by Bradley West
Tom saddled up and offered his best wishes. Greg made a show of returning the M-4, spare magazines, and ammunition but secretly held onto the 9mm Glock and a box of shells. Though Steph would never approve, Vegas was a dangerous city.
Stephanie sat up front with Tyson, who was still sluggish with a discolored lump on his head. She was pleased that she had produced enough milk to feed the little guy. Tyson spoiled the mood by barely nursing.
“Let’s drive,” Stephanie said when Greg climbed into the Silverado. “I want to get our baby to the Children’s Hospital tonight.”
“Sal said we should stay away from the major roads and lay up until sundown when it’s safer. Besides, that hospital may not even be open, especially for non-Covid cases.”
“I know what my dad said. I also know we haven’t seen another soul and we have four doses of the Dark Cure that won’t be worth anything if the ice melts. We need to set off with the A/C on high, and we need to leave now. Otherwise, we should just drive back, rejoin the convoy and wait for Tyson to die.”
Greg recognized that tone and knew there was no arguing. He pulled out of the parking lot and nervously checked the freeway in both directions.
* * * * *
Greg pleaded ignorance though he knew that his Asperger’s made him a poor liar. “I don’t know where the convoy stopped because we arrived late last night back in the desert. I slept when we drove out to look for a vehicle.”
“Let me have your phone and password,” said the big man in the overalls.
Greg unlocked his phone and handed it over. “I don’t have the GPS coordinates of where we were.”
Overalls dropped the phone onto the blacktop upon confirmation of his abductee’s statement. “You either guide us back to where you came from, or we take you ten miles into the desert and leave you.”
“If you leave us out here, we’ll die. My wife and son are sick.” In desperation, Greg played his trump card: “On the floor of the front seat there’s a cooler with four Covid-20 doses. We were going to use them to pay for my baby’s medical treatment in Las Vegas. Take those but let us keep the pickup.”
Overalls snapped his fingers and a man with a big revolver and bushy black beard double-timed it to the Sierra and popped out with a small Coleman cooler. “It’s heavy, Wallace. I can hear the ice rattlin’ around.”
“Yesterday morning, my wife saved lives by offering herself as a hostage,” Greg persisted.
Wallace spewed a stream of tobacco juice on Greg’s shoes and waved the barrel of his shotgun derisively. “Didn’t save nobody in the end. We lost three men at the roadblock, eleven more at the medical center, plus eight wounded.”
“And two more dead at the fire station,” the bearded man said.
“Hugh Vargo died this morning of the Covid and two men were hurt bad when their truck rolled after hitting your spike strips,” Wallace said. “And here you are with the balls to tell me your wife is something special.”
“I had nothing to do with any of that,” Greg protested. “My wife leads the peace movement in our group. We have no quarrel with you.”
The third man shouted from the second vehicle: “Wallace! Spider! There’s a call on the radio from Jim. Take a listen.” Spider hustled over while Wallace covered the prisoners.
“We’re off I-80 at the semi,” Upchurch said. “The Californians left a cooler with eight Covid cures in it, plus instructions and a chip. It’s a peace offering.”
“Jim, it’s Spider. Do you have the doses in hand?”
“Yes, I’m looking at them.”
“Describe what you have and I’ll compare it to the four doses two of their hippies and their baby have in their pickup. We cut them off headed south. I’ll bet a case of beer that they have the real McCoy and you’ve got more decoys.”
“You’re talking about Stephanie, the woman with the hurt baby who offered herself as a hostage yesterday morning? The one who’d blow away in a strong wind, yet donated her blood for us?”
“That’s the one, wearin’ the same clothes.”
After three minutes of back and forth, Upchurch and Spider agreed each vial contained the same material down to the hand-lettered labels, quantities and viscosity. Either both sets were genuine, or both were fakes: they were the same material.
“Give them back their vaccines and let them go with our apologies,” Upchurch said.
“That’s not the play,” Spider said. “I say we let ’em go, but keep the Dark Cure. That’s four more of our people we save. They have a barrel of gas I’m taking too.”
“Send that blessed woman and her family on their way with our thanks plus all their gas and vaccines. For once in the brief life of the sorry State Line Militia, let’s do the right thing, and maybe we turn around our town’s bad karma. That’s an order.”
* * * * *
Burns took his time walking down the stairs as Muller wasn’t going anywhere. The desk clerk had changed since this morning and a woman with “Cheryl” on her name tag visually recoiled at the sight of his swollen and deformed face even hidden by his mask. “Hello. My name is Burns. There should be a package here.”
Flushed, Cheryl looked behind the vacant concierge’s podium and came up with a brown paper bag with “Burns” written on it. “Is this it?” she asked as she passed it across.
“I expect so,” he said, glancing inside and confirming the contents. “The person on duty before could turn on the router. I need an hour online and will pay the same amount, three hundred dollars.”
“Um, the router drains the backup batteries and when they’re run down, we won’t be able to operate the elevator in emergencies or turn on guestroom electricity for the two hours a day we promised.”
“I’ll put three hundred in Bitcoin into your personal wallet, if you have one.”
“I have one, all right. I’ll give you the account details. Only one hour and no refunds if the internet dies.”
“I’ll also need a new room on a low floor.” One of the few advantages to having only one set of clothes—stolen yesterday off an EMT—was that luggage wasn’t a concern other than the spare foodstuffs, battery-powered eggbeater, cup, and straw he’d already loaded into his rucksack back in the room. She squared him away for another five hundred U.S. dollars, that sum destined for the hotel’s cash register.
“One last thing, I need a new laptop.” As Burns suspected, there were enough missing hotel personnel that it wasn’t hard to convince Cheryl to let him scrounge around in the admin department. He found a nice Lenovo ThinkPad and transferred three thousand and three hundred dollars in Bitcoin to Cheryl’s wallet as his first act.
After creating a password-protected hard drive partition, next up was a Tor browser download. He opened the one-to-one Tox chat that he and Katerina had used when they’d negotiated her consulting contract. That was less than three weeks ago, but it could as well have been three years given everything that had happened since. His offer was a simple one: he’d gift her twenty-five thousand dollars out of his revenue split for a dose of the Dark Cure and a syringe when they met tonight. She would later offer Norris fifty grand—also paid by Burns—of ostensibly her own money to make it look like she favored bringing Muller back into the fold. That seemed like the right mix of cash and bullshit to buy the peace until he was done with them all.
A check on the Pirate Bay and Cyber Souk leads produced nibbles but no firm sales. He took Muller’s advice, created three sock puppet accounts, and placed firm one-hundred-fifty thousand-dollar orders.
Essential tasks concluded, Burns shut down his new laptop and shifted his attention to Muller. The man had quite the temper. How best to handle him? As tempted as he was to send Cheryl upstairs with the paper bag containing a spray bottle of acetone and a box cutter, there was mileage to be gained by pulling the thorn out of the lion’s paw. “Cheryl, be a dear and turn on the elevator. I have a bad knee and need to help a friend in a sticky situation up on level six.”
CHAPTER EIG
HTEEN
New Beginnings
Friday, July 17, 2020: Berkeley, California; and outside Winnemucca, Nevada; late afternoon into evening
Norris spoke through the closed lab door: “You’re on the clock. We have a cop hogtied downstairs and the idiot police will come here eventually. Either finish mixing the juice or find a stopping point and let’s move.”
“I can shut it down in fifteen minutes,” Katerina replied, “put everything on ice and restart later tonight or tomorrow. It will cost us an extra five or six hours. If you can keep your panties on, we’ll finish in three hours. If we move, I’ll need mobile refrigeration, a new sterile lab space with electricity and more disinfectant for the equipment. What’ll it be?”
Three hours? Did they have that long before the Berkeley PD figured out that the patrol car rolled into San Pablo Bay didn’t have the missing officer’s body inside and came knocking? Complicating matters, he still had Souls out making drug deliveries and collecting cash from those fatalistic abusers who were too poor to flee yet flush enough to go out in a blur. If the Souls blew town now, he’d still have to leave someone behind to collect the cash and bring it along
Other than himself, Norris lacked candidates for that vital role. His couriers also would run off with the drugs and cash if they figured they weren’t getting a Dark Cure shot. “What about a conference room in the main library? We can shuttle the equipment over and have you back up in less than an hour.”
“A library’s full of dust and book mold. That’s a terrible idea,” she said from behind the safety of the locked door.
“Three hours and not a second more.” Norris walked back to the requisitioned professor’s office and rebooted the PC.
“When we’re done, I’ll set aside the first two doses for us,” Katerina said to Specs.
“Norris will kill us if he finds out we shorted him,” Specs said.
“Norris will never know,” Katerina said. Her tongue probed the inside of her swollen, lacerated cheek and wiggled the loose molar where the backhanded knuckles had landed. She would make Norris pay and the first two injections were only the beginning.
* * * * *
Burns exited the elevator, turned his back on the cursing man down the hall, limped to the room, unlocked the door and entered. He left Muller’s Walther on the nightstand while collecting the .38 S & W revolver and a box of ammo. One more sweep through the kitchen turned up a mixing spoon and spoiling yogurt in the warm fridge. He added them to his bulging pack and bid room 638 adieu.
By the time he had dragged his bad leg the length of the hallway, his mood had darkened as the Percs faded. Muller aims to steal my information and either abandon or murder me. My natural ally is Muller’s enemy, Norris. However, Norris and his men will shoot Muller on sight, which would leave me at the Twisted Souls’ mercy.
Muller had been busy in Burns’ absence, using his Amex black card’s metal edge to separate his right thumb and index finger from a bloody doorknob. Pulling up well short, Burns stared at a face so contorted with anger, pain and hatred that he considered either fleeing or putting two rounds into Muller’s scarred cheek.
Instead, a stream of consciousness flowed from Burns’ mangled mouth: “You and I can get along. I have solvent to free your hand.”
Muller responded by breaking eye contact and inserting the makeshift blade between his right palm and the metal knob. A fresh rivulet of blood ran down his right forearm and puddled where his elbow rested on top of his bent right knee.
“I’ll give you my dark internet logins,” Burns continued. “I want you to control the Tor accounts so you’ll stop trying to steal the information. As soon as we free your hand, I’ll pass everything across and you can go downstairs, bribe your way online, confirm access to all my accounts and change the passwords. You’ll be in control of the funds. Norris and Katerina won’t trust you, and you’ll need to pay them as soon as the Bitcoins hit your wallet. You get to keep my share, but I need a few things in return.”
Muller stopped sawing and looked at his tormentor, curiosity piqued.
“Norris and you need to cooperate. He knows he can’t torture you into giving up the dark web sales and finance information. Deep down, you realize that you can’t kill all the gang by yourself. The bikers know what you look like and you’re wounded. You’ll take out Norris and a few others, but they’ll kill you. It’s a stalemate, and as long as Norris and you recognize it, then you’ll both want to keep me alive too.”
Okay, now for the big sales job. “The one thing everyone’s forgotten is that I’m the legal owner of the adjuvant vaccine 896MX. This, not plasma antibodies, is the Covid gold mine. It will take several weeks to complete an auction, but one of the big pharma companies will license the formula if I settle for a percentage of sales. I’ll appoint a subcontractor to put men in their plants and count vaccines out the door for, say, three dollars a dose. In return for Norris’ and your protection, I’ll cut you in for a quarter each. If I’m not alive, that deal doesn’t happen because I have the industry contacts and contract structuring know-how. I’ll put in place a dead man’s switch: if I don’t pass across the agreed codeword periodically at the specified date and time, the licensee stops payment and dangerous people come looking.”
Muller said nothing, but his eyes bored holes into the sweating Englishman’s eyes. “You don’t have the formula.”
“Bingo! I acquired my company’s intellectual property instead of a severance payout, but Sal Maggio stole the adjuvant’s formula. That brings me to the final tasks. Norris and you find the Maggio convoy. Next, you take Carla because she’ll give us the adjuvant’s recipe. Last, I want to kill Sal Maggio myself and that’s nonnegotiable. I owe him as much after he stole the vaccine, led to my wife’s death and ruined my looks.”
“You don’t want any of your share from Dark Cure sales?” Muller asked.
“No. Half the royalties on vaccine sales will be enough. That will take months to gestate. In the meantime, I’ll want a third of the provisions in Maggio’s convoy. Food and medicine, not money and Bitcoins, will be what’s valuable as long as this pandemic runs. Norris and you can fight over the rest if you like or divide it up; I’ll be long gone. What do you say?”
“I accept. Pass the solvent.”
Burns handed over the paper bag. “Tonight, you and I will go to the meeting at nine. You three either bury the hatchet or the deal will evaporate. Ask Norris and Katerina to show their goodwill by offering you a Dark Cure shot. Pick a vial out at random so they don’t poison you.”
Muller poured a generous measure of acetone over his glued hand and the hallway took on the aroma of a nail salon. It must have hurt like hellfire given the open wounds, but Muller maintained a rigid facial expression behind his mask. “Let me give the meeting more thought. If I just walk up, it’ll be a gunfight.”
“I’ll sell the concept hard before you arrive.” For the first time in days, Burns attempted a smile. Behind his mask, the effort failed with his jaw wired shut, his cheeks sewn up and his mouth a perpetual pucker. That didn’t diminish his joy any as he thought happy thoughts. I also look forward to accessing your passwords and accounts via the keylogger I installed. Enjoy your Dark Cure riches, fleeting though they will be.
* * * * *
The 3M carnival was packing up under the camo netting. Their balance sheet was down a dozen doses of the Dark Cure, the batching instructions and the Fergusons. In the plus column, Vegas doctors might yet save Tyson, and the hawks-versus-doves divide had healed for now. Carla and Travis seemed to be back on an even keel even as Barb and Jaime appeared headed for the rocks.
Sal sat in his folding chair under a kitchen fly tarp that offered scant relief from the late afternoon sun. Most of the uninfected adults gathered round as the pilgrimage’s architect spread out his map. “Depot #1 is here, about thirty miles south of Winnemucca. We’ll pull out at nine o’clock and head north through town, pick up Route 95 through southeast Oregon and stay on
it into Idaho. Our destination is four and hundred sixty miles (750 kilometers) away, outside Grangeville, Idaho. On paper, that’s seven hours but with a refueling stop and unseen obstacles, it may be closer to ten. That puts us on the scene after first light.”
“Why not scale back the distance and lay up somewhere while it’s still dark?” Carla asked. “The last time we rolled into a town that started with a ‘G’ at daybreak, they shot at us.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Pat said. “And Gardnerville versus Grangeville . . . are the two linked?”
“You folks picked Gardnerville-Minden as the state line crossing point, not me,” Sal said. “I was flat on my back. But Pat brings up a good point—there’s a big difference between where we are and where we’re headed. I set up this current resupply base over two weekends in June. I spread my purchases to avoid suspicion and rented a flatbed truck with a loading crane to shift the barrels and pallets. I even unloaded at night, which made it even more challenging.”
“That explains the dents in the barrels and the water bottles scattered all over,” Derek said, prompting laughter from the group.
“I’m no forklift operator, that’s for certain,” Sal agreed. “The reason I bring it up is that only I knew where our Oasis was. The land is public and we’re nowhere near any ranches or towns. With the camo netting over the supplies, Depot #1 was unlikely to be discovered and cleaned out.
“Depot #2 is a different ball of wax,” he continued. “I couldn’t drive sixteen hundred miles roundtrip in a weekend so I used sat photos and the internet to book remotely. A commune calling itself ‘Spice Land’ occupies nine thousand acres (3,600 hectares) of fenced-in land. A Bob Spicer is their leader. He’s quirky, and according to their website, goes by ‘Spice Bob.’