Rhoads wrote “star” in his notebook. “Okay, Dr. Trice, you…”
“Bea, Rhoads. Bea.”
“Okay, Bea. You’ve been honest with me, now my turn. I know you’re a smart woman. Unfortunately, a lot of smart people turn out to be, no offense, crackpots. Well meaning, well intentioned, but crackpots just the same. You’ll have to give me something a little more concrete to take back to the boys in Washington. They’re a black-and-white bunch. Super-personalities and burning stars. What can I do with that?”
“Rhoads, I can’t give you anything concrete. I haven’t enough information. The FBI probably doesn’t either, or they wouldn’t have sent you here, even as a practical joke in which you are the victim. But keep your eyes open for the ‘star’ hint.”
Rhoads clicked his pen closed. Dr. Trice looked disappointed.
“Okay then, Bea. Thank you for fighting the bureaucracy and trying to get through to us. I’ll write my report and describe your theory. I’m sure someone will get back to you soon.”
Dr. Trice stood up and walked around her desk toward Rhoads. She wasn’t much taller than when she was sitting. Rhoads saw her as a kind of Dr. Ruth, only heavier. She tossed the empty yogurt container into a wastebasket ten feet away. She didn’t watch to see if it landed in the basket. She knew it would.
She looked at Rhoads’s notebook. He had made only the one note. She studied his odd, childlike writing, big block letters. Then she looked up.
She pointed her finger at Rhoads. The friendly demeanor had disappeared along with the yogurt container.
“Let me warn you, in no uncertain terms. Virgil is a merry-go-round nightmare, and he’s not planning to let anyone get any sleep. You know he’s playing with you, right? What a sadistic, powerful opponent does is give you hope. He wants you to keep trying. It’s entertainment. ‘Star’ is a valid hint. Virgil wants you to realize he’s given you the hint after the fact. He’s not counting on the FBI putting together some kind of ‘star’ angle now. This is your personal opportunity. He may not give you another. And while you and the FBI boys are trying to figure out whether or not I’m nuts, Virgil will be proving what he is.”
Rhoads closed his notebook, stood and shook Dr. Trice’s hand. She had impressed him. And if “star” was too vague a clue to follow without more information, it was a start. The FBI was covering what they considered to be the high-probability angles of the investigation, so he’d just have to work with Dr. Trice’s clue. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.
44
Martin Muntor sat watching television in a drab motel room in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Bozzie curled in my lap right now would be nice, he thought. But it wasn’t loneliness that bothered him. It was the loss of his spotlight.
For the second consecutive day, the ongoing FBI manhunt for Virgil had slipped from the top news spot. Last night, Muntor had noted, the major networks led with news about a secret Middle East peace summit in Geneva attended by leaders of Hamas. And now this evening, CNN led with a breaking story about a National League sports-betting scandal.
Muntor knew what he needed to do to regain the media’s attention.
He had no appetite, so instead of eating, he made a quick stop at a local library. A reference librarian provided him with a tour guide to Europe. In it, Muntor found the name of Davidoff, a famous Swiss tobacconist at number 2 Rue de Rive in Geneva.
Back in the motel room, he packaged six packs of Easy Lights. He left again and bought a Congratulations! card at a Hallmark shop. “Please consider adding this terrific American brand to your shop’s inventory of first-class tobacco products,” he wrote. He signed the card “Nick Pratt,” but presumed the store manager in Geneva would know who sent the package and notify the authorities there.
The U.S. Post Office provided Muntor with a padded envelope and airmail postage. He left the post office content that he’d soon be the primary focus of headlines and newscasts throughout the world once again. And as a bonus, he grinned, he’d probably be the subject of an Interpol investigation.
Why should Hamas guerrillas have all the fun? he asked himself on his way back to the motel. Geneva’s a big enough town for the both of us.
45
Monday, October 9
Muntor was growing increasingly anxious. He was no longer taking the top news billings, and in fact, he wasn’t even getting blurbs. The media hype completely died and the international package had yet to make breaking news.
The lull aggravated Muntor. He thought of his father. You’ll never amount to anything. Those words, spoken by the elder Muntor time and time again, had become haunting. The nationwide panic was subsiding. Pratt must not have been too concerned with his hometown school being targeted. The announcement hadn’t come, and likely wouldn’t come, because public calm was being restored. And that meant people hadn’t learned the lesson.
Damn the media, Muntor thought. If these reporters were true journalists, they would hunt down new information, any information, to keep the story alive. Why aren’t they reporting anything? Why isn’t there a cigarette recall? Muntor thought for sure that by now the news would be trumpeting a nationwide recall. Nothing. There had been nothing.
He drew a deep breath. He coughed harder than he had in the past. His time on earth was drawing to a close and Martin Muntor would die with little fanfare.
It was time. Time to reset the alarm. Time to reset the panic button.
Martin Muntor will not die an obscure loser.
46
Washington, D.C.
Pratt’s lobbyists worked overtime on Capitol Hill to prevent even a temporary recall of tobacco products. They called in favor after favor. Favors due from insiders at the Food and Drug Administration, favors from the Federal Trade Commission, favors from sympathetic legislators.
Pratt’s key lobbyist, Joel Chankron, even dug in and made some headway at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Chankron was after “pressure,” he said to the ATF official who quietly agreed to meet with him. “Oppose any cigarette recall ideas as soon as you hear them. The story should be that a recall is exactly what the terrorist wants, and that is exactly why there should be no recalls.”
Chankron felt the insider would be cooperative. He paid for the meal and the drinks, and it paid off.
“Listen, Mark,” he said. “The Patriot Booking Agency in Boston is always looking for articulate people like you who might like to make speeches every now and then about, hell, anything that interests you. You’re a golfer, right? Why not call this number,” and he presented the business card of a Patriot Booking Agency executive, “and set up a tee time with this fellow here in Washington? I understand they pay a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee just for signing up, making yourself available in case anyone ever needs you to make a speech.”
The way Chankron was going, the booking agency exec was going to be playing a lot of golf.
“Plenty to be optimistic about,” Chankron reported to Pratt. “And I can guarantee we’ll know about anything before it happens.”
“What good is it to warn me about something I can’t doing anything about?” Pratt bellowed. Chankron didn’t have an answer.
Pratt thought that for $400 an hour, Chankron owed him one.
47
Deer Mountain, Pennsylvania
A light fog hovered in the woods around Rhoads’s Poconos retreat in Deer Mountain. There were no nearby neighbors, but had there been, and had they been watching, they would have seen little more than the red glow of Valzmann’s brake lights when he slowed for the gravel driveway of the Rhoads family cabin.
He drove the car as far around to the rear of the property as the driveway allowed.
He got out and opened the trunk. With some effort, he lifted an oversized canvas duffel bag. Something heavy and rigid inside clunked against the rear bumper as Valzmann str
uggled with the bulky bag. Leaves crunched loudly under foot as he hoisted it over his shoulder.
Rhoads’s cabin sat nestled under a grove of blue-green spruce trees. The man carried the bag about fifty feet into the woods and dropped it, caught his breath, and tried to pick it up again. Getting the dead weight back over his shoulder was more difficult than expected. Valzmann half-carried, half-dragged the bag. He made a mental note to obliterate the tracks he and the bag made.
He spent nearly an hour digging a hole in rocky soil with an awkward folding Army surplus shovel. When satisfied with the depth of the pit, he used his feet to shove in the duffel bag. Refilling the hole took only a few minutes. So long, Benedict. He removed his work gloves, pocketed them, and returned to his car, obscuring traces of his footprints and the bag as he went. He drove away over the bumpy one-lane county road.
With a sense of completion, Valzmann turned on the car’s CD player and twisted his neck back and forth, stretching to relieve the strain from the digging. He was glad to be rid of the body once and for all. It’d been a pain caring for it for two years.
Keeping a stiff in cold storage always carries with it some risk, and while what Pratt paid him made it worth it, he was glad to be done with it. He had earned his money on this one, and then some.
48
En route to Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, October 10
Rhoads, coming from a meeting in New York with other tobacco company security men, sat in a crowded Metroliner, his briefcase open and papers and documents scattered on him and the adjacent empty seat.
“Union Station, Washington D.C., next stop,” the conductor shouted from a car-length away.
Rhoads leafed through papers one last time, a U.S. map partially unfolded in his lap. Too close to the seat in front of him, Rhoads couldn’t get a good look at the map, so he positioned it against the seat back facing him. He was working, trying to make a star shape somehow fit the crime-scene sites. It wouldn’t quite work. In frustration, he pounded the map.
The woman sitting in front of him leaned around and glared. “Do you mind?”
“Sorry.”
He sloppily folded the map and jammed it into a folder. As he did so, something fell out. It was the 1994 Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. annual report. He absently thumbed through its glossy pages. He got to the last page and was about to put it back in the file folder when an idea barked at him.
He opened the annual report again, looked at each page carefully, not knowing why. What had he missed? He remembered Dr. Trice’s warning to pay attention to nagging feelings. He turned page after page, his mouth ajar. Suddenly, his head darted forward in recognition.
A two-page color spread described Old Carolina’s recent acquisition of StarCity Properties upscale hotels. Two beautiful hotel complexes in Princeton and Atlanta. There, on the right side of the spread, was a sky-blue map that marked both cities with the yellow stars of StarCity’s logo.
Although he did not quite understand how he could use the information, he felt he had stolen a march on the FBI. Pratt’s bonus hung on Rhoads being instrumental in catching Virgil, and this was his shot.
49
Wednesday, October 11
Prompted by Rhoads’s brainstorm on the Metroliner and reinforced by the FBI’s models of likely behavior patterns and the computer-generated Probable Vectors analysis, the Investigative Support Unit believed the StarCity Properties’ Princeton and Atlanta locations were the two most probable targets for any attack Virgil might attempt. Both were immediately staked out.
One day into the surveillance, nothing had happened.
Rhoads and Franklin sat talking in Franklin’s sedan in the parking lot of the StarCity Hotel on Route 1 in Princeton.
Franklin thought Rhoads’s idea wasn’t bad, but that, at best, crossing paths with Virgil was a long shot. And if the FBI had any decent leads to pursue, they wouldn’t have used more than one hundred agents to stake out the two properties. Benedict was a dead end, and until they could learn more about Midas, it was likely to stay that way.
Bored, Franklin said he would stretch his legs by taking a walk around the hotel complex. He wore a maintenance man’s uniform.
“I’m going in with you,” Rhoads said.
“No thanks,” Franklin said. “Look, Rhoads. Every bellhop, clerk, cashier, janitor, and half the guests in there are on my payroll. What do you think you can do in there besides get in the way?”
“I don’t need your permission,” said Rhoads. “For one thing, this is property owned by Old Carolina, where I’m a security consultant. And for another, I’ll be the only one in there who’s not looking for Loren Benedict.”
“Okay,” Franklin said, taking an official tone. “I think you had better go back to Asheville. Because you’re getting ready to stick your ass somewhere it doesn’t belong. And if you do that…”
“I know, I know. Two hundred and sixty-seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-four counts of obstruction of justice. You’re so dull, Franklin. It’s interesting, though.”
“What is?”
“I’m usually a good judge of character. I had you wrong. We made a deal that I’d help you out and you wouldn’t get in the way of my payday. But all you’ve done is try to freeze me out.”
Franklin bristled. “The deal was that you’d be my inside man and get me something on Midas. Until you deliver, I’m doing you a favor letting you tag along.”
“Then I hope your birthday’s coming up soon, because in a couple days, I’ll have something that will be the greatest present you ever got.”
Outside the hotel, and at nearby intersections as far away as a mile and a half, scores of unmarked federal agents’ vehicles in every conceivable configuration—taxicabs and ambulances, beat-up wrecks and a limousine, a plumber’s truck and a tow truck—idled impatiently or circled blocks, ready for the unlikely signal that Virgil had been spotted.
Martin Muntor, wearing a safari jacket and white Panama hat, was in the car of a ReMax real estate agent, a young woman, heavyset. Muntor told her he needed to make a pit stop. The car was marked with the agency’s magnetic placard affixed to both the driver’s and the front passenger side doors.
“Come in with me. I’ll buy you an iced tea, and you can try to tell me again why condo maintenance fees are really to my advantage.” Muntor coughed. “And I’ll sit there with as straight a face as humanly possible.”
The real estate agent laughed politely. “I’ll come in and get a seat in the coffee shop while you’re in the restroom.” She eyed Muntor warily. The man looked ill, and she hoped he didn’t have that coughy flu that had been wiping out everyone at the office.
She pulled into a parking spot and they walked across the lot toward the lobby.
Inside, Muntor livened his step at great effort. At once he saw several people who could have been agents, but he ignored them. And they ignored the little dandy with his seemingly lively step, fancy briefcase, and chubby associate. They were looking for a haggard man, wild-eyed and wheezing.
He walked her to the coffee shop, making himself available for scrutiny. Therefore, no one would bother. The hostess seated the real estate agent and he headed for the restroom. Near a bank of pay phones, Martin Muntor entered a men’s room, locked himself in a stall, and, still standing, removed his belt. He took off his jacket, snagged it on the hook, and, white hat still atop his head, rolled up his sleeve. He sat down on the toilet seat, reached up and from the inside pocket of his jacket, and removed an envelope containing a syringe partially filled with a milky-white substance, a Band-Aid, and a wad of alcohol-soaked cotton in a folded square of plastic wrap.
Muntor used the belt as a tourniquet around his left biceps. He made a fist of his left hand and slapped at his inner elbow with his right to anger the veins there. Two popped up right away. With cool, clinical efficiency, he swiped the cotton across one, j
abbed the needle into his flesh, and slowly, almost erotically, depressed the plunger.
Muntor’s blood energized and coursed through his veins with a hot fury. His diaphragm contracted involuntarily, and he drew in a sharp breath full and rich with the oxygen he’d been cheated of. Within moments, he felt lighter, stronger, fiercer.
He stood up now and snapped the belt from his arm. He quickly threaded it through his trousers belt loops, pulled on his jacket, and took another deep breath. He dropped the cotton and square of plastic wrap into the toilet and flushed. He put the syringe back into the envelope.
In a flash, Muntor was out of the men’s room, exhilarated and striding briskly in the direction of the parking lot, away from the coffee shop and the waiting real estate agent. Yes, the news wire would come alive once again.
Rhoads pushed through the doors and into the main lobby.
He was noticed but rejected as a possible Virgil by the numerous agents who didn’t know who he was, and those who did rolled their eyes or shook their heads. In the pre-shift briefing, they had been told about Rhoads and told to keep an eye on him. The assistant team commander referred to him as a troublemaker pressed upon the Bureau by tobacco industry lobbyists with Justice Department connections.
Dead ahead, Rhoads saw the StarLight Lounge. To the left, the StarDust coffee shop. And, to the right, the StarBright gift shop, through whose entrance he could see the salesclerk and behind her, shelves packed with cigarettes, junk food, and condoms. He headed straight for it. The carpet changed color inside the gift shop. He walked to the over-the-counter section and examined bottles of painkillers.
Standing a dozen feet away was a man who appeared to be in late middle age, wearing jeans and a bulky beige cable sweater.
Rhoads observed him out of the corner of his eye. The man picked up a copy of Scientific American, leafed through it, and put it back in the rack. A moment later, he pulled it out again, turned to a page at random, and appeared to be reading.
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 14
