Splicer (A Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  She straightened, peeled off her latex gloves and shook her head. "You got somebody in mind already?" Neither cop answered. "I've seen more talkative corpses than you guys have been today." She turned away. "Fine. A pro could make it look like this kind of a hatchet job." She shrugged. "If they had enough time. And that was what they wanted."

  They absorbed that. "Do you know who this is?" one cop asked.

  She looked down. "Does it matter? Toe tag says Ludd, W. Jeffrey. Politico?"

  "You never heard of Jeff Ludd? GeneFab?"

  She whistled softly. "The billionaire who buys his clothes at thrift shops?"

  "Bought," corrected the younger cop. She looked at him with only slightly less malice in her smile.

  "This is some going-away present they gave you, Kozak." She meant the older cop, the thin one with the mousy grey hair. She bent close again to the body, squinted at the knuckle-white separation of the skin. "This someone's idea of giving you enough rope to hang yourself?" She beamed at him, lips so red they seemed wine-stained. "Just a thought. Sorry to bring it up. You know . . . the carnage of your career."

  "Thanks for your help, Simmons," droned Kozak, darkly sarcastic.

  Out in the hall a few minutes later, he lit a cigarette and tried to blow the smell of disinfectant out of his lungs. The younger cop, his partner, leaned against the opposite wall.

  "Did you get what you need? Besides the abuse, I mean." No answer. "What'd you do to her? Kick her cat once?"

  His senior partner snorted. A short economical laugh - like he didn’t have enough air to get it right.

  Three years ago Kozak had been involved in the highly publicized arrest of a prominent lawyer who routinely defended battered women. Which led to an initial conviction for sexual harassment. Some women never forgave him for that. Then the case blew up in his face when it was discovered there was tampered evidence. It was a long messy story and he didn't want to get into it right now. It created a lot of enemies on the force.

  "I forgot to get her a birthday card one year. For some reason coroners are sensitive about that shit," said Kozak.

  The other cop sighed. "She'll be a big help."

  Kozak was writing something in his notebook. "She's pissed. But she's too dumb to lie. The fact that Ludd was hacked at by some amateur helps us anyway."

  "Unless she goes up on the stand and makes a big case for some hit man trying to make it look like a bungled job."

  Kozak looked up. "Since when did juries start gettin' an imagination?"

  His partner closed his eyes. "This case is giving me everything. The heebies. And the jeebies."

  His partner said nothing, no sign of anything coming from the other side of the hall. Like one of those statues in the park "You think they gave us this assignment as a career boost? This is like a fuckin' Kamikaze mission."

  The other cop juggled a bit of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. "I've had worse."

  The younger cop, Otter, smirked, shaking his big head. "In your nightmares." He shivered. "And of course everyone, including CNN, is breathing down our necks on this one. Those hyenas smell action. Personally I feel like I've got it unzipped, it’s overtime, and I'm standing out on center ice."

  They looked at each other for a few brief seconds across the dull green light of the hallway. They both sensed something cruel and unusual in the cluttered shape of their last few days together - a week that was only going to get meaner and stranger.

  The older cop looked for an ashtray, then tossed the butt on the yellowed linoleum and crushed it under foot. The coroner was right; this might be his last case.

  "Somebody up there likes us, I guess. So zip up, partner," he said. "It's show time."

  CHAPTER 4

  Everything came apart the way a fat June bug dissolves on your windshield at eighty miles an hour. Instantly, and with a mess to clean up.

  But Rusty wasn’t surprised. Maybe it was because he just wanted this sale so damn bad that just thinking about it gave him a tension headache. Maybe that was why the deal evaporated right before his eyes. And his life and his marriage too, approximately in that order. He was trying too hard again.

  His biggest customer just cancelled a huge sale. It was the deal he was depending on to make the rent check - actually the last three rent checks. Their excuse for not buying? A crummy quarter. Well, Rusty Redfield was having his own crummy quarter.

  At eleven AM he'd picked up the call about the cancellation. At eleven-fifteen, his boss asked to meet with him after lunch, likely to discuss why he thought she should be carrying a thirty-six year old salesperson who just fumbled the biggest prospective client in the company’s history.

  Then at ten to twelve, two plain-clothes cops walked in off the street and arrested him in front of everybody in the office, a small spectacle of crime enforcement playing out in the foyer, while they waited for an elevator crammed with employees headed out for lunch. And Rusty was wearing cuffs. They hadn't cuffed him the last time. But they told him that this time they had to. It was the rule with homicide suspects.

  He was soon hunched over a wooden chair in a small room no bigger than the bedrooms they build in those narrow plan starter homes. A single gray door, no windows. Sounds were coming through the roof vent from the floor above, women screaming obscenities. It was like sitting through one of those off-off-Broadway art plays - one seat, no waiting.

  He got his one phone call, which he declined to take back at Great Barrier. That was an easy decision. No one had offices anymore, only cubicle space. Virtual offices is what they called them in Wired magazine. He wasn't going to spill his guts to a lawyer while dozens sat by listening through the non-existent walls of his virtual office. So they passed a sweaty black phone to him through the door of the lock-up and he called Jayne.

  Jayne McEwan, a criminal lawyer and partner in the small downtown firm, McEwan & Osgood, was not in. She was in court, where she made a good living, though not as much as she might if she wasn't so attracted to those pro bono cases that put her in the media spotlight.

  Rusty left a message with her assistant. She was calm and professional. She didn't even flinch when Rusty said murder. Rusty hated her for that.

  He hung up then and waited. He had a sense that there would be a lot of waiting ahead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Aaron Grey felt worn out, his pale green eyes faded and unfocused like a 50's surveillance photograph.

  He set his phone down and studied his hands; boney fingers that had held babies, caused women to cry out in pleasure, and crushed the life out of a dozen men. He stared at them with dull fascination. They were the same hands of his youth. They had looked like the hands of an old man even then. But they didn't have this history written over them - this tale of woe tattooed across his knuckles like barbed wire scars.

  Aaron was the last of a generation at the CIA, a ghost in the machine. Long past retirement age with nowhere else to go, he was famous for being the oldest spook in the shop - yet he still ran one of the most powerful divisions in intelligence - the Property Operations Group (POG). So he could never be ignored. Ever.

  POG bought companies for the CIA; businesses that owned technology they needed, banks on the verge of closure they could leverage, foreign run companies operating in the U.S. that worried somebody in power. They operated over twenty domestic and foreign lending institutions and managed trillions of dollars of untraceable cash.

  When the Carter administration drastically reduced the CIA’s official operating budget in the eighties, the agency took matters into its own hands. Within a decade they had built a national network of covert businesses and tripled their operating budget. And virtually eliminated political over-sight in the process.

  Aaron had just finished talking to one of his agents who had finalized a business deal with a company called XTech. XTech was one of several companies they owned with a mandate to develop genetic opportunities before the other guy did. Genetic as in biological weapons.

  Grey's
connection in Toronto wasn't part of the shop. He was hired only because he understood gene research and DNA re-structuring.

  XTech had just made a very cagey investment in GeneFab, a company that had revolutionized the biotech industry and made its founders near billionaires in the process. But now that GeneFab's President was dead, the future value of the stock had plummeted and their newest discovery known as The Splicer, was being put on hold. This was getting them international attention. Nervous attention.

  The Splicer, it turns out, could be more dangerous than a neutron bomb and a lot cheaper. Grey, through his holding company, had managed to pick up more than half the privately-held shares of the only company that knew how to build one. Yet.

  Word had reached the intelligence community a year before that GeneFab had stumbled onto a technology that would allow complete desktop gene manipulation. Now a user, even an amateur, could cobble up a new gene the same way you whipped up a newsletter or sampled a rock and roll drum track. A gene that could destroy your immune system, turn your internal organs to mush, or give someone the equivalent of Alzheimer's in a matter of hours.

  When Grey first approached GeneFab, he was told to take a hike. Jeff Ludd, the company's President, was an idealist and at least a billionaire on paper. A very dangerous man.

  Now Ludd was out of the way completely. He may never have understood what he was really playing with. He had forgotten that this game was about more than just share prices. Which was unfortunate because Ludd was the genius who had taken an idea called GeneFab and had given it flesh and bone. Now his flesh and bone was lying lifeless on a stainless steel autopsy table.

  Aaron looked down at the printout he held in his gnarled fingers. For all intents and purposes, he now owned GeneFab lock, stock, and bank account. And that meant he finally had The Splicer. A technology that would give them all the willies - the Russians, the Chinese, Pakistan, Hezbollah - and yes, even the Democrats.

  CHAPTER 6

  Malcolm Grieves was slipping. He felt it every day.

  Sometimes he could sense a change in himself between morning and sunset, even between breakfast and lunch. He was reminded of the Incredible Shrinking Man. Everyday, every hour, a bloody new perspective.

  He bathed now only every third or fourth day. When he did manage to find an available shower at the Y or a nearby hostel, he felt as if he was washing away layers of himself he would never see again. He was reminded of a movie he saw once about lepers, their fingers and toes dropping off with no more drama than the kind reserved for a missing button.

  He toweled himself with lunatic precision now, in a hopeless attempt to postpone the emergence of that tremulous thing he imagined was quivering inside of him. He wasn't ready to let it out just yet.

  He had let his hair grow long and stringy. There was grime under his fingernails and his clothes were stained with his sweat. There was no question - he had re-invented himself and it made him dizzy to consider the wonderful potential of this new personality. He had a new toy to play with. Grieves two point zero.

  He was slouched over, shuffling across the pavement near Bloor Street, his clothes too large for him. The new Grieves, of wirier and hairier construction. Free of all that civilized bullshit. Free to push old ladies on the street, free to urinate against a parked car if he wanted to, let it hang out for all the goofs to stare at, free to ... SHIT.

  His mind went blank again.

  He stopped and felt his head. It was getting worse. What made a person keep moving when all the reasons evaporated? Maybe it wasn't movement. Maybe every day he just shrank back a little bit from the world and that gave him a sense that he was moving forward. If it weren't for Dante ... he didn't even want to think about that. Didn't want to think about what it would be like to just be there. Without his codes.

  Codes, or programming, were as relevant to most people's lives as the Dead Sea scrolls. But to Grieves, it was everything. Since his first year of university, it had obsessed him completely. He sat down as a student one day and pecked out a simple Basic program on a computer keyboard. The program was called 'Life'.

  'Life' was a simple game. The program planted four little graphic cells on a computer screen. You chose their position. Then they began to grow, multiply, and die according to how they were placed. Close cells prospered and grew. Distant cells died. They grew and then withered and grew again on the computer screen with the frenzy of fruit flies on amphetamines. Generations came and went in seconds. Grieves was mesmerized by the swirling patterns.

  So he finessed the program - added different kinds of cells - tried changing all the rules. He ignored his girlfriend, his classes, and his hygiene. At times like this, and there were many in his life, reality swung off into the distance out of focus. He was finally the god of his own little universe again.

  He developed a tiny program, hardly more than a few lines of instructions; a perfect little sonnet that calculated how long a person could survive without food or water. Another that estimated the effect of Brownian motion on a helium balloon. Or expected survival rates after radical mastectomy. With time, the numbing process of sitting down and mapping out a complex program became almost a subconscious process.

  Grieves could sit at a keyboard and develop a chunk of working software faster than anyone he knew. And he met a lot of superstar programmers during his studies at MIT.

  When he graduated, his impressive credentials gave him quick access to a number of plum jobs. He worked at Dow in Boston for three years creating computerized artificial hormones. The program would test them on an imaginary human host. Saved on the messy cost of volunteers.

  At Level Five Labs in New York he developed a computer program called a micronaut, which prompted a feature article in Discover magazine. A micronaut was essentially a computer virus that could be sent on a mission to infect distant computers, but could also search for information and return to home base undetected.

  He became famous in software circles worldwide - even appearing as the keynote speaker at various programming conventions, an article in Wired, even an offer from Google. Nobody could crank out more perfect code as quickly, as brilliantly, as he could. He was a prodigy.

  And then it all came apart.

  Under his coat now, his only worldly possession lay wrapped in a greasy bag. He hugged it to himself. He shuddered to think what his life would be like without this one last link to his past.

  "Malcolm?"

  He stopped, his hands in his pockets. He turned dumbly to the voice.

  "Malcolm Grieves? Is that you?" A female voice.

  No you bitch, it's the new Malcolm. This thought flashed in his consciousness and surprised him mildly - just another of the voices fighting for attention in his head.

  She looked familiar, like a face from a high school yearbook. She was tall, wore a dark suit, looked very clean and cool and freshly scrubbed. This puzzled him. He felt feverish. A phrase kept coming to him. Off with her head.

  "Are you all right?" she asked quietly.

  He smiled slightly and pushed the greasy hair away from his face. She was tall, very tall. Long straight black hair whipped around her face in the wind. He imagined it falling softly; her head clear from the body. A slight look of surprise on her lips. He studied her again. Her business-like attire couldn't hide statuesque breasts and long legs. Who the hell was she?

  Then he knew and a shiver ran through him. He felt as if a long thin needle had been pushed into his body, a spinal tap to go. He turned and stumbled but somehow avoided falling. He did a halting, jerky dance across the pavement. She stood watching him, her expression remote.

  A van lurched past him, the driver yelling obscenities. Then Grieves remembered his appointment. He turned into the dank breeze of an alleyway and moved away from her as quickly as he could, tacking away from her scent. But already he wanted to go back to her and he knew, as a programmer knows the flaws of his own yet unfinished code, that his mind was failing him; that left unattended it might crash a
nd burn.

  He wanted her; he also wanted her hurt. Another thought that only mildly surprised him. There would be pain for someone else too. Someone he thought of every hour - perhaps every minute of his endless unstructured days. He could hurt her he thought, choking back his emotion. He could cause her pain and he would feel less than nothing. This made him smile but also surprised him. You are truly capable of anything today, Grieves my friend. Capable of twisting her simple white neck. Capable of getting even. Then maybe his brain would heal itself, back to its original pristine orderliness. More than anything else, that's what Grieves wanted - his mind back.

  Shay stood on the curb watching Grieves scramble away. Like a battered crab looking for a rock, she thought, both amused and mildly disgusted by the analogy. But he was disgusting ... and he looked so ... haunted? Is that what going to prison for a couple of years does to a man like Grieves? She didn't think so. He was different, no question. Someone who had been abused and then made up for it with a false tinker-toy bravado. But was he still smart? What troubled her, made her skin itch, was she saw no intelligence in those eyes anymore.

  Her mother had a stroke last summer, the glimmer of intelligence gone forever from her sad gray eyes. Grieves looked like that. Someone should put up a sign. Vacancy.

  He was also a filthy smelling mess. He always wanted so badly to belong, she thought. Now he did - to the swelling ranks of the street people. She shuddered slightly and turned.

  She'd have a story to tell Rusty next time they spoke.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rusty had folded his arms and put his feet up on the scarred desk in the detention room. He was going to try to rest, chill. Relaxed prisoners drove cops crazy. He was going to work at it.

  He knew exactly why they thought he had murdered Jeff Ludd, and he was angry and hurt the moment they put the cuffs on him, but he saw it coming. Hell, he was great at seeing things coming but not overly adept at sidestepping them. This one had rolled right over him.