“Yes. He’ll be paranoid as hell when you call.” As they walked she told him about her conversation with Guy and her most recent conversation with Gaudet.
“Perhaps you’d like to go get some things done,” Chellis said. “I’m liable to be a while with Samir.”
“I’m fascinated to see how you handle him.” She put her hand under his arm and leaned close.
“And if I kick you out you’ll be hard to find.”
“I’m never hard to find. I just go to the labs sometimes in the course of doing my job. I do have a job.”
“You can stay.”
They sat on the couch, where he picked up the phone and she threw her leg over his, making sure that he could feel the warmth of her body on the meaty part of his thigh.
Samir’s assistant answered.
“Samir and I need to talk,” Chellis said.
“He is very sick. But he will try you in twenty minutes.”
“Maybe if we’re going to find him in Fiji anyway, we shouldn’t bother with a deal,” said Benoit.
“Finding Jason and bringing him out without them killing him are two different things,” Chellis replied.
“I suppose you’re right. We just need his work. It doesn’t matter who guards him for the next little while.”
Benoit knew that Samir would make his way to another phone line at a relative’s used only for occasional important calls. It had a scrambler and would not be tapped. She would receive the call through a router from another number outside the building taken in the name of a dead person. It would ring into the office from a relay to a special private line. It had all been swept for interception in the last twenty-four hours. Even if a government tapped the satellite link, the scrambler would disguise voices beyond electronic decoding so that voice-recognition sweeps aimed at either man would not sort the call from the millions of other calls going on between millions of other people. No doubt the government could develop software to detect scramblers, if it hadn’t already done so. But there were so many scramblers that it left a large number of transmissions to be decoded, and no one knew exactly the level of government success in unscrambling these signals.
“I have a feeling the Fiji thing is a good lead,” Chellis said while they waited. “It’s out of the way. Politically I recall it’s controlled by chiefs in fiefdoms. There is no intelligence agency, and like all third-world countries they love foreign money. There’s no dictator to undertake kidnaps and other crap.”
“Maybe. It wouldn’t have been my choice, but maybe.” The call rang through.
“Samir, old friend,” Chellis began. “I understand you’re nervous. I don’t really blame you for taking my scientist. But we both desperately need him to continue his work and he can’t do that without Grace Technologies.”
“What has that to do with me?”
“Listen, I know you have him in Fiji. In an hour I’ll know exactly where he is. Let’s not fight. I’m willing to give you the security you want, but we need a joint team down there protecting Jason. A very powerful man is after him. He is aligned with Anna Wade, the American actress and Jason’s sister. They have the American police and the Canadian Mounties on this. We need to work together, not fight each other to the death. Because unless we work together, that is what it will be.”
“What exactly are you proposing?”
“You and I hire Devan Gaudet-you’ve heard of him-to trap the American hired by the actress. You and I watch Jason together. My men and your men. I will send a small contingent to Fiji. Four men. Together we will hire more. You will have four of your men. Gaudet will be in charge of the trap.”
“And how do you know the American will come?”
“If he is as good as Gaudet says he is, he will come. They won’t wait for years of red tape in an undeveloped country.”
“I will have ten of my men. You will have four, or no deal. And I always keep control of Jason while you are working with him.”
“You know Gaudet from France and the South Seas?”
“He is not a man. He is not even an animal.”
“Yes. Well, he’s working for me. You agree he will be there to take care of the American. So can we make a deal? You’ve ten men but Gaudet runs the war with the American and works for me. You keep your ten men with Jason; I have only four?”
“It is a deal. But don’t cross me.”
“Hey, I want my research to continue. That is all.”
“Can you fix me? My head. You have scientists.”
“I will see what I can do. But if you don’t trust me with Jason, how are you going to trust me with your head?”
They knew they had him. Even when Samir said he would call back, they were pretty sure of his answer.
Chellis hung up the phone and rolled Benoit over on the couch. Their sex was fast and for her as mechanical as the drawbridges on the Seine.
“God, that relaxes me,” Chellis said.
“Why don’t you go home early? I will call your masseuse.”
“Good,” he said.
Thirty-one
Benoit called Jacques at the Kuching laboratory.
“So what’s happening?”
“I’m in the lab cleaning up spilled crap. Somebody got agarose and ethidium bromide all over the workbench and on the floor and didn’t clean it up.”
“You have people to do that.”
“Not in the wee hours. I still like to play in the lab. I’m cutting some plasmid.”
“So?”
“So if you really want to know, we are getting a better handle on the interaction between the amygdala and the thalamus. When a visual danger signal is processed, it goes to your thalamus. At that point the signal diverges and goes both through the cerebral cortex and directly to the amygdala. We have some information about the cascades and the feedback between the cortex and the amygdala that… well, let’s just say I think the fight on the roof would have gone better. We are getting some promoters for soldier profile that will knock your socks off. We already have the receptor coding sequence down pat.”
“Good, good. I need to know more. Gaudet wants to understand the science.”
“You don’t understand the science. Just tell him that.”
“Yeah, well, in the strict sense that’s right, but I know what you’ve told me. I know what I’ve seen. And he knows I’m not stupid. So I am going to have to give the basics.”
“We did that. He’s the one who first suggested putting the vector in Chellis.”
“He wants a little detail. He knows I know some of it.”
“Something about telling Gaudet even the general outline of the program bothers me.”
“I will be vague.”
“You won’t breathe a word about the soldier profile.”
“He knows we did something to those guys on the roof. He didn’t understand it but he heard enough to know.”
“Could have been a drug.”
“Look. I’m mostly going to explain all the legit stuff. Curing anxiety disorder, curing psychopaths. I told him how that research led to Jason and Samir.”
“You didn’t tell him the difference between Kuching and the other labs.”
“Just the most rudimentary basics of Nervous Flyer. No Soldier profiles. None of the new stuff. I said you do monkeys in Kuching and we do rats in France.”
“You didn’t even hint-”
“Will you relax? I didn’t. I won’t. I made it sound very preliminary.”
“Okay. I miss you. I want to see you.”
“Patience, my love.”
“And I want a crack at our beloved CEO. When I walk into the room I want him shaking in the corner like a poisoned rat, tongue out, eyes dried like little raisins, squinting, trying to remember a world that is no more and trying to escape a mind overrun with goblins.”
“Jacques, what did he ever do to you?” She laughed. “Don’t answer that. You will get your chance to fill his head with goblins. Soon. But don’t you think turning Chellis into Mother Teresa would be more of an accomplishment?”
“Too bad we can’t kill him.”
“Well, we can’t. The trust provides that Marie and I have control only as long as he lives. After that the lawyers and banks take over and we’ll be out on the street.”