The Dante Conspiracy (20 page)

‘Apparently not,’ Hunter muttered.

‘There’s also,’ Reilly went on, looking back at the body,
‘the footprints.’

Hunter nodded. ‘We see Dole’s prints clearly enough. The
soil was obviously soft when he walked up here, what, two days ago?’

‘The doc reckons he’s been dead thirty hours minimum, fifty
hours maximum. He can’t be more accurate without an autopsy.’

Hunter pointed towards the body. ‘And that single line of
footprints was made by the doctor, right?’

Reilly nodded.
‘Yeah.
I had to get
him up here just to confirm death – it’s the law,’ he added, somewhat
unnecessarily. ‘But before I let the doc go to him I had
everythin
’
photographed,
so’s
we got a permanent record of what
the crime scene looked like ’fore folks started
tramplin
’
the place up.’

Christy-Lee smiled at him. ‘That was good thinking,
sheriff.’ She pointed at the ground around the dead man. In a rough circle that
more or less followed the outline of the body, the grass had been almost
flattened, and the three-toed prints of the crows were clearly visible where
the mud showed through. Around the corpse’s head, the ground was soaked with
blood, and small scraps of flesh and blood were scattered about – the remains
of the crows’ last, unfinished, meal. ‘No sign there of any prints except those
made by the deceased, I suppose?’

Reilly shook his head decisively.
‘Nope.
I cast around the whole area when I first got here. The only prints I could
find were made by Billy himself and Andy Dermott – he’s the farmer who owns
this land – when he found the body this
mornin
’.’

Hunter turned away from the corpse and looked steadily at
Reilly. ‘You do realize what you’re saying, sheriff?’ he asked.

Reilly smiled again. ‘Sure I do. This man’s been killed by a
guy nine feet tall and as strong as a gorilla, who did the job with another
guy’s leg bone, and who didn’t leave no footprints anywhere near the corpse. We
are talking seriously weird here, and I’m real glad we got an FBI, ’cause I
sure as hell don’t have any idea where to start.’

Reilly hitched up his trousers and tightened the belt a
notch. ‘I know a lot of law enforcement officers bitch about it when the Bureau
gets involved in local crime,’ he added, ‘and I’ve got a bit uppity about it
myself a
coupla
times. But now, it’s different.
Anything you want, all you
gotta
do is
ask
. I’m real happy to be able to just walk away from this
and leave it to the professionals.’

‘Thanks a lot, sheriff,’ Hunter said, sarcasm dripping from
his voice, and turned back to look again at what was left of Billy Dole.

Oval Office, White House, 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

President Charles
Gainey
looked
steadily across the gold-embossed green leather top of his desk at the
Secretary of
Defense
.

After a few moments James Dickson closed the CIA report with
a snap and replaced it on the desk in front of the President. ‘It may be
nothing,’ he said, ‘or perhaps just a coincidence. The CIA’s witnesses are
hardly the most reliable of people.’

‘Agreed,’
Gainey
said, ‘but we do
know they’re not deluded. What they’re reporting is, at least in some cases,
actually happening to them, despite the lack of any credible supporting
evidence.’

‘I know,’ Dickson replied. ‘But it could still be just a
statistical anomaly,’ he repeated.

Gainey
shook his head. ‘I don’t
think so. The CIA could well make a horse’s ass of the figures, but I doubt
that the AMA would. And before you go any further down that road, I know that
the AMA report deals in national and international trends, while the CIA’s
contribution is specific, but the trend is certainly there. Small it may be at
the moment, but the consequences could be serious.’

Dickson sat in silence for a few moments. ‘Have you discussed
this with any of your scientific advisors,
Mr.
President?’

‘No, not yet.
For obvious reasons –
Roland Oliver’s security classification for one thing – I want to keep this
tight and in-house for the moment.’

‘So what do you intend to do,
Mr.
President?’

‘For the moment, nothing, but if further evidence emerges
that Roland Oliver is tampering with the gene pool of the American people for
its own purposes, we will have to take steps. What steps, exactly, I don’t
know, but I’d like you to give it some thought and come up with appropriate
recommendations.’

‘They do have the technology, I suppose?’ Dickson asked,
somewhat doubtfully.

Gainey
actually laughed. ‘Of
course they have. We could almost do it ourselves, so there’s no doubt Roland
Oliver can.’

Reno, Nevada

The two-storey office building sat among a dozen others just
like it on the northern edge of Reno. Between the building and the road was a
small parking lot which could house a dozen or so vehicles. The exterior of the
building was rough brownstone under a tiled roof, with rows of small square
windows marking the level of each of the two floors. The main entrance was a
double door, but the left-hand side was kept permanently bolted, and the
right-hand door was always locked. Beside the door was a faded plaque which
announced, to anyone who could decipher the wording, that the building was the
Nevada office of the North American Professional and Allied Trades Health
Insurance Company Inc.

Next to the plaque was a doorbell, but there were almost
never any visitors, because the company did all its business by mail. The
mailman visited every day, and other tradesmen when they were summoned, but
they never got beyond the ground floor and basement utility rooms. Those few
people who ever ventured into the building were met in a drab and poorly-lit
reception area, and were escorted wherever they went. If they thought about it
at all, they assumed that the upper floor housed offices full of clerks working
on files and letters.

In fact, upstairs, it was all rather different.

First, there were only nine people on staff, because almost
all the operations conducted there were effectively run by the computer system.
The five technical-specialist employees worked shifts which meant that one of
them was always on the premises, and they were simply there to minister to the
computers and solve any hardware or software problems as soon as they arose.

The other four staff did what the computers told them, which
generally involved mailing letters to hospitals, clinics, doctors, and
potential clients of the company, and handling the incoming mail. The computers
selected the people to whom client letters were sent, based upon strict
demographic criteria and other factors, and then printed the letters and
envelopes.

The envelopes were plain and
unadorned,
anonymous in every way, but the paper that ran through the printers was very
special. The surface layer contained a combination of specially-modified silver
salts, which made the paper highly light-sensitive. The printers were normal
commercial lasers, and when the paper went through them, the text of the
letters was printed in the usual way.

What was unusual was that the printing process, which
exposed the paper to extreme heat when the laser toner was fused to its
surface, also activated the silver salts. From the moment the paper emerged
from the printer, it had a life of about one month – the actual time varied
with its subsequent exposure to light. At the end of that period, the paper
would have turned completely and impenetrably black, making the text totally
illegible. It had been calculated that it would take at least one month from
the date of mailing before any sort of investigation would be likely to begin.

The other benefit, from the point of view of the Reno
program, was that any attempt to photocopy, scan or photograph the letters
using a flash camera would result in the immediate blackening of the paper.
That, as far as anything could be considered a guarantee for such a sensitive
operation, was one of the safeguards of the program.

The problem with all computers is that the data you get out
is only as good as the data you put in. The data used in Reno was derived from
a number of different sources, including the Internal Revenue Service and the
Census Bureau, and most of it was accurate.

But in one case and in one important respect, the data was
flawed. PC (Potential Client) 73418 was not quite without family. Her parents
were dead, and so was her husband, but she had decided to keep her married
name, and for some reason that had thrown the system. If she had reverted to
her maiden name, the fact that she had a sister would have red-flagged her. As
it was, the letter had been sent out to the address in Utah, and that was a
mistake.

Beaver Creek, Western Montana

Ninety minutes later the top field was almost empty. The
body of Billy Dole was starting to chill in the hospital mortuary, laid out on
a dissecting table and covered with a rubber sheet held down with ice-packs,
because the protruding thigh-bone made the corpse too long to fit inside the
refrigerator. The FBI-retained specialist pathologist had been summoned from
Helena. Reilly was starting on his second donut of the afternoon at the Diner.
Dermott had given up the idea of
plowing
the top
field, for a while anyway, and was checking all the ground floor doors and
windows at his farm house, just in case.

Three of Reilly’s deputies were taking plaster casts of
Dole’s last half dozen footprints, visible now that the body had been removed.
In fact, one deputy was pouring the plaster and lifting the casts when they’d
hardened, while the other two stood on either side of him holding pump-action
twelve gauge shotguns loaded with rifled slugs. They didn’t know who or what
they were watching out for, but they were watching out anyway. They were
actually looking in the wrong direction, but that didn’t matter, because Billy
Dole’s killers were long gone.

Hunter and Kaufmann had carried their overnight bags, which
they always kept in the Bureau Ford, into their adjoining single rooms at the
Rest-A-While Motel just outside Beaver Creek, and were wondering what the hell
to do next.

‘We’ll have to wait for the results of the autopsy,
obviously,’ Hunter said, sitting down on the edge of Kaufmann’s bed.

Christy-Lee nodded agreement. ‘When in doubt, stick to
standard procedure,’ she said, and picked up a small tape recorder. ‘We’d
better make notes as we go along, just in case either of us has a brainstorm.’

‘Right,’ Hunter said. He lay back on the pillows and stared
at the ceiling for a couple of minutes. Then he sat up again and began ticking
off points on his fingers.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘We need the pathologist to confirm the cause
of death, and also to estimate the force needed to drive that bone into Dole’s
skull. It’s probably a waste of time, but I want him to check that Dole hadn’t
got an unusually weak skull or anything like that, and that the bone is what we
think it is – a femur, a human thigh-bone.

‘We’ll ask the sheriff to start the usual next-of-kin
tracing, and to find out who last saw Dole alive. Then we need to talk to his
friends, if he had any here, and find out if he had any enemies, owed any money
to people he shouldn’t, that kind of thing.’

‘He was a prison guard,’ Christy-Lee pointed out. ‘He
wouldn’t have made many friends in the pen, but it’s real easy to make bad
enemies. We should find out which prisons he worked at and check all recent
releases. Maybe somebody big and nasty got out and came looking for him.’

‘If Reilly and the doctor are right,’ Hunter interrupted,
‘they’d have to be really big and really nasty and really light on their feet.’

‘Yeah,’ Kaufmann agreed, ‘and none of these standard
procedures are going to achieve anything until we can work out the answer to
just one simple question – how the hell did Billy Dole get himself killed?’

She stopped and looked inquiringly at Hunter. He looked back
at her and shook his head.

‘Right now,’ he replied, ‘I haven’t any idea.’

Helena, Western Montana

The Helena FBI Resident Agency office possessed five
computers linked in a Local Area Network, an email computer attached to the LAN
but with client-only access and a firewall for security reasons, three
printers, and a part-time secretary, Gloria
Gray
, who
worked from two to five in the afternoon, Monday to Friday. Kaufmann could
type, but not well, and much preferred to scribble notes which Miss
Gray
, an elderly and somewhat irascible spinster, then
attempted to read and type into her computer. This operation was made easier if
Kaufmann was in the office, because she could usually read most of what she had
written.

Gloria
Gray
got to Kaufmann’s
scribbled notes of the call from Sheriff Reilly at about four thirty that
afternoon. In accordance with standard procedure, she took a new file cover,
allocated a file name that was an amalgam of the date and reported location of
the incident, and inserted Kaufmann’s hand-written notes. Then she created a
new file on the computer and transcribed the notes into that. She printed a
copy of the finished text and inserted that in the file as well, so that
Kaufmann could check it for errors when she was next in the office.

When the FBI had been run as Herbert Hoover’s private
kingdom, the Bureau had nearly submerged in the sea of paper that he had
insisted upon. Every action, every day, by every agent in the Bureau, had to be
reported and passed up the chain of command.