* * *
“So what’s the plan?” Nina asked.
“What do you mean ‘what’s the plan?’” David fired back.
They were still marching down the corridor behind the hospital PR guy.
Jeff said nothing. His mouth was held tightly closed as they careened through the building. Students bustled past him. This was bringing back memories from years ago, high school, when he and his best friend had snuck into this same campus to play with the college’s computers. They had no idea what they were doing at the time, but now he knew they’d been laying the groundwork that had made their fortunes. Sometimes that bothered him. It felt like he’d had a part in one big thing, the creation that had made him his money and set him off from the rest of everything. His other projects were never that successful, but the funny thing was, he was so fucking rich, he couldn’t seem to spend the money fast enough. He’d lose several billion dollars, only to find that interest, investments, and shares in the original goose, the one that laid his golden eggs, had once again gone up in value. Weird how things worked out.
“I just don’t think this guy is producing.” Nina was saying. “And I know Jeff feels the same way.”
“About..?” Jeff asked.
David and Nina looked at him with darting, confused eyes.
“About Dr. Gupta not producing,” Nina replied.
Jeff gathered his thoughts. Time to stop daydreaming. Whether he made the money back after he lost it, that was beside the point. He hated losing money, but more than that, he hated being fucked with. This guy Raj Gupta was fucking with him. Jeff stopped walking. Nina and David took another couple of steps, turned around, and walked back to him. The PR guy, who was about ten feet in front of them, also stopped and stood in the middle of the hallway, looking back, wondering if he should walk back to them. David shot him a glance that said, Mind your business. Jeff took a step back into a recessed doorway.
“I think this fucker is producing, but I don’t think he’s producing what we asked for. We probably don’t even want to know what the fuck he’s been doing with the money.”
Nina looked at him. Her eyes were two cold gray marbles.
Jeff continued, “I just want to come in, confirm my suspicions, then get out of our arrangement with him. I feel like we’re funding a weapons maker.”
“Are we?” David asked. “How much do we know?”
Nina held her gaze on Jeff as she answered, “Enough.”
“And what do we do once we pull the rug out from under him? Run off with his work?”
“No,” Jeff responded, “We call Ransom at the FBI.”
* * *
The little boy was looking at them, but Tim felt nothing. That’s what he told himself.
His team’s scouts had entered the building through the maintenance stairwells. Their goal was to take in the general situation before they started the big show. Once the first 10 of them had made it past the security counters, they fanned out and began weaving their way through the corridors and back halls of the hospital’s research facilities. Their weapons were all hidden away under their fire department uniforms.
Tim walked out of the stairwell and into the main hall. Two of the men directly below him on the chain of command, Guy and Myer, were walking on either side of him. Their expressions were set in stone. Tim’s face was blank. He was here, but his mind and his heart were detached from the events at hand. This was a task that had to be carried out. There was no choice in the matter, like breaking the turkey’s neck -- setting its head on the chopping block. It was necessary if a man wanted to feed his family, wanted them to survive. No one would give his people what they needed. They had to take it for themselves.
The little boy sat on the carpet in the emergency waiting room. He must have been five or six years old, tops. Tim watched him as he and his men passed by, their heavy boots thumping on the linoleum floor. The boy was playing with a metal fire truck, pushing it back and forth in place, making “rumming!” sounds to himself. The boy stopped short as he looked up, catching his breath. His awed expression, the sparkle of innocence in his eyes -- if Tim had any doubts about their mission, he would have felt them then. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Besides, no one was going to get hurt, no one in this wing of the hospital, anyway. That wasn’t part of the plan.
Tim caught Myer glancing at him from the corner of his eye. He clenched his teeth and walked faster. They were almost to the entrance of the Health Sciences Building.
* * *
“Sir, you have been receiving and spending very large checks from my organization for the last several years, and now, I would like to know where that money has been going!” Jeff spat out.
“If you’ll listen to me, I can explain how your funding has been put to excellent use,” Raj said, his heavy accent unfurling the words down the length of his tongue.
Nina stepped forward. “We’ve seen your usual progress reports. We’re just interested in seeing some actual progress-”
“Well it doesn’t work that way!” Raj interjected.
“Yes, it does,” Nina shot back. “We’re not the NIH. We can pull the plug if you don’t cooperate.”
They were standing at the entrance to Raj’s lab. The one in the basement. Jeff looked around him. It was almost exactly like he had pictured it. Science-fiction-white hallways, brushed metal doorways and trim, double doors at the entrances to adjoining wings.
They entered the Department of Immunology’s conference room at 12 o’clock sharp, and they were down in the labs ten minutes later. Jeff knew he had met this Gupta fellow before, but he remembered the guy’s handshake immediately. Gupta’s hands were dry and chapped. Scientist or not, this was never a good sign. Jeff took it as a warning that the guy’s life was not in balance. Dry, irritated skin meant a lack of personal awareness, which meant a numbing to one’s own comfort and position in the world, which revealed detachment from the physical, the immediate, which meant trouble. Detached people missed the simple things, the obvious facts. They were also much more likely to compromise their values, or rationalize actions that lead to tragedies. Some might have found Jeff’s thinking a tad melodramatic, but that was okay, he could afford to be that way, and in his experience, melodramatic or not, he was usually right.
Raj had given them the tour, but he’d shown them nothing. He wouldn’t take them into the back rooms. Jeff could see through the windows into the front of the labs, where workers in white coats bustled back and forth. In Raj’s lab they’d been shown only a row of monkeys, each hooked up to a series of monitoring devices. None of the animals looked sick. They sat in their cages, IVs and catheters dropping from their bodies, clear plastic tubes fed through the metal bars of the cages. There appeared to be no research going on.
Nina was rattling off their demands.
“We’re going to need a detailed report on your findings, the status of the project, and an explanation of where all of this is going before we’ll release the next round of funding.” She paused. “And we’re going to need some video documentation and live demonstrations.”
“These are highly unusual demands for a research grant,” Raj sputtered.
“Like I said, we’re not the government. This is private money we’ve been giving you, and in return, you need to give us a little information back. We need to know we’re funding the right individuals and that we can trust the work you’re doing.”
Raj stared back at her, momentarily caught off guard.
“Trust the work that I’m doing?”
Jeff nodded.
“For all we know, you could be building a weapon down here instead of a cure.”
Raj paused for a moment.
“Are you cutting my funding?”
“Let’s just say we’re putting things on hold,” David cut in.
“For how long?”
“That will be discussed,” Nina said.
“Mr. Pepper,” Raj stammered. “I am doing important research. Everything I’ve d
one has been relevant to the intent of your grant.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Jeff responded.
“What do I have to do to make your happy?” Raj muttered.
There was a moment of silence, then Nina cleared her throat.
“Why don’t we go upstairs and talk that over.”
* * *
Morgan was breathing heavily now. She pressed her mouth against the side of his neck, biting into the skin as she tried to muffle her moans. He moved beneath her as she straddled him in the chair. They were both getting close. He tried to slow down, not wanting to finish before her. It didn’t look like that was gonna be a problem.
She was moving faster now, shifting her feet to lift herself up and down. Nick held his hands on her hips, guiding her body over him, back and forth. They looked each other in the eyes as Morgan’s lips curled into a sort of grimace -- a look of startled surprise, then a flash of concern as her teeth bit down on her lower lip -- then her mouth pulled up in a wicked smile.
“I’m coming.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick gasped back.
“Yeah.”
Then she was leaning into his chest, digging her nails into his shirt as her movements slowed, and her body ground against him in spasmic, quivering bursts. She was kissing his neck and growing still when the fire alarms started going off. The sirens weren’t nearby. It sounded like they were at the far end of the hospital. They were never for real anyways, the latest in a series of drills and false alarms. Half the time none of the faculty even left the building. What was the rush?
Besides, now it was his turn.
Morgan wrapped her arms around Nick’s shoulders as he held her tightly and tilted her back and onto the floor. Morgan wrapped her legs around his back and pulled Nick deeper.
“Ohh, baby,” she moaned softly in his ear.
Neither one of them heard the alarms after that.
* * *
Tim’s right hand man, “Simon,” walked out of a maintenance stairwell in the hospital’s front courtyard and glanced around the corner. Dozens of people were rushing out of the buildings. He pulled out a two-way radio and marched around the corner. Like the rest of his men, all of whom were now flooding the building, Simon was dressed in full Seattle firefighter equipment.
The Surgery Pavilion was located in the hospital’s east wing. That’s where the alarms were going off. Simon didn’t know the standard operating procedure if alarms should go off during surgery. Either way, it had to fray a doctor’s nerves. Glad I’m not having bypass surgery, he thought to himself as he approached the front counter. Volunteers were wheeling patients out of the cancer clinic. The wheelchairs were mostly occupied by children, many of whom looked excited to see firefighters entering the building. Others looked too sick from treatment to even lift their heads. Simon brushed past one boy, probably in his early teens, whose hairless head and skin looked sore and red from chemotherapy. The boy sat slumped in a chair as a large middle-aged woman in medical scrubs wheeled him towards the exit. The woman looked up at Simon.
“Man, you guys are fast! The alarms just went off!”
Simon said nothing, just marched past her towards the western side of the facility.
The boy gripped the handles of his wheelchair and slowly tilted his head up to look at Simon’s face.
* * *
Renoir hoisted a stack of paperwork and tapped it on the side of his desk. The first task of the day was taming the chaos of his work area. He was stepping down as chair of the department later that year, and the amount of work required for that transition alone was staggering. He had never been one for systems. His office was the picture of chaos. Piles and piles, and piles of paper lined every flat surface. The room was freezing cold. Stacks of paperwork blocked sunlight that might otherwise shoot its way through the windows, and papers covered every inch of ventilation. One day soon he’d get all of this cleared up. In the meantime, his lucky cardigan sweater made up for any temperature problems.
At the moment, he was devising a scheme that involved arranging the paperwork in order of importance. In his mind, everything on legal-sized paper was unimportant. If it was of any value, it would be printed and bound in hardcover books. The discard piles were at the far end of his desk. They were getting taller by the minute.
He leaned back and let out a long sigh.
“Shit,” he muttered.
That’s when the alarms went off in the distance. Then, to Renoir’s surprise, as he turned towards the entrance of his office, a man dressed all in black stepped into the doorway, raised a gun in his hand, and pulled the trigger.
Morgan
Eventually, as the alarms continued blasting, they decided it was time to get out and look around.
They’d just done it again. The latest in their ongoing series of sexual exploits in the workplace. God it felt good. They couldn’t help themselves. They didn’t even try. It had been almost a year since they’d first gotten together. Yeah, she knew he was married, but the way she saw it, she and Nick were together. His “wife” hadn’t called him in months. When they first met and started flirting with the possibilities of a relationship, he had tried calling Kendra constantly, but with only limited success. She was fucking someone else, Morgan was sure of it. Why else would a woman leave her husband on one side of the country, then resist his every effort to maintain the relationship? Morgan couldn’t understand this, but then again, she couldn’t understand many of her close female friends either. She had her personal aspirations. She didn’t just leap into things with one guy, and then the next, but if she felt the pull between herself and a man, she felt the pull, an undeniable, unavoidable need to be with that person, intimately, almost violently. She’d felt that with Nick the first time she met him.
She’d come back to school early the previous fall (technically still summer) to set up a new apartment with a half-dozen girls she’d met through classes and her sorority. By mid-August they’d done the late summer rounds of Seattle. She’d gone to the parties, hung out with her girlfriends, messed around with the Greek guys she knew on campus. But there had been nothing serious. Nothing until the day she walked down to the Health Sciences Building on south campus, had an interview with one or two of the faculty for a student assistant position, then walked out into the hall, and in her nervous post-interview haze, had glided over to Nick’s cubicle and seen him for the first time. He was certainly nothing special. His hair was short and sort of mussed, like he’d combed it fresh out of the shower, then forgotten to brush it again after pulling on his t-shirt. He was short, just an inch of two higher than her 5’6” build. He had the look of a once scrawny college runner, one who was having trouble adjusting to civilian life and was starting to get the tiniest signs of a bulge from too much sitting, and too much beer to ease the desk-job woes. She thought that was cute. But if one thing got Morgan on the hook from that first moment, it was his eyes. He had great eyes, deep blue, with little trails of darkness sliding back into the pupils. One glance and she was lying on her back in the grass, watching a bottle rocket as it trailed up into space, shimmering and shaking, the dark cone now the center of this man’s eyes. Below those eyes were the marks of disappointment, the slightest wrinkles of age, or fatigue, that rose and fell along with the laugh lines at the sides of his mouth.
She knew she could get him to smile. She had her charms, and she used them. A flutter butterflied in her ribcage as she stepped forward, brushed her long blond hair back over her shoulders, and smiled. Her skin tingled. Her breath came easily. She didn’t remember what she talked about, but it had worked. By the end, she’d reached out, put her hand on his arm, and known that she had him. Now she just had to find a way to extricate him from his disinterested wife.
The sex might help.
That had started quicker than usual, and it had been better than ever. First at her apartment. Then they’d gone away for a long weekend, a record-breaking weekend. Then, when waiting to go back to her place in the evening
s had become unbearable, they’d started fucking at work. That was some of the best sex they’d ever had.
Was it illicit? Of course. Dangerous? In a way. But she didn’t want to think it through too much, she just wanted to do it. And do it they had. She couldn’t begin to count the number of times it had happened, or the number of hideaways they’d discovered while slipping away. Suffice to say, in a teaching hospital like the University, it was easy to find places to go at it. She’d just lean into Nick’s cube, give him a look that said everything, and he’d follow her out the back door. A short, anxious walk through the building, then the switch of a lock, some fumbling with their clothes, and she was on top of him.
They’d just done it again.
Morgan stood, pulled on her panties, and walked over to Nick. She leaned down and gave him a long, lingering kiss.
The fire alarms continued ringing in the distance.
“Maybe we ought to pay attention to that,” Nick said.
“I thought it was just a drill. It’s always a drill.”
“Sometimes it’s not. Drills never last this long.”
“All right then, lets go,” she whispered with a wicked smirk. “I got what I came for.”
She kissed him again, her teeth pulling softly on his lower lip. He stood, one hand on her back, and opened the door to the hallway. The sirens were blaring, but the hall was remained dark and empty. They stepped out into the open, their shoes tapping softly on the carpet underfoot.
“Do you think Jeff Pepper’s gotten here yet?”
“He’s supposed to be,” Nick replied.
“Think he’ll like Raj?” Morgan moaned.
“I sure as hell hope not.”
Morgan reached down and took Nick’s hand. His fingers wrapped around hers, giving them a squeeze. He shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. He loved her, she knew it. She wanted to take him away with her, or just back to her apartment — make a pot of coffee, curl up on the couch, and watch a movie. That would be nice. Quiet and intimate. He wasn’t happy at work. She wasn’t happy without him around. Unfortunately he had to work, and there was no point in her skipping out if he had to stay in this hellhole. So they walked on, and as they walked, a chill crept up Morgan’s spine. She could see it in her mind, like the cartoon ice in a Bug’s Bunny short, creeping and crackling down a thermometer as the mercury shot down, then exploded through the bottom. She could practically feel the ice crackling up each bony link in her back.
Billionaires, Bullets, Exploding Monkeys (A Brick Ransom Adventure) Page 5