Biowar

8

Karr had seen bus stations bigger than the airport he landed in at Newburgh, New York. But that made it easier to spot the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent waiting to meet him.

“Hey.” Karr pointed at the detective as he approached, his voice booming in the low-ceilinged room. “I know you, right?”

Achilles Gorman stopped a second, temporarily puzzled. The NSA agent threw his arm around him without breaking stride, leading him toward the door.

“I’m Tommy. Whole name’s too long to worry about. Let’s hit the road.”

“You’re here from Washington?”

“That’s what the sign at the airport said.”

“You’re NSA?”

“Say that out loud again and I’ll have to kill you.”

The doors snapped open and the two men headed across the parking lot to a green Impala. The double antennae and grille lights made the unmarked car so obvious Karr wondered why they bothered. The Deep Black op paused next to the car, stretching his arms back as if he were stiff but actually taking the opportunity to make sure they weren’t being followed. Karr got in the car and pushed the seat back as far it would go, his legs still bumping against the dashboard.

“I’m sorry about inside,” said Gorman. “My boss said you were NSA and he didn’t make it sound like—”

Karr laughed. “Hey, don’t sweat it. I’m just busting your chops. I’m working for CDC as kind of a loaner on this. Communicable diseases — because the guy who’s missing is a disease expert. Germs. They told you all this stuff, right?”

Gorman nodded grimly.

“You all right?” Karr asked.

“Stomach’s giving me trouble.”

Gorman was silent until they found the Thruway, which took about five minutes.

“I didn’t recognize you at the airport,” said Gorman. “I expected someone in a suit.”

“Hey, these are my best jeans,” said Karr, who hadn’t worn a suit since giving up the black one he’d worn, briefly, as a member of the NSA security force. “You named after the heel or the hero?”

Gorman looked at him with the pained expression of a man who had wandered into an insane asylum and couldn’t find the exit.

“So tell me about Kegan,” Karr said.

“We’re looking for him,” said Gorman. “I was hoping you’d tell me about him.”

“All I know is he likes bugs.” Karr laughed, but the BCI investigator didn’t. “You think he killed the guy you found?”

“He’s the number-one suspect,” said Gorman.

“You find a murder weapon?”

“No.”

“ID the victim?”

“No.”

“Motive?”

“Unknown.”

“Not much of a case.”

“No kidding.”

Karr had spent part of the flight north reading the preliminary reports on the investigation, as well as news reports and some background on Kegan and the investigators themselves. The state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation handled homicides in most jurisdictions outside of cities north of New York; they had a decent track record in closing up homicides, but this didn’t look like it was going to be closed anytime soon.

The victim’s identity remained a mystery even to Desk Three. The man was around twenty-three years of age, of Asian descent, in decent shape, unarmed when he was found. He had no wallet, no jewelry, and no watch. His clothes could have been purchased in any Wal-Mart across the country. He had been shot once in the back of the head, execution-style, with a .22-caliber pistol. The pistol had probably been equipped with a silencer, according to the BCI’s ID division, which handled the forensic end of the investigation. The man’s prints didn’t match any the FBI had dug up, nor did they match those recorded of known foreign agents, at least not according to the common agency files that Desk Three had double-checked.

It occurred to Karr that the victim would have been better suited to have been the executioner.

“Kegan’s car was on the property,” said Gorman. “We think he drove away in the victim’s car.”

“Makes sense.”

“About the only thing that does.”

A uniformed trooper sat in his patrol car at the side of the driveway. Karr smiled at his disapproving glare as they came up the drive.

Big old house, in very good repair. Great view, but nobody was just wandering up here without having some sort of reason.

The NSA op got out of the car and walked up to the porch, letting himself in ahead of Gorman. He walked down the hallway to the office and stood in front of the scientist’s two computers. One had a DSL link as well as a wireless portal for other devices; the second wasn’t hooked up to anything, physically firewalled from the rest of the world.

That was the one he was interested in. Karr knelt down to the CPU, sliding a disk into the floppy drive.

“Whatcha doin’?” asked Gorman.

“Snooping around,” said Karr, hitting the power switch.

“We’ve already looked at the machines,” said the BCI investigator. “They’re clean.”

The investigator meant that literally. There was nothing at all on the two hard drives of the machine Karr turned on — the program on his floppy revealed nothing more than assembler-level zeros. Which meant it either was brand-new or had been scrubbed by a low-level formatting program sophisticated enough to defeat Karr’s snooper.

“I want to send the drives to my guys,” he told Gorman, pulling the computer out from its shelf beneath the desk. “Be easiest just to send the whole computer.”

“I guess that’s okay,” said German. “We haven’t found anything. I’ll just need a receipt. We have a form—”

“Whatever paperwork you want is yours.”

Karr went to the other computer and once more slipped his boot disk in. This one had the latest version of Windows, along with an intact file structure. Besides the system programs and files, Office, three different organizer programs, Quicken, and Turbo Tax accounted for most of the used space. Karr quickly recovered the deleted files; most were just Internet sites routinely deleted.

A calico cat came into the room, meowing as he curled against Karr’s leg. Tommy reached down and patted him; the cat licked his finger.

“Nice cat,” he said, wiping the cat slop onto his pants.

“Just hungry.” The detective shrugged. “No more cat food in the house. Gave it some tuna last time I was here. I don’t know if there’s any more left. Thing comes and goes. Probably somebody in the neighborhood feeding it. Hopefully they’ll adopt it.”

“No ASPCA?”

“Only take dogs in this county, not cats. Too many, I guess. I’d adopt it, but my wife’s allergic,” added Gorman. “Thing loves to be petted. Slobbers all over you so much you’d think it was a dog. What’s all that stuff?” Gorman asked, pointing at the screen.

“Things someone was looking at the day before the body was found,” said Karr, flipping through the recovered files on the second computer.

“Anything interesting?” asked Gorman.

“URL for a page showing what time it was in Asia. Couple of them.” Karr keyed up the DSL dialer to connect to Desk Three, which would siphon the contents for examination. Gorman watched him for a while, scowling but saying nothing.

“Mind if I take some pictures?” Karr asked after the modems connected.

“Of me?”

“Hell no — you’d break the lens.”

“Go ahead then.”

Gorman scooped up the cat and brought him into the kitchen, looking for food. Karr took out a small digital camera, sliding it into the base of his satellite phone. He walked to the next room, which was a library, and began scanning the shelves with the camera. The books were mostly related to science and medicine, though several shelves were devoted to period homes and furniture. When he was done he unhooked the camera and spoke to Rockman over the phone.

“You got it all?” Karr asked.

“Lot of books,” said Rockman.

“I’m just doing what I’m told. Gonna have to ship you the lone computer. Disk was scrubbed pretty well.”

“Well, that’s interesting.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe he backed up onto a CD or something.”

“Not in the inventory that I saw,” said Karr.

“Look at the music collection. Maybe he stuck it in there, you know, hiding it kinda.”

“You see that on NYPD Blue?”

“Murder She Wrote,” said Rockman. “We’ll crack this case.” His tone changed, becoming more serious. “We should have data from his work computers soon. We’ll buzz you if it’s important.”

Karr sat down in one of the leather club chairs at the side of the room. He settled his hiking boots on the floor. The carpet was thick and, though Tommy wasn’t an expert, looked handwoven and very expensive. It was the sort of thing that would go for thousands, probably.

He looked at the furniture and furnishings a little more carefully. There were a lot of antiques in solid, showroom shape.

“So you think this murder is related to his work?” Karr asked Gorman when the investigator returned.

The BCI man gave him a blank stare.

“Angry student or something?”

Another blank stare.

“Robbery? Guy comes here; he turns the tables, kills him, then panics and runs off?”

Gorman finally blinked. “I doubt that. There’s no sign of panic. Everything except the body is perfectly in place. There was even food for the cat.”

“What about the guy who found him?”

“Not a suspect,” said Gorman.

“No?” asked Karr.

“FBI ruled him out. Just some friend who came up on a lark. Works for the government. They didn’t say who, but I thought CDC for some reason.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think CDC,” said Karr, realizing that Gorman was talking about Dean. Karr had been instructed not to lie — but also to avoid stating Dean’s affiliation, if at all possible. It was the sort of bureaucratic reflex, bordering on paranoia, that made little sense to the op — they’d told the state police that Karr was from the NSA, after all, even if they clouded the affiliation by claiming he was working for the CDC — but obviously the people who were paid to worry about the agency’s public image had thrashed it all out. Karr was just here to follow orders.

Gorman gave him a funny look.

“They don’t tell me much,” claimed Karr. “Except where to go.” He laughed and propped his elbow against the arm of the chair and leaned his head on his hand. The BCI investigator was easy to read — he didn’t like Tommy and probably resented the fact that he was parachuting in to work on his case.

“The FBI working hard on this?” Karr asked.

“Hard as they usually do.”

Gorman apparently didn’t mean it as a joke. Before Karr could ask anything else, his phone buzzed.

“Hey,” said Karr, pulling up the antenna.

“Mr. Rubens wants you to go to Bangkok,” said Telach. “You found that Web page with Bangkok’s time equivalents.”

“And?”

“There were two E-mails from the missing lab assistant on the lab system Lia compromised that we traced to Thailand,” said Telach. “One of them has a date in it. Five days ago.”

“Okay.”

“D. T. Pound. He’s twenty-two years old,” said Telach. “Text of the E-mails is minimal. Just describes the weather. We’re getting pictures, tracing his credit cards — but we’re working on the theory that he’s over there in Thailand and Kegan went to see him. That jibes with your Internet pages.”

“This sounds suspiciously like a wild-goose chase, Marie.” Karr looked up at Gorman, who was pretending not to eavesdrop.

“Maybe. Go to Albany Airport. There’ll be a ticket waiting”

“Aw, come on.”

“Tommy—”

“Can I get some lunch first?”

“No. We may be under a time constraint here. We just don’t know what’s going on.”

“You’re out of your mind, Marie.”

“Not my mind. Mr. Rubens’.”

“You’re out of his mind, too.”