Harvey Bennett Mysteries: Books 1-3

by Nick Thacker

  He loved her quiet confidence, her ability to exude control over her words and naturally force anyone listening to her to pause and wait for her to gather her thoughts. It didn’t hurt that she was stunningly beautiful, either.

  He thought about the request for a moment before responding. “Amanda, I want to help. I really do. But I cannot imagine where I would even start.”

  “I have routing numbers and bank account numbers from deposits. We can start there.”

  “What about a name; someone at the firm?” He took another sip of his coffee, then added, “And why are you so worried?”

  Amanda shook her head. “I’m not worried… No, I don’t have any names, that was the agreement. Besides, it’s not just one person — this is an organization, one that prides itself on discretion. They agreed to fund the project to its completion, and give us complete control, in exchange for their anonymity. They prefer to be a silent partner.”

  “You mean a nonexistent partner…”

  Amanda smiled. “Nevertheless, they’ve let us operate without oversight thus far, and we’ve kept up our end of the agreement — my team uploads research every week, and someone there seems to be accessing it, but they’ve never responded with any questions or clarifications.” She paused a moment. “Fine. To answer your second question, I guess I’m just feeling… a little overwhelmed. Our project has been moving forward more and more quickly, and I came to the realization that we have no idea who it is we’re really working for .”

  Paulinho nodded. “Still, Amanda, I don’t know what it is I can help you with. I will certainly look around our offices for any obvious links, but if this company had a name, or a person associated — “

  “It has a name. Well, I do remember what they told me when I first heard from them.”

  Paulinho raised an eyebrow.

  “They called themselves ‘Dragonstone Corp.’ I have no doubt that it’s an umbrella corporation, and I’m receiving money from one of their subsidiaries, another company that goes by Drache Global.”

  Paulinho steeled himself. “A typical structure, to save on taxes. Any idea where they’re located?”

  Amanda shook her head. “None. The man I initially spoke with, seven years ago, sounded French. Maybe Canadian. I’ve done some research online, and haven’t been able to find anything on them.”

  “Good. I’ll see what I can find. Amanda, I hope everything is okay. Please let me know if you hear anything else.”

  Amanda stood to leave. “I will. And let me know what you find.”

  Paulinho stood to see her off, then sat back down at the outdoor patio table. He pulled his phone from his pocket again and opened a browser, looking for the number of an old friend. I wonder if her number is online, he thought.

  He scrolled through a list of office extensions for a moment until he came to the number he was looking for. He clicked the link, opening the phone app and dialing the number. He lifted the phone to his ear and waited, hoping the number was her personal cell, and not just an office line.

  Pick up, he willed into the phone.

  A woman’s voice answered. “Juliette Richardson.”

  “Julie? Hello? It’s Paulinho, from University.” It had been years since they’d graduated, but Paulinho and Julie were close then. They’d tried to stay in touch, but their professional ambitions had pulled them apart. Their paths had crossed again a few months ago however, when he was sent to the United States to help with the cleanup of some of the financial fallout the country suffered surrounding explosions and a virus outbreak at Yellowstone National Park.

  “Paulinho! Wow, twice in one year!” the woman answered.

  “Yes, and I’m sorry we haven’t remained in touch, but I’m calling for something else.”

  Julie paused on the other end. “And what might that be?”

  Paulinho sighed. “Well, I remember your… ordeal … back in Yellowstone.”

  No response.

  “Julie, I know you don’t want to relive any of it, but I also know how distraught you were after you and Harvey couldn’t get the closure you needed.”

  More silence.

  “Julie, I was just contacted by a friend of mine working in neurological research. She came to me asking for help looking into one of her investors. She seemed a little desperate, actually, which is somewhat out of character for her.” He paused. “Listen, the point is: I’m worried for her. I’m going to look into it, but I wanted to let you know first.”

  Finally Julie spoke. “Why?”

  “Well, the company name she gave me was Drache Global.”

  Chapter 3

  “Jules, I told you — I’m not interested in sitting on my butt for three weeks while you spend most of it throwing up over the edge of a boat.”

  Harvey “Ben” Bennett waited for the rebuttal he knew was coming, then turned back to the book he was reading: Plants of the Rocky Mountains . ‘Reading’ was probably too strong a word, since he was mostly just flipping through pages, hoping to catch some of what his father used to call “intelligence by osmosis.”

  He hadn’t waited long enough. Juliette Richardson stopped at the doorway to the tiny living room in the cabin they currently lived in together, and spoke. “I didn’t say I was seasick, Ben. I said I might be. My mom was, and her sister, and —“

  “And you’re saying ‘seasickness’ is hereditary,” he said, not looking up from his book.

  “I’m saying that I don’t know if I will be or not. But that doesn’t matter. I have medicine and they have these little bracelets now that —“

  “Oh, come on ,” he said, laughing. “You don’t honestly think those things work , do you?”

  Julie took a few steps closer to him and stood at the foot of his recliner — a ratty, crusted old armchair that he wouldn’t let her replace. It ‘sat well,’ as he always told her. She didn’t agree, and always chose to sit on the love seat next to it .

  “Let’s just take a second here and realize which one of us is being the most dramatic,” she said.

  “You,” he answered immediately, still not looking up from the ‘Key to Gooseberries and Currants (Ribes Species )’ description in the ‘Shrubs’ section of the book.

  Julie sighed. “Right. Me. I’m the dramatic one, for wondering whether or not I’d get seasick on a week-long cruise through the Gulf of Mexico. Not you , who wants to drive there . Ben,” She paused, waiting for him to look up.

  Don’t do it, you fool, he thought. She wins if you look up.

  He looked up. Damn, she’s cute .

  “Ben,” she repeated. “We’re in Alaska . You want to drive to Galveston, Texas. From Alaska.”

  He raised his eyebrows a bit. So what?

  She sighed again, then threw her hands up in the air and left the room to see to the massive pot of chili she’d been working on all day. It was an all-time favorite recipe from her mother, and since Ben liked to call himself a ‘year-round chili kind of guy,’ he had no issue with eating the hearty stew multiple times a day in the dead of summer.

  Julie had ’officially’ lived in his cabin for a few months now, and he knew neither of them was hoping to change the arrangement anytime soon. If anything, they were getting more serious, but Ben tried as hard as possible not to seem ‘in love’ whenever any of his fellow park rangers saw them together. He’d been able to stave off the jibes and taunts at first, but within a week of their finding out about his relationship status he was being called ‘Romeo.’ He quickly discovered that his fellow rangers at Denali National Park weren’t any more creative with their insults than those he’d left behind at Yellowstone.

  After transferring from Yellowstone, he and Juliette were welcomed with open arms onto the full-time staff at the park, Julie beginning a new role as an IT and technical support coordinator, and acting as a part-time consultant for the CDC. Her old program, the Biological Threat Research division, had been temporarily shuttered after the suspected murder of its leader and a terrorist infiltratio
n among its ranks. She made plenty of money doing IT for the park and contracting her services to the CDC on the side, and they allowed her to work wherever she wanted. After Ben had finalized the purchase of the land in Alaska he’d always wanted and made the arrangements, he’d taken Julie along to turn the tiny trapper’s cabin that sat on it into a home.

  Julie entered the room again, having swirled the chili around and deemed it safe for another five minutes. Ben never understood her cooking habits. They both loved cooking, but Julie was far more ‘hands on’ about it. When a recipe told her to ‘wait twenty minutes,’ Ben could be sure she’d be hovering over it every minute, watching, poking, and prodding it along.

  When a recipe told Ben to ‘wait twenty minutes,’ he gave it thirty, just to be safe.

  “My point is that you just don’t want to fly. If you wanted to fly, we could get there in a few hours and have time to kill before we got on the boat.”

  Ben looked up again from the shrub he was inactively studying. “‘A few hours?’ Seriously? Julie, it’s like 9 hours from Anchorage, and that’s not including the time it takes to drive to the airport.”

  “It’s three days of driving time. Not including hotels and food. I’m just saying —“

  “I know what you’re saying, Jules. I’m not doing it.” He’d meant it to sound final; to alert Julie to the seriousness with which he’d made the decision, but it came across as hesitant. If he was being honest with himself, he did want a vacation. While he absolutely loved the cool Alaskan summers, he had to admit that sitting on a deck, bathing in sunlight while drinking a Cuba Libre sounded decent.

  Not to mention Julie’s attire during the week.

  He knew she’d been ordering swimsuits online, expecting the conversation they were having now to go her way .

  And it would. Ben knew he just needed to hold out a bit longer to make sure she knew that she didn’t have him around her little finger. By putting up just a bit of a fight, she’d be that much more excited when he agreed to it.

  She left the room to stir the chili once more, then returned. “I’ve been ordering swimsuits online, and the first one came to the office today — want me to model it for you?”

  Julie flicked him the single raised-eyebrow look she used when she was trying to look sexy, which only made her look goofy.

  Which makes her look sexy.

  “Fine. I guess I’ll put the book down,” Ben said, grinning.

  Julie ran off into the bedroom of the cabin, situated next to the kitchen and behind the larger living room area, and Ben closed the guidebook and placed it on the end table next to the chair.

  He heard her cell phone ring, a piercing screech that she wouldn’t change or turn down. She carried the thing with her everywhere, afraid that at any moment she’d be called in to handle an emergency email password change or an office computer freezing.

  After another minute, Julie walked back in the room — still wearing the clothes she’d had on before.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  She shook her head. He focused on her eyes. Where there had been playfulness and joy in them a moment ago, she was now all business.

  “Jules, what’s up?” he stood up from the large chair and pushed the recliner in, then walked toward her.

  “We need to go to Brazil.”

  Ben wasn’t sure how to respond. “Excuse me? Brazil? The country?”

  “That was a friend of mine from college. He told me Drache Global had surfaced down there, and that he thinks they’re planning something again. ”

  Ben felt his blood run cold. Drache Global. After he’d spent two months trying to research what the company actually did — and more importantly, who was behind it — he’d all but lost hope. The government, if they knew anything at all, wasn’t offering any help, and Julie’s position at the CDC hadn’t been quite high enough for her to negotiate anything useful.

  All he knew was that they were one of the subsidiaries of the real organization behind the attacks at Yellowstone National Park months earlier, and they’d mostly gotten away with the act of terror. No one but Ben and Julie knew how close the nation had come to total destruction, and he made a vow to himself that he’d never stop looking for them. They had a few different names of other subsidiaries that might be involved, including Dragonstone and Drage Medisinsk, but searches for those companies only turned up public information on their dealings in whichever countries they operated. Nothing illegal, nothing that might link them to the attacks, and nothing for Ben to follow. He’d already spent too many waking hours trying to find and follow a thread, and he’d nearly thrown in the towel.

  Now, someone was handing them a lead, beckoning.

  He’d be damned if he let the opportunity slip through his fingers.

  Chapter 4

  Juliette Richardson stared out the small oval window of the 737 as it flew south over the Caribbean Sea. She longed to be down there, cruising around in the bright blue waters between Mexico and Jamaica. The cruise she’d chosen would have taken them to three ports in Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Port Royal, and they’d have spent a luxurious seven days aboard a gigantic floating 5-star hotel.

  Instead, they were flying over the open waters and onward toward Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where they would have a plane change and then fly north again to a smaller municipality in Central Brazil called Marabá, where they would land in the stifling heat and overwhelming humidity to spend God-knows-how-long tracking down an organization they weren’t sure really existed. They would meet up with Dr. Meron, Paulinho’s acquaintance, at her research firm, NARATech, and try to piece together tidbits of information that might — or might not — point back to Drache Global.

  She turned to Ben, who was sitting in the seat next to her. “You think we’ll find them?” she asked.

  He opened his eyes. “Hm?”

  “Sorry, I thought you couldn’t sleep on planes,” she said.

  He rubbed his eyes and sat up straighter in the seat. “I wasn’t asleep. Just couldn’t hear you… ”

  She watched him pop a piece of gum into his mouth and waited for him to respond. It took another ten seconds.

  “Yeah, I think we’ll find something,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows, hoping to get the message across. We could have been on a cruise right now, but you’re dragging me halfway around the hemisphere because you think we’ll find something?

  He got the hint.

  “Fine,” he said. “Yeah, I think we’ll find them. It’s a company, or an organization, or whatever. But it deals in currency, just like the rest of us. They’ve got to have their fingerprints there somewhere.”

  She nodded.

  “And you said that this ‘Paul’ — Paulinho — guy had some information that tied Drache Global to his friend’s company?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He told me she thought they were connected somehow; that maybe they were funding her, but trying to keep themselves out of the spotlight.”

  Ben was silent for a moment. “What does her company do, exactly?”

  “From what I gather online, they’re a neurological research company. Neurological Advanced Research Applications, I believe. NARATech. Paulinho said they’re currently working on an application to map dreamstates.”

  “Dreamstates?”

  “Dreams. They’re using fMRI technology, applied directly to the skull, to image and record human dreams.”

  “That’s a trip. Does it work?”

  “I guess,” she said. “There’s nothing about it on their website, but I pried Paulinho for whatever he knew about it. It’s not much, but he told me they’ve had ‘mostly positive results.’ ”

  “Wonder what ‘negative results’ looks like,” Ben said.

  “Whatever it is, if Drache Global is actually behind it, it’s probably important to something they’re planning.”

  “Did he say anything about what this ‘research’ actually looks like?”

  “No, except that t
hey’ve had some sort of anomaly crop up. He didn’t know what it was, but he said it made Amanda seem ‘fidgety’ when they spoke.”

  “‘Fidgety?’”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Ben didn’t respond, but instead went back to ‘sleep’ with his head resting gently against the rock-hard cushion of the airplane seat. His legs, far too long to be comfortable, were smashed against the seat in front of him, not helped by the passenger’s decision to recline the seat as far back as it would go.

  Watching Ben sit there like a crash-test dummy who had been smashed against the front of its vehicle after a failed test, Julie felt even more uncomfortable.

  “Now I know why you don’t like flying,” she said.

  Ben opened his eyes and grinned, shifting in his seat to try to find a more comfortable position. “You think this is why I hate flying?” he asked.

  She smiled back. “Surely it’s not the kind, caring staff of in-flight personnel.”

  He glared at her. “I know you’re joking, but it still hurts to remember.”

  She laughed. They’d flown together only once before, when they were both invited to the White House to meet the President after the events at Yellowstone National Park. The United States government, ostensibly intending to honor them at the nation’s capitol, didn’t seem to think it necessary to honor them until they arrived — they wouldn’t spring for anything more expensive than coach tickets. They spent the hours-long flight smashed together in the back row, neither seat able to recline to offer even a little respite from the miserable journey.

  To top it off, the plane had run out of alcoholic beverages, leaving Ben and Julie to subsist on peanuts and half-cans of Diet Coke delivered by a flight attendant that was clearly unsatisfied with his career. The attendant made a snide comment every time they’d asked for something, and he eventually told Ben to “get up and get it yourself” when Ben asked for another beverage.