Seven Grams of Lead (10 page)

They first met eight years ago, when Nolend broke Thornton’s nose. Having just arrived from Buenos Aires to serve as chief of the Special Collection Service’s New York bureau, Nolend thrust a bony fist into the air in celebration after winning a United Nationals recreational rugby league game. Or, rather, Nolend intended to thrust his fist into the air. Thornton’s face was in the way.

Despite the awkward beginning, they established a rapport bordering on friendship; Nolend liked to show off his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the foreign diplomats and industrial magnates among his subjects, and Thornton liked to listen. He realized that Nolend’s expertise wasn’t founded upon an interest in intelligence gathering or national security so much as an infatuation with his subjects’ third homes and private jets—in short, a way of life attainable to a spy only if he sneaks in. It was no surprise a year later when Nolend left government service for the private sector, taking a job in a Los Angeles advertising agency that sought to win government billings. He did well there, garnering sufficient clientele from Silicon Valley to hang out his own shingle in San
Francisco’s Mission District. Before long, his business filled two floors in the Transamerica Pyramid.

Thornton wondered why Nolend had issued him a free ticket to tonight’s $10,000-a-plate event.
RealStory
posted almost no society news. His best guess was that his old rugby teammate sought to flaunt his success, including his young second wife.

After parking at a long-term lot in Hyannis, Thornton boarded a hydrofoil that covered the twenty-two miles of a placid Nantucket Sound in an hour. Nantucket was a summer resort island that saw little tourism in November. Thornton had expected the high-speed ferry to be packed with people who looked like they could drop $10,000 on a plate. There were few passengers, though, all obviously townies.

At the wharf in Nantucket, Nolend was waiting in a silver mid-1950s Mercedes 300SL worth as much as Thornton’s apartment. The onetime spook wore a royal blue linen blazer and a pair of Nantucket Reds, the salmon-pink chinos that had been fashionable on the island for a century. His polo shirt no longer hung off a cranelike physique, instead clinging fast to a build that told of hours in the weight room. His hair was sculpted too, layered with obvious precision. His infectious smile was the same as ever—though his teeth were whiter. “Great to see you, Russ,” he said.

Thornton pulled the gull-wing door down with him as he sank into the leather passenger seat. He burned to say,
Nice to see you in something other than
a phone company van for a change
, but opted for, “Same.”

A delicate piano concerto drifted from at least eight speakers. The hot air from the vents felt good after the ferry ride.

“New station car?” Thornton asked.

“I’ve taken up collecting automobiles.” Nolend’s attempt to shift into gear resulted in a metallic grinding.

“For your kids?” Nolend’s son and daughter from his first marriage would be about four and six, Thornton thought.

“For some reason, clients are more impressed by this thing than they were with my old Wagoneer.” Nolend found first gear, sending the Mercedes banging across the wharf’s wooden slats and up Main Street, a cobblestone block sided by high-end boutiques in the guise of quaint village shops. In two centuries, the village’s primary external change had been the electrification of the streetlamps, and even that stirred a prolonged dispute between Nantucket’s two factions, preservationists and fanatical preservationists. The most modern-leaning among the preservationists still maintained that the exterior walls of every structure be clad with the same unpainted, unvarnished, weather-grayed cedar shingles in which Herman Melville presented the island in
Moby-Dick.

Nolend waved at the fork where Main branched off to Liberty Street. “Our new place has a guesthouse.
How about you stay there instead of the hotel? The Seven Seas is quaint, but it always smells like low tide.”

Thornton would have leaped at an invitation to stay in Nolend’s outhouse for the proximity to clues. “As long as I don’t have to share a bed with a savage harpooner, thanks.”

Nolend continued onto Upper Main, which was lined with stately houses that originally belonged to whaleship captains. From there, the Mercedes zoomed west past vast cranberry bogs before the grass on the roadsides yielded to sand. Like most of his neighbors, Nolend had a driveway made of crushed clamshells, but his led to no house, just a boat slip, where a gleaming nineteenth-century paddle steamer rose and fell with the waves. A boatman emerged from the tiny wheelhouse as Nolend steered the car onto the deck.

“Good evening, sir,” the man said.

Nolend cracked the driver’s window. “How are things, Captain?”

Releasing the bowline, the captain said, “The bay’s behaving herself this evening.” He returned to the wheelhouse and fired the engine, starting the stern-mounted cylindrical wheel spinning, propelling the craft forward.

Thornton followed Nolend out of the car and onto a bench at the stern, behind the wheelhouse. As Nantucket drifted aft, the paddles accelerated, the slaps
against the water building to a steady and tranquilizing thrum.

Pointing to a nebulous landmass in the distance, Nolend said, “The new place is on Muskeget.”

“Doesn’t the preservation trust prohibit building on Muskeget?” asked Thornton.

“Well, there’s been a
slight
modification of the rules. A couple years ago, I heard about a seaman’s shack from the nineteenth century that was still standing on the north shore of the island. I bought it, suggested to the preservation trust’s approvals committee that it was a matter of civic duty for me to restore and maintain the residence, providing we added a few modern amenities, and maybe a few extra rooms. In essence, the code says that if you leave one beam from the original structure standing and shingle the exterior with cedar, you can do whatever you’d like with the rest of the place. The day before the approvals committee had to vote on our plan, by the by, the chairman got an insanely good deal on my Wagoneer.”

As the boat drew closer, the hazy mass ahead sharpened to dunes, atop which sat a block-long gray-shingled house with a steeply pitched roof and cutstone chimneys. The more Thornton saw, the less he believed that the AT&T van in Torrington and the invitation here had been coincidental.

He tried an appeal to Nolend’s vanity. “So I take it your new bride isn’t a government employee.”

“Luisana was successful as a fashion model before she came to the States, but I would have married her regardless. Wait until you meet her. Gorgeous, and, thankfully, no interest whatsoever in little ones.”

“But you have two little ones.”

“Little enough to require diaper changes, I should say.”

Thornton took a stab. “So I heard a rumor about another windfall of yours.”

“Yeah?” Nolend regarded the paddle wheel. “Which one?”

“The one that got you your own island.”

Nolend glanced back at the wheelhouse. The captain was absorbed in directing the vessel toward the dock.

“For your ears only?” Nolend asked Thornton.

Thornton started to say yes, amending it to, “Off the record, for background use only.”

“Well, old chum, it turned out that the advertising game was short on spooks.”

“Lucky for you, huh?”

“I learned that selling isn’t as much about generating demand as understanding it, then telling people you have exactly what they want. Agencies and clients spend millions on focus groups, but most of the time come away with no idea of what influences purchases.”

“So did you bring in the Stargaters?” Thornton was referring to the trio of psychics employed by the
CIA as part of an operation code named Stargate. They were eventually let go due to their complete inability to demonstrate psychic power.

Nolend laughed. “A couple years ago, after a brutally long and fruitless week of focus groups at a mall in Boise, one of our clients threw up his hands and said that he would pay any amount of money to be a fly on the wall in typical consumers’ homes, to hear what they really thought as opposed to what they said in skewed focus groups. It gave me an idea. I had dinner with another old F-Sixer, a tech guy who was teaching electrophysics down at Stanford, and we ended up creating a device that actually allowed clients to be the fly on the wall and then some. To make a long story short, it bought me an island.”

“So what’s the ‘it’?” Thornton asked as though merely interested.

Nolend seemed to deliberate, fighting back a smile before giving in. Thornton guessed that pride had won out. “You’ve seen a nanodrone before, right?”

“No, and I thought nobody can see one.”

“You can—if you know where and when to look, and it catches the light. We reverse-engineered an F6 model, added audio, then flew the thing right into a prospective customer’s kitchen.”

“Probably Pollyannaish of me to ask, but isn’t that illegal?”

“No, not if you get a signed release. For what the ad agency pays, the subjects never bother to read the fine
print. Still, in case one of our rivals or some rabble-rouser gets a look at the release form, I’m checking into relocating our listening post from San Francisco to Barbados. When I played for the Sixers, I heard rumint about a domestic black op that put a listening post on Barbados because the island has virtually no electronic eavesdropping regulations. The audio goes to a transcription service, then the people at the service send the spooks in the U.S.
written
transcripts. It’s a legal loophole.”

Good old Barbados, Thornton thought. The Caribbean island was an offshore business paradise based on the minimal extent to which laws were enforced.

“As you can imagine, the intel we’ve gotten has been fantastic,” Nolend went on. “Our proprietary research won the accounts I was able to found my agency on, and since then, business has been going so well it feels like cheating.”

This was not the sort of admission made by someone complicit in a crime, Thornton thought. In any case, it provided the flimsiest of leads. If the domestic eavesdropping operation were black—the “black” meaning the elimination of any connection between what’s being done and who’s doing it—Nolend probably knew no more about it, and Thornton would find it near impossible to learn anything, even without the encumbrance of his eavesdropper. If and when such black ops appeared on government ledgers, they were veiled as “Transit Analysis Project” or “Currency
Classification Initiative” or something even blander. Always best to keep Congress in the dark, the spooks believed; oversight has a way of revealing the intelligence services’ best-laid clandestine plans to their targets.

Thornton still intended to extract all the information he could from Nolend. But before he could ask another question, they reached the Madaket pier, where a small crowd of event planners descended upon the host.

While changing into his tux in a palatial room in the “guesthouse”—essentially a twelve-bedroom luxury hotel—Thornton reflected that his investigation had yet to advance beyond square one: Some entity has a superbug. The telephone company vans and Nolend’s invitation—mailed to Thornton’s apartment two months ago and printed weeks before that—were probably just coincidence after all. Thornton considered the familiar espionage refrain,
There are no coincidences.
He countered it with the fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died of natural causes on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And five years later, July 4, 1831, president number five, James Monroe, succumbed to mortality.

Thornton didn’t see Nolend again until that evening, at a predinner speech in a room that evoked
a royal reception hall. Nolend was introducing the speaker, the director of the famine relief organization the event benefited, when Thornton found a seat in an audience of 400 people, many of whom he recognized from their positions in American government, business, and entertainment. His eyes were drawn to a strikingly beautiful woman in the last row. During the speech, he stole a look over his shoulder every chance he got. He’d seen her before on television, where she appeared pale. In the flesh, her paucity of cosmetics emphasized creamy skin, and silvery strands highlighted a chute of black hair. She wore a full-length, glittering amber gown that took to her lithe form like gold foil on fancy chocolate. Far and away her most compelling feature, though, was a detail Thornton had read about her recent run for political office: By revealing secrets from her personal life that she’d reportedly never shared, her opponent, Senator Gordon Langlind, had narrowly won reelection.

For security’s sake,
Tim Eppley had committed the directions to the safe house to memory. He was careful to keep his rental Kia below the speed limit. A fifty-buck ticket now could end up costing him a thousand times as much later tonight. Driving eastbound on the Chesapeake Bay Road, staying below forty miles per hour was no problem. The two-lane route was winding, slick, and dark—lined by so many trees that it was hard to believe there was a 64,000-square-mile body of water a few feet to his left. The still-leafy branches extended over the road, obscuring the moon and stars. The Kia’s headlights reached into the darkness like luminous sleeves, revealing only the rutted pavement ahead and the occasional pine bough flying past.

Eppley tried to tone down his excitement in order to focus on driving. He’d been paid $25,000 in advance, and now, having finished assembling the E-bomb prototype, he stood to get another fifty K. Not bad for three weeks’ work, especially for an unemployed twenty-year-old Cal-Tech dropout. Better, he stood to land a full-time gig at Blaise, arguably the most innovative advanced weapons development shop since the Skunk Works. The best part about the prospective gig was the chance to get to know his idol, Curtis Brockett, who, too, had wasted a year in school, at MIT, before founding Blaise and, five years later, making the
Forbes
list.

Three weeks ago, Brockett sent Eppley an e-mail beginning with a quotation from Sun-tzu’s
The Art of War
: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.” The remainder of the message was just one sentence: “Opportunity’s knocking, amigo.” It was signed, “CB.”