by Warren Esby
“I’m looking at the officers’ club.”
“No look over there.” And he pointed to a sight that was about five hundred yards from the officers’ club and I had to shift my gaze to see where he was pointing.
Sure enough, the drone came in, dropped its load of bombs and a large explosion took place that shook the ground where we and all the other spectators were sitting. When the dust settled it was obvious that a huge bomb crater was left behind and everyone started to cheer. I turned to Jerry, whose turn it was, and asked,
“But the officers’ club is over there. How does this help with a new swimming pool for the club?”
“They’ll build the new club house next to the pool after the pool is finished and get rid of the old club.”
“But the old one looked almost new.”
“Yeah. It’s only three years old, and they usually don’t replace them but once every five years, so they’ll be a little ahead of schedule. But they didn’t want to take a chance in harming the old club. It would have been bad for morale. You know when they started using this excavation method, they tried to get rid of the old pool and dig the new one with one strike, but in the beginning they weren’t as accurate as they are now and some of the club houses were hit and destroyed. And that affected morale. So they decided to play it safe if they wanted to use the new cost effective excavation method, and now they dig the pool a little ways away from any other building and the whole process works pretty well this way. Sure they’ll have to build the new club a little sooner, but that’s the price you pay for progress.”
“But it’s away from everything. How will people get out to it?”
“They’ll have to extend the road a little. Isn’t that obvious? Sometimes I wonder about you when you ask questions like that. Sometimes you ask really good questions and other times really dumb questions.”
I argued back, “So now they have to build a new club house and a new road. So how is that more cost effective than the old method which would only have required that the pool be replaced?”
“I said it was more cost effective to excavate the pool this way and that’s the whole point of using the drones. No one’s talking about the cost of the new club or road. That’s a separate issue entirely and doesn’t count when you talk about cost effectiveness. You better get used to the way the government looks at things now that you’re a government employee.”
I said I understood. On the way back I asked them again about the money that was in my apartment. I was worried about being caught with a bunch of used bills that had been marked as part of a drug smuggling operation. Ben told me what to do.
“Go to the post office and get a couple of those priority mail boxes. You know the ones they advertise by saying, ‘If it fits it ships.’ Well, get a couple of the big ones and we’ll tell you what to do with them when we see you next weekend. We’ll talk again then and don’t make any plans for the weekend after that. That’s when you’re supposed to go down to Rosarito Beach for a shipment, even though it’s Labor Day weekend. Sometimes we just have to make a sacrifice and work when we shouldn’t have to in order to do what’s right for our country.”
Very patriotic, I thought.
Chapter 20
The next week was uneventful. Since I was scheduled to work that week at HypeTech, as I had the week before, and since HypeTech was in the Carlsbad Research Park situated twenty miles north of the Salk Institute, and since I was no longer driving the Corolla or a Cadillac Escalade Hybrid for that matter, I thought it was unlikely that Olga or Igor or Vladimir would find me, especially if they were spending their days keeping an eye on the Salk Institute. I learned a lot that week about working for a biotech company and also about Dr. Lorenzo Toro. For one thing, I found out he wasn’t a real doctor. He had been born Diego Raymundo Lorenzo Toro but liked to go by his first two initials and his third and fourth names, so he used D.R. Lorenzo Toro kind of like J.R. Ewing used only the first two initials of his name but with a D instead of a J. But most people thought it was a mistake and eliminated the extra period, and he didn’t object when people referred to him or wrote to him as Dr. Lorenzo Toro. He liked it so much that he officially changed his first name to Dr. He found it very useful to have that kind of name if he was to be in the health care field. But his mother had to change his name on all the genealogy charts the family liked to keep so it would show he was born Dr. Lorenzo Toro.
Diego Raymundo Lorenzo Toro had started out as a young man in the health care field. He was still in high school when he read that Vitamin D deficiency can be treated by sunlight. He learned that exposure to sunlight causes the body to produce Vitamin D, so he went to the local large flea market down the road from his house every weekend and sold his new treatment for Vitamin D deficiency. He called it Sunshine Water. He took a big, clean new trashcan and filled it with water and left it in his back yard for about an hour in the sun before using the water to fill up some empty gallon containers that his mother had left over from buying her own grocery store water and from which he had removed the labels. And then he made a big sign that read VITAMIN D CAN BE MADE BY SUNSHINE and another sign that read VITAMIN D DEFICIENCY CAN BE CURED BY SUNSHINE. His third and fourth signs were the selling points. One read DON’T TAKE A CHANCE OF GETTING VITAMIN D DEFICIENCY, GET YOUR SUNSHINE, and the last and biggest sign read BUY SUNSHINE WATER HERE. And people did, for a dollar a cup. Part of his sales success was due to the fact he placed his stand at a corner of the flea market that had no drink stands nearby. Anyone who wanted a drink came to him and others saw people buying water from his stand and thought it might be legitimate and it was worth a try. It only cost a buck and most people are willing to try something new if it only costs a buck. Lorenzo saved his money and eventually was able to buy bottled water from a local bottler that would put a label on the bottle that said Sunshine Water, and he sold these for even more money. When he graduated high school, he sold his business to a local entrepreneur who wanted to get into the bottled water business. He refused to tell him his secret ingredient until he was paid. After he was paid and told the new owner how to make Sunshine Water, he took the money and ran, literally. And the legend was born. I didn’t say it was an admirable legend, did I?
Diego Raymund Lorenzo Toro had more success with a second business he started just before he got out of college. He used a similar model. He purchased aspirin in bulk and repackaged it in small bottles of twenty four pills each. He marketed it as Genuine Generic Aspirin. Now everyone knew about the generic brand of drugs. In fact all health care providers told people all the time to use generic drugs whenever they could. Don’t bother with a brand name drug if you could get a generic. And D.R. Lorenzo Toro, as he had started calling himself, wanted everyone to know that his aspirin was genuine generic aspirin so they would know that they were getting the real thing, the one that doctors told them to get if they could. No one else had Genuine Generic Aspirin for sale, only D.R. Lorenzo Toro. And people were willing to pay twice the price to get the genuine article. He made a fortune and the legend of Dr. Lorenzo Toro grew even more when he sold his company at a huge mark up to someone who wanted to get into the generic drug business and had ideas of other generic drugs he could market in the same way. Since then Dr. Lorenzo Toro had gone on to other things and was now the CEO of one of the hottest start up biotechnology companies in San Diego.
I liked working at HypeTech half my time for a variety of reasons. First, it was a different location and gave me some variety in my work, even though the only variety was doing the same things in a different location. What kept me from being bored was that the people were different. I know that people say that all people are basically the same underneath and it’s true. But the people at HypeTech were the same underneath a lot more fat, and some of them were kind of jolly and didn’t take themselves as seriously as the ones who were all taken up with the prestige of being at the Salk Institute. The other reason I liked it, as all people have found out when they work at two d
ifferent locations, was that you could tell one place you had to go to the other for something and tell the other you had to go to the first place and just go home early or goof off or go to Lego Land if you liked blocks or just go down and watch the Pacific Ocean and make believe that you were every bit as good a hot shot research leader because you could keep an eye on the Pacific Ocean as well as any of them. If you got caught, you only had to say you were stuck in traffic which was almost always true anyway, and people would not question it. The final reason I liked to work there was that they ended the week with a TGIF party that was a lot better than one of the Salk Institute’s teas. Food, wine and beer were plentiful, and they usually brought in pepperoni pizza for everyone to eat so I didn’t have to worry about having a bean burrito and could expand my diet to make it healthier. And Dr. Lorenzo would often give out prizes for showing up at the TGIF parties. He would also give prizes to people who were so dedicated that they had to work late instead of coming to the parties. He liked to give prizes to his employees so they would love and appreciate him, and everyone would ultimately get a prize to show that he appreciated them as well. The prize was an extra day off. Of course everyone knew if they actually asked for that extra day off, they would be accused of not being dedicated enough to the company and not being willing to work hard enough, and they would be fired, especially if they also weren’t fat enough.
Chapter 21
After working at HypeTech that week and living through another enjoyable and filling TGIF party, I was scheduled the following week to go back to the Salk Institute, and I was worried about running into a black Buick Regal that might have been cruising around. However, I thought I could possibly get out of it since almost all the scientists except me were going to Las Vegas for a convention. I started thinking of getting lost that week if I could, so I could at least live long enough to see another Labor Day. I brought up that possibility when Ben and Jerry showed up on schedule the following Saturday and took me out for breakfast at the Aviara Four Seasons Resort in Carlsbad.
“I don’t see why not. As long as we have a homing device on your car, we can always track you. Actually, it may not be a bad idea for you to get lost for a week since we need to keep you safe so you can make that shipment for us the following weekend. Where do you want to go?”
“I thought I’d visit some of my friends in Flagstaff.”
“You know, that may work. Ben and I can stay nearby in case you get in trouble or something. Maybe we can go to Las Vegas which is just a few hours down the road. That may just work. What do you think Ben?” Ben thought it was fine. A week in Las Vegas on taxpayer money was almost a tradition in government circles.
“I have a problem though,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“No money. I don’t really have that much and gas and insurance for the Chevy is draining my few resources.”
“But you have a half a million in your apartment.”
“I thought I had to give that back.”
“To who? We can’t take it and the government can’t admit it’s theirs. You’re stuck with it. It’s kind of like being the Old Maid, so to speak.
I’m stuck with a half a million. Some Old Maid I turned out to be. “But I can’t use it. You told me it’s marked and I’ll get caught if I try.”
“Only some of it is marked. We’ll show you which. And that reminds me. Did you get those boxes from the post office?”
I said I had and Jerry continued, “Well, we’ll give you address labels for the boxes and deposit slips and signature cards to put inside them. Then you’ll mail them on Monday and the money will be out of your hair. We’ll let you keep enough for a vacation, say one bundle, that’s five thousand, but you have to ship out the rest and we’ll know if you don’t. The rest you can have for services rendered once those services have been rendered.”
“Where’s the money going?”
“It’ll go first to a P.O. Box in D.C. and then by courier to a bank in the Cayman Islands where we’ve already set up an account for you. It has the correct social security number and everything. We have all that information on you. The money will be waiting for you once you’re in the double agent protection program, if you live long enough to end up in the program, I should say. It doesn’t matter if the money is marked or not. Since we marked it anyway, it will be okay.”
“And if I don’t live long enough? Who gets the money then? Can someone else withdraw it?”
“No one can withdraw it but you. But if it’s inactive for seven years, or if someone sends the bank a death certificate for you, then the money is confiscated by the bank and they get to keep it.”
That was a comfort since no one but the bank would benefit from my death. I spoke those thoughts out loud and Ben said,
“Not directly. But the bank is owned by a select group of government officials, both active and retired. The bank pays a really good dividend to its shareholders, and that dividend depends in part on how much money reverts to them. It’s like a special retirement plan, if you know what I mean. And Jerry and I and others at our grade and above are shareholders. So even if we can’t take any money directly, once this money goes into an account for someone like you, there’s a good chance we can share in your good fortune now and after we retire, provided your good fortune turns into bad fortune, so to speak, while we’re still alive.”
“But as long as I’m alive, it’s mine and I can spend it like I want.”
“Yep. You got it. It’s a good system over all and we all benefit, both you and us.”
When we got back to my apartment, they parked across the street so no one would see the Escalade parked at my apartment, and we crossed the street and went into the apartment. I opened the grocery bag and they showed me that most of the packets were tied with a white band of paper with a few having a blue band instead. The blue banded bundles were the marked bills. I took out one white banded bundle and loaded the rest into the boxes with the deposit slips and signature cards I had just signed. I sealed the boxes in their presence and they were ready to go. We said goodbye and agreed to meet the following Saturday morning before I left for Rosarito Beach.
I called Raffy and asked him if he and Wyatt would be available the next week to take a few days off to have a little fun. I said I had come into a little money and needed some time off. I wanted to do a little hunting and drink a little beer and it would all be at my expense. But I would need some company during the daytime so they would have to take off from work, but I would make it up to them. He said he was up for it since his wife was working the day shift and so was Wyatt’s. He’d ask Wyatt if he was available or else he would try Charlie. He called me back a few hours later and said Wyatt was in.
The next morning, I headed to Flagstaff by way of Phoenix and got into Phoenix in the afternoon. I checked into a decent hotel and spent the night. After breakfast the next morning I stopped at a post office and mailed my packages, and then I went to a gun shop that I had checked out on the internet before I left San Diego, one that had an extensive inventory. I purchased three nice Savage bolt action rifles in 22-250 caliber and three Leupold 4-16 x 40 mm rifle scopes and had the gun shop set up the three rifles for me. I also bought rifle cases for all three, a thousand rounds of ammunition, two large camouflage-colored tarps and a new sleeping bag. I still had my Massachusetts driver’s license since I hadn’t had time to get a California one and I still had a valid Massachusetts Firearms License, so there was no problem with my making the gun purchases. It was legal, which it wouldn’t have been for a California resident. I continued on my way to Flagstaff and got there in time for lunch with Raffy and Wyatt. We went out for lunch in the Tahoe and they were really impressed with it and my willingness to pay for lunch.
“That’s a far cry from that little Corolla you were driving,” Wyatt said. “I wasn’t at all sure you’d make it to San Diego.”
“You come by this legally?” asked Raffy.
“I did,” I told him. “T
his was made with money that was earned and paid for in a government approved way. I just happened to hit a government sponsored program that paid well. I bought this as government surplus.” I wasn’t sure they believed me, but they wanted to.
I asked Raffy how the prairie dog town was doing.
“They’ve about tore the first mile of it to shreds from the southern tip where that gate is goin’ north. I can watch what they’re doing from a ridge just beyond the north gate, and they’re working their way north. They’re within a quarter mile or so of that north gate, and there won’t be too much left by the time they’re finished.”
Over lunch I filled them in on what I knew. I told them it was a drone testing sight and they were having a contest on how many prairie dogs they could kill at a cost of ten thousand dollars a shot. You know that didn’t sit well with them, especially when I pointed out it was their tax money that was being used to ruin that hunting ground for them. I then told them about the scoring system they were using and the problem the buzzards were causing and how they were deducting buzzard kills from the prairie dog kills in their scoring system.
“So I thought you might want to have a little fun and maybe end this a little more quickly in the process.”
“What do we need to do?” asked Raffy.
“Well, you said you could watch the strikes from the north ridge. How far is that from the target area now?”
“About three or four hundred yards.”
“And what happens when there’s a strike?”
“Well the buzzards are all over the place now. As soon as there’s a strike they fly up until the dust settles and then they land and start going after the dead prairie dogs or pieces of prairie dogs, but a few of them are killed in the process. Those are the ones they deduct from the score according to what you just told us about their scoring system.”