“Hey, Harv, snap a few of the beard at table fifteen in the back. I got a feeling.”
“Yeah, I noticed him, too. Wonder who’s watching the farm while he’s here?”
Harvey stepped away, shooting toward the stage, disconnecting any attention to the beard with the interaction he and Dennis just displayed. A minute later, he casually turned and snapped the shot with a long telephoto lens from across the room. No one even noticed at the beard’s table.
As the event came to a close, Miles Taggert was barraged by do-gooders and well wishers wanting to connect with the man of the hour and bask in his glow. Dennis and his three men formed a Secret Service — style perimeter around Taggert. People were shaking his hand or speaking to Miles over, under, or through his or his men’s outstretched arms. As they proceeded toward the door, the people at table fifteen approached to congratulate Taggert. Dennis noticed the beard moving closer. He spent half his attention on him but continued to scan the rest of the crowd. After all, the cost of being wrong about the beard could be a dead Miles Taggert.
When the beard moved in a little too close for comfort, Dennis applied his considerable weight and muscle behind his request. “Do you want to step back, please?” As he placed his hand on the beard’s torso to accentuate his command, he detected something hard. He immediately called out to Benton and Davis, “He’s packing!” The two bodyguards immediately formed a barrier between him and Taggert. Harv proceeded to usher Miles out unceremoniously, a move the rest of the partygoers and admirers considered downright rude.
Dennis looked the beard in the eyes. He sensed a coldness and distance that gave him more impetus to further invade the man’s space. “Keep your hands at your side. Step to the rear of the room please.”
The beard stood frozen with a look of confusion on his face; his body stance hinted at the desire to run, but the combined girth of Mallory and Benton effectively sealed the tiny opening between tables in which he would have to pass. Their cop’s sixth sense, turning on all eight cyclinders, they moved on the beard as one. The man’s one second of hesitation was not tolerated well by the former cop who was used to having his wishes granted — one-way or the other. He chose the other. Benton got hold of the beard’s arm. Swinging him around, he grabbed the collar of his shirt as Dennis reached behind his rumpled sport coat only to find … a Blackberry. Steered by Benton’s hand on his belt and collar, the beard was thrust up against a column as Dennis continued patting him down, and then spun him around announcing, “He’s clean.” Dennis handed him back his digital palm-thingy and asked to see his identification.
“Are you cops?” the beard asked.
“Don’t worry about us, pal, worry about your situation,” Benton said.
“You aren’t cops, and you have no right to search me. I am leaving now and if you try to stop me I will have you brought up on charges.” With that, the beard adjusted his wrinkled and frayed sport coat. He tucked his checkered shirt into his faded, black jeans. Those second-hand-store Levis didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, go with the old, brown dirt-caked walking shoes that had seen better days. Definitely not the ensemble one wears to a high-society shindig.
That night, Tom (aka the beard, aka Voyeurger) went home and got online. The scuffle with Taggert’s security guards made a choice he had been agonizing over for the past week easier. The path of least resistance was the key to success. Those bonehead security jerks had proven a little too resistant to his plan to strike out for the cause.
Voyeurger: My primary target is too well protected. I had to abort.
SABOT: That is a shame.
Voyeurger: I will move on to target two.
SABOT: Keep me informed.
Voyeurger: Will do.
A day later, Dennis received a call from the Waldorf’s head of security. A .25 caliber Saturday night special was found taped under a table in the ballroom. Table fifteen.
“Son of a bitch!” was Harv’s reaction as he fished out six pictures of the beard from his desk drawer and headed to the scanner.
The bitmapped printout of the beard was forwarded to Joe Palumbo’s desk from the New York office. His decision to help out a cop who helped him one July day fifteen years ago was an idea that was starting to look better and better.
At Joe’s direction, the bureau immediately input the picture into their image recognition system. There it was compared and cross-checked with millions of National Crime Information Center pictures, as well as hundreds of thousands more from other world police organizations. Unfortunately, the NCIC computers didn’t make a high-confidence match. Joey knew that if every state department of motor vehicles had digitized photographs for every driver’s license in their database, the search would have been almost foolproof. But, that was a political issue. Although the mood of the nation was in favor of tightening up a little on personal liberties since 9/11, state DMVs fell under the issue of state’s rights, a thorny constitutional issue in the best of times.
At his office at GlobalSync, Dennis Mallory conducted a meeting of his team. He had already handed out six different computer projections of the beard — without his beard, with different hair colors, with and without glasses, and other options.
Benton spoke for the team. “Dennis, go home. We know how to do all this. You should be home, waiting for word, or at the hospital.”
“I know, but I can’t do nothing there but just sit around feeling helpless. Normally they do this while you’re awake — it’s amazing. But Cynthia is claustrophobic. The machine they’re using is more intimidating than an MRI, and she can’t last ten seconds in one of those. So they sedated her, she should be up in a few hours. So I figured …”
“You figured you’d break our balls a little. Listen, Miles will chopper straight to the house in the Hamptons tonight. Harv gets there an hour ahead. I am in the copter with him and then he’s nestled tight for the weekend. So forget about this and go be there when Cynthia comes out of it. Send her all our love, too.”
“Thanks. I hate feeling useless. This whole thing is just … well, thanks guys, if anything shakes call me.”
Alone in the elevator, Dennis started reviewing the events of the last few weeks. Miles had proven to be a man of, and beyond, his word. He took up Cynthia’s cause as though she was his own mother. Today, three of the world’s top radiotherapists were at her side, employing a technique the Detective Endowment Association medical plan wouldn’t cover. They used 201 beams of deadly radiation. Each beam’s dose was a minute fraction of the strength that healthy tissue would find lethal. By using computers and other gizmos, the beams would then converge somewhere within her head. At that intersection, their strengths would combine and affect only the targeted blood vessels that made up her AVM. That made this “gamma knife” technique a kind of sharpshooter picking off the dangerously abnormal blood vessels in crowds of healthy ones. The process was very expensive and not an easy list to get on. Once again, were it not for Miles Taggert’s substantial weight as a benefactor to the university and his subsequent clout with the directors, doctors, and companies responsible for the Stereotactic thingamajig, they would not be involved with this level of medicine at all.
From Dennis’s side of the bargain, the guys had all been doing a good job. With the big exception of letting the beard slip through their fingers, their police work was flawless. Now, if Cynthia had a good outcome with this procedure, she will have avoided the invasive brain surgery that, with her other conditions, would almost certainly be fatal, and all this would have been worth it.