Ogrodnik Interior 2.0c (23 page)

“Once the dust had settled, we found that the original two light trucks were Sunni rebels, and the large convoy was Iraqi Republican Guard. It didn’t take long to figure out that a splinter group of Sunni was stockpiling Iraqi munitions. Before the Sunni would call in an airstrike, they’d raid the depot, take the most valuable ordnance and stash it in this cave system with the intention of selling it back to the Iraqi. Unfortunately, all the Sunni involved in the operation were killed in the ensuing firefight, so we could only speculate as to who the brains behind the operation was. The Sunni were quick to point the finger at Yilmaz, and the fact that he disappeared after that episode lends credence to their theory. It’s possible that the Sunni dispensed their own justice and quietly executed Yilmaz on their own, but one of my colleagues who is still active saw him in Darfur a dozen years ago. I’ve heard various other reports of Yilmaz being seen in Somalia, Angola and Chad. How many are true, I don’t know, but I assume that some of them are.“ Rayce said as he subconsciously rotated his shoulder while running his hand over it as if thinking about Yilmaz had aggravated an old injury.

“When a mercenary is hired, he is selling more than his gun and his wit. He is selling his loyalty. Yilmaz’s loyalty has never been for sale. He is loyal to two things, himself and the almighty dollar.”

Elliot could tell from the way that Rayce had described Yilmaz that there was no love between them. In the short time Elliot had known him, he saw that Rayce had no compunctions about taking
another man’s life, but he also lived by a strict code of honor; a code that allowed him to operate on the right side of the moral ledger. Yilmaz had no such code. He lived to serve his own interests.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that only one of the two would walk away from the confrontation that was brewing.

“I’m going into town; I’ll be back late this afternoon, “said Elliot as he left.

"Hi, Jen," Elliot said from behind.

Jennifer turned and flinched slightly before settling on a smile when she saw Elliot.

"Elliot, such a surprise. What brings you over to this side of the campus?"

"Just running an errand," he lied.

"It’s good to see you. What's new in your life?" she said as they exchanged the traditional Quebecoise greeting of a double cheek kiss.

"I wouldn't know
where to start Jen. We haven't seen each other in such a long time."

"I know. I feel guilty for not pinging you more often. I could easily say I'm too busy, but that would be a cop-out. We really should have lunch one day."

"Exactly what I was thinking. How about today?" he said with urgency.

"Today, well, I— "

“Jen, I’m not here by accident,” he said as he lowered his voice. “I've been waiting for you to come out. I need to talk to you, and it can't wait."

"What is it, Elliot?" Jennifer whispered back
.

"What do you say we eat at Bellagio’s. We can talk there."

Elliot kept the conversation light as they walked the two blocks over to the restaurant. Upon getting there, he asked for, and received, a table in the back.

"Jen, I need to talk to you about your work, and I didn't want to use phone or email."

"What have you gotten yourself into?"

"Let me start at the beginning. I think you'll understand. As you may or may not know, my father was killed last month, and I’ve been investigating his murder.”

“Sorry to hear about your father. That’s terrible! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Jen, but I’m here to talk about something more important than Dad's death. The investigation has led me down many paths. One of those paths pointed me to a fire in the Waller Building eight years ago."

“I remember it well. It took us a year to get our trials back on track," said Jennifer as she leaned forward.

"It’s possible those responsible for the fire are the same people who murdered my father."

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a long, twisted story, and I’m not going to suck you into it. The less you know, the better. I’m trying to fill in some blanks to understand the entire picture, and I think you might be able to help me with that.”

“Ask away.”

“I know that the university does a lot of pre-clinical work for pharmaceuticals. Is Biovonix one of your customers?”

“Biovonix? No, not any longer. In fact, after the fire, all of our clients had to find other AROs to take over the testing or do it themselves. Biovonix was one of the pharmas that never came back.”

“ARO?”

“Academic research organization. It’s the official name for universities and the like that perform pre-clinical trial work for pharmaceutical companies.”

“I see. Do you know what drugs you were testing when Biovonix was still at McGill?”

“I can’t remember, Elliot. I’d have to look it up.”

“Does the name Isotin ring a bell?”

“It does. Yes, I’m sure that was one of the drugs we were testing.”

“Changing tacks now. Do you know what Sarah was working on before her accident?”

“Elliot, how is this related to the fire eight years ago? Sarah didn’t even work for us then. She only started with us about four years ago, long after the fire and after our new building was finished. She wouldn’t even know who Biovonix was.”

“Understood, Jen. As I said, I’m just trying to fit together pieces of a puzzle over a long period of time. I don’t know if Sarah is part of the story I’m weaving and won’t know until I can knit it all together.”

“Well, as you know, Sarah was hired as the head of records administration. She managed the record keeping for all the various research projects at our facility whether they be corporate pre-clinical trials or graduate thesis projects.“

“What was lost in the fire?”

“Almost everything, Elliot. The computers were centralized at that time, so we lost the servers and almost everything on them. We had eleven years’ worth of backup paper files that went up in smoke. All the cultures, mice, and animal-based test subjects were lost. It shut us down for over a year. The entire program almost folded. Why all the secrecy, Elliot? What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I’m just starting to pull things together now, but here’s what I’m thinking. As you know, eight years ago, the Waller Building and everything in it was intentionally burned to the ground. The perpetrator was never caught and no motive established. Tell me, did any of the staff who worked in your department die around the time of the fire?” Elliot asked on a hunch.

Without thinking, Jennifer was able to reply. “Yes, one of our graduate students, Carrie Leblanc was killed in a boating accident the same day as the fire.” Jennifer’s face paled as the words left her mouth and she realized there was a connection that she never made.

“Elliot! What’s going on here? Why is this coming to light now, eight years later?” she hissed.

“Jen, I can’t burden you with the whole story, not now. It’s too dangerous. By the look on your face, you’ve made the same connection that I’m driving at. The testing process for one of the Biovonix products was, and is, being manipulated. There’s a lot of money at stake, and people are being killed to keep it under wraps. I’m going to blow the lid off this thing, Jen, and bring these people to justice.”

Jennifer looked down at her lap and drew a deep breath. “Elliot, was Sarah’s death related to this? Was she one of the casualties?” Her words came out with a hint of underlying quiver. She asked the question but already knew the answer.

“No more questions, Jen. As I said, the less you know, the safer you’ll be. If Biovonix and their army of mercenaries even get a hint that you know anything, they’ll kill you without a second thought. That said, I need some info from you.”

Jennifer said nothing and nodded at Elliot as if to say,
go ahead
.

“The fire report from the Waller Building, do you still have it?”

“Yes, I can request it.”

“Don’t do that. Can you retrieve it yourself without anyone else knowing?”

“I can do that.”

“What was Sarah working on at the time of her death? Do you have records on specifically what she was working on?”

“I’ll pull her time sheets. Nobody else will know,” Jen replied now understanding that secrecy was mandatory.

“I’m not really hungry. Do you have time today to look into those two things?”

Jen, visibly shaken, nodded. “I’ll get that for you now. I should have it in about an hour.”

“Good. I’ll meet you in your office in an hour. You walk out now. We shouldn’t be seen together if we can avoid it.”

“I’m so sorry, Elliot,” Jennifer said softly. Elliot knew she was mentally making the connections: the fire, Biovonix, Carrie Leblanc, Sarah and Hubert Forsman, Elliot’s father. “I never even considered it.”

“We can’t change the past, Jen, but we’ll do what we can to make sure it doesn’t continue.”

Elliot knocked once and entered Jennifer’s office.

“Have you found anything?” he asked.

Jen pointed to a thick folder on the desk “There’s the fire report for the Waller Building. I’ll have the time sheets shortly.”

He opened the folder and browsed through the contents. He unfolded the floor plan and spread it out on the desk starting with the basement. The plan showed a long, rectangular building divided into three separate areas—a large room on the left taking up about half of the entire floor, a smaller room in the middle and an even smaller room on the right-hand side. The large and medium areas were marked with an oblong shape in red marker in the general center of the rooms. Elliot flipped through the other two pages that displayed the main and second floors, each with their unique red mark-ups.

“Is this where the accelerant was used?” said Elliot pointing at the red marked-up areas.

“Yes”

“What was in each of these areas?”

Jen walked around to the front of the desk beside Elliot and flipped to the pages to show the basement.

“Let’s start in the basement. This is records,” she said pointing to the large room on the left.

“It was where the written and electronic records were stored for all the medical research conducted at the university. The accelerant was splashed randomly over the rows of file cabinets and tape storage racks.”

“And in the middle room?” he asked pointing at the floor plan.

“This was the computer room. The computers were housed here, and this is also where most of the data entry was done. Remember, this was eight years ago, and the research system we used was antiquated even then. There were no web-based consoles accessible in the lab like there is in modern facilities. All the equipment racks were doused in accelerant.”

“What’s this tiny room at the end?”

“Storage mostly. It wasn’t targeted by the arsonists, but just about everything in there was damaged during the firefighting efforts.”

He flipped the page to display the main floor. “There was nothing targeted at all on this floor. What was it used for?”

“The main floor was almost exclusively lab area. Most of the large equipment was kept on this floor, freezers and cooling units,
chromatograph separation equipment, incubation equipment and the like. Culture analysis was performed and stored on this floor.”

Elliot flipped to the second-floor plan and pointed at the only red markup area. “And this area?”

“The second floor was where we performed the “in-vivo” testing. We used mostly mice, but other animals like rabbits and rats were sometimes used.”

“How would animals be used in the Biovonix type of pre-clinical testing?”

“A large part of our testing portfolio focuses on pharmaceutical testing. Typically, we establish a test plan to introduce each drug into the hosts in a controlled manner. We set up multiple groups of live hosts we call colonies and vary the treatment dosage and dosage frequency across each. The primary purpose is to
assess the toxicity of the drug on the animal at different doses, look for DNA and chromosome changes, and effects on reproduction, sperm and sometimes embryo.
The hosts would also be monitored for outward signs of behavior anomaly. The test schedule would be modified as test findings are brought to light. “

Elliot thought about what he just heard and countered. “Is the testing limited to the first generation of mice?”

“Sort of. Most colonies are prevented from breeding by either colonizing with only a single sex or using genetically neutered mice. These colonies garner most of the tester’s attention as side effects are almost exclusively found in treatment recipients. That said, in almost all test plans, there are generational test criteria to meet. We create one or more free colonies and let them breed at will. The focus for free colonies is to watch for birthing defects. All offspring go through a complete visual and medical workup after they are born. Some will go through the more intrusive testing. Behavior analysis is not the focus on the free colonies, but if anomalous behavior is noticed, it might be flagged for further analysis.”

“Interesting,” said Elliot lost in thought. He flipped the plan back to the basement view.

“Why would they use accelerant in two adjacent areas? Is this wall a typical interior wood frame wall?” he said pointing to the wall between the large and medium areas.

“No. The internal walls are not shown on this blueprint as they tend to change as needed. The walls we see in this plan are cinderblock firewalls.”

“So they’re totally fireproof?”

“No, they provide a level of fireproofing, but in a large fire like we had, they will only slow down the spread of fire, not stop it.”

Elliot sat down in the desk side chair staring at the plan blankly deep in thought. Seeing this, Jennifer returned to her computer to complete the time sheet aggregation.

“I’ve got the time sheets for the three months leading up to Sarah’s…” Jennifer paused before continuing, not knowing exactly what to say, “..accident.”