The King

by Steven James

  “Yeah,” she said, “if we leave ’em out they might get stale.”

  “They’re rice cakes, how could you possibly tell?”

  “Don’t try to be clever.” She yawned. “It’s way too early for that.”

  “Ah.”

  She went to get her things while I bagged them, downed a quick breakfast, and then mentally prepared to spend the day trying to untangle what might well be a string of suspicious suicides somehow related to one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

  57

  Tessa was glad that she didn’t know any of the people Basque had killed this week. It made hearing the news a little easier, but it was another stark reminder to her of how diaphanous the fabric of life is.

  It was something no one liked to talk about, but it was something that lay there, like a carpet beneath every passing moment. A carpet everyone tried to step over but no one actually succeeded at doing.

  She cleared her textbooks off her desk, stuffed them into her backpack.

  Ever since Aiden had asked her to the prom, she’d been thinking about her speech. And maybe it had to do with all the murders lately, but death was on her mind and what she had so far in regard to her graduation talk was not exactly what you would call inspiring.

  Life in a nutshell: we’re born, we suffer, and then we die.

  Heartache and grief and loneliness chase us every day, the kind of love we long for is never quite within our reach, justice eludes us, and in the end, meaning is nothing but an illusion.

  After all, life is an anomaly, the exception, not the norm. Death is the natural state of affairs both here and everywhere else we know of in the universe—and it’s on its way to reasserting itself.

  All the evidence from evolutionary biology, astrophysics, astronomy, all the theorizing in statistics and probability make it clear there’s no possible way intelligent life exists anywhere else other than on earth. Any other view is either wishful thinking or a carefully cultivated blindness. Death is the default setting of the universe. The end of life on this planet would be the end of life everywhere.

  And that day is coming.

  Because our planet is dying. The second law of thermodynamics is unrelentingly exerting itself. Entropy will win. Human extinction is inevitable. One day all the stars will grow cold and bleak darkness will be the final destiny of all that there is. The final result of all of our efforts, all of our advances, all of our accomplishments, technology, our hopes, our dreams, will be nothing but evanescent memories disappearing into a vast dead expanse.

  In the end, all is for naught.

  We are tiny specks on a tiny speck in an immense, barren, lifeless universe. And if there is no God, then there is no heaven and no hope; there is only futility.

  So live for today.

  Go ahead and make the best of it. Eat, drink, and be merry and all of that, because, really, what’s the alternative?

  Try to scrape out enough hope to make it through the day without screaming. Use denial. Tell yourself the comforting lie that your life has some sort of ultimate purpose, some degree of lasting significance. Bury yourself in busyness, distract yourself with pleasures, delude yourself with naive optimism, because the alternative is unthinkable.

  Hoping that there is hope is the most necessary sedative of all. Without that, suicide is the only reasonable response. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, distraction is.

  There.

  How was that for a graduation speech?

  Unless.

  Unless there really was something more, unless eternity is a reality and the physical universe we see is only a shadow of another deeper entelechy breathing out love all around us.

  Unless that.

  Then, nothing.

  But no, she didn’t dare mention any of that—God, heaven, eternity, ultimate meaning—because it was a public school speech and that was just not acceptable. In government schools freedom of speech—which is in the Constitution—must always bow to the almighty dictum of the separation of Church and state—which is not.

  She glanced at her phone and saw a text from the school’s administration office—the number they used to reach the students in case there was a snow day, that sort of thing.

  Okay, weird.

  She tapped the screen and found out that she was supposed to meet with Assistant Principal Thacker right after sixth hour.

  Oh, great.

  He probably wanted to see how her speech was coming.

  Well, if she told him about what she had so far, that would be interesting, to say the least.

  She found her thoughts splitting off in two directions—a touch of concern about meeting with Thacker, and excitement about tonight, about prom with Aiden.

  She texted back that she’d be there and promised herself this meeting with Thacker was not going to ruin her day.

  ++

  7:48 a.m.

  Graham Webb watched the men unload the boxes from the belly of the cargo plane.

  The rather unintimidating private security guard with the clipboard looked at him quizzically. “Mr. Graham? I didn’t expect you to be here. Not at this time of day.”

  “It’s good to get out of the office once in a while.” He nodded toward the boxes. “That’s the shipment from Chennai?”

  “Yeah. Got a lot of pills in those boxes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lots of sick people out there.”

  “Yes, there are.”

  All Graham had to do was route the drugs into the pharmaceutical supply chain and they would be shipped to pharmacies and hospitals nationwide.

  That was it.

  Then his family would be safe.

  He accepted the clipboard from the man.

  All he had to do was sign these forms.

  Once the drugs were in the system, unless someone checked the lot numbers of all the individual packages one at a time, they would be distributed to the public, starting this weekend.

  And nobody did that. No pharmacies, no doctors, no hospitals would. It just wasn’t worth the time.

  However, despite all the reassurances he tried giving himself, Graham knew that the man on the phone last night would not have threatened him and his family unless there was something outside of the law going on with these drugs.

  He let the tip of his pen rest against the top form on the clipboard.

  After the moment had stretched out uncomfortably long, the man beside him said, “I got a lot of work to do here, Mr. Graham. I wonder if you could—”

  “One second.”

  The security guard was quiet.

  Graham thought of Abigail again, of that woman getting to her, of the man threatening to hurt his little girl and his ex-wife—hurt them in ways that, from what the man had said, they would very likely never recover from.

  If they even let ’em live.

  Graham signed his name, then flipped through the stack and scribbled his signature on every page that required authorization.

  The security guard already had his hand out, waiting for the clipboard. “Thanks.” Once he had it, he immediately signaled for the workers to transfer the boxes onto the waiting semi.

  Graham waited until they were done.

  There.

  He’d fulfilled his role in all this—whatever this was—and his daughter, his ex-wife, would be safe.

  As long as the people who’d threatened him kept their word.

  And there was no guarantee of that.

  Telling himself that everything was going to work out alright, he went to his office to make sure all the details were in place for the shipment to arrive tonight at just after six o’clock at the distribution center in the nation’s capital.

  ++

  One last flight, this time to DC.

  Keith had never threatened
a child before his phone call to Graham Webb last night. He would have preferred being the one with the dog, the one talking with the little girl on the beach, but Vanessa had thought that both the girl and her father would be less suspicious if it was a woman who was walking the dog, and honestly, Keith had had to agree.

  After they’d left the beach, Vanessa had ordered him to slit the dog’s throat, but this time he’d finally refused her, and after a brief argument, she’d done it and left the carcass at the end of a dead-end road about a mile from Graham’s house.

  Keith had watched silently.

  He wanted this to be over.

  Wanted so badly for this to be over.

  They confirmed that Graham had kept his end of the bargain this morning, and then made it to the airport just in time for their flight to DC, where they would land at 10:33 a.m.

  58

  Ever since coming into my office I’d been trying to find out more about Corporal Tyree, but in the end, all I could locate was a photo that appeared in a regional newspaper in southwest Virginia of him returning from the Middle East. In the photo, he stood next to an unidentified, attractive red-haired woman who was apparently welcoming him to the States.

  I contacted Cybercrime to have them run the photo through facial recognition, but nothing came up. She was more of a ghost than Tyree was.

  Frustrated, I turned my attention to the two things right now that mattered most: (1) unraveling the relationship of Calydrole to the suicides of Corey Wellington and Natalie Germaine, and (2) stopping more of them from occurring.

  ++

  11:05 a.m.

  Over the last couple days Valkyrie had been following the story of the apprehension of Richard Basque by Special Agent Patrick Bowers.

  It brought to mind his own clash with Bowers in January.

  According to the news, a week ago Basque had tried to kill Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang—another FBI agent Valkyrie had met in Wisconsin.

  He remembered her well. She was a fighter. She had skills.

  And she’d escaped from Basque.

  Interesting.

  In Wisconsin, while Valkyrie was still living out his life as Alexei Chekov, Bowers had vowed to catch him again.

  And he was the kind of agent who seemed smart enough, tenacious enough, to stick with a case as long as necessary to see it through to the end.

  The angel of death had an idea.

  It would take a little work, he would have to call in a few favors, pull a few strings, but if he could arrange it he was certain it would be interesting to watch how things would all play out.

  Yes, to get things rolling, Richard Basque would be needing a good lawyer, and Valkyrie knew just the person. He phoned and caught her as she was getting in line to rent a car from Avis at Dulles International Airport.

  “This is Vanessa.”

  “Yes, dear,” he said, keeping up the facade that she meant something to him. “There’s something I would like you to take care of for me.”

  ++

  11:32 a.m.

  Ever since we caught Basque back on Tuesday, I’d spent whatever free time I could scrounge up researching counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and now I collected my thoughts in preparation for my one-o’clock meeting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jason Kantsos.

  I reviewed a few notes from the documents I’d assembled:

  • Thousands of Web sites sell substandard, tainted, counterfeit, misbranded, unapproved, contaminated, and adulterated pharmaceutical products. Half of the drugs sold by rogue Internet pharmacies are counterfeit.

  • According to World Health Organization estimates, one out of three drugs for sale worldwide is counterfeit.

  • Nearly every type of prescription pharmaceutical is available as a counterfeit: antibiotics, psychotropic meds, seizure medication, and drugs to treat cancer, hypertension, and diabetes. Some of the most common are weight-loss drugs and those meant to control high blood pressure.

  • FDA doesn’t test drugs per se, at least not for consumption, but it can do tests on drugs to determine if they’re counterfeit or not, as its analysts were doing this week with the Calydrole pills that’d been found in Montana.

  • The authenticity of a drug can be established by superimposing the imprint on the pill (the symbol, number, or name) in question with one known to be genuine, also by studying its chemical composition and biological effects. Sometimes analysts use forensic light sources to compare the ink on the packaging or on the bottles.

  • Back in 2008 when the CEO of the company that produces heparin testified before Congress, he said the counterfeit version “was able to evade the quality control systems and regulatory oversight of more than a dozen companies and nearly a dozen countries.” A dozen agencies in close to a dozen countries. That didn’t bode well for my hopes of determining if the Calydrole we’d found was counterfeit.

  Last year, one pharmaceutical company tried to circumvent the infiltration of counterfeit copies of their drugs by printing alphanumeric codes on their packages. Before consumers used the drugs, they were told to enter the code on the company’s Web site and verify that it was legitimate. Then, if it wasn’t, to return the product to the pharmacy where they’d purchased it. Or, if it’d been ordered through the Internet, to contact the FDA and the pharmaceutical company to report the product as counterfeit.

  But there were ways around that as well. Counterfeiters had hired hackers to get into the firm’s authentication Web site and enter in codes of their own that would come up as legitimate when customers entered them.

  Move.

  Countermove.

  The never-ending dance of law enforcement and crime.

  • • •

  Reviewing the different ways of determining whether or not a product was legitimate gave me an idea.

  I called to leave a message for Dr. Neubauer at the FBI Lab, and since he was almost always in his laboratory instead of his office, I was a little surprised to catch him at his desk.

  “Doc, this is Pat. I’m wondering if you can look into something for me.”

  “The pills?”

  “You heard about them? The ones from Montana?”

  “The boys down the hall are working on them as we speak.”

  “Well, I was thinking: pollen is everywhere, right?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “So, would it get on pills? I mean, while they were being produced?”

  He contemplated that. “You’re thinking a palynological analysis of the drugs?”

  “We have FDA and PTPharmaceuticals studying their composition, but I’m not interested just in what the pills contain, but in—”

  “Where they were produced.”

  “Precisely. If you could extract spores or pollen grains from them—”

  “Yes”—he cut me off again, but it was good to know he was tracking so closely with me—“of course, I might be able to tell the region in which they were produced and perhaps the season of the year—if the pollen of certain flowering plants was present.”

  Timing and location. It’s always about timing and location.

  “Right. We’re thinking the shipment came from India. If you can narrow down the section of the country, we might be able to find out, at least generally, where the drugs are being produced. Then we can compare that to the facilities PTPharmaceuticals uses to produce Calydrole. We might be able to zero in on their point of origin.”

  “Hmm . . . I’ve lectured at a couple of conferences with two doctors from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany in Lucknow, India. There are more than fifteen thousand different types of flowering plants in India, but if anyone can help identify the flora there, they can. I’ll take a look at the pills, see if I can extract spores from them, and contact my cohorts at the institute. I’ll call you.”

 
“Great.”

  After we hung up, I went back to work, but thoughts about the rest of the day distracted me. Tessa was going out tonight with a boy I’d never met, and that always made me uneasy.

  A little over a year ago, when we were visiting San Diego, a man in his early twenties tried to sexually assault her, and if it hadn’t been for her quick thinking, he would have likely succeeded. Since then, the thought of her being alone with boys I didn’t know had made me uneasy.

  I recalled my conversation with her a week ago, when she’d asked me, somewhat in good humor, not to do a background check on Aiden.

  I didn’t know his family, had no idea who he was.

  No, don’t do this, Pat. If Tessa finds out she’ll feel betrayed.

  But, truthfully, she didn’t need to know it. I could make a few calls, and if nothing came up I wouldn’t need to mention it at all. And if anything bad did show up, she might be upset at first, but she would thank me in the end.

  Since Aiden was in high school with her, a complete background check seemed too over-the-top even for me, however I did put a call through to the school’s safety patrol officer to see if Aiden had ever had any run-ins with the law or if there were any red flags I should know about, but the officer was away from his desk.

  After leaving a short message and my cell number, I hung up and worked on the counterfeit drug research and lost track of time until my ringing phone alerted me that Agent Kantsos was at the reception desk, waiting for me to escort him into the Academy’s administration building.

  59

  1:03 p.m.

  Jason Kantsos was a weary-looking man whom I guessed to be about my age. He’d put on a little too much weight, the gray hair that he still had left was thinning, and the goatee he’d chosen to grow actually made him look older than he would have without it.

  Kantsos had worked undercover for eight years posing as a counterfeiter bringing drugs from Asia into the U.S. He seemed like the perfect guy to talk to.

  Rather than return to my office, we went outside to the Academy’s 9/11 Memorial Courtyard, situated between the library, the Crossroads Lounge, and the Washington and Madison dorms.