by K C Gillis
“Specifics. I won’t ask again.”
“All right. She knows I arranged the accidents at the marina. And she knows the chief was part of it. I told her I got my instructions from him. Then she asked who was behind the accidents. But she already knew your name and that you worked for some casino. I don’t know how, but it didn’t come from me.”
“So she already knew about me and who I worked for?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s disappointing. Does she know about the finale?”
“No. She never asked if there was anything else planned, so I said nothing.”
“Good. Now think hard. Is there anything else I should know about this conversation with Ms. Reed? Anything at all?”
Nicky stood so close to Malone that he could almost taste the sweat that was trickling down his face. He was afraid for his life. He wouldn’t tell any lies.
“That’s all she asked. But she had her phone in her hand the whole time we were talking. It was probably nothing, but you asked if there was anything else.”
Nicky sensed a potentially troubling fact. “Her phone. Did she hold it the same way for your entire conversation?”
“Uh, I guess so. No, wait. It had been somewhere else first, maybe a pocket. She pulled it out to write down the name of a place I told her about. Then she kept it in her hand as she asked me those questions.”
Nicky had a bad feeling. “Did she say she was going to record your conversation?”
Malone’s eyes opened wide, making the connection. “No. No way. She said nothing like that at all.”
“But she pulled out her phone long enough to do something on the screen?”
“Um, yeah, I guess so.”
“She recorded you, you idiot. Now what the hell am I going to do?”
Nicky’s question was rhetorical, but Malone didn’t seem to pick up on that.
“Maybe you could take her phone?”
“If she’s smart, it’s already been backed up somewhere safe. Did she say what she was going to do?”
“No, but I think she’s figured out the accidents are connected.”
“Did she promise you something?”
“She said helping her would buy me some protection. That it would show I tried to do the right thing.”
“You shouldn’t trust reporters. They don’t know anything about protection.”
Nicky concluded that Malone had outlived his usefulness. From the moment Nicky had first met Malone, he could have predicted this end. The chief should have known better.
Nicky had pre-positioned a piece of nylon rope on a seat on the deck. The rope was thin but plenty strong enough for its intended purpose.
Aided by the low lighting, Nicky caught Malone off guard. In a rapid and coordinated motion born from practice, Nicky pushed Malone’s left shoulder with his right hand while he used his left hand to grab the rope. As Malone spun counterclockwise, Nicky extended his left arm in front of Malone, grabbing an end of the rope with his right hand. In an instant, the rope was around Malone’s neck.
Had Malone reacted fast enough, he may have been able to get a hand between his neck and the rope. That would have given him a chance of breathing long enough to fight back. But he reacted like someone who had experienced very few physical altercations in his life. With paralyzing indecision.
From behind, Nicky pushed Malone against a rail on the boat, forcing his upper body forward while he pulled back hard on the rope. Malone struggled, but he had no leverage and Nicky was too strong. Malone weakened as he ran out of oxygen. Within a minute, his struggles ceased. His body went limp, and Nicky let it slowly slide to the deck.
Despite his profession, Nicky wasn’t skilled at making bodies disappear in the water. The boat didn’t have many items of significant weight. But it had two anchors. One at the bow and one at the stern. Each one seemed about twenty-five pounds. He cut the last twenty feet of line for each anchor and wrapped the lines tightly around Malone’s body. Nicky figured there would be little natural buoyancy for a body wrapped in rope and that fifty pounds of weight would be more than enough to get it to the bottom of the lake.
Nicky knew there was some risk the body could eventually make it to the shore or the surface, but that would be at least days in the future. Maybe weeks or months. Hell, maybe never.
One problem solved, Nicky brought the boat back to the marina. He now had a new problem.
Nicky opened a beer and made a call.
“Yes,” Robbie said, answering on the first ring.
“It’s Nicky. There’s a problem that might affect your meeting with Banfield.”
“What sort of problem?”
“That reporter up here, Jordan Reed, got the guy the chief used to set up the marina accidents to tell her what he knew. I think she recorded him. She and Banfield could use it to get you to back off. They could also make it public, or tell the cops.”
“You mean cops other than Chief Foster?”
“Of course.”
“Then you better get whatever Jordan Reed has before I meet with Banfield. Can you do it?”
“It’ll be hard to get her alone. The marina is crowded. If I were her, I wouldn’t let myself be alone with me.”
“What about the kid? Jordan Reed trusts him, right?”
“Seems like it. Do you think he can do anything?”
“If he wants to be one of the managers when I get the marina, he has to earn it. There’s a price for everything.”
“OK. I’ll make it work.”
“What about the chief’s helper? He’s got two strikes, and I don’t want to give him a chance for a third.”
Nicky used language that Robbie would correctly interpret. “He won’t be a problem anymore.”
“Good. I’ll be there late afternoon.”
“See you then, boss.”
42
Drew MacGregor hated having to work on a holiday. But when he took the job, he knew the testing would require monitoring almost every day. He had gotten permission to schedule a gap in the testing for the Christmas period, but otherwise, he had to do something every day.
As he went about checking the feed supplies and dosing regimens for the day, he took some comfort knowing that, one way or another, he wouldn’t be doing this much longer. At a minimum, he’d be fired as soon as the company identified someone else to take his place. What he was about to do would accelerate that timeline.
MacGregor knew the site video system was continuous, that if it were interrupted for any reason, it would send an alarm to headquarters. Not that he knew exactly where that was. If he disabled the alarm while he took some samples, the company might immediately send someone to check the site and system. That would ruin the day.
The alternative was to take his chances of being seen on video stealing the samples. He had no idea exactly how often video was reviewed, but he suspected it wasn’t very often. After all, there had only been a few people who had ever been on-site. Why look at the video at all? With a little luck, his actions wouldn’t be specifically noticed.
With his work taking less than an hour, MacGregor turned to his last task. Stealing samples for Jordan Reed. He let his mind wander to the fact that the reporter was really attractive. That maybe she’d go out on a date with him once she finished her story. Sort of a thank-you for his help. That would definitely make up for losing his job.
At the door to the storage room, he entered his eight-digit code into the keypad. When the first light flashed green, he scanned the ID badge that he wore on a lanyard around his neck. The second light flashed green, and the door unlocked.
MacGregor entered the climate-controlled room that housed three ultralow temperature freezers and five large refrigerators with glass doors. There were also two metal storage cylinders that contained liquid nitrogen. These were for storage of critical tissue samples and cell cultures. The low temperature kept them viable for as long as they remained frozen.
What MacGregor needed was kept in two
different refrigerators. He had a key that, in combination with his ID badge, unlocked them both. In the first one, he grabbed a glass vial containing a white powder. While he didn’t know the structures of the chemicals used on the fish, he knew a few things. For example, he knew that one chemical was a synthetic growth hormone meant to target several receptors. He saw how fast the fish and other test animals grew in response. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before.
In a second refrigerator, he took out a small plastic tube. They used this chemical in smaller quantities than the growth hormone. MacGregor had no idea what the chemical was, but he knew that when used in combination with the synthetic growth hormone, the test animals seemed to grow even faster. Too fast, as he had observed.
Through some kind of delivery mix-up, MacGregor knew that the second chemical was being used at a different location. When he last received a batch one month earlier, there were two distinct packages in the shipment. One was for an address in Oklahoma. MacGregor had informed the chief, and one day later, someone had come and retrieved that package, with no explanation.
MacGregor placed the two samples into a small ziplock bag and put the bag in a pocket in his shorts. They’d be fine outside of a fridge for a couple of days, as long as they weren’t left to bake in the sunlight.
Finished with what he needed to do at the site, MacGregor locked everything up and exited the test building. He texted Jordan that he’d be at the marina soon.
A man sat at a desk watching the live video feed from the test building at the Copper Lake site.
He normally reviewed artificial-intelligence-flagged footage once a week but had been notified that, for at least the next few days, he was to monitor the movements of Drew MacGregor every time he was on-site. If MacGregor did anything suspicious, or violated any company policies, the man was to call Francis Emberly immediately. He picked up the phone.
43
Drew MacGregor sat in a jail cell. He knew he had been taking a risk, but never in a thousand years would he have expected to get caught within fifteen minutes of taking the samples. Someone at the company must have been watching him. In real time. He hadn’t considered that letting the drone get inside the testing building might have triggered an immediate increase in monitoring. Now he’d definitely get fired, and maybe worse. Not to mention that NeuSterone would still be in operation. His actions would have been for nothing.
The chief had left him alone, hardly saying anything more than they suspected him of robbery and that he’d be held pending charges. That might have been legally correct, but Drew wasn’t sure why the police had gotten involved right away. This was a case of an employee taking something from an employer. It should have been handled internally.
While Drew pondered the legality of his situation, a door opened. A single pair of footsteps echoed down the hall. It surprised him not to see the chief. Instead, he saw a man who seemed familiar but whose identity initially escaped him.
The man stopped in front of Drew’s cell, looking relaxed in khaki shorts and a golf shirt.
“Drew MacGregor,” he said. “It looks like you’ve forgotten the company policy on removal of property. You’ve created quite a challenging situation for me.”
As soon as the man spoke, Drew knew it was Francis Emberly. They had spoken on the phone enough that he recognized the voice. Their only face-to-face meeting had been a video interview eighteen months earlier, from which Drew remembered very little of Emberly’s appearance.
Drew could play this one of two ways. He could act apologetic and hope the company didn’t do more than just fire him. Or he could stand his ground and hope Jordan Reed had enough to be able to expose NeuSterone without the samples. He opted for the second scenario.
“You guys should have thought of that before you started testing a bunch of unapproved shit. You can’t expect to be able to keep something like that secret forever.”
“Of course not. Once we identify the right formulations and dosing, we’ll get all the needed approvals to be able to get our products to the market. The bureaucracy is too intrusive to allow a company like ours to succeed without cutting some corners. Sacrificing a few animals is a small price to pay for the improvement in animal yields we plan to deliver. Imagine the impact on the supply of fish, beef, and chicken. Animals will reach an optimal weight for slaughter in half the time it takes today. Maybe less. It’s too bad for you that you won’t be part of that future success.”
“If I had known what you were doing, I never would have joined the company. The shit you’re testing will never work the way you expect. Plus, the chemicals are getting out.”
“What do you mean, ‘getting out’?”
“Getting off the site. A deer died that looked just like the cows we tested. And there’s a stream that runs right through the property. The property where we’re also running our wastewater underground. Fuck, didn’t you guys plan ahead?”
From the look of frustration on Emberly’s face, either Drew’s revelation was new information or he was pissed that it was no longer secret.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. But you should have considered your employment more thoroughly before taking the job. I never heard any complaints about your paycheck.”
Emberly was right. They paid Drew what seemed to be an immoral amount of money for the work he did. And his benefits were better than he had ever personally experienced before. If he had stayed a few more years, he would never have been able to break free from the golden handcuffs of NeuSterone.
“Well, there’s more to life than money.”
“Not to most people in America. But enough philosophy. Now, the chief seemed not to want to confiscate what you stole. Fear of the unknown, I guess. You need to give me what you stole.”
Drew didn’t have much leverage. In fact, he had none. Locked in a jail cell overseen by a police chief who was part of the conspiracy to hide what NeuSterone was doing was about as impossible a situation as he could imagine. The chief could keep him locked up for days.
He stood up and reached into his pocket, pulling out the ziplock bag with the two samples. He walked to the front of the cell and gave it to Emberly.
“That’s a start. Now tell me what you told Jordan Reed.”
Drew laughed. “Can you really have no idea? I didn’t need to tell her much at all. She knew NeuSterone was testing unapproved chemicals on animals and that you killed a few hundred fish. She had one of them tested and knows why they died. She has a video of the inside of the testing building. I only confirmed that I dumped the fish. But she already knew the chief cleaned them up. Plus, she knows about the dead deer and the dumping of wastewater at the site.”
“That’s some interesting information. But without what’s in these vials you stole, she has no proof that what killed the fish came from NeuSterone. It’s just a theory, one that won’t go anywhere. There are enough people with a stake in NeuSterone to make sure there won’t be any official investigation. We may need to relocate the work from the Copper Lake site, but that’s just the cost of doing business.”
“So now what? When do I get out of here?”
“That’s up to the chief. I heard he’s investigating some accidents at the marina. Your name came up as a possible suspect. You may be here awhile.”
Emberly turned and left, leaving Drew MacGregor in a growing state of shock. The realization of how powerless he was had begun to set in. Along with confirmation that those with power had no reservations about using it to serve whatever purpose they chose.
Francis Emberly made a call. Good news had been elusive, but the MacGregor situation had ended acceptably.
“Talk to me, Francis,” Chisholm said.
“I have the samples MacGregor stole. There’s no way Jordan Reed will get them.”
“What does that do to her story?”
“It weakens it significantly. Maybe enough that her editor refuses to publish it.”
“That’s a positive chang
e. What about MacGregor?”
“The chief is holding him as a suspect in some marina accidents. He’ll be in a jail cell for a while. At least until MacGregor can get a lawyer good enough to dismiss the made-up charges.”
“Perfect. I’ve got good news myself.”
“Tell me.”
“The Vitali trying to buy the marina is the kid, Robbie. I hear he’s a hothead, so we have a better chance of derailing him than if we had to deal with his father.”
“Maybe everything will fall into place.”
“We’ll know soon enough. I’m on my way. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Jordan paced near the parking lot, waiting for Drew MacGregor to show up. Based on when he texted Jordan, he should have arrived already. He probably should have arrived at least twenty minutes ago.
Jordan used the wait time to assess where she stood with the whole NeuSterone story. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she needed the samples. She had an actual dead fish, with a solid cause of death. That was complemented by video from inside the NeuSterone test site that showed fish tanks. But without proof the chemicals that killed the fish were being used by NeuSterone, it was possible for them to squirm out of any real trouble.
Where the hell is he?
Jordan didn’t like to hassle people when they said they were doing something, mainly because she hated it when people did that to her. MacGregor had said he was on his way, so Jordan should be patient. He probably had to stop off somewhere first, maybe his place. It was all she could do not to call or text him.
Jordan distracted herself by listening to the recording of Punch Malone. It did a good job of implicating him, the chief, and Nicky Carlucci in the marina accidents. Punch didn’t specifically know who they all worked for, but his statement added that both the chief and Nicky told him that they were all working for someone else. Jordan would give the recording to Mike so he could use it with Vitali to get him to back off. They’d need to involve the state police eventually, but not until it was too late for the chief and Vitali to figure a way out.
