The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [79]
“Sam,” he continued, causing her to drop her paper clip and look up, “you and Willy go after Martin. Given his record and who you’re likely to meet, I’d like you to team up on this. Do not split up unless it’s totally safe to do so, right?”
“Yes, boss,” she said, while Willy merely looked at him.
“One other thing,” Joe added. “Do your best to tiptoe around this guy at first, okay? I don’t want him to know we’re checking him out until we know what he’s up to, if anything. Try to figure his action from the inside, maybe.”
“Undercover?” Sam asked, surprised.
“Not exactly,” he corrected her. “But you’ve both had experience in that line. I’m saying superlow profile for now.
“For my part,” he continued, already unhappy with the pleased look on Willy’s face, “I want to look at Newell beyond the field trip to Frankfort. I’ll meet with his wife, talk to his former coworkers, try to find out about his fi—”
Judy, their administrative assistant, opened the door from her small cubicle just off the hallway and peered around the corner. “Joe, I’ve been holding calls like you asked, but I thought you’d want this one. Milton Coven, from the Fusion Center?”
Joe nodded. Of the various ways the Fusion Center chose to communicate, direct phone calls were few and far between. In addition, Coven was a friend he hadn’t heard from in years. “Thanks, Judy.”
He picked up the phone. “Milt. The Fusion Center? They give you a double-O number to go with that?”
“Very funny,” Coven’s familiar voice said. “It’s more like they finally found me a chair to sit on instead of a cardboard box—I’m liaison here, probably until retirement next year. Your lady there said you were in a staff meeting, so I’ll cut this short. I promise I’ll call later so we can catch up.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“I heard through the grapevine that some of your people were working in Bennington, on what I don’t know, but I got a few recent hits over there you might find interesting, just in case.”
Joe raised his eyebrows, impressed and a little startled at what he was hearing. He wondered just what and how Coven knew of their activities. They all shared the same law enforcement tent, but this had a quasi-creepy feeling to it.
“Milt,” he told his friend, with just a touch of perverseness, “your timing couldn’t be better. We were just discussing Bennington. Since you’ve been keeping an eye on us anyhow, I’m going to put you on speakerphone so you can tell all of us what you’ve got.”
“What? Joe . . .”
The last word filled the small room.
“Go ahead,” Joe said. “I’ll spare you introductions. Suffice it to say the squad’s all ears.”
There was a telling silence as Coven scrambled to think. “Okay, okay. Hey, everybody. I’m Milton Coven, FBI, assigned to the Vermont Fusion Center. As you probably know, we serve as a kind of clearinghouse for intel, hoping to avoid the black holes that preceded nine-eleven. Anyhow, a couple of days ago, one of our gatherers handed me some information about a bag of low-level hospital waste that went missing from the Bennington area—technically radioactive but with a short enough half-life to be harmless. I almost . . . Well, never mind. I thought I’d do a quick follow-up, just to be thorough, and found another Bennington blip. Like I was telling Joe, I knew some of you were in the area poking around, so I thought this might be helpful. Sort of kill two birds with one stone.”
Joe watched Willy slowly remove his feet from his desktop and sit up, scowling. Trained by years of exposure to such body language, Joe signaled to him to keep his mouth shut.
Coven’s voice went on, oblivious. “Keep in mind that all we do here is pass stuff along. We don’t know its value necessarily, and we don’t know how or if it connects to anything.”
“What’ve you got?” Willy cut in, irrepressible.
“What? Oh, right. It