Cold Frame

TWENTY-ONE

Hiram Walker looked up as Thomas came into the library to report that there was a man in a cab at the front gates asking to be admitted.

“What’s his name?”

“Detective Sergeant Kenneth Smith, Washington Metro Police Department,” Thomas announced.

“Yes, let him in and bring him to me. See if he wants a coffee.”

Five minutes later Thomas ushered Av into the library and then went to get a coffee tray. Hiram stood up and offered an oversized hand. “Sergeant Smith,” he said, “welcome to Whitestone Hall. I’ll bet you’re wondering why she sent you here.”

“That’s putting it mildly, Mister Walker. It’s already been a pretty interesting morning.”

Hiram pointed to a chair and then sat back down on his “throne.” He was relieved to see that the policeman’s feet actually did touch the ground. Av told him most of what had happened earlier, omitting the more personal activities.

“I received a brief text from Ellen,” Hiram said. “Saying you were coming and that she was going. Where, I don’t know.”

“She’s leading some federal LE on a wild-goose chase, I expect,” Av said, trying not to gawk at the giant sitting across from him. “They’ll eventually catch her — it’s a small town, after all — and then we’ll see how good a bullshitter she really is.”

Hiram laughed. “A pretty good one, Sergeant,” he said. “But I believe her heart’s in the right place and that there is a serious problem to deal with downtown.”

“That being the DMX?”

Hiram hesitated. Ellen had said that this policeman knew about the problem, but that he was absolutely not read into the DMX. The policeman smiled when he saw Hiram hesitate. “I know, Mister Walker, I know,” he said, as Thomas came in with the coffee tray. “And now you can guess what my problem is.”

Hiram nodded, waiting for Thomas to back out of the library. They fixed their coffees and then resumed their conversation. Hiram told Av about his having let some covert agencies use some of his more exotic plants, and that he now thought that Mandeville had really gained access to them in order to kill off his opposition on the DMX.

“Ellen told me that she was involved in the first one,” Av said. “We got a lot of smoke blown our way when we looked into the McGavin death. Even the ME drew a blank, or else somebody got to them. The Bureau said it wasn’t their problem, and then it was their problem, and then — frankly, I’m completely confused at this juncture.”

Hiram said he understood. “The sheer size of the counterterrorism world down there is enough to make confusion the order of the day, I’m sure. I’d like to think that that is part of some grand strategy to confuse the enemy, but unfortunately, it’s just Parkinson’s Law. Ellen said you met Mister Mandeville under rather strange circumstances — do you think they were coming for you this morning?”

It was Av’s turn to hesitate. He really didn’t want to expose the fact that he and Ellen had gone to bed together, but if he said that they might have been after her instead of him, it would be pretty obvious. “I think they were coming for me,” he said. “I think Ellen had come to warn me — she’s aware of Mandeville’s crusade to do some ethnic cleansing — and then she decided to provide a decoy so I could get away. Before the helicopter showed up, she’d been telling me about you and that you might be able to explain what had happened to those people.”

Hiram put down his coffee cup and stood up. Ellen had told Av that Hiram was tall, but he’d had no idea. “I have to move around from time to time, Sergeant,” Hiram said. “With my condition there will come a time when I will be unable to move much at all. Care for a tour of my gardens?”

“Is it safe to tour your gardens?” Av asked, remembering Ellen’s words.

Hiram smiled. “As long as you stay on the sidewalks near the house, Sergeant,” he said. “It can be a bit of a jungle out there, you know.”

They’d been outside for half an hour when Ellen finally showed up at the gates. She joined them outside, dressed now in her business clothes and driving a government sedan. Hiram had been explaining how plants process sunlight, water, and CO2 to make food, and Av was glad for the distraction. She greeted Hiram with a warm smile and a quick handshake; with Av she was more reserved, which he thought was a little amusing, considering. But then, the previous few hours of her morning may have been a wee bit stressful.

“The sergeant tells me you’ve been having an adventure this morning,” Hiram said.

“Not for too long,” she said with a grin. “I took off on the sergeant’s motorcycle as a distraction, and they went for it. I pretended not to notice the helicopter or any of the blue lights stuck in rush-hour traffic behind me. By the time they realized where I was headed, the sergeant here was probably crossing the river into Virginia.”

“Where’d you lead ’em?” Av asked.

“To the Hoover building, of course,” she said, innocently. “That’s where I work.”

Av laughed. Hiram shook his massive head. “Do you know who ‘they’ were, Ellen?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said. “Black vehicles, MPD, and the helicopter looked military but had no markings, although I didn’t spend a lot of time staring at it. I did go across the Fourteenth Street Bridge to the Pentagon, circled through north parking and then up to the Arlington Cemetery boulevard, then back across the Memorial Bridge to the Hoover.”

“What happened then?”

“Went in the building, down to the gym facilities, got cleaned up, changed clothes, and then up to my office. Thirty minutes later, got a summons from Mister Miller, who wanted to know where I’d been earlier this morning. I told him, and then asked why he wanted to know.”

“What’d he say to that?” Av asked, wondering just how much she’d told Miller.

“Have a nice day?” she said. “As in, that’s all, thank you. Then I came out here.”

“So if it wasn’t the Bureau who was flying helicopters around the capital center this morning, who was it?”

“Beats me,” she said. “But since there were no heat-seeking missiles fired at it from the White House roof, it had to be federal and cleared in advance.”

“Is that something Mister Mandeville could arrange?” Hiram asked.

“Not on the spur of the moment,” Ellen said. “The airspace around the capital is closed to all traffic by a no-fly zone, deadly force authorized. He’s senior enough to get it done, but it would be a protracted process, with lots of meetings and coordination.”

“I guess I could check with Metro PD’s operations center,” Av said. “They’d have to be part of that process.”

“I think you need to stay off the electronic grid for a while,” Ellen said. “If that was Mandeville this morning, he won’t quit, and he’s got long arms.”

“I was just showing the sergeant around some of the gardens,” Hiram said, glancing up at the sky, as if looking for helicopters or other flying objects. “But perhaps we should go inside and discuss this matter further?”

Back in the house, Hiram had Thomas take them to his communications room, which was behind the library, while he tended to some medications.

“This is where he confers with the other members of the Phaedo Society,” Ellen said, as Av looked around at the big screens, now dark, and all the smaller displays, which seemed to be watching a laboratory of some kind, the estate’s perimeter, and three screens of separate news stations. She then had to explain what the Phaedo Society was.

“Mister Walker must be fabulously wealthy,” Av commented. “This is a serious setup.”

“He never leaves this place,” she said. “Imagine that.”

Thomas came in and told them that Mister Walker would be with them shortly. Then he went to a console in one corner of the room and made several settings, some of which changed the perimeter security cameras’ angle of view.

“Expecting company?” he asked, but Thomas did not respond. He completed his settings, asked if they needed anything, and then withdrew, closing the door behind him.

“Explain something to me, if you can,” Av said. “Rue Waltham?”

“Who’s Rue Waltham?”

“The blond number who sounded the alarm this morning?”

Ellen shook her head. “No idea — I didn’t see anyone else in the apartment.” As Av was about to object, Hiram came looking somewhat better than he had earlier.

“Sergeant,” he said. “Why don’t you and Ellen here come with me to my laboratory,” he said. “I think I can get a better handle on what killed McGavin and Logan. I’ve asked a friend in the Bureau lab to get me copies of the OCME results on both victims.”

“They’ll do that?” Ellen asked.

Hiram nodded. “I’ve worked with them from time to time, especially when they have an embarrassing toxicology mystery.”

“Actually, I can’t stay,” Ellen said, looking at her watch. “I’ve got a pre-DMX meeting this afternoon and then I can come back. Can Sergeant Smith stay here until we can find out who that was this morning?”

Hiram nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “So the Bureau will be looking into it?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “If it was an apprehension mission coordinated by someone in the White House, then the rest of federal law enforcement might be studiously looking the other way.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Hiram said. “Well, the sergeant was closer to the McGavin investigation and autopsy than you were, so get back when you can, and, in the meantime, we’ll go to the lab and see what we can see.”

“Right,” she said. “I’ll try to get back by five. I’ll call Thomas if I can not make it for some reason.” Then she turned to Av. “I think Mandeville knows you’re not in Petersburg anymore and that you know too much. If he’s willing to kill members of the DMX for disagreeing with him, he’ll sure as hell be willing to ice you. You’re safer here than anywhere else right now, but I’ll know more this evening. Okay?”

“You sure are an interesting date,” Av said. She rolled her eyes.

“Do this for me,” he asked. He wrote down a phone number on a notepad by his chair. “Call Sergeant Bento at this number, tell him where I am, and ask him to tell Precious.”

“‘Precious’?”

“She’s our boss at the Briar Patch. She can be trusted.”

Ellen nodded and said she would. Then Hiram rang for Thomas, who escorted her out to her car and opened the main gates.

“What in the world have you gotten yourself into, Sergeant Smith?” Hiram asked.

“Beats the shit out me,” Av said. “But I’m ready to stop anytime.”

Hiram gave Av the same tour he’d given Ellen, after which he listened carefully as Av recalled the events surrounding McGavin’s death and some of the things the pathologist had said. Av couldn’t tell if his information was helpful or not; Hiram just listened, but with an intensity that made him think Hiram’s big brain was recording every word. Then they discussed the second incident, and Hiram was most interested in Av’s description of Logan looking like a zombie.

Over lunch, Hiram told Av about the Phaedo Botanical Society, how they’d begun sharing their research and how that had evolved into a study of nature’s deadliest botanical substances. Av asked about the name.

“The word comes from the writings of Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher. It’s the title of one of Plato’s writings, but actually it’s a man’s name. The Phaedo describes the last hours and death of Socrates, another Greek philosopher.”

“I don’t have a real college education, Mister Walker,” Av said. “You’re talking over two thousand years ago?”

“Yes,” Hiram said. “In ancient Athens, Socrates was a bit of a rabble-rouser whose philosophic teachings began to worry the Athenian upper classes. The city was struggling to find a better form of government after the defeat at the hands of the Spartans, and Socrates was not a fan of democracy. They decided to shut him up by bringing him to trial for failing to honor the city’s gods and for ‘corrupting’ the city’s youth.”

“What happened?”

“Well, Socrates being Socrates, he made something of a mockery of the trial and the charges. He annoyed the jury, so they found him guilty, and the city fathers took that opportunity to sentence him to death by forcing him to drink hemlock tea.”

“What would that do to you?”

“Modern medical theory differs, but what Phaedo describes was a wave of cold creeping into the core from the extremities; when it got to the heart, it was all over. Not quick, but apparently not all that unpleasant, if you can believe Phaedo. On the other hand, Phaedo hadn’t been drinking hemlock tea.”

Av considered this story. “Then this Phaedo Society is all about poisoning?” he asked.

Hiram smiled. “Very perceptive, Sergeant, but not entirely accurate. Our interest in botanical toxins has more to do with the theory that plants are smarter than we know. So-called weeds, in particular. Anyone who has tried to make a flower or vegetable garden from scratch would know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Never have,” Av said, suddenly feeling a bit sleepy. “But I have heard some of my neighbors with yards cussing weeds.”

“Well, basically, we think that the persistence of weeds has to do with some kind of botanical instinct to survive, analogous to our own human survival drive. That’s why you see them in the cracks of sidewalks, for instance. Some plants have taken this instinct, if you can call it that, to a higher level by developing toxins to discourage predation, be it by animals, angry gardeners, or farmers who dump truckloads of glyphosphates on their fields.”

“What’s this got to do with what’s going on now?” Av asked.

“‘Toxin’ is another word for poison, Sergeant. It’s entirely possible that whoever’s doing this is using botanical toxins. Some would be easy to detect — aconitine, for instance. Others would be damned near impossible. That’s why I want to see those OCME reports.”

“Where the hell would a guy like Carl Mandeville get shit like that?”

“From me, unfortunately,” Hiram said.

Av just looked at him. He suddenly felt that he was back in the bowl again, going round and round but undeniably headed for an unpleasant ending.

Thomas came in, cleared the plates, and then announced that he’d heard from Ms. Whiting, and that she would not be able to make it back to Whitestone Hall this afternoon.

“Did she give a reason?” Hiram asked.

“No, sir,” Thomas said. “She did say to tell the sergeant here that she had been ‘unavoidably detained.’”

“Detained?” Av said, suddenly alert. “That could be a code word.”

Hiram raised his eyebrows. Av described how the people who had taken him to Petersburg had been very careful to distinguish between detention and arrest. Hiram frowned and then asked Thomas to follow up on expediting the OCME reports from the Bureau’s lab people.

They sat in silence after Thomas left. Av was truly worried now. He rubbed his eyes, realizing he was more tired than he’d thought. Ellen had told him what to do when the big black helicopter showed up, but now? Was he in a safe house or was he back under a different form of detention? He had no phone, and he was pretty sure that getting out of Whitestone Hall would not be any piece of cake. And why wasn’t Ellen coming back — had Mandeville figured out what had happened this morning and taken Ellen Whiting off the boards? When he opened his eyes, the giant at the head of the table was looking at him with a sympathetic expression.

“Ellen Whiting,” Hiram said, “strikes me as a woman who can hold her own in just about any circumstances. I can see that you’re worried, and I understand your apprehension about everything that’s happened recently.” He finished his coffee. “I have sources in the government,” he continued. “Not appointees who come and go, but people who’ve been in Washington for a long time. Let me pulse those sources, see what I can find out about this Mandeville person and the problems within the DMX.”

Av threw up his hands. “The National fucking Security Council?” he said. “The DMX? Black ops helicopters over Georgetown? The quiet room in the federal penitentiary at Petersburg? Mister Walker, I’m just a low-level Metro PD cop — so why do I think there’s this big black dragon coming for me tonight?”

“Probably because one is,” Hiram said, with a smile. “But take heart, Sergeant — we know how to handle dragons here at Whitestone Hall.”

After lunch, Hiram had Thomas take Av up to one of the guest suites on the second floor. The rooms were seldom used, but beautifully appointed. Thomas suggested that Av relax, perhaps take a nap. There’d be drinks in the library at five-thirty. He said that Mister Walker would also be retiring for the afternoon, due to his condition.

Once Thomas left, Av decided that he’d been given good advice. He shucked his clothes, took a long, hot shower, and then flopped onto the large, soft bed. He thought back to his physical interlude with Senior Supervisory Special Agent Ellen Whiting earlier in the day. Special, indeed, but no longer just dangerous.

Lethal, that was the word. Then he was asleep.

Hiram Walker was not napping. He and Thomas were busy going through the security precautions that needed to be in place before darkness. From the communications room, he had Thomas start up the big emergency generator down in the basement, and then they switched the entire house and hydroponic system over to internal power. They then reviewed the switchboard settings for the house lighting systems, so that if an intrusion team arrived and cut the power from outside the perimeter, the visible lights in the house would go down — but only the lights. They then went to the lab, where they set up the grounds’ hydroponic feeding system for manual control. They lined up specific chemical tanks to the plant networks that would need to be excited if someone came over the walls in the dark.

Hiram was pretty sure he knew what was going on and fully expected that some kind of government team would be coming tonight to recapture the hapless police sergeant. Av had related his conversation with Mandeville down in Petersburg, especially the part about Av telling Mandeville no, which was not a word anybody on the National Security Council staff was used to hearing. Mandeville sounded like a nut, but a nut whose sense of patriotism and self-importance had been inflamed to the point of Hitler-in-the-bunker madness.

Thomas came over and reported that the feeding systems were lined up and the same three huge screens used for teleconferencing were now switched into the estate’s camera systems. He asked that Hiram recheck the settings. Hiram did so and then asked Thomas to patch the eagle’s nest camera to the communications room display center. This was a trainable camera mounted at the very top of a sixty-year-old black Austrian pine tree at the southeastern corner of the property. It gave a full view of Deepstep Creek Road in both directions, with both day and night vision capability. Hiram did not expect an intrusion team to just come down the road and break down the front gates, but he did expect a fake VEPCo electric utility truck to show up before any raid began.

He smiled to himself for a moment. A man with Marfan syndrome had time to watch a lot of movies, but still, why not be on guard? The sergeant wouldn’t wake up for a few more hours, thanks to the little something Thomas had added to his lunch. He was disappointed that Ellen Whiting wouldn’t be here tonight. He’d been impressed with her brains and go-ahead style, not to mention her delectable physical attributes. He knew, however, that she needed to be on the outside for what was probably going to happen tonight. Perhaps after this adventure was all over he could get her to come back. Not for the first time, he regretted the stark fact of life that anything he wanted had to come to him and not the other way around.

He looked at his watch and sighed. Time for meds.