by J. Manuel
“Oh, baby, can I touch you here?” he said out loud as he caressed the ignition button with his index finger and imagined it was soft, pink flesh. The sudden throbbing at his temples brought him back from his fantasy. Damned migraines, he thought. He had to call Dr. Lakowski to change his meds again. He shouldn’t be getting any migraines. The meds he’d been on for the last few months were working pretty well. In fact, he couldn’t remember when he’d last had a bad migraine. Oh well, he thought, he’d call at lunch time. Now he just had to somehow make it to work in time to not piss off Karen, aka, ‘Madame Butterfly’, his endearing term for the young, super-genius, can-do-no-wrong, probably slept her way to cushy funding and her own lab, boss of his who was five years younger than he was. He was tired of working on her damned pet project. Thousands of hours had been wasted on some geometric design. Where did she get off blaming him for his algorithms not working? Well, at least he wouldn’t have to deal with the damned project anymore since Karen had sent him the schematic of a new design that she said would work. He’d looked at it quickly and had run it through his backup system at home, since he hadn’t been to work in a few days, and it looked promising—whatever. Maybe now he could get back to his work.
“Screw her and screw the sneezing guy, too!” Miles grumbled as he bolted up in his seat and angrily jabbed at the electric starter button. Or rather he thought he did. He tried again, but he couldn’t quite reach the button. He was having trouble extending his arm, which he now realized was numb. It was probably just the cold.
Miles brought his hand up to his mouth to blow on it, which was the only way to battle these cold autumn mornings in New England, that is of course, if you didn’t wear gloves. He tried to blow. Nothing came out. His face was numb. He was dizzy. His head started throbbing. The throbbing grew stronger, too fast to be okay. He was in trouble. He grabbed at his chest pocket trying desperately to get to his phone. He couldn’t. Miles slumped suddenly in the Tesla’s bucket seat, dead.
He’d be found by Tracy around 6 p.m. later that day on her way back from work. He’d soiled himself. She told the police that she’d found Mike―at least that’s what she thought his name was, or Mark―in his car by himself. “It was so sad how things like that can happen. You just never know,” she’d say. “So sad... ”
The official cause of death would be noted as an ischemic stroke. He had otherwise been a healthy-ish, thirty-year-old Caucasian male, slight build, brown hair, and brown eyes. There wasn’t much else to write in the medical examiner’s report. Other than the medical examiner’s professional opinion and lack of physical evidence to point to anything nefarious, Mr. Baker’s death was pretty cut and dry. Maybe he’d drunk too many energy drinks or popped a lot of party drugs in the past? His type was always into that kind of party drug scene, and too much partying sometimes caught up with you early. The medical examiner gave the body another glance, scrawled some intentionally illegible notes, and left the room. Her assistants would put the body away and handle the arrangements with whatever family members would come inquiring. It was Monday afternoon, and she was on to happy hour. Just a few days left until her retirement. She’d learned through all of these years to just write the simple, obvious causes of death. It helped the families move on. It was better this way. It was better for everyone. Questions brought misery. And so, nobody bothered to test for neurotoxins, let alone test for a particularly nasty one that had been used by professional assassins throughout the Cold War and that was seeing a recent resurgence in popularity. There was no reason to, at least not any that Miles Baker, or anyone else was aware of, but at least for Miles, that question no longer mattered.
CHAPTER 4
Paul Eckert was not the type to lounge around, not even in those moments when he arguably could. Anyone in his position, as CEO of BioSyn, one of the fastest growing, private, biotech companies in the world, would have taken the time to kick up his heels for a moment and appreciate his nearly unmatched, executive-office view of the gorgeous Manhattan skyline. Not Eckert. He never looked up in admiration. He always looked down. The lessons were there. He had always learned from looking down on people. From his vantage point, he could see them scurry, darting from corner to corner, point to point, except of course, for the fat ones. They only moved as fast as the tide of people about them could disturb their inertia. These floaters sucked what little energy there was around them, but they eventually fell with a thud, giving back the inertia that they had consumed their entire lives.
Eckert consciously touched the bridge of his nose, twice broken, and traced down to orbital bones, smashed too many times to count. He massaged his once cauliflowered ears; he’d had them surgically repaired. His current face perfectly hid the story of his past. As he leered down at the throngs, he recalled the first time his nose was broken. A fist from a fat fuck had done the damage. He could still taste the blood, so warm, thick, and salty, like gagging on spoiled molasses. He had stumbled to his knees, regained his wits momentarily, in time to see the fat fuck’s big boot crash into his face. That was also when his orbital bone was shattered for the first time. He was beaten senseless. Eckert smirked at the recollection. He lay in the street that day a bloody, pathetic mess. He would not get back up. There would be no comeback.
As he lay on the pavement, in broad daylight, convulsing, he learned the most important life lesson. The truth is that people never get up. There are no miraculous feats of will that propel you to rise to your feet. There is only weakness, weakness of the person pounding away at your motionless body as the dull thuds of boots fade into nothingness. You are at their mercy. If they pause, if they tire, if they are weak, they allow you to live. You thank their weakness when you regain consciousness, alone, battered, broken, forever changed, perpetually in fear of your own mortality, fleeting as it is. You can no longer ignore the truth that there is no plan. Nothing is ever okay. There is just one truth, you live or you die by your own hand or you suffer at the hands of others. His hands had granted him life without weakness from that day on.
- - - - - - -
While its corporate headquarters occupied prime Manhattan real estate, BioSyn’s labs, where it made its money, were located upstate, just outside of Syracuse. The labs occupied a sprawling 100 acre complex that was surrounded by a dense, deciduous forest. Some well-known pharmaceuticals had been birthed here, though nearly eighty percent of BioSyn’s product line had been purchased for less than reasonable sums. BioSyn’s investors lauded its hard negotiation skills while its competitors despised what some described as its bullying tactics, others still, suspected criminal collusion with Chinese generic pharmaceutical manufacturers. In all cases, under Eckert’s leadership, BioSyn quickly turned these modest investments into windfalls by marking up the retail price by some 300 to 500 percent. Eckert had also led the charge to transition manufacturing from the United States to mainland China, and when China became too expensive, he threatened to offshore production to Vietnam. The Chinese capitulated and granted BioSyn a ten-year agreement to manufacture their products at steep discounts.
With most of its steady income safely offshore, BioSyn had the luxury of working on purely proprietary projects within the walls of the state of the art complex. These were the high-risk, high-reward projects that, if successful, would revolutionize medicine, and more importantly, add billions to the balance sheets. However, the reality of pharmaceutical development was that most of the projects flamed out almost as quickly as they were conceived and that cost money.
Over the last five years, BioSyn had purchased most of the uninhabited land near the original laboratory building. It immediately began the frenzied construction of the complex, the likes of which, had been unseen in the county. The county commissioners praised BioSyn for bringing hundreds of middle-class jobs and families to Onondaga, which had collapsed economically during the “Great Recession” a decade earlier, and from which it had yet to recover. BioSyn promised to hire local workers for the construction phase of the project
and gave priority to Onondaga County residents in hiring for the high-tech laboratory positions, one of Eckert’s masterful strokes. Eckert was a great businessman and a greater politician. His coup de grace was instructing the legal department to include residency restrictions in every employment contract from janitor to engineer.
But the project had its hiccups, usually stubborn property owners who did not appreciate the kind of Manhattan progress that BioSyn was bringing up north to Onondaga. Eckert led the charge for BioSyn once again, partnering with Onondaga County to use imminent domain to uproot some of the more recalcitrant landowners in the area who had held out against BioSyn’s buyout offers. Eckert had earned notoriety and respect for the methods. He’d charmed most and strong-armed a few holdouts into giving up their properties, some of which had been owned for generations. But there had been one couple who had managed to resist: the Belinskis. They were octogenarians who had survived the Second World War. They had fled into the woods when the Nazis had overrun their Russian village during the summer of 1941. The next couple of years found them fighting alongside the Krasnaya Armiya as partisans. They were proud Russian Jews, and years of persecution had toughened them up. Years of living under Soviet rule had made them tougher still. Their life was basic, fulfilling, mostly living off of the land, making their own clothes and food. Boris had suffered from infertility because of his exposure to radiation during his service in the Soviet Navy. And though she wanted children, Marina eventually came to terms with her lot.
Boris and Marina made their way to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. Boris saved the little money that he had made during his years of selling hand-carved picture frames out of his shop on Brighton Beach. Marina saved what she could from her years making borscht and pierogis in the kitchens of several Brooklyn restaurants. Though they had earned very little, they had saved most every penny, which meant that the happy couple had more than enough to purchase their little dacha upstate, as an eightieth birthday present to themselves. A return to the countryside is what they had worked for all of these years. Fate led them to their little plot, and they looked forward to living out their days here.
So when Mr. Eckert arrived at their doorstep, they were suspicious from the outset. They had been hospitable, asking him to come into their little cabin and to sit down for some of Marina’s borscht. Mr. Eckert turned it down, something about an allergy to onions. That was strike one. Strike two came when Mr. Eckert refused to indulge Boris in a few stories, which like most Russian stories, spanned the length of ‘War and Peace’. The last strike came when he refused a third shot of vodka. Most conmen accepted the first or even the second shot, but never the third. They were always too worried about keeping their stories straight to risk that third shot. Vodka was truth. Mr. Eckert was a skillful liar, a politician of some sort, Boris and Marina would later agree, but the fact that he was an impatient man, refused borscht, and vodka, gave him away.
“Allergiya dlya luk?” Marina had never heard of such an allergy.
Boris looked at her and sighed, shaking his head, “Amerikanski!”
“Bolshoi shishka!” Marina exclaimed. The conversation was over. It was time for chai.
“Tak.”
Eckert’s luck would turn a few weeks later when Boris Belinski suffered a stroke. Marina would soon pass from a broken heart. They had died intestate and without any heirs. Eckert instructed the county paper to omit their obituaries. It was uncovered during the probate of the estate that the land had been liened by the county for failure to pay taxes. He made some phone calls and within a matter of weeks he had arranged to purchase the lien on the land. BioSyn’s attorneys would foreclose soon thereafter. Everything had fallen into place for him. His colleagues at BioSyn could not believe his dumb luck. The company’s financial backers took notice of Eckert’s take-no-prisoners approach and his ability to deliver. He had the touch. They would ensure his swift rise to power.
He was immediately promoted from project manager of the upstate expansion to Vice President of Operations, the steppingstone to the Chief Executive’s office. BioSyn’s operations expanded dramatically under his leadership, and the board thanked him by giving him the top job. They were enamored with Eckert’s alpha-male confidence and charm. With Eckert as the face of the company, there was no telling where they would go. They did know one thing, though: Eckert would make them lots of money at any cost.
CHAPTER 5
Sarah was a hard-working, intelligent, and good lawyer. There were many lawyers who shared the first two characteristics, but few whom she’d consider good. The good lawyer category was reserved for those few attorneys who were equal parts advocate and counselor. Many of her colleagues were occupied with the confrontational advocacy part. They relished the head to head, mano a mano, test of strength that was litigation; at least they posed that way throughout motion practice, depositions, and pretrial conferences. Behind all that puffery, however, they were ready to settle. The reason that they repeatedly found themselves in winner-take-all quagmires was that they inevitably wooed their clients by over-promising positive outcomes.
Don’t worry. We’ll handle this. Those bastards won’t know what hit them. You’re in good hands. We aren’t really supposed to say this, but we’re experts in this field and we can guarantee that we’ll crush the other side. We believe that your case is worth millions. We’ll get you what you deserve.
These lawyers never learned that clients are like toddlers; if you promise them a cookie, they will remember that to the exclusion of everything else, and will expect you to deliver that cookie. The biggest no-no of all is throwing out a number. Once a client hears a number, for example $10 million dollars, then $10 million is what the client expects regardless of whether or not the lawyer preempted the figure with a caveat such as “possibly as high as…” or realizing his or her mistake, tries to backtrack a little by adding, “Perhaps not as high in this particular case”. It does not matter; the client now expects the full $10 million. So in the extreme likelihood and near certainty that the case were to begin settlement negotiations, the client will be perplexed that the lawyer who had promised $10 million dollars is now begging the client to take a much lower sum. At best, half of the promised amount and usually a quarter or less.
The failure was on the lawyers for mismanaging the client’s expectations because of a rush to secure their business. Failing to prepare clients for the 97% likelihood that their lawsuit would either settle or be dismissed outright was not malpractice by the definition of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, but just as bad in her eyes.
Sarah favored the counseling role of the attorney―not that she did not enjoy a good trial or oral argument―but she found that with performance art, the hard work took place prior to the event, offstage. Flawless preparation was where you honed the craft of flawless performance. Her curtain call would be a bench or jury verdict for her client. Sarah’s preparation began at the very first meeting with a potential client. She avoided all of the pitfalls of an overeager attorney that a confused, ignorant client could manifest. She began every meeting in her counseling role. She would listen intently to her client’s story. There was always one. She would ask rather light questions, probing her client’s veracity, willingness to divulge information and to see if he or she would stray from the prepared monologue. Clients always told one-sided stories. They liked telling their side of the story and often saw lawyers as a stranger whom they had to convince.
The first run through their stories always painted the client as the innocent victim and the other party as the evil bastard who owed them money. Black and white. I am right, the other side is wrong! Now win me the case. Sarah had a knack for getting past those barriers. She was a naturally kind-hearted, easy-talking, girl from everywhere. Her parents were both U.S. Navy career officers, which meant that there wasn’t a place on this earth that she hadn’t visited or lived in for some period of time.
Sarah was a California girl at heart, g
rowing up in the laid back culture of San Diego most of her formative years. People described her as many things; smart, tough, bitchy, kind, and enchanting, but she was a surfer girl above all. She’d first taken to the water when she was a baby living in Okinawa, Japan. Her father was a promising young lieutenant assigned to the USS Humboldt. He was the ship’s Fire Control Officer, following in a proud, ten-generation long lineage of Deveraux’s men to serve in the Navy. Childers Deveraux was the first. He had served as a Negro deckhand and cannonier in the Continental Navy, and so the tradition passed on down to Sarah’s father, Jackson Childers Deveraux, the latest, and probably the last, to carry the Deveraux flame.
Sarah’s mother was a young orthopedic surgeon stationed at Kadena Air Base in the heart of Naha, Okinawa. She had finished eight years of surgical residency after which she had entertained offers of employment from the finest medical institutions, including Massachusetts General Hospital, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institutes of Health. However, after so many years of monotonous hospital settings, Emilia Estrada was tired of being confined to one place. She wanted something different. She was the daughter of Brazilian immigrants, who’d come to the United States and lived the American Dream. Through hard work and dedication they created a successful, small chain of Churascarias. Emilia decided to join the Navy and escape halfway around the world.
This was one of those mornings where Sarah’s memories turned to the nostalgic. She was supposed to be preparing for a meeting with a troublesome client who had threatened to leave the firm unless its matters were reassigned to more competent counsel, and at Bodner James you couldn’t get more competent than Sarah. He was a key client of the firm, and he had to be pleased however possible. Sarah sighed heavily and poured herself into her work while she battled to keep her worries about Jacob from tearing her apart.