BRIAN (The Callahans Book 1) (88 page)

              By the time he was pulling along the dusty road leading towards Davey Construction and the corporate trailer next to the trench, night had fallen. Aside from a few work lights posted along the trench, the site was dark with shadows.

              As he climbed out of his Lexus, Taylor spied a few figures through the trailer windows, though they were masked with curtains.

              Knocking once at the door after ascending the trailer steps, he opened the door and found his father hunched over a table topped with developmental plans. Another executive, Lawrence Mathers, stood beside him and appeared to be walking Porter through a course of action.

              Porter’s steely gaze snapped to Taylor, and he gradually straightened from the table.

              “I wasn’t expecting you.”

              “And I wasn’t expecting you,” said Taylor. “This is still my build.”

              Porter snorted, but his lip curled into a provocative grin.

              “I can’t help but feel like we’ve had this conversation,” he said, folding his arms. “I’m not going to grovel or defend my right to be here, Taylor, but I will say you were sorely missed today. Had I not been here to oversee things, we’d have lost another day.”

              Taylor pressed his mouth into a hard line, knowing he couldn’t argue with his father’s point. He’d been cooped up in bed with Rose, and it had been easy throwing caution to the wind to do so. Perhaps he’d been foolish to assume the project would hold off so long as he did.

              “What did I miss?” he asked in an even tone to draw his father’s good side out.

              “One disaster after another. We only have half the materials we need. That Godforsaken terrorist group has us tied up with legalities based on that idiotic woman’s accident. But we’re dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, and we’ll be up and running in no time.”

              It took everything Taylor had not to lunge at Porter for referring to Rose as an idiot. He clenched his jaw, swallowing hard and reminding himself that his father was a callous man, plain and simple. When Taylor himself had been laid up in the hospital for months, his father had barely visited. When he did, all he managed to convey was that Taylor was being weak and needed to snap out of it and get on with life. If he viewed his own son in that manner, why on earth would he treat a perfect stranger with more compassion?

              “Concerning the legalities,” he began, keeping his tone even and his gaze steady. “Is there any logic in reevaluating the chemicals we use? There might be a way to come out of this with more public respect than we went in with.”

              “I’d leave that to our PR manager if I were you,” he countered, dismissing the proposition, though Taylor had only skimmed the surface of the idea. “You shouldn’t have taken that rebel in, son. You should be highly cautious and guard against anything that presumes guilt. Helping her in any way, shape, or form presumes guilt. The best course of action would’ve been to have her arrested as soon as she left the hospital.”

              “Have her arrested?” he gaped, losing his cool then working hard to reel it in. “What would the headlines read if I did such a thing?”

              “They’d read as justice served.”

              Taylor touched eyes with Lawrence, but the man’s gaze held just as little compassion as his father’s. Registering that Taylor was searching for an ally, Porter indicated for his colleague to give them a minute, and Lawrence, reading him loud and clear, stalked to the door.

              “Now, son, I know you think you found a new pet—”

              “She’s not a pet—”

              “Fine, plaything. And mark my words, you’ve crossed a very serious line with her. My God, don’t you know better than to bed the enemy? Why do you think I send you escort after escort. Fucking around with the wrong woman can get a man killed, and I’m talking political suicide.”

              Taylor was about to object, but Porter cut him off without hesitation.

              “If you’ve worked in an accidental advantage, it’s the fact that you have her there. First of all, don’t think for one second she’s wormed her way into your pants for any other reason than to assess your vulnerabilities and use them against you. But the advantage is that you can do the same to her.”

              Taylor couldn’t stop the twinge of worry that stabbed him in the gut. He trusted Rose, but was that a mistake? At this very moment she and Carter were in his study, unsupervised. What would prevent them from searching through every last file? What if Carter had ways of hacking into Taylor’s user on the computer to pull up every last sordid fact about the Starlight pipeline? He was jarred from his fretting mind when Porter cut in with his second point.

              “Second of all, and this is the silver lining here, she’s blind...” Porter trailed off, chuckling, and it turned Taylor’s stomach. “She’s a weak woman. You can distract her, keep her in bed, give her a new focus in life.”

              He wanted to mention that Rose was hardly the type to be distracted in that manner, but he held his tongue, focusing on the end game and how best to persuade his father, not that he’d been doing a very good job of it so far.

              “It’s also to our advantage that she’s in your care.” Porter took slow and deliberate steps towards him, angling his dark eyes at him. “What’s best for the pipeline is that Rose Cole disappears.”

              Shocked, Taylor widened his eyes and felt his breath hitch in his throat.

              “If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll disappear from meddling and go on living her sad, little blind life. But if she doesn’t have the good sense for that, then there are ways of helping her along.”

              “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

              “I’m talking about keeping your eye on the ball. I’m talking about blood being thicker than water. And I’m talking about annihilating the opposition. Maybe she leaves indefinitely. Maybe she gets inspired to set off on a new life path, start instructing yoga or some shit. I don’t care. We need her out of the way entirely. And a dead woman who trespassed is easier to mitigate in the public eye than a blind woman on a crusade to use her disability to shut down my pipeline.”

              Taylor couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and the shock of it all scrambled his brain.

              “You’re in charge of her meds,” Porter went on, oblivious to Taylor’s evident horror. “You’ve got all the necessary medical supplies. Say she needs an IV. And hey, I’m not suggesting you do what needs to be done. I’ll arrange for a hospice nurse to swing by. And Taylor, this is a last resort. I have faith in you that you can persuade her otherwise, get her to leave well enough alone, but if she doesn’t, we need recourse. We need to shut her down before she shuts us down.”

              Finding his ability to think straight, Taylor said, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

              “I can’t believe you’re put off by this. If you think earning billions of dollars doesn’t come with blood, sweat, and tears then you are sorely mistaken. I grew up eating canned sardines. I had holes in my clothes and I didn’t get new pants until the old ones were hanging at my knees. I was poorer than sin and did everything I could to build a real life for myself, for your mother, God rest her soul, and for you. And you’ll do the same.”

              “No,” he said, “I won’t. And neither will you.” Taylor stepped in close to his father and pointed hard against his chest. “If you go near her, if you send someone, I will destroy you.”

              “No, you won’t,” he said easily. “You don’t have it in you.”

              “The build is paused until further notice,” he declared. “I’m going to find new materials, make this thing eco-friendly, start from scratch if I have to—”

              “We can’t afford that.”

              “That’s a joke if I ever heard one.”

              “We have investors, a board—”

              “And I’ll deal with their resistance, as necessary, but this is my pipeline and I can’t live the rest of my life in good conscience knowing it’s poisoning people.”

              “Taylor, I’m warning you, don’t make me tear you down again to build you into the son you should be.”

              “Again?” he said questioningly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

              Before Porter could answer, the trailer windows blew out and a deafening blast filled Taylor’s ears. The next thing he knew he was slamming against the floor, glass shattering and scattering over his head, raining down like needles. He covered his head, scrambling to process what had occurred.

              Outside, Lawrence shouted, “Bomb!”

              Then Taylor heard something crash to the gravel beyond the trailer as the light changed, and he knew the explosion had caused one of the work lights to fall.

              “Hey!” Lawrence yelled. “What the hell have you done?”

              Vaguely, Taylor heard the executive run after the assailant, as he lifted his head to see how his father had made it through.

              Porter was lying on his back, his eyes lolling dizzily, as Taylor crawled towards him, discovering a sharp pain in his ribs on the right side.

              “Dad?”

              Porter groaned, and when Taylor reached him, cradling his head in his lap, the older man said, “Kill or be killed. Don’t you see that’s where this is headed?”

              “She did what?” Rose was utterly beside herself that Layla had gone off on her own and once again acted recklessly, endangering others to thwart the pipeline. Carter had her by the shoulder from where she sat at Taylor’s desk, but it did little to comfort her.

              “She’s in the county jail,” Taylor explained. “I could overlook one attack that didn’t hurt anyone, but this time she used a grenade, blew out the side of our trailer, and put my father in the hospital. He’s going to press charges, needless to say.”

              “Is he all right?” she asked.

              “He hit his head fairly hard and fractured his shoulder, but neither are life threatening.”

              Rose could hear his voice waver as though he was entirely beside himself.

              “How are you?” she asked urgently.

              “A bruised rib, but I’ll live.”

              Rose sensed Carter get to his feet, as his hand slipped off her shoulder.

              “I have to see her,” he explained. “Let’s get Harold on this if we can. Get her bail set.”

              “You can try,” said Taylor. “I doubt she’ll be offered a bail. She’s dangerous and this is the second attack.”

              “Meaning you told the authorities about the first one?” Carter demanded.

              “How could I not?”

              Intuiting that the men were staring each other down, Rose got to her feet as though it might mitigate the tension rising between them. It didn’t.

              “I’ll call Harold,” she began, “but we’re out of funds and no one works for free. What the hell was she thinking?”

              “She’s desperate,” Carter offered as though anything could justify Layla’s level of reckless destruction. “We all are.”

              “But we don’t kill people to stop a corporation from killing people,” she countered, completely astonished that anyone could defend Layla’s logic. Then decisively, she asserted, “I’m sorry, Carter. She’s out.”

              “What?” he asked.

              “She’s out. I can’t have this on my head. I can’t have her actions representing my organization. If she needs an attorney and wants to contact Harold, fine, but it won’t be on One World’s dime, and I have to say, if you support her in this then you’re out, too. This is serious and I’ll not be a party to it.”

              “I’ll be out?” he gaped. “I’ve done nothing.”

              “You brought her in and you assisted the first explosion.”

              “But after everything we’ve accomplished in the last three hours, you’d cast me out by mere association.”

              “You heard me, Carter,” she stated, taking a firm tone. “It’s not mere association. You took measures prior, and I have a zero-tolerance policy on that.”

              He didn’t have to say anything for Rose to know he was staring at her wide-eyed and astounded.

              “It’s late,” she said softly. “I think you should go.”

              “I was and I will.”

              He punctuated the statement by pulling his satchel over his shoulder and crossing through the office, and Rose thought she caught the distinct sound of him clipping shoulders with Taylor. She waited until she heard the suite door open then shut, indicating he was gone, before she asked Taylor, “You really are okay?”

              “Yeah,” he said in an exhausted voice.

              She felt him wrap his arms around her. He winced at the embrace.

              “Why are you lying?”

              “It’s just a few bruised ribs. They’re tender, and if you weren’t so boney—”

              “Oh shut up.” She smiled. “I’m not boney.”

              “Have you eaten?”

              “No, we worked straight through.”

              Releasing her in favor of taking her arm, Taylor guided Rose through the office and down the hall. She was getting strangely used to the feel of each room in Taylor’s suite and sensed immediately when the ceiling overhead opened up, indicating they were now in the living room.

              “What do you feel like having?” he asked, rounding her through the living room and into the kitchen where he gently deposited her at the table. He didn’t let go until she eased into a chair. “I can make pasta.”

              “Make?” she said teasingly. “You can cook?”

              “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I don’t always order delivery,” he said and she could hear the smile in his tone. “What about pasta primavera?”

              “I won’t argue with that.”

              “Red wine while you wait?”

              “Absolutely.”

              Rose listened to the sounds of Taylor placing two long-stem glasses on the marble counter and popping the cork from a bottle. After pouring, he set her glass with a click on the kitchen table and she found the stem with her hand, lifting it to her mouth and taking a sip.

              “This isn’t going to knock me out?”

              “I’ll keep an eye on you,” he said easily, “but I doubt your painkillers from this morning are still in your system.”

              As Taylor filled a pot with water and got the burner going, riffled through the cabinets and refrigerator, and collected the ingredients, Rose contemplated all that she’d found in his office.

              In addition to drafting up new reports, composing their argument to shut down the pipeline based on her accident, working with Madison’s findings as well as their attorney to frame their argument as best they could, Rose also spent the first hour talking Carter out of searching through Taylor’s office for evidence that Starlight knew and disregarded the hazards of their chemicals, as well as dirt on Taylor, in general. But Carter had become more aggressive in terms of getting her consent, and when she heard him opening filing cabinets she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop him.

              Carter had come across two critical pieces of information, both equally disturbing, though she recognized she may have been and may still be in denial about the fact of their damning power.

              The first was that Starlight had conducted a test on the chemical back in the late 90s, which proved it would not only burn human skin, but had the chemical composition necessary to burn through steel and iron—the very materials the pipeline was made of. But that wasn’t what had disturbed her. Carter had also come across legal correspondence between Porter Montgomery and the Starlight attorney, all of which Taylor had been CC’ed on, which delineated how to omit the test findings in order to gain governmental approval and permits in order to move forward with their first pipeline in Arizona. Granted, Taylor was a teenager at the time and launched into medical school after undergrad, so Rose was holding out hope that he, perhaps, never took the time to read the messages. But if that were the case, why did Taylor have these e-mails printed and filed in his office? Clearly, he had reviewed them in tandem with taking on his role as CEO of the Bellevue pipeline and used the findings to make identical arguments and draw up falsified documents to gain the necessary permits to build Starlight here.

              Rose had begged Carter not to take cell pics of the e-mails, arguing that One World wouldn’t be able to use any information obtained illegally, but Carter had been too strong willed.

              If that hadn’t been enough of a gross misuse of Taylor’s trust in allowing them to work in his office, Carter took it one step further when he hacked into Taylor’s user on the computer.

              At first, Carter had meant to find further evidence of Taylor’s involvement in the conspiracy to use hazardous chemicals that the government would never approve had they understood the true nature and test findings, but what he happened upon was so much worse. Carter had uncovered Taylor’s medical files surrounding his months in the hospital after he’d fallen into the pool at his father’s charity event.

              They discovered the alarming results of a drug test that the hospital had run upon Taylor’s admittance. The test had come back positive for PCP and MDMA, two recreational drugs Rose would’ve never thought a man like Taylor would have indulged in. But that wasn’t the most puzzling part. The test also ran positive for scopolamine, a drug neither Rose nor Carter had heard of. After some Internet research on Carter’s end, he told her that the medical use for Scopolamine was to quell motion sickness. It was administered as a patch placed on the skin. When it had sounded odd anyone would use that drug recreationally, Carter dug deeper and found a street use for the drug. Though it was prevalent in Colombia and Buenas Aires and not the United States, criminals would use the drug to subdue their victims either by blowing it in their face or handing them a business card laced with the substance. Within minutes, the victim would be rendered debilitated, highly suggestible, functioning by command, but without their true cognitive abilities. The criminal could then merely suggest the victim take them to an ATM, empty the cash from their account, and hand it over, and the victim would. When the spell lifted, the victim would have no recollection of anything that had happened. For this reason, scopolamine, or devil’s breath, as it was referred to on the streets of Colombia, was considered the world’s most dangerous drug.

              The bottom line was that no one would ever use such a drug recreationally. Because of this, Rose knew Taylor hadn’t done drugs that night. He’d been drugged.

              So who had drugged him?

              And why?

              She had barely had time to wrap her mind around that when Taylor had returned to give them the news of Layla’s egregious behavior. And though she now had a minute to think while Taylor strained the pasta and drizzled his white cheese sauce on top of each plate, it was still too much to comprehend.

              The ramifications of having been drugged with scopolamine had led Taylor to over a month of clinical psychosis, which he marginally lifted out of in time to botch a routine appendix removal, resulting in the end of his medical career.

              More than anything, she was pained that he could’ve gone through something so gut wrenching as to lose his career over something he couldn’t have controlled.

              Did she really want to take him down and ruin another career of his?

              Not by a long shot, but what could she do to prevent Carter from going public with all that he’d learned?

              Taylor set the plates on the table and took his place in the chair next to Rose, then helped her hand over the utensils to the right of her plate.

              “You seem deep in thought,” he said warmly.

              “You can tell?”

              “I think I’m getting to know you well enough. Anything you want to talk about?”

              She smiled, but it was grim. “Why do I get the feeling we’re turning into Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog?”

              “The old Looney Tunes characters?” he said, laughing.

              “Every day we’ll go out into the world, fighting against one another, but every night we’ll come home and spend time together, closer than ever.”

              “So am I the wolf or the sheepdog?”

              “I’m definitely the wolf,” she asserted with a sense of humor before taking a sip of her wine.

              “Really? I thought you’d brand me the wolf, since I’m so evil.”

              “The wolf is powerful. The sheepdog is dopey.”

              “Ah, thanks for that,” he teased. “I’ll have you know the wolf never succeeded in those cartoons.”

              “Crap, I think you’re right.”

              As they dove into their meal, Taylor found moments to squeeze her hand. She felt a bit childlike stabbing at her pasta with little awareness when she accidentally pushed it off her plate, but Taylor cleaned up after her, making no fuss of collecting the bits and placing them into a side plate to his right.

              “One piece of good news about being at the hospital for an hour,” he started, but paused to drink his wine. “I was able to speak with a reputable ophthalmologist about getting you in for an appointment soon.”

              “To do what? Did you find an eye donor?”

              “Well no, not yet. They’ll need to run a number of tests first to see how your optic and retinal nerves are healing. I had thought we'd need to wait weeks before you'd be well enough to undergo tests, but after speaking with the specialist, it looks like you can go in right away. It’ll give them insight as to how to proceed when we do find a donor.”

              “And you like this doctor?”

              “He’s one of the best in Seattle and has had promising results with a number of other patients, though they didn’t suffer the same degree of trauma to their eyes.”

              “So...” she began, trailing off and wrapping her head around the implication. “If my eyes are totally shot, and they clearly are, then why would anyone need to know how the nerves are doing? Wouldn’t the doctor just take my eyes out and replace them?”