Power Play (34 page)

“Good. Fine.” Garza broke into a satisfied smile. “I think you’ve really got something here.”

Bending over the desk again, Rogers tapped the blueprint once more. “The heat exchanger is the trickiest part.”

“We could talk to our people who’ve done exchangers for nuclear plants,” said Garza.

“You’ll have to deal with higher temperatures than the nukes use.”

“Maybe NASA can give us some advice.”

“Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I know a couple of guys at the NASA center near Cleveland…”

Jake left the two of them huddled over the blueprint and almost tiptoed out of Rogers’s office. Topping plant, he thought. I’ll have to borrow Bob’s blueprint and work it into a news release. Keep the MHD issue in the news, keep Tomlinson ahead.

THE BIG RIG

Younger actually looked happy.

Jake drove up to Lignite a few days after his meeting with Rogers and asked the engineer’s opinion about the topping plant idea.

“Makes a lot of sense,” Younger said, as he kept a careful eye on a trio of technicians who were removing worn electrodes from the innards of the big rig’s central channel.

“You think?”

“Sure. There’s a lot of heat energy in the plasma after it leaves the generator’s channel. Why let it go up the smokestack? Instead of adding to global warming we can use the frigging heat to generate more electrical power.”

“And the heat exchanger? Can you develop one to work at such high temperatures?”

Younger shrugged nonchalantly. “You find the right engineers and pay them enough, they’ll design your heat exchanger for you.”

Jake thought that it couldn’t be that simple, but Younger seemed totally unworried about the problem.

Then Jake realized why Younger was so optimistic. Glynis came into the shed, pulling off a long fur-trimmed coat, smiling at Younger.

He broke into a positively boyish grin and rushed across the concrete floor to her.

Jake remembered the first time Glynis had come to the big rig, how Younger had practically thrown her out. He wasn’t so inhospitable now. He walked arm in arm with her across the test cell, obviously showing off what his team of technicians were doing, grinning like a schoolboy. And Glynis was smiling up at him, seemingly just as happy as he was.

But a few minutes later, as Jake started for the door and Younger turned his attention back to his technicians, Glynis walked over toward Jake and fell in step with him.

“How are you, Jake?” she asked.

Miserable, he wanted to say, but instead he replied, “I’m okay. Pretty busy. How about you?”

“I’ve been talking to Sheila. They’ve taken her off the investigation.”

“The FBI agent?” Jake asked. “She’s off the case?”

“From what she tells me, a couple of more experienced agents have been assigned to look into Senator Leeds’s connections to organized crime. It’s all very hush-hush, of course.”

They had reached the door. Jake said, “I wonder if we could get the FBI to make some kind of statement before election day.”

“I doubt it,” Glynis replied. “They’re walking on eggs, you know.”

“Probing a senator, yeah, I guess they’re going to keep as quiet as they can.”

Glynis looked thoughtful. “Unless someone does something to bring the investigation out into the open.”

Jake snapped, “You stay out of it! Keep yourself out of this, Glyn. I don’t want you in trouble with these guys.”

“There you go again,” she said, with a wry smile, “getting melodramatic.”

“Glynis, I know these guys. I know how they operate. Perez warned us, remember?”

“And you take him seriously.”

“Damned right I do. Let the FBI handle this. You steer clear of it.”

She shook her head. “Jake, the FBI is going through a strictly pro forma routine. That’s what Sheila told me. They’re not going to find anything because they’re not really looking for anything.”

“Glyn…”

“For god’s sake, Jake, Leeds
asked
them to investigate the link between Mrs. Sinclair’s killing and organized gambling. They’re not after Leeds; they’re just making copies of that Captain Harraway’s phony reports and calling that an investigation.”

“Stay out of it,” Jake repeated, trying to keep his voice low and forceful at the same time.

“Leeds is going to make a publicity splash about the FBI report finding nothing,” she insisted.

Jake didn’t know what to say about that.

“Unless we do something to stir them up,” Glynis added.

Jake gripped her arm. “Glynis, I want you to go back to West Virginia and stay there until this election is over.”

“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” she replied heatedly.

“I don’t want you—”

“Hey, Glyn!” Younger called from across the test cell, his voice echoing off the metal walls. “Come on over here, I want to show you something.”

Glynis pulled free of Jake’s hand, gave him a perfunctory smile, and turned to hurry over to Younger, her boots clicking on the concrete and the coat in her arms dragging along the floor.

Jake stood there, worried, fearful, angry—and alone.

*   *   *

He drove straight to Tomlinson’s campaign headquarters, calling Amy on his cell phone as he drove. A state highway patrol cruiser nosed alongside him on the interstate. Jake glanced at his speedometer, then realized that the cop was tapping his ear as he frowned at him from behind his mirrored sunglasses. He doesn’t like me using the cell phone while I’m driving, Jake realized. There was talk in the capitol of making that illegal, but so far no law had been passed. Jake clicked his cell phone shut and put it on the seat beside him. The patrolman nodded once, then sped on up the highway.

Keeping just below the speed limit, Jake drove into the city and parked behind the former supermarket where Amy and the rest of Tomlinson’s people were working.

The place was bustling with volunteers, people talking, phones ringing. A teenager pushing a cart piled high with Tomlinson posters nearly ran Jake over. He sniffed the odor of spicy food; sure enough, nearly a dozen empty cartons from a nearby Mandarin restaurant littered one of the long work tables.

Amy was in a huddle with a group of publicists at the far end of the big, cluttered room. She looked up as Jake approached, excused herself from the group, and led Jake through the rows of desks to one of the cubicles set up in the rear of the area, where it was a little quieter.

Once he had told Amy of Glynis’s report on the FBI’s inaction, Amy’s first reaction was, “You see a lot of her, don’t you?”

Jake felt his cheeks redden. “She works with the MHD guys,” he temporized. “She and Tim Younger are going together.”

“Are they?” Amy perched herself on the edge of the steel desk and eyed Jake with an arched eyebrow.

“Never mind her,” Jake said. “What can we do to goose the FBI?”

Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. I can ask Franklin’s father about it, maybe he can put some pressure on them.”

Jake glanced at the molded plastic chair in front of the desk, but remained standing. “Leeds could come out and claim that the FBI investigation confirms the Vernon police findings.”

“That wouldn’t be good.”

“So?”

Thinking out loud, Amy said, “It wouldn’t do us much good to accuse the FBI of dogging it. On the other hand, we’d benefit if they found some genuine links between Leeds and the crooks.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Jake admitted.

“Not unless this Glynis of yours stirs the pot.”

“No!” Jake snapped. “I don’t want her involved in this.”

“Sounds to me as if she’s already involved,” Amy said, knowingly.

“That Perez guy warned us to back off,” Jake said. “But Glynis wants to nail whoever it was that murdered Professor Sinclair.”

“What’s she after? What makes her tick?”

Jake hesitated a moment, then told Amy in a lowered voice, “She was involved with Sinclair.”

“Involved? Sexually?”

Feeling ashamed of himself, Jake muttered, “Yeah. They were sleeping together.”

Amy considered this for a moment, then said confidently, “Let me talk to her, Jake. Maybe I can talk some sense into her.”

Brightening a bit, Jake said, “That would be good, Amy. I appreciate it.”

“Think nothing of it.”

HALLOWE’EN

With just nine days to go before the election, Senator Leeds threw a massive Hallowe’en rally in the city’s National Guard armory. Everyone invited, bar none. Free food and drinks, courtesy of the Leeds campaign. Thousands were expected.

Jake watched the preliminaries on the television news as he dressed for the much smaller costume party that Tomlinson was hosting at his home. The TV news team was walking through the huge, open, high-ceilinged space inside the armory as volunteers, each one sporting red-white-and-blue Leeds buttons, were setting up long tables while caterers and workers from local bars were carting in crates of food and drink. Jake spotted waitresses from O’Brian’s Irish Pub in their kelly green skirts and off-the-shoulder white blouses. They all wore Leeds buttons, too.

The TV commentator was saying, “Despite slipping slightly behind Franklin Tomlinson in the statewide polls, Senator Leeds is looking confident about the outcome of the election.”

The screen cut to a pre-recorded interview of Leeds, standing in front of the city’s cathedral steps at an earlier rally. He was wearing a dark blue overcoat with a burgundy muffler wrapped around his throat. Hatless, with his thick thatch of silver hair. The woman interviewing him had a knitted cap pulled over her golden curls.

“The polls don’t mean a thing,” the senator was saying, smiling heartily. “What counts is how people vote. And they’ll vote for the better man, I’m sure.”

“Meaning Senator Christopher Leeds?” the interviewer prompted.

“You said it,” Leeds replied, laughing, “I didn’t.”

“But what about this FBI investigation? The Tomlinson campaign keeps harping on the links between the state’s gambling casinos and organized crime.”

The senator’s face grew serious. “Nothing but insinuations and innuendos,” he said. “It’s all a smear, a desperate attempt by my opponent to cloud the real issues of this campaign.”

“Which are?”

“The state’s economy. Jobs, jobs, and jobs. Real jobs for real people. Not some pie-in-the-sky promises that’ll only employ a handful of elite scientists and engineers for the next ten or twenty years.”

The news show cut back to the live report from the armory. A German oompah band was warming up in one corner of the vast, echoing space; huge posters of Senator Leeds were draped on the brick walls behind them.

Jake picked up the remote and clicked off the TV. He knew that Tomlinson’s Hallowe’en party was restricted to the monied elite, mostly old friends of his father’s. Shaking his head worriedly, he stared at the costume he was going to wear for the party: He was going as Tycho Brahe, the great sixteenth-century astronomer. The costume consisted of a pair of light blue silk knee britches and white stockings, with a long, deep blue coat, elaborately embroidered in silver thread. Louise had made the costume years ago, for an earlier, happier Hallowe’en. Sewn it with her own hands. She’d even gone to an antique store to buy a sword to go with it.

Jake had added the finishing touch: a false nose of silver. Brahe had had his nose sliced off in a youthful duel and wore a silver one ever after.

He laboriously wriggled into the pantaloons, pulled on the stockings, and wormed his feet into the buckled shoes. He strapped the sword around his waist and then slid his arms into the jacket’s silk-lined sleeves. Looking at himself in the mirror he marveled that the outfit still fit, after all these years.

And he burst into tears, remembering Louise and how much she had loved him.

*   *   *

It was starting to snow when Jake went down to the parking lot behind his apartment building. As he revved up the Mustang he turned on the radio and hunted for a weather report.

“… with accumulations of a foot in the city and more in the western suburbs. Strong winds will produce blizzard-like conditions overnight, with clearing expected by sunrise. Low temperatures near zero…”

Jake clicked off the radio and headed for Tomlinson’s place. The party’s going to end early, he thought. Everybody’ll want to get home before the storm gets bad.

By the time he stopped in front of the entrance to Tomlinson’s mansion, Jake had to admit the snowfall looked pretty. Soft flakes drifting down into the lights lining the curving driveway. A thin blanket of white covering the drive, the shrubbery, outlining the bare branches of the trees. The snow hushed the traffic sounds out on the street, making the night seem peaceful and quiet.

The first snow of the year is always pretty, Jake thought. For the first hour or so.

He ducked back into the Mustang to get his sword and clip it to his belt, then let the valet drive the car away. The butler stood patiently at the front door, waiting for him in his usual black uniform. But tonight he had garish Tomlinson buttons pinned to both his lapels.

The house was nearly empty; Jake was a little early, as usual. The butler showed him to the ballroom, where the caterers had set up a well-stocked bar at the far end of the parqueted floor. Tomlinson Senior was standing there, a tumbler of whisky in his hand, dressed like George Washington, complete with a white powdered wig.

“And who might you be?” the elder Tomlinson asked, by way of greeting.

“Tycho Brahe,” said Jake.

“Teeko who?”

“Danish astronomer. One of the great ones.” Then Jake remembered that he hadn’t tied on his silver nose. Feeling a little foolish, he fished in his jacket pocket for it.

Alexander Tomlinson gave him a look that was part curiosity and part contempt, then strode past Jake to welcome a pair of new arrivals.

Amy came in, alone. She was dressed as some sort of oriental harem girl, bare shoulders and midriff, slitted silk trousers showing plenty of leg, a jewel in her navel and a filmy veil over her face. She looked very sexy to Jake.

“Salaam,” he said to her.

Amy smiled behind her veil and said, “Don’t tell me. You’re that astronomer who lost his nose in a duel, aren’t you?”