Sterling blew out a long breath. “Under the circumstances, yes.”
“What's the problem?”
“I need your help on a case.”
“A case? Bledsoe, I haven't worked a case in twenty years.”
“I know that, sir, but it was you who told me, ‘Once in the Bureau, always in the Bureau.' I need that to be true right now and in a bad way.”
Gilden released a long, pensive sigh through the receiver. “Give me a minute. I need to go downstairs and change phones.”
Sterling waited for Gilden, knowing that with Director Murphy's approval on the massive manhunt to capture him, this could be one of his last chances to get some information from inside. He had thought about calling a couple of agents with whom he had developed a friendship over the years, but decided against it. It was too much of a gamble for an active to risk going into the shitter to help save Sterling's ass. The Bureau was still a stagnant cesspool of politics, even when it came to helping another agent who had put his life on the line countless times.
“What case has you in a snare?” Gilden was back on the phone. He sounded more like his old self, in control.
“My brother's.”
“Wilson?”
“He's been murdered.”
Sterling knew the words had hit Gilden like a cannonball to the gut. Men in the Bureau were accustomed to murders and deaths, but when it involved one of their own, the news was always difficult to hear.
“I had just read somewhere that he won a major science award,” Gilden said. “That couldn't've been more than a couple of months ago. What happened?”
Sterling hesitated at first, worried that bringing Gilden in could also land him in a heap of trouble, but with Skip Dumars on the hunt and the agency looking to contain collateral damage, it was this or nothing. He started from the beginning when Kay had called and told him that Wilson was missing. He laid everything out for Gilden, who like any good agent spent most of his time listening, only asking questions when he needed clarification. Sterling brought Gilden up to the final e-mail between Wilson and Heidi, then did something he had never done except with Dr. Lieteau. He told Gilden about his strained relationship with Wilson and how as a child he had harbored so much animosity toward his older brother that he couldn't even stand to hear the mention of his name. He explained how most of his life had been focused on stepping out of Wilson's shadow and proving to himself that he had his own talents.
Gilden let him pour out this last part without the slightest interruption, and when Sterling fell silent Gilden asked the question that brought a smile of relief to Sterling's face. “What can I do to help you catch these sonsabitches?”
“I don't want to jeopardize you, Professor.”
“Don't be silly. I know how these things work when there's a fix against you on the inside. Besides, what can they do to me? I'm not active. My pension is protected. And most of them don't even know I'm still alive.”
Sterling could feel Gilden's energy. “I need help with Vorscht,” Sterling said. “It blows me away to say this, but it's obvious that my brother had an affair with her. I don't know if he ever planned on leaving Kay or if he found himself trapped in something he couldn't get out of, but I get the feeling from Vorscht's last e-mail that things were becoming one-sided. I think that Wilson was trying to end it. Whatever it was, he must've fallen for her pretty hard.”
“Sterling, your brother wouldn't be the first professor to have an affair with a student. That doesn't seem to be enough to get him murdered.”
Sterling agreed. He had already ruled that out as a single motive. But he still felt the affair and the blackbirds and Wilson's research formed some kind of messy triangle.
“There was something more than just an affair,” Sterling said. “Every time I get a break in this case, it leads back to her. She was everywhere.”
“So you want me to run a background on her?”
“That's what I was thinking. It's too risky right now for me to call anyone inside for help. If you dig deep enough, I'm sure you'll find something.”
“Spell her name for me.”
“V-O-R-S-C-H-T.”
“You know her mother's name?”
“No.”
“How about where they're from?”
Sterling flipped back to the pages from his conversation with Nel Potter at the farmhouse. “The woman she lived with said that she came from Stuttgart.”
“Does she have any other name?”
“Well, the local Native American tribe called her Wogan, but other than that I think everyone else just called her Heidi.”
“How do I reach you if I find something?”
Sterling gave him the number of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. “Ask for Reverend or Mrs. Briggs. But if they aren't available, don't leave any messages. Keep trying them. One of them will be there some time during the day.”
“Give me at least twenty-four hours,” Gilden said. He would need to call on his few remaining contacts in the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA—the German equivalent of the FBI.
“If they start making inquiries, are you certain it won't circle back to you?” Sterling asked.
“One thing the Germans understand, Bledsoe, is secrecy.”
“Thanks for your help on this one, Professor.”
“Watch your back, Bledsoe. There's something I never told you. Agents can be the cruelest when it comes to taking down one of their own.”
43
S
terling knew he had a long day of research ahead of him, but before he burrowed into the computer, he needed to secure some untraceable means of communication. He stopped by Jerry's Den on 125th Street and quickly found out from the barber who had cut his hair yesterday where he could pick up a burner—an illegal cell phone that has no listed owner with the phone company, thus making it impossible to trace to its user. Fifty dollars and thirty minutes later, Sterling made his first call to Windsor McGovern.
“Yeah,” McGovern answered, his voice swallowed by the strains of a scratchy record in the background.
“It's Sterling Bledsoe, Mack. I hope I'm not disturbing you.”
“Hold on,” McGovern yelled into Sterling's ear. The music suddenly disappeared. “That's better,” he said, now out of breath. “How's the research coming?”
“Pretty well,” Sterling said. “I just have a couple of questions I didn't think of before.”
“You wanna stop by this morning?”
He knew McGovern was looking for company. Nothing could be lonelier than living in that apartment full of memories of his wife. Sterling wouldn't have minded paying the old man a visit, but today he had to make every minute count.
“We can do this over the phone if you don't mind,” Sterling said. “It really shouldn't take too long.”
“If that's what you'd like,” McGovern said. His disappointment was evident. “I'm ready when you are.”
Sterling flipped the pages in his book. “You told me they used something called DRC-1339,” Sterling said, reading from his notes. “What kind of toxin is that?”
“It's what we call an avicide,” McGovern explained. “Just like pesticides are toxins that kill insects, avicides are toxins that kill birds. DRC-1339 isn't anything new. It was developed back in the early 1960s in a collaboration between the Denver Wildlife Research Center and the Ralston Purina Company. They registered two products—Starlicide Technical and 1% Starlicide Pellets. The major goal at the time was to control the starling bird populations in animal feedlots, thus the name Starlicide.”
“Hold on, Mack,” Sterling said, running his pen quickly across the pages of his black book. “Did you say the Purina Company, like the cat food?”
“You heard me right. They make that cat chow my little Jessica hates with a passion.”
“So this Starlicide is the same stuff APHIS is now proposing to kill the six million birds?”
“Not exactly. Back in the sixties, APHIS was called the ADC—Animal Damage Control. Because Purina had the patent, ADC had to ask their permission to register a 98 percent concentrate that was much more powerful than the pellets. They were having lots of special bird problems and everyone just figured they could kill more by making the old stuff stronger. And bingo, they had a solution.”
The poison Mandryka had detected could be a variant of the DRC-1339, but that seemed too damn easy. Maybe the answer had to do with their killing mechanisms. Related toxins might have different names, but could still kill their victims in a similar manner.
“Do you know how this DRC-1339 works?” Sterling asked.
McGovern let out a loud grunt. “It's been a while since I read up on the stuff. But if my memory serves me right, one particle of the treated bait is sufficient to kill a blackbird. The more bait it eats, the faster it dies.”
“How fast?”
“Depends on how much it eats. Probably anywhere from three to fifty hours.”
Sterling flipped back in the book to his conversation with Mandryka. He had guessed the birds died within a matter of hours to a couple of days, depending upon how much and the concentration of the poison they had ingested.
“How does it kill them?”
“Shuts down their organs and gradually kills them from uremic poisoning.”
“Uremia?”
“That's right. The poison is absorbed into the bloodstream and impairs the liver and kidneys. The kidneys start to shut down to the point they can't get rid of the body's waste products, causing these toxic chemicals to build up in the blood to a lethal level. At first the birds drink tons of water—instinctively trying to dilute the accumulating toxins. Then they stop drinking altogether. About four hours before they die, they stop eating and become listless and inactive. We shot a video of the process to show the world how cruel this poisoning was. The birds just sit there with their feathers ruffled the way they do in cold weather. They look like they're dozing off. Just before they run out of steam, their breathing increases and becomes more difficult. They slide into a coma and die.”
Not what Sterling was looking for. Mandryka had said the blackbirds he examined died from electrical abnormalities in the heart, much different than uremia and kidney/liver failure. He quickly ran over the notes he had taken with Mandryka, then he thought of something.
“Can you find traces of the DRC-1339 in the blood?” he asked McGovern.
“Absolutely,” McGovern said. “A few years back a small group of farmers experimented with DRC. Our guys just stumbled on the carcasses and brought them back to the lab. A little blood work and bingo—they could tell right away what had killed them.”
“That's it!” Sterling said, circling a line of text in his book. He remembered that Mandryka had told him not all of the birds had the bufalin toxin in their bodies. And even in those in which he had found the bufalin, it had been in different stages of degradation. It made perfect sense. The longer the birds had been dead, the more likely the bufalin compound had already broken down in their bodies, making it undetectable in the blood when it was examined. Sterling ran his finger over Mandryka's words.
It's a perfect poison. It does its dirty work in a matter of hours, then quietly degrades and disappears.
“What are you hollering about?” McGovern asked.
Sterling had forgotton that McGovern was even on the phone. “Uh . . . nothing. I was thinking about something else I had heard about the birds. Thanks a lot for your help, Mack.”
“That's all?”
“At least for now. You've been a big help.”
“Any time. But the next time you want to talk, stop by. Jess doesn't care for many visitors, but she took a liking to you.”
“Tell her I'm flattered,” Sterling laughed, before disconnecting the line. He sat and stared at Mandryka's quote. The poisons were chemically different, but still related. Someone was testing a new toxin, but they were doing it far enough from the battleground in the upper Midwest so that no one would notice what they were working on. Halfway across the country, in the wilds of Vermont, who would ever find these dead birds, or better yet, who would think to investigate even if they did find them? Sterling could've kicked himself for looking at the problem all wrong. Wilson had been a target, but only because by finding the dead birds he had unknowingly crossed someone's path. The question that still needed to be answered was, whose?
44
S
terling hailed a gypsy cab and directed the driver to yet another school, this time to City College, a sprawling collection of neo-Gothic buildings set on thirty-five acres of greenery between Convent and Amsterdam Avenues and stretching from 131st to 141st Streets.
Riding up the steep hill of Amsterdam Avenue and past the caged, graffiti-scarred storefronts of the St. Nicholas neighborhood, one couldn't confuse City College with Dartmouth. The crowded surrounding streets were rumbling with signs of imminent danger. Teeth-baring pit bulls strained at their leashes while their masters gathered under the scarce shade, sipping from brown bags, their unbuttoned shirts exposing the shiny chrome handles of guns jammed into their waistbands.
Sterling walked quickly, keeping his attention directed on the school's towering buildings, then entered on the east side of the campus and passed under the stone arcade in the center of the quadrangle. The sense of struggle was pervasive even within the safety of the school grounds. The nearly twelve thousand students who crisscrossed campus weren't trust-fund babies bearing prominent names. Almost half of them had been born abroad, and those born in New York weren't strangers to the hardships of a tough city life.
With a knapsack slung over his shoulder, a pair of stonewashed denims, and the burner in his hand, Sterling was all but anonymous as he made his way to the V-shaped North Academic Center. He rode the long escalators to the second floor and entered the Morris Raphael Cohen Library. He flashed his Hunter College ID to the young clerk. She waved him through without so much as a turn of her head.
Sterling knew the library well, having spent several weeks many years back using some of its prized research materials on human anatomy. The library had changed little except for the worn-out circles in the thin red carpet and the new signs pointing to the online catalogs in the reference section. Sterling walked down the long aisles of disorganized bookshelves and exposed beams until he found a relatively secluded workstation.
As he placed his knapsack down, he thought about his own computers. He was certain Skip and the other agents had already confiscated every piece of hardware in his Hunter College office and both of his apartments. Sterling knew the procedure all too well. Some computer geek in the IT lab was already running through his hard drive recording everything from how many times the computer had been turned on to the addresses of the websites Sterling had most recently visited.
Sterling moved the mouse and scanned the long list of databases before clicking on the LexisNexis icon. He typed in the name Wallace Mortimer, then waited for the search engine to respond. When it did, it offered far too many sites for Sterling to review. He clicked back to the home page and reentered another search item. This time, Wallace Alexander Mortimer III. Much better. The computer spit back a little more than a hundred hits and ranked them by relevance. Sterling made one more revision to the search, typing in the words Dartmouth College next to Mortimer's name. In seconds he had narrowed the results to seventy hits, most with high relevancy ratings. He hit the print button and read through some of the headlines as he waited for the printer to finish. Most of the articles were in either academic journals or business magazines. The Associated Press had carried some of the stories, as did the
New York Times
.
However great the urgency, Sterling was not ready for the next exhausting round of research. He packed the articles in his knapsack, exited the library, and crossed Convent Avenue to a quiet courtyard in front of the administration building. As much as he hated Skip Dumars, it still bothered him that he had been forced to fire his gun to buy himself some time. There was no doubt in his mind that Skip would have taken full advantage of the incident, overplaying what had actually transpired and sending inflammatory words up the flagpole that Sterling had tried to kill him. Another excuse for Murphy to believe the ridiculous theory that he had killed Wilson and Heidi and Harry Frumpton.
Sterling took a seat on a concrete ledge facing the expansive stone building of Shepard Hall. Small groups of undergraduates lugged their heavy nylon knapsacks, most of them chatting away on cell phones with blinking antennae. Sterling felt old when he thought about how primitive technology had been when he was in college. They had had only one pay phone on each floor and the line could be up to an hour just to make a five-minute call home.
He watched an old couple feed bread bits to the squirrels. With his cane and disheveled whiskers, the man reminded Sterling of Mandryka. It had been more than forty-eight hours since they last spoke, and Sterling now grew concerned. Mandryka had agreed to call within twenty-four hours. Sterling pulled out the burner.
Sterling dialed his cell number and once his voice recording came on, he pressed a series of numbers that put him into the phone's voice mail. He had two messages. The first was from Director Murphy warning him that he was making a big mistake and assuring him things could be worked out if he just turned himself in. Sterling smirked and deleted the message. He knew the embarrassment and political fallout of a rogue agent on the run. His ass had already been fried. Now they just needed to produce him in handcuffs to parade in front of the news cameras. Sterling pressed the number key for the next message. He didn't recognize the voice. “Mr. Bledsoe, this is Amy Rimsdale from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover. I'm the social worker assigned to Professor Mandryka. He wanted me to call and tell you that despite the accident, he's really fine. He'll be with us for at least a few days of observation.” She ended the message with her office number.
Reciting the number so as not to lose it, Sterling disconnected from his voice mail and called Rimsdale. Her answering machine picked up. He cursed at the phone, then pressed O for the operator and asked to be connected to Yuri Mandryka's room.
A woman answered. “Professor Mandryka's room.” Her voice was tight, her tone impatient.
“Who's this?” Sterling asked.
“Gloria Edson. His nurse. How can I help you?”
“I need to speak to him.”
“He's taking a nap right now. Who's calling, please?”
It was too risky to give his real name. “His nephew, Stanley. I just received word about the accident and I'd really like to talk to him.”
There was a pause on the other end. “Are you coming to visit him?”
“If I need to, but I'm on the other side of the country. I'd really like to talk to him now if that's possible.”
“He needs his sleep,” she insisted. “He hasn't been sleeping well. Can you call back in an hour or so? Or if you leave your number, I'll see to it that he gives you a call when he wakes.”
That wasn't good enough. Sterling needed to find out what happened, but he had to be careful not to push too hard. “I'm on my morning break,” he said. “Only fifteen minutes and the clock is ticking. Now would be best for me. Boss isn't too crazy about me making long-distance calls on company dime and time.” Sterling heard her suck her teeth in frustration.
“Hold on, please.”
Sterling listened as she called Mandryka's name. They had a brief exchange, then she was back on. “Okay, but please don't make it too long. He really needs to get some sleep. He was shaken up pretty badly in the accident.”
Sterling heard Mandryka ask the nurse to close the door behind her. A few seconds went by before he spoke. “Nephew Stanley, you there?” Good old Mandryka.
“Yup. What the hell happened?”
“I don't remember much. It happened so fast. I left home a few hours after we spoke. I waited till almost daybreak because my driving isn't too good at night. I was heading down Interstate 91, considering all you had told me about there being some connection between the murders. I was trying to remember if Wilson had ever mentioned this Heidi person, when all of a sudden I felt a hard jolt from behind. It startled me, and I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the headlights of a truck. The last thing I remember was losing control of the car and skidding across the road.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Like someone took a battering ram to my head. And this Edson gal doesn't want to give me too many painkillers for fear it'll clog me up down low. They said I had a subdural hematoma. Bleeding on the brain. My doctor, a young guy who just moved here from one of the Boston hospitals, said given the condition they found my car in, I was lucky to even be alive. I asked to see the pictures, but no one will show them to me.”
“Where did they find the car?”
“Trapped between some trees in a ravine. The social worker, cute little girl named Amy, said the trees saved my life. If they hadn't been there, I would've kept going.”
“Yuri, I want you to think back to what you saw before the accident.”
“The problem is, I didn't see much.”
“I know, but you said you saw the headlights. Did you by chance see if there was someone in the passenger seat?”
There was a pause on the other end. “I can't say for sure,” Mandryka said. “It all happened so fast.”
“How about the color of the truck?”
“Nope. Too dark. Anyway, the headlights blinded me.”
“Had you seen the truck before it hit you?”
“That's the strange thing. I never saw it. There's not much traffic on those roads that early in the morning. I was the only car in the southbound lane.”
Sterling already knew this wasn't an accident. The truck had purposely hit Mandryka, and when he drove off into the ravine, they had left him for dead.
“Let me ask you this. Before the accident, did any trucks pass you in the northbound lane? Take your time and really think hard about this.”
Mandryka's response was immediate. “Just one.”
“Did you get a good look at who was driving?”
“No, but there were two of them.”
“Did you catch the make of the truck?”
“I'm not sure. I'm not too good with car models and such. But I remember it was an old pickup with flimsy wood railings in the back.”
Sterling remembered what Miles Borwind, the manager at the Grand Union, had said. Wood railings to keep cargo from falling out. There was only one conclusion to make—the killers were still closing the circle on everyone who knew about those dead blackbirds. Sterling wondered if Kanti was still alive.
“What's your prognosis?” Sterling asked.
“Good, according to my doctor. A couple of more days and they'll know if they have to go in and drain the blood off my brain. My left elbow was broken in two places, but they've already set it and put it in a cast.” Mandryka released a hacking cough. “Enough about me,” he said, winded. “I'll survive. What about you? Any progress?”
“I'm inching closer,” Sterling said. “Just trying to tie some things together. I had one question that I thought you might be able to help me with.”
“Shoot.”
“How well do you know President Mortimer?”
“We're not close, if that's what you're asking. He's always been pretty standoffish.”
“I know he inherited a lot of family money, but I was just wondering if you knew of any of his commercial interests.”
Mandryka cleared his throat before speaking. “I think the story has it that his great-grandfather made a bundle in the stock market, then after turning the fortune over several times, he left a lot of his money to charity.”
It wasn't the answer Sterling had hoped for. “Thanks, Yuri,” he said. “Remember what we talked about before. You're still a target. It wouldn't hurt if you could stay in there a couple of extra days while I try to wrap this up.”
“If I don't die from the mush they serve around here.”
They shared their first laugh since they had met at Wilson's memorial service. “Stay well. I'll check on you in a couple of days.”
S
terling dialed the inside line to the pit.
“Officer Hanlon here.”
“Hanlon, it's Bledsoe.” Sterling gave him a moment to register the name before continuing. “Put a couple of men on Yuri Mandryka's door at the hospital.”
“What the hell are you talking about? With all that's happened, you're calling about some old professor?”
“He's not just an old professor, he's the next target of the killers. Don't ask me any questions, 'cause I'm not answering. That was no accident a couple of days ago. Whoever killed Wilson and Vorscht were also trying to kill Mandryka.”
“Why the hell should I believe you?”
“Because I'm recording this conversation. If the old man dies, his blood will be on your hands.”
Sterling hung up before Hanlon could answer.