“Hello,” he said, knowing who it would be. This was a private line, and only one person dialed this number.
“How are things?” the voice asked.
“Okay. Just thinking about our potential problem in Denver.”
“Yes. That’s going to be an interesting one when it arises.”
“Interesting for sure. Why did you call?”
“I’ve been monitoring a situation you have in Richmond.”
“What sort of situation?” Andrews asked. This man did not call on this secure and scrambled line unless the issue was serious.
“Kenga Bakcsi, the employee of yours who recently died while she was on vacation-someone signed onto the mainframe from her house while she was in St. Lucia.”
“When?” Andrews asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Wednesday, August twenty-fourth, just before midnight.”
“It’s Tuesday morning. Why am I just finding out about this now?”
“I needed time to react, to see what files they’d accessed. Damage control, so to speak.”
“What were they looking for?” Andrews asked.
“Kenga Bakcsi had a secure file with a chemical formula on her home computer. Triaxcion. That was the file the person opened.”
“Anything else?” Andrews asked, his mind racing. Who had been in Kenga’s house? And why?
“There was a text file with a name and address in it. Gordon Buchanan, Butte, Montana. You know him?”
“I’ve heard the name through our legal department. Buchanan’s brother died of something-or-other and he’s got a lawyer looking into a possible litigation. Nothing yet.”
“But why would Buchanan’s name be on Kenga’s computer?” the voice asked.
“I don’t know. Unless Kenga was feeding Buchanan the information she was stealing from the company computers.”
“That would explain things.”
Like why we had to kill her, Andrews thought. “This Buchanan guy-what have you got on him?”
“Not much yet. Some hick from Montana who runs a sawmill near Butte. I’ll get more on him as fast as I can without raising any eyebrows.”
“You do that,” Andrews said. “And get back to Kenga’s place and get that file off her computer.”
“Already done. The file was removed on Thursday and the computer’s hard drive adjusted, so there’s no history of that file ever existing.”
Andrews stared across the vast expanse of trimmed grass to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distant west. He loved this view, especially in summer when the trees were in full foliage and the skies were lazy blue. He loved sitting on his deck enjoying the million-dollar view from his multimillion-dollar house. And he didn’t want that to change. “What level of threat does Gordon Buchanan pose to us?”
“In my opinion, minimal to nonexistent. He’s a two-bit ambulance chaser who talked one of your employees into getting him some classified information from the mainframe. He’ll fuss around with things a bit, try to light a fire under his lawyer’s ass, then go away. Buchanan is no threat.”
“All right. But keep tabs on him from your end. I’ll have our legal department monitor things in Richmond.”
The line went dead. Bruce Andrews hit the talk button and dropped the phone on the table. Life was never simple, especially when you headed up a major firm like Veritas. It was even more complicated when you played outside the rules. Killing Kenga Bakcsi was not high on his to-do list, but it had become a necessity. They knew she was selling information to someone but were unable to ascertain who. He had begun to suspect the Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission, so finding out it was some nobody from backwoods Montana was a good thing. Gordon Buchanan was a pest who would either quietly go away or quietly go missing somewhere in the woods.
The choice was his.
26
The Seattle-based offices of Connors and Company were small and poorly lit. Little sunshine filtered through the north-facing window, which opened onto a narrow alleyway that abutted the older brick building housing the investigative firm and a handful of other small businesses. There were two sconce lights, neither of which had a bulb, and a solitary overhead light with two sixty-watt bulbs. But the dim working environment suited Wes Connors perfectly. He seldom made it into the office in the morning without a hangover, but as long as his coffee machine and computer were working, he didn’t care about anything else.
Connors drained his first coffee quickly and poured a second, sipping it as the Advil and caffeine kicked in. He hooked his laptop computer to the printer, opened a file, and hit the print button. Six pages rolled off the HP LaserJet 4P The printing was slightly faded and he made a quick memo on a Post-it note to pick up a new cartridge. One thing Connors had learned early in his tenure as a private investigator was that the reports handed to the clients were all they saw, and they had better be professional-looking. He never let his toner get to dangerously low levels.
Wes Connors was thirty-eight and totally disillusioned with life. He had never been a good-looking man, always on the outside looking in when attractive women were deciding who in the bar to go home with that night. His face was oblong, with droopy eyes and thick lips under a bulbous nose, now stained bright red with tiny capillaries. He tried to hide his features with ball caps and by growing his hair long, but the only way he really looked any better was after ten or fifteen beers. So he drank. He drank a lot. It didn’t help; he still went home alone night after night.
But where he was unsuccessful with women, he did much better with his investigative business. There were always married men and women who wanted to know what their partners were up to when they were at work. Marital infidelity was a godsend. It paid the bills, kept him driving reasonably new vehicles, and even covered the cost of an occasional hooker. But this client was different. His work was interesting and it paid very well. Someone at Veritas Pharmaceutical had pissed his client off big-time. And Gordon Buchanan was not a man he would ever want to piss off. He was like a cornered wolverine, intelligent and dangerous.
Buchanan had come to him just after his brother Billy had died back in April, a referral from another satisfied customer. Buchanan was sure Billy’s death had something to do with the medication Veritas had manufactured. He had hired Connors and Company to scratch the surface at Veritas and see what was underneath.
Connors had pulled the company’s financials for the past ten years, concentrating on the long-term projections and goals. The bottom line looked good, but Veritas had not brought one new drug to market for some time now. And that hurt. Without revenues from a new patented formula and with patents expiring on two of their previous blockbusters, the company should be stretched tight. But it wasn’t. They were flush with cash and tangible assets, including owning the facilities in White Oak Technology Park, where eleven different divisions had labs and offices. Connors was no financial whiz, but something wasn’t adding up.
Then there was the premature death of Haldion, off the market for causing heart palpitations. The litigation against Veritas had stopped when Bruce Andrews had taken the corporate helm, but that didn’t increase revenues. Three new drugs were in the pipeline, one for reducing blood pressure, one some sort of antiviral medication, and the other a cholesterol drug. But nothing concrete yet. They were touting the arrival of Dr. Jennifer Pearce, a Ph.D. with eight years of Alzheimer’s experience at Marcon. According to Bruce Andrews, she was the woman with the answers to the Alzheimer’s puzzle, although he was tempering his words with kid gloves, careful not to ruffle Marcon’s feathers too much. The last thing Veritas needed right now was to give Marcon any excuse to tie up Pearce’s hands in legal red tape by claiming proprietary information had shifted companies when she moved. So far, so good. Marcon was sitting on its hands and watching.