"Oh, they have, they have," said Ford. "I've seen it. They burn candles before old Mayan carvings. They hold crucifixes but chant in Tlaxclen."
"See! It's all falling into place, Doc. Meeting you, hearing about those sharks, my brain coming back to life. It's like preordained, man. Don't doubt for a second that everything in this world happens at exactly the right time. It all falls into place, just waiting on us to come along. I know. " Tomlinson looked at the horizon and sniffed. "Karma's my business. Now I just need to get my hands on a copy of that damn book."
"You make it sound like it won't be easy." Speaking as if uninformed, but Ford knew that it wouldn't be easy. Now, in fact, it might be impossible.
"Maybe not. But academicians stick together, man. Flash the right credentials, see the right people. The Masaguan government will have to release that book someday."
"If the government has it."
"What? I had all the latest data on the screen yesterday, man. Supposedly they keep it in the Presidential Palace, locked up. Like a national treasure, proud enough to show it off, but too ashamed to let anyone translate it. You know something you're not telling me?"
Ford had hardly touched his evening quart of beer, but now he took a long drink. He knew something, but he wasn't going to risk telling Tomlinson. Not yet. He knew the Kin Qux Cho was no longer in the Presidential Palace. He knew that Pilar Santana Fuentes Balserio had been the graduate student who, eight years before, had discovered the significance of the book. And he knew that it was Pilar, working with an accomplice, who had stolen it.
It happened the night before he left Masagua. He had been the accomplice.
NINE
Harry Bernstein didn't call Monday morning from Masagua, but Ford got a nice surprise from Sally Field: a package, Federal Express, with computer cross-checks on every name he'd given her. She must have gone into the office immediately after he called and worked on her own time. A nice gesture, worth a lot more than just a dinner. Ford took the package inside and sat down with iced tea to read.
Almost everyone in America over the age of twenty-one is listed in some computer bank somewhere. Check those data centers one by one and they might produce a line or a paragraph. Access the facilities Sally had at her disposal, though, and even an innocuous law-abiding wallpaper salesman would produce half a page. Her sources were the best in the world, the sum of intelligence resources and data centers from around the globe.
Mario DeArmand was no wallpaper salesman. There were two pages of him, staccato nonsentences and figures. Before he became sheriff of Everglades County, DeArmand had been involved in pyramid schemes. Herbal Foods; Rags-to-Real Estate—two scam corporations disguised as multilevel marketing companies. They bought late-night television time to drum Herbal Food distributorships and their get-rich-quick real estate courses to poor schmucks who never stopped to think: If these people are making so much money selling health food and real estate, why do they want competition from me?
DeArmand had been investigated for tax fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the public, but had always found a way to buy his way out. When the quack food business got too hot, DeArmand and his partners pooled the rich profits and bought an island in Florida: Sandy Key.
That brought Ford to a sheaf of papers with information about Sealife Development Corporation. Sally's computer sources had provided a list of stockholders, lien holders, board members, and the board members of Sealife s parent company, Seaboard Marketing Unlimited. Most of the data was useless— but not all of it. It provided him with the link he was looking for, the connection through the maze work.
The most reassuring information was on Tomlinson. Tomlinson did, indeed, have a doctorate from Harvard—this after graduating summa cum laude, a year at the Sorbonne, and spending two days in the Suffolk County jail for refusing to pay more than a thousand dollars in parking tickets. His family had also had him committed to Cook County Sanitarium for six months—why, it didn't say. More important to Ford, Sally had noted at the bottom of Tomlinson's dossier: Never worked for us or anyone else here.
If Sally was right it meant Tomlinson had not been sent to Florida to keep an eye on him.
Ford needed someone smart and clean. But was Sally right?
When he could wait no longer for Bernstein to call, he got in his pickup truck and headed for Sandy Key and Rafe Hollins's funeral. He drove across the causeway, then turned south onto U.S. 41, a six-lane Cuisinart where bad drivers from all over the nation gathered to tailgate and rush only to wait impatiently at the next light; unhappy travelers as driven as their automobiles. Here was the asphalt essence of everything bad Florida had to offer: a fast highway of Big Macs, furniture warehouses, trailer parks, disco drunk factories, and used car lots with pennants sagging; an unbroken strip of tacky, plasticized commerce stretching two hundred miles from Tampa to Naples, jammed with traffic that slowed only when sirens screamed and ambulances came to strap the broken and bleeding onto stretchers and cart them away.
Ford hated it.
He endured the rush for about six miles, then turned east onto a back road. Then for thirty miles it was pastureland, phosphate heaps, and cypress heads rising cool in the distance. Crossbred Brahman cattle stood swatting themselves in the heat while vultures hunched on wires above, awaiting road kill. This was backcountry Florida: sun-bleached sawgrass and sulfur swamps, citrus groves and oak hammocks; land of stars and bars, country music and four-wheel-drive cowboys. Ford drove along at a pleasant 55, arm out the window, waving at anyone who seemed friendly, drawing his arm in when dumpsters screamed past leaving their haze of phosphate dust. Then he turned west again, crossed Highway 41 with its smell of hot asphalt and hamburgers, and for twenty miles it was trailer parks or stucco apartments and fields of smoldering slash pine where the bulldozers had come in and scraped the land bare, making room for more apartments, more development.
Years ago, he had traveled this road many times, but now he recognized nothing. He was not surprised. Florida wasn't just growing, it was exploding. People were moving into the state at a rate of about a thousand a day, seven thousand new residents a week, packing their lives into U-Hauls, turning their backs on the dying industries of the Midwest and heading sunward. The gush of transplants was making a few developers happy, making a bunch of investors and lawyers wealthy, but making fools out of just about everyone else. The love of money kept people in the development trade yammering for more zoning changes, and the fear of money inspired local commissioners to grant the changes. Never mind that the demand on Florida's already waning water supply was increasing by about a half-million gallons a week. Never mind the number of cars on the already jammed highways was increasing by about twenty thousand a month. And never mind how out-of-control growth was affecting schools or impacting on the environment because, hell, all growth was good; growth meant money—just ask the elected officials struggling to make their towns into carbon copies of Miami. Too few public servants had the foresight, or the courage, to say what was really true: that allowing growth to be self-limiting was the very worst form of carrion-feeder economics. It was a get-it-quick-before-it-rots philosophy that promised long-term disaster even more surely than short-term profits. Only three things limited growth naturally: crime, decay, and overpopulation. Most politicians didn't have the courage to say it, and too many voters didn't give a damn because Florida wasn't their state anyway, not really. Wasn't anything their grandkids were going to be stuck with. They were really New Yorkers or Hoosiers or Buckeyes; just happened to be living here for a while, that's all. Besides, Florida was just an old whore who was going to be picked clean no matter what, so why not get in line, make some quick money?