The Ilium Obligation (A Matt Savage Adventure) Chapter 29

[seymoure]

Someone’s at the Door!

 

“A piece of advice always contains an implicit threat, just as a threat always contains an implicit piece of advice.”
-Jose Bergamin

                                                                                                             

We didn’t have a long time to dawdle around and were to meet Connie Cho at the N.S.A. offices right away. She had cleared the path for us to investigate both Dr. Fox’s office and his home. I hadn’t asked how such an invasion of private space was allowable, but there was no way I was going to argue the point.

When the elevator doors opened to take us to the lobby, we found ourselves confronted by our traveling companions Sentalia and her pet Caveman.

They barely acknowledged our existence as they passed out of the lift, but I held the door a second and peeked out just in time to catch both of them shooting a glance back. I’m sure the smirk on my lips was visible.

I made a mental note to have Rayleen find out something about the man Frost that was supposed to be pulling her strings. He was the only one of those involved of whom I knew nothing at this point. I also decided that I would have to question Gaspion and Anderson about Malvito’s death. Had they resorted to murder to shrink the field of competitors? It wouldn’t be the first time that someone in the race tripped a fellow runner.

The bell captain was more than happy to summon us a cab, for which I thanked him. He looked at me as though I had let a child starve. Hugo leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “He’s expecting a tip, Boss.”

This was not the kind of thing I was used to dealing with. The only people I tipped were bartenders and waitresses. I queried the big man what a decent amount would be, he told me and I doubled it. That got a happy face. I knew if lubrication equaled service, I wanted to have the greasiest crew working for us.

When we got to the offices, Connie was waiting for us and took us to Emile Fox’s place of employment, which was nothing if not uninspiring. Everything had been gone through by the police and the FBI before we got there. It looked like a high school lab and was spotless. I remembered that the doctor was not known for being terribly wild; that must have also included his personal hygiene. He had three tooth brushes, four combs and two brushes beside the bathroom sink. There was also a wrapped example of each on the back of the toilet. Wouldn’t want to get caught without a clean brush.

We then went to his apartment. It seems that, since they worked for a federal research agency, they were forced to keep a copy of their keys at the NSA office. In case they might “take work home,” it had to be recoverable. I’m sure this was normally more of a consideration with other areas of research, but we had to be glad that the policy was used as a blanket.

We looked everywhere, at everything and came up croppers.

Then Connie found something interesting. There was a little plastic bag taped to the ceiling in his closet. I suppose that she, being of lesser physical stature, tended to spend more time looking up than either of us did. That would go for cops and FBI agents also.

We pulled the bag down and opened it. Inside was a notebook. In the note book were numbers. No names, but about 40 sets of numbers. Each set consisted of 10 numbers.

Now we were getting somewhere.

Where, I had no idea.

© C. Wayne Owens
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