He released the hand he wanted to hold fast forever.
“Hello, Rip,” said Jennifer Red Cloud. “Whatever it is, it must be important to drag you away from your ocean scows and society cows. Sit down and tell Mother all about it.”
“I’m sorry I’m so pressing,” Forte began, “but-”
“Don’t apologize-you’re always pressing, as I remember so well from our last meeting.”
“Yes, well-” Forte hurried on, “I’m here on a matter of national security, and I need your help.”
“I thought you’d already taken from me everything you wanted.”
Forte ran his calloused hand over his near-bald head. This was going to be worse than he thought. No matter what he said, she was going to bend it into a spear to skewer him with. “Look, Red, I know how you feel, but-”
“I should hope so, especially where the butt is concerned.”
“Hey-can we get off this subject?”
“And onto the four-poster, do you mean?”
Manuel saved him. The old Filipino retainer brought in a tray with a silver coffee service and put it on the low table between them. He kept his eyes averted from Rip-ley Forte, the wild man who, when they last met at Mrs. Red Cloud’s Tokyo home, had threatened to kill him when he had answered her cry for help, before Forte had disappeared upstairs with madam across his shoulder.
Jennifer Red Cloud poured coffee into one of those paper-thin china cups Texans hate worse than quiche, and handed it to Forte. He put it gently on the table, fearful it would disintegrate on contact with his hand.
“Why did you come here, Ripley?” said Mrs. Red Cloud, now all business, in one of her mercurial changes of mood.
“Like I said, it’s a matter of-”
“National security. You said that. Get to the point. I am a busy woman.”
Forte described the disappearance of the seventeen first-rate researchers and graduate students, how the FBI and CIA assumed they had defected en masse to the Russians, how he had learned that the Russians planned a sneak offensive against North America that would without question destroy them all.
Mrs. Red Cloud nodded. “I fail to understand your concern. You’ll lose your billions, to be sure, but after the Russians deploy their laughing gas, you’ll die happy. Would you rather die miserable?”
“I don’t intend to die either way just now.”
“You mentioned needing my help, I believe.”
“That’s right. I am convinced that those seventeen men and women didn’t defect to Russia. None had any problems defection would help. The logistics of spiriting seventeen people out of the country would be formidable; none was sighted at any point of departure. Yet it is apparent that their researches are in the possession of the Russians, who are using them to wage a particularly sneaky kind of war against us.”
“Yes, yes, you said that,” said Mrs. Red Cloud impatiently. “Tell me where I come in, before I tell you where you can go out.”
“The seventeen have been traced to El Centro. To your recently acquired ROR facility, in fact.”
“Oh, I see. I am collaborating with the Russians now.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Near enough. Now stop talking to me as if I were a fool and listen. I was approached by a government official with impeccable references, asking to use my El Centro facility for secret work. I agreed. When the disappearance of the seventeen scientists was made public, I assumed, naturally, that they were the ones at El Centro, and the government had good reason not to divulge their whereabouts.”
“When did you see them last?”
“I never did see them, actually. Had no reason to.”
“So, far as you know, they’re still at El Centro?”
“No longer. Around the middle of last month, my government contact informed me that their researches had been successfully completed and the team disbanded.”
“When?”
“The day before, I believe.”
“Can you be more precise?”
Jennifer Red Cloud spoke into the intercom, and a moment later her secretary produced a leather-bound diary. Red Cloud flipped through the pages. “The researchers left on June 15. Now maybe you’ll tell me why you think all this is significant.”
Forte reached for his coffee cup, thought better of it, and leaned back in his chair. “I was in El Centro this morning. Made some inquiries. I found, for example, that the food was catered.”
“So?”
“I spoke with the chef at the Barbara Worth Hotel, from which the catered food was dispatched three times daily. I asked whether the food was sent out in individual portions, or whether it was served out family style, thinking to get a check on the number of people served. It figured out to about twenty to twenty-five portions, which is what you’d expect seventeen young people to eat.”
“How shrewd of you!” said Red Cloud, her voice throbbing with synthetic wonder.
“Then I asked if the people requested any special food. Oh, yes, he said, they ordered hamburgers and dogs and fries, pizza, and lots of soft drinks and sugary desserts. Again, what you’d expect of a bunch of young folk. Finally I asked him when he made the last delivery of food. He said it was on 28 May. So I was wondering, what did they eat between that date and 15 June?”
Jennifer Red Cloud sat transfixed. Anger suffused her face. The seventeen young scientists had left the El Centro facility more than two weeks earlier than David D.
Castle claimed. Why did David lie? Obviously because it gave him two weeks in which-to-do whatever he wanted to do with the seventeen, who had not been seen since. All sorts of unpleasant thoughts assailed Jennifer Red Cloud. But among them was one certainty: David had lied to her about their departure date, and if he’d lied to her about that, he could just as easily have lied about everything else.
“You’ve been taken, haven’t you?” Forte asked quietly.
She nodded. “Not for the first time,” she said grimly. “But, I promise you, for the last.”
“Who was it?”
She shook her head. “You’ll know soon enough. All I can say is-”
Her words were cut short by the striking of six bells on the Apache’s bridge.
Before the sound of the last bell died away, the salon door opened and a woman in a white nurse’s uniform stepped across the combing. In her arms was a baby, swathed in a blue blanket. When she saw that Mrs. Red Cloud had a visitor, she blurted an apology and started back through the doorway.
“That’s all right, Carmen,” Mrs. Red Cloud said. “Mr. Forte is a friend.”
The nurse smiled shyly and brought the baby to where Mrs. Red Cloud sat. She took the baby tenderly in her arms and smiled down at the restless child. Carmen hurried from the salon.
Mrs. Red Cloud unzipped the front of her caftan, revealing a swelling breast to which the infant immediately attached itself, punching with both tiny hands.
Forte sat speechless, his jaw sagging foolishly.
“I guess you’d have found out sooner or later that I had a child, Rip.”
“But I-I-”
“And your natural curiosity would have brought you blundering into my life again. Well, now that you’re here, take a good look, because this is the last you’re going to see, for a very long time, of your son-Ripley Forte, Jr.”
18. BLACK MAGIC
15 JULY 2009
“David?”
“My dear, how wonderful of you to call.”
“I hope you don’t change your mind after we switch to scramble code 1137.”
“Switching.” The vice-president punched in the code. “But frankly,” he said in a ponderous attempt at gallantry, “I’d be flattered if everybody knew that the most desirable woman in the world wanted to talk with me.”
“You bet I do,” Jennifer Red Cloud said crisply. “And I’ll get right to the point. An hour ago… This line is secure, by the way?”
“Checked out by the Secret Service this very morning, my dear Jennifer. Nobody here but you and me.”
“Good. As I was saying, this afternoon Ripley Forte dropped in-I’m calling from the Apache, by the way, off Catalina Island-and raised a very interesting question about garden paths.”
“Garden paths?”
“Yes. The questions he asked made me wonder whether you haven’t been leading me down one.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“He tried to pump me about what was going on at El Centro. I got the impression he thought I was set up.”
“Did Forte tell you that?” Castle said sharply.
“Not exactly. But the hints he dropped would have squashed a fair-sized elephant. He was wondering aloud whether the people in El Centro were the seventeen missing scientists.”
“What did you tell him?” Castle asked tensely.
“Not a damned thing. It’s none of his business, after all-or is it?”
“Certainly not!”
“That’s what I told him-that it was none of his business what Raynes Oceanic Resources does. Well, he got a little huffy and said that he had some good leads he intended to run down, and I told him to run as much as he pleased, so long as it was in the other direction. He started to go, but then it occurred to me I’d better talk with you before he stuck his big hoof into your secret government project.”