Splicer (A Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  "I'm asking you and your friend to give me some time to convince Ludd to sell. I need two weeks."

  Grey was silent. "Ten days. We'd be willing to consider that. But not a day longer."

  "I'll deal with Ludd and get in touch with you."

  "Mr. Rosenblatt. There is very little time here. If we don't have a solution in ten days, there is absolutely no deal. And I think I can be frank with you by saying that this kind of offer will not come along again. Other companies are on your tail in terms of this kind of research. This is your golden opportunity."

  Two days later Grey received a copy of an email sent to XTech's tiny office in Toronto. Rosenblatt confirmed that he was doing everything possible to sway Ludd. A solution was close at hand, but he needed a commitment from XTech. One million dollars transferred to his personal bank account. A sign that they still had a deal. Grey suspected what the funds would be used for and arranged for the transfer. But not by bank account. Federal Express arrived at Rosenblatt's home one Sunday morning with a very large parcel containing ten thousand crisp one hundred dollar bills.

  Within the week, the news of Ludd's death was in all the papers. The tabloids had a grisly color picture taken at the crime scene of Ludd's blurry head slumped over the wheel, awash in blood. Grey thought about all the red ink that was used that week to poorly inform the public.

  This morning, the sun bright on the carefully manicured front lawn of the CIA head offices, Grey would worm his way into the bureaucracy that shored up his country’s internal interests and pull out a 1.5 Billion dollar plum. The money would then be transferred to XTech via a contorted and tortuous path of holding companies and trust accounts, that would then close the transaction with GeneFab's sole remaining majority stockholder.

  Meanwhile, the other side had become aware of the situation. Yesterday, intelligence reports informed him that several individuals with Pentagon connections had arrived in Toronto. And they weren't observers. They were Defense Intelligence (DIA) operatives on assignment. Gray hardly cared though. He had the company. There was nothing that the DIA could do now to stop his plans. At least that’s what he thought.

  CHAPTER 21

  Kozak tapped away at the keys of his battered computer, distracted by the buzz of noise in the outside offices. He wanted to close his door but it wasn't going to do any good. Two days before he had smashed out the glass. One good slam after twenty years. A little jumpy are we Koz? Shit! It was the first time he felt that good since he made detective and danced on the long shiny antique oak bar at Finn's Grill. What the hell was wrong? Part of him really didn't give a damn. How long had he wanted to smash that rattling yellowed pane? He rubbed his chest, felt his heart tighten, stared at the screen, the green letters jumping. He had gone over this before a dozen times.

  The Globe and Mail reported that morning that Rosenblatt was offering GeneFab to a Canadian firm called XTech. So Rosenblatt was about to make a pile of money. A move he couldn’t have made when Ludd was around.

  Something else came up. X-Tech Canada was basically only a holding company, because it didn't appear to have an office bigger than a shoebox. The real papa bear was X-Tech in New York City. And the New York firm was known to have several connections in other countries, specifically the third world. Kozak recalled Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka mentioned at different points in his conversations with various brokers. This case was spreading out of control like a brush fire on the prairies. He picked up the phone and called the office of an old friend, Judge England.

  He told England he needed an injunction against the sale of GeneFab. England laughed. He said Rosenblatt couldn't run a train set, but that was no reason to hold up the sale of a privately held company. Koz persisted. England finally agreed unhappily to plant a bug in the ear of someone with the Securities Commission, a friend. An investigation on their part could at best hold things up for a few months, but he warned the political fallout could be messy.

  Then England hinted at something that Kozak, in his eagerness to close all the loopholes in this case, had missed. He wanted to know why everyone in the Prosecutor's department had dropped everything in order to railroad the Ludd case through as quickly as politically expedient. What's the big hurry? he asked. And who’s behind pushing the Redfield murder case to the front of the line. Koz couldn't answer. But England was right. Someone upstairs was in a hurry.

  CHAPTER 22

  Rusty moved from the icy cool interior of the cop shop into a shock wave of heat and dampness that made him blink and stumble. He had his tie balled up in the right pocket of his suit coat, the knees of his suit were pouched and wrinkled and a five day growth of beard only served to accent the lines under his eyes. But he felt better than he had for days. He also felt the need to keep moving. He sensed that someone or something was racing down a long hall to take him from behind and pull him back into the oppressive stink of the 8th floor. He felt for his keys, listening for a sound. There was only the churn of traffic reverberating off the glass and brick that towered over him.

  Jayne had worked a deal with his bail. He wasn't sure how but Beth likely had a part in it. He hadn't talked to her since Saturday night, but Jayne hinted at her involvement. Everyone should have a guardian angel.

  They also played a little trick on the press. Carolyn, from Jayne's office, called the TV station's, said she was Koz's secretary and that Redfield was getting out Wednesday early - 7:30 AM during breakfast. Then Jayne wrapped up the paperwork on Tuesday at noon and let him leave by the side doors, a privilege usually reserved for cops or politicians caught with their fingers in the pie. Rusty wasn't sure how he felt about that - elevated or depressed.

  He was free, but it felt suspicious and temporary. But then again, perhaps he had too much freedom.

  He was almost certainly "free" of his job. If he had any knack whatsoever for reading into his bosses stony acceptance of his tale, he could sense arrivederci in her voice. How could you supersede the magnitude of murder? How solid or unmovable a reputation could withstand the freight train blow of a charge of homicide? Maybe she would err on the side of fairness and just suspend him. But what was the difference? Suspension without pay was hardly more than breathing room from a termination. If she fired him he could at least apply for unemployment and count on holiday pay.

  Rusty saw his life as a pumped-up version of Snakes and Ladders. They knocked you back a few steps, so you fought harder to regain lost ground. But you had less strength now - you were out of breath. Go back 2 steps. Lose your job? Go back 3 steps. Murder charge? That one wasn't even in the rulebook. Take the board away or introduce you to the snakes. Now you can really slide down fast, the scales taking big meaty chunks out of your soft middle management ass.

  He'd been out of work before. He'd survive. The irony of it was while you worked at something, you hated it, or it bored you. You dreamed of being free of the responsibilities. Once free, you could think of nothing else but getting back to work again.

  Human beings were so in-fucking-credible.

  Rusty walked the twenty or so blocks back to his car, moving like one of the extras in "Night of the Living Dead". He dreaded running into anyone he knew - they would smell the stink of jail on him. It was an effort. Something in him wanted to lie down in the clutter of a building front and wrap a newspaper over his head and sleep till doomsday. Don't wake me up, he thought. I've seen it all before.

  He found his car on the second floor of the parkade. He stood back from it for a few moments, puzzled. Wouldn't the police be interested in my car, he thought? They've searched my apartment for hours looking for clues, for a weapon, a link to Jeff Ludd's sorry and indecorous end. He walked past the dirty Olds Cutlass with the rusty side panels and continued to the stairs at the south end. There was no one in sight. It was cooler here but damp, the smell of wet concrete and recent oil almost palpable. He waited. This is stupid. Someone is going to think I'm stalking the place. After all I'm a known murder suspect. He walked back to his c
ar slowly, alert now to any sound. He jumped in, pushed in the keys and roared down the exit ramp. He left a blue cloud behind him.

  His apartment was empty. Beth was working the afternoon shift. He pulled something called a Cuban Cooler from the fridge and dropped into her leather recliner. Hers he thought. Everything was tagged in his mind by ownership. Her recliner. His chesterfield. Shay had let him keep it, ripped and shaggy as it was. His hair dryer. Her coffee machine. Without Beth's possessions he would be like a shipwrecked sailor - he'd be making furniture out of bamboo and leaves. He was 36, had no money to speak of, no assets. What he did own was marred and chipped and only by sheer providence, functional in some way that made keeping it worthwhile. But a life wasn't just an inventory sheet he countered. There had to be more to this than a bank balance. He had a Bachelor of Arts Degree. That was worth a Big Meal at McDonalds. Plus an apple turnover for desert.

  And what about experience? That had tangible value. But then you could store what I know about the job I do now on 10 nicely typed double-spaced recycled pages, transfer this to a USB stick, real estate on a microchip that would make a family of bacterium feel crowded and uneasy. Let's drink to that positive self-image. He chugged back the bitter drink; listened to the rattle of the air-conditioner for a few moments, dazed.

  His roommate was going to need an explanation - a detailed reckoning. Rusty believed she really liked him, perhaps even adored him, although he really believed that was a phrase reserved for people and their puppies. But didn't most men believe that? Wanted to believe that? Would she be interested in carrying him for long? He doubted it. They talked about a partnership once. But then she was a well-paid professional nurse working in the Emergency Ward at St. Michael's Hospital. She made more in a weekend of overtime than he made the first month he worked at Great Barrier.

  He drank the rest of the cooler, a taste of wet dust in his mouth. They could work it out, for a while. A financial counselor would probably agree - Rusty Redfield didn't look like a good long-term investment at this point in his career. And yet he had a way to make money, a shitload of it if he had the guts. He tucked that delicious thought way in the back of his mental refrigerator to cool for a while. A week after being charged with murder was not a good time to make important plans for one's future.

  CHAPTER 23

  A skywalk linked the solid-columned structure of the downtown Law Courts Building with a thirty-story glass envelope called the Wolever Center. The new building was named after James Wolever, noted adventurer and trader, one of the original city fathers from the early 1800's.

  The entire eighth floor of the Wolever Center housed the city's Archives, and buried deep within a mountain of historical data was the truth about James Wolever. At gun and knifepoint, over a period of a decade, he had raped and terrorized dozens of young native women, many of them employed by him or working as servants, during his tenure as County Magistrate. Wolever was a Protestant fanatic, a horrible drunk, and had fathered upwards of a dozen illegitimate children - and only because he had failed repeatedly to recognize an existing pregnancy in one of his slaves who's reward for having a fertile uterus was abandonment, or worse, a beating that ending in the death of both mother and child. If one cared to dig near the preserved historical home of the Wolever family they would find a sunken gravesite populated with the tiny fragile broken bones of dozens of babies. That grave however did not yet serve as the Wolever memorial, instead, a steel and glass triumph of human engineering known locally as the atrium.

  Judge Emmet Zukerman sat in the second floor cafeteria, looking out through an expansive wall of emerald-tinged glass at the city that surrounded him, thinking about the life of James Wolever. Of course he despised the man. Wolever was course, brutish and uneducated. He had the morals of a tapeworm. But there was still something attractive about the way he managed to overcome his short stature, ugly countenance, and low breeding. But that was the frontier. In those days a man could be the architect of his own destiny, all it took was courage and determination. And centuries later while others were less than a small moldy calcium deposit buried deep under the growing layers of fading civilizations, James Wolever had one of the cities proudest structures as his testament.

  Zukerman smiled ever so slightly - an internal smile. The outside world could have a better chance identifying a geyser erupting on the surface of one of Jupiter's moons than detecting the minute movement of muscle on Zukerman's craggy cheek. They used to call him the hanging judge, which was unfair considering he had never actually delivered a hanging verdict. But he knew what they meant by it. He was not in court to help lawyers; he was there to render verdicts. Lenient wasn't in his vocabulary. He was a complete believer in the rules of the game. You get caught, you pay the price. Let's not muddy the pool with arguments about why or how. Did you do it? Then let's spin the big justice wheel.

  James Wolever was one of the tricks of fate, one of the wrinkles in the fabric of the universe that gave Zukerman endless fascination. To stand above a terrified young native girl with a finely honed hunting blade, not so much asking permission to enter her but presenting her with a few of life's simplest choices, was human existence reduced its simplest. Wolever would clamber over her, his breath redolent with cheap whisky, pull aside a woolen breach cloth and press his sex into her while she lay with her eyes fixed on a pointed bayonet. He was a wealthy, powerful landowner with an aristocratic wife yet he chose to risk it all for a few moments of fitful penetration. Did he go back to the same young native girls again and again, or did the first-fear in their dark almond eyes bolster his passion?

  Zukerman sipped from his coffee and wet his lips with his tongue. And did he ever have to face the kind of smooth dauntless political machinery that was at work right now rolling its way down Bay Street, gobbling up with equal alacrity the wanabees and the sycophants and sending a dark chill down the courthouse corridors? This GeneFab business looked new and shiny, but the will behind it was as old as a pre-Christian sarcophagus. The cold blunt end of power pressed against a hundred sweaty foreheads. How would James Wolever deal with it? Zukerman wasn't sure. He turned his head slowly toward the cashier aisle looking for Jayne McEwan.

  He had first met Jayne while she was trying her first case, articling as a junior for a toney commercial law firm on upper Bay Street. Before she went Criminal. Zukerman liked her right away. She was a novelty. She had hope - and energy. She scrapped in court, loved dueling with judges. She had great legs. One night, in his chambers to discuss a point of procedure, he touched her arm. She seemed to ignore it. So he turned up to her and kissed her. She hardly flinched. The others he had tried this on either blushed and stammered and cried - or accepted his unspoken invitation. Over the years he had been surprisingly successful with young court reporters, document servers and stenos. Jayney McEwan however stood up straight, her eyes never leaving his, and fired point blank.

  "With all due respect, your honor, never try that again. I'm often tempted by offers from clients ready to trade my legal advice for services rendered. Some of these people are extremely cruel and totally lacking in ethics. They will do anything for money. They will break legs, kidnap wives and children. Some would not be above castration, for example. Scum of the streets, your honor. I would never consider taking them up on these offers because, as you already suspect, I am honest, hard-working and have integrity. However, if pushed, and sufficiently frightened or intimidated - people will do strange and desperate things. That is the way of the world. Do you agree?"

  It was an effective speech, thought Zukerman, and it touched on points he would agree on fully. Nonetheless she frightened him slightly. Not her threat, but her resolve. He believed her and from that point on he left her alone. He heard later that she was not treated well as a child. Again this bothered and excited him at the same time. But he chose to screw the less aggressive members of her species.

  McEwan stepped up to his table, addressed him professionally, then sat down. She looked serious, c
ontrolled. She pulled off her glasses and carefully folded them into her inside breast pocket. She had brought with her a Diet Pepsi in a can. Her trademark working lunch. He fixed her with his red-rimmed blue eyes.

  "Jayney, I retired last week, so call me Emmet".

  "I knew that," was her only comment. "Your honor is fine with me." A tiny rebuff, he thought. It was to be expected.

  "The prosecution's office is being railroaded on the Redfield case," he declared simply, then took a bite out of his cheese bread

  She drank from her can of lukewarm pop. "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Your in way over your golden locks on this one, Jayney. I thought it might help you to know that they've tied your client to the tracks and number 418 is right on schedule." He laughed. He always liked railroad analogies. He was a member of the cities oldest amateur railroad club. He just likes to keep his hand on his throttle stick the clerks of his court used to whisper.

  "Is that it? I'm delivered the appropriate analogy and then I'm expected to go back to my office and think Gosh wasn't he a nice judge," she said with disbelief. "If there's any truth to this then you should speak up."

  "Good. Very good. You haven't changed a bit. Still full of P & V. And that's probably why you have this case, Jayney. Anyone else, anyone else who understands this system, would accept that once and a while you just have to swallow it and smile." He paused to enjoy the reference and her tight lipped acceptance." And you won't. You don't swallow, do you Jayney." She was flushed, despite her resolve not to give her emotions away.

  "Who wants my client to plead?"

  Zukerman paused to stare up at the fluorescent strips in the lunchroom ceiling. They say they sap your strength he thought. As a matter of fact his arms felt heavy and he could feel sweat trickle down his side.