by Chris Culver
“It’s nice to feel loved,” I said, rubbing my sinus cavities with my thumbs. I straightened up. “I’ll worry about that when I can. In the meantime, somebody in your department crossed. I thought you ought to know.”
Olivia’s back straightened, and I heard her inhale deeply.
“What do you mean?”
“I found my police jacket in a warehouse near Plainfield. It had psych evaluations from the station’s shrink, copies of formal complaints lodged against me, even a picture of the two of us on a stakeout. It was my complete file.”
She stared at me for a moment as if she were thinking. Eventually, she nodded. Her gaze looked far away.
“Do you have it with you?”
I shook my head no.
“It’s gone. Burned last night.”
She sighed.
“Without the physical file, there’s not much we can do. I can go to records and see who’s been looking you up, but chances are they didn’t use official channels. If you had the actual file, we could at least dust it for prints.”
“I know there’s not much we can do. I just thought you should know,” I said, standing up. I looked around to see if there was anyone watching us. “Watch your back.”
She nodded.
“Don’t go public with this yet,” she said. “If you do, it’ll be like sticking your dick in a hornet’s nest. This is bigger than the two of us, so I’ll find something. If you have to contact me again, buy a disposable cell phone from Wal–Mart. And where are you staying now? I know you’re not at your house.”
“A cheap motel in Plainfield.”
She nodded.
“Did you pay with a credit card?”
“Cash.”
“Is the room in your name?”
I nodded.
“The clerk took a copy of my driver’s license, so I didn’t have a choice.”
“Okay. You should still be fine,” she said, nodding. “Even if the place is in your name, it will be hard to trace you there, so stay. Is your family with you?”
I shook my head no.
“They’re at my sister–in–law’s house.”
Olivia nodded.
“They ought to be fine there,” she said. “If you’re right, we can’t trust anyone on this. Keep me in the loop, and I’ll do what I can for you on my end.”
“I’ll do that.”
“This is too important to play cowboy on,” she said. “If you screw this up, someone will get hurt. Are you with me?”
I nodded.
“Good,” she said, standing up. “And get a disposable phone.”
Olivia took one final look around the area and trotted back to her car. It was one of the quickest meetings I had ever had with her, but I felt good, almost energized. For the first time in a long time, I felt as if I had an ally I could trust again.
Chapter 19
Despite Olivia’s assurances to the contrary, I figured I had a fifty–fifty shot of surviving my ordeal even with her help. I figured that I might as well forget about my cholesterol and live it up while I still could. Rather than drive back to my motel, I stopped by a greasy spoon my wife would never let me go to and gorged on fried eggs, hash browns, and more turkey bacon than the average man eats in a year. After breakfast, I decided to take a chance and run to my house. I hadn’t packed many clothes when I left, and after the fire at Sunshine, I was running low on those that didn’t reek of burning building supplies. Plus, it’d be nice to make sure the neighborhood kids hadn’t bashed down the front door.
To be safe, I drove up and down the side streets around my house for about twenty minutes, looking for surveillance teams. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, though.
I parked in the driveway. The rain earlier that day had slackened off, and the late–summer heat was taking its place, making it feel as if I were in the Amazon. I walked around the house, looking for broken windows or damage, but it was as I had left it. With a boarded front door and lack of lights, it looked abandoned, a state that wasn’t too far from the truth with my wife and daughter gone.
I went inside, grabbed a soda from the fridge, and headed to the bedroom. The place was still a mess, but it’d have to wait. I grabbed a duffel bag from the closet and stuffed it with shirts and pants. Once that was full, I hung my plastic–smelling jacket on a bedpost and grabbed an old brown one from my closet. I had lost weight since the last time I wore my brown jacket, so its arms and shoulders were a little roomier than I remembered. It still fit, but barely.
I took my duffel bag to my office and leaned against the door frame. If I were going to get Mike Bowers off my back, I needed to give him someone else to look at. It was daytime, so I doubted Karen and Azrael would come after me yet. I still had time. I sat at my desk chair and flipped through some of the notes and papers I had printed off recently. I stopped on Karen Rea’s CV. Her former colleague Dr. Wexler told me she had spent time with the South African Medical Services and felt guilty for whatever she had done. More than that, whatever she did sent her career down the toilet. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
I turned on my computer and spun around in my chair to think while it loaded. College professors are relatively tolerant of colleagues with eccentric views. The only professor I could think of who was universally panned by his colleagues was a California law professor who argued that torture was legally justified. I doubted Karen tortured anyone, but it got me thinking.
As soon as my computer finished loading, I Googled ‘South African Medical Services, biological weapons.’ That netted me a hundred–thousand results, most of which discussed what would happen if South Africa were attacked. I modified the search and added the dates of Karen’s trip. The number of results plummeted, and most had a common theme, something called Project Coast. I clicked a link to a scholarly article from the Brookings Institute and read the abstract.
“You evil bitch.”
***
From what I read, Project Coast wouldn’t land Karen in jail, but it wouldn’t earn her too many friends, either. The project was long–since closed, but in the eighties and early nineties, it had been apartheid South Africa’s response to a growing Soviet presence in Africa. The country’s leaders recognized they couldn’t compete with the Soviet Union’s nuclear technology or its conventional weapons, so they created a clandestine chemical and biological weapons program for self–defense. According to the article, they had stashes of Ebola, Rift Valley, and Marburg viruses. If the descriptions I saw were correct, they made the bubonic plague sound like fun.
The project was focused on more than the Soviet Union, though. It also had a domestic component. The article was sketchy on details, but it described a project to develop a virus that would selectively infect and sterilize the country’s native African population in order to ensure future white supremacy. It was ugly, and I would have dismissed it as a racist fantasy except that the article referenced a memo initialed by the lead scientist, K.R. I stopped reading for a moment, considering. That would explain why Karen Rea wasn’t teaching undergraduates anymore.
I leaned back from the desk. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I flipped through my paperwork until I came across a page I had printed a few days earlier. Karen claimed that Robbie and Rachel had been murdered by slayers. Azrael had claimed they had a plan to strike back. When I first read it, I thought the article was weird but not terribly threatening. Now I wasn’t so sure. I leaned back from my computer. I needed to find out what she was actually capable of. Luckily, I knew someone who might be able to help me. Before I did that, though, I needed to take care of something for him.
I called up my e–mail program, and, as per Jack Whittler’s request, I sent a generic letter of resignation citing personal issues to his secretary. I also added two small postscripts.
PS. Dr. Mack Monroe kindly requests the office pay his most recent consulting fee. In addition, he requests that any and all outstanding parking tickets given to the Mercedes registered in his name
be voided.
PPS. I enjoyed seeing you at the poker game.
Jack was facing an uphill election for a second term as Prosecutor in a few months, including a challenger in the November primary. Allegations that he was involved with one of the area’s biggest criminals would sink his campaign faster than if a photographer snapped a picture of him snorting cocaine off a dead hooker. If Whittler cared about his political future, Mack’s bill would be paid and his girlfriend’s car would be ticket–free in no time. Hopefully that’d be enough.
I called Mack’s cell phone, but it immediately went to voicemail. I told him that his parking tickets would be taken care of soon and asked him to call me back as soon as he could.
While I waited for my callback, I took my gun to my workbench in the garage. The Prosecutor’s Office convicted a lot of murderers because they were too cheap to get rid of their guns after shooting someone, making ballistics matches easy. I suppose I couldn’t blame them on some level. A reliable firearm was pricey. My Glock ran more than five–hundred bucks; I wouldn’t want to part with it, either. Unlike most of the people we caught, though, I knew how a modern forensics lab worked, and even though I wasn’t a gunsmith, I knew how to replace my weapon’s barrel and firing pin. I could at least make a match difficult in case the arson squad found my shell casings at Sunshine.
After twenty minutes in the garage, I tossed the old firing pin and barrel from my Glock into a trash bag and threw it onto the back seat of my cruiser for disposal later. As I did that, I thought I heard a car down the street, but it never crossed in front of my house. Must have gone to a neighbor’s place. Mack called as I opened my kitchen door. Olivia had warned me that Bowers had my cell phone tapped, but I didn’t care. I trusted Mack, but I didn’t plan to tell him anything incriminating.
I answered before it went to voicemail.
“Just got off the phone with parking enforcement,” he said. “Aleksandra’s SL is clean. I didn’t think you’d pull through until now. I appreciate it.”
I pulled a chair from under the breakfast table and sat down.
“I have the feeling you’ll be getting a check from the Prosecutor’s Office soon, too.”
“Fucking A, Rashid. I ought to do more favors for you.”
“Glad to hear that because I’ve got something to ask you. Last time I talked to you, you said you had hired someone with a PhD in microbiology. You think I can talk to her?”
“I’ll introduce you to whoever you want. Just hold on a sec.”
Mack didn’t put me on hold; instead, it sounded as if he just carried the phone with him to his newest hire’s lab. It only took him about five minutes to get there, but in that time, I heard him ask one woman if she wore space pants for her out–of–this–world ass, and I heard another woman squeal as he presumably squeezed some part of her anatomy. I made a long–term mental note to never allow Megan around Mack when she came of age. Eventually, I heard the phone clatter as he put it down.
“Ash, you’re on speaker phone. Dr. Michelle Weiss is here, so go ahead and talk.”
I hadn’t intended to be on speaker, but I guessed it didn’t matter much.
“Hi, Dr. Weiss. My name is Ash Rashid, and I’m a detective with IMPD. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”
She hesitated at first, and I thought I heard her exhale deeply before speaking.
“I’m sorry, but I refuse to talk to this man,” she said, presumably to Mack. “And I’m disgusted that you’re talking to him.”
I coughed.
“I think I missed something,” I said.
“Wow, this is awkward,” said Mack, chuckling. “I thought you were going to stiff me a couple of days back, so I told people you pick up girls at the local high school. It’s silly, but I was pissed. I take it all back now.”
“That’s swell of you, Mack,” I said.
There was an awkward pause in our conversation after that. Dr. Weiss cleared her throat.
“Sorry about what I said,” she said. “Since you’re not a child molester, I’d be happy to answer your questions.”
“Thank you,” I said, flipping my notebook to a blank page and shaking my head. I took a breath. “My questions will sound a little strange, but they’ve come up in a recent investigation. Let me ask you right away. Are you familiar with something called Project Coast?”
“Not off the top of my head,” said Dr. Weiss, her voice distinctively less sharp than it had been earlier. “You know anything about it, Dr. Monroe?”
I heard Mack grunt. I interpreted it as a thoughtful no.
“How about a biological weapon that targets specific racial groups?” I asked.
“Genetically sensitive therapies are a hot field right now, but I’ve never heard of a racially–sensitive weapon.”
I nodded and made a note of it.
“Is it possible to develop one?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it,” she said. “This is outside my area of expertise, but race is more of a social convention than genetic category. What we refer to as race is, in reality, a loose conglomeration of genes and geography. And frankly, human beings are so interbred I imagine it’d be virtually impossible to target one race rather than another.”
I leaned back in my chair and scratched my chin.
“What would happen if someone developed a weapon they thought was targeted but wasn’t?”
“It could fizzle, or it could infect everyone on the planet. There are too many variables to say.”
I nodded again.
“If you wanted to build one, what do you think it would take?”
Dr. Weiss was silent for a moment, and I leaned back in my chair, waiting for her to respond.
“You thinking about a new hobby?” asked Mack.
“Not exactly. I need to know if it’s possible.”
“Maybe for a big corporation,” said Michelle. “You’d need at least a level–III biocontainment facility, commercial–grade peptide synthesizers, and licenses from the government. And even if you had those, there are only a few dozen people in the world with the knowledge to even begin.”
I didn’t say anything, but my suspect had not only the knowledge, but experience. Worse, she genuinely seemed to believe she and her misfit friends were persecuted by a religious order hell–bent on eradicating them. If she and Azrael thought they could eradicate that group by targeting their genetic makeup, I had little reason to doubt they would. A biotechnology company which invested heavily in blood products was pretty good cover, too.
“Assuming you could get the proper licenses, how much money would it take to set up a lab like that?”
“Twenty or thirty million dollars, maybe. I really don’t know,” said Dr. Weiss. “But even if you had money, you’d need specimen viruses to work with. You can’t get those at any cost.”
Dr. Weiss would probably be surprised at what money could buy. I pushed back from my table and looked up at the ceiling, struggling to put what I had heard into my growing puzzle. Indianapolis wasn’t a huge city, but it had a couple of million residents. I didn’t know how much the local cocaine market was worth, but I had to assume even a small piece of it was enough. If Karen was funneling everything she had into her lab, it would also explain why her house was empty. I ran a hand across my face and considered whether my speculation was worth calling Olivia about when something hard and heavy pounded on my front door. My muscles tensed.
“You okay there, buddy?” asked Mack. “Sounded like you dropped a television.”
There was another crash and the now familiar sound of wood splintering. My heart thumped and my chair fell over as I vaulted up.
“Someone’s breaking into my house,” I shouted, ripping my weapon from its holster. “Call the police for me now.”
Without waiting for Mack to reply, I dropped my phone and ran into the hallway. The wood bracing on my front door buckled, and after that, everything moved so fast that I didn’t have time to think. Men swarmed into my front hall
way. The first two carried some sort of black battering ram, while those behind them carried the same sort of automatic weapons I had seen the night before at Sunshine. I never got a shot off; hell, I never even raised my weapon. Before I could react to my new guests, something sharp and hot tore through my shirt and into my chest. After that, every muscle in my body exploded at once and I felt more pain than I had experienced in years.
Chapter 20
They shot me with a taser, which has an upside and a downside. On the one hand, getting shot with one indicates that your shooter doesn’t want you dead. That’s always nice. On the other hand, though, having every muscle in your body fire at full strength for thirty seconds is about as pleasant as spending a night in a Mexican prison.
When I came back to my senses, there were four men staring down at me. Unless roving bands of vampire assassins started wearing Kevlar vests and carrying automatic weapons, they were members of my department’s Special Weapons and Tactics team. We used them when serving high–risk, felony warrants on drug dealers and other violent offenders.
“Normally you guys knock first,” I said, trying to sit up.
“Stay down.”
I got a boot to my chest by a young guy I didn’t recognize. Thankfully, he declined to taser me again. I slid my hands up to my head. Someone must have taken my gun from me because I didn’t know where it was.
“Take it easy. I’m on your side. I’m a detective.”
At least I used to be a detective. I didn’t think that moment was the correct one to tell the world about my abrupt career change.
“Stay down, Ash. We’re checking the house.”
I recognized the voice this time. Under normal circumstances the speaker was a plainclothes detective in our gang intel unit named Jim Price. He was a good man, and he knew the local gang scene better than anyone else on the street. The Prosecutor’s Office convicted at least four gang bangers in the past few months because of his tips. He leaned over me. There was sweat on his forehead and nose.