by J. Manuel
The truth was that for all of the pomp, his services were superfluous. The vast majority of the clients were never in any danger. The sad reality was that no one was out to get them because no one cared.
“Most people go about their lives too worried about their jobs, families, etc. to give a crap about any of the clients. Honestly most of us do too,” Jacob told a tired-looking John.
“Look, I know, but this is the job. We make decent money protecting these people from threats real or imagined.”
“Babysitting!”
“Sure, babysitting, whatever. All I’m saying is that it’s a little too early for you to start bitching about the job that’s all. These people have a real need. There’s a real need out there for people to feel safe, secure, like they are being watched over. They want to feel like nothing bad will happen to them. So they hire us.” John’s baggy eyes creased into the wrinkles of his growing grin.
He continued, “XPS fills that need. Sure we might coax it a little bit by sending out our monthly security reports and by the little bells and whistles we add to our details, but the clients actually get a kick out of that. It plays into their overinflated sense of self-importance. Look, man, it helps our bottom line, and everybody wins.”
“So we keep playing cloak-and-dagger, huh? Look, I’m not saying I don’t appreciate it, getting out of the house and making some money. Lord knows Sarah wants to keep it that way, but I’m a little bored.”
John assured him that this was a good thing. He could otherwise work in the Special Services Division, which was an entirely different scenario. More stress, longer hours, and the coffee sucked. A benefit was that the jobs paid a lot more money.
“What if I took on a few special service jobs just to change things up?” John had the juice within the company to make it happen.
“Look, I’m not promising you anything…”
“Thanks, John. I know you will.”
“But don’t complain when you’ve got plans with your family and then you’ve got to cancel because these jobs come up suddenly. There is no two-week heads-up like personnel side.” John smiled into his grin. Jacob knew he’d get an assignment.
“I’ll wait for the call. Thanks again, John.”
“You’ll regret it.” John’s phone buzzed; an incoming email from XPS operations. He sighed and excused himself, truncating the conversation before it devolved into the usual debauchery of banter about Gate Two at Kadena Air Base.
“Don’t forget to ask,” Jacob shouted, as his friend hurried through the door of the cafe with his phone to his ear. John returned an indecent salute as he exited.
Jacob’s phone buzzed a few minutes later with details of his latest assignment. There was just enough time to get a coffee to go. Jacob had about twenty minutes to get to 300 East 75th Street where he would be picked up by a company car, near the Fairmont. Upper-Eastsiders demanded an escort in fine attire, so he’d kept his suit on this morning. This would be the last assignment for the week, a business brunch, followed by a meeting at an area law firm where the client was discussing a merger of her business. He was already thinking about the JFK flight home. He’d arrive well past the boys’ bedtime, but they would be waiting for him as usual.
They hated when he was gone on the long jobs, but they couldn’t wait to hear his stories. He would spice them up a bit for them. Nathan and Luke didn’t seem to mind his absence as much when his stories were cool. They also liked when he brought them stuff from wherever he’d been. New York pizza was the best. Sometimes he thought that they waited more for the pizza than him. Who could blame them though? The pizza was good even if it was cold by the time they dug in.
CHAPTER 8
Winter 2014:
Lilith’s Phase I testing was providing solid data. She had exceeded all expectations. Lilith had been able to infiltrate and exterminate cancer cells within a petri dish medium, and did so effectively. She had eliminated all of the cancer cells within 7 days. Once all of the cancer cells had been eradicated, the disparate Lilicytes coalesced into a tight, gray dot the size and color of a period made by a number 2 graphite pencil. The Lilicytes bonded to each other through a process called catenation where each Lilicyte arm chemically bonded to the arm of another using covalent carbon - carbon bonds. Manny had described this process as children holding hands in a circle, expanding outward to form larger and larger concentric rings, which then stacked one on top of the other. The carbon - carbon bonds were so strong that if he dipped a small tweezer into the petri dish and began to pull slowly at the top of the period sized colony, the Lilicytes would hold on to each other with nearly unbreakable grips, creating a carbon daisy-chain. A small gray fiber, just a few microns wide, roughly one tenth the size of a human hair, would begin to emerge from the petri dish and could stretch a meter long.
If undisturbed, the Lilicytes would remain inert in the petri dish. Within a host organism, the Lilicytes would emerge from the destroyed cancer cells and out into the blood stream where they would coalesce into the inert colony. The small carbon mass would then be filtered from the body by the renal system and excreted through the urinary tract, leaving no trace, at least this is how the Lilicytes were supposed to work. The recurring problem was controlling the Lilicytes’ bonding affinity within a host organism. This problem became undeniable during Phase I mice trials.
The mice were divided into four, twenty mouse groups: Onco-mice #1 (OM-1), those with cancer given Lilith: Onco-mice #2 (OM-2) cancer not given Lilith: Normal-mice #1 (NM-1) given Lilith: Normal-mice #2 (NM-2) not given Lilith. The OM-1 mice were given the infusion of Lilicytes and were cancer free within seven days. The OM-2s still showed expected tumor progression after the seven day period and continued to show it for weeks as expected. NM-2s were as happy as lab mice after 7 days. The problem was with the NM-1s. They were dead within 48 hours of the Lilicyte infusion. Dissection of the NM-1s revealed that they remained healthy, but for an unexplained Lilicyte concentration in the cerebrum’s temporal lobe which had caused massive strokes. Manny was perplexed. They were all further perplexed nine days later when all of the OM-1s began to die suddenly as well. Their necropsies also revealed that the OM-1s had died from the same concentration of Lilicytes in the temporal lobe.
Manny was stunned. He pondered the ramifications of the results for a few hours before calling William to inform him of the bad news.
“Do you know if the Lilicytes were healthy before they were infused?” William knew that Manny required perfection, but he asked anyway.
“Yes, William, I triple checked the procedures used by our team. They were perfect. There was no sign of contamination or decay in any of the Lilith batches. I personally inspected them two weeks ago before the phase testing began.”
“Are you absolutely sure about that? You understand what this means right?” William swallowed hard as he palmed his balding scalp.
“Yes, William. I am having the team produce new Lilith batches. I am going to run the trial again, using the reserve batches from this Phase I and with the new batches. So we should have eighty new mice results within a couple of weeks. We will know for sure then.”
“Manny, we need to get this right.”
- - - - - - -
Two weeks later, Manny and William both looked upon eighty dissected mouse brains, all showing signs of ischemic stroke.
“Jesus Christ, Manny, what is this? I thought we had it!” William was distraught. His emotions clouded his mind of any logical solution to the massive problem neatly displayed in rows on the dissection table in front of them.
“It must be a bonding issue, William. For some reason the Lilicytes’ bonding affinity causes them to coalesce as designed, but instead of being excreted from the host through the renal system, they jump into the circulatory system and form blockages in the capillaries of the temporal lobe.”
“But why the disparate outcome in the mice groups, Manny?” William was searching.
“The Lilicytes are primed to do
their job, which is to seek out cancer cells. Once they find their targets, they begin the process of replicating, which delays the immediate coalescing that we see in the normal mice. So the OM-1s are cured first and then when they are cancer free, seven days later, the Lilicytes begin to coalesce and cause the same death as the control NM-1s within 24 to 48 hours. I’ve tried several experiments and the result is always the same.”
William sighed heavily. “So where does this leave us?”
“Up shit’s creek, frankly!” Manny tried not to sound as somber as he felt, but it was impossible. All of their years of painstaking work had resulted in a bio-synthetic organism that cured cancer, but the cure was fatal! “What she giveth, she taketh away!”
“We need to prevent the coalescence, or at least delay it long enough, within the host, so that Lilith can work on the cancer and then either be excreted naturally by the body or targeted by us for extraction.” William knew that he was grasping at straws.
Manny looked up at the ceiling, avoiding eye contact with his distraught mentor. He felt like an abject failure for having let William down. William had noticed his brilliance and taken a chance on him and at his most desperate moment, Manny could do nothing for him. His brilliance was extinguished by the enigma that lay on the dissection table before them.
CHAPTER 9
The silver sedan slowed as the driver’s window rolled down.
“Hey, bro!” The words, almost imperceptible in the night-covered alley, swirled away in the wind that twisted against the crumbling brick of the boarded-up bodega on one side and the adult novelty store on the other.
A hooded man emerged from the darkness of a covered stairwell, which hung suspended just out of view of the main thoroughfare, and whose joists cried eerily in the wind. The man walked with a confident pace assured that no one but God would stand witness. He approached the driver in the silver, late-model, inconspicuous sedan. Bone, knew that the driver was definitely a player, from the way that the driver had circled the neighborhood and the meeting spot before he had rolled up slowly.
“What you need, Cuz? Bone pulled back his hood and shot a quick glance around the inside of the vehicle. It was bare, stripped down for a quick burn. The driver looked straight, too. His game was tight. He was a typical cracka-looking G, with some Latino features, unrecognizable to people not from his streets, but there nonetheless.
“I need some heat. What you got?” the driver responded.
“What are you looking for, Cuz?
“Something clean. A lot of firepower.”
“What, you got beef? Need to handle a little business?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s that, not like that!”
“That then. What you got?”
Bone, didn’t sense any bit of hesitation from the driver. He’d been in the game long enough to smell when pork was cooking. “I got a couple deuce-deuce-tres!”
“Not that. Something a little more low key.”
“Got a Glock extended mag and all.”
“Sounds right. How much?”
“For you, Cuz, three fifty.” The driver looked uninterested. This guy was legit. “Aight, Cuz, aight. Three flat.” The driver nodded his approval, drove down the long alley, and disappeared around the block.
- - - - - - -
John drove the car around the back corner of the adult novelty store, taking a few laps to make sure that his hooded friend wasn’t being staked out. He met up with Bone twenty minutes later, behind another bodega, just as abandoned as the first, in a second alley about a mile from the original meeting point. This was the counter: a black-market merchant’s point of sale.
Bone was accompanied by another thug this time. He was there to make sure that things went down as planned: a quick exchange of money for merchandise. Three hundred dollars bought John, a slick-new, Glock-17, 9 mm pistol, with a 30-round magazine, serial numbers ground down and acid etched off, untraceable. The gun’s intended target was a 23-year-old journalism student from Georgetown named Tricia Rivers. It would be reported that a punk hustler, known as Flow, was the target, and that Tricia was tragically caught in the crossfire.
Tricia had volunteered at several North D.C. community centers throughout the summer. It was her way of giving back, of feeling connected when life at Georgetown got to be a bit too surreal. She didn’t party. The only thing she hit hard was the books. She spent most of her time in the library researching and writing. She loved to write, mostly non-fiction, current event shorts. She loved to tell stories about real people, the kind of people that roamed the streets in Northwest. Her stories went mostly unnoticed, appearing in The Hoya, usually behind all of the NCAA basketball coverage, and the Greek Life’s events calendar. These were picked up by the local news outlets that needed to fill twenty seconds of a forty-five-second clip about her tragically short life. What they did not find was her latest expose, an intriguing tale about a few street junkies who had disappeared after visiting a new community clinic, where they may have been recipients of an unknown drug treatment. Rumor had it that they had all suffered strokes. She wanted to bring awareness about the new clinic and its treatments. The truth was that no one cared what street people died of or that they had died at all. People only started caring when preppy college kids from well-to-do families wound up in hospitals or morgues. Then there would be feigned outrage about drugs and drug culture. There would be outcry for more treatment options for the innocent children who had become unwitting addicts of the drugs forced upon them by the nefarious influence that oozed from the dark parts of the District.
Muffled sounds came from the trunk. His shooter, Flow was coming to after several hours of barbiturate-induced unconsciousness. He would be the perfect fall guy. His prints would be all over the gun. He’d have gunshot residue on his hands and clothes. He’d be found with the stolen car that fit the description of the one seen by witnesses of the deadly drive-by. The police would conveniently find that the car had been stolen from the shooter’s neighborhood. The case would be closed before it could even be reported by the media. The police would have their collar. Everyone would pat themselves on the back for solving a tragic murder. Vigils would be held, and the community would heal, until the next senseless murder.
John pulled his purloined, mid-90s, silver-gray sedan into Flow’s apartment complex a few miles away from the counter and waited a few minutes to make sure that the parking garage was clear. His reconnaissance team had confirmed that the cameras in the parking garage had not worked in years. He stepped out of the car, walking calmly, steadily, and with smooth, swift precision toward the trunk of the sedan. He opened the trunk lid and pulled the still incoherent Flow out of the trunk, like a toddler removing a ragdoll from a storage bin.
Flow struggled to stand as his emaciated frame shook violently. Years of crack addiction, alcoholism, and when he could score some, cocaine binges had eaten away at his flesh. Sinew and decalcified bone remained. Flow’s vacuous eyes met John’s. Tears and vitreous humor pooled into his bottom eyelids, a result of the prolonged beating he had sustained at the hands of his captor, his Baron Samedi. Now as the pain rapped on his consciousness with the fervor of a newly converted zealot, Flow pled with the Baron to take him from his grave. He was overcome by the memories of his boyhood, when he used to sing the songs taught to him by the neighborhood, botanical priest. He sang to Dambala to shed his serpent skin and to Shango for peace from the storms. Now as he stood before his tormentor, he sang for sweet release from his corporal and spiritual pain. The smell of cigar tobacco and rum overwhelmed him as he let go. Flow was saved.
John carried Flow toward the front of the sedan, which still hummed idly. He quickly placed him into the driver’s seat, pulled out his suppressed .380 caliber pistol, and put all six rounds into his chest. No sense in leaving any doubt that this was gang retribution.
John checked Flow’s neck for a pulse. He hated using such small 90-grain rounds to begin with and then having to
suppress them was a nightmare. The suppressor reduced most of what little punch the rounds delivered in the first place. There were a couple of occasions when he’d emptied a magazine of small caliber pistol rounds into a target only to have to manually finish the job. His preferred cleanup method was strangulation by constricting the carotid arteries with his fingers. This not only ensured death, but allowed him to feel the life as it left the target, his guilty pleasure. The sensation of the throbbing arteries as they tried to carry what precious blood remained up past his obstructing hands was invigorating. His fingers tingled at the rhythm of the morbid tempo as it slowed and faded like a solitary snare drum playing the last measures in a drumline of death.
Satisfied that the job was done, he scanned the garage once more. Nothing. John placed the body sideways; the head slumped on the passenger’s seat, just out of view of any distant passerby. He strode calmly to a gray minivan parked a couple of spaces down, behind the silver-gray sedan and sat in the car for a couple of minutes. He scanned the garage to ensure no witnesses appeared. He chirped his mic and received two chirps back. The spotting team had not seen any activity either. He was clear. John carefully exited the parking lot and drove out of the apartment complex toward a rendezvous with his team behind a scrap-metal junkyard just outside of the district. He pulled alongside a stationary, white, utility van and handed the man inside a large Styrofoam coffee cup; the small murder weapon inside.