Exit Strategy

by Charlton Pettus

  He shoved the duffel under the bed and went down to the business center. He still had the phone but only used it for the Foldit app and Maps. He assumed Sam monitored it. The business center, really just a seedy little room with a pair of ten-year-old PCs with smudged LCD screens, was deserted. Jordan logged on to a new Gmail account. One new mail.

  Neil G. Ives

  Re: transport

  William, I have spoken with my associate Patrick, who is scheduled to run a load of Galway sheep to Montmorillon in a couple of weeks, March 13. Let me know if that will suit your purposes. As to the financial arrangement, Pat would require 5,000 E in addition to our agreed-upon fee for handling your travel needs. Cash. No bitcoin.

  Please let me know if that is acceptable.

  Regards, Neil

  Jordan hit Reply.

  That is acceptable. I will assume travel on March 14.

  Best, William

  He logged off. It was a little tight but it would work.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Trahon nodded impatiently. “Okay, I get it. You sure the partner’s fucking the wife?”

  “Pretty sure,” Herron said.

  “And are you going to be able to share the source of this opinion with the judge?”

  “Probably not, but the public financials should be probable cause on the insider trading angle.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Okay, let me see what I can do.”

  He was good like that. Knew when not to ask too many questions. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  Trahon only grunted and went back to the open folder on his desk as Herron let himself out.

  52

  THE WESTERN FRONT

  Thought you should know, Si confirmed.

  jordan?

  Yup. He’s sure.

  and you?

  Yes, I’m sure, too.

  how’s that entanglement thing going?

  Don’t make fun. I’m trying.

  i know sorry.

  One day at a time. But thank you.

  Really.

  mission accomplished.

  Let’s get together soon.

  lunch?

  Haha. Watch it!!

  kidding. but yes, let’s.

  Kk

  Alex switched to a different conversation on another phone.

  id confirmed. all quiet on the western front. thank you.

  53

  CONCORD

  There was an actual working pay phone just across the street from the Cézanne. Jordan swiped his telecarte and, holding a small, creased napkin up to the light, dialed the number.

  “Le Pré aux Clercs, bonsoir,” a harried voice answered.

  “Michel, s’il vous plaît,” Jordan said.

  “Un instant,” and there was a clatter as the receiver was set down and apparently fell to the floor. Jordan felt a strange sense of comfort as the sounds of the brasserie came down the line.

  Then there was a loud clattering and fumbling as the phone was retrieved. “Allô?”

  “Ça va, con?” Jordan said.

  “Ça va, Yanqui.” Without missing a beat.

  “I need that favor, Michel,” Jordan said. “It’s a big one. Do you have a pen?”

  “Bien sûr.”

  * * *

  Once you looked, the pattern was obvious. Viceroy Interests was the main player in Genometry stock. And Viceroy had made a killing. They had anticipated every significant announcement or patent with a major play, and always the right one, shorting the stock right before results of an unsuccessful clinical trial were published, or leveraging their position right before a new patent announcement. Viceroy had made tens of millions over the past seven years. It stank. Herron hadn’t ever chased an insider trading case before but this looked like a slam dunk. Follow the money.

  But who was Viceroy? The Boston address was a mail drop. Corporate filings indicated a Hong Kong–based office, but according to his contact in the AG’s office, that didn’t mean shit. It took a couple of days and a few old chits but Herron finally traced the actual ownership to a company called Hessians Global. Hessians was privately held, registered in Lichtenstein. It was a brick wall. Herron sat back in his chair and studied the screen. There was something. The connection danced just out of reach.

  He grabbed his jacket and took the stairs. He drove an old white Cadillac. Jewish grandmothers, pimps and him. Drove like a motorboat with a flooded bilge. He put on the radio. WEEI. Sports radio, 850. It was a phone-in show, bunch of idiots armchair-managing the Sox.

  Paul from Revere (that had to be a joke, right?) called in to say Papelbon was done and they needed to pick up a new closer before the season opened.

  He jumped on the pike and headed west. As he left the city behind, the scenery settled into that dull gray low terrain that Herron found so depressing in the winter. Soon spring would come and the hills would explode in the lush green that was the belated reward for one hundred and thirty-three days a year of rain. The chatter of the radio stilled his mind and allowed it to wander aimlessly. He thought about Christine, then tried not to, which just brought her into sharper focus. He supposed he had loved her. Not that it ever would have worked out, anyway. She was never going to be a cop’s wife.

  He sped past the Waban exit and saw signs for 128 and 95 North to the Concord Turnpike. Something stirred and shimmered in the darkness. Without his conscious mind taking any part, the Caddy slowed and drifted into the breakdown lane. He pulled the stem in the steering column to turn on the hazards and slid the transmission into Park with a little lurching clunk. He sat quietly as cars whipped by inches away. When trucks passed, the car shuddered. Bits of sand and gravel from passing tires struck Herron’s windshield with a spitting sound.

  Concord. Hessians... Jesus. How fucking stupid could he be? He banged the button on the glove compartment until it sprang open. He fished out a pad and wrote down the letters. H E S S I A N S. Then backward. Then the consonants above the vowels. H S S N S, E I A.

  There it was. He crossed out the letters one at a time. S H A N I S S E. Shanisse Prenn. The partner’s stepmother. Fuck. No way that’s a coincidence. Hazards still flashing, he pulled back onto the road with a spray of gravel and took the next exit.

  * * *

  It was completely dark. The air had that quality unique to hotels. It was neither cool nor warm; it had passed through so much ducting and equipment it had been stripped of all traces of terroir. It could have begun as a frigid icy blast from the North Sea, or just as easily as a balmy breeze off the Mediterranean.

  Jordan couldn’t remember where he was at first. The clock radio by the bed said 4:38. A small pad of paper illuminated by the pale green numbers bore the crest of l’Hôtel Anne de Bretagne in Rennes. Right.

  He’d been dreaming. There had been a boy. His eyes had been opened wide as if he were screaming but his mouth had been completely still. Jordan knew the boy was being chased by someone and was terribly afraid. But he couldn’t remember if he was the boy somehow or if he was the one chasing him. He was on the tipping point of wakefulness. Better to sleep if he could. He pulled his legs into his belly and counted backward from one hundred as his body almost imperceptibly rocked back and forth.

  54

  ANOMALIES

  He looked uncomfortable; his eyes darted nervously around her office. Tiny beads of sweat shone on his forehead, partly from the stuffy heat after the chill outside, but not entirely, Stephanie thought.

  “Can I get you something to drink, Simon?” she asked pleasantly. “I have—” she opened the brown minifridge beneath her desk “—let’s see, Diet Coke...and Diet Coke. Name your poison.”

  “Nothing, thanks, I’m fine,” he said, sounding unsure. Then it came out in a tumble. “Look, Steph, I went back and forth all night about this. I know there’s going to
be some reasonable explanation and I probably have no business even bringing it up, but at the same time, it’s weird and, you know, you’re my friend, and Jordan was my friend and I couldn’t just let it go and not say anything, you know?”

  “No. I have no idea what you’re saying,” she said with a wan smile, “but whatever it is you can tell me. You know that, Si.”

  He nodded absently while his fingers pinched a fold of his corduroy pant leg and roughed and smoothed the wale. He didn’t look at her. “I sequenced some more of the sample after we spoke. No reason. I just wanted to be, you know, thorough, I guess.” His eyes flitted around the cluttered office.

  “Anyway, there were some... I suppose you’d have to say...anomalies.”

  Her eyebrows rose slightly. “Anomalies?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s what I’d call it. I mean, strictly speaking, contamination is probably a better word, but not exactly right, either...” His voice trailed off.

  “What did you find, Simon?”

  He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Sorry,” he said. “First there was a substantial amount of P33. That’s an isotope of phosphorus used in gene sequencing, radioactive. Obviously my first assumption was that it was local contamination. So I rechecked the original sample. No question, it was there. I’m careful.”

  “I know you are,” she said. “How could it have gotten in there?”

  “That’s just it, I have no idea. It doesn’t make sense. But there was more. There were traces of protein that weren’t human.”

  “What do you mean, not human? Are you saying that it wasn’t Jordan? I don’t understand.”

  “No, no, the DNA was from Jordan. Positively. But there was contamination with some kind of animal protein. Again, I have no idea what or how.”

  “I see, and can you figure out what that animal was?”

  “I’m working on it—I think so. But that’s still not the strangest part. Like I said, you can write all that off as contamination from outside. But there was something else.”

  Stephanie struggled to keep her impatience in check. “Go on.”

  “Okay, I don’t know how to explain it. At first I thought there had to be some mistake on my part or with the sequencer, but I’ve checked it a dozen times now. There were a large number of strands that had the same sequence, identical, as if they had been PCR amplified or something, and the sequence was a nonrandom repeat that I’ve never seen before. It shouldn’t have been there.”

  “I’m not sure I get what you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying there was a long repeating section of code in Jordan’s DNA that doesn’t belong there.”

  Stephanie felt as if she were peering over the edge of a deep hole. “What was the sequence?”

  Simon dug a folded piece of lined paper out of his jacket pocket and opened it. He raised his chin slightly and looked down at the page. “I wrote down the bases—A, T, G, C, T, G...”

  “GTG!” she interrupted, leaning forward in her chair, trying to read his scrawl.

  He looked up at her. “Yes. How could you know that?”

  “You started at the wrong place,” she said. Her eyes shone with feverish intensity. “It’s CTG, GTG, ATG. The codons for leucine, valine and methionine. LVM. ‘Love, me.’ We signed a thousand notes to each other that way. LVM. ‘Love, me.’” She couldn’t speak. It felt as though great hands were squeezing her chest.

  He stared at her with a dull quizzical expression frozen on his face. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Like a tattoo... I don’t even think it’s possible what you’re suggesting.”

  It was her turn to be confused. “What am I suggesting? I don’t get it.”

  “Well, it seems like you’re saying this sequence of codons was something that had meaning for the two of you, and the inference would be that at some point Jordan synthesized the sequence, introduced it into his own DNA via a bacteria or something and that the plasmid was incorporated and replicated.”

  “Can that be done?”

  “Theoretically, I suppose. Ventner watermarked his bacteria—” talking more to himself “—maybe something Jordan experimented with. It would take a while...and why sixty repeats, although maybe that—”

  “Simon—” her voice was sharp “—tell me what you think this all means. Please.” Softer.

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t know exactly but I think I have some sense of it. The only explanation that makes any sense is that Jordan must have used himself as the subject of an experiment involving synthesized plasmids. I’m not sure when he was working that angle—my guess, years ago. But it clearly worked. He was on the way to a cure for, theoretically, anyway, any genetic disease. If you can identify the mutated gene responsible for the disorder and synthesize a normal version of it and then have the working copy incorporated into your DNA, you’re fixed!”

  “So you’re saying he used our little code as a test? Or a marker?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it was his way of making you part of him. He never told you?”

  “No.” She gasped as if she’d been holding her breath and her shoulders began to shake uncontrollably.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry. I knew I should have left it alone.”

  She couldn’t speak but shook her head.

  He came around the desk and awkwardly put his arm around her shoulder. She turned toward him and clutched at the back of his jacket, sobbing into his rib cage. He felt a twinge in his lower back as he struggled to stay upright and still. After a couple of minutes she released him and sat back, wiping her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. Finally she managed to say, “I’m glad. Thank you.” Her face was red and damp.

  “Ughh, I’m sorry, Simon.” She took a deep shaky breath. “That hasn’t happened in a long time. Oh God.” She laughed and wiped his shirt with her sleeve. “I’ve gotten you all snotty.”

  * * *

  Herron sat on the front edge of the sofa; he couldn’t imagine settling back into the cushions. The toile pattern in blue on white showed a pastoral scene, a young man pushing a girl on a swing. She is laughing, head thrown back, one bare foot crooked back, the other extended. A second boy is eating an apple with a smile that suggests he has an unobstructed view up the young lady’s voluminous skirts. Herron couldn’t decide if it was an actual eighteenth-century design or a smirking modern riff, but either way it was clearly a hideously expensive piece. There was nowhere to sit in the house that didn’t make him feel big and awkward. He felt as if the smell of his body, an honest sour loam, was despoiling the crisp linen air. He couldn’t imagine how people lived in houses like this.

  Mrs. Prenn had gone to get her husband. Four in the afternoon and he was apparently napping. Shanisse Prenn was comfortable in her skin, he thought. And shared it happily. She had answered the door in a pair of cutoff denim shorts and a man’s plaid button-up with only a couple of buttons buttoned. Her long straight hair was streaked with honey highlights and her skin was an even butterscotch. She was barefoot and seemed to skate over the slick hardwood floors. Radiant heat, he thought. He glanced at the neat group of shoes by the door and started to slip off his Clarks. She stopped him with a careless wave and showed him to the living room.

  She had offered him a drink, which he’d declined.

  He heard feet coming down the hallway and inched even farther forward on the sofa, standing when Shanisse and her husband, Martin, came in.

  “How can we help you, Detective?” Martin Prenn said, extending his hand. He had to be rich, Herron thought. A good twenty-five years older than the missus. Trying to keep it together—well groomed, light blue linen shirt and khakis, also barefoot. Thin lips, tiny eyes. He looked like a cancer patient dipped in Oompa-Loompa orange.

  Herron shook his hand, good grip. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Prenn. I’m just following up on the investigation into the death of your so
n’s partner, Jordan Parrish, and wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Oh! That was just awful,” Shanisse said. Her face took on an exaggerated expression of solemnity. “Traffic accident, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Herron said. “That’s right. Listen, if this is a bad time, I can come back...”

  Martin waved him back to the sofa. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re here now. Ask away.” Scent of lavender soap and sex. Hence the nap and her obvious good humor. For some reason the idea was disturbing.

  “Thank you,” he said, retaking his awkward seat. “Are you familiar with a company called Viceroy Interests?”

  Martin looked at his wife, who had taken a perch on the arm of his chair, one leg casually draped between his. They both shrugged. “No, never heard of it, why?”

  “They are a major investor in your son’s company.”

  Prenn nodded. “Here’s the thing, Detective... Harden, is it?”

  “Herron.”

  “Sorry. The thing is Alex doesn’t share much with me. Certainly nothing like that. Our relationship is...complicated.”

  Shanisse idly stroked her husband’s longish gray hair.

  “I see,” Herron said. There didn’t seem to be any point digging further here. Sleeping dogs. Why stir shit up? Besides, seeing the stepmom, he had some other ideas why Alex might name a shell company after her.

  He stood up carefully, resisting the impulse to smooth out the impression his ass had left on the sofa cushion. “Thank you both. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “That’s it? We haven’t told you anything at all,” Shanisse Prenn said. Somehow her tone suggested disappointment that he wasn’t going to stay, maybe have a couple drinks. They could light a fire, and who knows where things might go from there. Herron practically ran for the door.

  55

  CROSSWITS