House Blood - JD 7

by Mike Lawson

  As he sat there in his cheap, depressing motel room, there was a knock on the door, which puzzled him because he couldn’t imagine who would want to talk to him. He was certain it wasn’t a maid bringing him fresh towels. He opened the door, and standing there was a stunning woman. Her face was somewhat harsh and he didn’t like her punkish haircut, but she had the kind of body he’d fantasized about when he masturbated in prison.

  “Bill,” she said, “my name is Fiona West and I have a job for you. May I come in?”

  Hobson, too stunned to speak, stepped aside and allowed Fiona into his room, where she explained that the job entailed getting relief supplies to various third world countries and shipping biological samples to a lab in Delaware.

  “I could do that with my eyes shut,” Hobson said.

  “You don’t need to sell yourself, Bill. I know what you used to do and I know you were good at it. Until you decided to become a thief, that is.” She held up a silencing hand when Hobson attempted to explain his career-ending decision. “I don’t care why you did it,” Fiona said.

  “How much does the job pay?” Hobson asked, although he knew he was in no position to negotiate and would accept whatever salary she offered.

  “Mulray Pharma is willing to pay you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.”

  “Jesus!” Hobson said, before he could stop himself. As a retired one-star general he would have made less than a hundred thousand a year.

  “In return, you will volunteer your services to the Warwick Foundation, but you won’t tell them that Mulray Pharma is paying you to work there.”

  “Okay,” Hobson said. He had no idea what the Warwick Foundation was. He was also bright enough to know that Fiona was hiring him to commit some sort of crime—and he didn’t give a shit. Whatever crime he was about to commit was preferable to suicide.

  Two weeks later, René Lambert introduced Bill Hobson to Lizzie Warwick. Lambert told Lizzie about the fine job Hobson had done for the army and how he was the perfect man to manage the Warwick Foundation. Dr. Lambert then pulled out a copy of Hobson’s army personnel record—one that stopped at the point where he was arrested—and showed Lizzie the wide and varied experience he had. Then Hobson chimed in. He said he was willing to volunteer his time, as his army pension provided all the money he needed. He just wanted to do something meaningful, he said, for the good of his fellow man—and Lizzie had tears in her eyes as she hugged Bill and welcomed him to the Warwick Foundation.

  Hobson now had a number of urgent things to do. He needed to find a place to live in Philadelphia and purchase a car. He needed to make himself intimately familiar with the Warwick Foundation’s accounts and methods of operation, and he needed to start working with Lambert to establish the facilities needed for conducting Mulray Pharma’s clinical trials. But the very first thing he was going to do was go out and buy a puppy to replace the dog he’d lost while he was in prison.

  5

  Paktika Province, Afghanistan~June 2006

  The final item on Fiona’s to-do list was hiring the killers.

  About the time she recruited Hobson, she read a story on page six of the New York Times about two men who worked for a private security firm in Afghanistan called Romar-Slade Inc., the firm having been named after its founders, both former U.S. Army generals. According to the article, the two men—whose names were Kelly and Nelson—were protecting a duly elected Afghani provincial governor who was rumored to be an opium grower and, per the Times, the second most corrupt official in the country. (In 2006, the honor of first place went to the brother of the American-backed and questionably elected Afghani president.)

  The article stated that the governor had been driving through a village in his province when Taliban assassins, hiding in a roadside house, fired upon the governor’s car with automatic weapons. Kelly and Nelson responded to the attack immediately and in an overwhelming manner, and they turned the house into a mound of smoldering rubble in about ten minutes. No Taliban were found inside the house, however—they must have run out the back door when Kelly and Nelson opened fire—but five bodies were found, three of whom were children.

  It was not clear, however, if the children were killed by the Taliban or by the governor’s bodyguards. This was unclear because the bodies were badly burned and partially dismembered—and this wasn’t a place where forensic specialists sorted out the facts. The governor’s rivals claimed his bodyguards were nothing more than cold-blooded killers and that their complete disregard for the lives of Afghani civilians was typical of the American invaders. Politicians—both Afghani and American—jumped up and down and made speeches. Congress held hearings regarding the abuses—financial and moral—perpetuated by private security firms. And, while all this was going on, Kelly and Nelson sat in a cell guarded by disinterested Afghani policemen as they waited to hear their fate.

  Once upon a time, there were gunfighters in the Old West, men with Colt .45 six-shooters and lever-action Winchester rifles who hired themselves out to cattle kings, mining barons, and railroad magnates. Gunslingers no longer existed in the American West—or at least not in great numbers—but they did exist elsewhere. Today such men worked as mercenaries for private security firms in places like Iraq and Afghanistan—but they were much better armed.

  Fiona’s headhunters discovered that Kelly and Nelson both enlisted in the army at age eighteen and met each other in boot camp at Fort Polk, Louisiana. They attended Ranger training together at Fort Benning, spent two tours in Iraq in the same unit, and then were selected for Delta Force—the Department of Defense’s elite, covert-action response team. If DOD, for whatever reason, needed facilities demolished or enemies captured or killed in places where the U.S. was not officially at war, Delta Force soldiers were sent in to do the job. And these were extraordinary soldiers. Eighty percent of the men who begin Delta training wash out, but those who don’t are the most effective killers the army has.

  Fiona’s headhunters—and this was one of the reasons she used the firm—were also able to gain access to psychological exams Kelly and Nelson had taken to get into Delta Force. The army wanted capable killers—but not psychopaths. The two men’s psych files contained the same phrase: Judged to be capable of successfully suppressing counterproductive emotions following combat operations. This was army-speak. It meant: killing people didn’t bother Kelly and Nelson all that much.

  Kelly and Nelson worked for Delta Force for five years—in Somalia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Iran—but even Fiona’s headhunters, with all their government connections, couldn’t find out what they did there. The likely guess was that they had been inserted into these hostile places to kill terrorists—and that was good enough for Fiona. She had no doubt that these two men were the gunfighters she wanted.

  Fiona flew to Afghanistan with ten heavily armed professional bodyguards. She had no intention of being killed or kidnapped while recruiting Kelly and Nelson. She paid a small bribe to the men who were guarding them—a bribe equal to what they made in a year—and entered the cell where they were being detained. They were lying on their cots, reading novels, when she walked in—which surprised her. She figured that if they read at all it would be pornographic magazines.

  They were both brutes: six foot four, small waists, big chests, muscles on top of muscles. Kelly was black and Nelson was white, but aside from their skin coloring, they were actually quite similar in appearance: short, broad noses; brown eyes; thin lips; ears set close to their skulls. Fiona bet if their faces were completely covered with that black and green camo paint that soldiers use, they would have looked like frightening twins.

  “What can we do for you?” Kelly said.

  That was good: no boneheaded cracks about the fact that she was a good-looking woman and that they hadn’t been with a woman in quite a while.

  Without any sort of preamble, Fiona said, “If you agree to work for
me, I’ll bribe the right people and get you out of the mess you’re currently in. Second, I’ll pay you ten million dollars—five million each—for an assignment that will last approximately five years. You’ll be given one third of the money up front and the rest in annual payments.”

  Kelly laughed. “What do you want us to do? Kill the president?”

  “What if I said that’s exactly what I wanted you to do?”

  Kelly looked over at Nelson, and Fiona could tell that these two men had been together for so long they didn’t need words to communicate.

  Kelly, a smile still playing on his lips, said, “For that kind of money, we’d think about it.”

  He may have been smiling, but she knew he was serious. For ten million, he and his partner really might be willing to assassinate the president.

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t want you to do anything that difficult.”

  “Okay,” Kelly said. “So what do you want us to do?”

  “My company has a laboratory in Delaware, and everything that happens inside that lab must remain secret. Right now we have a corporate security firm that’s protecting the lab and monitoring every­one who works there, but if anyone attempts to pass information to a rival company, that person needs to be dealt with.”

  “You mean killed,” Kelly said.

  “Yes, if it comes to that.”

  “Go on. You’re not offering us ten million to kill some lab rat that talks to the competition.”

  “The second thing you’ll be asked to do is make sure that certain medical supplies reach certain places in the world. The places where we’re sending these supplies are often in war zones or have just suffered some large-scale natural disaster. These supplies must reach their destination no matter what.”

  “Okay,” Kelly said, “you want us to kill anybody who tries to get your supplies. The medical ones, that is.”

  “Yes. Furthermore, there is a man and a woman who will be in these disaster areas, and they must to be protected. This is just basic security work like you’ve been doing for Romar-Slade and you two won’t personally handle the protection detail. What you’ll do is hire competent people to protect them, and you’ll supervise those people.”

  Kelly nodded. “When are you going to get to the part that makes us worth ten million?”

  “Right now,” Fiona said.

  When she finished speaking, Kelly asked a couple of questions, then told Fiona, “We need to talk this over alone.”

  Fiona paced outside the jail, wondering how long it would take them to make up their minds. Unlike with René Lambert, she knew there was nothing else she could say or offer to convince them; they’d either agree or they wouldn’t. If they didn’t, considering all she’d told them, she was going to have to hire someone to kill them—and she knew it was going to be very hard to kill Kelly and Nelson.

  But it took them only ten minutes to decide to accept her offer. Their freedom, plus ten million dollars for five years’ work, was quite an incentive. She also suspected they had killed enough people during their careers that their consciences had become completely numb when it came to the act of murder. She was actually wrong about this, but it didn’t matter.

  Before she left Afghanistan, she flung money at local politicians like it was wedding rice and Kelly and Nelson were released from jail, charges against them were dismissed, and they promptly left the country.

  Six months after Clayton Mulray’s funeral, everything was in place.

  Dr. Ballard’s laboratory was fully staffed, his experiments were under way, and the lab was as well guarded as any top-secret government facility. Nothing left the building that wasn’t supposed to leave. Nobody entered the building who wasn’t supposed to enter. All phone calls and e-mails going in and out of the lab were monitored and, although they didn’t know it, the home phones, home computers, and cell phones of the people who worked at the lab were also monitored. Five months after the facility opened—approximately one year after Clayton Mulray’s death—Simon Ballard was ready to commence clinical trials.

  Thanks to ex-Colonel William Hobson, the Warwick Foundation was running like a Swiss watch. Lizzie Warwick and the charming Dr. Lambert jetted off to awful places struck by man or nature and administered to those who suffered. While in these places, Dr. Lambert selected test subjects meeting Dr. Ballard’s criteria. He housed these people in special facilities, ironically called Warwick Care Centers. He also hired local nurses or medical technicians—never doctors—to care for the people, administer the drug, and take biological samples. None of the nurses knew the exact nature of the drug.

  Periodically, Lizzie and Lambert would go on a globe-trotting tour to raise money for the Warwick Foundation. They would speak to church groups and fraternal organizations and civic leaders; they were invited to banquets with generous rich people in attendance. And Lambert charmed the audiences the same way he charmed Lizzie Warwick when he met her, and donations increased substantially due to his efforts.

  Kelly and Nelson hired a team of ex-soldiers to provide protection for Lizzie and Lambert. They supervised the delivery of supplies to places where Lizzie and the French doctor went and, in particular, they made sure that Simon Ballard’s drugs reached those places.

  They had only one security issue during the first three years. A molecular biologist who worked for Ballard discovered the casinos in Atlantic City and—after he lost thirty-seven thousand dollars on one incredibly unlucky weekend—decided to sell Ballard’s research. Not knowing that his cell phone was being monitored, he called a man he knew at Pfizer and asked if he might be interested. Fortunately, the biologist was very vague about exactly what Ballard was doing, stating only that he was light-years ahead of anybody else in the field and that the potential payoff was mind-boggling. The guy at Pfizer said, “Sure. Let’s get together and talk.”

  The biologist died in a car accident shortly after he made the phone call. The accident investigators couldn’t explain why his car erupted into flames after it went off the road. Some sort of manufacturer’s defect related to the fuel system, they supposed.

  Then, in 2009, a more significant security issue arose in the form of Phil Downing—and Kelly and Nelson were dispatched to Washington, D.C.

  That issue was resolved when Kelly put a bullet into Phil Downing’s heart.

  6

  Washington, D.C.~June 2011

  As DeMarco walked into Mahoney’s office, he heard his boss say, “Yes, Mr. President, I’ll do what I can. Thank you for calling.”

  Mahoney hung up the phone and shook his head. “You know, I like that young guy but …”

  DeMarco assumed he was referring to the president.

  “… but one of these days I’m gonna have to explain to him that I don’t work for him.”

  DeMarco didn’t know what Mahoney was talking about—and he didn’t care.

  “Mavis said you wanted to see me,” DeMarco said, but Mahoney ignored him as he filled his coffee cup from a carafe on his desk, and then added a shot of bourbon.

  John Fitzpatrick Mahoney—dressed in a gray suit and wearing a Kelly green tie in tribute to his shanty Irish ancestors—was a handsome man with a large hard gut, a broad back, and a wide butt. His most distinctive feature was a full head of snow-white hair. He had been Speaker of the United States House of Representatives for so long that people had a hard time remembering who the previous Speaker was—but he was no longer the Speaker. The year before, he had lost his job when the Republicans took control of the House.

  Some Democrats urged Mahoney to fall upon his sword and resign for the sake of the party. To these folks Mahoney’s response had been: Go fuck yourselves. He figured it wasn’t his fault the economy was in the toilet and other Democrats didn’t know how to run a decent campaign. He’d been a U.S. congressman for so long he didn’t know how to do anything
else and, at his age, he wasn’t about to get a real job. So he’d bullied the Democrats into making him the minority leader, and he planned to stay in that position until his party could retake the House. And if they didn’t … Well, he was confident he’d continue to be reelected from his district in Boston. His biggest regret—other than the loss of his title and the power and prestige that went with it—was that he had to give up the Speaker’s office in the Capitol, a space he’d occupied for so long he thought of it as belonging to him and not the republic.

  DeMarco had been extremely upset when Mahoney lost the Speaker’s gavel—he may have been even more upset than Mahoney. Now, DeMarco didn’t care about John Mahoney, and he didn’t care about the Democratic Party. Having been exposed to politicians and their self-serving antics for so many years, he knew the country was in bad hands regardless of which party controlled the House. The reason he was upset was because he was afraid that when Mahoney lost his job, he would lose his.

  Joe DeMarco’s employment had always been tenuous. Mahoney had an official staff he used for day-to-day political shenanigans—but DeMarco wasn’t a member of his official staff. DeMarco was the guy Mahoney turned to when there was some shitty job to be done he didn’t want his staff wasting their time on—or, more important, that Mahoney didn’t want traced back to him and his office. DeMarco was not, therefore, a vital cog in the machinery of government, and he had been terrified that when the Republicans took power, budget and staffing cuts would ensue and he’d be one of the cuts. But the budget axe never descended—and Mahoney continued to give him shitty jobs.

  After Mahoney took a swig of his bourbon-laced coffee, he continued to ignore DeMarco. He picked up the phone again and punched a single button, which meant he was calling somebody on his staff. “The president just called,” he said. “He wants to see if we can get another five hundred million added to the bill.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Yeah, yeah, I know. He thinks there’s a tree we shake over here. Anyway, figure something out.”