“Sounds great. And casual is fine. We already know we want you. This is more of you interviewing us. And I appreciate your flexibility to meet with us on such short notice.”
Erin waited while Fuller sent directions, confirmed that she had received them, and then ended the call.
She threw her head back against the headrest and rolled her eyes. She was going from one fishy situation to another. Was it surreal, alternate reality day? She didn’t trust this situation as far as she could throw it.
If this Steve Fuller did know about her activities, she would be at his mercy. She had broken the law. She was in this up to her neck. Three men had died. To make matters even worse, one of the deaths had occurred immediately after she had administered one of the test treatments in the trailer, and she had deliberately covered it up with a fake story about being attacked, and by roughing up a man who was already dead. Yes, all three men were convicted killers, but she would still be sent to prison for years, maybe decades. And not as a researcher either.
It was unlikely that Fuller knew. But he was awfully eager to talk to her. And she was a nobody. There was no way he would be giving her the VIP recruiting treatment on the basis of a pie-in-the-sky remark about working toward a remote psychopathy detector quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
She continued to search the Internet for more intel on Advanced Science Applications but came up completely empty. Other than their Web site, she didn’t get a single hit. For a company with this high of a profile, this was astonishing. And highly troubling.
She next searched for Steve Fuller, who had to be pretty high up in the company to be able to send cars and schedule helicopters. He had a common name, but searching the name in combination with the company name, science in general, and business, didn’t get her anywhere either.
Things just kept on getting stranger. And Erin Palmer couldn’t help but feel more unsettled than she had in a long, long time.
12
ERIN FORCED HERSELF to put both Drake and Steve Fuller out of her mind later that night and Tuesday while she was with her friend, although she wasn’t entirely successful. The good news was that she wasn’t entirely unsuccessful either, and managed to get reacquainted with the concept of actually having fun for long stretches at a time. She told Courtney that Hugh Raborn had been out of town, after all, and her friend was very supportive and genuinely disappointed for her.
If only her friend had known the truth. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though Erin knew the truth either, she realized.
Erin had traded texts with Drake and he had agreed to change their meeting to one thirty on Thursday, at the same meeting place, although the tone of his texts didn’t fully conceal the fury she knew he was feeling at a further delay. She could only imagine how pissed off he really was. She had also changed her flight to a day later as well as her rental car.
Now all that was left to do was learn why this mysterious company had taken such an interest in her, and take a ride in a luxury helicopter.
The heliport used by Advanced Science Applications was in one of the most isolated spots in all of San Diego County. San Diego was a tropical paradise with a perfect climate, at least along the coast. But venture even ten miles inland and it could warm up quickly, with temperatures often climbing from ten to thirty degrees over this distance, and with brown, rather than green becoming the dominant color of the landscape. Home prices and population tended to fall the farther inland one traveled going east, and the closer to the Mexican border one traveled going south. The heliport was located a full fifteen miles east of the coast and only a few miles north of Mexico, so it was very rocky and very sparsely populated.
Erin had used Google Maps to do a virtual recon of the area. She wasn’t about to get inside a helicopter with this strange caller when neither he, nor his company, had left much of an Internet footprint, and when he was far more interested in her than he had any right to be. Beyond that she wasn’t sure why this situation had rattled her so much, but she wasn’t going to enter the helicopter until she had satisfied herself that she wasn’t walking into an ambush, although why her instincts were screaming to her this might be the case wasn’t entirely clear. But she had learned to trust her instincts.
She laughed out loud as she thought about this further. She had trusted her instincts when it had come to Hugh Raborn, now a mystery man named Drake, and how had that worked out for her? The recent track record of her intuition was pretty miserable, she had to admit. Even so, she wasn’t quite ready to abandon her gut feelings just yet.
Erin pulled into the lot of a small Episcopal church, which probably attracted a significant fraction of the sparse citizenry of the area on Sundays and other occasions but which was now deserted. It was surrounded by a few palm trees that looked more dead than alive. If not for the sign, the white, eight-foot-tall wooden cross sticking up from the roof, and a concrete parking lot, the structure could easily have been mistaken for a very large, very boring house.
She parked her car so that only the front of it peeked out from behind the building, lowered her window, and pulled out a pair of high-powered binoculars she had bought along with a GPS tracking device—and one additional item. One even pricier than the binoculars. Thank God for credit cards. At her pathetic income, it would take her a year to pay off these spy gadgets.
She got her bearings and searched for the heliport with her binoculars. She found it, as expected, about two hundred and forty yards distant. There was only one helicopter sitting there, and even through binoculars as powerful as a small telescope, it looked like a radio-controlled toy, parked in the center of a light gray concrete slab the size of a basketball court, surrounded by a gate and fence. Inside the fence, along with the copter, was what looked like a maintenance shed and a small, self-serve gas pump, dispensing whatever kind of fuel helicopters used. Several cars were parked inside as well, in an area clearly designated for such use.
Based on its relative size compared to the cars, the helicopter was on the large side, probably able to seat eight or more passengers, and was an absolute beauty, exuding corporate opulence. But it didn’t have the company’s name painted on it, which Erin considered yet another red flag.
She made out a man sitting in the cockpit, the size of a figurine, who was almost certainly the pilot making preparations for imminent liftoff—they were expecting her at any minute. Two men were standing next to each other near the helicopter, dressed casually, who gave the clear impression, despite their diminutive appearance through the binoculars, that they could easily get jobs protecting the president, and both appeared to be scouring the road leading to the heliport for signs of her.
Erin removed the parabolic listening device from its leather case and assembled it by snapping together six separate panels. Fully assembled it was about the size and shape of an oversized umbrella without the spokes, with a thick black microphone in the center and a short, grooved, gun-grip handle. The parabolic dish was fairly light, about the weight of three equivalently sized umbrellas, but it came with a tripod, which she hurriedly set up. She adjusted the dish/tripod assembly until it was pointed directly at the heliport.
Fortunately, the chopper blades were still. Had they not been, they would have drowned out all conversation in the area. It took Erin three or four minutes to adjust the three-band equalizer on the listening device to bring up the frequencies and tones she wanted, but sure enough, just as advertised, she suddenly could hear the conversation over two hundred yards distant in her headphones as though it were taking place next to her. She felt a twinge of guilt listening in like this, but if this operation was legitimate and their intentions pure, no harm would be done. And if their intentions were not pure …