In a library not far from Lawrence Hannafin’s house, Jane sat at a workstation in the computer alcove and verified, as best she could, what Larkin had told her about Iron Furnace, Kentucky.
Iron Furnace Lake Resort was owned by a private corporation, Terra Firma Enterprises, which held a portfolio of six jewelbox hospitality-business properties. Terra Firma was owned by Apoidea Trust, which had an address on Grand Cayman Island, a tax haven.
The combined value of the five U.S. companies known to be owned by the Apoidea Trust: two billion dollars. The director of the trust: an Englishman named Derek Lennox-Heywood.
People sufficiently interested to speculate about such things believed Apoidea was one of several trusts that oversaw the assets of David James Michael. Although a link between him and Apoidea couldn’t be established beyond doubt, photos existed of D.J. and Lennox-Heywood together at charitable events in New York and London.
The house that Larkin said was D.J.’s secret retreat, a five-acre estate on Iron Furnace Lake, not far from the five-star resort, was held by Apiculus LLC. The owner of Apiculus was a corporation in Liechtenstein, about which she could find no information.
On a hunch, she looked up the word apoidea: the name of the superfamily that included hymenopterous insects such as honeybees and bumblebees. And Apiculus meant a small sharp point, such as a leaf tip…or the stinger of a bee.
She felt sure that in his desperation, Randall Larkin had told her the truth. Apoidea and Apiculus seemed to confirm it.
For whatever reason, perhaps a superstitious one, David James Michael tended to name things with words that began with the letter A. He called his inner circle of conspirators Arcadians. The hateful brothels staffed with girls whose minds had been scrubbed and then programmed was Aspasia. Now Apoidea and Apiculus.
However, confirming Larkin’s claim that D.J. could be found in the Iron Furnace house through the end of March wasn’t a simple task. Unlike celebrities, people worth billions of dollars tended to guard their privacy. They couldn’t be easily tracked by Star Spotter or similar services. D. J. Michael was scheduled to attend a charity gala in Miami in May and a conference on climate change in England in June. Otherwise, as far as anyone knew, he would be spending the rest of the year snugged in a coffin containing a cool bed of soil from Transylvania.
She put together search strings, trying to find any reference to his having been in Iron Furnace previously. Nada.
As she was about to log off, she wondered if Bertold Shenneck, the recently deceased scientist and Arcadian, partner with D.J. in a company named Far Horizons, had ever spent time in Iron Furnace. Bingo. In March of the previous year, Shenneck chaired a four-day conference on the future medical applications of nanotechnology, sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration.
By association at least, D.J. was tied to Iron Furnace. But she wished that she had more reason to believe the billionaire actually used the place as a secret retreat.
She went to Google Earth and conducted a look-down on the town and the resort as it had been when this database had been created.
Having had a minute to consider that the FDA had sponsored Shenneck’s conference, she wondered if scoping out the estate owned by Apiculus LLC would trigger an alarm somewhere. D.J. seemed to have allies in the security agencies—CIA, NSA, Homeland Security—as well as in the FBI, so perhaps they had done him the favor of putting this five-acre property on a watch list, to be sure that everyone checking it out would be themselves checked out.
She took a Kleenex from a coat pocket, tore off a piece, wet it with saliva, and pasted it over the computer’s camera lens.
Only then, she scanned farther on Lakeview Road and found a satellite shot of the target estate. When she tried to zero down on it, the magnification function failed to work.
She went to Google Street View, cruised past the front entrance to the resort, and continued west on Lakeview Road. As she approached the Apiculus-owned estate, the computer screen blinked to gray. The camera function had been triggered from some remote location. If the lens hadn’t been covered, a shoulders-up black silhouette of her would have been centered on the gray screen, and an Arcadian in one security agency or another would have had her photograph.
She didn’t take the time to log off. She killed the power to the workstation and got up and grabbed her handbag and exited the library and walked briskly three blocks to where she’d left her car.
All the evidence putting D. J. Michael in Iron Furnace was circumstantial. However, a preponderance of circumstantial evidence was sufficient to convict in a court of law. And everything supported Randall Larkin’s claim that currently D.J. would be found out there in Kentucky. Her next move was decided.