by David Zeman
There were differences, of course. The Boston girls lacked the dramatic physical changes that overtook the Pinocchio victims just before death. Some of them were alive many years after falling ill, while the Pinocchio Syndrome left no survivors.
But one final link convinced Karen that the disorders were related—the worddonkey that Jane Christensen had pronounced in her delirium. This convergence—though most observers might call it a coincidence—was too powerful to ignore. Karen thought it was a crucial “dot” that, when connected to its fellows, would complete the picture she sought.
There were other dots she still had to find. She began by obtaining from the girls’ families the precise dates of their discovery after being victimized. The episode had occurred fifteen years ago, over the seven-month period from October to April. All but one of the girls had been discovered the day after a nighttime outing. Most had gone out to the movies or to a party. One had gone to visit a sick relative. Two of the girls, less subject to parental discipline than the others, had not told their parents their destination. They were simply out.
Karen got the impression from the parents that all of the girls had been slightly wayward. A bit rebellious. Girls who had presented slight discipline problems for their parents. It was difficult to be sure of this, because the parents were naturally motivated to idealize the girls in memory.
Also, to judge from their photographs, they were all attractive girls with good figures and pretty faces.
Only one girl was an exception to the rule of waywardness. She was an Advanced Placement math student with a 4.0 grade point average at a special school for gifted children in Waltham. Her name was Emily Koehler. A bookish girl who had never given her parents a moment’s worry, she was also the only victim who had been on a daytime errand at the time of her disappearance. She had taken the bus to Cambridge to attend a mathematics clinic for high school students at Harvard.
Ask him what happened at Harvard. Karen’s antennae were alert. The episode involving the fourteen girls had occurred during Michael Campbell’s junior year at Harvard.
The transcripts of Harvard students were not confidential. Karen obtained a copy of Michael’s transcript from the registrar and made a careful study of it. In the reference archives at the Harvard University Library she found class schedules of the courses Michael had taken that fall and spring. From the breakdown of lectures, quiz sections, and exams, it was clear that Michael had been in Boston on each of the dates when the local girls became ill.
There was another thing to consider. In February of Michael’s junior year the recurrence of his scoliosis was discovered. Michael arranged to take final exams early in all his courses, and underwent his second spinal surgery on April 22. He spent the rest of the spring and summer recuperating. The next fall he was back at school. He joined the swimming team in November and was excelling at racing by the following spring.
The last of the Boston victims, a girl named Judy Luszczynski, was found unconscious in a city park on April 2 of that year. The series ended with her.
Karen filed this fact away in her memory. She sat back to ponder what she had learned. Obviously the key facts so far pointed to a connection between the voice on Susan’s telephone and Michael Campbell’s career at Harvard. This connection involved illness. Grimm had told Karen “he has made people sick before.”
Karen decided to widen her net. She would explore the possible connections of all the major players in this year’s political situation to that forgotten year.
She flew back to Washington and settled in at her computer for a long siege of research.
She began with the well-known figures. Dan Everhardt. Colin Goss. Kirk Stillman. Tom Palleschi. Susan Campbell. And, to make the series complete, the president.
She opened her online news archive, navigated to the year in question, and searched the index for the names, one by one. All were political figures at the time except for Colin Goss, so they left constant trails of news items, large and small, in their wake. The search was surprisingly easy.
The president, then a U.S. senator, visited Boston once that year, just before Christmas. The rest of the time he was in Washington or in his home state.
Dan Everhardt, then a congressman from New Jersey, went to Boston for a weekend with his wife to visit her mother in January. That was his only visit of the year.
Tom Palleschi, who had relatives in Boston, visited his mother in a nursing home the first Sunday of every month, flying back to his then home of Chicago the same evening.
Kirk Stillman, then a cabinet officer, did not visit Boston at all that year.
Susan Campbell was in Boston as a Wellesley student all year. She did not meet Michael Campbell until the spring, just before his surgery. When she visited his hospital room, she was a new friend, barely known to him.
That left Colin Goss. Karen’s news archive contained few items about him. Then, as now, Goss had been chairman and chief stockholder of The Goss Organization, based in Atlanta. He traveled widely, visiting his companies around the world and attending meetings with executives and stockholders. His precise itinerary was not available.
Karen went to the Library of Congress and began searching for Goss in the major indexes and catalogs. Her search led almost immediately to the one source she had foolishly overlooked all week.
It was a biography.
Karen had seen it before, but paid no attention to it because it was an authorized biography written by a Goss PR executive and published with funds provided by Goss himself. Clearly it was a love letter, the kind of pablum one often saw published by corporate people whose minions are paid to strew roses in their path.
But now, in paging through the book, Karen saw that it included a detailed chronology of the formation, acquisition, and divestiture of all the companies under the huge umbrella of The Goss Organization. She carefully searched the chronology for the year that the girls in Boston got sick. Her breath came short.
Colin Goss was putting together a major New England regional headquarters that year, and was involved in meetings starting in September. The new headquarters was officially dedicated on May 25. It was located in a downtown skyscraper whose striking triple towers became a highlight of the Boston skyline.
Goss must have attended meetings in Boston throughout the year. The headquarters could not have been set up without his personal supervision.
Goss,Karen thought.
It seemed as though the sun was breaking through the clouds after a long absence. She cursed her own blindness.
He has made people sick before.
Who else would have the capacity to intentionally make people ill? Who on the planet was more perfectly equipped to conduct biochemical terrorism than Colin Goss?
He has made people sick before.
Follow the trail of the sick.
Karen xeroxed the chronology before leaving the library. Her first stop was a business bookstore on M Street where she found a paperback copy of the Goss biography, which she bought and took home with her.
52
—————
Alexandria, Virginia
April 5
JOE KRAIG had had a long day.
He had spent the morning on the phone with contacts from all the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He attended a noon meeting with Ross Agnew and the CIA director, discussing the progress of the investigation. At three he attended a press conference given by the director of the FBI.
The whole day was an embarrassment. The investigation was stalemated. Though a handful of witnesses had been found who might have seen Susan’s MG en route from D.C. to Pennsylvania, no one had thought to notice whether a car was following Susan. It was simply too much of a long shot.
As a potential victim of abduction, Susan Campbell had done the worst thing she could possibly do. She had slipped away from home, unseen by anyone, and led her abductors right to the one isolated spot where they could take her without anyone seeing it happen.
“This hasn’t been a good year for the intelligence agencies,” observed the senior CNN correspondent sarcastically. “First a deadly terrorist nuclear attack which the federal agencies have not solved or punished. Then three political leaders neutralized, under highly suspicious circumstances, without the government being able to explain why. Now the most admired and visible political wife in the nation is missing, and you can’t tell us what happened or why. Are you surprised when you hear that the public’s confidence in the government agencies is at an all-time low?”
The question was hard to answer, the more so since CNN had just done a poll that confirmed that sixty-five percent of the population disapproved of the way the administration was handling the crisis. The broadcast media were full of man-on-the-street interviews with citizens who complained that the abduction of Susan Campbell was part of a pattern, and that the law enforcement agencies had neither the intelligence or the sincerity to get to the bottom of it.
“They’re all in on it,” said one middle-aged voter, summing up the national paranoia. “I’m not sure who is giving the orders, or who stands to benefit. But this is nothing new. We’ve seen shenanigans like this before. Ever since the Kennedy assassination . . .”
Kraig’s workday didn’t end until after ten. He badly needed a hot shower and a martini. He turned into his condo complex with a sigh of relief.
Then he saw a familiar figure sitting on his doorstep.
“Oh, shit.”
Karen Embry stood up when she saw Kraig emerge from his sedan. She was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, her battered briefcase by her side.
“It’s old home week,” he said. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“I’ve got to talk to you.” The reporter seemed nervous, intent.
“What about?”
She gestured to his apartment. “Is it safe in there? From bugs, I mean.”
Kraig shrugged. “From the occasional ant or roach, no. From the kind of bug you mean, yes. I sweep the place myself.”
“Good.” She kept her eyes on him as he turned his key in the lock.
He opened the door and motioned her to the living room, which looked dusty and unkempt. “Make yourself at home. Want a drink?”
“Sure. Whatever you’re having.”
“I’m having a martini.”
“Well, maybe not that. Gin makes me fuzzy.”
“Bourbon?”
“Thanks.”
He took off his jacket and flung it over a kitchen chair, wrinkling his nose as he smelled his own perspiration. The shower would have to wait.
He poured a stiff Early Times for the reporter and a short Beefeater martini for himself. He noticed the answering machine blinking, and didn’t bother to count the blinks. There were at least twenty calls every night by this time.
“What’s up?” he asked as he returned to the living room.
“I take it you’re no closer to finding Mrs. Campbell,” she said.
“Off the record, no.” There was no sense in denying the obvious, Kraig thought.
“Listen,” Karen said. “Susan Campbell had been receiving crank phone calls from someone who wanted her to find out what had happened with her husband at Harvard,” she began.
“How did you know about that?” Kraig asked angrily.
“So you knew too,” she observed.
“I asked you a question. How did you find out about it?”
“Remember the interview I had with her?” Karen asked. “I told you the phone rang while I was there. She went to the kitchen to pick up the phone. There was an extension in the living room. I listened in.”
Kraig let out an exasperated sigh. “Christ, you’re something.”
Karen lit a cigarette, giving Kraig time to cool off.
“How didyou know?” she asked.
“Susan told me.”
“When?”
“Back in January. Before any of this happened.”
“You mean she had calls before?”
“Off the record, yes, she did.”
“Before Everhardt?” Karen asked.
Kraig shook his head. “It was after Everhardt. That’s why she was worried. She thought Michael wasn’t safe.” He shrugged. “As you can see, not so.”
Karen saw the unintentional irony in his remark. If Michael Campbell was not in danger, Susan herself certainly was. Events had proved this.
“Did you investigate the calls?” Karen asked.
“No. I told her to tell me if it happened again.”
“Did you tap her phone?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She didn’t ask me to tap it.”
“And you didn’t do it on your own?”
Kraig gave Karen a twisted smile. “If you were in my position, how much cause would you need to tap the telephone of a United States senator? What if Michael found out?”
Karen nodded. “I see what you mean.”
“Besides,” Kraig added, “that kind of crank is par for the course when you’re in politics. What politician with a profile like Michael’s doesn’t have a hundred cranks coming out of the woodwork with stories about his secret sins?”
Karen was looking at him steadily. He wondered if she sensed the defensiveness behind his glib answers. After all, he did regret that he did not have a recording of the voice Susan had told him about.
“Did Mrs. Campbell tell her husband about the calls?” Karen asked.
“I don’t know.” Kraig looked impatient. “Where are you going with this? Do you think the crank on the phone is connected to her disappearance?”
Karen puffed at her Newport. “Let me start from the beginning,” she said. “This business about Harvard interested me. I have another source who suggested to me that there might be a connection between the present events and the past. With a specific connection to people getting sick in mysterious or unexplained ways. So I spent some time in Boston investigating.”
Kraig said nothing.
“It turns out there was a rash of unexplained illness affecting young girls fifteen years ago,” Karen said. “Fourteen girls were affected. They became mentally and physically incapacitated overnight. The doctors couldn’t find the cause of the problem. And, needless to say, no cure.”
“Did they recover?” Kraig asked.
She shook her head. “They slipped into coma. Nine have died in the years since. The ones who are still alive are vegetables. I saw them all.”
Kraig said nothing.
“Does this remind you of something?” Karen asked.
“No. Should it?”
“How about the Pinocchio Syndrome?”
Kraig thought for a moment. “Were there physical changes?”
Karen shook her head. “But the other features of the illness are certainly reminiscent of what we have going now.”
“Like what?”
“Sudden incapacitation. Mental and physical paralysis. Coma. Complete absence of any trace of a known organic pathogen or toxin. Totally incomprehensible disease in a person who should be healthy. See what I mean?”
Kraig nodded. “All right. What else have you got?”
“I was concerned about this phone crank who told Susan to find out what happened at Harvard.” Karen sipped at her drink. “I checked the academic records for Michael Campbell’s junior year at Harvard, the year these girls got sick. Michael Campbell was on campus for every one of them.”
“Why shouldn’t he have been?’ Kraig asked. “He was a student there.”
Karen shook her head. “Listen. These girls disappeared when they were out at night, going to movies, things like that. It looks as though they were picked up by somebody. In every case but one they were found the next day. And that one exception was a girl who was attending a math clinic on the Harv
ard campus.”
“So?” Kraig asked.
“So, Michael Campbell was on the scene for every one of those girls.”
“So was I,” Kraig said. “I was a junior that year myself. I was in Cambridge all year. What do you make of that?”
Karen ignored the question. “I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, though the similarity between the unexplained disease then and now impressed me. So I checked out the whereabouts of everybody who’s involved in this year’s events, from the president on down.”
“And what did you find?” Kraig’s tone was patronizing, bored.
“People like Dan Everhardt, Tom Palleschi, and the others were busy with their careers,” Karen said. “They spent a day or two in Boston that year, no more. But Colin Goss is a different story. His New England pharmaceutical subsidiary was setting up its headquarters in Boston that year. Goss was in town every few weeks from October to May, when the subsidiary officially opened.”
Kraig was silent. He looked less bored.
“Goss was in the city on each and every occasion when one of those girls went out for the evening and was discovered incapacitated the next day,” Karen said.
Kraig was looking at her steadily. “Did the Boston police check out Goss?”
Karen smiled. “Are you kidding?”
Kraig shook his head wearily. “Karen, you’re tilting at windmills again.”
“I don’t think so.” Karen was adamant.
Kraig sighed. “Colin Goss is a three-time candidate for president of the United States. Do you seriously think he hasn’t been checked out every which way by the FBI over the years? Not to mention the other major agencies? If there was a skeleton in his closet, we’d know about it.”
Karen held back her reply to this. She believed a man of Goss’s power was more than capable of keeping the intelligence agencies out of his private business.
She was tempted to tell Kraig about Grimm, but prudence told her to keep this crucial source to herself.
“You’re not impressed by the coincidence?” she asked.