David Hewson by Solstice

Author:Solstice
Language: vie
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-07-05T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 32

Martin Chalk

Washington, 1232 UTC

It didn't take long at all for an ID to come through. Forty minutes after the Bureau put the picture of the dead man on the internal net, the phone rang in the Pentagon bunker and Dan Fogerty started to smile, furiously taking notes all the time. A hurried conference was put together in a quarter of an hour. Tim Clarke was back at the head of the table, and this time, Helen Wagner thought to herself, the military men were starting to look energized. Targets.

'We have a lead,' Fogerty said. 'The office in San Jose picked the guy up from missing persons. His name is Martin Chalk, age twenty-six. Used to be a postgrad student at Berkeley, something to do with quantum mechanics and fusion. Then a year ago he dropped out, joined the Children. His family complained to the local police station and then to us that he'd been kidnapped, brainwashed, the usual thing. He was living with the Children in some commune they had in San Francisco.'

'Did you check it out?' Clarke asked.

Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'The local cops did that, sir. The guy was twenty-six. And very bright. He knew what he was doing. He was able to come and go as he wanted. There was no way they could intervene. This is a free country.'

Clarke sighed and shook his head. 'You're sure about the ID?'

'Oh yes, sir. Last year Chalk took part in some kind of ecoprotest on the Golden Gate Bridge. Climbing up the pillars and sitting there, holding up the traffic until the cops came and talked them down. He got fingerprinted after that. The records are still at the station. He was never charged, which is why we would have been a little slow to pick up on them through the main print database. But we doublechecked. And we know that he moved on to San Diego, presumably to be near the Children, because there was still some correspondence after the arrest, when they were thinking about whether to prosecute. This is the man.'

Clarke surveyed them all and Helen was astonished. There was a smile on his face, and this was such a rare thing it made all of them, even the Agency people, feel rewarded. 'That's great work, Dan. We can work with this. We can do something. General Barksdale?'

'It has to be somewhere near Vegas,' Barksdale replied. 'We need to start putting people in place right now.'

Clarke nodded. 'Right, we need -'

'Sir?' Even the President was staring at her as if this were an unwarranted interruption.

'Miss Wagner?' Clarke looked coldly at her.

'Are we asking ourselves enough questions about this? We don't know why this man was in Vegas in the first place. We don't know what drove him to talk to that woman in the casino or kill himself.'

'This isn't your field, Wagner.' Levine scowled. 'If you'd got as many years in Operations under your belt as some of us around this table, you'd know that the simplest explanation is always the best.

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