The Einstein Pursuit (19 page)

‘So,’ Payne said, ‘where do we go from here?’

As if on cue, the phone started to ring.

Dial stood in the hallway of the institute jotting a few notes. His conversation with Payne had brought new details to light – namely Sahlberg and those pursuing him – and he wanted to get the information down while it was still fresh in his head.

He was about to push through the double doors of the lecture hall when they swung open toward him instead and Eklund barged into the hallway, his cell phone pressed tightly to his ear. With his free hand he reached out and grabbed Dial’s arm.

His message was clear:
Don’t go back in.
You need to hear this
.

Dial watched and listened as Eklund launched into a long conversation in his native Swedish. He didn’t understand anything except for an occasional name, but he could tell from the wide range of expressions on Eklund’s face that something important had happened.

Eventually Eklund hung up the phone and filled him in. ‘That was my office. They just heard from the Rättsmedicinalverket—’

‘The what?’

‘Our doctor from the National Board of Forensic Medicine.’

Dial furrowed his brow. ‘The what?’

‘The coroner.’

‘Oh.’

‘Anyway, they’ve combed through every inch of the crime scene, and we now have an official body count.’

Dial knew a body count wasn’t enough to make Eklund run the course of emotions he had just witnessed. There had to be more to the story than that. ‘How many?’

‘Twenty-three – twenty of which have already been identified.’

‘Is Berglund one of them?’

‘No.’

‘Could he be one of the remaining three?’

Eklund shrugged. ‘So far we’ve been unable to locate Berglund’s dental records, so we can’t compare his teeth against those three. Obviously there’s a chance he is one of the victims, but mathematically speaking the odds are against it.’

‘Odds? What odds? What are you talking about?’

Eklund glanced at his notepad. ‘Over the past two days, we’ve received calls from eight – no, make that
nine
– embassies asking for information about missing scientists. We were able to match some of those names with bodies in the morgue, but right now we have way more names than bodies. According to my notes, we have eleven possibilities for the three unidentified bodies.’

‘You’re right. We’ve got a math problem.’

‘Here’s the thing: figuring out how many people died in the fire is not the same as determining how many people worked in the lab. I can’t tell you with certainty that Berglund is alive, and I can’t say for sure that he died in the explosion. We just don’t know.’

‘What about the Finnish police? Any word from them?’

‘They went to his house and peeked through his windows but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Right now they’re waiting on a court order to get inside the house.’

‘What’s the hold-up?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If he’s dead, the Finns should want to find his killer. If he’s alive, he’s a suspect or a possible target. Either way, a judge should be willing to sign the paperwork.’

‘I know, but—’

‘But what?’

Eklund paused, unsure how to respond to his boss.

Dial instantly regretted his tone. The last thing he wanted to do was insult Eklund by insinuating he had lost faith in his ability to direct the investigation. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to overstep my bounds.’

Eklund nodded. ‘Old habits are hard to break.’

‘Still, I promised that I wouldn’t interfere.’

‘You weren’t interfering. You were venting. Believe it or not, I’ve been known to snap at colleagues from time to time.’

Dial smiled, glad that Eklund wasn’t holding a grudge. ‘All cops do. In fact, I think I saw it during your phone call. What was that all about?’

Eklund laughed. ‘That wasn’t anger. That was
confusion
. I thought we were finally getting a grasp on the science at the lab. Now I don’t know what to think.’

‘About what?

‘Five of the victims had criminal records.’

Dial shrugged it off. ‘Well, I assumed the gunmen had rap sheets, and it stands to reason that a few of the scientists got popped over the years. What’d they do? Smoke a little pot?’

‘I’m not talking about either group. When the coroner ran the fingerprints and dental records of the victims, he discovered that five of them weren’t scientists. They were convicted felons.’

Dial pondered that statement for a moment, his mind working through a series of ‘what ifs’, each more terrifying than the last.

What if the scientists were being forced to work in the lab?

What if they had stumbled across a new biological agent?

What if they planned to sell their weapon to the highest bidder?

What if the weapon was taken from the lab before the fire was set?

Dial realized the worst thing he could do was jump to conclusions, so he tried to find out more. ‘Can we tie the five together?’

Eklund shook his head. ‘So far we haven’t been able to establish any connection between the men – except that they’re felons and all of them spent time in Scandinavian prisons.’

‘The same prison?’

‘Nope, different – so they didn’t meet inside.’

‘What were their crimes?’ Dial asked.

Eklund reviewed the notes he had scribbled during the phone call. ‘The first was a Finn convicted of more than a hundred counts of battery and aggravated assault. He was supposed to be serving a thirty-year term. Instead, he was paroled after serving only six years of his sentence. Same thing happened with a kidnapper from Denmark. He was to spend the next twenty years inside, but he was paroled after half of that.’

‘Were they paroled around the same time?’ Dial asked.

‘Two days apart,’ Eklund replied.

‘I doubt that’s a coincidence.’

‘It gets worse. Right about that same time, two men, a rapist and a murderer, were walking out of their respective facilities in Norway without
anyone
noticing. The prison authorities swear that the prisoners died and were cremated on site. They have no idea how they could have escaped, never mind how they could have ended up in a laboratory in Stockholm.’

‘The same story at both prisons? Why don’t they just shine a spotlight on themselves and announce that something fishy is going on?’

‘Agreed. Someone knows something they’re not telling us. These weren’t so-called country club facilities. These were maximum-security installations with protocols to ensure that someone couldn’t simply vanish.’

‘You said five. What about the last guy?’

‘An arsonist from right here in Sweden. He was transferred from Kumla prison to a psychiatric facility in the northern part of the country. Three weeks later he was released with a clean bill of health. From felon to freedom in less than a month.’

‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

‘Odd? I haven’t even gotten to the odd part yet.’ Eklund clenched his jaw and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. ‘To identify the bodies, they ran the same procedure I explained earlier.’

‘Rehydrating the fingertips to expose the ridge patterns,’ Dial recalled.

‘Right. Well, we also told the coroner to run the whole battery of testing. Given the scientific nature of the scene and our inability to say for certain that it was the fire that killed everyone, we asked for toxicology reports to determine whether they were drugged, virology reports to ascertain the presence of biological agents, you name it. If they had the means of performing the test, we wanted it done.’

‘And?’

‘When they examined some of the tissue samples under a microscope, they found something that goes way, way,
way
beyond odd. So much so that no one really quite knows what to make of it.’

‘What did they find?’

‘You might not believe this – I’m still trying to comprehend it myself – but some of their cells are still alive.’

‘
Alive?
As in
living
?’

‘That’s what they’re telling me,’ Eklund confirmed. ‘The fire should have destroyed them, or at the very least damaged them beyond repair, yet the coroner says he found viable tissue in some of the bodies. In fact, more than viable. He said the tissue was
thriving
.’

Payne and Jones had known about Kaiser for more than a decade, but they didn’t really
know
him. No one did, which was one of the things that kept him alive.

Back in his former life as a supply sergeant, he had set up shop near the Kaiserslautern military community in eastern Germany. With more than 50,000 soldiers and civilian contractors, Kaiserslautern was the largest military base outside of the continental United States, but one of the trickiest to pronounce. To make things simple, American troops referred to it as ‘K-town’. And the man who could get them anything was known as Kaiser.

In the beginning, Kaiser had focused on the comforts of home – items that the displaced men and women of K-town had grown to miss, whether that be American food, clothing, movies or video games. And he sold the products at a fair yet profitable price. Then, much to his chagrin, the rise of the Internet meant he wasn’t the only game in town. Suddenly his clients could order almost anything online, so he was forced to shift his business in another direction.

Weapons. Smuggling. Fake IDs.

Pretty much everything except drugs.

Payne and Jones knew he operated beyond the limits of the law, but they had experienced enough during their time as MANIACs to know that even the noblest causes sometimes required the support of bullets, grenades and the occasional surface-to-air missile. Likewise, Kaiser had heard of their exploits, and he realized that men of their skills were good to know.

They had a mutual respect for one another.

Not a true friendship. More like allies.

The phone belonged to DJ, but Payne grabbed it first. He smiled at Jones, hit the correct line to answer the call, then put the phone to his ear, despite a loud protest from Jones.

Before he said a single word, he realized something was different about the call. Normal phone calls – regardless of whether they originated from a landline, a cell phone, a satellite phone, or through voice-over Internet protocol – carried some degree of ambient sound. The hum of a computer. The horns and sirens of traffic. Even the steady breathing of the caller. These were typical background noises that were layered into the signal. Even the newest noise-canceling technology left telltale traces of white noise. They were virtually inaudible, but they were not imperceptible.

This call was different. It wasn’t hollow, it was silent. It was as if the caller was standing in the vacuum of space. Payne quickly realized the call was being
scrubbed
– his word for when high-tech gadgetry was used to ensure that no one was listening in. He knew the caller was running the signal through a computer, routeing the call through a series of lines and servers while at the same time erasing any digital footprint that might lead back to him.

‘Hello?’ Payne finally said.

A brief pause followed. ‘David?’

Payne recognized the voice. ‘No, it’s Jon. I’m here with—’

‘Put David on the phone.’

Payne was somewhat startled by Kaiser’s abrupt demand. He knew they weren’t friends in the traditional sense, but they certainly weren’t strangers. In fact, if it weren’t for Payne, Kaiser would be missing a lot more than an eye. He would be missing the rest of his life.

Payne wondered what had changed since they had spoken last.

‘It’s for you,’ he said, confused. ‘It’s Kaiser.’

Jones took the handset. ‘Hello.’

‘Secondary site. Sixteen eighty-two. Three. Four. Two.’

In a flurry of mouse clicks and keystrokes, Jones directed his Internet browser to a specific web address. This secondary site, as Kaiser called it, was used to screen his communications. The location, which changed at irregular intervals, was encoded on the message board that Jones had used to reach him.

The location for that particular conversation was a website that allowed people to discuss children’s literature. Jones was to find the 1,682nd post in the numbered list, scroll to the third paragraph in that post, find the fourth sentence, and provide the second word. If he failed to do so, or if he took too long to do it, Kaiser would terminate the call.

Jones traced his finger down the screen. ‘I authenticate … Mockingbird.’

‘David! How are you?’ Just like that, Kaiser had gone from cryptic and paranoid to warm and welcoming. ‘It’s been far too long!’

‘I’m okay, how are you?’

‘Still got my eye on the prize,’ Kaiser joked.

‘Which is what, retirement?’

‘Forget about that. They’ll put me in the ground before I call it quits.’

Jones laughed at his choice of words. He knew Kaiser wasn’t referring to old age. He was referring to rival businessmen who were actively trying to put him in the ground. ‘Do you have time for a question or two? I’m here with Jon, and we were wondering—’

‘Please apologize to Jon for my shortness. I didn’t mean to come across like such an asshole, but I have to take precautions.’

‘He understands completely,’ Jones said without consulting Payne. ‘No offense taken.’

‘Good. Now what is it that I can answer for you?’

‘Well, I’m looking at a weapon.’

‘I can get you anything you need.’

‘No,’ Jones clarified, ‘I’m not placing an order. I’m looking at the actual piece. And I don’t need any more. I just need to figure out where it came from.’

‘What’s this world coming to when someone like you is coming to someone like me for gun advice? Don’t they teach this shit in the special forces anymore?’

Jones laughed. ‘They do, but this gun is kind of different.’

‘How different?’

‘It’s a one-off,’ Jones explained. ‘The build resembles the Beretta 92 platform, but it’s a complete custom. Right down to the grip length, trigger pull, and weighting.’

‘I could name fifty guys who might have put that together. Is there anything else to go on? How’s the finish? Some of them are great at design but go light on aesthetics. They figure that as long as the gun fires, the look doesn’t really matter. You’d be surprised how many tool marks you can find on some custom jobs. Everything from drill scuffs to swirls in the polished steel. Things like that can narrow it down.’