Point of Impact

31

Michaels said, “Mean anything to you?”

Jay shook his head. “Nope, not right off, but I’ve turned the searchbots loose on it. I should be getting a first-hit list any moment.”

Howard came into the conference room. “Sorry I’m late. I had to park in the secured lot. There’s some, ah, hardware I was checking out locked in the trunk of my agency car I didn’t have time to return yet. I wouldn’t want to lose it.”

“No problem. Do you recognize the names Frankie and Annette?”

“No, sir.”

Michaels slid a hardcopy printout across the conference room table to Howard, who picked it up and looked at it.

Howard shook his head. “And this came from where?”

Michaels explained how Toni had discovered the hidden message inside the capsule. He was feeling a certain sense of pride when he told them.

Jay said, “Tell Toni that’s nice work. Nothing in the DEA reports about this. Somebody there is maybe sitting on this information?”

“That’s what I thought,” Michaels said. “I asked the director to pull some strings, and she’s gotten the original lab reports from DEA. They went over the caps they’ve recovered with a fine tooth comb. None of those have this little grandkids riddle inscribed in them.”

“We think the DEA might be hiding things from us?” Howard said.

Michaels nodded and brought him up to speed on what Jay had discovered.

“And there’s one more little tidbit,” Jay said when Michaels had finished. “I have a record of a telecon between Hans Brocken and our Mr. Brett Lee, of the DEA, from three months back. Herr Brocken is the chief security officer for Brocken Pharmaceuticals, of Berlin, Germany.”

“Careless,” Michaels said.

“I did have to look for it. It wasn’t something you’d stumble across accidentally. They made a pretty good effort to hide it.”

Howard said, “You really think Lee is in bed with a drug company? Looking to sell the formula for this stuff?”

“It makes a certain kind of sense,” Michaels said. “We talked about reasons for him shooting the movie star before, remember.”

“And you think Lee is in league with the NSA?”

“Only with one particular person there. No point in casting aspersions on the entire agency,” Michaels said. “It seems that Mr. Lee and Mr. George have history about which they have not been entirely forthcoming, though this is still circumstantial evidence.”

“I’ll get harder stuff eventually,” Jay said. “Oops, speaking of which—” He tapped keys on his flatscreen. “Okay, here’s what the Sherlock searchbot has to say about my query…”

Jay frowned at the flatscreen.

“You want to let us in on it, Jay?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” Jay tapped a key.

The flatscreen’s vox began reading aloud in a smoky, sexy woman’s voice:

“Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, teen singing and television idols from the late 1950s and early 1960s, first appeared together in the low-budget movie Beach Party, from American International Pictures, 1963, co-starring Robert Cummings, Dorothy Malone, and Harvey Lembeck, and featuring musical roles by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, and Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. The movie was the first of several in the chaste surf-and-sand genre, which was to remain viable and popular for the next two years.

“Avalon and Funicello were paired in several additional surf movies, including a distant sequel, Back to the Beach, Paramount Pictures, 1987, also starring Lori Loughlin, Tommy Hinkley, and Connie Stevens.”

The computer’s voice went silent, and the three men looked at each other.

Michaels said, “The stars of fifty-year-old teenybopper movies? Fine. Who are their grandchildren?”

Jay shook his head. “I’m cross-checking here, but it does not appear that the two had any off-screen relationship that would have resulted in children together. They were both married to other people.”

“Not having children would make it hard to have grandchildren, wouldn’t it?” Howard observed.

Michaels said, “Maybe we aren’t talking about literal grandchildren. Maybe movie grandchildren?”

Jay tapped away at the keyboard. A moment passed. “Nope, nothing that fits. Nobody ever did another beach movie with the actors who played their children in the’ 87 picture.”

“Maybe the message is speaking metaphorically?” Howard said.

Jay looked at him.

Howard said, “Anybody make any similar kind of pictures recently? Celluloid grandchildren, so to speak, of the originals?”

Jay smiled. “Well, film isn’t made out of celluloid anymore, but that’s pretty good, General. Let me see… Okay, here we are, under Beach Movies, there are several, hmm…ah. I think I found it!”

A few seconds passed while Jay read to himself.

“Jay?”

“Sorry, boss.”

The flatscreen’s vox said, “Surf Daze, an homage to the surf movies of the early 1960s, Fox Pictures, 2004, starring Larry Wright, Mae Jean Kent, and George Harris Zeigler. Set in Malibu in 1965, Surf Daze chronicles the adventures of—”

“Stop,” Michaels said.

Jay paused the recitation. “What?”

Howard beat him to it. He said, “George Harris Zeigler.”

Jay nodded. “Oh, yeah. The Zee-ster.”

“The recently departed Zee-ster,” Michaels said.

Jay said, “This was, um, seven years ago. Before he hit it big. He’d have been about, what? Twenty-four or — five then. Thing is, where he’s gone, I don’t think he’d be telling us anything useful.”

“This is too much of a coincidence. This dope dealer is pulling our chain. We need to talk to the other actors.”

“You gonna turn it over to the regular feebs?”

Michaels took a deep breath and let it out. “No. I think maybe we ought to go check this out ourselves.”

“Not in our charter,” Howard said.

“The current waters are very murky,” Michaels said. “Given the capabilities of the DEA and NSA, I’m not altogether sure just who we can trust. Sure, the FBI are our guys, and they love us — in theory, anyway — but we can’t cover any leaks on their part. We don’t want to be behind the eight ball on this, do we?”

“No need to convince me, Commander,” Howard said, smiling. “I’m going senile from boredom in my office. The drug raid was the most interesting thing that’s happened in three months. I’m game.”

“Me, too,” Jay said.

“I thought after your last adventure in the field you’d want to avoid it,” Michaels said.

“I was alone then,” Jay said, “and dealing with a militant gun dealer. With the general here and you, I’d feel secure enough to interview a drop-dead gorgeous movie star. Did you see Mae Jean in Scream, Baby, Scream?”

“I must have missed that one,” Michaels said.

“Me, too,” Howard said.

“I’m telling you, she’s got lungs could raise the dead, aurally and, um, visually. One of the great on-screen screamers of all time, right up there with Jamie Lee. And did I mention she was drop-dead gorgeous?”

“I thought you had a pretty intense relationship going, Jay?”

“That’s true, boss, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna do anything. I can look, can’t I?”

Howard and Michaels grinned at each other.

Howard went back and collected his staff car, then headed for home. He didn’t want to take the time to return the rifle right now, but it would be safe enough at his home; safer, in fact, than in the general access parking lot at Quantico. Since they weren’t going to drop everything and rush over to La-La Land in the next few minutes, he’d have time to pack a bag and tell Nadine good-bye. They’d be flying commercial — Commander Michaels did not want to attract any attention by cranking up one of the Net Force jets — and they’d be flying incognito, on open-ended agency tickets, so they wouldn’t have to put any names on a passenger list until just before boarding, and those would be cover noms anyhow.

Given that he’d just been out to the left coast, it might not be as big a thrill for him as it was for Jay Gridley; still, it would get him out and moving, and at this point, anything was better than spending another day doing make-work.

He headed out toward the freeway and the drive back to the city.

Normally, the drive was a straight run up I-95 and into the District, loop around the belt and to the north end of town where he lived.

But after a couple of miles, he spotted what he thought was a tail.

A lot of people drove this stretch of road, and there were scores of cars and trucks heading in the same direction, so there was no way to be sure, but he first saw the car as he changed lanes to pass. A little way farther, when he pulled back over into the right lane, the car did likewise.

Big deal. This was hardly conclusive evidence. But he had been through the standard Net Force surveillance course as part of his in-processing, and something one of the sub-rosa guys from the FBI who’d taught the class had said always stuck with him: “If you think you’re being followed, it is easy to check, and very cheap insurance. If you’re wrong, you might feel a little silly. But if you are right, you might keep yourself from winding up in deep shit. ”

Maybe he was overly cautious, but as a professional military man, Howard had learned long ago that being prepared was not the same as being paranoid. And like the instructor had said, checking it out was easy enough.

There was a little state road running northeast to Manassas not far ahead, and Howard eased over into the exit lane. If the car behind him — looked like a white Neon — kept going, he’d catch the next on-ramp and head on home.

Six cars back, the Neon reached the off-ramp and exited a couple hundred yards behind him.

Well, well.

That didn’t prove anything for certain. Two or three times, he remembered the FBI guy saying, it could still easily be a coincidence. “Think about it. What would happen if one of your neighbors heading home happened to get behind you on the freeway? They’d make every turn you would, right? Could be perfectly innocent. Don’t jump to to a conclusion until you are sure. ”

And there were several simple ways, Howard remembered, to be sure.

He tooled along on the state road, which was narrow but scenic, heading away from the suburbs toward the more rural country. There was an intersection ahead, and apparently the Occoquan Reservoir was to the left. Fine, left it is.

He went maybe a quarter of a mile, didn’t see the white Neon turn behind him.

So, okay, he was paranoid. He’d find a place to turn around and go home. He was relieved.

There was a little gas station minimart a half mile or so ahead, and Howard pulled in there, stopped, and went inside. He used the bathroom, bought a pack of Corn Nuts and a can of root beer, and headed back to his car. If anybody had been following him, he’d had an excuse to stop. The idea was, the surveillance guy had told them, not to let the people following you know you knew they were there. Better the tail you know than one you don’t.

He kept going the way he’d been going, figuring to loop back around to a main road or the freeway eventually.

Five hundred yards out of the minimart, he caught sight of the white Neon in his rearview mirror. The car was a ways back, maybe half a mile, but he was pretty sure it was the same vehicle.

Hmm. He was pretty convinced, but a few more tests should make it interesting.

Howard made a series of turns as he came to little branching streets, right, left, right, right, driving several miles until he was on a nice little country road — and thoroughly lost. He was going to need to use the GPS to find his way out of here. He had no idea where he was.

Eventually he found himself on another road that led, so the sign said, to the Civil War battlefield of Manassas. The two big battles there had been originally named, he recalled, for the little river that went through the area, Bull Run.

Several times, the Neon disappeared from sight, sometimes for as long as two or three minutes, and it seemed to Howard that the guy tailing him had an uncanny ability to guess the right way to turn.

Then it dawned on him that there might be some kind of bug on his vehicle, and all the guy had to do was follow the signal.

Damn, he should have thought of that sooner.

But after half a dozen random turns, there was no doubt in his mind that the Neon was shadowing him. Now, the questions were, who was it, and why were they following him?

He could have called the highway patrol, had a few beefy state troopers pull the Neon over and politely ask those questions. Of course, if the shadower turned out to be Lee, he’d just as soon not air that laundry in front of Virginia authorities; best to keep that in house. Or he could have scrambled a Net Force military team and had them brace the driver, but the truth was, he could take care of his own business. He had his side arm right here, and as yet there was no reason to call out the troops, especially if this turned out to be a huge coincidence. Somebody lost trying to find their way out by following him.

Yeah, right.

He was mindful of what Michaels had said about the DEA agent Brett Lee. After that shooting in L.A., Howard could cost the agent his job, maybe even cause him to face a criminal prosecution. And since the man seemed to be involved in something illegal besides that, he might not be too unhappy if Howard were to run his car into a tree somewhere and not survive the accident.

Of course, it was a long way from following somebody around in your car to premeditated murder, and maybe that wasn’t what this was all about. Maybe it was somebody else altogether. Somebody Howard had run afoul of and didn’t recall, out stalking for other reasons entirely.

So, the thing was, he needed to box up whoever it was tailing him, stroll on over, and have a few words with him and find out.

Out here in the country, among all the trees and fields and pastures, he ought to be able to find a place to do that.

He started looking.