Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
To Gary’s mind, the scheme sounded as harebrained as the contraption the professor had designed.
“So the CIA killed his son in the vague hope it would unhinge him enough to reconsider their offer? Or at least put him in a more vulnerable frame of mind?” What an insane, laughable plot.
Who thinks up these schemes? Wile E. Coyote?
“It could so easily have backfired,” Winter remarked. “What if he’d committed suicide instead? But their profilers thought it was possible. And if they didn’t do anything, they’d never know, right?”
And if he had killed himself, would they have cared?
Gary didn’t want to know the answer to that question.
“Wait a minute.” Sam gave Winter an aghast glance. “They sent Powell to Iraq to kill Robert’s son? I mean, Iraq?”
Winter nodded. “Don’t get me wrong, they had other… stuff for him to do while he was out there, but yes, that was the main purpose of his assignment.”
“Assignment makes it sound normal. We’re talking about murder. At our government’s behest.” Sam shivered. “I think I want to throw up.”
“What about the IED? Was that just a cover story?” Gary asked.
“Oh, there was an IED,” Winter informed him. “But Dale was already dead when it went off.” He coughed. “The autopsy failed to spot the bullet to the head.”
“I’d be willing to bet that wasn’t down to the sloppiness of the forensic pathologist.” Gary made a mental note to quiz Del when they got back to Boston.
“Powell told you all this, didn’t he?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, but I didn’t get to hear that part until early 2015.”
Nathan’s eyes gleamed. “That must have been some conversation you and Robert had to give them the idea in the first place.”
Winter’s mouth tightened. “I thought nothing of it at the time. Of course with hindsight….” He sighed.
“You know what? It wasn’t the bit where I tried to gauge his reaction to bioweapons that interested them.
That was cut-and-dried, a no-go. No, it was when we talked about Dale, and the direction the conversation took after that. ”
October 14, 2012
Professor Martin stared into the milky depths of his coffee.
He seemed to have been in a contemplative mood from the moment they met in the coffee shop, and John was happy to let him talk.
He already knew this was a bust. He’d encountered many people who were willing to consider working for the government, most of them with an axe to grind, but this guy wasn’t one of them.
Privately, John was happy about that too. He really liked Robert Martin.
Not everyone wants to sell their soul. There are still people out there with integrity.
It was a comforting thought.
Professor Martin removed his cell phone from his pocket. He scrolled, then gazed at the screen.
“I’d better leave you with what’s left of your Sunday,” John said after a couple of minutes had passed. Apparently, they were done. Maybe it was time to stop recording.
Professor Martin held his phone up for John to see. It was a photo of a young man in his early twenties, dressed in military uniform, his arm around a girl with long blond hair and laughing blue eyes.
“That’s my son, Dale, and his girlfriend, Rina, the last time he was home on leave.” He gazed at it, his eyes filled with love.
John knew all about Dale. It was in the professor’s file.
“He looks like a nice kid,” he commented.
Professor Martin’s face lit up. “He is. The best.” He chuckled. “Okay, so I’m biased. All three of my children are awesome. But Dale is….” His words died, and a spasm of pain crawled across his face.
“Professor? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” the professor assured him. “It’s just—” He gave John an apologetic glance. “—I got to thinking about something this morning, and it was kind of sobering.” He put his phone down and drank from his cup. “When Dale was ten years old, the world population reached six billion.”
The randomness of the observation struck John to the core, and he became still.
“Last year, he had his twenty-second birthday, and by then the population had hit seven billion. I suppose it was then that the thought first occurred to me.”
“What thought was that?”
Something about the professor’s expression made John uncertain whether he wanted to hear it.
“I’ve been working on this project for four years, totally committed to what we’re trying to achieve, but lately…
.” Another mouthful of coffee. “Here we are, striving to eradicate disease, to improve human existence, and you know something? Our work is having an unforeseen effect. I can’t believe I didn’t see it until now. ”
John was dying to ask what kind of effect, but the professor continued.
“To fully understand what led to my epiphany, we need to go back in time, to when I was ten and started reading comics.”
What the…?
Professor Martin’s train of thought was all over the place.
“By the time I was fourteen, I was into Marvel in a big way. I kept all my comics, you know. Even though my mom yelled at me to throw them out.” He smiled.
“My dad told me not to, however. He said one day they might be valuable. He also said he wished he’d kept his for me. Maybe I could keep mine for my kids.”
Where is he going with this?
“Anyhow, I gave them to Dale when he was ten, and he loved them.” Another wry chuckle. “Except that’s an understatement. He devoured them. We used to have lengthy discussions about characters, plots. His favorite character surprised me, though. Thanos.”
“I was never into Marvel that much,” John admitted.
Professor Martin finished his coffee. “Thanos was a villain. I read about him when I was fifteen. And in 1991, Marvel ran a story called The Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos collects the six Infinity Gems, and he has them attached to his gauntlet. He wants to be like a god, and when he clicks his fingers, he kills off half the population of the universe. You know what the real shocker was? He did it to win someone’s heart. ”
“Sounds like a villain to me,” John remarked.
Professor Martin nodded. “That’s what I thought. I asked Dale how he could like such a villain. His reply surprised the hell out of me. He said, ‘What if he was doing it to save the universe?’”
John blinked. “Save the universe—by killing half of it?”
The professor nodded. “That was my reaction too, but Dale came back with such a logical response that I was rendered speechless. He said ‘Suppose there are too many people in the universe? What if by killing half of them, he makes the universe a better place to live? Wouldn’t that make him a hero?’” Professor Martin chuckled.
“I told him we were going to have to agree to disagree on that one.” He mopped up the last of his brownie crumbs with the pad of his finger.
“But the other day, that conversation came back to me, and it got me thinking.” Professor Martin’s face grew grave.
“In twelve years, the Earth’s population had grown by one billion.
What will it be in another twelve years, when Dale hits thirty-four?
What will the world be like when he reaches my age?
Will there still be room for mankind on the planet, or will we spill out into space in search of new planets to overpopulate?
” He shook his head. “Maybe Dale was right all along. Maybe Thanos had the right idea.”
Saturday, October 27, 2018
“I can see why your bosses decided to run a profile,” Nathan murmured.
“I couldn’t at the time—we were two men discussing Marvel comics, for God’s sake—but now? Yeah, I see what piqued their interest. But it got me thinking too. Bobby was just starting out. What kind of world would he grow into?”
“So you went back to talk to Professor Martin again in 2014,” Gary prompted in an effort to get him back on track.
Winter shook his head. “No, 2014 was when I was told to talk to him again. But before I could approach him, he approached me and Rich in late January of 2015, with an invitation to go fishing.”
Gary stared at him. “Fishing?”
He nodded. “He’d rented a cabin up at Lake Gregory in California.
So I went. Rich too. It was a helluva distance to travel for a spot of fishing, but I didn’t mind, especially when it turned out to be the hottest February weekend on record for California.
Only when we got there?” Winter’s eyes clouded over.
“It was quite a shock. He looked as if he’d aged about ten years since the funeral.
” He expelled a breath. “But that wasn’t the biggest shock.
No, that was when I found out we weren’t there to fish. ” Winter met Gary’s gaze.
“He had something much deadlier to discuss.”