by Ben Bova
“Paul, we ought to go over our options.”
“Yeah. But let’s order dinner first.”
She smiled. “Good thinking.”
The service was slow, but Cochrane found his prime rib satisfying, although a trifle underdone. Sandoval said that her Dover sole was delicious.
They talked over their options, which hadn’t improved since Cochrane had skipped out of his meeting with Gould’s scientists. Sandoval ticked them off on her slim fingers: her nails were lacquered Chinese red, Cochrane noticed.
“We can go back to Gould, apologize, and collect the money he’s promised us,” she said.
“And hope that we live to spend it,” Cochrane added.
“Or we can go to one of Gould’s competitors. Tricontinental Energy, for example.”
“Who’s just as bad as Gould, I bet.”
She cocked her head slightly to one side. “Paul, all the energy companies are going to have the same attitude. They don’t want a practical hydrogen fuel system to compete with petroleum. Not yet.”
“Not until they’ve squeezed the last nickel in profits out of the oil.”
“There’s something more involved,” Sandoval pointed out. “Oil is a major factor in international politics. Especially Middle Eastern politics.”
“So that means,” he said slowly, “that if we went to the feds with this…”
“They might want to suppress it just as much as Gould and the others.”
“But the president says we have to develop new energy technology,” Cochrane replied, his voice almost pleading. “We’ve got exactly what the White House wants!”
Sandoval’s face took on an expression like a patient schoolteacher disappointed with a student’s answer.
“Paul,” she said softly, “what politicians tell the public and what they really want are two different things.”
“I know,” he admitted. “It’s just that, well, I thought maybe if we could get to the president or somebody high up in the West Wing…”
She looked directly into his eyes. “How do you think Gould tracked us down? How do you think he knew where to send Kensington to find us?”
“You mean he’s got access to police data?”
“Local, state, and federal,” Sandoval said. “Right up to the FBI. Count on it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Cochrane muttered.
Their waiter coasted to tableside, smiling brightly. “And what can I bring you for dessert?”
Despite the anxieties gnawing at him, Cochrane slept soundly in the museum residence’s guest bedroom. When he awoke, though, the other bed was empty.
Quickly he showered, shaved, and dressed. When he opened the bedroom door the aroma of sizzling bacon hit him. He went down a narrow corridor and found the kitchen.
Fiona Neal had wedged her bulk into the little booth tucked into an alcove, a half-finished plate of bacon and eggs before her. The windows were bright with morning sunshine. Cochrane saw the courtyard outside with its sculptures.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Fiona said, with a smile. “Coffee’s in the urn. Can you make your own breakfast or shall I?”
“Morning,” Cochrane replied. “Coffee and juice is fine for me.”
“Juice in the fridge,” she said, pointing.
“Where’s Elena?” he asked as he picked a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator.
“She was up early. Said she had to run a few errands.”
Errands? Cochrane wondered. What errands?
He poured steaming coffee into the mug that was waiting beside the urn, then took it and his juice to the booth. Sliding in, he saw that Fiona in her colorful caftan filled the other bench almost completely.
“I want to thank you for taking us in like this,” he said.
Fiona shrugged. “Ellie told me all about it this morning. I’m sorry about your brother.”
“Thanks.”
“You two are in something of a pickle, aren’t you?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She picked up her coffee mug in both hands and raised it to her lips. She didn’t drink, though, just held it there while she studied Cochrane with her deep brown eyes.
Feeling uneasy under her scrutiny, Cochrane said, “You must be very close to Elena.”
“Very close,” she replied.
“You’ve known her a long time.”
“How long have you known her?”
Cochrane thought a moment. Christ, it’s only been a week. No, more. He counted mentally.
“Ten days,” he muttered.
“You don’t know much about her, then.”
“Not much,” he admitted as he asked himself, Where is she? Where did she go? What’s she up to?
Fiona took a sip of her coffee. Then, “Is there anything I can tell you?”
Cochrane didn’t reply, but in his head he asked, Can I trust her?
She must have read the troubled expression on his face. “Well, whether you want to hear it or not, I’m going to tell a tale out of school,” she said.
“What?”
“Something that Ellie probably couldn’t tell you about herself. Maybe she doesn’t want you to know, but I think you should.”
Cochrane asked, “About herself?”
Fiona nodded solemnly. “She was twelve years old when I first met her, at a foster care home. Her father had been sexually abusing her for a couple of years and finally beat her up so badly she had to be hospitalized.”
“You took her in?”
“Somebody had to. I thought it’d just be a temporary thing, till she recovered physically and emotionally. The broken bones healed soon enough.” Fiona’s eyes shifted away from Cochrane, as though looking into the past.
“What about her mother?” Cochrane asked.
“A tramp. She took off when Ellie was a baby. Father drank, more and more as time went by. A couple of years after Ellie moved in with me the police found him dead of a heart attack in an alley behind some bar.”
“Swell childhood,” Cochrane said.
“It left its scars. Ellie worked for me here at the museum, became a docent. She was good at it, too: people liked her and she really got interested in the art we displayed.”
“That’s good.”
“But not good enough. You know how good-looking she is. After the way her father battered her she swore to me that she’d never let a man get the better of her again.”
Puzzled, Cochrane said, “But… I mean, we…”
Tight-lipped, grim, Fiona explained, “She found that she could use men to get what she wanted. I tried to set her straight but she told me she was just evening the score, letting men think they were taking advantage of her while she was taking advantage of them.”
Cochrane’s throat went dry.
“She got pretty wild for a time. She told me once, ‘They think they’re screwing me, but I’m really screwing them.’”
“Shit,” he mumbled.
“We went ’round and ’round on it. Fought like two cats in a cage. I know it sounds corny, but I was battling to save her soul.”
“Were you able to?”
“Sort of. Ellie was smart enough to figure it out for herself, eventually,” Fiona said, tapping the tabletop with her finger. “She realized she was on her way to becoming a whore and she stopped. Almost.”
“She’s more selective, you mean.”
“Let me tell you about it. We had a robbery here at the museum back when she was living here. Six paintings taken off the walls, including a Rembrandt and two Degas watercolors. The Boston PD, the state police, the FBI—none of them could find where the artworks had been taken. Ellie did.”
“She did?”
“One of the museum guards was under suspicion, but the police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Ellie sweet-talked him all the way to the North Shore millionaire who bankrolled the theft. He wanted to hang our Rembrandt, Christ in the Storm, in the fallout shelter he’d built for himself in his
mansion up in Swampscott. Said he was going to convert the shelter into a chapel and hang the Rembrandt over its altar. Can you imagine?”
“Elena found it for you?”
Fiona nodded happily. “I got the pictures back and the religious millionaire got a nol-pros from the state supreme court.”
“They didn’t prosecute him?”
“Money talks. The guard got fired and the two guys who actually took the paintings off our walls are still in prison, but the man who caused it all walked.”
Cochrane leaned back against the booth’s cushioned wall, his mind trying to process all this information.
“Ellie got the reward money that our insurance company had offered, and she figured right then and there that she could support herself pretty damned handsomely as a sort of unlicensed private investigator.”
“She told me she was doing industrial espionage.”
“I suppose there’s a good deal of money in that,” Fiona said.
Bitterly, Cochrane said, “Well, she’s good at what she does.”
“Oh, no,” Fiona blurted. “You’re taking it the wrong way. She told me this morning that you’re different. She’s not interested in the money. She’s interested in you.”
Cochrane felt a thrill of exhilaration. But then his common sense took control. “Yeah. Nice story. But how can I believe that—”
“She’s never lied to me,” Fiona Neal said firmly. “In all the years I’ve known Ellie, she’s never told me a lie.”
PALO ALTO:
CALVIN RESEARCH CENTER
With a surprising pang of sorrow Dr. Jason Tulius looked over the twelve men and women who comprised his senior scientific staff. Most of them had been graduate students of his when he’d founded the Calvin Research Center, young, enthusiastic, cocky. Now there was more gray in their hair than he had ever expected to see; they were quieter, more careful, fatter.
I should talk, he said to himself. I’ve gained thirty pounds over the past ten years, and it’s not all in my beard.
He had called his senior scientists together at the end of the nominal working day. Not that they punched out at five o’clock, like the administrators and support people. Most of the scientists stayed on long beyond the official quitting time. They enjoyed their work. They were driven, self-motivated men and women. Tulius often thought that they would pay him to let them do the research that they wanted to pursue.
The twelve of them were seated casually in Tulius’s office. They had pulled chairs from his little conference table and his assistant’s office outside to form a rough semicircle facing their director, who had wheeled his high-backed swivel chair from behind his desk to face them. Tulius unbuttoned his tan corduroy jacket and leaned back in the comfortably yielding chair.
“You’re probably wondering why I asked you here,” he began, grinning.
They chuckled politely.
“To listen to old jokes?” asked Rose Peterson, his second-in-command. She was a tiny, elflike woman with a granite jaw and piercing ice-blue eyes.
“No,” Tulius answered, his grin fading. “We need to discuss what Mike Cochrane was doing.”
“Mike was a flake,” said Ray Kurtzman. “We let him get away with murder.”
“That’s a clever choice of words,” Dave Lincowitz cracked. Like Kurtzman, he was bearded and wore a short-sleeved, open-necked shirt.
“You know what I mean,” Kurtzman retorted. “Mike went off and did his own thing. He wasn’t a team player.”
“He reported to me,” Tulius said. “He didn’t have an entirely free hand.”
“Who the hell does?” someone mumbled.
“But I’ve got to admit that his reports weren’t exactly monuments of clarity and disclosure.”
Olivia Vernon, the youngest of the twelve, and in Tulius’s eyes by far the prettiest woman in the center, cleared her throat and said, “Mike told me he was coming into a lot of money soon. I got the impression he was going to quit and go off on his own.”
Tulius said, “That may be true. As Ray said, Mike wasn’t a team player.”
“He had something cooking,” Lincowitz agreed. “He was working nights.”
“Working on some chick he picked up in Mountain View,” said Carlo Zapata, who headed the center’s instrumentation engineers.
“Is that true?” Rose Peterson asked. “Did he really have an affair going on?”
“That’s what he told me,” Zapata replied.
“Maybe that’s what got him killed,” suggested Kurtzman. “A jealous husband.”
“Or a jealous wife.”
Tulius shook his head. “How would an outsider get into his office? Past our security?”
“It’s not that tough,” Lincowitz said. “Especially if Mike allowed the visitor in.”
“Or brought her in with him.”
“Her?”
“His wife.”
“Did you see the size of her brothers at the funeral? One of them could have done it.”
“Do you think Mike was stupid enough to allow one of those bozos into the building?”
Tulius raised his hands shoulder-high, palms out. “Enough of the personal chatter. I’m not interested in Mike’s love life and it’s the police’s job to find out who killed him. I want to see what he was working on.”
“You think that has some connection to his murder?” Olivia Vernon asked.
“It might. But more important, Mike expected to get a lot of money for whatever he was doing. If he made some sort of breakthrough we ought to be able to find out what it is and duplicate it.”
“He was studying those stromatolites in that hothouse of his up on the roof,” said Rose Peterson.
“He had some interest in genetic engineering,” Tulius said.
“That was last year’s hobbyhorse,” replied Jake Freeman. “He was all over me for months, asking about techniques for gene splicing. Then he lost interest in it.”
“I don’t think Mike lost interest,” Tulius said. “I think he found what he wanted to know and then went off on his own.”
“Genetic engineering? Gene splicing?” Kurtzman shook his head. “He was playing with cyanobacteria, for god’s sake. Not E. coli or some other genetic engineering subject.”
“Yeah, but maybe he wanted to splice some foreign genes into the cyanobacteria.”
“Why the hell would he want to do that?”
Tulius was certain that he knew the answer to that, but he kept silent.
“Maybe he wanted to make them resistant to environmental insults. Or see how they might give rise to a new species.”
Within seconds all twelve of the scientists were spouting ideas and arguing with each other. Tulius sat back in his swivel chair and let them blabber. From such wild-ass debate comes new ideas, he thought. Sometimes. He folded his arms and watched their animated wrangling. This is all my fault, he told himself. I gave Mike too much freedom, let him wander off on his own without enough control or direction.
But he definitely hit on what we were looking for. I gave him all the freedom he wanted and then when he finds what we were after, he decides to quit the lab and go off on his own. Christ, if the police knew about that, they’d suspect me for his murder. Tulius thought about that as the argument raged among his senior scientists. Yes, he decided. Michael found what he was looking for. But he wasn’t going to tell me about it, after all the years I supported his work.
“Wait,” he called out.
The scientists stopped their arguing and turned toward him.
“Let’s organize this debate. What do we know for certain about Michael’s work?”
“He was dealing with the cyanobacteria.”
“Measuring their oxygen output.”
Tulius added, “And he had shown an interest in genetic engineering.”
“But he dropped that.”
“Or went underground with it,” Tulius suggested.
“Underground?”
“The chances are that Michael wa
s going to quit the center and go out on his own,” Tulius said.
“He couldn’t, not legally,” said Zapata. “He signed a nondisclosure agreement just like the rest of us.”
“Some smart lawyer could crack that.”
“You think so?”
“That’s what lawyers are for, dammit.”
Kurtzman got them back on subject. “So Mike was going off on his own with his oxygen-producing cyanobacteria.”
“And a working knowledge of genetic engineering,” added Rose Peterson.
Lincowitz shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like it’s worth a big jackpot of money to me.”
“Maybe Mike was just bragging. Exaggerating?”
“Why?” Tulius asked.
“To impress us.”
“Or whoever his girlfriend was.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Does anybody here know who the woman was?”
“If there was one.”
“From what he told me,” Zapata said, “it was somebody he’d met at a conference in Denver. Not one of our people.”
“He was romancing some girl in Denver?”
“Woman,” Rose Peterson corrected.
“Hey, Rose, I could’ve said broad.”
Zapata said, “I got the impression the, uh, woman came here. She was living here locally someplace.”
Tulius raised his voice again. “Let’s forget about the gossip and concentrate on Mike’s research. We’ve got to retrace his steps and find out what he was doing.”
They all nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
“I take it,” Rose Peterson said, “that this scavenger hunt will be in addition to our regular work?”
“That’s right.”
She sighed heavily. “There are times that I wish I was on an hourly wage.”
“Yeah,” Kurtzman agreed. “Then we could collect overtime pay.”
Tulius smiled paternally at them. Grousing was normal. He knew they were just as curious as he about the research that got Michael Cochrane murdered.
But Tulius was also curious about something else. His financial people had been handling a takeover bid from some holding company in New York with a Wall Street address. The offer had been good enough to tempt Tulius, and only his fears of being pushed out of the laboratory that he had created, the organization that was his chief joy in life, led him to turn down the Wall Streeters.