The Anonymous Source (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 1) Read online

  “I don’t know. I’m fine. Just tell me what happened with Sonia.”

  Alex told her about the call with Juan, then, sensing that she wanted to be alone, he went to the balcony and did twenty minutes of yoga.

  When he came back into the room, Camila was emerging from the bathroom, her hair wet from the shower. “I’ll stay until after we meet Sonia,” she said. “After that, I’m going to see my dad.”

  Chapter 46

  Thursday, September 12, 2002

  Sonia Hollinger’s estate sat high on a bluff just outside the town of Kona. The taxi turned up a thin road cut into a rock wall. They were buzzed through an iron gate and took the long, steep driveway toward the house, passing trees heavy with pomegranate, mango, and avocado.

  “Feels like we’re going through a tropical jungle,” Alex said.

  Camila leaned her head out the window. “We kind of are.”

  At the top of the driveway, the taxi stopped in front of a sprawling, glass house. Alex took the driver’s card as they got out and stared at the house’s thick glass walls supported by stainless steel beams. The day was hot but not yet muggy.

  They could see through the front of the house into the entryway, kitchen, and dining room, and out the back to a patio and garden. The house slanted sharply from front to back, giving the appearance that it didn’t have a roof.

  “Talk about modern,” Camila said.

  “I didn’t know houses like this actually existed.”

  On the left, beyond a low fence covered in flowering vines, they saw a disappearing-edge pool tiled in light blue granite. They opened a small gate, walked between the pool and the house, and found a small glass door. Camila knocked.

  When the door opened, Sonia Hollinger stood before them in layers of flowery silk robes that half-covered a yellow bikini. She wore full makeup and her blonde hair was held up with pins, exposing her long, tan neck.

  “Good afternoon, darlings,” she said, sipping a bright pink cocktail from a tall, narrow glass. “I’d invite you in but I prefer to be outside.”

  She led them around the side of the house to the pool, which was surrounded by tomato plants, banana trees, and patches of basil and cilantro. They sat at a glass table supported by a single piece of stone shaped like a giant octopus.

  “You seem to have a lot of good things to eat here,” Camila said. “What’s the growing season like?”

  “Aren’t you sweet, honey,” Sonia replied. “We grow all year here. Do you garden?”

  “No. I live in a tiny box in Manhattan.”

  Sonia frowned and studied Camila. “You’re Argentinian?”

  “Yes, how’d you know?”

  “I’m Brazilian-American. You have that look about you.”

  “I was born here,” Camila said. “Never actually been there.”

  Sonia gasped into her hand with feigned shock then smiled. Just then, Juan emerged from the glass door on the side of the house wearing a red Speedo and no shirt.

  “Juan, darling, yes,” Sonia called, waving him over. “Drinks for our guests, please. They’ve come all the way from New York City to see me.”

  Juan walked over to the table and looked at Alex. “Hola,” he said. “You want I should make you two of those?” He pointed at Sonia’s drink, then placed his hand on her shoulder.

  Camila and Alex looked at each other. Alex frowned. “I usually don’t do juice,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, honey,” Sonia said.

  Camila smiled at Juan. “Two of whatever fruity cocktails you like to make.”

  Juan headed off to the kitchen and the three of them spoke for a few minutes about the weather, Manhattan, and the Santiago trial, which Sonia was following.

  “The news you poor New Yorkers think is important is so . . . limited,” she said, looking at Alex and sipping her drink. “We have thousands of men and women in Afghanistan and will soon be after Saddam. And you run front-page stories about a little imbecilic killer from NYU. I know you’re just doing your job, but your bosses really ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

  Juan appeared with their drinks, set them on the table, then sat in a chair by the pool about ten feet away.

  “Mrs. Hollinger,” Alex said, “let me tell you a little bit about why we’re here.”

  Her face tightened. “You’re here because of Mac. You’re not the first people to show up, you know. First there were the estate people and the lawyers. Then journalists, journalists, and more journalists. Then that little bitch Green. She called for weeks before I agreed to see her.”

  “Sadie Green?” Alex asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sonia,” Camila said, “the man Santiago is accused of killing knew your husband.”

  “A lot of people knew my husband. So what?”

  “Your husband taught John Martin at Tulane,” Alex said.

  Sonia pulled a cherry from her drink and sucked on it. “Yes,” she said. “I met Mr. Martin briefly at Mac’s funeral.”

  “It’s the day of the funeral we want to ask you about,” Alex said.

  Sonia finished her drink and nodded at Juan, who stood and walked toward the kitchen.

  “I was there as well,” Camila said. “I went with John. We were together then.”

  “He was a little old for you, no?” Sonia looked at Alex and smiled, passing the cherry stem between her fingers. “This young man is . . . much more suitable.”

  Juan returned and refilled their drinks from a tall pitcher.

  “Comida por favor,” Sonia said. She looked at Alex and Camila. “Are you hungry?”

  Alex said no and Camila said yes, but Sonia wasn’t listening and Juan was already gone.

  “Sonia, please,” Camila said. “At the funeral, we spoke with a man named Denver Bice.”

  “Yes, I know Mr. Bice. He was one of my husband’s more successful students. No offense to Mr. Martin, of course.”

  “John and Mr. Bice were making polite conversation,” Camila continued. “But then John said the strangest thing.”

  “Did he now?” Sonia said, sipping her drink. “You know, Juan is the most amazing cook. He came from Cuba as a boy, but I think a piece of his soul comes from each Latin country. He can cook anything. He worked all morning preparing lunch for you.”

  Juan walked out from the kitchen carrying a metal platter covered with thinly sliced steak, roasted vegetables, chunks of mango and mounds of grapes, salad, two loaves of bread, and three kinds of cheese.

  “Please, help yourselves,” Sonia said. “I barely eat.”

  “Sonia, if I can just tell you about what happened,” Camila said.

  Sonia nibbled a grape. “Please continue, honey.”

  “At the funeral, John said it was lucky for Mr. Bice that Mac, your husband, died when he did.”

  Sonia put the half-eaten grape on the table and sipped her drink. As Alex ate a slice of steak wrapped around a lettuce leaf, he watched Sonia closely. He thought he saw a slight flinch in her cheeks as she drank. When she put the glass down, she said, “Hmm, that could mean a lot of things.”

  Camila reached across the table and took her hand. “You know something.”

  “Yes, but. . . ”

  Juan appeared behind her and held her shoulders. “Sonia, maybe it’s time for your rest.” He held her arm as she stood, but she wobbled and tripped on her chair. He caught her before she could hit the ground and led her into the house.

  Alex looked at Camila. “What the hell do we do now?”

  Chapter 47

  Rak approached the door of the plane and squinted. The evening air was warm and he had never felt such humidity. He leaned back into the plane for one last breath of cold air, then took the stairs to the tarmac wearing dark blue jeans, a black blazer, and sunglasses. Within a minute, his skin was clammy. He knew right away that he did not like Hawaii.

  After claiming his bags—a standard brown suitcase and matching laptop case—he took a taxi to the Marriott and checked i
n under the name Sven Goldberg, using an Israeli passport for ID.

  A teenage bellboy took his bags and led him to the elevator. “Where ya from?” the bellboy asked.

  “Am from New York, but I come from Israel originally.”

  The elevator was empty except for the two of them.

  “New York City?” the boy asked. “Boy oh boy. Were you there on 9/11? We felt for you all, even out here on the islands. That musta been some kinda thing.”

  “Yes, I was there that day.”

  “What was it like?”

  Rak stared up at the boy, who was tall and smiled down on him. “I tell you a joke,” Rak said. “What is the favorite football team of the Al Qaeda men who flew into the towers?”

  The boy looked away. “Uh, sir? I don’t feel comfortable hearin’ a joke about it, sir.”

  “The New York Jets,” Rak said, laughing.

  When the elevator stopped, Rak handed the boy a ten-dollar bill. “I can find the room from here.”

  In his room, Rak ate a club sandwich while watching a bright green gecko crawl across the sliding balcony door. It crawled back and forth, stopping occasionally to touch its nose to the glass.

  When he finished eating, he inspected the thickness of the glass door and the space it retracted into. There was about a quarter inch of space between the door and the doorjamb. He looked out the sliding glass door onto a vast lawn below, where a few staff members in crisp shirts were setting up a buffet under a tent. A woman stuck wooden torches in the ground every ten feet or so.

  Rak looked back at the gecko, sitting still in the center of the door. With a sudden jerk of his arm, he slid the door open. The gecko slid with the door, its tail and the lower half of its body wedging into the thin space between the door and the opening, then exploding as the force of the door carried its body further in.

  He picked up a cloth napkin from his room service tray and stepped onto the balcony, then closed the door and wiped the gecko’s guts off the glass. What was left of the carcass had fallen to the ground. Rak used the napkin to pick it up and toss it over the side of the balcony, then went back inside and put the napkin on top of his half-eaten sandwich.

  After showering, he dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing earlier, then took the elevator down to the lobby.

  Chapter 48

  Alex and Camila were sipping drinks in the pool, wearing swimsuits Juan had found them. Thick clouds had settled over the house and the sky was darkening, but they could see far out into the Pacific over the fruit trees. They heard pots and pans clanging in the kitchen and smelled smoke and pork.

  “I didn’t know situations like this really existed,” Alex said. “I feel like we’re in a cheesy sitcom about a rich widow. Why do you think Juan asked us to stay?”

  Camila swam to him and sat on the steps of the shallow end of the pool. “She knew something, right?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Maybe Juan wants to help us.”

  “Maybe. I think she knows something about Sadie Green. Do you know of her?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Camila said, dunking her head in the pool.

  When she came up, Alex said, “She’s the director of the Media Protection Organization. Right up your alley, actually. They lobby against media conglomeration and for things like net neutrality.”

  “I’m not politically active.”

  Alex smirked, “Yeah, no kidding. Why is that, anyway? From what you said in class, I would have thought you’d care about this stuff.”

  “I do, and I’m happy people like her are out there. But we’re living in the path of an avalanche. Digital media will smother us in the next twenty years. There’s no stopping that on a political level. Anyone who thinks they know how it’s going to go—or how it should go—is naïve about how technologies develop. But, on a personal level, we can still protect ourselves from what’s coming. We can safeguard our inner lives against turning into ones and zeroes.”

  Alex swam the length of the pool and back without coming up for air. Breathing a little harder, he said, “Sonia said Sadie Green was in touch with her after Hollinger died. Why would that be?” He swam another lap and came up breathing even harder this time.

  “Didn’t you already work out today?” Camila asked.

  “Yeah, but I’m drinking all these sugary cocktails. It wouldn’t hurt you to—you know—move your body in a manner that raises your heart rate. I’m not sure they have it in academia, but in the outside world we call it exercise. It’s like eating but without the food.”

  Camila splashed him and swam to the deep end of the pool. Alex swam after her. They reached the wall at the same time and both hung on with one hand, facing each other.

  “Can you stand up here?” Alex asked. Camila let herself sink to the bottom and extended her toes, leaving only her eyes above the water. “You’re short,” Alex said.

  “Is that your way of flirting with me?”

  “I guess so. I feel a bit like a first grader who throws sand on the girl he likes at recess.”

  She splashed him again. “Yeah, that’s how you seem.” She fished a few leaves out of the water and placed them on the edge of the pool, then she turned to him and studied his face. “Do you know why you feel so much anxiety about me?“

  He turned to look out toward the ocean. “Kind of.”

  “You’re afraid of what you might feel, afraid of getting hurt, and you know I won’t take care of you.”

  “Why won’t you?” he asked, sliding toward her along the wall but still not looking at her.

  “I don’t do that.”

  He turned to look into her eyes. “Why are you so . . . I don’t know . . . stiff, hard, distant?” He leaned toward her but she tilted her head away slightly.

  “You just said three words that mean the same thing. Writers aren’t supposed to do that.”

  Alex pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the pool. “What about your dad?” he asked. “Yesterday, you said that you needed to go see him.”

  “I will,” she said. “I figured out yesterday that I will.”

  “How? I mean, how did you figure it out?”

  “Remember on the plane, what I said about the sadness without cause?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “It turns out it’s not my fault. None of it is. None of it is me.”

  “Whose fault is it?”

  “No one’s. It’s just what happens.”

  “When will you go?”

  “I want to give this another day or two.” She splashed him again. “Plus, you’d miss me too much if I left. You’d positively fall apart without me.” She spoke with a high-pitched English accent, the back of her hand against her forehead. “You wouldn’t know what to do without me, you’d—”

  Alex looked up when he heard a door close. Juan was walking toward the pool.

  Juan had led them to a spare bedroom. While Camila changed in the bathroom, Alex turned on the wall-mounted TV. He flipped to CNN.

  A red, white, and blue graphic on the bottom of the screen read, “WMDs in Iraq?” Two men in their fifties sat at a desk, a moderator in a bowtie sat between them.

  The man on the left said, “The International Institute for Strategic Studies is saying that Iraq does not have any nuclear weapons—a point our president has been trying to obscure for months. And our national media has printed dozens of anonymous quotes, all hinting at WMDs. But there’s no actual evidence.”

  The man on the right said, “The IISS report is full of speculation and innuendo. Tomorrow the president will issue a new report detailing a decade of deception by Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military. It will show them to be an imminent threat to the United States. And—”

  The man on the left interrupted. “But will it show any proof of WMDs?” He looked at the moderator. “And will your network demand any proof? And—”

  The moderator interrupted. “And I hope we can have you both back to debate that report in the coming
weeks. I’m afraid that will have to do it for today. Up next—”

  Alex switched to Court TV and saw Cynthia Baker, Santiago’s lawyer, walking down the courthouse steps flanked by two assistants. Photographers and journalists snapped pictures and shouted questions at her.

  Camila walked out of the bathroom, smiling. “Have you ever been in a bathroom with heated floors?” she asked. “They’re incredible.”

  “Shhhh!” Alex held up a hand and turned the TV up as a reporter’s voice came in over the images.

  “The fifth day of the murder trial of NYU student Eric Santiago concluded earlier today with prosecutors calling their second witness, twenty-four-year-old Tamar Joseph, a law student, who testified to seeing Santiago in Washington Square Park on New Year’s Eve 2001—the night that Professor John Martin was killed.”

  Camila sat next to Alex on the bed.

  “Defense Attorney Baker, in cross-examination, tried to discredit the witness, questioning whether she could have seen Santiago clearly given that she admitted to drinking heavily at a party that night.

  “In one stirring exchange, lead prosecutor Daniel Sharp objected to Ms. Baker’s line of questioning, arguing that bringing up Ms. Joseph’s drinking was an inappropriate attempt to smear her. In his objection, he cited Matthew 5:10—’Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.’”

  Alex muted the TV and looked at Camila, who was smiling.

  “What was it before?” she asked. “John 12:25?”

  Chapter 49

  They joined Sonia around a small black table in an informal dining room off the kitchen. Photos of Hollinger’s children hung on the wall next to a large, framed black and white photo of a boy standing in front of a dugout. Lou Gehrig’s arm was draped around his shoulder.

  “Is that Mac?” Camila asked, pointing at the picture.

  “Yes, it’s from 1927, when Mac was ten. He loved the Yankees, and Gehrig especially. Thought he embodied America. Excellent mind, excellent body, and a work ethic that wouldn’t allow him to waste it.”