THE VIRON CONSPIRACY (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS #4) (10 page)

Scarne wondered how the camera was activated. Sound? Motion? Even if it was one of those two things, it made no sense to leave it on at all times. Then he noticed the double light switch next to the panel. He flicked one switch up and a
ceiling light came on. He flicked the other switch and a tiny red light in the front of the black box flickered on. Ralph knew his business, Scarne thought. He replaced the panel and went back out to the kitchen and put the knife back. Then, he left by the rear door, walked out to the street and called a cab. No one paid him any mind.

Scarne had no intention of turning over the SD card to the Honolulu police, even though it was potential evidence in a multiple homicide.
For all he knew, the card was blank.

But something in his gut told him it wasn’t.   

CHAPTER 16 - BABY BOTTLE

When he got back to his hotel, Scarne asked a desk clerk if there was an Apple Store nearby.

“Yes, sir. Just a few blocks away in the
Kahala Mall.” He pulled out a local street map and marked it up for Scarne. “I believe they are open until 10 P.M.”

Scarne went up to his room and got
his iPad mini. Then he walked to the Apple Store. It was crowded, but after a short wait a chipper young woman wearing earphones and an Apple t-shirt took him in hand.

“How can I help you, sir?”

He held up the tiny SD card.

“Is there any way I can watch whatever is on this on my iPad mini?”

“Have you set up a file structure on your SD card while it was inserted into your desktop or laptop, and then created a main DCIM folder with a 100DICAM sub folder inside of it?”

It’s like talking to a different species, Scarne thought.

“I think I missed that class,” he said.

The girl laughed and held out her hand, palm up. Scarne gave her the SD card.

“Come with me,” she said.

She brought him over to a display laptop and inserted the card.

“You have to copy your image files or videos in the sub-folder, making sure that they have an eight-character format. I’ll try JPEG.”

“Of course,” Scarne said. “I was just about to suggest that.”

“Sure you were. Now, once you connect your SD to your mini, your photos and video albums will open up. Then, you can select and import the files into your album. Want me to do it for you?”

It took her about a minute. Scarne watched her closely. He knew he could repeat the process if he had to. But he also knew that had he started from scratch without her it might have taken him until the next Ice Age. She held up the iPad mini for him.  

“See?”

It was playing a video. It showed most of a small room. Obviously the Campbell nursery. There was a woman bending over, placing a baby in his crib. Her back was to the camera.

“It’s a nanny cam, isn’t it,” the Apple girl said. “More and more people are getting them.”

Scarne didn’t want the girl to see anything else. He took the device from her hand and tapped the “pause” symbol on the screen.

“Yes,” Scarne said casually. “Just testing it out. Wife insisted we get it. But it’s not much good unless I can read the SD card. I appreciate your help.”

The girl refused a tip, saying it wasn’t allowed. With someone who looked like a supervisor hovering nearby, Scarne didn’t push it. With her brains, the kid would probably be a millionaire soon anyway, he reasoned.   

Scarne hurried back to his hotel. He was anxious to see the rest of the video. Just before he was able to pause it in the Apple Store, the woman by the crib turned around, looking directly into the camera. She looked terrified, but strangely resolute. But there was someone else in the room, just off to the side. A man. His face wasn’t visible. But he was dressed in black. And wearing gloves. Both of them left the room, the man’s face still only partially visible. The fact it was visible at all told Scarne what he already knew. The man didn’t care if the woman saw what he looked like. She must have sensed that, which accounted for her terror. She knew she would be killed.

Once
back in his room, Scarne opened the minibar and took out two airline-sized Jack Daniels bottles and poured himself a stiff drink. Then, with rising anticipation, he sat at a desk and plugged the SD card into his iPad. He then found the proper folder and started to play the video.

After the initial section when the woman and the man left the room there was a long stretch where only the crib and dressing table beyond it were visible. Scarne could see the baby’s arms at it reached toward the slowly twirling objects than dangled from a mobile attached to the head of the crib. While he waited for something else to happen, h
e sipped his bourbon and contemplated why the nanny cam was activated. He decided that the woman had switched it on when she turned on the light entering the room, hoping that her captor did not notice. It was the action of a brave and loving mother. Scarne’s throat constricted at the thought of what was probably occurring in the master bedroom during the blank portion of the video. He drank silently, feeling sweat trickle down his back despite the room’s air-conditioning.

Scarne fast-forwarded the video until someone else walked into the nursery. Scarne was almost positive it was the same gloved man from earlier. According to the video’s time log, almost an hour had passed. The man was holding something in his hand. Scarne tensed until he remembered that the baby had survived the slaughter of his mother and sister. The man leaned over the crib and Scarne saw what he was holding. It was a baby bottle!
He watched incredulously as the man changed the baby’s Pampers and gave him the bottle.

A moment later the man turned and walked out of the room, his face
now clearly visible.

“Got you, you son-of-a-bitch,” Scarne said to his empty hotel room.

Scarne fast-forwarded. Nothing else happened until a swarm of police officers entered the nursery.  They went right to the crib where one of them picked up an obviously squalling child. The relief on the faces of the cops was palpable. One of them made a sign of the cross. By Scarne’s estimation, he’d gone three hours into the video at that point. He shut it off and looked at his watch. It was almost 7 P.M. Anxious as he was to start the process of identifying the man in the nanny cam video, he knew that the time difference with New York made it impossible immediately. And it had to be done in New York. He had no intention of sharing what he knew with the police in Hawaii. There was only one person he would trust with the information and who also had the resources to identify the man in the nursery. And that person was surely home in bed asleep.

Sleep sounded like a good idea to Scarne. He’d been going nonstop all day. He’d hardly eaten all day, and the Jack Daniels was burning a hole in his stomach. But before he left to find some food, as a precaution he opened up his email account and tried to email the video file to himself. It was too large. Thanks to some ea
rlier impromptu computer lessons from Evelyn Warr, he knew what to do. He made a copy of the video and then cropped out everything but the parts containing the mother and the killer. He was able to email that section.

Scarne went down to the hotel restaurant, where the waiter recommended the broiled Onaga, which turned out to be a mild, moist, and very tender ruby-red snapper served whole. It was delicious, although Scarne knew a boiled octopus would have tasted good to him at that point. Then he went to his room and set his alarm for 5 A.M. He was asleep within minutes.

***

On his farm six miles outside Osceola, Iowa, Mitchell Royster fingered the kernels of a corn cob and frowned. They looked OK, but the outer layers of the corn husks worried him. They were scarred with brownish-yellow lesions sprinkled with black freckles. He pulled out his cell phone.

An hour later, Clyde Hoddstaler, an inspector with the Iowa Farming Bureau was gathering some of the stalks from a rectangular patch of corn about 50 feet wide. All the stalks in the patch had broken, twisted or discolored stalks.

“I don’t like it, Mitch,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“What do you think it is? The corn looks fine on the inside.”

“Looks to me like Goss’s wilt.”

“Is that bad?”

“Any disease is bad. The wilt had been spreading and we don’t know why. It’s caused by a bacterium, Clavibacter nebraskensis. It may not kill the plant, but it can cut yields by half.”

“Fuck me with a rotary tiller!”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” the inspector said.

“Why this patch? It doesn’t seem to have affected those rows over there.”

“And all your corn is hybrid, right?”

“Yeah. Hell, most of the corn in Clarke County is hybrid. I thought it was engineered to resist this kind of thing.”

Hoddstaler shook his head.

“Not every hybrid strain is altered to handle every disease. I mean, 90 percent of the corn in the United States comes from seeds that have had their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Most corn now can resist glyphosate, so you farmers can kill weeds without killing your corn crop. But some corn remains susceptible to Goss’s. I’ll send these samples to Des Moines. Where do you get your seed from?”

“BVM. But it can’t be their seed.”

“Why not?”

Royster pointed at the acres of healthy corn surrounding the affected rectangle.

“Same seeds.”

CHAPTER 17 - BLACKBRIAR

As New York City Police Commissioner, Richard Condon ran the largest police force in the nation. He had 40,000 of the best-trained law enforcement professionals at his beck and call.

He was taking out the garbage when Scarne called his home on Staten Island.

“This can’t be good,” he said when he took the phone from his wife, Charlotte.

“I heard that,” Scarne said.

“You were meant to.”

“How do you know I’m not calling to see how you are, or ask you to play golf?”

“Do you want to play golf?”

“Some other time. When I’m not in Hawaii.”

Condon looked at his watch.

“Hawaii? What time is it there.?”

“About 5:15 A.M. I need a favor.”

“You know it’s Sunday, don’t you?”

“What else do you have to do? I know you were just taking out the garbage. What was next on the agenda? Cleaning out the basement?”

“Washing the screens.”

“See. I’m doing you a favor.”

Condon laughed. He was fond of Scarne, ever since the former cop had held a city councilman by his heels off a balcony in City Hall. Even though he had to fire him for it.

“Tell me.”

Scarne did, leaving little out.

“You realize that you should probably turn over the video and whatever else you have to the local cops out there,” Condon finally said.

“The same cops who so easily bought the time differentials in the murders, the blood pools on the pillows and the fact that the killer was right-handed. Not to mention the nanny cam in the nursery? Those cops? They’ll probably arrest me for breaking and entering.”

“Which is, of course, exactly what you did. As for the locals, given the preponderance of evidence there was, a lot of departments would have missed all that. Too bad they didn’t have a New York hot dog like you right from the start.”

Condon didn’t like someone bad-mouthing another department.

“You won’t get an argument out of me on that point, Dick. What are you getting so uppity about? You helped train this particular hot dog. Besides, this thing has to be bigger than what happened out here. It’s got Federal jurisdiction written all over it. I can’t go to the Feds. At least not yet. But now that I’ve put you into the picture, I’m in the clear with the Honolulu cops. If you decide to, you can go to them with the video. You don’t have to tell them where you got it. Invoke national security. Everyone’s got videos of something.”

“I’m not a Fed. I run a city police department.”

“Hell, if you have to, invoke states
’ rights.” 

There was a long pause while Condon thought it over. Scarne usually knew what he was doing, even if the methods he used skirted many legal lines. But then, so did stop-and frisk and a dozen other things Condon’s own cops had to do to keep their city safe.  And it was the same in every jurisdiction in the country.

“What do you need?”

Scarne knew that, outside the F.B.I., the N.S.A. and a couple of other initialed Government agencies, the N.Y.P.D. had some of the most-sophisticated crime-fighting technologies on the planet. Its anti-terrorism unit was superior to those in most nations, some of which often and gladly asked for its help.

“I’ll email you some of the video, the part with the guy’s face. Your facial recognition people may be able to identify him. If they can’t, I know you can call in some favors from the Government, no questions asked. If he’s in the system anywhere, you can find him.”

“And if he’s not?”

“He’ll be in it. He’s either got a record or he’s ex-military. They all are. This wasn’t his first rodeo.”

“Then what?”

“Then you do your thing, and I’ll do mine. But I’ll have a head start, which is what we both want.”

Condon understood what Scarne meant. As a free-agent, the private investigator could do things that many cops couldn’t. Breaking and entering being the least. By the time the N.Y.P.D. cut through bureaucratic and jurisdictional issues with other departments, Scarne might be able to find the man.

“Send me the email. I’ll make some calls.”

“How long do you think it will take?”

“On a weekend? I don’t know. Some of the people I may have to speak with may be hard to reach.”

“Dick, you could reach the Pope in two minutes.”

“My personal record is five. I’ll get back to you. Probably won’t be more than three hours before I hear something.”

The sun was just coming up. Scarne resisted the urge to go back to bed. He felt listless and out of shape. He put on a bathing suit and a golf shirt, grabbed a towel and headed to the beach. As he walked through the lobby the clerk at the front desk called out to him.

“You’d be better off in our pool, sir. This is the coldest time of the year for the ocean in Hawaii. The water temperature was only 50 degrees yesterday. Our pool is heated.”

“Just going to wade,” Scarne said.

The beach was virtually deserted. The air was cool. Scarne stripped off his shirt and plunged in. The water was frigid, but after the initial shock, bearable. A strong swimmer, he headed out, ignoring the possibility that any sharks hanging around were early risers. About 100 yards from shore he began swimming parallel to the beach front. After a half hour, he turned around and headed back. By the time he made it to shore he was exhausted but elated by the workout. He lay on his towel and let the early morning sun warm him. There was a small cafe next to the hotel and, suddenly ravenous, he stopped in for a typical Hawaiian breakfast of linguiça, eggs, and white rice, which he washed down with three cups of strong Kona coffee.

***

Scarne was just coming out of his shower when his phone rang. It was Condon.

“His name is Michael Burke.”

“Criminal record?”

“No. Although he probably deserves one. We found him in a N.S.A. database. Former Special Forces, then Blackbriar, the security firm that does Government contract work. But he left that firm three years ago, apparently to freelance.”

“No doubt it’s him?”

“Facial recognition probability of 95 percent. It’s him.”

“Recent address?”

“Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson. Take this down.”

Scarne did.

“He’s apparently not hiding from anyone. Pays his taxes, although if he’s what we think he is, he probably doesn’t declare everything he makes.”

“That might be his only admirable quality.”

“What are you going to do?”

There was a pause.

“Jake, I know you have a personal stake in this. But be careful. Burke’s a real hard case. Won
a couple of medals in Iraq. If he’s part of a professional assassination team, he won’t think twice about killing you.”

“I’m not easy to kill, Dick. I’ll have surprise on my side. He can’t imagine anyone knows who he is. It’s a miracle I do. The whole thing, from taking the family hostage to the skydiving murder, was sophisticated and well-financed. He’s the key to unlocking whatever is going on. That’s why I need my shot at him before anyone else.”