“Excellent work. Your brothers and sisters have much to be grateful for. By the way, I was notified not too long ago of a certain incident. Our friends are searching for two men.” Men that don’t exist, of course. Hashimoto was careful to avoid using words such as Americans, manhunt or Uganda in the same sentence. “Do you have any concerns?”
“My former comrades will also be kept so busy running from our friends that they won’t have time to come look for me.”
“Don’t be too sure of that.”
“I know.”
Hashimoto hung up the phone, more assuaged than when he had answered it. Pandora was finally in his possession, the online news could wait. He knew his tea would be cold by now. That was nothing to stress over, he would send for another cup later.
Hashimoto was a handsome man, standing five-foot-seven inches and he was relatively fit for sixty-four. He had a doctorate certificate in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Tokyo. That and his numerous awards took up an entire wall. The other side was covered with awards and framed newspaper articles related to Hexagon Pharmaceuticals, of which he had been the CEO for the past twenty-three years. He was one of the youngest CEOs to have ever been given that title in the history of the company dating back to 1860.
Hashimoto’s association with Valerik went back as far as the early 1980’s, when the Soviets had recruited him based on his unique knowledge of brainwashing techniques. Hashimoto’s human experiments during the Soviet-Afghan war would’ve had him arrested for war crimes several years ago had the secret gotten out. In addition to the handsome salary the Soviets gave him, they facilitated his climb up the corporate ladder to become CEO of Hexagon Pharmaceuticals.
This was all threatened the day Dr. Tabitha Marx-otherwise known as the Undertaker-paid him a visit. She told him that she knew everything about him and Valerik after she rummaged through her late mother’s belongings. Blackmailing him was easy. Her making him trick Valerik into visiting his office only to have the Clarity drug used on him in order to brainwash him into becoming a double agent for Dr. Marx was pure genius.
Hashimoto accepted that he, himself, was tricked by Marx into taking Clarity, it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Since that day, Hashimoto was able to see that religion and politics were the root of all of the world’s problems. The world only needed one belief system, and that’s why she told him that he should establish his own cult, The Promise, and use Clarity to help recruit members. Hexagon was the perfect front.
Hashimoto wasn’t surprised that Dr. Marx hadn’t called him yet. She was on an American Military base-she’d be crazy to think that her phone call was secure. Valerik should’ve text-messaged a code to her that would’ve passed under the Intelligence community’s radar, illustrating his success in acquiring Pandora. This would in turn let her know that it was all right to disperse of what she had obtained. Framing Ares for it was a bonus.
Stealing Pandora from the weapons consortium, known as the Arms of Ares, would be a serious blow to that organization. Valerik was a professional. He’d proven himself several times before and wouldn’t be so careless as to lead a trail to either him or Hexagon Pharmaceuticals.
Even if he did, Hashimoto was more than equipped to handle them should they ever come looking for him.
Chapter 9
Hexagon Pharmaceuticals Head Office, West Tokyo, Japan, three hours later
Dr. Nita Parris parked her car in her reserved parking spot. It was the first time in days that she had chosen to drive to work. Most of Hexagon’s employees took advantage of Hexagon’s shuttle bus service from the nearby train station that dropped them off at each of the building’s four main entrances. She remembered the orientation session she had to get-mandatory for new employees and overseas transfers, like herself. Her guide even spoke English to her when he gave her a personal tour. All that was important to know about Hexagon Pharmaceuticals was that there were four Plexiglas-covered buildings that took up an area of ten football fields, named each according to orientation.
The south building was the tallest and had a two-storey lobby area with five office floors above it. The north building had residences on its two floors and a basement for compensated human trials. The east building had a ground floor and four sub-basements where chemicals and other products were manufactured and stored. Then there was the two-storey west building which consisted of conference rooms, auditoriums, and a cafeteria. All four buildings were easily accessible by horizontal escalators inside. Someone that could memorize that would never get lost inside. If they couldn’t, then they could refer to the maps.
With her black golf umbrella in one hand and her Madison Avenue Tote hanging from her opposite shoulder, she walked up the divided, flower-adorned walkway to the south entrance and joined a group that poured out of a shuttle bus. The crowd that surrounded her was a portion of the 105,000 that were employed worldwide in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Brazil, making Hexagon one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Being the only black woman among mostly Asians wasn’t the only thing that made her stand out-it was how fast she walked. Even in her four-inch-high stacked heels, she moved quickly. Seven years after she had hung up her track spikes, she still couldn’t slow down. But to her, it was everyone else who was slow.
As a young girl growing up in Barbados, she easily out-sprinted the boys, even the older ones. And although it’d been more than eight years since her last track meet, she couldn’t resist finding an outdoor, galvanized-rubber surfaced track to do some wind sprints on-just for the rush she used to have. She joined a gym that was a fifteen minute jog from where she lived and managed to go twice a week. She was flattered every time someone had trouble guessing her age, but she knew that most of the men did so just as a cheap pick-up line.
When she had competed for the Princeton University Track Team she was always hunted by the boys on the football and basketball teams. They’d always been present at home competitions, in packs of eight to ten, and always tried to get the phone numbers of the girls on the team.
Even today, things hadn’t changed in terms of how men looked at her. Such as the four men she had caught in her peripheral vision since she’d left her apartment earlier. It wasn’t a natural habit, it was a CIA-based trained habit to be able to spot people that either observed her or followed her inconspicuously.
She liked the flowers in the center median. They reminded her of the ones that she and her aunt Pauline had planted around the house, back home in St Phillip parish in Barbados. Those were such innocent times for her, when she would share everything with her aunt, whom she owed everything to.
She never knew her parents. Her mother had passed away a few days after she was born, and her father was a ghost. Aunt Pauline, with the exception of a few other aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in Barbados and England, was the only family that she knew.
After she passed through the revolving door to the South building, she glanced at the large digital clock that hung above the security guard’s round counter in the center of the atrium. It was 8:35 AM. She was well ahead of schedule. These past several weeks she had played to perfection the role of a senior researcher for Hexagon Pharmaceuticals. On the books, the company had several legitimate research contracts worth millions of dollars. But General Downing sent her there to spy on her boss, Dr. Hideaki Hashimoto.
The National Security Agency always suspected that illicit human trials were conducted by the Soviets during the Soviet-Afghan war and that they had recruited Hashimoto to run the experiments. Every investigation turned up a dead end. Nevertheless, the NSA’s paranoia led them to believe that if he had perfected his brainwashing techniques, it would likely fall in the hands of an enemy nation or terrorist group.
Downing felt that her background in biology and chemistry would make her a perfect fit. While she pursued her Biochemistry doctorate at Princeton, she had singlehandedly discovered a bio-weapon threat against the US. Downing wasted no time recruiting her. The CIA and the FBI’s top guns still could not figure out how they overlooked what she saw. To him she was a perfect candidate-no parents and an aunt for a legal guardian.
But what took her out of the labs at Langley, Virginia, and into the field, was the night she was nearly fatally wounded after a carjacking. It was all because some jerk stood her up on a date. She drove home after waiting for him for over an hour, finally arriving at the traffic light at the DC-Maryland border on Pennsylvania Avenue. It didn’t take too long until she heard someone tapping at her window, only to turn and stare into the barrel of Lorcin 9mm
