by Woods, Karen
“And who was the dead man?”
“Someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time with inadequate means of self-defense. This was not cost effective.”
Josh sighed. Putting it mildly. “So, why is Delgado stalking her now?”
“Your wife is right about one thing. He’s gone renegade, working for the highest bidder. His mission, as far as we can tell, is to get inside your operation to steal as much as possible.”
“They got the P100,” Josh said.
“Yeah, I know. The word is that it has already gone overseas. It used to be easier to stop this sort of thing. Once we could put a team on the ground to intercept stolen technology. Now, with file transfers, anyone with a decent internet connection can upload files into a space on the web and then auction off the passwords to the space,” Spider said. “It’s too easy for them, these days.”
“The version they got has serious flaws in it,” Josh replied with satisfaction in his voice. “That design is being scrapped.”
Spider laughed. “Enough flaws it won’t work?” he asked, hope in his voice.
“Not as expected. Geri’s doing a major redesign.”
Spider nodded. “Well, at least they didn’t get a good version of the project.”
“If the mission is to steal projects in development, then why have they launched this effort to terrorize Geri?” Josh said, sidestepping the question. “Seems counterproductive.”
“Misdirection. Revenge. A cover story. Because they can. Take your pick of one or all of the above.”
“How many people are involved?” Josh demanded.
“As near as we can tell, three—maybe four. Albert is little more than misdirection, in the original plan, for sure. I’m not certain how much longer he’ll continue to be a factor. Madmen are dangerous as they are uncontrollable. Clary won’t put up with him much longer.”
“So, Clary is involved?”
“Up to his neck,” Spider said. “He and Delgado. Between the pair of them, I wouldn’t care to be in your wife’s shoes.”
“This is crap,” Josh replied.
“I know. And it’s my job to clean it up before it begins to stink too badly.”
“Hate to tell you this, but you about thirty lives too late.”
“I know. But, I can still keep the odor relatively contained.”
“They sent a letter to the press about the death of Hilda Greene blaming Geri.”
“That’s Albert’s doing, I’m sure. Delgado and Clary are about ready to drop the leash they’ve had Albert on. When he moves against Geri, I suspect she’ll kill him.”
“If she doesn’t, I will, if it is at all justifiable. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.”
“I can’t say I disagree with you on that.”
* * *
Geri settled in at the computer and began working on the redesign of the P100. Dinner time came and went, but Josh let her work, bringing her a roast beef sandwich, some raw vegetables, a kosher dill, and a glass of milk.
It was ten o’clock that night when Geri rose from the computer after saving the work and burning a CD containing the latest version of the design files. She needed to take this to the engineering department and run off a paper printout then go over it carefully, checking her work. But, she thought it would work well, solve all the problems, and be a better way to get the desired results.
She walked from the office into the living room. Josh was sitting there, reading reports. He looked up at her. “Geri?”
“Thanks for letting me work.”
“Looked like you were on a roll.”
“It’s done. I think.”
“You are a wonderworker,” he said. “Come on, I’ll make you some dinner. It’s been a few hours since I brought you that sandwich.”
“I’m not too hungry. I’ll just grab a piece of fruit. I need to go into the shop and print this out on the plotter. I have to see it on paper to proof it.”
“Fine. I’ll come with you.”
“We can do it in the morning. It’s too late tonight.”
Josh stood. “If you need to see it on paper, then we’ll go on in. It won’t be the first time that either of us have been at work at this hour of the night.”
* * *
The engineering offices were normally quiet this time of night. But with the operation to sweep the building looking for listening devices and other nasty objects, there was quite a bit of activity ongoing in the building.
The senior engineer’s office had already been cleared, so she went in there to work. She accessed the files she had burned into the CD, then sent them one by one to the plotter.
Josh went with her to retrieve the prints. He briefly looked them over. “Woman, you are brilliant!”
“So, give me a raise!” she teased, taking back the prints.
Josh laughed as watched her stack and roll the large sheets of paper and put them into a cardboard tube. “I already have,” he told her.
“I was joking.”
“I’m not.”
“Maybe we had better go to my office to talk this out.”
He smiled broadly. “Maybe we had better do that.”
She didn’t know what he was finding so humorous, but she was almost certain that she wouldn’t like it.
Geri went to her office and discovered that the room was empty and her name had been taken off the door. She turned around to look at Josh, just smiling at her.
“What did you do with my office?” she demanded.
“I had it moved. I told you I was going to. Come on.”
Geri’s new office had been a small conference room connecting to both Josh’s office and to the outer office of the executive suite. Now her name was on the door. ‘Gerianne E. Sutherland, Ph.D., Exec. VP, Research and Operations’, was painted on the door.
She opened the door and walked in. The furniture matched that of Josh’s office. She noticed that through the open connecting door.
“Is that my workstation?” she asked as Josh closed the door behind her.
“Certainly. And your files are all arranged exactly as they were in your old office. This will just allow us to work better as a team.”
“It’s your call. It’s your company.”
“It’s our company. We are a partnership that can’t be dissolved.”
She smiled at him, then shook her head. “People are going to talk.”
“Let them. You’ve done the work of an executive vice president of operations for most of the last year, in addition to running R&D. It was high time that you had the title and the raise in salary that went with the responsibilities. Your new business cards are in the box there on the desk. And I settled your mother’s medical debts.”
“Oh, how sweet,” Bill Albert said from the connecting doorway to Josh’s office. He wore the overall uniform of the maintenance team. The name “Stewart” was embroidered on the right pocket. He’d shaved his head, and he wore a mustache that was mostly gray. Geri wasn’t certain if it was real or not. He’d put on a pair of eyeglasses. He also held in his hand a rather large semi-automatic pistol with a suppressor on the muzzle.
“You won’t get by with this,” Josh warned.
“Oh, yes. Yes. I will,” Albert said. “I’ve waited so long for this meeting, Geri. You don’t know how much I’ve anticipated this.”
“I didn’t think it would be long, Bill,” Geri said as she walked around her desk and sat down in her new chair. She positioned herself so that the right side of her body was hidden from his view by the large computer monitor.
Josh took the hint and walked over to the other side of the room to the conversation group there. From Albert’s vantage point, the man would be unable to watch them both as easily if they were apart.
Albert’s attention was entirely on Geri.
Josh looked around the room for something, anything, to use as a weapon. Geri was carrying a firearm. He rarely did, both because he was surrounded by bodyguards, and h
e usually left weapons within easy reach. There was a gun in his desk. There was always a gun in the back of whatever car he was traveling. And there were guns in strategic places around the house. But, there weren’t any weapons in Geri’s office. At that moment, he would have given his left arm for a good .45 caliber pistol or even something like Geri’s 9mm.
He saw the small solid brass globe that had been Geri’s Christmas present from Mandy and him years ago. The sphere was about the size of a baseball and weighed over five pounds. It would have to do.
Bill Albert said, “You are going to die, Gerianne. I’ve waited a long time for this. Kindly remove your pistol from your person and place it on your desk. No sudden moves or I’ll shoot you, then your husband. Understand?”
“I understand,” Geri said, keeping her voice quiet. “But, I don’t have my pistol. I left it at home.”
The expression on Albert’s face said he doubted her.
Geri lied, “Josh convinced me I didn’t need to be armed, since the bodyguards are always around us. After all, he’s never armed.”
Albert laughed softly. “Bad move on your part.”
Geri sighed. “No arguments from me on that.”
“No arguments. That would be a first. You talked Jan into breaking up with me. She was the only woman I ever loved. You poisoned her against me. For that you have to die,” Albert continued, keeping his attention firmly on Geri.
“And you killed Roberta, Clare, and Thom,” Geri stated.
Bill Albert smiled, but the expression was not pleasant. “I did. They had to die, too. If they hadn’t stopped me, I would have left that apartment and disappeared. I would have gone on with my life. Instead, I had to put up with shrinks and medicines and more shrinks. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be in a place where there are bars on the windows? Where you aren’t free to walk outdoor without an escort? Where the major occupation of the rest of the people is listening to the voices in their heads? It isn’t a good way to spend a life. I’m too smart to be lumped in with those people. I spent my days alone, in my room, working on my designs. They are brilliant. But the staff would confiscate them daily. Then the psychiatrists would examine them to see if they said anything about my mental state. There’s nothing wrong with my mind, Geri. Those doctors stole hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars from me by not allowing me to patent my designs. They’ll be the next to pay for what they’ve done to me.”
“Anything that’s happened to you, you have brought on yourself,” Geri stated.
“No. It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t poisoned Jan against me, and if you and your meddling cohorts hadn’t detained me, it would have been a situation that never would have occurred,” he replied. “I would never have raised my hand to Jan, if you hadn’t poisoned her against me, filling her head with those stupid ideas that I was a danger to her. I loved her. I never would have hurt her if she hadn’t wanted to leave me.”
“I don’t take responsibility for your fits of temper and violence. None of us were around when you killed your parents,” Geri told him.
“My parents were evil. They wanted me to major in agriculture then take over the running of the farm. I’m not a farmer. I grew up farming. I hate the smell of pig and cattle dung. I detest tractors and the long hours eating dust in a truck following a combine during harvest. I loathe spring planting, waiting for rain, and hoping that the crops will come up and be good. I hate applying pesticides and herbicides. Most of all, I am thoroughly sick of the idea of anyone working that hard for so little return. I was made for better things than having dirt under my fingernails,” Bill Albert replied, anger in his voice.
“Instead of dirt under your fingernails, you’ve got blood on your hands,” Geri offered as she removed her pistol from her waistband and made certain that the safety was off.
“Your own hands are hardly lily white,” Albert said viciously as he stepped towards her.
“No. But the only time I’ve killed was in self-defense.”
“That’s precisely what it was for me, self-defense. It would have killed me to have to be a farmer. Then, I couldn’t have lived if Jan had married some other man,” Bill Albert ranted. “Don’t you see that? I’m too valuable to the world—I have too much to offer—for me to abide by the same set of limited rules that control everyone else’s behavior. I am above the law. Some people are smart enough to realize that and help me. But you never were that smart. Now, you are going to die. And I’m going to enjoy watching you die.”
Geri stood and raised the pistol in one smooth move. “No one is above the law.”
“You’re a liar. You had the pistol!” He cursed her, his words vicious, crude, and unimaginative.
“Lower your weapon, and I’ll let you live,” she said as his stream of foul words died away.
“To do what? Go back to a mental hospital? I’d rather die,” Albert stated, his voice bitter. “Go ahead, shoot. We’ll die together.”
As this was going on, Josh grabbed the brass globe and hurled it at the other man. The heavy brass sphere struck Albert at his left temple. Albert staggered then crumpled to the floor. The pistol in Albert’s hand discharged with a loud thud as the man fell. The bullet went through Geri’s desk and struck her leg.
Before Geri was done screaming, the bodyguards were in the room.
Chapter Twenty
Josh stood beside Geri’s bed in the emergency room of the hospital. They had been here for a few minutes. The doctor looked at the wound.
“It’s not too serious, as gunshots go. You’re really very lucky. The wound needs to be closed. But, besides having a scar, there shouldn’t be any long term after effects. It really didn’t do much more than go through the skin,” the doctor said. “Are you allergic to anything?”
“Yeah. Bullets,” she teased.
“Any antibiotics or analgesics ever give you problems?” the doctor asked, obviously not amused.
“No.”
“Okay. I’m going to numb your leg and then stitch you up. I’ll give you a course of antibiotics I want you to take for the next ten days just to ward off any possible infection.”
* * *
Josh carried Geri out to the waiting car after the doctor had put six stitches into her leg and had given her both a prescription for antibiotics and instructions for caring for the wound.
“I can walk,” Geri complained.
“You could. You aren’t going to.”
“Josh, you are being overprotective.”
“Then it makes up for the fact I let him shoot you,” Josh said, his voice full of self-condemnation. “I fell down on the job, Geri. I failed you. And you could have been killed.”
“You were wonderful, Josh. You have absolutely nothing to reproach yourself about.”
“And you are too kind, my dear,” Josh told her.
“No. Just truthful, husband.”
The sheriff was waiting for them when they returned home, although the time was well into the wee hours of the morning.
Josh walked into the living room, carrying Geri.
“Well, I see she’s alive,” the sheriff greeted them with a small joke.
“You’re out late, Ray,” Josh said.
“This job doesn’t have regular hours,” Ray replied.
“You don’t have to wrap me in cotton, husband. I won’t break because of this small cut,” Geri groused. “I don’t need to be treated as an invalid.”
“You just relax and let me take care of you,” Josh replied gently. “You’re going to lay down on the sofa right now.”
“You’re impossible, husband!” she answered.
Josh laid Geri down on the sofa and placed pillows under her leg to keep it elevated. “Now, stay there and stay off the leg. That’s an order.”
“The doctor told me that all I had to do was to keep the leg dry. He didn’t say to limit my activities otherwise. This is ridiculous. Josh, it’s not that serious. It really isn’t.”
“Geri,” he
said lowly, “stop protesting and do what you are told.”
“Ray,” Josh spoke to the sheriff, “what do you need from us?”
“I’m assuming it was self defense?” Ray asked, his voice dry.
“If I hadn’t been,” Josh replied in an equally dry tone, “do you think I would have called the authorities?”
Ray smiled. “No. You wouldn’t have. You would have taken care of it with no one the wiser about it. The ME says it looks as though death resulted from a blow to the head with a blunt object. I’m assuming that was from the brass globe on the floor near the body.”
“It was,” Josh said.
Ray looked at Geri. “Your husband always had a good pitching arm.”
“I’ve faced that pitching arm during the company Fourth of July picnics,” Geri said. “I know first hand how fearsome it is.”
Josh laughed, “And you almost always managed to get at least a single, if not more, from me.”
“We played a lot of baseball on base, when I was growing up,” she dismissed. “And I lettered in softball as an undergraduate.”
Josh smiled at her, then he looked at his friend, the sheriff. “Did I tell you this was quite a woman I married?”
“I can see that,” Ray replied.
“What do you need from us, Ray?” she asked.
“You’re in a lot of pain?” the sheriff asked.
“Not a lot, no. I’ve got a few stitches. There was no lasting damage done,” Geri replied. “Give me two weeks, I’ll be good as new.”
“Well,” Ray said, “at least, this trouble is over now. You got the person responsible and you can put it behind you.”
“I doubt it,” Geri said. “He wasn’t working alone.”
Ray looked at Josh for confirmation.
Josh explained, “Two men attacked one of my employees Monday night/early Tuesday morning. We think it was connected. And another of my employees, Hilda, was kidnapped and murdered. There was a phone call from the kidnappers. The ransom demand was that Geri trade herself for Hilda. That body was found earlier today, or rather yesterday.”