by Dom Testa
“What does he have to do with this?” Miller had finally asked.
“I consider him to be the poster child of corrupted files. If it’s happening to me, perhaps there are similarities in behavior.”
“Swan, if there were similarities in your behavior — to that extent — you wouldn’t be active right now.”
I shrugged. “To that extent, sure. But markers for future behavior? Am I a test subject because I’ve maybe shown a few of those?”
He gave a low chuckle. “If you’re asking if you’re a guinea pig, the answer is yes. All Q2 field agents are guinea pigs until we develop more historical information. But you’re not a test subject the way you’re implying.”
“And you’ll never tell me anything about Agent One? Even if it might help me?”
“If I thought it would help you? Yes. But I haven’t made that determination. Not even close.”
I’d turned away and chewed on that, not just at the time, but throughout the rest of our session.
After meeting with Miller, I’d sat alone in a small room and listened to the Series-8 recording of my time with Jayanti. Imagine listening to the sound of your own execution. Then imagine listening to one of the most agonizing, horrific deaths ever conceived. It was brutal and disturbing.
But I listened to the whole thing twice, going over everything, from Jayanti’s contact with me at the party, to the invitation back to her room, and the short discussion we’d had. I paid particular attention to the last few minutes of the conversation, absorbing Jay’s odd behavior, the way she meandered back and forth between regret for her actions and the thrill of taking out “Mr. Government Man.”
After a torturous minute where my insides were eaten away as if dissolved by acid, and when I’d finally sighed my death gasp, she’d giggled. Actually giggled. I replayed that part a few times, mostly out of total disbelief.
I’d assumed Steffan Parks was a complete psycho; now it appeared he’d found his perfect match.
Quanta, at last satisfied with the report she’d been discussing, turned her attention to me. I prepared for the questions, which would not be pleasant.
She said, “Have you figured out how it happened? I think it’s pretty obvious.”
“Yeah. Bitch poisoned the ice cubes I happily added to my Jack. That’s the only possible way.”
“You never thought to just get ice from the vending area down the hall?”
“Honestly? No. I thought even doing the whole BYOB thing was over the top in terms of caution, but I did it anyway.” I shook my head. “Think about it, Quanta. Jayanti Pradesh went from meeting me for the first time to killing me in about 12 hours. Why? Just because I wore a Department of Defense badge? Does that seem right to you?”
Quanta laced her fingers on the table. “So the question is: What made her feel so threatened that she had to take you out?” She turned to Poole. “Thoughts?”
“Well,” the top assistant said. “It’s possible she’s programmed to take out anyone from the Pentagon or Defense Department, just to be safe. Seems absurd, but then she and Parks have become quite fanatical. If this is truly one giant vendetta against the United States, it’s not out of the question they’d resort to something this extreme.”
She paused, then added: “But is it just coincidence that Eric showed interest in Steffan Parks to a couple of people at the party and a few hours later Pradesh killed him?”
“The obnoxious Clara from Texas and the bottomless-pit, Jonas Aiken,” I said.
“Right.”
I thought about this. “Both expressed no love for Steffan Parks.”
“Could be an act.”
“Or they could’ve said something to someone else, maybe innocently mentioned that I’d brought up Parks. And that person could’ve alerted Jayanti.”
Quanta stepped in. “Regardless of what precipitated the killing, it confirms that Pradesh is just as dangerous as Parks. She’s not just his co-worker and girlfriend; she’s a verified murderer.”
“Does this vault her into knave status?” I asked, fighting back a smirk.
She ignored this. “What does your gut tell you about Aiken?”
I reined in my sarcastic nature and played it straight. “Struck me as a pretty genuine guy. Nerdy scientist, but not out of touch with the real world. Understands relationships and how they fluctuate.”
“And his relationship with Parks?”
“Seems to echo what everyone else says about him. They got along at first and then Parks went nuts.”
“And did that seem genuine?” Quanta asked.
I opened my mouth to say yes, but hesitated. This was one of those instances when I was thankful to have taken the time to upload an experience. If I’d rushed back to the party from my meeting with Aiken, I wouldn’t have preserved the feeling of our dinner chat. That feeling swirled right now, like silt in an ocean tide, looking for a place to settle. I didn’t have sediment to paw through yet; I had murky water.
But a picture began to take shape. It hadn’t registered at the time, maybe because I was engrossed in squeezing as much information out of Aiken as I could get. Now, however . . .
“He was too genuine,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Poole asked.
“I should’ve realized it over dinner. Look how much this guy spilled to someone he’d just met. Yeah, I was supposedly a government official, but still. Aiken wasn’t interested in grant money. He never asked me once about what I was looking for at the conference, or how he could help. But I asked one or two innocent questions about Parks and suddenly Aiken is laying out an entire backstory that’s sure to not only hook me like a tarpon, but practically guarantee I’d try to get more out of Jayanti.”
Quanta mused over this.
Poole fidgeted. “So you’re saying Aiken is part of it?”
“Maybe not. Maybe he’s just an over-sharer. But, there was a two-hour gap between my talk with this guy and my return to the party. Plenty of time for him to brief Jay, either on the phone or in person.”
“And he approached you at the party, right?” Poole asked. “Clara may have introduced you, but he put himself in position for that introduction.”
“Yeah. And remember what he said to me in the first few minutes? I think you’re poking around to see if Steffan Parks is going to kill a lot of people.”
“If what you’re suggesting is true,” Quanta said, “then this could be a bigger conspiracy than we thought. This group of disgruntled scientists — you never did get the name of the organization, right? Aiken might be a card-carrying member. And if they’re involved, we could potentially have a much larger problem on our hands.”
I shook my head. “I doubt we’re dealing with a sizable cabal. For one thing, it’s too hard to keep that under wraps. That’s why the whole fake-moon-landing silliness collapses. You can’t count on a large group of people to keep their traps shut. Not for long, anyway.”
Quanta sat back. “But a small team could include Parks, Pradesh, and Aiken. Maybe one or two more.”
The idea made sense. All along it had seemed unfathomable that one guy, even with a trusted partner like Jayanti, could pull off something of the magnitude we were investigating. Killing a handful of people? Sure. But poisoning a large population? That shit was straight out of a Marvel movie.
Of course, I always did fancy myself Iron Man without the suit.
I looked at Poole. “What did you dig up on Aiken and his company?”
She spent the new few minutes filling us in on Jonas Aiken, from his unremarkable studies at the University of Arizona to his first job at a chemical manufacturing company. Worked there almost ten years until he had a falling out with the owner over company direction. After that he moved around to various companies and labs, essentially flying under the radar. He’d opened his own business three years ago, primarily as a consultant. Again, nothing stood out.
Until Poole came to the end of her report.
“Based on everyt
hing we’ve just talked about, this would seem relevant. Aiken’s business has not done very well. There are numerous creditors with their hands out, and his contracts have dried up.
“He’s applied for multiple grants through the years, and used to get his fair share. But two years ago he lost out on funding for a major project. It went instead to a team at Arizona State University, supposedly based on a recommendation by Aiken’s former boss.”
I thought about this. “Okay, sure, he’d be pissed. But that’s the whole idea behind the Pissed Off Scientists, or whatever their code name is. They’re disgruntled scientists who feel they’ve been professionally mistreated. Where’s the relevance you mentioned?”
She’d been tapping on a tablet. Now she turned the screen toward me. It showed a PDF image with an inscrutable amount of small print.
“What am I looking at?”
“This is the application Jonas Aiken filled out for that large grant, the one he was ultimately denied. The fact that his old boss supported one of the other teams probably isn’t the most important thing about this. Look at the names at the bottom of the application.”
I scrolled down. Right beside the signature of Dr. Jonas Aiken was a co-applicant.
Steffan Parks.
“That son of a bitch,” I said. “All that talk about how Parks was insane and how he distanced himself. He was working with Parks.”
Quanta looked at the screen. “At least two years ago he was. But probably the worst thing Aiken could’ve done was include him on the application. Parks was already radioactive, professionally speaking, when this was submitted.”
On one hand, all of this struck me as absurd. Here we were, thinking that Aiken could be involved in a plot to kill people, all because he’d been snubbed.
But then I remembered the talk with my former girlfriend, Stacey Haas, the widow of the man who’d scorched the career of Parks. She said Steffan’s poison unleashed a living hell, and she implored me to “find this monster” before he could murder thousands. She had no reservations about the kind of man we were dealing with.
Jayanti Pradesh was clearly on his team. It wouldn’t be a shock to find there were more, each of them disconnected from reality and morality. Each ready to strike in retaliation for their grievances.
I pushed the tablet back to Poole’s side of the table and fixed a determined look on Quanta. “Get me on a plane tomorrow, back to Arizona. Mr. Aiken needs a visit from a dead man.”
Chapter Eleven
I had nine hours until my flight departed Dulles. I intended to spend most of that time in some form of physical contact with the gorgeous Christina Valdez. I was in a state of mind where even if she wanted to get a glass of water I’d tag along and hold her hand.
The professional killer with a soft streak. That’s me.
We accomplished quite a bit in the short time we had, if I do say so myself. Of course, the first 15 minutes were spent in the usual way whenever she got her first look at a new body of mine. Her critical eye looked me over the same way I’d seen her chef’s eye sizing up a cut of meat, figuring out what she could do with it.
She could do a lot.
Afterward, we lounged in the oversized bathtub on my side of our split-living arrangement. We’d filled it with almost-brutally-hot water and an insane amount of bubbles. We fell into a stretch of five minutes where we didn’t speak at all, just sipping our wine and letting the bath salts work their magic.
Christina broke the silence. “Do you remember Antonio?”
“Oh, I love it when you think about other men during these intimate moments.”
She flicked a soapy stream of water at me with her foot. “Do you remember him?”
“The server with the really tiny hands?”
“That’s Dylan.”
“Right. Drops a lot of plates.”
“Antonio’s the bartender. I told you he laughs at everything, whether it’s funny or not.”
“What about him?”
She dipped back until her face was barely above water. “He wanted to know why I never had kids.”
“As long as he’s not getting too personal. What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I had nothing against children, I was just never in the right space to have them.”
“You didn’t tell him that raising a child with a professional killer could be frowned upon?”
She laughed. “A daddy who looks different every time he comes home? No, it turns out he was doing research.”
One of her feet began to slide up and down my leg. “Okay. I’m listening,” I said. “Distracted, but listening.”
“Antonio and his wife were curious if I’d be a surrogate mother for them.”
Her foot continued to stroke my leg below water, but I’d leaned forward, pushing away a hill of soap suds congregated around my chin. “No shit.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
I let it sink in a while longer. “And . . .what did you tell him?”
“First, what do you think about it?”
This had officially become the most interesting bath we’d ever taken together, and we’d had some doozies. I kept my eyes locked on hers.
“Babe, it’s obviously your call. But I think it’s an incredible honor to be asked. If you want to do it, I’ll support your decision. I mean, I probably wouldn’t be around for much of the pregnancy, but I’d support it.”
She smiled at me. “That’s sweet. And I agree, I’m completely touched that they asked.”
“So what did you say?”
“I told him how honored I was, and said I’d think about it.”
I reached out beneath the suds and found her hand. Christina and I had talked many times about children, and the feasibility of anything like that happening in our unique — and downright bizarre — situation. Neither one of us had ever been gung-ho to become a parent, and yet we weren’t completely opposed to the notion, either.
Ultimately my job made the decision simple. I couldn’t raise a child like this, home for brief snatches of time before flying off to kill people. Christina would make an outstanding single mom, but never felt a strong enough urge to make that happen. Our homes remained quiet and perpetually free of toys and stains.
Occasionally I felt a pang, wondering if I’d made the wrong decision. Okay, a lot of wrong decisions, but this one in particular. Would we both regret the choice later? Then I’d shake away those thoughts and chide myself for slipping into that mindset. Our life together was complete. We didn’t even need a dog.
We’d been silent for another long stretch of time and something needed to punctuate the exchange. I finally said, “You’d grow a wonderful child. It’d come out smelling like one of your sauces, but that would just be a bonus.”
This drew the smile I’d hoped for. “Thank you for being okay with the idea,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
My flight to Arizona the next morning turned into a flight followed by a two-hour drive south. While I’d been soaking in the tub, Poole had tracked Jonas Aiken from Phoenix to a hotel in Tucson. No obvious reason for the visit that we knew of, but he must not have wanted anyone to know he was there. He’d paid for the hotel in cash to avoid a credit card transaction.
But the guy was a rookie; he’d used his phone, which pinged a couple of towers around Tucson. With the help of the area FBI office Poole discovered Aiken booked — under his own name — at a Hyatt Place. The guy might be perfectly legit and pure as snow, but if he wanted to be clandestine he needed to take an online course.
It was early afternoon and nearly 70 degrees, a nice improvement over the upper 30s I’d left in Washington. I cruised down I-10 in my BMW M4, another nice find courtesy of Ms. Poole. The music selection for this drive was a shuffle of artists who make the kind of stuff that quickens the pulse and prepares you for confrontation.
I don’t know if the bands in question intended this reaction to their songs, but it worked that way for me. All it took was a sol
id three-song set from Spoon and I was ready to play dirty with the shitty scientist.
While the music pounded the interior of the car, I thought about the last few minutes of my conference with Quanta and Poole. What they told me added a new twist to the case.
Until recently we’d believed we were dealing with only a couple of crazy scientists out for revenge. One believed his reputation had been cruelly maligned, the other felt disrespected as a scientist because of her family’s legacy. But now there was a new element.
They’d hired muscle.
The Series-8 recording of my murder in Scottsdale ended not long after the actual deed. You could hear Jayanti speaking with someone on the phone, but it was muffled, from a distance. Soon afterward it came to a stop entirely. Jay had cleaned out my pockets, looking for any sort of information, and the business card mic wound up in the trash, the fate of every business card since Don Draper dropped out.
But Q2 acquired the hotel’s security video. It showed two men, pushing a wheelchair, arriving at the door of Jayanti’s suite an hour after the killing. Minutes later my corpse was rolled out of the room, staged to look sound asleep, blanket and all, and taken out of the building.
The best guess was that my body was disposed of somewhere in the desert, either buried or left for critters to devour. No one seemed worried about fallout; in fact, they’d become wildly brazen. Kill the government man, chuck the body, then casually disappear into the night.
Good. I wanted them overconfident.
The salient new component was the hired help. Both men were large, well-built specimens, the kind you’d see on WWE. Poole would work on identification.
Steffan Parks, it appeared, had joined the major league of villains. He’d hired goons, ready to handle the dirty work and free him up to simply wreak havoc on innocent civilians. This might seem elemental to some, but it changed the dynamic. Parks knew he was a hunted man, and now he’d invested in protection.