“Yes, it is now,” the Assistant Special Agent in charge of the New York field division told his subordinate. “Gus Werner started this one off, and he’s keeping a personal eye on the case file. So, talk to the FCI guys and get them to help you cover the P.O. box.”
Sullivan nodded and concealed his surprise. “Okay, will do.”
“Next, what about the Bannister case?”
“That’s not going anywhere at the moment. The closest thing to a hit we’ve gotten to this point is the second interview with this Kirk Maclean guy. He acted a little antsy. Maybe just nerves on his part, maybe something else-we have nothing on him and the missing victim, except that they had drinks and talked together at this bar uptown. We ran a background on him. Nothing much to report. Makes a good living for Horizon Corporation he’s a biochemist by profession, graduated University of Delaware, master’s degree, working toward a doctorate at Columbia. Belongs to some conservation groups, including Earth First and the Sierra Club, gets their periodicals. His main hobby is backpacking. He has twenty-two grand in the bank, and he pays his bills on time. His neighbors say he’s quiet and withdrawn, doesn’t make many friends in the building. No known girlfriends. He says he knew Mary Bannister casually, walked her home once, no sexual involvement, and that’s it, he says.”
“Anything else?” the ASAC asked.
“The flyers the NYPD handed out haven’t developed into anything yet. I can’t say that I’m very hopeful at this point.”
“What’s next, then?”
Sullivan shrugged. “In a few more days we’re going back to Maclean to interview him again. Like I said, he looked a little bit hinky, but not enough to justify coverage on him.”
“I talked to this Lieutenant d’Allessandro. He’s thinking there might be a serial killer working that part of town.”
“Maybe so. There’s another girl missing, Anne Pretloe’s her name, but nothing’s turning on that one either. Nothing for us to work with. We’ll keep scratching away at it,” Sullivan promised. “If one of them’s out there, sooner or later he’ll make a mistake.” But until he did, more young women would continue to disappear into that particular black hole, and the combined forces of the NYPD and the FBI couldn’t do much to stop it. “I’ve never worked a case like this before.”
“I have,” the ASAC said. “The Green River killer in Seattle. We put a ton of resources on that one, but we never caught the mutt, and the killings just stopped. Maybe he got picked up for burglary or robbing a liquor store, and maybe he’s sitting it out in a Washington State prison, waiting to get paroled so he can take down some more hookers. We have a great profile on how his brain works, but that’s it, and we don’t know what brain the profile fits. These cases are real head-scratchers.”
Kirk Maclean was having lunch just then, sitting in one of the hundreds of New York delicatessens, eating egg salad and drinking a cream soda.
“So?” Henriksen asked.
“So, they came back to talk to me again, asking the same fuckin’ questions over and over, like they expect me to change my story.”
“Did you?” the former FBI agent asked.
“No, there’s only one story I’m going to tell, and that’s the one I prepared in advance. How did you know that they might come to me like this?” Maclean asked.
“I used to be FBI. I’ve worked cases, and I know how the Bureau operates. They are very easy to underestimate, find then they appear-no, then you appear on the scope, and they start looking, and mainly they don’t stop looking until they find something,” Henriksen said, as a further warning to this kid.
“So, where are they now?” Maclean asked. “The girls, I mean.”
“You don’t need to know that, Kirk. Remember that. You do not need to know.”
“Okay.” Maclean nodded his submission. “Now what?”
“They’ll come to see you again. They’ve probably done ii background check on you and-”
“What’s that mean?”
“Talk to your neighbors, coworkers, check your credit history, your car, whether you have tickets, any criminal convictions, look for anything that suggests that you could be a bad guy,” Henriksen explained.
“There isn’t anything like that on me,” Kirk said.
“I know.” Henriksen had done the same sort of check himself. There was no sense in having somebody with a criminal past out breaking the law in the name of the Project. The only black mark against him was Maclean’s membership in Earth First, which was regarded by the Bureau almost as a terrorist-well, extremist organization. But all Maclean did with that bunch was to read their monthly newsletter. They had a lot of good ideas, and there was talk in the Project about getting some of them injected with the “B” vaccine, but they had too many members whose ideas of protecting the planet were limited to driving nails into trees, so that the buzz saws would break. That sort of thing only chopped up workers in sawmills and raised the ire of the ignorant public without teaching them anything useful. That was the problem with terrorists, Henriksen had known for years. Their actions never matched their aspirations. Well, they weren’t smart enough to develop the resources they needed to be effective. You had to live in the economic eco-structure to believe that, and they just couldn’t compete on that battlefield. Ideology was never enough. You needed brains and adaptability, too. To be one of the elect, you had to be worthy. Kirk Maclean wasn’t really worthy, but he was part of the team. And now he was rattled by the attention of the FBI. All he had to do was stick to his story. But he was shook up, and that meant he couldn’t be trusted. So, they’d have to do something about it.
“Get your stuff packed. We’ll move you out to the Project tonight.” What the hell, it would be starting soon anyway. Very soon, in fact.
“Good,” Maclean responded, finishing his egg salad. Henriksen was eating pastrami, he saw. Not a vegan. Well, maybe someday.
Artwork was finally going up on some of the blank walls. So, Popov thought, the facility wasn’t to be entirely soulless. It was nature paintings-mountains, forests, and animals. Some of the pictures were quite good, but most of them were ordinary, the kind of thing you found on the walls of cheap motels. How strange, the Russian thought, that with all the money they’d spent to build this monstrous facility in the middle of nowhere, that the artwork was second-rate. Well, taste was taste, and Brightling was a technocrat, and doubtless uneducated in the finer aspects of life. In ancient times he would have been a druid, Dmitriy thought, a bearded man in a long white robe who worshiped trees and animals and sacrificed virgins on stone altars to his pagan beliefs. There were better things to do with virgins. There was such a strange mixture of the old and the new in this man-and his company. The director of security was a “vegan,” who never ate meat? What rubbish! Horizon Corporation was a world leader in several vital new technological areas, but it was peopled by madmen of such primitive and strange beliefs. He Supposed it was an American affectation. Such a huge country, the brilliant coexisting with the mad. Brightling was a genius, but he’d hired Popov to initiate terrorist incidents-
-and then he’d brought Popov here. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought about that as he chewed his dinner. Why here? What was so special about this place?
Now he could understand why Brightling had shrugged off the amount he’d transferred to the terrorists. Horizon corporation had spent more paving one of the access roads than all the money Popov had taken from the corporate coffers and translated into his own. But this place was important. You could see that in every detail, down
the revolving doors that kept the air inside-every door,, ay he’d seen was like some sort of air lock, and made him think of a spacecraft. Not a single dollar had been spared make this facility perfect. But perfect for what?
Popov shook his head and sipped at his tea. The quality of the food was excellent. The quality of everything was excellent, except the absurdly pedestrian artwork. There was, therefore, not a single mistake here. Brightling was not the sort of man to compromise on anything, was he? Therefore, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich told himself, everything acre was deliberate, and everything fit into a pattern, from which he could discern the purpose of the building and the man who’d erected it. He’d allowed himself to be beguiled this day with his tour-and his physical examination? What the hell was that all about? The doctor had given him an injection. A “booster” he’d called it. But what for? Against what? Outside this shrine to technology was a mere farm, and outside that, wild animals, which his driver of the day had seemed to worship.