Kerrick Read online

  Just then Griffin tapped his comm—but only once. Kerrick tapped back once and got the same answer—that meant to warn him something was off. He disappeared quickly down the hallway and headed for the labs. It was a big area that he had yet to check out. As he neared it, inside the lab, he could hear two men arguing.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” one asked.

  There was silence and then a hard smack.

  In his heart, Kerrick wondered if Griffin had been caught.

  Instead, a whiny voice answered, “You know I have a reason for being here.”

  “Nobody comes on board without our approval first,” came the first voice and then an audible sneer. “And that doesn’t include you.”

  “Hey, you know I’m valuable. I’m the one who gets you all the stuff you need,” the whiny voice said.

  Mr. Coleman, Kerrick guessed.

  “Sure, and still you asked for more money and tried to blackmail us,” the first voice snapped. “Research is important. We’re trying to save the world. Remember?”

  “Dr. Hinkleman, I’m trying to help you” came the whiny voice.

  “And what about your son?”

  Bingo. Mr. Coleman.

  “What about him? I told you that he didn’t matter.”

  “And yet, we had to hold him, to control him, when you couldn’t.”

  “I know,” his father said. “So let me be useful again. Let me help you fulfill some of these orders. You know you have these special requests. If you need to keep my son a bit longer, then keep him. Otherwise, send him home, so he is not your responsibility.”

  “Your son blackmailed us,” the man snapped.

  “He’s a kid. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  Kerrick froze and wondered at that. Was it really possible that Brandon had blackmailed Hinkleman? Absolutely. Brandon was smart enough. And maybe he hadn’t realized what the consequences could be, and maybe he was trying to help his dad or trying to get his dad to stop doing what he was doing. Is that really why Brandon had been kidnapped? It would be interesting to get Brandon’s take on that. It’s not like he’d proffered any of this information earlier. But Kerrick felt the boy got an unexpected education from the evil side of the real world this week. Poor kid.

  “The kid’s not important,” his father said. “You need to let me help you guys. You know I have the ability to do more.”

  There was silence. The other man appeared to consider it. “I’ll talk to a couple people,” he said. “But the fact that your son was privy to such sensitive data and then blackmailed us makes us very leery about the security of your operation and your accounting system.”

  “He’s just one of those genius kids,” the father said. “Look. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Meaning, you’ll take care of Brandon?”

  “If … I … have to,” the whiny voice said. Now there was a sullenness to it.

  “His brain would be interesting to study,” the other man said.

  Mr. Coleman sucked in a loud breath.

  And then the other man laughed and said, “See? You don’t really intend on silencing your son.”

  “There’s got to be another way without killing him,” the father said. “I’ll send him away so he never comes back again. He won’t know anything now.”

  “Which is why we’re keeping him,” the same voice said with a snarl.

  “Still doesn’t change the fact I can get you what you need,” he said.

  “I said,” the man screamed, “I’d think about it!”

  Then shuffling sounds were heard, and suddenly the door to the lab room opened, and a man was shoved out into the hall. The door was slammed hard in his face. The man, a small one, a weasel with haunted eyes, caught sight of Kerrick and sneered. “What do you want?”

  Kerrick crossed his arms over his chest and said, “I guess it depends if you wish to see Brandon alive or not anymore.” He caught the flash of fear in Mr. Coleman’s eyes and realized Brandon’s father really did care.

  “And with one call, you are done,” the father snapped.

  “Says the guy who sells body parts,” Kerrick said slowly.

  He nodded. “Yes, I do. But they’re necessary for research, and, all over the world, medical research is important.”

  “But maybe you supply them a little too fresh, don’t you?”

  The weasel stiffened in front of him. “You don’t know anything about it.” And he stormed off down the hallway.

  Kerrick wasn’t sure if he should let Mr. Coleman go or not, but it had been an interesting conversation. It confirmed Brandon’s father was alive, so that crispy critter in the morgue had the wrong name on his toe tag. It also confirmed that the father still cared about his son. What would he do if he knew that his son was close by?

  Kerrick hoped the boat-for-hire had pulled off far enough away that Brandon and Amanda weren’t being questioned. On that note, he turned the knob on the door beside him and pushed. It opened easily under his hand. He stepped inside to see somebody in a white lab coat sitting between a computer and several unknown specimens near a microscope. None were identifiable. Not to him anyway.

  The man turned, looked at him, and glared. “Not just anybody is allowed in here. Get out.”

  “I have something you need.”

  “And what’s that?” he sneered.

  Your punishment. “And, of course, you have the one thing I want.”

  Confused, the man straightened and walked closer. The name on his white lab coat read Hinkleman.

  Kerrick gave a feral grin. Exactly who he’d hoped to find.

  “What is it that you want? Not that I give a shit.”

  “What is it? I have questions, and you should have answers. That’s all that there is to know,” Kerrick said as he reached behind him and locked the door.

  The man studied him, saw the movement, and frowned. “I’ll call security.”

  “Go ahead. But, before they get in here, you’ll answer a few questions, like why you had your cohort Amanda Berg kidnapped and imprisoned.”

  “Oh, you overheard that conversation, didn’t you?” He sneered. “Well, I don’t expect you to be smart enough to understand, but she was a problem. We take care of our problems.”

  “And how many problems are you taking care of?”

  “Who cares? People always want somebody to take care of problems. I just happened to be in a position where I had a problem of my own that I could take care of at the same time.”

  “So, do you kidnap all your victims for your research purposes?”

  “God, no,” he said. “Although a tempting proposition. But, if it ever got found out that we were using humans for live trials without approval and then killing them when our research fails and selling their body parts …” He shuddered. “Just the paperwork alone is a disgusting thought.”

  Kerrick knew all this confessing by Hinkleman would be safeguarded by Kerrick’s ultimate death on board this ship. Not today, Doc. Kerrick decided to take advantage of the doc’s willingness to share by asking more questions. “So, what were you doing with Amanda? Would you kill her eventually or just keep her imprisoned for life?”

  “Well, if her damn research had worked, I would have killed her,” he said. “But the fact is, it doesn’t work, so I need her.”

  “Too bad she escaped then, isn’t it?”

  At that, Hinkleman froze. “You shouldn’t be here.” He stared at him and asked, “Who are you?”

  Kerrick smiled and said, “One of the men who helped rescue her.” The words were barely out his mouth when he lunged for the doctor, his fingers going around his throat and the back of his neck. He hit a pressure point, and the doctor opened his mouth to scream, but only a half gasp came out, and he sank to his knees.

  Kerrick kept up the pressure until the doctor fell face-forward to the hard floor, knocked out. Kerrick quickly took the lab coat off Hinkleman, tied him up with zip ties—he never left home without them—and dragg
ed his captive around to the back of the labs. He found a closet that would barely hold him.

  Then, with Hinkleman’s lab jacket replacing the uniform shirt that he wore, Kerrick quickly went through the information sitting on the computers. He sent a message to Griffin and to his Mavericks cyberteam. He got a response back from the chat people that made him smile. But he had no time to deal with that.

  He studied the monitors full of information. Interesting. Hinkleman had ledgers and correspondences opened. There were letters with Norway addresses. So Hinkleman was doing business there as well. Kerrick quickly downloaded the material and sent it off to the US government, the UK government, the French government, and the Norwegian government. Somebody needed to know what the hell had been going on. With all the computers up and running, and with information flowing as fast as the internet signal could carry it, he heard a sound outside in the hallway. He tapped his comm to see if it was Griffin, but Kerrick got no answer. He tapped again and got no answer. Shit.

  Suddenly the door opened, and Griffin stumbled in, falling to his knees, where he was then kicked to the ground. The two men behind Griffin pointed their handguns at Kerrick. “You, get away from the computers.”

  Kerrick stood and slowly stepped to the side, acting like he belonged here. “Of course. What’s the problem?”

  And somebody else came from behind the two gunmen and shoved Brandon to the floor beside Griffin. Amanda was then pushed inside as well by a few more people—none of those armed as far as Kerrick could see.

  More people filed in the room, pushing everyone else forward. Looked like the conference-goers had gone vigilante.

  She looked up at Kerrick, each walking slowly to the other, and smiled sadly. “It was the pilot from the ship.”

  He swore softly.

  She nodded. “Everybody’s into betrayal these days.” The look on Amanda’s face was pitiful. She whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  He gave a tiny shake of his head and reached out a hand. She placed her hand in his, and he yanked her beside him, just narrowly avoiding Amanda being knocked to the ground by one of the gunmen. “Wow, what a big man you are. Beating up a woman and a child.”

  The group of men standing in front of him just jeered. “We knew you were coming. You know that, right? We were ready for you.”

  “Hardly,” he said calmly. “Is this the geek brigade? A bunch of desk jockeys with guns in their hands for the first time? Where is the real security team?” He glanced at the computers, all the screens showing signs that his transmissions were in progress but hadn’t yet been completed. As he looked, so did they.

  “What did you do?” The closest gunman, the one with the curly hair and glasses, raced to the computers and quickly tapped on its keys.

  Kerrick just shrugged and said, “Figured your information needed to be shared with the world.”

  The gunman turned and belted Kerrick across the face.

  His head snapped to the side, and he let his body turn in the same direction. As he flipped around, using the force of the blow to drive him along, he heaved a healthy right cross, making contact with the gunman’s jaw. He must have had one of those weak jaws because he went down with a slump.

  In an instant, more guns were raised in Kerrick’s direction. He looked at the gunmen insolently and said, “Who’ll sign your paychecks now?”

  Frowning, a man in the back stepped forward. “You can’t stop our paychecks.”

  “Good,” he said, “more proof of what you’ve done. Because all the data found here on this ship, documenting all your illegal acts, is right now going out into the ether and spreading far and wide to various countries’ governments, so they all know what you’ve been up to.”

  “We’re not up to anything,” the man in front sneered. “What do you know? You’re a pirate trying to take over our ship.”

  Kerrick laughed. “Is that what you think we are? Is that what the good Dr. Hinkleman told you? Do you want to know what Hinkleman’s really been up to? He’s been kidnapping people and holding them prisoner, taking money from other people to make certain individuals disappear, who then become body parts, special-ordered organs.” His gaze was hard and glassy.

  The man in front frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re here for a conference. If we had realized we would come up against pirates in this area, trying to steal our research, we would have brought in more security. But as it is …”

  “As it is, you have a lot of security—where is the real security detail, by the way?—considering this is deemed a medical or scientific conference,” Kerrick said. “You can’t be so naive as to think this company and the scientists here are do-gooders, can you?”

  One of the men standing off to the side, another white-lab-coat wearer, protested, “We are do-gooders. We’re trying to cure some of the deadliest diseases.”

  “Only with very unorthodox methods and purchased by blackmail money, right?”

  He had the grace to look shamefaced. “I don’t know what you’re talking about with the body parts that are special ordered, but we had to raise additional money somehow. Hence the new facility.”

  “Where you kidnap people and keep them as prisoners?” Amanda cried out in shock, pointing to Brandon. “He was taken, and he’s a ten-year-old boy.”

  At that, even more confusion crossed that speaker’s face. He looked down at the boy and back up at her, then frowned. “Well, he wasn’t a prisoner. And what do you mean by prisoners? These were people who needed special care. We had to develop a special sanitarium with very high-end solutions, and these people were very grateful.”

  “Absolutely. I know I was very grateful,” Amanda said, almost screaming in frustration. “Don’t you realize what’s being done to those people? They’re held in a comatose state. I know because I was held in that prison. I got a tray of shitty food full of drugs once a day, if I was lucky, with one flimsy blanket and nothing but a chamber pot and a floor. That’s all we had for facilities and cleanliness! And this child endured the same treatment.”

  The man just stared at her in shock. “No, no, no. We created and built a very high-end sanitarium for people who have extraspecial problems and require extraspecial medical attention, where the families don’t want anybody to know.”

  “Have you ever visited the facility? I suggest you do. And the families too would be interested in seeing that.”

  “You mean, the families pay you to keep these people drugged out of their minds and away from their fortunes?” Kerrick asked.

  The scientists all looked at him in shock.

  “No.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Yes,” Amanda snapped. “Just like you’re stealing these people’s lives, Hinkleman wanted my research to call his own.”

  “Your research?” Several of the scientists turned to look at her.

  She nodded. “I’m Dr. Amanda Berg. I work at and am a major shareholder of Scion Labs, but, gee, I wasn’t invited to this meeting, was I?”

  “We heard you were dead.”

  “From Hinkleman, I suppose?” she growled. “I was kidnapped on the way from work. Thrown into the back of a lorry and drugged for a day so they could transport me from Paris to that London sanitarium and then inject me with a tracking device without my knowledge. When I woke up, I was a prisoner in a cold concrete cell with no windows and only a thin blanket on a rickety cot and a tray of drugged food once a day.

  “Hinkleman visited me twice. He walked in and told me that my data was corrupt. He was so furious that he couldn’t read my research notes that he smashed my face with his fist and walked off. I suspected that, after another day or two, he would have been chaining me to my computer chair to fix my data,” she snapped. “Instead, I escaped and found this little boy in another prison cell and got him out of there too.”

  “Dr. Hinkleman said he had a breakthrough,” one of the men in the back shouted.

  “Of course
he did,” Amanda said wearily. “He’s that kind of guy, isn’t he? Makes everybody else do all the work, and, when they find a breakthrough, he steals their work, takes the credit.” She shook her head. “The animal trials were complete. I needed to move on to the human phase, but my results have been excellent.”

  “So, how do you explain that your data is corrupt?”

  She gave him a half smile. “I often work in a partial shorthand style for my own use. It’s faster, and I’ve been doing so much research that I know exactly what I’m talking about. But Hinkleman hadn’t even looked at my research at that point. Until one of my coworkers told Hinkleman that my cure was working. So he had me kidnapped so he could steal my work, so he could be known as curing cancer. Yet he’s too stupid to decipher my notes.”

  A hard rumble of conversations began before them.

  “How many of you are a part of Hinkleman’s research team? Here at this conference?” Kerrick asked the maybe one dozen men who crowded around the doorway or had stepped inside the room.

  “Twenty-five of us are from Scion,” one of the men said. “We came because we expected to hear an excellent announcement from the company.”

  She nodded. “Likely about the success of my cancer cure research.”

  “And some of us purchase items via Scion,” said the other man who’d been horrified to hear about the prison firsthand. “I need a certain amount of pancreatic tissue for the type of work I’m doing, and I get that through the company.”

  “Of course you do,” she said, “but you can also get it from other companies. The boy’s father is the one who supplies Scion with organs and tissue, and it can be a very dodgy business. We’re hoping to determine if the body parts he’s been dealing in are hand selected by someone other than the donor.”

  The men’s faces expressed shock and dismay and absolute horror.

  “And why can’t you go through established biomedical companies?” Kerrick asked. “Many people donate their bodies to science. You could certainly get a tremendous amount of pancreatic tissue that way.”

  “But I needed it fresh,” the man explained. “Within hours of curating it. And preferably not preserved with the chemicals that are usually administered.”