“Not yet.”

  “Have Frigg send me a copy when it comes,” Ali said. “I’ll need that when I contact Sonja.”

  As they stepped into the elevator, Ali said, “This is one of those high-travel days. I can’t believe Frigg was able to book a flight on such short notice.”

  “She’s something else, isn’t she?” Stu said proudly.

  Ali couldn’t help but remember a time when, worried about Frigg’s unorthodox capabilities, Stu had been determined to pull the plug on the AI on a permanent basis. Now they were both glad he hadn’t.

  “She certainly is,” Ali agreed, “and the next time you talk to her, be sure to tell her I said thanks.”

  CHAPTER 11

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 6:00 p.m. (PST)

  The game, played in Dallas rather than Pasadena, ended with the Oregon Ducks beating the Wisconsin Badgers by a single point, 28 to 27. Once it was over, Frank turned off the TV and logged on to his computer where he checked the newsfeeds from both Flagstaff and Phoenix, looking for any sign that his intended hit had actually taken place. Unfortunately, the only newsworthy topic of the day seemed to be a huge brush fire that had temporarily shut down freeway traffic in both directions between Phoenix and Flagstaff. Frank doubted the fire had anything to do with Hal Holden. Disappointed and wanting to clear his head, Frank left the apartment and went for another walk, this time just around the apartment complex.

  The divorce Sylvia had initiated came through only months after Frank’s transfer from a holding cell in LA to Lompoc. Surprisingly, seeing the decree in black and white had gone a long way toward helping him settle into prison life. At the time she filed, Frank had not yet been found guilty in a court of law nor had he entered his guilty plea, but Sylvia had decided well in advance that his going to prison was a foregone conclusion. She hadn’t bothered asking for child support or alimony. She already knew that with him doing time, no financial support would be forthcoming.

  Somehow that had helped Frank put his own situation in perspective. If he had not been incarcerated and had been ordered to pay alimony and child support, he would have had to work overtime shifts or take on private security jobs just to make ends meet. In Lompoc he had assigned tasks to do—working in the mess hall or the laundry mostly—but those were nothing jobs. It wasn’t much, but here he had a roof over his head. On the outside, he would have had to do his own cooking. Here he had three squares a day, and although the food was admittedly bad, it was probably better than anything he could have concocted on his own.

  Frank wasn’t earning a steady paycheck, but he had a big payday coming. How many of the guys he’d met at the academy could walk away from a new job after only fifteen or twenty years with a cool tax-free $500,000 just sitting there waiting for them? Not very many, he guessed. So, although being in prison wasn’t all hunky-dory, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

  After learning about Gregg Atkins’s successful outcome, Frank realized that although he didn’t have a Bitcoin fortune available to fund a revenge campaign, he did have that $500,000. The problem was, he didn’t know if he’d be able to access any of his payout prior to being released. To that end, he sent a letter to William Banks, his now semiretired defense attorney, asking for a meeting to discuss a possible appeal. That was bogus, of course, since he had pled guilty.

  Nonetheless their attorney-client discussion was conducted in an interview room rather than a visitation one. Despite the fact that no recording equipment was supposed to be present, they nonetheless conducted their business by writing notes back and forth on one of Banks’s many yellow legal pads:

  FM: Can I receive periodic advance payments?

  WB: I believe so. How much?

  FM: That depends.

  WB: When?

  FM: As needed.

  WB: How much?

  FM: Don’t know yet.

  WB: How will I know the person asking is for real?

  FM: I’ll have them tell you that St. Nick suggested they stop by.

  Frank figured the name St. Nick was close enough to Nicholas for Banks to get the message, and he did. “Got it,” he said, returning the yellow legal pad to his briefcase. “Glad to be of service.”

  “What about the bill for your coming today?”

  “Not to worry,” Banks replied with a grin. “That’s still covered.”

  Frank had felt the slightest twinge of worry when he heard that. Obviously William Banks was every bit as crooked an attorney as the former legal beagles now locked up inside the Lompoc Correctional Complex—he just hadn’t been caught yet. The question was, if he ever did wind up on the wrong side of an FBI investigation, was he or was he not someone who would name names?

  During the meeting, Banks had given Frank enough of a thumbs-up for him to go ahead and create his mental kill list—starting with Danielle Lomax. He had no idea what had become of her after his arrest, and that was a problem. How does a hit man find a target if you can’t tell them where said target happens to be?

  A certain amount of sleuthing on Frank’s part revealed that someone named Salvatore Moroni, a lifer in Lompoc, was the guy who’d been Gregg Atkins’s fixer. Sal’s name may have been common knowledge inside the joint, but no one squealed on him. That was probably more due to the laws of self-preservation rather than any kind of loyalty. If Moroni could wave a wand and knock off two people in a luxury hotel in far-away Montenegro, he could probably arrange for a similar event to occur somewhere in the US of A.

  First, though, Frank needed to make Sal’s acquaintance. He was subtle about it by finding a way to be seated at Sal’s customary table in the mess hall. After a casual introduction, Frank spent several months establishing a sense of rapport between the two of them. On that score, Frank’s reputation for not being a snitch helped immeasurably. One day, when both he and Sal were in the gym, walking on side-by-side treadmills, Frank was finally able to get down to brass tacks. Sal’s response was completely straightforward and to the point.

  “Can you pay the freight?” he asked.

  “How much?”

  “Ten per,” Sal told him, “payable in advance, all cash and in untraceable bills. Can you do that?”

  “I think so,” Frank said.

  “Where’s the pickup?”

  Frank gave Sal William Banks’s name and location, as well as the St. Nick code word, and warned him that whoever was doing the pickup would need to stop by a day or so in advance to give Banks a heads-up.

  Frank liked the fact that Sal listened and nodded in response to all his questions but made no paper- or tech-based notations. Like Frank, Sal trusted his head to remember things more than he did any kind of outside reminder. That was reassuring since nothing hidden inside the man’s head would be at risk of falling into the wrong hands.

  “How will this work?” Sal wanted to know.

  “Have your messenger stop by Banks’s office in the next couple of days to introduce himself and work out the exact time and date for the pickup.”

  “Fair enough,” Sal said. “Once that happens, we can move forward.”

  Since Sal’s business was killing people rather than finding them, his first hurdle was all about locating the target. Danielle Lomax had seemingly dropped out of sight the moment Frank was arrested, so finding her wasn’t easy. For another five grand, Sal hired the services of a hacker who, according to him, could find anyone anywhere. Within days the hacker had located Danielle—happily married now and living a new life in St. Paul, Minnesota. That was where she was found, and, to Frank’s immense satisfaction, that was where she died.

  Sal let him know the job was done but provided few details. After being let out on parole, Frank had searched through newspaper archives in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to suss out the details. According to them, Mrs. Lomax-Reardon, the executive director of a local women’s shelter and mother of two, had been gunned down by an unidentified assailant late in the evening of October 31st in 2017 as she left the shelter after facilitating an evening support-group meeting for survivors of domestic violence. The homicide was considered to be an act of random violence. No perpetrator had ever been identified, and the homicide remained unsolved.

  Frank read those words with a euphoric sense of satisfaction. After setting Frank up to spend years of his life rotting in prison for more than a decade, Danielle had blithely moved forward with her own life. For Frank, spending fifteen thousand bucks to take that life away from her had been worth every penny.

  At first Danielle’s death was enough to satisfy Frank’s thirst for revenge, but eventually that urge returned. After all, Danielle wasn’t the only one responsible for sending Frank to the slammer. Jack Littleton and Hal Holden, fellow cops at Pasadena PD, were also involved. With Jack especially there had been a long-standing feud.

  Shortly after graduating from the academy, Frank had been one of the officers called to a reported homicide that had started out as a barroom brawl. As cops converged on the scene, one of the onlookers had gotten physical. Frank, who’d always had a bit of a temper, had lit into the guy and was cleaning his clock when Jack intervened, dressing Frank down right there in front of God and everybody, while the bleeding guy, still present and smirking, had been giving Frank the finger behind Jack’s back.

  “I’ll be reporting your actions to your FTO, Officer Muñoz,” Jack had growled at him. “If you pull another stunt like this, you’ll be booted off the force in the blink of an eye. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Frank had replied.

  The two men seldom crossed paths after that, but Frank remained convinced that Jack Littleton had it in for him. Frank had been at BJ’s on the night of the Alysha Morgan homicide. His name and contact information had been taken down by one of the uniforms at the scene, but Frank had managed to leave the area without being interviewed. When he learned that Littleton was the lead investigator on the case, he had fully expected to be put under a microscope, but that hadn’t happened.

  For a time he had wondered about that. Danielle had actually witnessed the shooting, so he knew she had been interviewed, but when he had asked her about that, she’d gone all squirrelly on him. Within a matter of weeks, she’d quit her job, moved out of her apartment without leaving a forwarding address, and disconnected her phone without so much as a vaya con Dios.

  Sometime later, when the feds came calling, Frank put it all together. Danielle must have blabbed to Littleton and Holden about Frank’s involvement in the goings-on at BJ’s. It didn’t take much for Frank to realize that the homicide cops had most likely brought the FBI into the picture, and now they were the next names on Frank’s kill list. With his parole in the offing, he went back to see Sal.

  “Where you gonna be once you get out?” Sal asked.

  “Vegas,” Frank had answered.

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “My daughter lives in Vegas,” Sal said, “and she works with me on this. What say we cut out your middle man and have Rochelle collect the cash from you directly?”

  “Works for me,” Frank said, “but if I’m on the outside and you’re on the inside, how do we make contact?”

  Sal had given Frank detailed directions that included Frank’s buying a computer. After that they communicated through draft files in a mutually accessed email account to plan and successfully carry out the hit on Jack Littleton. Still living where he’d always lived, Jack had been easy to find and easier to take down. Hal Holden was another story. He was now living in a small town in Central Arizona where he kept completely irregular hours. For Hal, Frank had been forced to fork over an extra five thousand bucks just to get a detailed look at the man’s schedule.

  But Frank’s new computer came with a terrific side benefit that had nothing to do with communicating with Sal. One of his first Internet searches had brought him to a small but important article on the second page of the Pasadena Times:

  FORMER COP’S DEATH RULED AS UNDETERMINED

  The LA County Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled last week’s death of former Pasadena Police Department officer and retired homicide detective Jack Andrew Littleton as undetermined. Mr. Littleton died of a single gunshot wound to the head.

  The body was found when neighbors, noticing unread newspapers accumulating on his front porch, requested a routine welfare check. At the time officers entered the victim’s residence, he had been deceased for at least three days.

  Mr. Littleton, age 71, retired from Pasadena PD in 2009 after twenty-five years of service, initially in patrol and later in investigations. During his years as a homicide detective, he is credited with closing fifty-three cases, including the brutal 1995 slaying of Hollywood starlet Loralei Day.

  According to sources inside Pasadena PD, when officers entered the residence, Mr. Littleton was found dead in a recliner in the living room with a gunshot wound to the head and with his service weapon on the floor nearby.

  The house was locked at the time responding officers arrived. There was no sign of forced entry nor did there seem to be a disturbance of any kind having occurred inside the home.

  No suicide note was found at the scene, but Mr. Littleton was known to have been in declining health for a number of years preceding his death.

  Funeral services are pending.

  In Frank’s opinion a ruling of suicide would have been better, but “undetermined” was a good second best. Sal’s hired hand had been enough of a pro to make sure the crime scene was properly staged. As the weeks went by the lack of any additional coverage indicated that the case had gone cold.

  With Littleton dead and Holden hopefully on his way out, Frank was three-quarters of the way there. Sylvia Garcia Muñoz Rogers was the last target standing, and Sal’s latest draft file communication indicated that her death would occur later this week.

  For Frank Muñoz it couldn’t come soon enough. He was tired of waiting.

  CHAPTER 12

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 5:00 p.m. (MST)

  Ali and Stu had merged onto I-17 and were headed north when a message from Frigg containing the flight plan details arrived on Ali’s phone. After dialing Sonja Bjornson’s number, an answering service told her Sonja would call her back shortly.

  “Any more news?” Ali asked when that call ended.

  Stu nodded. “Frigg has obtained a list of conference attendees and is creating dossiers on all the company execs expected to be there. Those should be ready for you by the time you board the plane.”

  “Will Adrian Willoughby’s information be included?”

  “Yes,” Stu said. “In addition, Frigg has retrieved a copy of B.’s presentation from his computer, so Cami will be able to study that while you’re on board.”

  “In other words, we’ll both have some homework to do,” Ali observed.

  Turning back to the flight plan, Ali saw they were scheduled to depart Pulliam Airport, FLG, at 9:00 p.m. on January 1, arriving at London City Airport, LCY, at 4:30 p.m., London time, on January 2, with a scheduled fuel stop scheduled at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey along the way. Seeing their scheduled arrival time, Ali switched over to the conference details, noting that a private opening reception was scheduled for 7 p.m. on January 2 in Il Bar at the Bulgari Hotel.

  With the timing of that in mind, Ali called Cami. “Are you packing?”

  “I am,” Cami replied.

  “About that, according to the flight plan, we should be on the ground in time for us to attend the opening reception, so pack accordingly.”

  “Which means?”

  “Suitable business attire for the meetings themselves and something dressy for the reception,” Ali told her.

  “By suitable, I’m assuming you mean something other than jeans and flannel shirts?” Cami asked with a laugh.

  To counter the considerable heat generated by the computer lab, High Noon’s thermostats were kept at a cool 68 degrees year-round, so business attire there was long on warmth and short on fashion.

  “Yes,” Ali agreed. “Something slightly dressier than that, but what about the hotel? Were you able to reserve another room?”

  “Nope,” Cami replied. “Right now the hotel is fully booked, but the conference already had B. in one of their suites. It comes with one and a half baths and a separate sitting room that includes a pull-out sofa. I’ll take the sofa and you can have the bedroom, unless you’d like me to look for another nearby hotel.”

  “No,” Ali said, “the suite will be fine.”

  Ali went on to update Cami on B.’s and Hal’s current medical situations. “By the way,” she added, “thanks for bringing Sister Anselm into the picture. She was already at the hospital when Stu and I got there.”

  “Not a surprise,” Cami responded. “Sister A. is one amazing woman.”

  Ali was taken aback to hear Cami refer to Sister Anselm by a pet name—something Ali herself had never done. Obviously the disconnect between the two women was a thing of the past.

  Just then Ali’s phone let her know that Sonja was calling.

  “I have to take this,” Ali told Cami. “It’s Sonja Bjornson.”

  “Wait,” Cami said. “You’re hiring a bodyguard?”

  “Trying to,” Ali said. “Under the circumstances, it seems like a good idea.” With that, she switched over to the other line.

  “What’s up?” Sonja asked. “From what my answering service told me, it sounds like you need a security detail sooner rather than later.”

  For the next ten minutes or so, Ali provided all the pertinent details, and she and Sonja began getting the situation sorted. Ali was in the process of hanging up when the screen of her iPad flashed red, indicating Frigg was sending out an urgent message. Out of deference for Stu’s fondness for J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, those flashing red messages from Frigg were always referred to as howlers. Ali read this one aloud for Stu’s benefit.

  An anonymous source at the Arizona Department of Public Safety is now reporting that a burned-out and abandoned 2012 Chevrolet Silverado pickup was the cause of the midmorning brush fire that shut down I-17 in both directions between Phoenix and Flagstaff. The vehicle had been reported as stolen from a construction company parking lot in Kingman, Arizona, earlier today.