On a Clear Day

  “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.

  “For at least the last two years,” 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 even publicly mentioned the prostaglandin project, we’d be fired and never work again. That’s the way it works 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 into 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. “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 voicemail. 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 did 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 started pulling 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 Ellen 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 stic
k?” 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’ve 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 time to get home and called her, but the calls kept going to voice mail. Was she afraid to answer the phone?

  I called Michael, got him, 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 at 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 gate, 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 it again. “Oh.”

  15

  Morristown. Javier was a mess. His face was puffy and swollen, and I imagined him crying. Him being so upset messed with Anja, too. Dear, sweet, Anja. She was the most empathetic person I had ever met. Sometimes it felt creepy the way she understood how I thought, but I loved being with her.

  The talk was all about how Javier and Mei-Mei were sure that Sayeed had left Morocco and was somewhere in Florida.

  “I estimate that he has close to a hundred people with him,” Mei-Mei said. She was back to center stage and confident. But her voice was shaky.

  There was no talk about Ellen’s death, but I knew it was filling up Javier’s head. I wondered if he was thinking of what they’d had going on at one time or how he had walked away from her.

  “A hundred guys isn’t very much,” Tristan was saying. “He’s either going to have to sign up local guys or somehow get his hands on some super weapons.”

  “If we find out where he’s headed in Florida, I can check out the local gang scene,” Drego said.

  “It looks like Miami,” Mei-Mei said. “Some of Sayeed’s people have rented rooms there.”

  “Let’s say that he is trying to make connections.” Michael turned sideways in his chair. “How do we stop him? How many people can we rely on?”

  “We can count on about two hundred guys,” Tristan said. “We can outgun Sayeed if we need to up the two hundred number. After that it gets hairy. I can call on a bunch of young guys and some girls from around the country who are okay with fighting for what they believe in. Nobody wants to just run up on a beach to get killed.”

  Tristan was more animated than I’d ever seen him.

  “Javier, can you coordinate … Javier?”

  Javier was losing it again. His head was down, his face in his hands. I tried to imagine him with Ellen, the two of them together.

  “I’m okay,” Javier managed. “I can coordinate bringing whatever resources we have together if Tristan gives me the contacts. In fact, I want to bring them together. I’m ready to do it.”

  “The more we know about what Sayeed’s got going on, the better we’re going to be,” Tristan said. “We don’t want surprises.”

  “Drego, you want to go to Miami? Maybe you and Tristan, so we have two sets of eyes going on?”

  “Tristan looks like a cop,” Drego said. “He won’t function with the people I’m dealing with.”

  “He’s probably right.” Tristan. No resentment. He was easing into his element.

  “Mei-Mei?” Michael asked.

  “No!” Mei-Mei’s voice was high and sharp. Emphatic. Hard. I imagined her squeezing her legs together. She was out of her comfort zone. “I don’t think I’ll like Miami.”

  The porcelain queen was vulnerable after all. I felt almost sorry for her.

  “Drego.” Michael had a stub of a pencil in his hand and pointed it across the table. “This is your show—can you do it alone?”

  A beat. Drego was thinking.

  “You down, Dahlia?” Drego asked.

  “I’m down,” I said.

  Across from me, Mei-Mei sat up in her chair; she glanced at Drego, then quickly away.

  “I’ll
work it out,” Michael said. “We’ll set up in Miami when the time comes. Meanwhile, Drego and Dahlia will be our intelligence team. Javier, you can map out the scene. Tristan will nail down our resources. How about weapons?”

  My stomach turned. They were still on the same kick.

  “I think we can match Sayeed,” Tristan said.

  “If I’m right,” I said, “if Sayeed is just a pawn that C-8 is pushing up the board, they won’t want him to win. They just need him to show up.”

  Michael seemed confused. I thought back to when he was telling me how he’d put together his band. Get the best, let them work.

  Michael, I’m the best you got.

  “Mei-Mei, will you and Anja see if you can make contact with some doctors or nurses in the area to see if they’re available in case we need them?”

  “Yes.” Mei-Mei spoke softly. “I’m on board, Michael.”

  “I think … I think there are a lot of people who thought like Ellen did,” Javier said. “They’ll work with us.”

  “Okay, I’ll work with Javier to coordinate the operation and then work with Tristan’s people when the time comes,” Michael said.

  “I think I got Sayeed’s style together,” Drego said. “I got some maps I made up from Al Jazeera news accounts. We know he’s the big man in North Africa,” he went on, shuffling through a sheaf of papers. “He’s got better players than some of the other groups in those mountains, but he’s still old-school and you can figure him out.”

  Michael, Tristan, and Drego started talking about Sayeed the way you think athletes review tapes of a football team they are going to play. The tension in the room rose.

  As the guys talked, they were all getting excited. The room was beginning to smell from sweat. They were talking about Sayeed, about a theoretical encounter, but their body language told me that they wanted to engage, not avoid an encounter. I hadn’t expected this. Maybe a little from Drego. Maybe even Tristan, but Michael was into it too. Some macho shit was kicking in, and I suddenly saw what Anja was talking about. They were becoming believers in confronting Sayeed. The focus had changed.

  I thought about Ellen saying that Javier just wanted to hang with the frat guys and show he had the right stuff. I wondered if he was doing the same thing this time.