Second Contact Read online

  “Good,” said Montoya. “He was scared to death about sneaking you in here.”

  “He had no reason to be.”

  “He works for security, and you gave him a bribe. That's reason enough. I figured that you weren't after the mythical Mr. Benares,” said Montoya with a self-satisfied chuckle. “I didn't know exactly what you wanted, but I had to keep assuring MacCarron that no one was going to harm me, that Mallardi was the only one who might, and that he's been transferred to Mars Base.” He paused. “I mean, hell, even a hit man wants to live, and there's just too damned much security around here, even if you were here to kill me, for you to get away with it. Still, it took almost half an hour to convince him.”

  “So how long will you be staying here?” asked Becker.

  “Until we tie Gillette and his successor to a certain Italian distributor,” answered Montoya. “Now that they've got me here, they're not likely to let me go.”

  “Are you talking weeks, months, what?”

  Montoya shrugged. “Who knows? I hope it's soon, though. I'm going nuts in this place.”

  “It could be worse,” said Becker.

  “Oh, yeah? How?”

  “They could keep you in the kind of cell they've got Jennings in.”

  “I thought I read that he was at Bethesda—or maybe I heard it on the grapevine. Either way, Bethesda is a hospital—they don't have cells there.”

  “I don't know what else you could call it.”

  “A padded room, perhaps?” suggested Montoya.

  “Actually, it's not padded at all.”

  Montoya shrugged. “They're making a big mistake. He's mad as a hatter.”

  “Did he strike you as mad when he was in control of the ship?” asked Becker as MacCarron reentered the room and handed Montoya his money.

  “No,” said Montoya. Suddenly he smiled. “But I didn't kill two crew members for the good of the service and the security of our planet. Jennings did—or at least he thinks he did.”

  “True enough,” conceded Becker.

  “You all through, Major Smith?” asked MacCarron nervously.

  “Yes, I think I am,” said Becker, walking to the door. “Thank you for your time, Lieutenant Benares.”

  “My pleasure,” replied Montoya.

  Becker followed MacCarron out into the hall, and they returned the way they had come, saluting at each checkpoint.

  “Do you need a ride back to your hotel?” asked MacCarron as they left the hospital.

  “No, thanks,” replied Becker. “I'm staying with friends. One of them should be picking me up any minute.”

  “Then I'll say goodbye to you here. I'm due on duty in about forty minutes.”

  “Thanks for your help, Lieutenant.”

  “It wasn't the right man, was it?” said MacCarron.

  Becker shook his head. “No, it wasn't.”

  “Do you want me to start checking for a Samuel Benares at the other Illinois bases?”

  “Might as well,” said Becker. “I've still got to find him before I can bring him to trial.”

  “How will I get in touch with you?”

  “I'll be on the move, and pretty hard to contact,” answered Becker. “I'll get in touch with you.”

  “Okay, then,” said MacCarron, walking to his car. “Nice to do business with you, Major.”

  “My pleasure,” replied Becker.

  As soon as MacCarron had driven off, Becker walked to the gate and hailed a cab. Fifteen minutes later he was back at the Inn by the Lake.

  Jaimie was working with her computer as he entered her room.

  “I hope things went better for you than for me,” she said, looking up from her screen.

  “I wish I knew,” he replied.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jaimie. “Wasn't he willing to talk to you?”

  Becker frowned. “He was too damned willing. He confirmed everything we suspected about the drug ring.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Did you ever listen to one of those talk shows on radio or holovision, and wish to hell that the host didn't agree with your position because he was such a son of a bitch you hated being on the same side with him?”

  “Once in a while. So what?”

  “Well, I had that feeling again this morning,” he replied. “I'd have been much happier if Montoya had denied that there was any dope at all aboard the Roosevelt.”

  She stared at him curiously. “What are you getting at?”

  “I'm not exactly sure,” said Becker, “but I think we're in big trouble.”

  10.

  “Maybe we'd better sit down together and start comparing what we learned this morning,” said Jaimie, a hint of nervousness in her voice.

  “All right,” said Becker, looking around the room. “Have you got anything to drink?”

  “Let's stick to water until we know exactly where we stand,” she replied.

  He nodded and sat down on an easy chair, while she sat cross-legged on the bed and lit a smokeless cigarette.

  “While you were at the hospital,” she began, “I spent the morning trying to follow the money trail.”

  “Follow it where?”

  She shrugged. “Wherever it led. Gillette doesn't grow or manufacture the drugs; he's just a middle-man. If he's got twelve million dollars in his Swiss and Brussels accounts—and he does—then somebody's got a hell of a lot more in theirs.”

  “What did you find out?” he asked.

  She frowned. “Nothing.”

  “You couldn't follow the trail?”

  “It's stranger than that, Max,” she said. “There isn't any trail.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No it's not,” she contradicted him. “If it was hidden or protected, I'd know it was there even if I couldn't read it. But there's no trail of any kind. That money wasn't transferred to his account. Somebody came into those two banks about six weeks ago and deposited twelve million dollars, cash, in his accounts.”

  “It couldn't have been Gillette. He's been in deep space aboard the Martin Luther King for longer than that.”

  “It shouldn't have been anyone. People just don't walk around with briefcases filled with cash, not even drug dealers. Hell, especially not drug dealers.”

  “That's interesting, but I don't know what it means,” said Becker.

  “I didn't know, either, so I did some more checking.”

  “And?”

  “The Swiss account has only been open for six weeks. Ditto for his account in Brussels.”

  “And before that?”

  “If he had twenty thousand dollars to his name before that, I'll be damned if I can find it.”

  “He had to,” said Becker. “He only signed on aboard the Roosevelt when things got too hot for him here.”

  “Yeah?” she said, picking up her computer. “Take a look at this, Counselor.” She activated the speaker and leaned forward. “Computer, bring up William Gillette's financial statement one week prior to his assignment as Chief Medical Officer aboard the Theodore Roosevelt.”

  Two columns appeared on the screen.

  “The left-hand column contains his assets, and the right-hand one lists his indebtedness,” she continued.

  “I can read a financial statement,” said Becker irritably, as he searched fruitlessly for any sign of the drug money.

  “Then you know that his net worth was about two hundred and sixty thousand dollars, including his house.”

  “Did you run credit checks on Mallardi, Provost and Greenberg?” he asked.

  She nodded. “The three of them together weren't worth as much as a new car. Provost had bill collectors on his ass for years, Mallardi was just starting out and didn't own much more than the shirt on his back, and Greenberg had managed to save eight thousand dollars during the three years he was in the service.”

  “Something's very wrong here,” muttered Becker.

  “I take it this doesn't jibe with what Montoya told you?”

  “No,
it doesn't.” He pressed his fingers against his temples. “Let me think.”

  He tried to recall his conversation with Montoya, tried to reconstruct just what it was that had made him so uneasy, so nervous that he didn't want even MacCarron to know where he was staying.

  “Well?” she said after he'd been silent for a full minute. “Was he telling the truth?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You said he was too willing to talk. What did you mean?”

  Becker spent the next few minutes relating his conversation with Montoya—the young officer's secret mission aboard the Roosevelt, his confirmation of Gillette's connection to a major drug ring, and his explanation for the military's complex manipulation of personnel once Becker tried to put together a defense for Jennings.

  “Well, it all fits nice and neat,” said Jaimie when he was through. “I suppose I'm just gonna have to try harder to find out where the money came from.”

  Becker shook his head. “It's too neat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don't know. I'm missing something, but I don't know what it is.”

  “Missing what?” she asked. “Information? Is there something Montoya didn't tell you?”

  “He told me too much,” replied Becker. “Something's wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “I don't know. It's been bothering me all morning, but I can't put my finger on it.”

  “Well, let's go over it step by step,” she said, putting her cigarette out and lighting another. “You walked into the room and there he was. Should he have been surprised to see you?”

  “No. MacCarron had told him I'd be coming.”

  “Okay. You accused him of being part of a drug ring, and he showed you his credentials. Were they authentic?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so?”

  “I don't know. They looked authentic. Hell, I've never seen any Internal Security credentials.”

  “But they didn't bother you?”

  “The only thing that bothered me at that moment was that he was willing to give me all the details I needed.”

  “But you promised not to use them.”

  “Even so, he shouldn't have told me as much as he did.”

  “Did you get the feeling that he would have told you even if you hadn't promised to keep quiet?”

  He shrugged. “I don't know. I never thought about it.”

  “Think about it now.”

  “I still don't know.”

  “But that's not what's bothering you?”

  “No, I don't think so.”

  “Then let's go on. He described Gillette's role in the drug ring. Then what?”

  “Then he told me about Mallardi, and about how the government was keeping him on ice until they built the bigger case. And then—”

  Suddenly he froze.

  “What is it?” she demanded. “What did you remember?”

  “He knew about Mallardi!”

  “Of course he did. He was there to keep an eye on Gillette, and Mallardi was part of the ring.”

  Becker shook his head impatiently. “No! He'd been incommunicado for more than a week, and yet he knew Mallardi had been transferred to Mars Base!”

  “You're onto something, Counselor!” she whispered excitedly. “Keep going!”

  Becker concentrated on the morning's conversation with Montoya.

  “There's something else, too—it's just at the edge of my mind!” Suddenly his whole body sagged from the effort. “Damn! I can't quite remember it!”

  “All right, calm down,” she said. “Let's attack it logically. You spoke to Montoya about the drug ring. He knew Mallardi had been transferred. What else did he know that he shouldn't have known? That there were no autopsies performed?”

  “No, that wasn't it.”

  “That Gillette is back in deep space?”

  “He knew that, but given his cover story, it's something he should have known. No, it wasn't about the drug ring.”

  “About Jennings, then?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “What? Something about the trial, perhaps?”

  “No, he didn't know I represented Jennings. It was something else, something—I've got it! He made some reference to Jennings saying that killing Provost and Greenberg was for the good of the planet, or for planetary security, or some such thing.”

  “So?”

  “Jennings never said that aboard ship. He never told anyone why he committed the murders until after he was arrested and incarcerated.”

  “And if Montoya was on the drug case, he'd have no reason to know that!” chimed in Jaimie.

  “I'm starting to wonder if the man I spoke to really was Montoya,” said Becker, an enormous sense of weariness coming over him now that he had ransacked his memory and pulled up the necessary details.

  “I'm wondering the same thing myself,” she replied. “If he was Internal Security, I should have found something in his record to indicate it.”

  “He said it was there if you knew where to look.”

  “He said a lot of things, Counselor, and we know that at least two things were lies. Let's see if anything was the truth.”

  She activated her computer again, placed a call to Bethesda Hospital, and started reeling off a number of equations that made no sense at all to Becker. He was about to ask what she was doing when she turned to him and placed her finger to her lips, and he recalled what she had said the night before about how the machine was unable to differentiate his voice pattern from hers.

  A moment later she looked up and nodded to him.

  “You can talk now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking your friend's story,” she replied. “He said that Gillette was assigned to Bethesda, didn't he?”

  “Not precisely. He said that large quantities of drugs were disappearing from Bethesda, and that they suspected Gillette. He never specifically said that Gillette was stationed there.”

  “Well, let's see,” said Jaimie, as a number of lists appeared on the screen. “Yeah, William Gillette worked there from 2061 to 2063.” She turned back to the computer. “Computer, produce a list of medical stores unaccounted for during the period of William Gillette's employment at Bethesda.” The screen changed instantly, and she frowned. “Too easy, Counselor. Too damned easy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See that?” she said, gesturing to a column of figures that ran down the left side of the screen. “That's supposed to be a list of how many drugs turned up missing during the time Gillette was there.” She paused. “You're looking at fifty million dollars or more.”

  “I know.”

  “You still don't see, do you?” said Jaimie. “If the military is trying to cover it up, how come I was able to call up the exact figures? Why weren't they hidden or classified?”

  “Because they want you to see them,” said Becker with a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “And they want me to see them ... “ she began.

  “...Because they want us to believe Montoya's story,” he concluded. “And since we know part of Montoya's story is phony, I think we'd better assume that the whole damned thing is one big fabrication.”

  “They went to an awful lot of trouble to set it up,” said Jaimie.

  “Yes they did,” agreed Becker. “And I bought it lock, stock and barrel.”

  “Shall we find out just how badly they want you to believe it?” she suggested.

  “I don't understand you.”

  “Watch and don't speak,” she said, and spent the next thirty minutes carefully avoiding a number of traps and viruses, at the end of which Gillette's Swiss funds, totaling some eight million dollars, had been transferred to one of Jaimie's own accounts.

  “I don't know what this proves, except that you're one hell of a thief,” said Becker when the last manipulation was completed.

  “It proves they're willing to spend
eight million dollars to make you believe their story,” answered Jaimie. “They could have made that a bogus account with no money in it, but they knew that sooner or later someone would inspect it.”

  “It could also be Gillette's account,” said Becker without much conviction.

  “I've done everything I can with this computer,” she said. “But when I get to one with a keyboard, I'll bet you ten dollars to a nickel that there isn't any drug ring and that Gillette doesn't even know this account exists.”

  “You really think you can prove that with the proper computer?” he asked dubiously.

  She nodded. “Half the game is knowing what you're looking for.”

  “So if you can get to a more sophisticated machine, you can tell me for sure if Gillette and Mallardi were implicated in a drug ring?”

  “I can do more than that,” she said confidently. “I can even tell you if the man you spoke to this morning was really Anthony Montoya.”

  “Then we'd better get you to a computer.”

  “I've got a great one at home.”

  He shook his head. “We're not going home yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if this whole thing is as phony as I think it is, the only two leads I've got are MacCarron and Montoya, and they're both here.”

  “You think MacCarron's a part of it?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “If we've been set up, then he's definitely part of it. He was the only link you could find to Montoya.”

  “I don't know...”

  “You think I'm wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “If we've been set up, then I think MacCarron and Montoya are probably hundreds of miles away by now.”

  He shook his head. “There's always a chance I might want to speak to Montoya again. It would be stupid for them to turn up missing while we're still in Illinois—and whoever's behind this may be a lot of things good and bad, but stupid isn't one of them.” He paused for a moment, then walked decisively to her closet, pulled out her coat, and tossed it to her. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To find you a computer.”

  He had the doorman summon them a taxi, then had it drive them two miles into the center of Lake Forest. They got off at a major intersection, then walked a block until they came to a computer store.

  “Here we are,” announced Becker.