Off The Grid (24 page)

Chapter 51

The knock on the Luke’s apartment door was so light that Rachel wasn’t sure she heard it. She went to the peephole in the door, expecting to see nothing, but standing in the dimly lit hallway was a pleasant-looking olive-skinned man fiddling with the cuffs of his light jacket. Luke was asleep on the Murphy bed of the studio apartment and she hated to wake him, so she opened the door using the chain and quietly asked what the man wanted.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought this was Luke Kincaid’s apartment,” Amir
Ghorbani said. “I must have gotten the wrong door.”

“No, this is Luke’s apartment, he’s a sleep. Can I help you?”

“Luke and I work together and I have some urgent matters to discuss with him.”

“Can it wait until morning?” Rachel asked, hoping the man would just go away. Work could wait and it was 10:30 at night.

Amir, tried to hide his frustration. Just open the door, he thought, and make it easy on all of us.

“My news could wait until the morning, but I think this is something you both need to hear,” Amir said. “I assume you are Rachel. He mentioned you. I’m glad to see you two together. Should do him good.”

She was surprised to be recognized by the stranger – especially since Luke and Rachel had been “broken up” for nearly a year and a half. When Rachel closed the door to unlatch the chain and let Amir in, she missed the thin smile that flashed across his face.

***

Amir helped Rachel fold up the Murphy bed into the wall, once Luke and his broken arm had rolled out of it. They needed the extra seating in the small living area. Luke warmed up a stale cup of coffee to try and break the cobwebs from his brain.

Amir wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. He looked nervous. More so than the first day Luke met him in the
MassEnergy auditorium when his right leg wouldn’t stop bouncing up and down and he was listening to his smuggled-in headphones.

“There’s something that I need to tell you and I’m not very happy about it,” Amir spoke at his typical rapid pace. “Not very happy with myself. I mean
, I’m a good guy. I think I am. I have a family and I raised my kid right and I don’t think I’ve done the right thing yet. And I want to do the right thing.”

“Do the right thing about what?” Luke asked.

“I wasn’t supposed to be involved, I was supposed to just do my job and that was it. No one said I was supposed to do anything else. Or let people do things that were wrong, but it happened and I don’t want it to happen again. And I think it might, so I want to help.”

“Amir, what are we talking about? Are you in trouble? Can I help?”

“Not me. You.”

Rachel handed Amir a bottle of water, which he downed in several long gulps. Luke and Rachel were leaning forward in their seats, waiting for him to spit out whatever it was that he needed to say. It was obviously weighing on him.

“The day after we started at MassEnergy, I was assigned a side project that I didn’t tell anyone about. And after I tell you what it was, you’ll know why I didn’t say anything. They offered me a 25 percent increase in my salary if I would help with this particular project. You’ve met my wife. You know she’s out of work and we’re living paycheck to paycheck with my daughter. I had to do it.”

“What was the assignment?”

“They said that because of the secret nature of the projects we were working on in the pods, that they needed to keep an eye on the employees. They wanted to make sure that no one was double-dipping – selling our secrets to the competition.”

Luke and Rachel shared a quick glance, knowing what that might mean for them. Amir ignored it and kept on.

“Beckman was worried about you since you used to work for StuTech. He wasn’t too keen on the idea of having you running around the company because he couldn’t be sure that you weren’t still working for StuTech. That’s why he wanted you on the Dev Floor right away, more security than the pods. It’s laughable really. Corporate espionage? I told him that I knew you and thought the idea that you were some sort of double agent was absolutely ridiculous.”

“Got that right. Ridiculous,” Luke said.

“He asked me to keep an eye on you and several other employees, while going about my regular job. Beckman said it was good business to keep a tight ship. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. He is so worried about this Senate Bill, the WES Act, now that it’s about to come up for a vote.”

“Why you? There were dozens of new employees that they could have asked.“

“Beckman knew I was an Army intelligence officer and was familiar with handling sensitive information. I feel like an idiot now. He just wanted someone who would follow orders.”

“OK, so they asked you to keep an eye on me, so what? I think that’s fair. I don’t have anything to hide,” Luke said, but of course, he did.

“I know and I told him that, but he wanted more. Luke, I’m ashamed to say this, but I followed you and Kathryn to Arizona and the Caribbean.”

“You tailed me?”

“Because that’s what he asked me to do. I’m truly sorry,” Amir said. His voice was calm and sincere.

“You said that you had something both of us needed to hear. What is it?” Rachel asked.

“Your car accident wasn’t an accident at all,” Amir said in a voice just above a whisper. “It was deliberate and I let it happen.”

Tears welled up in his eyes. He covered his face with his hands. He was shaking and sobbing. Luke and Rachel shared another glance, neither one knowing exactly where this conversation was headed.

“Luke fell asleep at the wheel and overcorrected,” Rachel said. “How did you let it happen?”

“Right, I was tired, but I don’t remember the actual accident very well,” Luke said.

“That’s why you’re in danger. They tried to run you off the road and kill you for the rock samples you were bringing to the lab.”

“Kill me? Wait, who?”

“Beckman. He wanted to eliminate you, but not before getting the samples for himself.”

The news rocked Luke. He’d been worried about Warren Evans and
StuTech, not Beckman.

“Beckman knew you were bringing back some new mineral that was supposed to be the missing link to making the Tesla project finally work,” Amir said. “Kathryn told him that you two needed a private plane back to Portland. He wanted those samples for himself and didn’t want to share the credit with either of you. The samples were the prize.”

“Amir, forgive me, but I don’t know you from someone off the street,” Rachel said. “Why would you know all this and why would you tell us now?”

“I’m here because I don’t want to follow orders anymore. I played along with Beckman and
MassEnergy. I’ve seen what they are capable of and it needs to stop. I’m probably putting myself in danger for just being here. Maybe I should just go.”

He stood and grabbed his jacket.

“No, please stay. I want to know why this happened,” Luke said, pointing to the 12 stitches on his forehead with his broken left arm.

Amir looked at Rachel who motioned for him to sit back down.

“Beckman arranged for a car service to pick up you and Kathryn from the executive airport. But instead you got two rental cars.”

“The airport concierge said there was a mix up at the car service,” Luke said.

“That’s where I made a mistake. I overheard Beckman planning what I thought was a carjacking with someone on the phone. I had already tapped his office line so I could listen to his calls. You were supposed to get into the car and somewhere along the route to the office, the man was supposed to stage a carjacking and get the samples. Beckman instructed him to do whatever he needed to do to make it happen.”

“You created the mix up at the car service, so we had to take the rental cars,” Luke said. “If they were planning on killing me, why the hell didn’t you just tell me that before I got into the car?”

“I didn’t know that then. Beckman’s instructions to the man were vague and I assumed that he just wanted the samples and the credit. He didn’t say anything about hurting you. I didn’t know who the hired gun was and I thought that if you two split up in different cars that he’d have no choice but to abort the whole thing. I don’t know why he went after you and not Kathryn.”

“If we weren’t in danger, why would you get in the middle of it and send the cars?”

“I didn’t think Beckman deserved the credit – I know what you had to go through to get the samples.”

Luke wanted to ask what Amir knew about their dive in Nevis and what he told Beckman, but he was confused about the car mix up.

“So you’re telling me that Beckman tried to kill me for the samples that he personally ordered us to go get? That doesn’t make any sense. We were driving to his office to deliver the samples to him personally.”

“What happened to your samples?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t in the car when we went looking today. I think that maybe they were ejected from the car when I crashed.”

“I don’t know how they got there, but as we speak, the lab techs are analyzing rock samples from Nevis. They started the day after you came home. I’m leading the project to analyze them.”

Luke was starting to wonder if Kathryn somehow orchestrated his car accident. He wouldn’t put it past her.

“Have you learned anything from the samples yet?”

Not yet, no. We’re working overtime on it because there’s some big shipment coming in tomorrow. It’s all been pretty hush-hush, but rumor has it that it contains pure elements for ARC.”

“Where did it come from?” Luke asked.

“I’m not sure, somewhere in Europe.”

Rachel hid her surprise. She had a pretty good guess what little country in Europe the shipment came from – Moldova. Probably near
Arionesti.

Chapter 52

Kathryn stood overlooking the Development Floor on the Green Level of MassEnergy’s campus. The dark walls of the sunken work area were a stark contrast to the jubilant voices coming from the employees below. It had been like that since she returned. They were finally making progress. James Beckman actually gave her a big, uncomfortable hug when she presented him with the rock samples. The samples that no one knew she had taken from the ocean floor.

Back on Nevis, she had almost laughed when
Estevan asked if she knew how to scuba dive, but kept it to herself, knowing it might be an advantage. She too was a certified diver. Her experience was mostly in lakes in Texas, not the open ocean, but she certainly knew her way around the equipment. Her improvised panic attack on the ocean floor worked exactly as she had planned. Luke went off by himself and she had time to collect her own samples. She simply replaced the weights in her buoyancy vest with the rock samples she collected. Her assortment of rocks was about a quarter of the size of what Luke had brought up.

She thought of Luke lying in the hospital. Why should she feel guilty about it, she thought? He wasn’t about to let her carry the samples once they made it back to shore. He wanted the glory for himself. He wanted to be the one getting all the credit from Beckman. He wanted to cash in too.

When the samples were inspected, Beckman had immediately ordered all of the Research and Development teams to start working on analyzing the samples.

“This might be the most important single project you’ve ever worked on in your entire lives,” he told the team. “You damn well better get it right.”

Most of the techs were working 14-hour days and sleeping in the dorms.

Kathryn had called the hospital several times to check on Luke, but they wouldn’t provide any information. Just that he was still a patient.

Her desire to make the Tesla project a reality had pushed aside her feelings of guilt toward not helping him. She should have stopped when she saw his rental car roll. She should have gone back for him when, through her rearview mirror, she saw the driver of the other car take Luke’s backpack out of the front seat. But she had her own samples, why did she care what happened to his? She wanted to be the one to present them to Beckman. That’s my job, she told herself. Winning was all that mattered.

She had called 911, and knew help for Luke was on the way. She then drove straight to the office. So why did she feel so guilty, she wondered?

The man who took the backpack knew exactly what he was doing, but she didn’t know how. Very few people could have possibly known what Luke was carrying or that it had any value at all. She’d only told Beckman. But why would Beckman send someone to snatch the samples from Luke, when he was in the process of driving them right to the corporate headquarters? It made no sense.

She had not left the campus once since she returned four days earlier. She stayed there because she was a workaholic, just like the techs who worked for her. She kept telling herself that. Nothing could happen to her here. There were too many witnesses. She wasn’t sleeping.

Kathryn was familiar with being uncomfortable. She had received death threats before from terminated employees and angry spouses. Those things came with the territory. She wielded the ax. She was the shark. It was expected.

But this was different. She forced herself to admit that the reason she was hiding out was because she feared for her life. If they tried to kill Luke for some rocks, what would they do to her since she already delivered them?