Randy White - Hunter's moon

He returned to the table, something on his mind. I waited, not surprised when he said, “I’m more worried about Tomlinson’s friend, sitting in a room right now being questioned. Tim. He’s a nice man, different… but he has no reason to protect me. The FBI’s good at asking the right questions.”

“Tim has no idea who you are.”

“But what if Danson or Shana Waters recognized me?”

“They didn’t.”

I wasn’t as confident as I tried to sound.

Wilson said, “I wish I’d have gotten a better read. Any new impressions come to mind?”

He’d asked variations of that question as well. I said, “Like Tomlinson said, the timing was more like fate. I’m still puzzled by Danson. One minute, he’s nearly unconscious; next, he’s a functioning drunk. Was it because he figured out the woman was trying to entrap him? Or because his radar sensed a big story?”

Wilson said, “You obviously haven’t spent much time with the White House press corps. The answer’s both. Wait… that’s unfair. Not to the press corps but to people like Danson who make it to the top.

“The ones who excel tend to be either decent professionals or they’re ruthless thugs. Both types appear nonthreatening; both are shrewd, but they are types. Tonight, you met one of the worst.”

“Danson,” I said.

“No. The woman, Shana Waters. She was an intern at CBS our last year in office. My wife was at the first press conference Shana attended. The two never exchanged words, but Wray took me aside afterward and told me to never let her get me alone.

“Danson is a borderline thug. He’s heavy-handed, biased as hell. But the man can cry on cue, and he looks like everyone’s favorite uncle. Shana, though, is a jackal. She’s after the anchor job and he knows it. So maybe he was trying to trap her by pretending to be drunker than he really was. The man’s not stupid. None of the top dogs are.”

“Your wife had good instincts.”

“Yes, but she had more than just instincts. She knew things about people. Wray sometimes saw events before they happened. In that way, Tomlinson’s like her.” Wilson smiled as he removed the telegraph key from the box. “Extrasensory perception. You don’t believe in that sort of thing, do you, Dr. Ford?”

“Mystic visions, no.”

“You seem uneasy.”

“I am. I’m surprised you do believe. It worries me-there’s a lot on the line.”

“More than you know-as I’ve said.” He was reattaching wires to the telegraph key for some reason. He began to tap the key, not sending, playing. “What if I called it ‘telepathy’ instead? The physics are similar to the telegraph. Our brains are chemical-electric transmitters. So is this key when it’s connected to a battery.” He drummed out a series of letters. No… it was the same letter over and over, I realized.

Dot-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dash.

W… W… W.

“Wray spent her life in the kind of silence you and I will never know. But she could hear music through the bones of her face. If she laid her head on a piano or touched her teeth to the wood. That’s how she learned to play. It’s also how she learned Morse code.

“When we were in the White House. I’m sure you heard all the cynical jokes. Always holding hands, like we were pretending. We weren’t.

“In all the years we were in politics, no one ever figured out the truth. When we held hands, Wray could tap out signals to me with her finger. Morse code. Warning me. Coaching me. Reminding me of a name; sometimes telling me to shut the hell up when I was midway through some idiotic remark.”

The president laughed as he continued to send and resend the same letter. Dot-dash-dash. I sat, fascinated, sensing the weight of the sea through the sailboat’s skin, and also the weight of Kal Wilson’s despair. He had lost his partner.

“You tell me,” he said. “How did Tomlinson know the importance of the two songs? ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and ‘Clair de Lune.’ ”

“Maybe he heard you mention them in an interview.”

The man was shaking his head. “No one knew. Morse code had been our secret language since we were children. Let me show you something.” He slid the telegraph key to the middle of the galley table. “In the first movement of ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ the left hand plays three notes over and over. The notes are C-sharp, E, and G-sharp. Do you perceive the significance?”

He’d asked the same question about Wray Wilson’s plane catching fire in a rain forest.

“I’m not a musician, sir.”

“You don’t need to be. You know the piece. Try humming those three notes.”

I felt ridiculous but I made an attempt. “Bumm bum-bum. Bumm bum-bum. Bumm bum-bum.”

He was nodding, conducting with his right hand while his left hand moved to the telegraph key. He resumed drumming out Dot dash-dash.. . Dot dash-dash… Dot dash-dash as I hummed.

I finally figured it out.

“In Morse code,” I said, “the sonata plays the letter W over and over.”

“That’s right. W, as in Wilson. When we were children, the sonata was our distress signal. The way the little deaf girl summoned the kid who’d become her protector. Me, the jock hero and Boy Scout.

“As we got older, it meant more. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote the piece. He was also in love with a women he knew he could never have. Because of her handicaps, Wray had felt the same was true of a guy like me. Unattainable. WW stood for Wray Wilson-her name once we were married.”

I nodded, not sure how to respond, so I asked, “And ‘Clair de Lune’?”

Wilson chuckled. “I’ll do us both a favor by not asking you to hum it but listen.” The telegraph key clattered with a series of dots and dashes too fast for me to read, but the rhythm was similar to the beginning of the Debussy classic.

“In Morse code, the first few bars of ‘Clair de Lune’ spell out I-L-U. Several times. Think about the melody.” He began tapping the key. “Hear it?”

I said, “Yes. But you lost me. What does I-L-U stand for?”

The president shook his head, a wry expression. “No one will ever accuse you of being a romantic, Dr. Ford. I’ll let you figure it out. But how did Mr. Tomlinson know? That’s what I’m asking you.”

I thought about it for a moment. “He has uncanny intuition, I’ll admit. He observes details, I think, that most of us miss, and his subconscious processes the data in a way that may seem mystical. But it’s not.”

“I think you’re wrong. He had nothing to observe regarding those two pieces of music. Yet he knew. My wife was the same way. You didn’t want him to come on this trip, did you?”

“No. I’m afraid he’ll get in the way-for what you have in mind.”

“Once again, I think you’re wrong. He knows things. That’s why I chose him.”

“But you never met Tomlinson before. And the only time we met-”

“Cartagena, Colombia,” the president interrupted. “My motorcade was coming from the airport, on the road by the sea. Secret Service had done its usual superb job. We had Blackhawk helicopters, more than a hundred agents working the streets. But the only one who noticed something odd about that little gray fishing boat was you, a vacationing tourist-or so I believed at the time.”

The gray boat was made for pulling crab traps yet the men aboard were fishing. They were also holding their rods upside down. I’d been in a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler watching the motorcade. I’d rammed the boat just as they fired the rocket. A SAM.

The president continued, “You both know things. But in different ways. That’s why I chose you. One of the reasons, anyway.”

“There are other reasons?”

“Yes. That’s something else I’m going to let you figure out for yourself. It’ll come to you. The significance.”