Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller

by Bouchard, J. W.

  Red and blue light danced across the living room windows. Several black and white squad cars were parked haphazardly on the street outside. Alan had already spoken to the officers, as well as two detectives from the San Francisco PD. The forensic team had mostly finished up, and the two bodies had been carted away by ambulance. Both of the men that had arrived in the black Suburban had been pronounced dead at the scene.

  Alan tried to keep his nerves in check as he stood up from the sofa and began pacing the living room. His legs were restless, as though they were gearing up to run a marathon. His eyes flitted over the expensive furniture, the art that hung on the walls, and the giant fireplace that was almost large enough for a man to crawl into.

  “You have a son,” Alan said, looking at McKay. “Is he home right now?”

  “What?” McKay asked dazedly.

  “Your son. Your seven-year-old. Is he home?”

  “Oh. No, he’s at his mother’s. He stays with her during the week. I have him on the weekends.”

  Alan followed this up with a series of innocuous questions. McKay wasn’t in any shape to talk, but Alan needed him to. He wanted to put the man at ease (or at least something close to it) before he started asking the tough questions.

  “Your wife lives here in Walnut Creek?” Alan asked.

  “Sausalito. I think I’d like a drink of water.”

  “That’s doable,” Alan said.

  He glanced at Knowles, who was leaning up against the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Knowles nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. Alan could hear the man rummaging through the cupboards, followed by the sound of running water. He returned a minute later with a glass and handed it to McKay.

  “Mind if I get a glass?” Knowles asked.

  “Help yourself,” McKay said.

  Knowles glanced at Alan. “Want some?”

  Alan shook his head.

  Knowles disappeared back into the kitchen. Alan had told him he was free to leave, but Knowles had insisted on staying. He was as curious as Alan was, and as much as it was against procedure to have Knowles present during the interrogation, Alan was indebted to the man. He figured Knowles had earned the right.

  Alan watched as McKay sipped at the water. He sat down in the chair that faced the couch at an angle. “Mr. McKay, who is it that you’re working for.”

  “I’m not sure I should talk about that,” McKay said.

  “I’m not in the mood to play games,” Alan said. “Not a bit. It’s late. I flew halfway across the country to find you. You told me you’d tell me whatever I wanted to know. So I’ll ask you again, who is it that you’re working for?”

  McKay took another drink of his water before answering. “They call themselves Odin,” he said. “I don’t really know that much about them.”

  “Prior to working for Odin, you worked for a company called Sagent BioGen. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were terminated for corporate espionage. You were providing confidential information to a third party. I assume this third party was Odin LLC?”

  McKay nodded.

  “And who do you report to at Odin?”

  “No one. I don’t work for them anymore. I quit earlier today.”

  “Do you know the two men that tried to kill you tonight?”

  “No. Well, I don’t know them specifically, but I know that they were sent here by Odin.”

  “What makes you think they would send someone to kill you?”

  “Because I quit,” McKay said. He held his glass of water in both hands. Alan noticed they were shaking. “They aren’t exactly on the up and up, if you know what I mean.”

  “By that, you mean they were engaged in illegal activities?”

  “Yes and no. The research wasn’t illegal. Unethical perhaps, but not illegal. At least not in the States. But what they were using it for…that was most definitely illegal. When I discovered what they were doing, I resigned. I even offered to give all their money back.”

  “And the work they were doing? Cloning humans?”

  McKay looked up in surprise. “You know about that?”

  “Yeah, we know they’re cloning people and using them to commit crimes.”

  “Can you believe it? They’re doing things that are light years beyond what the rest of the scientific community is capable of, and then they use it for that. It’s…unbelievable.”

  “What kind of work did you do for Odin?”

  “I oversaw the cloning process. You have to believe me when I say I didn’t sign up for anything illegal. But when I was approached by them, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Money?”

  “A lot of it, but that wasn’t what intrigued me. They said my talents were wasted at Sagent. That with my help they could do things that no one else had done.”

  “Let’s go back to my original question. Who was your point of contact at Odin?”

  “A man called Morrie Arti. But I never actually met him. All of our correspondence was conducted via email and over the phone. I would report to work with the others and there was little intervention.”

  “Others?”

  “Other employees. Scientists and engineers mostly. I worked with at least a dozen other people. None of them had met our benefactor face to face either.”

  “You weren’t curious? Didn’t think it was strange that you hadn’t met your employer directly?”

  “Of course, but I was more focused on the work we were doing. We had created a viable way to clone a person. And it wasn’t a fluke. The process was sound. It worked, with a very minimal failure rate. That was a critical breakthrough in and of itself, but it didn’t stop there. They provided us with technology we didn’t know existed.”

  “What kind of technology?”

  “Instead of using a live surrogate, we used specialized immersion chambers. We were provided with solutions that sparked accelerated growth. Instead of taking years to grow a test subject to adulthood, we could do it in a matter of days. A perfect copy of another human being, with normal motor skills and cognitive abilities.”

  “I’m curious,” Alan said. “You could grow these clones into adults within a few days. But what about their intelligence? How did they learn? Just because you could grow them into adults doesn’t mean they would have the knowledge of a normal individual.”

  “I don’t know much about that. That was an entirely different department. I know there was programming involved because while they were incubated they were fitted with internal sensors that could communicate information even when the subject was dormant. The programming was very specific. Cognitively, they weren’t like you or I. It’s as if they were trained to do a limited set of specific tasks. But that’s all I know about it. There were engineers that handled those things, and they kept us in the dark.”

  “After you had grown these clones, then what would they do with them?”

  “I don’t know. Once they reached maturity, they were taken someplace else. I never saw what happened to them. But it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because none of them lived for more than a week two. Ever since we cloned the first animal, there have been certain pathologies present in the cloned animal. Almost as though it was a part of their programming. I’m not a religious man by nature, but after a while you start to believe that maybe God really is at work behind the scenes. And the things we were doing…well, he must not have liked it.”

  “A glitch in the programming?”

  McKay finished his glass of water. He held it up and said, “Could I have some more please?”

  Knowles, who stood listening in the entryway, stepped forward, grabbed McKay’s glass, and went into the kitchen to refill it.

  “In this case, it wasn’t a glitch. It was intentional. It’s very much as though the company wanted all of the subjects to have a predetermined expiration date.”

  “You could do that?”

&n
bsp; “Me? No. I wasn’t privy to their process for doing that, but I was aware that all of the clones we made had a built-in off switch of sorts. It wasn’t as simple as I’m making it sound, but there was an estimated window of how long the clones could survive after they were removed from incubation.”

  “Which was how long?”

  “Several days. A week at most.”

  “Why would they do that? Why create an adult human clone just to destroy it?”

  “Isn’t the answer obvious?”

  “Humor me.”

  “You have to understand that had I known what was really going on, I never would have gotten involved, no matter how enticing the opportunity was.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Don’t you see, it’s the perfect crime?” McKay said. “Not only could you clone a person so that when the crime was committed the prime suspect would be the actual person rather than the clone. And no matter how vehemently the person might claim otherwise, no one would believe them.”

  “Because the clone would be long gone,” Alan said.

  “Not just long gone. But expired. Dead.”

  “There are less elaborate ways to commit a crime.”

  “If I believed that it was only about that, I would tend to agree with you.”

  “You don’t think the crimes are part of this man, Morrie Arti’s, end game?”

  McKay shook his head. “Not at all.”

  “Then what is the end game?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any idea.”

  “And you didn’t know what the clones were being used for?”

  “Not at first. Not until several of the robberies had been committed and I watched the aftermath on the news. I recognized the suspects in each of them. We had created clones of all of them.”

  “And that’s when you quit?”

  McKay hesitated, glanced around at Knowles, who was holding the fresh glass of water. Knowles handed it to him. McKay took a drink. He seemed to be on the verge of deciding something. Alan had seen the same look countless times before. The look said that McKay was trying to decide whether to tell the truth or not.

  “It might not seem like it,” Alan said, “but I want to assure you that the truth is always the best way to go.”

  “Am I going to jail?”

  “That isn’t up to me. The federal prosecutor will look at the case and make a determination. What I can tell you is that your best bet right now is to cooperate with us. I don’t make the decisions, but the prosecutor will listen to what I have to say, and depending on what that is, it could sway him in one direction or the other.”

  McKay took a long time making his decision. “I suppose you’re right. At this point, lying wouldn’t accomplish anything. It’s just that…I’m a little ashamed.”

  “So you did know that the work you were doing was being used for illegal purposes?”

  “I was telling the truth when I said I didn’t know at first. Not until I recognized the suspects in some of the cases. I should have gotten out then. I almost did. But the work we were doing…it was so advanced, so far ahead of its time, it was hard to just walk away. I wasn’t happy about it, but I tried to rationalize it by telling myself that they were only robberies. No one was actually getting hurt. It wasn’t until the car bombing, when they showed the picture of that woman who was killed that I couldn’t justify staying any longer.”

  “Were you the only one?

  “There were two others. One quit a day before me, and another at the same time I did.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  “Yes.”

  “Addresses?”

  “No. There wasn’t a lot of social interaction.”

  Alan looked at Knowles and made a gesture with his hand as though he were writing something on the air. Knowles disappeared for a moment and returned with a pen and a small notepad and handed them to Alan. Alan, in turn, handed them to McKay and asked him to write the names of the two men down on the pad. When McKay was finished, Alan tore the top sheet from the pad, gave it to Knowles, and whispered something to him. Knowles said, “I’m on it,” and exited through the front door.

  “What did your employer say when you put in your resignation?”

  “As I told you before, I’ve never made face to face contact with the man. I sent him an email. Impersonal, I know, but I’m thankful for that. He called me on my cell phone several minutes later and asked if there was anything he could do to convince me to stay. I said that there wasn’t. He wished me all the best and told me a final payment would be wired into my account.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “And then you just went home?”

  “I stopped off for drinks in the city first.”

  “With the other man that quit at the same time you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after you had drinks?”

  “We parted ways and I drove home, which is when those two men pulled in behind me and…they really were going to kill me weren’t they?”

  “Do you believe in luck, Mr. McKay?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, I’d say that luck must believe in you then, because you were extremely lucky tonight.”

  Alan spent another half hour interrogating Graham McKay. When he was finished, two uniformed officers took McKay into custody. He would be placed on a 72 hour hold, in which time the prosecutor would have to decide if he was going to file formal charges. There was no denying that McKay was involved in illegal activities, but Alan didn’t believe that intent was present. The most likely scenario would be for McKay to testify in front of a grand jury in exchange for a plea deal. That’s what Alan’s recommendation would be. Whether he was charged or not, Alan thought McKay might have trouble finding employment anytime in the near future. He almost felt sorry for him. Whatever the end game was, whoever was behind it, they didn’t seem to have any qualms with using innocent people as pawns. McKay was one of them. Doris Browning was another. Along with all of the civilians that had been killed or injured in the other bombings.

  You’re forgetting about Howard Sitka, Alan thought.

  All of them pawns.

  Alan was on his way to his rental car when Knowles approached him saying, “I’ve got news on those two guys that quit around the same time McKay did.”

  “That was fast.”

  “Yeah, well, something tells me that Guy would have wanted me to pull out all the stops.”

  “I’ll tell him he isn’t paying you enough.”

  Knowles uttered a brief chuckle before his face grew somber again. “Anyway, they’re not going to be of much help to you.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yep. Looks like both of them signed long-term leases in the dirt.”

  “Shit.”

  “You can say that again. Wanna grab a drink somewhere?” Knowles checked his watch. “I’d say we’ve got a good forty-five minutes to get our drunk on before last call.”

  “I’ll take a raincheck. Besides, I’m a lightweight.”

  “I hear ya. If you don’t need me, I’d be more than happy to extricate myself from this particular situation. I’ve got a wife that’s six months pregnant at home.”

  “Go be with your wife.” Alan extended his hand and Knowles shook it. “Thanks again. I’d probably be signing a dirt lease myself if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Well, next time you’re in town, you’re buying. That’ll even us up.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  They parted ways. Alan slid in behind the wheel of the rental car and started the engine. He sat there for a moment, hands gripping the wheel, and took a deep breath. It felt like the first real breath he had taken in hours.

  Chapter 14

  Alan was thankful for small favors. As far as he was aware, no one had yet figured out that the series of crimes taking place across the county were connected. No one had made the deductive leap that they were all linked by small but sign
ificant pieces of evidence, like puzzle pieces in some enormous, crazy jigsaw puzzle. Even Alan himself didn’t yet know how they all interconnected; he couldn’t yet determine what the final image would be once all the pieces were fitted into place.

  As far as he knew, only the GCB was privy to enough of the facts to realize they were all slices of the same pie.

  Well, maybe Darrow knows, Alan thought. But who the hell knows who he works for.

  Alan remained convinced that Darrow was a spook for the CIA, NSA, or some other branch of the government that spent normal business hours lurking in the shadows. Whatever agency Darrow belonged to, they weren’t represented that morning as what could only be described as a circus of law enforcement personnel gathered collectively two blocks from a vast warehouse not far from San Francisco’s business district.

  What do you call a gathering of crows? A murder.

  What do you call a gathering of law enforcement officers? A clusterfuck.

  There were beat cops from the SF PD, deputies from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, agents from the local ATF and FBI field offices, as well as enough top brass to make Alan a little nervous about what would happen if things went badly. It was the type of high-spectacle operation that guaranteed casualties, perhaps literally, but most assuredly figuratively. If mistakes were made, there would be a lot of people calling for a public crucifixion. The fact that the GCB was playing lead dog meant Alan was in the hot seat. Front and center.

  A radius consisting of at least a dozen city blocks had been cordoned off as everything was assembled. A parade of squad cars waited in formation to both the east and the west, all ready to converge on the warehouse when they received the signal.