by Steve Hadden
“Semper Fi, assholes.” The voice came from the cab.
CHAPTER 39
The lightning flashed through the window of the lab and revealed the deep scar on the left side of Butch Donovan’s neck. Violence was his job, and he wore the scar as a warning. Surrounded by eight men, all dangerous in their own right, he assessed the damage with short, cutting questions and piercing glances as each man responded. He was certain the breech was caused by the incompetence of the security guard on the front desk, who quivered as Donovan made that point clear to all. Missing were several frozen blood samples from the clinical trials for CGT. The pair had searched a second office unrelated to CGT and a drawer containing computer disks had been left open.
“Thanks to this asshole,” Donovan said, nodding to the security guard standing just to his right, “they now have evidence. Evidence our client will not be happy about.” Donovan’s glare narrowed on the quivering guard. “If that were to happen—game over.”
“Next steps. Sir?” one of the six men in black asked.
Ignoring him, Donovan pulled a 9 MM Glock, shoved it within inches of the security guard’s head and pulled the trigger. The blast, muffled by a silencer, sounded like a thud, as if he’d shot a melon. No one flinched and the guard collapsed on the floor of the lab.
Donovan spoke without emotion. “As you can see, Mr. Wellington is a dangerous and desperate man, desperate enough to kill his own security guard when he was confronted here tonight.”
All but the remaining two security guards shared a chuckle.
“He and Miss Clarke are evil bastards trying to fabricate DNA evidence with the material they stole tonight, in an effort to deny the world a cure for cancer and save their own selfish skins.”
Each man stared at Donovan and awaited his next orders.
“Contact Waters at the Newport Beach Police Department and report this tragic death. Advise him of the theft and tell them to alert the FBI to a possible attempt to contact the FDA and present fabricated evidence.”
“Yes, sir,” the man to his left responded.
“Tell them they’re both armed and very dangerous, and unofficially they should shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Got it,” the man responded and walked away with a phone to make the call.
Donovan turned his attention to the remaining four expressionless faces, whose eyes were still locked on his.
“Now, let’s go over this scene one more time before the detective arrives. Time is running out, people. We have to eliminate the marks now. If we fail, we don’t get paid.” Donovan pointed to the dead guard lying in a pool of blood. “And when we don’t get paid, I’m not happy.”
CHAPTER 40
The Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach had been a getaway for Southern Californians since the 1940’s. The completion of the Santa Anna freeway in the 1950’s solidified Balboa’s reputation as a year-round destination. While the elite built their homes atop the sea cliffs, hillsides, and mesas, the Peninsula remained the seaside getaway for the common man.
The rental house was like every other one on the block: A beachfront stucco two-story, wedged onto a fifty-foot lot with a shoe horn. Joe pulled the rented Ford Explorer out of the driving rain and into the double garage. He sprang from the car and opened the rear door where David was sitting. The bandages Joe and Tori had applied to his upper left arm at the transfer point had begun to show red blood. David winced as Joe helped him from the car. Tori joined them at the door and guided David inside. David looked at the blood on Tori’s blouse.
“You sure you’re not hurt?” he asked.
Tori looked down.
“No, this is all from you.”
David shifted his attention to Joe.
“Are we safe here, Joe?” David asked as Tori eased him onto the sofa.
“Yeah, boss.” Joe replied. “This is a rental owned by my Marine buddy’s wife’s cousin. No one knows we’re here.”
Joe dropped the black backpack next to the sofa and produced a medical kit.
“A good marine is always prepared,” Joe said, and he gave Tori a warm smile. “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. The bullet passed through without hitting the bone. Besides, he’s mean as hell.”
David shook his head. “One of my best employees,” he said to Tori nodding in Joe’s direction.
Joe began to redress the wound, while Tori sat beside David on the edge of the sofa. David kept looking at her. Her smooth skin glowed in the dim light and her eyes were dark and soft. He felt her beauty as much as he saw it. She stroked his forearm with her long fingers, and her touch was soft and gentle. He could feel her concern: about her work, about finding the cure for the cancer that had taken her brother and for him. She’d risked her life for all of those things. They shared a common purpose in preventing approval of CGT and regaining control of its development. But they were sharing something else, something deeper. Something he’d never had before.
“Good as new, boss,” Joe said.
Joe’s proud exclamation broke David’s trance. The rumble of the second major Pacific storm in two days signaled his return to reality. They were wanted for murder by the authorities. An entire team of assassins had been called in by someone who’d rather see them dead than in jail, and CGT approval was forty-eight hours away. Sheets of rain pecked at the sliding glass door and another flash of lightning warned of the next clap of thunder.
“We almost didn’t make it out,” he said to Tori.
“I’m sorry, David. I feel terrible. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been shot.” She continued stroking his forearm. “But when I saw the CGT lab had been dismantled, I panicked. All of this for nothing. I couldn’t leave empty-handed. I remembered where the blood samples were stored from the last clinical trial.” Tori reached into the black knapsack and produced what looked like small silver thermoses. “So I grabbed them. We need to get them into the freezer.”
She handed the container to Joe who responded to David’s nod towards the refrigerator in the kitchen.
David paused. Then his eyes flashed wide. “The DNA; we have the DNA in these blood samples.”
Tori smiled proudly. “That’s right. During my presentation to Mr. Brayton last Friday I’d given a copy to one of the techs down the hall, who was helping me with the Power Point graphics and transitions. He’d kept the copy and emailed me the final presentation, so I grabbed it. It contains the results of the microarrays I ran on some of the clinical samples.”
David pushed himself up from the sofa, cupped Tori’s face in his hands and kissed her.
“We’ve got the proof. You did it!”
Tori, blushed, then smiled. David, surprised by his own show of emotions, dropped back on the sofa. He’d never felt so alive. He could feel each breath fill his lungs. His senses had been awakened to the world around him, and for the first time he could remember, his heart was drawn to another.
Joe returned from the kitchen, interrupting their wordless communication.
“I’d hate to be the spoilsport, but who do you take the evidence to? You two are wanted for murder by the authorities. And based on the beating I took at the hands of the guy flashing a detective badge at that warehouse, the cops are in on this thing, too.”
David’s heart sank like a helium balloon suffering from a pin prick. Joe was right. The authorities thought he and Tori were cold blooded killers. On the trip to the beach house, Joe had described his encounter with who he believed was a hired killer and a Newport Beach detective in a darkened Long Beach warehouse. Going to the authorities was not an option. The newspapers and media weren’t an option either. They’d already sensationalized the case and characterized David as a billion dollar killer.
But, damn it, he wasn’t beat yet. Not now—not when he had just discovered something even sweeter than discovering the cure for cancer.
Only two possibilities came to mind.
“We’ve got two options as I see it.”
Tori and Joe l
ocked their gazes on David.
“Get to the FDA, or to the Rexsen board.”
As David heard himself say the words he realized the risks were extreme. A call to the FDA by the murderer of the founder’s son would result in a call to the FBI, and any meeting could be used to apprehend David. David’s credibility would be dismissed immediately. But he personally knew the Division Director of the Pacific Regional Laboratory Southwest in Los Angeles. They’d attended Harvard together, and he just might trust David.
Getting to the board was even more problematic. Someone within the power structure of Rexsen was willing to kill to get CGT to market. While he suspected Brayton, he couldn’t exclude someone else on the board. None of the directors would risk speaking to a murderer, and he wouldn’t be receiving any invitations to the next board meeting. He wasn’t the CEO anymore; he was a fugitive.
“I don’t think either of those will work, boss,” Joe said as if reading David’s mind. “They’re pinning everything on you two. The papers think you’re the Bonnie and Clyde of the corporate world. And whoever is behind this must be spending a ton of money to see that you two are taken dead not alive.”
David sensed Tori flinch, although she remained quiet.
“Okay, Joe,” he said reaching for Tori’s hand. “That’s enough.”
Joe looked at Tori. “I’m sorry Miss Clarke.”
Tori waved off Joe’s apology. “How can I help?”
Joe dropped into the chair to the right of the sofa, grabbed the TV remote, and the TV came to life. He flipped through the channels and stopped on the early morning news. The anchor summarized the weather and traffic and then excitedly began the news.
“In breaking news, we’ve received a report of another gruesome murder associated with the bizarre fall from grace of Rexsen Labs CEO, David Wellington.”
David and Tori perched on the edge of the sofa and leaned toward the TV.
“Reports are just coming in from the Rexsen Labs compound in Newport Beach where authorities say David Wellington, the former CEO, who was dubbed the miracle man after surviving a plane crash in the Pacific, apparently broke into the company’s complex and stole genetic material in an effort to sabotage the approval of the company’s blockbuster new treatment, CGT, the first gene therapy treatment for cancer. Detective Skip Waters of the Newport Beach police department had this to say moments ago.”
A reporter in a tan trench coat and holding an umbrella stood in front of the Rexsen Labs headquarters. “I’m here with detective Skip Waters of the Newport Beach police. Detective Waters, what’s the situation inside?”
The camera shifted to Waters’ face. “It’s gruesome. One person, a security guard, is dead, apparently executed by the perpetrators.”
“Can you identify the suspects?”
“The alleged suspects are David Wellington, former CEO of Rexsen Labs, and Tori Clarke, his accomplice and a researcher at Rexsen. They’re already wanted for the murder of Prescott Rexsen and are considered armed and extremely dangerous.”
“We have reports they were attempting to steal genetic evidence in an attempt to fabricate a story to exonerate themselves from the murder of Prescott Rexsen?”
“I can’t comment about an ongoing investigation. I just want to remind the public not to approach these suspects. If anyone sees them call the Newport Beach Police or the FBI immediately.”
“We didn’t kill anybody,” Tori whispered. “We’re not killers!”
The anchor moved on to the next story.
“Joe, turn that off please,” David asked, holding Tori’s hand hard.
Joe grabbed the remote from the arm of the Lazy-Boy rocker and the screen went black. They sat in silence. Tori leaned against David, and he could tell she was trying hard not to cry. He listened to the rain, driven by bursts of wind, pop against the sliding glass door. The surf pounded and added a constant roar to the storm. More than anything in the world, he longed to help this woman at his side. And, of course, Amy and all those other children who were dying of cancer.
“Is CGT really a bad thing?” Joe asked, breaking the silence.
“There’s a prob …” David started to answer but Tori cut him off.
“No,” she said. “There’s a problem but we have a solution.”
David turned to her.
“We have a solution?”
“Yes,” she said. She picked up the disk. “It was in my presentation to Brayton. He never let me get to it. There is a problem with the base pairing process, where the genes are transferred from the DNA to RNA, an intermediate molecule. It resulted in key proteins not being made correctly. The same new microarray process that allowed me to see the flaw also allowed me to isolate the problem. Like I said before, it’s repairable, and now we have the proof.”
David and Joe looked at each other. Joe shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to either side. David couldn’t believe what he’d heard. CGT could work and Tori had the proof. FDA approval should be delayed, but after a rapid review by the National Institute of Health and the FDA, clinical trials for terminal cases could begin almost immediately.
His thoughts turned immediately to Amy.
“Did you get any update on the girl in Cedars we met, Joe?”
Joe hesitated, as though carefully sorting through his choice of words.
“Not good news, boss. I called her mother. She said six to eight weeks.”
David dropped his head. He remembered Amy’s smile and her uplifting faith, then imagined her lying in a dark hospital room, clutching her Elmo doll, and wondering if the man she’d believed to be the miracle man had any miracles for her. He thought about his young son who’d died of a genetic imperfection while his hot shot biotech father stood by and watched. He glanced at Tori as flashes of lightning illumined her face. He recalled her pain when she described the suffering of her nine-year-old brother. At that point he’d again witnessed, first hand, the damage cancer caused not just to the tissue, but to the hearts of anyone who cared.
Not this time, he promised. Not this time.
CHAPTER 41
Royce Brayton felt the long corridor on the fourth floor of the Rexsen Labs headquarters closing in. Although it stretched the entire length of the building, it only connected the office of the CEO to that of the chairman. He’d feared the walk when the old man had the helm, and he hated the walk when Prescott was in control. But this walk was a first: He was being summoned to what used to be the old man’s office to give a status report to the woman he’d been sleeping with just days before. He stormed towards Priscilla’s office, and he heard his steps echo down the wooden planks of the polished floor. His fingernails dug into his palms as he clenched his fists. With each step, the air grew thicker, his breathing grew stronger and more deliberate, and the thought of losing control of Rexsen Labs to a woman who’d turned the tables and used him pushed his composure to its limit. This would be a Thursday morning he’d never forget.
The trip to New York had turned into a nightmare. He’d been blackmailed into giving his underwriter a piece of the yet undisclosed merger. Priscilla had embarrassed him in front of Wall Street’s most powerful banker when she claimed to be in control of the IPO as the head of the Rexsen Trust. The final dagger was thrust into his ego when Priscilla rebuffed his sexual advance and retired alone in her suite at the Plaza. He’d spent the night fuming and concocting ways to put Priscilla in her place and envisioning the gruesome methods the Marcosa family would use to make an example of him, should something go wrong with the IPO.
Upon reaching the suite, he stormed past the secretary and sent the door to the chairman’s office bouncing off the door stop. He stopped and leaned across Priscilla’s desk.
“Who in the hell do you think you are? I’m not some jackass flunky that you can order around. I’m the CEO of this company and without me there’ll be no IPO and no twelve billion for your polished ass!”
With her head down and her eyes focused on the letter in front of her,
Priscilla remained still and unflustered. Brayton had always been able to make a woman cry. Once they were no longer a source of sexual satisfaction, he’d cut them off at the knees. It was cleaner that way. But Priscilla’s indifference to his opening barrage unnerved him. He hesitated; and it was a mistake he immediately regretted.
Priscilla slowly raised her head, and her dark brown eyes appeared black and dead. For the first time, Brayton felt the primitive jolt of the fight or flight response pre-programmed into the human genome through millions of years of mutations. He was in danger.
“It seems, Mr. Brayton,” Priscilla carefully measured each word, “it is you who has failed to recognize your place in this enterprise.” She shifted in her chair and calmly folded her hands in front of her. “I am the head of the Rexsen Family Trust and, at the moment, I’m the sole owner of this company.”
Priscilla regarded him calmly.
Brayton crossed his arms and scowled.
“That may be true, but I run things here.”
“At my pleasure you do.” Priscilla wagged her finger in Brayton’s face. “And you need to watch your step. You can be replaced. If you think being a pin cushion for you will keep this bitch in line, think again. I can make my twelve billion now or a year from now, I don’t care. But know this: I can replace you with one call, you son-of-a-bitch.”
Brayton was stunned with the voracity of Priscilla’s attack. He searched for a response, but none came. He examined the situation for his leverage here—but there was none. She’d beat him at his own game and Brayton knew he had no choice. His plan hadn’t anticipated this about-face. He needed time to think—but most of all, he needed Priscilla to follow through with the IPO, or he’d be dead in a week.
She owned the company and could throw him out any time she wanted. She already had a company worth two billion dollars without CGT. Even if David Wellington was somehow able to survive and divorce her, she’d still have a billion to last her until the next gene therapy treatment, Proteus, emerged from Rexsen’s pipeline. Despite the problem with CGT, Rexsen was going public; if not Tuesday, then six months or a year from Tuesday. But the company’s trajectory was set.