Aphrodite

38

FBI Assistant Director Leonard Rollins thought he was having a bad dream. In this dream, he was suffocating. He couldn’t breathe. It felt so real, as if something was stuffed down his throat, cutting off his air supply. At some point, the pain in his throat deepened, and that was when he realized he was awake. This was not a dream. He was in his queen-size bed in his room in the not-very-swank East End Motel, naked under one sheet. His eyes were open and above him he could see Justin Westwood. Westwood was holding a gun. The barrel of the gun was jammed into Rollins’s mouth. He could feel it pressing against the back of his throat and he could see Westwood’s finger on the trigger.
“I’m here to give you a message,” Westwood said. “And I want you to tell your boss exactly the way you hear it from me.” Justin tossed that morning’s Times on the bed. It landed on Rollins’s chest. Justin eased his finger off the trigger, then slid the barrel of the gun out of Rollins’s mouth. He motioned so the agent knew it was okay to move, to sit up.
Justin flicked on the bedside lamp and Rollins squinted at the sudden brightness. He waited a moment to focus his eyes, reached for the newspaper, and angled it so he could read the front-page story Justin wanted him to see. The story told about the discovery of the bodies of Douglas Kransten and Louise Marshall. The bodies were found in a room in their remote estate in the English countryside. One gun was found in the room. British police had ruled it a suicide pact. They determined that Kransten had shot his wife of over thirty years, turned the gun on himself, and pulled the trigger. Although there was no suicide note, the Justice Department had already issued a statement saying that Kransten and Marshall had been investigated for the past several months for illegal financial manipulations of their company, KranMar. The transgressions were of Enronlike proportions. Chase Welles, the head of the FDA, said that Kransten had been falsifying medical-research reports on many of KranMar’s products that had recently been released on an unsuspecting public. According to the Times, the company was about to declare bankruptcy and the couple faced, in addition to public disgrace, charges that ranged from fraud to murder.
“I know all about this,” Rollins said. “Who the hell do you think formulated the Justice Department’s response?”
“The threat’s over,” Westwood said. “Nobody has anything to worry about from Kransten or from the Aphrodite experiments. It’s over.”
“I told them it was you. They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t figure out how you got out of the country.” Rollins gathered himself under the sheet, propped himself up farther, and stuck out his hand. “You did pretty good. I told them they shouldn’t underestimate you.”
Justin ignored Rollins’s hand. Wouldn’t shake it. He waited until the agent slowly dropped it back by his side. “I did better than you think.”
“And I’m sure you’re going to tell me about it.”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Here’s the first thing you have to know— and here’s the first thing you have to tell your boss: Kransten had what you were so worried about. The formula was finished. He had the fountain of youth in his computer, along with marketing plans and a multi-million-dollar launch. The government’s worst nightmare come true. It exists.”
“What’s the second thing?”
“I’ve got it. The complete formula. All the details of the years of experimentation. It’s enough to re-create it perfectly.”
“Then just turn it over,” Rollins said, “and the whole thing’ll be forgotten.”
“Not a chance,” Westwood told him.
“You don’t want to be in that position, Justin. As long as you have it, they’re going to come after you.”
“As long as I’m the only one who has it.”
“Oh, Christ. What are you telling me?”
“It’s been distributed. To quite a few people. Everyone I trust has a copy.”
“You f*cking idiot. You don’t know what you’ve done.”
“I know exactly what I’ve done,” Justin said quietly. “I’ve made sure you bunch of lying psychopaths leave me, Deena Harper, and her daughter, Kendall, alone.”
“You’ve done just the opposite. You just signed your own death warrants.”
“I don’t think so. You pass all this along: The people I’ve sent copies to …no one knows what he’s got. They don’t know its purpose. Everyone knows one thing only: Over the next ten years, starting today, if anything happens to me, Deena, or her little girl, they’re all to make the notes and the formula public. They’ve got instructions on exactly how to do it. And you’ll never be able to stop all of them.”
“Why ten years?”
“Less than that, you people hold grudges. You’d kill us out of spite as soon as you thought it was safe. More than that didn’t seem realistic. After a decade, I’ll take my chances. I figure by then you’ll be old and I’ll be able to take you in a fair fight if you decide to come after me.”
Rollins sank back in the bed. “How many people have copies?”
“Too many for you to go after. And in case you decide to, they’ve all got the names of three other people who have the disks. Anything suspicious happens to any of them, someone’s going to release the formula and spread the word.”
Rollins stayed quiet for the longest minute of his life. Finally, he said, “And all we have to do is leave you alone?”
“No. I want news coverage clearing us. Me, Deena, Frank Manwaring. I want a plausible explanation for Maura Greer’s death made very public. I want Wanda Chinkle to get credit for solving the case so you can’t fire her. You can link it to Kransten or Newberg or whoever you want. But we’re absolutely cleared of any suspicion in any of it. Same for the murders of Ed Marion and Brian Meves. Solve those cases and make sure we’re cleared. Wanda can get credit for everything, if that makes it easier for you. But I want to read about all of it in the New York Times and see it on every television news show in the country within forty-eight hours.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Rollins said.
“I do. You want me to run down the list of murders the govern-ment’s been involved in that have never come to light? How about just a list of supposed suicides?”
“I have to check with my superiors.”
“Fine. While you’re at it, check and see how they’ll like it if CNN gets proof of the conspiracy that’s been going on for fifteen years with the pharmaceutical companies.”
“All right. Let’s assume you’ve got a deal.”
“I want to make it even clearer. I want to make absolutely certain you understand the way things stand, you little shithead. If anything happens to me, Deena, or Kendall over the next ten years—and I mean anything—you’re f*cked. If any of us get hit by a car crossing the street or choke on a chicken bone in a restaurant or get cancer, the Aphrodite formula is made public and the conspiracy’s revealed. So you might not just want to leave us alone, you guys might want to hire crossing guards for us and make sure we’ve got really good medical insurance. You got it?”
“I’ve got it. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Get out of East End Harbor. After tomorrow, if I see you within two blocks of where I am, anywhere in the world, I’m going to kill you without even asking a question. You got that, too?”
“I’ve got that, too. You have anything else?”
“No.”
“Then I have a question for you.”
“Okay. You can have one.”
“We heard there was a daughter. Kransten had a daughter.”
“I heard that too. Apparently she died a long time ago. As a child.”
“So you didn’t see anyone? There was no trace of a daughter living there?”
“Absolutely no trace,” Justin said. And then he said, slowly, almost incredulously, “You people. You f*cking careless people. You think you can do what you want, hide the things you don’t want people to see. Why’d you go along with it? What makes you so sure you’re right about things that you’ll let so many people die?”
“I work for the government,” Rollins said. “I work for people who see the big picture.”
“There’s always a big picture with you guys, isn’t there? There’s always something that justifies all the damage you do.”
Their eyes met and locked. “Congratulations,” Rollins said. “You won.”
Justin shook his head. “Everybody lost,” he said. Then he turned and walked out of the motel room without ever looking back.