His mind began to drift, and the noise above lessened. Soon DeBolt was asleep again, a scant trace of amusement on the margins of his lips.
So energized was Lund, she stayed at the office until nearly midnight. As a civilian, she was expected to be on duty no more than eights hour a day. Unfortunately, the demands of law enforcement rarely meshed with any kind of civilized nine-to-five schedule. In truth, she hadn’t looked at a clock since getting off the phone with LaSalle.
Washington County, Maine.
She’d looked on a map to see where it was, and had no trouble finding the place. Unfortunately, that added nothing to her understanding. Trey DeBolt? Was he really still alive? Swimming at a beach on the other side of the lower forty-eight?
Late that afternoon she’d gone into town, and reached the credit union as the manager was locking the door. He made the mistake of letting her in, and she made an inquiry about DeBolt’s account. Lund said she was on official business, which wasn’t quite true, but the branch manager, a suit-clad bastion of procedure named Norm Peterson, had surprisingly shown her the records. He probably shouldn’t have, since she didn’t have a specific warrant, but she knew Norm from previous investigations, and anyway, Kodiak was Kodiak. In the end it had amounted to nothing. DeBolt’s last outflow had been the day before he’d died, a charge for $12.61 at the Safeway on Mill Bay Road. There had been no mysterious withdrawals since, say from an ATM in Maine. The truth was never so easy.
AT&T was more troublesome — the phone company declined to give up DeBolt’s records without official authorization. Not sure if she could get it, Lund took a more direct course, going straight to his unit and meeting with his skipper, Commander Erin Urlacker. Urlacker was happy to help: DeBolt had left his phone in his locker, she said, and it was still there waiting to be claimed. After a month the handset was dead, of course, but it used a universal charger, and within minutes Lund was able to access the call log. The last time the phone had been used was on the morning of the accident, and there had never been a call placed to a Maine area code. A look through the contact list was equally unproductive — no connections to Washington County.
At that point, Lund had thanked Urlacker and gone back to her office. She’d trolled social media sites, and found a handful of accounts, but DeBolt had never been very active, and there was no usage whatsoever since his alleged passing. She did get hung up briefly on his Facebook profile picture: a rescue swimmer in midair jumping out of a helicopter, the sea below a maelstrom of white in the rotor wash. She thought it might be a stock photo, dramatic as it was, but then she discerned DeBolt’s name stenciled on the back of his survival suit.
In the end, her hours of work went for naught. She could find no evidence to support the idea that DeBolt was still alive. The only things she had to work with: an apartment that had been searched, fingerprints on a doorknob thousands of miles away, and a young girl who’d seen a swimmer. Perhaps most mysterious of all, a Learjet flown to parts unknown.
It gnawed at Lund late into that evening, until she finally told herself it was nothing more than false hope. She rarely let cases get to her, but this one was an exception. Exhausted, she decided to go home. Before she did, however, one last thought flickered to mind. She pulled out her phone, added a new contact, and left a brief voice mail.
It was, without doubt, the most ridiculous thing she’d done in her investigative career.
19
Atif Patel rose in a pestilent mood. He pulled open the curtains and was greeted by a depressing Viennese morning, the sun powerless against espresso clouds and a dense mist. He could barely see the adjacent Stadtpark, and the few people braving its paths looked hunched and hurried. Altogether, a world far removed from the California sun he so enjoyed.
He ordered room service, and thirty minutes later Patel was drinking tea that had gone cold and suffering a stale croissant. This from the Hilton Vienna, a reputed five-star establishment. By eight he had succumbed to the inevitable, and thrust his knobby arms into the sleeves of his winter coat. He patted his pockets methodically: room key, glasses, wallet, and the flash drive containing his PowerPoint presentation. All there. He struck outside and became one of the wretched figures in the park.
With his head down into a stout November wind, Patel hurried along without noticing the statue of Schubert, and gave but a passing glance to the Kursalon, the pavilion where Johann Strauss had performed his first concert. Patel was a slightly built man with distinctly Indian features: dark skin and olive eyes, a nose like the prow of a ship. His mother was from Bangalore, his father Mumbai, but their only son had been born in Palo Alto, in the shadows of Silicon Valley and the Vietnam War. Indeed, if there was any providence at all in Patel’s life it was that he’d been born a U.S. citizen — without that he would never have gotten the security clearances necessary to be where he was today.
As he put the park behind him a drizzle began to fall, and with quickened steps Patel navigated the busy Tuesday streets until the Hofburg appeared. The palace façade was grand as ever, its wide arcing entrance topped by a magnificent golden eagle. Contained within the endless halls and colonnades were the official residence of the president of Austria, the Imperial Library, and the famed Winter Riding School. Inspiring as that might be, what had begun in the thirteenth century as a palace destined for kings and emperors had inevitably diversified in scope and digressed in grandeur, now putting on offer banquet facilities, exhibition space, and an array of tawdry gift shops. And this week only: the World Conference on Cyber Security.
Patel had hoped the long walk would have a tranquilizing effect, yet as he climbed the final set of stairs a statue of Hercules slaying Hydra with a club did nothing to soothe his frayed nerves. Of course, it was neither the coldness of his tea nor the inclemency of the weather that had soured his day so early. At 3:00 A.M. he had gotten a call from the general, and been told to expect a visit.
He thought the timing might have been intentional, meant to ruin a good night’s sleep. Patel tolerated the man, yet even after two years he did not completely trust him, this in spite of the most intimate professional association he’d ever joined. His future and the general’s had become forever intertwined, and he supposed it was the permanency of that bond that bothered him. Patel was a software designer, and the swirl in his gut today was not unlike what he felt during the beta testing of a critical new version of code — the fear of failure, the excitement of new possibilities, and always that back-of-the-mind certainty that more work lay ahead. But then, Patel had never been afraid of work.
He walked into the conference center and found a schedule of the day’s events on a pedestal. He dragged a finger down the program to find his name. Hofburg Galerie: Dr. Atif Patel, “Protocols and Architecture in Highly Secure Systems.”
He sighed mightily. There had been no getting around it — he’d committed to the presentation nearly a year ago. It was the kind of thing that was expected from professors at Cal Berkeley, and in spite of the poor timing, Patel knew that great minds across history had endured worse. Among these was his personal hero, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who’d also taught at Cal, and who had published groundbreaking work regarding wave functions, approximation, and quantum mechanics. Yet in spite of his technical brilliance, Oppenheimer was today known for but one thing, the government project he had so capably managed — the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was universally regarded as the father of the atomic bomb.