by Tom Clancy
“Well, Newman, you shot your bolt,” Marten rumbled. “If you hoped to shock anyone into confessing, you’ve failed. All you’ve done is make yourself the main suspect.”
The whole group settled into mistrustful silence.
At last, Maura Slimm said, “If it was such a big scandal, why isn’t it better-known?”
Spike Spanner gave a snort of laughter. “I can answer that one. Hey — look at what happens to anyone who even mentions the damned case?”
Megan O’Malley held the door while Leif Anderson stood in the entryway to her house, trying to stamp off the snow sticking to his low boots. They were ankle height, but dressy — the fine leather was already soaked.
“I thought Washington had mild winters. The Brits used to classify their embassy here as subtropical.”
“About every fifteen years we get a serious snow-storm.” Megan shrugged. “Count your blessings. They’re facing a real blizzard up in New York.”
“Yeah, but back home, I’ve got the clothes to deal with this.” The snow was gone now, but his shoes squelched as he stamped on the welcome mat.
“Just take ’em off,” Megan finally said. “We’ll try stuffing them with something and putting them on a heat vent to dry them off.” She looked Leif in the eye. “I suppose I should be flattered that you’d brave this weather to come and see me.”
“Actually, it’s your folks I need to see — or rather, their library.”
Now Megan really gave him a look. “I wonder if you’ve heard of this wonderful thing called the Net. You can check out whole libraries and even buy books without leaving your house. It beats turning blue at the edges and ruining a pair of shoes.”
“I’d rather not advertise what I’m interested in,” Leif replied. “But I figure, between your parents’ books and yours, you might have some of the stuff here I’m looking for.”
“Well, you can ask my folks,” Megan said. “They’re both home. Some people have enough sense to stay out of the snow.”
Megan’s mom was a freelancer for The Washington Post, while her dad was a mystery author. Both worked out of the house — even if sometimes “work” seemed to mean frowning at the displays of the stories they were writing.
Robert Fitzgerald O’Malley seemed glad for the interruption as the kids came into his office. “Leif!” He exclaimed, turning in surprise. “What brings you out in weather like — whoops!”
His sudden movement dislodged a teetering pile of books on the table next to him. Megan and Leif helped him retrieve the fallen volumes. She wound up holding books titled The Dictionary of Imaginary Places and Modern Metallurgy. Leif had True Crimes of the Twentieth Century and The Living Sword. He held the last book up, staring at the cover. “Aldo Nadi’s autobiography!”
“That’s right,” Megan’s dad said, “you’re a fencer.”
“Not in that guy’s class.” Leif added his books to the new pile Megan was creating on the table. “I can’t figure how all this stuff comes together — but then I never expected the way you worked out Morte Siciliano, either.”
“You read it?” The novelist beamed, almost as proud of his books as he was of his children.
“Leif wants to do a little digging in the library,” Megan said.
“Certainly,” her father said.
Megan grinned. Anything for a reader of R. F. O’Malley, she thought.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” her father asked.
“Biographies, I suppose.” Leif pointed to the true crime book in the pile. “And maybe a little of that.”
“I got that from Julie. It sounds more like the journalist’s side of the stacks.” Megan’s dad rose from his chair. “Let’s go and ask.”
Megan generally tried to stay away from her folks while they were working. The little house was noisy enough, thanks to her brothers. Luckily, Mike was off doing research, and Rory, Paul, and Sean were out investigating the exotic phenomenon of snow in D.C.
Julie O’Malley, Megan’s mom, had apparently reached a good stopping point in her story when Megan, her dad, and Leif came into the living room. “Biographies?” she said when Dad passed along Leif’s request. “Most of them are over here.”
“I’m especially looking for anything about the Callivant family,” Leif said.
Megan gave him a look. What was this all about? He takes one look at a girl who insults him, and all of a sudden he’s digging into her family tree?
“We’ve got a couple of books—Lost Promise, about Steve, Will, and Martin.” Mom made a face. “That was family-authorized, so there are lots of interviews, but it’s also something of a puff piece for the Callivants.”
She went to the shelf and chose a book. “America’s Anointed has a lot of stuff about the Callivants, and it’s much more balanced. There’s a story about Will Callivant’s daughter—”
Leif nodded. “The one who got involved in that weird spring break incident with those guys. She’s been in a private sanitarium ever since.”
Julie O’Malley nodded grimly. “You know that one? While life has been hard on the Callivant men, the family curse seems to be just as hard on the female members of the clan.”
Leif dug a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I was wondering if you had A Death in Haddington, by Simon Herzen.”
Megan stared at the rude noise her mother made. “That piece of…writing?” Julie O’Malley shook her head. “I was in journalism school when that came out. The buzz about the book was tremendous. Everyone said Si Herzen was going to blow the top off a big cover-up.”
Leif leaned forward eagerly. “And?”
“Then it hit the stands and sank without a trace. I read it. Herzen had done a clip job, more or less cutting and pasting what the media had printed and broadcast about the Hadding case. The book stank, but we never knew why. Maybe the publisher’s lawyers got into the act, or the Callivants got to Herzen or the publishing company.” Megan’s mom looked disgusted. “I wouldn’t give that book house room.”
The library shelves did yield a few other volumes about the Callivants. A couple were pretty old. One had a couple of chapters on Priscilla Hadding’s death.
Leif thanked Megan’s mom. Then Megan led him into the kitchen to get some plastic bags to wrap up the books.
As soon as they were alone, Megan folded her arms and stood in Leif’s path. “You’re up to something. What’s all this about the Callivants?”
“It’s for Matt,” Leif said. “He’s in trouble, and the Callivants may be the cause of it.”
Megan listened to the story of how Matt’s mystery sim had spiraled out of control. “I guess we should be glad we didn’t get into this world to play,” she finally said. “What’s he going to do?”
Leif shrugged. “Right now he’s just watching the clock tick away.”
While Megan worked to make a good, waterproof package, her mother came back in. “Here are your shoes, Leif, but I think you’d be better off with a pair of Rory’s boots.”
She looked worriedly out of the kitchen window. “The snow has stopped, but now we’re getting freezing rain.” A car went skidding by on the street. “Snow’s bad enough in this town, but this may even be worse.”
Matt hadn’t even gone out of his house. He’d sat in the kitchen, explaining things to his parents…and watching the clock move ever closer to Ed Saunders’s deadline. How long would it take the Callivants’ lawyers to start badgering him and his parents?
Matt’s father was obviously thinking the same thing — and worrying about it. “I just don’t understand,” he said for what had to be the fiftieth time. “How could you sign an agreement like that?”
“It’s fairly standard, Dad. Don’t you read the fine print whenever you load in a new program?” Matt said gloomily. “It’s just never been an issue in any of the programs I’ve used.”
“I find it hard to believe that giving away those kinds of rights would be standard,” Gordon Hunter said.
Matt’s mom ca
lled to them from the living room. They came in to find her standing in front of the computer console. Some sort of document, much enlarged, floated before her in holographic display. “I’ve been calling up the agreements for various sims we’ve used,” she said. “Look here.”
“That’s my tennis game,” Matt’s father said, looking at the heading of the display.
“Read this bit of fine print.”
Word for word, it was the same as the clause in the agreement Matt had signed, giving the sim operator the right, if necessary, to reveal the identities of all participants.
Gordon was shocked. “I thought the Revised Privacy Act of 2013 was supposed to protect consumers against things like this.”
“And I suppose this little clause is what the lawyers came up with to get around that law,” Marissa Hunter said grimly. “It’s also in my flight simulator. As Matt says, it appears to be an industry standard.”
“I’ll bet we could challenge that in court,” Matt’s father said.
His wife merely gave him a look.
Sure, we could challenge it, Matt thought. If we had money like Leif’s father, we could even afford the time and the lawyers. But Dad was a teacher, and Mom a career Navy officer. Their income wouldn’t let them hire a fraction of the kind of legal talent the Callivants already had working on this.
Dad must have realized the same thing even as the words were coming out of his mouth. Silently he led the way back to the kitchen to watch the hands of the clock advance.
The deadline came, then dinnertime. Everybody in the Hunter family barely touched the food on their plates, waiting for…something. A call, a virtmail message — Matt had ordered his program to sound a special chime if anything came in.
There was only silence as they tried to eat, silence as they cleared the table, silence as they cleaned the dishes.
“You would think Saunders would let us know, one way or the other,” Matt complained as he stacked plates in the kitchen cabinet. “Unless it might have something to do with the weather?”
Marissa Hunter gave her son a wry smile. “They don’t usually declare snow days for legal problems,” she said.
Matt waited a little while longer, then finally said, “I’m going to call him.”
Going to the living room console, he recited the Net address that had engraved itself into his memory. The computer display blinked for a moment, then Ed Saunders appeared. “Can’t talk to you right now,” his image announced. “But you can leave a detailed visual or virtmail message — your choice.”
Disgusted, Matt cut the connection. “He’s not there! What would he be doing out on a night like this?”
“He could be hiding behind his automated answering system,” Matt’s father suggested, “using it to screen his calls.”
“You mean he doesn’t have the nerve to face us.” Matt angrily returned to the computer, giving it a new set of orders. The machine took a moment or two to sift through the Net. But it finally came up with a physical address to match the owner of the Net site.
Matt told the computer to plot the location on a map of D.C., marking the nearest Metro stations.
“What are you thinking of, Matthew?” his father asked, his voice concerned.
“I want to know where we stand with this mess,” Matt replied. “It looks as though Saunders lives only a couple of blocks from the Waterfront Metro station.”
“You’re not thinking of going out in this ice storm,” his mother said.
“I’m thinking of going under it.” Matt looked at his parents. “Do we really just want to sit here and wait for whatever it is to fall on us?”
In the end Matt and his father, bundled up like Eskimos, wound up setting off for Ed Saunders’s house. Several times on the long, slippery walk to the Metro station, Matt wished he hadn’t been so persuasive. The frozen rain was coming down in tiny pellets of ice, which flew along on a howling wind. And no matter which direction they walked in, the wind seemed to be gusting right into their faces.
Now I know how it feels to be sandblasted, Matt thought as a new crop of sleet tore across his exposed skin. He could barely see where he was going through his slitted eyes, and every step he took along the slick sidewalk threatened to dump him on his butt.
It was a distinct relief to skid down the stairs to the station. But then they faced an infuriating wait for a train. “A good part of the Metro system is open to the sky,” Dad said. “I guess even the rails are getting iced up.”
At last their train arrived and took them, along with a few other harassed-looking evening commuters, across town. Clinging to an ice-crusted handrail, they made their way up the stairs. Of course, the wind had swung around again so that it was in their faces.
Head down, his cheeks feeling as if they were being peppered with tiny buckshot, Matt half-walked, half-skated through deserted streets.
Sure, he thought. Anybody with an ounce of brains in their heads would stay indoors and warm during a storm like this.
He and his dad slogged along until Gordon Hunter asked, “Two blocks, you said. How many blocks have we gone now?”
Holding on to a glazed light pole, Matt swung around to squint up at the street sign. Great. Now only half his face was being ice-blasted. “It’s right around the—”
He broke off as he spotted the lump in the middle of the block off to their left, almost beyond the wan circle of light thrown by the ice-frosted streetlight. It was a human-shaped lump, half-on, half-off the sidewalk.
“Dad!” Matt burst out, skidding toward the still form.
When he got close enough to make out details, Matt stopped so quickly, his father almost rammed into him from behind.
The ice-crusted lump was human. Worse, it was familiar.
Ed Saunders’s bluish face stared blankly up into the pelting ice storm, immobile despite the stinging particles rattling down on his cheeks, his nose…his open eyes.
Matt didn’t need to see the reddish-black stain on the curb beneath Saunders’s head to know that the man wouldn’t feel anything ever again.
6
After nearly having his face peeled off by gusts of wind-borne ice, Matt was glad for the shelter of the police patrol car. He’d had to open his coat to get out his wallet-phone and call for help. For the rest of the time he and his father had stood at the scene of the accident, Matt hadn’t been able to shake the resulting chill.
Maybe it was psychological, a reaction to standing beside a dead body. There was no doubt that Ed Saunders was dead. Matt had tried to resuscitate him, but it was like working with a very stiff dummy. He knew it was hopeless, but he’d had to try. Saunders’s cold flesh had just sucked away more of Matt’s body heat. Worst of all was the knowledge that the effort was a lost cause. Saunders already had a thin coating of ice over his eyeballs.
All in all, Matt had been glad when the police officers had arrived and put him in the stuffy warmth of their squad car. But the smell was wearing on him now. It stank of harsh cleanser and, under that, just the barest trace of vomit. Matt gulped against a suddenly rebellious stomach, wishing he hadn’t recognized that other scent.
He tried to distract himself by thinking of what lay ahead. His dad wasn’t with him. Gordon Hunter was sitting in the sector sergeant’s car, which had arrived just a moment after the ambulance Matt had called. But the paramedics had stayed in the meat wagon while the cops stood hunched in their blue parkas, guarding the scene of the accident — or, perhaps, of the crime.
It looked to Matt as if Saunders had slipped on the ice and cracked his head on the curb. But as he sat in the caged rear of the patrol car, he had to admit the possibility that Saunders might have had his head cracked before he hit the ground. No wonder the cops had been so interested in the people who had found the body and called in the accident. That’s why they’d separated him from his father — so neither would hear the other’s story.
So, what would Monty Newman have done in this situation? There was at least one Lucullus Mar
ten novel where the assistant sleuth had been accused of murder….
Annoyingly, Matt’s thoughts refused to get together and stay together. His eyes kept closing. The warm air wafting from the car’s heater was putting him to sleep.
The blast of cold air and ice that invaded the car when the door opened was a shock. But Matt got an even bigger shock when he managed to focus his eyes. He knew the man leaning into the car. It was David Gray’s father.
Martin Gray was a detective for the D.C. police — on the homicide squad. He looked almost as surprised to see Matt as Matt was to see him. “You’re a long way from home — on a night when most people would prefer to stay there,” David’s dad said.
Matt replied with a bone-cracking yawn. “Sorry,” he apologized. “I was dozing off in here.” He blinked. “My father and I were going to see Ed Saunders, the — the man out there.” Matt pointed through the fogged window toward the curbside.
“It must have been pretty important to come out in the middle of a storm,” Martin Gray prompted.
“Seemed so at the time,” Matt said. “I’d better start at the beginning.” He told the detective about the sim and the resulting problems. “Is there some reason to think that Saunders was killed?” he asked when he’d finished.
“I wouldn’t exactly call you a suspect,” Martin Gray replied dryly. “But what you tell me does explain something we found on the late Mr. Saunders.” He held up a piece of paper. “I guess you didn’t notice this in his pocket.”
Matt shuddered. “I was just trying to give him CPR.” An unpleasant memory intruded — how Saunders’s ice-impregnated coat had crackled under his hands while Matt tried to revive him.
“Saunders must have been working on an answer for those lawyers you mentioned.” Detective Gray held out the paper. It was a computer printout, but somebody had attacked the crisp letters with a smeary ballpoint pen. Lots of words had been scribbled over, with whole new sections of the letter put in by hand. “Is that the name of the law firm? Do you recognize any of the names in the list down here?”