Capitol Reflections (34 page)
“Mess?”
“When you’re followed by people who don’t seem to work for the good guys, believe me—it’s a mess. I’ve got some things to show you, and I’m not at all sure how they add up, but maybe if we work together, we’ll be able to figure out what the next step should be.”
Gwen turned away at that point to look out the window. Mark could only imagine what she was thinking.
The cabbie stopped at the Smithsonian Institute parking lot nearest the Air and Space Museum. Mark handed the driver a fistful of bills and said a hurried thanks as he exited the cab, grabbing his large Nike sports bag and helping Gwen with her luggage.
“What now?” asked Gwen.
“Follow me,” Mark said, placing what appeared to be a nickel on the ground as he walked behind the cab. He then crossed several rows of cars in the lot until he came to a dark green Suburban with tinted windows.
“Belongs to a friend of mine,” he said, pressing the unlock button on his keychain.
Mark and Gwen climbed into the van and stowed their gear. The large engine roared to life as Mark turned the ignition key. He backed out, headed for the interstate, and looked over at Gwen who still seemed a little shell-shocked.
Sixty minutes later, they checked into a small motel in eastern Virginia. Mark pulled out his cell—the same one he’d used to call Pequod’s and Randall, Inc.—and inserted a new chip into the phone.
“I’ve gathered some interesting devices over the years,” he told Gwen. “With this particular chip, the cell’s signal will be scrambled and untraceable.”
“Is that legal?”
“Not if you’re a civilian, but who’s going to tell on me?” He punched a set of numbers into the keypad. “I’m going to call an old friend of mine, Congressman Rick Mecklenberg. He’s the guy who loaned me the Suburban. Hopefully, he can get some info on Jack.”
Mecklenberg promised to keep tabs on Jack Maulder, though not in person. He’d have a friend of his call the nurse’s station and pretend to be family.
“Do you think we’re safe here?” asked Gwen.
“For a while. It depends on how many goons are chasing us.”
Gwen sat on the edge of the bed and put her head on Mark’s shoulder. Mark wasn’t sure what to do. How many times had he envisioned a scene like this—he and Gwen in a hotel, her head on his shoulder, back together after so many years. Except the fantasy scenes never involved hiding from an unknown enemy.
Or Gwen’s sobbing, which she was now doing.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “This can’t be happening—not now.”
Or Gwen’s being pregnant with another man’s child.
Mark put his arm around her shoulder. “We’ll deal with this. Hang in there.”
Her crying eased a bit. Mark wished the rest of their problems would resolve so easily.
Op Three listened to the electronic beeps emitting from the black rectangular object on his passenger seat. The gadget looked like a Radio Shack calculator, but it was a tracking device homing in on the signal coming from the magnetic locator he’d placed under the cab’s rear bumper minutes before Mark got into the taxi’s backseat at the airport. He followed it for several miles until he came at last to the Air and Space Museum parking lot at the Smithsonian.
“Shit!” he cursed. “That lousy SOB knows too much for his own good.”
Op Three got out of his car and picked up the magnetic locator, roughly the size of a nickel, lying on the hot asphalt. His call to Op One would be one of the more unpleasant exchanges he’d had in a while.
“Let’s see what we have to work with,” Mark said once he’d given Gwen a chance to orient herself to their new situation.
Gwen got out her hard copy of the seizure stats, some burned CDs, and a laptop onto which she’d transferred all of Jack’s files and research via portable jump drive. Mark was relieved to see that her scientific curiosity and inherent strength of character had risen to the occasion as she powered up the laptop and loaded Microsoft Word, which contained something called Haydn104 and Jack’s notes regarding his investigations into tobacco.
“All I know is that people are dying,” Gwen said with determination, “and tobacco has something to do with it.” Gwen showed Mark the postings Jack had found on the Internet, as well as the file on Virginia Rampling.
“To be truthful, Gwen, I’m still not buying into the tobacco angle. I know Kessler hired you at the FDA, but you have to stop trying to fight his fight. Big Tobacco is always under everybody’s microscope. If the seizure pattern is traceable, I don’t think the management of R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, or Compson would risk moving a high-nicotine cigarette into the market. Do they like what happened in the nineties? No, but they’re too smart to put a lethal cigarette into circulation. It would be a wet dream for every plaintiff’s lawyer in the country. Anyway, they’re not interested in immediately killing their customers—just in keeping them happily and fatally hooked.”
“But what if it’s not nicotine that’s responsible? What if the companies themselves aren’t aware of the seizures because of some new additive?”
“They test their brands too carefully to be ignorant of what they’re selling. That’s what made their manipulation of nicotine levels such an outrage. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
Gwen paced anxiously back and forth, massaging her temples. Her head had been pounding for the last two hours. “Are you saying that Jack was pursuing a dead-end lead?”
“He might have been.”
Gwen sat on the edge of the bed, arms crossed. “What keeps coming back to me over and over again is the last thing Marci said to me.”
“What was that?”
“Ondee.”
“What does it mean?”
“She was referring to
Ondine
. I know you’ve never been anywhere on a Saturday afternoon except a ball game, but Marci and I used to love scoring last-minute tickets to the ballet. Of all the pieces,
Ondine
was Marci’s favorite. It’s about a prince who marries a beautiful young woman named Ondine, who in reality is a water sprite who emerges from a fountain in the prince’s palace.”
Ondine
. I know you’ve never been anywhere on a Saturday afternoon except a ball game, but Marci and I used to love scoring last-minute tickets to the ballet. Of all the pieces,
Ondine
was Marci’s favorite. It’s about a prince who marries a beautiful young woman named Ondine, who in reality is a water sprite who emerges from a fountain in the prince’s palace.”
Mark, who had read every issue of
Rolling Stone
, but had never been near anything as cultured as a ballet, was puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t see its significance.”
Rolling Stone
, but had never been near anything as cultured as a ballet, was puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t see its significance.”
“Only that Marci really identified with that dance. She saw herself as Ondine, someone a man could never successfully love because she had another calling. She worked so hard to get through school that she put it above everything else. Guys would always be breaking up with her because she never had enough time for them. I guess it was threatening to their egos. Ondine had this signature series of leaps and spins in the final act. Whenever some guy would dump her, Marci would dance into my room that way.”
“Interesting—and very important to you and Marci—but probably not tied to anything.”
“I guess not. When someone dies, the right temporal lobe fills with electrical activity that causes pleasant hallucinations. Some think the phenomenon is the basis for near-death experiences.”
“Which leaves us, for the moment, with only the information from Jack’s laptop. Let me take a look.”
Mark inspected Haydn104 first. Unimpressed with the rows of numbers, he began to peruse Jack’s files that Gwen had imported to her laptop. These, consequently, included all of Marci’s files that Jack downloaded.
“Lots of legal files,” Mark commented. “There’s enough material here to keep us reading for days, assuming we could understand the legalese.”
Continuing to scan the directory of Marci’s files, Mark suddenly furrowed his brows.
“What is it?” asked Gwen.
“Just looking at what was apparently the last case Marci worked on. Nguyen v. Lazlow. Looks like a woman named Anh Nguyen was challenging a routine eviction by an all-too-common slumlord.”
“I think Jack’s visit to Virginia Rampling and his research on cigarettes are more germane.”
“Patience,” Mark said, winking at Gwen as he looked up. “An investigative reporter has to trudge through a lot of muck, sometimes on the street, sometimes on a PC.”
Mark read the details about Lazlow. The landlord was breaking Anh’s lease in order to sell his apartment building to a developer. Apparently, Lazlow had not maintained the tenement and the city cited him several times for violations of various building codes. Mark clicked on “N v. L—background info” to see if there was anything unusual about the case since the suit didn’t seem particularly noteworthy.
“What have we here?” he said in a low voice.
“You’ve found something?”
“Nested files. This one file is really a folder that contains dozens of other files. Trouble is, I can’t get into any of them.”
Mark paused, considering several possibilities. “This Haydn104 file. Jack was never able to do anything with it?”
“Nope, but Marci wasn’t the type to create a file for no reason. She was too methodical, too logical.”
“I’m no computer whiz,” said Mark, “but I wonder … ”
“What?”
“I wonder if these numbers open up the nested files. How would I connect the nested files with Haydn104? Any idea?”
Gwen pursed her lips. “I’ve watched Jack work over the years, but I confess I wasn’t always paying much attention. Let me see what I can do.”
Mark and Gwen traded seats. Gwen clicked the mouse on the nested files, then reloaded the Haydn104 CD. When it appeared onscreen, she highlighted the numbers, brought down a dialog box and clicked APPLY.
The nested files immediately opened into dozens of extra folders.
“Yes!”
Gwen switched places with Mark again, and he began to inspect the hidden files unlocked by Haydn104.
“Got something, Sherlock?”
“Yes, although I don’t know what it means. Anh Nguyen was married to someone I met recently.”
“Who?”
“The chief roastmaster for Pequod’s. His name is Dieter Tassin. I was staring into his eyes less than forty-eight hours ago. He married Anh in 1975, shortly after she arrived in the U.S. Tassin disappeared in the late seventies, according to Anh’s affidavit, and she filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion and subsequently reverted to her Vietnamese name since she and Tassin didn’t have any children together. Maybe Marci was saying ‘Anh and Dieter’—not Ondine.”
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