On Borrowed Time (11 page)

“Why do you think that?”

I told him about the guy following me, and the fact that he seemed to have either stopped doing so, or taken greater pains to hide himself. “I talked about him with Allie in my apartment, and on the phone.”

“Richard, you okay?” he asked.

“I’m getting by. Why?”

“You see a guy on the street and decide he’s following you. Then you don’t see him anymore, so you decide he’s bugging you. Your friend talks to somebody and that person gets murdered, and you think it’s all about you. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Craig, I know it sounds bizarre, but humor me.”

He looked like he was about to argue, but then shrugged. “Okay. You want me to bring in somebody to check your apartment and phones?”

“Thanks, but I’m going to get that done,” I said.

He looked skeptical. “How?”

“I did an article last year on espionage in business, and I interviewed a guy who’s an expert in this stuff. I’m going to call him.”

“You sure?” he asked. “Because I can take care of it.”

I shook my head. “I’m sure. I’ll have plenty of other things for you.”

On the chance that my cell phone calls were being monitored, I stopped at a pay phone on the way home and called Mark Cook, the electronics guy I’d mentioned to Craig. He remembered me and agreed to come check out my place, and even said he wouldn’t charge me. Chances are he had read my article about Jen and, like everyone else in America, felt sorry for me.

I went back to my apartment to write the magazine piece. I wasn’t smart enough to figure a way to draw out the people I was searching for, if they existed at all, so I went with the straightforward approach. I essentially wrote part two of what might become an ongoing series, which started with my previous article about Jen’s disappearance.

So I told the truth, or at least as much of it as I thought necessary. I wrote about Allie and Julie, and I included Julie’s picture. I wrote about the Donovans, and I also wrote about the guy following me, describing him and his car as best I could.

I didn’t mention anything about my apparently having been working on a major story that had been wiped from my mind, nor did I mention Dr. Garber and his comment that I had said the story was about Sean Lassiter. I still had to follow up on the Lassiter connection and see if it led me anywhere, but there were just so many hours in the day.

I really didn’t care that the majority of people who read the story would think I was descending further into a paranoid insanity. If sunlight was the best disinfectant, I was doing the best I could to flush out the germs.

The more I could bring everything out in the open, the better chance I had of finding out what the hell was going on.

Before I submitted it, I gave it to Allie to read over dinner. “It’s powerful,” she said, but didn’t say so with much enthusiasm.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t think you’ll scare them with this, Richard. You’re pulling your punches.”

“I’m drawing attention to what’s going on.”

She nodded. “Until some family pretends to send a kid up in a hot-air balloon, or another athlete or politician gets caught with his pants down. I think you should try to do more with this. I think you should try and scare the people we’re chasing.”

“Why?”

“So that maybe they’ll make a mistake,” she said.

“They might try to rectify that mistake by coming after us,” I pointed out.

She nodded again. “They might.”

“We don’t really have anything to scare them with. All I could do would be to put in the piece that we have leads I can’t talk about, but that are bringing us closer to the answer.”

“I think you should include that,” she said. “Make it sound like we’re hot on their tail, and that we’re about to go to law enforcement with what we know.”

“Good idea,” I said. “You know, I told Scott that he couldn’t edit the piece, and now you’re doing it.”

She smiled. “Somebody had to.”

The Stone made the presentation six times to eleven people.

At no time did he make it to more than two people at once. It was a game that had to be played; even though each of the people knew very well who they were competing with, there was no way they would ever get in the same room.

Stone was surprised that the repetitive process did not bore him. Such was the power of the presentation, and the recipients were so clearly impressed that he enjoyed it each and every time.

It was a multimedia show, starring Richard Kilmer, and broken into two parts, with an intermission so that questions could be asked. The dividing line was that day in Ardmore, with the post-car-crash material primarily a collection of the amazing video and audio surveillance that had followed Kilmer wherever he went.

The object was to show the great stress that Kilmer was under, and the fact that it was having no effect on the ultimate accomplishment. But the Stone didn’t hype anything; he just let the material speak for itself.

The Stone had long ago decided that using Kilmer was the smartest move he had ever made, and he had made a lot of smart moves. Kilmer had gone public, as the Stone had hoped he would, giving the project the kind of credibility that all the presentations in the world could never fully accomplish.

These people were smart enough to comprehend what they were looking at, and they had long ago understood how it could benefit them. Most of them weren’t the ultimate decision makers, but their recommendations would have great influence on those who were.

But the Stone was not looking to make the sale yet; it would not be in his best interest to do so. That would come when the demonstration was concluded, after Kilmer starred in the grand finale.

Then the final bidding would begin, and the winning bid would be more than ten billion dollars. The Stone had already decided on that minimum amount, and he knew he could get it. It was at least twenty times more than he figured he could get if he had acted legally. And then he would first have had to share that with his cocreators, before dealing with all the other vultures who would come looking to piggyback onto his success.

But the difference in money, while compelling, was not his only reason for going this route. He was determined that this country was not going to reap the benefits of his genius. The powers that be had long ago decided he was beneath them and was not to be respected or trusted. They would pay dearly for the way they treated him.

Based on the faces of the people watching his presentation, respect was there in abundance. They were in awe of his work, and prepared to pay a fortune to acquire it.

Which was fine with him.

“Did you see this?” Hank Miller walked into the room without knocking and laid the open magazine on the desk of his ex-brother-in-law, Lieutenant George Kentris of the Ellenville Police Department. Ellenville is a town about twenty minutes from Monticello. It’s similar in size, though slightly smaller.

Kentris looked up and frowned. “If I worked as hard as you, I’d have time to read magazines,” Kentris said.

“Then it’s lucky I stopped by. Read it.”

Kentris picked it up and scanned through Richard’s latest article, reading more carefully as he realized why Hank had brought it to him.

Kentris had been on station duty about eight months before when a man had been reported trying to enter a home in an upscale residential Ellenville neighborhood, and two officers had gone to get him. They brought him back to the station, which was how the guy became Lieutenant Kentris’s problem.

What made the situation unusual was that the guy, who seemed to be in his early forties, claimed to be the owner of the house he was trying to enter. And it wasn’t that he was breaking the door down or climbing through a window; he had knocked on the door because he said he had misplaced his key.

The man said his name was Daniel Richardson, but had no identification to prove or disprove it. He said he lived at that home with his wife, Cynthia, and their eight-year-old son, Andrew. He was employed as a science teacher at the local high school, and had been there for ten years.

Kentris had done some checking, and absolutely nothing the man said was true. He had never lived in the house, was not a teacher at the school, and there was absolutely no evidence that he or his family ever lived in Ellenville, or anywhere else, for that matter. Kentris let him call his wife, but the number he dialed was out of service, which he couldn’t explain and which seemed to both puzzle and worry him.

But the man sounded completely credible and earnest, and claimed to be confused by what was going on. There had to be some mistake, he proclaimed, because everything he was saying was true. What would he have to gain by lying?

He also didn’t seem like the typical vagrant. He was reasonably well dressed, clean and freshly shaven, and spoke clearly and articulately. He did not seem in any way impaired, no alcohol on his breath or needle marks on his arms, and passed a field sobriety test that Kentris administered, even though they were not in the field.

So he was either lying through his teeth or completely delusional.

It was late in the day, and Kentris would have to start the process of identifying the guy in the morning, but he wasn’t sure where to keep him that night. The jail was a possibility but somehow didn’t seem right. Kentris liked the guy, felt sorry for him, and wanted to help. And the guy hadn’t tried to break into the house; all he had done was knock on the door.

So Kentris had called Hank, who owned a motel out near the highway, and asked if he could put the guy up in a room.

“No problem,” Hank said. “As long as the department is paying.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t charge for the one night.”

“I was hoping the bank wouldn’t ask for my mortgage payment this month. And I was hoping your sister would send back my alimony check,” he said. “Hope is for suckers.”

“Okay, you cheap son of a bitch. The department will pay,” Kentris said. “Can you lock his room from the outside?”

“Sure, but there’s an additional locking fee for that.”

“You’re an asshole, Hank. My sister was smart to dump you.”

“No argument there,” he said cheerfully.

Kentris dropped off the mysterious guy on the way home and stayed while Hank put him in a room. He’d pick the guy up in the morning on the way in, and either solve the mystery or turn him over to Social Services. Or maybe the guy would have a true story to tell by then.

“You stay here, and we’ll get started on finding out what’s going on in the morning,” Kentris said. “You all right with that?”

“Sure,” the guy said. “I’m really tired.”

Kentris left after Hank locked the door from the outside. “What if he gets hungry?” he asked.

Hank shrugged. “Hopefully he has some Tic Tacs with him. Room service is closed.”

“When did it close?”

“I think during the Carter administration.”

As it turned out, the man had no need to call room service, because he was dead within an hour of his entering the motel room. Kentris discovered him in bed the next morning. He had placed a .22-caliber gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. His fingerprints were on the gun, and gunpowder traces were on his hand. The coroner ruled it a suicide; it was not a difficult call for him to make.

Both the arresting officers and Kentris had previously determined that he was not armed, and the door to the motel room had remained locked from the outside. No one had reported hearing a gunshot. After an investigation by the state police, the officers and Kentris were all given reprimands for their lax handling of the matter.

It was and remained the most upsetting incident of Kentris’s career, and not because of the reprimand. A man had died on his watch, and it was a death that could have been prevented. Having said that, Kentris did not understand how the weapon could have been concealed.

Two weeks after the body was found, it was learned that Daniel Richardson was really Larry Collins, from Norman, Oklahoma. He was an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Oklahoma, and had disappeared from his home three weeks before. His family and the local police could not provide any reason why.

When Kentris finished reading Richard’s article, Hank asked, “Sound a little familiar?”

“Worth checking into, that’s for sure,” Kentris said. The article had referred to a previous article written on the same subject, and Kentris had vaguely heard about it. But he never really paid attention, because until now he never knew it had any connection to anything he was involved with. But the Donovans were murdered less than ten miles from Kentris’s office, so now the connection was there.

“So if this turns out to be anything, can you deputize me?” Hank asked. “Maybe give me a commendation, or the key to the city, or something?”

“Why don’t you go back to the motel?” Kentris asked, looking at his watch. “The after-lunch, one-hour-quickie crowd should be showing up around now.”

“Who do you work for, the KGB?” The question was asked by Mark Cook, who was in my house waiting for me when I got home from dinner with Allie. He had just spent the last three hours checking to see if my place was being bugged.

“What does that mean?”

“Somebody has heard every word you said in this house, and seen every move you’ve made. Somebody who knew exactly what he was doing, and had an unlimited supply of money to help him do it.”

“The place was bugged,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but a statement. I was trying to let my mind process the implications.

“About twenty-five years ago the U.S. government built a huge new embassy building in Moscow. While it was being built, the Russians put bugging devices everywhere, even in the foundation. The Americans discovered it and never moved in, but if they hadn’t, nothing they ever did or said would have been private.”

“So?”

“So, compared to this, that embassy was clean,” Cook said.

“Should we be talking about this outside?” I asked.

Cook shook his head. “Doesn’t matter; it’s all been disabled. Took a while.”

“So they know we know.”