Night Talk by George Noory Page B

pocket?”
    He didn’t have an answer.
    â€œNevers is probably at the state bar event this weekend in Santa Barbara. Give him a call first thing Monday morning. The arrest warrant will probably be issued soon. Nevers can arrange for you to surrender and work at getting you bail.”
    They signed off politely and he hung up. He felt again as if he had been beat on. The worst thing about the call wasn’t just her opinion that he was in deep shit but something he picked up from her voice. Liz thought he was guilty. And he couldn’t blame her. No question—he was felony ugly when it came to exposing sins of the government. The crime fit him like a glove.
    He also remembered something he’d heard about Tom and Maddie and their attorney, Nevers. When they asked the attorney what his fee would be, the attorney’s reply had been, “Everything you have.”

 
    18
    He had been set up. Stolen secrets, money transfer, destroyed evidence. A dying declaration that was an accusation. But he was sure Ethan had been used rather than doing the manipulation. The hacker had been too terrified, pressured to the point of breaking on the phone. Greg didn’t see Ethan as diabolical enough to commit treason and blame it on him. To the contrary, whistleblowers who expose secrets want their own fifteen minutes of fame. The frame-up was all too well engineered, too ruthlessly efficient to be the work of a young hacker with a drug problem.
    Greg’s role was the fall guy, to take the heat when the government found out secret files had been stolen. Who, why and how were out of his reach, but he grabbed at pieces and tried putting them together.
    The van had a role. It had been stalking him. Could have killed him but only made an attempt when he turned and started walking toward it, challenging it. What the purpose was of the stalking, he didn’t know. To spook him? Get him worried and scared and wondering what was going to happen next because rattled people make mistakes?
    The woman was part of it, too. Cryptic messages. A tease. Who was she? Why was she playing games with him? What had she been doing on the street after Ethan took the plunge? How did she know that the fallout from Ethan’s death wouldn’t end with blood splattered on the street?
    He had only one solid piece of information about her other than a general idea of her appearance: She had an inside track about Mond’s plan to search his apartment. And even before that she had warned him that it had just begun.
    The “it” was his life being caught up in a maelstrom.
    There was something else, too. Something that made his skin crawl.
    He slid open the balcony doors and stepped outside to get some air and shake the sense of dread he felt.
    Like the sword hanging over Damocles, his encounter as a youth with the unexplainable had left him with both a looming fear and a certainty that someday he would be revisited by the nightmare.
    He couldn’t explain even to himself why he identified the bad dream he was in with what happened to him decades before, but he sensed a connection with the past. But what was it? How could top secrets and money transferred to a hacker have any connection with a paranormal incident he suffered years earlier?
    He had to put his fears from the past aside and concentrate on what he knew was on the table. There was a connection among Rohan, the woman, the van, the money, missing documents, a whirlwind of people and strange events swirling around Ethan.
    What had Ethan been involved in? The hacker’s hot spot had been the invasion of privacy that electronics interconnecting the world had created. As an electronics geek, Ethan understood better than most people the power and scope of the intrusion.
    Greg also feared and fought the control that the electronic invasions had brought to people’s lives. A great number of his callers shared apprehension about the electronic invasion. And there had