THE NIGHT SEBASTIAN received the text from Paul—and he knew it was Paul, because no one else but that cocksucker would have sent him that message—he ditched his expensive smartphone, with its fancy CIA-level encryption, and went the old-school route still used by drug dealers working the streets: cheap, disposable burner phones.
Sebastian had four, each one assigned to a certain key person in his operation: Frank, Ron, Maya, and his executive assistant at the real estate company, Gabriella, who was handling all of his business calls. Sebastian couldn’t tell her the truth of what was going on—she had no idea what he really did for a living—so he sold her a story about how he had been a victim of identity theft, his bank accounts nearly wiped out, the police suspected, by Russian hackers. Until the culprits were found, he had been advised by his accountant not to open up any new accounts—hence the need for a cheap disposable. Sebastian didn’t owe Gabriella an explanation, but revolving numbers—he used a new phone every day—were odd, the things of drug dealers, and he didn’t need Gabriella talking.
Every day at noon, Sebastian changed out his burners for new ones. It was a major pain in the ass, this process—he had to call each person and exchange new numbers (they themselves were all using brand-new burner phones each day)—but it had to be done. Sebastian and Frank still had no idea how Paul had gotten ahold of the number for Sebastian’s previous smartphone, which made Sebastian wonder if he had a mole in his organization. If he did, it was one of four people: Frank, Ron, Maya, or Gabriella.
Fresh from the shower, he grabbed a new burner, and was working it from its blister pack when one of yesterday’s burners rang. He walked over to the bureau, where he had set them up. Maya Dawson was calling.
As usual, Maya skipped the pleasantries and got right to the point. She spoke cryptically, afraid that Paul might be listening in. “I need to see you. I have something to show you.”
Sebastian knew what this something was. “Come to the house.”
“No. You need to see it. In person.”
Maya was asking him to come to their new Celebrity Center. She sounded nervous—or was that a tinge of excitement he detected?
“Okay,” Sebastian said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Since the attempt on his life, both he and Frank had operated on the assumption that Paul, Guidry, or a group of people had eyes on them at all times, hoping he and Frank would continue business as usual and lead Paul and his crew to the key places of their operations—the treatment centers and blood farms. For that reason, neither Frank nor Sebastian had visited the Celebrity Center. Fortunately, a plan had been put in place months ago, in the event he or Frank had to travel to any of his key buildings without being followed.
When Sebastian left his home, he drove to the Sherman Oaks Galleria and parked on the top floor of the private garage, where he traded his Jaguar for a Toyota Camry with tinted windows. All the substitute cars had tinted windows dark enough to prevent his face from being seen.
Sebastian drove and parked at two more locations. His last car, a Honda Civic, was the one he used to drive to the Celebrity Center. He was making his final approach to Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood, when one of his burners rang—the one labeled “Frank.”
“Anton reached out to Faye Simpson about twenty minutes ago,” Frank said. “He wants to take her out to lunch so he can pick her brain on—and I’m quoting here—why women are such ungrateful bitches.”
Sebastian didn’t have to ask how Frank had found out about the call, nor did he need to ask about the contents of the Simpson woman’s conversation with Anton. Faye Simpson’s phone, like that of every other employee they brought into their blood world, was bugged, along with the employee apartments and every single thing inside them.
“Lunch,” Sebastian said. “Should I call the press conference, or are you going to take care of that?”
“Reason I’m calling you is to figure out coverage.”
Which had become a major problem and a major headache since the house explosion.
Three of Ron’s men had died in the explosion, and there was no way to cover up that fact. Their remains would be identified at some point, so it was best for Ron to get ahead of the problem—and he did, using a story they had locked down in the event something catastrophic happened. He called a detective on the Blood Unit, Mark Alves, and explained that he had received a credible tip on his toll-free hotline about a sixteen-year-old carrier named Jonathan King, who had been abducted five months ago in Orange County. King, the caller said, was in a home in Cudahy. Ron had men in the area, working on an unrelated security matter, and he sent them to check out the lead. When they approached the house, Ron’s team leader, Marty Straton, heard what he thought were gunshots, and decided to enter the premises. That was the last word he’d received from Marty.
But an explosion in a residential area that had left three dead and many injured and hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage was another matter. A reporter had a source who had confirmed the explosion wasn’t caused by some amateur junkie chemists trying to make meth but by “a sophisticated improvised explosive device utilizing fertilizer—the kind of IED used by terrorists.” The terrorism angle was about to invite even more scrutiny, on a federal level, to Ron and his employees, who were already under the microscope, being questioned, possibly even watched. Ron had to divert his resources away from blood world matters until things quieted down. It was the safe play for everyone involved.
Frank said, “You know the guys Ron gave us, the ones who aren’t on the books?”
“The guys we have keeping an eye on the Celebrity Center.”
“Right. I say we divert them from the Center and have them follow Anton for the day, see if anything develops. I can remotely turn Faye’s phone into a listening device. My tablet has all the software I need to listen in. All I need is to be somewhere in a radius of seven hundred and fifty feet.”
“Here’s an idea: how about turning the dial down on the paranoia?”
“Paranoia is what’s going to keep us alive, Sebastian.”
“Look. You’re the one who’s been all Team Anton since the beginning—and everything keeps pointing to he’s still on our side of the fence. As for Faye Simpson—and I’m using your words here—she hasn’t done a single thing to indicate she’s working for anyone but us.”
Frank said nothing. What can he say? Sebastian thought. He knows I’m right.
“Besides,” Sebastian said, “Faye doesn’t have access to our blood clients, and she has no idea where our donors are housed. In other words, she doesn’t know anything valuable.”
“She knows the building belongs to us.”
“Which is all the more reason why we’re to keep the guys we have at the Celebrity Center. That’s our prime asset. You want to go play spy, you’ll have to do it alone.”
“I’ll come by and pick you up. It’ll do both of us good to get out.”
“I have to go see Maya.”
Frank didn’t ask what it was about; he knew.
Sebastian hung up, thinking about the explosion. Again. It was always there, what had happened, a thorn stuck in the brain.
Early on, he and Frank had considered the possibility of Paul trying to take them out with a mail bomb delivered to the home or office. Such bombs were easy to make, provided you knew what you were doing, and it stood to reason that Paul and Guidry did, given their military training. Sebastian had taken the necessary steps, diverting all of his mail to a post office box, where one of Ron’s men picked it up and brought it to a place where the mail was x-rayed. They had never once considered the possibility of Paul leading them into a trap, one involving an IED.
These past few months, he’d assumed—arrogantly, as it turned out—that Paul was simply a boy, and not a bright one at that. Sebastian had underestimated him. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
The Celebrity Center’s official, public name was the Los Angeles Health and Wellness Center. The building sat tucked back from the main street, another boring, vanilla structure of light gray concrete. It had ten floors, with nice views of the city and the ocean, but its main attraction was the private parking garage, with its private elevator access. Celebrities and other high-profile clients looking for a nip/tuck or to treat dermatological issues could come here and not risk being spotted by the paparazzi or anyone else; they were guaranteed privacy.
The same would be true for blood clients. They would be driven here and brought up separately, to the tenth floor, where they would wake up in private, hidden treatment rooms to receive their Pandora transfusions.
The master key he carried was the size of a credit card and fit neatly in his front suit pocket. It also acted as a garage door opener. As Sebastian approached the private, locked garage, the door opened automatically and, after he entered, slid closed. The only car he saw was Maya’s Jeep Grand Cherokee.
It was Saturday. The Wellness Center didn’t see patients on weekends.
He parked next to the private elevator, and then rode it up to the tenth floor. He made his way through the circular-shaped hallway, the walls made of glass, the heels of his shoes clicking across the spotless white floor until he stopped at the door of Maya Dawson’s private office. He didn’t need a magnetic key card to unlock it. The master key automatically did that. But it wouldn’t help him with the next part.
Once inside Maya’s office, he secured the door with a good old-fashioned dead bolt, even though Sebastian knew he and Maya were the only ones in the building. It was more out of habit than out of paranoia. Medical offices, like schools and other facilities, weren’t immune to gunmen looking to abduct carriers. Medical offices, though, were also targeted with alarming frequency, especially for break-ins, people looking for information on carriers or, even better, discovering which facilities stored carrier blood.
Sebastian moved behind the immense glass deck and pressed his right hand flat against the section of touch-sensitive glass. It scanned his handprint and matched it to the only three stored in the database: his, Maya’s, and Frank’s. Sebastian typed the password on the keyboard—Frank always insisted on dual security measures—and turned his attention to his left, where three bookcases took up an entire wall.
A soft click of latches springing free, and then the middle bookcase opening noiselessly. It hid the treatment rooms behind the walls, not only to give the clients ultimate privacy but also to prevent them from being discovered in the event of a police raid. It had never happened to him, but it had happened to the Armenians. Sebastian had survived—and flourished—by staying off everyone’s radar. And now Paul had put his life’s work in jeopardy.
Sebastian hurried inside the small hidden alcove and with four quick steps found Maya Dawson seated in an office chair in the compact square room, staring at three privacy screens. Each one took up a wall, and each one looked inside the treatment room using the same one-way glass the police used when interrogating suspects.
The middle screen was black, but not the other two. In those rooms he saw two clients, both middle-aged women, one of whom was a successful TV actress on a sitcom called Life with Howie, where the woman played a mouthy former beauty pageant contestant from Long Island turned trophy wife of an older guy who’d won the lottery. They both sat in comfortable chairs—the actress watching something on TV, the other woman reading an actual, physical book—while a transfusion machine slowly withdrew their blood and replaced it with a carrier’s, a process that took most of the day. Clients weren’t allowed to bring their phones or any other electronic devices they owned. They were meticulously searched for everything, including GPS trackers that could be injected under the skin, before being transported to the center.
Unlike the treatment rooms in the previous building, the rooms here resembled luxury suites—fresh flowers, beds with linens made of the highest-quality merino wool woven with a silk jacquard and small amounts of gold; catered meals featuring caviar; bottled water collected from a spring off the coast of Hawaii and hailed as having amazing health benefits; and a whole host of other bullshit trappings expected by the rich and famous.
“Why’s the screen turned off?” Sebastian said.
“I’ll show you in a minute.” She picked up a computer tablet.
In addition to overseeing the new Celebrity Center, Dr. Maya Dawson was responsible for the health of all of Sebastian’s carriers. When she discovered Jolie Simone’s pregnancy, Maya had immediately removed Jolie from the donation roster. Donating blood while pregnant depleted a woman’s iron, made her susceptible to anemia and other health risks.
During the time when no one except Simone and her baby daddy knew she was pregnant, Jolie had donated only two pints—not enough to perform a whole-body transfusion but certainly enough to test out Paul’s theory about the power of a pregnant carrier’s blood.
Which was why Sebastian had Sixto Ferreria, the second person Paul had texted, handed over for testing. But not before breaking the kid’s bones, he thought. Sebastian had ordered Frank to do that first, before taking Sixto here for testing. Sebastian wanted to see how pregnant carrier blood would affect healing, among other things.
“Mr. Ferreria,” Maya said, “is up and walking.”
Sebastian chuckled. “Bullshit.”
Maya’s expression remained stern.
Sebastian felt a quickening in the pit of his stomach. That can’t be true, he thought. Pandora could heal broken bones and fractures, but it would take way longer than seventy-two hours to be up and walking.
“He’s still a bit stiff,” Maya said, “and he’s not going to run any marathons, but the bones are healing quickly—much, much quicker than with Pandora.”
“Did you mix Jolie’s blood with our drug combo?”
“I did. If Paul knows the medications we use—”
“He doesn’t.”
“Did you ever find out what he’s using with his transfusions?”
“Viramab.”
Maya sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Those people . . . they’re as good as dead.”
Sebastian nodded with his chin to Ferreria. “Side effects?”
“None.”
That, too, surprised him. Almost every client complained of dizziness and nausea, experienced fever and chills during and after a Pandora transfusion. People who had an allergic reaction broke out in hives. There were more serious problems, things like a hemolytic reaction in which a patient’s immune system attacked the red blood cells of the donor.
“Actually,” Maya said, “there is one major side effect.”
“What?”
“He masturbates. Frequently.”
“On camera?”
“Anywhere. He’s totally uninhibited.”
Sebastian recalled the story Frank had shared with him about Sophia Vargas and the policeman in her backyard. Sophia had been on Jolie’s blood.
Maya unlocked the tablet using a series of complicated passwords, all of which changed on a weekly basis. “I gave him only half a pint of Jolie’s blood. I wanted to use it as a baseline. Take a look at these before pictures.”
Maya handed him the tablet. She always took pictures of clients before a transfusion—close-up shots of clients stripped down to their underwear. They were used for comparison purposes, to show the clients how their skin and body compositions reacted and changed.
Only Sixto Ferreria hadn’t come into the Wellness Center looking like the typical client. Like Link, Ferreria had been tortured, starved, and deprived of sleep over several months.
A series of small photographs, each one half the size of a playing card, was loaded on the screen. Sebastian tapped the first picture, enlarging it, and then used his finger to swipe through them.
In each one, Ferreria, stripped down to his soiled boxer shorts, looked like someone who had been pulled from a major car accident. Beneath twisted limbs, swelling bruises, and open wounds, Sebastian could see the traces of how the kid had looked before—a grossly overweight Hispanic twenty-something male with at least three chins, thinning black hair, and a pair of man tits with nipples the size of pepperonis.
“Okay,” Sebastian said, placing the tablet on the counter. “Let’s see him.”
Maya flipped a switch.
Twenty-three-year-old Sixto Ferreria stood in the middle of the treatment room, drying himself off with a towel as he watched baseball highlights on ESPN. At first Sebastian thought the man had stepped out of the shower; a lot of clients opted for one instead of using heavy cooling blankets to cool down after a transfusion as their core temperature shot up. Ferreria had on a pair of gray boxer briefs. They were dark with sweat.
Maya said, “He has a slight fever from the transfusion, which, as we know, is normal, as is his excessive perspiration.”
What wasn’t normal—what made Sebastian’s eyes widen with shock and awe—was just how different the Ferreria kid looked now. Not only was the man up and walking—a miracle in and of itself—but the wounds covering nearly every inch of his skin in the photos were either completely healed or on their way to being fully healed.
On top of that, nearly all his excess fat was gone. The kid wasn’t going to be a bathing suit model, but he might have been twenty pounds away from it.
Sebastian snapped his attention back to Maya and said, “This is after one pint?”
“Half a pint, and seventy-two hours.”
Sebastian wanted to call bullshit. To achieve Pandora’s optimum benefits, a client would have to be given a full-body transfusion and then wait at least two weeks for it to work its magic. After that much blood and that much time, you might see an amazing transformation take place: wrinkles reduced, skin tightened, everything firmed up.
But this, what he was seeing right here, right now . . . it couldn’t be possible. The man looked like an entirely different person. Like he hadn’t been beaten nearly to death.
“Vitals?” Sebastian asked as he watched Sixto run the towel across his hair.
“His blood pressure is a bit higher than I’d like, but blood pressure usually spikes after a transfusion, because of the stress the body is put under. Again, that’s normal. He may experience some mild flu-like symptoms in the days to come. We’ll see.”
“And his heart?” Heart attacks were always the biggest risk factor in carrier transfusions, the new blood putting the heart under strain.
“Normal,” Maya said. “I performed an EKG, just to be sure. No complaints of heart palpitations or dyspnea—breathlessness—and no loss of consciousness or reported dizziness.”
Sebastian couldn’t keep his eyes off of Sixto.
“That is goddamn remarkable.”
“That’s one word for it.” Maya didn’t hide her disgust. Sebastian had filled her in on Paul’s business plan of abducting female carriers and raping them until they were pregnant. He had also given her the pills Paul was crudely manufacturing.
“Paul was right,” Sebastian said, and turned to her. His throat felt unusually dry, and his heart was tripping inside his chest the way it had at night years ago, after he’d had too much Scotch, like it was pumping sludge instead of blood. “Pregnancy blood is much more potent.” Then, as an afterthought: “It will put us out of business.”
She looked at him sharply. “I will have no part in allowing current or future female carriers to be—”
“I wasn’t suggesting that. Jesus, Maya.”
“If he goes through with this, gets this stuff to market . . .” She didn’t finish the thought. She shook her head and rested a hand on her throat as she swallowed, and when she turned away, facing the window, she suddenly looked old to him, as if she’d aged ten years in the last ten or so minutes.