A few lights were on in the house. Getting out of his car, Eppley heard the ebb and flow of televised talk-show audience laughter. Anticipation offsetting his nerves, he hurried up a gravel path to the front door, on which, as instructed, he knocked four times.
The door opened inward, revealing a man in his mid- to late thirties with the erect bearing and boxy build indigenous to the military; his gray business suit conformed to muscles that looked like rocks. He wore his sandy hair cropped close. Not a crew cut; more like the cuts on actual oarsmen. His sturdy, chiseled face could have made him a soap-opera heartthrob if not for the cold eyes.
“Mr. Griffin?” Eppley asked, regretting the tradecraft breach as soon as the name was out of his mouth.
“Call me Steve, please,” the man said in a voice that was surprisingly soft and cultured, rather than the bark presaged by his appearance. “Mr. Griffin was my father, and a deadbeat.” He offered his hand.
“Great to meet you, Steve,” said Eppley, struggling to keep from squirming as his right hand was nearly crushed.
“How about a drink?” Griffin asked.
What Eppley wouldn’t have done for alcohol. But something told him the correct answer was no. “I’m good.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not a test question. I could tolerate a vodka tonic myself.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want you to drink alone.”
“Excellent.” Griffin stepped into the kitchen, where the drink fixings waited on a granite counter. He waved Eppley ahead into the living room, which was painted sky blue and furnished sparsely in typical rental-house fashion, things the owner wouldn’t give a damn about if they were broken or stained with red wine.
A few moments later, Griffin carried in a pair of translucent red plastic cups, the indestructible sort often found in such houses. Handing Eppley his, the Blaise exec said, “Here’s to being single, seeing double, and sleeping triple.”
“Cheers,” said Eppley, put at ease.
Griffin dropped into the adjacent wicker armchair, gesturing Eppley into the vinyl-covered sofa on the other side of the laminate coffee table.
“So tell me about your trip here,” Griffin said.
This was a test question, Eppley knew. Secrecy was as much a part of Blaise as science. “That’s a long story, starting with a severely mentally handicapped guy about my age who’s been confined to a state-run home in northern Nevada for eight years.”
Griffin sat back, propping black loafers beside the laptop case on the coffee table. “That’s exactly the type of story I was hoping to hear.”
“I took a back door into the state home’s system and obtained a copy of the guy’s birth certificate. I used it to get a driver’s license and a credit card in his name, sent to an accommodation address. For the record, it was he who rented the Kia parked outside, and you’re now talking to him. Then he — or, between us, I—drove cross-country in six days, stopping to buy our components at out-of-the-way academic supply stores, mom-and-pop electronics shops, places like that, paying in cash — thanks for that, by the way.”
“I’d tell you you’re welcome, but I get the feeling that I’m the one who ought to be thanking you,” Griffin said.
With rising confidence, Eppley resumed his account. “When I got to your facility, I told the office manager that I was the representative from Exxon’s engineering division, there to assemble the prototype of the portable petroleum hydrocarbon detector. Just like you’d said he would, he asked me how the drive from New Orleans was. So I said the line, ‘Great, because I won a hundred bucks playing the slots at a Choctaw casino along the way.’ Then he showed me into the back office, and that was about as much interaction as we had in the five days it took me to assemble the ‘portable petroleum hydrocarbon detector.’ ”
Griffin gripped the arms of his chair, seemingly bridling his excitement. “So you did it?”
Eppley put on whiz-kid nonchalance. “It wasn’t that much more complicated than following a recipe.” He unzipped his jacket pocket, dug out the dedicated cell phone, and placed it on the coffee table. “And now it’s good to go.”
“This is the remote detonator?” Griffin asked.
Eppley worried that Griffin was disappointed. “I know, I know. You see it all the time in B-movies, but ordinary cell phones really are the state-of-the art remote detonators. All you need to do here is press down on the five key to speed-dial the number for Bob programmed into the contacts. Bob is the cell phone that’s inside the weapon. When it gets the call, its vibrate wheel spins, triggering a low-amp wire fuse that detonates the half-pound brick of Comp C and PBX-9501.”
“What if ‘Bob’ were to get a wrong number?”
“He can’t. This is the only phone that can call his cell phone. I coupled the two phones into what amounts to their own Centrex network.”
Griffin sat back, regarding Eppley with what appeared to be awe. “Mr. Eppley, Blaise Advanced Development Programs owes you a debt much greater than the fifty thousand dollars you’re now due. I’d like to read you an e-mail that says exactly what Curtis Brockett has in mind.”
Eppley tried to rein in his smile as Griffin reached into the laptop case on the coffee table. Griffin drew out a pistol. Eppley felt his scalp tighten with fear and—
Canning snapped the trigger, the loudest part of firing the integrally suppressed .22, sending a hand-cast thirty-eight-grain soft-lead bullet over the coffee table and into Eppley’s forehead. The kid fell over backward, taking the cheap sofa with him. He bleated pathetically, but only for a few seconds. Then his central nervous system quit and he lay still. Canning liked the soft-lead rounds because they stayed in the head, which meant no gore on the safe house furniture. A little blood and brain matter oozed from the entry wound, sliding down Eppley’s face, but that was the extent of it. Now all Canning needed to do was get rid of the corpse, and he would be in the “portable petroleum hydrocarbon detector” business.
16
The so-called barn on Madaket was almost as large as Nolend’s house, with an interior of burnished cedar planks that would have been gleaming tonight even without the constellation of candles suspended from the rafters. If the place had any of the smells found in actual barns, like the musky scents of horses and hay, they were lost in warm air redolent of the exotic flowers representing every color in the spectrum, in mountainous centerpieces on fifty tables brimming with crystal and silver. Enjoying hors d’oeuvres and aperitifs, guests milled about a space that could be divided into dozens of stalls were the barn ever to accommodate livestock. Where a hayloft might go, there was a stage on which twenty-six Boston Pops musicians, all clad in tuxedo jackets and pairs of Nantucket Reds, played an up-tempo waltz. Mallery sat alone at table eight, the fluttering candlelight underscoring the sharpness of her features in a way that reminded Thornton of Garbo.
He planned to wander over, introduce himself, then, at some juncture, ask her to dance. If she accepted, he would try to feel for a capsule underneath her scalp.
Before he could take a step in her direction, she was joined at table eight by a towering man whom Thornton had interviewed years ago. Back then, Clay Harken was the chief of the CIA’s Special Activities Staff. Thornton didn’t know what Harken had been doing professionally since retiring from the Agency, but in graying, he’d acquired the right look for a dramatic turn as King Arthur. Harken took the seat beside Mallery’s, setting champagnes in front of both of their places. They clinked the flutes, her smile measurable in kilowatts. She was left-handed, for what that was worth. Nothing, thought Thornton, trying to conceive a new plan of approach.