Will wouldn’t steal my farm, he thought to himself as he watched the guy inspecting his suit, pulling at a piece of thread that didn’t meet his approval. Will was his Jeeves all right; all he cared about was that Jeff didn’t walk out of the house looking like anything less than a dapper billionaire. Jeff pulled out his own outfits each morning, but he knew Will shuffled them around each day. For all he knew, Will was in on it too, like most wealthy folks, this was one of his little amusements.
So he was going to the University because something was bothering him. A red flag of sorts had popped up. He had tons of funding out there, but he also had his pet projects, things he got excited about, or started up, then usually lost interest in, but kept funding. It was one of those projects that he was going to check on. He was a sci-fi nut, so lots of his personal projects came from watching old movies and TV shows. Occasionally something newer would pique his interest. In 1995 he’d seen that Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak, which had given him an idea. That was back when the Ebola virus was the worry of choice. There’d been books, documentaries, two competing movie projects, all about that issue. How he’d ended up seeing the Hoffman movie he couldn’t recall, must have been on the plane, or maybe he’d produced it. Well, that had given him an idea, he wanted to fund research to find a way to treat this sort of virus outbreak. The movie opened on a village in trouble, with two apparent researchers investigating the problem, only to leave and call in an air strike that drops a hydrogen bomb on the site. Not exactly a cure, but it had gotten Jeff thinking. What if someone could come up with something that could treat those people? A formulation of something that could be dropped from a plane onto an infected village and instantly treat every man, woman, and child on the ground. He didn’t know how they’d do it, but he must have seen something like it on Star Trek or somewhere. He’d talked to Nina about it, who took the idea away with her, wrote up a proposal, ran it past him again, and then sent it out.
That was 12 years ago. Eventually they’d gone with someone at the University in Seattle, a world renowned guy who seemed like a dream choice for the project, and that had been that. From time to time Jeff had heard updates on the progress, or received a copy of an article that had been published in one of the journals. Then it had all faded from his thoughts, until about six months ago that is, when he’d suddenly remembered the whole idea. He’d probably caught a rerun of Outbreak on Spike TV after a James Bond marathon and asked Nina to get him everything she could find on that “Ebola bomb cure thing” as he put it. So she’d done some checking and brought him a big binder full of stuff, but when he read over everything, it didn’t add up. They’d been funding it for a dozen years, and yet, aside from a few early findings and a handful of studies, no publications had been coming out of the lab that in any way related to cures. The foundation had kept sending the checks, and the researcher, some Raj guy, had kept cashing them, but nothing he published to meet the grant requirements seemed to have anything to do with cures. Everything was about ways to propel whatever substance he’d devised into as wide an area as possible. Jeff was no scientist, but everything he was reading seemed to be about “the bomb” part of the idea, with nothing about what exactly would be scattered through the air to stop the infections.
A murmur in his gut told him something was fishy.
He almost always went with his gut. It had treated him well over the years, told him when to start his company, when to leave, when he had cancer, and when something wasn’t right. At the moment, his gut was hurting him, and it wasn’t from the huevos rancheros. He wanted to meet with this researcher face to face, get a tour of the labs, bring along some experts from the foundation and see what they thought was going on. Nina had set up the appointment the week before. He had no doubt the scene at the University was chaos and confusion as they prepared for his arrival. Good. If nothing else, it would be interesting.
He finished the eggs and slid the plate to the edge of the nightstand. He’d had too many. Hopefully Mr. Morita would go easy on him today, but probably not. Will had set up his suit for after practice, and was just coming in with Jeff’s workout clothes. Jeff stood up, took the white pants and top, and walked into the bathroom. He was done thinking about the grant inspection for the time being. Now he was trying to remember the moves Morita had taught him last week. He motioned with his hands absentmindedly, trying to remember that particular defense. Hopefully the old guy wouldn’t pull it on him first thing. Ah who was he kidding? Morita always pulled that stuff on him. Jeff didn’t mind, and Morita always said to him, “You want to be fat, dimheaded billionaire, or do you want to keep sharp?”
Sharp, sensei. Sharp.
Jeff closed the bathroom door and changed into his workout clothes.
“Tim”
His name wasn’t Tim, not even close, but for some reason people always thought that it was. He just looked familiar to them, and the same name always came to mind: Tim. So that was the name he went by here. His friends told him he looked more American than the rest of them, whatever that meant; he took it as an insult, but he had to admit there was something different about him. He had no trouble blending in with society, a face that disappeared in the crowd. No threatening gestures. No severe angle to his brow. Nothing to make people suspicious, or wary, or alert.
He was a man of average qualities. Average looks. Average height, around five foot ten. Average weight. Average build. He had short brown hair and a set of matching eyes. Nothing about him was made to stand out. But still, when he looked in the mirror, he caught glimpses of traits he knew he had to work on. A glint in the eye. A set to his mouth. Both of which he feared would give him away, flashes of pride and anger.
So why was he in America? It was the last place he wanted to be. He didn’t hate Americans. He didn’t hate the country. It just wasn’t his. He wanted to be home, with his family, but he’d been sent away on a mission, and so he had gone. His own country was forever at risk, always in danger of being taken from its people. That was the way things were, the way they’d always been, but it didn’t have to stay that way, not forever.
Growing up, when two kids on a playground get into a tussle and one knocks the other down, common wisdom is to fight back, stand your ground, shove the kid and he’ll learn his lesson. When Tim was a boy and the bully had come for him, he didn’t shove him back. No, Tim had taken a pocketknife and stabbed it between his classmate’s ribs, collapsing his lung and bubbling blood to his lips. The boy had left Tim alone after that. He had to; he’d ended up in the hospital. Tim on the other hand had wound up in a special school, one specially designed to reform young boys who stabbed their comrades with pocket knives. But the school didn’t reform him, it couldn’t. He hadn’t stabbed an equal, he’d stabbed a bully, someone lesser than himself. An infidel. Even then, he knew the only way to make your point, to make it last, was to strike first, and if not first, then to strike hardest. It someone hurt one of yours, you killed two of theirs. If they used clubs and stones, you used fire.
That was what he was doing today, arming his people with fire.
They’d been preparing for this day for years. Finding their targets, making their plans. They knew what they needed, they’d learned where to find it, and they set about the scheme methodically. There were issues of money, all the variables of living in one country with the intent of gaining weapons for another. For the last year they’d known exactly what they wanted and where to find it.
He stood before the mirror in the front hall of the home he’d lived in for the past two years. This was one of several places they had set up during their time in the U.S.. It was a nice home. He’d actually grown fond of it. He really didn’t mind Americans. He didn’t want to hurt them, but all the same, he wasn’t one of them. He liked the place he had been staying, but it could never be home. He knew the facts, and they were hard ones. Sometimes some sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Some of those sacrifices would come today. He crouched down for a moment, unzipping a d
ark green duffel bag, once more going through its contents, methodically checking each item, each piece of equipment. His movements were mechanical, swift and precise, as they would have to be for the rest of the day. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t let emotions come into play, not for what he had to do. Half his men were outside. The rest of them were on their way. They’d descend on the building at the predetermined time. Everything was set. There was no stopping it. No turning back.
He zipped up the bag, heaved its weight over his shoulder, and walked out the door.
Behind Closed Doors
Fucking in broom closets was hot as hell. And it only grew hotter as time went on.
Nick and Morgan had made that discovery early on.
When they first made the leap from flirtation to physical relationship, they’d tried to keep it out of the office. Nick knew there were rules regarding affairs between faculty and students. He’d never heard anything about relationships between staff and students, and doubted any guidelines were in place, but still, he didn’t want to run the risk of learning the hard way. Plus, his boss was a world-class, bureaucratic tight ass (ironic considering her penchant for carbs — donuts, scones, family-sized fiddle faddle — which had left her physical ass a real estate challenger second only to the British Empire at its global peak) so he’d seen no sense in taking chances.
For the first few months they’d gone to Morgan’s apartment each afternoon. Then she’d started teasing him. He’d be sitting at his desk, reading some God awful paper about God knows what, when she’d walk by his cubicle, stop for a moment, then duck in and kiss him on the neck, then on the mouth. By the time her seduction techniques had advanced to running just the tip of her tongue up to his earlobe as she slipped her hand down to his crotch and gave him a gentle squeeze, Nick had had enough of the self-restraint business. He sat frozen, shocked, but tingling. Morgan left the cubicle, walked down the hallway, and out of the office. Nick followed close behind. They went looking for a place to fuck, and found one in the corner of an all-but-forgotten wing of the psychology department. To anyone walking down the unlit hall, the doorway looked like the entrance to a closed-up bathroom, but when you slipped around the corner and down the short hallway, you were met by a door with no sign. They’d pushed on that door slowly, not knowing if they’d find someone on the other side, but fortunately, all they’d uncovered was an empty room, about six feet square, containing two brooms and an old desk chair. A soft desk chair.
Morgan unzipped the front of Nick’s jeans as soon as he closed the door, slipping her hand inside and rubbing him as she unbuttoned her shirt. It was all Nick could do to get the door locked before falling back into the chair. She pulled off his pants, then stood up, slipped off her panties, and walked over to him. He leaned forward, cupping her breasts and slowly twirling his tongue around one nipple as she climbed onto the chair, straddled him with her legs, and lowered herself down over him.
That was how they’d done it in the closet that first time, and that was how they were doing it now. He knew they were pushing their luck. By this point, if someone in the office didn’t know what they were doing, then they must have at least had their suspicions. Today of all days they couldn’t afford to be slipping out for 20 to 30 minutes at a time for sexcapades around the health sciences complex. Someone would be needing something from one them, and when they couldn’t find Nick at his desk, or Morgan at the front table, they’d starting putting one and one together. The thing was, he didn’t care. He wrapped his arms under her and pulled Morgan tighter against him as she ground her body into him. He kissed her breasts and ran his tongue up her neck, losing himself in her blond hair and the sounds of her moaning.
They’d get back to the office soon enough. For now there were better things to do.
* * *
He’d gotten off the bus earlier than usual that day. There had still been that damp, cool feeling of morning in the air as he walked into the building. The front lobby was filled with the usual cast of characters: the homeless guy who cooked all of his meals in the microwave near the vending machines; the group of lab technicians, all in their fifties, with scraggly beards and flannel shirts, who sat at the table each morning, drinking coffee, reading the paper, and laughing away — eternal graduate students. Then there were the real students, studying their papers, highlighting pages in their books, or talking on their cell phones before their morning classes. Nick stumbled past all of this, half asleep, but mentally restless. He was thinking about the writing he’d done that morning. It had been going slowly lately. He was working on a novel, but fighting his own impatience to be done. He wondered if he should try the same story as a screenplay. No. He had to be patient. Then his mind went to Morgan, and he tried to force himself to think about work.
He walked through the department door to find the offices abuzz with activity. The administrative staff was copying handouts and making last-minute adjustments to the schedule. This was the big day. Jeff Pepper would be here around lunchtime to go through the facility and talk to Raj.
Raj.
Fucking cock.
Nick hated the man. He’d probably be in good and early today, with his pompous little rooster walk and his cracking ankle. That’s how he always knew when that asshole was walking by; he could hear his goddamn ankle cracking with each and every step.
Nick rounded the corner and started down the main hallway, bumping into Sandy, the main administrator, the one with the sizable posterior real estate holdings.
“Good morning,” he said reluctantly.
“Oh, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. Happy MONDAY!”
“Big day...”
“To say the least. We’re barely gonna make it. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Raj hasn’t even shown up yet and I just-”
Nick mentally tuned her out as she disappeared into the copy room. He kept on walking, lest she come back out and undergo her first mood swing of the day. Sandy was always in a tizzy about something, but he knew that was the way she liked it. Having someone like Jeff Pepper coming in was the ultimate excuse for panic and anxiety. She'd get everything done in plenty of time. Hell, it was probably already done. She was not a busy woman, just an excitable, self-important bureaucracy fetishist.
He got to his cubicle, turned on the fluorescent desk lights, and switched on the computer. He was getting a bit more excited about Jeff Pepper’s visit too. He wasn’t one for computers or programming, or even for business really, but something about that guy was fascinating. He had companies for everything. After he co-founded the software place he’d gotten sick, really sick, then he’d recovered and started founding all sorts of funky places. Museums, film companies, construction companies, research labs. Nick had tried getting jobs at a few of them when he first got out of school, but he was never able to get his resume through the logistical hoops set up by all of Pepper’s foundations. Maybe it was just as well; cool as all they seemed, he’d heard they weren’t the greatest places to work. Course, this certainly wasn’t the best place to work either. There was nothing creative about his job, which had been fine at first, but now it was starting to wear on him. That was no doubt one reason his daytime trysts with Morgan were becoming more and more frequent. Well, that and the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl, which worried him. He’d have to resolve things with Kendra soon. That was over, he was sure of it. She must have met someone else, and the truth was, he didn’t care all that much. He needed to talk to Morgan too. He didn’t want to scare her off, but she was just a sophomore in college, after all. Boy, life was a pain in the ass.
Speaking of pains in one’s ass, that was when he heard the dreaded cracking sound strutting down the hall toward him. Fucking Raj. All in all, the job shouldn’t have been that bad. He didn’t know what the hell he was editing, and the field could not have interested him any less. Yeah, drugs went through peoples bodies, and they were absorbed and processed in all sorts of fascinating and mind-blowing ways, but Nick didn’t give a sh
it. He wasn’t a scientist. Let someone else spend his life shriveling up under fluorescent lights, recording data, and writing boring, boooring research papers to report their findings, just don’t let that person be him. So he went to work, and he edited the papers, which was like trying to put grammar in a page of Chinese text, it was all foreign to him. A few of the professors were nice enough. They appreciated his work. At Christmas they’d given him Starbucks gift cards.
Then there was Raj. Raj was the department prima donna, the type of academic researcher Nick was starting to learn existed in every department at the university. One of the secretaries had described Raj perfectly during Nick’s first week on the job. Raj was the egomaniacal rooster in the department hen house. He sat in his office, appearing terribly, terribly busy and important, he assigned papers and studies, he made phone calls, went to meetings, and he wandered around telling people what he wanted them to do, but all in all, he himself did nothing. In the year that Nick had worked in the department, about 85 percent of his work had come from Raj. Raj had papers to submit. Raj had publisher proofs to correct. Raj had monumentally important reports to write, articles to cowrite. It was that whole cowriting bit that really pissed Nick off. The guy didn’t write a thing! He just had his post-docs and collaborators put together dozen upon dozens of drafts, then he’d cherry pick the bits he liked and slap his name on the front of them. An exploiting, plagiarizing fraud. He used people. Nick realized this was how the man did everything. His researchers were all from countries like India, China, and Japan. Their visas all came through Raj’s office, he chose whom he wanted, then the college filed the forms, so that once these researchers were there, working as post-docs for Raj, they were basically indentured servants, subject to the whims and abuses of Raj Gupta, researcher extraordinaire. Nick’s dislike for the man was growing worrisome. He hated the way the guy talked down to him in his singsong voice. He hated the way his researchers scampered in and out of the guy’s office, bobbing their heads submissively, all but tripping over themselves as they attempted to keep their great leader happy. The guy was beneath contempt, but Nick was generous and heaped him with mountains of gooey disdain. The one thing that bothered Nick the most about Raj, and the thing that warned him that Raj was coming while simultaneously tensing up every muscle in his back, was the sound of Raj’s goddamn cracking ankle. He couldn’t understand it. The guy worked in a medical research complex, attached to a hospital. He spent his days surrounded by reports on medical findings and ways to keep the human body running smoothly, and yet, as he strutted around the hallways, head held high, his little moustache squished against his nose by his pursed upper lip, his ankle made a sharp cracking noise with each step. It was the most annoying sound Nick had ever heard. It drove him up the walls. It made him long for Morgan to come in, so they could sneak away, and fool around, and be free of that sound and everything it stood for. Course, today he couldn’t afford to mess around. Raj would be in fine form. He had important visitors coming and there was no time to waste. And now, here he was, and with him, that joyful crack crack crack of his grinding, scraping, popping bones.
Billionaires, Bullets, Exploding Monkeys (A Brick Ransom Adventure) Page 3