Seven Grams of Lead (12 page)

He sat back, dumbfounded. He managed to get out, “Beautiful, intelligent, and uncomfortable with phrenological examinations.”

“You’re one for three.” Looking over his shoulder, she beamed. “More champagne!” Sliding to the edge of her seat, she aimed for the server dispensing flutes five tables away.

“Please allow me.” Thornton said. Leaping to his feet and starting toward the server, he dropped onto Mallery’s silver service plate a folded piece of paper
resembling a seating-assignment card. On the face of it, he’d written in pencil:

A dip in Nolend’s
pool, which was on the scale of a resort hotel’s, would have meant hypothermia tonight. Still fifteen guests milled about the deck. Some sought refuge from the clamor in the barn, others a place to smoke without drawing murderous looks. Although the temperature had dropped into the thirties, the deck’s forest of electric heat trees made Thornton’s tuxedo jacket a layer too many. He took it off, folded it over the back of a chaise lounge, sank into the canvas-covered cushions, and gazed out at the moonlight bobbing on the Atlantic. He was glad for a chance to relax after the long drive up. But relaxation wasn’t in the cards: Mallery appeared to be a no-show.

Possibly she’d been held up and would come at
ten o’clock, the fallback time. Although Thornton had glanced back and seen her reach for his card, he wondered if he’d done such a good job replicating the folded table assignments that she didn’t realize it contained a message. Or maybe he’d overplayed Head Injury Guy and she’d just been brushing the card aside in her haste to get the hell away from the table before he returned.

He watched a young couple at the table across the pool engage in lively conversation. He heard only the rhythmic heaves and sighs of the waves, until, from directly behind him, came, “I have to tell you, Mr. Thornton, only once have I ever been on the receiving end of a lamer pickup attempt.”

He turned to find Mallery, draped in a thick, black cashmere shawl. Hoping that she was playacting for their unseen audience, he sat up and said, “It’s always nice not to be the lamest. Who gets the prize?”

She lowered herself onto the foot of the chaise lounge. “Guy sidles up to me at a bar in the Haight and says, ‘Scotty’s my favorite member of the Starship
Enterprise
crew. How about you?’ ”

“That’s not so bad.”

“Maybe not by your standards, but you’re lucky. You can get away with any line because hunk and intrepid journalist are an unbeatable one-two punch.”

“Thank you.” He didn’t flatter himself that her words contained any truth.

“So, if you’d like, expound upon the phrenological
significance of each of the twenty-seven subdivisions of the cranium?”

“How about a walk along the beach?”

“Wherever.”

Apparently Mallery intuited the need to perpetuate their cover. As they wandered away from the pool, she looped an arm through Thornton’s. She had to miss her shoes, cast aside when the heels hindered her progress through the cold sand, but she didn’t show it.

“So does phrenology usually get the ladies onto the beach?” she asked.

“It’s never once failed.”

“Any reason I should know how you acquired your expertise? Skeletons buried in your backyard?”

“You can rest easy: I live in a third-floor apartment. Do you know who Margaretha Zelle was?”

“Your ex?”

“No, but she was the ex of a lot of other guys when she was known as Mata Hari. I learned about phrenology, like most everything else I know, while reporting. Margaretha Zelle made the news in 2000.”

“Wasn’t she killed during the First World War?”

“Executed by firing squad, after which her skull became part of the collection at the Museum of Anatomy in Paris.”

“Funny that I’ve missed that museum.”

“In 2000, the museum’s archivists discovered that
the skull was missing. Eventually they concluded it had been stolen. My reaction was,
Why would anyone steal a skull? Or even want one?
Little did I know, skull collecting is a veritable subculture.”

“Really?”

“Really, a function of the enduring popularity of …”

“Phrenology?”

“It drives devotees to skullduggery, literally.”

“As in grave robbery?”

“Exactly. There’s a long list of notable victims throughout history, including Mozart and Beethoven.”

“Gives new meaning to the Chuck Berry lyrics, doesn’t it?”

“Roll over Beethoven …?”

“… and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

Liking her no longer required any pretense on his part. She held up her end of the act, frequently making him laugh. When a wave broke too close to them, they skipped out of its way together. The only thing missing was mid-romantic-movie-montage music.

Ascending a dune brought their destination into view. “Hey, check that out!” he said.

The “restoration” of the nineteenth-century seaman’s shack included a 4,000-foot airstrip. The lights lining the tarmac turned it into a white stripe through the night, the wash outlining the flock of private jets parked to the side. Releasing Mallery’s arm, Thornton headed, as if intrigued, for the runway’s inland
end, the location of a radar system encased in a metal box the size of a refrigerator. Atop it rotated a dome-encased sensor with a cyclopean lens.

He walked to the metal rail fence surrounding the unit. “Looks like Robbie the Robot,” he said.

Mallery stayed alongside him. “The Nolends know just everyone, don’t they?”

He clutched the fence rails, pulling his body as close as possible to the radar unit, as if trying to attain the best vantage point. “Theoretically, the radar causes electromagnetic interference that prevents the device from recording.”

Joining him, her playfulness vanished. “How did Langlind do it?”

“He, or, more likely, some organization sharing his interests, gave you a short-acting sedative, then implanted a subminiature, self-powered eavesdropping device behind your right ear. I’d tell you you’re in good company, but the only other implantee I know of is me.”

“Why you?”

“I’ve been wondering about that every waking moment since I learned about the bug last week. Do you know about Leonid Sokolov?”

Mallery nodded. “The physicist who was assassinated.”

“The killer administered a sedative called midazolam first,” Thornton said.

“Why?”

“The FBI thought it was to subdue him.”

“Wouldn’t shooting him in the head do that?”

“In rare circumstances, midazolam can be fatal. It’s possible that the purpose of the shooting was to cover up an implantation that had gone wrong.”

“Do you have any evidence of that?”

“None, and I don’t want any; I hope there’s no connection whatsoever to Sokolov—his secrets in the wrong hands could be disastrous. There is a connection to you, though: Catherine Peretti.”

“The Langlind staffer who was murdered?”

“Actually, shot by a professional when she was seconds away from telling me some sort of secret.”

Mallery gasped vapor into the cold air.

“So the obvious question is whether that murder had something to do with Langlind,” Thornton said.

“If we’d had anything on him, we would have used it.” Mallery rubbed behind her right ear.

“Try not to do that, in case anyone’s watching, okay?”

Her hand moved through her hair, her fingers flipping wind-strewn strands from her eyes, as if that had been her intention all along. “Gordon Langlind could just be a stooge in this equation,” she said.

“Why do you think so?”

“Since Great-Granddaddy Cloyd Langlind’s first big oil strike in 1912, it’s practically been a family tradition that the craftier offspring are sent to Wharton and then corporate headquarters; those who don’t
make the cut, like Gordon, are sent to law school and then are bought political offices on the chance they can be of use to the company. Langlind Petrochemical has a private espionage firm on a five-million-dollar-per-year retainer. The right nugget of intelligence on a prospective oilfield can mean the difference between a hundred-million-dollar loss and a hundred-billion-dollar profit. They would view an eavesdropping system of this nature as the wisest investment they could ever make. Also Cloyd Langlind’s 1912 strike was in Kazakhstan, and the company’s been in bed with the Russians ever since. Wasn’t Sokolov assassinated by Russians?”

“That’s never been determined. The case is essentially cold.”

“Is it possible that someone else altogether dug up dirt on me, their goal being—for some reason—to keep Langlind in office?”

“Either way, it was election tampering.” Thornton hoped that would be enough to secure her cooperation. “I have a friend in New York, an NSA electrophysiologist with access to a Faraday cage that blocks radio signals. Inside it, he can easily remove a device without the surveillants knowing; then he can track the signal to their listening post. The catch is he needs two devices to do that.”

She said nothing. She just stared at the machine, her expression flickering between shock and horror.

“We should get going,” Thornton said. “A radar
tower is only so fascinating, and it’s the third source of electromagnetic interference I’ve had a conversation by this week. We need to decide on our next steps before anyone gets suspicious.”

She looked away. “You’ve already done a nice job playing on my gets-around rep.”

“Sorry, I didn’t have much time to come up with a plan to get you alone, and that was before I realized Clay Harken was your date.”

“Come on, Clay’s older than my father. He’s my security guard.”

“Oh.” Thornton hid his satisfaction that he’d been wrong. “So how about New York?”

She backed away. Then, no doubt remembering the inherent danger in distancing herself from the radar unit, she stopped. “Why wouldn’t I just go to the local police station? That way the device can be entered into a chain of evidence and tested without our having to watch our backs.”

“Because we can’t find out who implanted the devices without two of them. Anyway, most cops hearing our story would tell us to take a place on line behind the folks with the tinfoil hats. And if our listeners realize we’re onto them, they’ll deactivate the devices.”

“Okay, why not write up a statement of the case on your secret-agent dissolving paper and take it straight to the FBI?”

“The same risks in going to the police station apply
to going to the Bureau—or to any other government agency.”

Mallery focused on a wave rolling in, progressively larger until reaching the beach, at which point its top curled and turned silver in the moonlight. Her shivering, he suspected, had nothing to do with the cold. He extended a steadying hand.

She sidestepped it. “I know a good bar in New York,” she said. “And I’m going to need it.”

They devised a
cover story, a romantic hookup tonight, to add credibility to a “spontaneous decision” to go to New York together tomorrow morning. Then they took their act to the Rose & Crown, a dark Nantucket tavern decorated with a colorful array of antique model ships. Save for the televisions broadcasting games, the establishment had changed so little since the eighteenth century that each time the front door groaned inward, Thornton half expected a man with a peg leg to clomp in.

Thornton liked the tavern because it removed them from any prying eyes on Muskeget. And the large, boisterous bar crowd precluded the conversation that a romantic hookup cover demanded. Conversation of any sort was problematic. As he had
learned the past few days, it felt like trying to read with someone staring over your shoulder. Also Mallery seemed to be struggling to come to terms with the news that strangers had opened her head, implanted a machine, and been listening to her private conversations for months. Or maybe she blamed the messenger. Fortunately she had no trouble when the act called for drinking too much.

Ascending Main Street several rounds later, Thornton sensed that she would have clung to him even if it hadn’t been in the script. The oceanside resorts had closed for the season, but the village still offered plenty of places to stay, principally two- and three-story townhouses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that had been converted to bed-and-breakfasts. At Captain Orster’s, constructed in 1743 according to the sign swinging above the door, a fittingly ancient innkeeper answered the buzzer. While lighting the way to the room with an oil lamp retrofitted with an LED bulb, he told them that “revelers”—evidently his euphemism for late-night drunks—sustained the inns during the off-season.

As soon as the innkeeper left them alone, Mallery said, “Sorry, Russ, I need to pass out.” A line straight out of their script, alleviating the need to generate R-rated sound effects.

He knelt to steady the wooden stepladder to the antique four-poster bed. She started to unzip her gown before abruptly climbing the steps with it still
on. He read her lopsided grin as a blithe decision to trash a $20,000 designer original rather than expose another inch of flesh.

During the night, if someone had planted a video camera in the room, he would have seen Thornton frequently shift positions, unable to sleep in spite of the comfortable bed. Mallery slept on her back on the side of the bed by the window, graceful even in the simple act of breathing. As compelling a woman, he thought, as he’d ever known—or known of. He felt like an interloper. He’d long since learned that a press credential was a golden ticket, able to gain a journalist access to almost anyplace in the world or anyone, but not as a part of the action, not as a doer like Beryl Mallery. Just as a chronicler. The thirty inches between them now might as well have been thirty miles.

He spent most of the night using his police scanner app, which ran transcripts of the radio communications between various New York metro dispatchers and patrolmen. Eventually the black sky dissolved to a slate gray; the dark shapes outside transformed into gables and chimneys and, with the first flecks of dawn, individual cedar shingles. At sunup, a ray landed on the leaded-glass window, which sprayed a checkerboard of light across the bed. Mallery’s eyes opened.