The brown-haired goon flopped down in a chair on the porch. The red-haired one set off around the house. Teddy kept him in sight as best he could from the vantage point of half a block away.
On the side of the house was a row of garbage cans and what was obviously a kitchen door. The redhead went up the short steps and tried the knob. It was locked. He continued with his circuit of the house. A few minutes later he emerged from the other side.
Red sat down, and the two goons jabbered away in some language that Teddy was too far away to catch. Red got up, got in the van, and drove off. Brown stayed on the porch.
Teddy started his car and followed the van.
Red drove about ten blocks away to a little bistro. He went in and bought sandwiches and two bottles of beer. He came out, got in the van, and drove back to the house.
Red sat down, and gave a sandwich and a beer to Brown. Brown said something derogatory about the beer, probably that they shouldn’t drink on the job. He opened it, however, and used it to wash down his sandwich.
Minutes later, a car drove up and stopped in the driveway.
A little man with a black satchel got out. He had a stern face and round wire-rimmed glasses. He marched through the front door without so much as a glance at the two bodyguards.
The two men looked at each other, snorted in derision, and went back to their lunch.
While the goons were occupied on the front porch, Teddy crept around the side of the house to the kitchen and eased his way up the creaky steps to the back door.
The kitchen door was flimsy, old, and made of wood. The top half had windowpanes, but a blind had been pulled down in front of them. It was slightly askew, so Teddy could see in the crack.
The dog crate was set up in one corner. Rocky was in the crate.
The little man had set down his black bag and was taking the handler to task. Teddy could hear what he was saying through the cracks in the door.
“So,” the little man said. The eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses were cold. “You took him out?”
“I was supposed to let people see him.”
“You had him perform?”
“No. Just to look at. I put him right back.”
“He didn’t jump around? He didn’t pull at the leash?”
The little man waved his hand to cut off the reply. “Let’s see how much harm you did. Take him out.”
The handler snapped the leash on Rocky and opened the crate. Teddy could tell he was trying very hard not to let the dog jump, while not appearing to tug on his collar.
“Put him on the table.”
The handler went to pick up the dog.
“Wait.”
The little man popped open his bag. He took out a bottle of alcohol and wiped down the tabletop. It was white porcelain, and it gleamed.
The handler lifted Rocky onto the table.
“Turn him over.”
That wasn’t so easy. Rocky struggled while the handler got him on his side, subdued him in a firm hold, and rolled him onto his back.
“Pull his hairs apart.”
The handler spread the long brown hair on Rocky’s stomach. “Don’t you shave the incision?”
“Not if you don’t want it to be discovered. Pull them back.”
The handler parted the hairs.
The little man examined the dog’s stomach. Underneath the hair, Rocky had a fresh surgical scar running down his belly. The sutures were still in place.
The little man snorted angrily. “He’s torn a stitch!”
“Not because I took him out,” the handler protested. “The dog is wild.”
“Enough! Hold him tight. He’s not going to like this.”
The little man took a suture kit out of his bag, and leaned over the dog. Rocky howled and squirmed.
“Let him up.”
Rocky stood up on the table and shook.
“I’ll have to report this,” the little man said. He began gathering up his equipment.
Teddy slipped away from the window and stole across the neighbor’s lawn to his car. He slid in behind the wheel and settled down to wait.
The little man was out five minutes later. Teddy gave him a head start, and then followed him back to town.
He drove around the outskirts of Paris to a commercial zone where there were more factories than houses. Five miles later, he turned into the parking lot of a strip mall. He drove to the far end of the lot and pulled into a parking spot.
Teddy parked two rows away, got out, and followed him. The little man went into a building marked Kelso Labs.
Teddy would have loved to follow him, but the last thing in the world he wanted was for people to remember some Texan snooping around. Coupled with the fact he was driving a stolen car with a smashed driver’s-side window, it was too iffy a prospect.
Teddy drove back to l’Arrington, ditched the car in the garage fairly close to the space he’d stolen it from, and went up to his room. He took out his laptop, and did a search for Kelso Labs.
Kelso Labs was a research facility for 21st Century Pharmaceuticals, a drug company noted for its advances in modern medicine. Nearly sixty percent of their product consisted of innovations in the field of drugs.
Naysayers pointed out that the majority of these “innovations” in pharmacology were merely small variations on existing formulas allowing the same drugs to be rebranded, repackaged, and repriced, with as much as a thousand percent markup. Such complaints seemed to have little effect on the company, whose worth continued to skyrocket.
Twenty-first Century Pharmaceuticals was a wholly owned subsidiary of R & D Enterprises, a multibillion-dollar corporation presided over by Rene Darjon.
Teddy scrolled back to Kelso Labs and did a search for research scientists. The only ones listed were administrative types and low-level lab assistants.
He tried 21st Century Pharmaceuticals. Minutes later he was staring at a picture of the little man he’d been following.
Dr. Stephan von Heinrich was a third-generation German whose grandfather, Klaus von Heinrich, had come to France at the end of war. Exactly which side he had been on was a little murky. There seemed to have been a decided lack of interest, probably due to the fact he was a physicist rumored to have been working on nuclear fission.
Klaus von Heinrich’s son had been a schoolteacher, and barely rated a mention, but his grandson had inherited the family gene.
Dr. Stephan von Heinrich was a renowned research scientist, with degrees in microbiology and virology.
70.
TEDDY HAD PIECES of information now, and he didn’t like the way they were adding up. The auction of the endangered animals, disgusting as it was, was irrelevant, an illicit cover for something even deeper. The real auction was all about the dog.