The owner was a Chinese man in his thirties, who was introduced to Vince simply as Yuan. With bottles of Tsingtao provided by Yuan, Van Dyne and Vince went into the owner’s basement office, where two computers stood on two desks, one out in the main work area and the other shoved into a corner. The one in the corner was switched on, though nobody was working at it.
“This is my computer,” Van Dyne said. “No one here ever works with it. They never even touch it, except to open the phone line to put the modem in operation every morning and to close it at night. My computers at Hot Tips are linked to this one.”
“You trust Yuan?”
“I got him the loan that started this business. He owes me his good fortune.
And it’s pretty much a clean loan, nothing that can be linked to me in any way, or to Don Tetragna, so Yuan remains an upstanding citizen who’s of no interest to the cops. All he does for me in return is let me keep the computer here.”
Sitting in front of the terminal, Van Dyne began to use the keyboard. In two minutes he had Travis Cornell’s new name: Samuel Spencer Hyatt.
“And here,” Van Dyne said as new data flickered up. “This is the woman who was with him. Her real name was Nora Louise Devon of Santa Barbara. Now, she’s Nora Jean Aimes.”
“Okay,” Vince said. “Now wipe them off your records.”
“What do you mean?”
“Erase them. Take them out of the computer. They’re not yours any more. They’re mine. Nobody else’s. Just mine.”
A short while later, they were back at Hot Tips, which was a decadent place that revolted Vince.
In the basement, Van Dyne gave the names Hyatt and Aimes to the bearded boy wonders who seemed to live down there around the clock, like a couple of trolls.
First, the trolls broke into the Department of Motor Vehicle computers. They wanted to see whether, in the three months since acquiring new identities, Hyatt and Aimes had settled down somewhere and filed a change of address with the state.
“Bingo,” one of them said.
An address appeared on the screen, and the bearded operator ordered a printout.
Anson Van Dyne tore the paper off the printer and handed it to Vince. Travis Cornell and Nora Devon-now Hyatt and Aimes-were living at a rural address on Pacific Coast Highway south of the town of Carmel.
5
On Wednesday, December 29, Nora drove into Carmel alone for an appointment with Dr. Weingold.
The sky was overcast, so dark that the white seagulls, swooping against the backdrop of clouds, were by contrast almost as bright as incandescent lights. The weather had been much the same since the day after Christmas, but the promised rain never came.
Today, however, it came in torrents just as she pulled the pickup into one of the spaces in the small parking lot behind Dr. Weingold’s office. She was wearing a nylon jacket with a hood, just in case, and she pulled the hood over her head before dashing from the truck into the one-story brick building. Dr. Weingold gave her the usual thorough examination and pronounced her fit as a fiddle, which would have amused Einstein.
“I’ve never seen a woman at the three-month mark in better shape,” the doctor said.
“I want this to be a very healthy baby, a perfect baby.”
“And so it shall be.”
The doctor believed that her name was Aimes and her husband’s name was Hyatt, but he never once indicated disapproval of her marital status. The situation embarrassed Nora, but she supposed that the modern world, into which she had fluttered from the cocoon of the Devon house, was liberal-minded about these things.
Dr. Weingold suggested, as he had done before, that she consider a test to determine the baby’s sex, and as before she declined. She wanted to be surprised. Besides, if they found out they were going to have a girl, Einstein would start campaigning for the name “Minnie.”
After huddling with the doctor’s receptionist to schedule the next appointment, Nora pulled the hood over her head again and went out into the driving rain. It was coming down hard, drizzling off a section of roof that had no gutters, sluicing across the sidewalk, forming deep puddles on the macadam of the parking lot. She sloshed through a miniature river on her way to the pickup, and in seconds her running shoes were saturated.
As she reached the truck, she saw a man getting out of a red Honda parked beside her. She didn’t notice much about him-just that he was a big guy in a small car, and that he was not dressed for the rain. He was wearing jeans and a blue pullover, and Nora thought: The poor man is going to get soaked to the skin.
She opened the driver’s door and started to get into the truck. The next thing she knew, the man in the-blue sweater was coming in after her, shoving her across the seat and clambering behind the wheel. He said, “If you yell, bitch, I’ll blow your guts out,” and she realized that he was jamming a revolver into her side.
She almost yelled anyway, involuntarily, almost tried to keep on going across the front seat and out the door on the passenger’s side. But something in his voice, brutal and dark, made her hesitate. He sounded as if he would shoot her in the back rather than let her escape.
He slammed the driver’s door, and now they were alone in the truck, beyond help, virtually concealed from the world by the rain that streamed down the Windows and made the glass opaque. It didn’t matter: the doctor’s parking lot was deserted, and it could not be seen from the street, so even out of the truck she would have had no one to whom to turn.
He was a very big man, and muscular, but it was not his size that was most frightening. His broad face was placid, virtually expressionless; that serenity, completely unsuited to these circumstances, scared Nora. His eyes were worse. Green eyes-and cold.
“Who are you?” she demanded, trying to conceal her fear, sure that visible terror would excite him. He seemed to be balanced on a thin line. “What do you want with me?”
“I want the dog.”
She had thought: robber. She had thought: rapist. She had thought: psychopathic thrill killer. But she had not for a moment thought that he might be a government agent. Yet who else would be looking for Einstein? No one else even knew the dog existed.
“What’re you talking about?” she said.
He pushed the muzzle of the revolver deeper into her side, until it hurt.
She thought of the baby growing within her. “All right, okay, obviously you know about the dog, so there’s no point playing games.”
“No point.” He spoke so quietly that she could hardly hear him above the roar of the rain that drummed on the roof of the cab and snapped against the windshield.
He reached over and pulled down the hood of her jacket, opened the zipper, and slid his hand down her breasts, over her belly. For a moment she was terrified that he was, after all, intent on rape.
Instead, he said, “This Weingold is a gynecologist-obstetrician. So what’s your problem? You have some damn social disease or are you pregnant?” He almost spit out the words “social disease,” as if merely pronouncing those syllables made him sick with disgust.
“You’re no government agent.” She spoke entirely from instinct.
“I asked you a question, bitch,” he said in a voice barely louder than a whisper. He leaned close, digging the gun into her side again. The air in the truck was humid. The all-enveloping sound of rain combined with the stuffiness to create a claustrophobic atmosphere that was nearly intolerable. He said, “Which is it? You got herpes, syphilis, clap, some other crotch rot? Or are you pregnant?”
Thinking that pregnancy might gain her a dispensation from the violence of which he seemed so capable, she said, “I’m going to have a baby. I’m three months pregnant.”