Private L.A. (Private 6)
End of discussion. He turned from Hernandez, glanced at the atomic clock on the wall—fourteen hundred hours—and said, “Okay, Mr. Watson, upload it.”
“Straightaway, Mr. Cobb,” Watson said, and began giving orders to his iPad. “I’m taking it through scrubbing sites in India, Pakistan, and Hong Kong. Zero chance they’ll pull an IPN on us.”
Cobb understood. “Make sure you mix up the paths you take online. It’s just like being on the job. No routine routes. Change it up, all the time.”
“Got the Facebook page up,” Kelleher said, pivoted in his chair, stroked his red beard. “You like?”
Cobb glanced at the iPad in front of the big man. A Facebook page filled the screen, topped with the headline NO PRISONERS: FACES OF WAR L.A.
“Outstanding,” Cobb said. “Show them their ignorance, sow fear through them virtually. I’m going to catch a nap before things really ramp up.”
“Sixteen hundred?” Hernandez asked.
“Yes,” Cobb said before going to a cot and lying on it with one arm flung over his eyes. As a matter of survival, he had long ago taught his mind and body to shut down on command. When they did so this time, he plunged into a deep, dark void that after an hour gave way to dreams.
It was night. The chill wind smelled of wood smoke, tobacco smoke, coffee brewing, horse sweat, and the high desert. Boots crunched on sand and rock. Dogs began to bark before gunfire threw jagged flares through the night.
Women and children began to scream. In his dreams, Cobb heard men begging for mercy. He felt nothing but satisfaction at the screaming, at their pleas, and with that grew a sense of righteousness that surged when the first explosion hyperlit his mind, shook his body so hard he thought for a moment he’d been hit by the rocket-propelled grenade.
Then Cobb bolted upright, instinctually grabbing the throat of the man shaking his shoulder. Watson choked and looked down at him bug-eyed.
“No, Mr. Cobb!” Kelleher yelled, grabbing his wrist. “It’s a good thing.”
Cobb came free of the dream, fully awake, and slowly let go of Watson’s throat.
“We’ve gone viral,” Kelleher said as Watson choked and coughed.
“Already?” Cobb said, sitting up, shedding the grogginess. Johnson and Nickerson were standing there too.
Watson crowed in a hoarse voice, “One hour twenty in, we’ve got seventy-five hundred hits on YouTube.”
Kelleher grinned. “And two thousand thumbs down on Facebook.”
“Those numbers will grow,” Cobb remarked.
“Definitely,” Hernandez said behind him. “Frickin’ exponential.”
Cobb twisted to see not bald Hernandez but blond-locked and bearded No Prisoners slipping the mirror sunglasses on to complete his disguise.
Cobb smiled, said, “Outstanding in every goddamned way, Mr. Hernandez.”
Chapter 13
“PUT THAT THING away,” Sanders snapped, reddening after the initial shock of seeing the dildo in Mo-bot’s hand. “Jennifer Harlow’s private, uh, needs are not at issue here.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Mo-bot shot back. “There are drawers full of sex toys and gear in her closet. His too.”
Camilla Bronson blanched. “You cannot mention this to anyone!”
She must have said that six times over the next fifteen minutes as we discovered all manner and size of dildo, butt plug, suction tube, cock ring, and artificial vagina in the Harlows’ closets. There was also a sex swing and a device that resembled a gymnast’s vaulting horse equipped with a powerful motor inside and a mechanical penis jutting out of the top.
“Never seen one of those before,” I commented.
“It’s called a Sybian,” said Sci, who’d just come in. “The penis attachment not only goes up and down, it can be set to rotate or corkscrew.”
“And you know that how?” Terry Graves asked.
“Kit-Kat’s got one,” Kloppenberg replied matter-of-factly.