Measure of Darkness (23 page)

All he has to do is determine who the first responders are.

Kidder finds a nice, comfortable spot behind a Dumpster in the so-called public alley. He's good at waiting. Back in the day when he'd been in the military, an elite warrior trained to kill with his bare hands, he'd once had to hold position for fifteen hours until the target, a terrified gray-haired hajji with a comically hooked nose and a rap star's gold tooth, finally crawled out of the wreckage of what had been his home. Thought he'd made it, too, until he felt the cold muzzle against the base of his skull. Kidder put him down like Old Yeller—his own personal joke, because of the tooth. Of course he kept the tooth as a souvenir, who wouldn't? Had it drilled and put on a
matching gold chain which he wears around his neck as a reminder of the fun times over there in the sandbox.

Old Yeller, yuk, yuk.

With infinite patience Kidder begins to assemble his custom-made weapon. The twelve-inch rifled barrel from where it has been strapped to his leg. The plastic hand-stock from his right trouser pocket. The spring-loaded trigger mechanism from his left trouser pocket. And from beneath the carefully buttoned flap of his shirt pocket, a single fifty-caliber, five-hundred-and-seventy grain, center-fire, round-tipped, soft-nose bullet.

Just the one bullet. Because all he needs is one shot.

I
'm dreaming about prison when the alarm begins to whoop. In my dream the prison cells are a kind of concrete maze, with some cells branching off into dead ends, others leading to the next cell and the next. There are no prisoners, none that I can find. The prison/maze seems to be empty. Except I keep hearing something on the other side of the concrete walls, just around the next corner. Something furtive but alive. Something, or someone, that I have to find, and which keeps me hunting from cell to cell, heart pounding.

Whoop whoop whoop.

The alarm isn't particularly loud, but is accompanied by flashing lights throughout the residence. And if that isn't enough to wake me, Teddy pounds on my door. “Alice! Get up! Someone's trying to break in!”

The nightmare about the prison hasn't cleared from my mind, and at first I think that it's
me
that's trying to break in. Finally I surface enough to get what's going on, hurry into a bathrobe and find Teddy prancing around outside the door like his feet are on fire.

“Come on,” he says, grabbing my arm. “We have to get to the safe room!”

That's the drill. If the security alarm goes off, indicating a possible break-in, we're all supposed to pile into the safe room—a windowless vault not far from the library—and wait until the first responders from Beacon Hill Security clear the premises. Mrs. Beasley, clad in a very handsome pair of men's pajamas, has beat us to the safe room and sits there with her arms crossed, looking somewhere between bored and resolute. Naomi, fully, if hastily, dressed, arrives a moment later with Milton Bean in tow. Mr. Bean has wrapped himself in a sheet and looks like he escaped from a toga party, and isn't sure if he should be amused or terrified.

“What's going on?” he wants to know.

“Probably just a false alarm, but we need to take precautions.”

Naomi helps Teddy secure the door to the safe room. The vault is appointed like a small airport executive lounge, with low-level lighting, comfortable seating, a small refrigerator stocked with food and beverages and a video console wirelessly connected to all the security cameras in and around the residence. We watch as first one Beacon Hill Security patrol car rolls up in the public alley, then another, and finally a Boston Police patrol car arrives street-side. The Boston cops will secure the exterior of the building, which means they'll walk the perimeter and check for signs of break-in. The Beacon Hill Security guards will, by previous arrangement, enter the residence and conduct a room-by-room search.

Fifteen minutes after the alarm first sounds, the Beacon Hill boss punches into the safe-room intercom, enters the code and informs us that the premises are clear and the situation is, his word, “contained.” And so we emerge unscathed if bleary-eyed to the news that a bullet has been fired through the third-floor window of
Jack's bedroom. That's what triggered the alarm. No one has actually attempted to enter the premises.

“That glass is supposed to be bullet-resistant,” Naomi says, shocked by the news.

“Under normal circumstances it would be,” the security chief tells her.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Whoever did this was firing something like an elephant gun. We found a large hunk of lead in the bedroom ceiling. Had to be a fifty caliber, and to get through the glass—it punched a hole as big as a grapefruit. The angle indicates it was fired from ground level, from the vicinity of the alley.”

“An elephant gun, you say?”

He shrugs. “Something powerful enough to stop an elephant. Your window barriers will stop penetration from small-arms fire, up to and including an Uzi on full auto. So this had to have been a high-powered rifle with special ammunition. We're going to turn the slug over to the police, see what they make of it. With your permission.”

Naomi nods her permission and turns to me. “My God, what if Jack had been there?”

“Saved by his wife, you might say. I'll be sure to tell him that.”

“This is serious.”

“I am serious. Jack should know that in his case there's an advantage to staying married.” When she frowns her disapproval at my jocularity, I add, “Come on, this was a drive-by shooting, not a serious assassination attempt.”

“With an elephant gun.”

“Don't get hung up on the size of the gun. Whoever did this obviously knew they needed a powerful weapon to make a statement. Had they wanted to kill one of us,
they'd have fired into a room that was occupied. The lights never came on in Jack's room because he never came back from happy hour with his state cop buddy. It can't be a coincidence that the shot was fired into an unoccupied room. And into the ceiling at that.”

Naomi stares at me, her brain buzzing through the possibilities, and in the end she agrees with my assessment. “The odds favor your theory,” she admits. “This was likely a warning shot, intended to discourage our investigation.”

“No chance of that.”

“None whatsoever,” Naomi says, resolute. “As a precaution I'll keep the Beacon Hill security guards stationed outside the residence, at least for now.”

“So we can all go back to bed?”

“That's advisable. We're all going to need as much rest as we can get. That goes for you, young man,” she says to Teddy, who has lingered nearby, awaiting instructions. “By my estimation you haven't had a full sleep cycle in at least three days. I want your mind clear for the next assignment, which is going to be difficult.”

“What's the next assignment?” he asks instantly, beating me to it.

“I'll know more tomorrow,” Naomi says enigmatically, and marches off to her room, as if on a mission.

Teddy waits until she's gone before touching me on the arm to get my attention. “She'll know more tomorrow?” he asks, puzzled. “What's she going to do?”

I think about it. “My guess? She's going to call the Benefactor.”

Our young computer genius says not a word to that, but looks like he's seen a ghost.

O
ver the course of the next forty-eight hours absolutely nothing of interest happens. Okay, the Red Sox did somehow manage to win, barely, all three of their away games at Toronto. And a city councilman from Dorchester was found gamboling in the duck pond at the Public Garden, having declared his intention to interfere with the swans. He was stark naked. Lucky for the big birds he was too drunk to accomplish his task. Or maybe lucky for him, considering how aggressively swans tend to respond when under attack from naked councilmen. In Revere, a group of rowdy teens was arrested for underage drinking at the beach, and in Lexington a possibly rabid fox terrorized a neighborhood before lying down to take a nap on someone's porch and being identified as a perfectly healthy Pomeranian called, appropriately enough, Barker. The dog was taken into custody without incident and returned to its owner.

Okay, so I take it back about nothing of interest happening. I'm learning to be more specific: nothing of interest happened concerning our current case, at least nothing we knew about. We being everyone but Naomi, who spent hours on her secure line, waving me away
whenever I happened to approach in a vain attempt to eavesdrop. Whatever she's up to, she won't discuss it, although my bets are all placed on our mysterious Benefactor, who, as we know from previous cases, has influence in very high places. Jack occupies himself with legwork, following up on the late Jonny Bing's possible connection to the frozen corpse found at the foot of his bed in the vain hope that it might somehow, improbably, lead to Joey Keener. Teddy continues to plumb the depths of the World Wide Web, hoping to uncover something that will prove Taylor Gatling's complicity in the murder of Professor Keener or the abduction of his missing son. Dane has been spending most of her time at the hospital, where Randall Shane continues to improve both physically and mentally, to the point that she's worried the politically ambitious Middlesex County District Attorney will change his mind and put Shane behind bars while he awaits trial. Everything Shane has recalled in the past couple of days confirms what we already know, which is gratifying but essentially useless.

We still don't know what we don't know, and it's making me as crazy as that overactive Pomeranian snapping at ankles in historic, upscale Lexington, birthplace of American liberty and Rachel Dratch. Our only suspect, Pentagon darling Taylor Gatling, has a motive for silencing the professor, who he suspected of treason, and for framing Randall Shane, revenge served cold, but what possible reason would he have for stealing and keeping Joey Keener? Teddy, whose eyes are beginning to rotate in his head like the cherries on a slot machine, has been unable to find any link with Keener and Gatling, other than the obvious connection having to do with Gama Guards contracting to provide security for QuantaGate. Despite the coincidence of both victim
and suspect being from New Hampshire, the two men seem to have had nothing in common. Gatling was raised in the southern part of the state, on the seacoast, to a moneyed-at-the-time family, and Keener bounced around foster homes in the north. Moreover, Keener being ten years older than Gatling, he was already out of state as a Caltech undergrad when Gatling was pulling pigtails in elementary school. Their one undeniable connection is that both profited from Pentagon contracts, but the same could be said of thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals.

In the late afternoon of the second day of nothing, Jack finds me on the roof, where I've been watching the dinky sailboats to-ing and fro-ing on the Charles.

“Those are dinghies, not dinkies, and they're tacking, not to-ing.”

“I say they're to-ing and fro-ing. Tacking is something upholsterers do.”

Jack laughs, shaking his handsome head. As usual he looks like he just stepped out of the pages of
GQ,
sporting a pair of Armani sunglasses that perfectly complement his gorgeous summer-weight suit. The dark glasses fail to hide his frustration because with Jack it's all in the lips, that's where he expresses himself, from cynical sneers to pensive, pouting moues. “Teddy's been asking me about the Benefactor,” he says.

“What did you tell him?”

“Identity unknown to me. And that if he tried to dig something up, and somehow managed to establish a possible connection between Naomi and a wealthy and influential individual who might be financing this enterprise, he would be fired so quick his Mohawk would smolder from the friction.”

“Fauxhawk. And did you really?”

“I didn't actually mention his hairdo. But I did remind him that when he came aboard as a full-time employee he signed a document pledging to respect her privacy.”

“There's nothing there for him to find,” I suggest.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because if it was there to be found, someone would have found it by now and used it against her. There have been many enemies, many opportunities.”

“Yeah,” he says. “There have at that.”

“Pledging not to look doesn't mean we can't speculate. So far I've narrowed it down to a former spouse or lover, or a Saudi prince who owes her big-time. Or it could as easily be the Wizard of Oz.”

“You think she has family?”

“Everyone has a family, even if they're all deceased.”

“Or it's all Naomi and there's no Benefactor. That's just an excuse to tell us we can't use the jet or whatever.”

“You think she's been talking to herself for the last two days?”

He shrugs. “I guess not. Sounds stupid when you put it like that.”

I look up at the sky, endless blue but for a few wispy clouds out over the harbor. “Is that an eagle?”

Jack studies where I'm pointing. “Turkey vulture,” he says. “Sometimes mistakenly referred to as a buzzard.”

“But definitely not a drone.”

“Definitely not,” he says.

“I keep thinking of Predator drones equipped with Hellfire missiles.”

Jack takes off his sunglasses, looks me in the eye. “Put it out of your mind, kid. They'd never dare do that on U.S. soil. This is Boston, not Afghanistan.”

“You're sure?”

“Pretty sure. I'll be downstairs if you need me.”

“Thanks.”

Can't say why, exactly, but I sort of like it when he calls me “kid.”

 

The result of Naomi's secret machinations arrives in the evening, shortly after dinner (Mrs. Beasley's special variation on chicken tikka) when we've been instructed to take our coffee and lemon cookies into the library and wait quietly like good little employees. The excellent coffee is quaffed, the cookies devoured to the last crumb. Many minutes pass uneventfully. There is much twiddling of thumbs, and some interesting speculation about swans and inebriated councilmen, and the nerve of a certain very private investigator who refuses to drop even the smallest hint about what is supposed to transpire on this fine, early-summer evening

Teddy, haunting the street-side window, finally announces, “It's a limo.”

We all crowd to the windows. The streetlights are on but the twilight has lingered and the only impediments to sight are the fully leaved tree branches that obscure the hood of what is unmistakably an airport limousine. A driver, in full chauffeur livery, gets out and pops the trunk. He deposits several pieces of matching luggage on the curb and then, adjusting his cap, opens the passenger door with something like a bow.

A petite woman slowly climbs out and stands teetering for a moment, as if struggling with her balance. The driver rushes to offer his big, strong arm. She takes it.

“Wow,” says Teddy.

“Double that,” says Jack.

The woman, slender and young and elegantly attired, is Asian. Chinese, in all probability. And beautiful, breathtakingly. I know because the males in the room
are taking deep breaths, and Dane Porter gives forth with a little sigh of contented surprise, and because even a female of the heterosexual persuasion feels her heart do a little jump, confronted by such a vision of perfection.

She looks up, our mystery woman, and then vanishes from sight, passing under a veil of leaves on her way to the front door, tall heels clicking.

“Amazing,” says Jack in a soft, admiring voice. “How did she do it?”

He means Naomi, and because we've been firmly instructed to remain in the library, we'll just have to wait for the answer to come up the stairs and find us.