"Look . . . Julia. I'm sorry about Goody. I can't tell you how much. I know you two were close. I understand that you panicked, freaked out. But it's time to get back on track. Let's catch his killers, huh? What time can you be here? One? Two?"
"I need more time," she blurted. "I mean, I haven't slept, and I need to get organized." What she really needed was to sort through her notes and memory, then make a definitive decision either to go to the Bureau with her suspicions or to go somewhere else, like directly to the attorney general. She also wanted to give Bonsai time to decrypt the information on the chip.
"Okay. I understand. How about three?"
"Tomorrow morning would be better."
"Tomorrow?" He didn't say anything for a while, then: "Okay, look. You've been through the wringer. Take the day off. Be here first thing in the morning, right? My office."
"Thanks, Ed. See you tomorrow."
"Julia?"
"Yeah?"
"First thing in the morning. I mean it."
She disconnected and set the phone back on the bedside table. She had taken two steps toward the bathroom when it rang again. She picked it up and looked at the caller ID. Private number. Bonsai or Molland again. She pushed the talk button.
"This is Julia."
"We need to talk."
"Who is this?"
"Dr. Parker. Remember? We need to talk," he repeated.
"Parker?" She'd forgotten about leaving her number with him. "What do you mean, we need to talk?"
"Somebody tried to kill me last night. Twice."
"What? Who? No, wait—" Her head was spinning now. She expected Rod Serling to step through the door, calmly introducing the Twilight Zone episode her life had become. Meet Julia Matheson. Lonely federal agent. Her job requires her to think in terms of black and white, in logic and fact. But she's about to discover a place where logic and fact have no meaning. A place called .. . the Twilight Zone.
She said, "Are you where I can call you back in three minutes?"
"A pay phone."
"Give me the number." She memorized it. "Okay, three minutes."
Julia hung up, dug into her purse for coins, and walked in her stocking feet to the pay phone outside the hotel's management office. She dialed the number and dropped in the coins. When Parker answered, she said, "All right, who tried to kill you?"
"Three different people. One of them had a badge."
"A federal agent?"
"A local cop, a sheriff's deputy, I think. Another was a big guy, had a gun with a laser—"
"A gauntlet?"
After a moment, he said, "I didn't see anything like that. But he was fast and moved better than you'd think for a man that size."
"Glasses?"
"Yeah . . . thick black frames. You know this guy?"
"He attacked me last night too. He died in a shootout with the cops."
Parker made a noise that might have been a gasp or murmured profanity. She watched through the office's front window as an old man came out from a back room absently rubbing his chest under a stained T-shirt. He spotted Julia and waved.
Parker said, "So? Can we meet?"
"Me, as a cop?"
"No, not really. Maybe . . . Not officially. I don't know."
She laughed. "I think I know what you mean."
"Just you. No other agents, no cops, no surveillance."
"Just me."
"Okay. Meet us at the Appalachian Cafe on Market Street in Knoxville at—"
"Whoa, whoa. Knoxville?"
"There or nowhere."
"You're afraid of being in Chattanooga?"
"You're not?"
"I'm shaking in my socks. Who's 'we'?"
"My brother. He was with me last night. Noon?"
"Noon it is. Appalachian Cafe." She hung up.
A dozen thoughts tripped over themselves for her attention: the stolen body, the meeting with Parker, his attempted murder, Molland expecting her tomorrow morning . . . She squeezed her eyes shut and willed them all away. Not now, not now. Mentally, she constructed an agenda: shower (yes, long and hot. . . okay, not so long; Knoxville is a two-hour drive), enter the new data into her case journal (skip that, no time), check out of the motel (can't stay anyplace too long), hop a cab to a car rental company to replace her agency car, shoot up to Knoxville.
She went back to her room, stripped off her clothes, and laid them out on the bed. She added Call Mom to her list. Then she stepped into the steaming jets of the shower and let the pounding water wash away her concerns, if only for a short while.
She found a different phone booth to call home. Her
mother sounded tired, but she claimed to be mobile. She insisted she didn't need help. The next call Julia made was to Homecare, the home health agency. The company had a check-in service; a nurse would swing by the duplex every four hours to make sure everything was as it should be. That ought to drive her mom crazy.
thirty-five
Gregor knocked on the observation window until
Karl Litt turned from a biosafety cabinet. His arms were pushed into gloved ports that allowed access to the cabinet's sensitive contents. Gregor motioned and Litt nodded, pulled his arms out, and spoke to a young man standing beside him. A moment later, the laboratory door opened and Litt stepped through.
"A lead on Parker and the Matheson woman," Gregor said as Litt stripped off surgical gloves and smock and dropped them into a bin.
"Can we count on it?"
"Coffee?"
The compound's break room always featured a half pot of vile black sludge. Litt loved the stuff.
Litt nodded and stepped up to a metal door and absently passed his face before a square panel of black glass set in the wall. Behind the glass, an infrared camera scanned his physiognomy, creating a pattern of the invisible heat generated by the blood vessels under the skin. The scanner compared this thermal image with ones filed in its hard drive. Finding a match, it disengaged the door's lock.
When Gregor had first heard of a foolproof identification system that recognized individuals' unique thermal facial patterns—distinguishing even between identical twins—despite aging, cosmetic surgery, and the total absence of light, he had lobbied Litt to get the compound's security doors retrofitted for it. Years earlier, they had agreed to spend the bulk of the organization's financial resources on research and security, and because Litt had recently landed a lucrative contract to supply a Middle Eastern dictator with biochemicals, he had consented to Gregor's request.
They stepped into another corridor, this one much dimmer than the one that serviced the labs. Only one in three fluorescent tubes worked, and many of those sputtered on the brink of death. A dank odor filled the air. In some sections, the "corridors" were nothing more than large, corrugated-metal tubes, dripping water from the rivets and buckling and splitting like overstuffed sausages where earth pushed through. The military base had been abandoned over forty years before and wasn't in the best condition when new. Now it threatened to disintegrate back into the surrounding land, though Gregor knew Litt had done his best to keep it operational.
Falling in step beside the other man, Gregor continued. "The transaction-monitoring people have an affinity agreement with an organization that intercepts telephone transmissions. So, say your subject's away from his usual Internet service provider and uses a credit card number to temporarily tap into a new provider—something that happens frequently, I take it, if the subject suspects his lines are bugged. The transaction-monitoring guys pick up the credit card sale, which includes the new IP address he's using, and that, in turn, is associated with a phone or data line. The phone guys step in and bam, instant bug."