The Devil's bed

“Ms. Hansen is responsible for public relations. She’s not necessarily aware of everything that occurs here at NOMan.”

“Of course. I wonder if it might be possible to get minutes from some of the other nonsensitive meetings that Senator Dixon was scheduled to attend recently.”

“I’d be happy to have them sent to you.”

“That’s okay. I’ll pass on it. But I’m sure the folks back home would be interested in knowing why Senator Dixon’s presence is consistently recorded at these meetings if, as I’ve been told, he often slips away.”

“That’s not an issue I can address.”

“I see. Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?”

“About my face,” Gaines said, as if that was always the question.

“Vietnam. Napalm burns.”

“I thought it was our side who dropped napalm.”

“Friendly fire, as they say. A mistake that wiped out most of my platoon. Is there anything else, Mr. Lingenfelter?”

“That wasn’t actually what I was going to ask about.”

“No? I’m sorry. What would you like to know?”

“What do you think of our senator?”

“In my opinion, a great man.”

“The folks back home will certainly be glad to hear that.”

“Please give my best to those folks. In Pueblo, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Right.” Gaines smiled broadly but unconvincingly. “Good day, Mr. Lingenfelter.”

Outside, Bo stood on the sidewalk pondering questions that lay on him even more oppressively than did the heat of the afternoon sun. What was Hamilton Gaines doing at the hospital in Stillwater? And was there a connection between Tom Jorgenson and NOMan?

He looked back at the Old Post Office. NOMan is an island, Robert Lee had noted on his chalkboard. Lee had purposely distorted the quote to fit the truth. NOMan had done its best to secure a place in the vast, bureaucratic ocean, a place isolated from general knowledge and public scrutiny. Bo sensed something dark and creepy beneath the organization’s mundane exterior. Whatever that darkness was, it spread out far beyond the agency’s office, beyond even the capital itself. In a hospital room a thousand miles away was a man Bo had always admired greatly. Now he wondered if Tom Jorgenson lay in the shadow of that darkness, too.

He had to hit three used bookstores before he found what he wanted, a copy of Jorgenson’s autobiography, The Testament of Time. Several years had passed since he’d read it. This time around he’d be looking at it with a different eye.

Bo knew of a cyber cafe near Dupont Circle. He grabbed a taxi and in fifteen minutes was on the Internet again, calling up the Web sites he’d found earlier using Robin’s computer. He printed out the information he felt might be useful, then did a search with the termsThomas JorgensonandNOMan. He got no hits. He tried various combinations but came up with nothing pertinent. Next he searched usingWilliam DixonandPhilippines. He got the whole story. Bataan. The Death March. Cabanatuan. The escape and sea journey in a stolen boat. He got something else, too. The names of all the men who’d escaped with Dixon and Gass. One by one he searched them on the computer.

Four of them had served very long terms in Congress. Two of them were still there. One of the men had been an assistant director of the CIA before establishing a consulting firm. One had been an assistant for national security to a previous president. One had died in the war. The final man was someone named Herbert Constable. He’d been a cryptographer for the army, stationed in Manila at the outbreak of the war. He claimed to have broken the Japanese code prior to Pearl Harbor and to have notified his superiors of the impending attack. He died in a mental institution in 1950.

Bo printed out all this information as well, gathered up everything, and left. Back in his hotel room, he grabbed a Heineken from the room refrigerator, lay all the material out on the table, and looked things over carefully. It was on his third pass that he caught two small, but important, details he’d missed earlier.

One: The man who’d been an assistant director for the CIA was named James J. Hammerkill. The company he’d established after leaving the government was Hammerkill, Inc., a security consulting firm that now employed Jonetta Jackson, the only eyewitness to Robert Lee’s death. Bo thought about Jackson, a strong woman, trained to be capable of killing. It wasn’t a huge leap of logic to speculate that she might have been more involved in Robert Lee’s death than as a mere witness. On that isolated inlet, a small army could have been involved, and no one would have been the wiser.

Two: Senator William Dixon had been one of the two sponsors of the bill that created NOMan. His cosponsor had been the then freshman senator from Minnesota, the Honorable Thomas Jorgenson.