Jasmine smiled and turned her attention to the coffee.
The pine resin, knots, and wood blazed high and hot. I covered the hole in the stove with the black cast-iron disk and Jasmine put the coffeepot on top of it.
"Something to eat?" Jasmine said as she bent over and opened a crude, unpainted cupboard door. She stood up with a box filled with an assortment of foil-wrapped bars: Balance, Power, breakfast, granola. She set the box on a table made of wide pine planks ornamented by decades of use.
"Most everything's past its expiration." She pulled out a Balance bar and pushed the box over toward me. "But I don't think this stuff ever goes bad."
Jasmine unwrapped her bar and took a bite. "Probably not lethal."
I pawed through the box, listening to the coffee water start to tick. I pulled out a bar, unwrapped it.
She walked over to her pile of bags and came back with a legal-size manila folder I recognized as part of Lashonna's files we had retrieved the night before. A CD in a thin plastic jewel case fell out of the bottom of the folder. It landed on a corner and split apart, sending the top of the jewel box and the bottom in different directions and the CD rolling off in a third.
"Damnation!" She dropped the folder and stretched out to pluck the CD off the floor while it was still rolling. "Sometimes I am such a klutz." I helped her gather the jewel box remains, then went to get my laptop.*****
The mixed woodlot of oak and pine shed the previous night's rain with every breeze, showering Jael St. Clair as she made a broad circle through the brush. She wanted a clear shot to the path between the shack's front door and the red Mercedes.
Jael quickly found the correct angle, then walked a line back from the shack. She found the spot, but when she looked back, banks of fog drifted in and out, totally obscuring the shack as often as not. She moved closer and found a small cove surrounded by pine saplings. She pulled out her laser range finder and speced the distance at thirty-six yards. Not even a proper sniper shot. No matter. Business was business. She adjusted the Leupold for the distance. Then she jammed the aluminum walking staff into the rain-soft dirt. It sank in deep and steady.
Picking up the rifle, she knelt beside the walking pole, grabbed it with her left hand. Then she rested the M21 on that hand, holding it tight against the pole with her thumb. Then she placed her cheek against the M21 and looked through the Leupold, down at the path Stone and the lawyer would eventually walk when they went to the Mercedes. Then Jael St. Clair sat back on her haunches and waited. She craved a cigarette but knew the smoke could give her away.
Jasmine and I sat at the table and drank coffee, silently scanning record after record off Shanker's CD as I scrolled them down my laptop screen.
"I can't believe this," I said.
"You've said that a hundred times. Maybe more."
The CD contained thousands of images of medical records, administrative documents, experimental protocols, maps, diagrams, photos. The first document on the CD was a memo on Jay Shanker's letterhead that explained that all of the documents had been transferred from microfilm to the CD. The microfilm had been salvaged decades before from the vandalized ruins of a once-secret Army medical facility that had operated on the site of a POW camp built near Belzoni. The memo explained that the records had been salvaged by his client Darryl Talmadge, a hunting guide who had scheduled a duck hunt in a nearby slough. The client had been a no-show and Talmadge had passed a morning digging around in the ruins. Beneath a pile of termite-infested beams and flooring, Talmadge had found a safe that had sunk under its own weight through the decaying floor.
Talmadge concealed his find and returned with an oxyacetylene torch, opened the old, rusty safe, and found that leaking water had destroyed most of the contents. He did recover a number of watertight microfilm canisters, which he tossed in his garage, vowing to read them one day.
The microfilm sat untouched in Talmadge's garage for seventeen years.
In his only private conversation with Talmadge before the military took over, Shanker learned of the microfilm and his client's hunch it might be useful.
Jasmine leaned on my shoulder to better read the laptop's screen as we scanned the documents to get an overview of what we had.
"This Frank Harper starts out like a saint and turns into a monster," Jasmine said.
I shook my head. "I think he's the same person. But he got sucked in by his own insatiable curiosity about what makes us human, good, bad… who we are. He was grappling with the big question with some big consequences. I think its clear, early on, he wanted to explore this Phineas Gage thing firsthand." I paused. "I want to go back when I have time and read that essay he wrote about ethics, free will, crime, and punishment. It's pretty deep."
"So he starts out with a charge of pure scientific curiosity, then someone in Washington gets wind of things and dumps a ton of money on him," Jasmine said. "You think that's what made him cross the line? Moved him from fixing up people with head wounds and studying them into creating head wounds to make better warriors? Then the chemicals?"
"Clearly," I agreed.
"It doesn't hurt the rationalization process when your own government says it needs your research."
"Big factor. Really big."
The last document on the CD was a memo on Jay Shanker's letterhead summarizing a second CD dealing exclusively with Clark Braxton. That CD and the location of the original supporting documentation for all the information on both CDs would be made available once two conditions were met: if Vanessa Thompson joined in Talmadge's defense and brought me on board.
"Shanker and Mom agreed you're the only expert who could credibly unravel the data in the files."
"I don't understand why Shanker didn't go to the authorities with it," I said.
"He did."
"He did what?"
"He took it to the judge," Jasmine said. "And within hours, the suits showed up at his door and the threats began. That's when he came to Mama. She found it hard to swallow until the next day when Shanker's office and his house and a mini-storage unit, his RV, and even his duck blind had been ransacked."
"How come they didn't find the microfilm?"
"My understanding is, he'd been freaked out by what he had read and had hidden everything before he went to the judge."
"And we don't know where."
As Jasmine opened her mouth to reply, we heard distant sounds of tires on gravel.
"Quincy coming back?" I asked.
Jasmine frowned. "Not likely."
"Who?"
She shook her head. I rushed to the bedroom then and grabbed my Ruger. Jasmine pulled hers from her purse and clipped the holster to her waistband.
"Come on!" She said, heading for the back door. She unbolted it and lunged into a dense wall of green vines, weeds, and saplings. I followed her in my bare feet.
CHAPTER 56
Jael sat on her haunches, waiting. Her instructor had said she had the patience of a spider. The analogy pleased her.
When she heard the motor vehicle, Jael followed the sound and trained her glasses toward the source. Before she spotted the vehicle, Stone and the lawyer bolted from the rear of the shack and plunged into a green drift of kudzu stretching toward the back porch like stop-action surf. Fog frosted the deep green of the kudzu and feathered it into the surrounding green matrix of lush Delta undergrowth.
The vehicle sounds grew louder. Jael compassed the kudzu, methodically teasing it apart. It was hard to separate the movement of the leaves that might be caused by the wind from that which might be from her targets. As Jael toyed with the idea of pursuing them, an older-model, light blue Chevy pickup appeared out of the fog. A motorcycle sat in the bed, held upright by bright yellow straps.