While Galileo Preys (20 page)

“I need to call Tom,” he said, and fumbled for his phone.

“What is it?” asked Dr. Wu.

Daryl handed him page thirty-eight.

Dr. Wu studied it, frowned. “This doesn’t necessarily indicate…”

“It does,” Daryl replied. Tom’s voice mail clicked on. “Tom, it’s Daryl Hewes. The two students in the lighting booth were Type O. The superintendent was Type A1. But there’s fresh blood on a textbook in the lighting booth that’s Type A2. The superintendent was shot with a Beretta at point-blank range. I think there was a struggle. I think the superintendent hit Galileo with the textbook, maybe knocked the rifle out of his hands. I think the blood on the textbook belongs to Galileo. Tom, I think we’ve got him.”

T
hey finally got lucky. It was the law of averages, really. How many times could Galileo elude them? He had to make a mistake sometime. He wasn’t supernatural. He was just a man, after all, a man who bled.

In the early ’90s, the Justice Department launched a pilot program which married the burgeoning fields of computers and genetics. They labeled this program the Combined DNA-Index System, or CODIS, and by the turn of the century it contained records on over 100,000 known felons, just in the United States. In five years, the database passed 500,000. By 2005, though, CODIS had, in the spirit of Big Brother, expanded its jurisdiction to include federal employees. Tom’s DNA was in CODIS. The president’s DNA was in CODIS.

And Galileo’s DNA was there too.

“Or, should we say, Henry Booth.”

The technician handed Tom the printout. Twenty-two long hours later, after working the phones, calling in interdepartmental favors, and working every angle he knew, Tom had gotten what he needed and was on
a train to Baltimore, home to Booth’s last known place of business, a private security company that called itself Bellum Velum. Tom would have taken his bike, but he couldn’t ride with his arm, and he wanted to use the time to review all the data extant on Henry Booth. He sat by the window. To his left, the East Coast in bloom. He paid it no attention. His gaze was fixed on the file in his hands, his mind working overtime to compartmentalize the past, and the future.

Henry Booth was ex-CIA. He’d joined the Agency after completing ROTC at the University of Maryland and got enmeshed in various wetworks activities in the Middle East. All CIA operatives go through rigorous psych screenings, but no amount of Freudian guesswork can predict the effect that combat will have on a person. Henry Booth had a strong religious upbringing. He loved God and his country, in that order. He was in the Middle East for fourteen years. Whatever it is he saw there, whatever it is he did, took its toll. When his handler recommended he return to the states, he didn’t argue. He didn’t say much of anything. He turned in his letter of resignation and for five years he disappeared off the face of the earth. Eventually, he found his way to Bellum Velum, or they found their way to him, and tax forms were filed and suddenly Henry Booth was back on the grid. Any reservations that the CIA had about Mr. Booth were apparently not shared by Bellum Velum.

“Yes, Henry’s been with us for nine years,” said the woman on the phone. She said her name was Roberta Watson, and she was the head of PR for the company.
No one else was available. “He’s an excellent employee.”

“What exactly is it he does for you?”

“We are a private security firm serving North America, Europe and Asia.”

“Mmm-hmm. And what exactly is it he does for you?”

“Security.”

Tom didn’t feel like dancing with this woman, especially not on the phone, especially not with forty people dead. He made an appointment to come up to their main office in Baltimore.

He had a file on them too.

Once the train docked at the city’s neo-classicist Penn Station on North Charles Street, Tom flagged down a yellow cab and gave the driver Bellum Velum’s address—which turned out to be a skyscraper two blocks away. The private security company occupied the building’s top two floors. Mercenary work indeed paid well.

Tom looked both ways down either end of the sidewalk, saw what he wanted to see, then passed through the revolving door into the lobby and obstacle course of construction scaffolding. From the looks of it, the building was being renovated, although islands of burgundy carpeting were scattered throughout the exposed floor. Somewhere in this maze of tarps and orange signs, someone was drilling, by the sound of it, to the center of the earth. The security guard at the desk was wearing earplugs, and had to remove them when Tom approached.

“Tom Piper for Roberta Watson, Bellum Velum.”

He didn’t bother with his badge. The guard cupped one hand over his left ear, and phoned up. “She’ll be right down,” he said. But Roberta Watson took her time. Tom lingered in the cacophonous lobby for a good ten minutes before she showed. By then the noise had gifted him with a headache, deposited right behind his eyes.

“Agent Piper, good afternoon.”

Roberta Watson held out her hand. Tom shook it. He noticed two things: A) the woman was all smiles B) almost ninety percent of those smiles were genuine. She had a dark complexion that contrasted strikingly with her ice-white pantsuit.

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Agent Piper,” she said. “I hope you haven’t come all this way for nothing. I’m afraid that Mr. Yolen, our CEO, is away on business and Mr. Yates, our CFO, is out with the flu. I probably should have told you that on the phone.”

Tom was impressed. What an elegant liar she was! He almost complimented her, right then and there. Truly excellent fabricators, like her, were able to believe two contrasting ideas (what they knew to be the truth, and what they knew to be the falsehood) at the same time. They were able to convince themselves, on the spot, that one was just as valid as the other. It was a very difficult skill to master, if only because awareness that one was lying underlined—and undermined—the lie itself. Good for her.

“That’s okay, Mrs. Watson.”

“Please. Call me Roberta.”

“Roberta, can we maybe speak upstairs? The noise…”

She shook her head and grimaced. “It’s awful, isn’t it? It seems to be never-ending. Some people are never satisfied unless they’re making a racket.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Anyway, there really isn’t much to see upstairs. The nature of our business being what it is, our non-administrative employees, like Mr. Booth, don’t require offices. And, the nature of our business being what it is, the space we do have is, I’m afraid, restricted.”

“That’s too bad,” replied Tom.

“I don’t make policy, I’m afraid. If only I did, right?”

“If only.”

“Now I know you inquired specifically about Mr. Booth. Perhaps if you told me the nature of your investigation, I might be able to pass that information to either Mr. Yolen or Mr. Yates when they return and they could get back to you?”

“Well, do you know where Booth might be?”

Roberta pretended to think for a moment, and then she shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, I don’t. If he’s not currently on assignment, he might be at his home address. Have you checked there?”

“His home address. That’s good thinking.” It was time. Tom took out his cell phone and dialed a number. “Hi, Norm. Are you in place?”

Twenty miles away, in the Baltimore suburb of Severna Park, Norm Petrosky and a squad of armed (and armored) FBI agents stood outside 1114 Charleston Court, an old split-level on a long row of old split-levels on a long, old residential street.

“We’re in place, Tom.”

Roberta cocked her head. She seemed confused. Her confusion was about to get quite a whole lot murkier.

Tom then dialed another number, and set up a three-way call.

“Agent Cofer, I saw your team outside the building. Are you ready?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“All teams,” said Tom, “it’s a go.”

Twenty miles away, Norm and his squad smashed into Henry Booth’s house. Twenty yards away, Agent Cofer and his squad rushed into the lobby, submachine guns at the ready.

The security guard slowly removed his earplugs.

The drilling ceased.

Tom slid a folded warrant out of the inside pocket of his black leather jacket and handed it to Roberta. Her brown eyes went from the barrels of the guns, some pointed at her, to the paper.

“So,” said Tom, offering a friendly grin, “how about we go upstairs?”

Henry Booth had a bird. It was an orange-yellow parakeet and it was very happy to have visitors. It squawked and squawked all throughout the FBI’s search of the house. After about thirty minutes of it, Norm grabbed the bedsheet off of Booth’s bed, dragged it into the living room, and draped it over the parakeet’s cage. Convinced that it was night, the parakeet soon went to sleep.

The parakeet turned out to be the only interesting
find in Henry Booth’s house. Norm and his company of nine field-trained agents searched every room. It was a typical suburban domicile, albeit abandoned. Four navel oranges in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator had about a month’s worth of mold on them.

Madmen tended to collect esoteric books, but Galileo’s selection was far from exotic. He had only a few shelves, and they were only half-filled. Norm browsed through the selection, trying to glean whatever insights he could into the mind of their owner. There was a well-thumbed physician’s desk reference, but what household these days didn’t have one of these for self-diagnoses and first aid? Most of the books were a hodgepodge of used paperback fiction which ran the gamut in both genre and quality. There was no artwork on the walls. There was a stereo, but no CDs.

Aside from the parakeet, the house lacked any semblance of personality.

Norm pondered the discovery. Absence of affectation could, after all, itself be an affectation. But this felt different.

This felt wrong.

Galileo had quoted Mencken. Galileo had dubbed “God Bless America” over footage of the Atlanta massacre. But there were no literary texts here, and the computer in the bedroom was so antiquated that it ran DOS. There was no camcorder. Certainly he might have taken some of these with him on the road, but that didn’t fully account for the absolute banality left in this house.

“I’m glad you shut that thing up.” The field agent, a
horse-faced woman named Pamela Starkey, indicated the birdcage with a thumb. “If you hadn’t, I might’ve shot it.”

Norm was about to offer a reply when he realized exactly what was wrong here. He rushed past Agent Starkey and lifted the sheet off the birdcage. The orange-yellow parakeet bobbed its head at Norm and squawked.

Norm stared at the food and water bins latched to the side of the cage.

They were both full.

“Freeze!” Starkey suddenly bellowed, and Norm turned in her direction toward the front door. Cowering there, arms full of groceries, was a small man, maybe five-four, his brown hair slicked over his bald spot, his brown eyes magnified behind a clunky pair of glasses. His jacket was 100% polyester.

Now this, this was the type of man who lived here.

The groceries tumbled out of his hands. TV dinners, mostly. Two boxes of Twinkies. The latest issue of
People.

“On the floor!” demanded Starkey.

The man pressed his face against the issue of
People.
The parakeet squawked. As one of the other agents on scene took out a pair of handcuffs, Norm sauntered over and reached into the back pocket of the man’s chinos, where a wallet noticeably bulged. Norm opened the wallet, took out the man’s license, sighed, and dialed Tom.

“We got a problem.”

From the top floor of Bellum Velum, Tom listened patiently to Norm’s bad news.

“It would have been easy enough to do,” concluded Norm. “Our guy finds someone in the metro area who has the same name as him, and that’s the address he gives.”

“While his real home could be anywhere.” Tom leaned back against the wall. All around him, Agent Cofer’s squad was inventorying the contents of Bellum Velum. Much of this inventory was computer-based, so Agent Cofer was being walked through the firm’s many pass codes by the CFO, Mr. Yates, who Roberta had seen fit to call into the office despite his “flu.” Yates was in his sixties, but had the physique of a monster truck, barely concealed by his brown U.S. Army sweats.

“Thanks, Norm. Do a full sweep anyway. Maybe this patsy knows something. I doubt it, but at this point we’ve got nothing to lose.”

Tom hung up. He hadn’t expected all the cards to fall into place, but surely some of them would. Surely they’d be able to find something of value here, wouldn’t they? Galileo worked for a mercenary company. There had to be some link between his job and his current activities.

“Tell me about Booth,” Tom said to Roberta. She was supervising the agents, instructing them where everything was, the tricks to opening certain file cabinets, etc. Bellum Velum probably looked like every other office in downtown Baltimore, only Tom doubted that the other offices had vaults packed with automatic weapons, body armor, and C-4 (all obtained legally, of course—Roberta had documentation).

She smiled toward him. Her rosy, calm disposition hadn’t faded, not one bit. True, she had been momentarily
fazed downstairs when the agents had swept into the lobby, but she had quickly regained her composure and her confidence. Perhaps it wasn’t a veneer after all. Perhaps Roberta Watson was just that secure in her own skin.

“I wish I could say I knew each of our employees well, Agent Piper, but I just don’t. I remember seeing Henry Booth at our Christmas parties, but that’s about it. As I’ve said, when they’re not in the field, they tend to keep to themselves.”

“The nature of your business being what it is.”

“Exactly.”

Tom wandered over to Yates. His office was austere. Apparently he tended to keep to himself too, although he undoubtedly had other offices in other countries.

“Do you know Henry Booth?”

“Of course I do,” growled Yates, pointing at something on the screen for Agent Cofer’s benefit. “He works for me, doesn’t he?”

“Well, you’re just the chief financial officer. I don’t know what kind of relationship—”

“I own forty percent of the fucking company.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Roberta tells me you called first. Why was that? Did the judge stipulate you try to get this information from us peaceably before he’d issue your warrant? It’s good to know some jurists in this country still actually read the Bill of Rights before using it as toilet paper.”

“Where is Henry Booth?”

“Check his house.”

“We did.”

Yates shrugged his boulder-shoulders.

“That was real clever of you by the way, Piper, what you did.”

“What’s that?”

“Waiting until you were
here
before you invaded
there
. A two-pronged assault. Didn’t give him much of an opportunity to go to ground or for us to shred any incriminating documents.”