Elixir (28 page)

The scent of the oil provokes a reaction in her mind she finds strange in this moment getting her Last Rites read. It triggers memories of meals she enjoyed in Italy, olive oil a staple in Italian dining. A picnic her family went on in Positano. A pasta lunch her mom made her when she had a Tuesday off from school. The dinner she had in Tuscany with her boyfriend James, his aunt Leanne, and her husband Marco.

“Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit,” the priest says, dabbing more liquid out. Cradling her left hand, he spins his rubbery finger over her palm. He does the same to her right. “May the Lord Who frees you from your sins, save you and raise you up.” Making the sign of the cross over himself, he says, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

While he continues with another prayer, she thinks about all the things she wanted to do in life, see America, go to the moon, get married, have babies, make wine, write music.

He then begins explaining the transition to the afterlife, but her focus is glued to the night table. A Polaroid of her and her boyfriend James leans against the lamp, both of them making funny faces in a booth at the “Happy Dragon,” the karaoke bar they went to after the Hotel Vanessa on their first date.

She peers at the slice of space and time in the photo, recalling that piece of her history. She looks so happy in it, detached from the pressure of her classes and the life plan her father expected of her over the next twenty years, in tune with everything, in the moment. Free.

Then she reminds herself in all likelihood she’ll never see her boyfriend again and the story of happiness in the image changes to one of despair. In an instant the memory’s face morphs into a new one, an ugly one. He’s abandoned her and will never share a new experience with her for the rest of her life. He is to exist to her only in the renderings of the past etched in her brain until her brain expires, any minute now. And then she doesn’t know what will happen.

Filled with a gust of panic, she can’t help but extend her weak hand to the night table and flip the picture over. She glances at the Polaroid’s dark backside. Nothing there. No good. No bad. Nothing.

Sean blinks in the Lincoln backseat as he peers at 8:34 on the digital clock, numbers blurry to him from lack of sleep, the three digits converging into one multi-shaded green ball. Looking out the window, he sees the Redwood City business district come into view among the morning sky, dozens of modern glass buildings shining over the seaport in the first American sun of the New Year.

Though he’s never been in this town he recognizes the body of water and some of the architecture from geographical research he’d done during his
Jeopardy!
era. He recollects from the Colzyne website the company is located here. Things start making sense now, the people behind it all.

He sits up. He wonders how they found out, considering the non-detectable way he hacked into the system. Hank somehow? It doesn’t even matter he figures. Not at this point.

In about five minutes the sedan cruises in front of Colzyne Tower, Sean tilting his gaze up at the eighteen-story monolith. Dante hooks around a corner toward a service entrance. He puts the car in park and climbs out. Kneeling, he unlocks the gate with a key and heaves it upward along its tracks, the high-pitched ratcheting sound clashing with the low rumble of the idling engine.

He gets back in the Lincoln and drives through the rectangular opening into a parking garage, Sean scoping a sea of parallel painted white lines, vast majority of the spots empty on the New Year’s holiday. His eyeballs burn. He blinks a few times hoping it’ll help, but it only makes it worse.

They wind down a few levels, at the center of each a support formation of ten wide columns, a red emergency phone, and an elevator. Sean’s been staring with longing at the phones, so close, so distant.

Nosing into a space, Dante kills the engine. He steps out in his sockless loafers, bits of ankle exposed, then opens the rear door and scowls at the beat-up kid in the glow of the interior bulbs. Dante smacks his tongue in his mouth, the pop echoing through the large hollow garage, and says, “Let’s go.”

Sean takes a deep breath and sets his right boot on the rough concrete, then his left. Wincing from the ankle pain, he tries to transfer as much weight on his good foot as he can. It’s difficult to keep balance with his hands clasped behind his back in cuffs. Dehydrated and weak, he topples, his right shoulder grinding against the surface as he attempts to protect his head from the impact.

Dante laughs at him for five seconds or so, then hoists him up from the concrete by the collar, points at an elevator about a hundred feet away, and says, “Come on.” Sean coughs a couple times, then approaches the stainless steel entrance with slow, difficult shuffles of his feet. It takes him a solid two minutes to make it over, his shoulder throbbing now just as much as his ankle.

Dante summons the cart, enters, and motions for him to get inside. As Sean drags himself through the gap, his abductor hits “B4.” They descend for about thirty seconds in the posh elevator, marble floor, red area rug, mahogany paneling. The doors part. Dante extends his gray-suited arm, signaling for Sean to go first.

He totters out, scenery down here in contrast with the fancy elevator, unadorned cement walls, industrial fans, a chain-link cage with a few hundred stacked Colzyne cardboard boxes inside. He guesses he’s in a corporate warehouse. “Follow me,” Dante says with a slight grin, gloating in the successful drop-off of his target.

“Where?” he asks, skeptical of each of the five shadowy hallways splitting off from the main branch.

“This isn’t the time to ask questions.” He bangs his hands and veers into one on the right. Sean hobbles behind with caution, scanning his sides and back every few moments. The darkness grows as they distance from the large overhead lamps by the cardboard boxes.

The corridor is lined with tiny bulbs wedged where the walls meet the ceiling, one every three feet, a faint orangey ripple emitted from them, rest of the hall cloaked in black. Sean’s tired eyes do a poor job processing the light, his field of vision dotted with hundreds of little ovals coming and going.

In five minutes or so they reach the end of the hall, stopping at a door with specks of blue paint streaking across the bottom. Dante opens it and holds it in place, Sean peeking inside the tiny square room. Dante unfastens the handcuffs, shoves him in, and slams it shut behind him. Sean hears a click from the other side of the door. Glancing at the knob, he notices it’s been reversed so it can lock from the outside in.

His heart bangs. He looks around, no windows, a seat in the middle, a desk in the corner with a single reading lamp on it providing visibility. He assumes the room was empty in the recent past and modified for his expected visit, chair seeming unnatural alone in the center, a desk random down here, the doorknob in all likelihood flipped around just to keep him contained.

He limps to the wooden seat and sinks, freeing the weight on his left leg. The lack of pressure on his ankle is relieving, but he hurts elsewhere, all over, inside and out, his distressed mind having trouble at this point discerning which negative sensations are bodily and which mental, everything blended in an all-encompassing pulse of discomfort.

Dead silence. He stares at the walls, scrapes on them about three feet up, cause unclear, some paint the same color as the kind on the door in tear-shaped dabs on the floor. He wonders if this is where it’s going to end for him, this little room with the scuffed walls and drops of blue paint. From the Holy Trinity Hospital in Shipville eighteen years ago to this, some dungeon in the basement of a corrupt medical company.

He shakes his head, trying to snap from the self-destructive spiral he’s plummeting down. He realizes the stress, combined with lack of water and sleep, is clouding his thoughts. He tries to fight it, groping for logic. He tells himself if they wanted to kill him they would’ve done it before, his abductor having a bunch of chances out in the middle of nowhere.

About twenty minutes go by, Sean not moving other than to blink. Then murmurs emerge outside the door, seizing his attention. Inching the chair toward the hallway, he juts out his ear. Footsteps. Voices, four, maybe five.

The door cracks. Colzyne CEO Donald Phlace enters and seals the room behind him, same tailored black suit he had on yesterday morning but without the tie, the reading lamp beaming on his tight, wrinkle-free skin. Arms folded, he surveys the beaten teenager.

Sean recognizes him from an article he read in
Forbes
one day in Italy, Donald Phlace, Wharton undergrad, Wharton again for business school, north of four hundred million dollars in the sale of his genome company to Colzyne when he was thirty-six, vice president at the conglomerate for five years post-merger before being promoted to senior executive VP, CEO next, cutthroat reputation, many say a backstabber, three ex-wives.

Phlace recognizes the kid’s face too, battered and all, from the
Jeopardy!
photo on his Wikipedia page, his general look preserved between eleven and eighteen though matured. “You’re probably wondering why you’re here,” Phlace says with a hint of scorn.

“I think I put it together by now,” he says glaring, assuming this man is the person keeping him from his dying girlfriend.

“I hear you’re a pretty smart kid, so maybe you did put it together. But in case you didn’t, let me clarify. You’re here because you stole something very important to me.” Ten seconds or so go by, Sean not giving him any eye contact. “I’ve always enjoyed the Holidays. What about you?” He doesn’t answer. “New Year’s Day, today, is a time to spend with family. My wife and kids should be getting up right about now. I’d prefer not to be here. I’d rather get back to them. Can you help me out? Make this quick? What do you say?”

“I. Don’t. Say. Anything.”

Phlace links his manicured hands behind his back and begins pacing. “I guess that makes sense. That you wouldn’t have much to say about that.” He nods a couple times. “I did my research on you. I heard about your parents. What a tragedy. I should’ve guessed you wouldn’t have an opinion on family.” He stops walking and leans over, inches from Sean. “Not having one and all.”

The kid spits on his forehead. “Fuck you.”

He wipes it off with his Brioni suit sleeve and chuckles. “You done acting like an animal? Ready to talk?”

“Fuck you.”

“Who has my files?”

“Fuck. You.”

“I’m going to ask you again myself. If you don’t answer I’ll have my new friend Dante come in and ask instead.” Leering at Sean, he points an angry finger at the door behind. “Think. Be smart. Make this easy on yourself. Who has my documents?” No reply. “Huh?” Still no response. Enraged, he slaps the kid. Sean’s skin hurts, but he doesn’t grimace. He bites his tongue and looks the CEO in the eye, defiant. “I’ll break you, do you understand that? You’re nobody. Do you know who I am? Do you know who we are?” He clenches the leather of his jacket and shakes him. “Who are you selling my Goddamn formula to?”

Sean pushes him off and says with aggression, “Nobody. I’m not selling anything to anybody.”

He regains his footing, then snickers. “You don’t get to a position like mine in this world if you can’t smell bullshit.”

“If I wanted to sell your files I would’ve done it the minute I ripped them from your shitty IT system.”

“You just did it for fun then? You really expect me to believe that?”

“I wanted to finish what was there.”

“No kidding. To sell to who?”

“To sell to nobody.”

“Then why do it?”

“Doesn’t matter.” They’re hushed for some time, the lamp shining on the moon-shaped bruise on Sean’s right cheek.

“Well, you can’t have it. It’s mine.”

Sean doesn’t speak for a while, then grins. The smile leads to a soft laugh. Phlace is puzzled. “You weren’t even close,” Sean says, clapping. “It was funny really. You and your engineers and what you were putting in the mixture. It never would’ve worked.” He lets out a sarcastic, mocking sigh. “It was so obvious to me. And you probably spent billions on it. You never would’ve seen it. Donald Phlace with an army of five thousand scientists and an endless pool of resources never would’ve been able to see it, even if he looked at it twenty-four hours a day for the rest of his life. Never would’ve clicked.” He snaps his fingers. “Whatever it is you want is in my head. My head. Not yours.” He points at his own temple and says with a bark, “My head.”

Phlace sits on the desk, his left foot sweeping back and forth. “So you had some luck then? Finishing it.” His torso blocks half the glow from the reading light, Sean’s body divided before him into white and black.

“I did.”

Contemplating, he watches Sean for about ten seconds, the boy’s limbs quivering with adrenaline. Phlace slithers off the desk and starts circling the chair. “Did you study business at all? When you were at SoCal Tech?”

“Just business ethics. You know, like not using corporate money to hire psychopaths to kidnap people.”

“The first thing they teach you is that the man with the leverage is the most important in the room. Not necessarily the smartest guy. The one with the leverage. Do you know how leverage works?” He stops in front of Sean. “I consider myself a relatively savvy businessman. I do oversee an eighty-billion-dollar public company. I’d say I know a thing or two about it. Most importantly, I can recognize when I have it, and when I don’t.”

“If you kill me you’ll never get what’s in my mind. The mixture dies with me.”

“As I said, I did my homework on you. Any respectable businessman does before a meeting. And I must say, your credentials are impressive. I bet you did actually finish what we started.” He leans forward, his eyeline flat with the seated kid’s. “So I’m willing to barter with you.”

“How?”

He points at the door. “My chief chemist is standing outside. He’s going to come in here in a few minutes and you’re going to sit at the desk and diagram out exactly...what’s in your mind. And he’s going to determine if it’s something I can patent, package, and profit from. If it is we escort you upstairs and you’re free to go. We forget this ever happened. The cops never find out about your theft.”