“Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t be able to get to the damn thing when I need it, Leona. Which is the whole point,” Shaw snapped. “Old-fashioned thread will be just fine.”
She shrugged, cleaned the wound as best she could, stitched him up, wrapped gauze around it, and sat back.
“All done.”
Katie let go of Shaw and also let out a relieved breath. Shaw slowly sat up, carefully moving his arm.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
“For you, Shaw, anything,” she said sarcastically. “As you said, I so clearly owe you.”
“Yeah, well now we’re even.”
“At least even,” she corrected. “The needle in fact might have swung to my side.”
“I don’t think so. Calling it even was a gift on my part.” He put his shirt on. While he was buttoning it up she glanced at the scar on his right side. “How is it working, by the way?”
“Ask Frank, I’m sure he’d love to tell you all about it.” He reached over and pocketed the tiny instrument she’d used to put the metal device in his arm. “For old time’s sake,” he said, when she looked ready to protest.
As they were leaving Leona stopped him at the door. “Is that thing in your arm what I think it is?”
“You never know, Leona, you just never know.”
CHAPTER 75
“SHAW, ARE YOU GOING TO TELL ME what’s going on? What is that thing in your arm? How do you know that Leona person? Where’d you get that scar on your side?” Katie fired off these questions as they ate dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel across the street from St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin. It was late enough at night that they had a quiet table in the back and could discuss things. Though Shaw didn’t appear to be in a discussing mood because she’d been asking these same questions for hours and hadn’t gotten a single answer in return.
He stoically finished chewing his food. He hated Dublin now. He’d asked Anna to marry him here, at a little place north of the Liffey. On his knee with the damn ring. She’d said yes in nine languages. And now she was dead. There would be no marriage, no four or five kids, no growing old together. Nothing. Everywhere he looked he saw some place, some nook, cranny, smell, sound, even a funny thing the sky did, the drop of the rain, the honk of an Irish car horn that reminded him of her. He could barely breathe here. He could barely function. Hated it. And that wasn’t all.
Anna was on her way back to Germany for burial with parents who blamed him. Blamed him for the death of a woman he would have gladly sacrificed his own life to protect. Anna on a cold metal bed in London with a hole in her head. Anna being shipped to cold, lonely ground in Wisbach, for all of eternity, instead of being held in his warm arms. Safe, together.
Katie interrupted these thoughts. “We need to find out who was really behind the Red Menace.”
“The whole world has been looking, and nobody seems to have found it yet.”
“I’m not sure the whole world really has been trying to find out the source. They’ve just accepted that it was true, sort of a rush to judgment. Or if they did look it wasn’t very hard. And then events kept happening and kept people jumping. After awhile, the story didn’t become who was behind it, but what the hell are we going to do about the evil Russians. I think the whole world was basically snookered.”
Shaw looked at her with new respect. “That’s sort of what Anna was thinking.”
“I’ll take that as a big compliment.”
“Any ideas?” he asked.
Katie pulled her chair closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve actually been giving that some thought.” She dug in her purse and pulled out a battered notepad. “When I was in Anna’s office that day she had to step out to see someone and I sort of looked around.”
“You mean you were snooping,” Shaw said a little angrily, instinctively defending Anna’s right to privacy.
“Do you want to hear what I found or not?”
“I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“I looked through some of the Red Menace stuff on her desk and some notes she’d jotted down. One was a list of Web sites or e-mail addresses. Maybe she’d contacted them. Anyway, one stuck with me and I wrote it down.”
“Why’d it stick with you?”
“It was called Barney’s Rubble-Land. You know, The Flintstones? It was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. Anyway, it was a blogger page. I didn’t check it out then, but while you were showering back at the hotel after Dr. Doom worked on you, I accessed the site from my laptop.”
“What’d you find?”
“This blogger, apparently his name is Barney, had some questions about the Red Menace too. From his postings he didn’t think it was legit.”
“How does that help us?”
“Well, quite frankly, I didn’t think the blogger site was legit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think Barney is a sham. I have lots of friends who’re bloggers. You get obsessed with them, write stuff all the time. There’s really nothing regimented about them. Free association, spur-of-the-moment stuff. And you usually have a place for people to discuss things. I mean, that’s one of the main reasons to have a blog in the first place. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, this blog didn’t have that. I checked the dates of the postings. They come out every other day at the same time. That doesn’t sound like Barney’s Rubble-Land to me. It sounds like it was on some sort of preset spit-out-a-blog mode, bi-daily pattern.”
“Why would someone set up a system like that?” Shaw wondered out loud.
“They might if instead of a real blog, it was a way to test the waters.”
“Test the waters?”
“Yeah, people in the entertainment and ad fields do it all the time. I actually did a story on it years ago. You put out a product and you want to gauge people’s reaction to it. You can have focus groups, opportunities to phone in opinions, Web site discussions. But some companies go a step further. They use blank drops, like a façade to get people to really let them know how they feel without feeling pressure. It can be a fake Web site, 800 number phone bank, or a questionnaire put out under a sham company’s name.”
Shaw looked very interested now. “So you’re saying this Barney Rubble might have been a façade to test how people were reacting to the Red Menace campaign?”
“And since Barney’s blog was highly critical and suspicious of the campaign…”
“They might have put that carrot out there to see if anyone else felt the same way. But you said there was no forum on the site to leave your opinion.”
“But if you e-mailed the site, which Anna did-”
Shaw finished for her. “Then they get your e-mail address. And Anna’s e-mail was AFischer@ThePhoenixGroup.com.” He looked sharply at Katie. “That may be how they found out about The Phoenix Group. Not through you.”
“That’s probably something we’ll never know for sure.”
A minute of silence passed while they fiddled with the remains of their meals.
“Katie, I…”
“Don’t even go there, Shaw. This thing is complicated and we’ve both made mistakes. And we’ll both probably make some more along the way.”
“Let’s just hope one of them doesn’t end up getting us killed.”
“Can we track this Web site somehow? I’m not that great with technical things.” Shaw nodded, made a call to Frank. He put his phone away and finished his wine. “We’ll see what he comes up with.”
“So are we staying in Dublin?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We’re flying out tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Germany. A little town called Wisbach.”
CHAPTER 76