The Red Phoenix 12: Strength Comes in Numbers (13 page)

“Officers! Get him out of here!” hollered Wickenburg.

Mueller and his crew stood by, watching their secret works triumph with excellent results as Siddoway’s arms were twisted and he was placed into a headlock by the officers and taken out of the room.

***

Hours later, after being held in a detention room, Siddoway was calmed down but sunken in depression with a dried bloodied lip and a black eye, carrying a box of his personal belongings from his office out the front doors of the building escorted by security officers. Wickenburg and other administration personnel were with them.

Reese Johnson, the lead security officer, and Wickenburg stepped offline with Siddoway.

“You understand you are no longer permitted to enter the premises?” asked Johnson. “All of your security cards, credentials, login codes and ID badges are considered invalid. Do you understand?”

Siddoway didn’t answer. He was sunk in grief for his great loss and humiliation.

“I’ll take that as a
yes
and that you
will
comply,” Johnson added. “If you return here, for anything, you will be placed under arrest for criminal trespassing in a government facil—”

“—Are we done?” asked Siddoway in a scornful tone, staring at Johnson with hatred.

Johnson stepped away. Wickenburg stared at Siddoway with disgust.

“I never thought this day would come in a million years,” Wickenburg stated.

“Goodbye, Sam,” said Siddoway in a hard voice.

“You know it kills me that it’s come down to this, right?” asked Wickenburg.

“They stole my gun, Sam,” Siddoway answered, bitter.

“Why didn’t you have the proof with you then?” asked Wickenburg.

“I’ve been screwed over and you know it,” Siddoway insisted in a rough voice.

“I
don’t
know that, Alex,” Wickenburg stated. “Mueller and his people had all the evidence in the world that he created the XD-Three-Thousand.

“It’s my gun! It’s my design, dammit!” Siddoway replied, angry. “How is it that you can be so freaking blind, Sam?”

Wickenburg stepped back from Siddoway’s anger for a moment, feeling intimidated.

“You know, you’ve been spending all that time in your labs, nobody knows what you’re doing or what you’re up to,” stated Wickenburg.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Siddoway in disbelief that he cast suspicion.

“It means nobody knows what’s going on in your lab, Alex,” Wickenburg responded. “No one is monitoring your work, watching over you, checking your schematics to see if they’re legitimate.”

“That’s because I have spent years building a name for myself, Sam,” Siddoway snapped. “And my reputable name carries trust!”

“Well, isn’t it possible that you caught wind that Mueller Weapons was coming out with something advanced and it tripped your wire?” asked Wickenburg.

“You’re a damn fool if you think that snake Dennis Mueller could ever create anything that equals my inventions,” Siddoway responded.

“Your own assistant, Scott Warnick, even sold you out, Alex,” stated Wickenburg. “Why can’t you just accept the fact that you’ve been busted and just take it like a man?”

“Scott Warnick is a slimy, two-faced, little worm!” Siddoway declared. “They paid him off and he helped them wipe out my files!”

“Well, according to legal documentation, Mueller is the inventor and you’re the pretender this time,” Wickenburg snapped in a hard tone.

“If that’s how you see it, then I’ll presume you were in on it too,” stated Siddoway.

“Are you threatening me?” asked Wickenburg.

“Mark my words, you haven’t seen the last of me, Sam,” Siddoway answered with a cold stare.

“You know, I almost felt pity for you when I heard multiple charges of felony theft, computer fraud and copyright violations were being screened against you,” stated Wickenburg.

“Don’t worry; I always have a contingency plan for such things,” Siddoway retorted. “You can bet
your life
on it.”

“Just get out of here!” stated Wickenburg, sounding angry.

Siddoway glared out the corner of his eye at Sam as he turned and headed to the parking lot, carrying his box. A dark countenance came over him as he walked to his Mercedes.
They’ll be sorry they ever messed with me. I’ll show them what a real scientist can do
, he thought.

***

Scott sat in an automatic rotating game chair with swivel action in his living room, playing a graphic shoot-em-up game on an eighty inch flat screen TV. He wore a headset, holding an attached-by-cord laser weapon, firing away at space aliens on his screen. His chair jolted to the left and right as he fired his fake gun.

“Yeah! Yeah! High score, man! That’s what I’m talking about, guys!” he said in an excited tone.

He adjusted his glasses, swigging another gulp of his large iced cola on a standing tray. Scott made his character on the screen rush to the top of a hill.

“Okay guys, we need to team up at the next ridge,” he said to his other online players.

There was a knock at the door.

“Crap, I got company,” he stated, putting the game on
pause
. “Hold on everybody.”

He moved to the door.

“Who is it?” he asked in a loud voice.

“It’s us,” Vincent answered.

“You got my money?” Scott asked.

“Just open the friggin’ door,” Marcos answered in an abrasive tone.

Scott cracked the door; Marcos and Vincent stood on his porch.

“Come in,” said Scott, looking around with caution before letting them in.

“Here you go,” said Vincent, handing him a briefcase. “Nice work.”

“Yes!” Scott said, hugging the briefcase. “Money, money, money, money.”

“You look excited,” said Marcos.

“Oh, trust me, this isn’t money. It’s
early retirement
,” Scott replied in a cheerful tone, setting the briefcase on a table and opening it. “Oh! Look at all that Cheddar!” he added, flipping through the reams of one-thousand dollar bills.

Vincent and Marcos glanced at each other like Scott was the world’s biggest moron.

“It’s all here?” Scott asked, holding up one of the reams with a tad of greed in his voice.

“One million US dolares,” Vincent answered with a hint of a Spanish accent. “Just as promised.”

“Thanks guys,” stated Scott. “You know what? I’m going on a vacation! No, scratch that. I’m going to buy a freaking Corvette then going on a vacation!”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Vincent commented. “You upset about Siddoway at all?”

“That’s life in the fast lane,” Scott answered in an uncaring tone, standing up to show them out, smiling.

“Right,” Vincent answered in soft voice, staring at him.

“His day was coming anyway,” stated Scott. “No one gets to be on top living on the high road forever. As for me, I was just a sidekick lab assistant, going nowhere.”

“A means to an end in other words?” asked Vincent.

“Exactly,” Scott responded. “You guys probably wouldn’t understand fully.”

“Trust me, we know all about making things a
means to an end
,” stated Vincent. “Marcos?”

Marcos zipped down his jacket, pulled a silenced handgun on Scott, giving Scott’s eyes just enough time to widen with terror as he fired a round into his forehead. Scott flew back and crashed through his snack table, scattering a display of donuts and nachos and knocking over his cola, making a puddle of Pepsi on his carpet. He lay on his back on the floor dead, his eyes gazing at the ceiling with the permanence of death as a stream of blood rolled down the side of his face. Vincent and Marcos watched the game continue for a moment.

“Jeez, I hate these freakin’ shoot-em-up games,” said Marcos, staring at the paused first-shooter session Scott was playing.

Marcos fired two more shots into the screen, shattering it, causing the TV to turn off.

“What are you, crazy? That was an eighty inch plasma,” stated Vincent like Scott’s murder meant nothing.

“They say these games make kids turn to violence, you know what I’m saying?” said Marcos, holstering his gun back inside his jacket.

“C’mon, our work here is done,” said Vincent in dreary voice, closing the briefcase of money and carrying it to the door.

“This Warnick guy was a real sucker,” Marcos stated, following Vincent out the door.

Scott lay on the floor dead.

***

A few days later, Siddoway worked on a digital control box for a nuclear bomb on his dining table at his home, testing switches and twisting wires inside of it. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days and was wired on caffeine; his hair was messy and he had bags under his eyes.

He stopped working. A thought just entered his mind. He looked at an uncharged XD that leaned against the wall and stared at it.

“Damn, I need to get back to the facility to power you guys up, don’t I?” he said. “The bomb needs power from the two components at the lab,” he added, picking up the XD and aiming it at the wall.

He lowered the weapon, staring at it.

“I’ll never make it to the reactor division to get the canisters I need without Drexby’s hand print. My weapons are dead along with the bomb.”

He stared at a picture of a woman in her late thirties that hung on the wall in a nice frame.

“You’d be proud of me, Rachel,” he muttered in a sad voice. “After you were taken in the car accident, the world turned against me, despite all that I’ve done. Just don’t hate me for what I’m about to do. When the nuke goes off, I’ll make them all see that they made a mistake. A big mistake.”

He sat at his table and took a drink of water.

“Sons of bitches,” he mumbled.

The frustration of being escorted from the Red Phoenix so quickly was an annoyance beyond measure. He sat thinking what he could do to finish his nuclear project, tapping his fingers on the table. Just as he was about to drift into horrible despair, he heard whispery, echoing sounds again coming from somewhere in his house.

“There’s that sound again,” he said, standing, worrying he was losing it.

All the lights shut off in his house.

“What the—” he said in a startled tone, moving to the kitchen, nervous, still hearing the strange echoes coming from upstairs.

He scrambled through a kitchen drawer in the near pitch-black house, searching for a flashlight.

“Damn power outage,” he mumbled anxiously, grabbing a flashlight from the drawer, turning it on and heading for the stairs.

He shined it across the upper landing, scared.