“Nice.” Xavier holds his fist out toward me until I bump it with my own, then he offers to go with Fionna. “It might be good to have two of us there to deal with anything that might come up.”
“What might come up?” she asks.
“Stuff.” He looks around awkwardly. “You know. That might need handling.”
“Handling.”
“Hey, you never know what you might run into.”
“Well… I suppose I could use a minion.”
“Let’s go with ‘assistant.’”
“I can work with that.”
I collect some of my notes. “Good, and Charlene and I can try to set up a meeting with Dr. Colette. Fionna, see if you can find out where she’ll be.”
It takes a few minutes, but finally she finds what she’s looking for. “According to her calendar, Dr. Colette will be at RixoTray’s R&D facility up near Bridgeport this morning. I’m guessing it’s about half an hour drive from here.”
It strikes me that somewhere along the line I forgot to get us all cars. It’s less than a mile to RixoTray’s headquarters, but I figure Fionna and Xavier should at least have a car at their disposal. I make a quick call, get two executive cars and drivers for the day, and we get back to business.
“But how’ll we get through security?” There’s skepticism in Charlene’s voice. “Surely they won’t let us just walk into their R&D facility, not without an appointment.”
I find myself palming my 1895 Morgan Dollar, finger-flipping it. “True. Security is sure to be hypertight.”
“Go in as custodians?” Fionna suggests. “Or service workers?”
Xavier shakes his head. “Not enough time to put something like that into play. Besides, those people would almost certainly be vetted. Possibly even fingerprint ID’d.”
“New employees?” Charlene suggests. “We just got a job? We show up for the first day of work?”
“Too easy to check.”
“How about we’re there for a business meeting? Or what about the truth: we’re working on a documentary and have some questions we need to talk with Dr. Colette about concerning her research?”
That’s actually a tempting thought, but I doubt it would work. “It’d be too easy for them to just deny us access; we need something they can’t say no to.”
Fionna has been typing and now sighs. “There are three security checkpoints to go through. And Xavier’s right. They have fingerprint identification at the front gate.”
“Okay…” Xavier is thinking aloud. “So we need a way of getting two people who’ve never been there before, who the guards aren’t expecting and won’t be able to verify the identity of, into an ultra-high-level security pharmaceutical R&D complex in a way that won’t arouse suspicion.”
And that’s when it hits me. Misdirection. The thing I do best. “Well put, Xav. And I think I know just how we can pull it off.”
Complaint Procedures
They all eye me curiously.
“Government inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration following up on a complaint about the treatment of human subjects in their telomerase research.”
Everyone mulls that over for a moment.
Xavier gives a slow nod. “Government agencies are always reshuffling staff, renaming divisions, reworking their logos. Bureaucracy at its best. Shouldn’t be that hard to fake the paperwork, and it would make sense that they wouldn’t know you. But what if they decide to follow up? Call the FDA?”
“We’ll put your phone number on our cards.”
“We’d need IDs.” Charlene taps her chin thoughtfully. “Official ones.”
“There’s a FedEx Office store down the street. I saw it when I was getting the coffee. It’s amazing what you can pull off with a color printer, some card stock, and a laminator.”
Oh yeah. I was liking this. I could get used to being a freelancer.
“Fionna, we’ll need official-looking documents. Can you come up with those in an hour?”
She screws up her face. “No. Not ones that could fool the guards. But… maybe my kids can help me — do a little research on FDA complaint procedures. Extra credit.” After a moment of reflection, she nods. “I’d say we should be able to come up with something.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” Charlene offers.
“Great.” I stand. “I’ll help Xavier with the IDs and business cards. Charlene, you and Fionna tackle the paperwork; there’s a business center on the second floor. You can print what you need down there, or join us at the FedEx Office.”
We use my phone to take Charlene’s and my pictures for the IDs, then the two women head out to convene with the kids and Xavier grabs his computer. “Come on,” he tells me. “Let’s go do something illegal.”
Dr. Cyrus Arlington landed in DC.
Strode off the helicopter pad.
There was already a car there waiting to take him to the White House.
Mambo Atabei carried the goat’s headless carcass into the alley behind her home and tipped it into the dumpster.
She’d been ridden by her Loa for more than six hours last night, so long that the other members of her peristyle who were involved in the ceremony had begun to worry about her.
But she was thankful. Being possessed for long stretches of time was the most rewarding part of what she did, the reason she’d gotten into all of this in the first place.
Some people claimed that Loa possession was a hallucination brought about by cultural expectations, wishful thinking, and a little too much rum. That was an easy way to explain away what happens. Let them think what they wanted.
After turning from the dumpster, she brushed some of the goat’s hair off her shirt. The blood was still there. That wasn’t going to come out nearly as easily.
Then she went to check the news to see how everything had panned out concerning the doctor in Oregon.
Darren took a deep breath, said to his brother, “Ready?”
“Ready. Lancerton, Maine, huh?”
“Let’s see how well this works.”
Then the twins closed their eyes, relaxed, and focused their thoughts on the same thing. Just as they’d been training for so long to do.
Oil and Blood
Adrian Goss had slept in a little and was still a bit groggy as he walked toward the woodshed.
Behind him, smoke curled from the cabin’s chimney, wisped into the crisp Maine day, and wandered toward the steel-blue sky like a slowly uncurling snake.
He trudged through the mud and thought of the wood stacked by the side of the shed, of splitting it, and he thought of his wife, who would be home anytime from working the graveyard shift at the hospital.
And he thought of his son.
It would be his birthday next week, turning eleven, and Adrian had decided to buy him a football — real pigskin. Official NFL size and weight.
Eleven next week.
A fifty-year-old guy with an eleven-year-old kid to raise. Not ideal in some regards, but not that unusual. Besides, love can overcome something as trivial as the age span between a father and his boy.
Adrian passed the 1972 Chevy Impala chassis in his yard and the thick stump he used to balance the wood on when he chopped it, pressed open the shed door, heard the harsh squeal of the hinge.
Oil it.
He’d been meaning to.
Yes.
Later.
He stepped into the woodshed. Light filtered through the cracks between the boards that made up the walls. The shafts of light seemed like giant slivers that he should avoid but would never be able to if he was really going to cross over to the other side of the shed.