Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Be quiet!” Barris snapped.

Leave it to a military man to know how to get someone to shut up. I went silent, remembering exactly where I was and whom I was dealing with.

“Now listen up,” he said, a little more quietly now, yet with hardness in his voice. “We’ve been polite with you so far …”

I started to open my mouth, intending to make some smart-aleck remark about Miss Manners’s advice on how to properly put someone in handcuffs and give them a ride in a tank, but Barris stepped a little closer to put his face near mine. “If you persist,” he said in a half-whisper, “I’ll have you taken someplace where some of my men will enjoy making you more cooperative. Do you understand me, Mr. Rosen?”

I shut up, my wiseass remarks dying stillborn. There was no mistaking what he meant. Down there, beneath the stadium, were cold rooms with concrete walls, postmodern catacombs where someone could get lost forever. People had a habit of disappearing in Busch Stadium lately. I had heard the rumors, as had everyone else in the city, and Colonel Barris no longer looked like a retired bank clerk who sat around the house listening to old Carpenters records.

“Do you understand me?” he repeated.

I nodded my head.

“Good,” he said. “Now if you’ll follow me, we’ll go to my office where we can talk in private. We have someone waiting for us.”

He turned on his heel and began walking away, leading the way toward a short stairway to the club’s upper level. Huygens fell in behind me, and Farrentino met us at the top of the steps. Neither of them said a word to me, but Farrentino shot me a brief look of warning: don’t screw around with this guy … he means business.

The colonel’s office was located in the left rear corner of the club, a small cubicle formed by hastily erected sheets of drywall. A desk, a couple of chairs, a computer terminal, a wall map of the city spotted with colored thumbtacks. Very military, very spartan. The only decoration was a glass snowball on the desk, a miniature replica of the Arch sealed in with a liquid blizzard.

A man was seated in a chair in front of Barris’s desk. He was dressed casually yet well: pressed jeans, a cotton polo shirt, and a suede leather jacket. It was for that reason that I didn’t immediately recognize him when he turned around to look at us as a trooper opened the door to let us inside. It wasn’t until he stood up and held out his hand that I realized who he was.

“Mr. Rosen,” he said, “I’m happy to meet you. I’m Cale McLaughlin.”

I shook the hand of the last person I expected to see in Barris’s office; although I tried to keep cool, my discomfiture must have been obvious. “You’re no doubt wondering what I’m doing here,” Tiptree’s CEO said, favoring me with a fatherly smile.

I shrugged. “Not really. You’re probably the only person here who has a membership card.”

“Good point.” McLaughlin gave a short laugh, then waved me to the chair next to him. Farrentino sat down on the other side, while Huygens leaned against a file cabinet. “But the fact of the matter is that your friend’s murder is of vital interest to my company. When he learned of what happened tonight, Paul called me and I came down here.”

“It must have been on short notice,” I murmured, glancing at my watch. “It’s been barely three hours since John was shot.”

“Hmm … yes, it was short notice. And believe me, I’d much rather be in bed right now.” McLaughlin’s face became serious. “But, as I said, my company is greatly interested in what happened.” He glanced at Barris. “Perhaps I should let the colonel begin, though. George?”

“You already know that your friend was investigating a recent murder when he was killed,” Barris said as he took his own seat behind the desk. “What you don’t know is why he was killed, nor who did it.”

“And neither do you,” I replied.

“No,” Farrentino said. “That we do know-”

“We’re way ahead of you, Gerry,” Huygens interrupted. “You’re good, sport, but not as good as we are.”

“Yeah, right. Sure you do.” I gently massaged my wrists, still feeling the chafe left by the handcuffs. “If you’re so swift, then why do you need my help?”

Huygens opened his mouth as if to retort, but Barris cleared his throat; the other man shut up. McLaughlin remained quiet, a forefinger curled contemplatively around his chin as he listened. “What Mr. Huygens means is that we now have a suspect,” the colonel said as he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a thick file folder. “What we have to do is catch him …”

He opened the folder, unclipped an eight-by-ten photo from a sheaf of paper, and slid it across the desk. I recognized the face as soon as I picked up the picture: the distinguished-looking gentleman with the gray Vandyke beard I had spotted at the Tiptree Corporation reception.

“You may have seen him when you visited my company this morning,” McLaughlin said. “His name’s Richard Payson-Smith. He’s a senior research scientist at Tiptree … one of the top people behind our Sentinel R amp;D program, in fact.”

“Born 1967 in Glasgow, Scotland,” Barris continued, reading from the dossier. “Received his B.S. from the University of Glasgow, then immigrated to the United States in 1987, where he went on to receive both his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California-Irvine. After he became a naturalized citizen he went to work for DARPA at Los Alamos, where he was involved with various research projects until 2003, when he was recruited by Tiptree to head up a skunk-works team involved with the Sentinel program.”

He paused, then looked at McLaughlin. The executive picked up the ball. “At this juncture, Mr. Rosen,” McLaughlin said slowly, “we’re about to walk out onto thin ice. We need to discuss matters with you that are classified Top Secret, and I have to know for certain that you will not discuss any of these secrets outside this room.”

I opened my mouth to object, but he half-closed his eyes and held up his hand. “I know, I know. You’re a reporter, so you’re not in the habit of keeping secrets, nor did you ask to be involved in any of this. But we’re in a bind, and we need to have your full cooperation, so much so that the colonel simply doesn’t have time to ask the FBI to run a background check on you. Therefore, I have to ask you to sign something before we can go any further.”

Barris reached into his desk again, rifled through some papers, and produced a three-page document. “This is a secrecy pledge,” McLaughlin went on as Barris handed it across the desk to me. “In short, it says that you will not divulge to any third party any classified information that has been confided to you. Once you’ve signed it, you could be arrested under federal law for various felony charges-possibly including high treason-if you reveal anything that’s said in this room.”

I glanced through the document; as much as I could make out the single-spaced legalese, it was as McLaughlin said. The minimum penalty for airing out Uncle Sam’s dirty laundry was ten years in the pen and a fine so harsh I would never pay it off by stamping out license plates in Leavenworth.

“Sounds pretty stiff, Mr. McLaughlin.” I dropped the pledge back on Barris’s desk. “What makes you think I’d want to sign anything like this?”

Barris shrugged. “For one thing, it’ll get us a little closer to nailing the guy who killed John Tiernan,” he said. “That should mean something to you. Second, it’ll help you get your belongings returned. And third, once this whole affair is said and done, you’ll be the one reporter in town who has the inside story … within certain limitations, of course.”