Hannibal - Страница 16

"Brian called from the lab, Starling. Mason's X-ray and the one you got from Barney are a match. It's Lector's arm. They'll digitize the images and compare them, but he says there's no question. We'll post everything to the secure Lector VICAP folder."

"What about Mason Verger?"

"We tell him the truth," Crawford said. "You and I both know he won't share, Starling, unless he gets something he can't move on himself. But if we try to take over his lead in Brazil at this point, it'll evaporate."

"You told me to leave it alone and I did."

"You were doing something in here."

"Mason's X ray came by DHL Express. DHL took the bar code and label information and pinpointed the pickup location. It's in the Hotel Ibarra in Rio."

Starling raised her hand to forestall interruption. "This is all New York sources, now. No inquiries at all in Brazil. "Mason does his phone business, a lot of it, through the switch-board of a sports book in Las Vegas. You can imagine the volume of calls they take."

"Do I want to know how you found that out?"

"Strictly legit," Starling said. "Well, pretty much legit – I didn't leave anything in his house. I've got the codes to look at his phone bill, that's all. All the tech agents have them. Let's say he obstructs justice. With his influence, how long would we have to beg for a warrant to trap and trace? What could you do to him anyway if he was convicted? But he's using a sports book."

"I see it," Crawford said. "The Nevada Gaming Commission could either tap the phone or squeeze the sports book for what we need to know, which is where the calls go."

She nodded. "I left Mason alone just like you said."

"I can see that," Crawford said. "You can tell Mason we expect to help through Interpol and the embassy. Tell him we need to move people down there and start the framework for extradition. Letter's probably committed crimes in South America, so we better extradite before the Rio police start looking in their files under Cannibalismo. If he's in South America at all. Starling, does it make you sick to talk to Mason?"

"I have to get in the mode. You walked me through it when we did that floater in West Virginia. What am I saying, `floater.' She was a person named Fredericka Bimmel, and, yes, Mason makes me sick. A lot of stuff makes me sick lately, Jack."

Starling surprised herself into silence. She had never before addressed Section Chief Jack Crawford by his first name, she had never planned to call him "Jack" and it shocked her. She studied his face, a face famously hard to read.

He nodded, his smile wry and sad. "Me too, Starling. Want a couple of these Pepto-Bismol tablets to chew before you talk to Mason?".Mason Verger did not bother to take Starling's call. A secretary thanked her for the message and said he'd return her call. But he didn't get back to her personally. To Mason, several places higher on the notification list than Starling, the X-ray match was old news.

Chapter 14

MASON KNEW that his X-ray was truly of Dr Letter's arm well before Starling was told, because Mason's sources within the justice Department were better than hers.

Mason was told in an E-mail message signed with the screen name Token287. That is the second screen name of U.S. Representative Parton Vellmore's assistant on the House Judiciary Committee. Vellmore's office had been E-mailed by CassiusI99, the second screen name of the justice Department's own Paul Krendler.

Mason was excited. He did not think Dr Letter was in Brazil, but the X-ray proved that the doctor now had the normal number of fingers on his left hand. That information meshed with a new lead from Europe on the doctor's whereabouts. Mason believed the tip came from within Italian law enforcement and it was the strongest whiff of Letter he had had in years.

Mason had no intention of sharing his lead with the FBI. Owing to seven years of relentless effort, access to confidential federal files, extensive leafleting, no international restrictions and large expenditures of money, Mason was ahead of the FBI in the pursuit of Lecter. He only shared information with the Bureau when he needed to suck its resources.

To keep up appearances, he instructed his secretary to pester Starling for developments anyway. Mason's tickler file prompted the secretary to call her at least three times a day.

Mason immediately wired five thousand dollars to his informant in Brazil to pursue the source of the X-ray. The contingency fund he wired to Switzerland was much larger and he was prepared to send more when he had hard information in hand.

He believed that his source in Europe had found Dr Lecter, but Mason had been cheated on information many times and he had learned to be careful. Soon proof would come. Until it did, to relieve the agony of waiting Mason concerned himself with what would happen after the doctor was in his hands. These arrangements had also been long in the making, for Mason was a student of suffering…

God's choices in inflicting suffering are not satisfactory to us, nor are they understandable, unless innocence offends Him. Clearly He needs some help in directing the blind fury with which He flogs the earth.

Mason came to understand his role in all of this in the twelfth year of his paralysis, when he was no longer sizeable beneath his sheet and knew that he would never rise again. His quarters at the Muskrat Farm mansion were completed and he had means, but not unlimited means, because the Verger patriarch, Molson, still ruled.

It was Christmas in the year of Dr Lecter's escape. Subject to the quality of feelings that commonly attend Christmas, Mason was wishing bitterly, that he had arranged for Dr Lecter to be murdered in the asylum; Mason knew that somewhere Dr Lecter was going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, and very likely having a good time…Mason himself lay under his respirator, a soft blanket covering all, a nurse standing by, shifting on her feet, wishing she could sit down. Some poor children had been bussed to Muskrat Farm to carol. With the doctor's permission, Mason's windows were opened briefly to the crisp air and, beneath the windows, holding candles in their cupped hands, the children sang.

The lights were out in Mason's room and in the black air above the farm the stars hung close.

"O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!"

How still we see thee lie.

The mockery of the line pressed down on him.

How still we see thee lie, Mason!

The Christmas stars outside his window maintained their stifling silence. The stars said nothing to him when he looked up to them with his pleading, goggled eye, gestured to them with the fingers he could move. Mason did not think that he could breathe. If he were suffocating in space, he thought, the last thing he would see would be the beautiful silent airless stars. He was suffocating now, he thought, his respirator could not keep up, he had to wait for breath the lines of his vital signs Christmas – green on the scopes and spiking, little evergreens in the black forest night of the scopes. Spike of his heartbeat, systolic spike, diastolic spike.

The nurse frightened, about to push the alarm button, about to reach for the adrenaline.

Mockery of the lines, how still we see thee lie, Mason.

An Epiphany then at Christmas. Before the nurse could ring, or reach for medication, the first coarse bristles of Mason's revenge brushed his pale and seeking, ghost crab of a hand, and began to calm him.

At Christmas communions around the earth, the devout believe that, through the miracle of transubstantiation, they eat the actual body and blood of Christ. Mason began the preparations for an even more impressive ceremony with no transubstantiation necessary. He began his arrangements for Dr Hannibal Lecter to be eaten alive.

Chapter 15

MASON'S EDUCATION was an odd one, but perfectly fitted to the life his father envisioned for him and to the task before him now.

As a child he attended a boarding school, to which his father contributed heavily, where Mason's frequent absences were excused. For weeks at a time the elder Verger conducted Mason's real education, taking the boy with him to the stockyards and slaughterhouses that were the basis of his fortune.

Molson Verger was a pioneer in many areas of livestock production, particularly in the area of economy.

His early experiments with cheap feed rank with those of Batterham fifty years before. Molson Verger adulterated the pigs' diet with hog hair meal, mealed.chicken feathers and manure to an extent considered daring at the time. He was regarded as a reckless visionary in the 1940's when he first took away the pigs' fresh drinking water and had them drink ditch liquor, made of fermented animal waste, to hasten weight gain. The laughter stopped when his profits rolled in, and his competitors hurried to copy him.

Molson Verger's leadership in the meatpacking industry did not stop there. He fought bravely and with his own funds against the Humane Slaughter Act, strictly from the standpoint of economy, and managed to keep face branding legal though it cost him dearly in legislative compensation. With Mason at his side, he supervised large-scale experiments in the problems of lairage, determining how long you could deprive animals of food and water before slaughter without significant weight losses.

It was Verger-sponsored genetic research that finally achieved the heavy double-muscling of the Belgian swine breeds without the concomitant drip losses that plagued the Belgians. Molson Verger bought breeding stock worldwide and sponsored a number of foreign breeding programs.