The Resurrection File Read online

  “Why yes, I am sure it is.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I think you had better hear it for yourself, Mr. Chambers.”

  Will Chambers looked at his client. The bells from St. Andrew’s Church were tolling five o’clock.

  “I need to stretch my legs, if I could,” MacCameron said pushing himself away from the conference table. “Walk around and get a bite to eat before I head home. Tonight’s my night off. I have someone watching my wife—Helen—for me. So I thought that perhaps I could take in a bit of history about your charming little town.”

  “Sure,” Will said. “But why don’t you just tell me the gist of what was on that tape-recording first.”

  “You know, I’d rather not. I really want you to hear it for yourself. That’s essential before I tell you what I think is on it. Now if you will excuse me,” MacCameron said as he rose from his chair a little stiffly, “I will get some fresh air.” With that he loosened his necktie slightly. “I understand that St. Andrew’s Church across the street has some fascinating history behind it. I may take a gander over there. Is it open to tourists?”

  “Almost everything is open season for tourists in this town,” Will replied, still trying to figure out why his client had become so evasive about the message that Hunter had left. And then he added, “I’m sure you can look around in the church. The bell in the steeple is the same one they rang to announce George Washington’s first great victory during the Revolutionary War.”

  MacCameron grabbed his Bible, gave a wave, and then was out the door.

  After his client had left, Will remembered something MacCameron had just said about his wife, Helen. Will realized that he hadn’t asked him much about her. He wondered why he needed to have someone watch her.

  It was early evening, and Will knew that Betty had gone for the day. So when he heard a noise in the lobby he poked his head around the corner, expecting to see MacCameron there, perhaps returning for something he had left behind.

  Instead, Will saw it was Hattie, the elderly black cleaning lady for the building. Hattie was a tiny woman with glasses and white hair. She walked slightly bent over, and had one leg that looked like it had a hard time catching up to the other. Will usually knew that Hattie was coming because the soft sounds of her humming or singing would waft down the hallway ahead of her. She was dressed in her usual attire: a gray work uniform with the words “Hattie’s Clean-Up Company” across the back.

  “Evening, Mr. Chambers,” she said with her usual glowing smile, tilting her head down so she could peer through the top half of her bifocals.

  “Hattie, I thought you were someone else. How are you?”

  “As good as good can get, Mr. Chambers. Say, where is that good-looking young woman lawyer that used to work here—Miss Johnson? I haven’t seen her around for a while,” she asked, picking up the wastepaper baskets.

  “She doesn’t work here anymore,” Will explained, hoping that Hattie would not ask for details, which she usually did in her unabashed style.

  “Well, now that’s a shame. You lost yourself a good lawyer. I always liked her. Seemed like a real sharp one.”

  “Yes, she was sharp all right.”

  “What happened—didn’t pay her enough money?” And with that Hattie chuckled and gave a little stomp on the ground.

  “No. That wasn’t it, Hattie.”

  “Oh, I know. She must have gotten married to that boyfriend of hers—Howard. That must be it.”

  Will felt embarrassed that the cleaning lady seemed to have known more about the details of Jacki’s life than he had. He couldn’t help but think back to his last conversation with Jacki, while she was driving him home in his Corvette the day the law firm had given him the boot.

  “Not exactly,” Will replied. “Jacki did get engaged to Howard. But the fact is that I am no longer in the same law firm. Jacki stayed with them, and they moved her up to their D.C. office. I’m in this office by myself now.”

  “Well, you say hey to her for me if you see her, won’t you? The Lord bless you now, Mr. Chambers.”

  Hattie shuffled slowly out of the office. A few seconds later Will could hear her gently humming a hymn, and it was echoing down the stairwell.

  Will walked back to his office and looked out the window. He gazed out at the old, cream-colored brick of the church across the street, at its tall, green-tiled spire that rose to the tallest point in Monroeville.

  He saw MacCameron down below, opening the front door of the church and stepping in.

  As Will glanced over to the church’s graveyard and its black wrought-iron fence, his thoughts returned to the lawsuit. He reflected on the wording of the 7QA fragment that seemed to so clearly contradict the resurrection story in the Gospels.

  Dead men don’t walk out of graves, Will thought to himself.

  And then he asked himself the logical and inevitable question: So how do I prove that once, two thousand years ago, one man did?

  20

  AS REPORTER JACK HORNBY SLIPPED INTO THE BACK of the pressroom in the federal building he figured that this was going to be just one more government press conference. He struggled to be optimistic, speculating that it might be mildly interesting because it had to do with oil—and the possibility of oil shortages always made great press. There had been no official statement about oil shortages. But the Department of Energy had released a report that questioned the “availability of oil at the current range of prices at the wellheads” and the “ability of oil production to keep apace with the growing demand.” Hornby saw this as bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo for the fact that there might be some real concerns about oil supply/demand ratios.

  Hornby knew that oil, like money, was one of the great motivators of human events. It moved nations to war, built empires, and fueled the transportation that reduced the size of the planet down to a cozy global village. But at least at first blush, the veteran reporter could see nothing eventful or even mildly exciting in this particular press conference. Ever since the meltdown he had had with the city editor and then the managing editor over his story on the Reichstad lawsuit, Hornby had been given increasingly insignificant assignments.

  He wondered if they would soon have him covering the increase in cab fares, or the traffic problems created by the unpatched potholes in the Washington, D.C., streets.

  The Energy Department official at the podium was droning on. He was explaining how the world thus far had burned about 850 billion barrels of oil. Daily consumption of oil was running about 80 million barrels a day.

  He went on to describe how the rate of oil use around the world had been increasing by a few percentage points every year. However, oil discovery and production had not kept up with the same rising curve.

  Every nation of course maintained oil reserves, he noted. But the oil reserves of almost all of the major oil-consuming nations had been dropping by several percentage points every year. This was also true of the United States. For reasons of oil pricing and availability, America had been dipping into its strategic oil reserves.

  All of this would be of little concern, the official pointed out, if the results of oil exploration had reflected the optimistic predictions from the last decades of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the last major oil field to be discovered—Safaniya in Saudi Arabia—dated all the way back to 1954. There had been great expectations about a deep-water site off the Gulf of Mexico, however that field ended up containing only about one billion barrels—barely enough to supply the needs of America for a mere fifty days.

  Hornby was hoping against hope that this fellow at the podium would get to the point.

  Meanwhile, the speaker pointed out, OPEC’s oil policies and its production reserves were not audited, so the West could only guess about how well OPEC was supplying the oil needs of the rest of the world.

  But now, the official was happy to announce, the United States was exploring a new oil initiative with Saudi Arabia.

  Because of the recent
trend of cultural and international cooperation between the Arab nations—specifically Saudi Arabia—and the United States, talks were underway, he explained, that could be tremendously beneficial to the future industrial needs of our country.

  The United States—through the Department of State—and the OPEC nations were now engaged in high-level talks that could open up the OPEC oil monopoly to some Western influence and monitoring.

  When the speaker was finished, the hands shot up instantly. The reporters wanted to know the specifics. How would the U.S. benefit? What new arrangement with the OPEC consortium could we expect? What was the motivating factor behind the Arabs’ opening up their oil monopoly to the United States?

  The official avoided answering any specifics, indicating that he did not have the answers to those questions. Hornby decided not to raise his hand. Instead, he studied the speaker with that combination of intuition and exacting observation that a seasoned reporter develops. Hornby was trying to determine if this fellow, a relatively low-level Energy Department representative, really didn’t know anything more than he was letting on.

  Finally, when the questions slowed down, Hornby raised his hand.

  “Yes, one last question,” the speaker said, recognizing Hornby in the back of the room.

  Hornby’s voice boomed through the room.

  “I have reason to believe that you may be hiding information from us. The only question is, why? Are the American people on the verge of being denied gasoline at the pump for their cars? Are we heading for a catastrophic oil crisis? Is that what’s going on here?”

  The speaker’s eyes widened. A flustered look spread over his face. “I really don’t know how to answer such a question. Really—that of course—is an outrageous question. There is nothing being hidden here at all. There is enough oil to go around. I—really don’t understand what you’re coming from—or I should say, where you are coming from.”

  Hornby didn’t try for a follow-up question. He wheeled around and left the room. The awkward nonanswer he had received from the government official had answered it all. If this man had known anything of substance, his department would have prepared him with several slick avoidance-and-deflection responses. He would have been able to cover the weakest and most vulnerable parts of his position with a fifty-dollar smile and some well-crafted, but empty, hundred-dollar ambiguities.

  Instead, this fellow had tripped over himself. No one with real inside information would have reacted with such public-relations clumsiness. Clearly, the Energy Department had chosen as its spokesman someone who really didn’t know anything.

  That told Hornby that the government had dangled a pawn in front of the press on an issue that was apparently very sensitive—so sensitive that they had to build a firewall between it and the poor department underling who had the job of facing the press.

  Hornby didn’t care whether this story was going to get published or not. He had another reason. He wanted to get to the secrets of this oil story just to prove that it could be done.

  21

  TWO POLICE CARS WITH LIGHTS FLASHING were parked directly in front of Will’s law office building when he arrived at work the next morning. When Will entered the front door he heard the crackling sound of police walkie-talkies reverberating in the halls. Employees from the first-floor accounting and investment firms were mingling and talking with each other. In the background he saw one blue-uniformed officer. Broken glass was scattered over the carpeted floor of the hallway.

  Will scurried up the curving stairway to his office. Before he had reached the last step he saw two more patrolmen. They stopped him and asked whether this was his office, pointing to the open door at the end of the hall.

  As he responded that yes, this was his law office, Will looked down to the open door and noticed that the frosted glass bearing his name was smashed out of the door frame. Glass shards lay in the hallway.

  “What’s going on?” Will asked urgently, looking around for signs of Betty.

  “Break-in,” the older of the two officers replied. “We have secured the crime scene, but because it’s a law office and you’ve got confidential files and things we had to wait for you.”

  With broken glass crunching under foot Will stepped gingerly into the office with the officers following behind him.

  There in the lobby, Betty was surveying the office with bewilderment.

  “This is crazy,” she blurted out.

  “If you could size up the office for us, tell us if you see anything missing, we’ll make a note of it,” the officer said.

  Will and Betty walked around the office. The equipment and computers were intact. The lamps and furnishings all seemed to be there.

  That was when he noticed that the storage doors and file cabinets had been pulled open and not closed up. The plastic box for their backup tapes was open. The yellow light on the computer screen was still on, and the computer was humming.

  “The computer was on when I got here,” Betty noted, “when I walked in the door with the police.”

  “Check all the backups,” Will told Betty as he sat down in front of the computer.

  The screen blinked on and he checked the computer directory for the last computer file that had been accessed. It was the file on the Reichstad vs. MacCameron lawsuit.

  “Computer backups are all still here,” Betty replied.

  “What was the last file you worked on yesterday?” Will asked.

  “That one,” she said, pointing to the computer screen. “I was working on the MacCameron case.”

  “Is it possible that you just forgot to shut off the computer yesterday?”

  “Absolutely not,” Betty shot back, “that is something I don’t do. I don’t leave for the day without turning the computer off.”

  “I don’t mean to interrupt this Sherlock Holmes mystery,” the older police officer quipped, “but we need to know if anything was stolen.”

  Will and Betty both shook their heads.

  “Appears to be petty vandalism,” the officer remarked, closing up his notepad. “It looks like they entered down at the end of the hall on the first floor, smashed some windows in those offices—but they didn’t gain access to any of them. They ran up here, smashed the glass in the door of your office, got inside, looked around, and left. Might be kids. Sometimes it’s somebody looking for quick cash that might be lying around the office—you know—cash for drugs or whatever.”

  Will reached over to the side drawer of Betty’s desk and pulled it open. There in the top tray was their petty-cash fund, still perfectly intact—two twenty-dollar bills and some singles.

  “They must have been in a hurry, or just sloppy,” the officer said as he prepared to leave.

  “Aren’t you going to dust for fingerprints?” Will asked.

  “How many people do you think have touched the doorknob to your office in the last two weeks?” the officer asked. “I’m not putting you down, counselor, but the glass in the window of your office puts this at about one hundred bucks worth of property damage. Do you want to know how many minor-crime reports we get in a week?”

  The telephone rang, and as Will was nodding to the departing officer, he answered it. It was Tiny Heftland. Tiny was calling from Maryland and wanted to meet Will on Friday night, just outside of Baltimore, to go over the results of his investigation in the MacCameron case.

  “Why don’t you come down here to my office?” Will suggested. “Or better yet, let’s just talk by phone.”

  “Well, I really think you need to see Reichstad’s research center for yourself. Besides, on Friday I’m on my way north to Pennsylvania for a new case I’ve got. Your office is in the wrong direction, good buddy. I’m going to be tailing the husband of some really rich society lady in Philadelphia. If you get up here by seven, we can spend some time together and then I can head straight up to Philly.”

  Tiny gave Will directions to a small grocery store a few miles from the research institute. They would meet there on F
riday evening.

  As Will hung up the phone, he noticed that Angus MacCameron was in the doorway, looking down at Betty as she was kneeling to clean up the broken glass.

  “Good heavens, what happened?” MacCameron asked.

  “Vandals, I guess,” Will responded, motioning MacCameron into the conference room in the back.

  “Vandals?”

  “That’s what the police think.”

  “Was anything stolen?”

  “No.”

  “Were there signs of a search—of somebody going through your office?”

  “Reverend MacCameron, we’ve got it under control. So let’s pick up where we left off on your case.”

  But MacCameron wouldn’t let the matter rest.

  “Reichstad and his cronies are ruthless,” he declared. “This is exactly the kind of thing we should have expected.”

  “Are you saying that they are behind this—my office being broken into?”

  “I’m saying,” MacCameron noted with a slightly raised eyebrow, “that you can expect a leopard to act like a ruthless man-hunter, even if he has changed the spots on his coat.”

  Once again, Will was enduring another of his client’s wandering witticisms that always seemed to be off the mark—and forever irrelevant to the lawsuit. Will shrugged it off and got to the issue that he had been pondering since their last meeting.

  “Did you bring the tape?” Will asked.

  MacCameron pulled out a small brown-paper bag and emptied it onto the table, revealing a single microcassette and a small handheld tape recorder.

  The two looked at the little cassette.

  “You have listened to it recently?” Will asked.

  MacCameron nodded his head and said, “Now it’s your turn.” But then he quickly added, “Before you turn it on, tell me—are you coming with me this Friday to Fiona’s concert?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Will responded. “I just found out I have to be somewhere this Friday night.”

  MacCameron shook his head and gave Will a strange smile.

  Will snapped the cassette into the player and turned it on. There was a moment of fuzzy background noise. Then he heard the obnoxious, warbling beep at the end of MacCameron’s answering-machine greeting.