From Filth & Mud

by J. Manuel

  “Does this mean that you’ll help me?” Karen pleaded, desperately struggling to grasp at this last shred of hope.

  “I can’t make promises right now. I have some research to do first, but I will definitely try. Give me a day to get back to you. In the meantime, do you have somewhere that you can go, someone to stay with? I wouldn’t recommend going back to work right now or meeting with the university counsel.”

  “I can stay at a hotel here in town.”

  “Okay, good. Do you have cash on you?”

  “No, but I have my credit cards.”

  Sarah picked up her purse from the floor, and removed her wallet carefully so as not to disturb the loaded snub-nosed revolver inside. She’d carried it since her law school days when she had clerked for a criminal defense attorney. His clients tended to make threats when cases didn’t go their way. She handed Karen two-hundred dollars, the bills folded so as not to be visible. “Here, take this money and check yourself into the Grand Hotel for the night. It’s a nice place not too far from here. When you get there ask for Richie, the concierge. Tell him that I said to take care of you. He’s a nice guy. You can trust him. He’s put up several of my clients through the years.”

  Karen sat frozen with apprehension. “Don’t worry it’s very public so you’ll be okay. I’ll call to check up on you.” Sarah reached into her purse once again and pulled out a small, prepaid cellphone. “Take this. My number is already in it. I’ll call you. Don’t call anybody but me on this phone. Okay?”

  Karen looked a little more at ease when the two of them bid farewell, but Sarah was now concerned. Karen didn’t appear to be the nervous type which made her story all the more worrying. Lilith, the lab-mice, Miles Baker’s death, and this company, BioSyn, being somehow involved sounded fanciful, and yet she had learned in her experience that the truth was often spun of the tangled webs of stranger fictions.

  She drove to her office with her mind on the image of mice brains punctuated with gray dots and the Level 4 spacesuits out of a Hollywood set. She fought the urge to look into her rearview mirror to see if she was being followed, but she did so multiple times anyway. As she neared her office building, she pulled along the side of a broad avenue and waited. After several minutes, she turned the car around and headed home to the comfort and safety of Jacob and the boys.

  - - - - - - -

  Sarah was disturbed all weekend, so much so that Jacob had noticed her aloofness. She invited Jacob to go fishing with the boys, but they insisted on her coming along. She brought her favorite book, The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., but hardly turned a page. She couldn’t sleep so she used the time to do a little research on BioSyn, and found very little on it, or its CEO, Eckert. She had never heard of the company, and was sure that the firm did not represent it. It was 12:38 a.m. eastern time which made it 1:38 p.m. in Manilla, the home of the firm’s outsourced conflicts department. She ordered a rush conflicts search on BioSyn and Eckert expecting there to be none. She was wrong. The request returned twenty minutes later with one entry for Metro Treatment Facilities, LLC, and a parent, MTF Holding, LLC. It listed Eckert as a member of the LLCs. The attorney of record was Atty. Carson Brown who had left the firm a year earlier. Sarah searched Brown’s bar registration for his current employer. Brown was now gainfully employed in BioSyn’s corporate counsel’s office.

  Monday morning came and she had not slept more than a couple of hours all weekend. She called the office and informed them that she wouldn’t be in until the afternoon. She hoped that the unexpected deviation from her schedule didn’t tip some unseen pursuer to the fact that she suspected something. She saw Jacob and the boys off, and left the house shortly after. She drove aimlessly for an hour, trying to spot someone in her rearview mirror. She laughed at her ridiculous behavior, but she repeated it multiple times. She stopped at a gas station in Takoma Park where she texted Karen. She waited a few minutes before Karen texted her back from the prepaid cell, and then called her immediately.

  “How are you?” Karen was tense. “I thought something was up since you hadn’t called for a while.”

  “Sorry about that. I’ve spent the weekend…Well I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. I’m coming to see you. Be there in forty-five minutes. I’ll call so you can open the door.”

  “Oh no, I told you that there was something wrong.”

  “Don’t get worked up now. We can figure this out just hang tight.”

  Sarah pulled into the parking lot of the Grand Hotel forty-five minutes later. She found Richie working in the lobby and asked him if anyone had come asking for their special guest. No one had. Sarah could trust Richie. He was a retired detective with Metro P.D. who’d bought into the ownership group of the Grand Hotel back when it was nothing more than a fire consumed shell. Karen opened the door before she could knock, and pulled her into the dimly lit room. She didn’t waste a moment before barraging her with questions.

  “Do you think you were followed?”

  “No. I drove in circles for a bit and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.”

  Sarah told her what little she had discovered about BioSyn, and the connection to her own firm. The two women sat and stared at the floor in silence for a moment both searching their logically trained minds for answers.

  “This is crazy, Sarah. They already got to your firm. If what you are saying is true this is a dangerous situation for me, and maybe you, too. Do you have a plan because I’m starting to think that my best option right now is to act like this conversation never happened? Eckert may be a murderous psycho, and that’s enough of a reason for me to just disappear.”

  “This situation is strange, and I’m a bit unnerved honestly, but I don’t think that you are in mortal danger,” Sarah was interrupted by the sudden buzz of Karen’s prepaid phone, the one to which no one had the number. Both women stared at it with alarm, frightened to breathe lest they be heard.

  “Have you called anyone else with that phone?” Sarah interrogated Karen.

  “No! I promise. I’ve only called you.”

  The phone buzzed for a couple of seconds more then stopped for a moment before sounding an intermittent tone, announcing that it had received a text. Neither woman moved until Sarah’s phone began to ring loudly, inside of her purse, at which point both women jumped. Sarah fished for the phone frantically, it was still blaring when she turned it over to look at the screen. It was also a call from an unknown number. Both phones then began to ring incessantly, but neither one was answered. Finally a recording of the previous minute of their conversation began to play back on Sarah’s phone.

  Sarah reached furiously for the phone, “Who is this?” she demanded.

  “Call me Tovarich,” said a delicate woman’s voice.

  - - - - - - -

  Sarah sat stunned, staring at the phone on the coffee table. It was all true. Her paranoid client’s unbelievable story was true, but what was worse was that the details were more frightening than she had ever wanted to know.

  “I suggest that both of you get out of this situation as soon as possible. This means that you, Karen, should sign those papers and be done with it or go into hiding. In either case, I don’t know if you will be safe. They did kill Miles Baker after all.” Tovarich continued, “If they haven’t hesitated to send Dr. Monte-Alban halfway around the world, they wouldn’t hesitate to make you disappear.”

  “You know where Manny is?” Karen blurted out.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Basrah, Iraq. It looks like BioSyn sent him there under the care of the Chinese Government, and they don’t seem to have his safety in mind. He’s there to run unsanctioned trials of this Lilith treatment.”

  “Who the hell are these people?” Karen interjected.

  “Well Eckert, seems to fancy himself a demigod, but he’s backed by the CIA.”

  “Why in God’s name would they back him if he’s such a lunatic?” Sarah asked.

  “He provides
them with extremely lucrative distribution services for illicit drugs and black market pharmaceuticals. I’ve started snooping into their accounts, and it appears that BioSyn’s operations seem to be concentrated mostly in China and Russia for the time being. They’ve got options to enter the drug trade in the South China Sea, and it looks like they’ll be exercising them next year.”

  “So that’s more important to them than stopping Eckert from going around killing people? Sorry don’t answer that. It’s obvious that they value his services above everything else.”

  Karen jumped in again, “So besides stealing my work to make lots of money, why does Eckert want my designs so badly?”

  “It’s simple really. Lilith could be a weapon and that’s more valuable than any cure.”

  - - - - - - -

  John sat in the silver-gray sedan for an hour waiting in the multi-story parking lot across the street from the Grand Hotel. He sipped his lukewarm coffee and kept his eyes glued to the second floor room at the end of the building. His team had been following Dr. Mayfield for a couple of weeks keeping tabs on her for Eckert. The tracking devices that had been inserted into her belongings while she passed through BioSyn security relayed her exact location to John’s phone. This was another one of Eckert’s special assignments—a manifestation of his paranoia. Eckert had been getting more fickle and unmanageable lately. His normally cool demeanor was showing an ever increasing number of cracks. He’d become more rash since the takeover of LaPierre Pharma, and ordering the hit on that journalism student was beyond pushing the boundaries. Maybe it was the Russians, or the increasingly weary Chinese who were starting to get under Eckert’s skin, but in any case that made it dangerous to be around him. John was under no delusion that he would one day outlive his usefulness. He had multiple escape plans prepared for the inevitable, but the money and action was good right now.

  John had seen too much killing, so much so that it all blended into one big stream of carnage. He’d seen the aftermath of reprisal death-squad killings in the neighborhoods of Basrah shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the beheadings of women and children in Ramadi in 2004, and the mob justice from Shiite tribes against their old Sunni Baathist rulers in Mosul in 2005. He’d killed his share of insurgents in Fallujah in 2006. He’d seen a group of Shiite school children beaten to death by a Sunni crowd in an open-air market in Fallujah in 2007. He remembered how one woman held a toddler down with one hand as she smashed his face with a brick in the other. He’d seen a little girl probably no more than eight years old stroll up to a vehicle checkpoint in some unmapped backwater town in Afghanistan and detonate herself, killing two of his junior Marines on his birthday. These just added to the infinite number of deaths that had occurred, and still occurred daily on the planet. So what was one more body? Who cared if a few more insignificant ounces of blood, innocent or not, were shed? He’d stopped feeling long ago. The nightmares that had haunted him for years had long since blurred into his reality—he could not remember the last time he’d dreamed. So here he sat, stalking his quarry once again.

  An hour later, John observed the lobby entrance of the hotel, as the valets ran for the cars of their impatient guests. He took note of a woman who emerged wearing dark sunglasses and a low-hanging baseball-cap, the rim of which hid her face. The ill-fitting garments sagged off of her shoulders and waist. The amateurish disguise was as obvious as it was ridiculous, but there was something familiar about her gate and her mannerisms. John’s eyes followed her down the sidewalk until she reached the guest parking garage at the building’s edge. He leapt from his sedan to a better vantage point. He looked through his binoculars and found the woman walking briskly toward a familiar SUV, with an unmistakable Marine Corps Eagle, Globe, and Anchor emblem proudly displayed on the rear-window. A stick figure family, a man, a woman, and two boys were adhered to the window, opposite the EGA.

  Sarah! What in god’s name was she doing here? An affair? A business lunch at the hotel restaurant? John’s heart sank—did she have business with Mayfield? He fought the urge to get in his car and chase her down to get the answers. He thought logically for a moment. She was a lawyer who worked for a firm here in the district. Was this work related? Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t good for anyone, least of all Jacob. The best case scenario was that his wife was cheating on him. John watched Sarah pull out of the hotel parking lot and merge onto the street below. He waited for a few minutes, thinking of a scenario in which this would end positively. He couldn’t think of one. Just then his phone gave an alarm that Karen was on the move. John looked at his phone to find that his worst fear was confirmed, Karen’s signal was moving down the street, inside of Sarah’s SUV.

  - - - - - - -

  “So do we have a problem with Dr. Mayfield?” Eckert asked, circling John as he jogged lightly around the helicopter landing pad just outside of his office window.

  “No. She’s stayed put in her hotel room for the last week. She’s called her lab telling them that she’s taking some time off to deal with an unexpected family emergency. It appears that she doesn’t have family or friends to speak of because she hasn’t reached out to anybody else.” John was a good liar, but he knew that Eckert was a better one and in that moment he felt like a street-magician trying to pull one over on David Copperfield.

  Eckert stopped and searched his eyes for the faintest doubt, but found none. He grabbed a water bottle with disgust and threw it over the edge of the building. “I hate loose ends.”

  “What about Mayfield?” John probed.

  “Don’t worry about her. Jak will handle her. I need you to handle this delivery issue with the Chinese. They’re complaining about the Basrah operation. They say that Dr. Monte-Alban is not cooperating to the fullest. They’re even alleging that he’s been experimenting on his own on some of the local children. They practically have him and the entire team under house arrest. That’s more of a pressing concern to me right now. Jak will handle the clean-up here.”

  “Understood,”

  “Let yourself out.” Eckert picked up his pace. The meeting was over.

  John was relieved that he had not mentioned Sarah’s role. He knew that it was the right decision as he walked off of the rooftop and out through Eckert’s office. He had to reach Sarah quickly and figure out what her part was in all of this. He couldn’t allow her involvement to continue. Hers and Jacob’s lives were already in more danger than either of them could have known.

  CHAPTER 31

  Nathan had not been himself for the past couple of weeks. It was not that he had been sick that had worried both Jacob and Sarah, but the fact that he would wake up with persistent migraines that would not go away. At first the pediatrician thought that it might be due to some sort of virus, and since these things were currently going around she didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until Nathan started to experience nausea and vomiting that they really got scared. The pediatrician suggested an MRI. The worst case scenario, he thought, was meningitis. That made them worry even more, but when the MRI results returned, they would have given anything for a meningitis diagnosis. It was a tumor! Their world came to a crashing halt.

  The day of the first surgery was the worst. They had been referred to a neuro-oncologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Nathan would be given a local anesthetic, and would remain awake for the duration of the procedure. The surgeon would perform a stereotactic biopsy in which he would drill a small hole into Nathan’s skull, and guide a rod using an MRI to assist in navigating through the brain and into the tumor. Once there, the surgeon would remove part of the tumor through a hollow tube that he inserted into the gray-matter. The tumor cells would then be transported to the cancer diagnosis lab to confirm whether or not Nathan’s tumor was malignant. It was!

  A team of the best oncologists in the world informed them that the tumor was difficult to reach, and could not be extracted without causing Nathan great harm. Radiation and chemotherapy were the only courses of treatment avail
able, and these would take their toll on Nathan and the family. Nathan endured several courses of both treatments to no avail. The tumor had only shrunk by ten percent after six months of treatments. The neuro-oncologists and surgeons saw no hope in continuing. Sarah and Jacob were crushed. Luke, who was soon turning seven years old, wanted nothing for his birthday other than for Nathan to come home and wrestle with him.

  The disease had brought tension back to their lives. Their finances were equally in shambles. Sarah was forced to drastically reduce her hours which did not ingratiate her with Bodner James’ managing partners. She was stepping away just as they were ramping up their mergers and acquisitions practice in the biotechnology arena, and she was one of their star attorneys.

  Jacob took a hiatus from his team to tend to his family although the truth was that he had not taken any special service jobs since the mission in Montreal. XPS was not taking his hiatus well. John had attempted to recruit him back, but Jacob would not relent. He could not risk not being there for Nathan. Jacob tried to work the odd personnel security contract whenever possible, but he had not worked one in a month. His old clients seemed to have moved on. He had no income and XPS did not offer medical benefits since he was technically an independent contractor.

  All of Nathan’s treatments and care were extremely expensive. Sarah’s insurance covered eighty-percent of most treatments. The problem was that Nathan’s hospital stays were only covered for a month, and he had been in and out of the hospital for four of the last six. Sarah and Jacob had run through all of their savings, and Sarah had begun to raid her retirement accounts. Jacob had none to dip into. The harsh reality of his inability to provide for and protect his family was crushing his soul more than ever. He finally reached out to John in desperation. If he had to return to the Special Services Division then so be it. He could not sit idly by and watch Nathan die because of his inability to pay for his care.