The Green Trap (37 page)

“I didn't mean to kill him. That shot to his throat… it must have ruptured the blood vessels in his windpipe and he bled into his lungs.”

“He drowned on his own blood?”

She nodded, then looked down, as if ashamed.

“But what if—”

The door to the corridor opened and three men entered the conference room.

“I'm Special Agent Ignacio Yañez,” said a sturdy-looking man in a tight-fitting tan sports jacket and darker slacks. “These two gentlemen are lawyers from the Gould Energy Corporation.”

Yañez took the chair at the head of the table; the lawyers sat opposite Sandoval and Cochrane. Yañez had burly weight-lifter's shoulders that strained his jacket when he moved his arms. His face was not much darker than Cochrane's, but his hair was midnight-black, as was his bushy mustache. The two lawyers both wore impeccable three-piece gray suits: Brooks Brothers, Cochrane guessed. They each placed compact notebook computers on the table and opened them. Yañez put down a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen.

Yañez cleared his throat noisily, then said, “I know you've told your story to the Tucson detectives all day, but I'm afraid I'm going to need to hear it from you again.”

Cochrane glanced at Sandoval. The two lawyers tapped on their computer keyboards.

More than an hour later, Special Agent Yañez looked as if he didn't believe a word that any of them had told him. “And you're saying that this was a terrorist attempt to kidnap Lionel Gould?”

“That is correct,” answered one of the lawyers.

Turning to Cochrane, Yañez said, “Tell me again what Gould was doing at your apartment.”

“He was looking for information on the work my brother was doing at the time of his murder.”

“And?”

“He took my computer, my laptop.”

“Which he paid for,” the other lawyer jumped in.

“All nice and legal, huh?”

Both lawyers nodded in unison.

“And the two other guys were terrorists.”

“Apparently so,” said the first lawyer.

“Muslims,” said the second. “From Chechnya.”

“The one live suspect admits to being a Chechen. He's here illegally.”

“They are part of a conspiracy that reaches into the United Nations bureaucracy in New York,” the first lawyer said.

“So you told me.”

Cochrane said, “Look, we've been here all damned day, just about. We haven't even had lunch. Can't we go now? You've got our statements.”

Yañez looked distinctly unhappy. But he admitted, “Washington says they're taking jurisdiction. I'm just supposed to hand everything over to them.”

“Well, then,” said the second lawyer, shutting his notebook with an audible click.

“Unless you are charging Dr. Cochrane or Ms. Sandoval,” the first lawyer said.

“There's an open murder investigation in Palo Alto that seems to be connected with all this,” Yañez said.

Cochrane said, “That was my brother.”

“I checked with the Palo Alto police,” said the FBI agent. “They don't consider you a suspect.”

“That's good to know,” Cochrane said.

“So we're free to go?” Sandoval asked.

With a shrug of his big shoulders, Yañez pushed his pad of lined paper toward her. “Write down an address and phone number where I can reach you. E-mail address, too, if you have one. Same for you, Dr. Cochrane.”

“We'll both be at this address,” Sandoval said. And she wrote down a totally fictitious address in Denver, Colorado.

T
hey had more than an hour to kill before their flight continued on its way to San Francisco, so Cochrane and Sandoval left their Southwest Airlines plane to stretch their legs in the terminal.

After leaving the police headquarters building in Tucson, they had gone straight to Cochrane's apartment. They had to step over the yellow crime scene tapes across his front door. There was still blood smeared on the wall and staining the living room carpet. Cochrane quickly packed his roll-on suitcase and they left for the airport. He picked up his accumulated mail as they were leaving the apartment building and stuffed the envelopes into his suitcase.

The first available flight had a layover in Las Vegas. Sandoval bought two first-class tickets and they left Tucson just before sunset.

Cochrane spent the first leg of the flight opening his mail. Junk, most of it. A letter from his sister-in-law Irene, asking him where he'd gotten to;
she'd phoned him half a dozen times and gotten nothing but his answering machine.

And a notice from the university, suspending him without pay until he could attend a formal meeting to decide the future of his employment at Steward Observatory.

“Looks like I'm out of a job,” he muttered, handing the stiff sheet of stationery to Sandoval, sitting beside him.

She scanned it, handed it back to him. “Doesn't matter,” she said, leaning close to him. “You wouldn't want to stay there anyway: too easy for Gould to find you.”

He looked at her. She was completely serious. “You really think Gould's after me?”

With a solemn nod, Sandoval replied, “Absolutely.”

Cochrane was feeling depressed when they walked off the plane. A stroll through the terminal only worsened his dark outlook. Slot machines lined the terminal's corridors. People were eagerly jamming coins into them.

“Christ Almighty,” he complained. “If gamblers could win, the casinos would've gone out of business in the fifth dynasty of ancient Egypt.”

Sandoval smiled minimally. “Hope springs eternal, Paul.”

“A fool and his money,” he growled.

“Come on.” She tugged at his arm. “Let's get back to the plane.”

Once aloft and heading for San Francisco, Sandoval tried to cheer him up. “It'll be all right, Paul. I can sell the house; it ought to bring in a million-two, maybe more. And I've got nearly another mil in stocks and CDs.”

“You'd sell your house?”

“I've already put it on the market.”

“But where can we go? If Gould's really after my butt, where in the world can we hide?”

She made a bigger smile for him. “Australia, maybe. Tahiti. Singapore. There are places.”

“How'll I make a living?”

“You won't have to. You've got a woman of property mad about you.”

She leaned closer to him and he kissed her. But he was thinking, What kind of a life can we have together? Am I putting her in danger?

N
EW
Y
ORK
, NY—The Gould Trust announced that it plans to acquire Calvin Research Center, of Palo Alto, California. The Calvin laboratories, named after the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin, are dedicated to studies of photosynthesis and its possible applications in agribusiness and the energy industry.

A Gould spokeperson said that Gould Trust will fully fund Calvin's existing research programs and plans to expand into new areas of investigation. The financial terms of the acquisition were not released to the public.

—
W
ALL
S
TREET
J
OURNAL

Y
ou've been moping for two days now,” Sandoval said.

“I know,” Cochrane replied. “Guess I haven't been much fun to be with.”

It was morning, bright and breezy outside as the two of them sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen of Sandoval's house. She had made scrambled eggs for them; Cochrane had brewed the coffee from freshly ground beans. The kitchen walls were painted a cheerful yellow, Sandoval was smiling brightly at him, yet Cochrane felt down, dull, depressed.

“It's chilly in here, isn't it?” She got up and went to the thermostat on the wall. Cochrane heard the rumble of the heater down in the basement.

Returning to the chair beside him, Sandoval said, “It can get uncomfortable this time of year. Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

Cochrane tried to make a smile for her. He almost succeeded.

“What is it, Paul?” she asked, her face going serious. “You worried about Gould?”

He looked down at the remains of his eggs on his plate. “I'm not charmed with the idea of looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, no.”

“We'll get away from him. The real estate agent has several leads for the house. If you want, we can fly out of here and let her sell the house while we're in Tahiti or Tasmania or wherever we decide to go.”

“It's more than that.” As he spoke the words, he realized it was true. “More than that,” he repeated.

She grasped his hand in hers. “What, Paul? What's eating at you?”

“Gould,” he answered. “He's won. The sonofabitch has won.”

Sandoval blinked at him. “Of course he's won. What did you expect?”

“He's got Mike's data and he's going to sit on it until hell freezes over.”

“No,” she said, smiling slightly. “Only until he's made as much profit from oil prices as he can. Then he'll step in and be the big savior with your brother's hydrogen process.”

Nodding, Cochrane said, “He'll get credit for moving the world off petroleum and on to hydrogen fuel.”

“Maybe the Pope will make him a saint.”

Cochrane laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Maybe he will.”

“There's nothing we can do about that, Paul. We've got to think of our own safety, our own survival. You can't solve the problems of the world.”

“I could…if…”

“If?”

He sucked in a deep breath, then exhaled wearily. “If I had a copy of Mike's work, I could change things.”

“Change how? What good would it do? Sell it to the highest bidder? They're all in this together, Paul. Tricontinental, Garrison, OPEC: whoever you sold the data to would suppress it, just like Gould.”

“I wouldn't sell it,” Cochrane said, looking away from her. “I'd publish it.”

“Like you wanted Tulius to do.”

“That's right. Let the whole fucking world know about it. Tell them all how to make hydrogen fuel from Mike's process.”

“But what good would that do? You wouldn't make a cent out of it!”

He turned back toward her, looked steadily into her almond-shaped eyes.

“I'm a scientist, Elena. That means I try to learn about the ways the universe works, and when I've learned something I tell the world about it.
Can you understand that? It's not about money, god knows. If I'd wanted to make money I'd've become a banker or a lawyer or something like that. Maybe a plumber.”

She was staring back at him.

“But I chose to be a scientist. Because I want to understand things. And I want to share what I learn with the rest of the human race. That's what I do. That's what I am.”

“And if you had your hands on your brother's work you'd share it with everybody?”

“I'd put it out on the Internet. Send it to every Web site I could think of. All the universities. All the news networks. All the chat rooms and bloggers. Fuck Gould and the rest of them! I'd spread it around so that
nobody
could keep it a secret, nobody could suppress it.”

She pulled away from him slightly, edged back in her chair. “Gould's right to be afraid of you,” Elena murmured.

Cochrane made a self-deprecating smile. “Big talk. I don't have Mike's data. Nobody does except Gould and people Gould controls. So I guess I won't save the world, after all.”

Sandoval did not reply to him.

N
EW
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, NY—Already plagued by scandals such as the Iraq oil-for-food debacle, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Office (UNESCO) was rocked by the arrest yesterday of one of its minor officials, charged with heading a terrorist cell.

Zelinkshah Shamil, a Chechen national, was arrested by the FBI in his office at the UN Secretariat building. An FBI spokeman said Shamil was head of a terrorist cell that murdered several people in New York, Palo Alto, California, and Tucson, Arizona.

Shamil claimed diplomatic immunity, but the U.S. attorney general for New York said that under the provisions of the Homeland Security Act, a foreign national can be considered an enemy combatant even if he has diplomatic status.

—
I
NTERNATIONAL
N
EWS
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ERVICE

T
hey were sitting on the sofa in front of the gas-fed fireplace, watching the silent blue flames as the darkness deepened outside the big bay window of the living room. Cochrane heard the distant clang of a cable car trolley; otherwise the night was blessedly quiet.

“I closed on the house this afternoon,” Sandoval said, staring into the fire. “We can leave whenever you want to.”

They had planned to drive to Vancouver, then fly to Sydney.

“You think Gould will try to track me down in Australia?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I don't know.”

He reached out to slide an arm around her shoulders, but Elena pulled away slightly.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

“I can't,” she said, still not looking at him.

“Your period?”

“No, it's not that.”

“Then what?”

Elena turned toward him at last. “It's what you said a few days ago, about being a scientist and all that.”

He felt his brows knit. “What's that got to do with—”

“It made me realize what a gulf there is between us, Paul.”

“What gulf?”

“More than you realize,” she said. “More than you realize.”