“I have to protect my sources.”
“From what?” Jeannie knew she should lay off. Nothing was to be gained by antagonizing the press. But the woman’s attitude was insufferable. “As I’ve explained, there’s nothing wrong with my methods and they don’t threaten anyone’s privacy. So why should your informant be so secretive?”
“People have reasons—”
“It looks as if your informant was malicious, doesn’t it?” Even as she said it, Jeannie was thinking, Why should anyone want to do this to me?
“I can’t comment on that.”
“No comment, huh?” she said sarcastically. “I must remember that line.”
“Dr. Ferrami, I’d like to thank you for your cooperation.”
“Don’t mention it,” Jeannie said, and she hung up.
She stared at the phone for a long moment. “Now what the hell was that all about?” she said.
WEDNESDAY
21
BERRINGTON JONES SLEPT BADLY.
He spent the night with Pippa Harpenden. Pippa was a secretary in the physics department, and a lot of professors had asked her out, including several married men, but Berrington was the only one she dated. He had dressed beautifully, taken her to an intimate restaurant, and ordered exquisite wine. He had basked in the envious glances of men his own age dining with their ugly old wives. He had brought her home and lit candles and put on silk pajamas and made love to her slowly until she gasped with pleasure.
But he woke up at four o’clock and thought of all the things that could go wrong with his plan. Hank Stone had been sucking down the publisher’s cheap wine yesterday afternoon; he might just forget all about his conversation with Berrington. If he remembered it, the editors of the New York Times might still decide not to follow up the story. They might make some inquiries and realize there was nothing much wrong with what Jeannie was doing. Or they could simply move too slowly and start looking into it next week, when it would be top late.
After he had been tossing and turning for a while, Pippa mumbled: “Are you all right, Berry?”
He stroked her long blond hair, and she made sleepily encouraging noises. Making love to a beautiful woman was normally consolation for any amount of trouble, but he sensed it would not work now. He had too much on his mind. It would have been a relief to talk to Pippa about his problems—she was intelligent, and she would be understanding and sympathetic—but he could not reveal such secrets to anyone.
After a while he got up and went running. When he returned she had gone, leaving a thank-you note wrapped in a sheer black nylon stocking.
The housekeeper arrived a few minutes before eight and made him an omelet. Marianne was a thin, nervous girl from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. She spoke little English and was terrified of being sent back home, which made her very biddable. She was pretty, and Berrington guessed that if he told her to blow him she would think it was part of her duties as a university employee. He did no such thing, of course; sleeping with the help was not his style.
He took a shower, shaved, and dressed for high authority in a charcoal gray suit with a faint pinstripe, a white shirt, and a black tie with small red dots. He wore monogrammed gold cuff links, he folded a white linen handkerchief into his breast pocket, and he buffed the toecaps of his black oxfords until they gleamed.
He drove to the campus, went to his office, and turned on his computer. Like most superstar academics, he did very little teaching. Here at Jones Falls he gave one lecture per year. His role was to direct and supervise the research of the scientists in the department and to add the prestige of his name to the papers they wrote. But this morning he could not concentrate on anything, so he looked out of the window and watched four youngsters play an energetic game of doubles on the tennis court while he waited for the phone to ring.
He did not have to wait long.
At nine-thirty the president of Jones Falls University, Maurice Obeli, called. “We’ve got a problem,” he said.
Berrington tensed. “What’s up, Maurice?”
“Bitch on the New York Times just called me. She says someone in your department is invading people’s privacy. A Dr. Ferrami.”
Thank God, Berrington thought jubilantly; Hank Stone came through! He made his voice solemn. “I was afraid of something like this,” he said. “I’ll be right over.” He hung up and sat for a moment, thinking. It was too soon to celebrate victory. He had only begun the process. Now he had to get both Maurice and Jeannie to behave just the way he wanted.
Maurice sounded worried. That was a good start. Berrington had to make sure he stayed worried. He needed Maurice to feel it would be a catastrophe if Jeannie did not stop using her database search program immediately. Once Maurice had decided on firm action, Berrington had to make sure he stuck to his resolve.
Most of all, he had to prevent any kind of compromise. Jeannie was not much of a compromiser by nature, he knew, but with her whole future at stake she would probably try anything. He would have to fuel her outrage and keep her combative.
And he must do all that while trying to appear well intentioned. If it became obvious that he was trying to undermine Jeannie, Maurice might smell a rat. Berrington had to seem to defend her.
He left Nut House and walked across campus, past the Barrymore Theater and the Faculty of Arts to Hillside Hall. Once the country mansion of the original benefactor of the university, it was now the administration building. The university president’s office was the magnificent drawing room of the old house. Berrington nodded pleasantly to Dr. Obell’s secretary and said: “He’s expecting me.”
“Go right in, please, Professor,” she said.
Maurice was sitting in the bay window overlooking the lawn. A short, barrel-chested man, he had returned from Vietnam in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. Berrington found him easy to relate to, perhaps because they had a background of military service in common. They also shared a passion for the music of Mahler.
Maurice often wore a harassed air. To keep JFU going he had to raise ten million dollars a year from private and corporate benefactors, and consequently he dreaded bad publicity.
He spun his chair around and rolled to his desk. “They’re working on a big article on scientific ethics, she says. Berry, I can’t have Jones Falls heading that article with an example of unethical science. Half our big donors would have a cow. We’ve got to do something about this.” “Who is she?”
Maurice consulted a scratch pad. “Naomi Freelander. She’s the ethics editor. Did you know newspapers had ethics editors? I didn’t.”
“I’m not surprised the New York Times has one.”
“It doesn’t stop them acting like the goddamn Gestapo. They’re about to go to press with this article, they say, but yesterday they got a tip-off about your Ferrami woman.”
“I wonder where the tip came from?” Berrington said.
“There are some disloyal bastards around.”
“I guess so.”
Maurice sighed. “Say it’s not true, Berry. Tell me she doesn’t invade people’s privacy.”
Berrington crossed his legs, trying to appear relaxed when he was in fact wired taut. This was where he had to walk a tightrope. “I don’t believe she does anything wrong,” he said. “She scans medical databases and finds people who don’t know they’re twins. It’s very clever, as a matter of fact—”
“Is she looking at people’s medical records without their permission?”