Page 40 of Hero

Justine took a Band-Aid from her purse and stuck it over the fish-eye lens in the door to free her of the suspicion that somebody in the hall could get a half-distorted notion of where she was—bed or chair—and fire through the wooden door. She sat on the bed and turned on the television set.

She had not watched much television since childhood. It wasn’t something she’d had time for in college, and since then her job had kept her out almost every evening, so she did some exploration of the channels now. There seemed to be a number of things that could hold her attention, but her mind was too agitated to stay on any one program or movie for more than a minute or two. A couple of times she stopped on dramas, whether movie or television series she didn’t know, in which one of the actresses was somebody she had protected. Each recognition was a reminder that she didn’t work for Spengler-Nash anymore, because she had been fired. She kept changing channels until her eyes were tired from changing their focus with each click.

Justine turned off the television and used the toothbrush, dental floss, and mouthwash in the hotel’s kit, spending an inordinate amount of time caring for her teeth, rubbed face lotion on her face, and then let herself sleep.

26

Leo Sealy had expected somebody from Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein to show up at Le Chateau d’Or within a few hours after the press performance that Aaron de Kuyper had given. He had expected they would send a woman, but he hadn’t thought she would be a high-ranking lawyer like Marina Obermaier.

Justine Poole probably needed clothes and things, and only a woman could go into the right stores and make the right selections without attracting attention. But he had seen her and the white Tesla she had turned over to the valet parking attendant, noticed the vanity license plate ended in ATTY and then heard her say the name Marina Obermaier to the parking attendant. He typed it into his phone and learned she was one of the company’s stars, a lead lawyer who had won a lot of big cases, including acquittals in criminal trials.

He attributed her selection to the psychological cunning of law firms. They loved to establish rapport with new clients so they would be docile and accepting when the time came to manipulate them. The non-lawyers in a firm couldn’t be sent out on something like this, because they had actual grunt work to do to keep the place running. A big lawyer wasprobably there partly to judge the client and decide how she could be used in her own defense. Was she quick or slow, articulate or tongue-tied, honest-looking or shifty-eyed, attractive or plain? That kind of thing mattered in any human interaction.

He had put on his KN95 mask and followed at a distance when Marina Obermaier had walked into the lobby and gone directly to a corner to pick up the white courtesy phone. As he walked, he turned on his cell phone, set it to video and aimed the lens at her while he held it up to his face and talked to it. Recording her dialing and talking took no more than ten seconds, and then he turned and walked toward the hallway that clearly led to a restaurant.

He ducked into the men’s room just inside the restaurant doors, and a minute or two later he left the restroom and walked to the front door and out to the lot. He walked to his latest rental car, got in, and watched the video. He could see her fingers pushing the buttons on the old-style push-button phone. He drove a few blocks away, parked, and looked at his cell phone. He whispered to himself something that one of his elementary school teachers used to say: “Numbers will be our friends if we spend some time playing with them.”

Again, he watched Marina Obermaier pressing the keys of the hotel phone and then talking. The image was too small to read the key numbers. What he could see was her fingers. He pressed the symbol on his phone that showed a phone keypad, and then ran the video again. Her finger moved left to four. Down the middle to eight. One space to the left of there. That’s seven. Four-eighty-seven. The hotel phone didn’t connect to an operator if you didn’t dial 0 for one. You could dial the room by number. He watched the video again. Four-eighty-seven.

Leo Sealy had been thinking about the problem of hotels since yesterday morning. The reason hotels had always been a favorite place tohide protected people was that it worked. Every inch of those places was under surveillance, and nobody wanted to be recorded. The simple arithmetic made it difficult. A hotel could have hundreds of rooms, and a shooter had to find the one that mattered.

Leo had cleared the first obstacles easily. He had found the right hotel in a city with over a thousand of them. He had found the right room. The next parts were not going to be so easy. It wasn’t that there weren’t a lot of ways. People had been taken out by rifle fire to a hotel balcony or window. They’d been shot by a person who worked for the hotel with a pistol at close range. They’d been killed in explosions set off in public spaces in hotels. But how feasible were any of these against a woman who had worked in the security business for years?

Justine Poole was not likely to go out on a balcony, or even open her curtains. She was not likely to let a man into her room she didn’t know in advance was coming. She wouldn’t go downstairs to accept a package or even to meet with another lawyer from Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein without calling Marina Obermaier first. She wouldn’t go to the hotel restaurants for a meal or the bar for a drink. Even if he tried the most difficult method, preparing to trigger a large explosion in a public space, she would have to be in that space at the right moment. It would be nearly impossible to lure Justine Poole into any particular place at this point. He had to try something else.

Rooms in hotels were usually set up according to a few templates— single bed, double beds, king, suite, with the furniture almost impossible for a guest to move. He could try to find pictures of the various types of room in Le Chateau d’Or, and then figure out which kind of room 487 was. If he converted the picture on their website to a diagram, he could probably tell by inches which section of the room was occupied by her bed. The fourth floor wasn’t very high up, so if he found a building nearbythat was taller, he could occupy a space on the fifth floor or above with a window that faced room 487 of Le Chateau d’Or. He owned a couple of top-quality military sniper rifles fitted with folding bipods. It wouldn’t be too difficult to estimate what downward angle would allow him to place a shot through her window and into her bed. The best tool for his purposes would be his M24, a marine sniper rifle based on a Remington 700, comfortable for him because he’d owned his for a decade. He had a couple of ten-round box magazines for it and some Lapua Magnum .338 ammo that he’d bought years ago. He could walk ten rounds across her bed and around her room faster than she could get out of bed and make it out the door to the hallway, and he had the advantage of knowing that was her only route to safety. With a military-grade sniper rifle he didn’t have to worry too much about hitting a fatal spot. Almost any hit to her center mass or some places on limbs would make her bleed out in minutes.

He didn’t remember the tall buildings around her hotel. He had found the place and rushed to it to get there in time to spot anyone from Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein, and that had been his sole focus. He opened the Google Maps app. He started at the hotel and moved the display to see a continuous picture of the part of Wilshire Boulevard where the Chateau d’Or was. There were a number of apartment buildings to the east of there, and the advantage of his Remington was that it was effective at 1,500 yards. The problem was to find a clear sight line from above. There weren’t any buildings along the north side of the street that would do, so he tried the south side. He couldn’t get up high enough. He switched to Sixth Street and moved past the hotel. There was no suitable building there either. He had a moment of hope for the huge Park La Brea complex that occupied the space between Third and Sixth, because there were eighteen apartment towers, all of them thirteen stories. But he knew the process of renting an apartment took weeks, and vacancies were few.

Another problem was that Justine Poole’s hotel room would have to be on the north side of her hotel to be visible from Park La Brea, and the room he fired from would have to be on the south side of a tower and at least five stories up. If his perch was too high up, he couldn’t hit anything that was more than a foot or two in from the window. His shooting platform had to be between the fifth floor and about the eighth. He knew that the idea that he could find all of the conditions he would need was insane. He spent another few minutes on the plan because he had already invested so much time and thought, but then abandoned it.

It was probable that Justine Poole would live by ordering room service. Was there a way for him to know when she called in her order so he could poison her food? The only way would be to divert the room service waiter and deliver the actual order she’d called in, because otherwise she wouldn’t eat it, and she had to eat it.

He needed a circumstance he could produce and control without being caught in the act or captured before he could escape, recorded on security systems, or shot to death. He needed it badly and soon, because Mr. Conger was getting impatient to have his swift revenge while the offense against him was still fresh. This also had to be unerring revenge with no more random victims, only Justine Poole. Everything had to be right.

27

Justine heard pounding. Her mind tried at first to incorporate it into her dream. What entered her dream was a team of big football players running down a long corridor that led out onto the broad green playing field. They emerged and there were loud shouts, maybe from the people sitting in the stands, and others from the players themselves. “Open up! Open up!” Her brain couldn’t fit this into the dream, so her eyes opened.

There was a stamping of feet, and she realized she had been hearing that too. It took her a second to place herself in the hotel room, and then the telephone on the nightstand rang far too loudly, and she realized it was all the phones on the floor ringing at once. She snatched up the one beside her.

It was a pleasant female voice, a recording. “This is an emergency. If you’re hearing this message, you must immediately leave your room and make your way to the nearest stairwell, which is marked with a red ‘Exit’ sign. Do not attempt to use the elevators. Leave all luggage and personal belongings. I repeat—” Justine hung up. It was obviouslya fire. She stepped into the new pants she had laid out for tomorrow on the desk, tugged the top over her head, stuck her feet into the new walking shoes and wriggled into them, and slipped her purse over her shoulder.

The invisible men reached her door a second later and pounded on it. A man shouted “Police! We’re evacuating the building! Come out now!”

Justine put her hand on the doorknob gingerly, her mind still clouded but aware that it might be hot, found it wasn’t, and opened the door. What she saw was motion. The cop had already moved on, replaced by a stream of people of many sizes and ages, not stampeding but walking at a brisk pace from left to right across her doorway. She saw a break between a big man with a mostly bald head whose gray side-hair was standing up so it looked like animal ears and a woman who was wearing a long, graceful blue bathrobe with padded shoulders and a narrow waist like a 1930s gown, with stack-heeled shoes. Justine stepped into the gap and adjusted her speed to the procession, leaning to the side to peer around the tall man to see what was ahead.

The squad of police officers had moved out of sight already, but there was one standing under the “Exit” sign holding the stairwell door open and using a sweeping arm gesture to direct people into the stairway. “That’s right, everybody. Keep it nice and orderly, and go down carefully. Watch your step, and hold onto the railing. Help anyone who seems to be having trouble. The officers in the lobby will direct you.”

A man about forty-five years old who had a wife and a teenage daughter stopped in the doorway and said, “What’s the emergency?”

The officer said, “The officers at the bottom will explain,” and he adjusted his next sweeping hand gesture to guide the man through the doorway. “Eyes forward and watch your step, ladies and gentlemen.”

Justine was aware that it was best for her not to be recognized, so she followed more closely behind the big bald man and kept her head down as she reached the stairwell entrance.

She had to be careful to merge into the stream of people already coming down from the floors above. The first steps onto the staircase where an unpleasant surprise. Each section of the structure was a free-standing flight of steel steps that went from one rectangular landing to the next, followed by another flight aimed in the opposite direction. The whole structure seemed not to be well anchored to the walls, so it was shaking with the heavy footfalls of the dozens of people hurrying downward.

She started to look upward to see how the staircase was held together—bolts? welds?—then caught herself and conceded that it didn’t matter because the decision had been made long before now, but that made her wonder how long ago it had been.

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