“I will find out,” Aidan persisted, appearing defiant, yet he was terrified. “Remember, I found out that you and your fellow administrators are in cahoots with a bigger sibling, and that you are bullshitting your way through office by bullying those who see right through you.”
Aidan did not even see the order pass from McFadden’s eyes to his dog. Wolf’s boot shattered the left side of the journalist’s rib cage with one hefty kick. Aidan cried out in pain as his torso caught fire under the force of the steel reinforced shoes his attacker wore. He doubled over on the floor, tasting more of his warm blood welling up in his mouth.
“Now, tell me, Aidan, have you ever lived on a farm?” McFadden asked.
Aidan could not respond. His lungs were on fire and refused to inflate enough for him to speak. Only a hiss came from him. “Aidan,” McFadden sang to urge him on. To avert any more punishment the journalist nodded profusely in order to give some reply. Luckily for him, it was satisfactory for now. Smelling the dust from the dirty floor, Aidan sucked in as much breath as he could manage while his ribs constricted his organs.
“I used to live on a farm when I was in my teens. My father was a wheat farmer. Our farm yielded spring barley every year, but some years, before we took the sacks to the market, we would store them while we harvest,” the mayor of Oban recounted with a slow pace. “Sometimes, we would have to work extra fast because we had a problem with the storage sheds, you see. I asked my father why we have to work so fast and he explained that we had a vermin problem. I remember one summer when we had to eradicate entire nests burrowed under the barley, poisoning every single rat we could find. There were always more, when you left them alive, you see?”
Aidan could anticipate where this was going, but the pain kept his opinions inside his head. Behind the light of the lamp he could see the massive shadow of the thug moving when he tried to look up, but he could not twist his neck far enough to see what he was doing. McFadden passed Aidan’s laptop to Wolf. “Take care of all that… information, would you? Vielen Dank.” He returned his attention to the journalist at his feet. “Now, I am sure you are following my lead on this simile, Aidan, but in case the blood is filling your ears already, let me elucidate.”
‘Already? What does he mean with already?’ Aidan thought. The sound of his laptop being smashed to smithereens cut into his ears. For some reason, all he found concerning was how his editor was going to bitch about the loss of company technology.
“You are one of those rats, you see,” McFadden calmly continued. “You burrow in until you disappear in the mess and then,” he sighed dramatically, “it becomes more and more difficult to find you. All the while you sow havoc and destroy, from the inside out, all the work and nurturing that had gone into the harvest.”
Aidan could hardly breathe. His skinny frame was no match for physical castigation. Most of his strength came from his wit, his common sense and powers of deduction. His body, however, was terribly frail in comparison. As McFadden spoke of destroying rats it became explicitly clear to the veteran journalist that the mayor of Oban and his pet orangutan were not leaving him alive.
In his line of sight, he could see the red smile of Benny’s skull, deforming the shape of his staring dead eyes. He knew that would be him soon, but as Wolf crouched next to him and wrapped his laptop cord around his neck, Aidan knew that there would be no swift course for him. It was already hard to draw breath, and the only lament that came from this, was that he would have no defiant last words for his killers.
“I must say, this is quite the profitable evening for Wolf and I,” McFadden infested Aidan’s last moments with his shrill voice. “Two rats in one night, and a host of dangerous information countered.”
The old journalist felt the immeasurable strength of the German thug applied to his throat. His hands were too weak to pry the wire away from his throat, so he decided to die as swiftly as possible without tiring himself with a futile struggle. All he could think of as his head began to burn behind his eyes, was how Sam Cleave was probably onto the same thing these high profile crooks were stirring. Then Aidan recalled another ironic twist. Not fifteen minutes before, in his report draft, he had written that he would expose these people even if it was the last thing he did. His e-mail would get out. Wolf could not erase what was already out in cyberspace.
As the darkness enfolded Aidan Glaston, he managed to smile.
16
Dr. Jacobs and the Einstein Equation
Kasper was dancing with his new crush, the stunning, but clumsy, Olga Mitra. He was ecstatic, especially when the family invited them to stay and enjoy the wedding reception Olga brought the cake for.
“This day certainly turned out great,” she laughed as he playfully twirled her and tried the dip thing. Kasper could not get enough of Olga’s high pitched, soft giggles, filled with elation.
“I agree on that,” he smiled.
“When that cake started to topple,” she confessed, “I swear, I felt my entire life fall to pieces. It was my first job here, and my reputation was at stake… you know how it goes.”
“I know,” he empathized. “Come to think of it, my day was shit until you happened.”
He did not think of what he was saying. Pure honesty spilled from his mouth, the measure of which he only grasped a moment later, when he found her dumbstruck, staring into his eyes.
“Woah,” she said. “Kasper, that is the most amazing thing anyone has ever said to me.”
He just smiled, while inside him fireworks went off. “Yeah, my day could have turned out a thousand times worse, especially from the way it started.” Suddenly Kasper was hit by clarity. It smacked him right between the eyes with such force that he almost blacked out. At once, all the warm-hearted, good stuff of the day flew out of his mind, to be substituted with what wracked his brain all night before he heard Olga’s fateful sobbing outside his door.
Thoughts of David Purdue and the Dire Serpent surfaced instantly, penetrating every inch of his brain. “Oh Christ,” he scowled.
“What is wrong?” she asked.
“I forgot about something very important,” he admitted, feeling the ground sink from under him. “Do you mind if we go?”
“Already?” she moaned. “But we have only been here thirty minutes.”
Kasper was not a temperamental man by nature, yet he raised his voice to convey the urgency of the situation, to impress the weightiness of the predicament. “Please, can we go? We came with your car, otherwise you could have stayed longer.”
“Jesus, why would I want to stay longer?” she snapped at him.
‘Great start to what would have been a lovely relationship. That, or this is true love,’ he thought. But her aggression was actually sweet. “I only stayed this long to get to dance with you? Why would I want to stay, if you were not here with me?”
He could not be angry at that. Kasper’s emotions were running the gamut with the beautiful woman and the looming destruction of the world in brute opposition. Eventually he took the hysteria down a notch to implore, “Can we please just go? I have to get in touch with someone about something very important, Olga. Please?”
“Of course,” she said. “We can go.” She took his hand and rushed away from the crowd with a giggle and a wink. Besides, they already paid me.”
“Oh good,” he replied, “and here I was feeling bad.”
They rushed out and Olga drove back to Kasper’s house, but someone else was already waiting for him there, sitting on his front porch.
“Oh, fuck no,” he mumbled as Olga parked her car in the street.