MIND FIELDS (26 page)

At one forty-five a cab drove up to the front entrance at Fort McHenry and Paul Hingston emerged from the car.  The sun was shining and there were a fair number of tourists out, but it was not hard for Kincade to spot Hingston as he walked up to the main entrance.  No one was following as far as Kincade could tell.  He failed to notice the gray Buick LeSabre parked a few blocks away, or the high-powered binoculars that its driver had trained on him.

“Christ,” Agent Trace McKnight muttered, “is that son of a bitch just going to sit there all day.”  He still had a bad feeling about Kincade, and despite the warnings from Uncle Jimmy, Trace had decided to keep an eye on Kincade from time to time.  He had been tracking Kincade’s car with a global positioning system for the past week, and for the second time in the past few days he had traveled to the Inner Harbor near Poe Towers.  This was not particularly unusual for a Baltimore suburbanite, but it was enough to make Trace curious, and he decided to check it out.  After an hour of watching Kincade sitting on a park bench, he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of his action.

Richard Kincade stood and walked toward the entrance to Fort McHenry.  Trace hopped out of the Buick and followed at a safe distance.  He could just make out the figure of the other man who Kincade approached, but couldn’t see his face at this distance.  As he raised the binoculars to get a closer look, the two men disappeared behind a red brick wall.

Paul Hingston held his hand out to greet Kincade as he saw him coming.  Richie reached for Hingston’s arm instead.  “Come on,” he said as he pulled him around the wall and away from the entrance gait.

Hingston was too scared to protest.  He didn’t like these games.  “Was I followed?” he asked as he walked quickly by Kincade’s side.

“Not as far as I can tell, but I’m not about to take that chance.”

Hingston glanced back over his shoulder and tugged gently on his thick brown mustache, as he often did when he was nervous.

Trace McKnight walked rapidly toward the front gate.  Running would draw too much attention, but he needed to know who Kincade was meeting.  He was still a hundred yards away, and the two men were out of his line of sight.

Kincade motioned toward a small Coast Guard boat waiting by a dock behind the fort.  They hurried over to the boat and a man helped them aboard.

“Thanks, Jack,” Richie said to the man, “I owe you one.”

“You sure do, man.  I could have been sailing today. Look at that water, smooth as glass.”

“Ah, what fun is sailing without at least a thirty mile an hour wind?” Richie laughed.

They walked into the small cabin of the boat just as Trace McKnight came around the wall.  He focused his binoculars on the boat, but the men inside the cabin were all out of view. “Shit.”  He couldn’t get any closer without being spotted.  His only hope was to squat behind the hedge near the wall and hope the men would come out on deck.  He watched intently through the binoculars.

Jack pulled out an electronic wand and swept it carefully around Paul Hingston.  “He’s clean,” Jack declared, finishing the sweep.  “No weapons, no bugs.”

“Good,” Richie said.  “Let’s go.”

He motioned for Paul to sit and the two of them settled onto facing benches in the small cabin.  All Trace McKnight could make out as the boat sped away was a blurry glimpse of Jack’s face through the weathered window in the cabin. He went back to his car and waited.  It would be too difficult to follow the boat without drawing attention.  He could only sit and wait, and hope that Kincade and his clandestine friend would return to the same spot from which they had departed.

The roar of the engine made it difficult to speak and Kincade waited until they were a few hundred yards out in the bay before he broke the silence.  He motioned to Jack to cut the engines.

“So, I guess you were impressed by those files I gave you, eh, Doc?”

The boat rocked gently in the still water of the bay, drifting north toward the harbor.  Jack walked outside for some fresh air, and Paul waited until he departed to speak.  The stillness of the day was disrupted briefly as a pair of seagulls flew by calling out to each other in their high-pitched squeals, which faded into the distance as they glided away from the ship.

Hingston turned back toward Kincade.  “Impressed?  More like disturbed.  As unbelievable as those files were, it made it pretty obvious that there is something screwy  going on at BNI.  Four new employees, all with right frontal lobe injuries and all having some catastrophic event a couple of months after starting work...  Hard to write that off as coincidence.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much how I saw it too.  Some sort of hypnosis or mind control, don’t you think?”

“Mind control?  You’ve been reading too many science fiction books, Detective.  It’s probably just some shoddy work, somebody trying to speed up the research to get to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it usually takes years to get a new medical treatment to market, especially something as revolutionary as nanobots.  Once the product has been developed, it has to be tested with computer simulations and eventually with animal studies before you can even hope to get approval for human trials.  Those four people that died, their old brain injuries would have made them perfect test subjects.  Somebody at BNI was trying to jump the gun.  They were all treated with the nanobots during the animal testing phase, I’d bet on that.”

“But why? They’d still need to get approval to market it wouldn’t they?”

“Sure, but what better way to work out the bugs real quick than to see what happens in a human being.  You avoid the risk you usually have to take when problems with human trials go public; bad results with human trials can shelve a new treatment before it ever even gets out of the lab. One mistake could cost millions.  Hell, a little bad PR can ruin a company.  It’d be nice to have a guarantee of success before you begin human trials.”

“So that’s what you think they were up to?”

“Yeah, but it gets uglier. After I saw those files, I remembered a packet of information Sandi had mailed to me months ago.  She said it was the proof that I had been stealing her files.  I figured it was just professional jealousy; it was so pathetic that I couldn’t even bring myself to look at them.  See, I had this picture of Sandi as someone... well, someone a notch above the rest of us, you know?  When I got that packet from her, I just tossed it in a drawer.  I didn’t want to think of Sandi as petty.  I had forgotten all about it until you gave me that file to look at.  But after I read about those four BNI employees, I thought maybe there was something going on at BNI that I didn’t know about.  I couldn’t believe somebody was using my own work to do something like that.  It made me sick.”

Hingston paused and glanced out the window, collecting his thoughts.  “I went through that packet of Sandi’s.  I would never have stolen research from her, but someone sure had.  All of my work on Phase Two nanobots...all that time I was developing the bots based on research that someone was feeding to me...Sandi’s research.”

“Who?”

“My guess is JT.”

Kincade thought a moment.  “Of course… Jason Thomas Anderson…Tom.”

Hingston looked at Kincade with an odd expression.  “Tom?  Nobody calls him Tom.”

“Oh, sorry.  It’s just that I came across a bit of information I hadn’t quite been able to figure out for sure…until now.  It seems that Dr. Fletcher’s stolen files were uploaded to an employee file with the ID name Tom.  I checked out all the Toms at BNI, even those with the initials T.O.M.  The only ones that came up as possibilities were Anderson and, well, you.”

“Me?  My middle name is Milton.  How’d you figure me?”

“You were our most likely suspect…nothing personal…and your dad, his name was Tom, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, but...hey, you didn’t think I was the one, did you?”  He hesitated, but only briefly.  “And how did you know about my dad?”

Kincade was not ready to answer that question.  “Could Jason Thomas Anderson have been stealing the info and funneling it to you through someone else on the research team?”

“Hell, he was funneling it to me himself.  After I went through Sandi’s file, I thought back over our research protocol.  We met with JT every week.  He always wanted to know exactly where we were with the research, and I was glad to have his help.  He always seemed to have the right answer to every problem that came up.  I just figured he was some kind of genius, you know?  I mean, his track record speaks for itself, but all he was doing was stealing Sandi’s answers and presenting them as his own.  Makes you wonder about all of his other great work, doesn’t it?  I wonder how much of that was someone else’s ideas too.  It may be that his genius is in knowing how to steal rather than in knowing how to develop nanobots.”   He shook his head.  “Jason Thomas, huh?  I never really thought about what the JT stood for.”

“And you didn’t know about any of this until I gave you that file to look at?  For two years this was going on right under your nose and you had no idea?”

“I was too focused on my work.  I know it’s kind of hard to believe that I could have such tunnel vision.”

“I believe him,” Sandi said, half in tears as she emerged from the small cabin below.

“Sandi!” Paul couldn’t believe his eyes. She looked so different with the short, blond hair, but he recognized her instantly.  “But I thought you were...”

“Tales of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” she laughed uncomfortably. There was still a connection that was undeniable, but the closeness was awkward for both of them.

Sandi broke the discomforting silence. “All this time I thought it was you.  I hope you can forgive me.”

“I’m the one who should be asking for forgiveness.” 

“Uh, Doc,” Kincade interrupted, “I thought we agreed...”

“
You
agreed.”   She knew the tone in Paul’s voice well enough to know that he was telling the truth.  There was no doubt that he could be trusted, and no need to hide from him any longer.  Odds of success would be greater if they worked together; Sandi was sure of it.  She looked at Kincade.  No words were needed.  He went out on deck, where Jack was leaning against the rail, looking out over the Chesapeake.

“Sure is a beautiful day, Jack.”

“Yup.  Great day for a barbeque.  The wife and kids should be firing up the grill right about now.”

“Yeah, yeah.  You’ll be home in time for the steak, don’t worry.  We’re about done in there.”

“The lovers make up?”

“I don’t know about that, but at least they’re not trying to kill each other.”

Richie stood by Jack’s side and leaned on the rail, the two of them staring quietly out into the day.

“That’s a good thing,” Jack said.

“Yup.”

Inside, the boat rocked gently as Paul and Sandi sat across from each other searching for the right words to say.

“All this time, Paul.  All this time I thought it was you.”

“You didn’t really think I could do something like that, did you?  You know me better than that.”

“I refused to believe it at first.  When I sent you that packet, I was desperately hoping for some other explanation, but when I didn’t hear back from you…”

“Yeah, well I was a jerk.  What else can I say?  I was so excited when you called me that day, and then when I realized that the call was just to accuse me of stealing your work, well, I was fuming.  It hurt in more ways than one.”

“You deserved it.”

“Not that, I didn’t.  Look, we each made our own choices.  I don’t regret having joined the private sector; it has a lot of perks.  I’m not fighting for grants all the time and I’m not struggling just to pay the bills at the end of each month.  You can do just as much good in private industry as you can at the university, but…man, I never thought I’d get tied up in something like this.  Anderson’s a shark, but he’s always seemed so up front about everything.”

“You’ve got to help us, Paul.  If we’re going to stop them, we need something solid, some hard evidence tying them into the murders.  If you can get a hard copy of some kind of proof that the ‘TOM’ mailbox on BNI’s Intranet belongs to JT Anderson, then we’ve got him.”

“Hey, I’m not going anywhere until I figure out what’s going on.  It’s my reputation on the line; they’re using my work to do this.  I’m sure Sean feels the same way.”

“Sean?”

“Yeah, Sean Lightbourne, my lab assistant.  He’s in the same boat I am now.  Our fingerprints are all over this project.  I’ll get him to help me tomorrow.  He was a computer minor at American University; he can hack in to anything.  I’m going to get those bastards, whoever they are.”

“Just be careful.”

“Hell, they won’t kill me.  They’ll need me to blame it all on when it goes public.”  He laughed half-heartedly.

“Yeah.  Like I said.”

They looked at each other briefly, then turned away in an awkward moment of silence.

“Well, I’d better get back,” Paul said.

“Yeah.  I’ll get the captain.”

Paul watched Sandi as she opened the door.  It was painful to be with her, and yet to not
be
with her.  He had forgotten how much he missed her.

Jack started the engines up and the ship motored toward Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.  The boat pulled up to the Coast Guard dock by Federal Hill at about three-thirty.  Paul thanked Jack for the ride.  It was a short walk home to Poe Towers from there.  Kincade watched him walk away and hoped that this had not been a mistake.

  “You really think he’s with us, Doc?”

  “I’m sure of it, Detective.”

  He shook his head.  “Hope you’re right.”  He thought of the consequences if they had misjudged Dr. Hingston, but there had been little choice.  There was really no place else to turn.

  They took the boat back to Fort McHenry, where Jack dropped off his passengers.

  “Thanks, Jack.  Enjoy those steaks.”

  “You bet I will.”

  “And tell Ellie I’m sorry I dragged you away today.”

  “Why don’t you and Lara come on over tonight.  You can tell her yourself.”

  “Thanks anyway, but I’ll have to take a rain check.  I’ll tell Lara about the invite, though.  She’ll appreciate that.”

  “Anytime, buddy.  You take care.”

  Richie nodded and helped Sandi off the boat. They watched Jack pull away, and then Richie put his arm around Sandi’s shoulders and walked her back to the car.  He could see that the encounter with Paul had taken its toll.

  “You OK, Doc.”

  “No,” she reached up under her sunglasses to wipe the tears from her eyes, “but I will be.”

  They walked in silence the rest of the way. 

Trace McKnight had listened to the entire Raven’s game on the radio.  It was a good thing the LeSabre had comfortable seats.  He glanced over toward the fort, as he had done periodically for the past two hours, and this time he was relieved to finally see two figures emerging from around the wall where Kincade had disappeared with his mystery man.  He pulled his binoculars out.