On a Clear Day (16 page)

Ellen stopped and looked around the bar. Somebody had changed the music. Too loud, but it wasn’t bad.

“Cell growth regulation and cell repair,” Ellen said. “We all got excited. I’m excited now, just talking about it. Our people showed the results of the initial tests to some new execs who came in from somewhere. They stopped everything. They just moved the funding back to bacteria analysis, which isn’t all that interesting.”

“What’s the point?” I asked. “You think they just didn’t get … whatever you were getting?”

Ellen leaned forward until she was less than a foot from my face. “The key is the rate of cell growth. How many platelets are being produced, or how many white blood cells? If you control cell growth and keep it consistent, you can stop most cancers, and you can slow down the aging process until you wouldn’t be able to notice it in most people until they reached a hundred and ten or so.”

“So why did they stop it?” Anja.

“Because the correction—adjusting the way the cells developed—was a process, not a drug. You don’t make money on processes. You make money on drugs. If we found a way to convert the process so that it would work through pills—even fifty percent as effectively—CTI stood to make trillions of dollars!”

“Or a two-percent growth in a year!” I said.

“That’s what I wanted to get to Javier!” Ellen said.

“Crap!” Anja clapped her hand to her forehead. “They’re looking to make a profit? But who?”

“The two executives who shifted the funding are also on the board of Natural Farming.” Ellen downed the glass of wine, then wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “They’ve been playing a bigger and bigger role for the last year and a half. Almost two years.”

“
¡Ay, chica!
Natural Farming is sneaking around CTI?” I asked.

“Exactly!” Ellen said.

“Did any of the science guys at CTI object?” Anja asked.

“Yeah, we were so excited with the science, with all of its potential.” Ellen’s mouth twisted as if she were hurting.
Her eyes darted around and then she looked into mine. “But they told us that if any of us ever publicly mentioned the prostaglandin project, we’d be fired and never work again. That’s the way it goes in our field. You can never get into a lab without an okay from up above. I thought that, maybe, Javier could help.”

Suddenly the crap was coming together. All the players were showing up on the same field and it was beginning to make a foul kind of sense. I wanted to get back to the hotel and do some serious thinking.

“Maybe it will be okay,” Ellen went on. “Maybe they’ll restore the funding and we’ll be back on track. I don’t know.”

“Anja, if Natural Farming took over CTI, the big C-8 companies would be one giant smaller. Then C-7, or whatever we’d be calling it, could make a fortune—their friggin’ two percent—and have even more control of the world.”

“These things often take years,” Ellen said. I could sense she wasn’t getting the bigger picture. “In the end it’ll be okay. I think it’ll be okay.”

“Why were executives from Natural Farming on the board of CTI?” I asked.

“That’s the way things work in these big companies,” Ellen said. “One person can sit on the boards of three or four companies. It just works that way. Cooperating interests. Where’s the bathroom?”

We looked around and I saw a sign that read “Studs” over a door in a corner of the room. I pointed to another
door and another sign, which was too far to read. Ellen got up quickly.

“It’s all laid out on the memory stick in my purse,” she said. “It’s everything I know.”

“Anja, this is it! Everything makes sense now,” I said. “If Natural Farming takes over CTI, then C-8 suddenly becomes C-7.”

“And they make their two-percent growth by getting smaller,” Anja said. “Not by getting bigger.”

“If Ellen’s science is right and Natural Farming pulls this off, they’ll be able to say who gets old, who dies of cancer, maybe even who catches a friggin’ cold!”

“You really think they’d have that much power?” Anja’s eyes opened wide.

“Apparently
they
think so!” I said. “Check out her bag.”

Anja moved Ellen’s purse across her knees and next to her between her leg and the wall.

“You ever see a movie called
Casablanca
?” she asked me.

“What?”

“It’s an old movie that takes place in Morocco, same place that Sayeed is from,” Anja said, looking in the purse. “Humphrey Bogart was in it. Here’s a plastic case marked ‘Javier.’ It’s got to be the memory stick.”

“Let’s take Ellen back to the hotel,” I said.

The waitress headed in our direction.

“You want anything else?”

I noticed a guy from one of the tables standing and heading toward the bathrooms.

“What kind of pie you got?” Anja.

“Cherry, apple.”

“I’ll take cherry,” Anja said.

“Me too,” I said as the waitress towered over the table. My view of the bathrooms was blocked for a second as she made a big deal of cleaning the cracked Formica top. I was getting nervous.

“Let’s call a taxi now,” Anja said when the waitress was gone. “Or do you think Ellen’s driving?”

“I don’t think a cab is going to pick us up out here,” I said. “As soon as Ellen comes back, we can all split.”

Me on the phone to Michael. It went to voice mail. Shit!

“Michael, if the information we’re getting here is true, everything is coming together. We’re still with Javier’s contact, and I’ll call you later. Everything is falling into place. It’s a major power grab.”

We waited two minutes. Three. There was a clock on the wall, and the hand moved slowly.

“Anja, what are you thinking?”

“Same as you—what’s she doing in the bathroom?”

“Can we get the car back at the hotel to come pick us up?”

Anja on her pad trying to locate the car. Me getting scared and my mouth going dry. I glanced toward the bathrooms. Suddenly a slight man came out from the shadows. He headed quickly toward the front of the café and through the heavy doors. Was there another room in the back, or had he come out of the ladies’ bathroom?

“Fourteen minutes unless something happens,” Anja said. “The car will be here in fourteen minutes.”

I took Anja’s pad and saw an area map. The icon for the car was flashing.

“Anja, I think I saw a guy come out of the ladies’ room.” I was whispering.

Another man got up and went into the “Studs” room. Two minutes later he came out, wiping his hands with a paper towel. He stopped and looked at me and Anja, then threw us a kiss.

I flipped him the bird. He grinned. Good, a normal asshole.

I looked at Anja’s GPS screen. The car was getting near.

“I’m going in,” I said.

“I’ll come with you,” Anja said.

“No, you wait out here.”

I was wearing new flats but not sneakers. I thought of the bathroom having a tile floor and wished I had worn rubber-soled shoes.

The smell of urine was strong as I pushed the door open. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see anybody. Where the hell was Ellen?

I looked down under the doors of the stalls and saw a pair of dark, shiny pumps. I pushed the door open cautiously. Ellen looked up at me. The left side of her face was bruised, and the white of her eye was bloody.

“Ellen, let’s go!” I said.

“It’s no use.” Ellen shook her head. There was snot on her lips, and I grabbed some toilet tissue and wiped at it.

“It won’t do you any good to stay here either,” I said. “Move it!”

She started to say something, and I grabbed her and pulled her up. She was sniffling and stumbling as I pulled her from the stall. I got her to the door, opened it, and pushed her out. In a minute I was half lifting, half dragging her through the café.

“How did you get here?”

Ellen mumbled something about a friend dropping her off.

Anja moved to Ellen’s side and slipped under her shoulder. The other people in the café tensed as we made our way toward the door.

The night air was refreshing, and my breathing was almost normal as the car was pulling up. I tried the door and it was locked. I looked at my phone, found my way back to the GPS app, and opened the door.

Anja pushed Ellen into the backseat and got in with her. I got in the front just as the waitress came out of the Pig’s Eye Café with a guy. I didn’t think they were up to anything good.

The car started forward with a jerk, and we were on our way.

“I can’t stand being hit,” Ellen said. “Any kind of physical violence is just …”

“It’s okay.” Anja was trying to calm her down. “It’s okay. We’re all in this together.”

“No, we’re not,” Ellen said. “They don’t know who you are. The guy in the bathroom was asking if you were cops. Me, somehow, he knew. I said you were just friends.”

“Have you told us everything you want to?” Anja asked.

“Did you get the memory stick?” she asked. “They’d kill to keep that information hidden. I don’t mean literally, but they’d be really pissed.”

“How did they know you were coming here tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I just don’t know.”

I thought of Ellen calling us at the hotel and telling us where to meet her. Her messages were probably being intercepted.

Anja was wiping Ellen’s face with tissues and pushing her hair away from her bloody cheek.

“The names of the executives from Natural Farming who are on both boards,” Ellen said, “and the names of all the technicians at CTI who worked on the prostaglandin project are on the stick. There are a few other names too. Doctors and nurses we can trust.”

“You want us to take you to the police station?” Anja asked.

“No!” Emphatic. Clear. “Just drop me off in front of your hotel. I’ll be okay.”

“Ellen, we can take you home,” I said.

“I’ll be okay once I get into my apartment building,” Ellen said. “And I’ve got friends I can call. Really, I’ll be fine.”

I didn’t believe that, but we dropped Ellen off and saw her immediately get into a cab.

“You think they traced us?” Anja asked in the elevator.

“No, they’re not that sophisticated,” I said. “They can always bully people like Ellen. They probably had her phone tapped and knew about a meeting, but not who we are. That’s why they didn’t try to stop us outside.”

In the room we waited until Ellen had had time to get
home and then called her, but the calls kept going to voice mail. Was she afraid to answer the phone?

I called Michael and told him what had gone down. I could hear him cursing under his breath.

“Send me all the data tonight—or maybe send it to Javier,” he said.

“We’ll be there by noon tomorrow,” I said.

“Send it tonight,” Michael said. “Just in case there’s a problem.”

Like us getting killed before we get home
?

The St. Paul–Minneapolis Airport was bustling. Anja cradled a container of coffee between her hands as we sat in the gate area.

“We should get something to eat before we get on board,” I said.

“I can’t stomach artificial eggs, phony bacon, and those processed potatoes.” Anja made a cute face.

“How was the food in Africa?” I asked.

“Okay, if you can stomach everything being overcooked,” she answered.

“They can’t cook in Africa?”

“You have to overcook the food to make sure it’s safe,” Anja said matter-of-factly.

“I wonder if we should have made copies of the material Ellen gave us,” I started. “If we had copies, we could—”

Suddenly Anja grabbed my arm. She was looking past me, over my right shoulder. She was terrified. I turned and didn’t see anything.

“What?
What?!
”

“The television screen.”

I looked up and saw the screen. There was an image of Ellen on it, but no sound. The trailer under the image was about something going on in St. Lucia.

We got up and walked quickly to another row of benches, sat down, and got the news up on Anja’s phone. It took less than a minute to get to Ellen’s story. They were claiming she had jumped from her apartment window.

Twenty-three-year-old Ellen Chaikin, apparently in despair at the prospect of being laid off as a technician at CTI, jumped to her death from her well-appointed fourteenth-floor apartment in downtown St. Paul last evening. Ironically, a spokesman from CTI claimed that they had rescinded the layoff notice just that afternoon, but Miss Chaikin, a lab worker, had not yet been informed.

I was completely spooked. I felt mad as hell and even more guilty. We should have insisted she come to the hotel with us. I wanted to puke.

On the plane. We were nearly numb with the weight of it. Someone we had sat with, had talked with, had hustled out of the café the night before, was now dead. Anja was crying softly, her small chest going up and down as we settled in. The flight attendant brought her a glass of water and I thanked him.

Anja sipped the water, then put her head against my shoulder. “She was murdered!” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Dahlia, it had to be murder,” Anja said. Her face was close to mine, and it felt good having her this close. “These people are terrible and they’re doing terrible things.”

“Maybe,” I repeated.

Anja moved away and looked at me, puzzled. “Then what?”

“Maybe it was Ellen’s way of telling us just how important this takeover is,” I said. “Maybe she was saying, ‘It’s worth my life to let you know how I feel about it.’ ”

“Oh,” Anja said. And after a long while, she said again, “Oh.”