“Who the hell is in here?” Daniel shouted at the top of his lungs. He was outraged that an intruder had gotten into his apartment, but he was not foolhardy. Although the intruder had obviously entered through the front door, Daniel was confident he’d cased the apartment and knew of the back exit from the study onto the fire escape. As Daniel pulled out his cell phone to call 911, he fully expected the burglar to flee by taking this route.
To Daniel’s shock, the intruder immediately presented himself in Daniel’s line of sight and blinded him with his flashlight. Daniel tried to block the beam with his hand. He wasn’t entirely successful, but it was enough to see that the man was coming at him with breathtaking speed. Before Daniel could react, he was roughly shoved to the side by a gloved hand hard enough to cause him to literally bounce off the wall. His ears rang from the concussion. Regaining his equilibrium, Daniel caught sight of a large man dressed in a tight-fitting black outfit, including a black ski mask, rapidly descend the stairs on silent feet. After a shriek from Stephanie, the front door to the building burst open and banged shut.
Daniel dashed to the banister and looked down. On the landing below, Stephanie was pressed up against the mathematician’s locked door with her laptop clasped against her chest with both hands. Her face was white. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Who the hell was that?” she demanded.
“A goddamn burglar,” Daniel responded. He turned back to examine the door. Stephanie came up the final flight of stairs to look over his shoulder.
“At least he didn’t break the door,” Daniel said. “He must have had a key.”
“Are you sure it was locked?”
“Absolutely! I specifically remember even locking the dead bolt.”
“Who else has a key?”
“No one,” Daniel said. “There’s only two. That’s all I had made when I bought the place and changed the locks.”
“He must have picked the lock.”
“If he did, then he was a professional. But why would a professional be breaking into my apartment? I don’t own anything valuable.”
“Oh, no!” Stephanie suddenly voiced. “I left all my jewelry on top of the bureau, including my grandmother’s diamond watch.” She pushed past Daniel and headed for the bedroom.
Daniel followed her down the hall. “That reminds me: I was stupid enough to leave all the cash I got from the ATM last night on the desk.”
Daniel ducked into the study. To his surprise, the ATM money was exactly where he’d placed it in the center of the blotter. He picked it up, and as he did so he noticed that everything else on the desk had been moved. Daniel admitted he wasn’t the neatest person in the world, but he was supremely well organized. There might be stacks of correspondence, bills, and scientific journals on his desk, but he knew their exact location, if not the order within each pile.
His eyes wandered over to his upright four-drawer file cabinet. Even the journal article reprints stacked on top and waiting to be filed had been moved. They hadn’t been moved a lot, but their position had definitely been changed.
Stephanie appeared in the doorway. She sighed with relief. “We must have come home in the nick of time. Apparently, he hadn’t yet had a chance to get into the bedroom. All my stuff was where I’d left it last night.”
Daniel held up the stack of bills. “He didn’t even take the money, and he was in here for sure.”
Stephanie laughed hollowly. “What kind of burglar was he?”
“I don’t find this at all funny,” Daniel said. He began opening individual drawers of both the desk and the file cabinet to check the appearance of their contents.
“I’m not suggesting I find it funny either,” Stephanie said. “I’m trying to use humor to defuse my real feelings.”
Daniel looked up. “What are you talking about?”
Stephanie shook her head and breathed out forcibly. She successfully fought back tears. She was trembling. “I’m upset. This kind of unexpected event really disturbs me. I feel violated that someone was in here, invading our privacy. It emphasizes the reality that we’re always living on the edge, even when we don’t know it.”
“I’m disturbed too,” Daniel said. “But not philosophically. I’m disturbed because there is something here I don’t understand. It seems pretty clear to me that this intruder wasn’t a run-of-the-mill burglar. He was looking for something specific, and I have no idea what it could be. That’s troubling.”
“You don’t think we just came home before he had a chance to take anything?”
“He’d been here for a while, certainly long enough to take some valuables, if that was what he was after. He had time to go through the desk and maybe even the file cabinet.”
“How can you tell?”
“I just know because of my own brand of compulsiveness. This man was a professional, and he was looking for something in particular.”
“You mean like intellectual property perhaps associated with HTSR?”
“It’s possible, but I doubt it. That’s all covered with adequate patents. Besides, then the break-in would have been at the office, not here.”
“Then what else?”
Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I started to, but that was when he bolted out of here. Now I’m not sure we should.”
“Why not?” Stephanie was surprised.
“What would they do? The man’s obviously long gone. We don’t seem to be missing anything, so there’s no insurance issues, and besides, I’m not sure I want us to be asked a lot of questions about what we have been doing lately, if that were to come up. On top of that, we’re leaving tomorrow night, and I don’t want anything to mess that up.”
“Wait a sec!” Stephanie said suddenly. “What if this episode has something to do with Butler?”
Daniel stared across his desk at Stephanie.
“How and why would it involve Butler?” Daniel asked.
Stephanie returned Daniel’s gaze. The sound of the refrigerator compressor turning on in the kitchen broke the early evening silence. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I was just thinking about his connections with the FBI, and the fact that he had had you investigated in some form or fashion. Maybe they haven’t finished.”
Daniel nodded as he considered Stephanie’s idea, realizing it couldn’t be dismissed out of hand, despite its outlandishness. After all, the clandestine nighttime meeting with Butler two nights previously had been equally outlandish.
“Let’s try to forget this incident for the moment,” Daniel said. “We’ve got a lot to do to get ready. Let’s start!”
“Okay,” Stephanie said, marshaling her fortitude. “Maybe concentrating on packing will get me to relax. But first I think we should call Peter in the event this character is planning to break into the office as well.”
“Good idea,” Daniel said. “But we’re not going to tell him about Butler. I mean, you haven’t told him, have you?”
“No. I haven’t told him a thing.”
“Good!” Daniel said, as he picked up the phone.
ten
11:45 A.M., Sunday, February 24, 2002
As accustomed as Stephanie was to mercurial New England weather, she was still surprised at the balmy, beautiful day Sunday turned out to be. Although the winter sunlight was pale, the air was warm and the birds were loud and omnipresent as if spring were just around the corner. It was a far cry from her frigid Friday night walk home from Harvard Square with a dusting of snow on the ground.
Stephanie had parked Daniel’s car in the city garage at Government Center and walked east into the North End, one of Boston’s quaintest neighborhoods. It was a warren of narrow streets lined with three- or four-story brick row houses. Southern Italian immigrants had adopted the area in the nineteenth century and transformed it into an ersatz Little Italy, complete with the usual sights and smells. There were always people engaged in animated conversation on the street, and the aroma of simmering Bolognese sauce permeated the air. When school was out, there were children everywhere.