Lara Gibson was 'the queen of urban protection,' as the San Francisco Chronicle had once dubbed her. But those would be women weaker than she. The young man gave her a variation of a line she'd heard a dozen times before: Excuse me don't mean to interrupt but hey would you like me to break your boyfriend's leg for making a beautiful woman wait alone in a bar and by the way can I buy you a drink while you decide which leg?Īnother woman might have gotten mad, another woman might have stammered and blushed and looked uneasy or might have flirted back and let him buy her an unwanted drink because she didn't have the wherewithal to handle the situation. She figured that it would be two minutes before one of these boys approached her and she missed that estimate by only ten seconds. But that didn't matter to these two men, who were already captivated by her exotic, intense face surrounded by a tangle of raven hair, her ankle boots, a red-and-orange gypsy skirt and a black sleeveless top that showed off hard-earned biceps. And as a self-employed businesswoman who wasn't a geek - connected with a computer company - she was easily five times poorer. Other squadrons represented here were Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, not to mention a slew of new kids on the block, start-up Internet companies, which were held in some disdain by the venerable Valley regulars.Īt thirty-two, Lara Gibson was probably five years older than her two admirers. These two sported the blue cards of Sun Microsystems. Like nearly all the young men here for happy hour they were in casual slacks and tie-less dress shirts and wore the ubiquitous insignia of Silicon Valley - corporate identification badges on thin canvas lanyards around their necks. She returned to the bar and glanced at the two young men who were alternately ignoring her and offering subtle smiles. No, the van was just a coincidence, she decided - a coincidence aggravated by a splinter of paranoia. Either of those lots would've been a logical place to park to keep an eye on her - if the driver had in fact been stalking her. Nor was it across the street in the Apple Computer lot or the one next to it, belonging to Sun Microsystems. The van wasn't in the restaurant's parking lot. Lara slid off the bar stool and walked to the window, glanced outside.

She looked outside again, into the overcast drizzle, and saw no sign of the windowless Econoline that, she believed, had followed her from her house, a few miles away, to the restaurant.

Lara Gibson sat at the bar of Vesta's Grill on De Anza in Cupertino, California, gripping the cold stem of her martini glass and ignoring the two young chip-jocks standing nearby, casting flirtatious glances at her. The battered white van had made her uneasy.

The blue nowhere book