14
Jack Maulder
regarded himself as a patient man. A former Secret Service agent,
he’d served on the White House protective detail for ten years.
Before that, he investigated counterfeiters, potential threats
against the First Family, and high-profile homicides with possible
government connections, the kind that caused Washington insiders to
play super-sleuth and point fingers at one another. He had met his
wife, Gwen, in connection with one such case—a case that was nearly
the death of them both.
Jack was methodical,
analytical and thorough. He did things by the book—mostly—and
prided himself on knowing when to break the rules. An agent didn’t
get the call to ensure the safety of residents at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue without having the ability to survey hundreds of people at a
glance and pick out the one person who just didn’t look right—a man
holding an unusual-shaped package or a woman wearing a winter coat
in October. Sometimes it was an individual with a scowl or an
unkempt appearance that prompted an agent to speak into his
cufflink, alerting sharpshooters on nearby rooftops or plainclothes
detail mingling with a crowd as POTUS (President of the United
States) pressed the flesh along a rope line. An agent had to be
able to make split-second decisions and yet remain cool enough to
prevent a rifle from taking down someone who was simply an
overeager veteran trying to shake hands with the
commander-in-chief.
Maulder had lived a
life of high drama, literally rubbing elbows with the powerful and
elite men and women who controlled the destinies of nations around
the globe. He had resigned his position, however, in order to show
Dr. Gwen McBean, old-style family practitioner, that he was serious
about staying in one place and putting down roots.
The house on Twin
Pines Lane was located in Garrett Park, a small community midway
between Rockville and Bethesda. Fortunately, Jack handled a
keyboard and mouse with the same finesse as he handled a Glock. He
became a computer security specialist, helping companies stay
several steps ahead of the latest hacking technology. Today’s
outdated firewall was tomorrow’s disaster, and Jack’s innovative
ideas were effective because he could think from a hacker’s point
of view. As an innate programming genius, Jack figured he’d gotten
the best of both worlds: he could remain close to home while still
dabbling in a bit of intrigue.
Ironically, Gwen
realized that she couldn’t bring house calls and eighteen-hour
workdays into the twenty-first century without incurring exhaustion
and daily doses of righteous indignation at the ludicrous decisions
made by insurance companies and their managed healthcare plans. She
simply couldn’t deal with bean counters deciding whether or not a
patient needed a CT scan. Shortly after she married what she
regarded as a new-and-improved Jack Maulder, she found herself
drawn to the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service
in order to continue living her dad’s ideals: enhancing people’s
quality of life through medicine. She wasn’t going to cast her lot
with a medical partnership that double-booked patients into
five-minute time slots costing eighty-five dollars a pop. She
decided to apply her doctoring skills to the nation as a whole,
rather to one patient after another.
It was classic role
reversal; Jack leaves public service, Gwen signs up. Their marriage
was nevertheless solid, with Jack, by virtue of his first career,
understanding the demands and rigors of having to keep unusual
hours or pick up and travel at a moment’s notice. Secretly, he
thought he was more understanding of Gwen’s lifestyle than she
would have been of his if he had remained with the Service. Even
solid marriages were subject to personal prejudices.
Jack Maulder,
rightly or wrongly, believed patience to be one of his strong
suits. That said, he was more than a little concerned about Gwen’s
ongoing obsession with the circumstances surrounding Marci’s death.
The problem, as Jack saw it, was that there were no circumstances.
The young lawyer had died of exhaustion and stress. Period. Maulder
was certainly no expert in forensics, but agents of the Secret
Service were well-versed in conspiracy theories and suspicious
circumstances. In the case of Marci Newman, there was no smoking
gun. Nothing to indicate murder most foul. Nothing to suggest a
public health hazard.
Zilch.
Nada.
Gwen had brought
home a vial of Marci’s blood obtained from a New York Medical
Examiner. On their first day back, Jack caught her surreptitiously
transferring the vial from her coat pocket to the briefcase she
brought to the office each day. Speaking somewhat defensively, Gwen
claimed that she intended to store the blood at FDA headquarters in
Rockville in the event that some significant detail occurred to
her, something that warranted further examination of Marci’s
collapse in municipal court. Jack didn’t believe her for one
minute. He was one hundred percent certain that his wife was going
to analyze the blood sample, and this was troubling in the extreme.
Not only was he skeptical of the need to pursue analysis in the
first place, but, more importantly, she’d never lied to him
before.
To pursue peace and
domestic tranquility, Jack decided to back away from the confusing
signals his wife was sending, but still offer to participate in her
search. He even agreed to examine the Haydn104 file that Gwen
copied from Marci’s laptop. He’d looked at the file a dozen times
now, and nothing whatsoever aroused his suspicion. Granted, the
file was unusual, but Marci had been reclusive—even a bit
quirky—and Jack thought there might be any one of a thousand
explanations for the creation of Haydn104 that no one was apt to
guess. Humoring his unrelenting wife, he examined the file
carefully, putting the rows of numbers through a dozen different
encryption programs. He saw no pattern, no rhyme or reason lurking
in the numerals. It didn’t appear that Marci had been playing
Nostradamus, couching dire warnings in coded format. He even
applied sophisticated musical software to the problem, exploring
the possibility that the seemingly random digits might correspond
to Haydn’s work if the melodies, harmonics, or compositional keys
were converted into mathematical equivalents.
Thus far, Jack had
found nothing.
He looked at the oak
table in the corner of his office, a ground floor utility room
adjacent to the kitchen. On the table was the classic brown Wilson
fielder’s glove he bought in the hopes he might one day have a son.
Like many childless husbands, he often dreamt of electric trains
and games of catch. The mitt, purchased in the spring, was also a
not-so-subtle hint to Gwen.
Gwen was actually
starting to warm up to the idea of having children. The couple was
even beginning to debate which upstairs room would be the best
candidate for a nursery. But all discussion of having children had
ceased since the Maulders had returned from New York in
May.
Jack was firmly
convinced that it was time for Gwen to consult a therapist for
grief counseling, obsession, or both. She’d lost her dearest friend
and she couldn’t get through the pain of it alone.
And nothing Jack did
seemed to help.