A Knife Edge (14 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think?” he asked.

I told him what I thought, which was that I didn't buy it. Mainly because if it proved to be true it would turn every federal and state law-enforcement agency into an instrument focused almost solely on dismantling organized crime. Carrying out a terrorist act such as the one here—no matter what kind of beans the informant was likely to spill—was just plain bad for business, and my reading of organized crime was that anything compromising the bottom line was to be avoided at all costs. Chip agreed. I told him I believed Metzler was sticking to it as a theory only because he had nothing else to offer, and that the world was on his back to
do something.

“You got any theories of your own, Cooper?” Schaeffer asked.

“Not yet, sir.” That wasn't accurate. I did have a theory, only I wasn't ready to share.

“But you feel one coming on?”

I gave him a clue. “Professor Boyle's wallet was found beneath burned human remains.”

“Those remains been positively identified?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because the CIA has taken over on the ground here.”

Schaeffer grunted. “Yeah, I know. That's the way the wind's blowing.”

I could still see the smug satisfaction on Chalmers's face as he carried away the evidence bag containing Boyle's wallet, prancing out of the morgue, his middle fuck-you finger raised high and proud. War had been declared.

Chip asked me other questions relating to the written case report I had yet to submit on the death of Dr. Tanaka. Unlike the last time he asked me these questions, I told him what I really thought had happened to the man, rather than what the hard evidence outlined. I told him I believed Boyle had a hand in his partner's death. I decided on this course because of a couple of factors that had come to light since my last debrief on the inquiry, most notably the verbal account given to me by Al Cooke, the
Natusima's
cook. There was also the uneasy feeling I had after
the interview with Dr. Spears at Moreton Genetics. I thought my conclusions would take Schaeffer by surprise, but I got nothing back from the captain other than the tone and direction of his questions, which, the more I thought about it, only added to my suspicions that the case was less about a straightforward investigation into an accidental death and more about something I still hadn't been briefed on. There was just too much official and specific interest in Tanaka's demise coming at me, and now in Boyle's. But I could hardly tell Schaeffer that
his
interest in the case was one of the reasons I suspected there might be more to the business than an accidental death.

“Well,” said Schaeffer after a little small talk, “with the Company taking over, there's no point you hanging around. In fact, I want you back here as soon as you can get on a plane. Your orders have come through. You're being transferred back to your old unit—OSI at Andrews. Something has come up and they're short-handed.”

I was stunned. Off the case, ordered back to D.C., and transferred, almost all in the one sentence. Was I being rapped over the knuckles for something?

Schaeffer wished me Merry Christmas and a pleasant flight home. I stared at the handset for a few moments before I hung up, and tried to persuade myself that I'd had enough experience with command decisions over the years to know that reason didn't always follow rhyme in the military. The problem was, I was slightly more able to convince myself that flying reindeer could deliver presents to millions of children all over the world in a single night.

Then I surprised myself by having a long, uninterrupted sleep, waking at just after seven
A.M.
with the thought of a plate of low-fat Christmas bacon and pancakes on the brain.

I lay in bed thinking about what to do next. There wouldn't be a next—at least, not on progressing this case. As I was officially removed from the investigation, standard operating procedure said that all my case notes, reports, phone logs, and evidence would have to be turned over. That meant that as the
SAC, Bradley Chalmers would be the recipient. Galling was the first word that came to mind. Fuck was the second.

I peeled back the covers and headed for the shower. The firm water pressure meant I had to stay in there at least twenty minutes. The bacon and pancakes would wait. I got out and toweled off. The light spilled from the bathroom directly onto the door to the hotel room. A large white envelope lay on the chocolate brown carpet. This being Christmas morning, it could only be two things: evidence of a visit from the fat guy in a red suit, or the express checkout bill.

I turned on the lights, dressed, and threw back the curtains to let in the natural light. There wasn't much of it—the windows were streaked with heavy rain falling from a gray sky as solid and heavy as armor plate. I got down on all fours and examined the envelope. It wasn't the bill. Grabbing a hotel laundry bag and a couple of forks to use as tongs, I turned it over. Nothing obvious on the flip side. Not even “Attn Vin Cooper” written on it. I carried it across to the dinner-table-for-one and placed it on the laundry bag. The weight of it and the way it bent indicated the envelope carried something more substantial than a letter. Keeping my fingers off it, I slit the envelope open with a bread knife and tipped it up. Out slid a disk. I picked it up using the plastic laundry bag as a glove. The top side was blank; the underside was green, which meant it was a DVD. Both sides appeared to be free of scratches or prints. I checked the inside of the envelope. Empty. There was a player on the bedside table. I turned it on, placed the disk in the machine, and pressed “play.”

I
had to watch it several times but even then I didn't understand it—not the bigger picture, anyway. The starring role was played by Sean Boyle before his conversion to carbon. I'd recognize that haircut in my sleep. The cinematographer was a security camera—actually several of them. A display indicated the time and date: nine-thirty p.m. on the second of August—nearly five months ago. I guessed that the location was most likely Moreton Genetics. I played with the sound, but there wasn't any.

In that sketchy way security cameras operate, I saw a white room full of electronic apparatus I didn't recognize, plus a few scrolling computer screens. Boyle was leaning over something. He walked to a different bench to check on something else, then headed to yet another white box closer to the camera that featured a bunch of dials as well as a little screen. He could have been baking a cake for all I knew. Then one of the computer screens went blank, followed by two more. A desk light went out, and I noticed the streamers on the air-conditioning duct beside the camera grow less excited and then hang limp.

Boyle stood up straight. He was smiling a private, self-satisfied smile. Then a line went through the screen, freezing the picture for an instant, before the screen went blank. Nothing happened for a few moments and I was wondering
whether the show had finished, and then the picture returned. I was looking down on two people standing in a stainless-steel box. I assumed the location was an elevator. The time-and-date display had returned. One of the people, a male Caucasian in a uniform with a hand truck carrying bottles for the water cooler, was in a panic and pounding the doors, while a woman, also Caucasian, just stood there like a store dummy. I couldn't see her face—her head was tilted down away from the camera until the very last split second. Was she calm, or frozen in panic like the guy in there with her? It was impossible to tell. And then she turned and, as she did so, the picture again went blank—no signal again. I fast-forwarded but there was nothing else on the disk.

The time display told me only a couple of seconds had passed from the footage of Boyle fiddling with equipment to the pair in the lift. The familiar double-helix logo in the elevator confirmed I was seeing something that had happened at Moreton Genetics, some kind of power surge or power failure. But wouldn't a high-tech place like that, with all its delicate and important ongoing research, have some kind of emergency backup power source—generators—that would kick in? I was intrigued by what was on the disk because someone thought it important enough to slip under my door and because whoever did so wanted their identity kept secret.

I went to my laptop and called up the home page for the
San Francisco Chronicle.
I became a member and surfed around the site's archive, but I couldn't find any reference to power failures in any part of San Francisco in or around last August. If the power was cut, wouldn't everything at MG go out at the same time, rather than in a staggered fashion? I set up the news service to forward any articles containing the keywords “Moreton Genetics” to my Hotmail address.

I took the disk from the player and put it into my laptop's CD drive. I made an MPEG copy and e-mailed it on to Arlen at OSI with a note explaining what I wanted him to do about it. Then I called Moreton Genetics and received a recorded message letting
me know that MG would be closed until the fourth of January. Ten days. I turned to the online phone directories next. If I could get hold of Freddie Spears, perhaps she'd be able to tell me what I was seeing on the disk. But there was no Dr. Freddie Spears listed, nor was there any Frederique Spears in the data base, although there were twenty-three “F. Spears” in the San Francisco area. For a moment, I thought about cold-calling complete strangers on Christmas Day. I decided against it.

I carefully removed the disk from the slot in the laptop and returned it to its envelope. Then I placed the envelope in the laundry bag and put it with the rest of my stuff. What to do next? A rumble in my stomach told me it was getting impatient for those low-fat yuletide bacon-and-pancake stacks. Problem solved.

C
ooper! So you made it back in one piece,” Schaeffer said, looking up and then leaning back in his chair.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Take a seat.” The fish tank's air filter thrummed away in the background. “How was it out there?”

“They seem to be getting on top of things, sir,” I said. Schaeffer made a “humph” sound and raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “You're best out of it, son.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, not believing him but not having much choice anyway.

“You'll make available all materials on the Tanaka case.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Would you know whether the CIA intends to share any forensics with us from the Four Winds site?”

Schaeffer ignored my question. “Anything turned up on the Tanaka thing I don't know about?”

As much as I didn't like being excluded from the loop, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. I gave up what I didn't tell him when I called in from San Francisco. “Sir, I have a statement from a witness claiming he saw Boyle on deck moments after Tanaka was thrown overboard.”

“Then why didn't this witness do something to help the guy in the drink?” he asked.

“I don't know, sir, but it's a good question.” A couple of better
ones would be to ask whether Boyle pushed Tanaka overboard and why. And whether the Transamerica bombing was somehow linked to Boyle and therefore related to Tanaka's death.

“Some people …” he said, shaking his head.

“I strongly recommend that this witness be interviewed by the SAC,” I said. I strongly recommended it because the Marianas was a long way to go for nothing, the witness, as far as witnesses went, being a waste of time.

“I'll be sure and pass that on to CIA,” said Chip.

“I also received this.” I set the envelope containing the disk, still wrapped in the laundry bag, on his desk.

“What is it?”

“Possible evidence, sir.” I told him about the disk, gave a précis of what was on it, and explained how it came into my possession.

“I trust you haven't made copies.”

My fingers were crossed where he couldn't see them. “Can you tell me why the CIA has taken over the case, sir?”

“No, I can't,” he said, cracking his knuckles one by one. “Look, you've done a good job on this, Cooper. You've performed some fine work here and I've enjoyed having you on my team. That's going on your Officer Performance Report, by the way.”

“Yes sir,” I said, but I was thinking,
what fine work, exactly?
Sure, I could buy tropical fish with the best of them. I already knew the Tanaka case was no longer mine, so I was a little surprised. Was Chip attempting to soften me up for something, even if it was just for me to move on quietly? Or was he feeling bad that a difficult case I was making headway on had been handed to a jerk like Bradley Chalmers? I wasn't going to get any answers to these questions, so I let them slide.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, I was at OSI HQ, Andrews AFB. An agent I'd never met was sitting in the office that had my name on the door, so I walked down the hall to Arlen's. He was on the
phone. He gave me a nod and shifted in his seat, half turning his back to me. He cut the call short and said, “Vin! Here already? That was quick. We haven't really had time to prepare for your triumphant return.”

“I wondered where my parade was. Merry Christmas, by the way.”

“And a big ho-ho-ho to you, Vin. So, back in OSI's clutches now.”

“This week. Did you get the MPEG I sent you?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“You done anything about it?”

“You want to get some air?” he asked. “I can also brief you on the case you're gonna be working.”

“Okay, but give me ten,” I replied. “I'd better clock in with my new boss first.”

From the commanding officer, Brigadier General James Wynngate, who was drowning in mucus from a bad head cold, I received a lecture about the new OSI. After sneezing what appeared to be around a cup and a half of concentrated rhinovirus over my service record spread out in front of him, the general eventually got around to telling me that Arlen would brief me on the case I'd been assigned to.

And so, another twenty minutes later, I was back where I started. It had begun sleeting outside so Arlen and I detoured around the corridors of the HQ block and arrived at the cafeteria. It was much smaller than the Pentagon's and nowhere near as crowded. Arlen led the way to a table in a corner.