and Bobby to go forward.
When they joined him, he said, “They found this Rasmusen. You want to
see him, make sure he has the right diskettes?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said.
“Definitely,” Julie said, and her throaty voice didn’t sound at all sexy
now, just tough.
KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running
graveyard-shift patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from
the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him. He counted
fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds.
He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred
bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with
$140,000. He had no idea where the money had come from or whether it
belonged to him.
The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded
another surprise-a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but
two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a
California driver’s license. With the wallet was a United States
passport. The photographs on the passport and license were of the same
man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an
easy smile, and dimples. Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked
like, he tilted the rear view mirror and was able to see enough of his
face to match it with the one on the ID. The problem was… the
license and passport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.
He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found
another Social Security card, passport, and California driver’s license.
These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of
Frank.
James Roman meant nothing to him.
George Farris was also meaningless. And Frank Pollard, whom he believed
himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could
recall.
“What the hell am I tangled up in?” he said aloud.
He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in
fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for one to which
death had entitled him.
As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night
beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him.
He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere which he could
retreat and be assured of safety. A man with a past was also a man
without a future.
WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor,
in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom
Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the
wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a
length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together. He was
pouting. He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of
dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd’s
office he had cold-bloodily given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet
here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught. His weasel
face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his
yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if
anyone dared to say a cross word. The mere sight of him infuriated
Julie. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into
his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.
The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had
rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place. Evidently,
standing at Ackroyd’s window to watch the fireworks, he had been
surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota. She had driven the
Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far
back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel,
where no one had spotted her. Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the
first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who
else was out there. Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was