A Knife Edge

SEVEN

I was on time, 0930 as requested, but Captain Schaeffer wasn't. Fine by me. I told myself to snap out of the Anna thing and get busy. I started with the e-mails. The box was crammed with unread CC'ed crap. None of it was specifically sent to me, except for one with the inviting subject: “The proper completion of a DD Form 1351-2.” CC'ed e-mails are a waste of time, although the one about the 1351-2 reminded me to put in for my Japan expenses. I selected All and consigned the lot to the trash. I pulled my wallet and extracted the wad of receipts from my recent overseas junket and began filling out the form online. It was tedious going, but I don't earn enough that I can fund investigations for the government out of my own pocket. The online paperwork completed, I dispatched it and then forwarded the hard receipts to Accounts Payable through the internal mail.

Checking my wallet for any hidden receipts, the great white's tooth given to me by Dr. Samura Hashimura, the coroner in Tokyo, dropped out onto the desk. I examined it, holding it between thumb and forefinger. It was white and hard and made for cutting and tearing. With so many of these teeth ripping simultaneously into Dr. Tanaka, the unfortunate guy probably wouldn't have felt a thing. I taped the tooth to the frame of the computer monitor. Thus were fifty-nine minutes of my working day accounted for. It was going to be one of those days.

Next I pulled out my notebook and the voice recorder. There was a report to be written. An hour and a half later I was two thirds of the way through it and getting to the point where I felt I needed to rehash the interviews conducted on board the Natusima. I listened to them all, then tabbed to the time code marked in the device's memory.

My voice: “What was he drinking?”

Boyle's voice: “Scotch. We only had that and sake on board.”

“Do you know how much he drank?”

“Enough, obviously, though I didn't realize it at the time. I topped his glass up maybe twice, I think. As you may or may not know, Special Agent, many Asian people don't have the gene that allows them to metabolize alcohol effectively.”

“So you had never seen Dr. Tanaka drunk before?”

“No, never.”

“Did you see him leave the party?”

“No. I wish I had. Then perhaps he'd still be alive.”

Yeah, maybe. Boyle was one condescending asshole: “As you may or may not know, Agent Cooper, many Asian people don't have the gene that allows them to metabolize alcohol effectively.” I tabbed the memory button again.

“Dr. Tanaka wasn't discovered missing for some time — twelve hours, according to statements. Isn't that a long time to not notice somebody missing?”

“It might seem that way, but no, not really. The expedition was over and everyone saw how drunk Tanaka was when he left. I guess everyone assumed, as I did, that he was in his room, sleeping it off.”

Did you see him leave the party? I'd asked. Boyle had replied, no. A few minutes later, under a bit of stress, suddenly everyone including Boyle is watching Tanaka reeling out of the joint legless. Did this mean something? Or nothing? Very few statements contain no contradictions. The ones that don't more often than not tend to indicate coaching. And yet—

“Ah, Cooper, you're back,” said Captain Schaeffer, interrupting my thoughts, his head peering around the edge of the door. “What are you doing?”

“Sir,” I replied. “The report on the death of Dr. Tanaka. I'll send it over in about half an hour.”

“Forget about it for the moment. I'm afraid you have some visitors. I did warn you…”

Warned me? What about?

The two men swept into the room like a couple of big cats released from their cage, circling the space in front of my desk, ready to eat. One was Caucasian; his buddy, Asian. Both were in plainclothes. Actually, there was nothing plain about their clothes. Their suits were possibly Italian and improbably expensive, and they carried themselves a little like spooks, but far more like stockbrokers with a pitbull cross. I recognized their manner immediately. I was getting a visit from the most feared government department in D.C.: the General Accounting Office.

Schaeffer closed the door. I pictured a steel bolt slamming home. Escape was futile. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” I asked.

They flipped their credentials at me and then glanced around for something to sit on. The room was empty except for my desk and a faded color photo of our last President stuck with tape to the wall behind me. If they wanted to sit, they had the choice of the floor or my desk. Both chose to hang a cheek off the latter. I leaned back in my chair to get out of their personal space, or rather to get them out of mine.

“Don't think much of your decorator,” said the white guy.

“I'm living in it for a while before I renovate,” I said. “You guys got names?”

“De Silver,” said one.

“Wu,” his partner said. “We've had our eye on you, Cooper.” They were playing Good Accountant Bad Accountant.

“Really, which one are you sharing?” I asked.

“Watch your mouth, Special Agent. We can make this pleasant or we can spoil your day. Your choice.”

“You're too late,” I said. “It's already curdled.”

Wu slapped down a piece of paper on the desk in front of my keyboard. I leaned forward to get a closer look. It was DD Form 1351-2. Receipts were attached.

“That yours, Cooper?”

“Looks like.” I glanced over the figures. “Problem? Didn't I carry the one?”

“We sent you a priority e-mail about this and the system told us you never opened it.”

“Right, the e-mail. I filed it.” It was a half-truth. I still hadn't emptied the trash.

De Silver took a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket and opened it. “You went to a Sea Breeze Aquarium three weeks ago?”

“Correct,” I said.

“You got a receipt for a cab ride there that cost thirty-five bucks. Seems the return journey cost just ten.”

“And?”

“Why the discrepancy?”

“So this is about twenty-five bucks?”

“It's not just the twenty-five dollars, Cooper,” said De Silver.

“No, then what is it about?” Actually, I was anxious to know because, among the three of us, we'd already blown more than that in lost productivity.

“It's about procedure, systems, accountability,” Wu informed me. “You haven't answered the question.”

“Which one? There've been a few.”

“Were you on DoD business the entire time you were in that cab?”

I was about to answer when Wu said, “We've red-flagged you, Cooper. We're going to go over every receipt you've entered for the last six months. And the paperwork had better be in proper order.”

“So, you want to tell us about the cab ride?” De Silver again.

I can only take so much bureaucracy in one hit and I was starting to overdose. “There's nothing to tell. Stevie Wonder drove me out. A homing pigeon brought me back.”

One of them snorted.

“Your expenses will get reimbursed this time, Major. But know you're on our watch list.” So that's what this was all about. They just wanted to let the new kid on the block — me — know who was boss.

“Sure. Thanks,” I said with my best have-a-nice-day smile as they snatched back the 1351-2 and moved toward the door. “And, guys — no matter what everyone else around here says, you're doing a great job. Keep it up.”

Wu and De Silver turned and glared. They weren't used to receiving a “ fuck-you,” no matter how it was couched. The GAO had a problem. They were worried that there was another of those Defense-procured $7600 coffeepots out there, or a $9000 wrench worth a buck fifty, ready to be thrown into their works.

Schaeffer's head appeared around the door again seconds after they left. I wondered whether he'd had a glass to the wall. “You want to fill me in on Japan?” he said. “Now's a good time.”

He disappeared. I gathered I was to follow.

“I warned you about the GAO, Cooper,” he said over his shoulder.

“Yes, sir, you did.”

“What's the upshot?” he asked.

“Don't hurry back, I think is the lesson, sir.”

“Good advice,” he said.

I have no idea if he knew what I was talking about. In the six months I'd been in Chip Schaeffer's section, I'd learned that you could say just about anything as long as you said it nice. We walked past a number of offices, all occupied with personnel hunched over paperwork. I wondered if they were working on cases or sentence construction, and if, like me, they were on probation. I noticed they all glanced up when we walked past — not much happens around here. I also noticed they all sat facing their doors. They reminded me of moray eels in their holes. The area was gloomy, the dour atmosphere accentuated by the extensive use of overhead fluorescent tubes, most of them dusty. We were in D-ring, the hall that, colonlike, runs right through the center of the complex. This meant we had zero natural light. In fact, our offices had very little of anything in the way of staff-friendly amenities, an indication, I believed, of the department's true place in the pecking order. By comparison, I'd heard the GAO had a wet bar and sauna in theirs.

Captain Schaeffer's box was twice the size of mine, though also windowless. I finally understood why he was so keen on the fish tank. It bubbled away happily in one corner, lit up like a Tokyo shopping center. I counted two clown fish plus a couple of arrivals that had been added since my trip to the Sea Breeze, and saw that the octopus was still throttling the boat. I didn't see any sharks.

Schaeffer's desk was littered with paperwork. The wall behind his chair was a shrine to the heavyweights of D.C. There was a picture of the current President, flanked by a snap of the Secretary of Defense. Between and below the two men hung a photo of the Chief of Naval Operations, a woman. She smiled like she had something going with the other two.

“So, this scientist. What happened? Give me the bottom line.”

“Sir, Tanaka had been drinking. He went out on deck, presumably to get some air. Somehow, for reasons that may never be established on account of there being no witnesses, he ended up in the near-freezing water where he was eaten by a shark.” I neglected to add that this was one of the rare instances where the sashimi actually got even.

“Just as the preliminary from the Tokyo Police had it figured.” Schaeffer nodded. “So you're done with the case?”

“Pretty much, Captain. Got a few procedural aspects to clear up.” This was me, playing for time. It would hardly do for the department supposedly overseeing matters of procedure to be seen bucking it. What I wanted was time to check up on Professor Boyle and his employer, Moreton Genetics, before being redeployed in the war on grammar. Something about the guy troubled me, besides the odd Tupperware haircut.

As expected, Schaeffer said, “Better get on with it then. Dismissed.”

I went back to my office. I shut down all the internal software on my PC and opened a Web browser. A window came up reminding me of the U.S. government's policy about downloading files with viruses, cookies, and pornography. The advice: Don't. I brought up Google and behaved like a normal, everyday nosy citizen. I tapped “Sean Boyle, Ph.D.” into the search bar and pressed return. There were plenty of hits, approximately 78,000 of them. There were only five for a Professor Sean Boyle. One was a professor of English, the other a Ph.D. in automotive technology. I found references for the guy I was after on page two. He had three entries: two related to academic papers he'd written, the other an invitation to download the PDF file of a speech he'd given to the science faculty of Berkeley. I took up the invitation and double-clicked.

While I waited for it to download, I Googled the late Dr. Tanaka. There were nearly a thousand hits on the name, but I found my Dr. Tanaka on the first page. There was already a link to an obituary on him in the British newspaper The Observer. According to the article, Tanaka had headed numerous deep-sea diving expeditions on hydrothermal vents from the Arctic to the Azores. A marine biologist, he was apparently the leading authority on the unusual life forms found in these hazardous environments. The article included a picture of the guy with his head attached to his body. I barely recognized him.

I went back to the PDF of Boyle's speech. On the first page were the words “Playing God.” Interesting title. I hit the print button, sat back, and considered my next move. Moreton Genetics employed these two guys, and they were both working together on a top-secret project for the U.S. Department of Defense. One was a geneticist, the other a marine biologist. I was intrigued.

I tapped moretongenetics.com into the search bar to see where it took me. Almost immediately an animated double helix appeared, the M and G that I remembered seeing on Boyle's business card, revolving slowly, while the rest of the site loaded. The main image on the home page was of the Moreton Genetics offices and research complex, an architectural representation of the double helix constructed of steel and glass, nestled among ponds of reeds and birds, and set, the accompanying text told me, within five acres of land on the edge of Silicon Valley, California. The place radiated high technology. And money. I surfed the site. Apparently, Moreton Genetics had been one of the links in the chain that had helped unravel the human genome. The company had also isolated a gene responsible for switching off the production of insulin, resulting in new therapies worth millions. Most recently it had produced a sterile strain of the varroa mite, the creature that had single-handedly almost wiped out California's entire population of honeybees and, with it, virtually all flowering plants and crops in the state. Something like that — saving California's agriculture — would have earned Moreton Genetics a lot of money, not to mention kudos.

I checked the price of the stock, information also available on the site. MG was looking good. Their stock had increased its capital value by eighteen percent in the last year alone. If I had money, it would be a terrific investment, but then so would a decent pair of running shoes, I told myself, which was a fair indication of just how much spare cash I had lying about. I kept trolling around the site, but for what I had not the slightest idea. I saw that the MG complex was environmentally simpatico. It produced its own electricity supply through a combination of wind generators and solar panels, and had become a net contributor to California's power grid. Across its lush acreage, it was also providing habitat for various flora and fauna, those birds that featured on its home page, as well as a couple of endangered species of frog and a rare variety of pond slime. To summarize, MG was an extremely successful company with a social conscience, except that it was sponsoring programs paid for by the Pentagon — to be fair, an organization not known for loving its fellow man of the non-American variety. I also noted that this fact was nowhere to be found on MG's site. Didn't fit with its caring-and-sharing corporate image, no doubt.

I wondered what MG was doing for the DoD. I wondered whether I wondered about it bad enough to get into trouble finding out. The phone rang. I recognized the caller ID. “Arlen?”

He said, “I just spoke to Anna.”

“She stayed at my place last night.”

“I know.”

“She's going back to Germany this afternoon,” I said.

“I know.”

“It's over.”

“I know.”

“If you say ‘I know' one more time, I'll drive over and punch you.”

“So, what's next? What are you going to do?”

“What any red-blooded American would do. Go to a sports bar, get drunk, watch old NBA repeats, visit a hooker.”

“You hate the NBA,” he reminded me.

I shouldn't have been surprised that Arlen had found out so quick. When Anna had been hospitalized, he'd kept her room stocked with flowers on my behalf. When she'd been released, he'd kept her company while I spent hour after hour in physical therapy. During that time, they'd become close friends. And he was right; I probably wouldn't meet anyone like Anna Masters again, but then she wouldn't meet anyone like me again, either.

“How was Japan?” he said.

“Different. You'd love the food. Has a certain bite to it.” The memory of it gave me an idea. “Arlen, could you do me a favor?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it'll get me into trouble.”

“No, it won't,” I said.

“Yes, it will, Vin. Your little favors always lead to trouble. What's it about?”

“I can't say.”

“Then definitely no.”

I could tell he was weakening. “You don't want to know because then you won't have deniability.”

“Will I need deniability?”

“It's the best defense.”

“Will I need a defense?”

“Could you stop repeating everything I say?”

“Sorry.”

“Look, I need you to find out something for me. I can't dig around because I've been told specifically I don't have need-to-know. But you haven't had the official NTK bullshit on this one.”

“OK, before I say absolutely, categorically no, you want to at least give me something so that I have some idea what I'm saying no to?”

Arlen knows how to ask a question. I said, “A company called Moreton Genetics is doing some work for the Pentagon. I want to find out, even if just in general terms, what they're doing.”

“Is this related to what you were doing in Japan?”

“That's something I can neither confirm nor deny,” I said, slipping into jargon for absofuckinglutely.

Even though I couldn't see them, I knew Arlen's lips were clamped into a thin line.

“You'll need a code,” I continued. It would be easy to find the information I was after, but not without a thing called a case code. Whenever any classified information was required, or petty cash claimed, or resources allocated, a case code had to be cited so that an investigation could be traced, tracked, and costed as it wound its way through the system. With the proper code, Arlen could go straight to the DoD's archives and pull the paperwork. The problem was that his interest in Moreton Genetics would be on file if things did end up in the crapper.

“I'm doing a little general digging at the moment for a federal oversight committee. The job has a general access code. All areas. Maybe I can do it discreetly. Might be suitable.”

Damn right. “I owe you, Arlen.”

“Indeed you do, Vin. What are we up to now?”

“Convert the favors into dollars, I'd say around a million or so.”

“You ever going to cough up?”

“Next payday,” I vowed.

“I'll see you in half an hour in the Pentagon cafeteria,” he said.

I hung up and almost immediately the phone rang again. I didn't recognize the caller ID on this one. It did, though, have an unfamiliar international area code. I picked up.

I heard a cough echo down the line. I knew that cough from somewhere.

“Hello? North Pole?” said a male voice.

“Sorry?” I replied.

“Is this Santa Claus?”

“What?”

“You remember? You gave me your card.”

That wasn't a big help. I handed around my card like flu virus got handed around on public transport.

“I met you on the Natusima. The name's Cooke.” He coughed again, a rasping metallic sound.

My memory kicked in. “Cooke with an e, right? You're the cook.”

“You got it.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Cooke?”

“You said I should call if anything came to mind.”

“That's right.” The line wasn't great. There was a couple of seconds of delay every time he answered a question. I wondered where he was calling from.

“You asked me whether I saw the guy who got eat fall in the water. I told you no.”

“I remember.”

“Well, y'see, I said no ‘cause I didn't see him fall. That's because he didn't fall—the Jap guy was thrown.”