“And—as I told you before, Mr. Maggs—this works better if you simply answer
the questions.” He nodded. “Can you tell me any of the activities Dr. Weiss was
involved in during his visit?”
“Let me think. We’re going back over a decade.” He wagged his head slightly.
“Sorry. I guess mostly sightseeing and clubs, maybe a Broadway show.”
“Did he have any diplomatic or foreign service acquaintances in New York?”
Maggs furrowed his brow. “Ari? Doubt it. Ari was a science geek, pretty much just a
lab rat. Rarely left the maze, if you know what I mean.” That didn’t square with
what Fariq Kuzbari had said about his attendance at the symposium on WMDs. She made
a note and went at it another way. “Was he political? I mean, you donate
significant profits from your company to radical organizations like,” she referred
to notes, “Mercator Watch. What was your nickname for it?”
“GreedPeace,” he chuckled, but his eyes flashed with a sudden and visceral anger.
“The world is fucked up by top-down greed, Detective. It’s why we have so much
war. The wealthy use their power against the powerless. It’s got to stop. It will
stop.” He gestured through the showcase window to the copper and stainless vats
hulking in his production area. “This beer business is just my springboard. I plan
to rival Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in their philanthropy—but in my own way.
These days I spend more time with my broker than my brewmeister for one reason: I am
completely committed to using my business and investments to create a war chest for
peace.” He laughed and finger-combed his hair back. “And, yes, I hear the irony. I
went to Oxford, you know.”
“Didn’t any of your political passion rub off on Ari Weiss?”
Maggs came off his mini-tirade and relaxed again. “For Ari, rest his soul, if it
wasn’t under a microscope, it didn’t exist. The only thing radical he gave a rat’
s arse about was free radicals with unpaired electrons.”
“Did Ari ever mention the name Tyler Wynn?”
He thought and said, “Mm, no.”
“Does this help?” She tapped her iPhone and brought up Wynn’s picture. He shook
no. Then she showed Maggs Joe Flynn’s old surveillance shot of the two men in the
front seat of the parked car. The driver was the French doctor; she didn’t know the
other. “Do you recognize either of these two men?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Maggs pointed to the man on the passenger side. “That’
s my friend. That’s Ari Weiss.”
There it was. Carey Maggs had made a connection between Tyler Wynn and Ari Weiss,
and the link was the French doctor who helped the CIA man fake his heart attack. But
what did it all mean? On the subway uptown, while she scrutinized the lethal
potential of everyone who got on and off her car, Nikki tried to do the math and
couldn’t get there. What she needed was to bounce it off Rook, whose nutty
speculation both annoyed her and freed her from linear thinking at the same time.
Rook.
A butterfly rose, stirring dark sediment. She pushed it down and concentrated on the
case.
Before she even got to her desk, Detective Heat called across the squad room for
Roach to start digging on Weiss. At her computer, she opened the Web page Rook had
bookmarked weeks before and reread the obit of Ari Weiss, MD. The brief article said
the medical researcher had been a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine and a
Rhodes Scholar, which was how he would have met his friend Carey Maggs at Oxford. He
had died in 2000 of a rare blood disease called babesiosis. Heat clicked that
hyperlink and the Wikipedia page described babesiosis as a malaria-like parasitic
disorder. Like Lyme disease, it was generally tick-borne, but it could also come
from a contaminated transfusion.