grand sat next to the massive bay window in the living room. She turned on one muted light and sat on the bench. Her fingers glided over the keys, Enya gently filling the room. She played “Watermark” and “Only If…,” then “By Heart,” one of her favorite Jim Brickman pieces. The room, with its soft tan and black striped sofa and love seat, and pewter and glass tables, resonated quietly with the last notes as she drew her fingers back from the keyboard. She used the remote to turn on the stereo and found a Yanni CD on her multidisc system. She filled a diffuser with vanilla scent, lit the tea candle, and lay quietly in the darkness.
Gordon Buchanan. The name kept drifting back to her. Why would Kenga have his name inside a file she had pilfered from Veritas? And why the Triaxcion file? What was going on? She lay on the couch for three or four songs, then dragged herself vertical and switched off the stereo.
Six-thirty tomorrow morning was going to come awfully early.
18
Ian Goett, Jennifer’s immediate supervisor at Veritas, poked his head in her office. “Got a minute?” he asked. The look on his face was serious.
“Sure,” Jennifer said, dropping her pen and waving at one of the chairs facing her desk.
Goett closed the door, moved the stack of computer printouts from the chair to the floor, and sat.“Kenga Bakcsi is dead,” he said.
Jennifer froze. Kenga was on vacation. How could this be? What were the chances of someone dying while tanning on a beach in the Caribbean? She took a moment to collect her thoughts. “What happened?”
Goett cleared his throat. “She was on some sort of rain forest tour on Saint Lucia when the vehicle she was in went over a cliff. That’s all we know right now.”
“When did it happen?”
“Two days ago, on August twenty-third. The island authorities contacted her family and they passed along our number. I took the call from the investigator assigned to her case.”
“And that’s all they said, just that she went over a cliff?”
“Basically, yes. She was staying in the capital city of Castries and arranged for a driver to show her the island. They were deep in the jungle when he lost control and the cab slid off the road into a deep gorge. She was killed instantly.”
“Driver killed too?” Jennifer asked.
Goett looked taken aback at the question. “No, he managed to jump out.”
Jennifer nodded, just a slight motion of her head. Her mind was racing. Kenga had classified information on her home computer; information that dealt with a drug in a totally separate division. She had technical data that would see her fired immediately if the brass at Veritas knew she was poking around in secure computer files. And now she was dead. That thought slammed her mind against a brick wall. She was being paranoid. It was simply her imagination drawing a connection between Kenga’s death and the information on her home computer. Veritas had nothing to do with this tragedy.
“Thanks for letting me know, Ian,” she said to her supervisor. “I’ll break it to the staff. Any idea when her body will be back in the States?”
“Not at present. In fact, her entire family still lives in Romania. They may want her body shipped back home for the funeral. I’ll find out and let you know.”
“Okay.”
She watched Ian Goett leave, and her mind kicked into gear again. Was it really such a stretch to think Veritas could be involved in the woman’s death? Veritas was a multibillion-dollar company that protected its secrets fiercely, as did every pharmaceutical giant. The chemical formulas, like the one on Kenga’s computer, were public knowledge, but the process by which the company produced the drugs was its bread and butter. And that process was also on the computer’s hard drive. A process that Veritas would protect with a vengeance. Hundreds of millions of dollars went into research, and marketing the formula and the process, and it would be natural for a company to protect so valuable an asset. Then she shook her head and said aloud, so she could hear her own voice, “This is crazy thinking. This is your imagination. Companies don’t murder their staff for having classified information on their home computers. Kenga went on a vacation and died when the car she was in went over a cliff.”
The words sounded hollow in the confines of her office-forced, even. And she realized that the right side of her brain was not going to let go of this easily. She ran her hands through her hair and glanced at the clock on her desk. Three o’clock. She would wait until four to bring the staff together and break the news to them. They would be free to go anytime after they found out. There was going to be a lot of tears and disbelief. Kenga was a well- liked person in the office, and many of her staff had worked with her for a number of years. This was not going to be easy.
Jennifer watched the last of her staff leave. One was a junior research assistant who’d been best of friends with Kenga, and he was in no condition to drive. Jennifer ordered him a cab and gave the driver her Visa number to cover the fare. She shook her head in disbelief as she locked her office. Kenga was gone. The woman had been the lifeblood of the office, always smiling and organizing their silly little outings to the local pub or bowling alley. She fostered a real community spirit among her coworkers, and Jennifer knew it would be impossible to replace her. She felt a strange sense of depression wash over her as she left the building and started her car.
She checked her watch. Almost five o’clock. She couldn’t have picked a worse time to drive over to White Oak. I-64 was a mess. A semi with a full load of live chickens had jackknifed and spilled its load across the westbound lanes. Some of the crates had split open, and the road was littered with dead chickens. Live chickens were running around in no particular direction. The eastbound lanes were clear, but the rubberneckers were in fine form, slowing traffic to a crawl so they could have a good look at the carnage. It was after seven when she passed the Richmond airport and the traffic thinned out. She reached the intersection of I-295 and I-64 and took the off- ramp, watching her speed as she drove the last half-mile to the research park. The cops loved to check their radar guns along this stretch.
She reached the entrance to the park, identified by a slab of white stone with a large green
“Good evening, Dr. Pearce,” he said.
“Hi,” she said, returning the smile. At first, she had wondered how the guards knew everyone’s name, but after a while she noticed that a new line scrolled across their screen every time someone entering the building swiped his or her identity card. Technology in a technology park-go figure.
Veritas shared the building with the software development division of another corporation. The Veritas offices and labs were to the right of the main entrance, and she used her card to open the steel fire door that automatically closed at six o’clock every weekday. Once she was through the outer security door, there was a short section of hall, perhaps twenty feet, then another set of doors. A security camera registered every person who swiped their access card through the card reader. The doors were steel, with rectangular glass windows, but Jennifer suspected that this particular glass was virtually indestructible. She smiled at the camera, ran her card through the reader, and moved into the secret world of Veritas Pharmaceutical, White Oak Division.
Most of the Veritas labs were relegated to White Oak, for two reasons. The first was cost. Square footage at White Oak cost the company less than half what they paid for their space at BioTech Five. Second was security. Security in the new complex, built two years earlier, was vastly superior to that in Richmond’s older buildings. There were no back entrances or windows to smash for easy entry or exit. The glass in every exterior window was bulletproof, and every exit was monitored with a closed-circuit camera and an alarm. All the systems reported back to a central location that was constantly monitored. Secrets were easy to keep at White Oak.
