Shadow of Eden (43 page)

“Ever fight a man?” Valenti huffed, stepping off his treadmill and wiping his reddened wet face on a towel.

“Yeah, in high school,” Steve said between pulls of the rower. “It was over in one punch.” He pulled again. “I got a split lip, he got a bloody hand.” Another pull. “Fairly even, I’d say.”

“Very Rambo,” Valenti said, amused.

“Thanks.”

“Pistols? Firearms?”

“I had one, but it disappeared from my closet when I needed it that night.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t where I kept it.” He puffed. “It was supposed to be in the closet, but wasn’t there.”

“I wonder if our friends have it.”

“I sure as shit didn’t have anything to point at them.” Steve felt his anger growing again and pulled extra hard on the next several rowing cycles. “Those fuckers.”

“Yep, but,” Valenti hung the towel around his neck. “It’s our turn, now.”

“How?”

“I’ve yet to see a company do systematic illegal activity without leaving a trail. Remember Enron? Watergate? Madoff? It always reaches a point when just too many people know about it to keep it under wraps.”

Steve pondered for three pulls. “Okay, Morloch had to make himself the center of all the information in order to control it.”

“Right. What else?”

“Well, at the time, Trident was a much smaller company and it’s a lot easier keeping a secret in a small one than a large one.”

“Right. So, they had to limit the information to just a few people in order to pull this off. Can that be done in a biotech company?”

“Sure, if it’s small enough.”

“Then, as I see it, Morloch controls the information and applies the external pressure.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked in between deep breaths as he tried to catch the video competitor who had steadily increased his lead.

“To keep a deep secret requires threats of consequences or promise of great reward. The only other thing is intense personal loyalty to a person or cause. I doubt Eden is such a cause or Morloch such a person, so I return to the first two. Reward and or threat.”

Steve crossed the video finish line a sad second to his electronic opponent and let go of the handle. “The reward part is easy. Stock options.”

“Right, but I’m a cynical bastard. When you have human lives at stake, the stick probably needs to be employed.”

“Okay, so we figure out who had access to the critical information.” Steve ran his towel through his wet hair.

“It’s may be a little more complicated than that,” Valenti said. “You can have any number of people in on part of the secret as long as they don’t have the whole story. A technician may have access to an abnormal finding, but isn’t in on the secret because he doesn’t have the larger context.”

“So we target the higher-ups.”

“Both. If we can identify who may have had partial information, we can draw the conclusions ourselves.” Valenti screwed the top off a water bottle and took a long draught.

Steve reflected on that. “Morloch would have a close group of executives and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who. One might talk. We could also find out who worked in the lab when they were doing the early work on Eden.”

Valenti grinned. “You’re pretty smart for a Doc. That’s our initial strategy. Begin with public sources to identify likely candidates—you’ll need to help with that—and then we make personal visits and ask lots of questions.”

“Doesn’t sound too hard.”

“Trident’s big game, Doc.” Valenti pointed the water bottle at Steve. “Wound it and you get trampled. It’s got to be a kill shot.”

In the guest bathroom, Steve pulled three items from a bag that Valenti had left for him. He laid them out on the counter and examined a bottle of black hair color, a disposable razor and a new electric hair clipper.

He started with the hair clipper. He placed the small trash basket on the counter and, leaning over it, started cutting his wavy brown hair with the clippers, watching without emotion as clumps fell into the basket. He had chosen the largest snap-on attachment, which would leave him with about half an inch of hair all around. He cleaned up the hair clippings that sprinkled the counter and then read the instructions for the hair dye. He thoroughly rubbed in the hair color and let it sit the prescribed time.

He then took a long hot shower, where he rinsed off his hair. Emerging, he dried off, and, with the towel wrapped around his waist, he used the razor to shave, leaving a growing outline of a Van Dyke. Once done, he appraised the minor transformation in the mirror. His new short black hair and the emerging beard did not look like him; not a lot different but still different. There was no liking or disliking it; it was his disguise, another edge over the adversary.

Finally, he dressed and emerged from the bathroom to wonderful cooking smells. Finding his way to the kitchen, he discovered several pots steaming over the stove tended by a petite dark-haired woman. She looked up when he walked in.

“Hi, I’m Steve.”

A wide smile crossed her face revealing two rows of perfect teeth. “Hi, Steve. I’m Maria, Tony’s wife. Come on in.” Maria’s dark hair cascaded to her shoulders in abundance and she wore a colorful apron over her jeans and white blouse. She gestured with her hand to the maple kitchen table, “Have a seat.”

A slender girl of about eleven sat at the table in front of a textbook watching him. She was dressed in a sweatshirt and a stone-washed denim miniskirt. “That’s our daughter, Elissa. Elissa, Dr. James.”

Steve sat down in one of the cushioned wooden chairs that surrounded the kitchen table. “Hi, Elissa.”

“Hi, Dr. James.”

“What are you reading?”

Elissa made a face. “Social Studies.”

“One of my favorite courses,” Steve lied. “What are you learning?”

“How money changes hands and how it’s printed and stuff like that.”

Just then, another girl, about nine or ten, ran through the kitchen without stopping, ear buds sticking out of her head and singing something Steve did not recognize.

“Natalie,” Elissa said with sibling distain. “The next child star.”

Maria put a tall glass of ice water in front of Steve. “Here you go. Dinner’s on in about ten.”

“It smells good. What is it?”

Valenti walked in. “Pasta for energy and Lentil soup for your soul. Maria’s the best cook in the world.” He leaned over and gave his wife a kiss. “But she never cooks enough pasta.”

“You don’t look like you’re starving to me.” Maria could easily hold her own with her husband.

“I see you met my number one daughter. She’s bound for college and wants to bankrupt dad by going to Notre Dame.” He grinned. “We’re holding out for scholarships.”

“USC, Dad,” Elissa objected. “And why not scholarships? My grades are good enough.”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

Steve chuckled. “My man, you’re totally surrounded and out-maneuvered.”

“Don’t I know it.” Valenti’s happy look said that life just couldn’t get any better.

Chapter 91

“J
eff, what in the hell’s going on over there?” Dick Samuels barked through the phone at the President’s Chief of Staff. “I thought we were on track for the budget reconciliation bill.”

“We are,” Bell said calmly while trying to figure what had gotten the House Speaker’s dander up this time. The representative from Vermont, known in the White House as the Varmint Man, called Bell’s staffers regularly to berate them about something or other.

“I’m not so fucking sure. I’m hearing from Castell that the President is strongly supporting the Housing bill. I thought we had put that to rest.”

“We did. Where did you hear this?” Bell said. His kept his tone level, but underneath he was trying to figure out if Castell had gone off on his own.

“If it’s been put to rest, you need to reign in your hotshot Secretary. He’s arranging lunches with all the committee moderates and trading votes to get his bill through.” Samuels lowered his voice. “Look, you know we can’t support another drag on the budget. We’ll work with the President on that, but not if he blindsides us by sending out Castell to lobby for budget busting bills.”

“Right, Dick. I’ll check on it.”

“Like yesterday, Jeff. We’ve got the damn budget in committee.”

“I know. Like I said, I’ll check and I’ll get back to you.”

“Do that,” Samuels growled.

Bell hung up. He had a sinking feeling he knew what the answer would be.

Chapter 92

I
t was dark in Sheridan’s labs except for a glow of light from Cindy Eckhardt’s lab bench. She debated with herself whether or not she should stay and set up the experiment for the next day and get a jump on the work for tomorrow. A yawn decided the issue. She threw away the last of her cold pizza and turned out the lights. Locking the doors at eleven-forty six, she walked past the guard at the front entrance.

“Night, Juan,” she said.

“Hi, Cindy. Let me walk you to your car.” Juan Vargas got up from behind his desk and walked with her out to her car in the well-lit parking area. She got in, waved bye, and drove off. Juan looked over at the police squad car that had been parked in the lot since five o’clock. It was a regular feature every night since Professor Sheridan had gone on vacation. He waved although he couldn’t see anyone as he went back inside.

Upstairs in the main laboratory, precisely at midnight, the timed valve opened and a strong stream of gas poured out from beneath the counter, uninterrupted, for an hour and a half. Long enough for the gas, which was heavier than air, to fill the laboratory space and settle its way to the first floor, pooling in the stairwells and the elevator shaft.

The heat pump heater sucked in the gas and distributed it to all parts of the building, including the offices and lab spaces. Had the lab used a gas furnace, the flame would have ignited the gas much earlier. This would have caused a large fire and extensive damage. With the flameless heat pump, however, the building gradually filled with an enormous quantity of gas making it a huge two-story time bomb.

On the first floor, Vargas put down his Clive Cussler novel and looked at his watch. It was one thirty-four and past time for his rounds. As he stood up, he smelled an unusual odor.
Gas!
Where was it coming from? He walked around the lobby trying to locate the odor’s origin. After a couple of minutes, he decided it came from the air conditioning vents. He opened the stairwell door and a powerful gas odor washed over him.
Shit, the whole building was full—

Vargas never finished his thought as the automatic sparker ignited the gas precisely at one thirty seven. The laboratory walls and glass erupted like paper around a firecracker from the explosion that rocked the neighborhood and engulfed the entire building in flames.

Chapter 93

“T
his way, Dr. Green,” Joan said, opening the door to the Oval Office. Although Green had been to a number of dinners at the White House, he had never actually been in the Oval Office. It looked just like the pictures, although the colors were richer than he had expected.

Robert Dixon looked up from his desk, his head outlined by the rose garden seen through the windows, brightly lit by the early morning sun. Seeing him, Dixon jumped up and rushed over. “Tom, how are you? I didn’t see your name on my schedule. How did you slip in, you old trickster?”