The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #3 (Scarlet McRae)

by Vanessa Blackstone

  “Who did you say they had a partnership with? Arasanti Nanotechnologies?” Rodrigo asked him.

  “That’s what Mr. Pedone told me, yes,” Dr. Griswold said, “if memory serves.”

  Rodrigo glanced at Rick, who was already in the process of submerging back into trance to investigate the company mentioned.

  “Beth,” Rodrigo said, turning toward the exit doors of the lab, “you’re with us.”

  Rodrigo, Xiphos, and Dr. Griswold strode out of the lab, on their way to the service entrance, but Beth was not with them. Noticing her absence, Rodrigo stopped and re-entered the building.

  “Agent Summers, get your butt in gear,” he said as he stuck his head through the entrance. “No time to waste.”

  Beth, still standing with her arms crossed, shook her head. She avoided Rodrigo’s demanding eyes. “I… I can’t.”

  “Why not? What happened?” he asked. He stepped fully back into the lab and walked toward her.

  Beth looked at an entranced Rick, then at Rodrigo, then down at the floor. Then, in a quiet voice, she said, “I—I don’t know. I’m just… I’m not cut out for this job. Sir. I’ve been meaning to tell you, but I… I never…”

  Rick momentarily broke his trance to see what was going on between Beth and Rodrigo. “Hey,” he said to Beth, catching her gently by the shoulders and trying to look into her downcast eyes, “what’s wrong?”

  She held silent, but Rick asked his question again.

  After a moment, she confessed to him in a whisper, without making eye-contact with anyone, “I just want to go home. I want this whole investigation to be over. Deep down, I know that that can’t happen. But… if I have to be here… I want to be with you. At your side. Can we stay together in all this, Rick?”

  Rick swallowed, then directed his attention to Rodrigo. “Sir, is it ok if she stays with me? We can catch up with you in a bit.”

  Though not pleased, Rodrigo nodded, tapped a wall with his palm a few times as he thought unspoken things, then hurried out to rejoin the others.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The helicopter hovered close to the roof of Olympia-5 as it was about to touch down, whirling great gusts of air at the small team of medics who were standing assembled and ready with a stretcher. They squinted from the sunlight and from the blade-driven gale that blew upon them. The gusts pressed their white, flapping medical robes and masks skin-tight against their bodies.

  Working deftly, they extracted the assassin from the craft and strapped her to the stretcher. From there, they wheeled her onto a flat, giant oval many feet across. It sank slowly into the complex and disappeared from sight.

  Scarlet, having exited the craft, was about to follow them. Ulysses, however, standing right behind her, grabbed her wrist and held her back. He shook his head. Through the mask of his haz-rad suit, he said, “Nothing we can do for her now. She’s in good hands, though. The best. Not that she deserves it, but she’s more valuable to us alive than dead.”

  Similarly clad in a white haz-rad suit, she whirled around to face him, twisting out of his grip. Her fists were clenched. “What happened to her on that helicopter?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “We’re on your turf now, playing your game by your rules,” Scarlet accused.

  “Are you asking if I killed her?”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Ulysses objected. “I’m not like that. We don’t go around just killing people for the hell of it. Mac’s a better leader than that. Give him some damned credit already, lady. We’re trying to save her life, not take it. Can’t you see that?”

  “Or trying to make me believe that you’re trying to save her, when in fact you killed her. Where’s the syringe she had?”

  “Back on the chopper.” He nodded his head in the direction of the craft. “I put it in a medical canister that’s going to be taken to our labs. I didn’t stick her with that needle, I swear. I don’t even know for sure what was in it. I’m keeping it so our people can find out what was in there, who might’ve made it, where it might’ve come from. That’s useful intel that I would never waste by just injecting it into the veins of someone we could have killed in a dozen different ways. Ways that would have been much less costly than throwing away valuable clues.”

  He rubbed his shoulder and neck with a large hand. “Hell, if I wanted her dead, I could have just chucked her out the window of our bird anytime. Bon voyage! Saiyonara! Sweet dreams, sunshine! And besides all that, how would it have caused her ear to bleed, whatever it might have been? I’m no doctor, but doesn’t that sound like a strange-ass effect from getting jabbed with a needle of poison—or whatever it was? I’ve never heard of that happening from an injection of anything. Have you, McRae?”

  He waited for her answer, but she had none. Her tired head couldn’t think as quickly as it could when well-rested, but she tried to run some quick analyses through it anyway. She turned away from him and thought.

  Means, motive, opportunity. He had the means to kill her, the opportunity, but the motive…

  The motive…

  “Did you know her?” Scarlet asked, her back to him.

  “Never seen her in my whole life. Honest-to-God.”

  “You may not have seen her before, but did you know who she was?” She turned again to face him, but with less hostility now.

  “No. And this is getting ridiculous. We’re supposed to be on the same team, Ms. McRae. But the way we’ve started out here on this roof is pretty shitty. If we don’t trust each other, we’re both just wasting our time. And, with all due respect, the sooner you get that through your head, the better.”

  He turned to the pilot still sitting in the helicopter and motioned for him to take off. The machine’s great blades whirled slowly back into motion, gaining speed and sweeping stronger and stronger gusts of morning air over Scarlet and Ulysses. Catching the hint of fresh, morning air through the filter of her mask, she suddenly realized how wonderful it smelled out here, compared to the city’s persistent fog of numerous odors: the metallic bite of overworked electric motors; the vapors rising from neglected, overwhelmed sewers; the pungent, chemical smoke from the many refineries and factories.

  All of that was so far away now.

  Ulysses yelled through the thumping, rhythmic turbulence, hoping Scarlet would hear him. “He’s taking the syringe to some labs we have.”

  She stood with her arms folded as the helicopter lifted itself off the roof and began hovering to the opposite side of the complex.

  Once the helicopter had left, Ulysses looked Scarlet up and down—once—and then said in a disappointed voice, “C’mon. I’ll take you to meet Mac.”

  They walked to an access elevator that swallowed them and took them deeper, floor by floor, into the billionaire’s mysterious, beautiful complex.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hurried boots crunched the New England ice beneath them. Subtle, small flecks of snow began to fall, barely large enough to be noticeable. The gray sky overhead, bleak, endless, and featureless, blanketed the many tall buildings within the city.

  “It’s this way!” Dr. Griswold called as he led Xiphos and Rodrigo to the service-entrance at the other part of the lab.

  They rounded a corner of the lab and came upon a short alleyway that sloped downward, into the ground. The service entrance itself, a curtain of thick, metallic slats streaked with rust, now stood mangled. It had evidently been ripped open from the bottom; at least, the bends in the lower slats suggested as much. The result of the bending was a triangle-shaped gap in the entrance about two feet high.

  “Careful,” Rodrigo said, eyeing the damage. “We don’t know what’s in there. Whoever or whatever did this could still be inside. You two—stay back.” He drew his pistol and carefully approached the entrance. Xiphos and Dr. Griswold, frozen in place, did not need to be told twice.

  Now at the gap in the entrance, Rodrigo shone his pen-light into the void. As his beam of light searched th
e interior, he could see only a dirty, empty space about the size of a large bedroom, with a long hallway opening on its far side. His light could not penetrate the far end of the hallway enough to illuminate what might be at its other end. The floor of the interior had been badly scratched by years of on-loading and off-loading of bulky equipment and furniture. A few, bent cigarette butts lay scattered on the floor. The scuffed walls inside were a dingy white. Utter silence presided within. The odor of electronic parts and synthetic amniotic fluid, however, along with several other things he couldn’t identify, permeated the space.

  But no entity could be seen.

  Given the need for more light, more guns, and more manpower, Rodrigo texted Rick and Beth, “Get down here NOW.”

  On Beth and Rick’s arrival, Rodrigo briefed them on what he had been able to find out from peering into the service entrance.

  Rick then told him what he’d learned about Arasanti Nanotech. “It’s the world’s fifth largest manufacturer of nanotech, but widely regarded as the most technologically advanced. Some analysts say they’re at least ten-to-twenty years ahead of their nearest competitors.”

  “Who owns them? Who controls them? And what do they want?” Rodrigo asked.

  “There’s a board of directors, but I haven’t had time to look into them individually. Above the board of directors sits a billionaire, though. Some guy named Mac Stone.”

  Rodrigo’s heart sank into his stomach.

  That’s the bastard that Scarlet…

  “As for what they want,” Rick continued, “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Perez. I just haven’t had time to do more digging on them. With a little more time…” He shrugged.

  Rodrigo thought for a second. “No, no. You did all right, Watanabe.” Then he followed up with a text to him so that no one else could receive the following piece of their conversation: “When we’re done here, find out that info for me. Don’t pass it to the task unit; we don’t know whom we can trust with the info we have. Clear, amigo?”

  “Right now, though, I need you and Beth with me in there,” Rodrigo said while composing and sending his text to Rick. He pointed to the gap in the entrance. “We’re going to clear this part of the lab and make sure it’s safe for Drs. Baxter and Griswold to enter.”

  “Roger,” Rick texted back, then also said aloud.

  Rodrigo instructed the two doctors to stay put while the agents did their job.

  Then the old veteran of the PIR Units, followed close behind by Rick, climbed up toward the entrance and in through the hole. A reluctant Beth looked back at the doctors, then carefully followed behind Rick. Soon, all three were standing inside the abandoned space just behind the broken, metal curtain. There were no light switches here, but a faded fragment of the clouded daylight seeped weakly through the hole near their feet.

  The three agents, pistols drawn, clicked their pen-lights on and pointed them into a musty dark that still seemed to vibrate and shudder with the past deeds of an unspeakable evil.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Purified water shot from a dozen stainless steel nozzles protruding from the ceiling and walls of the decontamination chamber. The high-pressure sprays of water, stinging Scarlet’s skin through her haz-rad suit, removed the dust and other outdoor particles from them. The suits themselves were dropped into a large chute whose terminus, invisible from this height, lay somewhere in the dark below.

  Once on the outside of the decontamination chamber, Scarlet was met by three servants, one of them holding a new set of clothes for her; another, a towel.

  “It’s all right. You can go with them,” Ulysses said to Scarlet. “They’ll take you to your room. Tidy up a bit, huh? I’ll meet you there in an hour to take you to see Mac. But,” he added, looking disapprovingly at her, “you’d better behave. Don’t disappoint him like you’ve disappointed me.”

  He grabbed a towel from one of the servants and wiped his head down. He draped the towel around his neck and languidly walked away. Rounding a corner, he was gone.

  Me? Mr. Stone’s the one who’d better behave, she thought. This is a criminal investigation, and he’s got a lot of questions to answer.

  One of the servants, dressed in what Scarlet had imagined a butler—a real butler—might wear, bowed to her and said, “This way, m’lady.” His arm was congenially held out in what she presumed was the way to her quarters.

  As the servants escorted her to her room, her eyes took in as much of the interior of Olympia-5 as they could. Despite the circular shape of the building, the interior contained many long, straight, clean lines: the perfect counter-point to the building’s outward appearance. There was, at least at first, almost no furniture of any kind visible, but what little there was to be seen in the hallways blended into the background, for most of it was the same white color as the walls. Large panes of thick, clear glass, high as a three-story building, were set along the walls at regular intervals, allowing for the sunlight to illuminate the interior.

  Whoever designed this building had the eye of an artist.

  The servants soon escorted her to an open space that stole the breath from her lungs.

  An arboretum.

  As long as two football fields, and as high as the entire building itself.

  All of this—inside this indoor space.

  The trees of the arboretum looked like the ones on the outside. Certainly, they were a local species, or one closely related. Several birds flitted and chirped somewhere high above her. When she looked up, she could not tell exactly where in this vast space they were.

  The floor of the arboretum contained wooden furniture finely finished in a light resin. The pieces were all neatly arranged into lines, not unlike the arrangement of furniture inside a library. There were long, rectangular desks, hutches, and tables here, complete with chairs. Some people were sitting in them, quietly engaged with reading papers or working on computers. A few red-orange leaves, children of the majestic corrosion of fall, fluttered gently down from the heights, catching glints of sunlight as they fell. The quiet tap, tap of the clicking keyboards echoed like distant raindrops inside this vast, otherworldly space.

  “Madame likes?” one of the servants asked her. He was a man with a ginger mustache and a long, pointed nose. His glittering eyes did the smiling for him.

  “I—I’ve never seen… anything like this…” she managed to say, still looking around at it all. “These are real trees?”

  Even the most lavish of the AFE’s government buildings isn’t decorated like this.

  “Yes, Madame, they are,” the mustached servant replied. “We find it quite pleasant to work in such close proximity to nature. We cannot go outside without a protective suit, but we can bring in and decontaminate a few trees and some soil.”

  A “few” trees?

  She wanted to stay a bit longer and take in the grandeur of the arboretum, but she knew that she could not stay.

  The servants continued to escort her through the arboretum, to the other side of it, and out into a long, tall, rectangular hallway of white marble and glass. An analog clock, large as a bus, was hung high on one of the walls here. There were no numbers on it, but the hands of the clock were unambiguous in their telling of the time.

  9:38 a.m. That means Ulysses will be at my room at around 10:30 a.m.

  She set an alarm on her inner-phone, then tried to text Rodrigo, but she found that she was too far out of range for her message to go through.

  Great. Looks like Mac’s people use their own, private communications network, at least for their inner-phones. Probably for security, but it would be nice to talk to the outside world a little easier…

  When she asked one of the servants how she could place a call or text to someone back in New Washington, D.C., she was told that a communications device would be given to her if Mac accepted her for the mission.

  “And if he doesn’t accept me?” Scarlet asked.

  “You will go home. Naturally,” the servant with the ginger mustache s
aid with the greatest of cordiality. There was no trace of hostility in his voice, but Scarlet knew that she was dealing with only the surface-level appearances of his staff.

  Soon, they turned down a secondary hallway, along which were rows of doors, the outline of each one only barely visible against the walls. Indeed, the doors were so well camouflaged in the walls that she almost didn’t notice them.

  One of the servants draped a transparent key-card around her neck and said, “This card will let you into your room—and also other, select areas within the building.”

  “How will I know which doors it will or won’t open?”

  The servant shrugged. “The only way to find out is to try the card on them, m’lady. Mr. Stone didn’t tell us which areas you were or were not allowed into. It is his custom to allow his guests to explore the building for themselves, should they so choose. With their own access card, they don’t have to ask permission to go somewhere within the building; the permissions are all coded into the key itself. It’s efficient that way, wouldn’t you agree?” He smiled at Scarlet. “Now, here are some dry clothes for you.” He handed the clothes to her, which, in her dazzlement, she vaguely accepted.

  Another servant waved a key-card across the door, and it slid noiselessly open, revealing a room with a large, featureless bed covered with soft, lush-looking maroon bedding. The walls inside were made of a light grey slate, and a rectangular waterfall fountain sat at the far side of the room, filling the space with the hushed sounds of water tumbling over rock. Illumination came from a hidden line of lights tucked behind a carved-out crevice in the walls, just below the ceiling.

  “Your room, Madame,” a servant said. “Ulysses will be by shortly to introduce you to Mr. Stone. You will clean up and make yourself presentable to Mr. Stone, won’t you?”