Cats in the Mouse House: A Nicholas Drake Novel

By Michael Woods

Cats in the Mouse House launches a mystery/techno thriller series in the spirit of Rex Stout and Michael Crichton. Created by Michael and Mary B. Woods, co-authors of 50 published books on science and technology, the Nicholas Drake novels unfold from Towering Oaks, an updated Civil War era plantation in the Virginia countryside near Washingtion, DC. Home of Nicholas Drake, former FBI director turned news media magnate and private investigator and his flagship newspaper, Towering Oaks gives Drake a venue for solving crimes when not occupied by a compulsion to craft a new breed olive trees that will survive northern winters. Drake and confidential assistant John Kornecki repurpose reporters from the newspaper empire as investigators in their work. In Cats in the Mouse House, fires are mysteriously killing workers at the world’s biggest mouse factory. The “Mouse House” at the National Institutes of Health produces 20,000 laboratory mice each year. Medicine’s test tubes on four feet, stand-ins for humans in experiments that cannot be done with people. Drake and Kornecki discover that the fire victims have something in common. They all owned Mau cats. Exotic, beautiful, costly, Maus were the cats the ancient Egyptians worshiped as gods. As the deaths mount in this tale - rich with true-to-life glimpses of the world of news media and science - Drake uses a ruse to get reporters inside the Mouse House. They uncover a nefarious scheme to use that government facility for private gain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Woods
• Release date: Mar 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9780615456881

Michael Woods

Michael Woods is a science and medical writer whose nationally syndicated newspaper stories and columns have won numerous national awards. He directs a program at the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, to inform the public about science. He and his wife, Mary B. Woods, have written almost forty books together. Michael is the writer, and Mary is the researcher.

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CATS IN THE MOUSE HOUSE:

A NICHOLAS DRAKE NOVEL

by

Michael Woods and Mary B. Woods

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Michael Wood and Mary B. Woods

PUBLISHED BY: Michael Woods and Mary B. Woods on Smashwords

Cats in the Mouse House:

A Nicholas Drake Novel

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CATS IN THE MOUSE HOUSE:

A NICHOLAS DRAKE NOVEL

Chapter 1

The security system in the plantation house sounds an SOS, the international distress signal, whenever someone starts up the driveway toward the restored Civil War mansion where Nicholas Drake lives and I work as his confidential assistant. It was that urgent, nerve-plucking dit-dit-dit/dah-dah-dah/did-dit-dit—all running together fast with no pauses—that brought me to the front door that steamy July morning. With nobody on the appointment schedule, I expected to greet tourists who got lost while looking for Stonewall Jackson’s arm. Still, force of habit, I shrugged my shoulder to make sure that the 9 mm Beretta Baby Eagle was in its holster under my left arm. To me, the security system tone, that dot-dot-dot/dash-dash-dash/dot-dot-dot of old Morse Code, was a constant reminder that people coming up the driveway could mean trouble. A few of them had left us in real distress.

I thought tourists because they tended to take a wrong turn at the entrance to Towering Oaks, down where the road divides like a pitchfork. One fork has a sign for the newspaper that Drake owns and uses in his private investigation business. You may have seen that article in [I]USA Today[I], the profile of Drake Inquiries, LLC, as the world’s biggest and best private eye company. We do have 80 branch offices around the world and that article was right. It said we solve more cases than anybody else. With Drake a former assistant director of the FBI, what would you expect? That’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation, by the way.

One of those signs out front read: "[I]The Daily Bugle[I], Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting." It pointed the way to the Tobacco Barn. Well, there once was a real tobacco barn down there, in the 1800s when Towering Oaks was a working plantation. Now you’d see the eight-story stone and glass office complex for [I]The Bugle[I]. Another fork led to Oaks Manor, the historic section of the plantation overlooking the Rappahannock River. The Manor had a replica of the original planter’s house, built ten years ago rather than in 1715 like Drake’s [I]Gone-With-The-Wind[I]-style mansion. Clustered around the Manor were barns, stables, an icehouse, kitchens, a dairy, blacksmith’s shop, tannery, slaves’ quarters—all authentic reconstructions of the original plantation. Actors in period costumes played the roles of plantation workers and entertained tourists with vignettes about plantation life.

Most tourists come out here, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about an hour from Washington DC, to visit Oaks Manor and to see Stonewall Jackson’s left arm. Rebel surgeons had to amputate the arm after Jackson was accidentally shot by one of his own soldiers in the Civil War. Jackson was one of the South’s greatest generals, and he soon died after the incident. That was one of the many reasons why the South got whipped in the war. Believe it or not, that arm did get its own separate grave and tombstone. I’ll tell you what the tombstone reads: Arm of Stonewall Jackson, May 3, 1863. If you want to know more, check the Internet.

The other fork in the road leads right here to the Plantation House, where the planter and his family once lived, and then curves north into Oaks Acres, the residential subdivision where many of [I]The Bugle[I] senior staff and executives with Drake Inquiries have homes. Mary and me and the kids live in that brick southern colonial with the three dormers on the roof and those pink and blue and white hydrangea bushes running up both sides of the driveway. Further along, you’ll find 5,000 acres of corn, cattle, ostriches, greenhouses, barns, machinery sheds, and other fixtures of a working farm in the Northern Virginia countryside.

Expecting a frazzled mom navigating the family SUV, I grabbed one of the information packets from the table. It had a map and directions to the Jackson gravesite on the front and a history of Towering Oaks on the back. Inside were packets of coupons for Oaks Manor and the Towering Oaks Farm Shop, a cut-rate subscription offer for the online edition of [I]The Bugle[I], and other stuff. When I opened the front door, two young men were leaning their bicycles against the fluted wooden columns that straddle the entrance. Right away I got the feeling that they were not looking for Stonewall Jackson’s arm. Both had little lapel pins with the logo of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints—the Mormons. It was the 6-spired Temple from Temple Square at Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. I recognized it because Drake and I had attended publishing conventions in the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, and Temple Square is a two-minute walk down the street.

We would like to see Mr. Drake, one of the men said. I’m William Graham, and this is Joseph Snow.

They reached out hands to shake, and I obliged, introducing myself as John Koroneiki. You could tell from the white dress shirts with narrow gray ties and black slacks that they were Mormons doing their missionary work. Squeaky clean. About 20, 22 years old. Honest and earnest. Altogether nice folks. Still, they irritated me a little. There was a big sign on the column, right above their bikes. No Solicitation.

Mr. Drake is a devout Catholic, I said politely, pointing to the sign and hoping to make them go away. He respects other faiths but has no intention of changing his religion.

No, William, the older one, said, shaking his head. It’s not about that.

And we don’t try to make people change their faith, Joseph added, a little peeved himself.

Joseph nodded. "We’ve come because of the police. The police in Montgomery County in Maryland. They’re making a mistake. A terrible mistake. We want Mr. Drake to set the record straight. He can investigate and put a story in [I]The Bugle[I]."

I told them to go back down the gravel driveway, take the other fork in the road, and see Bob Bartell, the managing editor at [I]The Bugle[I]. But they wanted to talk to Drake. I tapped my wristwatch.

Mr. Drake is busy with the olive trees for another half hour. I will be meeting with him in a few minutes. If you’d like to save time, start with me and I’ll tell him about it.

But they had plenty of time. And a letter to deliver to Drake. They were both carrying a leather-bound Book of Mormon, and Joseph opened his carefully and pulled a white envelope from between the pages. He held it up for only a second or two, but I’ve got good eyes and saw the heavily engraved Mormon Temple logo and the large cursive letters: To Mr. Nicholas Drake. From James Barton. And they knew about Drake’s daily schedule, probably from the [I]USA Today [I]story last week, and asked if they could please wait until he got back from the greenhouses and the olive trees. [I]USA Today [I]had just run a page one feature story about Drake, the famous newspaper publisher-private detective-plant breeder and his efforts to establish an olive oil industry in Virginia. The story had graphics of the new cultivars—that’s cultivated varieties—of cold-tolerant olive trees that Drake was trying to develop. Drake and I were both impressed with its descriptions of the huge surge in demand for olive oil from millions of health conscious people in the United States. The stuff was Grandma’s Penicillin, the richest source of [I]healthy [I]fats and plant-based substances that reduced the risk of heart disease and cancer, and probably was the reason why people in France, Italy, and Spain who ate a Mediterranean diet lived so long and healthily.

Drake, however, was annoyed at how [I]USA Today[I] said that he used the 130 reporters on [I]The Bugle[I] staff as investigators for his private detective business. And he was furious when the article claimed that Drake leveraged the newspaper’s political power and all those constitutionally-protected freedom-of-the-press privileges not only to solve cases, but enrich himself, get even with his enemies, and generally get his own way. It even repeated that famous story about how Drake supposedly kept the new segment of Rt. 66 from being routed right through Towering Oaks. [I]USA Today [I]said that a team of [I]Bugle[I] reporters dug up dirt on the governor of Virginia’s private life, and Drake cut a deal. No interstate highway near Towering Oaks. No exposé. It was all absolutely true, of course. I was right here in the office when Drake struck that deal with the Governor. And we used [I]The Bugle [I]reporters to snoop around and gather information for Drake Inquiries all the time. And Drake’s bank account? Way up there in the seven figures from the outrageous fees he charged for investigations and the books and other stuff we scripted from the investigations. But that made no difference to Drake. He read the article and turned from the screen of his Mac Pro Work Station that he uses as his personal computer and said a word that I can’t write down here. Then he said it again, louder.

We’d been tricked, and that’s what really made Drake mad. The [I]USA Today [I]editor reporter told us, and the reporter verified that the story would be on olive trees, with [I]The Bugle, [I] Drake Inquiries, and everything else off limits. When you agree to let a reporter feature you in a story, it’s a risk. You never know the real agenda, or how the newspaper, TV station or website really plans to use the information they collect. Right away, Drake added [I]USA Today[I] to his enemies list. He’d wait until one of [I]USA Today’s[I] owners or top editors got into a compromising personal situation, or until the newspaper itself had stumbled and maybe screwed up a story. Then Drake would get his revenge, with an editorial in [I]The Bugle[I] that mocked that unfortunate individual or the newspaper and made them into a laughing stock. I’d seen it time and again during the nine years that I had been Drake’s confidential assistant.

As I led William and Joseph toward the waiting room, Joseph stopped and pointed at the ceramic flowerpots lined up along the floor near the big picture window in the hall, the west window that got such good afternoon sun.

Are those olive trees? Joseph asked, pressing the Book of Mormon to his chest, and touching the leaves on one tree with the other hand. He told William to come take a look.

I nodded and pointed from tree to tree. Arbequina, there on the end. Small brown olives from Catalonia region in southern Spain. Good eating and good for oil. Next door in the red pot is an Amfissa. It grows in Greece near the Oracle of Delphi. Good for oil. In the blue pot, that’s a Nocellara del Bice. Emerald green oil. From Sicily. Yellow pot. Bella di Cerignola. Ditto on the color and country of origin. And so on and so forth. Name tags on each pot.

Joseph was doing a knee walk from pot to pot, checking the tags. When he reached the yellow pot at the far end, I got curious to see whether he would react. Sure enough, James read the ID tag, cupped a hand over his mouth, and did a few double-takes between me and the pot to make sure he wasn’t imagining things.

Look, he said to William, face lit up in glee. It’s a… Joseph looked at me again as if seeking my permission, making sure not to embarrass me. I closed my eyes and nodded.

Yes, I acknowledged. It’s a Koroneiki. Those olive trees grow in the Peloponnese, the southernmost part of the mainland in Greece, where the Oracle of Delphi is located. Koroneiki trees are very temperamental and hard to grow, but they produce some of the world’s best olive oil.

William joined him on his knees in front of the plant, and they were both trying to comprehend.

So you’re, you’re…you’re named for… an olive tree? James asked.

Honestly, I never knew the connection until that smart-aleck [I]USA Today[I] reporter mentioned it in the story. Mentioning it was OK, I guess, but then she went on to say that well, the joke around town was that maybe the only reason Drake had hired me was to add another potted plant to his collection. That was a bold-faced lie. There was no such joke in circulation. The editor of [I]USA Today[I] added it to the story, just to spite me, and to put the joke in circulation. As you can imagine, I got a lot of ribbing for days afterwards, but nobody, so far at least, has dared to call me the potted plant. But it makes me wonder whether Drake did hire me partly because of my last name. He never mentioned it, even after the [I]USA Today[I] story.

William cupped a cluster of olives on the Koroneiki and caught my eye. And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off. So Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.

That’s Genesis, I said.

William smiled. And this? ‘His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree’.

I shook my head and shrugged.

Hosea, Joseph said. 14:6. Did you know that the Book of Mormon often quotes the King James version of the Holy Bible? There are a lot of similarities.

Really? I replied.

Yes, William said, getting upright. We’ll wait for Mr. Drake.

They settled down into chairs in the reception room, opened their Books of Mormon, and started reading. Joseph paused, looked around the room, sighed deeply, and turned back to the book. I excused myself to check with Mr. Drake in the greenhouses, and closed the door behind me. After a few steps, I stopped and touched an icon on my smart phone screen. There were a dozen webcams hidden in the reception room, each no bigger than the eraser on a pencil, and several directional and wide-area-coverage microphones. People seldom realize that someone always is watching and listening these days, and it’s amazing the things they do and say. A few months ago, Drake and I watched and listened as a certain Mayor of Washington, DC, sat in that room with two assistants and casually discussed where to get the best price on crack cocaine on their drive back to the District. The tapes of those conversations launched [I]The Bugle[I] on a series of stories that eventually led to the Mayor’s resignation, and a trip to prison. But William and Joseph stayed put and kept reading. I touched an icon on the smart phone screen to lock both doors in the waiting room, just in case, and headed for the greenhouses.

I found Drake in the south greenhouse scowling at a six-inch high Baladi seedling. After all these years of keeping Drake’s germination and propagation records, I knew most of the 100 or so commercially-grown olive trees by sight. Baladis grow in Palestine and produce a bright golden oil. Grow and produce are an exaggeration. Baldis grow at a snail’s pace. And you don’t get many olives. But they’re hardy and live though cold temperatures. Drake wanted to put some of that hardiness into trees that could survive the sub-freezing winters in Northern Virginia.

Baladi? I asked, knowing that it would irritate Drake, who thought he knew the names better than anyone on Earth. He scowled. I grinned.

As you know quite well, Drake responded. Hippocrates may have been the first to say, ‘Eat little, live long’. For these trees, it’s ‘Grow little, live long’. That’s why they live thousands of years.

Three thousand, isn’t it?

Drake peeled off the red lab coat with the little embroidered green olive tree on the chest pocket and hung it on a hook. He inspected the row of seedlings, picked out a potted Maalot tree—from Israel—tucked it under one arm, and headed for the office. He picked a different seedling every day, and kept it as the guest of honor on the edge of his desk. That was part of Drake’s daily routine. When I first interviewed for the job with Drake, he asked if I would be comfortable working for someone with a daily routine. If you look up that word, routine, you find that it means an unvarying or habitual course of procedure. Like a lot of high achievers, Drake had an ironclad schedule and did the same things at the same time day after day, seven days a week. He woke up at 3:45 a.m., spent an hour in the exercise room, showered, dressed, and was in the office by 6 a.m. At 7, Millie Coyne, the head housekeeper, brought in coffee. Breakfast at 9:30. From ten to one he worked with Art Bice in the greenhouses. Unless we had guests, Drake ate lunch at his desk, and then met with Tony Romero, the head chef, to discuss the menu for dinner or arrangements for [I]The Bugle’s[I] Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner events. Drake went back to the greenhouses from four to six, and then settled down in the office again until dinner at 8. Bedtime was around 10. If ever you get the chance, ask Drake whether he gets enough sleep. You will hear about all the great people in history who slept little but accomplished much. Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa on just two hours of sleep a day. Thomas Edison usually slept only 5 hours. Donald Trump, 4 hours. But now, as we walked toward the office, Drake was ruminating on the age of olives.

Three thousand years old? he said. Actually, that’s in dispute. One day I will visit the village of Vouves in the island of Crete. A tree there may be the oldest in the world. Some say 5,000 years. It would take 40 feet of rope to encircle the trunk of that tree. And still it produces olives.

Drake placed the ceramic pot on his desk, and caressed a tiny branch as he settled down in his chair. Millie Coyne appeared as usual promptly at one o’clock, and set a large cup of Starbucks dark roast on Drake’s desk and carried the other over to the oak desk in the little alcove where I worked. We thanked her and Drake immediately swiveled his chair, spent a few minutes dealing with email, and then and got lost in the Wall on the World.

The entire wall on the north side of the office was outfitted with flat-panel TV monitors that carried news from around the globe. There were 18 monitors with the audio muted and text from the anchor people streaming along the bottom of each screen. When I mention The Wall to people, they think of watching programming like the CNN international new and finance channels, the British Broadcasting Company, World Finance, and Global Weather. We could access all those, of course, plus more than 1,200 local, regional other broadcast outlets. There were a couple of extras, too, thanks to our friend Ian Fisher, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When Drake announced his retirement from the Bureau, he lobbied hard to make sure that Ian got the job. Ian faced a lot of competition, with dozens of other agents seeking the job. He never forgot Drake’s help, and quietly helped us with quite a few of our investigations. Drake was giving the newest channel a test drive almost like a kid with a new toy. And what a toy. It was a live feed from a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the Earth. Fisher left only a couple of the modes active in this sanitized feed that he gave us. With one, you could zoom from a full screen image of Earth down to see cars and people at ground level. During the demonstration, Fisher included a tease that left Drake and me speechless. Ian sat at the Mac Pro Work Station that Drake uses as his personal computer. With a few mouse clicks, Fisher zoomed to a man enjoying coffee and the morning newspaper at an outdoor cafe in Paris. You could read the headlines as Fisher panned the orbiting camera and actually see the man’s face right down to the stubble hairs left over from the guy’s morning shave. Fisher then exited the video and when his fingers finished on the keyboard, our access to that extreme zoom feature had been blocked.

Five minutes passed. Ten. Drake finally closed out the FBI feed and started catching up on the global financial news. Five more minutes. Enough’s enough. It was time to move on, and Drake needed a nudge. I walked over and sat in one of the green leather chairs in front of Drake’s desk.

We’ve got two Mormon missionaries waiting in the reception room.

Drake snorted and tried to ignore me.

I’m serious. William Graham and Joseph Snow. They rode up on bicycles.

Why did you let them in? Drake demanded. He swiveled the chair to scowl at me. We’re busy enough already! There’s scarcely time to breathe. With a sigh, he turned back to the Mac Pro Work Station. It had multiple processors, gigabytes of memory and one of those huge theatre screens. As you’ll see if you keep reading, we use every bit of that power in enhancing images and other detective work.

Check the schedule, I responded. "We have 15 minutes free, starting right now. Then Bob Bartell and the investigative team from [I]The Bugle[I] arrive for the weekly briefing. William and Joseph say they have a matter for you to investigate. It will make a great story for [I]The Bugle[I], too. You’ll become famous. A blockbuster. Malfeasance by the police."

Drake snorted, hunched those huge shoulders, and kept right on keyboarding. He was trying to block me out. I watched for a few seconds, still amazed at how gracefully hands the size of baseball gloves danced over the keyboard. You’d expect Freddy Fat Fingers mistakes, but Drake could keyboard for hours without even having to spell check.

Send them over to the Tobacco Barn, he said without turning around. They can talk to someone on Bob Bartell’s team.

They want you, I assured Drake. And they quote the Bible about olives.

Drake paused and turned his head half an inch, suddenly interested.

What quotes?

Genesis and Hosea.

Drake swung around in his chair and nodded.

The King James Version mentions thirty-seven different trees, he said. Many—ash, cypress, teil—appear only once. The palm, olive, and fig appear multiple times.

When I told Drake about the letter from James Barton, his fingers hit the keyboard on the Mac. He was goggling James Barton Mormon.

So, he said, facing me. Barton is one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Like the College of Cardinals in the Catholic Church. The Quorum is one step down from the Mormons’ President and that’s like the Pope for Catholics. It’s a small church compared to the Catholics. They have 1 billion members. But the Mormons—12 million. That’s a huge congregation, and many them are wealthy and powerful.

Drake always liked to run background checks on strangers before agreeing to meet with them. [I]The Bugle’s [I]stories got a lot of people upset, and some of them tried to take it out on Drake. If you read my next book, I’ll tell you about the lady who dropped by the visit Drake with a basket of tomatoes. So Drake sat there, pondering it.

Chapter 2

Just as Drake was deciding to see William and Joseph, or send them away—I still don’t know which—the office phone rang. Caller ID flashed up on one of the TV monitors. It said United States Senate. Drake nodded, and I picked up the receiver and touched the speaker button. The nice lady at the Senate switchboard announced that United States Senator Adam W. Wallace was calling for Mr. Nicholas Drake. We locked eyes, curious. Senator Wallace ran for President on the Republican ticket a few years ago, the first Mormon to do so. During the campaign, Wallace was the guest of honor at one of [I]The Bugle’s [I]Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner events. You’re going to read more about these dinners later in the book. We used one of them to finally solve the Mouse House case, or rather, the case solved itself after one of those dinners, in a way nobody expected. Anyway, the interview with Wallace and the story published in [I]The Bugle[I] helped make the Senator a plausible presidential candidate, and Wallace immediately won primary elections in three states. Now the deep rumble of Wallace’s voice filled the room with a boom.

"Nicholas? How are you? Adam Wallace here. You old rascal! I read that story in [I]USA Today! [I] Wallace whistled in admiration, and laughed almost wickedly. Now, now. Don’t get all aggravated. It makes perfect sense to use those reporters as your own personal private eyes. And an enemies list? God, Nicholas! These are modern times. Well, always remember, ‘Do unto others before they do unto you.’ That’s what