“It’s always work with you … Jack! No! John. John Wallenford.”
“Thanks, Janice. See ya tonight for dinner?”
“Um … not tonight, Bill.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing, I just can’t make dinner tonight.”
“Oh … Okay.” He clicked off, taking a deep breath. Tyler hung up, also taking a deep breath.
∞§∞
Sperling High Voltage made large capacitors for use mainly in research projects. One of those was the particle accelerator being assembled on Long Island at the Brookhaven National Lab. Opponents of the project claimed that the research being done right there on Long Island could create a black hole that would suck Long Island, the entire Earth, the sun, and this whole corner of the galaxy into it. Most of the protests took the form of sign-toting students and others who managed to acquire the delivery schedules of the supply trucks. They blocked the main gates for a short time and a few spoke over the various media outlets on the dangers of screwing with the basic glue that held everything in the universe together.
The idea came to Bernard after reading about the protests in Time magazine. He logged onto a bulletin board the society now ran under the guise of a hardware-trading web site for people who had old Olivetti word processors. The subject matter ensured that no one but the lost or stupidly curious would ever bother with the site. He typed in the message: “The weather on Long Island is getting better.” Voyeurger noticed immediately and responded to Sabot via Instant Messenger.
Voyeurger: What can I do for the cause?
SABOT: Hold on. I am reading your file now.
Voyeurger: What are you looking for?
SABOT: Do you have any experience with explosives?
Voyeurger: Yes, I remove tree stumps with them.
SABOT: Very good. Here’s my plan.
Although Bernard couldn’t see him, Voyeurger was smiling as he outlined his idea. It was Bernard’s turn to smile when Voyeurger typed back that he could do this within a week.
∞§∞
Hiccock was on his way to a military aircraft. He would shoot up to Boston, then an Air Force helicopter, already having arrived at Logan airport, would shuttle him to Cambridge. As he was leaving his office, Carly appeared at the door. “Can we chat?”
“Gee, I am out of here. I’ll be back tonight.”
“Can I buy you dinner?”
“No, I have plans for dinner… No I don’t.” Hiccock caught himself remembering that Janice had a date. “Sure! I’ll call you on my way back to D.C. this afternoon.”
He walked out to the car waiting for him in the portico wondering if this was a good idea, but not in any mood to cancel his spur-of-the moment acceptance of dinner. Did I just say yes to a date?
∞§∞
The offices of GlobalSync were the epitome of downtown chic. After following the prescribed protocol, a series of security guards and receptionists, Dennis and Cynthia finally stood in front of the company’s comptroller in her office.
“Can you tell us what this check is for?” Dennis asked the lady who probably worked her way up from assistant bookkeeper.
“Let’s see, the code here—23765—should tell us.” She entered the numbers into her computer. Her expression changed when the screen came up. “Oh, dear!” She picked up the phone, “Mr. Freidland, can you come into my office? You’re going to want to handle this yourself.” She hung up the phone, then hung “smile number three” on her face, and politely asked, “Would you kindly just wait here a minute?” Dennis caught Cynthia’s eye and shrugged.
Ten seconds later, Mr. Freidland, in a suit that cost half of Dennis’s Detective’s Benevolent Association pension, entered the carpeted, midlevel executive office.
“Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Mallory, nice to meet you. Would you follow me, please?” With the air of a maître d’ he turned and led them into a small private elevator. There were only two floor buttons. The mirror-polished, stainless steel doors opened onto a vast space. Floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the cityscape of lower Manhattan Island. The vista was reflected in the highly polished black-marble flooring that, to Dennis, had the unintended effect of making the entire floor look like it was covered in an oil slick. Way down, at the other end of the space, was a desk that was a replica of the “con” on Star Trek. A skinny man in a red turtleneck, green pants, and white shoes swung his feet around and off the side return where they had been planted while he talked on a wireless headset. Upon seeing the Mallorys, he removed the headset, stood up from his desk, and approached them. Dennis gave a glance to Cynthia that said, “Now I get it!”
“How’s the leg?” Dennis said to the man.
“Hurts when it rains, but I stopped limping about a month ago.
It took me a while to track you down, Mr. Mallory, and I can find anybody.” He smiled at Cynthia. “And you must be Cynthia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Cynthia returned the warm smile.
“I appreciate the two of you wanting to come here to thank me but believe me, it is I who should thank you, more than any amount of money could ever express.”
Cynthia caught on. “Oh, you must be the young man Dennis helped in the woods.”
“A lot more than helped, Mrs. Mallory. Your husband saved my life twice in one afternoon.”
“Well, thank you Mr…?” Dennis fished for the name.
“Oh, God, how rude of me! Miles, Miles Taggert.”
“Well, Mr. Taggert, I appreciate your generosity, but I came here to tell you that I can’t accept this money.”
The maître d’ gasped as if Dennis had just used a salad fork to cut into a chateaubriand.
Taggert shook the smile off his face. “Why not? Is it not enough?”
“Oh, no, no. That’s not it. It’s very generous. It’s just that I can’t accept money for helping you. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Wow, you really are a hero,” Taggert said.
“Yes, he is,” Cynthia said. “And thank you, but really, there is no need.”
Taggert walked back around and sat behind his desk. He gestured for the Mallorys to take the seats facing him. He pondered for a second. Then he reached his hand across the titanium desktop. “May I have the check, please?”
Dennis patted the pockets of his off-the-rack Macy’s sport coat, having absentmindedly stuffed the check in his breast pocket. He handed it over.
Taggert ripped it up. Then he turned to his keyboard. Typing quickly, he finished with a double tap on the return key. He then swiveled his high-tech, ergonomic chair and faced the Mallorys once again. “Okay, so let’s talk about you for a minute, Mr. Mallory. You were a decorated New York City detective, shot three times in the line of duty and retired with thirty-five years under your belt. I don’t know for sure, but my dad was a cop and I know your last three years couldn’t have been padded up too much, so I figure you’re making do with a comfortable but not great pension.”
Dennis bristled.
“Please don’t take offense,” Taggert added. “I just like to know things about people. All from the public record, by the way, and what I have learned from my father.”
“Who is your father?” Mallory asked.
“He was a sergeant, the seven-eight in Queens. He retired when I went past 500 million in personal wealth. It was my idea. I didn’t want my mom to lose him to some junkie or hoodlum after she worked so hard and sacrificed so much for all of us.”
“Wow, aren’t you the son of the century,” Cynthia said. “Dennis, I like this boy.”
“Anyway, so here’s my next idea. Do you know what we do here, Mr. Mallory?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Dennis said, turning his palms up.
“We protect secrets, our own and those of clients. We protect secrets that have to be out in the open to have any value. We make it safe for trillions of dollars to find its way from point A to point B.”
“Okay, so that explains all of this.”
“Then hopefully it
also explains why I’d like to hire you as a consultant.”
“Me? I don’t know anything about your business.”
“You don’t have to. I need what you already know. Security, police procedure, and how to keep my secrets secret.”
“What about your dad?”
“We’re not talking.”
“Now you are down to son of the month,” Cynthia said.
“He objects to my hang gliding.”
“With good reason,” Dennis said.
“He just doesn’t want your mother to lose you, after all they did to grow you up,” Cynthia said.
Taggert ceded their point. “You should meet them sometime. You’ll get along swimmingly!”
Just then, Dennis noticed the lady comptroller had silently glided across the “oil slick” and appeared in his periphery. If he was in an undercover operation, he could have been dead. It had been twenty years since he worked undercover, and upon reflection—the wavy one of the comptroller reflected in the slick black floor—that was a good thing. She handed Taggert an envelope. He peeked inside, nodded, and slid the envelope across the desk to Dennis.
“Here, I hope you’ll agree to work with us.”
Dennis opened the envelope to find a check for $100,000. He dropped his hands, wrinkling the check. “It’s another check for 100 grand!”
“Yes, but this one is different. It is an advance on your salary.”
“Are you some kind of a wiseguy?”
“Actually, yes! Three degrees and four patents. But if you are asking me if I am being a smart aleck, no. Look at this, please.” He gestured to the maître d’, who surrendered a note to Dennis. Scanning it, he quickly surmised it to be a nasty letter from some nutcase threatening Taggert.
“Have you heard about Intellichip?” Taggert asked.
“That place that blew up in Westchester?”
“Yes, well I did business with them and a company called Mason Chemical.”
“Never heard of them.”
“They were destroyed last month.”
“Have you notified the police about this note? It is a threat.”
“I’d rather not. They probe around, and I keep secrets, remember?”
“So does the mob.”
“I assure you everything we do is legal and within not only the letter, but the spirit of any law.”
“So, why me?”
“Why not? You saved my life twice already.”
“You think your life is in danger?”
“You tell me.”
“Look, I’m retired.” Dennis grabbed his wife’s hand. “We are retired.”
“Will you at least consider helping me?”
Dennis tapped the new check on his knee. “We’ll think about it.” He placed the check back on the desk in front of Taggert. “Meanwhile, you can hold on to this for a while, ’til we decide.”
“Fair enough. And whatever you decide, thank you for everything you have done for me. I hope you’ll at least be my guests from time to time for a weekend in the country.”
“Why, thank you very much, Mr. Taggert,” Cynthia said.
As the Mallorys turned to make their exit, Dennis hesitated. Glancing back at Taggert, he said, “When did you receive that note?”
“A minute before you entered my office.” Dennis noted the tinge of anxiety in Taggert’s voice.
Dennis now saw this man, a billionaire who was half his age, as a vulnerable, scared young boy. His immediate thought was of Taggert’s father. Or more correctly, himself in Taggert’s father’s shoes. After being a cop all those years, how would he feel if his daughter sought protection from some other cop? He knew that would never happen because … he couldn’t think of why it would never happen, which had the effect of softening Dennis’s demeanor. “We’ll let you know soon.”
CHAPTER EIGHTTEEN
One Man’s Junk ...
THE COLLEGIATE CALM AND SERENITY of the MIT campus were suddenly disrupted by the thumping sound of heavy composite resin rotors chopping through air. Hiccock looked down at the bike path he used to pedal between classes during his graduate study here at the nation’s premiere brain trust of genius. Leaves and dirt swirled, causing tiny whirlwinds that eventually developed into mini-tornadoes. A Marine Huey helicopter made an unscheduled landing on the highway in front of the vaunted institution, the commonwealth’s state police having closed both the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge and Memorial Drive to give wide berth to the hurriedly arranged arrival of the president’s science advisor. Hiccock emerged and was greeted by a school administrator and the head of school security. He was hurried into the gym.
At the front doors was a sign that read, “AUCTION TODAY 3–5 PM INSPECTION 9 AM–2 PM.” He was met at the door by John Wallenford, a man with long gray hair that was not in a ponytail, green-gray eyes, and a body alignment that made you think he was listening for baseball scores through the static of a table radio with one ear.
“I don’t know if this means you have good or bad timing,” Wallenford said, “but thanks to your government at work, 20 million dollars worth of 1960’s era state-of-the-art equipment is right this second up for surplus auction at pennies on a dollar.”
“What? Right now? We’ve got to stop the auction!”
In the gym, the auctioneer waved his gavel. On the small stage sat lot 112, a mass of two-inch videotape recorders, spectrographs, cameras, and racks of time-base correctors—the former subliminal research equipment now on forklift skids. “3,800 going once … going twice … sold! To the esteemed gentleman in the plaid jacket from Boris Reclamation Services.”
Nearly as soon as the word sold reverberated off the gym’s tiled walls and hardwood floor, Hiccock and Wallenford walked up to the recycling czar in plaid who just won the lot. Hiccock immediately sized this guy up as the A/V monitor from high school, now all grown up. “Excuse me, Sir?”
“Yes?”
“We arrived here late. We need this equipment.”
“Who’s we?”
“My name is Hiccock. I work for the president of the United States, and all I can tell you is that this equipment is needed for a matter of national security.”
“I just bought this from the government as scrap. Why didn’t you just hold onto it while you had it?”
“I’m willing to reimburse you for it.”
As they walked away, Hiccock placed his checkbook back into his vest pocket with prejudice. “I can’t believe I just paid 20,000 dollars for that pile of junk.”
“One man’s junk is another man’s dubious obsession, I gather,” Wallenford said wryly.
“I wonder if I can claim this as an expense,” Hiccock thought aloud while fingering the receipt and dreading the inevitable reams of paperwork to follow.
∞§∞
A huge crate and six pallets of what the untrained eye would categorize as junk were conspicuously plopped in the center of the FBI’s Electronic Crimes Lab. Hansen, returning from lunch, was shocked to see Hiccock standing beside the pile.
“What are we supposed to do with this junk?”
“Hook it up and test the computers,” Hiccock directed.
“How?”
Hiccock grabbed a curled, yellowed manual as thick as a phone book and slapped it into Hansen’s chest. “Here. Partial assembly required.”
∞§∞
Tommy was not concerned that the rear quarter panels of his Camaro were rotted out as he sat in the diner parking lot. It matched the rest of his life. Seemed ever since the seventies ended, his life was just a big pile of rot. He tried a few different get-rich-quick schemes: phone cards, Nutralite products, at-home distribution of cleaning products, and ten others that turned out to be stay-poor-longer schemes. At this point, the notion of lashing out, getting even with anything, had struck a receptive chord in his twisted mass of internal wiring. Three days ago he waited outside the Sperling Plant and decided that truck number seven was his baby. For the next three mornings he followed number seven, studyi
ng the driver’s habits. The teamster religiously stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Sunrise Highway. Lunch, however, would present the real opportunity.
The twenty-six-foot truck that Sperling used was a Freightliner M2-106, the same make and model that anyone with a driver’s license and a pocket full of non-traceable cash could hire from most any truck rental company. He went to Ryder. Scanning the application, he smiled inside when he came across the section requesting information regarding “materials to be transported.” Tommy dismissed the application and asked the clerk if he could see the truck, his well-rehearsed cover story being that he had to deliver custom cabinets to a client down poorly maintained roads and he needed to measure the clearance before renting. The clerk, who could not give a shit, said, “Yeah, go ahead. Knock yourself out.”
Out in the lot, Tommy crawled under the truck and measured not the clearance, but the area right ahead of the rear wheels and the distance between the main chassis rails, which ran the length of the truck. Those rails had facing flanges that formed a natural shelf support.
∞§∞
Twenty-four sticks of dynamite were stashed under the oil drum out back in his yard. He had accumulated them one stick at a time from uprooting jobs. His design was quite ingenious. He filled a four-inch-wide cardboard mailing tube with the twenty-four sticks. Precisely packaged in six bundles of four, they were wired to a kitchen timer set for ten hours from now. He then went to buy a pack of cigarettes, even though he didn’t smoke.
Setting the charge in broad daylight wouldn’t have been his first choice. Doing it at night, however, would have necessitated breaking and entering, since the trucks were garaged and locked then. That would have brought with it a whole slew of issues and risks he was not prepared to deal with.
The Eighth Day Page 14
