Fitch squinted and cocked his head a little to the left. Did he hear her correctly? "Started smoking?"
"Yep."
"I give up."
"Easter. Surprised?"
"Your friend."
"Yeah. Look, Fitch, gotta run. I'll call you tomorrow." She was on her feet and gone, disappearing as quickly as she'd come.
Dante with the hired woman reacted before Fitch, who was stunned for a second with the speed of her departure. Dante radioed Pang in the lobby, who saw her exit the elevator and leave the hotel. Jumper tracked her on foot for two blocks before losing her in a crowded alley.
For an hour they watched the streets and parking garages and hotel lobbies and bars but did not see her. Fitch was in his room at the St. Regis when the call came from Dubaz, who'd been dispatched to the airport. She was waiting for a commuter flight that left in an hour and a half and landed in Mobile at ten-fifty. Don't follow her, Fitch instructed him, then called two standbys in Biloxi, who raced to the airport in Mobile.
Marlee lived in a rented condo facing the Back Bay of Biloxi. When she was twenty minutes from home, she called the Biloxi police by dialing 911 on her cellphone and explained to the dispatcher that a Ford Taurus with two thugs in it was following her, had been in fact since she left Mobile, that they were stalkers of some odious variety and she was fearful for her life. With the dispatcher coordinating movements, Marlee did a series of turns through a quiet subdivision and abruptly stopped at an all-night gas station. As she filled her tank, a police car pulled behind the Taurus, which was trying to hide around the corner of a closed dry cleaner. The two thugs were ordered out, then marched across the parking lot to face the woman they'd been stalking.
Marlee performed superbly as the terrified victim. The cops got angrier the more she cried. Fitch's goons were hauled away to jail.
AT TEN, Chuck, the large deputy with a sullen attitude, unfolded a chair at the end of the hallway near his room, and set up watch for the night. It was Wednesday, the second night of sequestration, and time to breach security. As planned, Nicholas phoned Chuck's room at eleven-fifteen. The instant he left his post to answer it, Jerry and Nicholas slipped from their rooms and walked casually through the exit door near Lou Dell's room. Lou Dell was in bed sound asleep. And though Willis had slept most of the day in court, he too was under the covers, snoring furiously.
Avoiding the front lobby, they eased through the shadows and found the taxi waiting precisely as instructed. Fifteen minutes later they entered the Nugget Casino on Biloxi Beach. They drank three beers in the sports bar as Jerry lost a hundred dollars on a hockey game. They flirted with two married women whose husbands were either winning or losing a fortune at the crap tables. The flirting took a turn toward serious, and at 1 A.M. Nicholas left the bar to play five-dollar blackjack and drink decaf coffee. He played and waited and watched as the crowd dwindled.
Marlee slipped into the chair next to him and said nothing. Nicholas pushed a short stack of chips in front of her. A drunk college boy was the only other player. "Upstairs," she whispered between hands as the dealer turned to talk to the pit boss.
They met on an outdoor mezzanine with a view of the parking lot and the ocean in the distance. November had arrived and the air was light and cool. There was no one else around. They kissed and huddled together on a bench. She replayed her trip to New Orleans; every detail, every word. They laughed at the two boys from Mobile who were now in the county jail. She'd call Fitch after daybreak and get his men released.
They talked business briefly because Nicholas wanted to return to the bar and collect Jerry before he drank too much and lost all his money or got caught with somebody's wife.
They each had slim pocket cellphones which could not be completely secured. New codes and passwords were exchanged.
Nicholas kissed her good-bye and left her alone on the mezzanine.
WENDALL ROHR had a hunch the jury was tired of listening to researchers tout their findings and lecture from their charts and graphs. His consultants were telling him the jurors had heard enough about lung cancer and smoking, that they had probably been convinced before the trial started that cigarettes were addictive and dangerous. He was confident he had established a strong causal relationship between the Bristols and the tumors that killed Jacob Wood, and it was now time to ice the case. Thursday morning he announced that the plaintiff would like to call Lawrence Krigler as its next witness. A noticeable tension seized the defense table for the moment it took to call Mr. Krigler from somewhere in the rear. Another plaintiff's lawyer. John Riley Milton from Denver, rose and smiled sweetly at the jury.
Lawrence Krigler was in his late sixties, tanned and fit, well dressed and quick in step. He was the first witness without Doctor stuck to the front of his name since the video of Jacob Wood. He lived now in Florida, where he'd retired after he left Pynex. John Riley Milton rushed him through the preliminaries because the juicy stuff was just around the corner.
An engineering graduate of North Carolina State, he'd worked for Pynex for thirty years before leaving in the midst of a lawsuit thirteen years earlier. He'd sued Pynex. The company'd countersued him. They settled out of court with terms being nondisclosed.
When he was first hired, the company, then called Union Tobacco, or simply U-Tab, had shipped him to Cuba to study tobacco production down there. He'd worked in production ever since, or at least until the day he left. He'd studied the tobacco leaf and a thousand ways to grow it more efficiently. He considered himself an expert in this field, though he was not testifying as an expert and would not offer opinions. Only facts.
In 1969, he completed a three-year, in-house study on the feasibility of growing an experimental tobacco leaf known only as Raleigh 4. It had one third the nicotine of regular tobacco. Krigler concluded, with a wealth of research to support him, that Raleigh 4 could be grown and produced as efficiently as all other tobaccos then grown and produced by U-Tab.
It was a monumental work, one he was quite proud of, and he was devastated when his study was at first ignored by higher-ups within his company.
He slogged his way through the entrenched bureaucracy above him, with disheartening results. No one seemed to care about this new strain of tobacco with much less nicotine.
Then he learned that he was very wrong. His bosses cared a great deal about nicotine levels. In the summer of 1971 he got his hands on an intercompany memo instructing upper management to quietly do whatever possible to discredit Krigler's work with Raleigh 4. His own people were silently knifing him in the back. He kept his cool, told no one he had the memo, and began a clandestine project to learn the reasons for the conspiracy against him.
At this point in his testimony, John Riley Milton introduced into evidence two exhibits-the thick study Krigler completed in 1969, and the 1971 memo.
The answer became crystal clear, and it was something he'd come to suspect. U-Tab could not afford to produce a leaf with markedly lower nicotine, because nicotine meant profits. The industry had known since the late thirties that nicotine was physically addictive.
"How do you know the industry knew?" Milton asked, very deliberately. With the exception of the defense lawyers, who were doing their best to appear bored and indifferent, the entire courtroom was listening with rapt attention.
"It's common knowledge within the industry," Krigler answered. "There was a secret study in the late 1930s, paid for by a tobacco company, and the result was clear proof that the nicotine in cigarettes is addictive."