Eye Contact (41 page)

Cain crosses to the bed, uncovers the briefcase, and carries it to the door, which he opens. Walking into the vaulted space of his main office, he switches on a few lights (the blackout curtains on the west wall have been closed to the afternoon sun) and steps to the case that houses his collection of firearms. He opens the glass-paneled doors of the cabinet. Then he sets down the briefcase and opens it as well.

Inside, there are no papers, no sensitive files, only the Nambu pistol with its unique jade handle. Maybe that’s what got him to thinking about Buddy this evening—the gun was a gift from him years ago, from his own collection, marking his rise to power at the Pentagon, an odd token of friendship, a perverse expression of love, but one that Cain understood completely and implicitly. The gun was once used by a Japanese general who took his own life as a matter of principle. More than fifty years later, it is still in perfect working order. It has been used again recently, twice, again as a matter of principle.

Lifting the pistol, he cradles it in his hands with a reverence befitting the Eucharist, then returns it to its little silk cushion, plumping the edges, realigning the gilt-edged display card on its miniature silver easel. Perfect. Cain closes the glass doors and, noticing a smudge, buffs it clean with the fabric of his sleeve.

Picking up the empty briefcase, he crosses the length of his vast office, arriving at the spiral stairs that lead up to his library loft. The winding stairway is a whimsical structure that anyone would find awkward to climb—even a man younger and more agile than Cain would mount these stairs with a measure of trepidation. When this is over, Cain tells himself, he really must have an elevator installed. The project would entail a mess, however, a lengthy disarray of his quarters, so he dismisses the notion.

Clunking upward, tread by tread, he arrives at last on the balcony among the library stacks. The bookshelves are arranged tighter than they used to be in order to accommodate the metal cabinets that have recently been installed. They house electronics that are part of the
Journal’s
massive computer upgrade. Even now, on a quiet Saturday evening, they hum a low-frequency drone, emitting heat—the loft space is much warmer than the office below.

Cain retreats into one of the aisles of books, arriving behind a metal cabinet. Instead of vents, this one has doors, which he opens. There are no electronics inside, just some shelving and a few hooks, like a locker. Cain tosses the briefcase inside. It thuds against the back wall of the cabinet. From one of the hooks, he removes a hooded nylon windbreaker, black, draping it over his arm. From the top shelf, he takes a pair of dark sunglasses, a ring of keys, and a sizable black book—there’s going to be time to kill, and he might as well not waste it.

Equipped with these provisions, he closes the cabinet and turns to the back wall of the loft. There, hidden from the view below, is a door. Cain unlocks it with one of the keys, steps through, and closes it behind him. Beyond the door is a tiny room—it may have been a broom closet—just big enough to contain a second spiral stairway, leading up. He breathes a sigh of determination, then starts his climb. His bad leg darts with pain, just as it did yesterday when he trudged those last few flights to the top of the MidAmerica Building. He knew then that he could not be encumbered by something so trivial as physical discomfort, and he knows it again now. Yesterday’s mission was a diversion, a tactical necessity, a preemptive strike, but today’s is the real thing—everything, absolutely everything, is at stake.

Arriving at the top of the spiral, Cain rests, breathing, gripping the tendons deep within his injured thigh, waiting for the throbbing to subside. Fully a minute passes before he can move on. Then he chooses another key from the ring in his hand, opens another door, and steps out onto the tower platform of the Journal Building.

Blinded by the slant of the early-evening sun, he dons the dark glasses and surveys the rooftop. The Journal Building is only half the height of MidAmerica, and its tower platform is much smaller, only a few yards square atop the peaking Gothic limestone structure. While David had difficulty yesterday locating the laser projector amid the clutter on the MidAmerica Building’s spacious roof, Cain has no difficulty whatever finding the projector’s counterpart up here—there is room, in fact, for nothing else. Years ago, there were radio transmitters up here, broadcasting from a single mast, but as the city grew, the transmitters moved to taller buildings, leaving the defunct antenna as a decorative finial.

There are any number of taller buildings, better situated, that might have served as the third point of the triangle for tonight’s spectacle. But the whole plan was developed by Nathan Cain, presented to the mayor by Nathan Cain, funded largely by Nathan Cain, with no one else involved in the project who would dare suggest overruling Cain in his insistence that the Journal Building be used as a projection site. He argued that there would be a promotional advantage for those companies taking part, and it was unthinkable to deny him JournalCorp’s participation.

Cain takes a slow walk around the apparatus. Though by no means a timid man, he is prudent enough not to let his steps veer far from the device, which is mounted only a few feet from the building’s edge. A low parapet surrounds the platform, but it was built there more for aesthetics than for function, offering little protection from the wind or from the hazards of a fall. Peeking over it, Cain recoils in response to the sweeping sense of vertigo as he glimpses past the gargoyles’ heads to the ant-stream of cars moving on the boulevard below.

He steadies himself with a hand on the projector, dragging his fingers across the machine’s drab-painted surface as he moves around it, examining it in detail—its menacing snout, its ungainly shape, its coils and meters and dials. No, this instrument bears no resemblance to the one David Bosch examined yesterday. They look different because they
are
different. This one has a special, unique function. And in spite of its profusion of cryptic controls, only two must be manually operated, both simple switches, one green, one pink.

Nathan Cain assumes his post, sitting on a folding camp stool, waiting to pull these switches. He knows when to do it, and he knows what will happen when he does. He looks at his watch; there’s still plenty of time till he must act. He’s glad he brought the book.

It is the Bible. He rests it on his knees and opens it from the back, finding the first chapter of John. He’s always loved the way the opening verses of that book mimic those of Genesis, a sort of theological loop, a circular, perpetual, self-conscious evangelistic hiccup that spans the millennia. “In the beginning …” Cain sees the words, but his mind does not absorb them. He mulls instead the events that brought him here, the conversations and cajolery that allowed him to solidify a daring plan.

Project Zarnik is the work of many dedicated men, but he knows he can justly take pride as its creator. The idea was so simple—it sprang to mind so naturally and will achieve its goal so cleanly. Execution of Project Zarnik, however, has been unforeseeably complex, requiring the assistance and cooperation of men less purely committed than himself—men like Buddy.

His friend at the Pentagon was speechless when Cain first told him what he wanted, what he expected. When Buddy could at last muster words, he said, “Nathan, you’re mad.” Anticipating such a reaction, Cain was ready with his response. “Buddy,” he said, “you’re queer. Men of your rank have shot themselves for less grievous infractions. Project Zarnik needs you. I need you. If you’re not willing to sign on, I’ll understand. But I’ll also return something to you—General Sugiyama’s jade-handled pistol. You may have use for it.” So Buddy reconsidered and proved his friendship, as Cain knew he must.

Cain sits calmly in the shadow of the apparatus, Bible open in his lap. He checks his watch again. At six o’clock precisely, he will flip the green switch. At nine o’clock precisely, he will flip the pink switch.

Cain peers at his watch. He closes his Bible.

Downstairs in Cain’s outer offices, Lucille Haring pecks away at her keyboard. Hours have passed since she discovered that Cain had altered Manning’s story exposing the publisher as a murderer, and she has no way of knowing when Cain might reappear from his office. So the pressure is on, and she’s been digging feverishly in Cain’s directories, but she has yet to discover anything that might shed light on his motive to kill.

After her near-encounter with Cain when he returned to his
Journal
offices around one o’clock, Lucille Haring felt faint and sickly—not only because she narrowly escaped discovery of her hacking, which might have led to fatal consequences, but also because she was so hungry. As soon as she caught her breath, she got busy at the keyboard again, but decided she’d better eat. So she hurried down to the building’s main lobby, telling the guard at the elevator that she’d soon return, and grabbed a ham sandwich and a candy bar from vending machines. Arriving upstairs again, she asked the guard if the Colonel was still in his office. “Affirmative,” the guard answered, then admitted her with his key.

She rushed back to her desk, peeled the plastic wrap from the sandwich, and wolfed a couple of bites, hardly taking time to taste it. Then she realized that the sandwich felt funny in her mouth, not quite right. Lifting the bread, she saw swirls of the slightest gold-green iridescence tinging the surface of the ham—probably a day or two older than it should be. She smelled it, finding it impossible to detect anything beyond the mustard. She decided to risk it, eating the rest of the sandwich quickly, without thinking about it. Having refueled, she set the candy bar aside and tapped a few keys on her computer, calling up Cain’s “editorial” directory again.

Then she noticed a blank spot in the same list where she’d found Manning’s “hijinx” story. Digging deeper, she determined that the blank represented a story that had been deleted altogether. No problem—she could easily track it down in the electronic recesses of the mainframe and “undelete” it. A few more keystrokes, and the missing story popped onto her screen. Above the byline of Clifford Nolan, Science Editor, appeared the headline “Requiem for a Small Planet.”

Eyes widening with interest, she leaned closer to read Nolan’s lengthy article, which presented a detailed analysis of why Zarnik’s claimed discovery was surely fallacious. But during its concluding paragraphs, the story cut off abruptly, midsentence, without finish. Reading that dangling phrase, she knew that it was typed at the moment of Nolan’s death.

Manning was right. He conjectured in his own story, later altered by Nathan Cain, that it was Cain himself who tapped into Nolan’s exposé, visited Nolan as he continued to write it, then murdered him, absconding with Nolan’s laptop after deleting the story from the
Journal’s
editorial files.

Lucille Haring can’t shake the uneasy grief she now feels, having learned the circumstances of Cliff Nolan’s demise. She detested the man—indeed, she hated him—for his unwelcome advances and his spiteful threats of recrimination, but she understands that his death was a noble one. He fell, as it were, in the line of duty, attempting to share the truth of his knowledge with the public. In his last act, he became an unwitting martyr to journalistic integrity.

She knows, as Manning does, that Cain has murdered two of his own reporters, but she can’t fathom why. What could possibly warrant such treachery? All she can do is to keep on hacking, hoping that something will catch her attention and provide her with a hint, a tip, some mere suggestion of a motive.

It’s nearly six o’clock. She’s getting frustrated, tired—and hungry again. Glad to have that candy bar in reserve, she rips the wrapper from it and chomps a mouthful of nuts and chocolate. With her free hand, she scrolls through a list of Cain’s recent correspondence, finding nothing of note. Then she cursors along an obscure path and spots a subdirectory that has till now escaped her attention: “E-mail.”

She smiles, swallowing the lump of candy, tossing the rest into a wastebasket. Typing, she says aloud, “I wonder what dirty little notes you’ve been swapping with unseen partners in seedy, far-flung chat rooms.”

She frowns. She can tell from the slugs that most of Cain’s E-mail is just interoffice memos. But then she scrolls past a long sequence of files titled “Buchman0l” through “Buchman88.” They were all written within the last few months, the most recent ones only hours apart. Interesting.

She opens the last of these, sent yesterday afternoon, Friday, at four. It begins without salutation, “Urgent errand at MidAmerica site later today, serendipitous clue at lunch with Brad and Carl. Will detail at our nightly meeting, may be late. Schedule is firm for tomorrow. Green switch at eighteen hundred, pink at twenty-one. God bless America.”

Lucille Haring stares at the words, perplexed. She knows from Manning’s original story, filed by modem last night, that Cain’s reference to an urgent errand must refer to the killing of David Bosch, mistaken for Manning. But what does Cain mean by “Green switch at eighteen hundred, pink at twenty-one”? Surely, he’s referring to six and nine o’clock tonight, but what’s with the colored switches? And to whom was this E-mail sent? Who’s Buchman?

She glances at her watch—it’s a few minutes before six.
Something’s
going to happen, and she really ought to tell Manning about it. Maybe if they put their heads together, they could figure this out. And what, if anything, should she do about Cain? He’s still in his suite, somewhere in the inner sanctum, and he ought to be arrested. She needs to talk to Manning, but how is she to reach him? He’s undoubtedly in hiding, hardly likely to be sitting home by the phone.

She remembers that he carries a cell phone and a pager, but doesn’t know how to get those numbers. Maybe a little more surfing of the
Journal’s
mainframe will provide that information. It’s worth a try. She checks over her shoulder, confirms that Cain’s office door is still closed tight, then sets to work at her keyboard.