My thoughts swirled as if I had just popped into an epileptic seizure. The money in Paul’s accounts, the half-information he’d deliberately fed me, his affair with Dorothy. A sad, sick, impotent rage filled me. There I was, having spent days brooding on revenge for Paul Murphy, only to find out that the friend I was so desperate to avenge had duped me. And to get revenge on him, a dead man, was forever beyond my reach.
The irony made me sick. “Why are you involved in this?” I asked Bly.
“I was involved from the minute I found the tissue in Paul’s lab and asked him about it. Slippery slope.”
“Why didn’t you go to the FDA?”
“And tell them what? That I found some human tissue at the lab that wasn’t supposed to be there?”
“Yes.”
“And then what? Lose my job? Lose all my stock? Become one of those whistle-blowers who can’t get hired as a grocery clerk because he’s tainted goods?” Bly raised a bony hand to rub his stubble. “I should have gone to the FDA. God, I wish I had. But I didn’t. And then it was too late.”
We sat there, me on the bed, Bly on his windowsill. The ocean spoke quietly in the background.
“Everything changed when Paul was killed,” Bly said. “The wall between Tetra and the Chinese crumbled. Everyone got busy looking out for themselves.”
“And now you want to look out for yourself.”
“You bet your life I do. You saw what they did to Paul.”
Silence filled the room. Even the sound of the ocean seemed to slip away.
“I’ll call the police,” I said, finally. “You stay here or go somewhere else, if you want. Just lay low, and I’ll get in touch with you when—”
At the door, there was a gentle rapping.
106
BLY, AS CRACKED AS HE was at that point, didn’t flip, as I would have expected. In fact, his reaction was all wrong, way too calm. He stubbed out his cigarette, walked to the door, and, without looking through the peephole, undid the deadbolt and the slide lock. I was standing now, my body tight.
A woman pushed into the room. “Hello, Nathaniel,” she said.
“Alex.”
“It’s okay,” Bly told me. “She’s okay.”
Alex gave me a wan smile, walked across to the open window, and removed her shoulder bag. “Nice view,” she remarked, and turned from the window. “I need a drink.”
“I got water,” Bly offered. His voice had taken on an entirely different quality, softer somehow, more pliable. He smoothed his hair.
“A drink, Jon. Drink means alcohol.” She sat in a chair, stretched, her body tensing and relaxing like a cat’s. “I need it but I don’t need it. Tomorrow, when all this is done.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, but Alex ignored my question. Instead, she turned to Bly, who was filling a glass with tap water.
“You told him?” she asked. He nodded.
“You knew about this?” I asked her. If she knew what Bly had just told me, it meant that she’d been lying to me from the beginning. They’re all in on this, I said to myself, all of them. I looked at the door, at the window, wondered which would be the best means of escape.
Again, she ignored my question. “Did you ask him?” she said to Bly.
“Ask me what?”
“Not yet,” Bly said. He handed the glass to Alex.
“Ask me what?” Both their heads turned. Finally, I thought, someone realizes I’m here.
“We have problems,” Alex said. “As I’m sure Jonathan told you. We need your help,” she said.
Neurons buzzed and fried as I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. Need my help? The only thing I was sure of at that point was that I’d be damned if I’d help them. “Oh, no,” I said. “No way.”
“Nate, listen to me. This is a horrible situation. Truly awful. We’re trying to make the best of it.”
“You’re involved, Alex.”
“Yes, I’m involved. And I wish I weren’t. But your friend Paul pulled me into this—”
“Ah, Christ. Paul again?”
“Yes, Paul. He was desperate for help. And then when we—” She cut herself off. “I tried to help him.”
I stabbed a finger at Bly. “He said I was Paul’s fall guy. He said I was being set up.”
Alex flashed a look at Bly, who was leaning against the wall, arms crossed so tight he looked like he was hugging himself. “We weren’t going to let anything happen to you. I wasn’t going to let anything happen.”
I sat on the bed again, overwhelmed and confused. “Why didn’t you go to the police as soon as you heard about this?”
“I was being threatened as soon as I heard about it. We all were.” She hunched forward on the chair, opened her big brown eyes even wider. “Jon and I have everything assembled on our end. All you need to do is talk to the police and public health people and anyone else you spoke with. You tell them that this was an arrangement between Paul Murphy and Wei-jan Fang.”
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
“Because it would give us time. We just need for this to blow over, then we can think. We can go to the police later.”
“And what happens to Tetra? What happens to Garheng Ho? Everyone just gets away with it?”
“No one’s going to get away with anything. You’re buying us time so we can deal with this on our own terms. Jon and I think this is as horrifying as you do. But there is no other choice right now.”
“There’s always another choice,” I said. “What happens to the people with the fibrosarcoma?”
“We can help them later, when this is all cleared up. They’re not going anywhere. But there are more pressing issues now.”
“What iss—” But before the sentence was out of my mouth, I realized what she was talking about. “Dorothy.”
“Yes. Her.”
I felt fury begin to rise; I felt my face getting hot. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know, Nate.”
“What are they going to do to her?”
“I don’t know. But we all know what they did to Paul.” She looked at me with what seemed like sympathy. “They’re trying to force your hand, Nate, just like they’re forcing Jon’s and mine. We have to play along right now. When this is over—”
“It’s never going to be over,” I spat.
“—when this is over, we’ll have time to bring everything together. Then we’ll take them down.” Alex stood from the chair, crossed to the bed, and sat next to me. “Talk to your friends in the police and public health. I know you might be uncomfortable about implicating Paul—”
“That’s not what’s making me uncomfortable, Alex.”
“Okay, then. Good. Anyway, he won’t care what you do. And Wei-jan Fang—my God, he’s the guiltiest of all. Look at the big picture here, Nate: you’d be doing the right thing by helping us. And then we can do the right thing again and make sure no one gets away with anything. We do that after we’re safe.”
Bly, who’d been silent for the exchange, finally spoke. “You have to do it.”
I could not believe what I was being asked to do. I could not believe I was being asked to help those—even for a short while—who’d slaughtered the Murphys, the Mings. Who’d assaulted Brooke. Who’d taken Dorothy.
And I could not believe that—if I helped them—any of us would be safe.
“I can’t do it,” I said.
“Nate…” Alex said, reaching for my hand.
“I can’t.”
“You can trust us,” Bly said.
“Quiet, Jon.” Alex’s cool fingers wrapped around mine. “Nate, I’m juggling a thousand balls here. Things are moving very fast. There’s not much time.”
“I know,” I said, sliding my hand out of hers. “That’s why I have to call the police. We need their help to find Dorothy. We do that, and Garheng Ho and whoever else doesn’t have any leverage, right? We need to talk to the cops—all of us—get things rolling.”
“No. There’s not
much time because—”
Just then, I heard a phone trill some pop tune that seemed so incongruous in the circumstances. “Goddamn,” Alex said. She stood up from the bed. She rifled through her purse and removed a cell phone, glanced at the number. Before she clicked the Talk button, she turned back to me. “Nate, please,” she implored.
Unable to make sense of anything now, unable to form words, I just shook my head.
She groaned and pressed the phone to her ear. “Yes.” Then she said, “No.” She hung up, dropped the phone back into her purse, and stared at me. “Why did you bring the boy, Nate?”
I slammed against the side of the car, breathing fast from the run through the motel and across the lot, breathing fast from a rising panic.
Tim wasn’t inside.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I scanned the deserted lot, my eyes darting from the minivan to the old junker tucked in the farthest corner. All shadows and amber light. No sign of the boy.
A game, I thought. Please let this be some hide-and-seek.
I yelled Tim’s name.
Someone—not Tim—moved into shadow from the pool of light near the motel entrance. With a loose, unhurried gait, he glided over the black asphalt. It was the stride of someone in control. As he got closer, I could make out the features—the dark hair, the broad face, the smooth skin. A darkness, the tail of a dragon, marred the side of his neck.
107
“THIS IS KWONG,” THE TATTOOED man said into a cell phone. There were a few more words in Chinese, a silence, then a click as he snapped the cell phone shut.
I was in the back of a black sedan; Tim was in the passenger’s seat. Kwong—Michael Kwong, who was not supposed to be in this country, who did and did not look like the picture I’d seen in the police station all those days before—was driving.
Tim turned back to me, his dark eyes like two holes in his head. “I stayed in the car,” he said. His voice was accusing.
“I know,” I said. The words barely escaped from my throat.
“You wanted me to stay in the car and I stayed—”
Kwong said something sharp in Chinese, cutting Tim off. The boy turned away to stare out the window.
Whatever was going to happen to me I deserved. I deserved it for putting this kid in harm’s way.
The sloping bridges of Interstate 280 came into view; tiny dots of light skimmed the floating roadway. Kwong eased the car onto the highway, and we joined the northward flow of mankind, whose greatest worry was whether there would be a parking space available or whether the dog had been left alone too long. I imagined the music playing in the sleek cars that passed us; I imagined the soft lilt of conversation inside. I felt so separate from these people, so alone.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked, but Kwong made no reply.
I began to feel very afraid.
And I decided I would help them with whatever they needed. Of course I would.
Tim began to play with the power windows—his favorite car game that night. On the second cycle, Kwong fingered a button on the console. A few click-clicks pierced the silence while Tim tried the locked window, then gave up. That’s one way to deal with it, I thought.
I vacillated, first this way, then that, my mind jockeying between two paths, both dead ends. Help Mr. Ho and Michael Kwong and protect the kid and his mother, who were surely being used as leverage against me? Refuse to help? I wondered if it even made a difference.
In a minute, I found, there is, indeed, time for decisions and revisions which a minute can reverse.
Through this back-and-forth, one thing kept rising, like bile, like bilgewater: I am no hero, never was. Murph was right about me all along. Brooke, too. Not the most moral guy, a bad friend, a poor partner. A competent doctor, maybe, but a disaster of a caregiver. Maybe it was time I just accepted that this was who I am, accept those dark things curled like worms in my DNA.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked. “What are you going to do with Dorothy?”
At the mention of his mother’s name, Tim turned to me and stared.
108
SEEING THE HULK OF TETRA Biologics against a dark asphalt sea, I was again reminded of a ship: the Titanic, the Lusitania, those mighty vessels whose sterns tipped to the sky before being sucked into the inky, cold sea. And though Tetra hadn’t yet collected the tragedies of its nautical forbears, there was time yet for that. I felt a chill run through me.
Kwong took the car around to the rear of Tetra, where the asphalt sloped downward to a loading dock. The car glided down the incline and stopped nose first at a concrete ledge, above which were two large automatic doors. No worries about the vehicle being spotted, since it had effectively disappeared for anybody not looking directly into the loading dock. But that was probably a nonissue, anyway; no one unconnected to this thing was there, I was sure. There were no late-night worker bees running experiments. The cleaning staff had been given the evening off, no doubt, a gift from the gods at Tetra. The reason would be a hazardous waste spill maybe, a lie about necessary building maintenance. Maybe it was Rosh Hashanah that year—I never could figure out the roving Jewish holidays—and CEO Dustin Alberts had told everyone to take off to blow a shofar or two.
Anyway, the place was deserted.
“Get out,” Michael Kwong said.
Tim undid his seatbelt and hopped out of the car. He was frightened, I could tell, but not panicky. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t. Perhaps he was even comfortable with these people whom he knew. More likely, though, his eight-year-old brain couldn’t take in what sorts of things these men did in the course of their jobs.
Kwong tapped on my window with the barrel of his pistol. “Out,” he said.
Gun trained on me, I exited the car and Kwong indicated a man-sized metal door set next to the larger doors. As I walked up the concrete steps toward the door, I thought briefly of running. The thought of a bullet tearing through my brain stopped me.
“It’s going to be all right, Tim,” I said.
“I hope—”
“Shut up,” Kwong said, cutting off the boy.
At the door, Kwong slid a card through a black box next to the door. There was a click, and he opened the door. “Go in,” he said. I went in first, followed by Kwong and Tim.
We entered into a cavernous loading bay: concrete floor, stacks of wooden pallets, boxes of laboratory supplies held together with thick plastic wrap. Large containers of liquid nitrogen and oxygen were chained to the wall like gray metal prisoners. Only one bank of fluorescent lights flickered above us, giving the room a ghostly, dead feel.
I heard the door behind me close, and turned to make sure Tim was holding up. I didn’t see him, however. I saw only a blur before I felt an excruciating pain on my neck and everything cut to black.
109
THE FIRST THING I REALIZED: I was not dead.
I tried to open my eyes, but squeezed them shut when pain crashed through the back of my skull. I tried again to open them, slowly this time.
The loading dock came into view, hazy at first. The pain made turning my head a real bitch, but I managed to get a few degrees to the right and left. I was alone. And I could not move.
My feet were lashed to the legs of a chair. I couldn’t lean forward to see what they used to tie me, since my hands were bound behind me and fastened to the seat. From the sharp line of pain in my wrists, though, I assumed they used cable ties. I pulled, felt the plastic bite into my flesh.
All in all, this was not a very promising situation. But I was alive, and I was confused. Why was I not dead? Why, if they weren’t going to kill me, was I tied to the chair? The obvious threat they posed to those I cared about was enough to get me here without struggle. So why did they go over the top, braining me and tying me up?
I tried to rock my legs back and forth, maybe get a little play going in the cable ties, but it was useless. They’d used three ties per leg, I could now feel, which essen
tially fused the lowest parts of my body to the chair. Underneath the chair, they’d spread a sheet of clear plastic.
To catch the blood? Definitely not a promising situation.
I sat and I thought. If nothing else, I’d at least gotten the ego boost of having put together a large part of this mess. Tetra and the South Chinese Merchants’ Association tong. Partners in crime. Who’d have thunk it, except one renegade doc with no job, a few pennies in his bank account, and a disintegrated romance? And now that renegade doc was as good as dead. But, damn it, he was right. Huge consolation.
Considering my physical predicament at that moment, I couldn’t help but think about Paul Murphy and what had happened to him.
God, I thought, I hope they don’t cut out my tongue.
I won’t talk, guys, I promise.
To get my mind off imperiled body parts, I thought about fun things, like what the hell had transpired to put me in this loading bay, in this chair, with a headache gnawing at the back of my skull. First, Murph—drowning in debt—gets tapped to help analyze the tissue samples retrieved from Wei-jan Fang’s illegal clinic. As Regenetine gets closer to launch, and as everyone starts getting dollar signs in their eyes, Dustin Alberts wants to “get the Chinese off their backs.” Again, Murph is tapped. Who better to protect your little conspiracy than a six-foot-two ex-linebacker with a squeaky clean reputation, severe money problems, and a guilt complex? Murph—ladies’ man, Boy Scout—taps Dorothy Zhang, because she’s the niece of Uncle Tony. She doesn’t have much information (too bad) but she gets sick (poor thing) and she gets upset (we can use that!). Maybe Murph plants it in her head that she could help bring down the clinic, maybe the seed is already there. She is, after all, an ambitious reporter, which probably made her easy to manipulate. She gets pictures of people suffering the same fate as she is, which provides Murph enough—but not too much—to interest a wayward, mid-level, jobless public health official. Because he’s wayward and jobless and not the most ethical guy in the world, Nate McCormick will be easy to put on a leash. It will be easy to control and shape his investigation into Beautiful Essence and Wei-jan Fang. But the best laid plans of mice and Boy Scouts…
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