Power Play (17 page)

“Good evening,” she said, “and welcome to the first of what we hope will be a series of debates between the two candidates for the Republican Party’s nomination to run for the U.S. Senate.”

She introduced Tomlinson and Dant, then told the audience that Tomlinson had won a coin toss and would speak first. Of course Tomlinson won the toss, Jake thought. The rich always get their way.

“Dant doesn’t look like much, does he?” Glynis whispered.

Jake nodded his agreement as Tomlinson began his thoroughly rehearsed statement. Jake knew it by heart. Change. New hope for the state. Use our natural resources, both human and economic. Use the state’s best minds. Develop a new energy system that can lower the taxpayers’ electricity bills, cut the nation’s dependence on oil imported from foreign countries, deliver electricity cleanly, and rejuvenate the state’s coal industry. Jobs, energy efficiency, economic growth, and more jobs.

The audience applauded politely when he finished. Then the moderator turned to Harmon Dant.

With a rueful shake of his head, Dant began, “It’s fine for Mr. Tomlinson here to talk about pie in the sky. He’s so wealthy it doesn’t matter how high your taxes go; he’s got all sorts of fancy accountants and numbers jugglers to protect his money.

“Me, I’m just a businessman. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon. I worked for what I got, and I’m still working. But I know what’s important to you folks. Just like me, you’re worrying about taxes, about gang violence in our schools and on our streets, about teenaged girls having babies before they finish high school, for cryin’ out loud, about abortionists murdering unborn children.
That’s
what important to you, and by golly, it’s important to me, too!”

The audience broke into thunderous applause. Stunned, Jake heard hoots and whistles of approval.

“It’s going to be a long evening,” Glynis said over the noise of the ovation.

DEBRIEFING

Alexander Tomlinson was furious.

“You let him wipe the floor with you!” he raged at his son. “He ran rings around you and you just stood there!”

As planned, Jake had driven to the Tomlinson residence after the debate for a debriefing session, leaving Glynis in the frigidly cold high school parking lot. He had waited, though, to make certain Glynis’s cranky Jaguar started. To his surprise, it purred to life with no trouble. Glynis waved to him as she swung out of her parking space, leaving Jake alone in the dark, cold night.

Now, in the library of the Tomlinson mansion, it was blazingly hot.

Tomlinson and Amy were already there by the time the butler showed Jake into the library. The senior Tomlinson was pacing up and down the book-lined room, a blue vein in his forehead pulsing visibly.

“He’s a
nobody
!” the old man bellowed. “And you let him make you look like a fool!”

Tomlinson had stripped off his suit jacket. Sitting in one of the library’s capacious armchairs, his long legs crossed, he looked tired, frustrated, and bitterly unhappy.

“He didn’t say anything specific,” the son said. “He just talked in wild generalities.”

“I watched the whole thing on TV,” the father snapped. “I saw the applause he got.”

Amy spoke up. “Dant packed the hall with his own supporters. That crowd doesn’t represent the voters of—”

The elder Tomlinson spun on her. “Why wasn’t the hall packed with
our
people? That’s your job, lady!”

“It’s just the primary—”

“Those people will go out and vote! A dedicated group of crazies can swing a primary election!”

“I’ll do better next time,” his son promised. “I’ll know what to expect from him.”

“I don’t think there should be another debate. No sense looking like an ass all over again.”

Tomlinson slowly got to his feet and faced his father. Jake saw that their profiles were alike, their postures straight and rigid, their fists balled at their sides.

“I’ll beat him,” the younger Tomlinson said. “That’s a promise.”

His father backed away half a step. Then he said, “We need to know more about this man Dant. Why he’s running. Who’s backing him.”

“I’ll put some of my people on that right away.”

“No,” the old man said. “Not your campaign people. Keep their noses out of it. I’ll get some people I know to look into his background. Even if they’re caught snooping nobody will be able to trace it back to you.”

Amy asked, “Do you think Leeds has put him up to it? As a straw man, to take the nomination away from Franklin.”

Alexander Tomlinson glared at her for a moment, but then he muttered, “I wouldn’t put it past the sneaky sonofabitch.”

*   *   *

As he drove home through the bitter night, Jake wondered if he should have asked Tomlinson’s father to have some professionals look into Sinclair’s background. There’s something fishy about the professor’s attitude, his behavior. Something’s going on, and I can’t figure out what it is.

Maybe Glynis knows, he mused, but she’s too loyal to Sinclair to spill the beans. Or maybe she’s afraid he’ll cut her off from the program. That’ll kill her master’s thesis, ruin a year or more of work.

Somehow, the idea of hiring professional investigators to look into Sinclair’s life disturbed Jake. If they find anything they’ll take it straight to the old man, not to me. He’ll ruin Sinclair if he thinks it’ll help his son. He’ll run right over him like an eighteen-wheeler.

As he pulled into his parking space and killed the Mustang’s engine, Jake decided he’d have to work harder at finding out what was making Sinclair tick. But where to start? The professor won’t see me. His son works in Leeds’s office; I can’t barge in there and start questioning him.

That leaves Glynis, he thought. I’ve got to get closer to her and find out everything she knows about the professor.

Somehow the idea of getting closer to Glynis didn’t bother Jake at all. He smiled at the thought of it. But then he remembered that she was going with Tim Younger. A vision of a shootout in a frontier saloon popped into his mind: Younger gunning him down in a blaze of fury.

Jake pulled in a deep breath—and realized that it was well below zero, sitting in the post-midnight darkness in his unheated car.

HACKING

Jake sat alone in his office the next morning, still wondering how he could pry into Sinclair’s reason for refusing to back Tomlinson. Glynis is the key to it, he told himself. Yet somehow the thought of trying to use Glynis to ferret out Sinclair’s secrets bothered him. Too damned sneaky, he told himself. It wouldn’t be fair to Glynis. She’s too nice a woman to use that way.

Besides, he admitted ruefully, she’s too smart to allow me to use her. She’d see right through me. And if I came on to her, Tim would come after me.

Leaning back in his little wheeled chair, Jake asked himself, What do you mean, if you came on to her? She’s going with Tim and you’ve got something going with Amy. Who’s also letting Tomlinson sleep with her, most likely.

What a mess, he thought. What a tangled, bollixed-up freaking mess.

Then he thought of Cardwell. Ever since he’d been twelve years old Jake had brought his problems to the planetarium director. Maybe Lev can show me which way to go.

Half an hour later he was in Leverett Cardwell’s office on the top floor of the museum. It was a spacious, airy room, with a wall full of bookshelves and a trio of windows that looked out across the domed roof of the planetarium. The windows were rimed with frost, even this late in the morning.

“… so I just don’t know what I should do,” Jake was saying. He sat at the round conference table in the corner of the office, as he had so many times, with Cardwell sitting next to him in his prim little bow tie and neatly-pressed suit.

Cardwell hiked his eyebrows a bit. “You’re not cut out to be a detective, Jake.”

“You mean a spy.”

“Whichever. It’s not in your makeup. Drop the matter right here and now.”

“But Tomlinson—”

Cardwell silenced him with an upraised hand. “Tomlinson can hire professionals to dig into Sinclair’s life. Stay clear of it. If there’s any dirt to be uncovered, let them do it. Keep your hands clean.”

“I’m not being much help to Tomlinson, then.”

“You’ve already helped him immensely,” said Cardwell. “You’ve given him an issue that’s so good that Leeds is backing this man Dant in an attempt to knock Tomlinson out of the running.”

“You think Leeds is backing Dant?”

“Who else?” Cardwell smiled his odd little smile. “Oh, the senator’s working through other parties, I’m sure. Straw men. But ask yourself: Who will benefit if Tomlinson is defeated in the primaries?”

Jake nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

Hunching closer, Cardwell asked, “Now what about this electrode problem? What are they doing to overcome it?”

For the better part of an hour Jake went over everything Bob Rogers had explained to him about the MHD generator’s electrodes.

“Screwing them in like the lead in a mechanical pencil,” Cardwell mused. “That’s ingenious.”

“Younger’s going to set it up on the big rig, up in Lignite.”

“I hope it works.”

“If it doesn’t, MHD will flop.”

Cardwell shook his head. “No, Jake. It won’t fail. It’s too good an idea to fail.”

“I wish I had your confidence, Lev.”

The older man’s smile widened a bit. “It’s just a matter of perspective, Jake. You’re thinking about the election in November. I’m thinking about the next century. MHD will work, eventually.”

“After we’re dead and gone.”

Cardwell said, “You know, Charles Babbage invented the programmable computer back in the nineteenth century. It was a mechanical monster—they didn’t have electronics then, not even electricity. It never worked quite right, either. But it was a real computer, and it could have worked. It eventually led to today’s computers. He’s the grandfather of our modern computer age. He died a bitter old man, but his work was seminal.”

Jake hunched his shoulders. “I’d like to see MHD a success while I’m still here.”

“So would I, my boy. But the important thing is that it becomes a success, becomes useful, someday. Doesn’t matter if we’re here to see it. I’d like to be, but in the long run that doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“Good!” Cardwell said, with a grin. “Impetuous youth. Every new idea needs that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of vigor. You can’t build new ideas with old farts like me.”

Jake stared at him. “Lev, sometimes you’re weird.”

Laughing, Cardwell said, “Stick to the technical side of the game, Jake. Let Tomlinson and his father root around in the dirt. That’s not your field of expertise.”

Feeling far less than satisfied, Jake got to his feet. “I guess you’re right.”

Standing beside him, Cardwell said, “Of course, if you’re determined to do something, you might try checking out Sinclair’s file on some of the computer search engines. There might be something there that could help shed light on his behavior.”

“You think so?”

As he walked Jake to his office door, Cardwell said, “There’s a lot of information floating through the Internet. Who knows what’s in there about Sinclair?”

“I wonder.”

“It might be worth a try.”

“Might be,” Jake agreed.

As he reached for the doorknob, Cardwell said, “One thing, though. If you find anything that looks interesting, useful, would you bring it to me before showing Tomlinson? I’d like to see it first.”

“You would?”

His face hardening, Cardwell said, “I’d like to know what he’s up to. I’ve got an old score to settle with Arlan Sinclair.”

Jake had never seen Leverett Cardwell look so grim.

*   *   *

That evening, Jake found that there was indeed plenty of information on the Internet about Professor Sinclair. He decided to search the Net from his computer at home, rather than his office desktop. Too easy for other people on campus to poke into his files. Do it at home, he told himself. Less chance of being found snooping.

But there was damned little useful material among the megabytes of data. By midnight Jake was bleary-eyed and more respectful of Sinclair than he had been before. There was plenty of information about Professor Arlan Sinclair available on various search engines. His early work in high-temperature gas physics. His patents on laminar flow regenerative cooling systems for rocket engines. Awards and honors for everything from artificial heart pump designs to research papers on shock waves in interstellar plasmas.

But nothing useful.

According to his standard biography in the university’s files, Sinclair was still married. One child, a son, Arlan III. Tell me something I don’t know, Jake grumbled to himself.

Google. Yahoo. Wikipedia. Jake even looked up the state government’s site on prominent citizens.

Arlan Sinclair II. So he’s not a junior, Jake saw. Married 1983 to Olivia Vernon. One child …

Feeling sleepy and cranky, Jake logged off, got up from his desk chair, and headed for the bathroom. By the time he had finished brushing his teeth, though, he went back to the computer and looked up Olivia Sinclair, née Vernon.

There wasn’t much in the files about her. She was from old money, apparently, and lived upstate, in the town of Vernon. She was listed in the social registry. No e-mail address, but there was a phone number given.

Jake yawned as he shut down his computer for the night. It was nearly one
A.M.
Maybe I’ll phone her tomorrow, he thought as he went to the bedroom. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

OLIVIA SINCLAIR, NÉE VERNON

“It was very good of you to see me,” Jake said as he sat in the front parlor of the Vernon house.

It had obviously been a palatial residence, once, but now it seemed faded, dusty, a relic of bygone years. Mrs. Sinclair was a chubby woman with a round, dimpled face. Her hair was the shade of ash blond that older women achieve when they try to glamorize their gray. She was wearing a long-skirted print dress, two different shades of dull brown, as she sat primly on an armchair facing Jake.

He felt awkward. All during the drive up to Vernon Jake had wondered what he would say to Mrs. Sinclair, how he could explain his reason for visiting her. During the two-hour drive, the car radio had played seven ads for Harmon Dant. Jake had counted them. Seven. Dant’s ads were on every radio station, pushing his conservative message of cutting taxes, ending legalized abortion, cracking down on crime. Fishing around the radio dial, Jake could find no ads for Tomlinson. Not one.