Paul’s scratched arms had made me wonder. Had he really been wrestling with thorny rosebushes at this time of year? But why would he lie about it?
He was not the person I’d thought he was. He might have been uninvolved in running Kimball Pharma, but he sure wasn’t uninterested. He wasn’t the vague, out-of-it academic he seemed at first. He was sharp, and he was savvy.
But was he also a murderer?
I took a right onto Mass. Ave. The street was bustling with people.
Yet I had the sense that I was being followed. I felt a prickle at the back of my scalp. I passed a Thai restaurant and glanced at the menu, pausing for a moment as if I was considering whether to have lunch there. I looked in the reflection in the plate-glass window and saw a man half a block behind me who looked like a generic businessman. Short dark hair, steel-rimmed glasses, a suit and tie.
He passed me, which made me think I was just being paranoid, but after a few hundred feet, he stopped to look into the window of the Chinese restaurant where I often took Gabe.
He was looking to see whether I was going to turn around. He didn’t want to lose me.
My stomach tightened.
The Chinese restaurant was closed. I’d noticed that when I was last in Central Square to see Gabe.
This was the sort of time when you want a cigarette. They’re handy for giving you a reason to stop, pause, light up, and look around. But I didn’t have any on me, since I don’t smoke, and I hadn’t come prepared.
I glanced at my watch. As if I was meeting someone. I looked back at the menu. Like I couldn’t make up my mind whether to eat here. At this angle I could see enough of the man’s face to know it wasn’t the guy with the eyebrow. But he was around the same age—late twenties or early thirties—as the one who’d followed me from Westchester to Manhattan. He was evidently fit; he had the look. He was wearing a Bluetooth earpiece like lots of businesspeople do.
Maybe I was being paranoid. But I trust my instincts.
I turned and kept on walking past the guy. Past a yoga studio, past another Thai restaurant, past the record store, and I kept going.
The guy was following me.
Massachusetts Avenue is a heavily trafficked street in both directions, and there was no crosswalk nearby. But I stopped and turned and started trying to cross the street, which wasn’t easy at that point. There was no stoplight. I wasn’t able to look for my follower; I was intent on not getting killed. Finally I made it to the other side of the street, narrowly avoiding being hit by a speeding bicyclist.
This would flush him out. If he crossed the street now, I would know.
I entered the Santander bank on the corner and spotted an ATM. Not that I needed one, but I wanted an excuse to look, to see how he responded. I inserted a bank card.
He was either window-shopping at the record store or pretending to. Then he turned around and began trying to cross the street, and I knew.
But I didn’t want to let him know I knew.
I withdrew a hundred bucks, pocketed it and my card, and went back out onto the street. Kept going north up Mass. Ave. Sure enough, the guy fell in, following me at a distance of around half a block. He was good, but not good enough. He was following too closely.
I came up to a bicycle shop, stopped, and looked in the window.
The guy slowed his pace. Three college-age women in MIT sweat-shirts passed by, then an old guy, then a young guy in an MIT crew jacket, and I cut in to the flow of pedestrian traffic so that I was right in front of him.
I took a right at the next block, a small residential street, well-maintained old wooden triple-deckers on either side of the street, which was deserted. I got about halfway down the block and then began patting down my pants pockets as if I was looking for something.
Abruptly I spun around. As I expected, the man had been following me closely, and now we faced each other.
“Excuse me,” I called out. I drew closer. “Do you have a light?”
He said “Huh?,” shook his head, and tried to pass me on my left. As we came abreast, I launched my right fist at the side of his head, targeting his ear with considerable force.
But before my fist reached his ear, his left hand came right up expertly, striking my right wrist at the same time as he stepped back with his right foot. Triangular footwork. The guy was a pro. Trained in the martial arts. He’d hit me hard, and just in the right place.
My right arm went numb.
Shit.
I did the only thing I could: I whipped my left foot behind his left leg, trying to drop him to the ground with a hip throw.
But he was too good. He anticipated that move and lifted his left leg up, grabbed my right sleeve and left lapel, and quickly dropped to the ground, pulling me down with him. His Bluetooth headset clattered to the sidewalk.
I went down and over his prone body, my back smashing into the concrete pavement, and I felt the wind rush out of my lungs. Now he quickly rolled over and got on top of me. His full weight on me, he held me down by the right lapel with his left hand and immediately started raining blows on my head with his right.
I was in pain. I grunted. This was not going to be recoverable.
I groaned with pain, tasted blood.
I was in big trouble. I had only one option: I hugged his left arm to my chest, avoided the next blow by shifting my body to the right, and then hooked my left foot over his right ankle, hugging it to my left buttock.
Then I bridged up sharply using my right leg and levered him over my left shoulder. I rolled with his momentum and landed on top of him. I shot my right hand deep into the gap between the right side of his neck and his collar, then grabbed his left lapel with my left hand.
And I yanked hard.
My heart was hammering.
I had him in a classic cross-collar choke. He flailed and struggled, but I had him.
He lost consciousness in a matter of seconds.
A house door opened nearby and quickly shut again.
I was out of breath and needed to rest, but I couldn’t afford the time. I grabbed his weapon from a holster on his left side. A Beretta. A semi-automatic pistol. I ground its muzzle into his left ear, and he came to.
63
But barely.
The man was groggy, punchy. He blinked slowly, his eyes searching. His nose was copiously bleeding.
“Name,” I said.
He looked at me, and his eyes slowly came into focus. “Fuck you,” he groaned. A trace of an accent of some kind?
“You’re really going to make me do it?” I said, twisting the muzzle against the skin of his temple. “Because I will if I have to. Who are you working for?”
He stared defiantly.
I searched his pockets for a wallet, but all I found was a car key for a Hertz rental. I stuffed it in my own pocket.
“All right,” I said, grinding the muzzle of the gun into his temple again. “I got no choice.”
He was just about to say something, I could tell, when I caught a shimmer of movement in my peripheral vision. I looked up and over my shoulder and saw the man with the scarred eyebrow. He was holding a gun, and as I spun around and pointed the weapon, something hit me, hard, on the back of the head.
And everything went dark.
* * *
• • •
It might have been a minute later, or it could have been longer, but I came to and found both men gone. Fireflies swam in my field of vision. I got to my feet gingerly.
My head throbbed. It felt as fragile as an egg.
I looked around, oriented myself toward Mass. Ave., and began to walk, slowly and carefully. I stuck a hand in my pocket and found that the key to the rental car was still there.
The man with the scarred eyebrow had the opportunity to kill me but chose not to. I wondered why.
Slow
ly I crossed Mass. Ave., and I could hear a siren nearby. Someone on the block had seen the struggle and called the cops. By the time I reached the other side of the street, a police car was turning down the street where I’d taken down the Bluetooth guy. Since I was right near the record store, I decided to stop in and say hi to Gabe, as planned. I wanted to make sure he was okay.
He wasn’t at his usual place at the back of the store. Sitting at the desk, instead of Gabe, was the guy I recognized as the owner, a heavy man with a close-shaved gray beard and thick glasses. “You all right?” he said to me.
“Yeah. I’m looking for Gabe.”
“Not here,” he said testily.
“Is he on break?”
“Gabe took his last break. He doesn’t work here anymore.”
“He doesn’t? What happened?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m his uncle.”
“Well, Gabe misses too much work, that’s the problem with Gabe. He’s fired.”
‘‘I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Look, I have two employees. I can’t afford for one of them to keep taking sick days when he’s not sick.”
“Give him another chance,” I said, but I could see he didn’t want to argue about it.
On my way out of the store, I took out my phone and hit Gabe’s number. It rang and rang. Finally his voicemail came on. I left a message: “Call me.”
Strange, I thought when I’d hit End.
* * *
• • •
I retrieved the Defender, which was parked on Franklin Street, and drove over to Gabe’s dilapidated house on Putnam. I rang the buzzer and waited.
Nothing.
I rang again, and a voice came over the intercom, faint and crackly.
“What?” Not Gabe.
“Gabe there?” I said.
“No.”
“This is his uncle. Any idea where he is?”
A pause. “He left this morning.”
“For where?”
“Hell do I know?”
“When?”
“Early. I don’t know. He woke me up with all his noise.”
“Tell him to call his uncle Nick, please.”
* * *
• • •
Returning to my office, I tried Gabe’s mobile phone several more times. No answer. Finally, I left a message sternly instructing him to call me immediately.
And I wondered: Could someone have gotten to Gabe—knowing that he was my vulnerability?
While I waited for him to answer, I called Hertz.
When I finally reached a human being, I said, “I’m calling to extend the rental period on my car. That’s plate number—” And I read it off the plastic key fob.
A few seconds later, the woman said, falteringly, “Is this . . . Mr. Malka?”
“Yes, but don’t mix up my account with my brother’s again.”
“Mr. Elad Malka?”
“Yes, it is.” An Israeli name, it sounded like. “Where am I supposed to return it again?”
“That would be the Hertz office at Boston’s Logan Airport.”
The trick is to play the dunce. “Right, of course. I forget which credit card I have on file.”
“Yes, sir, it looks like your corporate card, B. P. Strategy. Is that the one you wanted to use?”
“Which one is it, again? Can you repeat the name on the card, please?”
She did.
I wrote it down. B. P. Strategy. I had no idea what that was.
The man was named Elad Malka, somehow connected with a firm named B. P. Strategy.
* * *
• • •
Dorothy emerged from her cubicle after I hung up with Hertz. “My God, what happened to you?”
“How bad do I look?”
“Like someone beat you up.”
“He certainly tried.”
“More than tried. Looks like somebody took you down.”
“Nearly, but not quite.” I gave her a quick recap of what had happened.
Her eyes widened, and her mouth came open. “Good Lord, who did it?”
“Someone working for a company called B. P. Strategy. Can you look that up?”
“Be right back.”
A few minutes later she stood at the threshold to my office. “B. P. Strategy is the trading name for Black Parallel,” she said.
I’d heard of them. Black Parallel was a private Israeli intelligence firm with offices in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris. They liked to employ ex–Mossad agents. The guy, obviously a skilled professional, was likely an operative who’d once worked for Israeli intelligence. No wonder he was such a difficult opponent. Or at least such a persistent one. Also, they did Krav Maga.
“I think the guy who knocked me out might have been Black Parallel too.”
“No doubt.”
“To keep the first guy from talking to me, I assume. But why were they following me in the first place?”
“Working for Kimball, I bet.”
“But for what?”
“Watching to see if you find the Tallinn file.”
“Or to find out where I live.”
“Could be.”
“You haven’t heard from Gabe, have you?”
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“Because he just got fired from his job at the record store, and his roommate doesn’t know where he is.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
I looked up Black Parallel’s website. It described itself as a “select group of elite intelligence community veterans” that provided “tailored solutions” to “complex litigation challenges.” This was all fancy language for the fact that they did dirty ops and provided not just muscle but smart muscle. They were spy mercenaries.
Black Parallel had probably put a watch on Paul Kimball’s house in Cambridge, expecting me to show up there—as I did. Maybe they were trying to find out where my office was or where I live. Neither location was in any database under my real name.
A few hours later my cell phone rang. Gabe’s number. I was relieved and, by now, angry.
“Thanks for bothering to call me back.”
“Uncle Nick, what’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? Where the hell have you been?”
“I can’t work at home, so I went to the library.”
“Why didn’t you return my calls?”
“I had my phone switched off.”
“Why haven’t you been showing up at work? Do you know you got fired?”
“The guy’s a jerk. A real asshole.”
“How are you going to pay the rent?”
A pause. “Money’s not a problem. I have some. Saved up.”
“You just told me you’re low on cash.”
“I found some. Anyway, I can always get another job.”
He was lucky to get a job at the record store. He didn’t interview well.
“All right,” I said. “I want you to stay in touch. I’m dealing with something sort of . . . volatile right now. I want to make sure you’re okay. Check in with me regularly.”
“Will do.”
My phone beeped, and I saw it was Sukie. “Gotta go,” I said, and I picked up Sukie’s call.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Indianapolis. Another funeral.”
I had to give her credit. She didn’t stop. No matter how busy she was on her documentary, no matter what else was going on, she kept going to funerals of Oxydone victims.
“Nick, I just got a call from Dad’s office. His admin, Wendy. Dad is calling an emergency meeting of the family four days from now. At the house.”
“Emergency? About what?”
“She said, ‘The future of the company.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I need you to get that Tallinn file in the next four days. You’re back on the clock.”
“Why?”
“Because what if he declares bankruptcy? As a tricky way to get out of all the lawsuits, which he knows he’s going to lose. Because bankruptcy freezes all lawsuits. And all those families that Kimball Pharma devastated, they get pennies on the dollar. They’ll end up with nothing.”
I thought of the encrypted folder, which might—or might not—contain the Tallinn file. And which was locked up forever unless we guessed the damned password. That seemed hopeless. Which left me with only the chief medical officer, Dr. Zubiri. He was one of the two people at Kimball who knew about the Tallinn study. Which meant he might well have retained a copy. If I could find a way to either steal it from him or force him to hand it over . . .
I just needed a few minutes alone with the man.
I called and told his administrative assistant that I was from Stat News, an industry news service, compiling a who’s who in the pharmaceutical industry, and I needed just ten minutes of the doctor’s time, in person. She apologized and said that Dr. Zubiri was “at sales conference.”
“He is?” I said, surprised.
“At Kimball, the chief medical officer always goes to sales conferences, to update the sales reps on the products in the pipeline.”
“Where is the sales conference taking place this year?”
“Anguilla,” she said, adding huffily, “and no outsiders are allowed. I’m very sorry.”
I called Sukie back and said, “I need to go to the Kimball sales conference in Anguilla. Which means I need you to go so I can accompany you. Only way I’ll be able to get in.”
“Why?”
“To talk to the CMO.”
“He’ll be there?”
“Yes.”
“It’s in Anguilla?”
“Right.”
House on Fire--A Novel Page 24