by Allen Steele
An old TV commercial had a punch line that had enraged feminists: my wife … I think I’ll keep her. Mari should have written a comeback: my husband … I think I’ll ditch him.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’ll be great.”
Marianne stood up, absently running her hand down the front of her robe so that I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her thighs. “Sure,” she said. “If it’ll get you out of here, I’d be happy to do it.”
“Mari—”
“Whatever you’re mixed up in,” she said, “I hope it works out … but I don’t want to get involved. You’ve done enough to me already.”
Then she trod upstairs to the bedroom and slammed the door.
Marianne dropped me off in front of the newspaper office; I was almost as glad to be rid of her as she was of me.
The trip downtown had been taken without any words spoken between us; only the morning news on NPR had broken the cold silence in her car. U.S. Army troops were still being airlifted to the Oregon border as Cascadia continued its Mexican standoff with the White House, and the crew of the Endeavour had succeeded in rendezvousing with Sentinel 1 and linking the final module to the antimissile satellite. And some lady in Atlanta was attracting massive crowds to her house after she claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in a pot roast.
Whoopee. I would rather have been in Birmingham, Seattle, outer space … anywhere, in fact, but St. Louis.
Everyone stared as I entered the newsroom, but no one said anything to me as I walked straight to Bailey’s office. Not surprisingly, he had already taken the cover off his IBM and was peering into its electronic guts with a penlight; Pearl was nothing if not paranoid.
“Close the door and sit down,” he said without glancing up from his work. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
I shut the door and found a chair that wasn’t buried beneath galley proofs and contact sheets. He patiently continued to poke through the breadboards and chips until he was satisfied, then he slid the cover shut and turned around in his swivel chair to gaze at me.
“Look, Earl,” I began, “I’m really sorry about—”
“Y’know what this is?” He picked up a large, flat case that lay atop the usual paperwork heaped on his desk. It had a pair of headphones jacked into one end, and one side was covered with knobs and digital meters; a slender spiral cord led to a long, needle-tipped wand. “Of course you know what it is,” he went on, “because you must have known I had one when I called you.”
“It’s an electronic surveillance detector,” I said. “You showed it to me once. Remember?”
“That’s right,” he replied, nodding his head. “Mr. Orkin Man himself. It can scan everything we use in this office and locate virtually any RF or VLF signal imaginable. Infinity bugs, hook-switch bypasses, modem or fax machine taps … you name it, this sucker can sniff it out. Put me back three grand, but hey, I’ve always considered it to be worth the dough. A little extra insurance, if you want to think of it that way.”
He carefully placed the instrument back on his desk. “If you meant to scare the bejeezus out of me, you succeeded. As soon as I got off the phone with you, I had everyone drop whatever they were doing while Jah and I went through the place. We switched on every computer, every light, picked up each phone, and turned on all the faxes … not a goddamn thing here went untouched, and that includes your apartment and the lab downstairs. I even had Jah run antivirus tests through all the computers and PTs … at least, the ones the feds didn’t steal from your place last night. And you know what we found?”
He raised his right hand, circling his thumb and forefinger. “Nada. Nyet. Zippity-doo-dah. Not so much as a loose wire. Now, either the feds have managed to put some pretty godlike equipment in here, or you’re an anatomical wonder … someone who can talk on the phone with his head shoved straight up his butt.”
I remained silent throughout all this. He needed to have a good rant right now, and I was unlucky enough to be the target. When he was done, he stared at me from across the desk, his hands folded together over his stomach. He finally let out his breath and kneaded his eyelids with his fingertips.
“The only reason why I haven’t thrown your ass out into the street,” he said very calmly, “is because you must be onto something. Or at least John must have been onto something, because some bastard took the time and effort to kill him. And I think you must have stumbled into it, because your door got kicked down last night and the feds carted off everything that could be plugged in. So now I’m stuck with a smart reporter who’s dead and a dumb reporter who doesn’t know how to call his editor when the shit’s coming down—”
“Pearl,” I began, “look—”
All at once, Bailey surged to his feet, grabbed a pile of paper at random, and hurled it at me so fast I didn’t have time to duck the printouts and photostats as they slapped me in the face.
“Fuck you, Rosen!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “I wanna know what’s going on!”
The paper rain cascaded down around me, falling into my lap and onto the floor. It was dead quiet outside the cubicle—every person in the office must have heard the explosion—but that wasn’t what I noticed. For the first time, I saw that Pearl’s eyes were puffy and red-rimmed.
The son of a bitch had been hit hard by the news of John’s murder. He was taking it out on me, and maybe he was right to do so because, God help me, I hadn’t wept a single tear since the moment Farrentino had called to ask if I could come down to the bar and identify his body.
If Pearl felt like a jerk for going on a futile bug hunt, then I now felt much the same way for not giving myself the time to realize that my best friend was dead. Yet, by the same token, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of wallowing in my own grief. There was something happening out there, at this very moment, of which John’s death was only a small and incidental part.
I didn’t know what was happening either, but it was time to stop being a victim of circumstance.
“Sit down, Earl,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
And I told him all of it, except a couple of the juicy parts.
There was no reason for him to know everything that had occurred during my encounter with Colonel Barris at the stadium … in particular, my signed agreement against revealing the details of Ruby Fulcrum. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping facts from my editor; I was concerned about his safety. If things went bad, I didn’t want ERA troops to come knocking at his door. There was no reason why they wouldn’t anyway, but neither did it make any sense to have Pearl mixed up in this shit more than necessary.
And, although I related the story of the strange IM I had received through Joker just before the riot at the Muny, I didn’t tell him about the phone call I had received in my apartment just before the ERA raid. I didn’t want him to think I had gone around the bend, even if I could explain how I might have heard my own voice and Jamie’s over the phone. When Pearl asked me why I hadn’t returned to my apartment after I was released from ERA custody, I told him I was too frightened to go back to my place but had simply fled to my ex’s house in Webster instead.
Everything else came out, though, and when I was through he simply gazed at me, his fingers knitted together above his lap. After a few moments he picked up his phone and pushed a couple of buttons. “Craig? This is Dad … yeah, come up right away, I want you to do something for me.”
He put the phone back on its cradle and stood up. “When he gets here, I want to give him Joker so he can run some tests on it. The bastards might have messed with it somehow, and I don’t want you running around with a Trojan horse in your PT.”
The same thought had already occurred to me, so I pulled Joker out of my pocket. “I take it this means I’m not fired yet,” I said as I typed in the “chickenlegs” password.
“I don’t fire people, Gerry. I just make ’em quit.” Pearl walked around his desk and opened the door. “Now let’s go upstairs and see if that disk is still where you hid it.�
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We met Jah outside Pearl’s office. He took Joker and went back downstairs to the photo lab, then Pearl and I climbed the stairs to the third floor.
My apartment was much as I had last seen it. The door was ajar; the desktop computer and the phone were still AWOL; along with the manuscript of my novel. I imagined some ERA officer at the stadium diligently reading the novel, trying to find hidden references within its pages. It would probably be the only audience the book would ever find; I hoped he liked the sex scenes, at least.
“I can’t tell whether this place has been ransacked or not,” Pearl murmured as he looked at my habitual mess.
“It’s a do-it-yourself job.” I walked into the bathroom, knelt on the tile floor, and peered beneath the toilet tank. The thin plastic case had gone undiscovered; it was still taped beneath the porcelain pony. I peeled away the tape and let the mini-disk drop into my hand, then held it up for Pearl to see. “We’re lucky,” I said.
“No luck to it,” he muttered. “They just didn’t have a containment suit at hand.” Pearl took the plastic case from my hand and gazed at it thoughtfully. “All that, to find what’s on this thing.”
He gave it back to me. “Give it to Jah and let him take a look at it,” he said quietly, folding his arms together. “He might be able to make something out of this sucker. Meanwhile, we’re going downstairs and see if we can get a line on those people from Tiptree.”
“Okay. Right …” Suddenly, I felt exhausted. For the last two days I had been punted from one side of the city to the other, and I didn’t have any real clues as to what was going on. I gazed at the unmade bed near the broken window. Only about twelve hours earlier I had been lying there dead asleep, more or less innocent of all that had been occurring just beyond my range of vision. And now …
“I’m like you,” Pearl said. “I don’t buy this story about one of their scientists going schizo and shooting people. If there’s some other reason why John was killed, then we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah …”
He looked down at the floor, absently kicking aside an old beer bottle. “You’re assigned to this story, Gerry. I want to find out who killed one of our reporters, what he was trying to find out when he was killed, and why someone is shooting people in the street. You’re relieved of all other editorial responsibilities until then, understand?”
I nodded. “You want me to bring down the guy who killed John.”
He gave me a sharp glance. “Listen, kid: the worst thing a reporter can do is go out on story carrying a vendetta. I know John was your best friend, but you’ve got to put that behind you right now. You’ve got to—”
“Yeah, right. Remain objective.”
Pearl shook his head. “No. Objectivity is what you do when you’re writing the story itself. Keeping your head is what you do before that. If this is some sort of conspiracy, then the people who are involved are way ahead of you. They’ve got their tracks covered. Your only advantage right now is that they assume you’re stupid. Don’t give them a chance to think otherwise …”
He grinned. “At least until you come up from behind and take a bite out of their ass.”
I looked up at him. In that moment our eyes met, and we were for that instant completely simpatico. All talk of journalistic objectivity aside, there was only one thing we both wanted.
“C’mon,” Pearl said as he turned to walk toward the door. “Let’s go to work.”
15
(Friday, 10:21 A.M.)
WE BEGAN BY TRYING to get a lead on Beryl Hinckley.
We didn’t have anything to go on at first; her number wasn’t listed in the phone book. Ditto for Richard Payson-Smith, our alleged laser sniper, and although there were four Jeff Morgans listed in the white pages, phone calls placed to three of the numbers quickly established that none of them belonged to our man.
The fourth didn’t pick up, but when the answering machine came on after the second buzz, a still picture appeared on the screen; it was the same person in the photo Barris had showed me. “Hi, this is Jeff” the recorded voice said. “I’m not available right now, but if you care to leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can …” I hung up before the beep. If Morgan was on the run, then he wouldn’t be calling me back, but any message I left could tip off the bad guys that I was searching for him.
I then made three successive calls to the Tiptree Corporation, asking the switchboard to connect me with Hinckley, Payson-Smith, or Morgan; I switched off my phone’s camera when I made these calls. On each try, the computer-generated woman on the screen informed me that none of the three were “available at this time.” Remembering that Tiptree employees wore smartbadges that would pinpoint someone’s location in the complex, every time I called I made up a different excuse for being adamant: a relative phoning Hinckley to tell her about a sudden death in the family, an insurance claims adjuster for Payson-Smith, a dental assistant calling to tell Morgan that next week’s appointment had to be changed. On each occasion, the computer put me on hold, only to come back a few moments later to tell me that none of the three were at the company offices today.
This confirmed my suspicion that the three surviving members of the Ruby Fulcrum team had taken a powder. I didn’t accept the virtual receptionist’s invitation to leave voice-mail messages for any of them; I had a hunch that none of them would be coming back to work anytime soon.
Not long ago, this might have signaled a dead end for a reporter on the trail of a missing person, but Pearl had his own resources. While I was taking the slow boat to China, he had already boarded an SST.
Tracker is an on-line computer service, little known by the public at large but used extensively by professionals who make their living by snooping into other people’s lives: PIs, skip tracers for bondsmen, credit bureaus, lawyers, and direct-mail ad agencies, not to mention a few investigative journalists who didn’t mind playing loose and fast with professional ethics. If you’ve ever wondered why all your credit card bills tend to arrive at the same time you missed a payment on one card, or why you suddenly get loads of junk mail advertising dog food or private kennels only a few days after you adopted a stray mutt from the local pound, services like Tracker are the reason.
Tracker is expensive. At five hundred bucks for the first fifteen minutes and escalating from there, it’s not something you logon at whim. It’s difficult to access—the company that runs it likes to keep a low profile—but if you have its on-line number and a gold card, then you too can poke around in someone else’s private affairs. All you need is that person’s name, and you can find out virtually anything available on them through various private-sector databases.
Pearl seldom used Tracker. As a privacy-minded journalist—and, yes, there are still a few of us around—he was loath to invade the personal business of a nonpublic figure, and peeking into someone’s credit card accounts is the type of thing that has given reporters a bad name. Yet this was one time he was willing to play lowball.
“Here she is,” he said after he had entered Hinckley’s name, hometown, and place of work. I bent over his shoulder to look at his computer screen. Next to HINCKLEY, BERYL was a street address in St. Louis and a phone number. “Try that.”
I picked up his desk phone and dialed the number. “No answer,” I said after I let it ring a dozen times. “She didn’t turn on her answering machine.”
He nodded. “Okay. Now look the other way for a minute.” He shot a sharp glance over his shoulder at me. “I’m going to do something you shouldn’t know about,” he said. “Only a jerk like me would stoop to something like this.”
I turned away while Pearl keyed in a new command. Just outside the office door, I spotted Chevy Dick hanging out in the office corridor, jawing with one of the bohos from the production staff. He was probably dropping off this week’s “Kar Klub” column. If things weren’t so intense right now, I would have wandered over to join the bull session.
“Okay,” Bailey said, “you can look now.” I turned back around to see that a new window had opened at the bottom of the Tracker screen; it displayed the account numbers of three major credit cards—Visa, MC, and AmEx—along with their current balances and the dates of their most recent purchases.
“You’re right,” I said. “Only a jerk like you would do something like this.”
“Nothing TRW doesn’t do every day,” he replied. “Now looky here …”
He pointed at the line next to the Visa number. “Three hundred fifty-dollar ATM cash advance, taken out last night at nine forty-six. And see this?” He jabbed his finger at MC and AmEx numbers below it. “Another three-and-a-half c’s from the other cards, taken out just a few minutes later. Probably from the very same machine.”
“Twenty-one fifty-eight,” I murmured, noting the time entered during the AmEx transaction. “Almost ten o’clock. That’s not long after John was shot … probably right after she took off from Clancy’s.”
Pearl nodded his head. “Uh-huh. She headed straight to the nearest ATM and took out as much cash as she could—just over a grand altogether—and there hasn’t been another charge on any of her cards since.” He glanced up at me. “She didn’t want to leave any tracks behind her.”
“Credit card receipts?”
“You got it. Your girlfriend didn’t want to have to pay for anything with a card because that would allow someone to trace her, so she grabbed as much cash as her credit limit would allow. That’s a sign of someone who’s going underground.” He rubbed his jaw pensively as he stared at the screen. “Now I wonder if she …?”
He called up her driver’s license, then cross-referenced it with her credit cards. “She didn’t rent a car,” he said after a few moments. “Car rental agencies always ask for a license and enter it into their records, but this shows she hasn’t used her license for anything.”
“What about Morgan and Payson-Smith?”