Black Tide (46 page)

I made a recommendation: that the
Buran
task force be reactivated and expanded, with extensive liaisons with NASA, the Pentagon's SDI office and the aerospace industry, and that the executive and legislative branches be notified immediately. When I left work that Sunday evening, having locked my memo in my office safe, I felt tired and a little smug. But when I came back, about ten hours later, I was nervous with energy and a lack of sleep. And before submitting the memo to our section leader, I decided to engage in a little unofficial peer review, and I asked Cissy Manning to read it.

I had been with Marginal Issues a little over a month and was immediately attracted to Cissy, but I was too busy adjusting to a new office and a new boss and co-workers to do more than just look. She was polite to me and I was polite to her, and I got the feeling, on seeing the way she worked, that in some ways she almost ran the section, leaving George Walker to his budgets and bureaucratic infighting. This day she came into my office wearing a subtle perfume that got my attention, took one of my guest chairs, stretched out her long and wonderfully slim legs and started reading. I was admiring her ivory blouse and the way I could make out the lace of her bra through the almost sheer fabric when she looked up at me, her green eyes crinkling with concern, shaking her head.

"Something's wrong," she said.

It felt like my office safe was now resting on my midsection. "What's wrong?"

"This whole report," Cissy said, waving the pages in her hand as if it had a bad smell to it. "You've got some interesting things here, Lewis, but you're trying to take some scraps of driftwood and re-create the Queen Mary. You've interpreted information in a manner that only supports your theory, when in fact it could do the exact opposite. You make some real stretches, like changing a meteor shower into the reentry of space debris. And you didn't go deep enough."

"I didn't?" I said, snappish from the work I had done all weekend, and some previous weekends before that. "Like where?"

“Like the members of the
Buran
task team. You ever talk to any of them before you started writing this fantasy about a Death Star in orbit, zapping space shuttles?"

“Uh, no,” I said.

“Well, if you had, you would have learned that just before the panel deactivated, they decided the second
Buran
was just a ducky. Just an informal decision, one that wasn't put on paper, but it was one that calmed everybody down. A ducky. Nothing to worry about."

''A what?" Cissy sighed and put my report down on my desk and picked up two pencils. She held them up. "Listen, young one, and learn something. Some of our spy satellites are wonderful indeed, and can read license plates from orbit and even newspaper headlines. But some are just lookers. They just reproduce what they see. You can take a picture of these two pencils, and your picture wouldn't tell you which pencil was real and which one was a miniature bomb."

The pencils clattered to my desk. "Now. Duckies. Back in World War II, we set up a fake army in southern England, commanded by General George Patton. The tanks were made out of rubber, but the Germans thought they were real, and they thought this army would invade at the Pas de Calais. I'm sure you can remember what really happened at a place called Normandy, with a real army. Closer to home, a few years back, one of our KH-11 surveillance satellites went over the Soviet Northern Fleet base at Polyarnyi, near Murmansk. The satellite took photos of three Typhoon-class submarines in the harbor. Then a bad winter storm came up, and when our satellite returned on its next pass, the three submarines were in bad shape. Two were leaking air and one was bent in the middle. They were fake. Rubber duckies. "

As Cissy was talking, I was extracting an old cover memo from the
Buran
task force from my file, and saw that one C. Manning was a member of the group, and my face was warm indeed.

"The second
Buran
was a fake," I said.

"Very good," she said, and even with those words, her tone wasn't mocking. "We like to think of those old Soviets as very dour, mean and sour sons of bitches. Which they are. But sometimes they also have a sense of humor. Think how funny it is. They spend under a hundred thousand rubles to make a fake
Buran
, and what do they get out of it? They get everybody in this building spun up, meetings are held and memos are rocketed back and forth, and we think they're bigger and better than we are."

"While in the process, we're wasting time, wasting resources and pulling people away from real situations," I said. "Exactly. One big practical joke." Then she eyed my report. "One that's apparently still catching people."

I looked at her and she looked back at me with a steady gaze. I picked up the report and swiveled my chair and tossed it into one of our special wastebaskets, with a shredder on top. In a matter of seconds, about a month's worth of work was shredded, and by this evening, the shredded paper would become smoke.

"Thanks for the catch," I said. ''And thanks for saving me from a major embarrassment."

Cissy laughed. "You're welcome, Lewis Cole, and you owe me one.”

It only took a second. "Then why don't I take you out to lunch?"

She kept on smiling. "That sounds like a wonderful idea."

So we did, and that was the start of something short, sweet and delightful.

But something was wrong.

I looked back up at the stars. You didn't go deep enough. Not a mocking or accusatory tone. Just a statement of fact. You didn't go deep enough.

How about that.

Above me a meteorite seared its way through the atmosphere. This one was bright, with a long tail that looked like it had been shot out from a white-hot sparkler. A preview, maybe, of the Perseids. I kept on looking above me. The stars were as special as they always were, just shining on through, some of their light taking tens of thousands of years to reach here. Lot of distance, lot of time, and though the stars were wonderful and I never tired of seeing them, I wanted very much for the sun to rise and the day to begin. I had work to do.

Something was wrong.

.

I slept fitfully the rest of the night and skipped breakfast in the morning. I made three phone calls to Felix's house before I gave up. I knew he wasn't spending too much time there, and with today being the day of the exchange, I was sure that he was keeping busy. Checking his answering machine for phone calls from me probably wasn't high on his agenda.

One more try, then, and I called the Tyler police department. Diane Woods was not in. I tried her at home, and I got her answering machine. Lots of answering machine work going on this Friday morning. I wondered where everybody was. One thing, for sure, was that Felix and Diane weren't together. That was something I could bank on, like the sun coming up every morning.

I sat back in my comfortable office and looked around and finally accepted that cold little ball of high-grade steel that seemed to be working its way through my digestive system. This was one that I would have to take care of myself. No depending on friends or acquaintances or contacts. Just me. I picked up the phone and made one more call, and the person on the other end said, "Boston police department."

Then I spun a tale.

For such a short amount of time, I was rather proud of this particular tale. I explained that I was a columnist for
Shoreline
magazine, and that I needed to speak to a public affairs officer. When this gentleman came on the phone, I said I was exploring some story ideas that I would later pitch to my editor (avoiding the sort of trap that Justin Dix had earlier laid for me) and could I talk to him for a few minutes? Being a polite flack, he agreed. I said that I was thinking of doing a story about a Boston police detective, one Cal Maloney, who had died so suddenly and tragically about five years ago in a traffic accident in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The story I had in mind was a retrospective of this fine officer's life, and a look at what he might have done and accomplished if he had lived. The family he might have loved, the cases he might have cracked and the other officers and detectives he might have worked with.

When this spiel was over, I asked a few questions and there was a very long pause on the other end of the phone line. I think the public affairs officer thought I was loony, but after a moment or two he said, "I'll give it a shot. What's your phone number?"

I told him and hung up and prepared to wait.

And wait.

I sat back in my chair. I sat forward in my chair. I got up and looked through the windows of my office, to the ocean and to the Samson State Wildlife Preserve to the north. Then I went around to my bookcases. I cocked my head, looked at the spines and tried to recall the plot of every book that was in the case. I wondered if I should at long last alphabetize my books by author, then I tried to decide if the bookshelves should be segregated by hardcover and paperback. And if I did that, should I subdivide it even further, into category and genre?

And what about my magazines?

I looked at a tiny clock on another bookshelf. About five minutes had passed.

When the phone finally rang the morning was almost over, and I was busy scrubbing the tub in the bathroom adjacent to my office. I rubbed my hands briefly on an already soiled towel, and then I got into my office and answered the phone by the fourth ring at least.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Cole? Officer Wimmer, Boston police department. I have that information you were looking for."

Hang up the phone, a perverse voice inside me said. Hang up. You don't want to know.

But I did want to know. I uncapped a pen and found a piece of scrap paper on the mess that was my desk.

"Go ahead," I said, and he gave me some stuff over the next few minutes about Cal Maloney's life and his family and where he went to school and how long he had been with the Boston police department. Then the good officer paused.

"Well, one more thing," he said, and I could make out the sound of shuffling papers. "It took some digging but the man you're looking for is no longer with the Boston police department."

"He isn't?" I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"Nope," Officer Wimmer said. "Cal Maloney's partner at the time of his death is now with the Massachusetts State Police."

"Un-hunh," and that was about the only intelligent thing I could say at the time. I was too busy praying that New England Telephone's long-distance service wouldn't pick that moment to have a system failure.

It didn't. Officer Wimmer's voice was clear and punctual.

"His name is Roger Krohn."

Chapter Twenty-Six

Time is a marvelous thing. While I was waiting for Officer Wimmer to call back that morning, the red numerals on my clocks seemed to move with the speed of year-old motor oil. But when I was finished talking to him, I sat in my office, motionless, my hands behind my head, and from the way the sunlight was moving across the bookshelves, the polished hardwood floor and the white plaster walls in my office, I knew that time was going by quickly.

I looked over at the digital clock. Almost a couple of hours. I forgot what I had been thinking about in those one hundred or so minutes. I believe I was in shock.

Roger Krohn. I let those two words race around in my skull for a bit, and I refused to think any further. A lot of questions were screaming for attention, but I let them be for a while. I finally stirred myself and made two more phone calls, and neither Diane Woods nor Felix Tinios was answering. I got up and left.

At Diane's condominium unit on Tyler Harbor, the two parking spaces in front of her town house were empty, but I knocked on the door anyway. No answer. A woman at the next unit, with short blond hair and wearing a white T-shirt and black tights, looked up at me. She was gently moving a baby carriage back and forth as she sat on the front doorstep to her unit. She wore only one earring.

"You looking for Diane?" she said, her voice a bit nasal. I knew her as a neighbor of Diane's, but I didn't know her name.

"Yes, I am. Do you know where she is?"

The baby carriage went back and forth twice and the infant inside gurgled. Diane's neighbor smiled. "She told me this morning that she was going to take a day off and drive south for a while, just get her head untangled. She even left her pager behind, she told me."

South. Massachusetts and Kara Miles and who knows where the two of them might go on this calm and sunny and marvelous day in August. The woman said something as I was thinking and I said, "Excuse me?"

She laughed. "I said, are you thirsty? I can get you a drink --- iced tea or lemonade, or something stronger if you're in the mood."

Some mood. I gave her my best smile, not wanting to scare her. "Sorry. Maybe another time."

Diane's neighbor smiled back. "I'll still be here."

Normally --- which around here usually means off-season --- the trip from Tyler Harbor to Rosemount Lane in North Tyler would take only about fifteen minutes, but today it took twice that, because of the long lines of cars filled with impatient vacationers who were determined to squeeze out the last minutes and seconds of this summer.