Collision (15 page)

Taylor responded with a smile of his own. “Well, it is engaging. I'm sure you're a pro and know how to use your flippancy as a way to loosen up your … what? Suspects? So what can I do for you?”

Sarsfield already had his black notebook open and his silvery pen poised. “I think I know the basics. Detective Seymour e-mailed his report to the field office, and the FBI people in charge of things like dealing with cooperation between federal cop outfits set up the deal. We—that is, the bureau—cleared its jurisdiction with the U.S. attorney's office. So it's an FBI case … my case, with Detective Seymour as consultant.”

Taylor slowly went to his desk, stood behind it for a moment, and then sat down, trying to use that moment to assume a calm air. Sarsfield took a few notes as Taylor again recounted the phone call from Cole Perenchio and the discovery of his body. After a short pause, he tapped his pencil on the open notebook and, nodding his head toward the monitors, said, “I was a bit surprised to see you in your office.”

“Why?”

“Your friend Cole Perenchio was killed last night.”

“We live in violent times,” Taylor said.

“Yes, violent times indeed,” Sarsfield said. He nodded toward the worktable. “What are you working on?”

“A
NOVA
show on asteroids.”

“Inspired by the SpaceMine announcement about the asteroid?”

“Well, that and other things,” Taylor responded, trying to keep himself from blurting out,
What the hell is this all about?

“I heard about the asteroid from my ten-year-old son. Mind if I tell him that you're planning a show about asteroids?”

“Well, no date's been set yet,” Taylor said, feeling himself relax. “But, sure.”

“He's a big fan of yours. We tape every episode of
Your Universe
. Danny replays them a lot. And we've been to the planetarium a million times.”

“Well, I'll be sure to invite him to the show. There's usually a preview. I'd like to invite you
and
Danny,” Taylor said, paused, and then added, “Now, what's going on?”

“Dr. Taylor,” Sarsfield said, “you're a person of interest, not a suspect. But we—the FBI—don't know as much about the victim as we'd like.”

The calm in the room vaporized as Taylor loudly asked, “And what does ‘person of interest' mean?”

“There's no legal definition of it. It's just a term that we use.”

“Seems to me I heard that term before. It was used on that poor guy the FBI accused of setting off a bomb at the Olympics in Atlanta a while back, and the guy you accused of sending anthrax through the mail? Bruce Ivins. He…”

“Committed suicide before we could formally charge him.… Look, we're talking to you because we want to know certain things.”

“What things?”

“General information about Cole Perenchio. Specifically, what he was going to tell you.”

“I told Seymour and I've told you, I don't know what he was going to tell me.”

Sarsfield flipped some pages on his notebook and asked, “Do you know a man named Peter Darrow? Or Daniel Bruce?”

“Look, Agent Sarsfield, I don't know anyone by those names. And I believe you're on some kind of fishing expedition, rather than an investigation. And, from what I know, when the FBI has a real case,
two
agents do the questioning. I'm ending the fishing expedition right now.”

“Please, Dr. Taylor,” Sarsfield said in a tone that was neither friendly nor pleading. “No need to get excited. I can assure you that those names are pertinent to a homicide. And they came out of what we believe to be a concurrent or related case involving the shooting at Sullivan and Ford.

“And, as to the late Mr. Perenchio, we think that if you put your mind to it, you'll figure out, at least in a general way, what it was he was hoping to tell you.”

Taylor sat down. Again shaking his head and speaking slowly, he said, “So. Let me get this straight. You—the FBI—believe that Cole—and maybe me?—might be involved in a mass shooting. And you want me to be the mind reader of a dead man. Right?”

Sarsfield did not answer.

“Obviously,” Taylor continued, “the FBI has some ideas about Cole. But you're not going to share them with this person of interest.”

“Dr. Taylor, there is something we both know,” Sarsfield said, his voice sharpening. “It involves you and the White House. The way you handle my—the FBI's—request for information in this case will have a direct effect on the matter involving the White House. Goodbye.” He closed his notebook, rose, and walked out of the office.

A moment later Molly came in and said, “I think we both need our morning coffee. Oh, and by mistake I left your phone open. And I accidentally recorded your interview with Agent Sarsfield.”

 

30

Several weeks before, Ray
Quinlan, President Oxley's chief of staff, had informed Taylor that he was under consideration to be the President's science advisor. If he was appointed, Taylor would want to put SpaceMine and asteroids high on his advice list. He would also be running the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where billion-dollar, politically thorny decisions about energy and environment issues would undoubtedly get priority over far-future ventures in space.

Quinlan had ordered Taylor not to tell anyone about the possible appointment. But he had told his old friend Sean Falcone. He did not seem surprised by the news, and Taylor wondered if Sean had had something to do with the appointment.

Taylor and Falcone went back a long ways, to the start of Taylor's career, when he was working at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Ames was NASA headquarters for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. NASA officials put Taylor on the team that was sent to Washington to testify before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Sean Falcone of Massachusetts, a champion of NASA and SETI. Falcone had also been vainly trying to get the Senate to restore the old Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, created by Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. The committee had been abolished in 1977. By then, NASA was already suffering budget cuts, even though the Apollo program was still going on.

Congress cut off the SETI funds, but Falcone continued his interest in space and kept in touch with Taylor. Falcone was still in the Senate when Taylor was transferred to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, about fifteen miles north of Washington. NASA, sensitive to political winds, had kept a low profile about the UN-sponsored Outer Space Treaty (officially, in long-winded UN prose, the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies). But Taylor had taken the risk of losing his job by testifying before Falcone's committee and openly ridiculing the mind-set of anyone who were suggesting that a way be found to opt out of the treaty. No senators were prepared at the hearing to openly gut the treaty or declare that it no longer served America's security interests, but Taylor came off as too arrogant and sarcastic during his appearance. Scientists were supposed to keep their heads down and remain completely deferential to those who controlled their agency's budgets.

As the President's national security advisor, Falcone discovered that the treaty needed to be amended to deal with commercial activities in space and to clarify the ownership and property rights of all celestial bodies. President Oxley, however, did not want to rouse the fury of anti-UN voters and stoke their visions of black helicopters shooting down America's sovereignty. But Falcone stubbornly kept the treaty on his wish list. And Taylor's energetic support of the treaty helped win Falcone's influential backing when Taylor was a candidate for the Air and Space Museum post and now for his nomination as the President's science advisor.

*   *   *

Taylor had thought he
should give Falcone more time to recover from the shootings before calling him. But the visit from Agent Sarsfield changed his mind. He needed the immediate advice of a friend and a lawyer. Usually he called Falcone at his office number, but, imagining the chaos there, he tried Falcone's cell phone.

Falcone answered on the second ring and, before Taylor could speak, said, “Ben, we need to talk.”

Taylor for an instant was surprised to hear Falcone identify him. Taylor had never got used to caller ID and the fact that phones made “Smithsonian” his ID.

“We certainly do,” Taylor said. “How about the club at twelve thirty?”

“See you then,” Falcone said, knowing that Taylor's club was not the Metropolitan. His voice was tense, and it was obvious that he did not want to talk on the phone.

They would meet in the elegant old Massachusetts Avenue mansion that housed the Cosmos Club. There was an old Washington saying: “The Metropolitan Club is for people with money; the Cosmos Club is for people with brains; and the National Press Club is for people with neither.”

Falcone belonged to the Metropolitan and the Cosmos. Taylor was a member only of the Cosmos. Someone had once described it as the perfect place for Mycroft Holmes to have met his brother, Sherlock—quiet, Victorian, a place where power dined with power, where intellect toasted intellect.

Included among the Cosmos Club members had been three presidents, two vice presidents, a dozen Supreme Court justices, thirty-two Nobel Prize winners, fifty-six Pulitzer Prize winners, forty-five recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Sean Falcone and Ben Taylor.

Several men and women said hello to Falcone as he wended his way past their tables to his favorite, which was alongside a window that looked out upon a small garden. Ordinarily he would have stopped for a few words, but today he looked grim and merely nodded. At one of the tables, everyone stood. That idea spread throughout the room. Then, in a rare breach of decorum, the quiet of a Cosmos lunch was shattered by a wave of applause. Falcone, uncharacteristically taken aback, waved and nodded in acceptance.

As he was about to take his seat, Ben Taylor appeared. “A hero's welcome,” he said, shaking Falcone's hand.

Falcone shook his head. “‘Being a hero,' Will Rogers said, ‘is the shortest-lived profession on Earth.' Glad—
very
glad—to see you, Ben.”

By long tradition no one can do business at the Cosmos Club. No one may open a briefcase and spread papers on the immaculate linen tablecloths. And certainly no one may make or receive a cell-phone call or consult any other electronic device. But business and the promise of business flows through the quiet talk, and meetings are noted by members and guests who casually glance around the room to pick up clues to deals in the making.

There was a
National Geographic
editor talking to his guest, a bearded photographer who wore a flowery tie and an ill-fitting suit jacket supplied by the club. There were a pharmaceutical lobbyist and a fellow member, a potential Nobelist from the National Institutes of Health. And, Falcone wryly thought,
Enough lawyers to fill a couple of jury boxes.

In an exercise that took him back to his days as national security advisor, Falcone had been deciding what to say and what, if necessary, he should withhold, temporarily or permanently. After they ordered—skewered fried shrimp for Falcone, butternut squash soup for Taylor—Falcone said, “I heard from the White House. Ray Quinlan called it a courtesy call. Sometimes he thinks he's an assistant president instead of chief of staff. He told me that the science advisor job is on hold.”

“I'm not surprised,” Taylor said. “I think I also heard from the White House. Well, indirectly.” He told Falcone about finding Cole Perenchio's body, about the Capitol Police session, about the Sarsfield interview and the agent's parting remark. Falcone asked only a couple of questions, not wanting to interrupt Taylor's smooth-flowing narrative.

When Taylor finished, Falcone said, “So, I killed a gunman and you found a guy with a bullet hole in his head. It's a brutal time, a city and a country full of guns. These are just shootings that just happened to happen within a few hours of each other.”

“One big difference, though,” Taylor said, tightly smiling. “Your guys were on the front page. My guy was on the bottom of an inside page in the
Post
's Metro section. A two-paragraph story with a one-column headline, ‘Killing on Capitol Hill.' No mention of me or the FBI.”

“I never read Metro,” Falcone said. “There's usually nothing much there that interests me. Even the obituaries. I don't need the
Post
to tell me if someone I know dies. To the
Post
, murders in Metro are just happenings in the invisible black city of Prince George's County or Anacostia. This one gets two paragraphs even though it's on the Hill because the Hill cops told a reporter it looks like nothing more than a black-on-black street crime. Did the story identify Cole Perenchio?”

“No. Just said ‘a Virginia man.' I remember that Detective Seymour had Cole's wallet in his hands. That's probably where ‘Virginia' came from.”

“But why didn't Cole's name appear in the
Post
story? Why just ‘Virginia man'?” Falcone asked.

“The story said that police were withholding his name until next of kin are notified.”

“That's bullshit. Police put out victims' names all the time, hoping to get witnesses or information about the crime.”

“So why didn't the
Post
name him?”

“Because, I bet, the cops asked the reporter not to. And the reporter did it to stay on the right side of the cops. So the question is why withhold his name? And why no further information about him? Or even a short obituary? He's from the area. Used to work at Goddard, right? He told you he was consulting, like just about everybody in this town. Was he consulting for NASA?”