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

  Next, he looked for calls from Hollinger’s office line. “Hollinger called Martin on July first and August twenty-eighth,” Alex said.

  Camila looked up from a stack of papers. “That’s it?”

  “That’s enough. It must be the August twenty-eighth call. If he called on the twenty-eighth, they probably got together sometime between then and the eleventh. That must have been when Hollinger told him about his plans.”

  Next, Alex went through the rest of the calls and crossed out everything he knew would not be relevant—calls to information, Martin’s daughter, NYU extensions, and all calls to or from Camila. In the end, he circled seventy-one calls he was interested in between August twenty-eighth and December thirty-first.

  “What do you think they might show?” Camila asked.

  “I can have James track down who owns all these numbers. Mostly, they’re probably dry cleaning and food orders—that kind of thing. But maybe we’ll find something interesting.”

  “Speaking of food orders,” Camila said, “he ordered from a Chinese place on the corner every few days.”

  “Is it this one?” Alex pointed to a 212 number that came up twice per week.

  “Yeah, that’s it. I could really go for some of their Hunan shrimp right now. Somehow, they kept them crispy all the way to the door. Delivery guy must have had a deep fryer on his bike.”

  Alex crossed out another twenty-seven calls. “That’s a lot of Chinese food. And it leaves forty-four calls to twenty-six different numbers spread over four months and twelve pages of phone bills.”

  “Now what?” Camila asked.

  “Now we fax this to James Stacy and pray.”

  Chapter 55

  They ate dinner in the hotel restaurant then walked to the beach. It had rained earlier in the evening but the clouds had passed and a bright moon lit the water as they walked away from the town and its lights. After a mile, they lay on their bellies on the wet sand, chins resting on their folded arms, watching the surfers, whose outlines they could see in the moonlight far out on the water. The beach was quiet except for an occasional car passing on the road behind them.

  Alex pointed to a spot where the moonlight hit the foam on the crest of a wave, turning it silver before it crashed into darkness. “Watch,” he said, “it’ll happen again.”

  Camila shot up onto her elbows. “Something’s not right.”

  “What?”

  “A car. I heard a car running. Now it’s off.” Camila sat all the way up and turned toward the parking lot. It was lit dimly by a few streetlights and looked deserted.

  “What’s going on?” Alex asked.

  “Shhhh.”

  Alex sat up.

  With her eyes still on the lot, Camila leaned over and put her mouth next to his ear. “A car parked a few minutes ago,” she whispered. “I heard it come into the lot. It was idling. I barely registered it, but it just turned off.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Alex said.

  They sat for a minute, their eyes darting back and forth, scanning the lot. A patch of the lot grew dark, then bright in a quick flash.

  “What was that?” Camila asked.

  “It was just one of the lights in the parking lot flickering. You’re really on edge.”

  They sat for another minute.

  “Camila, there’s nothing there. Really.” He threw a small handful of sand at her feet. “I’m beat, let’s go back to the hotel.”

  She scanned the parking lot one more time and then allowed him to pull her to her feet and lead her down the beach. They walked in silence, Alex glancing at her every few steps.

  Next to a pier near their hotel, a man fished from the shore. He had a five-gallon bucket and a small gas lantern sitting on a large cooler. They stopped and watched him cast far out into the water, then slowly reel his line back in.

  Alex took her hand. “Can I ask you something?”

  “If you skip the preliminaries.”

  “Do many of your students have tattoos?”

  Camila laughed. “That’s not what I was expecting.”

  “Downton had a tattoo. A few of them, but one in particular.”

  “I know. I was there when his mother brought it up.”

  The man with the fishing pole gave a hoot as his pole bent toward the water. Alex bit his cuticles as he and Camila looked on.

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

  “Well, a bunch of things. But I see more and more kids with tattoos. Is this some generational thing I missed?”

  The man sat on the cooler and wedged his feet into the sand, reeling steadily between jerks of his pole. An older couple that had been walking toward town paused behind the fisherman to take in the scene.

  Alex watched the couple watching the man. “It’s like, how can you feel solid enough? How can you know yourself enough—know anything enough—to get something tattooed on your body? You really have to believe, right?”

  “You think all the people getting tattoos actually know what they’re doing? I think a lot of them are just drunk.”

  “But they have something there, at least for a minute, something that feels real enough to act on. I just can’t imagine that. Whenever I look, there’s just nothing that . . . definitive in me.”

  The man unhooked the fish and dropped it on the beach. It flopped high at first, then lower, and finally just twitched in the lantern light, its silver-gray body covered in sand.

  “I think there used to be,” Alex continued. “I remember when I was little, I ran around like a wild man, full of energy, just loving everyone and everything. When my parents died, I fell apart for a couple years. Went on a bender. Got heavy. Then I regrouped, and since then it’s like all that energy is pressed through a pinhole of work and exercise and women.”

  The couple strolled past them. The man put the fish in his bucket and walked toward the parking lot.

  “That’s a big fish,” Camila said.

  “But what should I do?”

  “You need to relax.”

  “I’m afraid to.”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re trying to hold it all together.”

  Alex tried to catch her eye, but she was looking out at the water. “I’ve never been in love,” he said. “But I think I am. With you.”

  “I know,” she said. “Maybe you should try not to be.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know.”

  “But why should I try not to be?”

  “I need to go see my father.”

  Camila turned away from the water. “Let’s head through town. I want to get a shaved ice.”

  They walked to the road and left the beach at the beginning of the commercial zone. The same reggae band they’d seen their first night in Kona was playing on the sidewalk. As they approached, one of the band members called to Alex. “Hey mon, why dontcha buy a CD for the lady?”

  Alex and Camila both smiled at him but they didn’t stop, so he called after them, “Hey miss, make your man buy you a CD to rememba your trip!”

  They passed a few stores selling t-shirts and sunglasses, then stopped to look in the window of a shaved-ice shop. A teenage girl set a giant cube of ice on a machine and stuck it into place with metal prongs. She pressed a button and a metal rod dropped onto the ice to lock it into place. She pressed another button and the rod rotated on top of the ice, shooting what looked like snow into a large paper cup. The piercing sound of metal scraping hard ice caused Camila to cover her ears.

  Through the noise, Alex heard the steel drums and the man calling after passing tourists. “Hey you. Little man. You, want a CD? Hey, little man!”

  Alex turned and saw Rak, a block away, walking briskly toward them. He was dressed in sunglasses and a bright blue shirt and his pasty white legs stuck out under tan capri pants. Alex recognized his mustache from The Post’s sketch and was surprised by just how short he was.

  Camila was still watching the girl catch the shaved ice.

 
Alex grabbed her hand. “Run!” he shouted.

  She tried to look back but he was already pulling her forward.

  Chapter 56

  They ran hard for a block, past shops and tourists, without once looking back. Alex slowed a few times to encourage Camila to keep up. When he finally glanced back, he saw that they were losing Rak, who was still walking.

  “He’s not running,” Alex said, taking Camila’s hand and slowing to a walk.

  “What’s . . . going . . . on?” Camila said, panting. “I knew I’d . . . sensed something back on the beach.”

  They crossed Alii Drive onto the beach side of the street. Alex looked back every few seconds and saw Rak taking long strides with his short legs, now about two blocks away.

  They passed the last of the streetlights and entered a shadowed stretch of sidewalk. Alex looked back at Rak, who was still visible under the last lights of the commercial zone. As Rak came under the light of the final streetlight, he broke into a slow trot, then a run.

  “He’s running,” Alex said. He grabbed Camila’s hand and pulled her for a long block. She was panting again as they slowed to let a few cars through an intersection. When the cars had passed, they took off again, but Camila tripped on the curb and fell into the street.

  She screamed as cars swerved around them and Alex knelt by her side. Her hand was scraped and bleeding. She got up and immediately collapsed again. Alex looked down at her, then up at Rak, who was running toward them, now just a block away.

  “Your ankle?” Alex asked.

  “It’s bad.”

  Alex moved into a crouch, took Camila by the waist, and lifted her up as he stood, draping her over his right shoulder as he slid between cars and crossed the intersection. On the other side of the street he stopped and looked back. Rak was only fifty yards away, arm extended, holding what Alex thought must be a gun.

  Alex turned and sprinted, Camila still over his shoulder, her left arm clinging to his back. His mind was blank as he ran, lifting his knees high and straining to keep Camila level. After two blocks, he looked back again. Rak was now much farther behind and had stopped running.

  “He’s walking,” Alex panted.

  He jogged for another block then stopped. This time, when he turned to look back, he saw Rak walking in the other direction.

  Alex dropped Camila onto the bed and slammed the door to their room. He slid the desk up against it, walked to the closet, and opened the safe. “The USB drive and the recordings are still here,” he said. “At least he hasn’t been in the room.” He closed all the curtains and peeked through the window that looked out onto the stairway. Seeing no one, he sat on the bed next to her.

  Camila gripped her ankle with both hands. She pressed it lightly for a moment, then pulled down her sock to reveal a red, swollen mass.

  “What do we do?” Alex asked frantically. “I mean, we have to call the police, right? Rak knows where we are. He’s here. I mean he’s fucking here.” He walked in small circles around the room, wanting to run and jump and smash things all at once. “I can’t believe he’s here.”

  Camila watched from the bed. “Alex, we’re okay.”

  He took a few deep breaths, then sat on the bed and called the Kona police. “They’ll be right over,” he said when he hung up.

  “He doesn’t know we‘re in the hotel,” Camila said, gently massaging her ankle.

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “If he did, he would have killed us already. This is a perfect place to kill us, right? No lobby to go through, just up a flight of stairs, kick in the door—or pretend to be room service—and bam!”

  “You’ve thought this through.”

  “It’s a good thing. Somehow he knew we were in Kona and—”

  “Yeah, how did he know?”

  “I don’t know. Flight records? Maybe some other way. We’re not exactly ninja spies here.”

  Alex went to the bathroom and emerged a minute later with a large towel soaked in cold water.

  He stood beside the bed and Camila closed her eyes as he wrapped the towel around her ankle.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I mean, for carrying me and all.”

  He smiled at her, then looked up when there was a knock at the door.

  “It’s probably the police,” Camila said.

  Alex peeked through the window to see who was there, then slid the desk away from the door. Very slowly, he opened the door and, once they’d shown their ID, he invited the two officers into the room.

  Pono Grady was in his early fifties, lean, and deeply tanned, with long brown hair. He sat in the desk chair as Alex sat down next to Camila on the bed. Samuel Balby, young and pudgy, stood beside the bed and took notes while Alex told them about Downton, Rak, and their chase through town.

  When he told them that his apartment had been ransacked, Grady leaned back in his chair. “You didn’t report it? Any man tears up my apartment, I report it.”

  “And I never heard of no assassin on the island,” Balby added, looking up from his notes.

  “Look,” Alex said, “we were scared as hell, okay? We were on a plane a few hours later. This guy had just killed one of my sources and I have something he really, really doesn’t want me to have.”

  “Look,” Grady said, “it’s not that I don’t believe you. I do. But all you’ve got is a story about a man running after you, possibly with a gun. We’re gonna do everything we can to find him, and to keep you safe. We’ll check it out with the NYPD, but it’s four in the morning over there, and they’re pretty busy these days. We’ll put Sammy here outside your door and check in on you tomorrow.”

  Once the officers left, Camila ordered room service and a bucket of ice. When it arrived, Alex wrapped her ankle in ice and towels as she made sandwiches with fresh crabmeat and dinner rolls. She ate by the sliding glass doors, looking out through a crack in the curtains and dipping her sandwiches in melted butter with lemon.

  Alex sat at the desk, nibbling steamed vegetables and pushing an untouched steak around his plate with a fork. “When are you going to see your father?” he asked.

  She didn’t respond.

  After finishing her second glass of sauvignon blanc, Camila grabbed a cup of chocolate pudding from the tray and turned to Alex. “You want some?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think will happen if you try some?” She licked her spoon.

  “I’ll die,” he said, smiling.

  She hobbled over to him with a spoonful of pudding. “Just try one bite.”

  He sat up rigid in the chair, not looking at her.

  “Seriously,” she said. “One bite.”

  He rotated the chair toward her. She straddled his leg and held out the pudding.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I feel like a stripper.”

  His body stiffened as she sat on him. He looked into her eyes as she touched his cheek with the back of her hand. He felt softness and a burning lust, but both were immediately displaced by a hollow, sinking feeling. “What are you doing? I thought you said—”

  “Straddling your leg and trying to get you to have some pudding.” She moved the spoon toward his mouth and he took a bite.

  His body tingled and his brain felt sharp. “I can feel myself retaining water already.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “But I kind of hate it too.”

  He could feel the sugar and the desire moving through him. He felt out of control and this made him angry, but he smiled at her. “Sugar is a drug,” he said, trying to sound light.

  She stared straight at him and adjusted her position on his leg, then squeezed his thigh by tightening both of hers. All of his awareness went to the place of contact between them and he forgot himself for a moment.

  “Cam?” He stared at her. “Cam, what are you doing?”

  She put the spoon in his mouth, swiveled off him aw
kwardly, and flopped down on the bed. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Alex took the spoon from his mouth and put it on the desk. He looked at her on the bed, swallowed the pudding, then walked over and lay down on his own bed.

  Chapter 57

  Alex stared at the ceiling. “I’m never gonna be able to fall asleep,” he said.

  “Me neither.”

  “Let’s go over this again. If we hunker down here, the police might catch him and—”

  “And what if they do catch him?” Camila asked softly. “I say we send copies of the Santiago video to the police and the papers, you write up everything we’ve found about Hollinger, his money, Bice, and so on, and we disappear for a while.”

  Alex sat up and looked at her. Moonlight came through the curtains, lighting her face, but she was not looking at him. “We already tried disappearing,” he said. “That’s why we’re here. Plus, the video won’t be enough to get him off. They need Rak to confess—or they need some evidence on him. If they get him, maybe he’ll flip on Bice. Plus, I still have the Martin calls to track down, and the phone records to get from Sonia. With another few days, I think we can get enough solid evidence to nail this thing.”

  She rolled over onto her side with great effort. Ice spilled onto the bed. “And then what? Even if you get evidence that Bice hired Rak to kill Martin and Downton—and us, for that matter—he will never do jail time.”

  “Well, I think that—”

  “You can’t actually be that naïve, can you?”

  He rolled toward the wall.

  “Bice’s company has more power than most of the governments in the world,” she continued. “He has the power to ruin any prosecutor, any police chief, almost any politician. You think your news story will bring him down? Plus, he owns your newspaper. It’s bad luck. We got caught in the middle of a storm, the kind I usually like to avoid. It’s just really bad luck.”