The phone rang, the display indicating it was Jill.
"You know he loves it so much when you call."
"What? Have you got that boy's phone bugged?"
"He calls me all excited."
"How are things with Anna?"
"I think you lead a charmed life. Right at the moment of truth with Anna, the CIA calls. First they say nothing all week. Now they demand we take the French as a client on the Gaudet case."
"As in, France?"
"Yep. And you'll never guess who the French have hired to represent their interests in this matter?"
"I suppose Figgy wants to meet immediately."
"You're a mind reader."
"Tell Anna I'll meet her at Forbes for dinner." He wondered if the subject of his house would come up at dinner. Actually, he wondered whether the world would be the same by dinner.
Grady Wade sat at her desk with a stack of Michael Bowden's books and a letter from his publisher. Her half-full coffee mug read: if it's not outrageous, it's boring. From what she'd read—and she'd now read all of Michael Bowden's books—he seemed anything but outrageous, but far from boring. A welcome surprise for a young woman who found little in life that invigorated her.
At the end of her career as a stripper, Grady had told Sam that the major problem in dancing naked for a living had been the truth in the coffee mug inscription. In the end that had been what frightened her most. Perhaps a life of kids and family and an old oak tree in the backyard would leave her listless and drive her to constant excess. The irony, of course, was that her cure, working for Sam's organization, was undoubtedly more outrageous than dancing naked. Actually, Grady did two things at this desk: work for Sam and study for college, and which activity received her attention depended on the demands of each.
Anna Wade, Grady's aunt, had a profound need for Grady to become "self-actualized"—a normal person would say "succeed"—and Sam did his best to play godfather to Grady, determined that she make herself into something that she would eventually approve of. The catch there was that Sam claimed unique insight into what it was that Grady should approve. Many days she felt like a social-conditioning project, but even that felt better than working in a strip club and coming down from a coke addiction. And so Grady studied, worked, slept a bit, and had little time for boys. Perhaps she had overloaded on men in her former occupation. For a time she had dated a man named Clint, who had fallen overwhelmingly in love with her and wanted to marry. The free spirit in Grady just couldn't do it. Not at age twenty-one. Now she saw Clint only on occasion; like most men, he wanted to see her more often.
To top off her complicated life, she lived with Jill, her immediate boss.
Researching scientist/author Michael Bowden came as a blessed relief from her normal work and schoolwork. In just a couple of days Grady had made copious notes on Bowden and the Amazon jungle, and in doing so had made one promise to herself: when Sam went to the Amazon to find Michael Bowden, she would use her best moves to ensure she boarded the plane with him—Devan Gaudet notwithstanding.
Her work area was in a large room with over twenty cubicles, each with at least an eighteen-inch computer screen, some with two or even three. Most of one wall was glass and beyond the glass was a large array of computer equipment. In addition, the complex held a large conference room, a lunch-room complete with cooking facilities, and a dorm-like sleeping room.
The place was a self-contained fortress. Indeed, all the office's perimeter walls were lined with Kevlar beneath studs laid over a heavy concrete wall. The windows in the outer walls—small openings above head height—were covered over with a so-called bulletproof plastic material. The place didn't have a true name; the people who worked there just called it "work" or "the office."
It secretly pleased Grady that Harry often picked the corner of her cubicle as a parking spot when Sam was in the office. He'd returned less than an hour ago, and she'd not seen him yet.
Her phone rang. That would be Sam, ready to be briefed on Bowden.
"We have some people coming in and I want you to brief them."
"Really? Nobody ever comes here."
"Sometimes the CIA does. Scotland Yard does."
"Sheesh.
When?"
There was a long silence.
"I know. It's a secret and it'll happen when it happens."
* * *
The sound of cell doors slamming had become commonplace for Benoit Moreau. She did not live in squalor or misery, but the modern, antiseptic prison felt desolate. On her cell walls she'd hung art torn from magazines: photos of the Swiss Alps, the Pyrenees, and a picture of the Tour de France. There was also a picture of herself so that she would not forget what she was supposed to look like.
Benoit mostly lived in her mind and not in her cell. She had an exceptional ability to visualize what was not, but what might be, and consequently she never gave up. In the words of a writer of the New Testament, with which she had become familiar as a child, she knew both how to be abased and how to abound. It was a tribute to her otherwise questionable character that she did not allow the trampling of her personal pride to dismantle her psyche. She had thought long and hard about how she'd gotten here, and she dwelled particularly on the men she had bedded and duped along the way. Of them, she was really interested in only one, and she determined that she would find her way back to him. Life, she decided, was the sum total of many small choices and she had made many bad ones to get to this place.
Before her life with DuShane Chellis and his company, Grace Technologies, she had been a rising executive, before that a student with many honors, including being named
prenier,
graduating
avec mention particuliere du jury,
and having her examination paper published in
Le Monde.
A series of jobs in the computer industry and related medical applications had resulted in her rapid rise. She had acquired a reputation as a smart, aggressive young woman who could get things done. Born Bernice, she called herself Benoit, a man's name.
On a bright full-moon night in December she met DuShane Chellis at a party. Attending the event had been an afterthought, and when she arrived, there was a buzz—people were talking about the consummate executive who was building a conglomerate faster than any businessman in French history. Some called him a savage because of his corporate takeover practices, but to Benoit, on that first evening, he was a charming savage. At the party, the first time he saw her, he kept his eyes on her. People noticed and opened a small path so that he could make his way to her. His attention and intensity were infectious; after a few minutes all those around him were glancing at her.
Within a few days she was hired as his assistant and within months a vice president. In six months the relationship became personal.
Benoit remembered him in the early years as uncompromising, determined, passionate, and seemingly without weakness. He could always concentrate and was never distracted, or so it seemed. He was a large man in every way, and when he walked into a room, he seemed to fill it. He knew how to relate to the man on the street and a prime minister. He seemed to Benoit to be the perfect corporate personality.
Like others who have lost control of their ego, as Chellis's success increased, he changed, became self-absorbed, abusive, and paranoid. For Benoit the day came when the thought of being near his power was replaced by the thought of taking it.
That day did not start out bad. Reports from Malaysia regarding the genetic technology—vector technology it was called—were never more optimistic. A brilliant young French scientist by the name of Georges Raval had discovered something amazing. He had taken two macaque monkeys and traded their hearts in simultaneous heart transplant surgeries. Both monkeys accepted the new heart without rejection and without the use of immunosuppressants. They had reprogrammed the immune systems of the two monkeys using a process familiarly known as "Chaperone." They expected that it would work on humans as well and would allow doctors to alter a patient's cells genetically in ways that made the expressed protein fundamentally different, and then allow the immune system to accept the altered tissue that resulted from the gene therapy—a genuine medical miracle.
She had walked into DuShane's office with two of the staffers that helped her administer the program. He was alone but on the phone yelling at a banker. He was in fair condition for age fifty-two, and he kept his salt-and-pepper gray hair impeccably groomed, swept back with natural waves. His face was unrounded by fat, more distinguished than pleasant. With his serious, dark eyes and the flat line of his mouth, he appeared to be a man who counted his conquests, a predator.
"I can always go across town. Don't ever forget that. And don't you dare ask me for more fees again." He slammed down the phone and looked at Benoit, then at her assistants.
"I have some very good news from Malaysia," Benoit began.
"Have you received Boudreaux's budget yet? The costs over there are out of sight."
"I mentioned that the budget will be here day after tomor row. You agreed."
"I ask for a simple thing and I can't get it!"
"Well, we wanted to share with you the great news concerning the research of Georges Raval, a young scientist."
"I already know about it. You were supposed to have those reports. I ask for things around here and people pay no attention."
"We discussed it and you agreed...."
"Then all I get is goddamn arguments. How can you do this and call yourself an executive? And why do you bring your damn toadies in here?" He dismissed the two assistants with a wave of his hand.
"That was rude and embarrassing."
"Don't fucking tell me what is rude. Rude is not getting the damn reports in on time. I have to run this whole company myself—do it all. Nobody else gets anything done. I have to watch, watch, watch. A bunch of damn children still shitting their pants."
"If you would not like to hear about—"
"Don't ever bring your flunkies in here unless I ask," he shouted.
"I am leaving "
"You are not leaving. Ever since I promoted you, you have been building a little empire. You think you're really doing something over in Malaysia. Well, I will tell you I started that when you were still a snot-nosed intern over at a bullshit company. So, now you want to run in here and tell me the good news as if you had something to do with it."
"We know it was your idea. I just thought it was important that—"
"Get on the couch. We're going to do what you're really good at."
"We're working."
He slapped her hard.
"I made you," he said. There was blood on her face. He continued to work himself into a rage. She did not deny him the sex he demanded and during the days to follow continued to offer it under less violent circumstances, and for that as much as the other bad choices, she still loathed herself.
It was that same day in the evening that she first responded to Devan Gaudet's entreaties. He was the most sinister man she had ever come across. Chellis hired him for things that he seldom talked about, but she knew that Gaudet was shrewd and ruthless. That night she went to bed with him and thus began the long plot to dethrone Chellis. Thereafter she learned that there were men even more ruthless than Chellis, and Gaudet was one of them.
Chellis had been unwise in creating trusts to hold the stock of Grace Technologies, making his wife and Benoit trustees if he became incapacitated. Benoit, Chellis's wife, and Gaudet saw to it that he was incapacitated, using the genetic brain-altering technology developed by Grace Technologies in Malaysia to turn him into a quivering mass. Although it certainly wasn't the purpose for which the technology was developed, the personality transformation was astounding.
When Benoit and Gaudet got control of Grace Technologies, the world was their oyster—except for a man called Sam. Unfortunately, Benoit didn't know that this Sam fellow hated Gaudet as much as she hated Chellis. Sam, she learned, lived in a shadow world of spies and treachery. When Sam built the case that put her in prison, Gaudet did what he always did—protected himself and killed his enemies. Apparently, Sam was the exception to the formula since Gaudet had never been able to carry out the second half of his equation.
Benoit blamed herself for her lot in life and had carefully traced the bad choices. The difficulty was that making only inherently good decisions, if indeed she could recognize them, would not get her out of this pit. To escape she would have to resort to the more troubling of her talents and then, like a caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly, she would use her dark side to produce the light. Her task would require more cleverness than was common even for her, more guile than she had yet displayed, and in the end more goodness.