“What? Why not?” My lab! My new lab! And I need it to understand, much less have a snowball’s chance in Hell of solving this problem!
“It’s been compromised.”
“What do you mean, compromised?”
“Does the name Timothy Schneider mean anything to you?”
“Of course! Tim’s my right hand! He’s been my assistant for eight years!”
Fleck withdrew a sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a photocopied ledger of accounting transactions, headed, “FCU 00505028-99 PITHOS BIOCHEM.” Several of the transactions were highlighted.
“Did you order cultures from Standard Labs of Minnesota?” He laid the ledger on the formica tabletop.
“All the time, of course.”
“How many at once?”
“Usually forty-eight at a time. They were cheaper that way, and that was how many we’d usually use up before they died.”
“Why does this invoice say ‘240 pieces’ then?” He tapped the page.
She slapped her hand down and drew the paper closer. As her eyes flicked from transaction to transaction, she saw an account number that was familiar: 115, petty cash. But petty cash transactions were only authorized to $100. Why were the numbers in the right-hand column bigger? $355…$622…$1560! And all the negative transactions into petty cash…from Supplies and Equipment…one transaction from an outside company she’d never heard of, Sinopec Corporation, what was THAT about?
“I’m no accountant, but is this…”
“Our forensic accountant estimates that Mr. Schneider has embezzled about $184,000 from FCU in the time he’s been working for you, most of it in the last three years”
DD’s stomach wasn’t hurting any longer. Bad sign. Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. I gave him all my passwords, including to the new lab’s server.
“I have to get back to my lab.” She had tunnel vision now. “I have to get back to my lab. I have to see if this is true.” I never liked Tim. But I did trust him.
“DD, if you insist, I’ll take you to the lab. But he’s been logging into the server with your username. Believe me, you won’t want to use that lab until we find out for sure what software he’s uploaded and what it’s designed to do. It could be spyware, or even malware.”
DD torpidly stood. Fleck dropped a $5 bill on the table. Fleck stuck out his right arm and DD took it automatically with her left hand. As they left the restaurant, DD stuck her right hand in her pocket and touched her KelTec. To her distress, the plastic grip felt soft and sticky.
XXIX.
Burn After Reading
Fleck patted DD’s left hand in the crook of his elbow, seemingly in reassurance. She drew a breath to ask a question, and his hand firmly pressed hers, trapping it. Before she could pull her hand away or react at all, two other men in trench coats, jeans, and deck shoes appeared out of nowhere. One of them seized her right arm and the other stood directly behind her. Her hand was still curled around the KelTec in her pocket, but there was no round in the chamber and her other hand was trapped. Overabundance of caution. Excessive concern with safety. Should have kept a round in the chamber. She released her hold on the gun and made a token struggle; then she saw that the three men were dragging her towards a waiting car, a huge grey sedan.
Nope, not getting in there! She screamed, “FIRE! HELP!” She bent one of the men's pinkies back and heard a satisfying “snap!” But these guys were pros, and he barely flinched at the broken finger. As they roughly stuffed her into the vehicle, nobody nearby even looked up. I guess we’re not going back to my lab, she thought, sandwiched between two goons with Fleck in the front passenger seat next to the driver. The doors slammed and the car pulled away.
DD had just enough time to see that the car was headed west, towards Houston, before someone slipped what felt like a pillowcase over her head. She lifted her hands to pull it off and someone caught her wrists and held them together; she heard the ratcheting trill of a zip tie closing and felt the bite of the plastic. She raised her bound hands towards her covered face to pull the fabric away from her nose and mouth, and hands forced hers back into her lap. I can’t breathe! She fought the panic back. Yes, I can. The air was warm and stale from her exhalations, the fabric was getting damp from the tears rolling down her cheeks unbidden, but she forced herself to realize she was able to fill her lungs if she paid attention and breathed slowly. It wasn’t easy to breathe slowly; her heart pounded and she willed herself to relax, with little result. She puffed air through her lips with each exhale to make a small space in front of her nose and mouth.
Time was distorted by her lack of vision, but she thought it was only a few minutes later when the vehicle exited the Interstate, and she could tell by the stops, turns, and bumps it was wending its way back into a local neighborhood. The vehicle made one last, slow turn and stopped on a slight uphill slope. The man to her right got out, while the man to her left held her zip-tie bound wrists. The first man reached into the car and seized her wrists, pulling her out. He put a hand on top of her fabric-covered head as she cleared the door. She staggered to an upright position on a gravel-paved surface.
She gasped as someone (the man from the left side; he was shorter and had something in his pocket that jingled faintly, keys or change) grabbed her waist, beginning a frisk which found the KelTec in her jeans immediately. The searcher’s hands took the little gun and then traveled up and down both her legs, goosed her crotch twice, hard (Bastard! Just like the fucking TSA!), then went under her jacket, around her back, up under her breasts, then cupped each one briefly before traveling up her bra straps. She swallowed, blinking back tears of outrage, and forced herself to focus on breathing.
The other man (or maybe Fleck, she wasn’t sure) fiddled briefly with her bound wrists, and suddenly they came free, the zip tie cut. She shook her stiff hands and pumped them open and closed briefly before they were abruptly captured again. She broke free from the captor’s grip with her right hand and, just as she began to struggle, the other man grabbed the free hand and both hands were pulled together and re-tied, behind her this time. She panted from the brief scuffle; the most chilling thing was the absolute silence in which it all took place. Should she scream? She drew a deep breath to, but a hand clamped over her fabric-covered mouth before she could. Her scream came out of her nose as a moaning whine, and the man pinched her nose shut for a moment while keeping her mouth covered, suffocating her just long enough to make her start to panic. Pulling up on her wrists, torqueing her shoulders painfully enough to capture her full attention, the man behind her let go of her face and propelled her forward, jerking her to a short stop just before a slight step up into a doorway, then slowly nudging her forward until her toes found the sill and she stepped up. This is all happening so fast!
The light filtering through the pillowcase wasn’t quite as bright as she was steered forward, and then they turned a corner; suddenly it was almost fully dark. Her captors let go of her completely and she swayed on her feet, trying to find a way to orient herself. Then the case was pulled off her head and the zip ties snipped at precisely the same moment, and before she could even begin to react, a door slammed and cut off the light in the room, leaving her in full darkness. Alone?
She shuffled slowly forward, hands out in front of her, until her shins hit something metallic. She bent and felt it…a toilet. A sinking feeling as she identified it and realized its presence implied a cell; she might be in here a long time. She explored the whole room with her feet and fingertips.
As she moved about, her eyes adjusted gradually to the tiny, linear outline of light that came in around the tightly-fit door. About eight-by-ten, the room contained the steel toilet mounted on the wall, a steel sink, and a wall-mounted steel shelf bed with a thin mattress of naked foam rubber, a roll of toilet paper sitting in the middle of it. The walls were raw wood, cut closely around the bed, sink, and toilet, and attached to the studs with screws. The floor was tile. There was what seemed to be a window, which was thor
oughly boarded over with the same wood, which the edges revealed to her fingertips as thick plywood, screwed into the window frame and overlapping the plywood wall. There was also a cluster of faint red dots in the far-left upper corner by the ceiling: the infrared lights of a night-vision camera. Something barely discernible on the ceiling might have been a light fixture, but she couldn’t find a switch anywhere, though she ran her hands over every centimeter of wall she could reach.
The movement and stretching calmed her a little. She finally sank down on the bed to think, the steel shelf hard against her buttocks through the skimpy foam mattress. She pinched the foam rubber and found it to be just ordinary foam; she could rip it to fluffy pieces or cut it into a shape. And then do what, exactly? No point in that. The searcher had missed the tiny Swiss-army knife that was in the same pocket as her handgun, but the miniature screwdriver on it would only endure removing a few of the screws holding the plywood before breaking. And then what? She was forced to conclude that her available resources weren’t up to the task of getting her out of here.
She zipped her windbreaker. Her feet were cold inside her sneakers and she recognized the room was quite cold. Maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She stood and paced to keep warm, her hands in the empty pockets of the jacket. The sink produced only cold water. She cupped her hand beneath it and drank deeply, then thrust that cold hand into her warm jeans pocket. Think of this as a survival situation: water, check.
Next, avoid hypothermia. Only one thing in this damned room...cell...that’s a good insulator. She picked up the foam mattress and, standing against the wall, rolled her torso up in it. She awkwardly flopped her burritoed body onto the steel mattress, yanked a corner of the mattress up to use as a pillow, and tried to rest. She repeated the serenity prayer over and over and forced her breathing to slow and deepen.
The extra shipments of cultures. The dual labeling. Maybe some of the organisms weren't actually p putida? Or alkanivorax? I wish I had some way of finding out. She imagined what steps she could take to find and isolate the new enzymes and trace their origins. She began to imagine coming up with a plasmid which would inactivate the DNA that coded for it, and then realized the plasmid had to be administered by shooting bullets at it with her KelTec; the bacterial chromosomes were really zip-ties.
She awakened instantly as three naked 100-watt bulbs flicked on in a steel wire cage overhead. Disoriented, she didn’t know how long she’d slept, and she struggled briefly to free her arms from the claustrophobic embrace of the foam enveloping her before remembering where she was. She sat up, blinking and squinting and very much aware of her full bladder. She unwrapped her foam rubber cocoon the rest of the way, just as the two men who'd been in the car burst into the room.
The taller one immediately grabbed her by the front of her jacket; she heard something rip in the lining as he jerked her towards him. She smelled his coffee-fouled breath in her face, as he demanded, “Why’d you do it?”
“What?”
“You know what! Tim’s told us everything!”
“Tim?” She struggled to get on top of the dialogue. “But Tim…”
He shook her so hard her teeth clunked together and her eyes sparked in the back of her head. She found herself saying “Hnuhnnuhnuh,” and then her knees started to buckle as he released her. She found her footing and felt her teeth with her tongue—not broken, thank God!—then stood with her hands on the front of her thighs as if frozen, her eyes once again betraying her by streaming tears. Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. She drew a shaky breath and let it out, then began another, smoother breath…
Her knees buckled completely as the shorter man swept a leg into the backs of them. She jammed her wrist and hit her hip hard on the tile floor. He stepped in front of her and pulled back a foot to kick her, but his comrade said, “Wait!”
He put a hand on her attacker’s shoulder, and she noticed, stifling a smile, that the last two of his fingers were taped together. The other man subsided. The courage to change the things I can. A deep breath. She cautiously rose to her feet. And the wisdom...
“Sit down,” Short Jingly commanded, gesturing at the bunk. His shirt was a different color, DD was almost sure, so it must be the next day already. She sat with another deep breath. ...to know the difference.
“Look, Dr. Davis. We don’t believe you came up with this yourself. Tell us who recruited you and things will go better for you.”
“Came up with what? P. davisii? I most certainly did come up with it myself…”
“So, you admit it?” Interrupted Tall Coffee-breath.
“Yes, of course I admit it! It was all techniques I developed myself. It was based on the work of Viswanathan, but he had nothing to do with it directly.” The two men exchanged glances and nods when they heard Viswanathan’s name, which puzzled DD.
“Who convinced you to make it do this?”
“Do what?” DD stalled.
“Don’t play games with us. This is a terrorist weapon worse than any we’ve encountered. Tim told us about your little ‘side’ experiments!”
DD made a mental leap. She’d known a few people in the political cesspool in Tallahassee who’d been sold out to prosecutors during political witch-hunts. Her mouth gaped suddenly as the truth dawned on her. “I suppose,” she began numbly, “that you offered Tim immunity for what he told you?”
She saw red, and found herself half-lying on the bunk’s steel surface, before she felt the pain in the side of her head. She touched her temple and her hand came away with a trace of blood.
“That’s enough!” bellowed Short Jingly. He walked over to the door and opened it with a key. “Get out of here and calm yourself down!” He was talking to his partner, the one who’d struck her. Revenge for the broken finger.
Tall Coffee-breath complied. DD dimly knew it was a ploy, but she still felt viscerally better with him out of the room, and she couldn’t help feeling absurdly grateful to Short Jingly for sending him out. She remained seated, pivoted towards her right, facing the wall at the end of the bunk, palms flat on the steel, left foot on the floor, not looking at Short Jingly as he locked the door. He sat at the farthest end of the bed, elbows on his knees, head turned towards her.
“DD…my name is Isaac; may I call you DD?” She didn’t respond. Deep breaths.
“DD, you are in a lot of trouble here. My partner wants to remand you for prosecution and let them decide whether to treat you as a terrorist or an ordinary criminal. But here's the thing: I don’t believe you did this on purpose.” She pivoted to look at him blankly, both feet on the floor, hands in her lap. Not buying the good cop bullshit, no sir.
“I believe you were duped into this and you didn’t know what the consequences would be. You see, I know a lot about you academic types—my dad was a professor—and I know you sometimes get so absorbed in your studies that you don’t see things beyond the tip of your nose.
“You want anything? You hungry? Thirsty?” He seemed to suddenly realize she might be uncomfortable.
“No,” said DD. She was actually still feeling nauseous and a little dizzy after the shaking and the blow to the head. “But I need to pee.” His eyes flicked to the toilet, then away. He got up and let himself out.
“Be right back,” he said as he pulled the door shut behind him.
DD glanced up at the corner. Yes, it was a camera up there. She grabbed the toilet paper, pulled off her jacket, and performed a sort of fan dance to preserve her dignity as much as possible. She sighed in relief as she pulled her jeans up and pressed the button, inset in the wall, to flush.
Short Jingly…his name is Isaac…came back in with a foam cup of black coffee, four sugars, a plastic stirrer, and two little plastic cups of creamer, all of which he held out to her. She took the coffee, disdained the additives, and sat on the bed, blowing on the scalding liquid so she could take a sip. The heat felt good on her cold fingers, even through the Styrofoam. Which was not melting, she observed.
“DD, I don’t want anything more to happen to you. You may think you’re protecting these people, but they don’t give a crap about you. Tell me who they are and we can make sure you’re not prosecuted.”
“Look, Isaac. I only just figured out what was happening myself. I saw the boat sink. I know that p davisii is wreaking all sorts of havoc in the Gulf and it's obvious that it’s going to get worse. Believe me, I had no idea it would develop the capacity to eat plastic. I don't know how it happened, which as a scientist seriously ticks me off. But it was an accident.” She was talking more than she’d intended. I guess having had no one to talk to makes me want to talk more. She sipped the coffee and winced at the bitterness.
“Pretty bad, isn’t it?” Asked Isaac with a wry smile. “Sorry about our coffeepot. We all put plenty of sugar in to make it drinkable…” he held up the sugar packets, and DD wordlessly took them from him. She shook them by one end, then tore all four open and stirred them into her cup.
“DD, Tim came clean with us.”
“About his embezzlement?”
“DD, Tim wasn’t embezzling from you.”
DD was silent. I don't know what to believe anymore. She didn’t want to believe Tim was committing larceny. As much of a prick as he was, she’d trusted him for years and she never suspected that dishonesty was one of his faults; quite the opposite, he was painfully honest in his criticisms of others, to the point of verbal abuse at times. But what about the dual labels on the cultures? Those Sinopec transactions? what about the printouts? Of course, the ledger transactions could have been faked. She had to consider the source.
“Let me talk to Fleck.” Since when do you trust Fleck? Since that boat sank right before your eyes? Since he showed you the ledgers? And what did that get you, trusting a government agent? Whom can you trust?
“Fleck’s not here right now.” Like some Kolkata phone-bank operator being asked for his supervisor.
“I’m not saying anything else until I’ve talked to Fleck again.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 10
