Chris Jordan - Measure of Darkness

Shane has several, all geeky technical stuff-he knows a lot about bugs and bug prevention-but in the interests of not boring the reader, I will refrain from mentioning anything that involves interferometers, beam splitters or microprocessors. With the geeky stuff concluded and our consulting expert having taken his leave, the conversation resumes at just above a whisper. The three of us, me, Naomi and Dane, as close to the big guy as we can get without sitting in his lap.

“Kathleen Mancero,” he begins. “You looked her up, right?”

“We have everything available from published sources. What can you add?”

“Only that her involvement is my fault. I want that to be on the record. Whatever Kathy’s done, it’s because I was never quite able to say no to her. Not absolutely. She desperately wanted a mission, much like the one I’ve made for myself, and for similar reasons. They took advantage of that. If she’s helping them with Joey Keener, it has to be because she thinks she’s helping me. That’s the only explanation.”

“We assumed as much.”

“You did?” He looks much relieved. “Well, good then.”

“I notice, Mr. Shane, that you’re still referring to the kidnappers as ‘they.’”

“Just Shane, please, no mister. I say ‘they’ because I don’t know who ‘they’ are.”

“Because you can’t remember?”

“Because I never knew. Professor Keener believed that his son had been taken into custody by agents of the Chinese government, in an attempt to persuade him to share secrets. That was my assumption, too, until I saw the video of Kathy and the boy. That changed everything. If the Chinese were involved they’d have used one of their own, not gone prospecting for a nanny in Kansas. So it has to be domestic. One of our own spy agencies.”

Naomi nods in agreement. “Did he share?”

“Keener? You mean was he complicit in an act of treason? No, I don’t think so. He said not, and in my judgment he lacked the ability to lie convincingly. Then again, I’ve been wrong about so much, maybe I was wrong about that, too.”

“Possibly,” Naomi says. “That has yet to be determined. Tell me what you recall of your interrogation.”

He grimaces. “Not much is clear. I was with you, in your office. There’s a lot of noise and then something hits me and I pass out. When I come to I’m strapped to a gurney. Someone asks me about Joseph Keener and I tell them everything I know, but that isn’t enough. They beat me, they drug me some more and then it all gets very vague and blurry.”

“Could you identify any of your interrogators?”

He shakes his head. “Never saw them.”

Naomi sits up straight, takes a breath. “We have news to impart. As yet we have no line on who has Joey, precisely, or what they hope to gain by holding him after his father’s death, but we do know who abducted you.”

Naomi delivers a succinct description of the events of the day, in particular the threat to “go chemical” on Milton Bean, and the convenience of a nearby airfield with professional interrogators on-site. Midway through the account something relaxes in Shane’s expression, and when Naomi concludes, he says, “Taylor Gatling, I’ll be damned. Haven’t heard the name in twenty years, but that explains it.”

“How so?”

“Keener told me he was under surveillance by his own security guards, but I never made the connection between Gama Guards and Taylor Gatling, Jr. Now it all makes sense. Or some of it does.”

“Gatling is previously known to you?”

Shane shakes his head. “His father was. I had no idea his son owned a security firm. This all happened so long ago, he must have been a kid at the time. I have no recollection of him at the trial.”

“Trial?”

“The father, Taylor Gatling, Sr., was an embezzler. A very bold and clever one, too. Owned a chain of automotive dealerships, had his face all over the local television stations promoting sales. Get the Taylor-made deal on the car of your dreams! — that was his pitch. Very successful, but it wasn’t quite enough to sustain his lifestyle, or his many mistresses, and Gatling came up with an elaborate scheme to defraud the finance company that floorplanned his cars. I won’t go into the details, which involved a confederate at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but basically he sold cars while pretending to still have them on one of his many lots. Because it was interstate fraud, the Bureau got involved. I was a newbie with a computer background and they decided to put me undercover as a car salesman, where I might get a chance to examine the paperwork, find out how he was doing it. Which was kind of a joke, me as a car salesman, since I never managed to sell a car. Not one! But I did collect VIN numbers, and figured out who was assisting at the DMV-one of his girlfriends-and we were able to put it all together and prove the fraud.”

“So you sent Taylor Gatling’s father to prison.”

“I wish that was all it amounted to. Despite being a con man, or maybe because of it, Taylor was one of the most charming guys I ever met. You couldn’t help but like him. But he was guilty as sin, there was no way around it, and he was eventually sentenced to five years in a federal lockup. Where he could have practiced his tennis with the rest of the embezzlers and tax cheats. Except that on the day that he was supposed to surrender to the federal marshals he shot himself.”

Naomi shakes her head. “How come we didn’t run into that when we researched Taylor Gatling, Jr.?”

Shane shrugs. “Just a guess, but if he’s been as successful as you suggest, he’s probably had as much of it scrubbed as possible. That takes a lot of money and a lot of effort, siccing lawyers on search engines and archives, but it can be done. Plus you were researching the son, not the father.”

“Plus once we found Gatling Security Group, that’s what we researched, not so much the owner,” I chime in, defending Teddy.

“It’s been less than twelve hours, for cryin’ out loud,” says Dane. “Look at it that way, the kid found a lot. He was the one who made the connection, started the ball rolling.”

Naomi is having none of it, and waves me off. “Thank you, Alice, thank you, Dane, but there’s really no excuse. I don’t blame Teddy, I blame myself.”

She turns back to Shane, who looks puzzled at our exchange. “So let me get this right,” she says. “Taylor Gatling, Jr., blames you for his father’s suicide and is taking his revenge? After all those years?”

“Looks that way. Unless someone is framing him by framing me.”

Naomi sighs. “The very thought of that makes my head hurt.”

“Wheels within wheels, Nantz.” Shane grins, as if enlivened by the idea. “Gatling and company have been working on behalf of the so-called intelligence community. Anything is possible.”

“Who scratched your face?” Tolliver wants to know. “Your wife or your girlfriend?”

“Not funny, Glenn.”

“Or maybe it was a threesome. Hey, come to think of it my wife might go for a threesome as long as I wasn’t invited.”

Jack stands up, as if to go.

“C’mon, Jack. You want a beer?”

“Hey, sure. One beer can’t hurt.”

The state police captain has something he wants to impart, supposedly, which is why Jack has agreed to meet his old friend at The Diamondback on Boylston, up the stairs to the rooftop cafe so Glenn can have a smoke if he wants. The D-back being approximately the least coplike bar in this part of Boston, which means they’re unlikely to be overheard by colleagues. Plus Piggy likes the nachos, and the rules of the arrangement mean that Jack will be picking up the tab.