AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Before they could follow, Kaiser said, “Rod, stop. Stop.”
“What?”
“I want to see if anyone follows us up.” They waited a few minutes, looking for bright-whites, but no other cars came up the hill.Kaiser said, “Okay,” and Baxter took the truck around the motel to the back, where the hackers were pulling their suitcases and computer gear out of their cars.
Letty got out on the tarmac and asked Kaiser, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” The motel was not at the top of the slope but had been built into it. The slope continued up from the back of the motel and was heavily treed, as was the downslope in front of it. “You put a guy up there with a rifle, you’d have a hell of a hard time digging him out of all that brush.”
“They’d have to know where we are.”
“My gut tells me they do know,” Kaiser said. “I believe that car was following us. But I’m not sure. If it was, and if they come in with a team, at least part of it will be up on that hill.”
“Then we oughta get up there first,” Letty said.
Twenty-Six
As the hackers began spreading through one wing of the motel, Letty, Kaiser, and Cartwright walked all the way around the outside. The building was a single-story squared-off U shape, the bottom four feet built solidly of red brick with a white wooden superstructure above the brick.
A flickering “Ynez Crest Motel” sign stood in front, above a flickering “Vacancy” sign. The building was old—perhaps fifty years old. Each room had a window facing a parking lot, with curtains that were stiff and hard to close, and a window with venetian blinds that looked out to a corridor that ran down the center of the wings. The wings had rooms on both sides, with hollow wooden doors facing the corridor; Letty suspected Kaiser could punch his fist through the doors. No protection there.
A short center wing connected the two arms of the building, and contained the office, a vending machine room, a little-usedlounge with a sofa, a few easy chairs and a television, and a yoga room. The owners, two trust-fund hippies, were friends of Sovern, and had hoped the yoga room would attract more customers, but it hadn’t. That room, with its polished wood-strip floor, was empty, except for twenty rolled-up and slowly disintegrating rubber-like yoga mats and a small brass bell of the kind used to signal the end of meditation.
“The brick is good,” Kaiser said. “The interior corridor is good, too. We can move people around without them being seen. If we’re hit when people are asleep in their rooms... These guys had grenades and a couple grenades through each window would wipe us out.”
“Fire,” Cartwright said, pointing at the ceiling. “It looks like the whole thing above the brick is old, dry wood... Fire would push us out in the open.”
“Can’t let that happen, can’t let them get close enough,” Letty said. “Sovern says they need more time, at least a day.”
“If they’re coming for us, that could be tough,” Cartwright said.
“We don’t want the hacks to hear that, not after the hotel,” Kaiser said. “If they heard you, they’d be out of here in a heartbeat.”
“So we keep our mouths shut. I don’t think the Russians will hit us in daylight—they’d be too visible and we’d see them coming,” Letty said. She pulled her phone and checked the time. “We’ve got about four hours until sunrise. If that car with the European lights was following us and calling back to LA, I can’t see that they could get a whole crew up here and do recon and hit us while it’s still dark.”
“I agree. We’ve probably got twenty-four hours,” Cartwright said. “They’d come after midnight when most cops are in bed.”
Kaiser nodded: “That doesn’t mean we won’t want to have a few guns awake during the day.”
The motel’s front deskwas manned by a retiree who stayed up nightly until one o’clock, then locked the front door and went to sleep on a rollaway cot in the back office. He’d stayed up to greet the hacking group, but as soon as they’d signed in and Letty had paid for the rooms with the NSA credit card, he grumpily disappeared into his makeshift bedroom.
A little later, Letty knocked on his door and when he cracked it open, she asked, “Do you have a landline telephone?”
“Not for about ten years,” he said. “Now let me sleep.” He shut the door again.
Sovern found them while they were doing their survey, and said, “We can move chairs and tables out of the individual rooms and take them to the yoga center... use it as a workspace. I already checked with Manny and he said okay. We might want to throw him some extra dollars when we leave.” Manny was one of the owners.
“Do that first thing tomorrow,” Letty said.
“How’s the wi-fi?” Cartwright asked.
“Good,” Sovern said. “The cable comes right down the highway and we’re hooked into it.”
“You guys need to make your own work schedule. John and Barbara and I will be up overnight,” Letty told Sovern. “Jane and Patty can take the watch tomorrow while we sleep. That’ll have the three of us up and alert tomorrow night. Barb thinks that if the Russians come after us, that’s the most likely time. They’ll be under time pressure, too. If they’re coming, they could do some recontomorrow afternoon. And listen: we need to finish this thing. As soon as we can. You’ve got to be awake and directing traffic. I’ve got some speed if you need it.”
Sovern shook his head: “I’m good for now. Ask me tomorrow.”
Cartwright looked up at the drop ceiling, of warped and discolored polystyrene tiles. “Fire. I can’t help thinking...”
