Pandora's Succession (9 page)

Even if he did, Hashimoto was more than equipped to handle them should they ever come looking for him.

Chapter 9

Hexagon Pharmaceuticals Head Office, West Tokyo, Japan, three hours later

Dr. Nita Parris parked her car in her reserved parking spot. It was the first time in days that she had chosen to drive to work. Most of Hexagon’s employees took advantage of Hexagon’s shuttle bus service from the nearby train station that dropped them off at each of the building’s four main entrances. She remembered the orientation session she had to get—mandatory for new employees and overseas transfers, like herself. Her guide even spoke English to her when he gave her a personal tour. All that was important to know about Hexagon Pharmaceuticals was that there were four Plexiglas-covered buildings that took up an area of ten football fields, named each according to orientation.

The south building was the tallest and had a two-storey lobby area with five office floors above it. The north building had residences on its two floors and a basement for compensated human trials. The east building had a ground floor and four sub-basements where chemicals and other products were manufactured and stored. Then there was the two-storey west building which consisted of conference rooms, auditoriums, and a cafeteria. All four buildings were easily accessible by horizontal escalators inside. Someone that could memorize that would never get lost inside. If they couldn’t, then they could refer to the maps.

With her black golf umbrella in one hand and her Madison Avenue Tote hanging from her opposite shoulder, she walked up the divided, flower-adorned walkway to the south entrance and joined a group that poured out of a shuttle bus. The crowd that surrounded her was a portion of the 105,000 that were employed worldwide in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Brazil, making Hexagon one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Being the only black woman among mostly Asians wasn’t the only thing that made her stand out—it was how fast she walked. Even in her four-inch-high stacked heels, she moved quickly. Seven years after she had hung up her track spikes, she still couldn’t slow down. But to her, it was everyone else who was slow.

As a young girl growing up in Barbados, she easily out-sprinted the boys, even the older ones. And although it’d been more than eight years since her last track meet, she couldn’t resist finding an outdoor, galvanized-rubber surfaced track to do some wind sprints on—just for the rush she used to have. She joined a gym that was a fifteen minute jog from where she lived and managed to go twice a week. She was flattered every time someone had trouble guessing her age, but she knew that most of the men did so just as a cheap pick-up line.

When she had competed for the Princeton University Track Team she was always hunted by the boys on the football and basketball teams. They’d always been present at home competitions, in packs of eight to ten, and always tried to get the phone numbers of the girls on the team.

Even today, things hadn’t changed in terms of how men looked at her. Such as the four men she had caught in her peripheral vision since she’d left her apartment earlier. It wasn’t a natural habit, it was a CIA-based trained habit to be able to spot people that either observed her or followed her inconspicuously.

She liked the flowers in the center median. They reminded her of the ones that she and her aunt Pauline had planted around the house, back home in St Phillip parish in Barbados. Those were such innocent times for her, when she would share everything with her aunt, whom she owed everything to.

She never knew her parents. Her mother had passed away a few days after she was born, and her father was a ghost. Aunt Pauline, with the exception of a few other aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in Barbados and England, was the only family that she knew.

After she passed through the revolving door to the South building, she glanced at the large digital clock that hung above the security guard’s round counter in the center of the atrium. It was 8:35 AM. She was well ahead of schedule. These past several weeks she had played to perfection the role of a senior researcher for Hexagon Pharmaceuticals. On the books, the company had several legitimate research contracts worth millions of dollars. But General Downing sent her there to spy on her boss, Dr. Hideaki Hashimoto.

The National Security Agency always suspected that illicit human trials were conducted by the Soviets during the Soviet-Afghan war and that they had recruited Hashimoto to run the experiments. Every investigation turned up a dead end. Nevertheless, the NSA’s paranoia led them to believe that if he had perfected his brainwashing techniques, it would likely fall in the hands of an enemy nation or terrorist group.

Downing felt that her background in biology and chemistry would make her a perfect fit. While she pursued her Biochemistry doctorate at Princeton, she had singlehandedly discovered a bio-weapon threat against the US. Downing wasted no time recruiting her. The CIA and the FBI’s top guns still could not figure out how they overlooked what she saw. To him she was a perfect candidate—no parents and an aunt for a legal guardian.

But what took her out of the labs at Langley, Virginia, and into the field, was the night she was nearly fatally wounded after a carjacking. It was all because some jerk stood her up on a date. She drove home after waiting for him for over an hour, finally arriving at the traffic light at the DC-Maryland border on Pennsylvania Avenue. It didn’t take too long until she heard someone tapping at her window, only to turn and stare into the barrel of Lorcin 9mm semi-automatic pistol. The next thing she knew, she lost her car and wound up having to be taken to the hospital with a mild concussion.

The CIA managed to get her into Hexagon, in their San Francisco branch first, until she got herself transferred to West Tokyo’s International Headquarters. Fortunately, she didn’t have to speak Japanese since she worked with bilingual colleagues.

She got on the horizontal escalator that carried her to the north building where she hopped on the elevator. There was a ping before the doors opened one floor below, to a white hallway with several doors on each side. The strong scent of lemon stung her nostrils as her heels clapped across the recently washed floor. She stopped once she got to the third door on her left, entered, and closed the door behind her.

She reached to her right and grabbed a lab coat from one of the brass hooks. She removed her jacket and put on the lab coat, leaving her brooch exposed. The events would also be inconspicuously filmed with the miniature camera that was in the brooch pinned to the lapel of her pantsuit. She was there for one reason—to brainwash the two new test subjects with the latest variant of the Clarity drug. After submitting a report, she would meet with her colleague, Tomas Levickis, who was no doubt in his van somewhere doing surveillance as well as recording everything from the brooch.

To her right was a door to the monitoring station, and the one ahead led to the testing room. Both rooms were separated by a one-way see-through window. She walked ahead, pushed the door open, and saw her two test subjects, Dewan and Eva, and her boss, Dr. Hideaki Hashimoto, as he spoke to them.

“Hexagon has patented more than twenty over-the-counter medications and is one of the leading researchers in drugs that could reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.”

She heard the door click shut as it closed automatically behind her. She smiled. Dewan and Eva were in two dentist-like chairs and beside them was a table with a metal box.

Hashimoto turned to the sound of the clicking door. “Dr. Parris.”

“Good morning, sir. I didn’t expect to see you here.” Parris walked over to the table, laid down her tote, and dropped her jacket on the back of the chair.

“I wanted to chat a bit with Dewan and Eva. Yesterday’s meeting was so brief that I wanted to get to know them better.” He looked at the two subjects, one a twenty-one year old African-American man and the other a nineteen year old Caucasian woman.

Parris walked up to the one-way mirror to fix the collar of her lab coat. On the other side of the mirror, there would’ve been at least two other scientists, both male, in front of computers recording everything from blood pressure to brainwave activity in the two subjects.

Levickis had already run their background checks the day before when Parris first met them, and both of them had criminal records. Dewan had a previous charge for marijuana possession in Brooklyn, New York—one that he denied by claiming the drugs belonged to his college roommate. Eva had been arrested in London, England, for hacking into an Italian bank’s computers and transferring over one hundred thousand Euros to different accounts she had set up worldwide.

“Did I mention before that Dr. Parris moved here from San Francisco where she conducted research for our sister company?” asked Hashimoto.

Eva rolled her eyes. “You have.”

Parris, now back at the table, glanced at Eva briefly and pulled the metal box closer to her. Although she tried to hide it, she actually stared at Eva’s circular nose ring. She had three other studs in both ears and even one through her tongue.
Uggh. What was so exciting about puncturing holes all over your body?
She flinched at the thought of having a piece of metal protruding through her tongue. Then there was Dewan—a handsome young man. He wore the typical baggy jeans and a Los Angeles Lakers basketball jersey. No tattoos.

“Now that Dr. Parris is here, I’ll leave you three alone.” Hashimoto got up and smiled at Parris before he exited, leaving a trace of his aftershave behind.

She’d successfully brainwashed two others like Dewan and Eva, a little over a week ago. But this time she would use a more recent variant of the drug, and the guinea pigs in front of her would be her first experimentation with it. “So tell me, how do you like your new surroundings?”

Neither one answered her.
All right, time for a different approach.
“Do you miss home?”

Dewan and Eva looked at each other as though they were silently trying to determine who should answer.

Parris looked at Dewan. “How about you, Dewan?”

“Me?”

“Yes.” Parris immediately dropped the sarcasm in her voice. “Yes, you, dear.” Parris clenched her teeth behind closed lips as though to catch her last word from leaving her mouth.

Too late.

Dewan shrugged his shoulders. “It ain’t Brooklyn, but hey, it’s a free trip. Anything to get away from there. It’s starting to become too
bougie
for me.”

“Why do you say that?” Parris asked.

Dewan sighed. “I mean, New York’s becoming a place for rich people only. Living in Brooklyn today, you might as well live in Manhattan. Damn rent is so expensive that it’s harder for people like me to get ahead, ‘cause I’m always broke.”

Parris looked him in the eye. “No offence, Dewan, but is that why you were selling dope on the side?”

“Aw shit, man. I’m going to tell you like I’ve told everyone else,” said Dewan. “It wasn’t my weed, I don’t smoke it, and I told my roommate to stop keeping that shit in our apartment. The police messed up their investigation and I go down for it. So much for justice.”

Parris did not notice any change in his eyes that made her believe that he lied to her. “I’m sorry to hear that, Dewan. I wasn’t trying to offend you. You’re right, life’s unfair. And injustice always tends to happen to the better ones. Trust me, I’ve met others. As a result, you’ve found yourselves on the other side of the law.”

“So what does that have to do with us?” Dewan asked.

So now he wants to talk.
“I was just coming to that, Dewan—and this concerns you too, Eva. After three days around your new brothers and sisters, what is your own personal take on the group?”

Dewan sighed. “First of all, they aren’t my brothers and sisters. Second of all, they’re weird.”

Parris raised an eyebrow. “Weird?”

“Yeah, weird,” answered Dewan. “You know. Strange, odd.”

Parris put her hands in her lab coat pockets. “How are they weird?”

Dewan looked over at the table before he looked back at Parris. “They all act so happy, like they’ve all been visited by Mary Poppins or something. And also this ‘end of the world’ thing they keep talking about. That it’s coming and that they’ll be all saved.”

“And you find that hard to believe.”

Parris then turned to Eva. “How about you, Eva?”

“Well, yeah. I just wonder how everyone, or why everyone, in that group seems to think that the world’s coming to an end,” she answered.

“I had enough listening to that 2012 crap already,” interjected Dewan. “And now this. Then there’s the leader they all follow who says, ‘The wicked, they’re all going to be punished.’ Whatever that means.”

Eva moaned. “And they never stop.”

“No offence, Doctor,” said Dewan. “I just want to get paid, see a bit of Tokyo, and then go home. I’ve seen enough. That’s what you all promised in your agreement, right? I can quit this so-called experiment whenever I choose and you’ll fly me back home for free. That’s the agreement.”

Parris raised her index finger as she looked at both of them. “It is. But you haven’t come to the fun part yet.”

“Oh, so now there’s a fun part?” Dewan said sarcastically.