A Knife Edge (48 page)

“Special Agent Cooper,” she said unnecessarily. I knew who I was. And I had a pretty good idea who the woman holding open the door was too, though she was a somewhat different woman from the one I thought I knew. “You look awful,” she added after a second look, once I'd walked past.

“I fell,” I said, eyeballing the room. “Nice place.” It was, if you went in for expensive junk sales. Crystal chandeliers, silver candelabra, couches with carved claw feet, ottomans, Persian rugs, clocks, quilts, and old paintings of English fox hunts slugged it out for attention. Heavy burgundy brocade drapes hung above two vast ceiling-to-floor windows framing multimillion-dollar views of Central Park.

“I was just about to fix myself a drink,” said Dr. Freddie Spears. “You care to join me? How's the mission going?”

I saw my favorite brand keeping company with a number of other bottles on a liquor cabinet beneath a painting that looked like the English countryside except that it wasn't—a group of Native Americans were handing over a few beads to a couple of European types. “Sure,” I said. “Glen Keith with rocks. And I guess you could say the mission is still in the planning phase.” I was relieved—not about getting a drink, but about the mission's integrity. Spears knew as much as the newspapers about what had happened in Thailand: nothing.

The doctor moved to the cabinet. She was dressed in beige slacks and a fitted white silk shirt. Her feet were bare, toenails carefully manicured and painted pink. She was looking relaxed, all things considered.

The rocks tinkled into the glasses. The sound was music to my ears—like Beethoven, only easier to play.

“So, what can I do for you today, Special Agent?” she asked, handing me the tumbler.

“You can tell me about the moment you decided to make a killing on something other than the stock market.”

“What?”

“You know, Doc, you're a smart businesswoman. No doubt about that. But, like a lot of smart businesspeople who go off the rails, you believe that the rules the rest of us follow don't apply to you.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Gotta hand it to you, you were convincing. When I first met you at Moreton Genetics, you had me believing you were concerned about your great friend Tanaka, the same Tanaka who got nauseous in your company unless you had gills.”

Spears's mouth was open again like a fish sucking air.

“And you
were
concerned about him, but not in the sense I thought you meant at the time. What you were concerned about was that he might actually make it back from that expedition—other than in a box with the lid screwed down.”

She swallowed. “I beg your pardon?”

“At first I thought perhaps you were just shaken up when you found out
how
Tanaka died. The whole shark thing—you weren't expecting it. Perhaps you were hoping for a simple drowning.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Spears put her drink on a side table and flopped on the couch beside it. She tucked her feet up beneath her, all relaxed like I was a friend about to spill some interesting society gossip, or maybe to give her my thoughts on interior decorating. She was getting good at this, more confident—practice makes perfect.

“Does the name Al Cooke ring any bells?”

“Cooke … Cooke …” She stroked her chin and glanced at the ceiling. The gesture looked self-conscious. I wondered if she'd practiced it in the mirror.

“He was a crew member of the
Natusima.”

“Why would I know the—”

“He was the ship's cook. You knew him well enough to have thirty-six thousand dollars transferred into his bank account.”

“I don't think so.”

“I know so, Doc. Because of 9/11, banks these days are pretty cooperative when it comes to the transfer of large sums of money.” I silently thanked Arlen for his persistence on my behalf. “It's the sort of activity indulged in by drug dealers and terrorists. You live well, Doc. Large five-and six-figure sums like that appear and disappear in your accounts sometimes on a weekly basis. Your record of spending and saving is consistently extravagant, so you don't look like a drug dealer or a terrorist to the system, and the computers that monitor these things skip over you. Only this particular thirty-six thousand dollars went to an account registered in the Caymans to one Sean Boyle. From there it was transferred to Al Cooke's account, an account that has rarely, if ever, been out of the red. It arrived in two chunks—eighteen thousand dollars one month, eighteen thousand dollars the next. To me, that makes it look like a half-now-and-half-after-the-job-is-done kinda transfer, especially when the arrival of those deposits book-ended the day Dr. Tanaka got turned into fish food.”

Doc Spears was frowning like she wasn't following my logic. More acting. “Are you saying Professor Boyle used money I loaned him to have Dr. Tanaka
murdered?”

“Nice try, Doc,” I said. “I don't believe you loaned Sean Boyle anything. I believe you conspired with him in the murder of Hideo Tanaka.”

Spears picked up her drink and took a delicate sip. The glass wasn't shaking. “This is ridiculous,” she said.

My turn to shrug. “When I first met you, you told me that you got on well with Tanaka, but not with Boyle. I've been doing
a little fishing of my own, Doc. You'd been at MG sixteen months. Tanaka was twenty thousand feet under the water for much of that time, collecting specimens. You barely knew the guy. And while you did your best to keep it quiet, you got on real well with Sean Boyle—lovers first and then business partners. And you both wanted Tanaka a little closer to the surface, like only six feet under.”

The doctor sucked in her top lip, and tapped her chin with her index finger like she was considering her next move.

“We've had a team going over your expenses,” I said. This wasn't accurate. What I should have said was, we
will
have a team of experts going over your finances, shift it from the perfect tense to the certain future. But under the circumstances—the circumstances being that I wanted her rattled—I was sure even Chip Schaeffer back at the DoD would have approved of my grammatical license. “The bellhop at the Sofitel knew you by name. I could have believed the front desk or even the concierge might know the names of the hotel's paying guests, but the guy in the monkey suit who picks up the luggage? Unlikely. Unless of course you'd stayed there many times before. And that was certainly possible. On a hunch I had him shown photos of the professor. Seems I'm not the only one who never forgets a bad haircut. The bellhop figured Boyle was your husband. You always registered as Mr. and Mrs., didn't you? Except Boyle never signed the register, which meant he never had to show ID.”

I waited for an answer, a reaction, but Spears's face remained a mask. She said, “Is that all you've got, Special Agent?”

A challenge like that is the cop equivalent of smelling blood in the water. I suddenly knew how the shark that ate Tanaka felt. I said, “Do you want to know what I think, or what I can prove?”

“I think you should leave,” she replied, her plucked, arched eyebrows knitted in a scowl, the corners of her mouth pulled in the general direction of her manicured toenails.

“OK, if you insist, I'll go with what I know: Tanaka and Boyle's research came up with something interesting. Tanaka
wanted to take it in one direction, perhaps as a sewage treatment; Boyle in another. Boyle came to you; you agreed with his point of view. You secured more funding from MG's old friend the DoD to develop the biotechnology for purely military purposes. Tanaka wasn't thrilled.

“I don't know yet where you and Boyle started banging each other's doors—the Sofitel was one of your favorite fuck pads. Maybe the close proximity to power, the White House being within spitting distance, turned you on. Somewhere along the way—perhaps right from the beginning—you both decided Tanaka had to be removed from the scene permanently. And then Boyle double-crossed you. You weren't a hundred percent sure about that until I showed up and started asking questions after the Transamerica/Four Winds explosions. At the time, I thought your distress was the normal concern one human being shows for another—the unfortunate and violent deaths of not just one but
two
of your employees, and so close together. But I read it wrong. At some point during our little chat at Moreton Genetics that day, you realized Boyle's death had been staged so that he could take his nasty little secrets to a new buyer—Pakistan—without having to split the profits with you. With scandal inevitable, and in order to protect the value of your stock, you resigned, but not before passing me a copy of the security-camera footage that showed Boyle stealing the technology—technology
you
helped him steal. That envelope the disk came in had your DNA all over it. By slipping me that disk, you were behaving just like the seemingly innocent who goes on television to beg the public for leads to a crime she herself has committed.”

Spears's nostrils flared as she breathed.

“But then you got a break. The DoD called you in to consult on the mission to snatch Boyle. That's when you met Staff Sergeant Chris Butler.”

“The British soldier?” Spears shook her head. “I had nothing to do with him. The only times I ever saw him were in those briefing sessions.”

“Security cameras are everywhere these days, Doc. You of all
people should know that.” I pulled the small rented DVD player from my bag, flipped up the screen, and pressed play. The picture quality was poor, with lines and glitches. A code in the bottom right-hand corner identified the camera that had taken the footage, as well as a date and time. The subject matter was pretty dull—just a number of cafeteria-style tables occupied mostly by men of various ages, some in uniform, but most in business suits. Plenty of bald heads. In the top left of frame, Spears was clearly identifiable, sitting alone at a table for four, with a paper cup full of what I assumed was coffee, or at least what passed for it at the main Pentagon cafeteria. No sound accompanied the pictures. Suddenly, Spears got up and left, leaving her coffee behind. The picture jumped to footage from another camera. It showed Staff Sergeant Butler standing in a hallway. The date was identical to the first view, the time pushed barely seconds forward. Spears joined him. They shook hands. A third view—same day but two minutes later—captured them getting in a cab together. The Pentagon Police would trophy my nuts if they knew I'd copied their disks and edited this little show together.

Freddie Spears took some ice in her mouth and crunched it. “I'm calling my attorney,” she said.

“Relax, Doc, I can't arrest you. I'm OSI and you're not in the military. And even though you told Butler to kill me, I'm not the kind that bears a grudge.”

Spears leaned forward, elbows on her knees, fingers laced. She'd dropped the act. If I wasn't going to arrest her, that left only one other alternative, didn't it? “So, what do you want?” she asked, very casually.

I leaned back and crossed one leg on top of the other. Bingo. “Fifty percent of what you left Moreton Genetics with,” I replied. “According to my research, that makes my share worth around twenty mill.”

Spears's eyes narrowed. “That makes Chris Butler and me minority shareholders. What do we get for that?” Her fingers were still laced, only now she was wringing them.

“With any luck, around twenty years.”

“What?” she said, bewildered by the sudden change in direction.

Much of what I was saying was guesswork and gut instinct. No way could Boyle have pulled off the theft from Moreton Genetics without someone on the inside helping out. And then there was Butler. He was already a rotten apple, but someone had to have planted the seed in his head to turn the Phunal mission into an investment opportunity.

Spears was clever, and no doubt the team of lawyers she'd hire would be, too. All the evidence, even the bank transfers to Boyle and to Cooke, could conceivably be presented as something innocent. With Boyle and Butler both dead, there wouldn't be much of a case. The only way to nail her was to get an admission made freely to someone who wasn't an officer of the court—specifically, a
civilian
court. An admission made to someone like me.

The doorbell rang right on cue, making a sound like Big Ben.

I went to the door and opened it. I was surprised to see Chalmers standing there, leering with that stupid grin on his face, his crutches updated with a cane. Behind him were several FBI types; behind them my backup marshals; and behind them, the doorman with my ten bucks. “Special Agent Cooper,” said Chalmers, stepping inside. “Bumbling along as usual?”

“What are you doing here, Chalmers?”

“Come to help collect the latest addition to the FBI's witness protection program—mostly to make sure there are no problems with you. And maybe, well, maybe to gloat just a little …”

A half-dozen humorless types filed in behind Chalmers, filling the expensive room like a flood in a blue suit. Along with the old doorman, the marshals kept to the outside hallway, but peered in to satisfy their inquisitiveness.

I checked this invasion with Spears, glancing over my shoulder as a black guy the size of a locomotive put his hand under her arm and hoisted her to her feet. From the look of uncertainty on her face, this was all news to her.

“You planted that wallet at the Four Winds,” I said to
Chalmers. “And then you used my presence on the scene to legitimize its discovery.”

He took a step toward Spears.

“We both know it couldn't have been the bombers, those Pakistani glass blowers; it had to have been someone who'd come along later,” I said. “I might actually have fallen for it if you'd had the thing properly deep-fried.”

Chalmers was still looking smug. If he'd had a nail file, he'd have pulled it out and used it. “The evidence could have been better prepared, I suppose,” he agreed.

“So you going to tell me why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Playing dumb comes naturally to you, Chalmers.”

I wanted to hit him, knock the supercilious smirk right off his face, but I resisted the temptation. “So now you've got Doc Spears over a barrel,” I told him. “She'll have to cooperate with you or go to prison for a very long time.” I wondered what Spears had that Langley wanted so badly. Then it hit me like a slap. “All the missing research on this bug. You people think Spears knows where it is.”