Forty-Eight X Read online

  “You knew about that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And the Lemuria Project?”

  “The what?”

  “The Lemuria Project. He didn’t talk about that?”

  “In the last few months, for some reason, he became very close-mouthed about his work. That was not like him, either.”

  Maggie closed her eyes for a moment. Her life was in a ruin, and this man was piling on debris.

  “I have to go back to Boston and I really don’t believe—”

  “All right. All right. I know you want to put this behind you—but just meet somebody for me.”

  She was about to bury her father. All she wanted now was to heal. But she agreed to listen. Let them throw one more spear, she thought. How much more could it hurt?

  Maggie Wagner had her luggage in the trunk and the ticket for her flight back to Boston sitting in the glove compartment of her rental car. She agreed to meet Nathan Stumpf at a local restaurant near the airport.

  “Have to run. Can’t miss my flight”—she had the words rehearsed. She wanted to be able to make a quick getaway from this lunacy.

  Nathan Stumpf was a San Francisco detective hired by Professor Petersdorf to look into Julius Wagner’s death. He was a short, scrawny fellow in his midthirties, with early balding; white, scaly psoriatic elbows; crooked teeth; and a bit of a W.C. Fields vein-mapped bulbous nose, a skin disease called rosacea. He fancied that a tan would make him look healthy, and his face had come to look like café-au-lait-colored leather. The only virtue of appearance he brought to the table was his stylish dress—his wardrobe was rayon baggy pleated pants, rayon classic fifties-style embroidered bowling shirts, a Robert Mitchum jacket, and, since he thought shoes mattered, well-shined Bruno Maglis. He thought the shoes had a bizarre panache. They were just what O.J. Simpson wore when he killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

  Nate Stumpf lived in a third-floor walk-up just off the Haight, an area in San Francisco that was still emulating the 1960s. Although the area was gaining popularity among yuppies, it was nevertheless well populated with panhandlers and stoners, and tourists shopping in one of the many vintage stores, trying to achieve the retro look that Stumpf had perfected so well.

  “Look,” Professor Petersdorf had explained to Maggie, “I made a lot of inquiries about private investigators and got a lot of recommendations. But they all wanted big retainers and had pricey hourly rates. Nothing I could afford on a college professor’s salary. Mr. Stumpf, well yes, he’s a bit sleazy and crude, but I think he’s sincere and he’s honest. I trust him, and he works cheap.”

  Stumpf waved at her when she entered the restaurant, a small diner frequented by Haight-Ashbury locals just around the corner from the classic Red Vic Movie House and Jerry Garcia’s old digs. A sign in big bold red letters in the front window read GOOD FOOD. She already knew what she’d order. Nothing. No place that advertised “good food” ever served any. She wondered if Stumpf recognized her from clips of the funeral on television or because she was the only non-morbidly obese woman in the restaurant. He was sitting in a booth at the rear of the family-style, low-cost eatery and had already started lunch. With every step forward, she thought about turning back. But she was here already, so she sat down. The waitress placed a glass of ice water and a menu in front of her.

  “Chicken potpie’s good,” Stumpf said, gravy dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “I’m Nate Stumpf,” he added, and held out his hand.

  “I have to catch a plane,” she said, politely shaking his hand. She was already setting up her getaway.

  “Open-and-shut case, they said.” He got right to the subject. “Uh-uh.”

  Stumpf pushed a photo across to her. It was a photograph of her father in the torched hotel room. A woman was lying naked in bed. Her father, clothes charred, body blistered from the fire, had a gun in his hand and was lying with his head at the dead woman’s feet, his legs hanging over the bed.

  “How did you get this?” Maggie asked.

  “That’s my job.”

  “And why is it that you and Professor Petersdorf think my father was murdered?”

  “Did you read these?” Stumpf asked, pushing two autopsy reports to her.

  “Yes, I did. I know how they both died. And—I have to catch a plane.”

  “Listen, he was your father. If your father’s boyfriend cares more about him than you do—well, I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Professor Petersdorf was not my father’s boyfriend. He was just a friend and I don’t think—”

  “I’m ready to talk,” Stumpf interrupted with deliberate calm, “when you’re ready to listen.”

  “Listen to what?”

  Stumpf cleared his throat and took a drink of water. Then he got up and moved to her side of the booth, sitting next to her—close. She tried to edge herself farther away. What is that awful odor? she thought. It was a mix of a strong citrus cologne and sweat. Stumpf’s fancy shirts required dry cleaning. Dry cleaning was expensive. Looking good was what mattered, and as long as he looked good, Stumpf rarely cleaned his clothes. He picked up the photograph and held it right under her nose, pointing out the highlights.

  “The hooker. See. She’s lying naked in bed. Your father’s lying there fully dressed. Now he either fucked her and he’s getting ready to leave, or he couldn’t fuck her and was getting ready to leave.”

  This is my father, Maggie thought. For godssake, I don’t need to hear this about my father. She wanted to get up to leave, but he was blocking the way. Stumpf took a noisy slurp from his Coke and got to the meat of his case.

  “I read the medical report. I read the crime scene report. They do an autopsy, and the hooker has no come in her vagina and they find no condoms anywhere in the place. So maybe you’re thinking, he can’t get it up. I know hookers. They’re professionals. They’ll try to help a guy who can’t get it up. But your dad had no saliva on his dick. They check for that, too, you know. Doesn’t fit.”

  Stumpf, who fancied himself a ladies’ man, put on his most charming smile. He popped a Mentos and seemed about to say “Ta da!” to celebrate his ingeniousness.

  “So, that’s why you think somebody murdered my father. Because he couldn’t consummate an affair with a hooker and didn’t get a blow job?”

  Stumpf shrugged. “That’s one thing. And another thing.” Stumpf tapped on a highlighted portion of the autopsy report. “Read that.”

  Maggie read the report out loud. “Five-centimeter gaping occipital scalp laceration with underlying hematoma.”

  “Picture this,” Nate went on. “Your dad is sitting in bed, puts a gun to his chest, and shoots himself. He falls back onto a mattress and cuts the back of his head. Come on, ‘open and shut’ my ass.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “I think somebody shot the hooker, coldcocked your dad, shot him, made it look like he did it himself, and then set the room on fire.”

  Maggie looked at her watch. She would have to leave now if she was going to make her flight. What was it? she thought. Her father frequented prostitutes? Her father was gay? Her father killed a prostitute? Her father committed suicide? Her father was murdered? What should I wish for? she thought, with burning bile welling up in her belly.

  “How do you find out the truth?” she asked.

  “I ask a lot of questions. And sometimes I get rough. I charge $300 per hour.”

  “Mr. Stumpf, I can’t afford that.”

  Nate Stumpf leaned to the side a bit and stared at the young blonde. His eyes followed her curves from the arch of her neck to her knees. He took her hand and gently caressed her fingertips with his.

  “I would accept other types of compensation,” he said with a wicked smile. His upper lip was sweating.

  Maggie pulled her hand away, and shoved him off the seat, so she could get out. She stood and strode toward the door.

  Nate yelled after her. “I meant credit. Credit or barter. What did ya think I meant?!”
r />   Maggie was out the door, but before she got to her car, she thought again. What if he was right? There was no way she would or could pay three hundred dollars an hour, but he said credit or barter, didn’t he? She walked back into the diner. Stumpf was at the cashier’s counter paying the bill.

  “Mr. Stumpf—”

  The detective turned around. He smiled broadly, exhibiting his yellow, crooked teeth, and looked like he was salivating.

  “I didn’t mean for you to get the wrong impression,” he said with all the charm he could muster. “I’m really quite a nice guy, once you get to know me.”

  “Mr. Stumpf, my father bought a five-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy one year ago. It’s uncollectible on a suicide. If you prove my father was murdered, I’ll give it to you.”

  “Half a mil?”

  “That’s right.”

  Nate Stumpf thought a moment about how he’d pay his bills on potential earnings, but at this moment he had no other potential.

  “Well then,” he said, still leering at her, “you’ve hired yourself a private dick. I guess you won’t have that plane to catch. Let’s sit down again. I have questions to ask.”

  “All right.”

  “Can I change your mind about the potpie? They serve good food here.”

  Maggie had no appetite. She was still second-guessing her decision.

  Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.

  —George Bernard Shaw

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Besides the task of training his troops and refining their missions, Colonel McGraw was also directed to listen to a bunch of non-military folk who had very unique ideas on how to best utilize their special talents. While General Shell and his scientists chose what ideas would be presented, McGraw was generally given the leeway to choose if he wanted to buy into it and implement it.

  While they waited for their lecturer to set up his presentation, Shell laid out McGraw’s new mission.

  “Link, your troops have done a superb job in annihilating small hamlets that we’ve targeted as terrorist camps. But we’ve started them off easy. Your missions have been in relatively open areas, easy to reconnoiter, well suited for quick attack and retreat. But we both know that most of our enemies are not hiding in little villages. They’re hiding under rocks. And that’s where the battle has to go.”

  Shell described McGraw’s next target, a vast Al-Queda military base called Zwahar Kezar Al-Badr, or the “Worm Hole,” an area of deep lattice caves inside the walls of a steep gorge in the Sodyaki Ghar Mountains, part of the Hindu Kush mountain chain that stretched from Eastern Afghanistan to the border of Pakistan.

  “Intelligence from captured Al-Queda indicates that some of these caves are as deep as a hundred meters. Of course we’ve tried to bomb them. But not even bunker-busting smart bombs can fly down a narrow gorge and turn ninety degrees into the mouth of a cave. All we’ve managed to do is temporarily block the openings to a few caves. We’ve sent teams in to probe these hideouts, but it’s virtually impossible for heavily armed troops to sneak up on a mountain site without the enemy knowing well in advance they’re coming. And when they get there, all they find are booby traps. The enemy has plenty of time to run and plenty of other places to hide. I’m hoping you and your team can do better.”

  “I’m familiar with the terrain,” Link told his general. “I’ve been there before.”

  “During the Tora Bora campaign?” Shell asked.

  “No, sir. Two thousand years ago.”

  Shell smiled. “You want to give me a history lesson here?”

  “I was there, sir.”

  “All right. All right.” Shell waved him on, moving past being bemused. “What about the terrain?”

  “Well, sir, Afghanistan has an arid climate. Its rivers are often dry for months. But during the rainy season, the caves in their mountains become natural cisterns. So, farmers dug down to the water table in the caves and built tunnels called karez to move the water from the mountains to their farms to irrigate their crops. Over centuries, the mountain caves became interconnected with thousands of these man-made tunnels. That cave and tunnel system was already in place in 328 BC. The natives fought from those caves then, too.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes, sir. And when we marched into Afghanistan in 328 BC—it was part of the Persian Empire then—the natives fought us from those caves. But the history is written, sir. Alexander and I prevailed then. And I will this time, too.”

  Mack Shell was pleased to have a determined and optimistic commander, no matter where he found his conviction. His job was to give him the tools to succeed.

  The current presentation was by a researcher from the University of California at Davis School of Engineering and Applied Science. He was a young man in his early thirties with a doctorate in microelectronic engineering. He had a full beard, wore sandals, and had a T-shirt with the Rolling Stones big lips logo. He looked more ready to toss a Frisbee than present a proposal to a colonel, a general, and an assortment of PhD’s. But he had an infectious exuberance for a project he had spent a decade researching.

  “Magnometers,” the engineer began simply, “detect the presence of metal. Metal distorts the earth’s magnetic field and magnometers detect those changes. We all know that military equipment—guns, and tanks, and missiles—are all made of metal. Now, I know a soldier doesn’t need a magnometer to tell him if somebody standing right in front of him in broad daylight is pointing a gun at him, but what if that gun is under a caftan? And what about whether there’s a guy with a gun hiding in a concrete bunker or—”

  “Or,” McGraw piped in, “a hundred meters underground in some tiny tunnel?”

  “Exactly. Or a hundred meters underground in a tiny tunnel.”

  Tired of being lectured like some simpleton, Link pressed the young man. “You can get to the point!”

  “Yes, sir. Well, we’ve been able to detect metals deep underground for a while now—but the magnometers you need are big. They need a lot of power. And they’re not practical for a soldier to lug around on a battlefield.”

  The engineer pulled a small, thin round disc from his pocket—thinner and smaller than a dime with several tiny wires protruding from it.

  “This is a micro-magnometer. It can focus and detect the presence of metal—think military equipment like a tank, truck, or even a soldier holding a rifle—from a hundred feet away. And it is not meant to be powered by any outside source. It’s designed to be powered by the normal acid-base chemical interactions in the brain. I’ve implanted it in pigs and monkeys. If you put it in the temporal regions, the animal gets auditory stimuli when any metal is detected. If you implant it the olfactory area, there’s a taste or smell reaction.”

  “And how do you shut it off?” McGraw asked.

  “A magnet. You wave a magnet over it and it shuts off. Another magnet, back on.”

  “Any problems?” General Shell asked.

  “Seizures. Some of the animals have had seizures. There has, of course, been no human testing. But if the military has volunteers…”

  McGraw stayed after the main lecture was over to watch the movies. The professor had filmed the procedure required to implant the magnometers. The animals underwent craniotomies—surgical drills cut through skulls to remove a flap of bone to access the brain. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  The advantage of working on the Lemuria Project, however, was whatever questions one had, there were always experts to answer them and they were never far off. Minutes after the presentation, McGraw simply walked from the conference room to the third-floor offices of Marty White. Dr. White, formerly chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at USC Medical Center, was now Lemuria’s chief of neurosurgery. Just two years before, the forty-five-year-old handsome, athletic, egotistical surgeon had been at the top of his field, with a Ferrari F-430 Spider in his garage and starlets in his bed. And then, in just a few months, h
is career was over. He developed Parkinson’s disease and a fine tremor. Although medications suppressed most of his symptoms, the results were not sufficient to allow him to perform the most delicate surgeries. Then he underwent his own brain surgery. Marty had a DBS, a deep brain stimulator, implanted in his brain. The device emitted high-frequency electrical impulses to block the signals that caused his tremors. It was like a “pacemaker for the brain” and completely relieved his symptoms. Unfortunately, patients were still hesitant to allow a surgeon with a history of Parkinsonian tremors and electrodes in his brain to operate on theirs.

  “Marty, are you gonna waste away in this office reading journals?” Julius Wagner had personally confronted the surgeon. And then he teased his ego. “Or, will you let me put your golden hands to work on a project that will change history?”

  Dr. White had indeed been kept busy by Lemuria. Mack Shell and Julius Wagner had put him into their business of genetic engineering. But most of what he did was postmortem work, measuring brain weight, examining pathology specimens, and accessing anomalies and cancers. When McGraw showed up with questions about micro-magnometers, Marty White listened enthusiastically.

  “I like the idea, Marty,” Link admitted, “but I don’t like the idea of cracking the skulls on my soldiers or having them flopping around with seizures in the field.”

  “No problem,” Marty replied. “I’ll go through the nose.” The advantage of a military research project with almost unlimited funds and the security of a Manhattan Project was that ideas could reach fruition quickly. The next morning, Marty White had performed the first successful transphenoidal implantation of a micro-magnometer. His transphenoidal approach allowed him to reach the brain through the patient’s nose rather than by cracking open a skull. And a week after the Davis engineer had first presented his idea, he was back at his UC campus actually tossing Frisbees. Within that same week, McGraw’s troops had attacked two terrorist strongholds in the caves of the Hindu Kush Mountains of Northern Pakistan. There were several survivors—women, children, and a few old men—but no one carrying a weapon. And fortunately, Link thought, none of his troops had a seizure.