Project Moses - A Mystery Thriller (Enzo Lee Mystery-Thriller Series)

by Robert B. Lowe

  “So, what were you trying to do in the labs?” interjected Lee.

  “Stop the killing. Do you know how many monkeys die in this country every year in the name of medicine and developing new drugs? More than 28,000. Think of it. You could populate a couple of rain forests. If you count the number that die during capture or because of disease, the number is probably twice that.

  “That’s just the beginning,” continued Warrington. “There are hundreds of thousands of cats, dogs, rats, rabbits. It’s just too horrific. To a Hindu, that’s unbelievable. It’s criminal. Somehow, it must be stopped.”

  “Okay. So what specifically were you trying to do?” asked Lee. “Do you know about specific experiments? Are there some specific documents? Maybe I can get them through a public document request.”

  Warrington laughed.

  “This is all covered up,” said Warrington. “You think they’ll just tell you? Lawrence Livermore Labs is involved. The UC School of Medicine uses thousands of dogs each year. There’s no record of it. It’s all off the books. That’s where we’ll get ‘em. The coverup. You’re a reporter. You should know that. Watergate, right?

  “That’s all I can tell you, man,” said Warrington suddenly, turning his back on Lee and walking toward his group. “Talk to my lawyer if you want anything else.”

  Lee watched as Warrington sat down again on the brown blanket.

  “Hey, Lloyd,” the guy in the serape greeted him.

  Someone handed Warrington a bottle half filled with a pink fluid and he took a quick swig, keeping his eye on Lee the whole time.

  Lee walked back to Warrington and stood over him.

  “What about your trial?” said Lee. “You know the prosecutor and the judge both died after your trial.”

  Warrington shaded his eyes with one hand as he squinted up at Lee. He took another swig from the bottle in his other hand.

  “I guess the Bible would call that justice,” said Warrington.

  ***

  AFTER THE THIRD ring, the computer 3,000 miles away answered the call. A few seconds later, a soft squeal was audible as the connection was made. “Access code:” read the white lettering that suddenly appeared on the deep blue screen of the monitor. The man sitting in front of it typed in: “Nightwriter.” Next, the computer asked for his user ID. He typed in the initials “GWK.” Finally, he was asked for his personal code, and he typed in: “Gloria.” He wondered for a moment who “Gloria” was. Maybe it was the wife or daughter of the person whose initials were “GWK”. Perhaps his mistress. Or his poodle.

  The menu of words that suddenly appeared across the top of his screen flushed away the Intruder’s idle speculation. The list told him that with a few keystrokes he could look into GWK’s personal documents files, explore his electronic mail and even look into the computerized calendar to see what appointments were scheduled for the next day. But, the only thing about GWK that interested the Intruder was that through him the Intruder could access the same information for any of the 44 reporters on the staff of the San Francisco News.

  In a couple of minutes, he was rummaging through the stored files of Enzo Lee. He bypassed 90 days worth of old newspaper stories and concentrated on everything the reporter had input into the computer since the day that Judge Miriam Gilbert and prosecutor Orson Adams had died. He was delighted to find that the reporter used the computer for everything: notes of interviews; telephone numbers of contacts and sources; appointments; even reminders to send birthday cards.

  The Intruder was less sanguine to see that Enzo Lee had been assigned to cover the deaths of both Miriam Gilbert and Orson Adams, and that Sarah Armstrong was in his telephone list. But, the Intruder had anticipated the possibility that someone might try to link the deaths of the judge and prosecutor. As a hedge, he had made sure they were provided with such a connection in the form of a petty burglar named Lloyd Warrington. He was relieved to see that the planning was paying dividends. When he was finished with his electronic foray, the Intruder turned off the lights in his government office and joined the evening commute on his way home.

  • • •

  “NI HAU MA, lai lai,” said Lee.

  His grandmother was staring out the window of her small room. She shuffled slowly on the green linoleum in her brown, fuzzy slippers until she could see Lee. She was tiny and seemed almost childlike to Lee. She was bent forward, her head naturally angled toward the floor unless she exerted the effort to lift it as she did now.

  She blinked at Lee, focusing through thick eyeglasses that magnified her eyes to twice their size. Her hair was white and fell to her shoulders. Her face was round and held a wistful expression. She remained silent.

  Lee walked over to her and guided her to a soft chair with padded arms.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Look what I brought you.”

  He produced a wrapped slice of wintermelon.

  “Ummm,” she said, accepting the melon in both hands and inspecting the pale flesh. “Doeng gwa. Makes good soup.”

  Lee usually brought his grandmother some sort of Chinese vegetable. She didn’t seem to realize that she couldn’t cook in the rest home. She would give the food to a nurse to keep for her and then forget about it. But, she enjoyed getting it.

  In his youth, Lee had seen his grandmother on rare occasions, usually at the weddings and funerals of relatives. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he learned his grandparents had broken off all contact with his mother before he was born. She had refused his grandparents’ order to end a relationship with a young man considered unsuitable. She not only defied her parents but had the audacity to accept her lover’s proposal. Thomas Lee was Italian-Scottish and died in an auto accident when Enzo was 8. The rift within his mother’s family survived.

  Then, Ben Hom, one of Lee’s cousins, had called him one day in New York. It was soon after his grandfather had passed away. His mother had died a few months earlier. Only his grandmother had attended his mother’s funeral. And, Lee hadn’t bothered to attend his grandfather’s. Ben’s message was simple: His grandmother was ill and wanted to see him.

  It had been an emotional meeting. He could never fathom nor totally forgive the abandonment of his mother. But, when he saw his grandmother, small and weak, in the hospital bed, he couldn’t help but feel compassion for her. Then she showed him the scrapbook. Pictures of his mother growing up. A report card from the fourth grade with straight A’s. A newspaper clipping announcing his mother at age 13 as the featured dancer at a Chinatown benefit. Pressed flowers from her prom night.

  She described how she had hidden the book from his grandfather, saying that she had thrown it away. Then, his grandmother had shown Lee a second scrapbook. It was filled with clips of newspaper stories that Lee had written. She had been having friends and relatives in Florida and New York collect them for years. He quickly realized the only words his grandmother could read in the stories were his name.

  “Your mother and your grandfather were the same,” she had told him. “Very strong will.”

  Afterward, Lee had felt a kinship with his grandmother that was based on more than common blood. He guessed it was the way people felt when they discovered someone else who has lost their loved ones to the same war.

  She had recovered from her illness. Now, his grandmother was physically well but her mind wandered, leaping decades in a moment.

  His grandmother abruptly looked up at Lee.

  “What stories you work on, Enzo?” she said.

  “Oh, the same old thing, grandma,” he replied. “A little bit of this. A little bit of that.”

  “I’m sure they very good, Enzo,” she said. “I so proud of you. I see you name in paper alla time.”

  She suddenly handed Lee the melon and pushed herself out of the chair.

  “I will cook this later,” she said. She went to the dresser and pulled out a scrapbook and began turning the pages.

  “Your mother. So beautiful,” she said.

  Chapter 9
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  JORGE MASVIDAL HAD watched the numbers grow daily in the small camp in the middle of the vast sugar plantation he supervised. Most of them came with a bag or two. Some came with nothing more than a paper sack carrying a clean shirt, underwear and a couple of pairs of socks. Invariably, they came ill prepared for the back-breaking work they faced.

  He wasn’t surprised. Nothing surprised him in the state controlled economy of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the reduction in aid to Cuba, he had witnessed the technological regression of the country’s agricultural industry with increasing dismay. First, the new tractors due the year before had never arrived. Then, the replacement parts to keep the old machines running failed to materialize. Finally, the gasoline and diesel oil needed to operate all of the machinery on the farm ran out.

  Instead of machines and fuel, Masvidal was getting men, hundreds of them. Buses brought more each day, soft-handed urban dwellers conscripted into work gangs and forced to work for the glory of Cuba for 90 days at a time. It had taken all of Masvidal’s resourcefulness to keep them all decently sheltered and fed, much less turn them into a labor force capable of plowing, planting, irrigating and fertilizing the fields.

  Now, Masvidal was facing a problem even greater than overseeing the substitution of man for machines. Something was destroying his fields. It had started with the most southern plantations, a brown powdery growth that first attacked the leaves and then spread into the precious sweet cane itself. It had spread northward at the rate of twenty miles a week. Finally, it had reached his plantation.

  Like the other plantation supervisors, he had tried to fight back. He had burned the worst fields, hoping to spare the others. It hadn’t worked. Nothing did. The small supply of fungicides he had on hand was exhausted almost immediately. Now, he was trying to salvage what he could. Maybe 15 percent of the plants resisted the disease. At least he could harvest that much in the fall. The disaster was solving his other problem, however. Now, Masvidal could start sending the laborers back to Havana.

  • • •

  LEE WAS SURPRISED when Sarah Armstrong called him at the newspaper earlier in the day. He knew that the simple funeral for Judge Gilbert had been the day before. He had intended to call her in the next day or two. He wanted to see how she was recovering from her injuries. Lee also wondered whether Sarah could shed any light on the events of the past few days.

  When Sarah asked if they could meet to talk about her “accident,” he suggested dinner that night and Sarah agreed.

  After returning from Berkeley in the late afternoon, Lee had stopped at his flat, spent a half hour with his grandmother in the rest home, and then drove to Sarah’s. He found his leather jacket in the trunk of the Fiat. Sarah buzzed him in, and as he trudged up the interior stairway, he could hear her shuffling footsteps off somewhere in the flat.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said as he reached the top. He walked down the hallway to the large living room that looked out on the street, and again admired the beautifully finished hardwood floors, maple paneling and tall white walls that curved into the ceiling 12 feet overhead.

  Sarah came in through the dining room moving slowly on her bad leg. She was wearing black corduroy pants, a beige cashmere turtleneck with splashes of red and blue, a black suede jacket and hand-tooled cowboy boots.

  “Hello,” said Lee. “No ballroom dancing tonight, huh?”

  Sarah smiled at him. “I’ll take a rain check. You wait. I’ll be back on my rollerblades in another week.”

  “Are you a big rollerblader?” he asked. Lee couldn’t help associating rollerblades, neon clothes, zinc oxide and Walkman tapeplayers with the decline of Western civilization.

  Sarah shrugged.

  “I’ll do anything that involves spending time in Golden Gate Park,” she said. “Bike, run. Even ride those stupid paddleboats in the lake.”

  Sarah directed Lee to the nearby Hilltop Cafe on Filmore Street, a small restaurant with dark polished wood and elegant lace tablecloths. They found a parking space in front. Lee was famished and immediately ordered fried calamari to go with his Samuel Adams beer and her camomile tea.

  After he put down his menu, Lee had a chance to study Sarah more carefully than he had earlier. He noticed her hair had a hint of auburn in it. Aside from lipstick, she wore little makeup. Her face was well tanned. She must have spent a lot of time outdoors. He could imagine her in ski goggles, slaloming down a mountainside in perfect, no-nonsense form. Sarah’s menu was flat on the table, her hands palm down on either edge. She was studying it carefully. She sat with her shoulders squared but leaning slightly toward him.

  “You’re staring,” Sarah said, without looking up.

  “Oh. Yeah. I’m sorry.” Lee looked at his hands and realized he had been unfolding and refolding his napkin. He put the napkin down and took a gulp from his beer.

  Sarah looked up and studied him for a few moments with a considering gaze.

  “So,” she said. “How did you end up at the News? I understand you used to work in New York.”

  “Quite a change, huh? So, you’ve been checking up.”

  “I have my sources. I want to know who I’m dealing with.”

  “It’s not a particularly interesting story,” said Lee.

  “That’s all right. Tell it anyway.”

  Lee could see that he was going to have to give her at least part of his story so he retraced the early years of his journalism career. He started with the years in Florida, learning the craft, moving to various newspapers in the itinerant lifestyle of a young journalist. He didn’t try to describe exactly what he wrote about. He glossed over the New York years.

  “So what made you leave New York?” Sarah asked.

  Lee finished his beer. Set down the bottle and ordered another.

  “Change of climate,” he said. “I just couldn’t stand the cold anymore.”

  They were silent for a minute. Lee studied his thumbnail, irritated that he had lied. It must be the guilt. He was still paying for that original story about Judge Miriam Gilbert. He took a sip of water.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I needed a change.”

  “And has it been a good one?”

  “The jury is still out. I have a city editor that I am ready to murder, though. So I may just kill him and get it over with. It would simplify my life. The only drawback would be the food on Death Row, speaking of which…I’m starving.”

  Lee ordered salmon filet in a creamy sauce with minced ginger and mango. Sarah opted for New York strip steak. While they waited for their food, Lee demanded equal time.

  “You know that I’m an attorney, right?” said Sarah.

  Lee nodded while he speared another lightly crusted circle of calamari. “Second in your class at Hastings. You went to work for some big law firm, right?” Sarah nodded.

  “But you left after two years,” he went on. “I guess the money was too good. See. I have my sources, too.” Lee flashed a smug grin.

  Sarah lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly. “Your intelligence is remarkable,” she said. “You must have honed those investigative skills working for Newsday.”

  Lee munched the calamari slowly. It had suddenly turned rubbery. He eyed Sarah thoughtfully.

  “All right,” he said. “I get the message. Tell you what. I’ll fill you in on all the sordid details of my past. Just not today, okay? I don’t want to ruin my appetite.”

  “Besides,” Lee said through another ring of calamari that was starting to taste better, “I want to hear your story. Tell me why you left and what you’re doing now. That part I don’t know and I am curious.”

  “Well, as I guess you know, I spent the first two years out of law school at Flowers & Myce. It was a very prestigious law firm, or so they thought,” said Sarah. “I hated it. I just wasn’t ready to spend my entire life making and saving money for rich people. I need more suspense than wondering whether the kids will make it into Stanford.

  “So, now I wo
rk at a small firm of lawyers that specializes in prosecuting lawsuits against employers, mostly accused of discriminating against women, minorities or the elderly,” Sarah continued. “I like the work. I run my own cases. I get into court. I have a lot of fourteen hour days but it’s good.”

  “Is that why you were so close to your aunt? I mean the fact that you were both lawyers?” asked Lee.

  Sarah nodded. “Yes. There was that. Actually, it was more. My family…our family…was not what you could call full of professionals or academics. Aunt Miriam blazed the trail. She really inspired me. And, she helped me along the way. It was a lot of things.”

  At the mention of her aunt, Lee could see Sarah’s mood darkened perceptibly. Fortunately, the food arrived on cue and Lee fell back to a safe discussion of their favorite restaurants.

  They skipped dessert and Sarah proposed that they return to her flat for coffee and more privacy than was available at the tightly packed restaurant. They still hadn’t discussed what had happened earlier in the week outside the News’ building.

  Chapter 10

  THE MAN IN the blue Ford station wagon had been waiting outside Sarah Armstrong’s flat for two hours before Enzo Lee had arrived. Abdul Hassan had followed Lee’s Fiat when they drove to the restaurant, parking farther down on Filmore Street and then walking back up Filmore where he could watch them through the large windows of the Hilltop Cafe.

  When he saw that they were ordering dinner, Hassan returned to Sarah’s flat. He parked the station wagon a block away and walked back to the flat. Hassan was Egyptian by birth, although he had moved to Queens as a teenager. He had short black hair and a thick, well-trimmed mustache. He was wearing jeans, Reebok running shoes, and a gray sweatshirt with the hood drawn over his head.