The Resurrection File (20 page)

Finally, when the questions slowed down, Hornby raised his hand.

“Yes, one last question,” the speaker said, recognizing Hornby in the back of the room.

Hornby's voice boomed through the room.

“I have reason to believe that you may be hiding information from us. The only question is,
why
? Are the American people on the verge of being denied gasoline at the pump for their cars? Are we heading for a catastrophic oil crisis? Is that what's going on here?”

The speaker's eyes widened. A flustered look spread over his face. “I really don't know how to answer such a question. Really—that of course—is an outrageous question. There is nothing being hidden here at all. There is enough oil to go around. I—really don't understand what you're coming from—or I should say, where you are coming from.”

Hornby didn't try for a follow-up question. He wheeled around and left the room. The awkward nonanswer he had received from the government official had answered it all. If this man had known anything of substance, his department would have prepared him with several slick avoidance-and-deflection responses. He would have been able to cover the weakest and most vulnerable parts of his position with a fifty-dollar smile and some well-crafted, but empty, hundred-dollar ambiguities.

Instead, this fellow had tripped over himself. No one with real inside information would have reacted with such public-relations clumsiness. Clearly, the Energy Department had chosen as its spokesman someone who
really didn't know anything.

That told Hornby that the government had dangled a pawn in front of the press on an issue that was apparently very sensitive—so sensitive that they had to build a firewall between it and the poor department underling who had the job of facing the press.

Hornby didn't care whether this story was going to get published or not. He had another reason. He wanted to get to the secrets of this oil story just to prove that it could be done.

21

T
WO POLICE CARS WITH LIGHTS FLASHING
were parked directly in front of Will's law office building when he arrived at work the next morning. When Will entered the front door he heard the crackling sound of police walkie-talkies reverberating in the halls. Employees from the first-floor accounting and investment firms were mingling and talking with each other. In the background he saw one blue-uniformed officer. Broken glass was scattered over the carpeted floor of the hallway.

Will scurried up the curving stairway to his office. Before he had reached the last step he saw two more patrolmen. They stopped him and asked whether this was his office, pointing to the open door at the end of the hall.

As he responded that yes, this was his law office, Will looked down to the open door and noticed that the frosted glass bearing his name was smashed out of the door frame. Glass shards lay in the hallway.

“What's going on?” Will asked urgently, looking around for signs of Betty.

“Break-in,” the older of the two officers replied. “We have secured the crime scene, but because it's a law office and you've got confidential files and things we had to wait for you.”

With broken glass crunching under foot Will stepped gingerly into the office with the officers following behind him.

There in the lobby, Betty was surveying the office with bewilderment.

“This is crazy,” she blurted out.

“If you could size up the office for us, tell us if you see anything missing, we'll make a note of it,” the officer said.

Will and Betty walked around the office. The equipment and computers were intact. The lamps and furnishings all seemed to be there.

That was when he noticed that the storage doors and file cabinets had been pulled open and not closed up. The plastic box for their backup tapes
was open. The yellow light on the computer screen was still on, and the computer was humming.

“The computer was on when I got here,” Betty noted, “when I walked in the door with the police.”

“Check all the backups,” Will told Betty as he sat down in front of the computer.

The screen blinked on and he checked the computer directory for the last computer file that had been accessed. It was the file on the
Reichstad vs. MacCameron
lawsuit.

“Computer backups are all still here,” Betty replied.

“What was the last file you worked on yesterday?” Will asked.

“That one,” she said, pointing to the computer screen. “I was working on the MacCameron case.”

“Is it possible that you just forgot to shut off the computer yesterday?”

“Absolutely not,” Betty shot back, “that is something I don't do. I don't leave for the day without turning the computer off.”

“I don't mean to interrupt this Sherlock Holmes mystery,” the older police officer quipped, “but we need to know if anything was stolen.”

Will and Betty both shook their heads.

“Appears to be petty vandalism,” the officer remarked, closing up his notepad. “It looks like they entered down at the end of the hall on the first floor, smashed some windows in those offices—but they didn't gain access to any of them. They ran up here, smashed the glass in the door of your office, got inside, looked around, and left. Might be kids. Sometimes it's somebody looking for quick cash that might be lying around the office—you know—cash for drugs or whatever.”

Will reached over to the side drawer of Betty's desk and pulled it open. There in the top tray was their petty-cash fund, still perfectly intact—two twenty-dollar bills and some singles.

“They must have been in a hurry, or just sloppy,” the officer said as he prepared to leave.

“Aren't you going to dust for fingerprints?” Will asked.

“How many people do you think have touched the doorknob to your office in the last two weeks?” the officer asked. “I'm not putting you down, counselor, but the glass in the window of your office puts this at about one hundred bucks worth of property damage. Do you want to know how many minor-crime reports we get in a week?”

The telephone rang, and as Will was nodding to the departing officer, he answered it. It was Tiny Heftland. Tiny was calling from Maryland and wanted to meet Will on Friday night, just outside of Baltimore, to go over the results of his investigation in the MacCameron case.

“Why don't you come down here to my office?” Will suggested. “Or better yet, let's just talk by phone.”

“Well, I really think you need to see Reichstad's research center for yourself. Besides, on Friday I'm on my way north to Pennsylvania for a new case I've got. Your office is in the wrong direction, good buddy. I'm going to be tailing the husband of some really rich society lady in Philadelphia. If you get up here by seven, we can spend some time together and then I can head straight up to Philly.”

Tiny gave Will directions to a small grocery store a few miles from the research institute. They would meet there on Friday evening.

As Will hung up the phone, he noticed that Angus MacCameron was in the doorway, looking down at Betty as she was kneeling to clean up the broken glass.

“Good heavens, what happened?” MacCameron asked.

“Vandals, I guess,” Will responded, motioning MacCameron into the conference room in the back.

“Vandals?”

“That's what the police think.”

“Was anything stolen?”

“No.”

“Were there signs of a search—of somebody going through your office?”

“Reverend MacCameron, we've got it under control. So let's pick up where we left off on your case.”

But MacCameron wouldn't let the matter rest.

“Reichstad and his cronies are ruthless,” he declared. “This is exactly the kind of thing we should have expected.”

“Are you saying that they are behind this—my office being broken into?”

“I'm saying,” MacCameron noted with a slightly raised eyebrow, “that you can expect a leopard to act like a ruthless man-hunter, even if he has changed the spots on his coat.”

Once again, Will was enduring another of his client's wandering witticisms that always seemed to be off the mark—and forever irrelevant to the lawsuit. Will shrugged it off and got to the issue that he had been pondering since their last meeting.

“Did you bring the tape?” Will asked.

MacCameron pulled out a small brown-paper bag and emptied it onto the table, revealing a single microcassette and a small handheld tape recorder.

The two looked at the little cassette.

“You have listened to it recently?” Will asked.

MacCameron nodded his head and said, “Now it's your turn.” But then he quickly added, “Before you turn it on, tell me—are you coming with me this Friday to Fiona's concert?”

“I'm afraid not,” Will responded. “I just found out I have to be somewhere this Friday night.”

MacCameron shook his head and gave Will a strange smile.

Will snapped the cassette into the player and turned it on. There was a moment of fuzzy background noise. Then he heard the obnoxious, warbling beep at the end of MacCameron's answering-machine greeting.

“The next voice you hear will be Richard Hunter's,” MacCameron said solemnly.

And then they listened, mesmerized, as they heard Richard Hunter leave this message:

Sorry to change plans on you chap, but strange things…dangerous things…I was followed again from our lunch meeting. I had to take two different cabs. I think I've lost them. Can't meet you as we planned. I'm taking an earlier flight to London, back to the British Museum.

Hunter's voice was hushed and out of breath. He continued:

I'm sending the fragmentseparately…in case something happens to me…

Will grabbed the tape player and hit the pause button. Then he said, “I need to hear that again.”

“Yes!” MacCameron shouted, his arms outstretched. “By God's everlasting grace you caught it. You did hear that, didn't you?”

“I don't know what I heard.”

“Yes, you do. You heard it. Tell me, what did you hear?”

Will's finger was on the pause button. He looked the Scot in the eye and said, “I don't know what I heard.”

“Well then, play it again by all means. Play it twice. Play it three times,” MacCameron said, as he bounced in his chair with glee.

The lawyer rewound the tape and played it again. But this time he moved the little side switch to slow play. This is what he heard, as he listened to Hunter's voice in slow motion, basso profundo:

I-m…s-e-n-d-i-n-g…t-h-e…f-r-a-g-m-e-n-t-s…s-e-p-a-r-a-t-e-l-y…i-n…c-a-s-e…s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g…h-a-p-p-e-n-s…t-o…m-e…

“There it is,” MacCameron cried out. “Now look at me and tell me, Mr. Chambers, what did you just hear?”

Chambers had a little smile in the corner of his mouth. “What I
heard
. What I
think
I heard was Hunter saying that he would be sending the fragments separately.”

“Fragment
s!
” MacCameron exclaimed.

“Yes.
Fragments
. As in
plural
.”

“More than one!” MacCameron cried out.

“Yes. Which is what plural means, I guess,” Will noted with a touch of sarcasm.

“More than one fragment. So obviously,” MacCameron said, his enthusiasm growing, “7QA is only
one
part of a whole. Thus there are other missing pieces to the puzzle. Which is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that article in my magazine accusing Reichstad of fraudulent scholarship. He had to have known that 7QA is just one piece, and that there are adjacent pieces to that papyrus writing that could completely change the meaning of 7QA once we see them all put together.”

“On the other hand,” Will continued, trying to bring his client back to reality, “we don't even know for sure whether Hunter's fragment—whatever it was—was the same fragment as Reichstad's 7QA.”

“Here is what we know,” MacCameron said, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe the heavy perspiration from his brow. “We know that Hunter said he got his fragment from Azid. Reichstad claims that he bought 7QA from Azid for fifty thousand dollars. That's point number one. Point number two. Hunter said that his fragment came from cave 7 in the Qumran area. Reichstad has admitted 7QA came from cave 7. Point number three. Hunter said his fragment would erase two thousand years of Christian history. Reichstad's interpretation of 7QA, if it's true, would do exactly that.”

With that MacCameron leaned back in his chair, as if he were an English barrister who had just presented a smashing closing argument for the Queen's Bench.

“All of that is circumstantial evidence,” Will responded. “It may make your case. It may not. But I don't trust my ears—or yours for that matter. I know a guy who is a freelance voice analyzer. He used to work for the FBI. I want to send this tape over to him to see if he can substantiate what the two of us think we are hearing.”