Yes, that was the best course — trust, but verify. Don’t jump to conclusions, but also don’t ignore a message from the dead. Because there was still the plane crash to contend with in the alternative theory Jeffrey was forming: one where his brother had been losing his grip. But the plane crash couldn’t be easily dismissed. That was a major sticking point in the “Keith was a loon” hypothesis.
One thing was clear: If Keith really had been involved in something worth killing over, he clearly hadn’t envisioned how extreme the danger was. Would he have ever gotten onto the plane to Rome if he’d suspected it would be the end of his life? Obviously not. Which meant that he’d misjudged his adversaries. A mistake that had cost him everything.
As his thoughts turned increasingly dark, Jeffrey had a sudden impulse to move, to get out of the condo, to run away and never look back.
Except that given what his brother had warned about, that wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t outrun what you didn’t understand. As Keith had ultimately learned.
Fine. I’ll play along. So think. What can you do? What are the first steps?
If everything was bugged, he was hosed. It would be impossible to do anything.
No. That wasn’t correct. It would be harder, but nothing was impossible.
A sudden ugly idea popped into Jeffrey’s consciousness as he paced in front of the couch. His brother had assumed he was still in San Francisco. And so he had been — until the job offer had come.
The job that had seemed too good to be true. The one that had resulted in him cutting off all his personal contacts back home and moving abruptly to the same city Keith had lived in. Where, presumably, it would be easier to keep an eye on him.
Was that what all this had been about?
Viewed in the light cast by the note, the offer suddenly seemed implausible. Why pay a small fortune for him to move? To offer advice any of hundreds of other experts could have at a fraction of the price? And he’d followed along unquestioningly. Believed the transparent flattery, that he was special and different. They’d played to his vanity and he’d bought it.
He shook his head as if to clear it. Was he going down roads of his own invention now, connecting something that was innocent and unrelated? Becoming paranoid about things that didn’t warrant a nefarious explanation? Following his brother down a rabbit hole where the walls had ears and everyone was out to get him?
Maybe so. Or maybe he was just beginning to see the outline of the truth. Maybe that sinking, anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach was the recognition of veracity.
Whatever the case, he had a problem. The first practical hurdle was that if the warning was accurate, his phone and computer were compromised, as was his car. And if it was the government that Keith had gone up against, Jeffrey could assume that his credit cards and passport were also being used to track him.
The only good news was that up until a few minutes ago, he hadn’t known anything, so he couldn’t slip up or do anything that would alert them.
Them.
The bad guys.
But now he knew. And the only defense he had was to act exactly as he had before. Any deviation, any hint of subterfuge, would alert them, and then he could expect the same fate that had awaited his brother.
So what was he going to do? If his every movement was being monitored?
The answer came to him as he put on his coat and walked through his front door to have another beer — liquid courage to calm his frazzled nerves and help him think.
He would have to hide in plain sight.
Because it would be the last thing that anyone would expect.
NINETEEN
A Feint
The following day, Jeffrey went to work and slogged through his morning, meeting with his staff, responding to emails. At lunchtime he deliberately forgot his phone at the office — he would begin establishing a pattern of being forgetful, starting now. He left his car in the garage and walked to get lunch, trying to detect any surveillance without success. Perhaps after weeks of nothing, he was only being passively watched. After all, he couldn’t have displayed any awareness or suspicion so far, and they were probably convinced that he was exactly what he seemed — Keith’s clueless younger brother, self-involved and self-important, strutting like an ignorant peacock, inflated by his recent success and overblown sense of self-worth.
He bought a sandwich at one of the packed delis a few blocks from the office and quickly ate it, then ducked into an office supply store that had internet access and paid for half an hour of time. His first errand was to do a search on the mysterious professor. It didn’t take long to find mentions of him, but it was more involved to find a physical address or phone number. Eventually he got lucky, and he committed the information to memory before going back to the articles the man had authored decades before.
The professor was principally associated with cattle mutilations from the seventies — a very odd period when thousands of animals had turned up drained of blood, many with their organs missing, and with surgically precise incisions that had been lavishly documented. They’d caused a furor, with public speculation about UFO experimentation and the FBI investigating the possible involvement of Satanic cults. Like most mass hysteria media events, the story had died over time and eventually faded from the public consciousness.
He thought back to the discussion with Becky, about Keith researching the cattle mutilations and becoming obsessed. He’d left the professor’s name, and that was the man’s only claim to fame, so whatever it was that he’d been involved in must have been related. Jeffrey did a quick internet search on relevant sites and found himself swimming in crazyland — every possible variation of conspiracy theory on the planet seemed to have found a home for a while in the savaging of livestock.
Jeffrey browsed through a few, and then navigated to the FBI’s site and read the documents that had been archived, which were exclusively newspaper articles from the period, and of no help other than historical perspective. The investigation had gone nowhere and been quietly closed in the early eighties, when the unusual rash of mutilations ended just as abruptly as it had begun. Apparently the little green men with enough sophistication to build intergalactic spacecraft grew tired of dissecting cows and sheep after a decade, and presumably moved on to abducting trailer park residents.
Try as he might, he couldn’t see any smoking gun, but he was out of time for the day — he didn’t want to raise any eyebrows by deviating from his normal behavior. He stopped at a pay phone on his way back to the office and called the professor’s number, unsure what he was going to say when the man answered, but found himself listening to a message announcing that the number he’d dialed was no longer in service. A part of him wondered whether the professor had also been killed, but he put it aside. It was unlikely that the government was killing retired academics with an interest in cattle. Then again, he mused as he returned to the office, it was also unlikely that it was shooting planes out of the sky and covering it up.
Was that what was happening with Keith’s flight? A cover-up? It certainly seemed so. Already the machine was in gear, spinning theories that the mid-air disappearance was a mechanical failure of some sort, a freak accident whose cause might never be known.
His footsteps pounded on the sidewalk as he approached the office, and he realized that he would have to visit the professor in person if he was going to get any answers. But he would need to do it without leaving any traces, which meant no cell and no car. Hopefully the man was still alive and could bring some clarity to a murky situation.