Old Poison (26 page)

“When we started getting into government
contracts, the toy solders and wannabe James Bonds started showing
up in the company.” With a slight nod of her head, she indicated
Folger. “Speaking of which, I think someone must have wound his
spring. Story time is over.”

I looked up to see Folger marching toward
us. His face held a hint of a sneer as he stopped in front of me.
“Ms. Gomez, Mr. Woods has ordered you to cease your inquiries
regarding this company until after your security clearance has been
completed. You are to accompany me to his office immediately.”

I turned to Lucille. “More wasted time, and
I have clients waiting in New York. I am going to have to tell
James that this is not working out.”

Lucille picked up my call for help. “I’m
heading that way. I’ll let him know you need to speak with
him.”

Folger stepped in front of her blocking her
path. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Owens. You are to accompany me to Mr.
Woods office also. He wishes to speak with you regarding security
protocol.”

Lucille removed her thick glasses, polished
them with the edge of her long blouse, and replaced them.

“Sonny Boy, you tell Harry Woods that I
won’t be needing his security lecture for two reasons. First, I
have already retired and am returning to the States this afternoon.
If he wants this mess picked up, he will have to find someone else
to do it. Maybe some of his young toy soldiers, if he can find any
of you who can read. And, second, tell Harry that I have a long
memory for security matters, memory that goes all the way back to
1989 and a certain young congressman’s wife.”

Then she carefully unpinned her security
pass, opened Folger’ hand and thrust the badge into his palm, pin
first.

He jumped back, his aggressive expression
changing to one of confusion. “Hey, God damn it! Watch it.”

Lucille turned to me. “Good luck, Dolores.”
Then she turned and walked out of the building, leaving Folger
sputtering and me almost choking as I tried not to laugh.

* * * * *

Any compulsion I might have had to laugh
disappeared when I entered the office of Harriman Woods. He was
about six feet tall and, despite the paunch, in better physical
condition than I had noticed in our previous brief encounters. His
face was bony and hard with age lines that drew a permanently grim
expression. His small, dull brown eyes were rimmed with red,
reminding me of my uncle’s old Yorkshire sow. She was the meanest
animal I have ever met . . . and the smartest. Here in his office,
under his control, I should have had the good sense to feel afraid,
but I remembered the story Sam had told me of how he had butchered
those children, and all I could feel was rage that such an evil
person should be allowed to live.

Without looking up he growled out, “Sit
down, Gomez.”

I studied him a minute, steadying myself to
gain voice control. “And good morning to you, Mr. Woods. How kind
of you to offer me a chair.”

He looked up from the papers on his desk.
The expression in his eyes was hollow, as if there were no soul
behind them.

“We won’t waste any time on pleasantries or
verbal banter, Ms. Gomez, if that’s your name. I’ve checked your
CV. It all checks out, as I expected. It would probably get by most
investigations; but you see, I have planted enough phony covers to
recognize one when I see it. Yours has no depth. Some places I can
find a computer record or a personnel clerk who can verify your
employment, but not one employee who remembers meeting you.”

“Since I am an outside consultant, that
should hardly be surprising.”

“Uh huh. You’re an outside consultant here,
too, and I believe you have been here less than twenty-four hours,
but every employee in the plant could identify you and tell me what
your job is supposed to be.”

“Right. In a tiny compound in a foreign
jungle. Try the same thing in New York or Dallas. Look, I don’t
know what your problem is, but your boss yanked me away from other
jobs to come here as a favor to him and help with your records. Now
if you have a problem with that, talk with him.”

“I have, and as soon as I get through with
my job, you can get on with yours.”

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and
pulled out a box and opened it on the desk top. It was a
fingerprint kit, one of the old-fashioned ones with nasty, real
ink.

“So let’s just run your fingerprints, and if
your ID checks out, you will be allowed to work with non classified
records.”

“I don’t believe this. You want to
fingerprint me like some sort of criminal?”

“No, Gomez, like every other employee in
this plant. It’s standard security protocol. You should have no
objection, unless of course you have something to hide.”

My brain was scrambling for an out. If he
just checked the states where my CV said I had worked, he would
find no record, but there was no doubt in my mind that he would run
it through the FBI repository. There he would nail me. I had been
fingerprinted in California for both my PI license and my guard
card. The only question was, how long would it take? The FBI’s new
automated fingerprint identification system can kick back an answer
on a criminal search in two hours. That wouldn’t even be time for
me to get to the main road, unless I could snag a car. But he would
have to run me as a civilian request, and that would take at least
twenty-four hours. That was time enough to get away, but I would
leave empty-handed.

“Let me get this straight, you want to
fingerprint me and run some sort of check on me before I can go to
work. How long will that take, and what am I supposed to do in the
meantime?”

“About three days, and frankly I don’t give
a fuck what you do as long as you stay away from our company
records until I’ve cleared you.”

“And then what else? Will you find some
other way to–”

There was a soft knock at the door.

“Who the hell is it?”

The door opened and James Nolan stuck his
head in and gave us a smile.

“Hi. Understand there’s a slight
misunderstanding down here.”

“Nolan, you try to interfere in security and
I will have your nuts.”

James came in and put his hands up
submissively. “Oh, hell no, Mr. Woods. I wouldn’t think of it. I
just realized that Mrs. Gomez here may not have worked for a
company with security clearance needs like ours, and she might
think you’re picking on her. Now, Dolores, I know this seems a
little severe, but we have a lot of military contracts here, and
I’m afraid it is necessary. Now just go on and cooperate with Mr.
Woods, and then we can get on with business.”

I hesitated wondering if James had any idea
what he was doing. By the time those prints came back, I intended
to be out of here. But what would happen to the guy who brought me
in?

“Go on, it’s got to be done.”

I walked over to Woods and surrendered my
hands, allowing him to roll each fingertip through the damned ink,
then roll them onto the print cards. When he finished, I stood
there waiting for him to supply me with something to clean my
hands. Noticing the omission, James pulled out his handkerchief and
offered it to me.

“Here, you can wipe the worst off with this,
then we can walk back over to the commissary. You can clean up, and
we can have lunch.”

We walked silently out of the building, then
James left the elevated pathway and guided me down a lovely garden
path lined with brilliantly colored flowers.

Once clear of the building, I asked in what
I hoped was a jocular tone, “James, what if he discovers I’m really
something terrible like a serial killer or something? What will
that do to your position, since you brought me in?”

He stopped on the path just in front of me,
picked a flower, and as he handed it to me said, “Or something like
a private investigator? Game time’s over, Diana.”

At the sound of my real name, my heart
started pounding faster. I looked from the flower to his eyes and
saw that the Kahuna was gone and the warrior was back.

“He’ll deliver that card to the embassy in
San Jose within three hours and get a report back twenty-eight
hours after that. Now we are going to take a pleasant little walk
around the grounds and have a little talk, and we don’t have time
to waste. I’ll start, then I need to have some very straight
answers from you.”

He spoke quietly as we continued walking up
the path. “In one week, scientists from this company are going to
release the first of two information bombs that will cause more
economic, political, and diplomatic havoc than a full-scale war.
Some of us in the company would like to believe we are doing the
right thing and that the disruption we are going to cause is the
lesser of two evils.

“A lady named Evelyn Lilac claimed to have
information that could be crucial to a responsible decision, but
the board of Blue Morpho hadn’t heard of her until just a few weeks
ago. When I started checking I found that Woods and his bunch had
been searching the world for Lilac, which gave credence to a report
we had received. Now Woods is putting the same effort into finding
one Diana Hunter.”

To my amazement, James began to chuckle. How
could he find anything to laugh at?

“I would love to see that bastard’s face
when those prints come back and he learns that you were standing
two feet from him.”

My anger flared, and I grabbed his arm and
pulled him around to face me. “Oh, yeah, that will be just
hilarious. Does your company know that son of a bitch killed Evelyn
and, so far, five other people that I know of?”

“We do now. What the hell do you think I’ve
been doing down here, soaking up the sunshine? I have enough
information to put him and several of his lackeys away, but I have
to give him rope until I learn what the hell it is that Evelyn had.
So give.”

“What’s next week’s information bomb?”

He studied me for several seconds before
answering. “It’s a series of scientific studies by us and other
petroleum companies confirming the worst predictions of global
warming and proving that fossil fuels are the chief cause. It also
contains papers proving conspiracy to deny and discredit these
facts.”

“Wow! Like the tobacco industry admitting
they knew nicotine was addictive.”

“Much worse. You can always quit smoking.
The engine that drives the entire modern civilization is oil.
Without oil, none of our factories will produce, none of our modes
of heat and transportation will work, all of our economies
worldwide will collapse. None of our home heaters or refrigerators
will run. Do you suppose this modern civilization could turn around
in a week and learn to string bows and chip arrowheads, go back to
bringing home the bacon the old-fashioned way?”

“But that dismal picture is not exactly what
Blue Morpho has in mind, is it? What is the second information bomb
the company has planned?”

“We’ve developed a new fuel to gradually
replace fossil fuel. It’s inexpensive to produce, clean burning,
environmentally safe.”

“I suppose that news flash is timed to ride
to the rescue after your first release has been checked by world
scientists and everyone is nicely desperate about the future. But
it won’t be free, will it? Your replacement fuel is patented by
Blue Morpho, right?”

He nodded, and I found myself laughing and
realized it was as inappropriate as his laugh had been.

“No wonder there is so much security and
paranoia around this plant. You guys are planning to cut down the
richest, most powerful people in the world and replace them with
yourselves. Mr. Duffy’s dream comes true. Good luck. You’re going
to need more than Woods’s toy soldier brigade to pull this
off.”

“That’s not my problem. My problem is Evelyn
Lilac’s information. If she has proof that the new fuel is actually
more harmful to the environment than petroleum, our company will
not proceed with next week’s release. I think you know what she had
and where it is. I need you to tell me.”

Suspicion and cynicism truly are
occupational hazards for both reporters and investigators. It’s not
that you start out that way. It’s that time after time you learn
through experience that nothing is ever what it appears to be . . .
nothing. Suddenly I felt as though I had been manipulated ever
since I got here in an elaborate game of good cop, bad cop. I
wanted to ask how he knew my name and when he knew it, but this was
not the time. Now I could reveal no suspicion of James Nolan. Now I
had to play his game.

* * * * *

“Well, James, as you put it, that’s not my
problem, and not the reason I came down here. The FBI agent who is
investigating Evelyn’s murder called me to identify her body. I
held out on him because the story Evelyn told me about Martians
colonizing Earth was so ridiculous, I figured he’d think I was as
loony as she was. Now he wants to take my license and toss me in
federal prison. I came down here looking for her murderer in the
hopes that if I help him he will back off on me. Now you tell me a
new whopper of international oil intrigue that sounds as crazy as
Martians. If you really have hard evidence regarding Evelyn’s
murder, I’ll take it to the FBI for you, and they can take care of
Woods.”

He smiled. “I’ll bet you would. We might
arrange something like that, but first I need you to give me the
data Evelyn had.”

“Data? All she gave me was a chapter of a
science fiction book.”

“No, I know all about her Martian book. She
had something else, some old experiments that Duffy had done on an
alternative fuel code-named ‘Hyacinth Red’.”

“She wrote about Red 19 in the
Martian
Diary
, but she never mentioned any real experiments or anything
to do with Blue Morpho.”