The God Organ

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  A buzz and blinking red lights interrupted Monica’s thoughts. Her heart leapt to her throat and she choked it back down. “Audrey! Audrey! You have a call.”

  Audrey didn’t respond. She had succumbed to another bout of painkiller-induced sleep.

  Monica looked back and forth between the flashing comm card and Audrey. Her eyelids were scarlet. The exposed skin on her face was a mottled mess of purple and blue. Her arms seemed to shake and shiver as she slept.

  Preston Carter’s name blinked across the holodisplay and Monica couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “Audrey’s card. Hello?”

  From the other end of the line, a voice rose over a cacophony of sirens and shouts. “Audrey? You’re awake? I can’t hear you very well.” Carter’s voice shook with a raspy quality. “No, I’m fine.” It sounded as though he was talking to someone there with him. A brief conversation, a few terse words exchanged, and Carter again spoke into his comm card. “I don’t have a lot of time. I was just going to leave you a message before they make me leave with them in an ambulance. I’m so glad to hear you’re awake.”

  Monica had difficulty making out his words. “What are you talking about?”

  Carter ignored her and continued. “It was Jacqueline Harper. I don’t know how much you know about her, but I think it’s her. Someone killed her, too. Right after she shot me.”

  “She shot you?” Monica couldn’t help herself.

  “Missed anything major. Sustain stopped all the bleeding before the paramedics even arrived. They gave me meds anyway, but—”

  More voices on the other end. Carter was telling someone to be patient. Monica thought she heard them demanding that he leave now, that he was being delirious.

  Carter spoke again. This time, his breathing was heavier. “I’ve got to go. They’re moving me now, getting me to a hospital. Jacqueline Harper, though. She did it. When you get a chance, when you’re feeling better, look up her history, her work before us, her son. She—”

  The line cut off.

  Her heart beat faster than before and her anxiety grew. But she couldn’t wake Audrey. The injured journalist needed her rest. It was selfish of Monica to demand anything of her.

  And, besides, Carter had said Jacqueline Harper had done it. Monica had been wrong, and someone had already killed Harper.

  Carter’s words echoed in Monica’s head. Maybe it was over. That was it. Wherever Carter had been, something had gone down.

  His enigmatic words left her with more questions than answers and she turned immediately to find out as much as she could on Jacqueline Harper.

  It took Monica only a few minutes to track down information on Harper. She found the woman’s marriage history, her role in ProlifiTEC and its subsequent purchase by LyfeGen, and a robust publication history in scientific journals. A professional photograph caught Monica’s interest. She thought she recognized Harper’s narrow face and striking blue eyes, but she couldn’t place where she had seen the woman before.

  Still, nothing publicly available confirmed anything that Carter had claimed during his brief call. Monica turned to her next available resource: the mined data from LyfeGen.

  Audrey briefly woke but only blinked a couple of times before losing consciousness again. She slept on as Monica went on searching for information. A flurry of lab reports, years of payroll stubs, email correspondences, and a slew of other documents running into the thousands. She needed to filter the noise from anything substantial, anything that might confirm Carter’s assertions. She needed to prove to herself that Carter was right, that she had been wrong all along and she could rest knowing that everything was over.

  Initial searches with the terms “Jacqueline Harper” and “Joel Cobb” unveiled a series of personal correspondence that had occurred between the two shortly after LyfeGen acquired ProlifiTEC. Harper had become another cog in LyfeGen’s machinery. She had apparently pleaded with Cobb, among others, to enroll her son in a clinical trial of the Sustain for pediatric patients. No one seemed to have accepted her son, Austin, into any of the clinical trials. The correspondence ceased about a year and a half after LyfeGen’s purchase of ProlifiTEC. No more mentions of Austin Harper and his cancer appeared.

  Curious, Monica searched for Austin on the Net. She held her hand over her mouth as she read the obituary of a young boy whose one passion was baseball, a Cubs fan until his death.

  Putting her comm card down for a moment, she averted her eyes from the obituary, and let out a sigh. She shook her head, imagining the woman’s pain at being so close to, in fact working on, the very technology that could save her son’s life. Yet Harper had been helpless to convince the higher-ups at LyfeGen to take action.

  Cold-hearted. Selfish. Maybe Carter was right. Maybe Harper’s motive had been all too clear. For a moment, Monica wondered if Carter had also refused to enroll Harper’s son into the clinical trials. She could’ve confirmed her suspicion by searching further back into the LyfeGen data dump, but she feared she already knew the answer.

  Motive. Harper had it. Carter had one half of the puzzle put together.

  Harper also needed opportunity, though. She must have been somehow associated with genetic production of the Sustain updates to have been the saboteur, so Monica filtered out all documents unrelated to production.

  She funneled all the remaining documents to only those pertaining to or mentioning the Sustain updates within the past few months.

  But she found that Harper had hardly worked with production. Nothing indicated her involvement with the department.

  Monica extended the date range of her search to include six months prior to Joel Cobb’s death. Interestingly, she found that Harper had been working on a collaborative project with Dave Stemper. Although she couldn’t comprehend the nature of their computational modeling project, Monica guessed that the actual work between the two hardly mattered. She remembered exactly why Harper’s image had sparked a hint of recognition in her.

  She recalled the photograph she had seen of Dave Stemper with a woman she had at first mistakenly believed to be Whitney Brayson. Stemper was dancing with a slim brunette woman in one of the publicity photos displayed on the live-music joint Blues’ website. A brief review of Blues’ online image gallery, complete with the dates of each photograph, confirmed Monica’s suspicion. She recalled all the images she had seen of Brayson and Stemper together, the two of them clearly in a publicly recognized relationship. A relationship that had apparently begun two years ago and continued all the way until his death.

  This picture, though, with Harper and Stemper, had been taken and posted to the Blues website a little over six months ago.

  Another radical theory sprouted in Monica’s mind. Maybe she was right, maybe Carter was mistaken. Maybe Carter thought exactly what he was meant to think.

  A plot more conniving and vengeful than Monica had initially thought started to take shape. Again, curiosity overtook her.

  She glanced at Audrey again, sure that the battered journalist had finally fallen asleep for the rest of the night. Monica would do this alone.

  Praying to a god she didn’t believe in, Monica searched the data she had retrieved from Harper’s work computer. She had been very fortunate that some unwitting victim had activated one of her dummy comm cards right next to Harper’s computer. Hell, it could have been Harper herself, possibly setting herself up for posthumous vindication.

  “Yes. Hell, yes.” Monica’s nose scrunched up and a grin spread across her face.

  Brayson appeared to have picked up a few decent hacking skills, but her forays into networked sleuthing were even more amateurish than Monica’s own novice abilities. A cookie-crumb trail led from Harper’s work computer back to Brayson’s computer and her comm card. She recovered a list of dates that Brayson had trespassed into Harper’s data, with a spike of activity in Harper’s lab reports regarding the investigations into the Sustain stroke victims.

  Monica could only think of one reason why Brayson would
be so determined to examine each of these reports with such discretion. She had a hard time imagining anything else that would explain the intrusion into Harper’s computer.

  Carter was definitely wrong. Someone had screwed up royally. And someone else was getting away with murder.

  Heart pounding, thumbs tapping madly through the comm card’s project keypad, Monica’s grin widened as she recognized the worst characteristic of an amateur wannabe hacker: an open pipeline, a connection still viable, between Harper’s old computer and Brayson’s comm card. She followed the address saved in the data dump and her efforts rewarded her with direct access to Whitney Brayson’s comm card.

  To top it off, the woman’s comm card GPS capabilities were currently enabled.

  ***

  Monica crept through the darkened hallways, conscious of her breathing. She hadn’t expected Brayson to be precisely where Monica had first contemplated involving herself in LyfeGen’s affairs, but fate was funny like that.

  The NanoTech offices were silent, curtained in shadows. The familiar buzz of fluorescent bulbs, harassment from Sam, and obnoxious chatter that ordinarily accompanied her presence in the building were uncannily absent. She had never been in the building past the hour when the hallway lights turned off. Most of the time, she left as soon as she reasonably could, dreading each second she spent at the company just to collect another meager paycheck in her embarrassingly small bank account.

  While the GPS signal was strong enough to affirm that Brayson—or at least her comm card—was present in the NanoTech building, Monica couldn’t confirm exactly where the signal originated. She passed potted plants and empty desks, cubicles with photographs and holodisplays obscured in the darkness, heading toward the meeting rooms near the center of the building.

  As she tiptoed through the darkness, she felt naked.

  What could she possibly do when she found Brayson? If the woman was as dangerous as Monica suspected, there was no doubt in her mind that Brayson would dispose of her without a second thought.

  It was nearly impossible to purchase a firearm in Chicago, although ammunition remained ironically plentiful. Files of 3D printable, single-use firearms could be illegally downloaded and made with a 3D printer, but Monica had neglected to take even this precaution. She had contemplated printing a weapon at home, but she thought it would be enough if she was labeled a cyber-terrorist. No need to add to those federal charges.

  There were no signs of activity in the main lobby and no trail of evidence pointing to where Brayson might be. Instead of wandering directionless throughout the building, Monica crept back to her cubicle in IT.

  At her old desk, there were a couple of framed holos of Ford Mustangs from 2015. They brought back memories of working alongside her dad in his garage as he restored an ancient ’69 Mustang Mach1. She picked up one of the holos, admiring the car for a moment, before setting it down.

  Figuring that Sam had been too lazy to deactivate her account, she opened the computer and began typing in her old credentials.

  She stopped. Even if she could still log back into the network, would she want to leave indisputable evidence of her involvement in this whole affair?

  Gritting her teeth, she logged in under her old username. She had already made the decision to reveal Brayson’s role in the Sustain sabotages. At least for now, the police appeared satisfied with catching Cody Warren and Jacqueline Harper, blaming them for the bombing and the Sustain sabotages. Before they realized their mistake, Brayson might disappear completely.

  Monica shook her head, thinking of an earlier mistake. She had already walked straight into the NanoTech building using her comm card. That meant that Sam had been stupid enough to have never removed her employee access to the building and, more importantly, she had already created a record of herself trespassing that night.

  Shaking those worries from her mind, she scanned through the NanoTech infrastructure map that showed rooms where network signals were currently active. Two blips appeared on the display. The first marked a room deep in the basement where the maintenance staff was located. Probably just a worker avoiding his night shift. The second blip shone in an office where the company’s IP lawyers were located. Could be a lawyer working late into the night on a new provisionary patent.

  Monica exhaled and closed out of the computer. Avoiding the main lobby and walkways, she strode briskly through the shroud of shadows and darkness that enveloped the building’s secondary hallways to the IP lawyers’ offices.

  A glimmer of light glowed past a corner. Voices, muffled by distance, carried along the length of the hall. As Monica approached, she could hear a distinct low male voice and the higher tones of a female.

  She peered around the corner. A large glass wall separated the lawyers’ offices like a fish tank. There were a couple of receptionist desks in front of the glass wall. Behind those desks, there was an opening in the glass that led into the offices. One of the offices, luminous in the otherwise dark building, displayed the silhouettes of two people talking animatedly. One figure paced back and forth.

  Monica hunched down and crept to the receptionist’s desk. She hid behind it and strained her ears to listen to the conversation. The voices were louder there but the words were still muddled.

  She risked a glance, only to notice that the office windows were at least partially opaque. The shadows of the inhabitants could be seen, but she couldn’t make out any recognizable facial features. She worried that the window opacity might be unidirectional. If that were the case, they might be able to clearly see her before she even realized they were staring at her.

  Breathing heavily, she willed her heart to slow down. The thumping in her ears was so loud she feared it would be enough to reveal her location.

  She contemplated just creeping away or making a run for it. But that wouldn’t guarantee she would go unnoticed. She had already made it too far.

  Peering around the desk again, desperately clinging to the hope that the shadows were enough to obscure her face, she waited for a moment when the two silhouettes seemed to look away, then sprinted forward.

  She pressed herself against the window of a vacant office adjacent to the one occupied by the two shadows. Once her breathing had slowed again, she could make out their words through the cracked door.

  “—too much.”

  The female voice responded coolly. “You told me you didn’t care how it happened. Warren, no alibi and no friends, is going to take the fall for the bombing. Everything was planted on his comm card and he’s such an easy target.”

  “I have no doubt you did your homework.” The man’s voice sounded familiar. “But it’s too obvious. It was stupid.”

  “Their shares went down seventy-five points in one day. Is that really too much? You can act tomorrow and have the whole company. They’re going to be desperate. It’s everything you wanted. And, besides, you’re right: Warren is too obvious. That’s why he’ll lead them to ‘Charlotte’ and she’ll lead them right to that den of religious nuts.” She said the name Charlotte with a sarcastic emphasis.

  “This is insane.”

  “Absolutely. That’s why people will love this story. One huge conspiracy, a tale of murder and deception, religion gone bad. Hell, I even got Jacqueline to believe that her new boy-toy was the one out to destroy LyfeGen.”

  There was silence for a moment. Monica took her comm card out. She turned on the recording application, praying that these two were not as suspicious as her philandering former boss. If that oaf was wary enough to install a recording jammer in his office, wouldn’t these two be?

  The woman spoke again. “It really couldn’t have turned out better. All the circumstantial evidence around Jacqueline that I spent time weaving, and she isn’t even around anymore to deny it. I can thank that dense Hannah girl for falling for the whole ‘Charlotte’ ruse. I never dreamed she’d actually pull off something like that. I just thought she’d lead the police to Jacqueline, best-case scenario.”

>   “What if they look for Charlotte and can’t find a match?”

  “That won’t be a problem. I manipulated Hannah and Warren. They’ll give a description that matches Jacqueline perfectly and tell a sob story about a woman whose kid died of cancer. A woman who had a vendetta against LyfeGen. Everything fits Harper. Everything will be tied back to her. It’s watertight. Like I told you, I’m a damn good actor.”

  Again, the man spoke. “You’re crazy. I wish you’d given me some warning about the bomb. That was a goddamn terrible idea. I’ve got half a mind not to give any of the NanoTech shares to you.”

  Now, the woman’s voice quaked in a frenzied anger. “You do that and you’re dead. No, better than dead. I’ll speak out, I’ll tell everyone about our work together.”

  “You’d go straight to prison, too.”

  “You think I actually care about that? If you wrong me, if you go back on the promise you made before I started all this, I’ll send you off just like Jacqueline and Dave. That fucking cheater, Dave. They both deserved to die, and I’m glad they did. I just wish I could’ve been the one to take out Jacqueline, too.” The woman’s voice seemed to grow distant, lost in introspection.

  “No, I won’t go back on my word,” the man said. “All the shares will be in your Cayman accounts.”

  “Great. I short-sold a thousand LyfeGen shares, just in case your deal fell through.”

  Monica struggled to understand what the woman was talking about. She had a vague recollection of short-selling a stock to capitalize on falling share prices from a mandatory finance class, but couldn’t recall any more concrete details. For now, she was just happy she was catching this exchange on her comm card.

  The woman continued. “God, I can’t wait to move there. More money than I know what to do with, hot beaches. You ever been to Stingray City? I went there once with Dave, before he screwed around with Jacqueline. Stingrays swimming up all over you, taking fish from your hands.”