Dues of Mortality (6 page)

“
Why
do you want to know that?” she asked.

A
noise sounded off somewhere on Kelmer's end and he yipped like dog
whose tail had been stepped on.

“
Are
you alright?” Glenda asked again. “Do you need help. Do
you need me to call the police or...”

“
No!
They already have the police. Whatever you do, don't trust the
police.”

A
series of incomprehensible sounds echoed over what seemed like Kelmer
cursing a blue streak. “Dammit I...I think th...they're here.
This was a mistake! I'm sorry Ms. Jameson. I'm sorry.”

The
line went dead.

“
Dr...Richard?
Rich...Oh.” Glenda stared at the webscreen frazzled. Kelmer was
in an absolute tizzy about
something.
Enough to even upend his personal
behavioral boundaries. The traditional introverted scholar, Kelmer
could ordinarily make the invisible man look like Michael Jackson.
Although, one would think someone so vastly lauded for his work would
have a few more friends. As far as Glenda knew, all he had were
colleagues and research assistants, like that Dana Holliman, who
followed him around like a Japanese geisha. Glenda got the impression
Dana was diffidently endeared to Kelmer, but unless words like
microdissection and quantitative analysis were code for “do
me,” they weren’t sharing any broom-closet time.
Well,
he didn't leave a number
,
Glenda thought and there was nothing on the caller ID. She hoped
whatever it was, he was okay.

Glenda
turned again, walking off in the direction of the kitchen. She pushed
past the swing door and was yanked off her heels, constricted in a
bear-hug. She started to scream, only to have it stifled by a huge
sticky palm across her mouth. Instinctively, Glenda began to buck and
kick like a wild steer in a rodeo, throwing her body into every
contortion possible. She forced her assailant back through the swing
door.

“
Want
it to be quick and painless, then stop this shit,” the man
grumbled.

Glenda
kicked harder. If this asshole's intention was to simply scare her
into submission, then he hadn’t thought things through very
well. Most bullies never do.

“
Goddamn,
girl,” the brute grunted. He wanted to hit her someplace that
would result in unconsciousness, but her feral threshing made a free
hand impossible.

Glenda
knew that if she could at least get sideways, she'd be a lot harder
to hold on to. She squirmed and squirmed, not letting up until she
felt she'd pivoted far enough toward the nearest wall. She threw her
feet flat against the wall and pushed off. The two of them tumbled
over the sofa and thudded to the floor. The man’s grip
loosened. Glenda’s incisors then found a fat chunk of palm and
she bit into it like a famished tiger. Not wanting to draw attention,
the man muffled his wail with his sleeve. Glenda spat out the
leathery skin and swiftly rolled over into a superior position. She
then let loose a firestorm of knuckles and fingernails, beating him
gangland style. This was her home, she thought.
Her
home!
Who was
this
prick
to come breaking in and...
uhhhh!!!
The violation!
Bastard!

To
the intruder the flurry of blows was painful but still quaint. He
jolted his thighs upward and Glenda toppled sideways. He then grabbed
a huge handful of her hair, and snapped her head backward. She threw
back an elbow and, by the grace of god, hit him square in the
testicles. He let go, clutching his crotch and wheezing
asthmatically. Glenda then sprang to her feet and dashed into the
kitchen. The ugly beast sucked in a helping of air and raised from
the floor. He clumsily charged the still flapping swing-door madder
than shit. When he pushed it open, he was bonked dead on the nose
with the fatty part of a flying pork roast and its remains of piping
hot bathwater. His hands padded his scalded face and he let out a
gurgled scream. He lunged forward, grabbing blindly for his would-be
victim. Glenda stepped aside, allowing him to list into the kitchen.
She leaned heavily into her swing. The pot skipped off his skull,
with the ring of a cathedral bell. The underside of the man's chin
caught the kitchen counter as he fell. He hit the floor and lay
still. If the pot hadn’t already knocked him cold, the
counter's uppercut certainly had. Seconds later, Glenda was in
perverse spasms, gripping her priceless cookware and standing over
the intruder's motionless form as it defaced her decorative tile. He
was a pug-faced linebacker of a man. He wore a tacky suit and had
skin like stale chocolate. His head was so polished it was like
looking into the sun with naked eyes. He'd breathed on Glenda at some
point and she was certain he had the kind of halitosis that could be
smelled from orbit. Glenda backed up through the swing door and hit
the direct police line. She then exchanged the pot for the old
Louisville slugger her father had given her when she moved out.
She scoffed at the sophisticated front door locks on her way back and
noticed the closet door was wide open. The asshole must have been
watching her the whole time, saw her with her arms loaded and didn’t
hear the lock reengage. Jesus, the one time she didn’t lock it
right behind her. How long had he waited inside the closet? Was he
watching her sleep? God, maybe her father was right: you had to have
eyes in the back of your head if you were going to live on your own
in the city.

“
But
I
won
,
you asshole,” she shouted at the sharply-dressed lump. “I
beat you!”

She
poised herself over the body, club-over-shoulder, like a caveman
warrior atop a fresh kill. If he so much as twitched, it would be a
home run.

Jerome
Wallace barely acknowledged Mai Ling Chow as he approached his office
lobby in a huff. His stride remained seamless as he asked if Gabriel
was inside—no dirty-old-man look, like she was used to getting
from him—and Mai Ling could practically see the steam geysering
from his ears as he goose-stepped toward her like one of the soldiers
in her mother's old home vids from China. She gave a quick, “Yes,
sir,” and Wallace entered his office, leaving her to await the
severed head that was certain to come rolling to her feet.

Once
inside, Wallace made a beeline for his desk. He ventured behind it,
but refused to stand still. His lips were intractably curled over his
tall stalks of teeth and the most motley shade of rouge had overtaken
his features. It seemed as if he was silently counting to ten in
order to prepare himself for that revolting look of serenity he just
knew was beaming like a full moon from the man seated across from
him. When he finally pulled his chin up to take a look, he saw he was
right and his whitened fists hammered the desktop.

“
Impossible!”
Wallace screamed. “He never got that deep into the files and he
was cut off before he could copy anything!”

“
There's
no other way he could’ve known,” Gabriel said. “And
he's an experienced hacker along with being a brilliant geneticist.
Good with the bad, so to speak.”

Gabriel’s
calm was like a painful itch in Wallace’s balls. Everything
going to hell and Gabriel was just sitting there adjusting the drape
of his Armani trench coat, basking in the glow of his men’s
magazine profile, and Blondelicious hair restoration. He made
forty-five look like a seasoned twenty-five and, though Wallace was
loathed to admit it, Gabriel had a constant bead on Wallace's jealous
streak. It was why Wallace could take a smidgen of kinky pleasure in
sending Gabriel to places like the upstate facility, from where his
silk-lined tuchas had just returned. Wallace knew his lawyer detested
the duty, but no one else could be trusted to oversee the
transactions with the foreign buyers. The upstate installation—the
Octohetero-something-or-other—the worker-nerds called
it—engaged in the bulk of Wallace’s illegal cloning and
bioweapons projects. Disgusting stuff. Gabriel would rather have
spent the night in the all-too-famous Turkish prison.

But
fair is fair
, Wallace thought. And it just
wasn’t
fair for the
boss
to be sweating bullets while his employees rolled around on an
emotional bed of roses. A good thing Gabriel was so valuable.
Millenitech's acquisitions had skyrocketed since the Thaddeus Maguire
case and Wallace was well on his way to eliminating the competition
nationwide.

“
It’s
not
possible,” Wallace
reiterated, throwing his hands against the big bay window that
stretched across the office. He looked like he was being arrested.
“The computers don’t lie.”

“
Computers
lie, cheat and steal with the best of them,” Gabriel said,
nestling his hands in his lap with obscene repose. “Apparently
a few details have been overlooked.”

“
You
think?” Wallace said sarcastically and turned his head toward
Gabriel like a tank turret. “Goddamn files might as well have
been encrypted with a crossword puzzle! It's not enough I have to
keep throwing money down a bottomless hole to keep my offices and
labs from being blown up! Do you know how many people called in sick
this morning?”

“
I'm
not surprised.” Damn right he wasn't. Gabriel had gotten a most
inappropriate phone call just after 2:00 a.m. from a very agitated
Thaddeus Maguire who'd also been awakened by an unexpected caller
just minutes prior. By the end of the conversation Gabriel knew
exactly who had hit MIT and that they would claim responsibility
before the day was out. Gabriel thereafter “advised” his
client and cursed his name for robbing him of the remainder of his
beauty rest.

“
As
long as we're on the topic,” Gabriel said, lacing his fingers.
“I spoke to one of my friends at the FBI this morning. He
suggested we beef up security around Millenitech headquarters and
some of the more exposed areas around BioCore...at least in the short
term.”

“
Then
be sure to thank your friend for me! I enjoy running scared because
they keep getting outsmarted by some fucktard with a bag of
fertilizer and a Zippo!” Wallace paused, looking ten seconds
away from a stroke. That would be
all
he needed: to end up
sharing the fate of those losers like Jenetix, out of San Francisco,
who'd had its main headquarters damn near leveled. And after its
owner, Nigel Thurman, was murdered, Thurman Industries, out of
Boston, bled money so profusely it went into receivership.
Millenitech had been able to largely steer clear of the loony
leftists’ warpath early on, but within the past year a number
of their subsidiaries had been hit pretty close together and now
everything was about security, security, security. It was bound to
happen; with its finger in so many pies, Millenitech was gorging
itself atop a biotechnology food chain that spanned the country and,
unintentional or not, it produced some mighty scrumptious table
scraps. It had taken Jerome Wallace less than twenty years to expand
Millenitech into the largest biotech firm in history, propelled
largely by its patented organ replication process, which had
revolutionized the medical industry. It employed over 700,000 people
all-told and brought the dream of the Great Lakes BioCore to life. A
small city of smooth marble and fiberglass research centers, office
complexes, and pavilions, BioCore was the centerpiece of a
reconstruction project that gave Cleveland map surveyors a five-year
headache. Underground and overhead walkways bridged Cleveland Clinic
and University Hospital branches to the huge spawning ground of
leading-edge medicine that provided an unprecedented coalition of
education, research and development, and patenting and sales. It was
truly a global empire to be coveted by both king and peasant alike.
It was also a lot to protect. And while Jerome Wallace, could always
accept it graciously when things got ugly, when they began getting
expensive...it was time to start collecting scalps.

“
FBI
should stand for Fucking Brainless Incompetence,” Wallace said.
“That's just what it would take too: somebody detonating a bomb
in the middle of BioCore. The entire complex stretches across
twenty-two city blocks—if they ever decided to hit it, it could
make every terrorists attack so far look like a series of backyard
barbecues! And you know they'd find
someplace
where security was lapse and I'd
get dragged through ten years' worth years of civil suits while the
plummeting stock drove me to bankruptcy!” He pounded his fist
on the window's thick glass over and over. “Now, to make
matters worse, I've got this little frog-faced fuck hacking my
systems and stealing my tech!”

“
One
might argue that he was actually stealing it back.” Gabriel
said, maintaining his smoothness.

Wallace
looked at him, perturbed.

“
You
two had been disagreeing pretty hotly since you 'scuttled' his
implant; isn't that right?”

“
I
had to. He never would’ve approved of the applications and I
didn’t want him talking.”

“
You
should’ve cut him loose.”

“
Do
you have any idea how far that would’ve set us back? Brains
like his don’t exactly grow on trees! God damn it! Who the hell
do you have to hang over a bridge to get decent fucking security in
this town?”