Dues of Mortality (12 page)

“
I
don’t know, kid,” McCutcheon said cautiously. “If
Trineer had no involvement or even
knowledge
of MIT then it may mean someone
has reason not to trust him anymore. You could be walking into the
lion’s den.”

“
I
know the risks, boss. I took the same oath you did.” Bruckner
almost turned, now wanting terribly to look McCutcheon in the eye.
“I’m close. I can still do this.”

McCutcheon
sucked in his stomach and held it. “It’s not that simple.
There’s...more.”

“
What?”

“
Remember
the lab that got hit in San Francisco, just before we busted
PHANTOM?”

“
Jenetix?”

Jenetix
was a profitable biotech firm that produced a breakthrough in
small-scale tissue regeneration. It was poised to deliver new
treatments that would double the healing and recovery speed of
certain wounds.

“
There
may or may not have been some 'research' consigned at that lab,”
McCutcheon said. “I'm not talking about the kind of shit any
ten year-old can find on a Grid search either. It's the kind of stuff
nobody finds out we've been screwing with until it ends up in the
wrong hands.”

Emil
blinked. Did he just hear what he thought he heard? “You think
Ross may have been working for
someone
else?
Someone
inside
the government
?”

“
It's
just a passing thought. One that gives me a whopper of a headache.
But you won't have to guess what public relations will be like if
this gets out.”

“
Something
like it is now?”

“
Times
ten.”

Bruckner
sighed. “Classified or not, there must be dozens of people who
could’ve spilled it.”

Dozens?
McCutcheon thought.
Try
a number with a few
more zeroes at the end of it
.
“We’ve
already got people working on narrowing it down.”

“
What
about motive? Is it some sort of anti-investment scheme—trying
to dissuade financial backing in certain labs? Or is it fanatical?
What could one of our own find so threatening in the Pentagon's
charter that they'd league up with a terrorist to stop it?”

“
I
don't know. But Ross and his hatred for the biotechs is a perfect
scapegoat. Don't get carried away; I just wanted you to know the
stakes and what to keep an eye out for. It's probably not as dramatic
as all that, anyway. At least I don’t think so.”

McCutcheon
didn’t say “I don't think so” to express his
conclusion, but to express his uncertainty. The biotechs weren't just
another powerful lobbying group in Washington; they had an agenda,
and the people they were in bed with were ruthlessly insane. Some
even fell into the category of nihilistic. It made McCutcheon wonder
just how close their brand of technology—the cloning, the
advanced gene-mods and all that crap—was to actualization.

Bruckner
sighed even louder, smoothing his forehead.

“
What?”
McCutcheon said. “Did you think ‘need-to-know’
basis was only for the grunts?” He paused. “Look, I don’t
give a flying fuck what those Frankensteins are up to, although I
have my theories. Ross is a terrorist and a killer. That means we
have a job to do.”

Bruckner
thought for a moment. “Wait...are you telling me we had
contracts at MIT?”

“
The
leading contributors to that lab do have '
unofficial
connections'
at the
Pentagon.”

“
All
the more reason to keep me in.”

McCutcheon
tugged at his pants again. He knew Bruckner would say that. “You'd
have to go in completely un-wired. Ross is extremely on top of his
game; if you go in transmitting he'll know it. We'd have to rely
strictly on the slipdisk. No offense, kid, but I'd have to be crazy
to let a rook do this.”

Bruckner
raised his chin. “You know the only difference between me and
that MIT security guard?”

“
Kid...”

“
He
didn't sign up for it.”

August 26, 10:00 a.m.

Glenda’s
interview at the bank was in thirty minutes. She checked the time and
saw that she'd been listening to her mother for at least half that. A
mild headache threatened as she sat at the old hardline phone trying,
like hell, to keep the woman from going off the deep end. The last
thing Glenda needed was to have to worry about her parents worrying
about her. She’d done enough of that as a teenager, even
getting arrested a couple of times, testing personal boundaries, and
grappling with a puberty-induced stubborn streak. She squinted hard,
raising a vein in her temple. Cabin fever had set in after just one
night in the dinky motel room.

“
Mom,
I told you, I’m fine,” Glenda said for the fourth time.
“It was just some sleazebag who couldn't take 'F you' for an
answer; it was nothing.”

“
Your
father thinks you should come back home,” Louise said, stifling
the plea in her voice, “at least for a little while.”

“
Mom,
Daddy’s been trying to get me to come back home ever since I
left. I’m not just going to turn tail and run at the first sign
of trouble.”

Their
conversation was temporarily broken by an incoherent rant from
somewhere on Louise's end. Glenda’s father could no longer keep
quiet as he drained the wet bar in the dining room, attempting to
thaw his blood at the news of his daughter being accosted. It was
renown, throughout the land, that to mess with Jeremiah Jameson’s
little girl was to enact the wrath of God almighty. Once, when she
was in the fourth grade, Glenda had come home sopped with tears after
a classmate at school had viciously taunted her before an audience of
unsparing children. A sweep of layoffs at the auto plant had kept her
father out of work for several months, and Glenda had qualified for a
discount lunch voucher. Some buck-toothed little piss-ant in the
lunch line had noticed and given her the Oliver Twist treatment the
rest of the day. Ordinarily, Jeremiah would've gone twelve rounds
with a grizzly bear if
it
had given his daughter that kind of shit. But, he couldn’t just
go smacking around a nine-year-old kid, no matter how much the little
turd had it coming. By the time the clatter of car parts had drawn
Louise to their garage, her husband had demolished every shelf in the
room and had reduced his workbench to firewood. He was just standing
there, the old Louisville slugger stiff in his pulsing fists. “They
hurt my baby,” he kept snarling in a voice that had to be
shredding his vocal cords. “They hurt my baby!”

It
took nearly an hour for Louise to settle the man. Meanwhile, little
Glenda had been eating chocolate pudding and laughing at her favorite
cartoons in the family room, tears long since dry.

Glenda
heard her father shout something again from the background.
“
Oh,
knock it off, Jeremiah! She’s not getting a gun!” she
heard her mother respond. Not surprising. Glenda's distaste for
firearms was practically an inherited trait. Louise couldn't stand
them. From Jeremiah Jameson's perspective, his wife had become
considerably easier to live with after he gave up hunting when Glenda
was still in grade school.

“
Mom,
will you please tell him it’s not that serious. Statistically,
if I’d had a gun in the place,
I
would’ve been the one more
likely to get shot. Everybody and their mothers are walking the
streets with a damn gun. I’m not contributing to that. It only
makes things worse.” Glenda pinched the bridge of her nose. Did
she just sound like her mother?
Oh
my god
, she
thought. If her sanity was to survive the day, this conversation had
to end now. “I have to go, okay? I’ve got an interview.”

“
Glenny,
are you sure you’re all right?” Louise asked. She wanted
desperately to whisper into the phone that she would bring her one of
her father's old rifles. The one he used to kill the
big
animals.

“
Mom,
I know it’s a sad statement, but these things happen sometimes.
Trust me. I’m fine.” Not entirely false, but not entirely
true either. “Please don’t worry, okay?”

There
was a queen-sized sigh and Louise said, “
Okay
honey, if you say so.”

“
I
do. I’ll try to call you later. Tell Daddy to put down the
vodka.”

“
Okay,
sweetie.”

“
Bye,
Mom.”

Glenda
hung up, knowing her mother would not be able to say goodbye. Louise
hated that word. Rarely, could she bring herself to use it. Most of
the time, she just said things like “later” or “much
love,” and left it at that. If she ever said “goodbye”
it was a sure sign for Glenda to keep talking.

In
the motel’s parking lot, a blue antique Camaro coasted into a
space and its engine killed. The thin, overly-tanned man behind the
wheel sat casually with puckered lips, looking into the rearview
mirror and stroking his hair. Hobson had a habit of primping a bit
before a job. When finished, he leaned over and took a small black
case, about the size of a thick novel, from the glove compartment. He
rested it in his lap and smoothed his hand over it as if caressing a
woman’s buttocks, his favorite part of the female anatomy. He
flipped open its lid, exposing a digital organizer and a fanciful,
pearl-handled hunting knife, recessed in a molded case. He gazed back
at the mirror at the first hint of movement.

A
gorgeous brown-haired woman with a long, curvy frame exited her motel
room and headed for a blue Honda Civic parked not more than twenty
feet away. She was wearing business attire, a black skirt, dark blue
blouse and a white blazer. She massaged her neck, looking fatigued.
Poor thing.
It
looked like it had been a long night for her; she probably hadn’t
gotten much sleep. That might make it all the easier though, Hobson
figured, since he had heard she was feisty. He examined a detailed
holograph of the woman in his organizer. He seemed a tad annoyed with
the fact that she was leaving the room, just as he was arriving. But
that wasn’t his fault. Gabriel took his sweet time deciding
that since Hobson was already in for a penny, he might as well go for
the pound. All Hobson would need would be a few minutes of alone
time, isolated, in a dark or at least poorly lit location, and away
from surveillance. Such spots were rare in the city this time of day,
but not completely off the map, depending on where she was headed. He
waited for her to start her car and get far enough ahead before
pulling out.

Washington, D.C., August 26,
10:42 A.M.

In
a small motel just a stone's throw from Mt. Vernon square, Ross
entered the room, closed the door behind him and engaged the locks in
one seamless movement. He was disgusted with himself. The fleabag
motels were all starting to run together in a mishmash of
unaccomplished goals. He let his backpack slide from his shoulder and
caught the strap in his hand.
How
far I’ve fallen,
he thought. The very notion of
trifling with Case Western Reserve University's servers as a
PHANTOM
attack left him dead inside
.
The
technicalities alone rendered the entire exercise virtually pointless
and wholly uninspired. The only reason to even proceed with such a
waste of energy was if he'd given up on taking out BioCore
altogether—and there was no chance in hell of that happening.

Ross
went straight to the room's desk, extracted his fliptop from the
backpack and established his secured connection. A connection icon
flashed on the fliptop's cover and he opened it to Thaddeus Maguire's
timely expression of “what-the-fuck”.

“
I
want
BioCore, Tad,” Ross
exclaimed off the bat. He paced between the desk and the bed, as if
he couldn't decide from which to sit. “I
want
Millenitech.”

“
You
wanted them last year too,” Maguire said. “Look where
that got you.”

Ross
stopped and practically bored a hole in the screen, with a glare that
said, “This is how I'll look at you when I break your neck.”
It didn't matter that Maguire was right, that it
had
been
Ross's overreaching that had tipped off the feds and
led to PHANTOM's downfall. Ross had gotten so caught up in the
Millenitech hype that he hadn't taken the time to fully vet his
opportunities. Not that he ever had a real chance. Jerome Wallace
always had more gators in the moat than it appeared. Even if Ross's
hit against Millenitech had made it out of the planning stages, he
wouldn't have gotten so much as a firecracker beyond the front door.

“
I
sent you what I could for now,” Maguire said with a gulp.
“They've got to be tracking my withdrawals and wire transfers
are too dangerous.”

“
It's
not enough!”

“
You
said you needed to pay people. I sent you enough for that.”