The Green Trap (32 page)

The hotel clerk looked at them with a mixture of disdain and disbelief: a bedraggled couple with no luggage.

“We got caught in the rain,” Cochrane muttered, tugging the wad of fifties he'd accumulated. Whether it was the cash or the excuse, the clerk found them a small room with twin beds.

“That's all that's available at present,” he said.

“We'll take it,” Cochrane agreed gratefully.

As he locked the door and slipped on the security chain, Sandoval went straight to the bathroom. He heard the shower turn on, fidgeted for a moment, wondering whether he should go in and join her. He decided not to. Instead he stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in a blanket from the closet.

Sandoval came out at last, a bath towel tucked around her like a sarong. He brushed past her and entered the steamy bathroom. When he came out she was sitting up in one of the beds, the sheet and blanket pulled up to her armpits.

“Yes, I was sleeping with Gould,” she said, her voice flat, unapologetic, almost defiant. “As I said, I didn't have much choice.”

Cochrane sat on the edge of the other bed. “You were trying to protect me, is that it?”

“Whether you believe it or not.”

“I want to believe it.”

“But you don't. Not completely.”

“No,” he admitted. “I can't.”

“I decided that Gould was a better choice than Kensington,” she said.

“Kensington was in Boston, burglarizing my friends' houses.”

“I didn't know that.”

“I guess you didn't,” Cochrane said. He looked into her sea-green eyes and saw no trace of sorrow, no hint of regret or remorse. Nothing but a cold, hard anger.

“Let's forget about it,” he said, sliding into his bed.

“Can you?” she asked.

“I don't know. Maybe. I can try.”

“Kensington found me in Washington and told me either I went with him to Gould or he'd kill you.”

“You believed that?”

Ignoring his question, “Once I was in Gould's place I had to go along with him. It was the only defense I had. Either I told them who your three friends were or Gould would send Kensington to beat it out of you.”

Lying on his back, staring up at the faintly cracked ceiling, Cochrane muttered, “So that's how he got to Don's house. And Sol's. And then he just followed me and let me lead him to Vic.”

From the other bed, Sandoval said, “I suppose so.”

Turning to face her, he said, “But what about Senator Bardarson? I thought he wanted to help us.”

“Gould got to him,” she replied. “Bardarson will talk about moving from oil to hydrogen, he'll make that a central part of his election platform. But Gould will control your brother's hydrogen process. He'll decide when the switchover comes about. If ever.”

Cochrane closed his eyes briefly. It's like swimming against the tide, he thought. He remembered building fortresses in the sand at Lynn Beach when he was a child. And watching tearfully as the tide inexorably wiped them away.

“It's hopeless, isn't it?” he murmured.

Sandoval reached up and switched off the lamp on the night table between their beds.

“I mean,” Cochrane said into the darkness, “what I really want is to find out who killed my brother. Who murdered Mike?”

“Kensington,” Sandoval answered firmly. “It had to be Kensington.”

Then he recalled, “But Kensington's dead. Somebody killed him. Who the hell was that?”

Her voice came through the shadows. “There's somebody else in the picture, Paul. Somebody we don't know about.”

“And whoever it is, he's got those three hard drives.”

D
r. Jason Tulius hunched forward in his swivel chair and stared at the three small oblongs of brushed aluminum that rested upon his desk. About the size of cigarette packs, but half the thickness. How many men have been killed for them? he wondered.

He looked up from the three hard drives at the quartet of dark-suited men who had brought them into his office. The four Chechens looked like thugs: squat, thick-bodied, hard-faced. The receptionist out in the lobby had been decidedly nervous when she'd called Tulius to announce their unexpected appearance. Their message had been simple:

“We have something for Dr. Tulius, from Mr. Shamil.”

Shamil had already phoned Tulius, so he knew what their “something” was. Tulius told the receptionist to have a security guard escort the four men to his office. Both the guard and Tulius's secretary were obviously rattled by the four visitors, but he waved them out of his office and told them to shut the door behind them.

The four strangers had stood mute before his desk. Their leader—indistinguishable physically from the other three—had pulled the hard drives out of his baggy jacket and laid them carefully, almost tenderly, on Tulius' desk.

Now Tulius looked up from his desk at the four men. Their faces were swarthy, two of them were mustached, all of their jaws were dark with stubble. Their eyes were hard as chips of flint.

“Shamil says you need these,” said their leader.

“Yes,” Tulius replied, a little shakily. “Thank you. And thank Mr. Shamil for me.”

“You are to telephone Shamil at once,” he said.

“I will. Immediately.”

None of them moved.

His hand trembling slightly, Tulius lifted his telephone from its cradle and tapped out Shamil's private number.

“I am Shamil,” came the rough voice. No picture. Tulius kept his wall screen blank.

“Tulius here,” he said, trying to sound unperturbed. “Your friends just arrived. With three gifts.”

“Ah, good. The gifts we discussed.”

“Yes.”

“Put them to good use.” And Tulius heard the click of Shamil's hanging up.

He replaced the phone and said to the quartet's leader, “Thank you. The guard outside will show you the way back to the lobby.”

“We will be nearby if you need us,” said their leader.

“I understand,” Tulius replied, “but I'm certain that won't be necessary.”

Without a further word or gesture, they turned and left. Tulius felt a wave of relief once they were out of his office. Then he looked down at the three hard drives again. Those Chechen toughs had somehow taken them away from Gould's people. Inside these three little packages was the data from Michael Cochrane's work. The key to producing hydrogen from water. The key to billions of dollars. Trillions.

Tulius thought of his grandfather and all the tales he'd told of Russian oppression. Of the Latvians' plea to Molotov when it became clear that Stalin was going to march into the Baltic republics. Molotov's blunt, cold reply: “It would be inexcusable for us not to take advantage of this opportunity.” Tulius's grandfather had been a judge on Latvia's supreme court. He spent the years of World War II living in huts in the forest, freezing in the snows of winter, hunted by the Nazis and the Soviets both.

And then, after the war, half a century of living under the Russians' heavy hand. Tulius's father had been smuggled out of Latvia and came to America, content to work as a stock boy, a clerk, a salesman in a shoe store so that his son could go to a university and make a better life for himself. When the Communist rule in Russia finally collapsed, his father had joyfully returned to Latvia, to work for his nation's independence from the Russians. His reward had been arrest, imprisonment, and death from brutality at the hands of the still-despotic KGB.

Latvia and the other Baltic republics finally attained their freedom from Russia, but too late for Algis Tulius.

His son stared at the three small packets of brushed aluminum on his desk. The information in these hard drives could cripple Russia's oil exports, he told himself. I could send the Russian economy into a black pit of misery.

And what would I gain by that? he asked himself. Would it bring back my father? Would it please my grandfather? They're in their graves, beyond all pain and pleasure.

But I am alive. I could gain international fame by giving the world this means of producing hydrogen fuel. Tulius pictured himself at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, accepting the plaudits of the world.

But then he shook his head. No, it's Cochrane's work. Too many people here in my own lab know that Michael did the work, not me. I haven't done any real research work in more than ten years. I'm an administrator, not a working scientist any longer.

No one knows what's in these hard drives, he realized. No one knows who those four thugs were and why they came here. If I called Gould, how much would he pay me to deliver these hard drives into his own hands? I could retire, live like a king anywhere on earth I chose to.

Shamil would be furious, of course. But Gould would protect me from him and his Chechen animals. The FBI might be interested to know that four Chechen terrorists are in the country. The local police are still trying to find Michael's murderer. And if Shamil's been funneling UN money to me, he's probably been playing fast and loose with others, as well. He's vulnerable.

With these thoughts swirling through his mind, Tulius carefully placed the three hard drives in the top drawer of his desk. Then he picked up his phone once again and placed a call to Lionel Gould.

I
t was early afternoon when the airport taxi pulled up in front of the address Sandoval had given the driver. Cochrane paid the bill and the two of them stepped out onto the sidewalk. They had hardly spoken a word to each other in nearly forty-eight hours.

The morning before, Elena had gone off from the Gramercy Park Hotel on a brief shopping spree among the street stalls that lined Fourteenth Street, using some of Cochrane's cash. He stayed in their room, staring mindlessly at the TV news. Once she'd returned and changed, they checked out and went to Kennedy Airport for a flight to San Francisco.

“Why San Francisco?” Cochrane had asked her.

Sandoval replied, “It's where I live.”

They had to wait overnight at the airport before a pair of standby seats became available for them, sitting up in one terminal gate after another. Fearful of being spotted by Gould's people, they had sat as far away from one another as they could while enduring the agonizing wait. The
crowds thinned out during the night as flight departures and arrivals came further and further apart. Cochrane hardly slept, feeling more and more vulnerable as the terminal became emptier and emptier.

He was afraid of more than being discovered by Gould's hired thugs. He worried that if he stayed close to Elena he'd start arguing with her again. The thought of her with Gould tormented him. No matter why she slept with the sweaty fat bastard, he couldn't stand the knowledge that she'd gone to bed with him.

Macho bullshit, he told himself as he sat through the endless hours at the airport. She did it to protect me. Yeah. Right. And for the ten million Gould promised her. I can protect myself; I didn't ask her to jump into bed with him.

And how many others? he asked himself. How many? I'm just another John as far as she's concerned. Her ticket to the money. She said she loves me. Sure she does. Just as much as I love her.

And that's where it really hurt. He did love Elena, he realized. He wanted her to be with him always. But he knew that could never happen. Not now. It would never work. How could it?

Painfully stiff and puffy-eyed after a night of sitting up in the airport, he had walked down the aisle of the airliner, then watched Sandoval sit several rows ahead of him, her shoulders slumped tiredly. He had slept most of the way to San Francisco.

Standing now on the sidewalk in the early afternoon sunshine as the taxi pulled away, Cochrane felt weary, irritable, grimy in the clothes he'd been wearing since their dinner at Gould's residence. Squinting up in the bright sunlight, he saw an unpretentious row of three-story houses, each painted a different pastel shade, that marched down the slope of the street. The neighborhood seemed quiet; cars lined the curbs, but hardly any pedestrians were walking past. A cable car clanged faintly several blocks away. Looking farther down the street, he could see a glimmer of bright blue water in the distance, between rows of high-rise towers.

“This is my home,” Elena said, her tone flat. She looked as tired as Cochrane felt.

“The whole house?”

She nodded as she went up the steps to the front door and tapped out the security code on the electronic lock. The door popped open; Cochrane followed her into the cool shadows of the entryway.

“You're my first houseguest,” she said as she led him up the narrow stairway to the second floor. “No one's ever been here except me, until now.”

“How come?”

“Safe house,” she replied matter-of-factly. “The kind of work I do, I don't want anyone to know my home base.”

They were in a spacious living room. Bay window fronting on the street. A fireplace, cold and dark. Big sofa, several comfortable-looking armchairs. Paintings on the walls. Impressionists, he saw. Reproductions. They reminded him of the museum in Boston.

She walked him back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of Corona Light.

“Would you like a beer?” she asked, rummaging in a drawer until she found a bottle opener.

Cochrane shook his head. The place looked spic-and-span. “You have a housekeeper?” he asked.

“An old Hispanic woman. She does several houses on this block. Once a week, whether I'm here or not.”

“How long have you had this place?”

“Couple years,” Sandoval said, after a long pull on the beer.

Nobody's ever been here before? Cochrane wondered how true that was. Maybe—

“I'm going to take a shower,” she said, putting the bottle down on the counter. “What about you?”