When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 7

  Though he hated the bugs, the money he was making, man, that put a zing in his pulse. A better wage than he’d ever seen. Sweetening his bank account, wired in every month from a bank in Germany. Lots of zeros added to his available balance, something he’d never seen before.

  Ordinarily Dickens shunned outdoor work. Had enough of that growing up on an Oklahoma wheat farm and doing two tours in the merciless open spaces of Afghanistan. These days he preferred the great indoors. Quiet days in his El Paso ag lab and nights in smoky cowboy bars with loud jukeboxes, pretty ladies, and dance floors where everyone was drunk and sweaty.

  Dickens had fled the life of a farm boy on his family homestead and gone to college so he wouldn’t have to sit in the cab of a goddamn John Deere harvester the rest of his life. And what had he ended up doing after escaping a foreign war without being killed or maimed? Soil analysis, grid sampling, determining the optimum levels for secondary and micronutrients in plant samples. The busywork of an agriculture lab.

  Lab work wasn’t exciting, but the air-conditioning was good, and the salary and benefits were fine, plus nobody had shot a weapon at him or planted an IED in his path in years.

  For the last six months, he’d become a farm boy again, roaming the olive grove that sprawled over a few thousand acres. His job: carting box after box after box of spittlebugs up and down the rows of olive trees and letting the insects go. Starting back in April, hour after hour, box after box. When one load was done, it was back to the port at Bari to pick up another load, drive his Jeep back to the orchard, and repeat.

  Nobody bothered him. The foreman of the grove, a stumpy Italian named Pagolo, watched him coming and going, never smiled, never returned his wave, simply watched as Dickens checked off another quadrant of the grove, then another quadrant after that.

  Releasing dozens at a time, distributing them along the narrow sandy roads between the rows of trees. By the time July rolled around, the bugs he’d released in June had spewed out their protective foam sacks, and the next crop had metamorphosed into adults. They mingled with the other froghoppers and spread fast, jumped from tree to tree, sailed off on the breezes, and, sometime in early September, the females laid another fifty eggs apiece. Before long, their offspring were spewing out foam nests in olive trees miles away in every direction.

  Dickens could see these spittlebugs were doing a tiny bit of damage to the olive leaves, here and there nibbling on a few, but it was nothing major, so releasing so many must’ve been a part of a pest-prevention plan. He’d e-mailed Bixel several times, asking her to explain the purpose of his job, but she never answered. Dickens explained that he was a college grad, a professional. He could understand whatever the goal was. If he knew that, he might do a better job.

  No response.

  He assumed the spitters were meant to outcompete some other destructive bug and crowd it out. Some of his colleagues at the Albion lab in El Paso were doing that kind of research. Pitting bug against bug in different ecosystems to see which would dominate.

  Why Dickens had been tapped for this assignment, he hadn’t a clue. Out of the blue, he’d gotten the phone call while sitting at his desk. The voice said to hold, an executive at the ag lab’s home office in Zurich wanted to speak to him.

  She introduced herself, Larissa Bixel, executive vice president for global affairs at Albion International, and asked a few questions: Would he be willing to live in Italy for the next six or seven months? (Sure, he loved pasta.) Could he handle delicate insects? (Of course he could.) Could he transfer them from one location to another without damaging them? (Yes, he believed he could do that as well as any other ag tech.) Then she posed a series of personal questions: Was he married? Did he have children, close friends? No, he wasn’t married, had no kids he knew about, and yes, he had a couple of drinking buddies and old army pals he stayed in touch with. Mostly he was a loner, had been all his life.

  And the question she saved for last: Could Dickens keep a secret? He didn’t see why not.

  Finally, Bixel told Dickens to pack his bags. A ticket to Bari, Italy, would be waiting at El Paso International later that afternoon. In his absence, the ag lab he’d been working for would continue to pay his salary and benefits, plus he’d receive a healthy bonus each month from his new employer. His El Paso boss would know nothing about the exact nature of his work, only that he’d been reassigned temporarily to a project for the home office.

  Detailed instructions to Dickens would follow via a special e-mail account she’d set up just for him. Tell no one at the lab or anyone else about the nature of his new job. Okay, though it was sounding more top secret by the minute. And on the plane to Italy he should begin to familiarize himself with the life cycle of the meadow spittlebug.

  “Now write this down,” she’d told him, giving him the name of his contact in Bari, a man who’d make sure the cartons he was picking up made it safely through customs and port inspection without undue delay.

  “I thought shipping live insects internationally wasn’t kosher.”

  Bixel went quiet and Dickens thought, Shit, I’ve lost the job.

  “Is there anything else you need to know about the position?” she asked.

  And that was that.

  Turned out the work was mind-numbing, but Dickens loved Italy. Excellent food and loads of delectable women. He’d enticed a couple to his hotel room for romps. Something about a Catholic woman rolling around on hotel sheets, sinning with a godless foreigner, made those gals mortally crazy, made them buck and squirm so wild he’d been thrown clear more than once.

  A couple of months ago, he’d met Valentina Lombardi. In her late thirties with jet-black hair, a solid meatiness on her frame, garlic on her fingertips and herbs he couldn’t name that scented her secret parts. She lived at home with her aging father and mother, worked behind the bar at their little trattoria. Her English was basic, and she wasn’t the prettiest woman he’d ever slept with, but Dickens had fallen for her. Her sweet smile, her dark hungry eyes, her voluptuous body, their talks in the darkness.

  Damned if he wasn’t in love. Only the second time in his life. Couldn’t stop thinking about her as he was distributing the spittlebugs in the grove. Lately, he’d been working up his nerve to ask her if she’d consider coming back to the states with him. Just a holiday, look around, see how she liked El Paso. He was building up his nerve, his time in Italy running out.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, late October, winding down to the last day of the job, flying back to Texas in a couple of days, back to the air-conditioned quiet of the Albion lab. Dickens was making the usual bonfire of cardboard shipping cartons full of twigs and needle clusters of eastern white pine, the sap of that tree being the favorite food source for spittlebugs. When the fire burned out, he’d head back to the hotel, wash up, wait for Valentina to close down the bar. And he’d ask her. Tonight was zero hour.

  It was sunset, a damned fine one, with veins of blood and gold running through the slab of purple sky out over the Adriatic Sea. A good sign.

  He was poking the bonfire with an olive branch, making sure the last of the cardboard caught before he left, when Pagolo came walking out of the woods behind him. Dickens turned around, said hello. Pagolo halted ten feet off, scowling at Dickens.

  “Boss want speak.”

  “To me?”

  “You.”

  “Where?”

  The man pointed back into the grove. Pagolo wore gray overalls over a white long-sleeve jersey. His face was square and raisin dark and wrinkled. A stumpy man with big-knuckled hands, heavy arms and legs. He was breathing slow and shallow. Dickens had never heard the man speak and was surprised how deep and throaty his voice was. Like Johnny Cash slow-talking one of those ballads about a man who’d lost his wife of fifty years.

  “What? Boss is on the phone?”

  “Phone, yes. This way.”

  He followed Pagolo through the olive trees. Must’ve gone a half mile before Dickens said, “Hey, how much farther
is it? Maybe I should take the Jeep.”

  “Close,” the old man said. “Up ahead.”

  Night shadows were sneaking between the trees, the sky almost drained of color, and Dickens’d had enough. He stopped and told Pagolo to go fuck himself, ready to circle back and look after his fire. If the boss wanted to talk to him, she could call him later at the hotel.

  Pagolo said nothing, and Dickens turned back and headed down the empty lane between the rows of trees. Something wasn’t right. The way Pagolo was looking at him, the phone off somewhere in the woods, it didn’t compute. Dickens sped up, getting a prickle down his neck and a chilly streak of sweat across his ribs.

  He was almost back to the fire when he heard a shuffle in the woods off to the left. Dickens stopped.

  “Hey,” he said. “Pagolo? Come on out, you old fool.”

  Must’ve been a bat, a cut-down baseball bat, the kind Dickens’s dad used to brain fish flopping on the boat deck. That’s the meaningless, stupid thought Dickens had when he was falling. Pagolo had hit him with a bat. Like it mattered, like a pipe wouldn’t have done just as well.

  He slammed flat on the ground, busted his nose against the earth. But he was still awake, could feel the man grab him by the shirt, turn him over, take hold of his collar, and drag him on his back across the dusty ground. Stunned but not dead. If he could just get his feet under him, he could take the old man.

  But Pagolo was hauling him over the hard, bumpy ground, and Dickens was feeling sick and distant from his body. Floating a little way off above the treetops and thinking how stupid he was for not finding out exactly what the hell he was doing with those foamy spittlebugs. He should have asked. Should have insisted. Maybe he would have quit, but, damn, the money was so good, twice what he was making in the lab. That should’ve been a red flag, the money.

  Pagolo stopped. The man was out of breath. Strong little bastard, hauling Dickens so far. It was full-on dark.

  Dickens opened his eyes, or maybe not, he wasn’t sure. Everything was midnight black. He knew he was still alive because, Jesus, his head ached, and all down his backside where he’d jolted across the rocks and gullies of the olive grove he knew he was bleeding, could feel the slick warmth.

  He should’ve asked more questions. He tried to ask one now. What’s going on? That’s what was in his mind, but it didn’t reach his throat.

  Pagolo was rolling him. Onto his front side, onto his back, then onto his front side. The man grunted from the effort. He was probably getting paid pretty good too. Probably better than Dickens.

  Then one more revolution, front, back, then the ground wasn’t there, and Dickens pitched into a hole. Thumped hard, lost his breath.

  The smell of dirt, the taste of it, gritty Italian dirt. Didn’t smell a bit like dirt in Oklahoma or Afghanistan. Had some kind of honeyed herb scent like Valentina’s secret parts. An herb he couldn’t name. He should’ve paid more attention to herbs. All those scents with exotic names. He should’ve asked Valentina to marry him, come live in Texas. He should’ve done a shitload of things, a shitload more than he had.

  Dirt was raining on him. Dickens wasn’t dead, but he could feel everything bleeding away fast like the color fading from the Adriatic sky after sunset.

  The money was too damned good. That should’ve been the tip off.

  TEN

  Albion Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland

  Summoned by Lester Albion to the infirmary, Adrian Naff found his boss lying on a leather recliner cocked back so far he was almost flat. Behind him, company nurse Jackie Neiderhoff was monitoring the high-speed blood separator that whirred between Albion’s chair and the chair of his eight-year-old daughter, Bonnie.

  Adrian nodded hello to Albion and stepped over to Bonnie’s chair, patted her shoulder, and gave her a reassuring nod. She looked up at him and frowned. He waited in silence as the machine rumbled and purred.

  As he understood it, the centrifuge was drawing out Lester Albion’s blood and spinning it to separate the red cells from the plasma and platelets, then pumping the depleted blood back to Albion, while Bonnie received the plasma-rich concoction from a different plastic tube that originated in the other side of the blood separator. According to Albion, the newly refreshed blood was going to bring Bonnie back to full health.

  Adrian hadn’t been told the name of Bonnie’s ailment. He’d asked Albion, Neiderhoff, and Larissa Bixel, but they always replied in generalities. “A not-uncommon childhood malady.” “Very treatable condition of the hemoglobin.” “We’re just lucky Lester and his daughter are the same blood type.”

  “I’m sick of being sick,” Bonnie said to Naff. Her blue eyes were bright and agitated. “I say we shut down this whole deal, yank the plug. It’s obviously a fake cure that isn’t working, and I’m tired of getting stuck in the vein twice a week. I want to go to school. Can you take me to school, Mr. Naff? Much more of this and I’ll never catch up.”

  “Hang in there, kiddo. You’ll be in fighting shape soon.”

  “Everyone says that, but I feel worse every day.” She shut her eyes against Naff and the rest of the oppressive adult world.

  The kid was a few light-years beyond precocious. She was also irrepressibly articulate. Fully formed paragraphs had been streaming from the kid’s mouth since Adrian first met her three years earlier. A truth-telling machine locked in overdrive.

  Last winter it was Bonnie’s unfiltered remarks that incriminated her father in front of a half dozen witnesses and caused Albion to draw a pistol from his suit coat and fire wildly at those assembled, wounding several, missing Adrian by inches. If it hadn’t been for Harper McDaniel’s bravery and quick reaction, that room might have been piled high with bodies.

  In the court cases that followed, to the surprise of no one familiar with Swiss culture, Albion was exonerated by the high courts and his behavior brushed aside by the national media as mildly scandalous. Lester Albion was simply defending himself against armed intruders who had conned their way into the boardroom that day to make scurrilous and defamatory public claims and cause financial injury to the corporation.

  A few months after the incident, Lester was back at work as if none of it had ever happened. And as far as his 150,000 employees in seventy countries were concerned, whatever had gone down in the Zurich headquarters last winter was irrelevant as long as it had no detrimental effect on the corporation’s bottom line. Since yearly global revenues were up 13 percent, all was well with the Albion workforce.

  Nurse Neiderhoff shut off the blood separator and drew the needle from Albion’s arm, then did the same for Bonnie.

  “I feel worse,” Bonnie said. “Thanks for nothing. Who’s taking me to school?”

  Albion told Neiderhoff to send for one of the drivers stationed on the first floor of the office building.

  “You can’t take me, Daddy? You’re so busy you don’t have time for your own sick daughter?”

  “Sorry, dear. I’ll see you at home tonight. We’ll watch something together on television.”

  “Oh, joy. Sit side by side and watch the screen? This is exactly why Mother divorced you.”

  Albion shook his head and grimaced helplessly at Adrian. He was a small-boned man, just over five feet tall with thinning brown hair and a weak chin. His intense blue eyes were his strongest feature, almost offsetting his diminutive stature.

  Neiderhoff helped Bonnie to her feet. The girl blinked a few times as if the room were whirling.

  Without another word to Bonnie, Albion waved for Adrian to follow.

  “I have a job for you.” Using the same brusque tone he employed with all his staff, though Adrian had once been exempt from such disdain. “I do hope I’m not taking you away from anything important.”

  Adrian said no, he was at Mr. Albion’s service.

  “Well, I should certainly hope so.” He was at the door of the infirmary. “Bixel, you come too. It’s gym time.”

  “Of course.”

  Larissa Bixel trai
led Adrian down the corridor between the infirmary and the fitness center. Bixel was in her late forties. She’d recently let her buzz cut grow out a few inches and had bleached it an unfortunate shade of yellow that Adrian thought resembled motor oil.

  She wore leggings in a black-and-gray faux camouflage and a loose teal hoodie that didn’t quite conceal her burly physique. Her garish running shoes looked like she’d been wading in fluorescent paint. Maybe the mishmash was hip. Adrian had no idea. He didn’t stay up on pop culture. Clashing colors might be in this fall. Or maybe Bixel had no fashion sense, and being a fortysomething woman, second in line at a global empire, she’d decided, what the hell, she could wear whatever she pleased. Fine by Adrian.

  Albion, in a gray jogging suit with white stripes, led them into the gym and halted just inside the door. A couple of midday joggers were slogging along on the treadmills, a young woman Adrian knew from accounting was doing abdominal crunches on the inclined board, and there was a beefy new guy from Adrian’s security team bench-pressing about three hundred pounds while Jerome Bennetto, another of his security jocks, spotted for him.

  Albion clapped his hands three times, and the action in the room slowed to a halt.

  “Tell them,” Albion said to Adrian.

  “Tell them what?”

  “To get out, go back to work. I want the room.”

  In the Zurich office, all Albion employees had an hour each day to use as they wanted. Not surprising to find the gym occupied at any hour.

  “Why would I do that?” Adrian said.

  Albion scowled at him and turned to Bixel.

  “You do it.”

  Bixel marched into the center of the fitness area and called out, “Hey, hey. Everybody out. The gym is closed. Go now. Back to work.”

  As the staff filed out, Bennetto passed by Adrian and cocked a questioning eyebrow at him. How do you put up with this shit-heel? Adrian shrugged apologetically. Good question.