The Prisoner (35 page)

The professor had carried on his monologue for almost two hours while his spellbound audience soaked in his words, at times laced with a left-wing touch carefully designed to delight his listeners. Toward the end, he’d offered a gem, one that Nikola had saved in his repository of useful data. Stability, status quo, and security—however illusory the security may be—and the possibility of losing these, floated to the uppermost layer of our fears in later years when most other dreads had been tamed into submission.

The Brownells were successful, professional, rich, and well connected. The retired couple—Martha, the ex-dean of a prestigious university, and Vance, an old-fashioned four-star general—didn’t fear much. Now in their seventies, they had surrendered to the unstoppable ravages of time, had more money than they could ever spend, and their family had long since disappeared or climbed to respectable heights on the social ladder. Socially, they were untouchable, and threatening them with changes to their physical integrity or their life span was out of the question. If prodded, they could tap into the awesome power of friends and relatives.

As Nikola sped north, weighing how much Mrs. Brownell valued her peace and security, he relaxed behind the wheel. He read the names of the towns as he passed—Winnetka,
Glencoe, Ravinia—rolling the words over his tongue like wine, and he toggled the entertainment panel until he found music worth listening to. As a wistful oboe filled the car with the notes of Mikhail Kinsky’s “Rhapsody for Steppes and Silences,” the skies got wider and brighter, the horizon flatter and longer.

The previous day had yielded a precious puzzle piece: a corner, an anchor to which other pieces could be attached. Dr. Hulman had a prodigious memory after Sergeant Cox paved the way with a conscientious dose of the world’s best oil: three broken fingers. With the help of the plentiful notes in a notebook jealously stashed away in his safe—with scores of other pads and agendas—the obliging doctor remembered calling a young man to Araceli’s deathbed. He had nodded to the page in the agenda where he’d noted the man’s name and address; pointing would have been difficult under the circumstances.

In retrospect, Laurel’s father’s identity was almost predictable, and Nikola could have kicked himself after reading the name in Dr. Hulman’s spidery longhand. Laurel’s adoption by the Coles and the identities of her natural parents explained the young woman’s involvement—a relationship that Nikola could have learned at once had he ordered comparisons from the fugitives’ DNA.

Damn!
Araceli Goldberg had been Eliot Russo’s woman, and heavy with his child.

Dennis had pulled the images of Araceli’s last minutes from a film archive. Sobering. After the demonstration, when she fell before a trooper’s well-aimed kick, Eliot, with remarkable political savvy, ran away. Afterward, when the good Dr. Hulman humored his dying patient by calling her absent lover, he refused to admit his paternity. A moot point now. The DHS had genetic material from both Russo and Laurel. Within a few hours, Nikola had a lab report confirming that Laurel was Russo’s daughter.

Yet, in the family portrait forming in Nikola’s mind, there were two figures in the shadows: one, whoever had stored Russo in the center of tank 913 in Washington, D.C., and, two, Laurel’s still-anonymous benefactor. Number one’s identity
was slowly forming in Nikola’s mind, and the emerging shape filled him with foreboding. Then there was number two, whose persona had to be inextricably linked to the subjects in the picture, but he couldn’t figure out how or why. Nikola knew that as soon as he determined the
why
, a name would emerge.

To flesh out numbers one and two, Nikola had compiled a hand of playing cards, a list of names tied, however thinly, to Araceli, Laurel, and Russo—family, friends, relatives, and a few professionals like medical doctors and teachers who could perhaps shed a little insight into their lives. In Nikola’s game, the Brownells were almost insignificant. The card they represented, if it existed, wasn’t an ace but a little one in a side suit. Of course, in the endgame, when all the trumps and big guns had been laid down, the humble card they held might afford Nikola a missing trick and net him the contract.

As a student of human frailty, Nikola knew the richest depositories of treasure didn’t hide in safes or vaults but in the dark recesses of wardrobes. Nikola frowned on coincidence, but the fortuitous discovery of a noisy skeleton lurking in Martha Brownell’s wardrobe had given him a tool.

Before Martha’s election to preside over Grimes University in 2036—an appointment she held until her retirement in 2047—she’d run the privately owned Paulson College for over twenty years. It was widely acknowledged that, under Martha’s tutelage, Paulson had grown from insignificance into an elite institution for grooming young women with powerful or wealthy pedigrees.

After Martha resigned her post three years after Araceli’s death—ostensibly to claim her rightful place at the top of academia—Candace Bishop, her second-in-command, had taken over as principal. Both had been Araceli Goldberg’s teachers and mentors.

Seemingly intelligent people do the dumbest of things in the name of self-mortification, like writing diaries. It’s well known that diaries are written for others to read, but only one degree of sublime stupidity can improve on committing compromising or even criminal events into the permanence of text: entrusting the data to the treacherous care of a computer.

Dennis Nolan had sifted through Paulson College’s computer more as a pastime than to look for anything specific. Nikola had expected him to skim over Araceli’s college record, perhaps noting a few peccadilloes, but Dennis was curious and loved to track archives with long roots.

Candace’s diary, tucked at the end of a score of subdirectories, inside a calendar-making program but unaccountably accessed daily, was a sobering read. Martha had not left Paulson College of her own choice. Rather than meeting twice a week with the college’s benefactors, Martha had been exercising Candace’s husband, Edward, for the previous ten years on Mondays and Thursdays. In itself, the affair wouldn’t have merited exposure but for a tiny detail: Martha and Edward loved to invite a few chosen pupils to share in the fun. To beef up her case, and before pulling the rug from under Martha’s feet, Candace had secured the services of an obliging detective. The sleuth had compiled a bulky, graphic document brimming with acrobatic competence and bound to delight the vice squad. Instead of raising a stink, Candace had counseled Martha into seeking greener pastures and surrendering her post, but not before heartily recommending herself as successor—or else. A shrewd move, at odds with the recklessness of leaving the incriminating evidence on her hard disk.

After parking the car in front of the house, Nikola strolled past a well-tended lawn, breathing the tangy mid-morning air and eyeing the beds of pansies and marigolds. Pendulous figs, almost black with ripeness, hung from a generous tree. Nikola stopped to admire a small rectangular pond, its margins fashioned from old bricks. No faun with water spurting from its mouth or similar ghastly statuary but a simple rippling sheet carpeted with water lilies, broad and bright. To a side, a band of sparrows competed over a spray of bread crumbs in the grass. He paused at the door to tune his mind to the task ahead and pressed a brass button on the nose of a small lion’s head.

“Good morning. Can I help you?”

Nikola appraised the starched uniform of a prim Asian woman. Outside old bondage books, he hadn’t seen a maid’s
uniform in years. “I have an appointment with Mrs. Brownell.” Nikola reached into his coat pocket and offered a card from an obscure government department but with his real name.

She stood aside to allow Nikola into the hall. “Please, wait here.”

Nikola glanced around, taking in the art—a passable Mac-Tarvish oil on canvas of a stormy sea and a group of watercolors he couldn’t identify. Subdued but expensive. Class. The room was a reflection of its owners—neat and with a tightly controlled atmosphere of wealth and orthodox good taste. A slight noise drew his gaze to the facing wall and a display of schiavonas, rapiers, foils, and a couple of smaller side swords. Underneath, a clepsydra—an ancient time-measuring device worked by a flow of water—whispered and clicked. Nikola stepped closer and peered at tiny cups slowly filling and emptying into larger ones. It wasn’t a reproduction.

“Mr. Masek?” A tall thin man with the gait of the career soldier marched across the hall, one hand outstretched.

Nikola caught a glint of determination in his light-blue eyes and arrested a reflexive move to accept his hand.

“Let me see your credentials.” Delivered in a measured tone, but an order.

Nikola produced a wallet and offered the ID he’d chosen for this particular errand without taking his eyes from the general. With a carefully combed-back mop of white hair and trim mustache, General Brownell didn’t look a year older than sixty, although Nikola knew he was seventy-two. In khaki trousers, a dark-brown wool jacket, and tan loafers, he cast the imposing figure of a driver of men—an illusion, because General Brownell had never seen real fire besides the one blazing in the adjoining living room.

“What’s your department’s interest in my wife?”

After stowing away his wallet, Nikola squared his shoulders and straightened. “None, sir. Our inquiry concerns an alumnus of Paulson College, from the time Mrs. Brownell was the principal.”

“Shouldn’t you address the college authorities?”

“I would, sir, but it’s a sensitive matter.” He lowered his voice a fraction. “Terrorism. If possible, we want to restrict the matter to the highest levels without involving people who might not be familiar with security realities.”

General Brownell stood even more erect.
There, you loved the “highest levels” bit, associating you with the patricians instead of the commoners. After the “security realities” line, I bet your ears rang with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“I see.”

I doubt it
.

“Please, keep it short. My wife is recovering from a long illness and she’s not strong.” General Brownell marched to a set of double doors at the end of the hall. The doors slid open, revealing paneled and tapestried walls flanking another lined with bookcases and a woman sitting in a wheelchair. Slender, with high cheekbones and silver hair held off her face with tortoiseshell pins, her sage-green shirt and matching trousers seemed to glisten and reflect the light. With a thick gold choker at her neck, she looked like an aging Egyptian princess.

“It will take only a few minutes,” Nikola said.

When Nikola heard the door latching behind him, he approached Mrs. Brownell’s wheelchair, which rested beside a gleaming leather Chesterfield sofa, and tendered another card.

She glanced at it and dropped it on a glass tray resting on a small side table. “Never heard of this department.”

“We are attached to the DHS, dealing with sensitive matters.”

“Bullshit.”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me. I listened to the way you soft-soaped my husband.” She glanced at a squat intercom resting on a sizable desk. “Nicely worded, but it won’t do for me. What do you want?”

A change of tack was compulsory. Nikola stepped to the couch, picked the creases of his trousers between thumb and forefinger, and sat down on its edge, his eyes on Mrs.
Brownell’s as he shelved his carefully prepared speech. He hated needless insults, and his sense of aesthetics cringed at addressing an intelligent woman like a dimwit. Nikola studied her face. She had a high, intelligent forehead and a predatory nose over full lips—too full to owe nothing to a surgeon’s needle. An attractive face but not altogether pleasing—too sensuous, hinting at stubbornness and self-will rather than firmness or strength. This woman controlled her passions and never burned by any fires other than those of hate, worldly ambition, or anger.

“Are you done?” she asked.

“No.” Nikola stared into her eyes for a few heartbeats, reached into his jacket’s inner pocket, and drew out a flat device the size of a PDA. After flicking a switch, he waited for a line of red LED to flicker and slowly turn green before pressing a bar on its lower half. Satisfied, Nikola deposited the device with care on the table before the couch, where it continued to emit a faint high-pitched drone. She followed his movements and smiled but didn’t offer any comment. “I propose a trade,” Nikola began.

“What have you got?”

Nikola leaned forward and offered Mrs. Brownell a glassine bag with several snapshots inside.

She reached over, glanced at the first photograph through the transparent cover, turned it over, and deposited it on her lap. If the uppermost print had shocked her, she disguised her feelings with such mastery that Nikola couldn’t spot any telltale sign. His respect for the old girl increased.

“And in exchange?”

“The life and miracles of Araceli Goldberg.” He raised a hand to still her reply and complete the specification. “Not the college records; I have those.”

She nodded, and a fine-boned hand rested over the glassine bag with the photographs before returning to the wheelchair’s armrest.

Nikola stiffened when she glanced down and pressed a red button by the wheelchair’s controls.

As if on cue, the double doors opened and General Brownell stepped in, turned, and slid the doors closed.

Mrs. Brownell handed over the photographs to her husband.

The general extracted the prints and examined each one until the stack played out. “The lighting is wrong, as is the choice of lens. Good resolution in the center, but a tad blurred on the edges. The composition is passable, though.” After replacing the prints in the bag, he handed them back to his wife and stood still, as if at attention.

Mrs. Brownell’s long fingers laced together over the photographs on her lap. “I fear this barter of yours is a little lopsided. You don’t have much to offer.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I have exactly what you want.” She raised her face and eyed her husband, a smile, soft as candlelight, touching her lips. “Mr. Masek and I could do with a tot; would you join us, dear?”