“That part of the story, I don’t doubt,” he said.
I wondered what he meant by that, the suggestive tone, but said nothing.
He said, “Okay, so you picked up on the Colombian accent. About six months ago, Lindsey Harrington’s father-Hal Harrington, that’s his name-attended a summit in Cartagena, along with representatives from several other Latin American countries. The U.S. has given them in excess of a billion dollars a year for the drug war-what they call a war, anyway-and the summit was to outline operational methods and long-term goals. That much is in the dossier. Maybe Harrington did something to piss them off. Maybe he bucked the Colombian establishment-it’s one of the most corrupt countries on earth. Whatever he did, he made someone mad enough to go after his daughter.”
“That’s it? It’s really all you know?”
“Yep. Pretty thin so far, but it’s early. You haven’t exactly been a fountain of information yourself. What I should tell you is… here, let me point out something that you may not realize, Ford. Something you haven’t thought much about. Right now, you’re safe. So’s Lindsey Harrington. For the next twenty-four hours, two different federal agencies are going to keep this island secured while we finish collecting evidence. We have lots of video to shoot, lots of photos to take. Where you are right now is one of the safest places in the world. But you can’t stay on Guava Key forever. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to get into your boat and go home. So what are you going to do if those punks come calling again? You really feeling that lucky? That’s why I’d like you to cooperate. If they put you on their personal shit list, it’d be nice to grab them when they come to grab you.”
“Stake me out like a goat, huh?” I shook my head. “Sorry, the timing’s bad. I’m too busy. I’ve got several research projects going on right now.”
He parroted my words with a flat sarcasm. “Research projects. Like what that’s so damn important?”
“I’m working on sturgeon, too. Not just bull sharks. I’ve got current projects, old projects-but sturgeon are what I’m doing right now. I’m working with some biologists from a lab not far from here, Mote Marine.” All true. When Waldman didn’t respond, I proceeded to tell more than he wanted to know about our sturgeon project, aware that a good way to deal with interrogation is to bore your interrogator. I informed him there’d once been a booming sturgeon fishery on Florida’s Gulf Coast, all because of the profitable caviar market. I described the fish to him, with its scale cover of primitive bony plates and rows of bony scutes on its body. Told him that the sturgeon is a freshwater species that migrates into saltwater, and is very easily netted-which is why the sturgeon was so quickly decimated north and south of Tampa. I added, “Now you mention sturgeon to a coastal fisherman and he’ll look at you like you’re nuts. No one even remembers that they were here. So we’re working on raising them in captivity, then releasing them into the wild. Problem is, they grow so damn slow.”
Waldman stared at me, bored, not letting the details register. “You’re not going to tell me a damn thing, are you?”
I said, “Nope, Doug, I’m not. I don’t want any trouble. I really don’t. I live a quiet, private life, and that’s the way I want it to keep it.”
He stood, hunted around in his jacket pocket for a moment and pulled out a tin of Copenhagen snuff. He flapped the can with his thumb, opened it, and pushed a big pinch of tobacco between cheek and gum. “I kinda figured you’d be a tough one to budge. That call I just took-when my cell phone rang a few minutes ago?”
“What about it?”
Waldman walked to the kitchen sink, spit, and flushed it with water. “Our people in D.C. and Virginia have now had”-he checked his watch-“they’ve now had slightly more than four hours to come up with a dossier on you. Know what they found? And I’m talking about the best-equipped, most computer-savvy security agency in the world. Nothing,” he said. “They found nothing interesting at all about you. Zip, zilch. Know what, Ford? From the information we got back, it’s almost like you really don’t exist.”
I began to feel uneasy, but made it a point to take a deep breath, relaxing in my chair. “You’re saying there’s something wrong with not being in some crime computer somewhere?”
“You’re in no computers anywhere. Nothing but the barest stuff, anyway. Harrington was tough to get information on. You’re even worse. Any idea why that is?”
I told him no, hoping he’d drop it, but he didn’t.
He leafed through a couple of sheets of paper and said, “Here’s what we’ve got on you. You’ve got a six-cylinder Chevy more than twenty years old. I’ve got the block number and the registration number right here. Another thing? When you were still in high school, you took the battery of Armed Services Vocational Aptitude tests. Damn near aced them all. Not the highest scores ever recorded, but way, way up there. Then you vanished for seven years. Not a trace. No military record, no nothing. Next thing that shows up is that you’re in California, graduating with a B.S. from San Diego State and then you get a master’s a year later from Stanford. No record of where you lived, no record of credit cards, no student loans or a checking account. Nothing at all that indicates you were actually at those places and attended classes. But the degrees are legitimate. I made our people check. Your doctorate from the University of Florida? Same thing.”
“That’s weird,” I said. “They don’t give degrees unless you attend classes. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been kind of a loner. That, and I’ve always tried to pay with cash. Saves on bookkeeping.”
His smile told me that he knew that I was lying. “I’ve done background checks on grade-school teachers that turned up more data. Oh, by the way-our people did dig out one little interesting tidbit of information hidden away. Came from an old file in Pitkin County, Colorado. Aspen, that’s a town you might know there.”
It seemed to please him that I didn’t react. “Seems that more than a decade ago, a guy by the name of Marion W. Ford was a prime suspect in the abduction and probable murder of a political radical who lived in the mountains out there. A guy who specialized in bombing military installations. The cops detained you-this guy Ford, I’m talking about-but nothing ever came of it. Once again, you just vanished. Marion W. Ford vanished, I mean.”
I stood, not comfortable with the direction the conversation was leading. I said, “I think the computers have me confused with someone else, Doug. That was a long time ago, but I’d certainly remember something like that.”
“I’d think you would, too. Know what the really sad thing is, Ford? Okay, here’s what I think. The sad thing is that you should be given an award for what you did today. Or a bounty. Instead, maybe because you’re nervous about certain things you did or didn’t do in your past, you feel like you have to lie about it. Or maybe you just don’t want to be put into the bureaucratic machine, deal with all the bullshit details.”
I said nothing, waiting.
“There’s something else that pisses me off, too. Something not directly related to you or what went on today, but there’s bound to be a connection. Sooner or later.”
I raised my eyebrows-what?
“It’s those punks you chased off. Bigshot drug people when they have weapons, or political freaks like the ones who came looking for Lindsey Harrington. Sooner or later, if we don’t take them down, respond with lethal force whenever we get the chance, the day will come when they score big. I mean really, really big. They’re going to murder a bunch of us. They’re going to make a great big pile of bodies. Just watch. When it happens, the so-called peace-loving members of this society are going to be outraged all to hell. They don’t like it when their government plays rough. They won’t vote or allocate the money for us to maintain a serious defense, but they’ll sure as hell demand some answers. Why didn’t we stop it from happening?”