The Sinai Secret lr-4

by Gregg Loomis

  "As always," Lang said. "Overcooked steak, raw hamburger. And I just love those limp, extra-greasy fries."

  "Glad you enjoyed it." With the hand not holding the plates, he deposited the check on the table. "I'll take that when you're ready."

  Lang picked it up. "I suppose we may as well follow the ritual."

  The two men routinely flipped a coin to determine who would pay the tab. Lang could not remember ever winning. What were the odds of that?

  Maybe Francis was right: There was a greater power.

  Instead Francis reached for it. "Let me get this one."

  "No, no. We'll toss for it. Always post prandium."

  Lang lost.

  Francis grinned." Manus e, nubibus. A lucky break."

  "I think the literal translation better describes it: A hand from the clouds'. The consistency with which you win is enough to convert most heathens."

  "Including you?"

  Lang handed the bill along with a credit card to the waiter. "I have faith, just not one that's centered on a pope."

  "Or anything else, far as I can see."

  "I believe in a higher power, right now the highest: Judge Adamson of the Atlanta division of the northern district of Georgia. Believe me, there is no power on earth mightier than a U.S. district court judge. If you don't believe me, ask Dick Nixon."

  "He's dead."

  "Okay, so you might have to wait awhile to ask."

  The credit card receipt arrived and Lang signed it, adding an undeserved tip to ensure the same booth would be available next time.

  "The mayor is being tried in federal court?"

  Lang pushed back from the table and stood. "Unluckily for him, yes. The feds indicted him while the Fulton County DA was still thinking about the political ramifications."

  The Fulton County district attorney's office was famous for mishandling its workload. Statutes of limitation expired while county lawyers searched for misplaced files or evidence. Felons walked free after exasperated judges waited for prosecutors to show up for trial.

  Both men headed toward the rear door that opened onto the parking lot.

  "Too bad," Francis observed. "You'll have an opponent instead of a victim."

  Lang beeped the security device that unlocked a silver-gray Porsche Cabriolet. "You're right there. Trying a case with the local guy has gotten too easy anyway. Poor bastard couldn't have convicted John Wilkes Booth for discharging a firearm in public."

  The priest folded himself into the car's passenger seat. "One of these days you'll get a grown-up car."

  Lang turned the key and was rewarded by a muscular rumble from the rear-mounted engine. "I did. Remember the Mercedes convertible, the malfunction mobile-had everything from the burglar alarm to the power top not working?"

  "At least it wasn't a toy. Seems to me a multijillion-dollar charitable foundation would want its president to have something a little more dignified to drive around in."

  Lang was looking over his shoulder as he backed out of the parking spot. "You forget, my dear Francis, I am the foundation."

  That was true: A few years previously Lang had demanded annual payment of millions of dollars from Pegasus, an international organization, as compensation for the murder of his sister and nephew. The money funded a charitable trust in their names. Although the trust had the directors and officers mandated by tax law, Lang made the decisions that mattered. The board did, however, serve two very important functions other than satisfying the IRS: It screened the needy from the greedy, and it kept secret who really made what choices. If Lang's solitary power became known, he would drown in a sea of mendicants.

  FIVE

  Peachtree Road

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Twenty Minutes Later

  Lang had dropped Francis off and was within blocks of his high-rise condominium when the BlackBerry in his pocket chirped.

  Has to be a criminal client, he thought. The foundation pays its staff way too much for someone to call me at night.

  He fumbled in his pocket for the Bluetooth earpiece before remembering leaving it on the dresser in the bedroom. With a regretful sigh he thumbed a button, wedged the phone between cheek and shoulder, and gave a grudging, "Hello."

  "Mr. Reilly? Langford Reilly?"

  The voice was familiar, yet Lang couldn't quite place it. He downshifted as he approached a red light. The arm movement sent the phone slithering into his lap. Modern cell phones and classic stick-shift transmissions didn't mix. He plucked the phone out of his lap.

  "Yes."

  "Det. Franklin Morse, Atlanta Police, Mr. Reilly. Maybe you remember me."

  Lang wished he didn't. More than once the detective had been summoned to Lang's home after some deadly misadventure. "Swell to hear from you again, Detective, but it's been a quiet night. Nobody's tried to kill me so far."

  "Early yet. 'Sides, ain't you, Mr. Reilly. It's Dr. Lewis."

  Lang drew a total blank. "Who?"

  "Lewis, professor over to Georgia Tech."

  The name finally came up in Lang's mental Rolodex just as the elusive phone slipped free again. The foundation had made a rare exception to its policy of endowing medical causes in the third world. It had provided funds to persuade a professor at Oxford to move to Tech his research on a promising alternative to fossil fuel. Lang had deviated from the norm at the request of Jacob Annueliwitz, a personal friend of both men in London. The results had been sufficiently promising that the foundation was currently sponsoring parallel research both in the United States and abroad.

  He retrieved the phone before it could make its escape under the seat. "What happened?"

  There was a pause. Lang could hear other voices in the background. "Too soon to know 'xactly, Mr. Reilly. 'Cept Lewis is dead. Since you th' man pays his research grant, thought you could maybe help. You come on, see fo'yo'self."

  "Dead? But how…?"

  "Tell you what, Mr. Reilly; I'm at the man's laboratory right now. Know where that is?"

  Lang had overseen the installation of some very expensive equipment there just a month or so ago.

  "Yeah. Just off Hemphill Avenue."

  "Right."

  Georgia Tech liked red brick, a fact evident in buildings as diverse as its signature semi-Victorian bell tower and the newest ultramodern box of a classroom structure. Despite a few desperate trees, the campus looked just like what it was: an urban school in a shabby part of town. Unlike its neo-Gothic-styled, verdant rival, the University of Georgia, Tech had a blue-collar, hard-work ethic about it that included Saturday classes and a very high job-placement rate. Its only real failure was its football team, which had to play schools where three-hundred-pound tackles could major in athletic education and were not required to pass calculus.

  A gaggle of police car lights sprayed a symphony of red, blue, and orange across the face of an otherwise anonymous brick building. The squawk of radios roiled in the night air.

  Lang showed his driver's license to the cop blocking the door. The man murmured into the radio pinned to his blouse, and Morse appeared.

  The black man's slender, athletic build made it hard to guess his age. Lang guessed he was somewhere in his forties, an assumption based more on his rank than his appearance. He reminded Lang of one of those East African runners who dominated marathon competitions. The detective was also far brighter than his lazy drawl indicated.

  They shook hands.

  "When did you transfer to this part of town?" Lang asked.

  "Figgered this'd be a quieter beat, since you wasn't on it."

  Lang grinned in spite of the circumstances. "Now who's wise-assin' somebody?"

  Morse held lip his right hand. "No wise-assin', true." He became serious again. "Reason I axed you down here was to see if anythin's missin'."

  "How'd you know I had any connection to Dr. Lewis?"

  "I'm a detective, remember? I detect stuff."

  Perhaps a quick check of the school's records had revealed Lang's name on the g
rant.

  Morse headed down a short hall. "This way."

  The room they entered was filled with people. A woman and a man Lang took to be crime scene technicians were using what looked like an artist's brush to sweep shards of glass into small plastic bags. A man sat in front of a computer. Another, this one in police uniform, interviewed a man in the uniform of the school's security personnel. A woman was using her flashlight to study the pages of a loose-leaf notebook.

  When Lang had last left the place, it had resembled a modernized version of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. Now it looked like it had hatched Hurricane Katrina instead of a humanoid monster. The only things in place were two long tables that would have been too heavy to move without a crew. Loose pages, perhaps from the notebook, were scattered on the floor, which crunched with broken glass as Lang walked. Microscopes and tools he didn't recognize were thrown about as though shaken in some huge blender. He saw a spectrophotometer lying on its side. The thing had cost the foundation as much as a pair of Ferraris.

  "What the hell…?"

  Morse pointed to yet another man, who was photographing the chalk outline of a body sprawled across the floor. "We found him there. The rent-a-cop heard sounds like somebody was tryin' to take the place apart, came in, took one look, an' called us."

  "Any idea who…?"

  "This ain't Law 'n' Order, where we solve the case in half an hour so the prosecutor can have the other half for a conviction between ads. Fact is, we don't even know yet what time the vie died. We're assumin' it was 'bout the time someone was trashing the place."

  "Any motive?"

  "That's why I called you, Mr. Reilly. Other'n the fact that you're involved in half the mayhem in this town, I figgered you might have an idea, since your foundation funded this operation."

  It had been the grant. How had Morse gotten that information in the middle of the night?

  "I only met the man two, three times."

  "Awful lotta money to give a stranger."

  "Dr. Lewis wasn't a stranger," Lang said stiffly. "He was an internationally respected physical chemist." Or was it a chemophysicist? "He was doing research on non-fossil fuels."

  "You mean like gas substitutes, like ethanol to run cars?"

  Lang's knowledge of chemistry and physics stopped at the composition of water and the law of gravity.

  "I'm not sure."

  "Not sure? You're mighty careless with a whole lot o' money, Mr. Reilly."

  "The foundation hires people to manage how the money's spent, Detective, as well as how much each project legitimately needs and the qualifications of the people running those projects. I assure you, the foundation watches its money a lot closer than your employer does."

  A safe guess. With ability to pay bribes being the former administration's only apparent qualification for selecting city contractors, and a tax department that could not be more incompetent if operated by Moe, Larry, and Curly, both the city and county were perpetually curtailing an ever-diminishing list of services. Those most in need of those services were, of course, those who didn't pay for them.

  The only true beneficiary of the system was, or had been, Lang's client, the former mayor.

  Morse held up his hands in surrender. "I'm just an employee doin' my job. Think I wouldn't like to see the mayor crucified for what he stole?"

  Hopefully Morse would not be on the jury panel.

  "Sorry, Detective, I…"

  Another man entered the room. Even though he had never seen the newcomer, Lang knew who he was. Slender build in a medium-priced suit, shiny wingtips. Large, over six feet, mid-thirties. Dark hair cut slightly shorter than currently fashionable, and freshly shaved, as though he had put down his razor just before coming here. Or, more likely, had an electric shaver in his government-issued Ford or Chevy.

  Lang had seen him hundreds of times in slightly differing sizes and shapes. This man, or one just like him, routinely testified against Lang's clients. The names changed but that special uniformity did not.

  The cop at the door followed the new man in and pointed to Morse. The man stepped purposefully across the room. Lang thought he heard a "Shit!" from the detective.

  The man held up a wallet with a badge attached to it. "Special Agent Charles Witherspoon, FBI."

  He did not extend a hand to shake.

  Neither did Morse. "A Fibbie. Now, ain't that a surprise, the bureau workin' such late hours? I woulda sworn he'd be from the funeral home they gonna take the vie to."

  Either Special Agent Witherspoon was inured to the barbs of local cops or he wasn't clever enough to recognize them. "You are Det. Franklin Morse?"

  Lang could see a wisecrack flash across the detective's mind, but Morse said, "Yep. What can I do for you, Agent Witherspoon, seein' as how this is purely a local matter?"

  "I'm here to offer the bureau's complete and total assistance."

  That, Lang knew, translated into a statement of intent to take the case over if any possible federal grounds for doing so could be found or, for that matter, created.

  Witherspoon turned to Lang. "And you are?"

  "He'd be head of the foundation that funds… funded Dr. Lewis's research," Morse said before Lang could reply. "The doctor was engaged in some sort of non-fossil fuel research. You know, like ethanol to run cars."

  The federal man was clearly annoyed that Morse had taken over the interview, and Morse was just as clearly enjoying it. Lang would not have been totally surprised to see each man start urinating around the room to mark each square foot as his exclusive territory.

  Disappointingly, no bodily functions ensued.

  Instead Morse asked, "And just what can I thank for havin' the bureau's offer of assistance?"

  Without so much as a flicker of a smile, Witherspoon replied, "National security."

  "Based on what?" the detective asked.

  "I'm not at liberty to say."

  "Okay, then, how did you find out about a killin' so quick?"

  "Again, I'm not at liberty to say."

  Morse leaned back, stroking his chin as if in thought. "Lemme see here, now. You want to know whatever we find out, you're willin' to cooperate, but you ain't answerin' none o' my questions. That about it?"

  Lang fully expected the same response about lack of liberty to say.

  Instead Witherspoon gave a chilly smile. "Detective, you and I will get along a lot better if you simply tell me what the bureau can do."

  Morse appeared to give the matter serious thought. "For starters, you can reduce the number o' folks standin' 'round the crime scene by one. Gimme your card an' I'll call soon's I figger what else you can do."

  This time Witherspoon understood. "Mind if I look around?"

  "Long's you don't touch anythin' an' don' git in the way o' my folks."

  The G-man turned to Lang. "What do you know about Dr. Lewis?"

  Lang shrugged, about to repeat what he had told Morse.

  Th' man was an internationally renowned scientist," the detective volunteered.

  "Your foundation funds hospitals and medical services in poor countries," Witherspoon said to Lang. "What made you deviate into supporting fuel research?"

  Lang paused before answering, again surprised at how readily information was accessible day or night. "A friend in London suggested it, actually. He was a personal acquaintance of Dr. Lewis's. The people in charge of new grants checked him and his work out and decided that finding an alternative to fossil fuels was a worthy cause."

  Witherspoon shot a quick glance to someone who was taking pictures of the wreckage. "Exactly what sort of alternative fuel was he working on?"

  The question was almost a statement, without the inflection of real curiosity, as if Witherspoon either didn't care or already knew the answer.

  "I'm not sure. He'd been here less than six months, so a detailed progress report wasn't due yet. If you're really interested, I can-"

  The man who had been at the computer interrupted. "Detective, the hard driv
e's been taken, along with a dozen or so pages from his research log."

  Morse's head bobbed slowly. "I'd say that eliminates the possibility of the perp bein' some junkie randomly lookin' for somethin' to steal to feed his habit."

  "Don't be too sure, Detective." The man held up a plastic bag. Lang had to lean forward to see a trace of white powder.

  Morse took the bag and held it up to the light. "Ain't coke. It's grainy, like crumbs from some sorta crystal." He rolled his eyes. "Don' tell me, Mr. Reilly, that your foundation's been runnin' the world's most sophisticated meth lab."

  Lang shook his head. "Lewis wouldn't have needed all this equipment just to cook up methamphetamine."

  "How would you know that?" Witherspoon asked.

  "Mr. Reilly here does criminal defense when he ain't givin' money away to worthy causes," Morse said. I spect he done come across the process."

  Actually, Lang had consistently refused to represent anyone associated with hard drugs, no matter how remotely or how high the fee. He did, however, watch the local news broadcasts that regularly showed arrests at meth labs, usually kitchens in private homes utilizing quite ordinary cookware and ingredients available at a neighborhood pharmacy.

  Morse pocketed the envelope. "Whatever it is, we'll know soon's the state crime lab gits through with it."

  "Our lab can test it sooner," Witherspoon proposed.

  Morse slowly shook his head. "I 'preciate the offer, really do, Agent Witherspoon."

  "But?"

  "But a year or two ago I axed you guys fo' help in a shootin' connected to an interstate cocaine operation. Nex' thing I know, my perp is in your Witness Protection Program, off somewhere 'tween here 'n' Alaska. I done had more o' your help than I can stand."

  Witherspoon's jaw muscles tightened. "That mean you're not gonna share that powder?"

  "Agent Witherspoon, you're an unusually perceptive young man."

  The federal agent looked around the room again, as though this time he might find an ally. "We'll see about that."

  He turned and left.

  Lang and Morse watched him go before Lang said, "The federal crime lab really is superior to anything the state has."

  Morse nodded. "I know, but ever' time I hear somethin' 'bout 'national security; I feel like I need to duck. Somebody's throwin' a. load of bullshit."