The little town of Vienna, Virginia sits about a dozen miles due west of Washington, D.C., a straight shot down I-66. By that time in the afternoon there was quite a bit of traffic flowing in both directions. Ben Blair’s office was there, on the 12th floor of a glass tower. Hannibal was grateful he was headed there from Anita’s home, a pleasant ten minute drive due south. Just enough time for him to appreciate Blair’s commute, and have an idea why he chose to live in a townhouse in Tysons Corner instead of the mansions he could afford that gathered around Washington like Hollywood Indians surrounding the fort, an hour or more away. Not quite enough time for him to recover from Anita’s final words before he left her, or to manhandle his rage at Rod Mantooth into a manageable form. His jaws ached from clenching them against his own anger.
The parking lot was free, at least for the first two hours, and Hannibal had no plans to be there that long. He found the air conditioning a little overdone in the lobby. It made the marble columns and tile flooring seem even more impersonal. Two other people waited for the elevator, but neither spoke during that wait, or during the elevator ride.
When at last he entered the Tactical Datamation offices, Hannibal faced a mature receptionist who sat as a calm veneer in front of a beehive of activity. Her dyed auburn hair was well lacquered in place, and her smile was equally frozen. To her left and right, people clattered at computer keyboards or wheeled their chairs around to confer with coworkers. He could see that they worked in a bullpen atmosphere, without the usual cubicle walls separating the workers. When anyone stood, they walked quickly, as if the person they wanted to speak with might get away. Or, more likely, they moved in fear that their latest inspired idea might escape them before they could share it. A week in this place would drive Hannibal to try to leap through one of the sealed windows. Maybe that was why buildings like this one never had windows you could open.
“How may I help you, sir?” the receptionist asked, with that air of power one gets when one stands guard at the gates of the rich and famous.
“Hannibal Jones to see Ben Blair.”
The Gatekeeper seemed to scroll Blair’s schedule behind her eyes. “I’m afraid no one sees Mr. Blair without an appointment. Can I write you in for tomorrow morning?”
“He’ll see me,” Hannibal said with a calm smile. “We have personal business.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, matching his calm demeanor. “Mr. Blair sees no one without an appointment.”
“Just tell him I’m here.”
“Sir,” she added just an ounce of weight to her voice, “Mr. Blair’s schedule is extremely tight.”
This could become tedious. Hannibal placed his gloved palms on the oak reception desk. “Neither of us has time for this, so we will proceed in one of two ways. In the next ten seconds, one of us is going to walk into Mr. Blair’s office and ask if he will see me right now. Which do you prefer?”
Hannibal kept his eyes on The Gatekeeper’s but his other senses told him that the buzz of activity to his left and right had stopped. Perhaps they had never seen this woman challenged and waited to see if she would scream or call the security guard or pull a revolver out of her desk. In the end, nine seconds later, she stood and walked with perfect posture down the hall behind her. Normal activity did not return until Hannibal could hear her heels clicking back toward him. When she returned her smile had not moved an inch.
“Please follow me, Mr. Jones,” she said with a small nod. She escorted Hannibal down the hall, which took two turns before ending at a closed office door. When she turned to wave him inside, her smile was as cordial as when he first saw her.
Blair’s office was laid out in three areas. To Hannibal’s right a sofa and love seat in soft beige formed a conversation area. On his left, a round table and five steel chairs seemed to constitute a business area. The control center was dead ahead.
The desk was no deeper than an arm’s length, with a stack of four shelves on each end. Wings on each side formed a “U” shape, and each wing held a keyboard and flat screen. Papers were stacked neatly on each of the shelves and across the desk. In the midst of this power cockpit, Blair looked up at Hannibal with one eyebrow raised in curiosity.
“I’m impressed Jones. Nobody gets past Margaret, you know?”
“You just have to know how to ask,” Hannibal said.
“So do we have progress?” Blair asked, then as an afterthought, “Oh, have a seat.”
Blair waved toward the loveseat, but Hannibal stepped toward the round table. “I had a question, but first I wanted to clear my next step in the investigation.”
Blair nodded, and then refocused on his right hand computer. Hannibal stood still while Blair finished whatever he was in the middle of. He appeared uaware of how rude most people would find his actions. Less than two minutes later he stood and walked toward the table. He pulled a chair out, spun it, and sat straddling the seat.
“Okay, what can I do to help you find our man?”
Hannibal stood behind a chair, his hands on the corners of the back. “Well, the obvious things didn’t get me anywhere. Our boy Rod is clearly working at not being traced. The most obvious and best lead has got to be your neighbor, Ms. LaPage. But Anita told me you were members of the same clubs and such. Wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be causing any trouble if I questioned her.”
Blair lowered his eyelids to half-mast and pushed out his lips. His thinking pose, Hannibal assumed. “No, I don’t think you’re likely to cause any repercussions. She probably thinks I’m crass and crude already, so what harm can you do to my rep, you know?” At Hannibal’s quizzical expression, Blair added, “Marquita LaPage is old money, Mr. Jones. I’m a tech driven upstart. We go to the same clubs and eat in the same restaurants, but we live in different worlds. If you think you can get anything out of her that will lead us to this Rod and Anita’s valuables, go for it.”
“Good. I’ll be interviewing her when I leave here.”
“Fine,” Blair said, his eyes straying briefly to his computers. “Now, you had questions?”
“Just a couple,” Hannibal said.
“Me first,” Blair said. “What five letter word become shorter when you add two letters to it?”
What?”
“Nevermind. Just a puzzle. You’re the man who likes puzzles. Anyway, what did you want to ask me?”
Hannibal watched Blair’s eyes as he spoke. “First, who knows I’m pursuing this investigation?”
“You, me and Anita,” Blair said without hesitation. Then he added, “Henry of course. That’s it.”
Hannibal leaned forward a bit and tilted his head a little to one side. “One last question, Mr. Blair. Are you having me followed?”
“Excuse me?”
“I think someone’s tracking me. If I’m right, this person is very good.”
“Why would I have you followed?” Blair asked.
“Good question.”
Blair ran his fingers through the straw thatch on his head and stood. He walked around the room, becoming animated again. “You know, Mr. Jones, I think I said before that you and I are in the same business. But it’s more than mere data mining. We both deal in trust, you know?”
“Trust?” Hannibal leaned back. “I thought it was information.”
Blair wandered like a moth in a roomful of candles. “Information? People are already being bombarded with information. It’s all there at their fingertips these days. They just don’t know what to do with it. One piece of software I’m working on right now retains, analyzes and orders people’s financial records. It will detect warning signs and alert you when there’s a credit card with a lower interest rate you could qualify for, or when you can get a cheaper mortgage or car loan. Things everyone wants, you know? But for it to work, you’ve got to trust me to have your credit history and financial records.”
“I don’t ask clients for credit histories.”
Blair swooped in toward the table at a pace that made Hannibal shrank back. “No, but for you to help them, they have to trust you with their darkest secrets, things they’d tell no one else. That’s because more often than not, trouble comes from keeping secrets. Am I right?”
Hannibal thought about Anita’s leather collar and nodded.
Blair seized his small victory with both hands. “Yes. The whole point of the services we offer is trust. The trust of the client is the number one business asset of our age. And I wouldn’t have hired you if I didn’t trust you to do what you need to do to get the job done. Besides, six years as a cop in New York City, half that time as a city detective, then almost eight years in the secret service. Who could be more trustworthy?”
“How?”
“I told you I checked you out, didn’t I? Anyway, the bottom line is, if I thought I needed to have you followed I’d have just hired somebody else, you know?”
Hannibal nodded again as he stood. “Yes, I guess I do know. Sorry, but I had to ask.”
“I understand,” Blair said. His voice had calmed back down and he sounded like the little boy again, instead of the fanatic he was just seconds before. “So, is Marquita LaPage your next stop?”
“Right. She should be able to give me a lead as to Mantooth’s path after he left the area.”
“Well I hope she’s home,” Blair said. “I heard the place was up for sale.”
At the door Hannibal paused and turned. “Shorter,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The five letter word that becomes shorter when you add two letters to it,” Hannibal said. “The word is short.”
The sun was sliding down the left side of the sky when Hannibal pulled into Marquita LaPage’s driveway, throwing a series of long black shadows across the landscape. He was barely two miles from Blair’s townhouse, yet the difference was startling. While Blair’s home looked smaller than it was from the outside, Hannibal was now surrounded by detached houses making a big outward showing of their size. Marquita LaPage’s colonial crouched behind six wide white columns whose shadows pooled to his right, to become one thick slash of darkness reaching to the neighbor’s yard.
Hannibal parked behind the silver Lexus and stepped out onto the asphalt. The sprawling, three-level structure stood proudly on its corner, yet the signs of neglect jumped out at Hannibal as he headed for the door. The lawn had not been mown or edged in quite a while, giving it a disheveled appearance relative to the yards on either side, which appeared to suffer from compulsive neatness. The mailbox flap was ajar, unable to hold back the crowd of neglected envelopes. And the rows of violets along the path to the three steps were gasping for water.
The doorbell gave a merry chime, but nearly thirty seconds of silence followed. Hannibal was reaching for the button again when the door swung inward. His first reaction to the vision before him was that he might have awakened a ghost.
The woman half hidden by the door wore dull platinum blonde hair that accented her apparently bloodless skin. The exposed arm was rail thin, and he could see her ribs through her silk dressing gown. Her makeup was smudged, as if it had been applied yesterday or maybe the day before but never washed off. Somewhere underneath the lipstick and mascara lay a pert nose, high cheekbones and full, pouting lips. If not for the bags under her eyes and her haggard expression she might have been beautiful. As it was, this pale specter gave him a chill. Judging from her bulging eyes and trembling lower lip, he scared her even more.
“Ms. LaPage?” Hannibal asked. The woman nodded. “My name is Hannibal Jones. May I come in for a moment?” Her light brown eyes looked around him as if she hoped someone was standing behind him. “I just want to speak with you for a moment.” She tried a tentative smile and Hannibal returned it.
“What’s this about?” she asked, with an accent Hannibal didn’t recognize.
“It’s about a man you know. Rod Mantooth.”
On hearing the name, Marquita stiffened and a series of emotions moved across her face too quickly for Hannibal to identify them individually. Surprise was certainly among them, and fear and something like resignation. Then she forced a bigger smile and tilted her head in a welcoming bow.
“Of course. Please come in, Mr. Jones.”
Marquita led him through a broad living room into a plush sitting room. White carpets appeared to cover the floors of the house everywhere Hannibal could see. The furniture was a soft cowhide and hand-rubbed maple. But dusting had been left too long undone, and the carpet had not been vacuumed in a while. The air conditioner labored more noisily than it should, as if it had not been serviced in months.
Marquita never spoke another word as she waved Hannibal onto a sofa in the sitting room and busied herself at the bar across the room. The sofa smelled of spilled bourbon, probably the same stuff Marquita was filling two tumblers with.
“You needn’t pour for me, ma’am,” Hannibal said. Marquita gave him a quizzical look, pushed the second glass aside, and tipped her head back to swallow half the contents of the first. Then she walked very slowly to stand in front of Hannibal, bowed low and smiled as seductively as she could. She was not quite steady on her feet, but she tried hard to sway her hips anyway.
“So, Hannibal eh? That’s rather an unusual name,” she said in what sounded almost like a French lilt to him, or like the Haitians he knew. “So what would you like, Hannibal? Maybe a little dance first? I dance well, they tell me. Or do you have a favorite game? Or perhaps you’d just like to go right to it?” Her arm rose with surprising grace toward the stairs.
Hannibal rose to his feet, his palms faced toward his hostess. “Look, I don’t think you understand.”
Marquita took two steps backward, her eyes darting from side to side, confusion or nervousness making her lick her lips. “Wait. What did I do? You can’t… I mean you have to at least tell me what I did wrong.”
Hannibal’s mouth became very dry and his stomach lurched. Marquita’s behavior was bringing back an ugly recent memory. “Oh my God. Did he do it to you too? Look, just sit down a minute.”
His voice must have been more menacing than he had intended, because Marquita dropped to her knees in apparent terror. Her back was straight, her legs spread wide, and he could see she wore nothing under her nightgown. Her head was raised, but her eyes would not look high enough to see his face. This must be a practiced pose, he thought. But he had to be sure.
“You know the rules, don’t you? Even after number three.”
Instantly she replied, “I trust my master. Above all else, my only desire is to please my master. I am always in complete submission to my master.”
He waved a hand, and Marquita stopped talking. She sat there on the floor, her feet on either side of her hips, looking almost straight ahead, as if waiting for instructions. As gently as he could, Hannibal grasped her upper arms and very slowly lifted her to her feet. Here skin was cold and clammy.
“Ms. LaPage. I know what you must think, but I’m not here as a friend of Rod Mantooth’s.”
Marquita’s eyes spent a few seconds trying to focus before she asked, “Master didn’t send you?”
“No, ma’am. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about him.”
“Then, you’re not like the others? He didn’t send you?”
“Others?” Hannibal asked. “Other men have come to see you?”
“Oh no.” Marquita’s face twisted into a strained expression that looked to Hannibal more ghastly than the faces he had seen on men who suffered violent deaths. “Oh my God no. You’re not one of them? And I just…” She was babbling, her face bright red with what he guessed must be shame. At least he knew that was what he would be feeling.
“Relax,” Hannibal said. “I’m not here to hurt you. You’re safe now.”
“Safe?’ Marquita said in a far away voice. “Look what I’ve become. How did I ever come to this? How can I be safe now, after what I’ve become?”
Hannibal thought she was about to break away from him, just before she passed out in his arms.