“Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s a matter you?”
He laughed again.
“One born every minute. Okay, let’s talk about snow runners.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “Okay, I’ll bite, what is a snow runner? Some kind of extreme sport?”
“Back in the hot summer days before refrigeration you usually drank your beer warm. If you wanted something to plop into your drink to cool it, you had three choices: Wait for winter; collect and store a whole lot of ice in a cool dark place during the winter, like a cave or an ice house; or go to where there was natural ice and fetch it. In temperate or even tropical countries, you can usually find such places.”
Thorn considered it for a moment. “Mountains,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “So while it might be ninety in the shade down in the flats, five or ten thousand feet up the local hills, there could be snow on the ground, frozen ponds, like that.”
“Uh huh.”
“The Romans, the Europeans, and even the South Americans had snow runners. Say you were the local king of the Incas down in Peru about the time Pizarro came to call, and you had a fondness for cold chocolate in the hot summer. What you did was, you sent your snow runners up to collect it for you. These were fleet-footed fellows who could run for marathon distances at a goodly clip — at least for the part where they got to the base of the mountain. They had to slow down some on the uphill leg, and coming down, they had these big, watertight baskets lined with leaves and wrapped in some kind of insulation, holding forty or fifty pounds of densely packed snow or ice chipped from a frozen stream, depending on the boss’s tastes. The stuff would start to melt pretty quick once you were below the freezing level, of course, so you had to be fairly swift. By the time you got back to the temple, or wherever the king liked to hang out, much of it would be melted, so you’d be heading back up the mountain soon, and if the king was having a party, well, you’d be hustling.”
“A busy life.”
“Kind of like being a mail carrier,” she said. “Lots of exercise outdoors, and the pay was relatively good. The snow runners would have eaten well, they needed to be in shape. But my point, Tommy, is that you might not be able to get at him directly, but it’s like ice in your drink in the summer. You can find a way if you want it bad enough.”
He sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. You just need to use that sharp brain of yours to come up with something that will do the job.”
He nodded. She was right, of course. If only it were as easy as she made it sound.
35
Another week passed, and Net Force had nothing to show for it regarding Cox.
Yes, Jay Gridley had come across some information on the net indicating that Natadze had fled the country, but Jay had said it seemed hinky, and after Thorn examined it, he agreed. The data was too perfect — a little work had revealed flights, a name, and dates, but the passenger had never been photographed by any security cams, and the copy of his ID had somehow been garbled so that nothing remained of it but that it was on file as having been checked. Too easy, and both Jay and Thorn thought it was a red herring set to throw them off Natadze’s trail.
What Thorn had hoped for hadn’t materialized. Keeping teams in the field 24/7 cost a lot, and with nothing to show for it except suspicion, he couldn’t keep justifying it.
Worse, he had spoken to an old friend who was working for the Attorney General, and just a few minutes earlier had had a long and hard discussion with the Director of the FBI. Neither set of comments had been encouraging.
Coming out of the Director’s office had left him feeling stunned. He had thought he knew how politics worked, but she had given him a lesson in just how little he knew.
Reality was ugly.
And now, he had to pass that lesson along.
It wasn’t going over well.
Jay said, “I’m sorry, I don’t see the problem. This is a bad guy — he’s probably a spy, certainly a murderer, and not to take it personal or anything, but he had his goon
Kent nodded. “Gridley is right.”
Fernandez said, “I third that.”
Thorn sighed. “I don’t disagree at all. Cox is definitely a bad man. But it has been pointed out to me that it’s not that simple.”
He looked at them, and knew that no matter how he tried, making them understand the total picture was going to be difficult. Especially since he didn’t agree with it himself.
“Pointed out to you by whom?” Kent asked.
“A source in the AG’s office. And my boss. Who got it from her boss, who, I shouldn’t need to say, is the President of these United States and at whose pleasure we serve.”
“Politics. That’s just great,” Kent said. His tone could have etched glass.
“It’s not just that Cox is richer than Midas,” Thorn said, “though he can afford to throw a brigade of lawyers at the government and probably keep from going to jail until he dies of old age—
“Then what is our worry?” Jay asked. “You’re saying we don’t have enough on him to arrest him.”
“You know we don’t. We don’t even know for certain
“I’m working on it. I’ll get it. What about his connection to Natadze? How would a hit man have enough on the ball to do all that corporate crap to hide his house? That had to come from Cox.”
“
“Bull,” Jay said.
“I’m not arguing with that. Look, the point is, even if we had a mountain of evidence, it still might not go forward.”
Fernandez, just promoted to captain, said, “Excuse me?”
Thorn shook his head. “I’ll explain it to you the way it was explained to me. Remember the Enron scandal some ten years or so ago? Big company got caught doing some real creative wheeler-dealing, went bust?”
“Yes,” Fernandez said. “So?”
“A lot of people lost their retirements, their jobs, their homes, and even their families, and they had nothing to do with the situation other than that their companies had invested in Enron.”
Fernandez nodded. “I remember.”
“Here’s the biggest obstacle: Cox is the head of a multinational corporation worth more than some countries. There are tens of thousands of people directly working for him around the world, and millions of people indirectly connected to his businesses. Stock markets all over the globe trade shares in these companies.”
“Like the Captain said,” Colonel Kent said, “so what?”
“International concerns like Cox’s carry a lot of weight. Given the nature of the world’s economy, with everybody linked to everybody else, it’s kind of like a house of cards. Pull the wrong one out and the whole thing collapses.”
Fernandez picked up on it first: “So, what, we’re supposed to let this guy off because that
“It’s not just rich folks. It’s the proverbial widows and orphans who can’t afford what you call a ‘glitch.’ ”
“Are you saying that arresting Cox will cause a collapse of the entire planet’s economy?” Jay said. “Come on!”
