“Not that much, from the look of you,” Naomi says, popping the container into a small microwave. “First you’ll do me the favor of trying Mrs. Beasley’s macaroni and cheese, and then we’ll sweep the room for bugs and have a conversation.”
“I’m really not hungry.”
“That’s why I brought this particular dish. It has been known to stimulate an interest in food.”
Naomi carefully dishes a portion into a white crockery bowl, supplies it with a fork and hands it to the reluctant patient. Shane places it on the table beside him but makes no move to eat. Naomi, persisting, removes a small shaker of salt from her purse. “Sea salt,” she announces briskly. “It makes a difference. I checked your chart, you have no prohibition against salt.”
“Really, Miss Nantz,” he says, looking annoyed.
“Call me Naomi or Nantz, but never Miss Nantz.”
“Okay, Nantz. Thanks for the food. Maybe I’ll try it later.”
“By then it will be cold and it won’t reheat well for a second time. Let me describe the contents, which are exceedingly simple but nevertheless not like any similar dish you may have had in the past. Certainly not like whatever glop the hospital, or indeed most restaurants, calls macaroni and cheese.”
“Look, I appreciate everything you’ve done, really I do, but-”
“No buts. Allow me to finish,” Naomi says, overriding his protest. “Mrs. Beasley first makes fresh pasta according to her own recipe, in this case rotini in shape, and boils it to a precise state of al dente. The steaming pasta is then transferred to a casserole pan. Over the pasta she grates a precise quantity of truly exceptional aged cheddar, sharp but not too sharp. On the top, a crust of toasted bread crumbs moistened with drawn butter. The dish is then baked for thirty minutes at three hundred and fifty degrees so that the cheese melts and achieves a kind of magical balance with the pasta. As a last touch the casserole is taken from the oven and the bread-crumb crust is browned with a hand torch and lightly sprinkled with select parmigiano. The result is simple, nutritious, delicious and easy to digest. I dare you to take one bite and prove me wrong.”
Shane grimaces. “You don’t give up, do you, Nantz?”
“Never. Be glad of it.”
He sighs and reluctantly lifts a small forkful to his mouth. His pale blue eyes brighten. Without saying another word he adds a few shakes of sea salt and empties the bowl in about three minutes. He then heaves a sigh and says, “Oh my God. Who is Mrs. Beasley?”
“A woman of many mysteries. Shall I dish out another portion?”
“No, I’m good. You’re right, it was delicious. Familiar but at the same time not like anything I’ve ever tasted before. Wait, wait. Changed my mind. Yes, please,” he says, handing her the bowl.
In the end he empties the Tupperware. I’m not one of those women who derive any particular satisfaction from watching a man eat, but there’s something about Randall Shane that makes me want to pay attention to whatever he happens to be doing at the moment. Not my type, not my type at all, but still.
When he’s done Shane pushes himself back in the armchair and flexes the ankle that has the plastic monitoring device attached. “We need to talk about Kathy Mancero,” he says.
Naomi stops him. “Not quite yet. Sweep first.”
She steps out of the room and returns with Dane Porter and a gentleman, a consulting expert who shall not be named or described in this narrative, per his explicit request. Suffice to say that he’s the same gentleman who designed and implemented the electronic-surveillance shielding system at the residence, and checking a hospital room for bugs is something he could do in his sleep. The process takes about fifteen minutes, wanding his detector over every square inch of the room, and in the end he pronounces the place bug free.
“Excellent,” Naomi replies.
“That being said,” the expert continues, “my concern is the windows. Glass transmits sound vibrations, which can be detected from a considerable distance by a laser microphone. Before leaving I’m going to place a small, battery-operated device on the windowsill that generates random masking vibrations, but even so I suggest you keep the conversation as quiet as possible and be sure to face the wall, not the windows. Any questions?”
Shane has several, all geeky technical stuff-he knows a lot about bugs and bug prevention-but in the interests of not boring the reader, I will refrain from mentioning anything that involves interferometers, beam splitters or microprocessors. With the geeky stuff concluded and our consulting expert having taken his leave, the conversation resumes at just above a whisper. The three of us, me, Naomi and Dane, as close to the big guy as we can get without sitting in his lap.
“Kathleen Mancero,” he begins. “You looked her up, right?”
“We have everything available from published sources. What can you add?”
“Only that her involvement is my fault. I want that to be on the record. Whatever Kathy’s done, it’s because I was never quite able to say no to her. Not absolutely. She desperately wanted a mission, much like the one I’ve made for myself, and for similar reasons. They took advantage of that. If she’s helping them with Joey Keener, it has to be because she thinks she’s helping me. That’s the only explanation.”
“We assumed as much.”
“You did?” He looks much relieved. “Well, good then.”
“I notice, Mr. Shane, that you’re still referring to the kidnappers as ‘they.’”
“Just Shane, please, no mister. I say ‘they’ because I don’t know who ‘they’ are.”
“Because you can’t remember?”
“Because I never knew. Professor Keener believed that his son had been taken into custody by agents of the Chinese government, in an attempt to persuade him to share secrets. That was my assumption, too, until I saw the video of Kathy and the boy. That changed everything. If the Chinese were involved they’d have used one of their own, not gone prospecting for a nanny in Kansas. So it has to be domestic. One of our own spy agencies.”
Naomi nods in agreement. “Did he share?”
“Keener? You mean was he complicit in an act of treason? No, I don’t think so. He said not, and in my judgment he lacked the ability to lie convincingly. Then again, I’ve been wrong about so much, maybe I was wrong about that, too.”
“Possibly,” Naomi says. “That has yet to be determined. Tell me what you recall of your interrogation.”
He grimaces. “Not much is clear. I was with you, in your office. There’s a lot of noise and then something hits me and I pass out. When I come to I’m strapped to a gurney. Someone asks me about Joseph Keener and I tell them everything I know, but that isn’t enough. They beat me, they drug me some more and then it all gets very vague and blurry.”
“Could you identify any of your interrogators?”
He shakes his head. “Never saw them.”
Naomi sits up straight, takes a breath. “We have news to impart. As yet we have no line on who has Joey, precisely, or what they hope to gain by holding him after his father’s death, but we do know who abducted you.”
Naomi delivers a succinct description of the events of the day, in particular the threat to “go chemical” on Milton Bean, and the convenience of a nearby airfield with professional interrogators on-site. Midway through the account something relaxes in Shane’s expression, and when Naomi concludes, he says, “Taylor Gatling, I’ll be damned. Haven’t heard the name in twenty years, but that explains it.”
“How so?”
“Keener told me he was under surveillance by his own security guards, but I never made the connection between Gama Guards and Taylor Gatling, Jr. Now it all makes sense. Or some of it does.”
“Gatling is previously known to you?”
Shane shakes his head. “His father was. I had no idea his son owned a security firm. This all happened so long ago, he must have been a kid at the time. I have no recollection of him at the trial.”
“Trial?”
“The father, Taylor Gatling, Sr., was an embezzler. A very bold and clever one, too. Owned a chain of automotive dealerships, had his face all over the local television stations promoting sales.
