A moment later the man turned and walked out of the room, his face now clearly visible.
“Got you, you son-of-a-bitch,” Scarne said to his empty hotel room.
Scarne fast-forwarded. Nothing else happened until a swarm of police officers entered the nursery. They went right to the crib where one of them picked up an obviously squalling child. The relief on the faces of the cops was palpable. One of them made a sign of the cross. By Scarne’s estimation, he’d gone three hours into the video at that point. He shut it off and looked at his watch. It was almost 7 P.M. Anxious as he was to start the process of identifying the man in the nanny cam video, he knew that the time difference with New York made it impossible immediately. And it had to be done in New York. He had no intention of sharing what he knew with the police in Hawaii. There was only one person he would trust with the information and who also had the resources to identify the man in the nursery. And that person was surely home in bed asleep.
Sleep sounded like a good idea to Scarne. He’d been going nonstop all day. He’d hardly eaten all day, and the Jack Daniels was burning a hole in his stomach. But before he left to find some food, as a precaution he opened up his email account and tried to email the video file to himself. It was too large. Thanks to some earlier impromptu computer lessons from Evelyn Warr, he knew what to do. He made a copy of the video and then cropped out everything but the parts containing the mother and the killer. He was able to email that section.
Scarne went down to the hotel restaurant, where the waiter recommended the broiled Onaga, which turned out to be a mild, moist, and very tender ruby-red snapper served whole. It was delicious, although Scarne knew a boiled octopus would have tasted good to him at that point. Then he went to his room and set his alarm for 5 A.M. He was asleep within minutes.
***
On his farm six miles outside Osceola, Iowa, Mitchell Royster fingered the kernels of a corn cob and frowned. They looked OK, but the outer layers of the corn husks worried him. They were scarred with brownish-yellow lesions sprinkled with black freckles. He pulled out his cell phone.
An hour later, Clyde Hoddstaler, an inspector with the Iowa Farming Bureau was gathering some of the stalks from a rectangular patch of corn about 50 feet wide. All the stalks in the patch had broken, twisted or discolored stalks.
“I don’t like it, Mitch,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“What do you think it is? The corn looks fine on the inside.”
“Looks to me like Goss’s wilt.”
“Is that bad?”
“Any disease is bad. The wilt had been spreading and we don’t know why. It’s caused by a bacterium, Clavibacter nebraskensis. It may not kill the plant, but it can cut yields by half.”
“Fuck me with a rotary tiller!”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” the inspector said.
“Why this patch? It doesn’t seem to have affected those rows over there.”
“And all your corn is hybrid, right?”
“Yeah. Hell, most of the corn in Clarke County is hybrid. I thought it was engineered to resist this kind of thing.”
Hoddstaler shook his head.
“Not every hybrid strain is altered to handle every disease. I mean, 90 percent of the corn in the United States comes from seeds that have had their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Most corn now can resist glyphosate, so you farmers can kill weeds without killing your corn crop. But some corn remains susceptible to Goss’s. I’ll send these samples to Des Moines. Where do you get your seed from?”
“BVM. But it can’t be their seed.”
“Why not?”
Royster pointed at the acres of healthy corn surrounding the affected rectangle.
“Same seeds.”
CHAPTER 17 - BLACKBRIAR
As New York City Police Commissioner, Richard Condon ran the largest police force in the nation. He had 40,000 of the best-trained law enforcement professionals at his beck and call.
He was taking out the garbage when Scarne called his home on Staten Island.
“This can’t be good,” he said when he took the phone from his wife, Charlotte.
“I heard that,” Scarne said.
“You were meant to.”
“How do you know I’m not calling to see how you are, or ask you to play golf?”
“Do you want to play golf?”
“Some other time. When I’m not in Hawaii.”
Condon looked at his watch.
“Hawaii? What time is it there.?”
“About 5:15 A.M. I need a favor.”
“You know it’s Sunday, don’t you?”
“What else do you have to do? I know you were just taking out the garbage. What was next on the agenda? Cleaning out the basement?”
“Washing the screens.”
“See. I’m doing you a favor.”
Condon laughed. He was fond of Scarne, ever since the former cop had held a city councilman by his heels off a balcony in City Hall. Even though he had to fire him for it.
“Tell me.”
Scarne did, leaving little out.
“You realize that you should probably turn over the video and whatever else you have to the local cops out there,” Condon finally said.
“The same cops who so easily bought the time differentials in the murders, the blood pools on the pillows and the fact that the killer was right-handed. Not to mention the nanny cam in the nursery? Those cops? They’ll probably arrest me for breaking and entering.”
“Which is, of course, exactly what you did. As for the locals, given the preponderance of evidence there was, a lot of departments would have missed all that. Too bad they didn’t have a New York hot dog like you right from the start.”
Condon didn’t like someone bad-mouthing another department.
“You won’t get an argument out of me on that point, Dick. What are you getting so uppity about? You helped train this particular hot dog. Besides, this thing has to be bigger than what happened out here. It’s got Federal jurisdiction written all over it. I can’t go to the Feds. At least not yet. But now that I’ve put you into the picture, I’m in the clear with the Honolulu cops. If you decide to, you can go to them with the video. You don’t have to tell them where you got it. Invoke national security. Everyone’s got videos of something.”
“I’m not a Fed. I run a city police department.”
“Hell, if you have to, invoke states’ rights.”
There was a long pause while Condon thought it over. Scarne usually knew what he was doing, even if the methods he used skirted many legal lines. But then, so did stop-and frisk and a dozen other things Condon’s own cops had to do to keep their city safe. And it was the same in every jurisdiction in the country.
“What do you need?”
Scarne knew that, outside the F.B.I., the N.S.A. and a couple of other initialed Government agencies, the N.Y.P.D. had some of the most-sophisticated crime-fighting technologies on the planet. Its anti-terrorism unit was superior to those in most nations, some of which often and gladly asked for its help.
“I’ll email you some of the video, the part with the guy’s face. Your facial recognition people may be able to identify him. If they can’t, I know you can call in some favors from the Government, no questions asked. If he’s in the system anywhere, you can find him.”
“And if he’s not?”
“He’ll be in it. He’s either got a record or he’s ex-military. They all are. This wasn’t his first rodeo.”
“Then what?”
“Then you do your thing, and I’ll do mine. But I’ll have a head start, which is what we both want.”
Condon understood what Scarne meant. As a free-agent, the private investigator could do things that many cops couldn’t. Breaking and entering being the least. By the time the N.Y.P.D. cut through bureaucratic and jurisdictional issues with other departments, Scarne might be able to find the man.
�
�Send me the email. I’ll make some calls.”
“How long do you think it will take?”
“On a weekend? I don’t know. Some of the people I may have to speak with may be hard to reach.”
“Dick, you could reach the Pope in two minutes.”
“My personal record is five. I’ll get back to you. Probably won’t be more than three hours before I hear something.”
The sun was just coming up. Scarne resisted the urge to go back to bed. He felt listless and out of shape. He put on a bathing suit and a golf shirt, grabbed a towel and headed to the beach. As he walked through the lobby the clerk at the front desk called out to him.
“You’d be better off in our pool, sir. This is the coldest time of the year for the ocean in Hawaii. The water temperature was only 50 degrees yesterday. Our pool is heated.”
“Just going to wade,” Scarne said.
The beach was virtually deserted. The air was cool. Scarne stripped off his shirt and plunged in. The water was frigid, but after the initial shock, bearable. A strong swimmer, he headed out, ignoring the possibility that any sharks hanging around were early risers. About 100 yards from shore he began swimming parallel to the beach front. After a half hour, he turned around and headed back. By the time he made it to shore he was exhausted but elated by the workout. He lay on his towel and let the early morning sun warm him. There was a small cafe next to the hotel and, suddenly ravenous, he stopped in for a typical Hawaiian breakfast of linguiça, eggs, and white rice, which he washed down with three cups of strong Kona coffee.
***
Scarne was just coming out of his shower when his phone rang. It was Condon.
“His name is Michael Burke.”
“Criminal record?”
“No. Although he probably deserves one. We found him in a N.S.A. database. Former Special Forces, then Blackbriar, the security firm that does Government contract work. But he left that firm three years ago, apparently to freelance.”
“No doubt it’s him?”
“Facial recognition probability of 95 percent. It’s him.”
“Recent address?”
“Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson. Take this down.”
Scarne did.
“He’s apparently not hiding from anyone. Pays his taxes, although if he’s what we think he is, he probably doesn’t declare everything he makes.”
“That might be his only admirable quality.”
“What are you going to do?”
There was a pause.
“Jake, I know you have a personal stake in this. But be careful. Burke’s a real hard case. Won a couple of medals in Iraq. If he’s part of a professional assassination team, he won’t think twice about killing you.”
“I’m not easy to kill, Dick. I’ll have surprise on my side. He can’t imagine anyone knows who he is. It’s a miracle I do. The whole thing, from taking the family hostage to the skydiving murder, was sophisticated and well-financed. He’s the key to unlocking whatever is going on. That’s why I need my shot at him before anyone else.”
CHAPTER 18 - CIRCLES ON A MAP
Solna, Sweden
Dr. Knut Thorkelson was not happy. As head of the European Center for Disease Control, he was used to working long hours and even the occasional weekend. But damn it, he’d planned this three-day weekend a month ago, and to have it cut short was highly annoying.
“What’s so important that it can’t wait until Tuesday,” his wife had asked, not unreasonably in his estimation.
“Lars wants me at the weekly briefing. He says he’s worried.”
“Lars is always worried,” Inge Thorkelson rebutted. “He sees the end of the world in every new disease.”
“He only has to be right once,” her husband said mildly, feeling the need to defend a colleague. “I agree he is a worry-wart, but he is a first-class scientist. He wouldn’t ruin my holiday without a good reason.”
“I think he’s after your job,” Inge said.
“He can have it,” Thorkelson said. “I’ll retire. Then you can have me to boss around the house every day, instead of just one extra day. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”
She laughed.
“There is some work that has to be done before it gets too cold.”
Thorkelson knew she was right. Swedish winters can be brutal. There were windows to caulk, firewood to stack and a heating system to check. The older home that Inge had talked him into buying on the lake was charming to be sure, but keeping it up was a royal pain. That reminded him. The dock was sagging a bit, probably from ice damage the previous winter. The fact that he spent much of the previous two days doing such household chores didn’t bother Thorkelson. Like most Swedes, he liked manual labor. It was a nice break from his days at ECDC, where he spent much of his time poring over epidemiological reports from around the globe.
His wife walked over to him and ran a hand down the front of his trousers.
“It wasn’t all work and no play, Knut,” she said with a lascivious smile. “You got your rewards.”
One of the advantages of having a beautiful second wife 20 years his junior was her sexual fervor. It was also one of the disadvantages. At that moment, the respected Dr. Thorkelson would have ignored an Ebola outbreak in the Vatican to stay home. Inge saw, and, through his pants, felt his distress. She laughed.
“Go to work.” She kissed him. “I’ll probably get more done without you. But don’t worry. When you come home I’ll still schtupp your brains out.”
***
Dr. Thorkelson lived only 20 minutes from the ECDC campus in Solna, a municipality located just north of Stockholm. On his drive to the Monday briefing, he wondered what had gotten Lars Bohlander’s knickers in such a twist. He liked Lars, although the fact that they were both Swedes did cause some grumbling among the international staff. And Inge was wrong. Lars knew he’d never succeed Thorkelson, for that very reason. The next director would probably be Martine Babineau, the woman who once ran the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in Paris. More than competent, and in the current political climate, politically correct. Thorkelson smiled at the thought of some of his colleagues taking orders from a woman. Well, the married ones should be used to it.
He passed Friends Arena, the new national football stadium adjacent to the Solna Stockholm commuter rail station, and then the Karolinska Institutet and the Karolinska University Hospital, where he often lectured or observed, before pulling up to the gate guard at ECDC. Security had been beefed up in recent years because of the threat of terrorism, even though the ECDC was strictly a gatherer of information and did not keep dangerous viruses or bacteria on hand. The center publishes an annual Epidemiological Report, which suggests where European resources should be devoted to reduce the damage caused by communicable diseases, and Eurosurveillance, a seminal journal devoted to epidemiology. But there was always the chance that some ignorant terrorist would view the ECDC as a threat, or assume the place was loaded with deadly pathogens that could be stolen. It was a crazy world, Thorkelson knew. Just the month before the nearby Stockholm International Peace Research Institute received a bomb threat. Who the hell would bomb a peace institute?
The ECDC guard checked Thorkelson’s pass and, as usual, teased him about his car, a 1998 Saab 9000. He took the ribbing good-naturedly. The sedan was in wonderful shape, and he was determined to get at least 250,000 miles out of it. His young wife had expensive tastes, and he indulged them all. Inge’s new Volvo had set him back more than 200,000 krone! He was not about to buy another car. He drove to the small private lot and his reserved space and entered the modernistic, three-story, glass-and-steel ECDC headquarters building.
The organization Thorkelson headed was less than 10 years old. Europeans have the highest respect for, and a good working relationship with, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, the American agency considered the finest facility of its kind in the world. But as economic integration increased and traditional frontier barriers were removed in the
European Union, it became apparent that Europe needed its own bulwark against infectious diseases. The outbreak in 2003 of the SARS coronavirus, which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome first in Asia and then rapidly spread across country borders, scared the hell out of Europe. The urgency was so great that the usual red-tape and bureaucratic wrangling was dispensed with and the ECDC, an independent entity of the European Union, was established in 2005 and located in Solna, Sweden. ECDC’s network comprises 28 Economic Union members (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom), plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. The ECDC has a staff of around 300 and an annual budget of over 50 million euros.
Thorkelson looked at his watch. It was almost 10 A.M., the time for the Monday briefing, so he went directly to the conference room on the third floor where it was always held. There were 12 people sitting around the large rectangular table, each an expert in one disease or another. He greeted them all with fake grumpiness, to let them know that he put their concerns ahead of his aborted holiday. Grabbing a cup of coffee from a sideboard, he sat down at the head of the table and nodded to the man on his right, who stood up and began speaking.
“Sorry I had to bring you in on a day off, chief,” Dr. Lars Bohlander said, “but we just received a report from India that is very disturbing.”
Thorkelson’s expression didn’t change but he was slightly nettled. I hope I wasn’t brought in because of another Indian outbreak, he thought. There was always something disturbing going on in the rural unsanitary hell holes of that huge country.
THE VIRON CONSPIRACY (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS #4) Page 11
