The Devil's Elixir

39

Lina Dawetta came through for Perrini, as he knew she would. wiz She told him that the target was using a new Verizon iPhone, which had helped. Her contact at that carrier was über-efficient, highly pliable, and far from insensitive to the appeal of a small batch of crisp hundred-dollar bills and the charms of her dark Sicilian skin. Also helpful was the fact that Chaykin had her GPS location service switched on. Most people did, without realizing it. In Chaykin’s case, it showed, as Perrini had suspected, that she was currently in San Diego.

Perrini chuckled to himself as he wondered if there had been any domestic fireworks following her undoubted discovery that her boyfriend had a kid he didn’t know about.

Ah, the wicked web we weave.

“I just emailed you the tracking app,” Lina told him. “Your client’s Android-based, right?”

“Correct,” he told her. “You done good, darling. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up, checked his email to see that he’d received what she sent him, then he dialed Octavio Guerra’s number.

An hour later, Tess still hadn’t found any Deans in her online search.

She quit her browser and tossed her iPad onto the bed, then sat up. The day was wasting away, and she wasn’t getting anywhere.

Her thoughts turned to Alex, and she felt they could all use a change of scenery. Balboa Park, with its open spaces and its museums, was a short hop away. The zoo had been great in terms of keeping him occupied and giving him a distraction from the reality checks that, she knew, were hounding him at all hours. There were plenty of other attractions there to provide him with more of that.

She peered into the adjacent room, where her suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by both Alex and Jules.

A few minutes later, they were all in Jules’s car and on their way there.

Twenty miles north of their position, the black Chevy Tahoe emerged from the gates of a beachfront villa and breezed down the quiet residential street, headed for the freeway.

In it were three well-groomed, casually dressed men in combinations of chinos or cargo pants, sports shirts or polos, and Timberlands or Merrells. They also all sported sunglasses that masked the resolve in their eyes and light Windbreakers that hid the silenced handguns in their upside-down underarm holsters.

One of them, the one riding shotgun, had his eyes trained on the Android-powered HTC phone that he held in his hand.

He’d just downloaded a custom app that had been emailed to him, one that worked off the phone’s embedded Google Maps feature. The phone’s browser was open on a live map of San Diego, and the map had two live markers blinking on it: a standard one that used the phone’s built-in GPS function to display its current position, and a second marker—a white, blinking one that the app had overlaid onto the map.

The marker, they’d been told, was accurate to within ten feet of the target’s true position.

The three men were about to put that claim to the test.