Xenotech Queen's Gambit: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 2) (8 page)

Chapter 9

“There is hardly anything in the world that someone
cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper…”
— attributed to John Ruskin

On my way to WT&F my phone spoke up and announced I had a call from Mike.

“Put him through,” I said.

“Jack…” he said. I cut him off.

“These early morning calls are getting to be a habit.”

“No witty banter, please, Jack. I’m worried.”

“About?”

“Jean-Jacques.”

“Why? What’s up with him?”

“He’s acting weird.”

“How?”

“He arrived at eight, called me into his office, and
didn’t
scream at me.”

“In early and no screaming. That
is
weird. What
did
he do?” I said.

“He asked me what happened yesterday morning, so I told him. He just sat calmly and didn’t react.”

“No shouting? No threats? No promising to fire you?”

“No. He said ‘Thank you, Mr. Goodman,’ and asked me if I thought you’d be coming to talk to him. When I told him you were planning to stop by this morning with Lieutenant Lee, he just nodded and told me to go back to the production floor. It was like someone had snatched his body and replaced him with a pod person or something.”

“That certainly doesn’t sound like the Jean-Jacques we know and love,” I said, keeping most of the cynicism out of my voice. “I would have been happier if our visit could have stayed a surprise. Jean-Jacques doesn’t react well to surprises and it keeps him off balance.”

“From what I could tell,” said Mike, “he’s so far off balance right now, he’s close to falling over. When I left his office, I turned around and saw him wipe sweat off his forehead.”

J-J typically liked to make
other
people sweat.

“He looked scared, Jack. Really scared.”

Jean-Jacques was tough. He was a blue-collar Qu
é
b
é
cois kid from a rough neighborhood in Montreal who had moved to an even rougher neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. I could stop him from running over me, but not many other people could. If Jean-Jacques was scared, it must be serious.

“Thanks for the heads up, Mike,” I said. “Please pass the word to J-J that Lieutenant Lee and I will be stopping by at nine.”

“Will do,” said Mike. “Keep me posted.”

“I will,” I said. “Kirk out.”

My phone made the Star Trek communicator sound, the way it always did when I said “Kirk out.” The familiar chirp always made me smile.

* * * * *

Martin and I met in the WT&F parking lot. I slid my van in beside his Capitol Police cruiser, got out, and crossed to stand next to him. I gave Martin a recap of my conversation with Mike.

“J-J’s frightened?” said Martin. “That’s a new one. What scares a barracuda?”

“A shark,” I said. “Probably a big one.”

One of the not-Poly receptionists was on the front desk at WT&F. She saw Martin’s uniform and didn’t bother handing us visitor’s badges. Come to think of it, WT&F didn’t do visitor’s badges. I’d have to talk to J-J about that—some other time. CiCi, the night security guard with pink, purple, and lime green accented hair, was standing with Mike in the far corner of the lobby. Their heads were close together and they looked like they were sharing a moment, so I didn’t say anything. Mike looked over CiCi’s shoulder, caught my eye and sent me a concerned glance. I nodded and kept moving.

Martin and I rode the elevator up one floor and walked down to the executive wing. The second floor had new carpet and new cubicles for the regular workers. No signs of the rabbots’ depredations from six weeks ago remained. I was pleased that the carpet and cubicles were of slightly better quality than they had been earlier. I’d been adamant that J-J should upgrade the furnishings for his employees with some of the insurance payout. Jean-Jacques was
not
an enlightened CEO, so I’m glad I’d insisted.

The ugly, patronizing “Go Team” motivational posters on the walls had been replaced by a system of flat screen frames showing fine art that rotated through artistic periods on a weekly basis. Now it was showing Cubists, and the distorted, unreal images seemed appropriate for the strange new world of a frightened Jean-Jacques Bonhomme.

When Martin and I passed through the heavy wooden doors separating regular employee territory from executive country it was clear that some of the rabbot infestation settlement money had also been used to upgrade WT&F’s already opulent executive wing. In particular, a large oil painting of Jean-Jacques in a business suit, looking regal and a good deal taller than he was in real life, hung on the wainscoted wall outside his office. J-J’s assistant, a harried, ash-blonde woman with the paranoid look of a mouse living next to a rattlesnake, waved us in.

“He’s expecting you,” she said. Then she scurried off down the hall as if to get out of range of whatever was going to happen.

Martin and I looked at each other.

“It’s your show,” I said.

“Feel free to help,” said Martin.

I pushed open J-J’s office door and walked in behind the lieutenant. There was a beautiful new oriental rug on the floor. Jean-Jacques rose to meet us and came out from behind his desk.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said the penny-pinching CEO.

He stuck out his hand. Martin ignored it.

“Lieutenant Martin Lee, Georgia Capitol Police,” said my friend.

I looked at J-J and gave him my biggest grin. After what happened the last time we’d met here, J-J didn’t find my expression reassuring.

“Jack,” he said, nodding to acknowledge my presence. He sat down on the raised chair behind his desk. “Have a seat, gentlemen. Can I get you any refreshments?”

“No,” said Martin.

Both of us were nearly a foot taller than J-J. Martin remained standing, his official police tablet and stylus in his hands. He let his height and Samuel L. Jackson I-don’t-take-any-crap demeanor work their intimidating magic. I was playing good cop, so I sat on the arm of one of the guest chairs.

“Tell us about the client who placed the rush order on Sunday, Mr. Bonhomme.”

It wasn’t a question.

“A woman called me while I was in New York,” said J-J. “She offered me a lot of money if I could handle a rush order.”

“What were you doing in New York?” said the lieutenant.

Jean-Jacques looked embarrassed, as if his tough guy mask was slipping.

“I was visiting my mother.”

J-J had a mother? Who’d have thought it?

“It was her birthday and I took her to a matin
é
e on Broadway, then dinner at Sardi’s.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

Martin gave me a sharp look as if to say, “What does it matter what show they went to?”

“The revival of
Cats
.”

Maybe J-J wasn’t such a good son after all. For me, watching
Cats
is like listening to two and a half hours of chalk screeching on a blackboard, but your mileage may vary. Maybe his mother liked T. S. Elliot, or Andrew Lloyd Webber, or, you know, cats.

“How much money is ‘a lot,’ Mr. Bonhomme?” said Martin.

J-J looked down at his hands, reluctant to answer.

“Mr. Bonhomme?”

J-J kept his head down and whispered.

“Eight hundred thousand galcreds.”

I kept my face neutral, but whistled inside my brain. That was enough to tempt a much stronger man. The client could have probably convinced Jean-Jacques to take the job for half, or even a quarter of that.

“What can you tell us about the woman who contacted you, Mr. Bonhomme?” said the lieutenant.

“She was just a voice on the phone,” said J-J, shifting his gaze from side to side.

“She didn’t give her name?”

“No, she said she was calling on behalf of her boss, Mr. Duke Vanderbilt.”

I’d heard that name before. It was an obvious pseudonym, like Cornell, Penn and Princeton, three of Anthony Zwilniki’s henchman, only using well-known southern schools instead of members of the Ivy League.

“What did this woman sound like?” said Martin.

“Cold. Hard. All business.”

Jean-Jacques looked left and right, then at me, then at the lieutenant.

“Kind of like you, officer.”

“Do you mean she sounded African-American?”

“Well, sort of,” said J-J, “though more like Jamaican.”

A cold, hard voice from the Caribbean. I thought I knew where this was headed and I didn’t like it.

“Did she mention the name of her company?” said Martin.

“It was the same one from before.”

J-J couldn’t look me—or Lieutenant Lee—in the eye.

“From before?” I said.

“You know,” said J-J. “Factor-E-Flor.”

I looked at Martin. He knew I’d dealt with Factor-E-Flor’s handiwork earlier. They were the small company, registered in the Cayman Islands, that had provided the doctored plans for the one hundred thousand pink robot rabbots WT&F had 3D printed six weeks ago. The rabbots had been connected to a drug production operation that Martin and Tom
á
so and I had helped shut down. They were owned by the James K. Polk Group, which was a subsidiary of the mysterious EUA Corporation. And according to Poly’s research, Factor-E-Flor’s owner of record was—Duke Vanderbilt.

Jean-Jacques was looking even more overwrought. I thought Martin’s interrogation was going quite well. I was filing his technique away in my memory for future reference.

“What, precisely, did this woman ask you to do?” he said.

“Print up a job for her boss.”

“Did she tell you what WT&F would be printing?”

“Some sort of large-scale construction equipment,” she said.

“Did you have any prior knowledge that her order was actually for a well-armed two-hundred-and-fifty-foot combat robot?”

“No,” said J-J. He sounded as depressed as he would have been if he’d been forced to sit through a dozen back-to-back performances of
Cats…
but I may be projecting.

“Let’s walk through the time line,” said Martin. “You got a call on Sunday…”

“After dinner,” said Jean-Jacques. “It was around seven. We’d gone back to my mother’s apartment and she’d gone to bed early. I was checking email.”

“And you called Mike Goodman after you talked to the woman?”

“That’s right. I think it was close to seven-thirty.”

“You asked Mike to come in and work overnight on her rush job?”

“Yes. I promised him a bonus for the extra work.”

Sure he did. I spoke up.

“How did the woman get the production plans to you?”

“I gave her a link to our corporate cloud LoxBox account.”

I restrained myself from slapping my forehead with my palm and quoting Homer Simpson. I’d bet a dinner at the Teleport Inn that J-J had given the mystery woman his admin link to LoxBox, the
de facto
standard business app for exchanging large files, not a secure, single-use upload link. I’d have to spend hours reviewing the files on WT&F’s LoxBox folders to confirm none of them had been compromised. Later.

“Was that the last time you heard from her?” said Martin.

The blood drained from Jean-Jacques’ face. He looked as white as cheese curds.

“No,” said J-J. “She called back at noon yesterday. She hadn’t received her order and told me that I had twenty-four hours to complete delivery.”

“Was that all she said?”

Jean-Jacques shook his head back and forth slowly.

“No,” he said. “She also said if I didn’t produce her order on time I’d be very, very sorry.”

Martin nearly dropped his stylus and I stood up quickly to keep from falling off the arm of my chair.

“A death threat?” asked Martin.

“It sounded like one to me,” said J-J. “I have a ticket to Dauush on a star liner that takes off at eleven. I’m leaving for Hartsfield as soon as we’re done. I’m going to check out used 3D printers while I’m there, so I can write the trip off as a business expense.”

Martin and I looked at each other and came to an unspoken agreement.

“Are we done here?” asked J-J.

Now that he was getting out of Dodge some of his old cocky attitude was returning.

“Just a few more questions,” said Martin. “Did any funds change hands?”

Jean-Jacques’s eyes bored into the lieutenant’s.

“What do you take me for?” said J-J. “I’d never print an order without a deposit.”

“That should do it,” said Martin, “so long as you provide us with all the details of the transaction.”

“My assistant and my CFO will take care of that for you,” said J-J.

His desk phone rang and his assistant’s voice announced, “Your limo is here, sir.”

“Show yourselves out,” said Jean-Jacques. “I have a starship to catch.”

He pulled a suitcase out from behind his desk and left us standing in his office. Martin kept it together, but my mouth was hanging open. I shut it.

“You know what we have to do now, right?” said my friend.

“Yeah,” I said. “Follow the money.”

* * * * *

Martin stayed on the executive level to get information from Jean-Jacques’ CFO and assistant. He promised he’d have police financial forensic investigators look into WT&F’s deposit from Factor-E-Flor and said he’d share the account numbers and other particulars once he got them. I suspected the official investigation would take weeks, if not months, and promised myself I’d do some digging of my own a lot sooner.

I also shared my own suspicions about who had called Jean-Jacques and threatened him. Martin agreed with my reasoning and promised to make the ongoing search for her a higher
priority for law enforcement across the state. We shook hands, then I went downstairs to find Mike and warn him about J-J’s death threat.
CiCi and Mike weren’t in the lobby—it was probably long past the end of her shift—so I walked to the entrance to the production floor, pulled open one of the steel double doors, and entered. 

Mike was standing at the Model-43’s control panel. His head was down and he looked like he was trying to make sure his settings were right.

“Did you remember Rule #3?” I said.

“There’s a Rule #3?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We just learned it. Always know what you’re fabbing.”

“Smart,” said Mike. “I’m doing something like that now.”

“How so?”