Invisible Armies

Chapter 28

"Here you are," Danielle agrees. "Come on. I've got a hotel. By the beach."

It's a twenty-minute drive down the Santa Monica Highway to the Cadillac Hotel, a moderately priced Art Deco hotel right on Venice's boardwalk, where Danielle once spent a week with Jonas DeGlint, one of her nicer Crazy Years boyfriends. Jonas was neurotic, needy, a bad guitarist and worse songwriter who believed himself the second coming of Jimi Hendrix, but he stayed away from hard drugs and was always good to Danielle, and her memories of the Cadillac are fond ones.

She parks on Rose Street. Jayalitha is half-asleep in the passenger seat. Danielle wanted to watch the sun set over the Pacific, but it is already dark; she wanted to buy Jayalitha sandals, but the stores have all closed. She supposes one more barefoot night won't kill her. The Indian woman hardly needs shoes anyhow, she has half-inch callouses on her feet.

"You must be tired," Danielle says, when they arrive in their room, small but clean, with two double beds.

"Exhausted." Jayalitha's eyes drift from Danielle to the bed as if magnetically compelled. "I know we must speak. But if it is possible to sleep first..."

Danielle knows she has to find out what Jayalitha knows, why she fled India and has stayed quiet for the six months since, but she also knows the subject is poison. She is reluctant to bring it up now, when Jayalitha is so childishly happy to be fed and given a place to sleep.

"Go ahead," Danielle says. "Take a shower, go to bed. We'll talk in the morning."

** *

The ringing phone startles them both awake. Danielle crawls to the edge of her bed and gropes for it, dazed by sleep. The room is lit only by starlight and the glowing red digits of their alarm clock. It takes her four rings to locate the phone by sound.

"Yes?" she answers.

"Danielle. It's Keiran." The connection is terrible, his voice sounds fuzzy. "They know where you are. You have to get out of there."

"What?"

"I'm serious."

Danielle shakes her head to clear it. "How, how do you know?"

"I have a tracer on P2's VOIP gateway. I can't listen in, it's encrypted, but I know he just called your hotel. Presumably confirming your presence. Then he called two other Los Angeles numbers. I think he's sending people after you."

"How, how could they have found us?"

"P2 must have cracked every hotel in the city," Keiran says. There is something like awe in his voice.

"What are we supposed to do now?"

"You're supposed to run."

"Where can we go?"

"We? You found her?" Keiran asks. "Yes. She's right here with me."

"Good. Where's a good place to meet, near the airport?"

"The airport," Danielle says, and tries to think. "There's a building in the middle. A restaurant. Looks like a flying saucer."

"I'll be there by noon. Your time."

"Noon?" Danielle looks at the clock. It is 3:05 AM. "Where are you?"

"Five miles over the Atlantic. Listen. Don't make any phone calls. Don't use a credit card. Take out as much cash as you can and move right away. I think this P2 can trace most anything. Banks, government, maybe even military, it's fucking mad what he can do."

Danielle swallows. "All right."

"Don't pack. You don't have time. Just leave."

** *