Runaway Heart (19 page)

     
"I thought she was supposed to be a close friend—that
you had an
outstanding working relationship," Susan said angrily. "What kinda
liar are you? She looked like she wanted to kill you." His karma with
women hovered near zero.

     
Time to come clean.
"Look, Susan, you're right. I lied,
okay? I wasn't planning on running into her. She hates me. We used to date. I
cheated on her and she damn near shot it out with me in a. motel room in
Monterey. It ended about as badly as possible and I. . ." He paused.
"Look, I needed the work, so I fudged a little."

     
"Fudged!"

     
"Yeah, but I still have a way to get what we need. Actually,
this new way is smarter than asking sworn personnel to steal confidential
records. That probably would have backfired. This idea is much safer,
okay?"

     
She was really pissed. "What kind of an asshole are
you?"

     
Some questions are better left unanswered. "How much cash do
you have in your wallet?"

 
    
"I don't
carry cash. I told you, we're a nonprofit institute. I need checks as receipts
for our tax-exempt status."

     
"A check won't do it. Okay, in the spirit of cooperation, and
because I see how upset you are, I'll front the Institute a couple'a hundred
dollars. Deal?" She was calming down, he thought. . . hoped.

     
"Why? What are we doing?"

     
"We're gonna find a Chinese lab attendant and bribe him. The
Chinese are easy marks."

     
"I'm really not much on racial slurs," she said, looking
daggers at him now.

     
"It's not a racial slur. It's a cultural reality. I happen to
know that a lot of Chinese people end up working in the police lab up here.
They're good technicians and they work at minimum wage. Most are immigrants
with big debts to the triads for getting them or their families over here from
mainland China. Two hundred bucks will buy a lot of cooperation if I can find
the right guy. We go downstairs in the ME's building on Turpin Street. It's not
a secure location. We go to the cafeteria, do a little eavesdropping, pick
somebody with a thick accent. Believe me, it works. I've done this
before."

     
It pissed her off that he'd lied to her. But then, she reasoned,
she'd lied to him, too. He'd be in for a big surprise when he tried to cash her
check, so she figured they were even . . . more or less.

Before they got back in the car she
watched him with concern as he sprinted across the street to the Wells Fargo
Bank to deposit her bad check in the ATM.

His name was Shing Nam Shan, but he went
by "Danny." He was twenty years old and weighed only one hundred and
fifteen pounds all in, canvas shoes included. He had short, bristly hair and
eyeglasses thick enough to start a fire. Danny snatched the cash out of Jack's
hand like a lizard snapping up a fruit fly. After Jack explained that they
wanted a copy of Roland Minton's crime scene and ME reports, Danny smiled and
said in broken English, struggling with each sentence:
     
"I know where keep. Make some . . .
same kind . . . copies. You rait here." He turned and left them standing
in the maze of hallways in the basement of the Medical Examiner's building.

The smells were putrid. A mixture of
odors so dense and complicated that it was hard to separate them—except to say
that the brutal tinge of Lysol enveloped everything.

     
"You were right," she said, feeling slightly better
about him.

     
He smiled, then added a few slices of baloney to the sandwich.
"When you hire the Wirta Agency, you get all the Bs of police science:
basic brilliance and boundless bullshit."

     
She cocked her head at him as if she didn't quite know what to
make of that. So he added, "But I don't charge for the bullshit. It's an
agency extra."

     
Twenty minutes later Danny returned and handed them a light Xerox
still warm from the machine. "It faded. We outta toner," he said.
"You not say Danny get, hokay?"

     
"Don't worry, we're leaving town in two hours. Now all I need
to know is how do we get outta here? This is a maze down here." That
brought Danny's worst sentence to date.

     
"Go light, den reft. . . den up stair to erevator."

     
"Why don't you go ahead and pay for lunch. You can just put
it on your expense sheet," Susan suggested.

     
They were at Fisherman's Wharf sitting in Alioto's Fish House. The
windows overlooked a picturesque little tuna fleet adorned with outriggers,
high bows, and women's names. He counted four Marias, a few Magdalenas, and a
Madonna (probably not the one in the leather concert bra). The food was great
and the bill was reasonable. Jack peeled off some twenties thinking he hadn't
been a private detective for that long but that he was pretty sure this wasn't
the way it was supposed to work.

     
Before lunch they had gone over the crime scene and the ME's
reports, and there was still no getting around the fact that the death of
Roland Minton was very violent and damned strange. Sergeant Lester Cole's crime
sheet was very specific—he had particularly noted that there was no
obvious
way
anything or anybody could have gotten in or out of Roland's room. Cole had
speculated that somehow someone must have hung outside the window thirty
stories up, pried open the frame, which he noted would be a superhuman feat,
then had gained entrance to the hotel room. Sergeant Cole had no theory on how
that could have been done or how the thick metal could have been bent.

     
The coroner's descriptions were unemotional but graphic: felonious
homicide, extreme mutilation, blunt-force trauma, anti-mortem severance,
multiple commuted fractures, decapitation, cutaneous subdural matter. . .

     
It went on like that, detailing shredded body parts and
blood-splatter evidence. Jack read it but didn't comment, because Susan had
become very quiet and seemed on the verge of tears. The coroner called the
murder extreme homicidal mania. What it came down to was Roland Minton had been
ripped apart while he was still alive.

     
The only other noteworthy thing was in the short paragraph listing
stomach contents: a partially digested Big Mac approximately six hours old,
Coca-Cola, minibar peanuts, and a note. According to the coroner, it had been
swallowed seconds before Roland died but was still readable. Just one word:

OCTOPUS

T
he briefing was at 5:00
p.m.
in the main conference room on the
sixth floor of DARPA headquarters. The building was a nondescript, brick-faced
affair located inside the Virginia Square Plaza in Arlington, Virginia.

     
In attendance were Deputy Director Vincent Valdez; his assistant,
Paul Talbot, and his two assistant military attaches, Captain Norm Pettis,
U.S.M.C., and Captain Stanley Greenberg, U.S.N. There were also two
Acquisitions and Technology special assistants, an information special tech, a
liaison officer, a defense science officer, and a captain from the Special
Projects office. A naval lieutenant JG, Sally Watts, the youngest person in the
room at only twenty-three, was also a top forensic computer specialist. Next to
her was a program interrogation coordinator and a woman from the comptroller's
office.

 
    
For such a large
gathering the sixth-floor conference room was opened and they had put out
coffee and donuts. A low murmur of voices filled the corridor, finally,
two-star Air Force General William "Buzz" Turpin, director of DARPA,
swept into the room and took his place at the head of the table.

     
Young at sixty-eight, Turpin's demeanor was hard and humorless. He
began without preamble: "Did everybody get the oh-eight-hundred
Re-Op?"

     
The room nodded. Re-Op stood for Report of Operations. This one
was the detailed description of a breach of the secure computer at Gen-A-Tec.

     
The room was hushed. This was Turpin's meeting.

     
"Since the penetration at the New Fairview Hotel in San
Francisco by our high-risk special response team at oh-five-hundred yesterday
morning, and the subsequent collateralization of the computer hacker by our DU,
we have, unfortunately, experienced further breakdowns," Buzz said softly.
He always spoke in a very quiet voice—a trick he'd learned on the debate team
at the Air Force Academy. Everybody in the room was leaning forward to catch
every word.

     
"The DU recovered Roland Minton's computer. Minton attempted
to erase his last e-mail after he sent it, but Lieutenant Watts managed to
digitally reconstruct the message. We have copies for all of you."

     
Vincent Valdez stood and passed Roland's last e-mail around the
table. Turpin paused while it was read. When all eyes were once again focused
on him, he continued.

     
"This message was e-mailed to a portable computer. We have
the name of the owner but not his location."

     
Several ballpoint pens clicked and people began making notes.

     
"You'll note that the e-mail address is Strockmeister at
earthlink-dot-net. That turns out to be somebody named Herman Strockmire Jr.
I'm going to go over the pertinent facts in the e-mail, then you can address
questions to your section leaders or to Mr. Valdez after the meeting.

     
"One: The dead hacker sent the fifty-page Chimera file to
Herman Strockmire's computer. Location unknown. The only address we have is his
office in D.C. He's not there. Apparently his secretary doesn't know where he
is. More on that in a minute.

     
"Two: According to our cryptographer the encoded file is
going to take around two days for Roland's 'bud' to decode, even with ten sun
solar work stations. That means we have as little as two days to get it back
before we end up in a public-relations disaster.

     
"Three: The forensic computer section under Lieutenant Watts
is working up a list of companies in the Western U.S. that have ten sun solar
work stations. It has to be a
big lash-up. Once we have that list we cross-check it against an
employee named Zimmy. It's undoubtedly a nickname, so it could stand for
anything from Zim to Zimmerman. And, Lieutenant, I need all of this
yesterday."

     
Sally Watts nodded as she jotted notes furiously.

     
"Four: Herman Strockmire Jr. runs a legal firm called the
Institute for Planetary Justice. To put it politely, he's a
tree-and-bunny-hugger who has sued just about every federal letter agency in
the government. I'm evaluating the possibility of picking up his secretary and
debriefing her, but these people are fanatics, and I'm not sure that's our most
prudent course of action. Besides, if Strockmire's the delusional paranoid our
profile makes him out to be, she may have been kept in the dark."

     
Buzz Turpin leaned back in his chair and paused for emphasis, then
said, "Strockmire is in possession of devastating material that could
create huge problems for us. Last week he was in L.A. suing a bunch of federal
agencies and private labs over GMO food. He got Rule-Elevened in Judge Melissa
King's court and fined a million dollars. I think a primary course of action
might be to contact Judge King through a blind and see if she can lure him in
again. Maybe, if she offers to cut his fine, he'll show up and we can grab him.
We're running a logistics scan on that and one or two other potential operation
plans. We'll have something in a few hours. As of now nobody seems to know
where Strockmire is. We have to change that.

     
"Five: This person Susie who's mentioned in the e-mail is
undoubtedly Susan Strockmire, Herman's daughter. She is leverage, and I want
her. Get a sniffer on her bank account and on Strockmire's. Five-hour
updates."

     
Buzz Turpin cleared his throat and leaned forward. "Okay,
people, one more thing—and this is important: I'm not looking to turn this into
a major news story. One of the problems with this guy is that he has celebrity friends
who are environmentalists and animal-rights fanatics. The last thing I need is
for fucking Marlon Brando or Cher to jump on the
Today Show
and start
screaming we murdered him.

     
This means Strockmire needs to be neutralized but
not
necessarily
collateralized—at least not yet. What we've got here is a big, sloshing bucket
of shit, and I don't want to get any more of it on us than necessary. Any
deviation from this op plan gets cleared by either Vincent, Paul Talbot, or me.
Nobody moves on his own initiative. Are we all absolutely clear on this?"