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Short Description

Venture capitalist Jack McDonald is minding his own business and falling in love.  His younger sister Meghan, the brilliant young chief scientist at biotech firm ReWire is beaten into a coma during an apparent robbery.  Jack left his beloved Special Forces years ago to care for her when their parents dies in a car wreck. Jacks finally tuned instincts tell him that something is not right with the robbery.  Captain Alvin Yang of the San Francisco police doesn’t buy the robbery either.  Alvin, Jack and his eccentric friends work together and uncover what looks like a plan to sabotage industrial research into anti-viral drugs to make money from insider trading. If only the world was that innocent. 

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Chapter 1

The man put on thin nitrile gloves.  A careful observer might see his hands tremble and assume he was afraid.  But there were no observers, careful or otherwise.  What he felt was far from fear.  He did not feel fear, didn’t really feel at all.

He reviewed his plan one last time, but the review was not necessary. He knew the plan by heart.

He did not look up toward the security camera even though he had been promised that the camera wouldn’t work today. The long-billed baseball cap hid his face from accidental eyes and any peripheral cameras still working. Light rain fell.  He reached into the right hand pocket of his jacket and pulled out the key to the service door.  He inserted the key into the lock and entered the building through the service door, closing it behind him.

The man walked three paces to his left down the hall.  He effortlessly placed the heavy toolbox on the floor, pulled out the electric screwdriver, and removed two screws and a cover plate labeled “cable access.”  He reached into his left jacket pocket and removed a circuit board with attached connectors.  He attached the blue lead to the blue wire, red-to-red, and black-to-black.  The blinking orange light on the alarm system changed to steady blue.

The man placed the circuit board inside the access area and replaced the cover.  He reached into his toolbox for two magnetic labels, one for each side of his toolbox.  He hung a lanyard ID around his neck.  He removed his jacket, revealing a cable company uniform shirt, placed his jacket in the toolbox, and changed caps.  Now, he looked remarkably like the cable guy checking problems on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors.

He arrived on the seventh floor winded and dizzy. He shouldn’t have taken the stairs two at a time.  He bent over, hands on knees, forcing air in and out of his lungs.  One of the drugs in his four-times daily cocktail killed off too many of his red blood cells to exchange enough oxygen. The drugs were not helping as much as he hoped.  The virus was winning the fight because he had received treatment too near the end.

He felt a flicker of something.  What?  Self-pity?  He put the small feeling in the box where he kept such things now.  He had never learned to feel much emotion except anger.  His childhood pushed most of his feelings deep.  Then the head injury left him with barely enough emotion to make decisions, one of the reasons he had been allowed this mission.  The devil’s servants could not read his feelings if there were no feelings there.

He waited on the landing until he could breathe.  He opened the heavy toolbox, took off the shoes he wore when entering the building and put on different shoes.  A careful observer would have noticed that the man’s right shoe was a different brand and size than his left.  The man slipped booties over his feet.

The man pulled the complex key to the front door from his right hip pocket.  He opened the door of Unit 7A, stepped inside quickly and closed the door behind him.  He pulled another even more complex circuit board from his toolbox.  He turned to the right and shifted the Gore-Tex jacket with ReWire corporate logo hanging on a peg in the mudroom, holding the jacket with his elbow. He pressed the wall behind the jacket and watched the alarm cover pop open.  The man quickly attached four leads to the appropriate connectors.  The light continued to blink red for a few more seconds and then turned steady green.

He pulled the stocking over his face, slipped the booties off his shoes, and checked his watch, confirming he had less than an hour and more than thirty minutes.  He moved as lightly as a dancer.  He was not even six feet tall, yet weighed two hundred and twenty-six pounds.  Very little of this was fat.  Even with the ravages of the virus and effects of the drugs, he was still immensely strong.  Not long ago he had been freakishly strong, as many men are who spend much of their lives in prison.

He moved quickly into the office off the hallway next to the master bedroom, having memorized the list of items and their location weeks ago.  The Toshiba Portege rested in its dock on top of the kneehole desk.  The MacBook Pro rested safely in its ergonomic bag.

The man dropped both laptops into the oversized gym bag he grabbed from the hall closet, pulled the desk away from the wall, unplugged two Time Capsules and dropped them in the bag.  He walked into the master bedroom.  The room smelled of clean, healthy women-and money.  He breathed deeply, enjoying both scents.  Then he remembered his mission.  He thought about what these women represented.

He pulled the ironwood jewelry box from the dressing table with a gloved left hand and tipped the box into the gym bag he held in his right hand.  He dropped fifty or so of the music CDs from the floating racks on the wall into the same bag. He heard the front door.  No!  She was early.

He moved quickly despite his foot, and was on the woman as she reached into the alcove.  The rail-thin woman with the wild mane of red hair turned fast as a lizard.  He meant to punch her square on her head and stun her.  He hit the right side of her head near her temple.  Something gave in her head and the beautiful woman bounced off the wall and puddled to the floor.  He dragged her into the bedroom by an ankle, checking to see if she was still breathing.  She was.

He lifted her up by her sweatshirt and held her against the wall.  He punched her in the abdomen and ribs, feeling ribs break.  He dropped her to the floor.  Still, she refused to die.  The man stomped on her right arm and kicked her left leg. He heard bones crack.  He kicked her in the side with his left foot first, moved to her other side to kick her with his right. Blood bubbled at the woman’s lips.  He scraped the fingernails of her dominant left hand across the piece of flesh in the baggie marked #1, placing the baggie back in his pocket.  When he was done seeding the rooms with the rest of the evidence, he would make sure she was dead.

He heard the front door open again.  A woman’s voice, “Sweetie, I’m home. Are you…what the fuck?”

He bounded toward the dark haired woman. She too bounced off the wall.  As she slid to the floor he saw the alarm fall from her hand.  A klaxon sounded.  Lights flashed.  He opened other baggies containing bits of hair, skin and fiber and scattered the contents around the rooms.  He slipped covers back over shoes, shoved more valuables into the gym bag and sprinted out the door, not noticing he had torn the scar pad on the knuckle of his right index finger.