Eashan, a slim, twitchy man who made Keith think of a fox, was in charge of the facility. Jagjeevan, who was husky, quiet, and wore a dark, bushy mustache, stood nearby, printing out labels that the women who worked here would be using in the morning when they came in.
The women had all been told that the drugs being produced here were authentic, but almost certainly they knew the truth. However, with the scarcity of jobs in the area — especially for women — Keith and Vanessa were confident that they wouldn’t say anything to anyone. Career choices for women were pretty much limited to being a seamstress or working at a factory that produced goods for Westerners. Although some women, of course, had been forced into becoming street workers — that is, prostitutes — by family members.
The women who worked here were paid well to keep quiet about the specifics of their jobs.
But Keith and Vanessa had also paid off the local police, just in case.
Vanessa was a lawyer, but ever since Keith had known her, she’d only shown interest in circumventing the law, not operating inside it. The situation begged for a punch line about lawyers, but Vanessa was not a woman with a robust sense of humor and Keith had never been tempted to joke around with her about it.
When the two of them entered the room, Keith noticed Eashan gulp, and he took that to be a bad sign — perhaps the drugs weren’t ready to be shipped. But of course, that was primarily the reason they were here.
Primarily.
The products’ readiness to be shipped to America.
Eashan approached them and gave them a polite, albeit reserved, greeting. Jagjeevan nodded heavily to them but said nothing.
Vanessa didn’t waste any time. “We have a problem and we’ve come here to address it.”
“A problem?” Eashan said. “No. There is no—”
“Yes”—she produced two boxes and laid them on the table—“there is. See if you can tell me which is legitimate.”
“That’s not my specialty. I’m not an expert at—”
“Look at the holograms, Eashan.”
After a moment, he picked up the two boxes and inspected them. Even as he continued to object, claiming that he couldn’t tell, it didn’t take him long to identify which of the two boxes was the counterfeit one.
“The detail?” he said nervously. “Is that it?”
“Good for you. You have gifts you weren’t even aware of. The name of the drug company in the foreground of the hologram isn’t as well-defined.”
“I—”
“This will never pass an inspection by either PTPharmaceuticals or the FDA, not even a cursory one. Even pharmacists and doctors will be able to tell them apart. I thought we had this fixed?”
“I… I mean, we did. We do. Maybe this box is an earlier attempt.”
“It is not.”
Keith noticed Eashan’s fingers tremble as he asked, “What would you like me to do?”
“It needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed now. The shipment is supposed to be on the plane that leaves on Tuesday.” She nodded toward the boxes containing the counterfeit Calydrole. “Those drugs enter the supply chain on Friday.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Don’t tell me you know. If you knew, you wouldn’t have been so careless as to print these labels.” She threw the box against his chest. “And our employer would not have sent us here to assure that you fix things.”
“Miss Juliusson, that is not enough time to recalibrate the machine and print all the—”
“I’m afraid it is going to be enough time.”
“But those labels were designed in Hyderabad.” He indicated the printing press in the corner. “We don’t have the technology here to redesign it. All we do is print them.”
“I am well aware. Of the process. We go through. To print the labels.”
Almost imperceptibly, Eashan swallowed. “Yes, of course.” But then he paused. He had something more to say. “You could have called, perhaps, saved yourself the trip. And…”
“And?”
“And… forgive me for saying so, but did you come all this way just to tell me to fix this?”
“No.” She walked to the door, closed it, and locked it. Keith removed the pruning shears from his pocket. Both Eashan and Jagjeevan froze. Vanessa said, “We came all this way to punish you if you do not.”
Eashan cast a look toward Jagjeevan and the big man reached for his jacket pocket, but Keith was too quick for him. He was on him in an instant. He grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted it backward to control him, and had him on his knees before he could get the gun out.
Setting down the pruning shears for a moment, Keith retrieved the gun, tossed it to Vanessa, then took the shears and positioned them carefully around the base of Jagjeevan’s left ear, encircling the place where it attached to the side of his head.
He began to cry out for Keith to stop, not to do it, that he was sorry.
“Be quiet now, Jagjeevan,” Keith said to him. “Or your ear is going to end up on the floor.”
Properly motivated, the man managed to stifle his cries.
Vanessa directed the gun at Eashan’s right kneecap.
“No!” he cried.
She didn’t fire, but instead gestured toward Keith. “You do know what my associate did to Caleb three weeks ago? How things turned out for his wife and children?”
Eashan was stone silent. Jagjeevan begged again, this time reverting to Hindi, and Keith told him once more to hush, then squeezed the shears just enough to convince him to obey.
“It’s after office hours, ma’am.” Eashan was shaking. “We’ll have to wait until morning to make the calls and get started.”
She handed him her mobile phone. “Get started now. Either that, or we’ll get started with the pruning shears. On both of you.”
20
The morning passed and Lien-hua slept.
Saundra Weathers did not return my call, which worried me somewhat, but if she and her daughter had gone camping, it did make sense that she wouldn’t be checking her messages.
The team didn’t find any clue as to Basque’s whereabouts. However, inputting the sites from the video footage and using FALCON and my geographic profiling algorithms, I did come up with three possible hot zones Basque might be working out of.
One was in southeast DC; the second, about five miles north of the city; the third, twelve miles east of us past Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility, which most people around here still refer to as Andrews Air Force Base, or simply Andrews.
Distance decay refers to the diminishing likelihood of someone committing a crime as the distance from his anchor point and his awareness space surrounding it increases. Depending on the distance decay values I used for the calculations, the three areas came up with differing degrees of probability.
Just before noon, Lien-hua woke up and we made a few necessary phone calls to members of our families.
Last night I hadn’t taken the time to notify our relatives about what had happened, but I found out that Brineesha had sent out e-mails this morning. Fortunately, she hadn’t Facebooked about it or else I could only imagine how much we would have been inundated with messages.
As it was, I had received e-mail messages from Lien-hua’s two brothers, my parents, and my brother, all urgently asking how she was.
I’d sent them brief replies, but now Lien-hua suggested it would be best to talk with them.
Both of Lien-hua’s parents were dead — her mother from a car accident four years ago, her father from a heart attack a year before that. Her two brothers — Nianzu, who worked as a software designer in Beijing, and Huang-fu, a veterinarian who lived in the Houston area — both e-mailed that they would be glad to fly over here to be with her.