Terrorist
Chapters Four & Five
Mon/May/2008 07:00 AM Chapter 1/2Chapter 4/5
Chapter Four -
"Tim"
His name wasn’t Tim, not even close, but for some reason people always thought that it was. He just looked familiar to them, and the same name always came to mind: Tim. So that was the name he went by here. His friends told him he looked more American than the rest of them, whatever that meant; he took it as an insult, but he had to admit there was something different about him. He had no trouble blending in with society, a face that disappeared in the crowd. No threatening gestures. No severe look about him. Nothing to make people suspicious, or wary, or alert.
He was a man of average qualities. Average looks. Average height, around five foot ten. Average weight. Average build. He had short brown hair and a set of matching eyes. Nothing about him was made to stand out. But still, when he looked in the mirror, he caught glimpses of traits he knew he had to work on. A glint in the eye. A set to his mouth. Both of which he feared would give him away, flashes of pride and anger.
So why was he in America? It was the last place he wanted to be. He didn’t hate Americans. He didn’t hate the country. It just wasn’t his. He wanted to be home, with his family, but he’d been sent away on a mission, and so he had gone. His own country was forever at risk, always in danger of being taken from its people. That was the way things were, the way they’d always been, but it didn’t have to stay that way, not forever.
Growing up, when two kids on a playground get into a tussle and one knocks the other down, common wisdom is to fight back, stand your ground, shove the kid and he’ll learn his lesson. When Tim was a boy and the bully had come for him, he didn’t shove him back. No, Tim had taken a pocketknife and stabbed it between his classmate’s ribs, collapsing his lung and bubbling blood to his lips. The boy had left Tim alone after that, he had to, he’d ended up in the hospital. Tim on the other hand had wound up in a special school, one specially designed to reform young boy’s who stabbed their comrades with pocket knifes. But the school didn’t reform him, it couldn’t. He hadn’t stabbed an equal, he’d stabbed a bully, someone lesser than himself. An infidel. Even then, he knew the only way to make your point, to make it last, was to strike first, and if not first, then to strike hardest. It someone hurt one of yours, you killed two of theirs. If they used clubs and stones, you used fire.
That was what he was doing today, arming his people with fire.
They’d been preparing for this day for years. Finding their targets, making their plans. They knew what they needed, they’d learned where to find it, and they set about the scheme methodically. There were issues of money, all the variables of living in one country with the intent of gaining weapons for another. For the last year they’d known exactly what they wanted and where to find it.
He stood before the mirror in the front hall of the home he’d lived in for the past two years. This was one of several places they had set up during their time in the U.S.. It was a nice home. He’d actually grown fond of it. He really didn’t mind Americans. He didn’t want to hurt them, but all the same, he wasn’t one of them. He liked the place he had been staying, but it could never be home. He knew the facts, and they were hard ones. Sometimes some sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Some of those sacrifices would come today. He crouched down for a moment, unzipping a dark green duffel bag, once more going through its contents, methodically checking each item, each piece of equipment. His movements were mechanical, swift and precise, as they would have to be for the rest of the day. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t let emotions come into play, not for what he had to do. Half his men were outside. The rest of them were on their way. They’d descend on the building at the predetermined time. Everything was set. There was no stopping it. No turning back.
He zipped up the bag, heaved its weight over his shoulder, and walked out the door.
Chapter Five - Behind Closed Doors
He’d gotten off the bus earlier than usual that day. There had still been that damp, cool feeling of morning in the air as he walked into the building. The front lobby was filled with the usual cast of characters; the homeless guy who cooked all of his meals in the microwave near the vending machines; the group of lab technicians, all in their fifties, with scraggly beards and flannel shirts, who sat at the table each morning, drinking coffee, reading the paper, and laughing away - eternal graduate students. Then there were the real students, studying their papers, highlighting pages in their books, or talking on their cell phones before their morning classes. Nick stumbled past all of this, half asleep, but mentally restless. He was thinking about the writing he’d done that morning. It had been going slowly lately. He was working on a novel, but fighting his own impatience to be done. He wondered if he should try the same story as a screenplay. No. He had to be patient. Then his mind went to Morgan, and he tried to force himself to think about work.
He walked through the department door to find the offices abuzz with activity. The administrative staff was copying handouts and making last minute adjustments to the schedule. This was the big day. Jeff Pepper would be here around lunchtime to go through the facility and talk to Raj.
Raj.
Nick hated the man. He’d probably be in good and early today, with his pompous little rooster walk and his cracking ankle. Nick always knew when the little prima donna was walking by, 'cause he could hear his damn ankle cracking with each and every step.
Nick rounded the corner and started down the main hallway, bumping into Sandy, the main administrator, an older, heavy set woman who was alway in a tizzy about something, however minor.
“Good morning,” he said reluctantly.
“Oh, it’s crazy. It’s crazy." Sandy prattled. "Happy MONDAY!”
“Big day…”
“To say the least. We’re barely gonna make it. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Raj hasn’t even shown up yet and I just-”
Nick mentally tuned her out as she disappeared into the copy room. He kept on walking, lest she come back out and undergo her first mood swing of the day. Sandy was always at her wits end, but he knew that was the way she liked it. Having someone like Jeff Pepper coming in was the ultimate excuse for panic and anxiety. She'd get everything done in plenty of time. Hell, it was probably already done. She was not a busy woman, just an excitable, self-important bureaucracy fetishist.
He got to his cubicle, turned on the fluorescent desk lights, and switched on the computer. He was getting a bit more excited about Jeff Pepper’s visit too. He wasn’t one for computers or programming, or even for business really, but something about that guy was fascinating. He had companies for everything. After he co-founded the software place he’d gotten sick, really sick, then he’d recovered and started founding all sorts of funky places. Museums, film houses, construction companies, research labs. Nick had tried getting jobs at a few of them when he’d first gotten out of school, but he’d never been able to get his resume through the logistical hoops setup by all of Pepper’s foundations. Maybe it was just as well, cool as all they seemed, he’d heard they weren’t the greatest places to work. Course, this certainly wasn’t the best place to work either. There was nothing creative about his job, which had been fine at first, but now it was starting to wear on him. That was no doubt one reason his daytime trysts with Morgan were becoming more and more frequent. Well, that and the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl, which worried him. He’d have to resolve things with Kendra soon. That was over, he was sure of it. She must have met someone else, and the truth was, he didn’t care all that much. He needed to talk to Morgan too, he didn’t want to scare her off, but she was just a sophomore in college after all. Boy, life was a pain in the ass.
Speaking of pains in one’s ass, that was when he heard the dreaded cracking sound strutting down the hall toward him. Fucking Raj. All in all, the job shouldn’t have been that bad. He didn’t know what the hell he was editing, and the field could not have interested him any less. Yeah, drugs went through peoples body’s, and they got there and were absorbed and processed in all sorts of fascinating and mind blowing ways, but Nick didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t a scientist. Let someone else spend his life shriveling up under fluorescent lights, recording data, and writing boring, boooring research papers to report their findings, just don’t let that person be him. So he went to work, and he edited the papers, which was like trying to put grammar in a page of Chinese text, it was all foreign to him. A few of the professors were nice enough. They appreciated his work. At Christmas they’d given him Starbucks gift cards. Then there was Raj. Raj was the department diva, the type of academic researcher Nick was starting to learn existed in every department at the university. One of the secretaries had described Raj perfectly during Nick’s first week on the job. Raj was the queen ant in a colony of drones. He sat in his office, appearing terribly, terribly busy and important, he assigned papers and studies, he made phone calls, went to meetings, and he wandered around telling people what he wanted them to do, but all in all, he himself did nothing. In the year that Nick had worked in the department, about eighty-five percent of his work had come from Raj. Raj had papers to submit. Raj had publisher proofs to correct. Raj had terribly important reports to write, articles to cowrite. It was that whole cowriting bit that really pissed Nick off. The guy didn’t write a thing! He just had his post-docs and collaborators put together dozens upon dozens of drafts, then he'd cherry picked the bits he liked and slap his name on the front of it. An exploiting, plagiarizing fraud. He used people. Nick realized this was how the man did everything. His researchers were all from countries like India, China, and Japan. Their Visa’s all came through Raj’s office, he chose who he wanted, then the college filed the forms, so that once these researchers were there, working as post-docs for Raj, they were basically indentured servants, subject to the whims and abuses of Raj Gupta, researcher extraordinaire. Nick’s dislike for the man was growing worrisome. He hated the way the guy talked down to him. He hated the way his researchers scampered in and out of the guy’s office, bobbing their heads submissively, shuffling in and out, all but tripping over their own feet as they attempted to keep their great leader happy. It didn’t surprise Nick one bit when he learned Raj had grown up in a wealthy family, the youngest of four children, the only boy, the little prince, waited on hand and foot by the family’s servants, and by his mother and sisters. God, the guy was beneath contempt, but Nick was generous and heaped him with mountains of gooey disdain. But there was one thing that Nick really hated about the guy, and it was the sound of Raj’s goddamn cracking ankle. He couldn’t understand it. The guy worked in a medical research complex, attached to a hospital. He spent his days surrounded by reports on medical findings and ways to keep the human body running smoothly, and yet, as he strutted around the hallways, head held high, his little moustache squished against his nose by his pursed upper lip, as he bobbed his head like an impotent little rooster, his ankle made a sharp cracking noise with each step. Each and every god(.) damn(.) step. It was the most annoying sound Nick had ever heard. It drove him up the walls. It made him long for Morgan to come in, so they could sneak away, and fool around, and be free of that sound and everything it stood for. Course, today he couldn’t afford to mess around. Raj would be in fine form. He had important visitors coming and there was no time to waste. And now, here he was, and with him, that joyful crack crack crack of his grinding, scraping, popping bones.
The little man strutted past the entrance to Nick’s cube.
Crack crack.
If he turned and said hello, it meant he had work to dump on him. Raj never said hello unless he wanted something. Nick stared at his screen, avoiding eye contact as he heard the little rooster digging through his pockets, looking for his keys.
Jingle. Jingle jingle.
Nick held his breath as a key slipped into a lock, and the door to Raj’s offices opened with a wheezing squeak. Then… then…
Crack, crack, crack, crack…
Raj walked into his office. Nick could already hear the sounds of the little man punching his codes into the phone to listen to his messages over the speaker phone (as all horribly busy men must do). Everyone must know who was trying to reach Raj, and why, and how often they called. The worst was the sound of Raj calling these people back, often while post-docs or graduate students were in the room. He was so important!
Bah.
The messages played, “Hello Dr. Gupta, this is Nina Parker from Mr. Pepper’s office calling. Just a reminder that we’ll be arriving this afternoon around twelve. Please have everything ready for Mr. Pepper’s arrival, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Oh, and please don’t force him to ask questions during the the visit. All information should be shared in a forthcoming manner. I believe you know what that means. Oh, and Dr. Gupta? He can tell when people aren’t telling him everything, trust me.”
Nick’s ears perked up. The messages from the Pepper Foundation had grown blunt over the last several weeks. That wasn’t a good thing for Raj, but Nick found it extremely interesting. It sounded like Pepper was getting suspicious about Raj’s work. Nick had been suspicious about his work from the get go. He’d edited a few of the papers that had come out of the lab, but as usual, he could understand little of what was being discussed. He was able to extrapolate some information about the program, but it was sketchy. As best he could tell, the money from the Pepper Foundation was going towards a project aimed at halting the spread of an airborne virus and quickly reversing its incubation in subjects. Early on, there had been a few papers examining the effects of the virus in several of the monkeys in the primate center. Research papers never reported failures, those were brushed under the rug, but these reports did seem to show promising advancement toward the goal. Yet for the last six or seven months Nick hadn’t seen anything from the labs. He did edit one early draft of a paper discussing the best manner in which to disperse substances into the air once a vaccine formulation had been finalized, but even then, that had been a strange manuscript. Nick felt it would have been better suited to an entirely different department, maybe something in applied physics or the engineering school. Either way, that had been the last paper to come out of Gupta’s lab in months. Either the research was going badly, or it had veered off target. Maybe Pepper was getting the same impression.
Jeff Pepper.
In the back of his mind, Nick couldn’t help but think that making contact with the man was as good a way as any (and better than most) to get his work seen by people who mattered, maybe even get it produced by one of the Pepper Foundation’s publishing and entertainment branches. If the circumstances had been any different, if the visit weren’t so riddled with doubt and apprehension, Nick might even have brought something in with him, maybe just a short story. But the thing was, Nick had an inkling of why the guy was coming in. It was just a stab in his gut, but he’d felt it for a while now. Maybe it was fear, or dread, but Nick’s instincts told him he knew something he wasn’t meant to. He still didn’t know if Raj had seen him that day.
Right after Christmas, Nick had been trying to track Raj down in the labs to get an author release signed for one of the research journals. It had been one of those rare days when Nick was looking for Raj, rather than trying to avoid the man at all costs. Finally, when the journal had emailed for a third time, saying that they really, absolutely, without delay, need the signed paperwork now, Nick had gone looking for the little man. When he couldn’t find him in any of the Health Science Building labs, he’d headed down to the Primate Center, which was located several stories below the building’s western wing. Nick was surprised his identification badge had gotten him all the way down to the heart of the center. No one had given him more than a passing glance as he walked down corridor after corridor, asking the whereabouts of the Gupta lab. Finally, a small Asian woman shuffled past him, and Nick had to all but clothesline her with his arm to get her to stop.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where to find the Gupta laboratory?”
“Which one?” she asked sharply.
“The Pepper Foundation facility?” Nick guessed.
She lifted her arm and pointed to the end of the hall. “There.”
Then she was gone, once again shuffling down the corridor.
That was when Nick saw it. A quick, split second snapshot, the briefest flash before his eyes, but one that burned itself into his mind. He’d rounded the corner, head down, looking over the paperwork, when his gaze turned upwards, towards a small viewing portal in one of the walls. Thats where he’d seen it, just for a millisecond, the pleading gaze of a monkey’s eyes, sharp and terrified, staring through the glass at him. The air was filling with a sort of mist. He could hear a hissing sound in the background, then…
Phoom!
The face and eyes were gone.
Nick turned in horror, stumbling to the side as he covered his eyes, but the image was stuck there, every gory detail. The animal had disintegrated, its insides turned out. Every blood vessel, every opening on its face -- eyes, mouth, nose -- in an instant, they had sprayed a puff of red, curdled inward, then torn apart in a bloody cloud of fluids and pulpy tissue.
That wasn’t research going on in those labs. That was testing.
Thats when Nick turned and ran to the elevators. He’d ridden them back to the Department of Immunology’s main floor, sat down at his desk, and held his head in his hands. Just as he was doing now, all these months later.
The memory had briefly silenced the office around him. Then the squeak of a desk chair, and the “pop” of Raj’s ankle. Nick turned in his chair, just as the “great scientist” peered around the corner of the cubicle wall.
“Uhhhhh….” Nick heard the thick spit sputtering in the back of Raj’s throat as he stuttered around for the right word. “Nick. I’m going to have some paperwork for you to go over later, okay?”
Nick nodded his head.
Raj held his gaze for a moment. “I’ll drop that off for you later, all right?”
“Okay.” Nick responded.
“Just a few things, you know?”
Jesus, Nick thought through a forced smile, I know already! Why did this guy always repeat rhetorical questions long after he’d gotten a clear response?
Then Morgan walked by. Quickly and silently. Nick caught her eyes as she glanced over Raj’s shoulder. He knew the look well. She wanted to sneak off to their storage room. They'd found it a few weeks ago in an all but forgotten wing of the psychology department. To anyone walking down the unlit hall, the doorway looked like the entrance to a closed up bathroom, but when you slipped around the corner and down the short hallway, you were met by a door with no sign. Behind the door was an empty room, about six feet square, holding two brooms and an old desk chair. A soft desk chair. That was their hiding spot.
Raj continued nodding his head and blathering away, but Nick was no longer listening. At last the annoying little man shuffled off and Nick rose from his chair, walked past Morgan’s desk in the workroom, and headed upstairs. Morgan waited an agonizing minute, then followed after him.
Moments later they were upstairs in the dark, door locked, clothes stripped away, hearts ready to explode.
His name wasn’t Tim, not even close, but for some reason people always thought that it was. He just looked familiar to them, and the same name always came to mind: Tim. So that was the name he went by here. His friends told him he looked more American than the rest of them, whatever that meant; he took it as an insult, but he had to admit there was something different about him. He had no trouble blending in with society, a face that disappeared in the crowd. No threatening gestures. No severe look about him. Nothing to make people suspicious, or wary, or alert.
He was a man of average qualities. Average looks. Average height, around five foot ten. Average weight. Average build. He had short brown hair and a set of matching eyes. Nothing about him was made to stand out. But still, when he looked in the mirror, he caught glimpses of traits he knew he had to work on. A glint in the eye. A set to his mouth. Both of which he feared would give him away, flashes of pride and anger.
So why was he in America? It was the last place he wanted to be. He didn’t hate Americans. He didn’t hate the country. It just wasn’t his. He wanted to be home, with his family, but he’d been sent away on a mission, and so he had gone. His own country was forever at risk, always in danger of being taken from its people. That was the way things were, the way they’d always been, but it didn’t have to stay that way, not forever.
Growing up, when two kids on a playground get into a tussle and one knocks the other down, common wisdom is to fight back, stand your ground, shove the kid and he’ll learn his lesson. When Tim was a boy and the bully had come for him, he didn’t shove him back. No, Tim had taken a pocketknife and stabbed it between his classmate’s ribs, collapsing his lung and bubbling blood to his lips. The boy had left Tim alone after that, he had to, he’d ended up in the hospital. Tim on the other hand had wound up in a special school, one specially designed to reform young boy’s who stabbed their comrades with pocket knifes. But the school didn’t reform him, it couldn’t. He hadn’t stabbed an equal, he’d stabbed a bully, someone lesser than himself. An infidel. Even then, he knew the only way to make your point, to make it last, was to strike first, and if not first, then to strike hardest. It someone hurt one of yours, you killed two of theirs. If they used clubs and stones, you used fire.
That was what he was doing today, arming his people with fire.
They’d been preparing for this day for years. Finding their targets, making their plans. They knew what they needed, they’d learned where to find it, and they set about the scheme methodically. There were issues of money, all the variables of living in one country with the intent of gaining weapons for another. For the last year they’d known exactly what they wanted and where to find it.
He stood before the mirror in the front hall of the home he’d lived in for the past two years. This was one of several places they had set up during their time in the U.S.. It was a nice home. He’d actually grown fond of it. He really didn’t mind Americans. He didn’t want to hurt them, but all the same, he wasn’t one of them. He liked the place he had been staying, but it could never be home. He knew the facts, and they were hard ones. Sometimes some sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Some of those sacrifices would come today. He crouched down for a moment, unzipping a dark green duffel bag, once more going through its contents, methodically checking each item, each piece of equipment. His movements were mechanical, swift and precise, as they would have to be for the rest of the day. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t let emotions come into play, not for what he had to do. Half his men were outside. The rest of them were on their way. They’d descend on the building at the predetermined time. Everything was set. There was no stopping it. No turning back.
He zipped up the bag, heaved its weight over his shoulder, and walked out the door.
Chapter Five - Behind Closed Doors
He’d gotten off the bus earlier than usual that day. There had still been that damp, cool feeling of morning in the air as he walked into the building. The front lobby was filled with the usual cast of characters; the homeless guy who cooked all of his meals in the microwave near the vending machines; the group of lab technicians, all in their fifties, with scraggly beards and flannel shirts, who sat at the table each morning, drinking coffee, reading the paper, and laughing away - eternal graduate students. Then there were the real students, studying their papers, highlighting pages in their books, or talking on their cell phones before their morning classes. Nick stumbled past all of this, half asleep, but mentally restless. He was thinking about the writing he’d done that morning. It had been going slowly lately. He was working on a novel, but fighting his own impatience to be done. He wondered if he should try the same story as a screenplay. No. He had to be patient. Then his mind went to Morgan, and he tried to force himself to think about work.
He walked through the department door to find the offices abuzz with activity. The administrative staff was copying handouts and making last minute adjustments to the schedule. This was the big day. Jeff Pepper would be here around lunchtime to go through the facility and talk to Raj.
Raj.
Nick hated the man. He’d probably be in good and early today, with his pompous little rooster walk and his cracking ankle. Nick always knew when the little prima donna was walking by, 'cause he could hear his damn ankle cracking with each and every step.
Nick rounded the corner and started down the main hallway, bumping into Sandy, the main administrator, an older, heavy set woman who was alway in a tizzy about something, however minor.
“Good morning,” he said reluctantly.
“Oh, it’s crazy. It’s crazy." Sandy prattled. "Happy MONDAY!”
“Big day…”
“To say the least. We’re barely gonna make it. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Raj hasn’t even shown up yet and I just-”
Nick mentally tuned her out as she disappeared into the copy room. He kept on walking, lest she come back out and undergo her first mood swing of the day. Sandy was always at her wits end, but he knew that was the way she liked it. Having someone like Jeff Pepper coming in was the ultimate excuse for panic and anxiety. She'd get everything done in plenty of time. Hell, it was probably already done. She was not a busy woman, just an excitable, self-important bureaucracy fetishist.
He got to his cubicle, turned on the fluorescent desk lights, and switched on the computer. He was getting a bit more excited about Jeff Pepper’s visit too. He wasn’t one for computers or programming, or even for business really, but something about that guy was fascinating. He had companies for everything. After he co-founded the software place he’d gotten sick, really sick, then he’d recovered and started founding all sorts of funky places. Museums, film houses, construction companies, research labs. Nick had tried getting jobs at a few of them when he’d first gotten out of school, but he’d never been able to get his resume through the logistical hoops setup by all of Pepper’s foundations. Maybe it was just as well, cool as all they seemed, he’d heard they weren’t the greatest places to work. Course, this certainly wasn’t the best place to work either. There was nothing creative about his job, which had been fine at first, but now it was starting to wear on him. That was no doubt one reason his daytime trysts with Morgan were becoming more and more frequent. Well, that and the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl, which worried him. He’d have to resolve things with Kendra soon. That was over, he was sure of it. She must have met someone else, and the truth was, he didn’t care all that much. He needed to talk to Morgan too, he didn’t want to scare her off, but she was just a sophomore in college after all. Boy, life was a pain in the ass.
Speaking of pains in one’s ass, that was when he heard the dreaded cracking sound strutting down the hall toward him. Fucking Raj. All in all, the job shouldn’t have been that bad. He didn’t know what the hell he was editing, and the field could not have interested him any less. Yeah, drugs went through peoples body’s, and they got there and were absorbed and processed in all sorts of fascinating and mind blowing ways, but Nick didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t a scientist. Let someone else spend his life shriveling up under fluorescent lights, recording data, and writing boring, boooring research papers to report their findings, just don’t let that person be him. So he went to work, and he edited the papers, which was like trying to put grammar in a page of Chinese text, it was all foreign to him. A few of the professors were nice enough. They appreciated his work. At Christmas they’d given him Starbucks gift cards. Then there was Raj. Raj was the department diva, the type of academic researcher Nick was starting to learn existed in every department at the university. One of the secretaries had described Raj perfectly during Nick’s first week on the job. Raj was the queen ant in a colony of drones. He sat in his office, appearing terribly, terribly busy and important, he assigned papers and studies, he made phone calls, went to meetings, and he wandered around telling people what he wanted them to do, but all in all, he himself did nothing. In the year that Nick had worked in the department, about eighty-five percent of his work had come from Raj. Raj had papers to submit. Raj had publisher proofs to correct. Raj had terribly important reports to write, articles to cowrite. It was that whole cowriting bit that really pissed Nick off. The guy didn’t write a thing! He just had his post-docs and collaborators put together dozens upon dozens of drafts, then he'd cherry picked the bits he liked and slap his name on the front of it. An exploiting, plagiarizing fraud. He used people. Nick realized this was how the man did everything. His researchers were all from countries like India, China, and Japan. Their Visa’s all came through Raj’s office, he chose who he wanted, then the college filed the forms, so that once these researchers were there, working as post-docs for Raj, they were basically indentured servants, subject to the whims and abuses of Raj Gupta, researcher extraordinaire. Nick’s dislike for the man was growing worrisome. He hated the way the guy talked down to him. He hated the way his researchers scampered in and out of the guy’s office, bobbing their heads submissively, shuffling in and out, all but tripping over their own feet as they attempted to keep their great leader happy. It didn’t surprise Nick one bit when he learned Raj had grown up in a wealthy family, the youngest of four children, the only boy, the little prince, waited on hand and foot by the family’s servants, and by his mother and sisters. God, the guy was beneath contempt, but Nick was generous and heaped him with mountains of gooey disdain. But there was one thing that Nick really hated about the guy, and it was the sound of Raj’s goddamn cracking ankle. He couldn’t understand it. The guy worked in a medical research complex, attached to a hospital. He spent his days surrounded by reports on medical findings and ways to keep the human body running smoothly, and yet, as he strutted around the hallways, head held high, his little moustache squished against his nose by his pursed upper lip, as he bobbed his head like an impotent little rooster, his ankle made a sharp cracking noise with each step. Each and every god(.) damn(.) step. It was the most annoying sound Nick had ever heard. It drove him up the walls. It made him long for Morgan to come in, so they could sneak away, and fool around, and be free of that sound and everything it stood for. Course, today he couldn’t afford to mess around. Raj would be in fine form. He had important visitors coming and there was no time to waste. And now, here he was, and with him, that joyful crack crack crack of his grinding, scraping, popping bones.
The little man strutted past the entrance to Nick’s cube.
Crack crack.
If he turned and said hello, it meant he had work to dump on him. Raj never said hello unless he wanted something. Nick stared at his screen, avoiding eye contact as he heard the little rooster digging through his pockets, looking for his keys.
Jingle. Jingle jingle.
Nick held his breath as a key slipped into a lock, and the door to Raj’s offices opened with a wheezing squeak. Then… then…
Crack, crack, crack, crack…
Raj walked into his office. Nick could already hear the sounds of the little man punching his codes into the phone to listen to his messages over the speaker phone (as all horribly busy men must do). Everyone must know who was trying to reach Raj, and why, and how often they called. The worst was the sound of Raj calling these people back, often while post-docs or graduate students were in the room. He was so important!
Bah.
The messages played, “Hello Dr. Gupta, this is Nina Parker from Mr. Pepper’s office calling. Just a reminder that we’ll be arriving this afternoon around twelve. Please have everything ready for Mr. Pepper’s arrival, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Oh, and please don’t force him to ask questions during the the visit. All information should be shared in a forthcoming manner. I believe you know what that means. Oh, and Dr. Gupta? He can tell when people aren’t telling him everything, trust me.”
Nick’s ears perked up. The messages from the Pepper Foundation had grown blunt over the last several weeks. That wasn’t a good thing for Raj, but Nick found it extremely interesting. It sounded like Pepper was getting suspicious about Raj’s work. Nick had been suspicious about his work from the get go. He’d edited a few of the papers that had come out of the lab, but as usual, he could understand little of what was being discussed. He was able to extrapolate some information about the program, but it was sketchy. As best he could tell, the money from the Pepper Foundation was going towards a project aimed at halting the spread of an airborne virus and quickly reversing its incubation in subjects. Early on, there had been a few papers examining the effects of the virus in several of the monkeys in the primate center. Research papers never reported failures, those were brushed under the rug, but these reports did seem to show promising advancement toward the goal. Yet for the last six or seven months Nick hadn’t seen anything from the labs. He did edit one early draft of a paper discussing the best manner in which to disperse substances into the air once a vaccine formulation had been finalized, but even then, that had been a strange manuscript. Nick felt it would have been better suited to an entirely different department, maybe something in applied physics or the engineering school. Either way, that had been the last paper to come out of Gupta’s lab in months. Either the research was going badly, or it had veered off target. Maybe Pepper was getting the same impression.
Jeff Pepper.
In the back of his mind, Nick couldn’t help but think that making contact with the man was as good a way as any (and better than most) to get his work seen by people who mattered, maybe even get it produced by one of the Pepper Foundation’s publishing and entertainment branches. If the circumstances had been any different, if the visit weren’t so riddled with doubt and apprehension, Nick might even have brought something in with him, maybe just a short story. But the thing was, Nick had an inkling of why the guy was coming in. It was just a stab in his gut, but he’d felt it for a while now. Maybe it was fear, or dread, but Nick’s instincts told him he knew something he wasn’t meant to. He still didn’t know if Raj had seen him that day.
Right after Christmas, Nick had been trying to track Raj down in the labs to get an author release signed for one of the research journals. It had been one of those rare days when Nick was looking for Raj, rather than trying to avoid the man at all costs. Finally, when the journal had emailed for a third time, saying that they really, absolutely, without delay, need the signed paperwork now, Nick had gone looking for the little man. When he couldn’t find him in any of the Health Science Building labs, he’d headed down to the Primate Center, which was located several stories below the building’s western wing. Nick was surprised his identification badge had gotten him all the way down to the heart of the center. No one had given him more than a passing glance as he walked down corridor after corridor, asking the whereabouts of the Gupta lab. Finally, a small Asian woman shuffled past him, and Nick had to all but clothesline her with his arm to get her to stop.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where to find the Gupta laboratory?”
“Which one?” she asked sharply.
“The Pepper Foundation facility?” Nick guessed.
She lifted her arm and pointed to the end of the hall. “There.”
Then she was gone, once again shuffling down the corridor.
That was when Nick saw it. A quick, split second snapshot, the briefest flash before his eyes, but one that burned itself into his mind. He’d rounded the corner, head down, looking over the paperwork, when his gaze turned upwards, towards a small viewing portal in one of the walls. Thats where he’d seen it, just for a millisecond, the pleading gaze of a monkey’s eyes, sharp and terrified, staring through the glass at him. The air was filling with a sort of mist. He could hear a hissing sound in the background, then…
Phoom!
The face and eyes were gone.
Nick turned in horror, stumbling to the side as he covered his eyes, but the image was stuck there, every gory detail. The animal had disintegrated, its insides turned out. Every blood vessel, every opening on its face -- eyes, mouth, nose -- in an instant, they had sprayed a puff of red, curdled inward, then torn apart in a bloody cloud of fluids and pulpy tissue.
That wasn’t research going on in those labs. That was testing.
Thats when Nick turned and ran to the elevators. He’d ridden them back to the Department of Immunology’s main floor, sat down at his desk, and held his head in his hands. Just as he was doing now, all these months later.
The memory had briefly silenced the office around him. Then the squeak of a desk chair, and the “pop” of Raj’s ankle. Nick turned in his chair, just as the “great scientist” peered around the corner of the cubicle wall.
“Uhhhhh….” Nick heard the thick spit sputtering in the back of Raj’s throat as he stuttered around for the right word. “Nick. I’m going to have some paperwork for you to go over later, okay?”
Nick nodded his head.
Raj held his gaze for a moment. “I’ll drop that off for you later, all right?”
“Okay.” Nick responded.
“Just a few things, you know?”
Jesus, Nick thought through a forced smile, I know already! Why did this guy always repeat rhetorical questions long after he’d gotten a clear response?
Then Morgan walked by. Quickly and silently. Nick caught her eyes as she glanced over Raj’s shoulder. He knew the look well. She wanted to sneak off to their storage room. They'd found it a few weeks ago in an all but forgotten wing of the psychology department. To anyone walking down the unlit hall, the doorway looked like the entrance to a closed up bathroom, but when you slipped around the corner and down the short hallway, you were met by a door with no sign. Behind the door was an empty room, about six feet square, holding two brooms and an old desk chair. A soft desk chair. That was their hiding spot.
Raj continued nodding his head and blathering away, but Nick was no longer listening. At last the annoying little man shuffled off and Nick rose from his chair, walked past Morgan’s desk in the workroom, and headed upstairs. Morgan waited an agonizing minute, then followed after him.
Moments later they were upstairs in the dark, door locked, clothes stripped away, hearts ready to explode.