Final Hour (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page B

computers, printers, and associated equipment did not stand upon the fine furniture, but on a table in an alcove.
    “He’s a bounty hunter,” Pogo told Makani. “Like Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman from that old reality TV show, only without the macho.”
    “I’m as macho as they come,” Simon said as he settled into an office chair before the computers. “You’re just jealous.”
    “Aren’t there days,” Pogo asked, “when you yearn to man the barricades and rebel against the system?”
    “The system invented computers and the Internet,” Simon said. “Without the system, hackers would have nothing to rebel against and nothing to rebel
with.
And I’d still be poor.”
    Like the narrator of an old radio drama, Pogo portentously said, “Simon Michael Hunter—wise man or sellout? The answer lies only in the shadows of his own tortured heart.”
    At his keyboard, Simon flexed his fingers as if he were a pianist about to bring music from a Steinway. “On the phone, you said this woman has no Facebook page, no website.”
    Makani said, “We’ve got some search skills of our own. So far as we could learn, she doesn’t blog, doesn’t tweet, has no email address. Ursula Liddon is off the grid.”
    “No one is off the grid, sweetheart, not even those who’ve worked their ass off to get there. You gave me her street address, which is all I needed to find everything
you
need to do whatever dirty work it is that you’re doing.”
    “It’s not dirty work,” Pogo said. “It’s just delicate.”
    “It’s all relative,” Simon said. “One man’s delicate is another man’s dirty.”
    “I’m an honest man.”
    “Yes, so you’ve told me.”
    “I’ve been a house-sitter for you twice. Ever been as much as a doily missing?”
    “There’s never been a damn doily in this house,” Simon said, “and there never will be.”
    “You see? Not one missing.”
    “The first two times, you might’ve been setting me up, winning my confidence. Next time, I expect to come home to nothing but empty rooms.”
    “You have problems with trust. I pity the man you marry.”
    “
That
will never happen,” Simon said.
    To Makani, Pogo said, “Simon is a traditionalist. He still opens doors for women, wears a coat and tie to fine restaurants, and laments the hoi polloi’s increasing inability to properly use
who
and
whom
in speech.”
    “I should have been born around nineteen hundred. Here we go.”
    Simon indicated the computer screen, then the printer, which began to feed paper through its laser jet and into the output stacker. “I’ve created a file for you, anything useful regarding Ursula Jean Liddon, who was briefly Ursula Jean Norquist, bride and widow within four months, now Liddon again. She keeps a low profile. Fortunately, the cokehead horndog who married this looker wanted to show her off, so there was a little coverage in what passes for the high-society publications here along the California Riviera, those slick luxury-living magazines we all love to drool over. Now give me your phone.” Pogo gave it to him. “I’m going to load a little app for you, my own creation, but customized to your needs regarding the pneumatic Ms. Liddon. With this, you’ll pretty much know where she is twenty-four/seven.” He succinctly explained the app, and when he finished installing it, he suggested, “Say, ‘Thank you, dear Uncle Simon,’ and quietly be gone. I have a
paying
job to finish for a Fortune Five Hundred company, and
they
would never insult me by implying that doilies are a part of my décor.”

6
Ursula and the Evil Twin
    The basement of the factory lies under the thick floor of the main work area, which is an effective lid to prevent all sound from rising out of the rooms below.
    Ursula finishes descending the second of two wide flights of stairs that lead to a fireproof steel door.
    Webs have been spun where treads and risers form tight corners, but there are no spiders on the stairs, as though none