Simple Simon (3 page)

“You can call her Dr. Anne,” Ohlmeyer suggested.

“I can call you Dr. Anne,” came the repetition. Simon’s chin rose a bit. He was now tracking the far edge of the table.

“Dr. Anne is a good friend of mine,” Ohlmeyer said as a subtle assurance. And for a more important reason.

Simon wore an oversized grey sweatshirt. He reached up and then down through the loose collar, and pulled out a set of ringbound three-by-five cards that hung around his neck on a lanyard. A small pen, clipped to the front card, was similarly attached by a single string to one of the rings that held the cards together. Simon pulled the pen free, clicked the top, and flipped through a precise number of cards. He stopped at one with the large title FRIENDS written across the top in blue marker. Below it were rudimentary scribbles on individual lines. Anne could make out the name
DOKTR CHAZ
near the top, and thought immediately:
He writes phonetically…but without e’s.

Simon held the stubby pen close to the card in a fierce grip. He found the next empty line and wrote
DOKTR AN
. He now had a friend named Dr. Anne. Friends were good people who could be trusted. Only friends could tell you if another person was a friend. Father had told him that. So had mother. And what they said was right.

Anne dipped her head a bit, eyes trying to meet Simon’s. “You do puzzles very well, Simon.”

His head seemed to nod between extremes of the rocking. “I like this puzzle.”

“Simon, Anne is going to be working with you some days,” Ohlmeyer said. “Is that all right with you?”

He inspected the FRIENDS list, then dropped the cards back down the neck of his sweatshirt. “It’s all right with me.”

“Good!” Ohlmeyer said with enthusiasm. Tone conveyed feeling more than words, he knew. “And speaking of puzzles, remember I told you I had a magazine with some good puzzles in it?”

Remember
… He didn’t. But ‘magazine’ meant something. “I read
Ranger Rick
.”

“That’s a good magazine,” Ohlmeyer said. “And here’s a new magazine for you.” He held it out. Simon accepted it with both hands and brought it to his lap. He flattened it out, pressing with both palms and ironing toward the sides, without letting his eyes settle upon it. His dry skin caressing the slick cover made a sound somewhere between a whine and a hiss. “When you get home you can look at the puzzles.”

Home
… Simon pulled the cuff of his left sleeve up and brought the watch on his wrist very close to his face.
Big hand three ticks before the 12. Little hand on the 4
. He saw many things in that, but he knew that one of them was the time, and it was almost at the time when his mother had told him he should get in the yellow bus. He let the cuff fall and tugged at the long edges of
The Tinkery
once before tucking it under his arm. He stood, the chair screeching as it slid backward. “Dr. Cha
zzz
, my mother said I should go now.”

Déjà vu was an easy thing to experience with autistics, Ohlmeyer knew. He’d had this same exchange with Simon each afternoon when it was time to head for the bus. “You’re right, Simon. It’s almost four o’clock. Carolyn is waiting down the hall for you. She’ll take you to the bus.”

Simon reached toward his collar, then stopped. He seemed rapt in some thought.

“Simon?” Ohlmeyer inquired.

“Carolyn is my friend.”

Ohlmeyer smiled, nodding. A small success. “Yes she is.”

Simon stepped around the table and took two steps toward the door, then he stopped in front of Anne, his left shoulder to her. His head came up and twisted toward her for an instant. He resumed a head-down posture and said, “My mother is a pretty lady.”

“I bet she is,” Anne said, accepting the roundabout compliment.

“Okay, Simon.” Ohlmeyer placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You had better get moving.” He opened the door and guided Simon through it. He watched him until he was safely in Carolyn’s hands. When Ohlmeyer turned back, Anne was resting against the table in a half-sit. “You passed muster, I have to say.”

“He’s—” She checked ‘nice’ before it came out. “—sweet.”

“He’s special,” Ohlmeyer added not as a correction, but as a statement of additional fact. “Very special. If we can work with him, and get him to explore his abilities, we might pick something up in the process.” He crossed his arms, his face twisting into a teeth-gritted smile. “Something to help explain this damned disorder.”

“Anything I can do, Chas, just put it to me.”

“Talking to the parents might help. I want him here five days a week. He needs to be here five days.”

A slow nod agreed…almost completely. “Just promise me something.”

Some old friends never changed, Ohlmeyer recognized. “Anne…”

She showed a cautionary palm to her friend. “Not you, Chas, but that young man does not need to be made into a lab rat for one of these eager young PhD candidates you’ve got lurking in the shadows. He has a life, he deserves a life. I won’t be party to his exploitation.”

Ohlmeyer held four fingers up. “Scout’s honor.”

“Wrong number, Chas,” Anne commented. “Well, this has been a rather pleasant ending to the day.”

“And now you get to go home to your G-Man,” Ohlmeyer said with a smile. “So, tell me, is the Windy City keeping Art busy?”

“Well, he has a saying: There’s bad guys wherever you go.”

“Atrocious grammar,” Ohlmeyer said, then added soberly, “But true.”

Anne nodded. “Very.”

*  *  *

The day was almost done when Art Jefferson swiveled his chair toward the window that, on a clear day, afforded him a partial view of Lake Michigan and pulled the folded note from his shirt pocket. He opened it and smiled at the five words.

Love you. Tonight, my place?

As if it were some tryst his new bride were planning. He tucked the note away and chuckled to himself, realizing that he felt somewhat like a twenty year old newlywed. Well, he was the latter, but he was thirty years and change past the former, on his second and last wife—knock wood—and at a place in his life he’d hardly dreamed possible three years ago.

Recently divorced, number four in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Los Angeles Field Office, handling the biggest investigation of his career, and on the edge. What had come of that combination? A good agent—a friend—with a bullet in his neck, a heart attack, and a quasi-demotion from command to street duty. Two years of taking stock followed, case after case, some big, most not, just plodding along until the world began to spin his way again.

Anne
… he thought, feeling his warm cheeks rise. On a blind date of all things he had met her. A woman of impossibly meshed qualities. Fiercely strong and independent, vital, intelligent beyond his measure by far, and at heart she was a little girl who savored life.
Tonight, my place?

He could mark the instant in time when the change in his life took hold. It was the moment when he realized that he loved Anne. Truly loved her beyond anything he’d felt for his first wife, in fact so different from any emotion he could remember that he’d wondered if he ever really loved Lois. The feeling ushered in a newness to his life, relieved him of whatever demons had haunted him. Opened new paths. The job he held now, A-SAC (assistant special agent in charge) of the Chicago field office, had come not as an offer, but as a request.
I want you as my number two, Art
, Bob Lomax, the SAC, had said in the call some five months earlier. The two had worked as street agents together during Art’s posting to the Windy City more than a decade before.

And so he was here…again. With all the pieces of his life in place, finally. Staring out his office window into the mist that shrouded Lake Michigan, his heart beating beneath Anne’s note, Art Jefferson felt content, warm, and completely at home for the first time in his life.

“Your place, huh?” Art said aloud as he swung back toward his desk and locked the file drawer. He’d accomplished all he was going to this Friday. He stood from his chair and was feeding several pieces of paper into the shredder when three taps sounded on his door. Bob Lomax came in behind the knock.

“Got a minute?”

Art let the last document ride into the shredder. It came out as paper spaghetti and fell into the burn bag. “Sure. I was just finishing up. What’s up?”

The SAC approached and took a seat facing Art’s desk. He slid it close and laid a plain file folder on the desk. “Have a look.”

Art sat and put his reading glasses on, then lifted the file’s cover. A face less its eyes stared up at him from an 8 by 10 glossy. “Jesus.”

“Pretty, huh?” Lomax asked the A-SAC. “Recognize who it is?”

Art’s eyes, narrow and troubled, came up from the photo. “I’m supposed to recognize this?”

Lomax leaned back in the chair and scratched his scarred left cheek. He had a face more reminiscent of a boxer than a bureaucrat. “Think back. Before you transferred out west. Nineteen seventy-five or so.”

Art looked back to the photo, and carefully through the others. He grimaced visibly and was very glad they were in black and white. “Sorry, Bob.”

“Vince Chappell,” Lomax said, now rubbing his lower lip with a single finger. “Ring a bell?”

It did. Art returned to the first photo, eyes plucked, lower lip cut away and hanging in a flap over the chin, exposing the teeth like some ghoulish Halloween mask. The tip of the nose was gone, leaving a bruised pyramid of flesh less its peak.

In one picture the genitals were missing.

“Is this Vinnie?” Art asked in a hollow voice.

Lomax nodded. “He worked with us back then doing OC investigations.”

Art closed the cover and dropped the file on his desk. The corners of several photos slid free. “My God.” He covered his mouth and reclined toward the window. “What…”

“Remember when he left where he was going?”

“CIA, wasn’t it?”

“Right,” Lomax confirmed. “A week ago today he was killed in Japan, in an Agency house north of Tokyo. He apparently took a hooker there for some fun. It turns out she wasn’t a hooker.” The SAC reached across the desk and took the folder. He removed two typewritten pages from behind the photos. “This is from the Agency team that did a hush-hush on this. ‘
Victim was bound to the bed with buckled leather straps. There was evidence of damage to every pain/pressure point on the victim’s body, indicating an attempt (result unknown) at information extraction.
’ A nice way to say ‘torture’,” Lomax commented, moving to the next page. “Then this: ‘
Blood was evident throughout the room, and along a path leading to the shower in the adjoining bathroom. Numerous fingerprints, palmprints, and footprints (most in blood) were apparent and were collected for analysis.
’“ Lomax returned the report to its place in the file. “CIA sent the fingerprints to our lab in D.C. and got the results yesterday. The ‘hooker’ was some sick bitch named Keiko Kimura. Ever hear of her?” Art shook his head. “The CIA brief says she’s a former Japanese Red Army terrorist schooled at the finest establishments in North Korea, Libya, Iran, etcetera. A real pedigree type with a specialty in getting people to talk. In ninety-one she dropped from sight and reappeared last year doing freelance work for the money.”

“Not enriched by the JRA ideology, eh?” Art observed. Revolution was not the path to success for most.

“You got it,” Lomax agreed.

Art gestured to the file. “So why do we have this?”

“We have this so I can give it to you,” Lomax answered, setting the file back on the desk. “High priority, and keep that under lock and key. Assign it out to check on Vince’s connections when he was here. The CIA is trying to rule in or out anything that could have compromised him. Maybe he had an old acquaintance here and said something he shouldn’t have. You know the routine.”

Somehow the term ‘routine’ sounded distasteful when it pertained to someone you once worked closely with, Art thought. “I’ll have it taken care of.” He took the folder and locked it in his desk’s file drawer. “Do we know why Kimura was put onto Vince?”

“The new round of trade talks is coming up. Vince was probably trying to get some inside intel on their strategies. Someone on the opposing team probably thought he was privy to ours. The new gold standard, Art. Economic espionage.” Lomax thought quietly, then went on. “One more thing. Somewhat related, in fact. Monday the new code gear will be up and running. NSA put it in this morning. Big damn thing. The Director wants us off the MAYFLY system in two weeks.”

“That’s a damn short time to get everybody checked out,” Art said.

“That’s why you’re in charge of it. Monday I want you checked out with the Com clerk so you can set up a schedule to get everybody up to speed. Two weeks.”

Art nodded. Lomax was very serious. “How does this relate to Vince getting killed?”

“CIA thinks MAYFLY might be compromised. Everyone’s been using it for five years now—us, State, CIA, Defense. If it is leaky it could put a lot of people in jeopardy. All our office to office Secret and Top Secret stuff gets transmitted using MAYFLY. And worse things can happen to one of our UC’s than happened to Vince if they’re blown.”

Worse? Art wasn’t certain about that. But dead was dead, and an undercover agent losing his or her cover could easily end up that way. “All right. What’s the new system?”

“It’s called KIWI. Supposed to be
the
system. Unbreakable and tamper-proof.”

“Hmm,” Art grunted, nodding. “I heard the same thing in L.A. when MAYFLY went in.”

Lomax crossed his fingers and stood. “You wanna grab a beer?”

Art came around his desk and lifted his coat from the brass tree near the door. “I think my wife has plans for me tonight.”

Bob Lomax raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Get lucky, number two.”

Art walked Lomax back to his office and caught the elevator alone. He pressed the button for the basement garage and leaned back against the waist-high hand rail. He closed his eyes and thought of Anne.

But from another part of his consciousness Vince Chappell stared at him with bloody voids where his eyes should be. Art opened his eyes and looked straight ahead at the elevator door until it slid open. He stepped off quickly and turned right toward his car.