He stared at us for a second, then picked up a phone, spoke quietly into it, and told us, “Someone will be with you shortly.”
Half a minute later, a short, odd-looking man in an expensive suit appeared behind us. His face was pale and disconcertingly placid, his eyes drooped, and his skin was smooth but saggy, like bad cosmetic work.
“How may I help you gentlemen?” he said. He had an odd hitch in his voice, like a faint but unfamiliar accent. He extended his hand. Shaking it felt like grasping a wisp of smoke.
“How do you do, Mr.…?”
“Bortman,” he said. “I’m the CEO here at Xenexgen.”
I looked over Bortman’s shoulder at the security guy behind the desk. He shrugged and nodded.
“Unusual for a CEO to respond in person to a request for information,” I said.
Bortman smiled again, weirdly. “We take our support for law enforcement very seriously. So what can we do for you?”
“We’re looking into the disappearance of a young woman named Melissa Brant and a young man named Moose Scott.”
He paused, as if thinking about it, then shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know them. Are they employees here?”
“No, but they recently discovered a plant growing in this area that seemed to match some of the genetic characteristics of your Clean Sweep soil remediation microbes.”
Bortman let out a hiccup that was probably intended to be a laugh. “As you said, Clean Sweep is a microbe, not a plant.”
Carrick said, “So you’re not developing green plants with similar characteristics?”
Bortman shook his head.
“Any chance the gene splice could have jumped species?” Carrick said.
Bortman hiccuped again. “No, but we’d be happy to look at a sample, if you have one.”
“We don’t, unfortunately,” I said, handing him a card. “If you have any other thoughts, please let us know.”
Bortman did his smilelike thing and said, “Certainly.” He palmed the card and slipped it into his pocket, reminding me of one of those old-fashioned toy banks with the hand that comes out and swipes the coin.
As we turned to go, Carrick pointed at the stacks against the wall. “What’s with the boxes? Are you moving?”
“Minor restructuring.”
Back in the car, Carrick said, “That was one strange little man.”
I nodded. “Seriously strange.”
My phone buzzed. It was Bug. I put him on speaker. “What have you got for us?”
“First, that Tapazole is heavy-duty stuff, used to treat hyperthyroidism. Missing a dose can be extremely dangerous. Second, we just monitored two bursts of transmissions from Xenexgen, both seriously encrypted, one routed back to Oslo, and one to a cell phone a few miles away from you. The coordinates don’t match anything on file, but I’ll send them to you.”
Carrick watched as I opened the coordinates in my GPS. The map revealed a solid expanse of green.
“Zoom out,” he said, and when I did, Schoolhouse Road appeared to the south.
“That’s it,” Carrick said. “That’s where Moose found the tiger cress.”
I pressed the navigate button and Carrick turned the car around.
Twenty minutes later, we were stumbling through the woods, holding out our phones. Me with my GPS, Carrick with a compass app.
“This looks familiar,” he said.
“GPS says we should be almost there.”
He pointed at a rocky incline twenty feet high. “Right over there.”
As we climbed up, I smelled something different from the rest of the woods, but it wasn’t weird or chemical or alien. It smelled natural. When we reached the top, I recognized the smell of soil. Exposed earth.
Below us, the entire valley was stripped clean, scoured of vegetation. It wasn’t level, as if it were ready for builders, it was just a raw, open wound.
Carrick said, “Huh,” as he tramped down into the middle of the glen and turned in a slow circle.
“Not how you remembered?” I called down to him.
He shook his head. “Weird. There’s no sign of heavy equipment.”
“You’re sure it’s the same place?”
He nodded, then something caught his eye, a little scrap of white and blue in the middle of all that brown. He picked it up and looked at it, recoiling as he sniffed it.
“What is it?” I asked, coming over to where he was.
He held up a scrap of white plastic with the blue Xenexgen logo. “Clean Sweep,” he said, holding it up in front of my face.
I caught a faint whiff of that strange mixture of sulfur and menthol.
Just then my phone buzzed. “Bug. What have you got?”
“Shit’s going down.”
“Talk to us,” I said, putting him on speaker.
“I’m breaking into Xenexgen’s files and they’re being wiped clean even as I’m doing it. The place is bustling, too. Lots of data coming in and out, ever since you guys left. We got satellite thermal scans. I’ll send you one. But here’s the thing, people are scrambling all over the place, all except for two figures lying horizontal in a room on the third floor and two other figures standing outside the room, like they’re guarding it. I think your friends might be in there, and it looks like whoever is keeping them there is packing up and getting ready to go.”
By the time the scan came through, we were already crashing through the woods so fast, I was worried one of us would break a leg or get impaled on a broken branch. Miraculously, we burst out of the woods right next to the car, unharmed.
Carrick pulled the car in a tight, loud circle, and we sped back toward Xenexgen.
Almost immediately, Bug called back. I put him on speaker.
“Xenexgen just closed down their operations in Oslo,” he said. “Today. Announced the sale of their assets to a German chemical company, and the transfer of their patents to a trust in the Cayman Islands.”
Carrick whistled.
“Anything else?” I said.
“I’m working on it. I’ll call you when I get anything.”
“If I don’t answer, text.”
“Got it.”
“Do we have anyone in a fifty-mile radius?”
“I’m in Trenton.”
I was quiet. Bug was a badass with a computer, but not so much in the conventional sense.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I hear you. I can assemble a team, but they won’t be our guys.”
“Do it.”
“Probably take them a half hour.”
“Then tell them to bring bail money and Band-Aids.”
I thumbed off the phone and Carrick said, “Jesus, big day at Xenexgen. What’s that about?”
“Let’s find out.”
Even in the bright sunshine the Xenexgen compound looked dark. Armed guards patrolled the lawn, and Carrick eased up on the accelerator so we could get a look at them. The place disappeared behind a bend in the road and Carrick pulled off the road, rumbling thirty feet down a slight incline.
As we came to a stop, I turned to him. “You’re armed, right?”
He nodded. “One on my hip and one on my ankle. Are we here to ask questions or are we just going in to get our friends?”
I shrugged. “What did you think of the answers we got last time?”
“Point taken.” He rubbed his chin, an expression on his face as if he were chewing something awful that was going to be even worse to swallow. “We sure we don’t want to involve local law enforcement?”
“Do you even know what jurisdiction we’re in?” I could have asked Bug and found out in three seconds, but that wasn’t the point. I did not want to involve local law enforcement. “Technically, Melissa and Moose are still hours away from being officially designated missing persons.”