The Protocol: A Prescription to Die (17 page)

Chapter 45

“We have a problem,” said Eat.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

“What?”

“Titmueller found my camera.”

“That’s not good.”

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

They watched as Carl approached the camera can, pick it up, and stare directly into one of the cameras. His mug was displayed in high definition 1080p resolution on the eighty inch screen.

To Andy, he was not a handsome man.

Andy winced.

The close-up showed his pale, acne-pocked forehead and cheeks. His stringy, unwashed, greasy hair. His furry nostrils. His mouth hinged opened as he examined the camera. The single front tooth wasn’t the only one he was missing.

“Christ! Get yourself to a dentist, man!”

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Eat grabbed his chin with his free hand, one finger crossed his lips as he thought.

And waited.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

“There we go. That’s what I was waiting for.”

“Now what?”

“Look,” he said as he released his chin and thrust it at television screen. He clicked Carl’s picture into the background and brought the data screen for Barbara Nordstrom into the foreground. “Nordstrom just received an email.” Eat leaned closer to the screen. “With an attachment.”

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Twirl, click click. Twirl, click click.

Chapter 46

Barbara was pissed.

Beyond pissed.

She was fucking pissed.

She’d already gone through three Waterford wine glasses. She held the fourth in her hand and willed herself to remain calm. She didn’t want to have to clean up four piles of glass. She forced herself to breathe.

To take deep, cleansing breaths.

She stepped over the shards of lead crystal and blotches of red wine strewn across the kitchen floor. It was her last wine glass, and the only store that carried them in this forsaken city was at The Mall of America and that had closed hours ago.

After reading the email from Carl and seeing the picture, Barbara saw all of her hard work falling from her grasp. Someone was following her.

She brought the pictures back up on her laptop screen and studied them again.

“That fucking little bastard.”

Barbara leaned in closer to the monitor. She took her mouse pointer and made an imaginary circle around the number engraved on the small rectangular box on one the picture from Carl.

314159.

“Teague.”

She picked up her phone and dialed.

“Pick up you son of a bitch.”

A man’s voice finally answered. The voice of a man who’d been sound asleep.

“Hello?”

“This is Nordstrom. Get to my office. Now,” she fumed and hung up.

Chapter 47

Eat owned a four-story warehouse off of I-94 and Broadway in Minneapolis. He used the second, third, and fourth floors for his business operations and living space. When he had purchased the building sixteen months and twelve days ago, the first floor was already subdivided into small rental units perfect for a small business. He was an adopted landlord to a coffee shop, a hair and nail salon, a small new age book seller, and a Japanese restaurant called
Chan Svedberg’s House of Udon
.

He was positive that he alone was subsidizing the income of both the coffee shop, with his daily habit of lattes, and the Japanese restaurant, because of his lackluster culinary skills. He had yet to patronize the bookstore or salon.

When Eat was contemplating starting the company, he debated with himself for seventy-seven hours and fifty-two minutes about what to name it. Then one night, after having multiple slices of his favorite dessert that his mother made specifically for him, banana cream pie, it came to him. As he finished his last piece, 314159 Enterprises was born. In certain business meetings he simply referred to it as Pi. Since Eat shied away from publicity, he chose to only have the numbers 314159 on the front door. Most thought it was just an address instead of an actual company name. The office space wasn’t the most extravagant work area, but it had character. The area consisted of rugged brick walls in a mélange of reds and ochre, an open beam ceiling, and hardwood floors that creaked with each footstep. More than half of the area though, unseen by those who did not know it was there, was dedicated to housing a server room built to Eat’s very precise specifications. It had its own redundant power supplies, air conditioning, two diesel generators on the building’s roof, a raised floor, and a server farm that would make anyone from Silicon Valley blush with envy. It was the heart of his organization, and keeping its beat continuous and steady, was critical to its livelihood.

It was Mother’s home.

Eat was positive that she lived better than he did.

In addition to the artificial intelligence technology, the security system embedded into the building was one of the most sophisticated on the market. Eat knew this because he had created it himself, and he wanted the best. Eat could control almost every electronic device in the office and living area with his phone or voice. At this point, Eat did not have any plans of marketing the system, even though he knew he could make millions off of the software alone and probably three times that much in monthly maintenance charges. However, Eat preferred to keep the technology to himself, for now. Before going to market, he wanted to make sure all of the kinks were worked out.

With the touch of a button, he could instantly see live video from every square inch of the interior along with panoramic views of the building’s exterior. He could turn off any computer in the office, lock or unlock any door, and turn on the light in the bathroom while at the same time turn one off in the kitchen. The fire suppression technology consisted of an aragonite system that simply suffocated the fire by depriving it of oxygen. With a three digit code entered on his phone followed by a zone number, he could quickly and easily remove every atom of oxygen in a particular area, a group of rooms, or an entire floor in seconds. The key was to protect the technology at all costs. Computers did not need oxygen to work, and they especially didn’t react well to the water used in regular fire systems. Eat just had to make sure there were no humans in the area when the system turned on and there were several failsafe systems in place to prevent that from happening.

Eat passed by the entrance to his office, and continued up the stairs to the building’s third floor. This was the his primary living space: living room, kitchen, home theater, three bathrooms, a wet sauna, a dry sauna, a small lap pool, and a hot tub outside on a four-season deck accessed from the living room. His second floor, the building’s fourth, consisted of his library, three full baths, four bedrooms, and another four-season deck outside of the master bedroom. Before he reached the entrance, Eat turned on his kitchen lights, put on some of his favorite music, and tilted the window blinds open at a 30.546 degree angle. All of this was accomplished by pressing a few buttons on his phone. And all was done before he even opened the front door.

When he first moved in, Eat’s home wasn’t even remotely close to being the type profiled in Architectural Digest. Now that Andy had been living here for awhile, it would probably make grade. He didn’t like the homes profiled in the magazine where it seemed as if no one lived there. Things were too neat. Too organized. Too much like a museum instead of someone’s home. Homes with bookshelf-lined walls, but having only a handful of books.

Eat liked his stuff to be out and about. Not cluttered, just easily accessible. Along with his pen, his stuff was his security blanket, and God help anyone who tried to change or relocate it.

Andy had tried.

Once.

She had tried to organize his books. To take some off of the shelves and put them in boxes so the shelves weren’t so full.

But as she pulled books off, Eat put them back on. To an outsider looking in, they would have thought it was a comedy routine.

It was simple.

Eat liked his books.

Eat walked into his kitchen, and placed the four bags of groceries that he had strung on his arm onto the countertop. Tonight was going to be special. Or at least he wanted it to be. He would never consider himself a great cook, but with Andy’s help, he had learned to become adequate. It had only taken 5.436 months from the time Andy started to teach him the basics until he could make a full-blown dinner with a vegetable, starch, and some sort of meat.

Best of all, tonight’s plan didn’t involve heating anything in the microwave.

Tonight was the second anniversary of the first time he built up enough courage to give her a kiss. And that, in Eat’s opinion, deserved a nice dinner, despite the current events. Over the past few weeks, he had scoured the Internet for recipe sites, and created a menu: roasted brussel sprouts and cauliflower, au gratin potatoes, and broiled chicken breasts with rosemary and fennel. He had even stopped at the liquor store and picked up her favorite bottle of Chianti. He prayed that he wouldn’t hurt himself before she got home.

The task looked daunting. Where most may need liquid encouragement to begin a big project, Eat preferred something crunchy. He pulled a box of Cookie Crisp cereal from the pantry, poured himself a bowl, stuffed a handful in his mouth, and started studying the recipes he’d printed out.

The first task was slicing the brussel sprouts into quarters and soaking them in salt water, supposedly to remove the bitterness.

Eat took another handful of cereal cookies.

This was not going to be easy.

*

Things were progressing nicely, and there hadn’t been any fires or explosions when he was interrupted. Eat’s phone rang while grating the cheese for the potatoes. He had a pot of potatoes boiling “until they were almost fork tender” as the recipe told him, a cookie sheet with a layer of parchment ready for the vegetables, a handful of cereal, and a cold soda. He licked the cheese off of his fingers the best he could, and answered the phone. Although he really didn’t want to talk to anyone in the middle of his project, he decided against ignoring the call after looking at the caller id.

It was Ben Williamson, his financial advisor.

Eat pressed the speakerphone icon, and transferred the call to the surround sound system. He needed all of his hands to work the kitchen gadgets, and he wasn’t comfortable enough to hold the phone to his ear, and use a knife at the same time. Ben was now on seven speakers.

“Hi Ben. What’s up?”

“Hey Eat. Who have you been pissing off?”

Eat stopped stirring the potatoes. His curiosity was piqued.

“Not sure what you’re talking about, Ben.”

“Well, all of your accounts have been frozen.”

“Frozen?”

“Frozen. As in the money cannot be accessed for any reason. It says the IRS, DHS, and HHS have all placed holds on all of your liquid assets. This is a first for me. I’ve never seen a consecutive freeze ordered by three federal agencies. The IRS? Definitely. Maybe Homeland Security if you’re a terrorist. Never seen Health and Human Services doing this before though. Like I asked. Who’d ya piss off?”

Eat was already thinking beyond what Ben was telling him.

“What about the off shore accounts?”

“Those are safe. They don’t have jurisdiction there.”

“Mom’s?”

“Same. Frozen solid.”

“What do we do?”

“I think you’d better come down to the office.”

Eat looked at the clock on cable receiver. It was 3:40 in the afternoon.

“Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be right there,” said Eat as he ended the call.

“What else can go wrong?” he said to his reflection in the refrigerator’s stainless steel door. Something like this affected his and Andy’s future, and had to be dealt with. He hoped his meeting with Ben wouldn’t take too long and that he’d be able to get home before Andy did, and still have a surprise waiting for her.

*

The warehouse had an underground parking garage that he and Andy used for their cars, and also storage for excess furniture resulting from their combined households. It was the graveyard to his old furniture that Andy wouldn’t allow in her vicinity.

She called it vintage 1970’s Winnebago.

It was his intention to donate it to charity but he just had to find the time to get it over to the drop-off. Andy didn’t believe anyone would take it, free or not.

Whereas Andy liked shoes and rock concert souvenir t-shirts, Eat liked cars. When it came to them, his will power was non-existent. So far, Eat had a collection of four: a BMW 650xi, a Mini Cooper Roadster, a Ford F-150 Raptor, and a Jeep Wrangler Arctic. Before his father died, he had test driven a silver Audi R8. He loved it. Eat had no clue about the type of engine under its hood, but the car had some of the sexiest headlights he’d ever seen on a car. When Andy saw the price tag, she did the math and said she’d need more closet space for her one thousand pairs of new shoes if he ever bought it.

“I have sexy headlights too and they don’t cost the same as a house,” she said.

Eat decided to wait.

For now.

Andy had a point.

Her headlights were pretty fascinating, and he rather enjoyed putting on the brights.

All of the keys were in a bowl next to the microwave. He reached in and pulled out the first set that his fingers came in contact with, the Coop’s.

Eat shook his head.

The Cooper wasn’t quite right. He put them back in the bowl and began spelunking for the Wrangler’s keys. He didn’t really feel in a whimsical, cherry red Cooper mood. Eat was in a brown, run-over-whatever-was-in-his-way, Wrangler mood. Not only was someone interrupting his surprise for Andy, but their finances, and his mother’s, were being screwed with.

He didn’t appreciate that.

The Wrangler was big, beefy, and had a testosterone-filled rumble.

The Cooper?

Not so much.

It buzzed more than grumbled.

With its clearance and extra wide tires, the Wrangler could run over anything in his way and leave a nice tread pattern to boot. That’s the way he felt right now. He wanted to run something over and that wasn’t possible in the Cooper, at least nothing of substance more than four inches high.