The Third Twin (22 page)

“How old are you, Jeannie?”

“You didn’t like me calling you a big strong kid.”

“I’m twenty-two.”

“I’m twenty-nine. It’s a big difference.”

“Do I seem like a kid to you?”

“Listen, I don’t know, a man of thirty probably wouldn’t drive here from Washington just to bring me pizza. It was kind of impulsive.”

“Are you sorry I did it?”

“No.” She touched his hand. “I’m real glad.”

He still did not know where he was with her. But she had cried on his shoulder. You don’t use a kid for that, he thought.

“When will you know about my genes?” he said.

She looked at her watch. “The blotting is probably done. Lisa will make the film in the morning.”

“You mean the test is completed?”

“Just about.”

“Can’t we look at the results now? I can’t wait to find out if I have the same DNA as Dennis Pinker.”

“I guess we could,” Jeannie said. “I’m pretty curious myself.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

25

B
ERRINGTON
J
ONES HAD A PLASTIC CARD THAT WOULD OPEN
any door in Nut House.

No one else knew. Even the other full professors fondly imagined their offices were private. They knew the cleaners had master keys. So did the campus security guards. But it never occurred to faculty that it could not be very difficult to get hold of a key that was given even to cleaners.

All the same, Berrington had never used his master key. Snooping was undignified: not his style. Pete Watlingson probably had photos of naked boys in his desk drawer, Ted Ransome undoubtedly stashed a little marijuana somewhere, Sophie Chapple might keep a vibrator for those long, lonely afternoons, but Berrington did not want to know about it. The master key was only for emergencies.

This was an emergency.

The university had ordered Jeannie to stop using her computer search program, and they had announced to the world that it had been discontinued, but how could he be sure it was true? He could not see the electronic messages fly along the phone lines from one terminal to another. Throughout the day the thought had nagged him that she might already be searching another database. And there was no telling what she might find.

So he had returned to his office and now sat at his desk, as the warm dusk gathered over the red brick of the campus buildings, tapping a plastic card against his computer mouse and getting ready to do something that went against all his instincts.

His dignity was precious. He had developed it early. As the smallest boy in the class, without a father to tell him how to deal with bullies, his mother too worried about making ends meet to concern herself with his happiness, he had slowly created an air of superiority, an aloofness that protected him. At Harvard he had furtively studied a classmate from a rich old-money family, taking in the details of his leather belts and linen handkerchiefs, his tweed suits and cashmere scarves; learning how he unfolded his napkin and held chairs for ladies; marveling at the mixture of ease and deference with which he treated the professors, the superficial charm and underlying coldness of his relations with his social inferiors. By the time Berrington began work on his master’s degree he was widely assumed to be a Brahmin himself.

And the cloak of dignity was difficult to take off. Some professors could remove their jackets and join in a game of touch football with a group of undergraduates, but not Berrington. The students never told him jokes or invited him to their parties, but neither did they act rudely to him or talk during his lectures or question his grades.

In a sense his whole life since the creation of Genetico had been a deception, but he had carried it off with boldness and panache. However, there was no stylish way to sneak into someone else’s room and search it.

He checked his watch. The lab would be closed now. Most of his colleagues had left, heading for their suburban homes or for the bar of the Faculty Club. This was as good a moment as any. There was no time when the building was guaranteed to be empty; scientists worked whenever the mood took them. If he were seen, he would have to brazen it out.

He left his office, went down the stairs, and walked along the corridor to Jeannie’s door. There was no one around. He swiped the card through the card reader and her door opened. He stepped inside, switched on the lights, and closed the door behind him.

It was the smallest office in the building. In fact it had been a storeroom, but Sophie Chapple had maliciously insisted it become Jeannie’s office, on the spurious grounds that a bigger room was needed to store the boxes of printed questionnaires the department used. It was a narrow room with a small window. However, Jeannie had livened it up with two wooden chairs painted bright red, a spindly palm in a pot, and a reproduction of a Picasso etching, a bullfight in vivid shades of yellow and orange.

He picked up the framed picture on her desk. It was a black-and-white photograph of a good-looking man with sideburns and a wide tie, and a young woman with a determined expression: Jeannie’s parents in the seventies, he guessed. Otherwise her desk was completely clear. Tidy girl.

He sat down and switched on her computer. While it was booting up he went through her drawers. The top one contained ballpoints and scratch pads. In another he found a box of tampons and a pair of panty hose in an unopened packet. Berrington hated panty hose. He cherished adolescent memories of garter belts and stockings with seams. Panty hose were unhealthy, too, like nylon Jockey shorts. If President Proust made him surgeon general, he planned to put a health warning on all panty hose. The next drawer contained a hand mirror and a brush with some of Jeannie’s long dark hair caught in its bristles; the last, a pocket dictionary and a paperback book called
A Thousand Acres.
No secrets so far.

Her menu came up on screen. He picked up her mouse and clicked on Calendar. Her appointments were predictable: lectures and classes, laboratory time, tennis games, dates for drinks and movies. She was going to Oriole Park at Camden Yards to watch the ball game on Saturday; Ted Ransome and his wife were having her over to brunch on Sunday; her car was due to be serviced on Monday. There was no entry that said “Scan medical files of Acme Insurance.” Her to-do list was equally mundane: “Buy vitamins, call Ghita, Lisa birthday gift, check modem.”

He exited the diary and began to look through her files. She had masses of statistics on spreadsheets. Her word-processing files were smaller: some correspondence, designs for questionnaires, a draft of an article. Using the Find feature, he searched her entire WP directory for the word “database.” It came up several times in the article and again in file copies of three outgoing letters, but none of the references told him where she planned to use her search engine next. “Come on,” he said aloud, “there has to be something, for God’s sake.”

She had a filing cabinet, but there was not much in it; she had been here only a few weeks. After a year or two it would be stuffed full of completed questionnaires, the raw data of psychological research. Now she had a few incoming letters in one file, departmental memos in another, photocopies of articles in a third.

In an otherwise empty cupboard he found, facedown, a framed picture of Jeannie with a tall, bearded man, both of them on bicycles beside a lake. Berrington inferred a love affair that had ended.

He now felt even more worried. This was the room of an organized person, the type who planned ahead. She filed her incoming letters and kept copies of everything she sent out. There ought to be evidence here of what she was going to do next. She had no reason to be secretive about it; until today there had been no suggestion that she had anything to be ashamed of. She must be planning another database sweep. The only possible explanation for the absence of clues was that she had made the arrangements by phone or in person, perhaps with someone who was a close friend. And if that were the case he might not be able to find out anything about it by searching her room.

He heard a footstep in the corridor outside, and he tensed. There was a click as a card was passed through the card reader. Berrington stared helplessly at the door. There was nothing he could do: he was caught red-handed, sitting at her desk, with her computer on. He could not pretend to have wandered in here by accident.

The door opened. He expected to see Jeannie, but in fact it was a security guard.

The man knew him. “Oh, hi, Professor,” the guard said. “I saw the light on, so I thought I’d check. Dr. Ferrami usually keeps her door open when she’s here.”

Berrington struggled not to blush. “That’s quite all right,” he said.
Never apologize, never explain.
“I’ll be sure to close the door when I’m through here.”

“Great.”

The guard stood silent, waiting for an explanation. Berrington clamped his jaw shut. Eventually the man said: “Well, good night, Professor.”

“Good night.”

The guard left.

Berrington relaxed.
No problem.

He checked that her modem was switched on, then clicked on America Online and accessed her mailbox. Her terminal was programmed to give her password automatically. She had three pieces of mail. He downloaded them all. The first was a notice about increased prices for using the Internet. The second came from the University of Minnesota and read:

I’ll be in Baltimore on Friday and would like to have a drink with you for old times’ sake. Love, Will

Berrington wondered if Will was the bearded guy in the bike picture. He threw it out and opened the third letter. It electrified him.

You’ll be relieved to know that I’m running your scan on our fingerprint file tonight. Call me. Ghita.

It was from the FBI.

“Son of a bitch,” Berrington whispered. “This will kill us.”

26

B
ERRINGTON WAS AFRAID TO TALK ON THE PHONE ABOUT
Jeannie and the FBI fingerprint file: So many telephone calls were monitored by intelligence agencies. Nowadays the surveillance was done by computers programmed to listen for key words and phrases. If someone said “plutonium” or “heroin” or “kill the president,” the computer would tape the conversation and alert a human listener. The last thing Berrington needed was some CIA eavesdropper wondering why Senator Proust was so interested in FBI fingerprint files.

So he got in his silver Lincoln Town Car and drove at ninety miles an hour on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. He often broke the speed limit In fact, he was impatient with all kinds of rules. It was a contradiction in him, he recognized that. He hated peace marchers and drug takers, homosexuals and feminists and rock musicians and all nonconformists who flouted American traditions. Yet at the same time he resented anyone who tried to tell him where to park his car or how much to pay his employees or how many fire extinguishers to put in his laboratory.

As he drove, he wondered about Jim Proust’s contacts in the intelligence community. Were they just a bunch of old soldiers who sat around telling stories about how they had blackmailed antiwar protesters and assassinated South American presidents? Or were they still at the cutting edge? Did they still help one another, like the Mafia, and regard the return of a favor as an almost religious obligation? Or were those days over? It was a long time since Jim had left the CIA; even he might not know.

It was late, but Jim was waiting for Berrington at his office in the Capitol building. “What the hell has happened that you couldn’t tell me on the phone?” he said.

“She’s about to run her computer program on the FBI’s fingerprint file.”

Jim went pale. “Will it work?”

“It worked on dental records, why wouldn’t it work on fingerprints?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Jim said feelingly.

“How many prints do they have on file?”

“More than twenty million sets, as I recall. They can’t be all criminals. Are there that many criminals in America?”

“I don’t know, maybe they have prints of dead people too. Focus, Jim, for Christ’s sake. Can you stop this happening?”

“Who’s her contact at the Bureau?”

Berrington handed him the printout he had made of Jeannie’s E-mail. As Jim studied it, Berrington looked around. On the walls of his office, Jim had photographs of himself with every American president after Kennedy. There was a uniformed Captain Proust saluting Lyndon Johnson; Major Proust, still with a full head of straight blond hair, shaking hands with Dick Nixon; Colonel Proust glaring balefully at Jimmy Carter; General Proust sharing a joke with Ronald Reagan, both of them laughing fit to bust; Proust in a business suit, deputy director of the CIA, deep in conversation with a frowning George Bush; and Senator Proust, now bald and wearing glasses, wagging a finger at Bill Clinton. He was also pictured dancing with Margaret Thatcher, playing golf with Bob Dole, and horseback riding with Ross Perot. Berrington had a few such photos, but Jim had a whole damn gallery. Whom was he trying to impress? Himself, probably. Constantly seeing himself with the most powerful people in the world told Jim he was important.

“I never heard of anyone called Ghita Sumra,” Jim said. “She can’t be high up.”

“Who
do
you know at the FBI?” Berrington said impatiently.

“Have you ever met the Creanes, David and Hilary?” Berrington shook his head.

“He’s an assistant director, she’s a recovering alcoholic. They’re both about fifty. Ten years ago, when I was running the CIA, David worked for me in the Diplomatic Directorate, keeping tabs on all the foreign embassies and their espionage sections. I liked him. Anyway, one afternoon Hilary got drunk and went out in her Honda Civic and killed a six-year-old kid, a black girl, on Beulah Road out in Springfield. She drove on, stopped at a shopping mall, and called Dave at Langley. He went over there in his Thunderbird, picked her up and took her home, then reported the Honda stolen.”

“But something went wrong.”

“There was a witness to the accident who was sure the car had been driven by a middle-aged white woman, and a stubborn detective who knew that not many women steal cars. The witness positively identified Hilary, and she broke down and confessed.”

“What happened?”

“I went to the district attorney. He wanted to put them both in jail. I swore it was an important matter of national security and persuaded him to drop the prosecution. Hilary started going to AA and she hasn’t had a drink since.”

“And Dave moved over to the Bureau and did well.”

“And boy, does he owe me.”

“Can he stop this Ghita woman?”

“He’s one of nine assistant directors reporting to the deputy director. He doesn’t run the fingerprint division, but he’s a powerful guy.”

“But can he do it?”

“I don’t know! I’ll ask, okay? If it can be done, he’ll do it for me.”

“Okay, Jim,” Berrington said. “Pick up the damn phone and ask him.”