It's me." His voice sounded pinched and thin.

"I'm here. Where the hell are you?"

"Listen, Karen-"

"Miss Dawson," she corrected him.

"Miss Dawson. I'm a Federal fugitive. I'm in no hurry to go back to Lompoc. I don't completely trust you. You could be transforming on me right now, so cut the shit. Okay?"

"Okay."

There was a long silence and then he said, "I'm in the phone booth across from the Hertz counter. I can see you from where I am. Pull out and drive slowly toward the gate. I'll come to you. Leave this phone connection open so I know you ain't dimin' me out 'fore you get here."

"Okay." She got in, put the cellphone down on the seat, then drove the blue LeBaron slowly toward the Hertz return. She saw Malavida sprinting across the pavement-a tall, handsome young man who suddenly looked much different, dressed in khaki pants and a white shirt. He moved quickly in front of the car and jumped in. He picked her cellphone up off the seat, checked it, then switched it off.

"Let's go," he said, and she drove out of the airport.

They rode in silence while she concentrated on getting onto the right interstate. Once she picked up Highway 42 across the Charles Owen Expressway, heading toward downtown Tampa, she looked over at him. "Why?" she said.

"Why what?"

"You bullshitted us. You got away. You were free. Why call me?"

He looked out at the flat landscape rushing past the window. "I told you… It was my fault Lockwood's old lady got put down. I never was directly responsible for somebody being dead before. It feels horrible. I can't just let it be." There was heavy self-disgust in his voice. "I was showing off. I was trying to make you think I was hot shit. I didn't bother to consider that the guy we were cracking could be as good as me. I didn't figure on him using a backfinger, getting the address. I gotta put that right 'fore I move on."

She thought he somehow looked older. She could sense him beside her. He seemed different, more assured, more in control.** sadder. She stole a glance at him. In that moment he looked almost god-like, his square jaw jutting, his glossy black hair and penetrating eyes flashing in the sunlight. But she was still angry at him for playing her like a mark.

He gave her directions and they arrived at his motel, which was near Tampa Bay, just off the Courtney Campbell Causeway. He had her park in the back.

"Where's your car?" she asked. "Or don't you have one?"

"I had one. It was a G-ride. I left it in the airport parking lot this morning. If the hubcap cops don't find it, it'll be a duck in two days."

She thought he was saying that if the cops working auto theft at the airport didn't find the car, it would get stripped. But she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of asking.

They climbed the exterior stairs to his motel room on the second floor of the colonial building. He unlocked the door and she walked into a cluttered room that looked like the repair center at Radio Shack. There were directional loop antennas, resistors, capacitors, and wires everywhere. Open on the bed was a suitcase with an assortment of wire clippers and needle-nose pliers, along with digital volt-ohm meters and screwdrivers. Two radios, stripped of their casings, were on the bed, center stage.

"What's all this?" she asked, looking around.

"It's how we catch this buster," Malavida said. "It's all stuff from Rat Shack. This zoot is using Pennet to make his calls. Unless he changes locations or computers, I think I have a pretty good chance of finding him by triangulating on his cellphone." He was looking down at the radios on the bed. "This stuff is just high-frequency receivers with direction loop antennas I made from HF wire. I'm pretty sure he'll stick with the name Rat or Wind Minstrel, and that's gonna help us."

"Why would he?" she interrupted.

"Two reasons. Because it's already in Pennet that way and it would be a hassle to change, and because hackers get attached to their user-names. I've been Snoopy for almost ten years. But you can bet he'll be more careful about his security next time he's on-line. The one part of the link he can't protect is from his cellphone to the pod that puts him into the phone line. He's vulnerable there and that's how I'll get him." "How do you know he'll use a cellphone?"

"Anybody wanting to protect their POO usually uses a cellphone." "Their what?"

"Point-of-origin. Sorry." He smiled at her, and she couldn't help noticing that the smile was dazzling and lit his handsome features. "Cell-phones are better, because with no hard wire, they're harder to trace." He continued, "All you can do is get to the local cell pod, like we did. We know its origin is here in Tampa. He knows that's a huge area. Now we've gotta narrow it down."

"Go on." She took a sheet of writing paper out of the desk and began to make notes.

"We ain't gonna be having no test here, Miss Dawson, and I don't need all this down on paper if I get busted."

"I wanna know what you're doing. Since I'm certain we're breaking half a dozen FCC regs and a couple of dozen State and Federal statutes, I wanna have a list so I'll know how many years I'm gonna serve."

He looked at her and put his hands into his back pockets. "Why are you willing to stick your nose out, anyway? It wasn't your fault Lockwood's ex got killed, unless you got a thing for him."

"It was my idea that got her killed," she said, feeling her face redden.

He cocked his head and raised one eyebrow in disbelief.

"Come on… let's give each other's personal motives a rest," she said, back-pedaling. "You wouldn't be my first guess to be helping Lockwood either. I'm willing to buy your reason. Why don't you just buy mine and tell me how all this works?"

"Okay. You're gonna take one of these units and go check into a hotel in St. Pete, across the bay. I'm gonna be right here with the other unit. We're gonna wait for this guy to make his call. When his cellphone opens up, we'll grab the signal and triangulate on it, then get an approximate location."

He opened a map that he had taken from her rental car's glove compartment and laid it on the motel's cigarette-scarred desk. It showed the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area.

"How will we know his signal? There's gotta be thousands of cell calls to this pod."

He turned around and tapped a key on his computer, which was near him on the bedside table. It had been on, silently firing screen-saving electronic starbursts onto its cobalt-blue screen. As soon as he hit the button, twelve tones sounded through the computer's speakers.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Those twelve tones are the sound he's gonna make when he punches in the twelve letters of 'WindMinstrel.' I also have a six-tone sequence for 'The Rat.' My computer will be scanning Pennet for those exact tones. As soon as it hears them, we know this guy is hot. I'll double-check Pennet for his username and once I see it we'll know he's out on the Net, using his modem via the cellphone. Then, I'll scan the cell frequencies he could be using. When I hear a modem hiss, I'll feed it to my computer and see if it's The Rat. That'll get his frequency and I'll give it to you. Then you and I have to locate the signal by triangulating on him from two separate locations before he stops transmitting."

"With this stuff?" She was looking at the equipment on the bed.

"Yeah." He picked up one of the smaller radios and turned it on. It wasn't much bigger than a cellphone. He had a homemade loop antenna on the top. "He's using a cellphone operating in the eighthundred-megahertz band. This is a Uniden BearCat 200XLT hand-held scanner," he explained. "It's one of the few radio scanners that can be modified to scan the eight-hundred-meg frequencies his cellphone uses. They quit making this unit when the FCC made it illegal to listen to cell calls. There are scanners you can buy at Rat Shack, but they are real expensive and automatically lock out the cell frequencies we want. So we pick up this guy's signal, on whatever frequency it goes out on. Then we'll look for the 'null point' in the signal."

"The null point," she said, writing that down.

"Yeah. You got any idea what you're even writing?"

"Don't be an asshole. Just tell me."

"The null point is the weak spot in the signal. Every transmission has a strong point and a weak point. The null point is the spot where the signal disappears when you make the three-sixty spin of the antenna."

"Don't we want the strongest point? Isn't that the transmission point?"

"Theoretically, yes, but the weak spot is in the exact opposite direction and it's easier to locate. The absolute absence of sound is much easier to find than an abstract guess at where sound is loudest in the spectrum."

"Got it," she said.

"Once we find the null point, we line it up with this Boy Scout compass." He held it next to the loop antenna, reading the direction of the plane of the loop. "For instance, if my antenna is pointing like this, it would be exactly two hundred sixteen degrees." Malavida set the compass on the road map and turned it until he found 216 degrees. "My motel is here, so we draw a line through my motel out at two hundred sixteen degrees." Using a book as a straightedge, he drew a light line on the map. "Now say you're over here in St. Petersburg," he said, pointing to another spot on the map. "It doesn't matter how far away, as long as it's far enough to get a baseline on the triangle. You're doing the same thing as me, and let's say you get eighty degrees on your radio, then I plot it in like this…" He turned the compass till he found 80 degrees, then drew a straight line through her hotel on that heading. The two lines converged and intersected. "Where the lines cross, that's where he is, give or take a square mile or so."

"A what?"

"You gotta figure we're gonna be off a few degrees. This isn't a satellite fix. That few degrees off from several miles away could give us an area as much as a square mile."

"Shit," she said, disappointed. "One square mile in a huge city…? It might as well be a hundred."

"Look, right now, all we got is metropolitan Tampa. I'm trying to narrow it down. If he's not using tempest shielding, which he's probably not, then there's ways to get closer. Just do what I ask."

She looked at him and saw that she had hurt his feelings. The dynamics between them had changed. There was something about his energy and bearing that made her see him differently. He no longer seemed like the convict they had picked up in Lompoc. He seemed older and sexier-a thought that struck her as strangely inappropriate. She was having trouble reading her feelings of late. She had made several mistakes in recent years, when she had confused the transitory absence of loneliness with sexual attraction. Her emotional survival alarm went off and she pulled back. "You're right," she said softly. "This is better than where we were. Good going."

"And I don't need a Vaseline rub either," he said sharply.

She reached out and picked up the compass and looked at it for a long moment. "But could you use a hamburger?" she asked recklessly.