John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Bingo!

Burke stared at the screen. Stanford.

If that was legit, knowing Wilson’s alma mater should be useful. There had to be databases you could get to – or at least his sister could. (Meg was a genius at data mining.) Stanford alumni groups, enrollment and graduation records, library cards – maybe even a published master’s or doctoral thesis if Wilson had been a master’s or doctoral candidate. And he must have been. Vector drag? Scalar pair-coupling? I oughta get a Nobel just for typing them, Burke thought.

His sister, Meg, worked for an environmental law group in Charlottesville, and she really knew her way around the Internet. Their dad, amazed by what his daughter could find out about something – or someone – joked that if Meg ever went over to the dark side, she’d make a great identity thief. Cool, she said. I want to be Moby.

But trying to find Jack Wilson via Stanford would take a while, even for Meg. Burke didn’t know when, or even if, Wilson had actually gone there. Or if he’d graduated. Or what his degree was in – if he had one. Physics? Math? Engineering? Science fiction? Stanford was a big place. “Wilson” was not “Heimerdinger.”

He remembered the three-by-five card that the desk clerk had given him. Taking it from his pocket, he found two numbers. There was no reverse lookup on the Internet that gave you international numbers. But he Googled “386 country code” and saw that Wilson’s first call had been to Slovenia. That was probably Luka Ceplak’s number at Lake Bled. The second call had gone to the Ukraine.

His next stop was anywho.com. When the site came up, he put “Jack Wilson” and “White Deer” in the slots and… nothing. He tried “John Wilson.” And again, nothing. The e-mail address had been a phony, and the street address wasn’t any better.

Burke was beginning to get a sinking feeling. Maybe “Jack Wilson” was an alias, too. Maybe “Jack Wilson” was a character in The Fountainhead – in which case, he could forget reopening Aherne & Associates. He tried again, using “Wilson” by itself. Maybe the guy has parents there, he thought. Or a wife, or a cousin – This time, he got a hit. Erica Wilson. Must be a small town, he thought. Only one Wilson.

So he checked. And, in fact, White Deer had a population of 362. What were the odds that White Deer’s only Wilsons, Jack and Erica, were related?

It cost a dollar a minute to make a telephone call from the Esplanade, so Burke bought a phone card at a kiosk near the river. He stood in a Plexiglas bubble that didn’t do much to inhibit the cold wind, and tried to figure out how the hell you made an international call. The Cyrillic lettering was not a big help. It took him four tries to get the call through and by that time, his hands had turned to stone.

“Hel-looooo,” crooned the voice that answered. An old woman, Burke guessed, from the timbre of her voice.

“Hi!” Burke shouted. “I’m trying to reach Jack!”

“‘Jack’? I think you have the wrong number!”

“Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait!” Burke pleaded. “I’m in a phone booth in Belgrade.”

“Lucky you. I love Maine!”

Burke took a deep breath. “Look,” he said, “I’m trying to get in touch with a man named Jack Wilson. I got your name off the Internet. You were the only ‘Wilson’ in White Deer, so… you know anyone named Jack Wilson?”

“There was a Hazel Wilson on Elm, but she’s dead, four years. Maybe five.”

“I’ve got an address,” Burke told her.

“Well, that’s the ticket!”

“Maybe not. It’s just a post office box.”

“Oh.” There was something cautionary about the way she said it.

“Excuse me?” Burke said.

“Let me guess… is that Box two thousand?”

Burke fumbled open the sheet of paper that Novakovic had given him. “As a matter of fact-”

“Well, that’s your problem right there. If it’s Box two thousand, that’s the prison. All the inmates get their mail there.”

Burke didn’t know what to say. “It’s a prison?”

“They call it a federal correctional institution. Most of us, though, we just call it Allenwood.”

A plump woman stood behind the roping, wearing a pantsuit so closely fitted that she appeared to have been upholstered. She beamed a welcoming smile and held aloft a hand-lettered sign: ROMANTIC TOURISTS.

Jack Wilson joined the men around her, a collection of nervous males who joked too much and avoided eye contact. He’d tried to pick them out on the plane from New York, and he’d nailed all but one. As a group, they displayed the physical and social liabilities (bad skin, obesity, a piercing giggle, a stutter) that you might expect of men who’d surfed their way into the arms of Madame Puletskaya, their Internet matchmaker. Men who were shopping for a wife and willing to pay the freight.

Wilson was odd man out. For one thing, he was conspicuously good-looking. And while he hadn’t been with a woman in years, there was a time, before his incarceration, when they had flocked to him. His easy athleticism and dark good looks made his youthful poverty ingratiating, his ratty cars adventurous, and his brilliance at math and science – which might have seemed nerdy – interesting. Thanks to Mandy, he had the cowboy manners of the Sundance Kid, all Ma’am and Sir. He shook hands with a firm grip, looked folks in the eye, and never made excuses. Sharon, his Stanford girlfriend, had guided him through the mysteries of advanced cutlery, taught him the proper way to consume soup, conveyed a knowledge of wines and the ways of a valued houseguest. In her way, she’d polished him up like a piece of rough.

Wilson studied his traveling companions. They were really rather ordinary-looking. A cynic might suppose that they were there to get laid, but that wasn’t it. Not really. There were easier and less expensive ways to do that. These men had flown halfway around the world, while submitting to the rigmarole of a staged courtship. Why? Wilson guessed that their resort to an Internet matchmaker was for much the same reason as his own. Like himself, they knew what they wanted, and whether from shyness or impatience, they were unwilling to look for a lover in the conventional ways. On the flight over, he’d met two of Madame Puletskaya’s clients. The first was a fifty-four-year-old businessman who owned a lumberyard in Michigan, had never been married, and figured, “It’s now or never.” The second was younger and suffered from an illness he didn’t identify, but which, he said, was certain to kill him. “What I really want,” he said, “is a kid. Someone to carry the name. So it isn’t like I didn’t leave nothin’ or no one behind.”

Wilson faced the same dilemma as these other men. He didn’t have the time or patience for seduction or courtship. Filling in the blanks for Madame P. suited him just fine, a choreographed courtship that required no thinking, planning, or endeavor.

1. Flowers

2. Letters

3. Chocolates

4. Lingerie

5. Telephone calls

6. Visit

7. Marriage

He understood that the “Ukraine Brides” would not be so readily available – would not have their photos on the Internet, would not be willing to leave home and family – if they were not desperate to escape a hopeless future. So it was that a beautiful and well-educated woman like Irina was, if not for sale, on offer. Not to anyone, of course. She had the power of rejection. But Wilson guessed that if push came to shove, she’d probably accept most of the Americans now standing in the lee of the formidable Madame Puletskaya.