Mary smiled the smile people use to hold back tears, the smile that crinkles their eyes. “But what about your brother. And his family?”
“They’re all I have, and I’ll do anything to take care of them, but it’s not the same. I talked to Teddy the other day. He says rehab’s okay and that he’s working the program, so that’s good.”
“So you think he’s going to be all right?” she asked.
“If all right means all better, no, not in the long run. But I do think that with a little help he’ll make it. He’ll do okay, and sometimes, okay is all you can hope for.” Rhoads went on. “I thought about that wallet and that photo the other day when we met for coffee.”
“Why?”
“You were the girl who came with the wallet. There you were, in my life. We’re talking to each other, not at each other, about something important. Yet, you were the girl in the wallet. You weren’t mine, you were going home. You had a husband you loved and had to care for. It gave me an idea for a business. You see, I could start something like a prostitution ring, except instead of sending a woman to screw a guy, the woman calls you up and asks you over to her house for dinner. And after dinner, she’d fake affection, pretend she liked you, and not let you help wash the dishes.”
“Oh, T.R.,” she said, standing up and taking a step toward him. He remained seated. “I know the timing’s terrible, but here it is anyway. I think about you all the time. I don’t have to be the girl in the wallet. I want to be the girl.”
Mary stepped closer still and took Rhoads by the hand. He got up and started to reach out to embrace her. She stopped him and led him out of the kitchen and into the den. The air was chilly and damp. Several big, old blankets were on the floor.
Logs sat piled over a thatch of kindling in the fireplace, waiting for a match.
“Light a fire, T.R.,” Mary said. “Make it warm in here.”
Outside, the mist swirled in the wind and leaves fell from trees, fluttering down onto soaked lawns and slick, black asphalt driveways.
60
New Jersey
Muntor drove for hours, across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, over to the New Jersey Turnpike, and north toward New York. He intended to go home, but he couldn’t yet, not until he was far enough away to make another telephone call.
First, though, he stopped at a turnpike service plaza. He thought he needed coffee, but once inside, he knew he needed more. Muntor shot up in a grimy bathroom stall. His energy level and mood skyrocketed as soon as the syringe left his arm. He forgot about the coffee.
Back in his car, seeing the road became difficult. The lights from oncoming cars were beginning to get bright, too bright, in contrast to the darkening sky. The Biphetamine had the effect of hypersensitivity to light. Muntor finally arrived at JFK Airport with a stunning headache and difficulty breathing. He found an outdoor pay phone and double-parked there with his flashers on.
What if a cop drives by and makes a note of my license plate? Muntor surveyed the scene. He didn’t think it was very likely.
He dialed the telephone number on the scrap of paper he removed from his pants pocket and spoke fast as he left his message with the WWW-FM newsroom on Long Island. He told the person who answered that he would be calling FBI Headquarters at noon Saturday, the next day. He had a big announcement, he said, and he wanted Tom Rhoads to be available.
The news intern who answered was a Cigarette Maniac news addict, and after receiving the call from someone purporting to be the Maniac himself, he dialed the home number of the news director and let the telephone ring barely three times. Then he hung up, glad his boss didn’t answer. He relished the idea of becoming involved in the case. The news director would have insisted on handling the matter himself, or worse, snorting and assuring the intern that the call was a phony. And even if the call was a prank, the intern was still well within reason to sound the alarm to the FBI.
The intern took a piece of printer paper and wrote out, as best as he could remember, the exact text of what the caller had told him. He called directory assistance in Washington and asked for the FBI’s emergency number. He said, “Wow,” when informed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has no public emergency number, just a main switchboard number. The operator gave him the number—202–324–3000—without comment. The intern really wondered about the kind of people the telephone company hires. Couldn’t she appreciate the gravity of the matter that was clearly evident in his voice?
He called. He told the FBI switchboard operator he had information “of the most urgent nature” on the cigarette-tampering case. He smiled at his legitimate use of such a phrase. The operator, flushed with panic, paused a full second before activating the Centrex circuit-seize key. Had the caller disconnected during her moment of hesitation, investigators would have lost an opportunity to identify the call origin site.
“Please remain on this line, sir,” she said and connected him to the CYCIG Task Force in the ERC.
A special agent, monitoring a bank of eight television screens, each attached to a VCR, was watching SportsDay on CNN when the telephone rang.
His headset had been pushed back so he could hear the sportscast better. In one quick motion, he pulled the headphone ear tabs into place, tapped the mute key on the audio-system remote, and picked up the telephone. The switchboard operator announced the call on line 6260.
Without comment, he disconnected her and finger-punched the button.
The special agent asked the intern whether the radio station automatically records calls to its newsroom. The answer was no. The agent asked many more hurried questions, determined that nothing ultra-time-sensitive had been said, made two pages of quick notes, thanked the intern, and told him to sit tight, that FBI investigators would be there shortly to interview him. They’d want to know, he said, among other information, if the intern had any idea whether Virgil called WWW-FM, or him, for any particular reason.
The special agent sat up straight and spun his chair around toward the three other special agents clustered in conversation half a room away.
“Call from Smokey!” he shouted, running his finger across the supervisors’ schedule. He had prepared himself to awaken Franklin if anything significant happened, but the three-card schedule told him Brandon was to be called first. He thanked the Lord he hadn’t called Franklin in error.
The other agents looked over, wondering what had happened.
“He called a radio station on Long Island then hung up,” the special agent told them. “Said he’s going to call here noon tomorrow with some sort of important message. The station’s news intern called us. Sounds real.”
One of the other agents jogged out of the room in shirtsleeves to the Telecommunications Section, where they probably were already duping the recording of the intern’s call onto cassettes.
The Director and Deputy Director would get one, and copies would go to the Behavioral Science Section, the Investigative Support Unit, and the case agent serving as liaison with the consultants. Within the next few days, the FBI planned to release a montage of Virgil’s various calls, hoping the public might be able identify the voice despite his various vocal disguises.
Franklin entered the ERC and silence swept in with him.
“What do you say to keeping Virgil from communicating with Rhoads?” Franklin asked Dr. Myron Sorken, the linguistics expert from Johns Hopkins who had arrived minutes earlier. Franklin ignored Rhoads, who was there as well. “That’s what I’m inclined to do.”
Sorken objected, saying he agreed, in part, with Dr. Trice’s idea about nurturing the relationship between them. Franklin countered with the lost-ground argument. The FBI, he said, was playing along, but the killings were continuing, maybe even escalating. In a losing battle, change tactics.
Sorken threw in a complicating assessment. “Virgil’s dying. You can hear it in his voice. Whatever his announcement’s going to be, you can bet it wi
ll be consistent with someone who is well aware that he’s getting weaker. That can be good news or bad. Virgil will in some way, maybe some very subtle way, give away something that confirms he’s fading fast.”
61
FBI Headquarters
Saturday, October 14
Virgil telephoned one minute after noon. Franklin instructed Rhoads to answer.
“Good morning, Mr. Rhoads,” the gruff voice began, speaking too quickly for Rhoads to respond. Excessive static crackled on the line. “I haven’t seen anything on CNN about upstate Pennsylvania. Didn’t hear about it yet? Or is the FBI trying a strategy of a news blackout? If so, it’s ill advised. Everything I do should be duly noted by the media.”
The communications tech wearing the headset had the approximate call-origin location. He scribbled “cell phone, Long Island” in large black-marker letters on the pad he had for that purpose and held it up.
“Did you visit somewhere in Pennsylvania?”
“Sure I did. Groundhog Day, sort of. You’ll find out. Anyway, I’m calling to make another fair trade agreement. I can’t stay on the line too long. I borrowed someone’s car phone without asking, and I don’t want to run up too big a tab, so here’s the deal. You get in touch with the Association of Tobacco Marketers and see to it that the Big Eight tobacco companies begin a promotion offering postage-paid money-back refunds for any customers who wish to quit smoking and mail in their unsmoked cigarettes. I’ll let the tobacco companies figure out the logistics. And since I currently work in corporate America myself, in the entertainment industry, I know that it could take a few days to organize such a promo. I’m not unreasonable, I’ll give them time, on the condition that they publicly announce no later than nine o’clock Monday night that they are preparing the offer.”
It sounded as if Virgil was calling from a cell phone in a moving vehicle.
“You said ‘fair trade.’ What are you offering?” Rhoads asked, referring to the script prepared by the Behavioral Science Section. BSS had predicted some kind of deal would be offered. “Because what we need is to put a stop to the killings. Otherwise, we have no more room to negotiate. As a matter of fact, if you won’t give me that, the FBI is taking me off this investigation altogether. Virgil, you don’t want to make a fool out of an ally, do you? You make me look bad to the guys here. Can you agree to a cease-fire?”
Muntor did not want Rhoads and the FBI to see this refund deal as just one more in a relentless stream of demands. If they thought they were just digging deeper and deeper holes, they’d soon quit playing along. He needed to make them think his requests came from a very short list.
“Oh, come on, T.R., they’re just bluffing you. They wouldn’t take you away from me. You’re the one who’s most intimate with me. They need you. Don’t put up with their silly threats. Nevertheless, you just made a deal. I’ll take a break. I believe I have a well-deserved vacation coming to me. How’s that?”
“Great,” Rhoads said. “That’s just great.”
Virgil continued. “I’ll tell you what. Maybe I’ll even bail out of this ugliness early. It’s tempting, it’s very tempting, the way I feel, completely beat. Maybe I’ll just fade away.”
The agents and consultants wanted the killings to end, but only by apprehending Virgil. If he simply quit, they might never find him. For how many years did the Unabomber suspect remain free?
While Rhoads spoke, Franklin listened on a headset. He thought the refund arrangement would be no problem. Didn’t the cigarette manufacturers offer automatic refunds anyway as part of their standard customer-satisfaction policy?
Virgil wasn’t finished. “My vacation, however, won’t begin until Monday night after the announcement. Then, no more action until further notice, provided I see the refund plan moving along. If it is a nicely conceived refund deal, I may throw in a bonus. But we’ll see. Shall I commit myself to more mayhem in the event the ATM is not inspired to launch the refund deal?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Rhoads said. “We’ll contact them immediately.”
“All right, thank…”
Rhoads thought fast and diverged from the script. He needed more, and he sensed he had only seconds left before the line would go dead.
“Wait, Virgil. One more thing. You want to help me personally?”
“Such as?”
“Such as no more trick-packs, beginning right now. That will demonstrate you and I have a working relationship. Please.”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“Please? I’m working with you here.”
“Deal’s a deal. You’re an honest man, Rhoads. I know you’ll stick to the deal even if the FBI won’t,” Virgil said and disconnected. His voice sounded as natural as they had ever heard it.
The collective mood in the ERC turned somber. Rhoads could picture the sick bastard grinning.
“You believe him?” Franklin asked, removing his headset.
“So far, he’s done what he’s promised,” Rhoads said.
“What about that ‘working in corporate America’ line? I think we have a hit on the VoiceStressor.”
“If that’s his idea of a red herring, we’d have caught him by now. He’s just throwing in an obvious phony lead.”
Sorken interrupted them.
“Which means his mind is in the deception and misdirection realm,” the professor said, “instead of the strategize-and-attack realm.”
“What does that mean to you, Doctor?” Franklin asked.
“Like the rest of it. It may mean absolutely nothing. How innocuous a lead is ‘working in corporate America’? Or on the other hand, should this be a precursor to a change in his behavior, I would say that it suggests a turn toward more risk-taking and more violence. This man is not the emotional Rock of Gibraltar. In him, changes are like pre-quake tremors. In most cases, they foretell an imminent, more powerful transformation.”
Franklin rubbed his beard stubble. He hadn’t been home for thirty hours. “What do you make of his refusal to cease planting his trick-packs until Monday night?” he asked.
While Sorken pondered the question, Rhoads spoke up. He narrowed his eyes as if he were focusing on something in the far distance.
“You know,” Rhoads said, “Virgil may be even smarter than we think. He has never asked for something that we could have had reason to deny him. He’s playing public sentiment like an experienced PR pro. We ought to check the Big Eight’s public relations departments for unhappy employees, past and present. Guys laid off, et cetera. He knows that if we refuse him, he can simply report us to the media as uncooperative, then he kills fifty kids and signs it, ‘Your Friendly Tobacco Companies.’ We already know the bastard’s tape recording his calls to us.”
The communications tech spoke. “With a suction-cup mike and the wire run up his sleeve into a compact recorder in his pocket, he could stick it on the receiver of a pay phone or cell phone without being seen and remove it just as easily. That’d be no problem.”
“Can’t our communications people do something with the modulation of the phone calls to make taping us more difficult for him?” asked one of the Behavioral Science psych team members.
“Veto!” Franklin said. “Get off that track. No games like that. I need ideas on what he might do next and where he might do it. If we can assume he’s going to keep his promise and put the brakes on, at least temporarily after Monday night, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that he will want at least one last fling?”
“It’s impossible to put every cigarette retailer under surveillance,” an agent said.
Rhoads was busy figuring something in his notebook. “Why don’t we go to the media and say that we expect an attack, or a series of attacks, between now and Monday night?” he said, looking at his notes. “That will serve the cause three ways. First, it will put smokers on alert. Two, it will make an assumption that the manufacturers w
ill float the refund deal. That will squeeze them into a ‘yes’ position. And three, it may force Virgil to perform, to take a risk that he wouldn’t normally take.” Rhoads turned to the members of the psych team who sat next to each other at the conference table.
“Rhoads has a point,” an FBI behaviorist said, “We can’t just keep reacting to him. We need to do something, make him react to us.”
“Exactly,” Rhoads said. “There’s a risk, yes, but we have to assume he won’t stop. The best we can do is try to push him in a direction where we can anticipate him.”
“He can only place so many cigarette packs,” the psychologist said. “Practically everyone on the planet is on the lookout for him. He’s probably not quite ready for his grand finale. We have him mapped to a probable home base in the metro areas of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington.”
“There’s a risk,” Franklin said. “He said he thinks Rhoads is an honest guy. If we push him, we might lose him. He might stop calling us, and the calls are our best leads at this point.”
“What’s that all about? How does he know Rhoads?” the psychologist asked.
“I don’t know him,” said Rhoads. “But he thinks he knows me. Look, if he objects to our play, I’ll just say you overrode me. It’s a risk, but we can’t just follow his lead.”
“He’s right,” Franklin said. “We need to grab the reins while we can. We go with Rhoads’s plan.”
62
Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. World Headquarters
Asheville
Rhoads flew to Asheville. In the Executive Suite, he sat down, lit an Easy, and watched while Pratt paced and cursed.
Pratt took a seat in a guest chair next to Rhoads, crossed his legs, and steepled his fingers, lost in thought.
“Damn it, Rhoads, what the hell is going on with the FBI investigation? You haven’t given me anything. Why do you think I assigned you to this thing?”
“I can tell you what the FBI thinks about that.”
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 17
