Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 26
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“A big Russian.”
As soon as the words left Robbie’s mouth, I remembered something Darla had said when recounting her first meeting with Dean Merrick. The media had been writing crazy stories about him, including reports that he was borrowing operating capital from the Russian mafia. What if the stories weren’t just stories?
Suddenly, Merrick’s insane behavior made sense. If he really was in business with the Russian mob, he couldn’t afford to let the business fail. I didn’t know exactly what happened if you failed to pay back the Russian mob, but it was probably creatively gruesome. Merrick had been desperate when he resorted to breaking into Darla’s house and he’d gotten more desperate every moment after.
Had they murdered him? I didn’t think so. If the Russians had come for Darla, it was probably because he’d saved his neck by making promises about what she could do for them. What exactly he’d told them was anybody’s guess, but apparently it was convincing enough to earn her an abduction.
In a flash, any residual doubt I’d been carrying about my feelings for Darla fell away. I loved this woman. And it felt like I always had. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t sensible. But there it was. And if I made the wrong call now, there was a good chance I’d never see her again.
I looked down at my Quest Summary. It was just 7:15 p.m., so I still had about ten hours until the last boss showed up. I didn’t know what form it would take, or if I’d be able to see to Darla’s safety before it arrived. But I knew I had to try. Who knew what would happen to her if I waited? Who knew if I’d even survive the final bout of RIP madness to help her afterwards?
I dialed Margaret’s number.
“Hello?” she answered groggily, then shifted gears into a panic. “What is it? Is Robbie okay?”
“He’s fine,” I assured her hurriedly. “But I’ve got . . . an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?”
I took a breath. Even in light of the circumstances, I knew Margaret didn’t need more on her plate. So I wasn’t going to saddle her with the unsettling account of Darla’s abduction. But I didn’t have the time to make up stories or the energy to keep track of any lies I told her.
“I just . . . have to go,” I said.
“I’m on my way,” she replied as she hung up.
While she didn’t understand what was happening, she knew I wouldn’t skip out on Robbie if it wasn’t important.
But where exactly was I going? I hadn’t gotten that far in my planning. Yes, over the last few days, I’d fought off more weird threats than I could count. But this was different. This was regular, real-life criminal stuff. I decided I needed regular, real-life help—help that came with a badge and backup.
###
As it happened, at that moment, Darla wasn’t locked in the trunk of a car. She was locked in the backseat of one, with a canvas bag over her head.
“Who are you?” she growled. “What do you want?”
“I’m Boris,” she heard her abductor answer in a thick Russian accent from behind the wheel in the front seat. “Boss says get girl, I get girl.”
“Why do you get girl?”
“No more talking.”
The car rolled to a stop, and Darla thought she could hear gulls shrieking and waves crashing. But that was all drowned out by a metallic rattling. Then the car inched forward several yards and stopped again. She heard Boris open his own door and walk around the car to open hers. He hoisted her awkwardly to her feet outside, then yanked the sack off of her head. She found herself in a dimly-lit warehouse. The poor lighting became poorer as the roll-up door behind the car was pulled closed with the same metallic racket she’d heard a few moments before.
She could just make out a few people sitting in chairs around a folding card table. Stretching off to the right and left beyond that were half a dozen rows of giant metal shelves that stretched fifteen feet up and ran thirty yards back before disappearing into darkness. Various goons were milling around with automatic weapons as Boris led her over to the table. Sitting at the table was what had to be “the boss.” And beside him, with hands tied behind his back, was . . .
“Merrick?” Darla cried.
Merrick just gazed back at her, miserably. He had a bandage over the broken nose he’d sustained when he ran his Jag into the tree. But that wasn’t all. There was a cut on his cheek. His eye was blackened. And judging from the way he was wincing with every move, he was nursing plenty of fresh injuries. Darla noticed the baseball bat laying on the table in front of the boss and cringed. But her sympathy didn’t run very deep.
“So you really are in business with the Russian mafia?” she exclaimed.
“Mm,” The Boss gave a qualifying grunt and elaborated in an accent that matched Boris’.
“Merrick not so good business partner. But he say you can help.”
He smiled with the warmth of a panther, pre-pounce.
“So now, you are business partner too. I am Nikolai. It is nice to meet you. You help, yes?”
Darla shook her head at Merrick. She was still unclear on exactly what she was doing here, but at the moment, she was still fixated on what it meant that he was here.
“So are you really cloning JFK too? Or Bruce Springsteen or whatever?”
“Eh?” Nikolai said. “You doing cloning? Of ‘Born in the USA’ man?”
He shook his head disapprovingly.
“No,” Merrick croaked. “The tabloids made up all kinds of—”
“Happy to hear,” Nikolai cut him off. “Springsteen no good. Taylor Swift—very good. You clone her. She also born in the USA, but not make big deal about it.”
He nudged Boris.
“You like Taylor Swift, yes, Boris?”
Boris nodded, then elaborated, “At first, I’m not so sure. Then I take Nadia to see her. Now . . . I am a Swifty.”
“Who is not a Swifty?” Nikolai agreed.
“Only crazy person, boss.”
Darla ignored this surreal detour and refocused on Merrick.
“You’re a billionaire!” she exclaimed in puzzlement. “Why would you get mixed up with criminals?”
Merrick looked down at the floor.
“Some deals not going so good for Merrick,” Nikolai explained. “He need little bit of capital and banks not liking him so much.”
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It seemed a lot of deals were not going so good for Merrick. Many more than he’d let on in his first meeting with Darla.
“Look, we’ve been tracking you all over the place to get ahold of the copy you printed,” he said.
How did he know about the printout? Darla thought.
He saw the question in her eyes and answered, “You left the print queue open.”
Darla cursed under her breath. Printing the feed up to the present date had taken forever, and she’d been in a rush to meet her mystery pseudo-husband. So she hadn’t bothered with her usual ritual of tidying up the desktop before making her exit. As a result, the print queue had been there to greet Merrick when he walked into the attic. This explained why she’d still been targeted after the feed was lost in the fire. The one time she’d over-ruled her OCD, and it had landed her in a warehouse full of Russian gangsters.
“Just show them how to read it,” Merrick went on. “Or it’s gonna get bad for both of us.”
The bruises and lacerations on his face added credibility to his claim.
“I don’t even have it,” she said.
Nikolai produced the printout from a nearby shelf and held it up. Apparently, whichever thug had been dispatched to find them at the hotel had searched the room.
Darla shrugged and said, “Okay, well, I can’t read it any better than you can.”
“No games, girl,” Nikolai said. “This is serious business.”
He tossed the printout onto the table in front of her. Boris let out a little whimper and took a reflexive step back. He was in his mid-twenties, but Darla could suddenly see the little boy in his eyes.
Nikolai chuckled.
“Boris thinks it’s magic and magic means Baba Yaga. Always Baba Yaga with Boris.”
“What is—” Darla began.
“Russian boogie man. Only she is woman. Boogie woman?”
“She is not woman,” Boris grumbled defensively. “She is witch. Who eats children.”
Then he shivered and added, “She lives in house with legs of chicken.”
Nikolai rolled his eyes, and then asked Darla, “You read Arthur C. Clark?”
The name was vaguely familiar to her but she shook her head.
“He’s good,” Nikolai went on. “Science fiction visionary. He say, ‘Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.’
He gestured to the printout.
“Merrick says written here is important information. And you can read. Maybe he is crazy. Or maybe this is science we don’t understand yet.”
###
“Crazy girl’s boyfriend has crazy story,” Detective Derrick Branch said. “That’s what I’m writing down in my notebook, unless you’ve got something solid.”
Branch was the cop Darla and I had talked to outside the smoldering ruins of her house. From what I could gather, the San Jose police department suspected arson and Darla was the prime suspect due to her record of institutionalization, as brief it had been. So when I’d arrived at the San Rafael police department to report her abduction to Officer Larry Chazworth, he’d found a flag in the system and contacted Branch to sit in on our chat via speakerphone.
“Darla didn’t set the fire!” I exclaimed. “For the last time, it was Dean Merrick!”
Chazworth rolled his eyes at the outlandish accusation.
“Look, her entire fortune was riding on keeping that equipment safe! Why would she burn it up?”
“Because she’s crazy,” Branch said.
“No, she isn’t!”
“Then what was her stay at the cuckoo’s nest all about?” Chazworth asked.
“It’s not like they sent the men in white coats for her. It was a precaution. She checked herself in.”
“That’s supposed to fill us with confidence?” Branch asked.
“Kind of! Crazy people don’t know they’re crazy.”
“Unless they’re extra crazy,” Chazworth put in.
“Well, she’s not extra crazy,” I said.
“She sounds extra crazy,” Branch countered. “I mean Russians? It doesn’t get much more paranoid schizo cliché than that. She could at least make up something original.”
“Well, to be fair,” Chazworth said, “She didn’t make up the stuff about the Russians.”
He pointed at me, “This guy did.”
“Hm. You should maybe keep your distance,” Branch suggested. “Sounds like maybe extra crazy people are contagious.”
“Nobody is extra crazy!” I shouted, sounding extra crazy. “And I’m not making this up!”
“Oh, no?” Chazworth questioned. “Did you actually see these Russians?”
“Russian. Just one Russian. And no. But my nephew did.”
“Your nephew, and only your nephew, saw your girlfriend dragged out of the hospital by a Russian gangster?” Chazworth asked skeptically.
“She wasn’t dragged. She walked. The Russian had a gun.”
“But your nephew is the only one who saw the guy waving this gun around?” Branch piled on with another dose of skepticism.
“He probably wasn’t waving it around.”
Chazworth rolled his eyes and Branch sighed.
“We’ll have some guys pull the security footage,” Branch said with a note of charity.
“How long will that take?”
“It’ll take as long as it takes. And when we see the footage of your girl skipping out on you with a handsome doctor or whatever, I’ll try not to say ‘I told you so.’”
He hung up.
###
“I don’t know what you think I can read that you can’t,” Darla said. “There’s nothing new in the printout—nothing that wasn’t already translated on-screen.”
“What are you talking about?” Merrick replied.
“What do you mean what am I talking about? You already saw everything anybody can read in that code after you threw all my undies on the floor, you pervert.”
The two Russians looked over at Merrick questioningly and he gave them an uncomfortable shake of the head, quietly pleading “not guilty.”
“I couldn’t read anything,” he snapped. “It was nothing but gobbledygook.”
“What?” Darla snapped back, irritably. “Look at the highlights!”
She picked up the printout, flipped to one of the highlighted sections and held it out to him.
“See?”
All three men looked at the page. Then they all looked back at her like she was nuts.
“See what?” Boris asked.
Darla looked back at them like they were nuts.
“Can you not read?” she asked. “This entry from November of last year,” she said, pointing to the passage. “NeuroVista parent company BioLink’s stock will split on provisional FDA approval and drop by 50% on reversal?”
They all frowned, clueless.
“That section is all gibberish,” Merrick said.
Darla’s eyes went wide. She looked back at the page she was holding up. The words were clear as day to her. She flipped to another highlighted section and held it up.
“What about this?” she asked.
“Nonsense,” Merrick answered. “It’s all nonsense!”
“Oh my God,” she said, realizing that while she’d shared much of the printout’s contents with me, she’d never let me read it. And now she realized I wouldn’t have been able to.
“The computer never translated any of it,” she mumbled, as if to herself.
All of her fears about her shaky grasp on sanity came flooding back once again.
“Stop screwing around,” Merrick said. “Your uncle left you everything. He obviously gave you a key or taught you how to—”
He trailed off, seeing from the look on Darla’s face that her uncle hadn’t given her any key, hadn’t taught her anything.
“Are you . . . are you some kind of whacko, just making stuff up?”
He looked over at Nikolai slowly, realizing he’d played his last card and was about to go bust. But Nikolai was still staring down at his phone, seemingly disinterested in the revelation that Darla was a hallucinating headcase. Then he said simply, “Nyet.”
He looked up from the phone and elaborated.
“Not gibberish. Girl can read.”
“What?” Darla asked.
“BioLink stock split two months ago,” Nikolai answered, holding the phone up to display the Wall Street Journal headline from a couple months earlier. “It says here, all about NeuroVista tech.”
Merrick sighed in relief.
“Yeah!” he said. “Yeah, okay. You don’t know how you’re reading the gibberish, but you are.”
Darla stared back at him, with stunned, confused relief. Of course. She knew some of the things she’d read had happened. Her panic had sprung from the jarring realization that she was seeing things others weren’t. But the fact that blind people can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
“So none of it was being translated . . . ” she mused. “And I’m not crazy. I can just . . . ”
“Read little bit,” Boris said. “I am same way. Sometimes with German. I think because I watch ‘Das Boat’ many times.”
Everyone looked at him like he was an idiot and he shut up, recognizing his failure to grasp the significance of the moment.
After a long pause, Nikolai pointed to the printout.
“You read more.”