Unlike the rest of the office, the workstation was uncluttered, without even a sheet of paper or a manual on the steel table that supported the IBM computer. Using my penlight, I searched through the three drawers in the table, but found no diskettes-not even blank ones. Whatever information there was might be on the computer's hard drive. I turned on the machine and executed a few keystrokes to see what kinds of programs and menus I was dealing with. On one list I found indications of several coded files, markers on the trail to what I was looking for. I inserted the blank diskette I had brought with me, then executed a command to copy Fournier's files. That would take a while. While the computer whirred away at its busy-work, I went over and sat down behind Fournier's desk.
Again using my penlight, I searched through the desk drawers more carefully, found nothing but a collection of paper clips, rubber bands, and a dozen sharpened pencils of various colors that he apparently used to grade student papers. There were no filing cabinets. Except for whatever might be in his computer, Dr. Guy Fournier traveled light in the record-keeping department.
The books and magazines on his desk, many of them marked in a dozen or more places, all looked like standard armament for a professor of comparative religion. I leaned back in the chair, played the thin pencil of light around the office, over the stacks of literature piled on the floor to the hundreds of books filling the bookcases. I wondered how he found anything when he was looking for it.
Or how anybody else would find anything, assuming they were looking for something that could not be reduced to bytes of data and stored in a password-coded computer file. The place still looked more like a storage area than an office, but it also looked like an excellent place to hide something; burying it in plain sight, as it were.
I got up, began working my way slowly through the stalagmites of literature on the floor. There were books and magazines in French and English on everything from anthropology to Zen Buddhism, and they were all covered with a film of dust that made it evident they had not been consulted in some time. The books in the bookcases appeared the same, all covering appropriate subjects in the professor's field of expertise, and all coated with dust. Or almost all. When I got to a section of shelves that were almost directly across the room from the desk, at a height that would be just about at Fournier's eye level, there were a number of books that looked as if they had recently been referenced, at least to the extent that they had not had time to collect a film of dust since their last outing. I selected one, a thick tome on Zoroastrianism, stretched up, and pulled it out. When I held it upside down by the edges of its binding and shook it, three photographs fell out and floated down to the floor.
Well, now.
I sat down on a pile of French professional journals and shined my penlight over the photos. All three were eight-by-tens, black-and-white, and appeared to have been taken with a telephoto lens. The shots were obviously of three different groups of pro-life activists demonstrating outside abortion clinics. The faces of the shouting men and women were appropriately twisted with emotion, their gestures eloquent, the messages on the placards they carried evocative. The clinics were not identified, but seemed to be in different parts of the country; there was the trunk of a palm tree visible behind a demonstrator in one photo, and another photo showed a group standing atop a snow bank. But the pictures had something else in common besides the fact that all three were of activists demonstrating outside abortion clinics. The same two men-young, white, the expressions on what otherwise would have been fresh, midwestern faces twisted with hate-appeared in all three of the photographs. Although it was unclear whether or not they knew each other, in all three shots the heads of the two men had been circled in red. I looked on the backs of the photos, but there was nothing there, nor on the front, to identify them. I stared at the faces for some time, trying to etch them into memory, then replaced them at random in the book- hoping Fournier wouldn't notice they weren't where they had been- and put the volume back on the shelf.
The next book I took down seemed out of place in Fournier's large-if rarely used-professional library. It was a compendium of recent Supreme Court decisions with the complete texts of opinions rendered. As I leafed through the volume I could see that a number of sections had been marked with yellow highlighter; all of the marked sections were from the bitterly dissenting opinions of two justices, Mabel Roscowicz and Richard Weiner, both now deceased. Taped onto the back cover was another photograph, a formal group portrait of the Supreme Court justices in their robes. The heads of Richard Weiner and Mabel Roscowicz had been circled in red ink.
The thrill of discovery was thoroughly dampened by a sudden chill and the wave of nausea that rippled through my stomach. I was staring at the text and photograph, wondering whether I should risk searching around through other offices for a copying machine, when the lights suddenly came on.
I dropped the book and spun around, clawing for the Beretta in my shoulder holster, then froze when I saw Guy Fournier-unshaven, dressed in rumpled khakis, loafers with no socks, and a thin leather jacket over a pajama top-standing in the doorway, a Glock with some kind of custom-made silencer held steady with both hands and aimed directly at my chest. The thick, white hair crowning his triangular head was uncombed, but there was nothing sleepy about his piercing eyes. I'd completely missed his security apparatus; it wasn't some bell or siren rigged to the door or window, but must have been an alarm in his quarters that went off when his computer was turned on. A big tut-tut on me; but I needed those computer files, and by lingering I did find the marked photos of the pro-life activists and the two dead justices. In any case, that decision was now obviously moot.
"What kind of voodoo shit is this?" I asked in a mild tone, nodding toward the gun in his hand. "Isn't that cheating?"
"This is nine-millimeter voodoo shit," Fournier replied evenly in his resonant bass. "It's used for dealing with people who walk around as well armed as you do these days. Toss your gun away."
"Where?"
"Anywhere you like, as long as it's well beyond your reach. Use your thumb and index finger to remove it from the holster."
I did as I was told, lifting the Beretta from my holster and tossing it to my right, in the general direction of his desk. The gun skipped across the tops of two stacks of magazines, then clattered to the floor.
He continued, "Now the other one."
"What other one?"
"The Seecamp you carry in an ankle holster on your right leg. Again, use only your thumb and index finger to remove it."
"Jesus," I said, bending over and pulling up my right pant leg, "you've been reading my mail. The company must have quite a dossier on me."