I’ve long ago come to the realization that I don’t need to understand the technology to do the job, just as long as I can trust the people I hire. And I trusted Devlin and knew he was good at what he did.
Now I had to wait about ten minutes.
I sat in the ergonomic desk chair and looked at the two little wooden placards. Some executives place inspirational sayings on their desk. You know, like Success is failure turned inside out and Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.
Dr. Arthur Scavolini’s placards—the words engraved in metal—were both science-related. One read, The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. The other read, You are the result of 4.5 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.
I waited impatiently for the Bash Bunny to complete its work. At any moment, I knew, the security guard might return. Or even the police, which would make my life far more complicated.
Ten minutes dragged on. I looked out of the window. Saw a few cars pass by on the highway in the distance. I checked his office for file drawers and didn’t find any. He probably stored his files in cabinets outside his office.
I went out to his assistant’s area and propped the door open. There were rows of cherrywood file drawers behind his administrative assistant’s desk. I pulled at one. It was unlocked. I yanked it open. Glanced at them. These were personnel files. Nothing useful there.
I heard a bing and drew breath.
That was the sound of the elevator arriving on the seventh floor.
50
I froze.
Considered whether to go back into Dr. Scavolini’s office, grab the Bash Bunny, yank it out of its USB strip in the middle of its data download, and close the office door. But I didn’t know how much time I had. A few seconds? I didn’t want to be caught inside the CSO’s office. Actually, I could finesse that. I just didn’t want to be caught with spy equipment in my hands, looking guilty.
But what if it wasn’t the security guard from earlier? What if, instead, it was the Waltham police?
I had my answer about four seconds later, when the glass door slid open and a security guard hustled in. Not Jomi, a new one. He was holding a walkie-talkie in his left hand. This guard, unlike the last one, was armed. I could see the Glock in a holster on his left hip. He looked older, around fifty, and had a gray brush cut. Maybe he was a supervisor or a manager.
“Hey,” he called out. “What’re you doing here? Who are you?”
I’d left my iPad and my clipboard in Dr. Scavolini’s office, but my badge was still hanging around my neck on a lanyard. I held it out to him. “Didn’t Jomi fill you in?” I said.
“Who’s your supervisor?” he asked.
I parried with my own question. “What’s your name? I need it for my report.”
But this guy would not be deterred. “I called the VP for operations, Mr. Thomas, and he never heard of no security audit.”
That I hadn’t counted on. Someone was doing their job. That rarely happened.
“Well done,” I said. “I’ll write you up with a commendation.”
The guy hesitated, for just a moment. He wanted to believe me, but he’d made up his mind that I wasn’t on the level. He’d come up to the seventh floor to kick me out.
Then he noticed that Scavolini’s door was propped open.
“Hey, you’re not supposed to be in there, I don’t care who you are. Can I see your badge, please?”
I pointed to my ID key card on the lanyard around my neck.
“Your company badge.”
I didn’t have one. This guy was determined to break my balls. He was stubborn as a mule.
He pressed a button on his walkie-talkie and began to speak into it. “Omega six, this is Alpha twelve. I gotta run a check, do you copy?”
The guard was older than me and looked out of shape. He looked more like a back-office guy. But he did have a gun.
His radio crackled. “Roger, copy. Send traffic.”
I took out my phone and swiped at it, touched the email app, and held it up for the guard to see. I approached, moving it closer to him.
He didn’t even look at it. With his right hand he reached for his pistol. “Hold it right there,” he said. “I’m shutting this down unless you have authorization.”
Now he pointed the gun at me. One hand held the walkie-talkie, the other held the gun. He wasn’t going to fire it. Not even close. But I couldn’t take the chance of his flushing me out as a fake.
I shot out my left hand and grabbed his left sleeve, pulling him toward me suddenly, spinning him around clockwise. Now his body was between me and his gun. “Hey!” he shouted. His walkie-talkie fell to the carpet. I snaked my right hand behind him and grabbed his wrist tightly. Then I yanked his right wrist up and back into a chicken wing. At the same time, with my left hand I shoved his head forward, cracking his forehead into the solid mahogany of the doorframe. Hard.
He sagged in my arms.
I took his gun and set him down on the carpet, facedown. He was out.
There were no security cameras in the executive suite, I’d noticed. For reasons of executive privacy, probably.
So his colleagues in the back office hadn’t seen what I’d just done to the man.
I grabbed his walkie-talkie, pressed transmit, and said, “Disregard my last. The guy had the wrong building. He’s leaving. Out.”
Quickly, I went to Dr. Scavolini’s desk. The light on the little device was still red, meaning it was in the middle of copying, but I couldn’t wait here any longer. I unplugged it from Scavolini’s laptop. Gathered the USB hub and the black credit-card-size drive, and put everything in my messenger bag.
Closing the door behind me, I raced for the elevator and punched the button.
The elevator doors opened on the freight entrance, the dark garage, lit dimly by low emergency lights. To my right was the entrance to the clinic. I glanced at my watch. No one would come into the clinic bedroom, I was sure, until six in the morning. Early, but not thumb-in-your-eye early. So no one would notice I was gone until then. Probably.
Then they’d find my discarded pH probe, slick with gel or whatever, and an empty bed. But by then I would be long gone. Maybe they’d conclude I had freaked out about that damn probe dangling down in my stomach and called it quits.
The best way out was through the loading dock exit, which was probably locked from the outside, not from the inside. Closed-circuit cameras in here, probably monitored by some security guy in another part of the building. Maybe they’d be watching, on alert. Maybe the guy who’d come to intercept me had informed the watchers in the monitoring station.
Or maybe not.
I walked through the gasoline-smelling loading dock, quickly but not too quickly, along the concrete apron to the right of the first vehicle bay, which was being used as a truck servicing area. The asphalt floor gleamed with motor oil. Past a pallet of wooden crates, five trash bins, a pile of cardboard boxes, past the closed door to the loading dock manager’s office. A couple of dollies and a hand truck.
Down a short set of concrete steps. Past an electric forklift.
To the exit door, which opened easily, and I was outside in the cool air.
But I was not alone.
51
A couple of guys were running toward me. In the moonlight they were little more than jagged silhouettes. A third guy was walking behind them, taking his time.
“Whoa!” one of them called out to me, before I had a chance to say anything. He put his right hand out like a traffic cop. “Stop right there, buddy.”
The first two stopped about ten feet away. As if they didn’t want to come any closer. As if they were wary.
“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” I said.
“What are you doing?” the lead guy said. He was ruddy-faced,
beefy. Next to him was the security guard who’d challenged me earlier. Jomi, his name was. With the pockmarked cheeks and the cauliflower ears.
“I advise you not to interfere with this audit,” I said.
“The CEO doesn’t know anything about a security audit,” the lead guy said.
So someone had called the CEO. That was unexpected.
“Of course not,” I said. “He’s the suspect.”
“What?”
“The audit was ordered by the board of directors in executive session,” I said. “The CEO is not allowed to know about it. If you want to interfere with this, that’s up to you, but I’m going to need all your names.”
“Let me see your badge.”
“Sure. It’s in the car.”
“Where’s your car?”
I pointed toward the clinic parking area.
“You parked in the wrong lot,” Jomi said.
“Oh dear,” I said. “Gimme a ticket.”
My mind was cranking away, trying to figure out some way out of the situation. The problem was, I didn’t know what they knew or if anyone had seen anything on the security cameras.
“We’ll go with you,” Jomi said.
I shrugged. I started walking toward the Defender, and the three men fell in beside me. Two on my right, one on my left.
The left-hand guy said apologetically, “Sir, we’ve had a problem recently with volunteers in the clinic. Some of them enroll thinking they can steal meds. Last week one of them left the clinic and wandered around the building, breaking into pharmacy lockers.”
The third guy, who hadn’t spoken before, said, “We’ve had guys, they break into the dispensary, looking for amphetamines and opiates. These are lowlifes.”
“I can see why you’d be suspicious,” I said.
“You’re not wearing a uniform, and you’re not carrying your badge,” Jomi complained. Not apologetic at all.
“You guys are doing a terrific job,” I told him. “I’m going to report up the chain the high quality of your responses.” I truly was impressed. They were ruthless.
The lead guy’s radio crackled to life. “Broken arrow, broken arrow! We have an intruder. He just tried to take me down. Male, late thirties, six two, six four, dark hair. Gray pants, gray slacks. I stopped him at Dr. Scavolini’s office.”
Jomi had been looking at me the whole time, and now he stopped. We all stopped. He squared his shoulders. We were just about the same height.
“Let me see your wallet,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and I feigned reaching for my right pocket, then jabbed my right elbow, hard, into his abdomen. Really sunk it in there. I must have connected with his solar plexus, because he gagged and staggered backward and collapsed to the ground. He was writhing in pain. Then one of them punched me in my kidney, and I saw stars.
With my left hand, I grabbed the nearest wrist of the guy to my right, then I bent my knees, which straightened out his left arm. Vising my right forearm behind his elbow, I pulled, hard. I had him in an arm bar, straining his elbow joint. At any point I could have broken his elbow. But I took pity on him. He was only doing his job. So I put on enough pressure to do some damage but let up before I heard the bone snap. He screamed. I used the levered arm to spin him counterclockwise into the guy who’d been on my left. They became momentarily entangled face-to-face. Almost intimate. I reached over with my left arm. Grabbed behind the neck of the guy who’d formerly been on my left side, pinning them together. At the same time I stomp-kicked the guy closest to me in the back of his right knee and then pulled. Both of them tumbled to the asphalt.
Behind me, Jomi was struggling to get up, and nearly succeeding, so I turned and drop-kicked him under his jaw, which put him out.
This wouldn’t put an end to them, but it certainly slowed them down. I ran for the Defender and was out of that parking lot within a minute or two. Before any of them could recover quickly enough to find their camera phone and capture my license plate.
52
It was nearly six A.M. by the time I got home to my loft in the Leather District. I was bruised and battered and feeling some pain. Getting kicked around when you’re twenty is one thing. But when you’re older and a security guy lands a punch pretty well near your kidney, you do feel the pain. I took a few Advil, grabbed a power nap, showered and changed and felt a little better, and had just called Dorothy and asked her to meet me in the office when my mobile phone rang.
It was an admin from the clinic I’d just escaped from. She wanted to know what had happened. I told her I’d had a panic attack from having that probe down my stomach. I couldn’t take it anymore, I’d had to leave. She told me that if I left the study at this point I was ineligible to receive any compensation. I told her that was fine with me.
Then the phone rang again, and this time it was Detective Goldman. He introduced himself, this time, as Detective Bill Goldman. Now he had a first name.
“I called you last night,” he said.
“Sorry, I was occupied.” I wasn’t going to explain.
“You turn up anything yet?”
“Not me. What about Maggie’s phone? Have you gotten her call record, at least?”
“Better than that: we have her geolocations.”
It’s amazing, and more than a little depressing, how much information law enforcement can find out about you. Not just the numbers you called but where you were when you did.
“Anything interesting?”
“Right before she went to Conrad Kimball’s place, she was in the headquarters of a company in Waltham, Mass.”
Let me guess. “Okay.”
“A company called Phoenicia Life Sciences,” he said. “Know anything about it?”
“Not enough.”
“But why do you think she was there?”
So Maggie had been after more than Conrad’s will after all. I smiled, shook my head. “Probably trying to get a copy of a clinical study that Kimball had buried.”
“All right. One more thing. What’s your read on Cameron?”
“The typical screw-up youngest son, is what I figured. He came with Maggie but left in the middle of the night, horny, on a booty call.”
“Yeah, that didn’t happen.”
“I saw him arrive home at, like, four A.M.”
“Big Boobs Betty didn’t see him. No one at the Hole in the Wall saw him that night, and he’s a frequent customer.”
* * *
• • •
As I ended the call, I was thinking about Cameron Kimball and what he might have been doing in the middle of the night, that night. Whether he might have gone to meet, and murder, Maggie Benson. He’d been seriously drunk that evening. Did he even have the capacity to do it?
I had no idea.
I walked into my office, waved good morning to Dorothy. I wanted to sit in front of my computer for a couple of minutes.
Something tickled at the back of my mind about the quotes on Arthur Scavolini’s desk. I’d taken pictures of them with my phone. The one about how science is true whether you believe in it or not. The other one about how you’re the product of whatever billion years of evolution, act like it. I entered them into Google. The last one just pulled up a bunch of Pinterest quotes laid out nicely. The first quote turned out to be by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who’s the head of the Hayden Planetarium and is on TV a lot. To lots of science nerds, he’s a rock star. A geek’s Bruce Springsteen.
Then on my phone I pulled up the photo of Scavolini with the man with the black mustache and I knew right away that it was none other than Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson himself. Clearly a peak moment in Dr. Scavolini’s life, meeting such a celebrity.
I filed that away mentally, in case it meant anything.
* * *
• • •
Dorothy was impressed w
ith the credit-card-size device, the solid-state drive onto which I’d copied—or at least hoped I’d copied—Dr. Scavolini’s hard drive. I’d taken it out while the red light was still on and it had still been copying. Maybe that screwed something up; who knew, with computers.
She plugged it right in, looked at her monitor, and said, “Well, you got something here.”
“Okay.”
“Arthur Scavolini?”
“Right.”
“Oh, there’s a lot here. What am I looking for, Oxydone?”
“Or whatever its scientific name was before it was called that. And Conrad Kimball.”
“Won’t take long. I’ll search and let you know.” She didn’t want me standing over her cubicle.
“Good. Let’s hope there’s a needle in the haystack.”
“You know how you find a needle in a haystack?” she said.
“No, how?”
“Magnet. You got a magnet?”
“A rare-earth one. Neodymium.”
“Well,” she said, shaking her head, “maybe we’ll get lucky. I’m impressed you got this—all on a physical penetration?”
“Right.”
“Can I ask what you’re going to do with whatever you find?”
“Me? Oh, I’m planning to bring Kimball Pharma down.”
“Very funny, Nick.” She smiled a sort of contorted smile and didn’t look at my face. She would have seen that I wasn’t laughing.
* * *
• • •
At first it seemed that we’d struck out. There was plenty of correspondence between Dr. Scavolini and top officers at Kimball Pharma, but none of it had to do with Oxydone. Other drugs, yes. In the meantime, I called the other scientist on my list, Dr. Sossong, the whistle-blower.
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