Under Cover of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

laughed.
    Woody was looking at his four-foot-by-six-foot computer monitor. He said, “Okay. There were three dead in the blast. Eleven injured. Marion Nye is in the secret hospital in Portland.”
    â€œGood! How is she?”
    â€œStable, it says. So that gives us anywhere between five and eight suspicious deaths, all IRS, all within the last two months, and nobody knows who’s doing it. It’s driving the IRS crazy. They could start bombing us .”
    â€œCould it be us?”
    Woody didn’t answer. The top levels at Sales Tax don’t tell us everything.
    â€œWhat if we could solve this ourselves?” I asked.
    Woody’s lips pursed. “First you’d have to find out who’s doing the killing. Then it has to be someone that isn’t us. We don’t know that yet. Then you have to make the IRS believe it. You like mysteries?”
    I grinned.
    Room service appeared. We stopped to eat, and made conversation for Christine’s benefit, before we settled in for some computer work.
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    Eloise Stern had drowned. That was seven weeks ago at “June in Jamaica,” mid-June 2005, when the upper ranks of all the United States tax gathering bureaus met for four weeks of riotous excess. If the Jamaican police had done a proper autopsy, they’d have found her lungs filled with champagne from the swimming pool.
    Fourth of July: Harry Greene had been poisoned. Woody stared. “Poison? Doesn’t the IRS have garnetine?”
    Garnetine is an inoculation against most poisons. I said, “No, that’s just ours, just Sales Tax. One day we’ll trade garnetine to them for something we need.”
    â€œDamn office politics.” He read on. Washington DC police found Greene’s death puzzling. Stomach contents: both beluga and salmon caviar, with onion and chives and chopped egg as condiments. Odd things to find in a government employee earning $80,000 a year and spending the night alone.
    Three might have been ringers, but they’d died very close together. Jane Hennessey was descending Everest when she’d had a stroke. Samuel Jefferson and Keki Tomomato had died within days of each other, both from heart attacks or strokes, no autopsies yet: the only deaths ever recorded (except that their presence never would be recorded) aboard the International Space Station. All in July, 2005.
    â€œToo many strokes,” Woody said.
    I said, “Coincidence happens. Strokes happen when the oxygen’s thin.”
    He said, “Say Jefferson and Tomomato pulled rank: that would get them up to the Space Station without training. Their hearts stopped all by themselves. Hennessey’s probably did, too.”
    â€œYeah.” Why murder her on the way down from Everest? Why wait?
    â€œWhich leaves five killings and not many suspects. We’re looking for an organization, right? No single person could do all that.”
    I nodded. I was keeping half an eye on Woody’s computer screen. We might be getting more word of Marion.
    â€œWhat have we got for suspects? There’s Sales Tax, that’s us. There’s Hidden Tax. There’s the IRS itself; it might be some kind of internal war. They’ve got the power and the dominance games, too. We’d like it to be Hidden Tax, because if it’s internal IRS, we won’t know which side to talk to. What do you know about Hidden Tax?”
    â€œThey’re pretty secretive.”
    Woody sipped coffee, waiting me out.
    â€œOh, all right. They’re ungodly rich, even compared to the rest of us. They were a fringe group once, a branch of Revenue when it was just one branch, until they put the country on a silver money basis. First silver, then just paper. There isn’t any real money anymore. They can get all the wealth they need by printing it. We have to play numbers games.”
    â€œWhere’s their motive? Why would they bomb a restaurant, or poison people? Hidden Tax were