Dues of Mortality by Jason Austin Read Free Book Online Page A

moon from the man seated across from
him. When he finally pulled his chin up to take a look, he saw he was
right and his whitened fists hammered the desktop.
    “ Impossible!”
Wallace screamed. “He never got that deep into the files and he
was cut off before he could copy anything!”
    “ There's
no other way he could’ve known,” Gabriel said. “And
he's an experienced hacker along with being a brilliant geneticist.
Good with the bad, so to speak.”
    Gabriel’s
calm was like a painful itch in Wallace’s balls. Everything
going to hell and Gabriel was just sitting there adjusting the drape
of his Armani trench coat, basking in the glow of his men’s
magazine profile, and Blondelicious hair restoration. He made
forty-five look like a seasoned twenty-five and, though Wallace was
loathed to admit it, Gabriel had a constant bead on Wallace's jealous
streak. It was why Wallace could take a smidgen of kinky pleasure in
sending Gabriel to places like the upstate facility, from where his
silk-lined tuchas had just returned. Wallace knew his lawyer detested
the duty, but no one else could be trusted to oversee the
transactions with the foreign buyers. The upstate installation—the
Octohetero-something-or-other—the worker-nerds called
it—engaged in the bulk of Wallace’s illegal cloning and
bioweapons projects. Disgusting stuff. Gabriel would rather have
spent the night in the all-too-famous Turkish prison.
    But
fair is fair , Wallace thought. And it just wasn’t fair for the boss to be sweating bullets while his employees rolled around on an
emotional bed of roses. A good thing Gabriel was so valuable.
Millenitech's acquisitions had skyrocketed since the Thaddeus Maguire
case and Wallace was well on his way to eliminating the competition
nationwide.
    “ It’s not possible,” Wallace
reiterated, throwing his hands against the big bay window that
stretched across the office. He looked like he was being arrested.
“The computers don’t lie.”
    “ Computers
lie, cheat and steal with the best of them,” Gabriel said,
nestling his hands in his lap with obscene repose. “Apparently
a few details have been overlooked.”
    “ You
think?” Wallace said sarcastically and turned his head toward
Gabriel like a tank turret. “Goddamn files might as well have
been encrypted with a crossword puzzle! It's not enough I have to
keep throwing money down a bottomless hole to keep my offices and
labs from being blown up! Do you know how many people called in sick
this morning?”
    “ I'm
not surprised.” Damn right he wasn't. Gabriel had gotten a most
inappropriate phone call just after 2:00 a.m. from a very agitated
Thaddeus Maguire who'd also been awakened by an unexpected caller
just minutes prior. By the end of the conversation Gabriel knew
exactly who had hit MIT and that they would claim responsibility
before the day was out. Gabriel thereafter “advised” his
client and cursed his name for robbing him of the remainder of his
beauty rest.
    “ As
long as we're on the topic,” Gabriel said, lacing his fingers.
“I spoke to one of my friends at the FBI this morning. He
suggested we beef up security around Millenitech headquarters and
some of the more exposed areas around BioCore...at least in the short
term.”
    “ Then
be sure to thank your friend for me! I enjoy running scared because
they keep getting outsmarted by some fucktard with a bag of
fertilizer and a Zippo!” Wallace paused, looking ten seconds
away from a stroke. That would be all he needed: to end up
sharing the fate of those losers like Jenetix, out of San Francisco,
who'd had its main headquarters damn near leveled. And after its
owner, Nigel Thurman, was murdered, Thurman Industries, out of
Boston, bled money so profusely it went into receivership.
Millenitech had been able to largely steer clear of the loony
leftists’ warpath early on, but within the past year a number
of their subsidiaries had been hit pretty close together and now
everything