Runaway Heart (2003)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I should get lost, then."

  "Right." Uniformed police officers were streaming past them while they stood at the foot of the stairs. Jack was starting to feel very vulnerable and exposed. It was just noon, and any moment Eleanor Drake could come down on her way to lunch. Most cops were extremely punctual when it came to eating.

  "Should I wait outside?" she asked.

  "Yeah, maybe outside would be best." His plan was to go upstairs and hide in the men's room for a while, then come out, claiming she'd been sent to Oxnard on a case, something like that, and try to figure out an alternative plan.

  "Wirta!" a woman's voice rang in the stairwell.

  Jack spun around and there she was, standing on the landing not ten feet away with three uniformed cops. "What the fuck are you doing here?" Eleanor Drake demanded, glaring down at him. Like most female cops, Eleanor had a mouth on her.

  Jack gave her his best smile. It had no effect. Zero. "I came to talk to you. My god, Eleanor, you look marvelous." Now he sounded like Fernando Lamas.

  "You prick," Eleanor said. "You've got your full ration of nerve coming here." She was wearing a tailored suit with a short skirt. It was her legs that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.

  "Is that her?" Susan asked, almost whispering.

  "Uh . . . uh . . . yeah. Gimme a minute, here."

  "Get outta my sight, you asshole. I'm not kidding. You'd better get the fuck outta my precinct house."

  "One doesn't have to use foul language to make one's point." Stealing Miro's lines.

  "I'm not fooling, Jack."

  "Right. Let's go." He turned and grabbed Susan's arm and led her out of the building. He could feel Eleanor's eyes tracking him like gunsights until he was out the door and on the street. It had stopped raining, but his lower back was still a fire zone, his emotions in turmoil, his honor in question.

  "I thought she was supposed to be a close friend that you had an outstanding working relationship," Susan said angrily. "What kinda liar are you? She looked like she wanted to kill you." His karma with women hovered near zero.

  Time to come clean. "Look, Susan, you're right. I lied, okay? I wasn't planning on running into her. She hates me. We used to date. I cheated on her and she damn near shot it out with me in a motel room in Monterey. It ended about as badly as possible and I . . ." He paused. "Look, I needed the work, so I fudged a little."

  "Fudged?"

  "Yeah, but I still have a way to get what we need. Actually, this new way is smarter than asking sworn personnel to steal confidential records. That probably would have backfired. This idea is much safer, okay?"

  She was really pissed. "What kind of an asshole are you?"

  Some questions are better left unanswered. "How much cash do you have in your wallet?"

  "I don't carry cash. I told you, we're a nonprofit institute. I need checks as receipts for our tax-exempt status."

  "A check won't do it. Okay, in the spirit of cooperation, and because I see how upset you are, I'll front the Institute a couple'a

  hundred dollars. Deal?" She was calming down, he thought. . . hoped.

  "Why? What are we doing?"

  "We're gonna find a Chinese lab attendant and bribe him. The Chinese are easy marks."

  "I'm really not much on racial slurs," she said, looking daggers at him now.

  "It's not a racial slur. It's a cultural reality. I happen to know that a lot of Chinese people end up working in the police lab up here. They're good technicians and they work at minimum wage. Most are immigrants with big debts to the triads for getting them or their families over here from mainland China. Two hundred bucks will buy a lot of cooperation if I can find the right guy. We go downstairs in the ME's building on Turpin Street. It's not a secure location. We go to the cafeteria, do a little eavesdropping, pick somebody with a thick accent. Believe me, it works. I've done this before."

  It pissed her off that he'd lied to her. But then, she reasoned, she'd lied to him, too. He'd be in for a big surprise when he tried to cash her check, so she figured they were even . . . more or less.

  Before they got back in the car she watched him with concern as he sprinted across the street to the Wells Fargo Bank to deposit her bad check in the ATM.

  His name was Shing Nam Shan, but he went by "Danny." He was twenty years old and weighed only one hundred and fifteen pounds all in, canvas shoes included. He had short, bristly hair and eyeglasses thick enough to start a fire. Danny snatched the cash out of Jack's hand like a lizard snapping up a fruit fly. After Jack explained that they wanted a copy of Roland Minton's crime scene and ME reports, Danny smiled and said in broken English, struggling with each sentence: "I know where keep. Make some

  . . . same kind . . . copies. You rait here." He turned and left them standing in the maze of hallways in the basement of the Medical Examiner's building.

  The smells were putrid. A mixture of odors so dense and complicated that it was hard to separate them except to say that the brutal tinge of Lysol enveloped everything.

  "You were right," she said, feeling slightly better about him.

  He smiled, then added a few slices of baloney to the sandwich. "When you hire the Wirta Agency, you get all the Bs of police science: basic brilliance and boundless bullshit."

  She cocked her head at him as if she didn't quite know what to make of that. So he added, "But I don't charge for the bullshit. It's an agency extra."

  Twenty minutes later Danny returned and handed them a light Xerox still warm from the machine. "It faded. We outta toner," he said. "You not say Danny get, hokay?"

  "Don't worry, we're leaving town in two hours. Now all I need to know is how do we get outta here? This is a maze down here." That brought Danny's worst sentence to date.

  "Go light, den reft. . . den up stair to erevator."

  "Why don't you go ahead and pay for lunch. You can just put it on your expense sheet," Susan suggested.

  They were at Fisherman's Wharf sitting in Alioto's Fish House. The windows overlooked a picturesque little tuna fleet adorned with outriggers, high bows, and women's names. He counted four Marias, a few Magdalenas, and a Madonna (probably not the one in the leather concert bra). The food was great and the bill was reasonable. Jack peeled off some twenties thinking he hadn't been a private detective for that long but that he was pretty sure this wasn't the way it was supposed to work.

  Before lunch they had gone over the crime scene and the ME's reports, and there was still no getting around the fact that the

  death of Roland Minton was very violent and damned strange. Sergeant Lester Cole's crime sheet was very specific he had particularly noted that there was no obvious way anything or anybody could have gotten in or out of Roland's room. Cole had speculated that somehow someone must have hung outside the window thirty stories up, pried open the frame, which he noted would be a super-human feat, then had gained entrance to the hotel room. Sergeant Cole had no theory on how that could have been done or how the thick metal could have been bent.

  The coroner's descriptions were unemotional but graphic: felonious homicide, extreme mutilation, blunt-force trauma, anti-mortem severance, multiple commuted fractures, decapitation, cutaneous subdural matter . . .

  It went on like that, detailing shredded body parts and blood-splatter evidence. Jack read it but didn't comment, because Susan had become very quiet and seemed on the verge of tears. The coroner called the murder extreme homicidal mania. What it came down to was Roland Minton had been ripped apart while he was still alive.

  The only other noteworthy thing was in the short paragraph listing stomach contents: a partially digested Big Mac approximately six hours old, Coca-Cola, minibar peanuts, and a note. According to the coroner, it had been swallowed seconds before Roland died but was still readable. Just one word:

  OCTOPUS

  Chapter Sixteen.

  The briefing was at 5:00 P.M. in the main conference room on the sixth floor of DARPA headquarters. The
building was a nondescript, brick-faced affair located inside the Virginia Square Plaza in Arlington, Virginia.

  In attendance were Deputy Director Vincent Valdez; his assistant, Paul Talbot, and his two assistant military attaches, Captain Norm Pettis, U.S.M.C., and Captain Stanley Greenberg, U.S.N. There were also two Acquisitions and Technology special assistants, an information special tech, a liaison officer, a defense science officer, and a captain from the Special Projects office. A naval lieutenant JG, Sally Watts, the youngest person in the room at only twenty-three, was also a top forensic computer specialist

  Next to her was a program interrogation coordinator and a woman from the comptroller's office.

  For such a large gathering the sixth-floor conference room was opened and they had put out coffee and donuts. A low murmur of voices filled the corridor, finally, two-star Air Force General William "Buzz" Turpin, director of DARPA, swept into the room and took his place at the head of the table.

  Young at sixty-eight, Turpin's demeanor was hard and humorless. He began without preamble: "Did everybody get the oh-eight-hundred Re-Op?"

  The room nodded. Re-Op stood for Report of Operations. This one was the detailed description of a breach of the secure computer at Gen-A-Tec.

  The room was hushed. This was Turpin's meeting.

  "Since the penetration at the New Fairview Hotel in San Francisco by our high-risk special response team at oh-five-hundred yesterday morning, and the subsequent collateralization of the computer hacker by our DU, we have, unfortunately, experienced further breakdowns," Buzz said softly. He always spoke in a very quiet voice a trick he'd learned on the debate team at the Air Force Academy. Everybody in the room was leaning forward to catch every word.

  "The DU recovered Roland Minton's computer. Minton attempted to erase his last e-mail after he sent it, but Lieutenant Watts managed to digitally reconstruct the message. We have copies for all of you."

  Vincent Valdez stood and passed Roland's last e-mail around the table. Turpin paused while it was read. When all eyes were once again focused on him, he continued.

  "This message was e-mailed to a portable computer. We have the name of the owner but not his location."

  Several ballpoint pens clicked and people began making notes.

  "You'll note that the e-mail address is Strockmeister at earthlink-dot-net. That turns out to be somebody named Herman Strockmire Jr. I'm going to go over the pertinent facts in the e-mail, then you can address questions to your section leaders or to Mr. Valdez after the meeting.

  "One: The dead hacker sent the fifty-page Chimera file to Herman Strockmire's computer. Location unknown. The only address we have is his office in D.C. He's not there. Apparently his secretary doesn't know where he is. More on that in a minute.

  "Two: According to our cryptographer the encoded file is going to take around two days for Roland's 'bud' to decode, even with ten sun solar work stations. That means we have as little as two days to get it back before we end up in a public-relations disaster.

  "Three: The forensic computer section under Lieutenant Watts is working up a list of companies in the Western U.S. that have ten sun solar work stations. It has to be a big lash-up. Once we have that list we cross check it against an employee named Zimmy. It's undoubtedly a nickname, so it could stand for anything from Zim to Zimmerman. And, Lieutenant, I need all of this yesterday."

  Sally Watts nodded as she jotted notes furiously.

  "Four: Herman Strockmire Jr. runs a legal firm called the Institute for Planetary Justice. To put it politely, he's a tree-and-bunny hugger who has sued just about every federal letter agency in the government. I'm evaluating the possibility of picking up his secretary and debriefing her, but these people are fanatics, and I'm not sure that's our most prudent course of action. Besides, if Strockmire's the delusional paranoid our profile makes him out to be, she may have been kept in the dark."

  Buzz Turpin leaned back in his chair and paused for emphasis, then said, "Strockmire is in possession of devastating material that could create huge problems for us. Last week he was in L.A. suing a bunch of federal agencies and private labs over GMO food. He got Rule-Elevened in Judge Melissa King's court and

  fined a million dollars. I think a primary course of action might be to contact Judge King through a blind and see if she can lure him in again. Maybe, if she offers to cut his fine, he'll show up and we can grab him. We're running a logistics scan on that and one or two other potential operation plans. We'll have something in a few hours. As of now nobody seems to know where Strockmire is. We have to change that.

  "Five: This person Susie who's mentioned in the e-mail is undoubtedly Susan Strockmire, Herman's daughter. She is leverage, and I want her. Get a sniffer on her bank account and on Strockmire's. Five-hour updates."

  Buzz Turpin cleared his throat and leaned forward. "Okay, people, one more thing and this is important: I'm not looking to turn this into a major news story. One of the problems with this guy is that he has celebrity friends who are environmentalists and animal-rights fanatics. The last thing I need is for fucking Marlon Brando or Cher to jump on the Today Show and start screaming we murdered him. This means Strockmire needs to be neutralized but not necessarily collateralized at least not yet. What we've got here is a big, sloshing bucket of shit, and I don't want to get any more of it on us than necessary. Any deviation from this op plan gets cleared by either Vincent, Paul Talbot, or me. Nobody moves on his own initiative. Are we all absolutely clear on this?"

  Everyone in the room nodded.

  "Okay. Get going. We're going to have twelve-hour debriefs in this room at oh-seven-hundred and fourteen-hundred hours. Everybody, except people assigned to location field ops, will be in attendance. No exceptions." General Buzz Turpin stood and exited the room with long strides and a face that looked like it had been hacked out of granite. Once he was gone Vincent Valdez turned to the room.

  "Okay, organize into subgroups. Operations on the right side and Lo-Recon on the left."

  Operations was headed by the two Marine and Navy captains. They were joined by the information officer, the defense weapons specialist, and the captain from the Special Projects office. Lo-Recon was Logistical Reconnaissance, and that was everybody else.

  In his office at the end of the sixth-floor corridor, General Turpin slumped behind his desk and looked out through his large picture window at the mall parking lot. A light mist was falling. He glowered down at the slick pavement feeling a surge of impotent fury.

  He had fought for DARPA, defended its projects on the Hill in front of the Armed Services Committee, fended off a liberal congress that questioned not only the military applications of their research, but even DARPA's very usefulness to the country's defense. He had artfully steered huge sums of money from Pentagon research accounts into DARPA's coffers. He found promising research at various aviation companies and science labs, then proceeded to funnel DARPA money into those private programs that he controlled. He hired leading scientists and formed think tanks to conceptualize the weapons of the future. The Stealth Bomber was the brainchild of a Northrop engineer, picked up by one of Turpin's science advisers. The project, financed by DARPA, eventually produced a new generation of attack aircraft.

  Now, the Chimera Project, his most innovative accomplishment, was in mortal jeopardy, and with it the entire agency. The concept and execution of the project was brilliant a chance to create test-tube soldiers, better by far than their human counterparts, with abilities far superior to any grunt who ever wore the uniform or fought and died for his flag. Never again would General Turpin be forced to stand at a military funeral and engage the tearful eyes of a dead soldier's parent, wife, or child.

  Buzz Turpin had found the ultimate solution to ground warfare. He was about to rewrite the book on military effectiveness.

  With these chimeras, never again would even one American GI be forced to go into battle or be sent home inside a flag-draped coffin.

  But, because of Stockmire's sil
ly lawsuit to protect a bunch of damn butterflies, this legal joke, this accident in a three-piece suit was threatening to destroy everything. The lawyer had compromised the security of the Gen-A-Tec computer system. With this security breach, General Turpin's crowning career achievement was in jeopardy of being exposed before he had his public-relations plan in order.

  Turpin was well aware of how the liberal media would portray this scientific adventure. They would see only the science-fiction horror movie aspects of the program: "Genetic Monsters Created in Government Labs."

  They would attack the program as evil or perhaps even criminal. They would come after Turpin with a vengeance, forcing him to defend his program in a peacetime vacuum. From the beginning he had known that the only way to introduce disposable soldiers was in the field. If the Development Units had been ready during Kosovo he would have used them there. Then, after they had been victorious after no American soldier had been lost on the ground Turpin would reveal them to the world. Under that scenario he could verify their military superiority. He would have results to parade before the press, pictures of the DUs in action. He would be able to show their overpowering effectiveness, their courage and strength in battle.

  But this this discovery, these so-called dirty secrets stolen from a secure computer would make all his efforts appear nefarious, evil, and illegal.

  Turpin sat in his office and studied the mist-wet tops of cars six stories below. He steepled his fingers under his chin and his mind went back to the snow-blown fields of North Korea thousands of miles and fifty years behind him. He was nineteen, on the ground behind enemy lines, his jet shot down by ground

  fire. He wandered in desperation, cold and weak, until he finally hooked up with a forward-area communications battalion. It was the same day the Chinese under the command of General Chai Ung Jun attacked the DMZ, swarming down from the north under leaden skies filled with shrieking artillery.

  He remembered the horde of screaming North Koreans, their heads and feet wrapped in rags for warmth, charging insanely while vicious artillery barrages exploded around him, the concussions rupturing his eardrums. He saw American GIs being blown to bits by incendiary grenades, some shredded above ground by Chinese Bouncing Bettys. He could smell brave American flesh burning, the odor choking him. Even now he could hear the GIs screaming, see their blood spurting from open wounds, splashing in ugly patterns on the frozen snow.