by Jason Briggs
Charlotte leaned forward in her chair. “Did my father tell you how he came across this? How it ended up on his laptop to begin with?”
“No,” Nance replied. “He simply asked us to take it and provide him with our unbiased opinion of the data. Unfortunately, we don’t know who this research belongs to.”
I was pretty sure I knew. Douglas Peterson had told me that a Dr. Parker had taken his research findings from his time at DARPA over to MercoKline.
“If all this is what I think it is, then whoever controls this formula within the marketplace would be sitting on a gold mine of boundless proportions. It may,” he said, now looking at Charlotte, “serve to explain your father’s death. Maybe someone is trying to get it back after finding out he had all this.”
Tissot reappeared and stepped into the conference room looking pensive. He returned to his previous chair and shook his head. He was lost in thought.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“I… just received a very strange phone call. The caller indicated that they were with Pursuant Services and asked if we were finished with Mr. McCleary’s computer.”
I looked to Charlotte for an answer. “No,” she said sternly, “that can’t be right. My dad’s partner at Pursuant is in Asia right now—Travis Barlow. He’s finishing up a case he’s been working with NCIS. Travis certainly wouldn't have called you without talking to me about it first. Did the caller give you a name?”
“No, he didn’t. I asked for one, but he hung up.”
Charlotte pinched at the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “How is it that we know so little and someone else keeps staying one step ahead?”
“They’re one step behind on this one,” I said. “Can GRM turn the computer over to Charlotte?”
“Yes,” Nance replied. “We can. I’ll meet you downstairs with it. I’ll need to go down the hall and get it from the lab. Miss Charlotte, I’ll need to see your ID before I release it to you.”
We all stood up and made our leave from the conference room. Dr. Nance disappeared around a corner, and Charlotte and I followed Tissot back down the steps to the front lobby. I turned to face him. “It might be wise for you to hire some expert security until I can figure out what’s going on. Like I told you on the phone earlier today, Charlotte was almost killed last night because someone is trying to keep the information on that computer off the streets.”
“A good idea, Mr. Savage. Thank you.”
Dr. Nance reappeared with a MacBook in his hands. Charlotte presented her ID, and he handed it over. We thanked both men and returned to my truck. As we pulled out and started the drive south I continued searching for a tail. That call back at GRM asking for the laptop did nothing but keep me on high alert.
I was certain that the formula Dr. Nance had just revealed to us had originated from Dr. Parker’s research. And I was certain that Douglas Peterson was killed last night to cover up details surrounding it. But I still didn’t understand why someone would go through all this trouble to cover up a patent that Parker had chosen to take to a private company. He had clearly broken some big rules by not keeping his research within DARPA’s walls, but that was nothing that a well-paid team of the right lawyers couldn’t make go away.
There were still plenty of missing pieces and I was beginning to run out of patience.
I merged onto the Ronald Reagan Turnpike and headed south. Charlotte sat in the passenger seat staring out the window. “Do you have anyone you can go stay with until I figure this out?” I asked her.
“I have a cousin out in Phoenix. I don’t think anyone would look for me there. But honestly, I don’t want to be that far away from the investigation. I’d rather hang around here until we figure out what’s going on.”
“I can get my boss to book you a hotel in Miami, under an alternate name. Or you can come back with me to Key Largo. I have a friend I’m sure you could stay with. I would offer for you to stay at my place, but if the wrong person picks up on the fact that I’m working this case, I don’t want you getting caught in the crossfire again.”
“I don’t know that I’m ready to spend a night alone yet—not after last night. I wouldn’t mind staying with a friend of yours.”
“I’ll get you connected,” I said. “We’ll be at my office in about two hours. After that, it’s beer-thirty.”
Chapter Nineteen
The chain caught, and I waited for the steel gate to slide away before driving into my office’s parking lot. I parked, grabbed William McCleary’s computer, and stepped out of the truck. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I told Charlotte. “There’s a seawall over there if you want to stretch your legs and take in the view.”
“Thanks, I might do that.” I stepped back to shut the door. “Ryan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for everything you’ve done. Everything you are doing. It means a lot.”
“I’ll be back soon.” I shut the door and went inside, making my way down the first-floor hallway toward the evidence locker. I stopped when I saw a sliver of light coming from beneath Spam’s door. I rapped on it and opened it. Spam was the FID’s IT expert. He was a whiz when it came to computers, the internet, or hacking into programs or servers. His desk was facing the door and several empty cans of Diet Coke sat on his desk, and a congested band of wires and cords ran down to the floor and over to a bank of servers and routers and other gadgets that were completely foreign to me. A poster of Luke Skywalker standing face-to-face with Darth Vader hung—a little lopsided—on the wall behind him.
He looked up from one of five computer screens and brushed back a lock of red hair that had fallen over his eyes. “Ryan! What are you doing down here on a Sunday? Shouldn’t you be on the water with a line in the water?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. Shouldn’t you be at home playing Zelda, or Call of Duty or something?”
“Yes,” he said. “I totally should be. But my boss up at headquarters sent me a program he needs encrypted by tomorrow.”
I held up the laptop. “Can you take a look at this for me? I need you to scour this computer and segment all the information on it. Emails, notes, documents, and the like.” I handed it across his desk.
“A MacBook? Sure. Piece of cake. When do you need it by?”
“As soon as possible.”
“I can have it done by tomorrow at the latest. If I have it finished today, I’ll call you.”
“Thank, Spam. I don’t care what Brad says about you. You’re a good man.”
“Wait. What’s Brad say about me?”
I grinned and stepped back toward the door. “Thanks again, Spam.” I shut his door and took my exit of the building. Charlotte was sitting on the seawall, looking down at the water lapping just below her feet. I walked across the lush grass and came up beside her. “Hey,” I said.
She sniffed and looked away.
“You okay?”
“I can’t believe he’s gone.” A breeze tickled a few strands of hair off her shoulders and rustled the palm fronds above our heads.
I let out a long sigh. “Yeah,” I sighed. “I can’t either.”
“Earlier, you said something about a beer?”
“Damn right I did.” I held out my hand and helped her to her feet. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty
My feet crunched over the broken shells of The Reef’s parking lot as I made my way to the door. Key Largo was a far cry from Miami, where the hum of traffic never stopped filtering through the air, functioning as an internal background noise. Out here, the silence was easy to recognize and appreciate. It wasn’t unusual to take a morning jog into the state park to find yourself nearly convinced that you were the only person on the island. It wasn’t a challenge to find a cove to run your boat into and hear nothing but the wind or a critter moving about in the mangroves. It was my kind of place. Everyone else could keep their big cities and skyscrapers and traffic. For
me, this was home.
I opened the door for Charlotte and followed her in. The restaurant was unusually crowded for an early Sunday night. The bar was mostly empty and a couple dozen people were assembled on the back deck. The tables and chairs had been pulled back and everyone was standing along a line looking down near their feet.
Roscoe was behind the bar drying off clean glasses with a bar towel. “Ryan, there you are!”
“What’s going over there?” I asked. “Someone pass out?”
His large chest shuddered as he chuckled. “No. It’s the first annual, and possibly the last annual, Wayward Reef iguana race. Don Berry asked if they could use The Reef for some races. I said sure, but I’d better not come in tomorrow morning to have a lizard staring at me from some perch above the bar. Who’s this pretty thing you have with you?”
“Roscoe, this is Charlotte. Charlotte, Roscoe.”
He wiped his hands on the towel and came around to the front. He reached out and shook her hand. “A pleasure, young lady. How do you know this guy?”
She smiled half-heartedly. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“And I can see you would rather not talk about it. What kind of beer do you like?”
“Anything?” she replied.
“I have lots of anything. Give me a second and I’ll get you something to wash your cares away.” He returned to the bar and poured a couple of drinks from the tap, then set the glasses on the counter. “Here we go. Two Clamshell IPA’s. Guaranteed to make you feel better by the time you reach the bottom.”
I took them and handed one to Charlotte. “Thanks, Roscoe.” A loud cheer erupted from the deck, followed by a riot of laughter and groans. We walked over just as everyone started to disperse. I saw Brad bend over and pick something up. When he turned around a green iguana was laying across his forearm. Brad saw me and came over, looking disheartened.
I nodded toward the reptile. “Since when do you own an iguana?”
“Since about three hours ago. I was coming back from Key West and Roscoe called to tell me to come by, that there were going to be some iguana races. So I stopped off at a pet store in Big Pine Key and got this loser. Apparently, there are such things as semi-professional iguanas who race for a living and have sponsorships. This guy just parked at the starting line like he expected me to hand-feed him.” He looked to Charlotte and smiled like a used car salesman. “Hi, I’m Brad. Wanna buy an iguana? He’s potty trained and his shots are all up to date.”
Charlotte laughed. “No, thank you.”
“Potty trained?” I said.
He glanced at me conspiratorially and shook his head. Roscoe came up behind Brad and clapped a meaty hand on his shoulder. “When I told you to come see the races, I didn’t think you would actually enter a damn lizard.”
“It sounded cool.” Brad looked to the reptile on his arm. “But I didn’t know you could buy a dud.”
I excused myself when I saw Amy step out of the kitchen. I took her to the side and gave her the highlights of Charlotte’s situation before asking if Charlotte could stay with her for a few nights or until we made some more progress on the case.
“Of course,” she said. I brought her to Charlotte and performed the necessary introductions before leaving the two of them to talk. I returned to the bar and continued working on my drink. Brad followed me over and placed the reptile on the stool between us. It was a little strange trying to relax and enjoy my beer while being stared down by a creepy looking reptile.
“So,” Brad said, “Kathleen called me and said she’s putting me on this case with you because you’re in dire need of more brainpower.”
“I think she said she wanted to put another hurdle in front of me.”
“Ryan, how is more smarts a hurdle? See? That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I’ll get you up to speed on everything at the office tomorrow. Right now, I’m checked out.”
The iguana’s back legs suddenly slipped off the stool, and it dug its front nails into the stool’s padding as it slowly lost the fight and moved toward the ground. “You going to help it out?” I asked.
Brad sighed and stared indifferently at it. “I guess.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I woke up to the familiarity of my own bed the next morning. After rolling out of bed and knocking out my typical regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, I made some coffee and went up to the upper deck of my houseboat, where I sat into a wooden Adirondack chair. A fiery orange sun was emerging from the Atlantic and a half dozen brown pelicans were diving on a school of baitfish not ten yards off my bow.
I had slept well last night with the confidence that Charlotte was safe for the time being. She and Amy had seemed to hit it off well last night. Amy was as skilled as anyone I knew at the helm of a boat, and she said she would take Charlotte out on the water today and try to keep her mind off the surrounding chaos. I was anxious to start connecting the dots, to understand who had sent those men after her and her father, and just what was going on with this research that Dr. Parker had produced.
Finishing my coffee, I went back down and took a shower before getting dressed and heading to the office. Brad’s _ was already in the parking lot, but when I got upstairs, he was nowhere to be seen. I scooted my chair in, opened my laptop, and typed in my password. I reached down and opened my bottom desk drawer and flinched back when I saw a reptile staring back at me. From the back of the room, I could hear Brad enjoying a fit of laughter. I turned to see him and one of our lab techs doubled over.
“Hey,” I said. “You know how you said this stupid thing is potty trained? Well, you have a mess to clean up in my drawer.”
That dried his laughter up. He came over and looked in, swearing under his breath. “Bad Brad,” he said.
“Wait a minute. You named your iguana after yourself?”
“No,” he snapped. “That would be dumb. My grandfather’s name was Brad. I named it after him.”
I struggled to see the difference. “Can you get this cleaned up so we can get some actual work done?”
After locating a spray bottle and a roll of paper towels, it was another ten minutes before he was finished and the iguana was resting in a pet carrier on the side of his desk. The following half-hour was taken up with my recounting of the last two days, beginning with my meeting with Douglas Peterson and ending with my meeting at GRM with Jacques Tissot.
“Dude, I’m glad you’re okay,” Brad said. “And Charlotte. You still have no idea who’s behind all this?”
“No. But there has to be a lot of money on the line. That, or someone is desperate to cover their tracks.”
“So, what now?”
My desk phone rang and I snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Ryan, it’s Spam. Are you at the office yet?”
“Spam, you just called my desk phone.”
“Oh. Right. Come to my office. I’ve got everything you asked for. And then some.”
I hung up. “Spam has something,” I said. “I’m heading downstairs.”
“I’ll be right behind you. I need to do something real quick.”
The door to Spam’s office was open, and I went right in. “Ryan,” he said, “have a seat.” The only chair I saw was sitting against the wall with a stack of paperwork on it. “Oh. Sorry.” He started to get up.
“Don’t worry about it. Keep your seat. What do you have for me?”
“Okay, well, I ran a program that did what you asked. I had it search all the information on your friend's laptop and then segment it according to topic and date accessed. Mostly it was emails, a few pictures, and the rest were documents. No videos and no hidden files.”
Brad stepped in beside me and listened quietly.
Spam continued, “But Mr. McCleary had a file on someone else that, according to the system logs, he had spent a great deal of time looking at the two days leading up to his death. Those files are all about a Sergeant Marcus Treadwell. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“He was in the Army for six years. Three of those as a Ranger and the last several months as a Delta operator. His file is basic enough, so I did some more digging through the Department of Defense’s servers and discovered that Treadwell has another file that is classified top secret.”
“Can you get into it?” I asked.
That got a dirty look from Spam. “Of course I can. But I’m not going to. You know what would happen to me if I got caught hacking into a DoD database and accessing a classified file?”
“They’d take away your access to Diet Coke?” Brad said.
“They would arrest me and throw me into a Supermax.” Spam waved his hands. “No thanks.” He turned back to a monitor and started typing. “So I did the next best thing and pulled what I could on Sergeant Treadwell’s last couple of deployments. The first was when he was still a Ranger. He spent four months in Libya training locals there and maintaining peacekeeping efforts. His last deployment wasn’t until eight months later, after he’d finished Delta training. He was in Afghanistan and it looks like he was sent out on a mission where two men in his troop didn’t make it back. What’s strange about this is that I can’t see who was in his troop. His is the only name.”
“Is he still with Delta?” I asked.
“No. No, see that’s the thing. I don’t know what happened on that mission, but Treadwell came back stateside right after and left the Army. Your friend, Mr. McCleary, had something on here that connected Treadwell with a company called MercoKline. Which I think is a major pharmaceutical company.”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “What was the designation on his discharge?”
“Let me see…” Spam fingers danced over his keyboard. “Honorable.”
That didn’t fit at all. It would have made sense if he had gotten badly wounded in combat; that would have qualified him to be medically discharged. It also would have made sense if he would have done something against the military code of conduct, something that would have slapped him with a dishonorable discharge. But for a new Delta operator to just be allowed to walk away? He would have owed the Army at least four more years after all that training.
