48
Mark and Gwen traded
Rick’s Suburban for the congressman’s Honda Accord. They drove
right through Quantico, Virginia, however, deciding to find a new
place to stay before doubling back and heading for the base that
was home to a great many government installations. Feeling the need
for something more comfortable than a motel, Mark found a
bed-and-breakfast in Fredericksburg. They registered under assumed
names.
“Now then,” Mark
said, creating a workspace on a mahogany writing table in the
corner, “I need to access the Journal’s
database again. We can head over to Quantico later.”
“Be my guest,” said
Gwen. She stood there with a wistful expression on her face and
Mark could tell that she had plenty on her mind.
“What are you
thinking?”
Gwen smiled softly.
“It was good to hear Rick say that Jack was doing
better.”
Mark felt for her.
He didn’t think he could hold up as well as Gwen was holding up if
their situations were reversed. “Greater range of movement and
improved articulation—I’d say that’s better than
better.”
Gwen nodded, her
eyes misty. “I should be there. Fitz rule Number Ten: Love is the
most potent drug of all.”
“Jack would
understand.”
“I don’t think so.
We had a huge fight before he collapsed. He probably … I don’t know
what he’s thinking.”
This was alien
territory for Mark. He wanted to hold Gwen and comfort her, but he
knew that wasn’t the right thing. He was stymied. The only thing he
could think to do was deflect her thoughts.
“Then let’s take
care of business, nail the bad guys, and get you back to your
husband.”
Gwen took a deep
breath. “Okay.”
Amazingly, that
seemed to do the trick. Mark worked for nearly an hour before
leaning back in the straight-back chair and stretching his arms
over his head. “I want you to look at something,” he told
Gwen.
Gwen looked over
Mark’s shoulder at the data displayed on the laptop. “Numbers and
pie charts,” she said. “What’s the bottom line?”
“You yourself said
that gourmet coffee is flying high right now. We all know which
coffee chain is the hottest in America. Pequod’s.”
“Can’t argue with
that.”
“Here’s the smoking
gun, as far as I’m concerned. Every time Pequod’s moves into a new
market, seizure spikes occur, whether we’re talking about Podunk or
Pittsburgh. Simultaneously, sales of Pequod’s competitors start to
taper off—especially the small micro-roasters. In response, they
usually scale back considerably and eventually settle for a much
smaller market share or else go belly-up entirely after a few more
months. The thing is, long before then, the seizure spikes
stop.”
“Come on, Mark.
Everyone knows that if you throw together enough different types of
information, you’ll find patterns, even in the
phonebook.”
“Granted, but I
wasn’t on some fishing trip. I started out with the hypothesis that
this was about coffee. You’re the statistician here, not me, but
this chart says the chance of error in the correlation is less than
one in fifty thousand.”
“Okay,” said Gwen.
“Let’s suppose that there really is a correlation between Pequod’s
entering a new market and the seizure spikes in a community. Your
theory of evildoing still doesn’t hold water. The spikes stop long
before the competitors go out of business. If Pequod’s was doing
something to the coffee to knock out the competition, wouldn’t they
keep doing so until they finished the job? And let’s go back to the
simple medical facts: coffee can’t cause seizures.”
Mark scratched his
head. “I admit I’m missing some pieces to the puzzle. If Pequod’s
is somehow responsible for the seizures, then the episodes should
continue until the market is secured.”
“Exactly.”
“But the
correlation, in and of itself, can’t be ignored, Gwen. The chances
are just too remote that seizure activity would happen, month by
month, in only those cities that Pequod’s enters for aggressive
marketing.”
“I’m not really
debating that point, but as an epidemiologist, I’m saying that
cause and effect can be a tricky business. Just consider the early
days of AIDS. At first, it was supposedly a gay disease. That
turned out to be totally false. After that, people tossed around
theories about methods of transmission like crazy, with people
afraid to be in the same house or workplace with someone who tested
HIVPOSITIVE. True, there were some basic correlations, but they
either didn’t hold up or there was some other reason, far more
scientific, that explained the correlations in a different way. It
turned out, for example, that gay men had a higher percentage of
sexual partners and didn’t use protection as much as their
heterosexual counterparts. It also was, and is, harder for women to
give the disease to men than men to women because the exchange of
body fluids isn’t the same.”
Mark sighed. “It’s a
valid analogy.”
“And I could give
you a dozen more. In Africa, villagers contract any number of
tropical diseases, but because of poor education and sanitation,
they attribute symptoms to what comes down to folklore and
superstitious practices. In the case of Pequod’s, people in my
field would ask, ‘What patterns accompany coffee consumption? Are
there interactions between drugs, possibly a new drug on the
market, and a perfectly normal chemical compound found in coffee?
Or since Pequod’s is so popular and so available, is the quantity
of coffee being consumed affecting those individuals in the
population who can be pushed over the seizure threshold by
something ordinarily benign?’ That doesn’t make the company a
culprit, assuming coffee’s involved at all, which I still doubt.
There are a lot of possibilities, Mark.”
“I’m open to
whatever theories you might have, but the seizure spikes shouldn’t
cease if coffee is interacting with something else. The correlation
is still too weird.”
“What does America
enjoy most with a cup of coffee?” asked Gwen.
Mark groaned.
“Cigarettes—yes, okay, but I’ve already told you how I feel about
that.”
“Cigarettes are
known killers, and tobacco companies are known for deception. Fact,
not opinion. Pequod’s moves in, and people start to smoke more. I
think we have to keep an open mind.”
“You’re still
ignoring the spikes. People wouldn’t stop smoking all of a sudden.”
Mark paused. “According to his files, Jack had some cigarettes
analyzed. Let’s make a simple call and find out what his friend at
ATF found.”
Gwen reached for her
cell phone.
“Not so fast,” Mark
said with a grin. “We’ll use my cell.”
Mark got Todd
Gimmler on the line and then handed the phone to Gwen. She talked
for several minutes, asking many questions involving various
chemical compounds, some which Mark had never heard
of.
“The cigarettes came
up negative,” Gwen admitted, “but Gimmler’s analysis isn’t the
final word.”
Mark sighed heavily.
“Come on, let’s get to Quantico and have my coffee bean checked
out. The analysis might give us some information.”
“And if nothing
unusual shows up?”
“I’ll eat my words.
Every journalist does it sooner or later. But I’m also relying on
my instinct about Dieter Tassin. The man seems to be the
quintessence of evil, and he just happens to be working at
Pequod’s. In newspaper work, that’s the kind of thing that grabs
your attention.”
Mark was cruising on
the highway when he turned on the radio, and adjusted the digital
scan until he found a National Public Radio affiliate. The piece
currently airing caught his attention immediately.
“Reports are now
surfacing,” said a female correspondent, “that noted author and
newspaper columnist Mark Stern is a drug abuser who has been in and
out of several expensive rehab centers since his twenties. Stern is
also believed to be sympathetic with more than one ecoterrorist
group—the proverbial ‘tree-huggers’ who have allegedly been linked
to the bombing of several timber companies over the past decade.
Stern, who is not yet considered a suspect in any of the bombings,
has been unavailable for comment. Likewise, the Washington Post had no comment on the story, which
first broke in USA Today.”
“Wow,” said Gwen.
“You’ve been a lot busier than I thought.”
Mark laughed. “An
iconoclast makes a lot of enemies. If anything, this is rather
suspicious as far as timing goes.”
“How
so?”
“Someone is taking
pains to discredit me, which in turn means that the same someone
thinks I might be on the verge of disclosing information that’s not
supposed to see the light of day.”
“Have any idea who
that someone might be?”
“Gwen, there are
more people in New York and Washington who’d like to see me take a
fall than I could list during the next five miles.”
“So there’s a price
to fame and fortune, eh?”
“Most definitely,
Dr. Maulder. There are many days when even I don’t want to be in my
shoes.”
Gwen seemed to
accept Mark’s dismissive attitude at face value. He was thankful he
had such a good poker face. It wouldn’t help Gwen to know that he
took attacks like this very personally. It also wouldn’t help her
to do the same math in her head that he’d just done in
his.
They’d made
extremely powerful enemies.
Using Mark’s cell
phone, Gwen called John Van Rankin, one of Jack’s close friends
within the Secret Service. She told him of Jack’s hospitalization
and spinal cord injury and that she’d like permission to visit
Quantico. She didn’t go into any detail—she and Mark had decided to
play things by ear and decide what they’d tell Van Rankin
later.
As they drove, Mark
had a nagging feeling that he was forgetting something, something
important.
Something to do with
Dieter Tassin.