Milkshake (37 page)

“Fifth floor, room 521,” the porter offered
helpfully.

“Thanks, mate, I know.” Brent lied.

Looking impressively like a security professional, he slowly
scanned the lobby, looking for the lift. He turned back to the
porter once again. “And Mr Turner. Is he still in room ...
?”

“519, just down the corridor from your boss.”

“Cheers, Bro'. “

Brent knew that, despite his status, both
political and industrial, Patrick O’Sullivan rarely travelled with
any kind of entourage, let alone security staff. He was a well
known and popular figure, an image he’d carefully cultivated over
the years and one that, in the recent past, he’d been given
additional coaching for.

Strangers smiled or greeted him warmly. In the past year even
farmers had taken to giving him the odd friendly slap on the back
and a firm handshake. There was no need to surround himself with
burly men in dark suits and even darker glasses.; it was against
the ethos of openness and accessibility he wanted to encourage as
leader of the Ecological party of New Zealand.

The lift doors opened. Brent stepped into the deserted
corridor and waited. A few moments later there was the faint sound
of another lift door opening. A member of the kitchen staff emerged
from the service elevator carrying a small tray of coffee and
liquor chocolates. Brent waited for the young girl, wary of
startling her and causing an accident. As she got closer, he moved
towards her, smiling.

“Hi, how ya doing? Look, I’m meant to be guarding the guy in
521. He asked me to take his coffee in for him.” Brent flashed his
pass once more as he gently teased the tray from her palm. “So, if
I could just take this - thanks, you have a good evening.” He
smiled again, as she blushed, turned and disappeared back around
the corner.

Brent balanced the tray in his left hand, his right moving
inside his jacket pocket. He flipped the lid of the plastic phial
with his thumb, poured half the remaining contents over the coffee,
closed the lid and replaced the phial.

Outside room 521, he checked the distance to 519, the position
of the swipe mechanism on the door, and rotated the card in his
sweating right hand so the black strip was ready to
swipe.

Placing the tray on the floor, he took a deep breath and
knocked hard on the door. “Room service!” As the last syllable
passed his lips, he leapt to his left, swiped the card, opened the
door and stepped through into the deserted room. Half closing the
door, he stood and listened as O’Sullivan’s door opened. The tray
was silently lifted and the door clicked shut again.

Brent reached for the light switch he’d seen just before the
door had shut out the residual light from the hallway. A
fluorescent tube flickered into life in the bathroom, illuminating
the rest of the room. The porter said this was David Turner’s
room.

He moved towards the table looking for any sign Turner may
have perhaps scribbled a message on the notepaper that lay on the
table beneath the window. There was something on the chair, large
and dark. He picked up the motorbike helmet, revealing the keys on
the seat beneath. He remembered the motorcycle that had been parked
outside the hotel since late afternoon. Brent picked up the keys,
went back to the door, and slowly opened it. The corridor was
deserted. He ran back to the lobby and handed the pass key back to
the night porter. Brent saw him looking at the bike
helmet.

On the shift handover, the porter had been told the motorbike
parked out front belonged to the guest in 519 who’d been told it
was ok to leave it there overnight. Now this security guy, who had
asked about the same guest, had re-appeared apparently carrying
this guest’s crash helmet.

Brent sensed his suspicion. “I needed to get the guy in 519 to
move his bike. It’s a security hazard parked out there like that.
He‘s already in bed, so he asked me to move it for him.” Brent
dangled the key between his fingers, re-enforcing the explanation.
The porter hadn’t asked for any. The moment felt a little awkward.
Further details were needed, Brent decided, to allay any remaining
suspicion.

“So, anyway, I said I’d move it to the
underground car park and, to save disturbing him again, I’ll drop
the key back to him in the morning.” Brent was having difficulty
reading the guy’s expression. He couldn’t decide between ongoing
suspicion and genuine indifference. He left it there, said
goodnight, went back outside, fastened up his jacket, pulled on the
helmet and rode off, retracing the route he’d taken in the bus a
short while before.

This time, at the roundabout, he turned onto the state
highway. There was no chance of catching the black car but the
motorbike would at least allow him to arrive at his destination
undetected.

* * *

Patrick sipped his cappuccino and sucked on the soft dark
chocolate, savouring the warm silky texture in his mouth, mulling
over what had occurred tonight. He’d dealt with Turner in a calm
manner. Once the card had been recovered, the courier would die
somewhere out in the bush, like so many others had already. But he
was still concerned that Turner had somehow been able to link the
card to him. Why, having done that, did he feel the need the warn
him?

The glow of guilt flushed over his face, a rare feeling
nowadays. He allowed his mind to open up to the possibility those
who opposed his political ambitions and economic aspirations were
even now actively working against him. There was surely only one
group who sought to oppose what he was trying to achieve for New
Zealand. The comfortable Old Boys' Club of conservative-thinking
politicians had become unnerved, almost to the point of paranoia,
by the way in which EPANZ had apparently managed to reach out to a
significant proportion of the voting public in recent months. Polls
were showing their popularity rating soaring across the board.
Affluent business executives in Auckland were being promised fuel
bills for their gas-guzzling urban tractors would drop by eighty
per cent within two years of EPANZ getting into power, dairy
farmers on the Canterbury Plains assured their land would be
purchased from them at hugely inflated prices, then leased back at
a peppercorn rent in order for them to continue to produce the milk
that would literally fuel the nation’s economy.

But, as he sat alone in his hotel room, Patrick struggled to
deny the immorality of what he intended to accomplish. He
remembered the first time he’d met Dr Taylor Morgan, who’d
introduced himself as an admirer of Dairytree’s innovative product
research, at a Los Angeles trade fair back in the spring of
1998.

Morgan spoke at length about his own investigation into the
whey based ethanol theory, and Patrick soon realised how similar
their professional paths had been up to that point. The American
was leaving his faculty and had financial backing to set up a
commercial research facility called the Cowood Institute that had
been granted a licence by the American FDA to research producing
whey-based bio-fuel in commercial quantities.

Over the next year, the pair kept in touch on a professional
level by email. A formal memorandum of understanding was signed
between the two organisations, allowing them to share information
and data. Dairytree had no way of knowing that the research Cowood
was sharing was actually old data gleaned over many years. Morgan
already knew that to produce large quantities of the milk, and
therefore the whey, it was necessary for thousands of calves to be
carrying the mutated gamma casein gene.

When the Americans realised the risk in introducing this gene
into the national dairy herd, they halted development. With the
formal link with Dairytree established, however, they drip fed
their knowledge to the point where the Kiwis caught up, believing
they had made the breakthrough themselves.

Directors from other Agencies were uneasy about the way in
which this uncontrolled, unregulated, and largely unmonitored
project was evolving. The FDA had somehow become the leading
protagonist and they, in turn, were placing their faith, and
hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, squarely at the feet of
Taylor Morgan.

The relationship with Dairytree grew and Morgan began
travelling to New Zealand on a regular basis, meeting with the
research team and spending time relaxing at Patrick and Anika’s
lakeside lodge in Queenstown.

Anika was uninterested in the business side of her husband’s
life. She had introduced him to green politics whilst they were
both still at university and had supported him during his rapid
rise to leader of the party. She’d successfully used her female
intuition to protect her husband from unsavoury influences,
ensuring he had a faithful and trustworthy team around
him.

In Taylor Morgan she smelled a rat the first time she met him.
The way in which he had cultivated the relationship with Patrick
was clearly calculated. She could sense a hidden agenda but nothing
she could pinpoint, yet.

When Patrick came back from a business trip to the States and
announced a tie-up between the two companies, she felt vindicated,
and even more suspicious. Hoping this wasn’t merely yet another box
ticked on Morgan’s list, Patrick just smiled and reassured her he
had everything under control.

What he did not have under control were the production costs
of the main Dairytree operation. He was spending too much of his
time concentrating on research, determined to prove his father’s
theories. The link with Cowood was, apart from everything else, a
financial necessity in order to keep the rest of the business
afloat.

Anika was still not convinced. She feared Patrick was being
exploited, manipulated, and her desire to protect him grew
stronger. She hired a private investigator with the intention of
exposing Taylor Morgan as the threat she believed him to be. But
the American Government was bankrolling Morgan. They needed to
protect their investment.

It took less than an hour for agents working on behalf of
Cowood to detect the clumsy surveillance by the Kiwi gumshoe doing
his best to keep track of Morgan driving around the outskirts of
Los Angeles.

By the second hour, the incompetent detective was himself
being followed and filmed. His car now carried a GPS tracking tag
and a small camera had been installed in his rented
apartment.

Phone and email interception quickly confirmed that he was
reporting directly to Anika O’Sullivan, trying to prove some
malevolent intent on Morgan’s part. Cowood’s Investment Management
Program swung into action. Exposure of Morgan, and more importantly
of his superiors, particularly by a second rate amateur private
dick, had to be averted.

Stacey Martin was introduced to Patrick as a graduate recruit
to the Cowood Research team, keen to travel and work for Dairytree
in a proposed employee exchange program. Patrick offered to take
her to dinner, to discuss her ambitions and what Dairytree, and New
Zealand could offer her.

As the evening wore on, Patrick relaxed in the young woman’s
company. He began to look forward to having Stacey working for him
soon. By the end of the second bottle of wine, the pair was
laughing and joking, and Patrick couldn’t fail to notice the
signals she was clearly sending out.

By the end of the evening, with both clearly under the
influence of the wine, Patrick offered to share a cab. When Stacey
invited him up for coffee, for the first time since he had met
Anika, the combination of alcohol, being thousands of miles from
home, and a beautiful young woman proved the ultimate
temptation.

The tiny camera in the bedroom light fitting captured the
images the private detective, who’d been clicking his shutter
through the restaurant drapes, couldn’t.

The Kiwi investigator’s email account had been hacked. He
pressed send and the blurry images he’d captured in the restaurant
flashed across the Pacific. He had no idea the email was
instantaneously intercepted, re-routed, and in addition to his own
photos, others were added; pictures that made Anika feel physically
sick as she clicked each one in turn, as if leafing through a
pornographic flick cartoon book.

There could be no question; Patrick had betrayed her ultimate
trust. It wasn’t the evidence she’d been expecting. She’d wanted to
show to Patrick he should cut all links with Taylor Morgan and
Cowood. She never imagined the evidence the private detective
uncovered would be against her own husband.

Patrick, in his drunken euphoria, never considered he’d been
set up, that Stacey’s interest in him was purely for the financial
reward she would receive. In fact, it was a double set up. The
private detective Anika had hired had no reason to suspect the
liaison was anything other than genuine and had no idea of the
additional images added to his otherwise innocuous
email.

For the next three days, Patrick kept calling two people, both
to no avail: Stacey to tell her he had been stupid, to apologise
and to offer a position at Dairytree; Anika to let her know he was
nearly finished in LA, would be home soon and, as always, that he
loved her.

His calls were intercepted. He believed he was leaving
messages on both women's answering machines. The messages he left
for Stacey were digitally edited, creating the impression he was
ardently pursuing her. These files were sent, via the private
detective’s email account, to Anika. Not only was the knife thrust
in deep, Cowood ensured it was also blunt, rusted and being slowly
twisted.