The doctor had a flashlight, which wasn’t exactly covert, but Burns didn’t have high expectations after meeting him in the parking lot.
Winslow made his way to the trash can and pulled up the lid, wincing at the foul smell from dozens of poop bags. Such was his lust, though, that he reached right in, fingers searching.
That’s when Burns got the feeling. It was one many combat vets experienced and the smart ones trusted. It was too easy and too dumb. Burns shifted from Doctor Winslow and began to scan the area beyond the parking lot, into the trees.
Through his night scope, Burns caught the faintest glimmer in the trees a quarter mile away and he immediately knew what had caused it: someone breaking the seal on their own night scope and letting the computer-generated light out. It was gone as quickly as it had appeared, but Burns pressed his eye socket tighter into his own rubber seal to prevent the same mistake.
There was a sniper out there covering the doctor making the pickup.
Where the hell did Winslow get a sniper? And Burns knew right away: an investor protecting his investment.
In the dog park, Winslow withdrew the hard drive from the bag with a trembling hand.
From his perch, Burns could have sworn the doctor was doing some kind of jig. A Snoopy happy dance perhaps? As the doctor ran back to his car, Burns focused on the real threat in the trees. He waited, a trait Nada had impressed upon him as essential to survival.
After thirty minutes, the sniper emerged from the trees. Burns tensed as a second person, rifle slung over his shoulder, emerged fifty meters away. A dark van, headlights off, pulled into the parking lot and both got inside.
Two snipers on over-watch.
Burns nodded. This was good. There would be extra protection.
CHAPTER 12
The Research Triangle at the junction of the towns of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina, started out using the brains from nearby Duke and the University of North Carolina to do just that: research. Then more businesspeople with financing were bought in, more patents were sold, and a shift from pure research for knowledge and science to research for profit took over the region.
There is a difference.
Southeast of Chapel Hill, and southwest of Durham, near Jordan Lake, is a large gated community set pretty much in the middle of nowhere: Senators Club. In the most exclusive part of the exclusive Senators Club, Doctor Winslow was preparing for a dinner party, the day after having secured his future at the dog park.
He stared at himself in the mirror while the electric toothbrush buzzed in his mouth. He used it three times a day for the full two minutes, just like the instructions said. He was good about instructions and he always read them first, while whatever he bought was still in pieces in the box. He wondered about people who’d buy something and start putting it together like they’d been born just knowing how to assemble a bookshelf. They were the people who left off screws that didn’t fit, as if the manufacturer had sent no plans, no instructions, and didn’t have a purpose for everything in the box.
Over the buzz inside his head, he could hear the caterers preparing for the party and his wife’s excited voice telling them what to do. As if they didn’t do this for a living and she wasn’t just a nuisance. He supposed such nuisances were part of the perils of their job description. But why hire professionals if you were going to flit around them and tell them how to do the jobs you hired them to do? He had married Lilith even though she rarely read or followed instructions, leaving it dependent on her moods. He glanced at her sink in the bathroom bigger than most people’s living rooms. Her toothbrush sat on its charger and it had never run for the full two minutes. He’d timed her on several occasions and she’d never broken one minute. Always moving on to the next thing before the first was properly done.
His vanity was pristine and Lilith’s was covered with bottles and brushes and cords to blow-dryers and irons and things whose purposes he couldn’t imagine, and he ran a lab that made some of the most sophisticated scientific equipment in the country — in the world, for that matter. But his wife’s vanity and its machines were as much a mystery to him as relativity was to her. She wasn’t a dumb woman, almost smart, but he’d caught her reading in the huge Jacuzzi tub one time with a lamp clamped to the towel rack above her head to shine down on the pages while the cord stretched across the room to the nearest plug.
She had a doctorate, too, but he never thought of her that way. It was in some arcane field that served no useful function: interdisciplinary philosophy. Sometimes he resented that they shared the same title of doctor, as if the top of her heap of education somehow equaled his.
He rinsed and walked to the large closet to the right of the bathroom (also bigger than most people’s bedrooms) that was all his. His wife left his laundry hanging on the hook outside the door and never invaded this inner sanctum, like a redneck would value his man-cave with his naked-girl racing calendars, old fridge full of beer, and gun rack.
He stopped at the first built-in and admired his six-piece watch winder, rhythmically rocking back and forth, keeping the elegant timepieces inside running. It was his favorite thing in the house. It cost more than most people’s watches and its entire purpose was to keep the timepieces running because they weren’t on his moving wrist. It was actually the height of indulgence for a man who’d grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, spending his childhood in the barn, wrist always moving over and over, never stopping, in between morning chores and evening chores and going to school and to sleep at night, as if he were the machine he now admired doing the work for him.
He always saved the “choosing of the watch” for after he was dressed, the crowning event in his ritual.
He opened the drawer where his socks were neat little bundles arranged by color and use: dress, casual, and workout, with subdivisions in each. There were times when he knew his wife wouldn’t be home when he opened all the drawers and cupboards in the huge closet like some secret cross-dresser on a quiet afternoon and just stared at the perfection of a place for everything, and everything in its place. He loved how the colors of his dress shirts worked from white to light to dark from left to right, matching the suits hanging over them. And the ties on the motorized rack could roll up, rank after rank, like soldiers going to war, also ranked by color.
But he was always drawn back to the socks. His mother had tried to keep up, but the farm had taken too much out of her and she’d drawn the line at sorting socks. Everyone has their limits. She cleaned, she had her own rules, but his socks she dumped in his drawer in one tangled mess. Luckily he was an only child, so he didn’t have to sort his out from a sibling’s. But the amount of time he spent looking for two that matched? In grad school he’d sat through a boring lecture by writing an algorithm for the hours he’d wasted on what should have been solved before the drawer.
He reached into the drawer and moved aside the neat pile of socks dedicated to matching his various golfing outfits and picked up the laptop. He felt a rush of excitement, like the redneck would if one of those girls on the calendar actually entered his man-cave.
He’d finally broken a rule, but it was going to make him rich. Technically, richer than he’d been once upon a time, but why quibble over some zeros?
His students thought ten million was a lot of money, but he knew it wasn’t. Not when you had to fill the watch winder with six timepieces of quality and then support the timepieces with the lifestyle worthy of them and buy a house in Senators Club. And then fill that house with things required of a house in Senators Club.