Burke frowned. Today was June 13.
Mandy saw the look on his face, and guessed what he was thinking. “I know,” she said, “it’s not even ten days.”
CHAPTER 44
The city at night. It took your breath away.
Wilson drank it all in as he headed into town. The hills tumbling down to the water. The contours of land, made visible by the city’s lights, ending at the harbor’s inky edge. It was gorgeous, and it just got better the closer you came. A galaxy of skyscrapers glittered against a backdrop of stars, the Golden Gate ablaze with the lights of cars.
The natural setting was spectacular, but it was technology that made the city beautiful at night. Wilson smiled at the irony. The glittering world in front of him was a direct descendant of the first illuminated metropolis: the White City of the Chicago World’s Fair, which Tesla’s inventions had helped to light.
Ironically, Wilson thought, it was Tesla’s technology, improved upon by himself and manifest in the transmitter atop the lookout tower in Nevada, that would put out the lights forever. America was about to return to more natural, diurnal rhythms.
How long, he wondered, until the cars disintegrated? Decades, he guessed, even in the Bay Area’s moist air. Some of the metal might be scavenged. The rest would oxidate. But the plastic? The rubber? It would be there for centuries, an eyesore and a reminder, except in the country’s more fecund climates, where it would disappear in the midst of encroaching forests.
And the bridges? The bridges would remain until an earthquake pulled them down.
Driving into the city, he felt the lure of it: the normal life. He and Irina could be happy here. He could sell the ranch and buy a house. Get a job, or start a business. Felon or not, a good engineer was a rare commodity. He could introduce Irina to the silver-dollar pancakes at Sears, and watch her dimpled smile as she enjoyed the role reversal of being waited on. They could go to Chinatown and Golden Gate Park. Their kids would play t-ball and soccer. He’d buy her a minivan, and head north along the coast to the Russian River, where people from her part of the world settled a century ago, trapping and fishing.
Right, Wilson thought. We’ll do that. And then we’ll hold hands and sing “We Are the World.”
He pulled up in front of the Nikko, and let the valet park the Escalade. The transmitter he’d used in Culpeper was locked down under the bed’s cover. Then he checked in, went to his room, and cleaned up.
He grabbed a bottle of water from the minibar, dropped into a comfortable chair, and removed the tiny photograph of Irina from his wallet. He looked at it for a long time. There was something almost inscrutable about her expression, a mixture of sadness and hope… and something else. He couldn’t quite figure it out, but that was okay, too. She’d be flying into Vegas in a few days, and after that, he’d have a lifetime to learn her secrets.
It was raining the next morning. Brake lights bled onto the slick black pavement. The Escalade’s wheels hissed as it rolled along a network of one-way streets, arriving, just a few minutes later, at the courthouse.
The building didn’t open until nine, but he wanted to get to it early, so he could scope out the parking. He needed exact GPS coordinates for both the spot where he’d be parked and the courtroom he was targeting. Culpeper had been a more amorphous target, and therefore comparatively easy.
The awkward part was the need to expose and elevate the weapon. It didn’t look like much, it didn’t even look like a weapon, but it looked strange – there was no question about that. And while he needed clean sight lines, he also needed to park in a spot where no one was likely to notice the truck for the few minutes it would take to do what he had to do.
In the end, any number of places might have been suitable, but the decision as to which was best was a no-brainer. He smiled as he pressed the button and retrieved the ticket for the Turk Street garage. It was so early that only the first two levels were occupied – with a sprinkling of cars on the third. After that, nothing.
Wilson drove straight to the roof. Rain pounded the windshield as he emerged into the open air. It was clear at a glance that at eight a.m. on a weekday, level five was likely to be empty.
After checking the locations of surveillance cameras, he backed into slot 952.
Standing at the truck’s rear, Wilson looked out directly at the courthouse. The CCTV cameras would be able to see the bed of the truck, this was true, but one camera’s visual field would be partially impeded by a post and the other would be somewhat obscured by the truck’s cab.
He considered it. He could spray-paint the lenses. Or he could go with the probabilities. There were four cameras on each level. That made twenty cameras in all. There was probably a bank of monitors somewhere on-site. But most of the time, absent a disturbance, no one would be looking at the feed from the surveillance cameras. The footage was primarily for later use, if there was a theft or some other crime.
What were the odds, Wilson wondered, that a security guard would be paying attention to the camera covering slot 952 during the five minutes Wilson needed to deploy the weapon? And what, in any case, would the guard see? Surveying equipment, or something like it, in the back of a Cadillac Escalade.
He took the elevator to street level and crossed to the Philip Burton Federal Courthouse. It was a huge structure. He’d read that there were eighty assistant U.S. attorneys, six federal magistrates, and thirteen district judges walking its halls. Fed Central, in other words.
One of the district judges was former U.S. Attorney Joe Sozio, who had brought the solicitation of murder charge against Wilson. Sozio had been appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. He was currently presiding over a case in Courtroom 3.
Wilson signed in, and showed his ID. He placed his jacket and hat on the conveyor belt, and put his wristwatch and change in a plastic bin. The guard waved him through.
The case in Courtroom 3 seemed to involve a Central American gang. Wilson scanned the crowd. The benches closest to the defense side of the courtroom were packed with Salvadorans. At least, he thought they were Salvadorans. Their skin was darker than Wilson’s own, and they had the distinctive features of the region. Wilson noticed that the older observers – parents, aunts, and uncles, he supposed – were modestly but respectably dressed, while the younger males wore the big shirts and droopy pants of gangbangers.
Like Wilson, they were Indians or, what was more likely, mestizos – a mixture of Indian and European blood.
“All rise.”
Wilson got to his feet with the others while the bailiff called the court to order. He took a GPS reading from his wristwatch, and noted it on a pad. It was nine thirty-two.
Wearing his robes, Judge Sozio entered the room with the air of a celebrity, striding to the thronelike chair on which he sat in judgment on mere mortals. He was the patriarch, and it was only when he had taken his seat that the rest of them were allowed to do the same.
Wilson watched him with a cold eye. His hair had thinned and gone to gray, and his chin was beginning to sag. But, otherwise, he looked much the same. His light brown eyes still had the predatory gaze of a raptor. For a moment, they flicked Wilson’s way, and Wilson felt his heart do a little dance in his chest. But there was no gleam of recognition in Sozio’s eyes.
One of the Salvadoran kids was sworn in. “I do,” he said in a high-pitched whispery voice, following the bailiff’s bored recitation.