But why? What could Rincon offer them?
There was only one answer that made sense: longer life. Some people would do anything for it — especially people in power.
But the numbers didn't add up. Eagleton was middle-aged, sixty years old, give or take a couple of years. According to what Hartman had told them, he would be far too old to have a clone made at his birth. Sixty years ago was before World War II. The concept of cloning wasn't even dreamt of back then. The technology for it was nonexistent. The only people with clones were children of the Lab, in their early thirties.
Like me, he thought.
Jude was at a dead end. He pushed the question aside. It would have to be solved later.
He took another sip and looked at Skyler. He was getting used to seeing him across a bar table.
God, they had been lucky to spot that picture. That one little piece made a whole section of the puzzle fall into place. Eagleton's involvement accounted for the FBI's interest in the case. It explained the phone taps, the agents tracking them in Wisconsin, maybe even the tails he was convinced had been hounding them.
On closer inspection, the discovery raised a question. His old friend Raymond, where did his loyalties lie? He could be anything — friend or foe. Who knew what side he was on? Who knew which side anybody was on?
Jude had a sudden insight. He raised his beer glass and tapped it against Skyler's.
"You know," he said, "this guy Raymond, this FBI guy we were going to meet — he's been after one thing. All along he's been wanting to meet you. He wants to hook up with you. He asked me to bring you to him. And now we know why."
"We do?"
"Certainly. Don't you see? You're the key. You're a Rosetta stone."
"What?"
"It's a stone that helped them decode hierogly—"
"I know what the Rosetta stone is. I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"You're someone who can help them break the code."
Now Jude was speaking faster in his excitement.
"If Eagleton's a member of this group, this conspiracy, then undoubtedly there are others. They're tied into it in some way and for some reason we can't fathom. But nobody on the outside knows who they are. They need to have some way to identify them. And you're it. You're the way. Because you're an eyewitness, don't you see? You saw them all together that day on the island. The whole congregation."
"No kidding. Don't remind me."
"I've been so stupid. Here you are, this font of information, so valuable the FBI is dying to get hold of you, and all this time you're sitting right next to me."
"I'm glad you finally see my value."
"C'mon, this is important."
Jude put down his glass with a bang.
"Don't go away. I'll be right back."
He was gone in a flash, out the front door. He soon returned, having visited a newsstand down the block, a stack of magazines and newspapers under each arm.
He spread them out on the bar and opened them at random. They were chock-full of pictures.
"Here, flip through these. See if anybody looks familiar."
"You're joking."
"No, give it a try."
And while he did, Jude read through The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Mirror, and some other papers.
One bit of news caught his eye. There had been another one of those "body-snatcher murders," the body found mutilated beyond recognition, the visceral organs missing. This one was the third. It had been discovered in a woods in Georgia, not far from the others. The story got good play in the Post, but merited only four graphs in the Times, and he couldn't find it in the Mirror at all.
I'll bet the odds are good that the mutilation includes a quarter-sized piece of flesh missing from the inside right thigh, he thought. And it's typical of the police not to let that information out — they're holding back something they assume is known only by the killer.
Just then Skyler found something of his own. He gave a little cry, not very loud but enough to turn a few heads at the bar stools.
"Here's one," he said, lowering his voice. "Look at this."
The heads at the bar lost interest and turned away.
Jude looked. Skyler's finger was resting on the forehead of an internationally known entrepreneur, an investment banker named Thomas K. Smiley. Smiley had reason to smile: at the age of thirty-five he had invested in a start-up software company. He wasn't the brains behind the company, he was the money behind the brains. It had done well for him in the rat race: it had gotten him out of the starting gate and given him a lead that he'd never squandered. He'd bought up companies left and right, carefully selecting the ones that needed an extra infusion of cash to bring home the prize. He had the Midas touch, and by sixty, his accumulated fortune was comfortably in the nine digits.
The photo showed a handsome man with a widow's peak and a tan, smiling at the opening of a charity ball at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A long-haired socialite hung from his arm.
"I saw him that day. I'm sure of it. He flew down in a small plane. I'd recognize him anywhere — same cut of the jaw, same cocky smile. He expected everyone to wait on him — and they did."
"Bull's-eye. Two down — and God only knows how many to go!"
Two more beers and Jude was dragging Skyler off on his latest brainstorm.
They caught a cab. It was raining, the kind of late-summer halfhearted drizzle that doesn't cut the humidity but just seems to merge with it. Here and there on the sidewalks, umbrellas sprouted.
"So why are we going there?" asked Skyler.
"Oh, just a little stroll through the corridors of our nation's government."
They pulled up at the Capitol and took the tourists' entrance off the main rotunda. It was already late afternoon. A small line waited to go through the metal detector. They were sightseers, weary and short-tempered in dealing with their children, who were pulling on their skirts and pant legs, dangling from their hands and whining.
At first they had no luck. Skyler stared at everyone who walked by. They poked into offices and wandered around the hallways. They pretended to examine busts of famous lawmakers while eavesdropping on lobbyists. They found a reference room and searched the photographs in a bound volume called the congressional directory. They even followed a throng of representatives who led them to an underground electric train, which they took to the Samuel Rayburn Building and back.
Jude was ready to give up, when they noticed that the congressmen seemed to be hurrying though the corridors. A guard explained that a quorum call had been issued for a vote on a budget amendment, the last order of business before Congress would adjourn to start its summer recess. No wonder they were so eager to vote.
The two found their way to the visitors' gallery. Skyler took a front-row seat and peered down from the balcony, just as the speaker gaveled the proceedings to order and asked for a voice vote. A roll call was ordered, and the congressmen could be seen flipping switches at their curved mahogany desks to ignite a tally board off to one side.
Skyler elbowed Jude in the ribs. "That one, down there, fourth row back on the right."
Jude found him. A slightly rotund man with dark-framed glasses and a balding pate shining through a not-very-successful comb-over.
"I think so, but I'm not really sure. I need to face him directly."
They located the man's seat in the printed visitors' guide called "Know Your Congresspeople." It was a seat that belonged to the delegation from Georgia.