Jericho Iteration

12

(Friday, 12:52 A.M.)

When the meeting was over, Mike Farrentino escorted me out of the Stadium Club. We didn’t say anything to each other while we rode the elevator down to the ground level, and once we had cleared the guarded front foyer I turned to walk away from the stadium.

“Hey, Rosen!” he called out. “Wait up a minute!”

I turned back around, hands shoved in the pockets of my jacket, and waited for him to walk over to me. “Need a lift back to your place?” he asked. “I got my car parked over here.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll hoof it. It’s not far.” Nor was a ride necessary. Barris had assured me that I now had safe conduct on the streets after curfew, so long as I played by his rules. He had given me a laminated plastic card before I left and told me to carry it on my person at all times; it was printed with the ERA logo, and Barris told me if I was stopped or questioned by an ERA patrol, I was to show them the card. Sort of like getting a hall pass from the principal.

The plaza was almost empty now, save for a few troopers manning the barricades. Most of the LAVs I had seen earlier had vanished, presumably off patrolling various parts of the city. The downtown area somehow looked very peaceful: no traffic on the streets, no city noises, only the faint twitter of night birds in the branches of the elm trees, abruptly broken by the low moan of an Apache coming in for a landing within the stadium walls.

Farrentino looked up at the chopper as it flew low overhead. “How much of that do you believe?” he asked in a soft voice, casting a glance at the ERA soldier standing guard near the Stadium Club entrance. “I mean, how much of that was bullshit or what?”

I hesitated. I had my opinions, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to trust them to a cop. “I don’t know, Lieutenant,” I said carefully. “You’re the one who’s been investigating this mess, so you tell me.”

“Mike,” he said. “My friends call me Mike-”

“And so I’m your friend now, huh, Mike?” I looked him straight in the eye. “Most of my friends wouldn’t have my door kicked down and have me dragged off in the middle of the night.”

“Whoa, fella. Chill off.” He held his hands up defensively. “The colonel ordered the raid, not me. I simply reported that the evidence bag had been tampered with and that the disk was missing and that you were the most likely suspect. He was the one who sent in the goon squad …”

“Yeah, sure, Mike. Have a nice night.” I started to turn away again, but then he grabbed me by the arm. Before I could do anything, he pulled something out of his raincoat pocket and held it out to me.

It was Joker. “I got it out of the impoundment room when I went to take a leak,” he explained. “You should be getting the rest of your junk back sometime tomorrow.”

I took Joker from his hand and studied it. The PT didn’t look as if it had been tampered with-even the mini-disk was still in drive-but I couldn’t be sure until I had Jah run it through a full diagnostic. “Thanks,” I said as I slipped the little ’puter in my jacket pocket. “I’ll catch you later-”

“Look, Gerry,” he said, his voice almost a whisper now, “I know you don’t believe this, but …”

He hesitated. “Things aren’t always what they seem, y’know what I mean? I don’t think Barris and McLaughlin gave either of us the full lowdown. In fact, I don’t think this Payson-Smith character is the mad scientist they made him out to be.”

“Yeah?” The night was getting cold; I zipped up the front of my jacket. “And what do you think is the full lowdown?”

“I don’t know yet. All I know is, I smell a rat.” He paused, looking over his shoulder again. “You may not believe this,” he went on, “but truth is, not everyone in authority is crazy about ERA. We might have a lot of problems in St. Louis right now, but we don’t need tanks and helicopters to get them fixed.” He shrugged. “They’re only making things worse …”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, “but that still doesn’t make me trust you. So far as I can tell, you’re just a big swinging dick with a badge.”

Farrentino turned red, but he nodded his head. “I understand that, but let me tell you … there’s some bigger swinging dicks out there who are getting out of line, and I don’t trust them any more than you trust me.”

I looked into his face and saw only honesty. He was no longer a homicide detective and I was no longer a reporter; we were now only two men who had seen a lot of crazy shit go down in recent months and were scared by what was happening to our hometown. I’ve never been the greatest fan of the SLPD as a whole, but I knew that there were individual cops who did care about their line of work, who weren’t just playing out old cop-show fantasies of busting heads and breaking down doors. Mike Farrentino might be one of these guys.

And besides, I had a weird hunch I wanted to follow up on …

“You say you got a car parked around here?” I asked. He nodded. “Want to give me a lift out to Webster?”

He glanced at his watch and shrugged. “Sure. I’m off the clock and it’s on my way home. Why Webster?”

“I want to drop in on my ex,” I said as I began to follow him toward the unmarked Chrysler four-door parked on the street just beyond the barricades. “Give her a big surprise when I show up at one o’clock in the morning in a cop car.”

The drive out to Webster Groves didn’t take long. Farrentino hopped on I-44 at the Poplar Street Bridge, and traffic in the westbound lanes was very sparse, mostly interstate trucks on their way to Springfield or Oklahoma or Texas. A light rain had begun to fall, and the car was filled with the sound of the windshield wipers and the ethereal murmur of voices from the police scanner mounted beneath the dash.

We didn’t say much to each other. He was tired, I was tired, and all we wanted to do was to get home, although his wife was expecting him to come through the door while mine … well, I would have to cross that doormat when I got to it. I lay back in the seat, watched the trucks pass by, and contemplated all that had been told to me in Barris’s office.

Mainly, it was a matter of counting all the occasions my bullshit detector had rung a bell.

Ernest Hemingway, the godfather of all self-respecting word pimps, once said that the most valuable gift a writer could have was an unshakable, foolproof bullshit detector. For reporters, that means learning to know instinctively when someone is trying to pull a fast one. I’ve grown a half-decent b.s.-o-meter over a lifetime of writing, and even though it’s neither unshakable nor foolproof, it had rung at least four, maybe five times while I was sitting in the Stadium Club.

Ruby Fulcrum, McLaughlin had said, was the Pentagon code name for an R amp;D project within the Tiptree Corporation’s Sentinel program: the development of a precise space-based tracking system to pinpoint the trajectories of suborbital ICBMs. The first major obstacle had been to develop an energy weapon that could penetrate Earth’s atmosphere without losing too much power, and that had been licked when the whiz kids at Los Alamos had invented a chemical laser that substituted fluorine/deuterium for ordinary hydrogen as its fuel source.

The next big hurdle had been to devise a c-cube system for Sentinel 1. Given the chance that a missile might be fired from a ship or sub off the Atlantic coast, Sentinel’s onboard computer system would have to be virtually autonomous, capable not only of detecting and tracking an ICBM during its boost phase, and thus enabling the satellite to shoot it down before it reentered the atmosphere, but also of differentiating between possible decoy-missiles and real targets. The problem was made even more hairy by the fact that if an SLBM was launched from a vessel just off the Eastern seaboard, Sentinel 1 would have only a few minutes to accurately detect, track, and destroy the missile before its nuclear warhead detonated above Washington or New York.

Richard Payson-Smith had been the leader of the Ruby Fulcrum team, since his scientific background included both high-energy lasers and cybernetics. The team had also included three other scientists: Kim Po, a young immigrant from United Korea who had previously worked with Payson-Smith at Los Alamos; Jeff Morgan, even younger than Kim, who had been recruited straight from MIT to work on the program, and-no surprise here, although I had been careful not to let on-Beryl Hinckley, a former CalTech professor who had recently escaped from academia to pursue a more lucrative career in private industry.

“We knew that Richard had some misgivings about Sentinel when the company assigned him to the program,” McLaughlin had said. “He had a-well, call it a pacifist streak, if you will-but we needed his expertise nonetheless. We thought that, since Sentinel is purely defensive in nature, he would overcome his leftist tendencies. And so it seemed, at least at first …”

But as the project went along and the team gradually managed to overcome the technical hurdles, Payson-Smith’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. His temper became shorter; he began to berate his colleagues over minor mistakes or even for taking time to answer personal phone calls or making dentist appointments in the middle of the week. Payson-Smith managed to calm down after a while, but as he did he also began to voice his objections to Sentinel, calling it a “doomsday machine,” “a Pentagon war wagon,” and so forth. As Ruby Fulcrum’s objectives were gradually achieved and Sentinel 1 inched closer to deployment, Payson-Smith became actively hostile toward the other three members; no one dared venture into his office lest they be subjected to a political harangue. He had also become manic-depressive, sliding into silent fugues that could last for weeks on end.

“Didn’t your company notice?” I had asked. “If the project was that crucial, why didn’t you have him replaced, or at least force him to seek psychiatric-”

“Because, as you said, the project was crucial.” Huygens gave me an arch look: you don’t know what you’re talking about. “The program was on a time-critical basis, so we couldn’t just up and fire him. Where would a replacement come from? How could we get one to fit in with the team at this late stage? We-”

McLaughlin shot a look at Huygens; the PR man shut up. “It was impossible to get Richard to see the staff psychologist,” McLaughlin continued in more patient tones. “When we made appointments for him, he’d find a way to avoid them. He was stubborn and, well …” He raised his hands in helplessness. “We just had to work with him and hope for the best.”

That was the first time my bullshit detector had gone off. Now, upon reflection, I knew why.

First, whatever purpose Payson-Smith had fulfilled in the Ruby Fulcrum team couldn’t have been so critical that Tiptree had been unable to replace him, even in a pinch. However brainy this man was, I hadn’t heard his name mentioned in the same breath as Robert Oppenheimer’s, and they had replaced him, too, way back when. Oppenheimer’s only mistake had been in openly expressing his objections to the atomic bomb, and that was after it was exploded over Japan. No one had ever claimed he was mentally ill, only that he was a suspected commie sympathizer.

If Huygens was telling me the truth, then Payson-Smith should have been canned immediately, for being mentally unhinged and opposed to Sentinel before it was even built, let alone made operational. But they wouldn’t have kept him on the project … and that, I now realized, was why the first alarm had rung.

At the same time this was going on, McLaughlin continued, certain spare parts and lab instruments had turned up missing from the company storerooms; they included various high-quality mirrors, lenses, Pyrex tubes, small carbon dioxide and water tanks, and a portable vacuum pump. The theft of the items had not been detected, it later turned out, because someone had managed to access the company’s computer inventory system and delete their removal from the records. The loss was discovered only when other scientists complained to the company comptroller that they couldn’t find items that had been there last week.

Then, almost exactly one week ago, Kim Po was found dead outside his condominium in Richmond Heights. He had apparently been coming home from a late night at the lab when he was shot just outside the condo’s front door … not by a conventional rifle, but by a laser weapon of some sort, one that had drilled a self-cauterizing hole straight through the back of his head from a parked car. As with John’s murder, no one had heard gunfire, nor had a bullet been recovered from either man’s body.

“We’ll cut to the chase,” Barris said. “Judging from the information Cale has given us and the near identical circumstances of both Dr. Kim and Mr. Tiernan’s murders, it seems as if a high-power laser had been used.”

McLaughlin coughed into his fist. “A CO2 laser rifle, to be exact,” he said. “Not like something you see in movies, of course. It would be extremely large and cumbersome … at least the size of a rocket launcher, in fact … but my people tell me it could produce a beam capable of burning through metal, wood, plastic, just about anything … and that includes flesh and bone.”

He shook his head. “It’s a nasty weapon, probably even more powerful than the one that kid in Chicago used a couple of years ago. Silent, invisible, absolute flat trajectory, almost infinite range. If you had a good infrared sight to go with it, you could fire it through a closed window, provided it was made of nonreflective glass, and hit a target several blocks away. No one would even know where the shot came from.”

“And you think someone from Tiptree concocted this thing?” I asked.

McLaughlin glanced hesitantly at both Barris and Huygens. He put the glass snowball down on the desk and leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees. “No, not just anyone,” he replied, looking embarrassed by the admission. “We think Richard’s the one. He had the training and the technical ability, plus access to the parts he needed.” He looked at Mike Farrentino. “Lieutenant? If you’ll continue …?”

For the first time since we had entered the colonel’s office, Farrentino spoke up. “After Mr. Huygens tipped us off,” he said quietly, “some of my people visited Payson-Smith’s home earlier this evening. He was missing, but they found a small workshop in his basement. Something had been built on a bench down there, all right, and there were pieces of burned-through metal that looked as if they might have been used for target practice.”

“But why would he …?”

“Why would he kill Dr. Kim and Mr. Tiernan?” Barris shrugged. He picked up the glass snowball and juggled it in his hands. “Who knows what goes on in a sick mind? Maybe he’s upset at the other members of his team for having built Sentinel … that’s our theory, at any rate. First he knocked off Dr. Kim, then he tracked down Dr. Hinckley when she was trying to tell Tiernan about Kim’s murder and tried to kill her, too. Unfortunately he nailed your friend instead.”

I started to ask another question, but Huygens beat me to it. “We did our best to keep Kim’s murder out of the press. There was only a small item in the next morning’s Post-Dispatch about it, but we managed to get their reporters to believe that Po had been killed during a robbery attempt … but Beryl obviously found out the truth and decided to go to your paper instead.”

“That’s another reason why we suspect Payson-Smith,” the colonel said. “He was one of the few people who could have learned of her plans to meet Tiernan at the bar tonight.”

McLaughlin raised a hand. “Before you ask why Payson-Smith didn’t kill them both when he had the chance … according to my people, this laser rifle apparently consumes a lot of power. It would have to be run off an independent current, so it takes about a minute for its battery to recharge before each shot.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “So Hinckley suspected that Payson-Smith was the guy behind Kim’s murder and went to John to tell him the story.”

Barris and McLaughlin both nodded their heads, and that was the second time my bullshit detector went off.

They didn’t know it, but I had seen Hinckley and Payson-Smith talking to each other during the reception. For a woman who suspected her boss of having gone psycho and killing one of her friends with a home-built laser, she had not appeared apprehensive about being in his company. Nor had Payson-Smith struck me as the homicidal maniac type. Yeah, maybe you never know for sure. When some nut with a machine gun goes on a rampage in a shopping mall, his neighbors invariably describe him as a nice, quiet person who always minded his own business. Yet my guts told me that Payson-Smith just seemed the wrong guy to be carrying this sort of rap.

And then there were other implausibilities. Even if Payson-Smith was the sociopathic killer these guys made him out to be, how could he have known where Hinckley would be tonight? After all, she had been the one who had told me to pass the message to John. I had not disclosed this to anyone else. So how could Payson-Smith have known where these two people would be meeting each other?

For that matter, why were these guys so certain it was Beryl Hinckley who had met Tiernan at Clancy’s? “Middle-aged black lady” was a description that could fit a few hundred thousand people in St. Louis, but that was how Farrentino had described Hinckley to me when I had been summoned to the murder scene.

And why, on the basis of such circumstantial evidence, were McLaughlin and Huygens here at all, putting the blame on one of Tiptree’s own scientists?

The bullshit detector was sounding five alarms now; fire engines were leaving the station, and the dalmatians were howling like mad. Yet I continued to play the dummy; I stretched back in my chair, resting my feet against the bottom of Barris’s desk. “Okay,” I said. “So you’ve got a mad scientist on the loose. Why are you telling me this?”

Barris didn’t like my boots touching his desk. He stared at me until I dropped them back to the floor, then he went on. “When you took Tiernan’s PT, there was the possibility that you might have found some evidence that could conclusively link Payson-Smith to Kim’s murder. We needed to get that back at all costs, and that’s why you were brought in.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “But why the rest of the-”

Barris raised a finger, a silent admonition for me to shut up. “There’s also the possibility that Dr. Hinckley may try to contact you, now that Mr. Tiernan is dead. We haven’t been able to locate her since the shooting, and we suspect that she has gone underground to avoid being killed. So has the other member of the Ruby Fulcrum team, Dr. Morgan.”

He put down the glass ball and leaned forward across the desk. “Mr. Rosen, I realize that there is little reason for you to trust us,” he said. “ERA has a bad reputation in this city, and as easy as it may be for me to put all the blame on the media, I know that my men haven’t always … well, behaved themselves. But this once, we need your cooperation. We’re trying to track down a killer, and we’re also trying to save the lives of two valuable people.”

“Uh-huh.” The bullshit was getting so thick in there, I thought I was going to need a shovel just to get to the door.

“If you hear from either Dr. Hinckley or Dr. Morgan, we need to hear from you at once,” Barris went on. He pulled a calling card from a box on his desk and handed it to me. “That’s how you can reach me personally, any time of the day or night.”

I glanced at the card. No phone number was printed on it, only Barris’s name and the ERA logo. The codestrip on the back would connect with his extension if I passed it in front of a phonescanner. I nodded my head as I tucked the card into my shirt pocket.

“Here’s something else you may need,” he went on, and that’s when he passed me the plastic card and explained how it could be used to get me through ERA blockades.

“We also need you to keep quiet about this matter until it’s resolved,” he went on. “When that happens, you’ll have the complete story from us … and you’ll have helped to bring your friend’s killer to justice. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “I hope I can be of service.”

What should I have said? No, sir, this place reeks like a barnyard and you can take me down to the basement now?

Barris nodded, then he stood up from his desk. So did McLaughlin; once more, he extended his hand to me. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rosen,” he said as I shook his hand again. “I’m glad to have you on our side.”

Farrentino pushed back his chair and stood up. Huygens gave me a perfunctory nod. Barris glanced at Farrentino. “Now, Lieutenant, if you will kindly escort Mr. Rosen to the street …?”

I was free to go-but I was certainly not free. There were too many secrets, too many lies.

Too much bullshit.