Redoubled

by Warren Esby

  Jack Doff was a very careful man and in addition to the three men in the conference room, he had Gopang stationed in a car outside the front door as a lookout, but we didn’t know it at the time. As we left our office and walked towards Doff’s, we couldn’t see outside, but Gopang could easily see us inside because the inside was so well lit. We didn’t know it but Ghazan Gopang, who turned out to be his brother, had surreptitiously taken a picture of Anya with his cell phone, isn’t technology wonderful, and sent it to his brother bragging about the hot Russian blonde who had invited him over. That was the last phone call that Ghorzang received from his brother, and he hadn’t seen him since.

  As we walked into Jack Doff’s office, Doff was on the phone being told all this by Gopang who was outside in the car on his phone, and the van was listening in. Doff motioned us to sit down on the chairs in front of his desk as he was listening. The agents in the van immediately alerted Ben who sent me a text that said, “Run.” I took my phone out of my pocket when the alert went off, showed the message to Anya and glanced up at Jack whose demeanor had changed. I got up and opened the door and told Anya we needed to leave. As that old Lynyrd Skynyrd song said, “gimme three steps, gimme three steps mister, gimme three steps towards the door.” We got our three steps and were out the door before Jack could get out from behind the desk.

  The group in the conference room saw us going by as Jack came out of his office and started yelling,

  “Kill them! Kill them!”

  Anya had pulled her Glock out of the pouch on the side of her purse which serves as a holster and I had pulled my Smith and Wesson five-shot revolver out of my pocket holster. We were about half way down when Jack started shouting, and I noticed Anya starting to swing her Glock towards me, so I shouted at her,

  “He said kill them. He said them, not kill him.”

  She nodded and kept going. We ran by the front door and towards our office because we saw someone was coming in that door with a gun. We were almost to our office door when the first shots from those behind us went off. We knew we would never get inside, because we would need to insert our key card, so we both ended up diving behind the receptionist’s table at our end of the building before one of those behind us opened up with an AK-47. The noise was deafening and the top of the desk we were behind was chipped away, and the whole wall of glass behind us exploded and disappeared. So much for needing a key card.

  It’s difficult to control the recoil from an automatic rifle and the barrel has a tendency to ride up so all the shots were high. While he was shooting, I took a shot from around the side of our desk at the guy who had come in the front door, and he dived behind the main receptionist’s desk. When the noise momentarily stopped, presumably because the one with the AK-47 had emptied the clip, I nodded at Anya and we both peeked over the desk and noticed that the closest Pakistani was getting ready to shove a new clip into the AK-47. The others behind him were waiting. We both fired together as the one holding the AK-47 slammed the new clip home and took him out. We are a good team that way. I aimed for the body since I only had a snub-nosed revolver and Anya shot him in the head. We then took out the two standing behind them. They did manage to get a few shots off before we got them, but they were rushed shots and missed. Gopang, who had come in the front door, and Doff were blazing away by this time and my little revolver was empty. We had just enough time to get to our office door with Anya returning fire in a rear guard action to keep them off balance while we did so, but she ended up emptying her gun too.

  Our office has a desk right behind the front door, two tall metal filing cabinets on either side, and two more desks in each of the right and left corners behind the filing cabinets. I slammed the door behind me as we came in, but it didn’t automatically lock. It wasn’t set up that way. I had dropped my revolver on my way in since it was now useless and I’m sure Gopang and Doff saw that. They didn’t know about Anya. As soon as I came in and slammed the door, I went around the left filing cabinet and got my Glock out of the top drawer of my desk and swung around just as Gopang came through the door and stopped. Anya, who I love dearly and I know has a lot of confidence in me, was sitting at the desk in front of the door with the chair swung around facing the door as Gopang came in with his gun. Her hands were both visibly empty, and she just sat there looking very cool. As soon as Gopang saw her unarmed and facing him, he stopped and started to raise his pistol towards her as he shouted,

  “Where is my brother? What did you do with Ghazan?”

  He was too emotional about the whole affair. He should have shot her when he first came in. I may or may not have been able to get him before he did.

  Anya replied coolly, “Please give him my regards when you see him.”

  He said, “Huh?” and I blew his head away.

  Anya dived to the side, and I took a shot towards the door of our office at a hand with a gun, which I presumed belonged to Doff who couldn’t have come in because Gopang had been standing at the entrance. His gun went off once but didn’t hit anything, and he wisely decided to retreat, because, if he had come one step further in, I would have killed him too. He ran towards the front door and I followed him. He threw a quick shot in my direction as he was looking back over his shoulder, but it didn’t come close. I couldn’t fire back because, coming in the front door, directly in my line of fire, was Ben, holding a Dove Bar of all things instead of a gun. He hit Jack in the face with the Dove Bar, and before Jack could react to this strange attack with an unexpected weapon from an unexpected direction, Edy shot him twice and he fell to the ground dead. Edy also had a Dove Bar, but it was in her other hand. She looked down at Jack, now dead, and took a big bite out of the Dove Bar. I told you she was a tough babe.

  Anya came up next to me, looked down at Jack and then at Edy and said,

  “Oh! You decided to get the lavender one. What a good choice.”

  Chapter 15

  Ben and Edy got on the phone and called ServePro and arranged to have them come and clean up the mess as best they could over the weekend and remove the dead bodies. I bet you didn’t know that ServePro did that, cleaned up dead bodies that is. But this is not the ServPro that you see with the green painted trucks. This is a company that has trucks that look the same as ServPro trucks, but spell their name ServePro, and are a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. Ben had used this service before to remove some unwanted bodies from my apartment in California. They were there in a few hours and spent Saturday morning cleaning up all the glass and debris in the inside. Edy told the regular janitors not to come that weekend. The ServePro guys proceeded to remove the shot up furniture and broken glass and began patching all the bullet holes. Another team went through and collected all the personal effects left behind by the Prokaida employees and separated out those belonging to all the dead individuals and took them away for further analysis. The rest was put in several big plastic waterproof containers and placed outside so the remaining employees could collect their belongings without going into the building. ServePro had hung cloth, floor to ceiling cloth, so that no one could see what was going on inside. All the laboratory equipment, data and specimens would be left behind and removed the following week by another skilled group who knew how to handle potentially hazardous material. Edy changed all the coding on the key cards so that they were now all non-operative except for the ones that the ServePro people, she and Anya and I had.

  The employees showed up Monday morning. They were told that Prokaida had ceased to exist and left with no forwarding address. They were lucky to have been paid the Friday before and would be unlikely to find anyone to give them severance. Edy told the facilities manager and his assistant to take two weeks off and come back after the renovations and try to lease the facility again. We told them that Apoptosis, Inc. would not be there either, so the whole building would be available.

  Frank was naturally upset when he came in. He asked what would happen to Apoptosis, Inc. because he was really impressed with what he had seen of o
ur technology and told me it was a lot better than anything that Prokaida had. I told him that compared to other new treatments being developed out there, ours was just like a drop in the ocean, and we weren’t going to pour any more money into the treatment. I did tell him that I heard there would be two positions opening up, at least part time, at UNC and Duke and suggested he apply. I wished him luck. There was no evidence that he was part of Doff’s operation. He was an opportunist who had made a little extra money by sabotaging other people’s experiments and spying on them for Doff. You might say he was just supplementing the income from his regular job in the laboratory by moonlighting as a laboratory rat. He was really no different from a lot of other rats out there in other fields, and I’m sure there are more like him working in RAT Park.

  Later that morning, Clark Kentson drove up in a big Mercedes and asked Edy what was going on. She told him that the only remaining tenant in the building had left with no forwarding address and the building was being renovated in preparation for a new tenant. He seemed confused and upset and drove off. I was off to the side and turned my face aside in case he recognized me from the seminar. After everyone who had been expected had come and gone, we left the building in charge of the clean-up crew with instructions not to let anyone else in and went over to Southpoint Mall, for lunch, followed by a sojourn in the Häagen-Dazs store where we discussed what we should do next. We knew there was a connection between Clarkson and Doff, but didn’t really know what, except that they had both been working on programmed cell death, and we didn’t really know what Dong’s connection was since the other two hadn’t interacted with him at Dong’s seminar. We decided to wait while those in charge of evaluating all the material left behind in the Prokaida facility had done their analysis, which included Doff’s laptop and cell phone, and a report was issued. That should take a week or so, Ben told us. Anya and Edy decided to go shopping, and Ben and I sat on one of the benches in the mall within view of the Häagen-Dazs shop and just relaxed. I chose a bench within sight of the ice cream shop because I had learned that Ben got uncomfortable if he strayed too far from the source of one of his greatest pleasures, even though the pursuit of that pleasure had almost cost him his life. But a lot of people are like that. If they really like to do something, they will go to great risks to do it.

  We didn’t do much for the next week. Anya and I played a little golf and tennis and she did some more shopping. She bought a light grey leather jacket that reached to her hips and had big pockets where she could keep her Glock. It had the collar and cuffs trimmed in Carolina Blue, because her colors were grey and blue, but most people she ran into just assumed she was a die-hard Carolina fan. I bought her a present to go along with her new outfit. I know you’ll think I’m a hopeless romantic when I tell you that I bought her a fifteen-round Glock magazine for her gun, and you’re probably right. In fact I bought her two and two more for myself. We had acquired the Glocks in California, and they have a restriction on the number of rounds a gun’s magazine can have. The limit there is ten, although most 9mm Glock Model 19 magazines hold fifteen. Not having those extra five rounds during our recent firefight had almost killed her. I mean, if she hadn’t run out of ammunition by the time we got into the office, she could have blown old Gopang away herself as he came through the door. We could have bought those magazines in South Carolina, and it had been a mistake not to have done so. I mean, Carolinians as compared to Californians are with it as far as properly arming their citizens against Al Qaeda, even if the North Carolinians would rather flee than fight. I think those San Franciscans are in for a big surprise one day, or maybe not. Maybe they’ll all stay stoned so much that they won’t really notice when that day arrives.

  When the CIA analyzed the material from Prokaida and the report came back, it was very interesting. Both Doff and Kentson apparently were single and had no known living relatives anywhere in the United States. Kentson was raised in New York City, attended NYU, and got his medical training at Duke. He was an only child and both parents were dead. Doff’s parents had moved back to Russia. The fat Duke Blue Devil Dong had a wife, but no children. They had both been born in Shanghai, China. The CIA also gave me a flash drive containing the report as well as the data about Prokaida’s work that they had obtained from the information on Doff’s laptop. I went over it during the next two days and got the following picture of what they all were doing. Prokaida had compounds that would promote cell death on a variety of animal cells and these were the compounds that had first originated in Pakistan. These compounds had produced the various animal balloons. Kentson was working with three compounds known to do the same with three different kinds of cancer cells, but these compounds also interacted with normal cells from which the cancer cells had mutated. These were not Kentson’s own discoveries, but were available from other laboratories for the legitimate cancer research that he was also doing. A combination of these compounds had been responsible for the death at Durham Forest Nursing Home, and apparently Gopang had administered them by intra-peritoneal injection. All of the administrations thus far had been by injection, so Al Qaeda hadn’t yet really developed a weapon of mass destruction. They needed a delivery system.

  The report indicated that Rhong Dong was working on the delivery system that Al Qaeda was attempting to develop and it involved attaching the compounds to ordinary cold viruses so that when people encountered the altered cold viruses with the compounds attached, they would start to sneeze and liquefy at the same time. It was diabolical as most diabolical plots are, but it didn’t sound to me to be that plausible. I would need to know more details about it to assess the threat. Anyway, it was apparent that the key work yet to be done was in the hands of Dong. Now Dong had to be very clever since everyone assumed he was only working on fat metabolism.

  If he was that clever, I knew it would be hard to find out exactly what progress he had made and how close he was to the final biological weapon. And how was he disguising the work? Had he somehow incorporated the delivery of these compounds into his fat work? I mean, was he making a claim that sneezing made you fat or that you could cure the common cold by losing weight or drinking only diet drinks? Some other people like the mayor of New York City, who I hadn’t realized was a scientist but apparently is one, had claimed that drinking large sugary soft drinks caused cancer, but he hadn’t said that they also caused the common cold, and he was the expert on all drinks of sixteen ounces or more, so he should have known. I realized that I had to read up on this whole subject a little more in order to really understand it and see how it was connected with Dong’s published work.

  Not much happened over the next two weeks and, although I read as much as I could about Dong’s research, I didn’t find a link. We decided we might have to have a serious discussion with Kentson along the lines of what we had had with Ghazan Gopang, but it was a long drive to Camp Wantmo. Then, as is often the case when I am on a case, I got lucky. I don’t mean I got lucky as when you are talking about getting lucky after meeting a girl, which is a different kind of lucky. And I’m always getting lucky with Anya, although I hope she thinks she is getting lucky with me as well, even though I have never heard a girl refer to that as “getting lucky,” and I have certainly not heard Anya talk about getting lucky, except for the time we both got lucky in a casino in Las Vegas. But that was another kind of luck, and I got lucky again that night after we left the casino, but the luck in the casino turned out to be unlucky in a way, although I really did get lucky afterwards in the other sense of getting lucky. And although I’ve often said, I’d rather be lucky then dead, sometimes when I get lucky this way, I feel dead afterwards, or at least a certain part of me does.

  The kind of lucky I got with Kentson was not getting lucky in a perverted sense, but getting lucky because I had been reviewing announcements of scientific meetings being held in the area of programmed cell death and looking at the list of the participants who were attending. I had found out that Kentson was scheduled to present his wor
k at a meeting being held at Rio Rico Resort in Arizona in about a month. I had spent some time in Arizona, although a bit further north than Rio Rico, and I had an idea how that would be a good location to have a discussion with Dr. Kentson. Rio Rico is in southern Arizona, not too far from Nogales, Mexico and Arizona has a lot of sparsely populated areas and desert areas near there, areas where you can have a very private conversation. A month would be adequate time to prepare for what I had in mind, and I wanted to make some additional plans to take some time off after the meeting at Rio Rico to visit some friends I had nearby. As an aside to the reader of this narrative, if you had read my first memoirs, you would know about being both lucky and unlucky in Las Vegas and might even have an idea of who the friends were who I wanted to visit in Arizona.

  Ben and Edy and Anya and I all checked into a hotel in southern Arizona that was not too far away from the Rio Rico Resort at the same time as the meeting was being held. We didn’t want to be in the resort in case Kentson recognized Edy as the owner of the building that Prokaida had been in. Because I had registered for the meeting, I could go to the meeting and attend Kentson’s seminar, which I did. While Kentson was speaking, Ben and Edy knew it would be safe to go to the resort manager, show him their credentials, and find out which room Kentson was in, and when he was scheduled to depart. It turned out he was planning to leave the very morning after his presentation and had hired a car to drive him to the Tucson airport for his flight back.

  Ben and Anya knocked on Kentson’s door the following morning a few minutes before his car was due to pick him up figuring he would be packed and ready to go. He was. As he came out, Ben picked up his bags and loaded them into the back of the black Ford Expedition we had rented, and Anya escorted Kentson to the SUV. As he got in, Edy, who was sitting in the far back seat, put a gun to his head. Anya got in after him and Edy showed him her CIA identification as Ben came around to the other side and got in so that Kentson was in the middle seat between Ben and Anya.