Measure Of Darkness
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“You know lots of beautiful women, Mr. Bing. Maybe Joe was at one of your, um, gatherings, and you introduced him to a lady, something like that.”
“Because you think he had a Chinese girlfriend, I had to be involved? I’m insulted.”
“No insult intended. I mean, where else would Keener have had the opportunity to cross paths with such an exotic beauty? I’m sure it was quite innocent. A social occasion, two people meet who happen to have you in common. No big deal. Not insult worthy.”
Bing keeps shaking his head, disturbing the emo bang, and looks, for a brief moment, something like his age. “No, no, no. Never happened.”
“So you wouldn’t know about the baby they had? A five-year-old?”
“Definitely, I am now insulted.” Bing studies his small hands, examining his beautifully buffed nails. He seems to have recovered his aplomb. “Someone has given you bad information, Mr. Delancey. That is the only explanation. As far as I know, Joe Keener never had an actual relationship with a woman, or with anybody, really. Not that kind of relationship.”
“It doesn’t take a relationship to father a child,” Jack points out.
Jonny Bing laughs, a little too sharply. “Believe me, I know that! But seriously, someone has been pulling your leg. Not Joe. No way.”
“Okay,” says Jack, letting it go for the time being. “What about enemies, threats, anything of that nature? Something connected with QuantaGate, perhaps?”
Bing thinks about it. “I’m the prime investor, but that doesn’t mean I have anything to do with the day-to-day operations. Quite the opposite. Still, I would know if there was anything to be concerned about. Corporate espionage is always a worry, but those types steal information—trade secrets and so on—they don’t kill.”
“But there is something worth stealing?”
“Absolutely,” Bing says, folding his spindly little arms.
“So what exactly do they make at QuantaGate?” Jack asks, pressing.
Another big, boyish grin as Bing raises his eyes, looks directly at Jack. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you—sorry, bad joke under the circumstances. The truth is, I don’t know or understand the technical specifics, but it’s public knowledge that the company has an exploratory contract with the Defense Department to develop a new way for computers to communicate over long distances. Joe had a theory about that, which he believed had practical applications. That was the basis for the company, taking one of his ideas and finding a way to make it work.”
“And did he? Make it work?”
Jonny Bing smoothes the thatch of hair away from his eyes, grimacing slightly. “No, not yet. There are many difficulties, which is to be expected with a breakthrough technology. To my surprise, the DOD has shown remarkable patience and has continued to fund the project. They seem to understand that they’re dealing with the future, and that it will take a while to get there.”
“And now that Professor Keener is gone?”
The smaller man shrugs. “The project continues as long as there is funding. We will continue to work on developing practical applications to Joe’s theories. Beyond that, I have no way of knowing. Time will tell.”
“Who gets his share of the company?”
Bing winces, looking slightly embarrassed. “I was looking into that just before you arrived. The answer is, I don’t know, not yet. Voting control of the shares, which are privately held, reverts to the partners. That’s me, mostly. But any income derived will go to his estate.”
“So you won’t benefit financially?”
A somber expression adds years to his youthful appearance, making him look closer to forty than thirty. “I don’t benefit at all, Mr. Delancey. No, no, no. Joe dying is absolutely the worst thing that could happen. If faith in QuantaGate collapses the whole investment is in jeopardy.” Bing sighs, fishes a vibrating cell phone out of one of the guayabera’s many pockets, checks the screen. “Sorry, it’s been really cool talking with an action dude like you, but I have calls to catch up on. Can you find your way out?”
“No problem.” Jack stands up, shoots his cuffs. “Just one thing. You mentioned a concern about corporate espionage. Who handles security for QuantaGate?”
“The usual rent-a-cops, I suppose,” Bing says vaguely, as if he couldn’t care less. “Sorry, but that kind of day-to-day really isn’t my thing. I’m a big picture guy.”
“I can see that,” Jack says affably, offering his hand.
“Tell Dane to have her people call my people. Joke, joke. She has my number.”
“Thanks again for your time,” Jack says. “And have a blast in Bermuda.”
Kidder observes the marina from his vehicle, from a carefully chosen location not covered by any of the security cameras he’s been able to identify. Most of the cameras are along the shoreline, focused on the floating dock area, which makes sense, and presents a mild level of difficulty. All part of the game. As is the constant awareness that he has an item in the trunk that will be defrosting in the heat, and that must be delivered before it goes bad.
Tick tock.
Watching through his pair of small Nikon binoculars, Kidder sees the lean, athletic man in the sharp suit exiting the big yacht, striding purposefully toward the security gate, obviously leaving the area. This is good. Every inch of the guy says “senior investigator,” and Kidder doesn’t need the complication of dealing with a professional, not when he has to find a way around the security cameras.
Using the Nikons, he follows the sharp dresser to the back of the marina parking lot, and manages to pick up the plate number on the gleaming Lincoln Town Car as it makes the turn. What is the guy, a glorified chauffeur? Would any self-respecting investigator have an uncool ride like that? Maybe he’s misread Mr. Sharp, maybe he’s an empty suit, but that can all be resolved later, when he runs the plate.
For now, keep to the task at hand. Kidder glasses the big yacht, notes again that it’s tied to the farthest of the floating piers, just inside the breakwater. Kidder grunts, having arrived at a solution. There’s more than one way to skin a cat—not that he’s ever skinned one, he sort of likes cats, cats are killers—and more than one way to board a fat-cat yacht.
One if by land, he thinks, grinning to himself, two if by sea.
Chapter Thirteen
Life Is Short But She’s Not
Dane Porter perches at a sidewalk table in downtown D.C., seething. Her arms are firmly crossed, her brow furrowed. She has never been so humiliated. First she’s refused entrance to the FBI by a pudgy female with a smug attitude, and then she’s ordered to cool her heels—and heels is where the trouble began—at a Five Guys hamburger joint.
As if. A French fry hasn’t passed her lips in two birthdays, at least, which is part of how she maintains her lithe and youthful figure and a body mass index of nineteen. She’s in the open air, but every time the restaurant doors open she can feel deep-fried calories exuding through the atmosphere.
Twenty minutes, the voice on the cell had promised, and sure enough in twenty minutes exactly Assistant Director of Counterterrorism Monica Bevins comes striding up the sidewalk, all six foot plus of her, looking in every way formidable. Smart, no-nonsense hairdo, power pantsuit, black executive handbag on a long strap slung from her wide athletic shoulders. Ready to leap tall bureaucracies in a single bound, save the planet, no problem that can’t be solved.
“Attorney Porter?”
Dane stands, formally shakes the big lady’s hand, figuring that’s what you do with high-ranking feds, you tug the forelock and curtsy, or whatever.
Bevins towers over her.
“Let’s go inside, shall we?”
Dane opens her mouth to demur—she loathes the smell of frying cow—but AD Bevins is already moving through the door. A force-of-nature type, obviously, and used to assuming full command of any given situation. Bevins marches to a recently vacated table in the back of the place, sweeps away the peanut shells, slips into a seat, points Dane to a chair.
“You hungry? You want something?”
“I’m good, you?”
“I’d love a dog and fries but I’m dieting.”
“Oh?”
“I’m always dieting. Dieting sucks. You wouldn’t know because you’ve never weighed more than what, a hundred and five?”
Dane wants to tell the big lady that she, too, has to watch her weight, but knows from past experience that, given the exquisite petiteness of her figure, nobody wants to hear it. “So what are we doing here?” Dane asks. “I offered to take you to lunch at Café Milano. They have lovely salads.”
“Ambient noise,” the big woman intones, lowering her voice. “Lots of ambient at Five Guys.”
“You think we might get bugged?”
Bevins smiles and shrugs. “Better safe than sorry. Considering who may be involved.”
“There’s a ‘who’?” Dane says, bright with excitement. “What have you learned?”
“First, tell me what happened at the checkpoint. All I heard, Naomi Nantz’s personal attorney failed to pass security.”
“My heels,” Dane says, showing off her Pampili strap-ons. “This horrible woman made me take them off so she could measure. Said the maximum heel length allowed is three-and-a-half inches and mine were five, and I’d have to leave them with her if I wanted to enter the building. I said I wasn’t going to walk the halls of Justice in my bare feet and that was that.”
AD Bevins smiles, her eyes twinkling.
“Glad to amuse you,” Dane says tartly. “These heels cleared Homeland Security at Logan Airport. That should be good enough.”
“Logan will never be good enough,” Bevins responds darkly. “Flight 11? Mohamed Atta? Ancient history, but it still rankles.” The big woman grimaces and leans forward, her face inches from Dane’s, as she begins to speak very quietly, almost a murmur that very nearly blends into the bright background noise of the restaurant. Her breath is mouthwash-minty. “You first. I understand you bring news of my friend Randall Shane. What’s the latest?”
Keeping her voice equally low, Dane says, “In the last hour or so we confirmed that his client, Joseph Keener, did indeed have a child, possibly out of wedlock. All evidence of the child had been erased from the crime scene. Well, almost all evidence: one of our investigators found a sandbox under some leaves in the backyard, and a neighbor who will swear to the little boy’s existence, and to the fact that the mother is Chinese, possibly a Chinese national. It’s clear that the victim was secretive about the child, for reasons yet to be determined.”
“I never doubted it,” Bevins says.
“That the kid was real?”
The big woman nods. “Shane wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. He can be fooled—we all can, depending on circumstance—but not like that. Not Randall Shane.”
“What’s your take on the case against him? All the physical evidence indicates he killed the professor.”
“Crap. His own gun? A bloody shirt? Shane does the deed, then keeps blood evidence? No way.”
“So you believe he’s been set up?”
Bevins nods, keeping direct eye contact with Dane. “No doubt. There are national security implications I can’t discuss with you, and which I’m not fully briefed on myself, but you can take it to the bank. Shane is being framed.”
“By who?”
Bevins looks grim. “Unknown to me at present.”
“Why? What possible motive?”
“Also unknown.”
“Come on, who took him? You must have some idea. Some theory.”
“Lots of ideas, no evidence. But I’ve been making noise, letting it be known that one of the FBI’s own has been detained, and that if he’s harmed we’ll be all over it.”
Dane sits back. The place is packed, quite noisy, and nobody obvious is listening in to the conversation. “Can we speak normally for a bit? I can call you Monica?”
“Not if you worked for me, but you don’t. Monica is fine for civilians. As to the conversation, proceed. I’ll stop you if we need to go SV.”
“SV?”
“Sotto voce. With a hushed quality.”
“Got it. Is that FBI lingo now?”
Monica shakes her head, shows the hint of a smile. “Just me.”
“Interesting,” Dane says, filing it away under Personal Eccentricities. Because she works for Naomi Nantz the file has numerous entries, starting with the boss. “So. You and Shane go way back.”
Bevins nods, her eyes large. “All the way to boot camp at Quantico. I came in straight out of law school, he’d been on the FBI civilian side for a couple years as a technical expert, then decided to apply for Special Agent. We’re both big, so we got lumped together, sort of. I fell in love with him in about twenty minutes.”
Dane is startled by the confession. “Seriously?”
Bevins shrugs. “He was married, so I kept it to myself. He figured it out, of course. So he played it like we were going to be best friends. And you know what? That’s how it worked out in the long run. I got over the crush after a while, but never the friendship. Randall Shane is the bravest, truest, most decent human being I’ve ever known. Point one. You’re aware of his personal tragedy? Wife and daughter? Ever since, he’s devoted his life to rescuing children. Most of his cases are pro bono. Long as he’s got enough to put gas in that big fat car of his, he’s good to go. Therefore incorruptible as to financial temptation. Point two, to my certain knowledge he’s a red-blooded, salute-the-flag, die-for-your-country patriot who would never do anything to threaten the security of the good old U.S.A. Caveat: unless a child’s life is in danger, then it might get complicated.”
“So you believe there might be national security implications?”
Bevins ever so casually checks the burger crowd to see if anybody is paying particular attention. Satisfied, she puts her elbows on the table, goes into sotto voce mode.
“Genius physicist working on a top-secret project, who just so happens to have a secret Chinese mistress and a missing child? Of course there are national security implications. Not that any agency has admitted to involvement. And believe me, I’ve been asking. Like I said, making noise to let them know we know. Kicked in a few doors, metaphorically speaking. Folks look blank, shake their heads. Never heard of Shane, no business of snatching him in plain sight, cross their hearts and hope to die.”
“Somebody made it happen. From all descriptions, this was a professional, military kind of outfit, precision- executing a mission.”
Bevins nods in recognition. “Covert special ops. Which leaves us with at least a couple of possibilities. One of our agencies dispatched an elite unit to seize and detain a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and has somehow managed not to share that fact with any of the other interested national security agencies, mine included. Or some evildoer has it in for Shane and sent mercenaries to snatch him.”
“Evildoer?”
“That’s how we talk in the FBI. Saves a lot of explaining. ‘Evildoer’ covers terrorist, dictator, gang boss, Wall Street banker, the Yankees, take your pick of the loathsome.”
Dane looks startled. “The Yankees?”
“I’m from Jamaica Plain. My dad was a Boston cop.”
“No kidding? I should have known that.”
“You can’t know everything.”
“Anything I found on Google, it alluded to you growing up on Long Island.”
Bevins reveals a sly smile. “Evildoers might want to target family. Search engines can provide a useful smoke screen. We call it ‘identity diversion.’ Simple but effective.”
Dane nods thoughtfully. “You’re FBI from Boston and Shane’s your BFF, so you must know Jack Delancey.”
After a slight hesitation, Bevins says, “That’s an affirmative.”
“You could be telling this to him.”
“You’re the better choice.”
“You and Jack don’t get along?”
Bevins shrugs. “We never saw eye to eye, and that’s his problem. Me being tall.”
“What?” Dane does a double take. “Your height? Seriously?”
“He calls me ‘The 50 Foot Woman,’ as in Attack of The 50 Foot Woman, some cheesy horror flick he finds amusing. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Jack loves women. What you may not have noticed, he only loves ’em if they’re five foot ten or less. Turns out, he can’t handle a female boss who’s taller than he is. Admitted as much. I’m one of the reasons he resigned. The other, of course, is that a higher salary means he can buy more suits. And wives.”
“I’ll give him your love.”
“Do that. Really, it’s not a problem. We get along fine just as long as we don’t have to speak, or see each other.”
The shiny-top table starts to vibrate delicately. Bevins retrieves a cell phone from her briefcase, flips it open, checks the display. “Sorry, gotta go. You’ll keep me informed?”
Dane stands, takes a deep breath. “Monica? One more question. Do you think Shane is still alive?”
The big woman blinks, holding herself still. “Absolutely. I’d bet everything that he’s been taken alive for interrogation purposes. Whoever it is behind this, they think he knows something.”
“What? What could he know?”
Bevins hoists the handbag strap to her shoulder. “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It wouldn’t be you, it would be Shane, and he’d be buying bacon cheese dogs for two and insisting I eat with him, because life is short but we’re not.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Invisible Man Revealed
The first time I saw Naomi destroy one of her beautiful watercolors, I screamed for her to stop. She gave me a look as flat as Death Valley and kept slowly and methodically shredding the damp paper.
“Get used to it,” she said.
Three years, close to a thousand attempts at perfection, and I’m still not used to it.
Here’s the deal. Almost every day at 3:00 p.m., boss lady goes to the ground-floor solarium, which has the requisite northern lighting, and arranges a still life on a small table kept there for that purpose. Could be cut flowers, or an antique cream pitcher, or a found object, or all three. When she has the arrangement just so, she tapes a heavy, pre-cut sheet of Arches watercolor paper on to a small, horizontally-tilted drawing table. She selects her brushes and colors. She takes a deep breath and does some sort of Zen thing that involves closing her eyes and holding her hands out, palms up. Then she sets a timer for thirty minutes and gets to work. First a quick pencil sketch. That never takes more than a minute or two. Then she wets her brushes and begins. Sometimes the mistake happens right away, in the first pass of the brush. More often the timer will ding and she’ll step back, look at the still-life arrangement, glance at her painted version—almost always lovely, in my opinion—and then calmly peel it away from the drawing board, tear it into strips and feed the pieces into a paper shredder.
Zzzt, zzzt, zzzt. It’s gotten to be a sound that makes my teeth hurt.
Today is no different, except that the arrangement involves a folding carpenter’s ruler, a combination square and a brass bevel, donated to the cause by Danny Bechst, who once told me, in confidence, that Naomi was like van Gogh, except better looking and with two ears. Apparently van Gogh wrecked a lot of his paintings, too. A fact you wouldn’t expect the average carpenter to know, but in Boston there are no average carpenters. Most of them seem to have Ph.D.’s. Anyhow, Danny isn’t as appalled by the daily destruction as I am. Says he understands a quest for perfection and that one of these days when the bell dings, voilà, a flawless masterpiece.
As for Naomi, you’d think that failing on a daily basis would bother her, but she insists that the process is relaxing. Indeed, she always appears to be calm as she methodically destroys her creation. Maybe driving me crazy makes her feel serene. All part of the unwritten job description.
Today the shredder sounds about twenty minutes into the process, cuing me to enter the studio with the latest update on the investigation. Naomi, breaking down the still life, looks up, raises an eyebrow.
“Dane called,” I tell her. “Shuttle delayed out of Reagan National, but they should be wheels down at Logan by five. She has some interesting tidbits about possible evildoers, but nothing solid.”
“Evildoers?”
“Dane does enjoy the evocative phrase.”
“Worth the trip, just to show the flag.”
“Jack’s day has been more productive. He interviewed Jonny Bing, the venture capitalist, and formed, he says, ‘an opinion.’ Declined to specify what opinion, exactly. Before that he made a quick run up to New Hampshire to talk to the foster care folks about Joseph Keener’s childhood. Said he uncovered some ‘facts of interest.’ He’ll fill us in tonight.”
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