Ratio: A Leopold Blake Thriller (A Private Investigator Series of Crime and Suspense Thrillers) (16 page)

Jerome grunted. “Just stick to the soda. Be back up here in thirty minutes, or I’ll send Chuckles and Fizzbo here down to get you.” 

The agents looked puzzled. 

“Code names,” Leopold said. “I’m sure you understand, Chuckles.” He paused, looking at the agent on the right. “Or maybe you’re Fizzbo.” He turned to leave. “Work it out between yourselves.” 

He took the elevator. Hit the lobby, headed straight for the bar. Took a seat near the taps. Ordered a Coke. The barman brought him a glass with ice, a bottle of cola. Leopold poured the contents into the glass and drank it down. Ordered another. There was movement behind him, so he turned. 

“Take it easy on those,” a female voice said. 

Leopold smiled. Patricia Johnson stood a few feet away, smiling back. She was dressed in dark jeans, heels, a fitted shirt and slim jacket. She had let her hair down. It came a little past her shoulders, dark and flowing. 

“I can quit any time I like,” said Leopold. He motioned for her to join him at the bar. “What are you doing here?” 

“It’s after six,” she said. “I’m off the clock. I felt like a drink.”

“You’re not the only one.” 

“Bad day?” 

“Let’s just say this line of work isn’t exactly my forte.”

She waved the bartender over. “You don’t say.” 

“Is it that obvious?” 

“The other guy seems to know what he’s doing.” She looked up at the barkeeper. “I’ll have a Bombay Sapphire and Tonic. Diet.” 

The bartender nodded. Fetched down a bottle of gin, poured a measure over ice. Handed her the glass with a small bottle of tonic water.

She took a sip. “Thanks.” 

“I’ll have the same,” Leopold said. “No ice.” 

“Aren’t you on duty?” 

“You going to tell on me?” 

Johnson smiled. “I haven’t decided yet.” She changed the subject. “You enjoying Seattle?”

“Kinda wet.”

“Yeah, we get that a lot.” She laughed and ran one hand through her hair. “You get used to it.”

“You got any family here?”

Johnson didn’t reply for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, eventually. “My parents died a few years ago, but my son…” She trailed off. “Anyway, enough about me. You got family in town?”

He shook his head. “It’s just me. My parents died too.” 

“Sorry to hear that.”

Leopold looked her up and down. “You were waiting for me to show up, weren’t you?” 

“What gave you that idea?” 

He grinned. “You went home to get changed. Came back here, waited until I arrived to order a drink. Are you stalking me, Officer Johnson?” 

“How do you know I didn’t just change at work?” 

“Your clothes are freshly pressed. No creases. You would have had to fold them up to bring them to work.”

“Any other observations?” 

He shook his head. “Maybe another time.” 

“Something on your mind?” 

Leopold decided to change the subject. “Listen, it’s a big day tomorrow. I get the feeling the Secret Service folks aren’t going to go out of their way to lend us a hand. How about a little Seattle hospitality from you and the rest of your team? We could sure use it.” 

Johnson took another sip of her drink, pushing a strand of hair behind her ears. “It’s all business with you, isn’t it?” She paused. “Listen, you’re right about my wanting to see you. I couldn’t say anything with all those agents around, but I’ve got my own concerns about the conference this weekend.” 

“What kind of concerns?” 

“Call it a gut feeling.”

“I’m going to need a little more than that.” 

She took another sip, ice clinking against the glass. “I’ve worked security for fifteen years. I’m trained to spot things that look out of place. So far, I’ve not seen anything.” 

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Yeah, it is.” 

Leopold finished his own drink. He considered ordering another, but settled for a Coke instead. “Explain.” 

“With any high-profile event like this, you always get a few crazies pushing the perimeter. Or at least one or two alarm bells. It’s part of the job. I’ve made a few friends on the Secret Service detail. They keep me in the loop. With this, nothing. Not a whisper. It’s all far too polished, too perfect. That in itself rings alarm bells.” 

“Maybe we’re just doing too good a job.”

She laughed. “Maybe. Or perhaps somebody knows something you don’t. Perhaps they know exactly what we’re looking out for, know how to keep their movements hidden.”

“Like an inside job? You have any suspicions?” 

Johnson shook her head. “Like I said, it’s just a gut feeling. Hell, maybe this is just the one time in the history of my career that everything’s worked out without a hitch.” She drained the last of her gin and tonic. “But you got to plan for the worst, right? I’d keep my eye on Harper, if I were you. She’s not exactly popular around here.” 

Leopold watched her stand up. “There is one other explanation,” he said. 

“What’s that?”

He pushed his half-drunk bottle of Coke to the side. “That something’s already happened and we just haven’t been looking in the right place.”

Chapter 24

IT HAD BEEN a long time since June had cuddled. Feeling the coarse hairs of Jack’s chest on her back was reassuring. Even better, he hadn’t got up and left her. They were still cozy and warm beneath the sheets. 

“What time do you present tomorrow?” she asked in the dark.

“I open the session in the morning. Ten o’clock.”

“Wow, session opener. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, well, at least the President won’t be there for it.”

“What’s your topic about?” She instantly regretted asking. He had sent her information about it, but she never had looked at it.

“You didn’t read the promo material I sent?”

Her face felt warm and she knew she was blushing from embarrassment. “Kinda busy lately.”

“Use of phi and certain numerical streams to predict economic trends in specific markets.”

June fluffed her pillow, trying to find a comfortable arrangement. She turned her head back to look at him. “Phi?”

“The Golden Ratio, and using the Fibonacci sequence as predictors in economic development. The Fibonacci sequence is…”

“I know what it is,” June said. “I built a Fibonacci spiral from origami paper for a calculus class in high school. But how does Fibonacci relate to economics?” Lovemaking had been set aside until her curiosity could be satisfied.

“With reinvestment of profits at a Fibonacci growth rate, profits are shown to grow at an exponentially faster rate, depending on the market and product availability. Using idealized assumptions, anyway.”

“Whatever that means.” She squirmed around in his arms until she was facing him.

He looked into her eyes. “It means if business profits are reinvested at the same rate of the Fibonacci sequence, future profits will grow at the same rate, but exponentially higher. I’ve been using the same methods in campaigning. By reinvesting new campaign funds into previously balloted states, I remain not just in a static position comparatively to other candidates, but move ahead in polls.”

She waited for a moment, to see if he had more to add before asking the question that reflected the elephant in the room. While she waited, she struggled with her pillow. “How come you got flat, lumpy old pillows, but in my room there are brand new ones?”

“I’ll have the housekeeper replace these in the morning,” he said.

“Are you going to win?” she asked, not really caring about the pillows.

“My numbers are better this time than at the same time in the last campaign. As long as I don’t screw up something, I should be fine.”

“Screw up as in getting abducted from a bathroom while taking a leak, like last time?”

 “Yes, I’m so glad America knows that little detail.” He smiled and kissed her. “If only there had been photos.”

She pulled away. “But you have no idea of what happened after that?” 

He shook his head. “The next thing I knew I was in an operating room of some sort, and they were getting ready to put me under. I wasn’t sure if I would ever wake up again, or even what sort of surgery they had planned. Everything after that was a blur until I showed up in that little hospital out in the desert. That’s when the Corps started shifting me from one place to another in some armored car.” He stroked the hair away from her face. “By then I had missed my chance. Millions of dollars in campaign funds out the window.”

“Then we met, in that travel trailer.”

“The heroic brain surgeon that saved my life, working against all odds.”

“I had a lot of help that night. But whatever.” June took a deep breath, worried about her next question. “I guess I’ve been wondering where I fit in all this?”

“I’ve been wondering that also,” said Jack. “There’s certainly plenty of room for you to fit into my life.”

“Yeah, into your life…”

“First things first, okay? We still need to get to know each other better than having weekenders together.”

“Very true, Mr. President.” She kissed his collarbone.

“And after tonight, the first thing we need to get through is tomorrow morning.”

“One day at a time, as they say.”

“And in a campaign,” Jack said, “it’s often one moment at a time. But what about your talk? Ready for it?”

“Yeah, and believe it or not, it has a lot to do with your surgery.”

“Brain surgery, Fibonacci, the Golden Ratio, and me,” he said. “This I gotta hear.”

“It’s the technique I use in the approach to getting to the third ventricle. To find the sulcus I want, I lay out on the side of the head the Fibonacci spiral, that shell-shaped deal, like a template for the exact spot to make the craniotomy. Essentially, if I arrange the five-eight arcs of the spiral along the top of the cranium, then the central block of numeric tiles is the section of bone I remove, and the access point for my tunnel into the brain is the very first tile of the spiral.”

Jack raised one eyebrow. “And it always works like that? Don’t we all have different shaped heads?” 

June nodded. “Surprisingly, it’s been quite accurate. Of the two dozen cadaver heads I worked on in my research, including both genders and four different races, and of all the live cases I’ve done, it’s been spot on.”

“But what happens if you don’t find the fold you want after you knock the hole in the head?” 

She pinched him. “I don’t knock holes in heads. I very carefully use a high-speed perforator and drill four holes in the skull, then connect them with a high-speed bit. Then it’s just a matter of popping that piece of skull bone off, without dropping it on the floor first of course.” She playfully pinched him again. “But to answer your question, if the access point I want is not right in the middle, I can always enlarge the hole I’ve made. Any more questions?”

He was quiet for a moment, before asking, “And that’s what you did to me?”

“Yeah, but I put everything back together again.”

They lay quietly for a while, June letting Jack absorb the information. From experience, June knew patients that had major brain operations took a while to come to terms with their surgeries. But it came time to push along the conversation.

“Interesting how in nature the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden spiral keep recurring,” she said. “Pine cones, asparagus, pineapples, sunflower seed arrangements, fern fronds, so many things. I suppose it’s the same for you in economics?”

He sighed contentedly. “My first degree was in mathematics, but I have to study whenever I go back to it. That all seems so long ago.”

“Interesting, huh? Even ideas of beauty are influenced by one point six one eight, or the Golden ratio. Hokusai’s wave combines both the Fibonacci spiral and the Golden ratio. Quite a few years ago, while my sister Amy was at the top of her game in fashion modeling, some math student somewhere decided to look at the ratios of different races of models and actors, people considered beautiful. One of them was Amy. The interesting thing was, each of their faces closely approximated the Golden ratio, even though they all looked different and were different races. Except Amy. Her face calculated out at what’s known in Japan as the Silver ratio.”

“Silver ratio?” he asked.

“It’s called
Yamato-hi.
Or one to the square root of two, or more commonly one to one point four, instead of one point six of the Golden ratio. Common shapes of ancient architecture, sheets of origami paper, shapes of old hand carts, Buddha statuary, even
ikebana
flower arranging. For a while, that’s all agents and advertisers were interested in, if a new model or young actor’s face met the correct ratio, the Golden ratio for white people and the Silver ratio for Asians. Then they started getting clever, reversing the ratios per races, trying to come up with exotic looks. That pretty much fell flat.”

“But…”

“I know what you’re going to say, and it’s the same thing everyone says. Some very ordinary looking people also meet the calculated ratio, and many people thought to be beautiful don’t meet it.”

“It’s all just fluff then?” Jack said. “Beauty products and actors’ appearances?”

She laughed. “No, it’s all marketing, which is exactly what you do in campaigning, right?”