A Dangerous Breed

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Willard crossed the street at Marion, walking without hurry. He carried a long cardboard mailing tube, which looked a little like a drinking straw in his fingers. I joined him at a bench outside, for privacy. Willard’s ass wouldn’t have fit on one of the bodega counter stools, anyway.

  He opened the mailing tube and slid a thick roll of papers out. The blueprints were the largest, but some of the other plans were nearly poster-sized as well.

  “You’ve already looked,” I said.

  “Sure. And the headline is: Don’t Do It. Check this.” He unrolled the stack and leafed through to pick one batch of pages. Eleven-by-seventeen sheets, and thick. Electrical schematics.

  He flipped to an interior page and held it out to me. “Fourth floor. Everything’s pretty much normal until you see that they’ve wired the cameras separately. I think that’s because this section”—he pointed to one quarter of the building—“has got its own power supply that switches on in case of an outage.”

  “That’ll be the cryogenic storage bank,” I said. “Can’t have things melting during a blackout.”

  “Well, that room’s cameras and alarm are completely enclosed. Even if you manage to patch into the building system somehow from outside, or make the lights go out, that piece of real estate keeps right on humming. The guards downstairs can still see everything that happens in that section. And I gotta assume the system can still make a cellular call to nine-one-one, too.”

  “Aura Nath said that Ceres has controlled burn safeguards to destroy their biological matter in case of a breach.”

  Willard actually smacked his heavy brow. “Controlled burn. That explains it. I was trying to figure why they had this.” He flipped to another page. “It’s a tiny room off the cryogenic unit. Hypoxic air generator, the label says.”

  “Fire suppression,” I realized. “The oxygen level in the cryo unit is kept low. In case a controlled burn is set off. The flames destroy the virus or whatever it is, then sputter out from lack of oh-two before anything else catches on fire. I saw hypoxic chambers in the Army. They have them for high-altitude training. And computer data centers, so they don’t have to use water sprinklers.”

  “So you can’t breathe inside the cryo room?”

  “There’s enough oxygen in the air for humans. Might give you a headache after a while.”

  “Christ. Now I get why Nath wanted a pro.”

  I sat with the thought. Being a professional meant being a realist. And realistically, Ceres was a bitch.

  Gulls cried overhead. Just a few weeks ago their caws might have been drowned out by a constant sonorous drone of traffic right over our heads. But the old viaduct was closed. If I listened hard, I could hear the scrape and crunch of the claw machines south of us as they tore down the two-story highway. Route 99 now went far under our feet. It had taken billions of dollars and nearly that many delays, along with the biggest drill in the world, to bore two miles of tunnel through the heart of the city. The whole waterfront would soon be repaved and redesigned, once the highway was gone. I guessed it wouldn’t be long before market forces pushed the bodega out, too. Maybe the perpetual TV would carry on as a marker.

  I thumbed through the schematics Willard had brought. The challenge with complex defenses, overlapping means of security, is that they add extra wrinkles that can go wrong. Your backups wind up needing backups. Somewhere in Ceres’s design there was a flaw. Maybe systematic, maybe human. But what could I exploit with just a few hours to prep?

  Nothing. Time to face facts. I had to bring in the law. Maybe I could convince them that I wasn’t a terrorist myself.

  I heard Hollis coming before I saw him. He was breathing hard and sweating lightly, even with the morning chill.

  “I misremembered which block,” he said, before coughing violently into his hand. “Thought you might have left already.”

  “Ceres is a wash, anyway,” said Willard.

  “Van?” Hollis asked.

  I shrugged. “With time, it’s beatable. But Bilal Nath is expecting me to show up in nine hours.”

  Hollis settled onto the bench with a sigh. “I hesitate to suggest it, but there is the nuclear option.”

  “Killing Nath,” Willard said.

  I’d thought about that, more than once. It was an option. Even if it made my mouth taste bile.

  “I know he claims to have an axe ready to fall on your head if he suddenly dies,” said Hollis, “but do you believe him?”

  “Ondine gave me Nath’s bona fides. Even she respects him. And Bilal has a whole team to avenge him, not counting Aura.”

  “So he means what he says,” Willard noted. “There’s a contract on you, unless he cancels it personally.”

  “And I can’t force him to do that. He’s already dying. I don’t know what he fears.”

  “He loves his wife, you told me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But going after Aura is a fool move, even if I could stomach it. Threaten Aura, and Bilal will just spirit her off to Karachi or Indonesia or anywhere else out of our reach. Kidnap her and Nath comes after Cyndra or Addy in return. There are too many ways for him to retaliate.”

  “Which leads us back to Ceres Biotech,” Hollis said, glancing at the blueprints. “What about a takedown? Masks and shouting and make one of the guards hand over the goods?”

  “That stinks,” Willard said. “What if there’s employees working late, or another guard wandering the building?”

  “I know it’s a lousy idea,” said Hollis. “I’m not a damned beginner. But we’re down to the dregs here.”

  “Here’s an employee roster,” Willard said, finding a stapled bunch of sheets in the pile. “All the security is contracted through Markham Protective. I’ve got some history with that company. They’re good, but they follow the same procedures with every client. We could pull the old gag of telling the guard we’ve got thugs watching his family.”

  I glanced at the top sheet, less because I was honestly weighing Willard’s idea than to grasp at straws. The roster started at the Ceres executive board and went down by department and rank from there.

  One name, just below those of the CEO and the president, caught my eye: Timothy Gorlick, MD, PhD. Chief medical officer, co-founder.

  Gorlick. I’d seen that name before. On Aura Kincaid’s civil records from my new buddy Panni at the FBI.

  Aura had been married to Timothy Gorlick shortly before Bilal Nath. And she’d fought ovarian cancer. Had she been struck with it before she and Gorlick were divorced?

  “You all right?” Willard said to me.

  “We’ll figure a way out of this, lad,” said Hollis.

  I barely heard them. I was getting an inkling of what Bilal Nath wanted. Why he and Aura were so ruthless in their determination.

  And, more important, how I could turn that against them.

  “Willard,” I said, “walk me through everything you have on Markham Protective. Start with their camera circuits.”

  Twenty-One

  Two hours later, I left Hollis and Willard to the tasks we’d agreed upon. For me, that started with retrieving gear I kept hidden in storage.

  My apartment was a studio. Hiding burglary tools there was out of the question. During the past weeks I’d set up a workshop inside a multistory storage unit on the Hill. Not in my own name, of course. There were plenty of DIYers using their units for home repair jobs and side businesses, so nobody looked twice at the occasional whine of a drill or the shriek of metal being cut coming from my own space. I’d slipped the manager extra to clear out a unit way at the back, with plenty of privacy.

  I wasn’t blind to the ways my life had begun to echo my grandfather’s. Hidden places, extra identities. I hadn’t chosen Dono’s life of crime for profit. I’d carved my own path, winding as it might be. But the methods I used were the ones he’d taught me. Plus my own innovations, some courtesy of my Ranger training.

  Duffel bags and backpacks of various sizes lined shelves I’d built from two-
by-fours and plywood. I opened four of the bags to retrieve items from within. A keycard programmer. A set of fiber-optic cables and splicing tools. A laptop computer, and a wireless transmitter similar to those used in home theaters. A device that looked very much like a paintball gun. And a short prybar, in case brute force was called for.

  Burke. I hadn’t given much thought to the man during the past few hours, which was a freakishly odd thing to say about a guy who’d aimed a gun at my face the night before. There was no question in my mind that he would have shot me, save for my extremely good fortune that he’d been interrupted.

  He hadn’t gotten the answers he’d demanded. He’d try again. Although Burke knew my name, it was my motive for seeking him out that really concerned him.

  Burke was a killer. So was I, if I were being honest with myself. Besides the rough similarity of our dark hair and size, he and I had violence in common.

  Like me and Dono, Burke had apparently started on the same path as his brutal elder. Gut Burke had been a murderer and enforcer. Whoever Sean worked for now, himself or some racket, he was operating on a higher level than roughing up shopkeepers who had fallen behind on their protection payments. Which made him that much more dangerous.

  If Burke learned he might be my father, would he be less likely to murder me, or more?

  The keycard programmer looked like an oversized calculator. In the side pocket of one of the duffels I kept a bag of blank RFID keycards. I distracted myself from further thoughts of Sean Burke by getting to work with the programmer and the specs Willard had acquired on Markham Protective Services. I’d have to hope Markham had stuck to their cut-and-paste approach to installation. If Ceres had sprung for an extra level of security, those bells and whistles might bring every guard running the moment we stepped inside.

  When that task was complete, I spent another half hour double-checking my plans. Ceres’s system was good. I could be better.

  Finally, I packed the tools I’d chosen into a rucksack, wrapping each piece in a towel as padding. It would be heavy but manageable once strapped to my back. And silent, which was at least as important.

  The rucksack rested on the passenger seat as I drove the old blue Dodge down Interstate 5. Rattles and pings all the way. The truck saying it was grumpy at having its rest disturbed, or peeved at being left alone so long. Maybe both. Maybe it was confused.

  I switched on my blinker to move out of the fast lane, taking advantage of a gap in traffic to glide over three lanes in one go. A hundred yards behind me, a low silver Acura moved, too, abruptly jogging one lane to his right and then holding, as if the car had reacted reflexively. He dropped back as I accelerated.

  Another half mile along, I moved into an exit-only lane for the next ramp. After a slow five-count, the Acura steadily crept over the last two lanes, until he was on my tail.

  I drifted out of the exit lane, and of course the Acura followed.

  Damn it. Who was this guy? My gut said police. He followed like police, like he had the basics of mobile surveillance down. Patient enough to keep his distance in the easy sightlines of the freeway, but maybe more accustomed to being one of two or more cars in a rotating pattern, plus air support. Hell, he might have exactly that kind of backup, and there was a police radar plane tracking me right now.

  And me with a rucksack full of suspicious tools on the seat next to me, some of them worth a Class 3 felony. If my new admirer realized that I’d clocked him, his next move might be to pull me over. All my plans for Bilal Nath and Ceres Biotech would be smoked.

  So my new first priority was to ditch this sucker before he got smart.

  The next exit led to Highway 518 and SeaTac. I drifted onto the ramp without changing speed in the slightest, letting the Acura have plenty of notice. He followed me as I merged onto 518 and off again almost immediately, following the exit for International Boulevard.

  This close to the airport, long-term parking lots dominated the landscape. I chose one called Renny’s FastPass Parking—The Business Traveler’s Best Friend!—and pressed the button at the gate to receive a ticket. The gate lifted, and I sped inside.

  I would have to count on my pursuer hesitating. Should he follow me inside or wait and see if I left? What if I boarded a shuttle for the airport? I swung the Dodge around and up the ramps to the third level and into an open space in a row of parked cars. In an instant I had my door open and was grabbing the rucksack with my other hand. I dropped to the ground and began to low-crawl under the cars in the row, as fast as I could, dragging the ruck with me.

  At the fifth car, I turned faceup and shimmied so that I could reach the exhaust pipes leading to the mufflers. I unclipped the rucksack straps and fastened them around the pipes, pulling them tight so the ruck was suspended off the ground. It would have to do. I crawled back to the Dodge, whose engine still idled expectantly.

  As I walked to the stairs, I glanced at the fifth car from the truck. A Nissan Altima, not that I’d been able to tell that from just its undercarriage. The rucksack below was essentially invisible, unless someone leaned way over and looked for it.

  I made it down one flight of stairs. Two plainclothes cops—as recognizable by their flat affects as from their aggressively business-casual shirts and trousers and sport coats on a holiday—met me at the second landing.

  “Mr. Shaw,” said the one in the lead. “Come with us.”

  Twenty-Two

  They didn’t have to show identification for me to know they were legit, but I asked them to do it, anyway. The bigger one, the cop who’d first spoken, tugged his ID off his belt to flash it for a full two seconds. Walter Podraski. A detective sergeant with the state. A big guy, almost as large as Bilal’s goon Juwad, but with the added spread of middle age.

  And jowled. Podraski had been the man tailing me on foot after my lunch with Willard. His partner’s sandy hair was less windswept now that they were off the downtown streets.

  “What’s this about?” I said.

  “Nothing serious,” the partner said. In addition to being much leaner, he was slightly better dressed than Podraski. Nordstrom Rack instead of JCPenney. His hair and stature were boyish, but up close I realized both men were the same age, well north of forty. He hadn’t offered his ID and he wasn’t showing much deference to Podraski in answering my question. My antenna buzzed Fed.

  “Driver’s license,” Podraski said. I took it out of my wallet and showed it to him. “This is your current address?”

  “I sold the property. I’m staying with a neighbor down the block.”

  “Where are you headed?” the federal cop said.

  “To that Thai place up the road.” Name and address and where I was going officially exhausted, what they could demand of me, or bust me for if they caught me in a lie.

  “So why not park there?” the Fed asked.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “This won’t have to go that way,” said Podraski. “We just want to clear some things up.”

  On another day, I would have smiled. They’d already decided to haul me in. Playing nice was just to dangle a carrot and get me talking. One way or another, I wasn’t walking free. Which meant bad things for my appointment with Bilal Nath in just a few hours.

  If I made a show of cooperating, maybe I could figure out what this was about. A state detective and a Fed was an odd combination to be tailing anybody.

  “All right,” I said. “Where we goin’?”

  Just up the boulevard, as it turned out. They stuck me in the backseat of the Acura—undoubtedly the Fed’s personal car, as he was driving and there were stale Cheerios wedged into the rear seatbelt buckle—and drove a quarter mile to a WSP station right off 518.

  While Podraski stayed behind to clear things with the admitting officer, the Fed ushered me through a long room of cubicles that might have been any office in America, save for the PSA posters and the holstered weapons on the uniformed desk workers. Our destination was an interview room with three chairs and on
e camera, high on the wall.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I said to him once we were seated. The room was cramped. They are always cramped, and hot, and boring, increasing pressure on the interviewee every way possible. There was no table between us. The better to get personal, establish a rapport.

  “It’s Rick. What do you do for a living, Mr. Shaw?”

  “I just sold that property, Rick.”

  “So you’re between things?”

  “You don’t need to wait for your partner?” I nodded toward the closed door.

  He shook his head. “What have you been doing the past couple of days?”

  “Enjoying the holiday.”

  “A day off from all that free time, being between jobs and all.” Rick the Fed grinned, like I was clearly making the right choices in life.

  Podraski opened the door, closed it behind him, and took the last chair. No notebooks, no visible badges or guns or other signs of authority. Just us dudes, hanging out.

  “You don’t look like someone who sits at home playing PS4 all night,” Rick continued.

  “I’m more of an Xbox guy.”

  “First-person shooters? Since you don’t have the real thing anymore?” Podraski said, taking over the lead. “I know another vet when I see one.”

  Making friends already. “You?”

  He smiled. “A long time ago.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “MPs.”

  “Nope, just plain old Eleven Bravo.” Infantry. “You do any contract work after serving? A lot of guys sign up for that now, I hear. Private security. Bodyguarding.”

  “Not yet.”

  “If I was as tough as you, I’d be cashing in.”

  “Could you tell us where you were two nights ago?” Rick said.

  And there it was. Two nights ago I’d been breaking into Sean Burke’s house.

  “Sure,” I said.