Déjà-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  “Hi, Tina,” Molly said, waving at us as she wiped up a blob of blue finger paint one of her sons threw on the wall.

  Linda sat with her legs up in a recliner. Her daughter, Sandra, was engrossed in doing a puzzle on the floor.

  Linda is my height, and we look enough alike to be sisters except for her now near-term pregnancy. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, with degrees in accounting, computer science, and law. She practiced law before she delivered her daughter, who is the same age as Kerry.

  Linda doesn’t enjoy exercise, but she loves using her math skills to do most of our computer research and, even though she’s an attorney, occasionally illegal hacking.

  “Have you received any feedback about your front page article, Tina?” Linda asked.

  “Some of my old work friends texted me, but I haven’t had any job offers,” I said. “Not to worry, though, as I have a couple of stories in mind to pursue.”

  “That’s a relief,” Linda said. “We were worried your story would be a one-off, and we would have to go back to being bored out of our skulls with inane conversation.”

  “Whoa,” Molly said. “We talk about lots of cool stuff.”

  “Like what?” Linda asked.

  “You know: kids, clothes, hair stylists, nail girls, restaurants…”

  Cas’s jaw muscles twitched. “Aburrido.”

  “Huh?” Molly said.

  “I think she means ‘boring,’ ” Linda said.

  I held up my hands. “I need to say something. The reason I got into this was because I wanted to write a gripping, in-depth news story again.”

  “But it really was because you got dumped from your job in D.C., right?” Molly asked.

  “Tina and I have discussed that,” Linda said. “If I’d been her lawyer, we would have won a large settlement for the egregious act of her employer terminating her.”

  “Does that mean you wouldn’t have been canned?” Molly asked.

  “I was fired because I did something while chasing a story maybe I shouldn’t have done. Against the FBI’s orders, I ran into the Arlington abortion clinic to try and stop the bomber. I shot him, and he blew me up.”

  “And you damn near died,” Cas said.

  “What does this have to do with a future story?” Linda asked.

  “My bomber might have survived those gunshot wounds and be here in the Chicago area.”

  20

  My friends remained silent as I told them about the two bombings in the Chicago area.

  “What do you want us to do?” Linda asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Molly shrugged her shoulders. “Huh?”

  “We have a bigger problem,” I said. “Do you guys remember Jamie?”

  “How can any of us forget him?” Molly asked. “He’s yummy.”

  “What does he have to do with the Arlington bomber?” Linda asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Her voice was hard. “Then why are we wasting time discussing him?” she asked.

  It was time. Did I tell them everything about what had actually happened to me last Wednesday, or let the “industrial spy” story stand as fact?

  If I told them the truth, and one of them couldn’t keep her mouth shut and Carter found out, he would never trust me again. He would never let me near another story, even if it wasn’t dangerous.

  And I couldn’t blame him, but my reporting career would be over. Plus, the FBI might toss me in jail if the true story came out.

  “Industrial spies” it is.

  “Jamie is one of the ‘industrial spies,’ ” I began.

  “No way!” Cas exclaimed. “According to your story, those guys worked for a big pharmaceutical company in Iran.”

  “Believe me, he worked with them, but the problem is the FBI let him go.”

  “Why would they do that?” Linda asked.

  “They claimed they didn’t have anything on him, and his record was clean, so they couldn’t hold him.”

  “I think the feds plan to follow him,” Cas said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To lead them to other industrial spies, and then they can find and arrest anyone else involved.”

  “That’s a logical suggestion, but federal law enforcement agencies and local police departments do not have funds to follow one man for a low-level crime like industrial spying,” Linda said.

  “Then why did they let him go?” Cas asked.

  “They want him to do their dirty work for them,” Molly said.

  21

  Because Molly is street-smart, she sometimes has a different take on issues than the rest of us, and we’ve learned to listen to her.

  “What are you talking about?” Cas asked, still smarting from Linda’s rejection of her solution about why the FBI let Jamie go.

  “Tina, you and Linda have been doing background research on Micah’s financing for his lab, right?” Molly asked.

  “Actually, Tina assigned me that task when we all began to investigate what kind of research Micah did in his lab,” Linda said. “So far, over two hundred million dollars has been spent.”

  “But only – what – twenty-five million came from Hannah’s trust fund?”

  “Yes, the rest came from Sherman Krevolin, the billionaire in Dallas.”

  “And he’s the best buddy of the president, right?”

  “According to the press, he is,” Linda said.

  “But you think something is fishy with the money.”

  “It’s possible the majority of the funding illegally came from someone in the federal government and was funneled to Micah through Krevolin.”

  “And you guys think it might be coming from the president because of his connection with Krevolin, right?”

  “We do, but we can’t prove it,” I answered.

  “Why not? You hacked into Micah’s home computer. I thought all the hot poop was in there.”

  “There was a section we downloaded from Micah’s computer that was encrypted,” Linda said. “We think the proof of where his financing is coming from might be in there.”

  “Molly, where are you going with this?” Cas asked.

  “Maybe some people on the president’s staff, or in his political party, are worried that the story about the illegal funding might come out, and it would be really embarrassing to the president.”

  OMG! Like the Iran-Contra affair.

  If the story of illegal funding involving hundreds of millions of dollars leaked out, it would be a political scandal that would discredit the president and ruin his party’s chances in future elections.

  People were killed to cover up the Iran-Contra affair. Did we have to worry about government agents protecting Jamie so he could permanently silence Micah for them?

  22

  Cas was still pissed off at Linda, and now she took it out on Molly.

  “Molly, this is just plain stupid,” Cas said. “That’s something for a TV series or movie.”

  “But see, the farmers did stuff like this all the time,” Molly said.

  Molly worked for the CIA when she was a model. She’s great at getting people to talk to her, and her outstanding physical assets are a useful distraction to any man under the age of dead. She calls the agricultural attachés “farmers.” That they are actually CIA agents is of no concern to her.

  Linda picked up on Molly’s idea. “If Jamie killed Micah, there would be minimal publicity, and the illegal financing story would never surface.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you guys,” Molly said. “The feds will let Jamie do their dirty work.”

  “One problem with your supposition, Molly,” Linda said. “We now know that Micah discovered the cure for multiple sclerosis using embryonic stem cell technology. If Jamie kills him, what happens to all of his research?”

  “Nothing,” Cas said, finally dialed in again with the discussion.

  We waited.

  “Most of the actual lab work is being done by lowly te
chs,” she continued. “His work won’t be lost because someone else in the lab will take up the slack.”

  Uh-oh!

  I told them about the lack of security at Micah’s lab.

  “And for that reason, we have to focus on finding Jamie and stopping him,” I concluded.

  “I remind you that Jamie hasn’t broken any laws,” Linda said. “The FBI let him go. No police officer in Chicago will help us unless we can prove he has committed a crime.”

  “Then that’s what we’re going to do,” I said.

  “How?” Cas asked.

  “Yesterday, I checked out Jamie’s apartment building. It looks like he’s still living there.”

  “And?” Linda asked.

  “Maybe we’ll have to figure out a way to give the police solid evidence that he’s committed a crime.”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Linda the Lawyer said.

  23

  The Hamlin Park Irregulars had to do something to stop Hannah and her family from being slaughtered, but I also couldn’t get the abortion clinic bomber story out of my head. I had to figure out what to do about all of this before I went cuckoo.

  On Wednesday morning, I started my run, intending to go past Hannah’s to make sure everything was okay there. It was a great plan, but my leprechaun got in the way. David John caught up with me two blocks before I got to Hannah’s.

  “Hi, Tina,” he said. “Great morning for a run.”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  There wasn’t much wind, and the humidity was low enough that I didn’t feel like I was breathing through a soda straw.

  We began running together and turned onto Hannah’s street. I slowed down as we ran past her home. The cameras were on, scanning the neighborhood.

  David watched me check out Hannah’s house.

  “Do you know them?” he asked.

  “Them, who?”

  “The people who live there.”

  We sped up. I wasn’t sure how to handle his question. “Yeah, kind of. Why?”

  “Since I moved here in June, I’ve run on all of the streets in Lakeview, and this is the only house with security cameras.”

  “That’s an interesting observation. Why would you notice something like that?”

  He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. Sunlight flashed off of the lens of his black rimmed glasses as he turned his head. “No reason. Just thought it was strange.”

  Dude, are you lying to me?

  With my paranoia sky-high from everything that had happened to me in the last week, and hearing about the recent abortion clinic bombings, I wanted to know more about David.

  And I still needed a fluff story for the Lakeview Times. “How about having lunch with me tomorrow at the Wishbone?” I asked.

  “Is it on Lincoln across the street from Dinkel’s Bakery?”

  Mentioning my favorite place made my stomach growl. “I guess you discovered our most famous neighborhood establishment.”

  “I went past it the first day I ran in this neighborhood and checked it out online when I got home. The rave reviews attracted my attention. I tried it, and now my wife, my daughter, and I are hooked on every item in the place.”

  Wife? Daughter? Need to check this out.

  “Welcome to the club. So, how about lunch?”

  “Great.”

  “Do you want my cell number in case you can’t make it?”

  We stopped and exchanged that information.

  He put his phone away. “Done. See you then.”

  I had another day to research him. Maybe I could get Linda to help me.

  24

  Wednesday night, after I read two books to Kerry and failed again to coax her to use the toilet, I went down to the computer while Carter rocked her to sleep.

  I was going to meet David John for lunch on Thursday, so I went down to our computer room to research him. I stared at his name on the screen.

  Who are you, and why did you lie to me about your interest in Hannah’s security cameras?

  After an hour on LexisNexis, Intelius, and ADP, I had David John’s life story in front of me. He went to grade school and high school in Twin Falls, Idaho, and had not participated in any extracurricular activities. He attended the University of Idaho and, after graduation, went on to receive a master’s degree in computer science at Cal-Tech, where he, again, was not involved with any student organizations or activities.

  After graduation, he took an entry-level software engineer position with the Hogan Company in San Jose, California, where he had been employed for the past ten years. Hogan had security contracts with a few large corporations and several government agencies.

  Security?

  Maybe that was why he lied to me about his interest in Hannah’s security cameras.

  But why?

  I called my computer expert, Linda, and told her about David John.

  “Send me what you have, and I’ll do a little extra research,” Linda said.

  “Extra” meant hacking into computers that were supposed to be secure. I wasn’t good at it. Linda was, and even though it was illegal, doing it didn’t seem to bother her as an officer of the court system. At least it didn’t as long as she wasn’t caught doing it.

  “Perfect,” I said, as I emailed David’s information to her.

  “Does he have a wife?”

  “He did mention one, and a daughter, but I haven’t checked that out yet.”

  “I will.”

  Linda called me ten minutes later.

  “That didn’t take long,” I said.

  “I used the information you sent on David, and it was easy from there. His wife, Mary, attended the same grade school, high school, and university as her husband.”

  “Childhood friends and, later, sweethearts.”

  “That would be my guess. After graduation, she went to work as an accountant for the Santa Barbara-based J.P. Cooke and Sons, where she’s still employed.”

  “What about the daughter?”

  “Her name is Margaret. Her birth certificate indicates she was born in San Jose a little over three and a half years ago.”

  “Anything else?”

  “In mid-June, the couple signed a month-to-month lease on an apartment five blocks north of your home. Both of their signatures are on the contract.”

  This was proof of Linda’s ability to hack into bank and state government agency computers.

  “David and Mary have money in the bank, great credit ratings, no outstanding debt, no list of criminal offenses, and no lawsuits or complaints against them,” she continued.

  “Looks like they’re the perfect couple and model citizens,” I said. “The Johns aren’t the type of people I usually research.”

  “But there is one other thing. I couldn’t find any real information about David’s job with Hogan. That data is protected by a firewall.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He probably had top secret security clearance. He might still have it.”

  “Thanks. Send me anything else you find.”

  “Done.”

  Top secret security clearance.

  There was a little “reporter’s ding” in my head, and I began to pull on my lower lip ⎼ my “tell” that something bothered me. Carter had been the first to notice me doing it at the Post. Gradually, all the other reporters began kidding me about doing the “Tina-tug” when I first began to sniff out a story.

  Now I had something to talk to David about.

  25

  It was 11:55 a.m. on Thursday. Kerry was in her stroller. I pushed it inside the Wishbone, a restaurant in a brick building at the corner of North Lincoln and West School, across the street from Dinkel’s.

  The restaurant has a modernized southern comfort menu. As I pushed Kerry’s stroller toward her special table, the aroma of spices and deep-fried foods from the chef’s southern reconstructive style of cooking made my mouth water.

  About Kerry’s special table: it’s a bo
oth with a picture of a momma pig nursing her babies, which hangs on the wall above the table. I have no clue why she loves it so much, but when I call for a reservation, they know to give me that table.