“Is that what the police report says?” Christopher asked. “Thirty kilometers an hour?”
Gordon nodded. “Seems excessive.”
“Seems stupid.”
Gordon walked to the edge and looked over. It was an almost sheer drop, punctuated by ridges jutting out from the wall. The first ridge was about forty feet down and stuck out six or seven feet. It was covered with trees and shrubs, their roots clinging to the rocky outcrop. Gordon stared at the foliage for a few minutes, then motioned Christopher to join him.
“See that tree?” he said, pointing to a palm angling out from the wall. “It has a huge gash in it, almost at the roots.”
“I see it,” Christopher said. “And a couple of shrubs are broken as well.”
Gordon looked back up the road. “Imagine a vehicle coming down this road at thirty kilometers an hour. It goes over the edge but somehow manages to hit the tree next to its roots. How is that possible? The trajectory of the vehicle would send it flying out into open space, not tumbling over the edge. A vehicle moving at that speed would probably clear that tree, or at best shear it off near the fronds. But not this. This is all wrong.”
“Maybe the car did clear the tree. Maybe that’s an old cut mark on the bark.”
“You know that’s not true, Christopher. In this heat, that mark will be overgrown in another week. No, that’s where her vehicle hit. Which means it was just barely moving when it went over.”
“Pushed?” Christopher asked.
“Pushed,” Gordon said, gazing out over the St. Lucia rain forest canopy. “Which would explain why the driver wasn’t in the vehicle when it went over the cliff.” He brushed his hair back off his forehead and slipped a toothpick from his pocket and between his teeth. “I think someone murdered Kenga Bakcsi.”
25
The estate was invisible from the main road, obscured by a border of thirty-foot butternut and black birch, trees indigenous to the central Virginia area. Numerous flower and shrub beds ran parallel to the highway asphalt and offered a warm touch, almost inviting. But the wrought-iron gate and eight-foot fence told a different story. So did the guard dog signs posted every hundred feet on the fence. Bruce Andrews took the issue of home security very seriously.
Inside the gates was a true country estate. The drive was long and winding, through groves of trees, trimmed grass fields punctuated with equestrian hurdles and numerous ponds, some complete with ducks and geese lazing on the still, summer waters. The main house was set almost in the center of the forty-six-acre package. Its facade was two-story, Southern plantation style, with Ionic pillars on volutes. A wide second-floor balcony ran the length of the house with four separate sets of French doors opening to it. The mixture of Grecian columnar architecture and Palladian-style house worked beautifully, and off-white shutters framed all the windows.
Bruce Andrews was perusing a copy of the Financial Times on the rear deck. He often wondered if the land he viewed from where he sat was that which Grant and Beauregard had fought over during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. Many a brave man on both sides of the skirmish had died on this quiet tract of land south of the Appomattox. Occasionally, he wished that time would slip and he could see the historic battle firsthand: trench warfare in its infancy, breastworks shielding the soldiers as they reloaded their Springfield muskets. But the field remained quiet, and it appeared that he was destined to replay the siege in theory only.
He sipped on freshly squeezed Florida orange juice and scanned the article the Financial Times had written on his company. When he finished, he set the magazine on the table and smiled. They had taken the bait and swallowed it whole. And that was all he needed. With such a glowing review by one of the premier financial publications, it would be months before anyone took another serious look at Veritas’s books. And by that time, the danger of his house of cards collapsing would be history. The smile just didn’t want to leave his face. He had done it. He had taken a huge risk and succeeded.
Haldion, the FDA recall that had threatened to empty the company’s coffers, was behind them. The lawsuits were finished, the cash flow stemmed. Triaxcion, Veritas’s antibalding drug, could hurt them, but with the new projections, they could now weather a full-blown tort suit. That had yet to materialize, but the possibility was ever-present and real. The most active legal challenge they had to date on Triaxcion was from some irritating ambulance chaser in Butte, Montana. Christine Stevens kept threatening a substantial tort action unless Veritas admitted Triaxcion was responsible for altering blood chemistry in A-positive men and women. They hadn’t mentioned anything financial yet, and when pushed to name a figure that would see them disappear quietly, she had insisted that this issue was not financial. Her client simply wanted them to admit that their drug was dangerous.
“Yeah,” Andrews said to himself as he finished his morning coffee. “Like you’d just let the whole thing go if we admit fault.
You bastards would be on us like hyenas on a rotting carcass if we publicly said we made a mistake.” Not a chance in hell that was happening.
He glanced again at the Financial Times. What a coup. He had manipulated the interviewer in such a way that she had seen exactly what he wanted her to see, and arrived at precisely the conclusions he had wanted arrived at. With the Enron scandal still a glaring reminder of where creative accounting can lead, he had chosen his words carefully. Veritas did not have the wide array of offshore subsidiaries Enron had when falsifying its economic performance, but they had other, more discreet methods of reporting higher-than-truth incomes for the year. There was nothing as simple as shifting day-to-day expenses into the investment column. Andrews had different methods that used government tax credits, very difficult to discern even with a forensic audit.
But he had an up-and-coming problem: Evan Ziegler. The man was going to discover that Veritas was shutting down its brain chip operations. The future of spinal cord injuries was now moving in a new direction, courtesy of the researchers at Duke University Medical Center. Fat cells, harvested through liposuction, were now being transformed into stem cells that could be used to repair spinal injuries. That cut through a lot of red tape-no ethical issues with using embryonic stem cells. And there were lots of available fat cells, which eliminated the painful procedure of cutting into bone to harvest them. This ability to create neurons from fat cells had essentially doomed the future of brain chips, which looked to generate new electrical synapses in the spinal cord.
And once Ziegler knew he had been used, he would become very dangerous very quickly. The man was a trained killer, an ex-SEAL who wouldn’t think twice about coming after whoever set him up. Andrews knew that that someone was him.
No level of security would stop Ziegler. Armed bodyguards, the walled and gated estate with patrol dogs, a pistol under his pillow-everything would be useless once Ziegler was unleashed. So the trick was to take care of Evan Ziegler before he
found out. Too bad, Andrews thought. Evan was an excellent assassin. He was organized and efficient. His downside was a stubborn streak of human kindness the army had been unable to snuff out. The same goodness he showed to his wheelchair-bound son was the one weakness that would eventually be his downfall. Andrews had some ideas for removing Ziegler, but nothing was imperative yet. No need for panic. Wait for the right moment, the right opportunity.
Patience.
It had served him well over the years, and Bruce Andrews had a feeling that it was the key to dealing with Evan Ziegler. The cordless phone rang. He plucked it off the table and punched the talk button.