Antenna Syndrome Read Free Page B

so high I didn’t like to think about it, but the
transponder took the hit in lieu of paying cash, and I’d only see
the bill at month’s end. Transportation costs usually discouraged
me from operating outside of Manhattan, but for the money I was
getting for this gig, I would have driven to hell and back.

Chapter 4
     
    I hadn’t been out to Long Island in ages so I took
the Southern State Parkway for a change. With so many residents
having fled the area, traffic was light. Mostly it was vans and
trucks – day-strippers from outside the five boroughs – visiting
the suburbs for a day of salvage. Armed with reciprocal saws, a
crew could strip an abandoned house clean of its copper plumbing
and wiring in a day. Scrap copper was worth a fortune. Urban strip
miners, at least those who stayed one step ahead of the police,
were the new entrepreneurs of the era.
    En route to Long Island, I kept the speedometer at a
steady 60 mph, and not just for the sake of fuel economy. Every
licensed vehicle was fitted with electronic VIN, and roadside
transponders made it virtually impossible to speed without getting
ticketed in real time. Progress sucked. Although new cars featured
automatic road control, my 10-year-old Charger wasn’t one of them.
I didn’t care to give up control to a cluster of chips and software
anyway.
    I switched my iFocals to audio and ran a search on
Harris Jordan to find anything else on him that I hadn’t already
been spoon-fed by the media. I listened to a biography I found on
Wikipedia. It was all squeaky clean, as perfect a curriculum
vitae as any mayoral candidate could ask for, something his
staffers had probably posted just before he’d declared his
candidacy.
    After Harvard Law School, Jordan had worked his way
through a series of mandates: non-profit organizations, municipal
government, the state legislature in Albany, Wall Street, a stint
in Iraq with the State Department, a few years in Washington, then
back to municipal government and an increasingly public profile,
first as a city councilor and then as financial controller.
    On the personal side, he’d been married only once,
in 1999 to Patricia Dunning, whom he’d met at Harvard. They’d had
one daughter, Natalie, in 2001. They’d divorced in 2006, his
ex-wife reclaiming her maiden name, taking custody of the daughter
and moving to Florida. The Wiki article offered no other details of
his personal life.
    However, thanks to an attempted character
assassination by a political rival last year, I knew there’d been
rumors of adultery at the tail end of his marriage. That rumor had
later found its way into the digital news network, but Jordan had
promptly slapped the publishers with libel suits, and the story had
been withdrawn before gaining traction.
    But online, nothing ever really disappears. It just
sinks into the background, waiting to be dug up by a search engine.
Eventually I found what I was looking for. Rumor was, Jordan had
formed a relationship with a state legislature intern named
Jennifer Teale. Perhaps more than an affair, maybe more like the
love of his life, he’d been with her almost two years during his
stint in Albany. But for some reason, the relationship had come to
an abrupt end.
    After more searching, I found an obituary notice.
Jennifer Teale had died on June 17, 2006. The date rang a bell.
Marielle’s birth date!
    Now it fell into place. Marielle’s mother had
probably died giving birth to her. Because Jordan had loved Teale,
and Marielle was their daughter, he’d adopted her. That probably
hadn’t sat too well with his wife, hence the divorce.
    I closed the search engine and tuned into some hard
rock on satellite radio, rewarding my research productivity with a
few puffs on my personal vaporizer. Cigarettes were now outlawed
everywhere in America, although a lively black market continued to
service those still nostalgic for the good old days, when inhaling
a burning cloud of carcinogens seemed a relatively