“I told Agent Musseridge and Agent Lamont everything I know, too,” Hoagland said. “That took all of five minutes, I’m afraid. There was a time when Catherine and I talked shop every night, but then we had a baby, then a second, and then months would go by without our having time to discuss anything more substantive than the need for more diapers or a half gallon of milk. I don’t have the faintest idea what type of damning information she could have found. Do you?”
Thornton felt like an AA member standing outside a pub. “It’s hard to speculate.”
“I’d be happy with even a half-decent for-instance.”
“Could be anything,” Thornton said, trying to shrug off the subject.
But Hoagland waved for him to go on.
“Well, as chief of staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as I’m sure you know, she read reams of classified material. It’s possible that she happened on a report that wasn’t supposed to be released to the committee, or she could have pieced together something that no one else did when she read reports from two different services who hadn’t shared information.”
Hoagland shook his head. “So far, based on what I’ve heard, the intelligence committee knows less than you.”
“Or they’re keeping it to themselves.”
“Is there someone you suspect?”
“No, not at all. And you can be sure the Bureau will debrief everyone who might know anything, then polygraph anyone they suspect isn’t being forthcoming.”
“The ‘box.’ Do you believe those things work?”
“With a good examiner, they’re effective enough of the time that they’re more than worthwhile.”
“But not nearly as effective as you, I’m betting, after all your experience with politicians and other professional liars.”
“If only that were true. In any case, I don’t have access to the classified material Catherine read that could offer clues. Also I don’t do investigations; I only chronicle them. Most of the time, I’m just sitting around my apartment looking up stuff on the Internet.”
Hoagland stared at the sidewalk. “So what do we do?”
Thornton had no good answer. Seeking to provide a dash of optimism, he said, “It would help to have an idea of what Catherine wanted to tell me.”
“She told me she was going up to New York for a meeting on commercial shipping security. Obviously a cover story, right? That’s what the FBI thinks.”
Thornton shrugged. “You never know.”
“You think it means something?” Hoagland asked.
“It might,” Thornton said, but only because the guy’s wife had just died.
The train doors were closing. Hobbling and stumbling, Thornton leaped into the last car and careened into a bulkhead seat. Without the energy to wriggle free of his coat, let alone stow it in the overhead rack, he sank into the cushions. Watching Union Station recede, he enjoyed the soothing rhythm of the wheels banging the rails. He loosened his tie, let his eyelids sag, and slid eagerly toward sleep.
But the image of Peretti’s younger daughter, Emily, intruded. Her black dress had been much too loose. Was it because it had been a hand-me-down from her big sister? Or because she hadn’t been able to eat for the past five days? Which again made Thornton wonder what the hell Peretti had died trying to tell him.
After a visit to the bar car, he succeeded in sleeping, in a position that would have been unattainable without the three bourbons: legs folded against his chest, the left side of his head against the window, his right hand wrapped around the back of his head.
He woke to a blindingly lit train already parked at Penn Station. He saw just a few passengers, all hurrying onto the platform or up the stairs to the terminal. His skull felt like it had been filled with cement. His limbs were too painful to be merely asleep; they were seemingly poked from within by barbs. In trying to rise, he found himself pitching forward. He grabbed the headrest on the seat in front of him. The only other passenger still aboard, an elderly woman at the other end of the aisle, shot him a disapproving look.
Propping himself into an upright position, he released the headrest. His right ring finger stung, and when he looked at it, he noticed a slight depression in the base of the fingertip. He wrapped the hand around the back of his head, placing the ring finger where it had spent the last couple of hours of the train ride. There was a small lump there, behind his left ear. Something beneath the skin. A sebaceous cyst, he guessed. Normal and utterly harmless. He’d had five or six of them over the years.
This one was unusually symmetrical, though. Like a Tic Tac. An absorbable suture? Probably not. It was nowhere near the incision.
He propelled himself to the end of the aisle and jerked open the sticky sliding door to the small bathroom. A fluorescent cylinder above the mirror rattled on, revealing mustard yellow plastic walls imprinted with tiny fleurs-de-lis. He angled his head and folded his left ear forward to get a view of the lump. But even when he stretched the skin as far as he could, he saw no sign of the thing. Given the same treatment, a sebaceous cyst would be as plain as a rivet.
He detached a square of toilet tissue, moistened a corner with a drop of water, and adhered the soft paper to the area behind his left ear. Next he pulled at the corners of the square to conform it to his head. Then he squirted spearmint-green liquid soap from the dispenser and painted it onto the square, directly over the lump. He hoped to produce an impression of whatever was in his scalp.
When he held the paper up to the light, he saw a pale green image of a capsule with staplelike handles top and bottom and a perfect circle rising from the center of its face.
7
Beryl Mallery wanted Gordon Langlind’s Senate seat.
“How do you explain the Dutchman?” Langlind asked her during their debate, three days before the election.
She didn’t know who the Dutchman was, and she had a bad feeling that she should. No doubt Langlind was trying to shift the discussion from California’s high rate of unemployment to his favorite topic, her personal life, which he had attacked viciously and explicitly throughout the campaign.
From the moment she entered the race, Mallery recognized that her “John Does”—Langlind’s designation for the men she’d dated — posed a liability. She hadn’t been lucky in love. Or, as the tabloids put it, she “got around.” Was that illegal? No. Immoral? According to the experts on the all-star campaign team she’d assembled, hypocrisy was the only moral transgression voters couldn’t abide. So at the announcement of her candidacy, she acted preemptively, telling reporters, “As you may know, I’m thirty-six and I’m single. My opponent will disregard the multibillion-dollar online dating service I built from my dorm room and try to position the fact that I’m one of my best customers so that it disqualifies me from the Senate. Here, in my view, are the real issues …”
Afterward, she opened her personal life to her campaign team, urging them to claw through it as if she were their opponent. They identified forty-eight John Does she’d dated for longer than dinner and eleven others who might be influenced by Langlind to declare her a deviant. Fortunately, none of the men held a grudge, and her team gained their endorsements.
But evidently the team had missed someone.
The Dutchman?
Had she ever met a Dutchman? Had she ever known anyone from Holland for that matter? Business took her all over the globe, often, so she had probably shaken hands with dozens of Dutchmen. Just none she could recall.