by Mike Lawson
Standing in the corridor outside Nelson’s room, Erhart said, “That didn’t go so well, but maybe he’ll change his mind after he’s had some time to think things over.”
“Yeah, maybe,” DeMarco said, but he didn’t think Nelson was going to change his mind.
“Anyway,” Erhart said, “please tell the Speak … Congressman Mahoney I tried and I’ll call you if anything happens.”
“I’ll let Mahoney know what you did, and I’m sure he’ll be grateful, but you have to do what you said. You gotta make sure that guy gets the max if he doesn’t talk.”
DeMarco decided to go talk to Bill Hobson next.
37
Bill Hobson sat in his office, thinking about his future.
The fact that Lizzie Warwick had killed herself didn’t mean the Warwick Foundation had ceased to exist. The foundation was a legal entity, a nonprofit corporation with money in the bank and assets in various parts of the world. And Lizzie’s team—minus Lizzie and Lambert—was still at the refugee camp in Uganda, and Hobson needed to get supplies to them. More important, Hobson needed to make sure that the Warwick Care Centers had everything they needed to continue to operate.
Hobson’s primary job had always been related to testing Ballard’s drug: shipping drugs to the care centers, getting biological samples sent to the lab in Delaware, delivering corpses to Thailand for autopsy. He also had to make sure the care centers had adequate food and fuel and everything else needed to house forty or fifty elderly people—but the only reason the welfare of the old folk mattered was because they were the petri dishes for testing Simon Ballard’s drug.
The original plan had been to close the care centers as soon as the Thai drug trials were complete. They wouldn’t need the centers after that—or the people in them. But now, because of the article in the Washington Post, they couldn’t simply walk away from the centers, leaving a bunch of old people stumbling about with no one to tend to them. That wouldn’t look good.
So Fiona had told him to keep the centers running normally for a while, maybe six more months. Then, after the media had settled down a bit and turned their attention to other matters, Hobson would send a letter to appropriate officials in Peru, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Africa saying: We’re making you a gift of those facilities—the Quonset huts, the generators, the beds—but all those old coots are your problem from this point forward.
After Fiona told him this, he asked her, “Uh, what happens to me after all this is over? Are you going to have another job for me?”
Fiona paused before she answered. “Don’t worry, Bill. You’re a good man and we owe you. We’ll find something for you.”
A good man? In the time he had known her, Fiona had never been the least bit complimentary, nor had she ever been friendly toward him. Whenever she’d spoken to him in the past, she’d been pissed off, swearing at him about some minor fuckup, threatening to fire him if he didn’t fix whatever the problem was.
But now he was a good man—and it was those three words that made up his mind.
Had Hobson been a naïve optimist, he might have thought that he could indeed have a future with Mulray Pharma, that maybe they needed a guy like him to deal with some legitimate logistical issue, like building drug-manufacturing facilities overseas. During his army career, he’d set up bases for entire brigades in parts of the world where they didn’t have running water or electricity. Building a facility in China to manufacture drugs would be a piece of cake.
But Bill Hobson wasn’t an optimist. He was a pessimist and a realist. And from Mulray Pharma’s perspective, he was now one thing and one thing only: he was a liability. He knew what they had done in Peru and those other places. He knew what they had done to keep Phil Downing from exposing them prematurely. And he knew—he was absolutely positive—that as soon as Fiona no longer needed him, she was going to have someone put a bullet through his head. Why was he so certain? Because he was a good man.
He had six months, however, because Fiona needed him for six months. That would give him plenty of time to develop a getaway plan. Then he thought, Why wait? This was the perfect time to run. Nelson was in the hospital and Kelly had disappeared. In six months, Fiona would hire a new pair of killers and Hobson would be at the top of her list—and she wouldn’t need guys as good as Kelly and Nelson to dispose of him; any garden-variety hit man would do. Yeah, this was the time for a good man to get out of Dodge.
In the five years he’d worked for Mulray Pharma, Hobson had lived frugally because he’d always known that his future was uncertain. He didn’t have any kind of pension plan—he wasn’t even eligible for social security since he’d worked for the army for thirty years—so he lived in a cheap apartment, drove an economical car, and saved 30 percent of his annual salary; he was able to save so much because he didn’t pay taxes on the money. As a result of all this, he currently had three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars in the bank. With that much money he could buy a trailer—a fuckin’ double-wide, like every other broke-dick old man—and then maybe find some kind of job to supplement his savings. And if he moved to someplace down South, like Alabama or Arkansas or Mississippi—someplace where the cost of living wasn’t too high—he might be able to get by. But wherever he moved to, it had to be in the South. He hated the cold. He would have preferred Florida, someplace like Fort Myers or Naples, but it was too expensive there.
He finally decided on Little Rock. The city wasn’t too big, but big enough that there were employment opportunities. And when he was in the army, he’d visited the Pine Bluff Arsenal near Little Rock and found the city charming in its own way. And except for the occasional tornado, the weather was usually fairly decent.
So that was his plan: run for Little Rock before Fiona sent someone to kill him.
As Mulray Pharma’s chief attorney, Fiona was up to her neck dealing with the various legal issues arising from the new drug. None of these issues, however, were unexpected or insurmountable, and it looked as if the two-hundred-person outside law firm that Mulray had retained was doing a better-than-average job of fending off anyone who might cause the company trouble. Yes, it looked like she and Orson had pulled it off. Mulray Pharma’s stock continued to rise, and Orson was betting that within a year the drug would be approved for use in the United States and Europe.
As for Orson, he was on a whirlwind media tour. He was appearing on television and radio talk shows saying virtually the same thing he said at his press conference. In part, he was reinforcing the fact that Mulray Pharma had done nothing illegal—but what he was really doing was promoting his new drug. Instead of paying a few million dollars a minute to advertise on television, he was being given ten- and fifteen-minute blocks of time to talk about the wonders of his new drug on prime-time shows like 60 Minutes.
Fiona’s cell phone rang—not her BlackBerry. The BlackBerry was her corporate phone and the number she gave out to everybody who might need to talk to her. The cell phone was untraceable and disposable, and was used only to communicate with Kelly, Nelson, Lambert, and Hobson. And now Earl Lee.
“Yes?” she said.
“It’s Kelly.”
“Where are you, goddamnit! I’ve got things I need you to do.” Actually, she didn’t have anything for him to do.
“You don’t need to know where I am,” Kelly said, “and fuck whatever you need me to do. The only thing I care about right now is Nelson.”
“I told you, Nelson’s going to be all right. If he pleads guilty they’ll give him three or four years, then parole him in a few months because of his condition. He just needs to be patient.”
“Yeah, well, there’s something you don’t know. The Arlington County DA and DeMarco met with Nelson and—”
“DeMarco?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why the hell he’s involved in Nelson’s prosecution, but he is. Anyway, the prosecutor told Nelson that if he d
idn’t give up everything he knows about Mulray, they’re going to throw the book at him. He’s going to get fifteen years unless he rats you out.”
“They’re bluffing.”
“I don’t think so, Fiona, but it doesn’t matter if they are or not. I’m going to get Nelson out of the country.”
“How will you do that?”
“Never mind how. And that’s not the reason I called. I want the rest of what you owe us, the last installment, which is one point six million.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, since you’re no longer working for us.”
“Fiona, if you don’t give me the money, I’ll get a good rifle with a good scope and shoot you in the head from three hundred yards away. Now Nelson and me, we upheld our end of the bargain. You got your drug tested and we did our part, and now I want the rest of the money. If you don’t wire it to our account by tomorrow afternoon, I’m going gun shopping.”
Maybe this was okay, Fiona thought. Kelly and Nelson had no reason to talk. They’d go to jail if they did. And if Nelson was out of the country, the chance of them talking was even less—and she could always kill them later. As for the money, who gave a shit? Mulray Pharma was going to make so much money off Ballard’s new drug that a million six was pocket change. Hell, it was less than pocket change.
“Okay,” she said, making it sound as if she was reluctantly giving in. “You’ll have the money tomorrow. But you better do what you say, Kelly, and you better keep your mouths shut. You think you’re a hard guy, but there are a lot of hard guys like you out there.”
After she hung up, she thought about the situation some more. She assumed Kelly was going to try to spring Nelson from the hospital and then fly him out of the country, and, being Kelly, he’d most likely pull it off. But if he didn’t pull it off and he was caught … well, that could be a major problem.
One option she had was to have Earl Lee kill Kelly and Nelson. She would tell Lee to stake out the hospital, kill Kelly when he showed up to free Nelson, then whack Nelson while he was drooling in his wheelchair. But as much as she liked that idea, she wasn’t sure Lee was good enough to kill Kelly, and if he didn’t kill him, Kelly would very likely kill her.
The best thing to do at this point was let Kelly do what he wanted. But again she thought: What if he’s caught? Would he make a deal with the government for a reduced sentence? No, he wouldn’t do that. Kelly and Nelson were serial killers, mass murderers, whatever the correct term was. They’d killed a bunch of helpless old people. There was no way the government would give them a get-out-of-jail deal even if they testified against her and Orson. They might get reduced sentences, like maybe life in prison instead of the needle, but they’d still end up doing years and years in prison if they confessed to what they did. She didn’t know what sort of prison sentence Kelly could get for helping Nelson escape, but whatever it was, it would be substantially less than if he confessed to what he had done for Mulray Pharma.
Let’s see what happens, she thought. If Kelly succeeded, great. Then she’d find him and Nelson later and send in a fucking team to take them out. And if Kelly failed to escape with Nelson then she’d come up with Plan B. Fiona had always been able to develop a Plan B.
Then another thought occurred to her: Why was DeMarco still mixed up in this? Did he still think he could get Brian Kincaid out of jail? And why would the Arlington County prosecutor permit DeMarco to be there when he met with Nelson? She had always thought that DeMarco was just a low-level congressional flunky, but now she was beginning to wonder if that was really the case. It looked like he had some clout—or had someone behind him with some clout—and that wasn’t good.
She and Orson had been hoping that what they had done with the Warwick Foundation would never come to light. They didn’t want to have to face all the issues they were now facing in the media, the main issue being that they had taken advantage of the downtrodden folk that Lizzie had been trying to help. But after DeMarco and Emma sicced the press on them, Orson dealt with the issue head-on: he admitted what they did with the Warwick people and took the stance that everything they had done was legal—which it was, except for killing a few folks and those killings would never come to light unless Lambert, Hobson, Kelly, or Nelson talked.
So for now there was no reason to kill DeMarco and Emma—the cat was fully out of the bag. Yet it bothered her that DeMarco was still poking into things, and it looked like his latest maneuver had been to convince the prosecutor to threaten Nelson with the maximum sentence. But that gambit would be neutralized when Kelly sprung Nelson.
She paced her office, unconsciously scratching her left forearm, as she mulled everything over. She stopped once to touch the yellowing leaves of a dying fica plant that sat near a window. She had her secretary water the stupid thing and it was in a place where it got sun, but it seemed as if it just wanted to die. It was like the plant was committing suicide to spite her.
Her biggest problem, she thought, wasn’t DeMarco, nor was it Kelly or Nelson. And she wasn’t worried about René Lambert, either. There was no evidence that Lambert had done anything illegal and, even if he had, the United States had no jurisdiction in the countries where he had operated. If the U.S. government could prove that Lambert had broken some U.S. law—although she couldn’t imagine what law that would be—he’d have to be extradited from France, and the French, being the contrary pricks they were, would most likely refuse to extradite him. Yeah, René was okay; he wasn’t a problem.
Hobson was her problem. That potbellied pencil pusher—he was the weak link. He hadn’t committed a major crime—he’d mostly just shipped things to and fro—and although he was an accomplice in Phil Downing’s murder, he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Yeah, the government would definitely give Hobson a deal if he talked.
Hobson had to go—no matter what Orson said.
She had told Hobson that she needed him to maintain the care centers for six more months, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized she didn’t really need him—she just needed someone like him. And now that Mulray’s role with the care centers was out in the open, some manager at Mulray Pharma could do Hobson’s job. Yes, she should get rid of Hobson now, particularly since DeMarco was still poking into things, because when Nelson escaped, DeMarco might decide to squeeze Bill Hobson next.
But no more tricky stuff. She was going to keep it simple with Hobson.
She called Earl Lee. “I want you to take care of Hobson. Break into his house, shoot him in the head, and steal some shit. Do it right away.”
“Roger that,” Lee said.
Roger that. What an asshole.
The first thing Hobson did after leaving his office was drive to the day care center to pick up Brad.
General Omar Bradley was a purebred black cairn terrier—the cutest little four-legged, button-eyed critter you’ve ever seen—and he was named after the great World War II general, whom Hobson had always admired. And just as Patton had called the human Omar Bradley Brad, that’s what Hobson called his pet most of the time.
When it came to spending money on himself, Hobson was miserly. General Omar Bradley, however, was a different matter. The doggie day care center was a four-star facility: Brad ate nothing but the finest, most nutritious foods; he had quarterly checkups at the vet’s to make sure he was healthy and free of fleas and worms. The reason Hobson was so generous when it came to his pet was that Omar Bradley was the only creature on the planet who loved him and whom Bill Hobson loved in return. When he walked into the day care center to pick him up, Brad yipped with delight, wagged his stubby tail, and licked his face—which he did every time he saw Hobson.
He would have gone crazy with loneliness had it not been for his little dog.
With Brad sitting on the seat next to him, he drove back to his shitty apartment. He took the dog for a short walk so he could do his business and gave h
im his medicine (mixed in with a snack), then stood in his small living room, looking at the few things he possessed. There were a couple of pictures on the wall, a sofa and a reclining chair, two end tables, three lamps, and an IKEA bookshelf that held about fifty paperbacks. All his furniture had been purchased at the same yard sale. His laptop, television, and DVD player were the most expensive things he owned, and they were all bottom-of-the-line. He’d keep the laptop but would leave the television and DVD player; he didn’t want to lug them around. All his cooking utensils he’d bought at a Goodwill store, and when he needed more, he’d go to another Goodwill.
He packed as many clothes as he could get into a large duffel-bag type suitcase, leaving most of his heavy winter clothes. Then—so he wouldn’t even be tempted to use them—he chopped up all his credit cards with scissors, and fed the pieces down the garbage disposal. He kept his AAA card, however, because he might need it if his car broke down—but he hoped he wouldn’t.
He grabbed Brad’s travel cage and all the dog food he had, and crammed everything—duffel bag, laptop, dog cage, and dog food—into the trunk of his car. He wished he had a pistol for protection, but he didn’t, and he’d never tried to buy one when he got of out of prison, figuring it would be too much of a hassle.
He opened the passenger-side door of his Ford Taurus and Omar Bradley hopped into the car and sat down on his haunches. His tail was wagging frantically; Brad loved going for a ride. As they were driving, Hobson tossed his cell phone out the window. If his car broke down, he wouldn’t be able to call AAA, but that was okay. Better to be stuck on the highway than have someone track him using his phone.
His next problem was money. He had almost four hundred thousand in a bank in the Caymans, but if he transferred it to another bank he’d leave an electronic trail. So what he couldn’t do was transfer the money when he reached Little Rock. He called the Caymans bank from a pay phone, went through all the security rigmarole, had them wire the money to his Philadelphia bank, and then had the Philadelphia bank give him cash. He hated to do it, but he put all the money into a black plastic garbage bag and shoved it into the trunk of his car, where it was going to have to stay until he could find someplace safer to put it.
