The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Jude was ready to give up, when they noticed that the congressmen seemed to be hurrying though the corridors. A guard explained that a quorum call had been issued for a vote on a budget amendment, the last order of business before Congress would adjourn to start its summer recess. No wonder they were so eager to vote.

  The two found their way to the visitors' gallery. Skyler took a front-row seat and peered down from the balcony, just as the speaker gaveled the proceedings to order and asked for a voice vote. A roll call was ordered, and the congressmen could be seen flipping switches at their curved mahogany desks to ignite a tally board off to one side.

  Skyler elbowed Jude in the ribs. "That one, down there, fourth row back on the right."

  Jude found him. A slightly rotund man with dark-framed glasses and a balding pate shining through a not-very-successful comb-over.

  "I think so, but I'm not really sure. I need to face him directly."

  They located the man's seat in the printed visitors' guide called "Know Your Congresspeople." It was a seat that belonged to the delegation from Georgia.

  Ten minutes later, the people's business having been concluded, the gavel came crashing down and the figures below clamored out of their seats. They pumped each other's hand, gave a hug here and there, boomed goodbyes in hearty voices and disappeared as quickly as children on the last day of school.

  Jude and Skyler had to ask directions three times, but eventually they found the office. The door with a glazed window and the number 316 was closed. They passed it by and stood far away at the end of the corridor where it joined the rotunda, waiting. All up and down the hall, doors opened and men and women hurried past, carrying briefcases and magazines, a look of urgent expectation on their faces. After a good ten minutes, just when the place was quieting down, the door to 316 opened. Out scurried the small man with glasses. Seen from the same level, his body possessed an avocado-like shape.

  He walked right at them. The two withdrew behind a pedestal bearing a marble likeness of William Jennings Bryan, standing in mid-oratory, one hand outstretched, the other clasped to his heart.

  "Get a good look," exhorted Jude, remaining out of sight behind the statue.

  The man emerged from the corridor, walking quickly, and veered on one heel. He headed for a door in the opposite direction.

  Turn around, Skyler commanded mentally. Turn around!

  The man continued on his way, reached the door. Just then Jude sneezed, a loud, rip-roaring sneeze that echoed deep into the corridor.

  The man turned and Skyler got a good look. So good he was able to quickly turn his back and move behind Bryan's boot. When he stepped out again, the man was gone, the bang of the door resounding through the rotunda.

  Skyler said only one word: "Bull's-eye."

  "We've got one more port of call," said Jude, looking at his watch. "If we hurry, we can just make it."

  In the taxi, he gave Skyler a lecture on the First Amendment, the freedom of the press and the glories of the Fourth Estate. When all else fails in a democracy, he said, when you're desperate and don't now where to turn, you can look to the nation's newspapers for deliverance.

  "And that's why I'm already getting pissed off because of what we're about to find out," he declared.

  The executive offices of Worldwide Media Inc. were the top three floors of a modern building on Connecticut Avenue. From it Tibbett and his executives could look down, figuratively and literally, upon the White House.

  Once inside, Jude recalled that the lobby had an exit at either end. Hordes of people were already rushing out both of them. That was bad news: if Jude and Skyler door-stopped one exit, their man could slip out the other. There was nothing for it but to try to cut him off on the twelfth floor. Jude knew from a previous visit to Washington—when the bureau chief had for some reason invited him to the annual political roast known as the Gridiron—that the company had its own reception lounge there. The executives riding down from the top floors transferred elevators to reach the lobby.

  He also knew there would be a receptionist on the twelfth floor who would demand to see their identification. He had his Mirror press card, but what would Skyler do? He was the one who counted. Maybe they could sweet-talk their way.

  His worries were for naught. When they stepped off the elevator, the receptionist's chair was empty. So was the lounge. A TV set—tuned, of course, to Tibbett's broadcasting network, called "TB" by its detractors—played to itself in the corner.

  Everything in sight, from the doorknobs to the curved hard steel of the chairs, was spanking modern. Floor-to-ceiling windows the color of smoke ran along one wall. All that glass lent an illusion of being suspended in space, like inside a cockpit. In fact, Tibbett was a fanatical pilot, and the aviation motif was picked up in knickknacks here and there, like model planes, propellers mounted on the wall and a crystal ashtray engraved with a photo of Lucky Lindy.

  A couch rested on the wall opposite the elevators, and two deep leather chairs faced it at a gentle angle. Jude stationed Skyler in one of them. He handed him a newspaper from a pile behind the reception desk.

  "Use this to cover your face if you need to. Don't forget: you have to see him, but he can't see you."

  Jude waited in a small passage around the corner that led to the men's room.

  They didn't have long to wait. Five minutes later, an elevator came down and a group of four men stepped out. They moved quickly to the downward bank. One was talking in the confident, preemptory manner of a CEO. Peering cautiously around the corner, Jude confirmed that it was Tibbett.

  And Tibbett detached himself from the group and was headed right for him!

  Jude beat a hasty retreat to the men's room. He heard the footsteps on his trail and ducked inside a stall. He stood upon the toilet and waited, holding his breath. He heard the door open. Then he heard footsteps approaching, a fly unzipping, a man relieving himself at the urinal, a loud flushing. He made not a sound. Finally, the footsteps moved again, the door opened and closed.

  Jude waited a full two or three minutes before he dared to leave.

  Skyler was in the lounge, standing.

  "I was worried about you," he said. "He looked like he would have chucked you out the window."

  "And is he one—"

  "You know you don't even have to ask. I remember him clearly, because he flew his own plane."

  The remark made Jude think. That evening back at the rooming house, he connected to the Mirror's web site and culled through photos of Tibbett until he found the one he was looking for. It showed the real estate mogul dressed in a brown safari shirt, posing for the camera somewhere in the tropics. In the background were palm trees and the nose of a small aircraft.

  "Take a look," said Jude. "Is this the plane?"

  "Absolutely. I recognize the name—Lorelei. And I recognize something else. This is the exact same kind of plane I hid in to get off the island."

  Jude looked at the name and saw a small insignia under it. He got closer to the screen so that he could make it out, and then he could see what it was—a tiny W.

  Chapter 25

  Jude and Skyler made preparations for the trip south. Finally, after all this time of trying to devise ways to locate the island, they had a solid clue—the photo of the plane—that might point them in the right direction.

  But first they needed money and a car.

  Jude called Tom Mahoney, an old friend in the Mirror's Washington bureau, and met him for a hamburger. Mahoney was a legend, and not just in his own mind. He had been on the political beat for as long as anyone could remember, and all those lobster lunches and steak dinners showed; he weighed in at about 270 pounds, and that before the first round of drinks, which began shortly after noon. But pound for pound, he was the best reporter around: good with anecdotes, loaded down with home numbers and able to pound out a banner lead—all on deadline. Jude had a lot of time for him.

  He and Jude went way back, to Mahoney's slimmer days when Jude had
been briefly trying his hand as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press and Mahoney had worked for UPI. They'd met over a coup in Nigeria; both had seen the bullet-riddled body of the head of state in the back of a Mercedes, but Mahoney hadn't been able to file; he couldn't use the telex. Jude, a competitor but always the gentleman, sent the story for him, though not until his own was already on the wire. Mahoney never forgot the favor.

  "What d'ya need?" he asked.

  "Two thousand," said Jude, and he was grateful that Mahoney hadn't flinched. "And the use of a car."

  "You in trouble?"

  The answer to that one was hard to exaggerate.

  They finished their hamburgers, talked a bit about the old days. When the check came, Mahoney said: "You pick it up."

  They walked to his bank two blocks away, and he took out the money and gave it to him in fifties. Then he handed him his house keys and told him where to find the keys to an old Volvo parked around the back.

  "Drop the house keys in the mail slot," he said. "Trudy will let me in—if she's not too pissed at me."

  Mahoney wished him luck and shook his hand, then turned and walked away. Jude felt a rush of affection as he watched the broad shoulders recede down the sidewalk, without stepping aside for anyone.

  After picking up the car, Jude made a quick call to Tizzie, just to tell her they were leaving Washington, and what they'd learned so far. Tizzie sounded tense, and they weren't able to talk long. Then they spent the rest of the afternoon at the Library of Congress. Jude used his real name and Mirror ID to gain access to the librarian's office, where, after a brief interview, he was granted the right to use the research room. They were shown to a large, windowless chamber deep in the bowels of the building. It was practically deserted, except for three scholarly-looking types who looked as though they had spent their lives there.

  Along one wall was a series of cubicles. They worked out of one that had a plain, empty table and a computer in one corner.

  First they ordered photostated copies of maps—nautical, topographical, all kinds of maps in all kinds of scales—anything that showed the coastlines of South Carolina, Georgia and eastern Florida. They spread them out on the table as if it were a war room.

  Then Jude called up the photo of Tibbett and his plane from the Web, downloaded it and printed a copy. He propped it up next to the computer and went on-line, calling up dozens and dozens of files of small planes. Eventually, he found what looked like a match, a five-seater single-engine Cherokee. He called up the specifications and found what he wanted: fuel capacity, consumption rate, and top speed. He estimated the distance capability with a full tank of fuel at six hundred and fifty miles, more or less.

  Jude borrowed a compass from an assistant librarian and, using the map key, set it to represent the maximum distance. Then he centered it on the dot that represented Valdosta—Skyler's landing spot—and swung it in a half circle, creating an arc that dipped out into the ocean and took in a large swath of coastline.

  "The island's got to be somewhere within the circle," he said. He looked at the marking with a deflated air. It took in more land and sea than he'd thought it would, all the way south to the Florida peninsula and north almost to Washington.

  "Now think. Think hard—anything you can remember, any landmarks, anything at all that will help us place it."

  They sent for reference books on the barrier islands and eliminated the larger, better-known ones such as Hilton Head, Pawley's, Ossabaw, St. Helena, St. Catherines, and Sapelo. The odds of a medical cult coexisting with a resort or tourist island were decidedly low. Next they obtained books on plantation farming, Gullah culture and early Indian inhabitants, and they combed through them, looking for something, anything, that might trigger a recollection from Skyler. They found nothing.

  "Damn it," said Jude. "There's got to be something. Try, can't you?"

  Skyler was trying. He closed his eyes and remembered everything he could. He attempted to gauge the size of the island, its shape, even its distance from the mainland. But all he could see in his mind's eye was a flat expanse of a brilliant green and golden blanket of cordgrass around the edges, giving way in the center to luxuriant woods. His recollections weren't specific enough to convert into hard and fast estimates of acres or miles, certainly nothing befitting a map.

  They took a break and went out for coffee. As soon as he took the first sip, Skyler's eyes lighted up.

  "I think I've come up with something," he said. "Remember I told you about the abandoned lighthouse? That could be the landmark we're looking for."

  They returned to the reference room and ordered up books on old lighthouses and mariners' routes and landmarks in the coastal marshes. They pored through them carefully, page by page, but found not a single image, painting or picture that resembled Skyler's memory of his precious hideaway.

  "How about the hurricane?" said Jude. "You mentioned that a hurricane struck the island—not the one when you were in Valdosta, but one many years ago. Try and figure out what year it was."

  Skyler tried to remember. He took a pencil and scribbled some notes. He thought some more and finally pronounced that his best guess was 1989. Jude called up Nexis and punched in the information.

  "If we can get the name of the hurricane, we can call up the meteorological data," he explained. "Then we can plot the path of the storm on our maps. That might narrow it a bit."

  He waited while the computer ticked, searching.

  "Here it is," he said. "Hurricane Hugo. Struck Charleston, South Carolina. Sustained winds of a hundred and thirty-five miles per hour. Caused extensive damage."

  "That's it," Skyler exclaimed. "Hugo. I remember it now from the radio."

  "What did you say?"

  "I remember, it was Hugo."

  "But how?"

  "From Kuta's radio."

  Jude looked up at him hopefully. "And do you by any chance remember ever hearing the call letters of the station?"

  Now Skyler caught on. "Of course! WCTB."

  Jude closed the books and rolled up the maps.

  "I'd say we've got enough to go on," he said. "What are we doing wasting our time up here?"

  They drove the old Volvo to the rooming house to collect their few belongings, but couldn't get there. The block was closed off by police cars and fire trucks, their lights spinning and cab radios barking out squawks. Firemen in thick rubber boots and bright slickers carried hoses that unraveled out of the trucks like fishing line leaping out of reels. Jude parked the car three blocks away, and they walked back. A crowd had gathered, kept on the other side of the street by policemen. They pushed their way to the front.

  "Jude—that's our place."

  A cop stood four feet from Skyler.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  The cop looked him over a full three or four seconds before answering.

  "Fire."

  "Anyone hurt?"

  "No."

  "What caused it?"

  "Hard to say. Could be a gas explosion."

  They gaped at the damage. Smoke or dust hung in the air. The front of the building was blown away, its facade reduced to a pile of rubble. The roofs of the buildings on either side tilted toward the open cavity. The back was still standing, so that it was possible to read the layout of the missing floors upon it—a partial staircase, the white plaster lines of the walls, the wooden ceiling planks sticking out. It looked pathetically quaint somehow, like an overly large dollhouse.

  It was entirely unrecognizable from the rooming house where they had spent the night only hours before.

  Jude grabbed Skyler by the arm and pointed across the way to the other side of the throng. A large man was standing alone, looking at the damage with all the others, but from time to time he turned and looked at the people around him, surveying the crowd. That was peculiar.

  Skyler held his breath and waited for the man to turn away. He wanted to see if he bore a white streak down the center of his hair.

 
; The man turned. He did not.

  Jude and Skyler slipped back through the crowd and walked quickly to their car.

  They were shaken. They decided it was definitely time to skip town.

  Radio station WCTB was little more than a whitewashed cottage in a weed-infested lot on Gloucester Street in Brunswick, Georgia. It had a dish on top and a thirty-foot-tall metal broadcasting tower that looked like something out of the 1940s. The windows were blacked out, and the front door, painted Ashanti colors of yellow, orange and green, was closed. A table and chair sat out front under a tree that had a tire swing.

  As they pulled up next to a cyclone fence, Jude and Skyler could hear a distant steady thud, the beat laid down by a drum, coming from inside the building. The walls were practically vibrating, and as Skyler stepped outside the car, he imagined one of those anthropomorphic houses from the days of black-and-white cartoons, huffing and puffing and dancing so recklessly its shutters shook off.

  It had been a quick trip. As they drove down Route 95 past Savannah and turned onto the old coastal road, Route 17, it was like moving back in time. The air had grown heavy with humidity and thick with the scent of magnolia and peach and, as they'd approached the coast, the pungent odor of the salt marshes. Skyler relaxed into the sounds and smells of a lifetime. He felt better now that he was back where there were peeling shacks raised on stilts, where Spanish moss draped from the branches and people moved as if they had all the time in the world.

  They walked to the radio station. Skyler carried a cold six-pack they'd purchased from a convenience store behind a Texaco station. They had to bang on the front door for some time, and only then they were heard because a commercial interruption came along. The black man who opened it, in a loud printed shirt and with padded earphones hugging his head and leading to a cord that dangled by his side, peered at them from top to bottom and stepped aside to let them in.