The Shadow Hunter

voice said, “You have mail.”
    Not Abby’s voice. He wasn’t sure it was even human. It sounded false, electronic. Baffled, he pressed the receiver closer to his ear. “Who is this? Hello?”
    The voice said again, “You have mail.”
    Click. A dial tone hummed.
    Slowly he set down the phone. He understood now. The voice had been a recording, the kind that greeted users of an Internet service provider when they logged on.
    It meant the user had e-mail.
    In her bedroom with the lights out, Abby sat curled on the floor watching closed-circuit, real-time coverage of Raymond Hickle’s living room. The video image was crisp and stable on the seveninch picture tube of a portable TV tuned to an amateur frequency. The TV—which Abby had brought from home, not trusting the antiquated set provided by the landlord—sat atop a VCR capable of recording forty hours of time-lapse video on a standard VHS cassette.
    Audio from the two surveillance microphones was received on a stereo deck and recorded on a long-playing tape reel. Both audio transmitters operated at one of the standard frequencies for cordless telephones. Anyone who happened to intercept the signaland heard Hickle’s mutterings would assume it was a stray, indecipherable telephone call.
    Abby had set up the gear in her bedroom closet so that it could be easily hidden behind the closet door whenever she left. Not expecting her efforts to yield significant results right away, she’d been paying only desultory attention to tonight’s broadcast until Hickle’s telephone rang.
    She saw him answer the phone, and via the surveillance microphone she heard him say hello and ask who was there. But she didn’t know what, if anything, was said on the other end of the line. She found herself wishing she’d taken the risk of installing an infinity transmitter in the phone.
    Hickle hung up and stood unmoving for a moment, then stepped into his bedroom, out of camera range. A minute passed before he emerged, carrying his duffel bag. The look on his face was grim. He left his apartment, moving fast.
    “What the hell?” Abby was already on her feet, grabbing her purse. She ran to her door but hesitated. Hickle might still be in the hall. She peered out. At the far end of the corridor the elevator doors were closing.
    She pounded down three flights of stairs. When she reached the parking lot, Hickle’s car was already gone. She tossed her purse into her Dodge and pulled onto Gainford. The street was dark in both directions. She went north to Santa Monica. There was no stoplight at the intersection; a left turn into the constant stream of traffic was impossible. If Hickle had come this way, he had headed east.
    She shot into a gap in the traffic and accelerated, shifting from lane to lane as she scanned the boulevard for a white VW Rabbit. She didn’t see one anywhere. “Where are you, Raymond?” she whispered. “Where are you going in such a rush? And what do you want the gun for?”
    She had no idea what was happening, but her intuition, which seldom failed, insisted that it was big and somehow dangerous. Dangerous to Kris? she wondered. Or to me?
    She didn’t know.
    Two blocks from Gainford, Hickle veered off Santa Monica, cutting south on Wilcox, then negotiated a maze of side streets and arterial boulevards until he reached Western, where he turned north. He checked his rearview mirror repeatedly.
    There was a chance that Jack was following him, that the phone call had been a ruse to lure him out of his apartment after dark. It seemed unlikely, but Hickle had no way to fathom Jack’s motives or the extent of his knowledge. To Hickle he was only a name on an e-mail account, untraceable, mysterious.
    He remembered the letter that had arrived a month ago, bearing a downtown LA postmark and no return address. The letter had consisted of three lines of computer printout, unsigned. It had said that a ZoomMail account had been opened for Hickle under the name JackBQuick, with the Volkswagen’s license plate number as the password. The note had advised him to check his mail regularly. It had concluded simply,
Destroy this letter
.
    Hickle had obeyed the instructions, first burning letter and envelope, then visiting the library and using a public terminal to find ZoomMail’s homepage, where he logged on as JackBQuick. There had been two messages in his Inbox. One was a note from ZoomMail congratulating him on selecting their free service. The other, according to