by Tim Tigner
I was torn. I wanted to get on with the physical investigation, but now that we were both on the same new page, I wanted to keep reading. It was helpful to talk things through with a mind as sharp, precise, and logical as Katya’s. I’d never experienced a mental partnership quite so satisfying before, even with Granger.
I moved a couple empty plates from the buffet to the pub table where they’d look used. “Let’s follow the next angel. I want to double-check my math with you.”
Katya backed up a step. “What do you think the killer secret is?”
“It has to be product related. Brillyanc is the common denominator. My father and brother were working on it. Tarasova was working on it. All the activity surrounds it.”
“But it works.” Katya threw up her arms in an atypical display of emotion. “We experienced it. Max and Saba both swore by it. Colin was incredibly enthusiastic about it.”
“Until he wasn’t. You said he was confident one day and despondent the next.”
“Right. He was.”
“And shortly thereafter, Vitalis was shut down.”
“Right. Vondreesen explained that with the whole sun bear, endangered species, gallbladder thing.”
“But we know from Max that was a lie, because Brillyanc is entirely synthetic. So Colin must have discovered something else. Something worse. They made up the sun bear story to camouflage something more damning.”
Katya was nodding along with me. “I like the concept, but what could that possibly be? As Vondreesen pointed out, the sun bear discovery was a triple blow. It decreased supply, and demand, and killed any chance of regulatory approval.”
“It may have been a triple blow, but look around.” I gestured back toward the main room. “They’re still able to sell it for a thousand dollars a day.”
“Oh my God, you’re right. So Colin must have found something that would have prevented that.”
“Exactly.”
“But what?”
“It’s a drug, right?” I prompted.
“Sure…” Her face lit up a second later. “Side effects.”
Chapter 85
The Path
AS THE WORDS ‘side effects’ escaped Katya’s lips, another angel walked through our room. Again Katya saw the white form reflected in my eyes. She spun around as the angel made her exit, and without a word we began to follow, our minds racing in one direction, our feet headed in another.
Within two seconds of the angel’s disappearing through the archway to our right, we rounded the corner in silent pursuit — and bumped into a couple of the angels’ male counterparts.
They wore black suits and black tees, and together formed the operational equivalent of a brick wall. The left suit spoke, his accent Russian. “Two-oh-four, and two-oh-five, come with us please.”
I studied the faces of our adversaries, trying to get a reading on their disposition. The set of their jaws, the angle of their heads, and the tension in their necks told me they knew that I’d killed five of their friends.
Neither fight nor flight was an option. Not in that place. Not at that time. We’d have been running blind. Then and there, the smart move was to capitulate. “After you,” I replied.
The left suit spun around and walked toward the back of the room, toward nothing that I could see. Katya and I followed, side by side, with the right suit trailing behind. It appeared that he was going to collide with the wall, but a panel slid silently aside just before he did. We followed him into a dark corridor lit only by blue LEDs embedded every few feet in the floor, like a luminescent highway divider.
He turned right, taking us back in the direction of what I’d speculated was the procedure room. We passed chest-high LEDs on the corridor wall every twenty feet or so, some red, some green. When I saw one slide aside just before an angel appeared, I understood that they marked the hidden doors. I couldn’t tell how they were activated. They didn’t slide open as we passed, so it wasn’t a typical motion sensor. Still, the door into this hidden corridor had opened before the suit as though sensing his approach. Thinking about it with my Brillyant brain, I realized that was exactly what it did.
If a person had an RFID chip, a radio frequency identifier, then the system could be programmed to react specifically to him. This would explain how the angels came and went through doors that were invisible and inaccessible to anyone else. My next thought struck like a crashing wave, sweeping me up in a moment of darkness before delivering me into the light.
Katya and I had also been tagged.
RFID chips could be as small as a grain of rice. You could easily hide one on anybody, and they had created the perfect place: our masks. With that system, they could track every guest’s every move on the equivalent of an air traffic control console.
But why?
I answered my question as quickly as I’d asked it. Security, of course. Rule One.
A minute into our tour, the lead suit stopped directly before a triangle of three green LEDs. A panel slid aside after two seconds, revealing a staircase going up. Rather than entering, he stepped aside. “They’re waiting for you upstairs.”
Chapter 86
Burning Man
KATYA AND I both turned to face the lead suit. His angular face looked evil in the dim glow of green LED lights. She spoke first. “Who’s waiting for us?”
He scoffed for an answer. Looked like Rule Two applied within the organization as well.
We turned our backs on them and started climbing. There must have been forty steps, each lit by a twin pair of green lights. After the door slid shut behind us, Katya grabbed my arm and paused. “Do you think this is routine? Something they do for all first-time partygoers?”
“No. They know who we are.” I spoke low and in Russian, assuming someone was listening in, and trying not to make it easy.
“But how?” Katya replied in kind.
“I was a fool. Again. They ID’d us in the car. Our disguises are good enough to deceive people who aren’t personally acquainted with Chris and Alisa, but they won’t fool a sophisticated computer. Not one that’s looking for us. Not one that already has our real identities to match against.”
Katya clutched my hand as we neared the top. “What do we do now?” She moved around me so that she was on the stair above mine, putting our heads on the same level.
“We fight back — when the time is right. We hit them with everything we have, and don’t stop until we escape.”
“But we’re not armed. We’re in pajamas.”
“That means they won’t be expecting much. And not all weapons are physical.”
Katya pondered that for a second, then she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips — a quick kiss, but one that spoke volumes. Before I could react she turned around, and climbed the last stair.
I stood still for a moment.
Then another shock came.
As I stepped onto the landing beside Katya, the floor began moving beneath our feet. It rotated us clockwise around a six-foot section of wall into the adjoining room. A room we’d seen before. A room with twin staircases, eighteen-foot ceilings, and a wrought-iron chandelier.
The disk we were standing on didn’t stop rotating after a half-turn. We had to hop off to avoid being taken back into the hidden corridor. I watched over my shoulder with childlike fascination as the wall returned to its original position behind us — displaying a large painting from the studio of Raphael.
Two men were waiting for us when we turned back to face front. They were dressed in robes and masks, rather than black suits. “Good evening, Vaughn. Hello, Casey.”
“Well done,” Vondreesen said, removing his hood along with Casey. “If not a few days overdue. Let’s go up to the library. I’ll tell you a story.”
With Casey bringing up the rear, we followed Vondreesen up the winding staircase and back into the room we’d visited a few days before. The lights were dimmer now, and the back wall flickered and glowed like one of the entryway fishbowls, bringing the wh
ole room to life. “Looks a bit different downstairs, doesn’t it? I named it Burning Man after the annual desert festival that inspired the design. To my knowledge, there’s nothing else like it.”
“It’s captivating, in a Faustian sort of way,” Katya said, her tone reflecting a robust emotional state.
“Tell me, Vaughn, why’s it circular downstairs, but semicircular here?”
“My bedroom and private study are on the other side. You don’t see through to them because the lights are out.” He led us back to the central of the three coffee tables as he spoke.
We sat in the same chairs as before, with Casey in the last seat. After we’d removed our hoods and masks, Vondreesen lifted an ornate crystal bottle from the coffee table. He poured generous portions of amber liquid into four brandy snifters. “Louis XIII Cognac. They say there’s a century in every bottle. I thought that appropriate, given the perspective required for what we have to discuss.”
It struck me that while the elder statesman in Vondreesen was on display in high resolution, Casey seemed much less at ease. It was almost as though he had a sense of shame. Nonetheless, he kept his right hand in his bathrobe pocket, where the silhouette of a silenced pistol cast a shadow over us. I recalled that he had been a Marine — and once a Marine, always a Marine. Semper Fi.
Vondreesen nudged a glass in each of our directions. An invitation in lieu of a tasteless toast.
With everyone leaning in to grab a glass, I thought about snatching the moon rock off the table and braining both my nemeses. In less than three seconds I could have my revenge. Casey would probably get a bullet off, but it would be the last thing he’d do. Pyrrhic victories didn’t work for me, however. And besides, I was most curious to hear Vondreesen out.
“Can I get a cigar to go with it?” I asked, not because I wanted a smoke, but because I wanted to disarm Casey — and see if Vaughn would hand me a weapon more substantial than a snifter glass. Eyeballs and nerve centers reacted poorly to contact with tobacco burning at a thousand degrees.
Chapter 87
Gorilla Marketing
VONDREESEN SMILED at my request for a cigar. I couldn’t tell if he thought I was caving, or if he’d read my mind. He rose and retrieved a box, torch, and cutter from a side table. Romeo & Julieta coronas, packed in the same tubes Rita used to camouflage her syringe. Hard to believe that was a coincidence.
Katya declined.
Alas, so did Casey.
Vondreesen clipped and torched our cigars. “I was in shock when your father brought me the news about the sun bears. I got the Russian on the phone then and there. He insisted on meeting in person to discuss it. So I flew to Moscow.”
I knew this was a lie. The sun bear story was a fabrication. But I decided to play along and see where Vondreesen took it. Information was power, and knowing one of Vondreesen’s secrets gave me some. “Did my father go with you?”
“No. I wasn’t sure where that meeting was headed, so I didn’t want to expose him. By then, there had been enough indications that the man I was dealing with could be dangerous. But he made me bring Casey. Called him my consigliere, no doubt having learned about Western business by watching The Godfather.” Vondreesen paused, as if picturing the memory.
“We met in his Moscow office. Or rather outside his office. He took us out onto the ledge circling his penthouse. We were thirty stories up and walking a few feet from an open edge while he explained the facts of life to us. He treated it like a walk on the beach. I nearly peed my pants. Unbelievable.
“Meanwhile two of his goons trailed us at arm’s length the whole way. Those security guys you keep, uh, dispatching — they aren’t mine. None of them.” Vondreesen gestured toward the door. “The large gentlemen you met downstairs, Boris and Ivan, they’re his. Presumably provided for operational security, but most of the time they’re watching me.”
I was beginning to wonder if Vondreesen really had been duped with the sun bear story. Perhaps the Russian had fed Vaughn the same grand deception he was now dishing out. Or perhaps Vaughn was just that good a bullshitter. His accent made everything sound so prim and proper. “If you’re looking for pity, you’re speaking to the wrong person.”
Vondreesen continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “The Russian told me that he’d fundamentally changed our marketing strategy. We wouldn’t be taking the traditional pharmaceutical path, with its regulatory approval and physician prescription and insurance reimbursement. We weren’t going to be marketing to the masses either. And we wouldn’t be selling Brillyanc for a lousy two or three grand a year.”
He paused for a couple of cigar puffs. “You know where he went with it. You heard Rita’s pitch. But did you do the math?”
Katya was all over that. “At $360,000 per year per user, your revenues will top a billion at just 2,800 patients.”
“Exactly. And ten times that amount wouldn’t be a stretch. The Russian mapped it all out for me, step by step. We’d start with operational centers in DC and the Bay Area. Hand select the ripest three hundred souls in each, the top 0.01 percent of our target demographic, and make each the offer you heard. An offer they’d be fools to refuse.” Vondreesen’s voice brimmed with excitement as he spoke.
“The plan is to expand to another major metropolitan area every six months or so. New York, Chicago, Dallas, and LA. Then London, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Milan. Followed by Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, Sydney, and Seoul. And let me tell you, it’s happening exactly as he said it would. DC and San Francisco now have over two hundred Brillyanc users each. That’s worth a hundred and fifty million dollars a year, most of it profit, and we’ve only been rolling Brillyanc out for half a year.”
“So it’s all about money?” I asked.
Vondreesen gave me a silly-boy look. “Is it ever about anything else?”
“But you have plenty of that. How much more do you need?”
Vondreesen took a long swallow from his snifter. “Let me finish. That was just the carrot. Attractive as it was to the businessman in me, of course it wasn’t enough. The Russian knew it wouldn’t be. So he had his goons show me the stick.
He had a big one.
You know those movies where the gangster dangles his mark over the edge of a building until he capitulates?”
“Sure.”
“Well, he wasn’t that kind to me. He said, ‘I’ll give you five seconds to think it over. That may not sound like much, but it will suffice — if you’re in the right frame of mind.’ Then his goons picked me up and hurled me over the edge.”
Vondreesen mimicked a tossing gesture. “I was over three-hundred-feet up when they released me. That’s where he got the five-second calculation, the amount of time required for a thirty-story free fall. It was dark out at the time, but the snowy ground below was illuminated by landscaping lights so I could see where I was headed. At least until I closed my eyes.” Vondreesen shook his head and took another puff.
“I fell to within a few feet of an icy hedge, and then sprang back up. One of the goons had cuffed a bungee cord around my ankle while they were throwing me off. Had it hooked up to a device that looked like a fishing pole, keeping me away from the building when I bounced. The goons reeled me back up but left me hanging there by my ankle ten feet out from the edge. I was scared to death my shoe was going to come off and I’d slip loose. Haven’t worn loafers since.” He pointed down at his lace-ups.
“That’s when he asked me if I’d decided to embrace the new marketing strategy.
“I agreed.
“Casey went along too, of course.”
Chapter 88
Mission Accomplished
VONDREESEN LEANED FORWARD and poured more Louis XIII into all our glasses, although he had been the only one drinking. He took a slow sip with closed eyes before speaking. “Once I agreed to the new marketing strategy, we shut Vitalis down, just as we would have done otherwise. Your father and brother were none the wiser.” He twirled the brandy around in his snifter, staring int
o it as he spoke.
“I had no idea the Russian was going to kill them. There was no reason for that, beyond paranoia. But as the rules have made you well aware, we’re dealing with a paranoid personality. A megalomaniac with a cruel streak a mile wide.” Pausing for a moment, he finally met my eyes.
I knew the big reveal was coming.
“He called me the morning after the accident, while you were still asleep. Told me what he’d done. Told me to put Casey on it. Told me that he’d impose the death penalty if you weren’t convicted in court. No delays. No appeals.”
I took a second to digest that twist. “You’re trying to tell me that by getting me convicted for a triple homicide, Casey was really working in my best interests?”
“Yes, exactly. In that context, you can see that he did a great job. He effectively got the death penalty reduced to six years, for Chrissake. It was an incredible deal. But you turned it down.” Vondreesen shrugged. “So Moscow ordered the hit.”
I looked over at Casey, expecting to see him nodding along, vindicated.
He wasn’t.
He just looked troubled. Preoccupied.
I turned back to Vondreesen. “You called Detective Frost after our last visit, didn’t you? The minute we were out the door, you were on the phone.”
“Actually, I called Frost the moment you arrived. Gave him an anonymous tip — for your benefit. Ever since your escape we’ve been trying to funnel you back to prison where at least your life expectancy would be measured in years rather than days. But that hasn’t worked either. So here we are.”
“Where, exactly, are we?”
Vondreesen set his snifter down. “I’m going to give you and Katya the same choice he gave Casey and me. But I’m going to give you a very different experience to help you make up your mind.”
“What’s the choice?”
“What do you do if you can’t beat ‘em?”