End Game

  Dolph pursed his lips. “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the enormity of what’s going on here.”

  “So enlighten us,” interjected Robie.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Dolph. “Don’t go anywhere,” he added with a smirk.

  A few minutes later someone approached the cell door once more. It was a man neither of them recognized. He was in his thirties and skinny with thick bushy hair.

  “Who the hell are you?” demanded Reel.

  “My real name is Arthur Fitzsimmons.” When he next spoke his voice was one that they both instantly recognized. “But you might also know me as Dolph.”

  Both Robie and Reel gaped.

  “God, that feels so good,” Fitzsimmons said, running a hand through his hair. “That latex head mask is a real bitch to wear. And the fat suit! Well, even in the cool weather it’s a bitch. Now I can understand what actors feel like.”

  “Why the alter ego?” asked Reel.

  Fitzsimmons used a sanitary wipe pulled from his pocket to clean some sticky gum from his face. “Well, I didn’t want anyone to know who I really was, of course. If things went to hell the police would be looking for a pudgy guy named Dolph who was in his fifties. I actually have a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech. And I’m not a Nazi, in any sense of the word. My great-grandmother was an Orthodox Jew, which means my mother was Jewish, and thus so am I. Though my mother never practiced her religion after her marriage. My father never converted. I was raised as a Catholic.”

  Reel said, “So the commandment about ‘Thou shalt not kill’ never really sunk in with you, did it?”

  “So why the neo-Nazi subterfuge, then?” asked Robie.

  “It was a good cover for what we were doing here.”

  “Like being a murderer?” said Reel.

  Fitzsimmons smiled a bit embarrassedly. “I have to admit, that was quite an adrenaline ride. I never got that rush poring over the periodic table, I can tell you that.”

  “You killed Holly in cold blood,” said Robie.

  “You pushed my hand. Of course, I never expected you to escape, either. Scared the crap out of me. It’s why I had to lie low here.”

  Reel said, “How did you get to them? They were on a bus heading to Denver and then on to California.”

  “They never got on the bus. We tracked them to the bus station via Luke’s cell phone. He’d thrown it away, but he did so at the bus station. They were about to board the bus when my men showed up. They came with no problem because we told them if they made any trouble we’d shoot everyone in the station dead.”

  “You bastard!” said Reel.

  Fitzsimmons performed a mock bow. “I’ll take that as a compliment. But I couldn’t very well let them go, could I?”

  “And Beverly Drango?” said Robie. “You couldn’t let her go either?”

  “She was stupid. We knew she lived with Lamarre. We were going to take her out along with the others, but she was smarter than Lamarre. She had learned some things through her job with the casino company. She put two and two together. And tried to blackmail us. Well, we paid her. You might have noticed that she lived in a dump yet she had a new car. But it apparently wasn’t enough. So we had to tie up that loose end.”

  “And I’m assuming that under the guise of it being Roger Walton, you paid Zeke Donovan to try to scare us off,” said Reel.

  “I should have paid him and his idiot nephew to put the bullets through your head, not the windshield. But hindsight is twenty-twenty.”

  “So what’s really going on here?” asked Robie. “What’s the point of all this?”

  Fitzsimmons stared at him. “How about I show you?”

  A few minutes later, wearing yellow jumpsuits but still shackled, Robie and Reel were led out of the cell and down a long corridor where a golf cart awaited them.

  They climbed onto the cart along with three guards, Fitzsimmons driving.

  “Lambert has a golf cart to get around his missile site too,” observed Robie.

  “It’s where I got the idea,” admitted Fitzsimmons.

  “So Lambert is involved in this?” said Reel.

  “Hell no. He’s a legit guy, which means I have no use for him. And he’s also a drunk. Loose lips sink ships, as they used to say.”

  Fitzsimmons started the cart and drove down a long tunnel with dim lights that appeared to be battery powered. After a ten-minute ride Fitzsimmons stopped the cart, and they all climbed off.

  He unlocked a door that had a biometric reader similar to the one they had seen right before Bender had been murdered. They passed through the door, and Robie and Reel had to blink their eyes rapidly to adjust to the heightened level of light.

  The room they were in was large, with numerous stainless steel workbenches and sophisticated automated equipment and machinery neatly arrayed around the space. There was also a conveyor belt assembly line down which packages and plastic trays were moving. The place was spanking clean. The tiled floor looked as though you could eat off it. The air was pure with no residual chemical smell and the temperature was comfortable.

  Robie counted twenty workers dressed in blue scrubs with masks over their mouths, goggles over their eyes, and latex gloves on their hands. This was obviously a manufacturing line of some sort.

  Reel’s observations had gone even further. She said, “You’re making drugs.”

  Fitzsimmons glanced over at her and smiled encouragingly. “That’s exactly what we’re doing, and on a grand scale if I might say so.”

  “What sort of drugs?” asked Robie.

  In answer Fitzsimmons strode over to a bench and picked up two plastic bottles and a small baggie. He carried them back over and held them up.

  “We have a diversified product line. Just like Apple, you have to have many things to entice your customers.” He indicated one of the plastic bottles. “Oxycodone, as fine a quality as anything manufactured by Big Pharma.” He indicated the other bottle. “Fentanyl. Some really powerful shit. The plastic bag, on the other hand, contains meth, but of a quality that is light-years ahead of the typical product you can buy on the street. And for that we charge a premium.” He swept a hand over the workspace. “We have four rooms just like this one sprawled across the missile complex. And living quarters for the staff, as well as other essentials.”

  “How does a Caltech chemist end up doing this?” asked Robie.

  Fitzsimmons looked sheepish. “I have to admit, I was a huge fan of Breaking Bad. And I thought, why not? I’m a smart guy with special skills. I was making peanuts at my old job. Why not go for the brass ring? I just decided to do it on a much bigger scale.”

  “How did you manage to build out all this without anyone noticing you rehabbing the space?” asked Reel.

  “Oh, we didn’t do it on the scale that Roark Lambert did. We weren’t building out luxury condos, after all. So we used the tunnel from the quarry to bring in all the equipment and other materials. And we did it all at night. We actually didn’t have far to go. Some research showed us that the Army Corps of Engineers had tunneled pretty far into that ridge to increase the amount of usable space for their operations. So we just connected up on the other side.” His gaze swept over some of the workers in blue scrubs.

  Robie noted that not one of them had looked up from their tasks when he and the similarly shackled Reel were led into the room. Also arrayed around the space were men with guns.

  Fitzsimmons followed Robie’s gaze. “We take security very seriously.”

  “I can see that.”

  “We also brought sophisticated business, manufacturing, and distribution protocols to the illicit drug market. There’s too much crap out there. It can kill you. There’s this stuff going around now, heroin laced with carfentanil, or elephant tranquilizer. It’s lethal if you smoke it, swallow it, or even inhale it. Hell, it can make you really sick if you just touch it. And then there’s this shit called gray death, which is just a mixture of crap that’ll be the last hit you take. You got
all these idiots trying to mix anything with stuff like fentanyl to give the big bang and they don’t know what they’re doing and they end up snuffing people left and right. And what business survives by killing its clients?”

  “Ask Big Tobacco about that,” retorted Reel.

  “Anyway, you have all these drug sites on the Dark Web. Remember Silk Road? They took that down years ago, but it was small potatoes compared to what’s out there now. There are hundreds of sites up now that are far bigger and trade only in synthetic drugs. Although the South American cartels are catching on to it, most are manufactured in China, shipped through to Hong Kong, and then mailed to the U.S.”

  “Mailed?” said Robie incredulously.

  Fitzsimmons smiled. “Heroin, coke, and pills are bulky. And easily tracked. Fentanyl on the other hand? You can ship enough Fentanyl to OD a hundred thousand people in a manila envelope. Two flakes of the stuff are lethal to an adult. But the thing is, the Feds are onto the Dark Web stuff and the use of the postal service. And they’re looking hard at shipments coming in from overseas. That gives homegrown manufacturers like us a huge leg up. American made, right? People want manufacturing jobs to come back here, right? Well, baby, here we are.”

  “I don’t think they had what you do in mind,” pointed out Reel.

  Fitzsimmons shrugged. “We can give people the same big pop much more safely with our crossover synthetics. And our drugs are made to exacting standards. Our facility is maintained to Big Pharma production standards. We actually have clean rooms where some of our most delicate processing takes place. We make custom products to order, too. We’re even thinking about using drones to deliver some of the stuff. You know, taking a page from Amazon. People do that right now to get stuff into prisons all over the country.”

  “But it’s all illegal drugs,” pointed out Reel.

  “I know all sides of the argument,” said a smiling Fitzsimmons, as he put the bottles and plastic bag back where he had gotten them. “People are going to use drugs regardless of what the law is, right? So we’re giving them a pure, safe product for their doping pleasure. And it’s not just druggies. Oxycodone is a painkiller. Do you know how much pharmaceuticals charge for it? It’s a disgrace. We’re actually making it affordable for people. I consider it a public service.”

  “You mean servicing their addiction,” said Robie.

  “We can mince words all day,” said Fitzsimmons amiably.

  “How much money are we talking about?” asked Reel.

  “Last year was our best, but this year I think we’re going to top it. Well into the nine figures,” he said. “Who knows, some day we might top a billion a year. And that’s with gross profit margins of nearly seventy percent.”

  “Is that because your labor costs are so cheap?” said Robie. “I mean it’s not like you’re paying these people, right?” He nodded toward the blue-scrubbed workers.

  “Well, we do have to feed and house them, if for a limited time.”

  “So they’re not permanent workers?” said Reel.

  “Nothing in life is permanent. Only death is permanent.”

  “Very philosophical of you.”

  Fitzsimmons smiled. “I actually studied philosophy in college. It balanced out the science part of my brain.”

  “And what does Scott Randall do for the ‘business’?”

  “He has his uses. He gets his healthy cut plus other things. That’s all I’ll really say on the subject.”

  “And Patti Bender?”

  Fitzsimmons smiled again. “She’s a free spirit. I met her when she came out to California for a few months. We really hit it off. We could see that our strengths and ambitions played well together. I let her know what I was thinking and she said she thought she could help. This operation was actually her idea. She knew about this silo. She also had a relationship with Scott Randall. She’d done some guide work for him. I just supplied the science. So I came out here as Dolph because she thought it would be good cover. And she said there were lots of ‘alternative’ groups in this part of Colorado. What was one more? I set up my neo-Nazi operation. In the background she actually helped with recruitment. There are a lot of lost souls around here looking for answers. For structure. Looking to belong to something. And I became their answer. But it was all just a sideshow for this operation, although it did help me meet people who provided excellent distribution for our product. We even ship internationally.”

  “So Patti really came up with this whole idea?” said Reel.

  “I think she got the concept from her mother’s marijuana business, which is a very nice, profitable, and legitimate business. But Patti wanted more than that. And to tell the truth, I think she loves the risk.”

  “When I first met her she just seemed like a relatively simple person who was independent and liked the outdoors,” said Robie.

  “She is that, plus a lot more. There are several more layers to the woman. I’m not sure I’ve seen them all, actually.”

  “But what does she do with the money she makes? She certainly doesn’t dress like she’s rich. And she and her buddies go off acting as guides.”

  “Oh, she likes the money. And I can tell you that she has a beautiful hideaway on an island in the Caribbean. I think she may end up there one day permanently.”

  “So she goes off to the Caribbean and her mother and brother have no clue?”

  “She disappears for weeks at a time,” said Fitzsimmons. “It’s the nature of who she is. Her mother and brother are well accustomed to that.”

  “She killed a police officer who happened to be her brother,” said Robie.

  “Well, the way I see it, she had no choice. She was actually quite fond of Derrick. And she blames you for his death. Had you not involved him, he never would have come here and he’d still be alive.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” said Robie.

  “How exactly do you distribute the drugs?” asked Reel.

  He wheeled around on her. “Why? So you can go and tell a certain Apostle all about it?”

  Reel said nothing, her features inscrutable, but Fitzsimmons still smiled.

  “I saw through that a long time ago. And when he ‘rescued’ you, my suspicions were confirmed. But he’s not a real concern. He thinks I’m into guns and other stuff, not drugs. As to our distribution, it’s a trade secret and not something you need be concerned with.”

  “So where are they?” asked Robie.

  “Who is that?” said Fitzsimmons as he watched the workers.

  “Roger Walton, Valerie Malloy, JC Parry, and Clément Lamarre.”

  “Well, we’ll have to see. But don’t you want to ask about our workers here? You already commented on our not paying them.”

  “They’re the prisoners, right?” Reel said.

  “We needed people to help connect up that quarry room with our facility. Fortunately, we were also able to do the work at night and dump the debris into the quarry.” He added with a smile, “Along with the workers, of course. Then, we needed to have people on the manufacturing line.”

  “And of course you didn’t want to hire them and actually have to pay them,” said Robie.

  “Well, there’s that and also the fact that there are too many damn undercover cops around. If they infiltrated our operation? Well, that would be problematic. Thus, we made an executive decision to utilize ‘disposable’ workers.”

  Robie and Reel looked at each other. Reel said, “So you just kill them?”

  Fitzsimmons said quietly, “We terminate their work status at the appropriate time.”

  “And exactly how do you do that?” asked Robie.

  “I invite you to use your imagination,” replied Fitzsimmons. “But I can show you one method. Two birds with one stone, you see. And I’m the sort of person who always goes for the shortcut.”

  Reel studied him. “And the fact that you’re telling us all this means that you don’t expect us to be able to tell anyone else?”

  Fitzs
immons smiled, but it never reached his eyes. “I thought that went without saying.”

  Chapter

  66

  THEY REVERSED COURSE on the golf cart and soon found themselves back where they had started, at the quarry.

  “We’ve gotten rid of your truck and Bender’s police car, of course,” said Fitzsimmons. “No one will know where you’ve gotten to.”

  “You have to know that an army of police and Feds are going to descend on this place like locusts, don’t you?” said Robie.

  Fitzsimmons said, “I quite understand that your Mr. Walton is a VIP in DC. And that you two are also highly valuable. Now, with the entire police force of Grand, Colorado, missing, the locusts, as you say, will descend. So that means we have to move our operation. And we’re going to do it very quickly, starting tonight.” He suddenly scowled. “You know, in an ideal world an idiot like Clément Lamarre would not be allowed to bring down an operation like this.”

  “In an ideal world scum like you wouldn’t have the opportunity to build an operation like this,” retorted Reel.

  Fitzsimmons ignored this and continued. “We traced every person he could have told, from Holly to your Mr. Walton. Patti knew he was well connected. When he started snooping around, asking questions, getting a guided tour of Roark’s facility, that concerned us.”

  “So you knew about that?” said Robie.

  Fitzsimmons gave him a condescending look. “I know about everything. I just couldn’t figure out how you two came to learn about this place.”