The Lupin Project

by Allan Leverone

  “Isn’t the middle of the night on a Saturday kind of an odd time to be doing maintenance tests, Mr. Greeley?”

  He forced out a chuckle, praying it didn’t sound as manufactured to the firefighter as it did to him. “It most certainly is, and believe me, I’m not thrilled to be working at this time of night. But the problem was just discovered this morning and my department needed our facility to be empty when we conducted our tests, so here we are.”

  “I see. And how long will these tests take?”

  Jason hesitated a split-second and then said, “Two hours, give or take. I’ll notify you promptly upon completion. Until then, please disregard any alarms you receive from Tamerlane. You might want to disconnect the system at your end if you have that capability.”

  “I’ll do that,” the voice said. The man was speaking slowly and his suspicion didn’t seem to have lessened much, if at all. Jason decided he had done all he could and it was time to get the hell off the line.

  “Very good,” he said. “Thank you for your assistance, and you can expect to hear from me again shortly.”

  It was a lie, but he felt he pulled it off admirably, under the circumstances.

  33

  Matt Bertrand sipped his now-mostly-cold coffee and squinted through the blowing snow at Unit Six of the Sleepy Logger Motel. After swapping vehicles at his friend’s house, the kid Colonel Toler was so hot to locate—for the second time—had driven straight here. He’d parked in front of Unit Six maybe ninety minutes ago and hurried immediately inside, and although a light was still burning behind the drawn curtain, there had been no sign of activity in or around the motel room since.

  Matt continued to hold off calling Toler. He still hoped to catch a glimpse of the young girl who had accompanied the Jeep driver earlier this afternoon. Toler’s desperation to find her had come through loud and clear in his latest phone call. Whatever the asshole had gotten into, those two kids played a critical role, which meant one thing to Matt: the possibility of a little bonus cash if he could tell the Tamerlane director that he had located both of them.

  And if Toler wasn’t willing to renegotiate the financial terms of their agreement, Matt was not above a little well-timed extortion. But first, he had to be certain the girl was inside Unit Six. Once he had that information, he could call Colonel Hardass and advise him that he’d just raised his rates, and he would only hand over the location of the subjects following agreement on those adjusted rates.

  Come on, little girl, just pull the curtain to the side and peek out at the storm. Anything to let me know you’re in there.

  He guessed he could get away with jerking Toler around about the price if he could deliver the goods, but if he blackmailed a loose cannon like Frank Toler and then didn’t come through, well, that was a recipe for disaster. The colonel might be unstable—hell, it was obvious he was unstable, and not just a little—but he also had plenty of contacts.

  Some of them were the kind who could make you disappear without a trace and never be found.

  Matt reached across the front seat and picked up his cell phone for probably the tenth time in the last hour. He ran a finger over the screen, thinking. He could only wait so long before making the call, and it was becoming increasingly clear the subjects had decided to hunker down for the night. Sitting here in the middle of the worst late-November snowstorm in decades didn’t seem likely to accomplish a damned thing.

  He sighed and thumbed the speed-dial button for Toler’s special phone. The number nobody else had access to, if the colonel was to be believed.

  Matt believed him.

  The phone buzzed in his ear. Once, twice, three times, and then continued as the call went unanswered.

  This was unexpected. Toler had emphasized that finding these people was a top priority. He’d said he wanted to be notified the moment Matt picked up their trail.

  Matt had been more than a little nervous about waiting the hour-and-a-half at the Sleepy Logger while he tried to determine whether the girl was inside, and now the colonel wasn’t answering?

  It made no sense.

  He punched the red “End” button and stared at the phone.

  It revealed nothing.

  He tried again.

  Still no answer. No voice mail message.

  Now what the hell was he supposed to do? He was tired and cold and sick of watching the snow pile up into steadily expanding drifts around his car. He had no desire to sit in this goddamned parking lot all night while Frank Fucking Toler lay under his covers, warm and toasty and getting a good night’s sleep while ignoring his ringing cell phone.

  On the other hand, if he left now, the kids could take off and disappear at a moment’s notice and Matt would have no way of knowing whether his intel was accurate when the asshole finally answered his phone. And if that happened, there was absolutely zero chance of Matt receiving payment for his services.

  Which meant he would have wasted all this time out here in the dark and the cold.

  He tried Toler’s phone again, this time stabbing at the speed-dial button in anger.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  Nothing.

  “Fucking asshole,” Matt muttered, and then blinked in surprise as a soft yellow-white halo appeared through the snow far off his right side. Against all odds, a vehicle was approaching, moving slowly north toward the motel. Not one single car or truck had driven past on Route 9 in the nearly two hours since Matt had pulled into the Sleepy Logger parking lot. Not a plow, not a sanding truck, not a police cruiser. Nothing.

  Matt glanced at Unit Six’s front door. Still closed.

  The headlights off Matt’s right continued to brighten as the vehicle approached, and after what felt like a very long time a truck materialized out of the restricted visibility. It was moving slowly, churning along the pavement that by now must be covered with at least eight inches of snow.

  Oddly-shaped protrusions seemed to be sticking out of the roof, and as the vehicle moved closer to Matt, he was able to make out what they were: small satellite dishes, the kind that could be extended from the interior.

  It was a news truck.

  Matt immediately ducked, an instinctive reaction that was as silly as it was unnecessary. There was absolutely no way the driver—or passengers, if there were any—would be able to make see Matt inside his car. The snow was falling too heavily, restricting their visibility. And even if they could see him, they would be too focused on keeping the damned truck from sliding off the road and into a telephone pole to worry about some guy sitting inside a parked car.

  Besides, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It might be a little strange to sit here in the middle of a snowstorm, but it wasn’t illegal and it certainly wasn’t newsworthy.

  The thought made Matt frown. What was a news truck doing way out here in the middle of Nowhereville, USA, anyway? There was no possible way a little shit stain like New Quebec had a TV station, and if the truck was from Manchester and the crew wanted to record video of the storm for their morning newscast, they could get plenty of that without ever leaving their station parking lot.

  A sense of impending doom radiated through Matt. This news van’s arrival was not random. Intuition told him it was related to Frank Toler’s increasingly desperate desire to find those two kids holed up inside Unit Six. What the hell was Toler up to that would warrant the arrival of the news media in the middle of a raging blizzard?

  Much more importantly, how complicit was Matt Bertrand in whatever Toler had done?

  “Keep going, keep going, keep going,” Matt muttered as the truck crept along Route 9. He wanted his suspicions about Toler and the man’s unspecified but newsworthy fuckup to be wrong, wanted the van to continue past the Sleepy Logger Motel and disappear into the snow and the darkness, on its way to somewhere else.

  Somewhere that had nothing at all to do with Matt Bertrand.

  He knew it wasn’t going to happen, though, and he wasn’t even a little
surprised when the truck slowed further and made the turn into the motel parking lot. Painted on the side in garish letters was EYEWITNESS NEWS 11.

  The truck eased past Matt’s car and pulled to a stop in front of Unit Six, just as Matt had known all along it would. He realized he might finally get the chance to discover whether the girl was inside the motel room when the occupants opened the door to greet the news reporter.

  Suddenly the prospect didn’t seem to matter much.

  Matt pressed the speed dial button one more time. This was it. He would give that asshole Toler one last chance to pick up, and then he was on his own, and good riddance to him.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck you, Colonel,” Matt whispered. He tossed the phone onto the seat and shifted into reverse. Left his headlights off for the time being, hoping the news people would be too focused on Unit Six to notice the little car easing out of the Sleepy Logger lot.

  When he hit Route 9, Matt flicked on his headlights and turned south. It was time to leave this hellhole in his rear view mirror once and for all. He had just wasted nearly twenty-four hours of work, because he knew without a shadow of a doubt he would never see a penny from Toler.

  And at the moment, he didn’t even care. Based on the way things had gone tonight, combined with what he already knew about Colonel Frank Toler, at this point if he could avoid prison time he’d consider it a win.

  34

  Jason had no idea whether the fireman bought his story about “testing the alarm system” or not, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He’d given his best performance and it was time to proceed.

  He shuffled out of Toler’s office—for the last time, he hoped; just being inside it made him feel dirty—and then descended the stairway located at the far end of the access hall. He’d taken a facility tour years ago after hiring on at Tamerlane and couldn’t recall whether he had ever ventured into the basement since. He didn’t think so.

  But one thing he did recall was that all the facility maintenance systems were located down here, including the main control panel for the fire suppression system.

  He stopped on the bottom step and surveyed the basement. It was massive, containing maintenance offices and storage areas, as well as tools and supplies, heating and cooling equipment, backup power generators and the like. He couldn’t recall the exact location of the fire suppression panel, but it turned out to be easy to find: it was bolted to the wall directly across the basement from where he stood.

  Large and fire-engine-red, the panel featured two monitor windows. The top window was covered with clear Plexiglas and consisted of three rows of status lights and gauges. Even from across the basement Jason could see that all the status lights were burning a steady green.

  The lower window was Plexiglas-covered as well. Immediately he knew this was the one he was looking for. It had a lockable handle and was hinged, opening outward to allow access to switches, buttons and knobs.

  One of them should allow him to shut down the system.

  The lockable handle could have been a problem, but in typical half-assed bureaucratic fashion, the key had been left in the lock by the maintenance supervisor. A lanyard hung from the end of the key and dangled toward the floor. If he weren’t so grateful, Jason would have shook his head in annoyance at the lapse in security.

  He stepped off the stairs and crossed the floor. Turned the key in the lock and pulled open the panel door. Under each switch and knob was a small placard indicating its function. Some of the descriptions may as well have been written in Latin because they were indecipherable to him, but it appeared different controls applied to different sectors of the building. Apparently the system offered the capability of disabling some sectors of the facility while leaving others up and running.

  The problem was that the sectors were identified by letter-number sequences that meant nothing to Jason.

  A large toggle switch at the very bottom of the array meant something to him, though. Inscribed on the panel beneath the switch were the words SYSTEM SHUTOFF. He tried to imagine any meaning for that descriptor other than the obvious and could come up with nothing.

  So he flipped the toggle switch from right to left.

  Immediately all the status lights on the upper panel switched from green to red. An aural alarm blared, loud and disorienting. Jason searched until he found the switch to disable the alarm and flipped it, breathing a sigh of relief at the return of blessed silence.

  Just to be sure, he took the time to flip all of the other toggles from the ON to the OFF positions. It was probably an unnecessary precaution, but as a lifelong research scientist, Jason Greeley believed in thoroughness the way other people put their trust in God or alcohol.

  He stepped back and ran his eyes over the panel one last time. It looked dead. He shrugged and returned to the stairs to continue the destruction of his life’s work.

  ***

  The gasoline was stored in a maintenance garage behind the main Tamerlane building. Since the facility was surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, and accessible only through a locked front gate via specially encrypted key-card, Colonel Toler had seen no reason to restrict access to the garage.

  Jason trudged the short distance through the storm to the maintenance building, surprised at how much snow had accumulated just in the hours since he and Toler had climbed out of the replacement Humvee following the colonel’s two failed murder attempts.

  Lined up inside the garage were the landscaping and outdoor maintenance equipment: heavy-duty lawn tractor, four-wheel-drive pickup truck with plow attachment, gas-powered lawnmowers, weed-whackers, hedge-trimmers and the like. Several five-gallon gasoline cans stood clustered near the door.

  Jason lifted two of the fully loaded containers and struggled back across the parking lot toward the main building. Seeing the plow truck caused a moment of concern, given the weather conditions. The last thing he needed right now was for the maintenance supervisor to appear, ready to plow the parking lot, and stop Jason from doing what needed to be done.

  Hopefully the man had decided to wait until daylight to plow. It would be a Sunday morning, with little or no activity expected at Tamerlane until Monday. He scanned the area and through the near-whiteout conditions could see no movement in any direction.

  So far, so good.

  He pushed his way through the rear door of the main building that had been his professional home for nearly a decade. A black sense of regret threatened to overwhelm him; disgust for his part in the tragedy that the Lupin Project had become, and self-loathing for allowing himself to be pushed around for so long by a man as morally bankrupt as Frank Toler.

  He set one of the gas containers down just inside the doorway and began moving slowly around the building, circling the interior in a counterclockwise direction, splashing gasoline as high as he could manage on the walls and allowing

  gravity to do what gravity did. The work was backbreaking, the five-gallon container heavy and awkward, but Jason persevered, and within fifteen minutes he’d completed working on the administrative offices and his container was nearly empty.

  Now for the important part: the lab and his office. He’d saved the second five-gallon can just for those areas. He dropped the first container and lifted the full one. Then he moved deeper into the facility.

  ***

  By the time he finished splashing the fuel around his lab, the feeling of regret had metastasized. But it wasn’t for the reasons he would have expected. Surprisingly, he didn’t mind abandoning the Lupin Project. Now that his resolve had hardened, the project represented nothing more than a failed experiment, albeit a long, draining one.

  What scientist wasn’t intimately familiar with failure?

  Rather, the regret was for what his life had become, for how he had wasted the promise of his talent. If he had life to live over again, there were plenty of things he would d
o differently. Pulling the plug on Lupin much sooner—certainly before anyone had gotten killed—would have topped the list, and the hell with the effect it had on his career.

  Not that any of that mattered now.

  The lab reeked of gasoline, the oily stench causing his eyes to water incessantly and a headache to pound at the base of his skull. He placed the second gas container, its fuel level now down to perhaps a gallon, just outside his office door.

  He straightened and listened at the door as he had done earlier. Wolves whined and growled, snapped and snarled, the commotion much more noticeable than it had been even while they were fighting over the remains of Colonel Toler.

  Jason shook his head sadly and shuffled away from his office for the last time. On the right side of the lab was a restaurant-quality refrigerator, and he stepped over and around the supplies he had scattered all over the floor while searching for the tranquilizer gun a little while ago. He never had been able to find the damn thing.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of matches. Ripped one off the pack and slid the head across the striking surface, wincing as he did so. The gasoline fumes were so strong he felt there was at least the possibility of explosion the moment the match lit.

  It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

  The match head flared and no explosion occurred. Jason tossed the match against the wall and watched as it flickered for a moment and then grew bright yellow, flames racing away from the source in both directions. They greedily consumed the gasoline and began licking their way up the walls. The fire was spreading rapidly, much faster than Jason had anticipated and he knew he would have to hurry if he wanted to fully execute his plan.

  He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a big plastic bag filled with raw steaks. He removed a couple of large cuts and began replacing the rest in the fridge. He hesitated and then lifted the bag out again and carried the whole thing back across the lab. No reason to save any of the wolves’ food now.