From the din a word so incongruous in this setting that at first he fully ignored it, believing his brain was playing tricks on him, or perhaps not hearing at all. Not feeling. The events of late had numbed him, like a limb falling asleep and tingling without the ability to feel or stand. “Boldt?” a male voice called. Still his brain refused to process the information correctly. “Boldt?” Again.
He turned toward that voice. The bartender, his mustache and curly hair reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. He held a phone’s receiver, standing at the end of the bar, by a waitress with more cleavage showing than necessary, a tray filled with empties in her hand.
Boldt wondered if by identifying himself, he marked himself for abduction and a “manicure,” or if the call were actually a call meant for him. Then it slammed home: He’d been led here like a dog in heat, the caller to the police department knowledgeable enough to know how Boldt would proceed, that he would request the caller-ID information and investigate. And if not, what then? he wondered, believing a second or third call would have been placed, and eventually contact would have been made. But the caller had wanted this on neutral ground, someplace Boldt could not easily or quickly trace, and that implied either a substantial conversation or a threat that one wouldn’t want recorded. The first name to pop into his head was Svengrad’s, the Sturgeon General. When he accepted the phone and heard the metallic, distorted sound of voice synthesis, he felt caught off-guard. The caller was using a voice-altering device, readily available from Radio Shack, that made his voice sound inhuman, like a robot.
“Well done, Lieutenant,” the Darth Vader voice said. It sounded vaguely comical, and had the circumstances been different, he might have experienced it as such. As it was, he suffered under the realization he’d been sucker-punched.
Not Svengrad, Boldt decided immediately. He couldn’t see the Russian wanting to obscure his identity-Svengrad’s power and authority came out of his personage. Why hide it?
Boldt resented his being so predictable, so easily baited.
“Why the cloak-and-dagger?”
“You have forty-five minutes to retrieve the software carried by Tony LaRossa when he collapsed in the bank lobby. I need your cell phone number. I’ll contact you.”
“I don’t think so.” Boldt hung up the call. The bartender flashed him an expression that asked if he was done with the phone. Boldt held up a finger, begging more time. He asked if this bar phone was used a lot by customers. The bartender replied that the one in the hall hadn’t worked in over a year.
“Anyone make a call from here about an hour ago?” Boldt asked.
“I don’t pay much attention.”
“You paid attention to me,” Boldt said.
“I don’t know you.”
“Know most of your customers, do you?”
“Part of the job.”
Boldt said, “Including the guy who used this phone about an hour ago?”
The bartender offered a smug look. Boldt flashed his shield, and the man’s composure wavered. He pulled out a twenty, and then another, and laid them both on the bar.
“Put it away,” the man said, somewhat apologetically. “I came on thirty minutes ago. I have no idea who used the phone an hour ago.”
“Someone we can check with?” Boldt inquired.
“Listen, it’s so damn busy in here between five and seven, there’s no way anyone’s going to be able to help you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Okay, listen… ” The bartender stood within inches of the bar and leaned toward Boldt. “Truth is, officer, the hall phone is kinda wired into the house line. It don’t ring there; it rings here. But customers dial out on the hall phone.”
“And the house pockets the money from the pay phone.”
“Something like that. Hey, I’m not the owner.”
“So unless you were in the hall, you wouldn’t know who used the phone.”
“That’s about it.”
The phone rang. The bartender reached for the receiver, but Boldt held him off. “This is for me.” Boldt yanked up the receiver. “Boldt.”
That same synthetic voice said, “Your wife has nice hands. You hang up again, she’s wearing gloves for the next six months, and her little pussy dance is on the evening news.”
“I don’t talk to robots,” Boldt said. Inside, he decided he’d gone too far. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to hang up the first time, to feign a lack of cooperation, except that it went so against his nature. This was, he decided, the call Liz had been expecting, except that the first step was apparently to collect the coveted software. Boldt had read two department e-mails on the analysis of the LaRossa disk. The first expressed optimism that the password cryptography on the disk could be “cracked.” The second explained in some detail the sophistication of the security protecting the software contained on the disk, and how it was never going to be compromised.
The bartender overheard Boldt’s comment, twisted his face, and walked away to service a customer.
“Forty-five minutes. Your cell number.”
Boldt repeated his cell number into the phone.
“You do this alone, or it all comes back on you and yours. Tomorrow, next week, next month-listen, you’d better keep looking over your shoulder if you bring others in on it, or do anything but what I say.”
“You don’t know me very well,” Boldt said, again wondering why his mouth got ahead of his brain.
The line went dead. Boldt hung up the receiver. The guy was smart, and that worried him.
He called Pahwan Riz, the Special Operations commander, before he even reached the Crown Vic. Hell if he was doing this alone. He could smell a trap a mile away.
Discovering himself the target of a surveillance operation left Boldt with mixed feelings. He couldn’t remember ever having been on the receiving end of such attentions, and he found it off-putting. The arrangements were made hastily, primarily because of the time restrictions imposed by his anonymous caller, but the brilliance of some of these guys never ceased to amaze him, and by the time he bumped the Crown Vic into the restricted parking garage attached to the Public Safety Building, the operation was already well under way.
Suspecting, but not quite willing to believe, that whoever had called him might have civilians paid off within the department-spies-he obeyed Pahwan Riz’s choreography to the letter. The Crown Vic was already equipped with GPS transmission equipment because, like patrol cruisers, it carried a Mobile Data Terminal on the dash-the equivalent of a built-in laptop computer that allowed text to be sent to and from the car. Limousine services and some taxis, parcel delivery and express delivery vans, all carried similar equipment-and all contained the satellite tracking device allowing dispatchers to locate any vehicle at a moment’s notice.
The trick was to get some of this same equipment-a small GPS and a voice-recording device-onto Boldt without him being descended upon by technicians. Riz’s solution was to leave the equipment in a men’s room stall, and to direct Boldt to visit the rest room upon his arrival at SPD, which he did. From the bathroom, now wearing the two devices, he proceeded directly to Property and signed out for the bright red disk that had been in the possession of Tony LaRossa as he’d collapsed from his heart attack. He took the man’s bank ID access card as well, already foreseeing its future use. With Boldt being lieutenant in charge of Crimes Against Persons, there wasn’t anything the Property sergeant was going to deny him. He signed the requisite forms, accepted the plastic bags bearing the chain of possession, all carefully detailed in indelible marker, and returned to the Crown Vic at a slow jog, moving a few uniformed officers out of his way while checking his watch on the fly. Ten minutes in which to reach the exit of I-5 north.