“The check!” Alice wailed. “They stole it!”
Knew it! Patrick thought. Complete waste of time.
“You mean,” Romy said, “someone broke in here and took it?”
“Yes! They knew my secret hiding place and they switched it with another check, a worthless one!”
Romy glanced up at Patrick and shrugged.
“Let’s go,” Patrick said. He wanted to be angry at this flaky lady for wasting his time, but she was too genuinely distressed. Her bizarro apartment, though, was giving him a grand case of the creeps.
“We can’t leave her like this. She’s terrified.” Romy turned back to Alice. “When did you last see the check?”
“Oh, I haven’t taken it out for years. But after talking to you last night, I pulled it out of my secret hiding place, to have it ready for Mr. Sullivan, and it had changed!” Another sob, louder this time. “The date’s the same and the money’s the same, but it’s not a SimGen check anymore and someone else’s signature is there instead of Mercer Sinclair’s!” She fumbled in her housecoat pocket. “Here. I’ll show you.”
“Romy…,” Patrick began but her quick sharp look cut him off.
“Let me calm her down a little,” she said, “then we can be on our way.”
Alice produced a slip of paper and shoved it into Romy’s hand. “There. See for yourself!”
Patrick saw Romy glance at the check, then take a closer look.
“What?” Patrick said.
Romy angled the paper back and forth in the dim light. “Well, it’s for five thousand dollars and it’s made out to Alice Fredericks. And she’s right about the signature: I don’t know whose it is, but it’s not Mercer Sinclair’s.”
“I’ll bet she’s also right about it not being from SimGen too.”
Romy nodded, still staring at the check. “Uh-huh. It was drawn on the First Federal Bank of Arlington, Virginia.” She looked up at him, her eyes so bright they fairly glowed. “From the account of something called Manassas Ventures.”
2
“I don’t get it,” Patrick said. His stomach lurched as one of the Federal Plaza elevators lifted them toward OPRR’s offices.
They’d held off talking about Alice during the ride over from Alphabet City. The odds that one of New York’s current crop of cabbies would know enough English to follow their discussion were astronomical, but still they hadn’t wanted to risk it. Now they had an elevator car to themselves.
“I think I do,” Romy said. “I think she did perform some service for SimGen in its early years, maybe even before it started calling itself SimGen. And it may well have had something to do with a baby.”
“What about the space alien angle? You’re not buying into—”
“Of course not. I’m no psychologist, but I can see how she may have felt very guilty about what she did. Combine that with not being too tightly wrapped in the first place, and you can understand someone unraveling. She structured a fantastic scenario that blended fact and fiction.”
“But Mercer Sinclair?”
“More mixing of fact and fiction,” Romy said. “Alice must have had some direct contact with him because he keeps reappearing in her story—taking the sim baby, signing her check.”
“Right. The check. Why did she think it had changed?”
“You heard her. She hadn’t looked at it for years, and during that time it did change—in her mind. Maybe Mercer Sinclair had given it to her himself. She remembered that and so over the years her loosely hinged mind substituted his signature for whoever really signed it. And since Mercer Sinclair is synonymous with SimGen, she began to remember it as a SimGen check.”
“Poor lady. I’d give anything to know the truth about her.”
“I don’t think even she knows anymore.”
He slipped an arm over Romy’s shoulders and pulled her closer. “You were good with her.”
“I felt sorry for the poor thing.”
It had taken Romy a while, but finally she’d managed to calm Alice Fredericks, telling her she was safe now: The aliens had what they wanted and so they wouldn’t be bothering her again. She could take down the foil, let some fresh air into the room, and stop worrying. Alice seemed to buy it. She hadn’t seemed quite ready yet to peel the foil from the walls, but she’d been in better spirits, and even gave them the check to take with them. After all, it wasn’t the real thing, so it was no use to her.
“How old do you think she is?” Patrick said.
“She said she was forty-seven.”
“Yeah, but is that reliable? She looks sixty.”
“Poverty and madness can age you pretty fast.”
“Yeah, well…” He sighed. “I guess there’s no way to find out what really went on between her and SimGen—or rather, the proto-SimGen being directly financed by Manassas. Which leaves us no closer finding out who’s behind Manassas.”
“But we’ve got a Manassas Ventures check, and it’s signed. That’ssomebody’s signature.”
“Right.” With his free hand Patrick pulled the old check from his pocket and held it up. “A C-like letter connected to a squiggle, and then an L-like thing connected to another squiggle, on a check drawn on a Virginia bank that was no doubt gobbled up by another bank that merged with yet another bank which was taken over by still another bank.”
“But the check’s dated back when all that appropriation money was being funneled into SIRG. If we can connect SIRG to that Arlington Federal account…”
“Fat chance.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’ve got Uncle Miltie working on SIRG.”
Patrick had to laugh. “How do you get your superior to do your scut work?”
She lifted her chin defiantly. “I’ll have you know I’m superior to Milton Ware in every way.”
“Except in seniority, position, and salary, right?”
“Mere details. Besides, he’s crazy about me.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“And he’s an expert at tracking down funding. Nobody better. Knows a ton of passwords and can sniff out an unclaimed research dollar at a thousand paces. That’s how I sicced him on SIRG. I told him this group got zillions in funding without ever revealing what it was doing. Maybe if OPRR learned its secret…”
“And he bought it?”
“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Did you tell him it hasn’t received a dime in years?”
“Of course. But I suggested that if he could find where all that funding came from, maybe some of it might still be around for OPRR to tap into.”
“And he bit?”
“Like a dog on a bone. And Milton Ware is the kind of dog who’ll work a bone until there’s nothing left.”
They reached the OPRR offices, a nondescript suite on the eighteenth floor. Romy led Patrick to a windowed office where a peppy, white-haired little man sat hunched before a computer. The plaque on his desk readMILTON WARE .
“Any luck?” she said.
The man looked up and regarded them with bright blue eyes. “Yes and no.”
After Romy made introductions, Ware took off his glasses and pointed to the inch-high stack of printouts on his desk.
“The good news is that I know where Social Impact Research Group’s money came from. The bad news is that OPRR won’t be able to get any of it.”
“Why not?” Romy said.
“Because its ultimate source was the Department of Defense.”
“Knew it!” Romy said, clapping her hands once. “Just like SOG—military bucks laundered through an innocent-sounding subagency. Any indication where the money went after it was cleared through SIRG?”
“Hell,” Patrick said, “we know damn well—” But a quick look from Romy shut him up.
Right. They both suspected that the money had marched through a parade of holding companies until it reached Manassas Ventures, which used it to fund the nascent SimGen. But Milton Ware knew nothing of this.
“We know it wasn’t anything legit,” Romy said, jumping in to cover for him. “Otherwise they would have been more open about the funding.”
“I don’t see why it matters,” Ware said. “It doesn’t exist anymore. No trace of it in anyone’s budget anymore.”