Ogrodnik

by Gary Coffin

  “Biovonix International. How may I help you?”

  “Hello, I need to talk to Dr. Banik.”

  “I’m afraid Dr. Banik is not taking calls at this time. May I take a message?”

  “Tell him it’s Elliot Forsman. He’ll speak to me.”

  “One moment.”

  Elliot waited for a moment and heard the line switch.

  “Alex Banik speaking.”

  “Banik, this is Elliot Forsman.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Forsman?”

  “I want my partner, Banik. Where is she?”

  “I assure you I know nothing of the whereabouts of Ms. Goldstein.”

  “Look, Banik, I know everything. I know you ordered the deaths of my wife, and my father. I know you have cops in your back pocket, and I know all about your bloodhound Yilmaz and his crew.”

  Banik said nothing.

  “We’re coming after you, Banik. We’re coming to burn your house down and take you and your gang down with it.”

  “I am a businessman and a scientist, nothing more. What is it you want from me, Mr. Forsman?”

  “I’ll offer you the same as your bloodhound put in front of me. Give me my partner, and we’ll back off and let the cards fall where they may. The wheels are already in motion to bring down Biovonix. That can’t be stopped. But I’ll back off on the confrontation that is imminent, and you can save some lives in the process.”

  “As I’ve told you already, I have no knowledge on the whereabouts of Ms. Goldstein.”

  “Ogrodnik has her, and he works for you.”

  “Ogrodnik does not work for me. The tenuous relationship we once had is no longer in place. Whatever Ogrodnik has done has nothing to do with me.”

  “Tell me how to find him.”

  “I don’t know how. Our arrangement was one-sided. He gave me a number to use when I needed him. He broke off our relationship last week and disposed of that particular phone. I am unable to contact him.”

  “I don’t believe you, so buckle up, Banik. We’re coming in to take you down.”

  “Yves. It’s Elliot Forsman”

  “Elliot, what can I do for you today?”

  “We need to meet, Yves. Right now.”

  “Does this have something to do with your visit to see the chief earlier this week?”

  “Yes. But I can’t talk on the phone. Can you meet me at Chalet BBQ on Sherbrooke? It’s important and imperative you don’t tell anyone, ANYONE, you’re meeting with me.”

  “You’ve got me intrigued now. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Yves slipped into the booth at the back of the restaurant alongside Elliot.

  “Thanks for coming. Did you tell anyone you were meeting with me?”

  “Did you ask me not to tell anyone?” Yves said slightly annoyed. “The answer is no. Why all the cloak and dagger? What kind of trouble are you in?”

  “Let me start at the beginning.”

  “As you know, Rivka and I started looking into Dad’s death and found the murderer, a man by the name of Paul Kulas. We put a tail on him, and Kulas allegedly killed the tail. That’s when Chief Doyle got involved and called us in. He booted us off the case and gave it to Durocher and Duval. In their subsequent investigation, they found Kulas dead with a gun in his hand and a hole in his mouth. There was also material in the house that suggested Kulas was carrying a grudge against my father and provided an explanation as to why he was killed. Everything was wrapped up neat and tidy. You probably know all of that already.”

  “I do.”

  “Here’s what you don’t know,“ Elliot said leaning forward onto the table to keep his voice down.

  “It was all bullshit, a total setup. The entire suicide was staged and orchestrated by the head of a pharmaceutical company and his security team. And they did it with the aid of the police.“

  Yves turned his head sideways and stuck his face further into Elliot’s space. “Do you have proof of any of this?” Yves whispered harshly.

  “I have enough to convince you, but before we get into those details, there’s more to the story.”

  If he didn’t already have it, Elliot had Yves full attention now.

  “When Rivka went to relieve our tail she was assaulted by a man with a Taser, not by Kulas but by an accomplice of Kulas’s, a huge monster of a man we later learned goes by the name Ogrodnik. During the assault, Ogrodnik admitted to Rivka that he was the one who murdered the tail.”

  “Why didn’t you report this?” Yves blurted.

  Elliot put up his hand, “Let me tell the whole story.”

  He hesitated for a moment to gather his thoughts so he could limit the information he was giving Yves to only what he wanted him to have. There was no need to let anyone else know about Rayce’s involvement nor did he want to overly complicate his account of events by going into the Stungun story at this point. He needed actions from Yves, not endless questions.

  “The story now branches into two separate but related threads. One thread is about my father’s murder and the reasons behind it. My father became privy to irregularities in the pre-clinical testing of a new cancer-fighting drug by a pharmaceutical company named Biovonix, and he was killed for it. The drug is currently on the fast track to being approved, and the investors stand to make billions from it. The rest of my father’s story I just told you about. The other thread centers on one of Dad's murderers. There were two men up on the mountain that morning, Kulas and his partner. Kulas we know is dead and was the principal in the staged suicide I just mentioned. His partner, Ogrodnik, for reasons I don’t understand, is infatuated with my partner, Rivka. At some point this morning, Rivka was kidnapped by Ogrodnik.”

  “Quite a story. Murder, crooked cops, corporate conspiracy. I’ll need you to come into the station and have someone take your statement. If what you’re telling me is accurate, this is huge. The force will want to contain it.”

  “Not going to happen, Yves. Not now. What I want from you, what I need from you, is to muster some personnel that you trust and start looking for Rivka. She’s out there in the hands of a known killer, and I don’t have the resources to start a manhunt from scratch.”

  “Elliot, I can’t sit on something this big. I could lose my job. Our best course of action is to do this by the book. Come in so we can take your statement.”

  “Our priority is to find Rivka before something happens to her, assuming she’s still alive. The rest of the story can wait. It’s not going anywhere. Pretend you didn’t hear those parts. Let’s imagine for a moment my story is that I want to report a kidnapping. That’s all. I’ll give you Ogrodnik’s description and the name of his employer at Biovonix. We leave it at that until Rivka is found.“

  Yves mulled it over for a moment. “I’ll play your game as long as you promise that as soon as the kidnapper saga plays out, we sit down and you tell me everything.”

  Elliot nodded.

  “One thing I will need to know is who the corrupt officers are.”

  “The only ones I’m sure of are Duval, Durocher, and the chief.”

  “The chief!, Are you sure? Duval and Durocher I can believe, but the chief?” Shrilled Renault quietly.

  The conversation continued as Elliot filled in Renault on his theories regarding the corrupt police and then gave him what little he knew about Ogrodnik. He needed Yves and his resources to find Alex Banik and question him. He did not mention Eastern Security, the bunker, or Rayce. In Elliot’s mind, there were two viable options for finding Rivka, one was to find and interrogate Banik. He knew that the police would have a much better chance of finding Banik than himself. The second means to find Rivka was to capture and question Yilmaz or one of his cronies. He was confident that Rayce could extract information more quickly from an unwilling participant than the police.

  Elliot arrived back at Rayce’s just as he was in the process of establishing an encrypted Skype connection. The screen flashed a couple of times as the connection was being n
egotiated, and then the tawny face of Evan Hernandez appeared in the viewing window.

  “You have questions about the tech in the Biovonix bunker?” asked Evan.

  “I do,” replied Rayce as he turned his full attention to the pixelated face. “I’ve been over the building blueprints and have a rudimentary plan, but I need to know more about the security at the bunker.”

  “Let me give you some background,” said Evan.

  “This facility will house the data center for Biovonix once they expand internationally and will also serve as the NOC. Whoever designed the security spared no expense. “

  “NOC?”

  “Network Operation Center. It is command central for all corporate electronic security as well as their data center.”

  “What can you tell me about the physical security?”

  “As you know we’re looking at a square, two-story building set back into a wooded zone at the back of the property in a cleared area about 600 feet squared. The bunker sits in the middle of that clearing. The building has a total of twelve cameras covering all four sides of the building with lots of overlap between the cameras. There are no blind spots. The surrounding wooded area also has hundreds of wireless, microwave motion sensors interspersed randomly. Nothing can approach the clearing without the NOC knowing about it. The entire building is clad in quintuple, laminated tempered glass with vibration sensors on each sheet. They are bulletproof. There are four exterior doors, each positioned in the center of the building's four sides.“

  “What about inside the building?”

  “The building is square with primary hallways crisscrossing down the center. The junction point where the two hallways intersect is a large foyer open to both floors. All the rooms in the building are accessed through these two hallways. The hallways have cameras on each end. The exterior doors have a 3000 lb. mag lock on them and also have open door sensors.”

  “What’s in the basement?”

  “The basement is used for parking. The garage door is at the bottom of a ramp at the front right of the building. The door itself is solid steel and has open sensors in it. There are also cameras in the garage. “

  “Roof?”

  “The roof is flat. The north side stairwell extends to a third floor landing that is essentially just roof access. The access door is an industrial steel door with an open sensor on it. There are no cameras on the roof.“

  “How is the building powered?”

  “The facility has electricity supplied by two separate grids and also has diesel generators in the unlikely event that both grids go down.”

  “Tell me about the NOC.”

  “It’s located near the center of the building and can be accessed from either of two doors, one door on each of the two first floor hallways. I can’t tell you too much about it. They have their security locked down tight. The reason I know as much as I do is because I was able to hack into the construction company that built the building. Their security was not nearly as robust as Biovonix’s.”

  “Where is the security infrastructure located?”

  “The servers, security appliances and most of the network equipment are in the NOC. The camera and sensor networks for the second floor and roof are routed through a wiring closet on the second floor just off the north stairwell and then down into the first floor wiring closet in the NOC. The sensors in the wooded area are wireless and communicate directly with hubs in the NOC.”

  “They’re using an OPUS III security solution; it’s a tier 1 security system that is un-hackable. If there’s a way in, I don’t see it based on the physical and electronic security.”

  “Is there any way to shut down the cameras?”

  “Not from the outside. From the inside, we could attach a DOS device to the network.”

  “How does that work?”

  “It’ll start a standard Denial of Service attack. You plug a small device into the second-floor network switch that carries camera traffic. The device will generate so much garbage traffic, it will prevent real camera traffic from reaching the consoles in the NOC. Because you’re already inside their firewalls, there’s nothing to stop that garbage traffic from flooding the network.”

  Elliot and Evan said nothing as Rayce stared vacantly at the wall.

  “Do the internal and external camera traffic travel on the same network?”

  “No. They are segregated. The cameras on the outside of the building are routed directly to the NOC on the first floor. The cameras in the hallways on the second floor are routed through the network switch in the second-floor wiring closet. That switch is connected directly to a network switch in the NOC that services the main floor cameras.”

  “So if we can plug your device into the second-floor network switch, all the internal cameras will be inoperable?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about the internal doors? Will they be locked?”

  “No, the internal doors are on a centralized security card system that hasn’t been installed yet. All the internal doors are unlocked.”

  Once again Rayce stared off into oblivion as he ran scenarios through his mind.

  “Okay, I think I’m good. Evan, can you send me that device?”

  “Consider it on its way.”

  “Thanks for the info.”

  “No problem, amigo,” said Evan as he signed off.

  “I think I have a workable plan.“

  After waiting for a moment, Elliot asked, “Are you going to share it?”

  “We have two goals; one is to capture and interrogate one of the mercs, preferably Yilmaz, to find out where Ogrodnik and Rivka are. The other is more personal. It’s payback for Sarah. I plan on bringing Eastern down, piece by piece. At the end of this, Eastern Security will no longer exist.”

  Rayce looked at Elliot to make sure he understood.

  “Agreed.”

  “Good, my plan is that we parachute onto the roof, take out the rooftop snipers, get into the second-floor wiring closet and install Evan’s device, if there are any mercs waiting in the basement or the second-floor hallway, we’ll take care of them and then hit the NOC. We’ll leave one merc alive for questioning,” said Rayce without offering any clarification on the oversimplified plan.

  “I have questions. First of all, how do you know where the mercs will be deployed?” asked Elliot.

  “I don’t, but their options are limited, and Yilmaz is a product of the military. If you want to know what we’ll do if they aren’t deployed the way I anticipate, then my answer to you is simple—we improvise.”

  Elliot was about to interject with more questions, but Rayce stopped him before he got started.

  “Enough questions. We need to get ready. I have most of the equipment, but we will need a couple of things. Can you get hold of an airplane?”

  “An airplane, are you kidding me? What do we need an airplane for?

  “How else do we parachute in?”

  Elliot looked at Rayce with a face that said, “Really?”

  “Well, can you get one?”

  He thought for a moment. “How about a copter? I know a guy who runs a heli tour around the island.”

  “Will he fly without an approved flight plan?”

  “A copter doesn’t need a flight plan in most areas and I know he’s flown on demand in the past. I also know that every man has his price.”

  “We’ll need some help as well. We need someone to create a distraction while we’re gliding in.”

  Elliot was past the point of being skeptical. “I know someone who has an axe to grind with Eastern.”

  Rayce clued in immediately. “Sammy? Yes, he’d be perfect. Here’s what we need him to do,” and Rayce explained the diversion strategy.

  * * * * * * *

 

  “Hello, Sammy. Elliot here.”

  “Elliot, what’s up my friend?”

  “How’s the thumb? “

  “It’s as sore as a hemorrhoi
d in a sandstorm.”

  Elliot didn’t have time to beat around the bush with small talk. “Sammy, they kidnapped Rivka. I’m going after them, and I need some help. Interested?”

  “Those fuckers. You’re damn right I want in.“

  “Good. Here’s what I need you to do,” and Elliot explained the plan to Sammy.

  * * * * * * *

  “Elliot, please.”

  “Jen?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Did you find out anything about the follow-up request?”

  “I did. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay. The report indicates that some mice were failing the learning and memory tests. That in itself doesn’t tell us much. We need to know under what circumstances these mice were failing and from which colonies they belonged. As I mentioned this morning, it wouldn’t do any good to bury a failed test report. The tests still need to be executed correctly, and we already know that test results cannot be fudged.”

  “Go on.”

  “I cross-referenced all of the mice identified in the report and discovered that all were from one of the free colonies. Digging a bit more, I found that they were first generation offspring of treatment recipients.”

  “What does that mean to you?”

  “Wait. There’s more. I decided to look for the actual test results, and I found the results linked to the failed test report, but I couldn’t find results from any other free colony.”

  “Okay. So what was different with the mice in the free colony in question?”

  “Hang on. Out of frustration, I started looking at Sarah’s other scanned documents, and I came across the test matrix for Isotin. It’s a checklist of all the in-vivo tests, how often they should be executed and which colonies they should be run against. The test grid tells me that memory tests are executed on most colonies throughout the life of the test period, but they are executed on free colony members in only one cycle, shortly after they are born.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s a time and resource issue. Remember, the focus for these tests is on treatment recipient mice and not necessarily on the offspring. We can’t possibly run every test on every mouse in every colony, so choices have to be made. This is standard practice for all in-vivo testing.”

  “What am I missing, Jen?”