PMadriani 12.5 - The Second Man

by Steve Martini

  Chapter 4

  “WHY NOT TAKE his case?” Joselyn puts it to me. We are getting ready for bed. She is out of the shower, a towel wrapped around herself, her hair still wet. She is standing in the master bath, the door open, facing the mirror, tracing one of the laugh lines under her eyes with a finger.

  “I’m not sure there is a case.” I am seated on the edge of the bed in my underwear, looking toward the open bathroom door.

  “He sounds like he needs help,” she says.

  “So do a lot of other people. Why do you care?”

  “I just think he’s an interesting man.”

  “That was pretty apparent.”

  “What do you mean?” She turns and looks at me.

  “The two of you tonight.”

  “What about it?”

  “Just that he was all over you like a cheap blanket.”

  “Are you jealous?” She turns and smiles at me.

  “Jealous? Who me? No!”

  “You sound like you’re jealous.”

  “I’m not. It’s just . . . well, in a public place like that. It’s, well . . . it’s unseemly, that’s all.”

  “What are you talking about? It was a bar.”

  “His hands were all over you.”

  “You are jealous.” She laughs. “That’s OK, I think it’s cute.”

  I feel the blood rush from my face as she looks at me, giggling. “I just think you should have stopped him,” I say.

  “Stopped what? You make it sound like I slept with him.”

  “It looked like you wanted to . . .” The instant the words pass over my lips, I know it’s a mistake. I would inhale and try to suck them back, but it’s too late.

  “What?”

  This time when I look up, there is a fierce anger in her eyes.

  “Listen. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I . . .”

  She slams the bathroom door in my face. A half second later, I hear the lock click on the inside.

  “Joselyn, please!”

  She fires up the hair dryer. The whining motor behind the shuttered door creates its own acoustic therapy chamber, me outside in the cold.

  Chapter 5

  A COUPLE OF days go by. It is getting lonely sleeping downstairs on the couch. I tell Harry this, and he asks: “So what are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. She is out of town overnight on business. She left me a note this morning.”

  “A note?” says Harry. “It’s that serious?”

  “I tried to call her a couple of times on her cell. She is not taking my calls. I’m hoping that by tomorrow, when she comes back, she’ll be in a better mood.”

  “Never been married myself,” says Harry. “But my experience with women tells me that’s not likely to happen. With them, silence is like a sliver under the skin. It tends to fester.”

  “How can I talk to her if she won’t take my calls?”

  “Buy her some flowers,” says Harry.

  “You think so?”

  “I don’t know. Like I say, I’ve never been married. What did you finally tell Akers?” Harry changes the subject. “Did you tell him we weren’t taking his case?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. He never called back.”

  “That’s strange,” says Harry. “He wanted an answer that day. Remember? He seemed pretty desperate for counsel.”

  “Maybe he found somebody else,” I tell him.

  “What is Herman saying? Is he taking it lying down? He was the one in Akers’s corner. He and your better half,” says Harry. He rubs it in.

  “He says Akers hasn’t shown up at the gym since our meeting at the Brigantine. He hasn’t seen him. Said he tried to call him. There was no answer.”

  “Tell him to leave the man alone. We don’t want to kick a sleeping dog.”

  “You think flowers might work?” I ask him.

  “You might try sending her some. Find out where she is staying tonight and have them delivered,” says Harry. “Or if that doesn’t work, try some diamonds.”

  “I’ll start with flowers.”

  “Cheap screw,” he says.

  For a man with no real love life, Harry sometimes has good instincts.

  I call Joselyn’s office and ask her secretary where she is, the name of the hotel where she is staying. What I get back is not what I want to hear. According to her secretary, Joselyn is not away on business. She has taken time off from work. They are not sure exactly how long she’ll be gone. What is worse, they have no idea where she is.

  When I tell Harry this, he looks up at me. “Maybe she just needed some time off to be alone.” But even Harry is not buying this. I can tell by the look in his eye as he says it.

  Call it paranoia, but the specter of Joselyn and Akers off together is beginning to do a number on my head.

  Chapter 6

  AKERS’S EYES WERE shaded behind a badass pair of Gatorz sunglasses, his gaze riveted on the highway as they sped north up I-5.

  “Nice car,” said Joselyn.

  “Yes, it is.”

  He was driving a gleaming black Escalade. It looked new, clean inside and out as if it were uninhabited, unlike Joselyn’s old Honda, which was a rolling trash can. She wondered how he could afford it.

  “Have you had it long?”

  “What?”

  “The car,” said Joselyn.

  “Not long. No. You know, I was a little surprised when you called,” he said.

  “You did invite me.”

  “I didn’t say I was unhappy. Just surprised.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I figured it would take you a little longer to get away.”

  “You mean my job?”

  “I mean your boyfriend,” said Akers.

  “Paul, yes, well . . . sometimes he thinks he owns me. He doesn’t.”

  “I was glad when you called,” said Akers. “I needed to get out of town. I was just looking for an excuse to leave, for a place to go and someone to go with.”

  “Wanderlust?” she asked.

  “You might say that. So when you called, it was perfect. Did you tell Madriani where we were going?”

  “No.”

  “So I take it he doesn’t know you’re with me?”

  “He doesn’t need to know,” said Joselyn.

  “Why, because he’ll go ballistic?”

  “That’s his problem. As far as I’m concerned, this is business. My job.”

  People at the foundation had heard all kinds of stories about the latest incarnation of the Triton, the Navy’s latest version of its high-altitude long-range UAV. The problem was that none of the information could be verified. They could wait until Jane’s US Military Aircraft Recognition Guide published specs, but that could take years. The craft was rumored to be modified for STAL, short takeoff and landing, and to have a beefed-up undercarriage and larger wheels. Speculation was that it was being designed to land in a remote location and take off again. Why wasn’t clear. One possible theory was rescue missions, assuming the soldier or downed airman could move to the vehicle and get on board, perhaps in some kind of a pressurized capsule. Word was it was be equipped with fine computer controls for midair refueling. Given the Triton’s current capacity to stay aloft for more than a day, in-flight refueling could mean that it might stay in the air almost indefinitely. The ability to hover over a battlefield for hours or even days and to provide real-time surveillance and intelligence would be a huge breakthrough. And then there were the sci-fi stories regarding ordnance, optics, and radar. It was believed to possess not only ground-penetrating radar, but a new system that would allow radar visuals inside hardened military structures. How this was achieved wasn’t clear, but Joselyn suspected that it was the development of this system that led to a civilian police counterpart. Police agencies around the country had begun deploying handheld radar systems that could penetrate walls to observe human conduct, movement, and activity inside homes. They had done this with little or no public notice and no assuranc
e that search warrants would be obtained. Such systems could shred the entire concept of any reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere or under any circumstances. If such a system was about to be deployed in the skies, Joselyn wanted to know about it. And she wanted to be the first to broadcast the alarm.

  “Sounds like the two of you had an argument.”

  “What?”

  “You and Madriani.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hope it was about me.”

  “Let’s drop it,” said Joselyn.

  “Whatever you say.” Akers looked over at her and smiled.

  “How long do you think it will take us to get there?” she asked.

  “Six hours, maybe less depending on traffic. But we got a late start. I was thinking maybe we’d stop somewhere along the way for the night. It would be best if we get there in the early morning.”

  “Why is that?”

  “That’d be our best shot to see the bird on the ground,” he said.

  “Are you sure it’ll be there?”

  “As far as I know. I talked to one of the researchers on the phone night before last. They’re testing takeoff and landing in the morning.”

  “STAL,” said Joselyn.

  “How would you know about that?” he asked.

  “What you in the Navy call scuttlebutt,” she told him. “Do you go up there often?”

  “Hunter Liggett?”

  She nodded.

  “No. Not these days anyway.”

  Fort Hunter Liggett is situated on the eastern slope of the coastal range in central California. It was part of the old Mexican land grant known as Rancho Piedra Blanca. The grant was issued to the Pico family by the Mexican government in the 1840s. In 1865, George Hearst, then a prosperous mining engineer and soon to be U.S. senator from California, bought the old Rancho as part of his holdings, hundreds of thousands of acres spanning from San Simeon on the Pacific Coast to the old Mission near San Miguel, on what is today Highway 101. Hearst’s son, William Randolph of publishing fame, sold large portions of the ranch to the federal government in 1940, just before the outbreak of World War II. Two military installations were established, Hunter Liggett and Camp Roberts, both of which remain in operation today. They run from dry grasslands under ancient oak trees to rugged mountains and serve as training grounds for tank crews, gunnery operations, and, at times, classified aerial operations. Thirty years ago, a military security blanket was thrown over large portions of the ranch when a highly classified fighter-bomber crashed there during testing. Though the government hushed it up, and the public wouldn’t hear the term for years, the aircraft in question was an early version of the stealth bomber.

  “Any truth to the rumor that there’s a spook facility of some kind up there?” asked Joselyn.

  “What do you mean ghosts?”

  “You know what I mean. CIA,” said Joselyn.

  “Ah. The Culinary Institute of America.”

  “You can’t talk about it, is that it?”

  “I think they offer cooking classes at the mess from time to time.”

  “Forget I mentioned it.”

  “I used to get up there regularly. To the airfield at Liggett, I mean,” he said, changing the subject. “Back then, it was one of my assignments. I did tech surveillance, so I got involved with the first primitive birds. You know, the little hand-launched radio-controlled jobs. The UAVs that look like toy models. I got into it just as they were being developed. We field-tested some of the early prototypes.”

  “On actual missions?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “That was before SOC, Special Operations Command, settled on the Puma. It’s been through three incarnations now. I think they’re working on another. Are you familiar with it? The Puma?”

  “A little bit,” she said. “These early toys topped out at five hundred feet, fifteen-kilometer range, three-and-a-half-hour battery, optical and infrared cameras . . .”

  “You do your homework, don’t you?”

  “I figured I’d better read up on what the Navy uses. I didn’t want to waste your time.”

  “Waste away,” said Akers. He looked over at her and smiled. “It’s amazing how far they’ve come in terms of range, altitude, and optics. You can read the name stitched on a guy’s tunic from five hundred feet up. Nobody can hear the thing. Feeds all the data to a command center through a satellite. Real-time surveillance. You can keep it in the air for two hours to be safe, bring it back, charge it up, and send it out again. When you’re done, you could fold it up and put it in your backpack.”

  “It is amazing,” said Joselyn. “Now all we need is to find some peaceful applications.”

  “Oh, we found those,” said Akers.

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. If you search and kill enough of the right people, the result is peace.”

  “Search and rescue is what I was thinking,” said Joselyn. “The fact is, there is nowhere you can have privacy anymore.”

  “From me you mean?”

  “No. I mean from your UAVs. Nowhere to hide.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Why would you want to hide from me?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure you’ll give me a reason.” Joselyn winks at him. “Are you sure these friends of yours will allow me in? I mean, if this is classified stuff . . .”

  “If it’s guys from Stanford, civilian researchers, don’t worry about it. Let me do the talking. If there are military types around, then we’ll have to be more careful. I’ll take the lead.”

  “I don’t want to get you in any trouble,” said Joselyn.

  “Don’t worry. If anybody goes to jail, it’s probably gonna be you.”

  “Well, that makes me feel better.”

  Chapter 7

  HERMAN HAS BEEN trying to reach Akers on his cell phone for two days without success. I am having the same luck with Joselyn. In her note, she didn’t say when she would be back, only that she had some business out of town. I thought she would be home by now. But there is no word. I am beginning to harbor some serious worries.

  Eight o’clock in the evening, and I’m out of the house, on the hunt for leads as to where she might be and whether she is with Akers. I leave a note, large block letters on the kitchen table in case she comes home. I tell her to “PLEASE CALL ME!”

  Herman and I visit a bar and grill on Orange Avenue about a block and a half north of the law office. It’s a place called McP’s. According to Herman, it’s a hangout for some of the SEALs down on the Strand, not the BUD/S trainees but older, enlisted types. Herman had met Akers there twice for beer in the evenings. He tells me that Cam has friends who frequent the place. Herman has met a few of them. I’m hoping that one of them might know where Akers is so that I can contact him to find out if Joselyn is with him, and if so, to make sure she’s OK.

  My suspicions are not grounded in sand. I know Joselyn. I picked up enough of the arcing energy between them on the other side of the table that evening at the Brigantine to know that it wasn’t just sexual dynamism at work. Neither was it idle curiosity or hero worship. Jocelyn was on a quest, looking for information, the reason she wanted to meet Akers in the first place.

  Joss reads Jane’s Defence Weekly the way most women read Vogue. To her, a SEAL from Team Six, somebody who had been to Abbottabad, would be a walking repository of military secrets. There would be no end to the dark, tactical deeds and technical details such a person would know.

  There was talk that night about drones, UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. That much I heard, and more. It was one of Joselyn’s relentless quests—the black-box doings and dealings of DARPA, an acronym in search of a name—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I had heard her talk about it enough times that it was now committed to memory. DARPA is the Pentagon’s equivalent of the stiff-upper-lipped Q in James Bond. If the military needs a new toy, DARPA will invent and develop it. Or it will contract with a university research lab to do
the job.

  The minute Joselyn mentioned the foundation where she worked, Akers had used DARPA like a lure. He cast it into the narrowing abyss between then. And when Joss bit, he reeled her in. The question is, did they go off together, and if so, where? If it’s work she is doing, then that’s fine. I had, after all, left her alone enough times for my own career that she has every right to do the same. If it is more than that, I need to know. Right now, I am worried.

  When we get to McP’s, I know the place. I have passed it a thousand times walking here and there, but for some reason I have never gone in. It’s not what I would think of as rowdy dive for hard-bitten SEALs. It looks more like a tourist spot.

  There are small-paned windows underscored by glossy, green-painted flower boxes across the front. From the outside, the building has a quaint cottage feel. There is an oversized cupola perched on the roof ridge, a boxy ornament that looks as if it’s about to swallow the building. Four large windows in the cupola emit a green glow from inside. This is topped by a dome.

  Inside, it’s cozy, what you might call warm. There are six or eight stools against the bar at the far end, a few tables and booths against one wall with green, tuck-and-rolled curving benches to match the green carpet. You get the sense that if you looked hard enough, you might see leprechauns peering out from the potted plants against the wall.

  Herman scans the bar, four guys perched on the stools talking. One of them is tall. They seem very fit. They could be SEALs, but I don’t know.

  Herman shakes his head. He doesn’t recognize any of them. He checks the tables and studies a small group gathered in one of the booths. They look like tourists. “No luck,” he says.

  I’m about to turn and leave when he grabs me by the arm. “Let’s look outside.”

  We troop through the place. I follow Herman. We head for the open door at the back, what looks like a small beer garden, wooden tables under large umbrellas. As we exit the building, I can see that the patio outside is bigger than I thought. Several long strings of incandescent lights illuminate the area, giving it a party atmosphere.