He was making a real effort for her. She had a feeling Creepy and Creepier would think twice before bothering her again.
Nicole smiled. “I really appreciate this, Mike. Thanks so much.”
His jaws worked. “Like I said, don’t thank me, thank Sam. He’s the one who sent me. He’s worried about you.”
Nicole froze, feeling another wave of heat wash over her. What could she possibly say? She opened her mouth and closed it, completely incapable of speech. Sam was watching over her and she was avoiding him because she didn’t have the faintest clue how to deal with him.
With enormous effort, she didn’t wring her hands.
Mike stood still, silent, watching her.
“Yes, um,” she said finally. Oh God. “Will you—will you thank Sam for me?”
“No, ma’am, I think you should thank him yourself.” He dipped his head, touched a finger to his forehead in salute, got into the patrol car and drove off.
EIGHT
Outlaw landedat the General Aviation side of Lindbergh Field Airport at 4 P.M., local time, carrying a small arsenal.
Oh, the joys of working for the Masters of the Universe, even if they’d been taken down a notch or ten and their plumage was not as bright and as full as before.
If you were a CEO and earning $170 mil a year instead of $240 mil, it gave you bitching rights down at the club, but it didn’t really make a whole lot of difference.
Included in the contract was reimbursement for private jets to take him anywhere he wanted to go. And the good thing about private jets was that no one was going to ask any questions at all.
He was definitely dressed for the part. He’d studied his clients like it was a mission and just as he could camouflage himself for a sniping mission in the desert or a quick infil into the African jungle, he could pass muster among the rich. He’d learned the camouflage well.
The human eye is overwhelmed by input from the brain. It won’t “see” a sniper in camouflage with mottled, disruptive patterns. It perceives the sniper and his surroundings as a continuum and can’t see the contour around him. A good sniper becomes invisible, whether in mountain terrain or in forests or in the desert.
The same here. He was dressed in the equivalent of his ghillie suit. A ghillie suit of the rich. He was dressed from the skin out in silk, Egyptian cotton, cashmere and new virgin wool. Look the part, be the part. What was underneath the $8,000 suit, a steel-tough, scarred body, couldn’t be seen.
The mission called for speed, otherwise Outlaw would have spent the day at a spa, to achieve that ruddy, pampered look. But there’d been no time.
It had given him enormous pleasure to put his Remington sniper rifle—he would use it only if he had to, to complete the mission—and his Kimber 1911, three magazines, tactical gear, body armor, powerful laser light, lockpick gun, K-bar, karambit knives and vial of acid all in matching Louis Vuitton carry-on hand luggage and briefcase.
No one would think to question it.
It was simply a different world, the world of theüber-rich.
They were as invisible in their way as the homeless. Outlaw had been both, under cover. People avert their eyes from the homeless, particularly if you were smart and pissed on yourself. Eau de bum. But they avert their eyes from the super wealthy, too. As if the rich gave off a special glare too bright for the eyes of ordinary people.
Outlaw had the bearing of the super-rich down, too. God knows he’d studied his clients enough and he knew the rules. You could never be too arrogant or act too entitled.
He drew up in a limo, which he exited without giving the driver a second glance. The pilot was at the top of the stairs and Outlaw passed by him with only a terse nod.
It was behavior so expected, he was invisible.
The flight was smooth, the weather excellent all the way into Southern California. He’d spent the entire trip studying the Google Street View of the Morrison Building, hacking into the blueprints on file in the San Diego County office and the building management company’s files. The office of Wordsmith was tiny, 500 square feet, and the rent was $4,200 a month. Nicole Pearce had a two-year lease and had never been late in payment.
Outlaw then hacked into a Keyhole satellite and checked out the roof of the building. He spent an hour on close-ups of every inch of the roof and had a viable game plan for getting into and out of Nicole Pearce’s ninth-floor office, and a backup emergency plan, by the time they landed.
He rented a Lexus and drove himself to near the Morrison Building. An hour after landing, he was parking the Lexus on a side street.
The street view had been astonishingly clear, but the Google cameras hadn’t been able to penetrate the smoked-glass windows of the lobby.
Outlaw watched the entrance for a quarter of an hour from a trendy café across the street. He monitored the ebb and flow of people, timed it and strode into the expensive glass-and-brushed-steel expanse of the large lobby together with an intake of men. He wore large wraparound sunglasses and walked with his head down. There were security cameras all around the walls, but their angle was such that if you walked straight down the middle of the 11,000-square-foot floor, chances were they’d only catch his feet. He put himself in the middle of a crowd of excited business executives who’d just come back from some seminar.
Like many Special Ops soldiers, Outlaw wasn’t a big man. He was of medium height and wiry rather than broad. He placed himself between two big, beefy executive types, keeping pace with them across the large lobby, wishing men still wore hats. A wide-brimmed fedora would have been perfect to cover his face.
