Read Online Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild - Free Book Online Page B

last, without looking at her. “Twenty years have taught me one thing, which is that the best way is to put off reaching a conclusion for as long as possible. Just let the evidence gather, and it will lead you to your suspect. You’re doing just the opposite. You have a hunch about Mr. Tregear, and you’re torturing perfectly neutral facts into supporting evidence. This is going to come to grief, Ellie. Even if Tregear is Jack the Ripper, it’ll end badly.”
    â€œSam, could we just take a look at this guy?”
    â€œEllie…”
    â€œCome on, Sam. Just give it a day or two. It’s not like we have any other hot leads.”
    *   *   *
    Lieutenant Commander Hal Roland parked across the street from the San Francisco Police Department. He picked up his hat from the seat beside him and, before he locked the car, took his uniform coat from the hook above the rear door. As he almost always did lately, he looked at the gold stripes on the sleeve—thick, thin, thick—and experienced a faint twinge of anguish.
    He was due for promotion. In another two months, if everything proceeded on schedule, that middle stripe would widen out to catch up with the other two, and it was about goddamned time.
    Until recently, Roland had had few anxieties about his career or much of anything else. He was a Navy recruiting poster boy, athletic and trim, with the sunny smile that comes with excellent fitness reports from adoring superiors. He had finished in the top ten percent of his class at Annapolis, having been gifted with the kind of practical intelligence the brass likes to see in an ambitious and promising junior officer. His private life, like his personnel file, was without blemish. He was happily married with twin girls. Everyone liked him, which even his posting to the Shore Patrol hadn’t changed. He was that contradiction in terms, a popular cop.
    And then one fine day he had been assigned as Stephen Tregear’s case officer.
    For starters, Tregear was a civilian. Granted, he worked for the Navy, but as a private contractor, so why was he the Shore Patrol’s responsibility? Naval Intelligence, yes—and Roland had more than a suspicion that the spooks kept themselves very well informed about Tregear’s movements and associations—but it was not normally part of the Shore Patrol’s duties to babysit the errant geniuses of Special Projects.
    And then there was the man himself. It gave Roland the fidgets just to be in the same room with him.
    Roland had read the files. Stephen Tregear, having lied about his age, had joined the Navy at sixteen. He had risen to the rank of seaman first class. He had never even finished high school, and yet out of the blue, God knows how or where he had picked it up, his Standard Interservice Aptitude Test scores revealed he possessed a knowledge of mathematics and probability theory that would have been considered astonishing in an MIT graduate. His IQ was not even considered measurable.
    The Navy had taught him computers and, after a while, had put him to work in Codes and Ciphers, where apparently he had performed wonderfully. The Navy had offered to send him to school so he could qualify for a commission, but he had declined. He regularly refused promotion. Still, at the end of his tour, Tregear had reenlisted for another four years. He seemed at home, a career man albeit rather a strange one.
    And then, at the beginning of his second tour, the whole world changed. There had been an arrest. A chief warrant officer had been selling code manuals to the Chinese for some eight years, and the Navy suddenly found itself without any secrets. The enemy had everything they needed to read Navy cipher like it was the Sunday funnies. But four weeks after the indictment Tregear came up with what amounted to a version of the old-fashioned book code but was virtually unbreakable because the referent was itself encoded and, anyway, changed