Returning to my apartment was too big a risk. Even though I’d kept my name off the lease, Bilal Nath had access to enough information that he might conceivably track me to my overpriced studio off Broadway. And there was no telling where Sean Burke and his silenced SIG might pop up again. Or the pair of men who had tailed me earlier in the day.
Less than a week ago, my biggest concern was how to mend fences with Addy. Now I was dodging at least three different menaces while setting up a score that might get me killed. I needed a new life plan.
The speedboat should be safe ground. Officially I’d sold the boat after Dono’s death and it was registered to a marine supply company in Everett. Which in turn was owned by a real corporation in Hong Kong, although those papers were false. I was subletting its moorage with cash. That made enough of a smoke screen that I could close both eyes to sleep.
In the morning, I rose to find the cloud cover had lightened to the point where I could at least guess at the position of the sun. The docks smelled of Canada geese and algae and clean ocean air every time the breeze picked up.
The Francesca wasn’t in its slip. Hollis might be offshore, out of the reach of Bilal. I texted him the number 16 and tuned the VHF radio to that hailing channel. I’d finished changing clothes when his voice came through the tinny speaker.
“Benning Boy, this is Francesca.” Fort Benning in Georgia was the home of the Ranger Regiment.
“Francesca, this is Benning Boy. Reply seven-one.”
“Seven-one,” he confirmed. We switched frequencies.
“Smart thinking calling on the radio,” Hollis said once we’d exchanged call signs again. “I’ve been nervous about using my cell phone since that—” He stopped himself from cursing over the airwaves. “Since our spot of trouble.”
“Where are you?”
“A few miles north. Have you heard from our large friend?”
I’d received a text from Willard overnight.
“I’m meeting him at ten,” I said. “You remember the place where Albie used to watch the ponies?”
There was a moment’s pause. “I do. It’s still around?”
“Sort of.”
“I can tie up at a guest slip in Edmonds and probably get there by then.”
“See you there. And thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. My head might just as well be on that same chopping block, you know.”
At a diner on Seaview Avenue, I drank too much coffee and picked at an egg breakfast, as I concentrated on reading details online about the CXS-3001 container I’d seen in Saleem’s hotel safe.
I’d been right about it being designed to transport biological material. The CXS-3001 was touted by the manufacturer as a new generation intended for small-scale transport, and top of the line. The heavy base of the aluminum bottle could receive a pressurized cartridge of liquid nitrogen that would charge the foam inside within minutes instead of the hours necessary for larger, older models, the advertising claimed. So charged, the bottle’s insulation and vacuum plug would maintain the temperature south of one-hundred-fifty degrees below zero, Celsius, keeping its contents viable for at least ten days.
Time enough for Bilal to escape. Far out of the reach of any law. He’d claimed he wasn’t after anything that would cause harm, but I trusted that about as far as I could fastball the runny egg yolk on my plate. Even if I were stealing some prototype vaccine that might help him avoid a slow death from ALS, who knew how that theft might set back research at Ceres, or how many lives a lost cure would impact?
I had to go through with the job or suffer the consequences. That, or call the FBI now and have them ready to bust all of us the moment I stepped over Ceres’s gleaming threshold. I’d keep Hollis and Paula Claybeck out of the story if I could. But if that was impossible, so be it. Better to have them in a cell than dead, or enabling the deaths of who knew how many others.
Would calling the cops even solve the problem? We’d all be stuck in holding tanks until Bilal’s lawyers arranged to cut him loose. Probably much sooner than I would be arraigned and make bail. He could be out and making his next move within hours, and I’d be trapped, unable to protect anyone.
Yet I couldn’t let Bilal Nath get hold of whatever he was after. Regardless of the risk to me or Hollis or even Addy and Cyndra.
The whole puzzle was giving me a headache. I swallowed two aspirin from my pocket, which reminded me of Bilal and Aura’s lineup of prescription bottles in their hotel bathroom. What had Aura’s been?
Olaparib. I looked it up. A cancer cell inhibitor. Commonly taken as a long-term maintenance drug to help prevent recurrence. The description I read mentioned particular use for patients with advanced ovarian cancer after prior lines of chemotherapy, once the tumor had diminished or disappeared.
I knew just enough to understand heavy chemotherapy could impact or even end a woman’s fertility. A book on pregnancy had been on Aura’s nightstand. Was she healthy now, or waiting until her body could handle carrying a baby to term? Were they racing against time with Bilal’s worsening health? Any way it shook out, I didn’t see how knowing she was afflicted could help my problem.
First things first. I’d meet Willard and Hollis, and we’d see how tough a nut Ceres would be. Then, unless I had some brilliant idea before nightfall, I’d drop by the FBI field office downtown and hand whatever agent had pulled holiday duty a shiny gift for the new year.
Luce’s late uncle Albie Boylan had loved to gamble. He never had enough money or credit to get himself deeply into hock, but he seemed to get as much joy out of betting five dollars as five hundred. The bar he’d fronted for my grandfather—who had called the shots behind the scenes—didn’t carry the cable channel showing the action at the old Longacres track. So to watch whatever horse race he’d bet that week’s spare change against, Albie would toddle down to Alaskan Way and a billiard hall nestled under the viaduct.
Over the years the pool hall had been sold and partitioned, with half the space becoming a coffeehouse, which was eventually halved again into a sort of lunch bodega for commuters and tourists coming off the ferries and looking to grab a fast bite. But the television stayed in roughly the same place on the wall, upgraded to a flat screen now and showing a singing competition on Telemundo. I bought a Coke to claim space at the window counter.
Willard crossed the street at Marion, walking without hurry. He carried a long cardboard mailing tube, which looked a little like a drinking straw in his fingers. I joined him at a bench outside, for privacy. Willard’s ass wouldn’t have fit on one of the bodega counter stools, anyway.
He opened the mailing tube and slid a thick roll of papers out. The blueprints were the largest, but some of the other plans were nearly poster-sized as well.
“You’ve already looked,” I said.
“Sure. And the headline is: Don’t Do It. Check this.” He unrolled the stack and leafed through to pick one batch of pages. Eleven-by-seventeen sheets, and thick. Electrical schematics.
He flipped to an interior page and held it out to me. “Fourth floor. Everything’s pretty much normal until you see that they’ve wired the cameras separately. I think that’s because this section”—he pointed to one quarter of the building—“has got its own power supply that switches on in case of an outage.”
“That’ll be the cryogenic storage bank,” I said. “Can’t have things melting during a blackout.”
“Well, that room’s cameras and alarm are completely enclosed. Even if you manage to patch into the building system somehow from outside, or make the lights go out, that piece of real estate keeps right on humming. The guards downstairs can still see everything that happens in that section. And I gotta assume the system can still make a cellular call to nine-one-one, too.”
“Aura Nath said that Ceres has controlled burn safeguards to destroy their biological matter in case of a breach.”
Willard actually smacked his heavy brow. “Controlled burn. That explains it. I was trying to figure why they had this.” He flipped to another page. “It’s a tiny room off the cryogenic unit. Hypoxic air generator, the label says.”
“Fire suppression,” I realized. “The oxygen level in the cryo unit is kept low. In case a controlled burn is set off. The flames destroy the virus or whatever it is, then sputter out from lack of oh-two before anything else catches on fire. I saw hypoxic chambers in the Army. They have them for high-altitude training. And computer data centers, so they don’t have to use water sprinklers.”
“So you can’t breathe inside the cryo room?”
“There’s enough oxygen in the air for humans. Might give you a headache after a while.”
“Christ. Now I get why Nath wanted a pro.”
I sat with the thought. Being a professional meant being a realist. And realistically, Ceres was a bitch.
Gulls cried overhead. Just a few weeks ago their caws might have been drowned out by a constant sonorous drone of traffic right over our heads. But the old viaduct was closed. If I listened hard, I could hear the scrape and crunch of the claw machines south of us as they tore down the two-story highway. Route 99 now went far under our feet. It had taken billions of dollars and nearly that many delays, along with the biggest drill in the world, to bore two miles of tunnel through the heart of the city. The whole waterfront would soon be repaved and redesigned, once the highway was gone. I guessed it wouldn’t be long before market forces pushed the bodega out, too. Maybe the perpetual TV would carry on as a marker.
I thumbed through the schematics Willard had brought. The challenge with complex defenses, overlapping means of security, is that they add extra wrinkles that can go wrong. Your backups wind up needing backups. Somewhere in Ceres’s design there was a flaw. Maybe systematic, maybe human. But what could I exploit with just a few hours to prep?
Nothing. Time to face facts. I had to bring in the law. Maybe I could convince them that I wasn’t a terrorist myself.
I heard Hollis coming before I saw him. He was breathing hard and sweating lightly, even with the morning chill.
“I misremembered which block,” he said, before coughing violently into his hand. “Thought you might have left already.”
“Ceres is a wash, anyway,” said Willard.
“Van?” Hollis asked.
I shrugged. “With time, it’s beatable. But Bilal Nath is expecting me to show up in nine hours.”
Hollis settled onto the bench with a sigh. “I hesitate to suggest it, but there is the nuclear option.”
“Killing Nath,” Willard said.
I’d thought about that, more than once. It was an option. Even if it made my mouth taste bile.
“I know he claims to have an axe ready to fall on your head if he suddenly dies,” said Hollis, “but do you believe him?”
“Ondine gave me Nath’s bona fides. Even she respects him. And Bilal has a whole team to avenge him, not counting Aura.”
“So he means what he says,” Willard noted. “There’s a contract on you, unless he cancels it personally.”
“And I can’t force him to do that. He’s already dying. I don’t know what he fears.”
“He loves his wife, you told me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But going after Aura is a fool move, even if I could stomach it. Threaten Aura, and Bilal will just spirit her off to Karachi or Indonesia or anywhere else out of our reach. Kidnap her and Nath comes after Cyndra or Addy in return. There are too many ways for him to retaliate.”
“Which leads us back to Ceres Biotech,” Hollis said, glancing at the blueprints. “What about a takedown? Masks and shouting and make one of the guards hand over the goods?”
“That stinks,” Willard said. “What if there’s employees working late, or another guard wandering the building?”
“I know it’s a lousy idea,” said Hollis. “I’m not a damned beginner. But we’re down to the dregs here.”
“Here’s an employee roster,” Willard said, finding a stapled bunch of sheets in the pile. “All the security is contracted through Markham Protective. I’ve got some history with that company. They’re good, but they follow the same procedures with every client. We could pull the old gag of telling the guard we’ve got thugs watching his family.”
I glanced at the top sheet, less because I was honestly weighing Willard’s idea than to grasp at straws. The roster started at the Ceres executive board and went down by department and rank from there.
One name, just below those of the CEO and the president, caught my eye: Timothy Gorlick, MD, PhD. Chief medical officer, co-founder.
Gorlick. I’d seen that name before. On Aura Kincaid’s civil records from my new buddy Panni at the FBI.
Aura had been married to Timothy Gorlick shortly before Bilal Nath. And she’d fought ovarian cancer. Had she been struck with it before she and Gorlick were divorced?
“You all right?” Willard said to me.
“We’ll figure a way out of this, lad,” said Hollis.
I barely heard them. I was getting an inkling of what Bilal Nath wanted. Why he and Aura were so ruthless in their determination.
And, more important, how I could turn that against them.
“Willard,” I said, “walk me through everything you have on Markham Protective. Start with their camera circuits.”