Dolph pursed his lips. “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the enormity of what’s going on here.”
“So enlighten us,” interjected Robie.
“I’ll be right back,” said Dolph. “Don’t go anywhere,” he added with a smirk.
A few minutes later someone approached the cell door once more. It was a man neither of them recognized. He was in his thirties and skinny with thick bushy hair.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Reel.
“My real name is Arthur Fitzsimmons.” When he next spoke his voice was one that they both instantly recognized. “But you might also know me as Dolph.”
Both Robie and Reel gaped.
“God, that feels so good,” Fitzsimmons said, running a hand through his hair. “That latex head mask is a real bitch to wear. And the fat suit! Well, even in the cool weather it’s a bitch. Now I can understand what actors feel like.”
“Why the alter ego?” asked Reel.
Fitzsimmons used a sanitary wipe pulled from his pocket to clean some sticky gum from his face. “Well, I didn’t want anyone to know who I really was, of course. If things went to hell the police would be looking for a pudgy guy named Dolph who was in his fifties. I actually have a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech. And I’m not a Nazi, in any sense of the word. My great-grandmother was an Orthodox Jew, which means my mother was Jewish, and thus so am I. Though my mother never practiced her religion after her marriage. My father never converted. I was raised as a Catholic.”
Reel said, “So the commandment about ‘Thou shalt not kill’ never really sunk in with you, did it?”
“So why the neo-Nazi subterfuge, then?” asked Robie.
“It was a good cover for what we were doing here.”
“Like being a murderer?” said Reel.
Fitzsimmons smiled a bit embarrassedly. “I have to admit, that was quite an adrenaline ride. I never got that rush poring over the periodic table, I can tell you that.”
“You killed Holly in cold blood,” said Robie.
“You pushed my hand. Of course, I never expected you to escape, either. Scared the crap out of me. It’s why I had to lie low here.”
Reel said, “How did you get to them? They were on a bus heading to Denver and then on to California.”
“They never got on the bus. We tracked them to the bus station via Luke’s cell phone. He’d thrown it away, but he did so at the bus station. They were about to board the bus when my men showed up. They came with no problem because we told them if they made any trouble we’d shoot everyone in the station dead.”
“You bastard!” said Reel.
Fitzsimmons performed a mock bow. “I’ll take that as a compliment. But I couldn’t very well let them go, could I?”
“And Beverly Drango?” said Robie. “You couldn’t let her go either?”
“She was stupid. We knew she lived with Lamarre. We were going to take her out along with the others, but she was smarter than Lamarre. She had learned some things through her job with the casino company. She put two and two together. And tried to blackmail us. Well, we paid her. You might have noticed that she lived in a dump yet she had a new car. But it apparently wasn’t enough. So we had to tie up that loose end.”
“And I’m assuming that under the guise of it being Roger Walton, you paid Zeke Donovan to try to scare us off,” said Reel.
“I should have paid him and his idiot nephew to put the bullets through your head, not the windshield. But hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
“So what’s really going on here?” asked Robie. “What’s the point of all this?”
Fitzsimmons stared at him. “How about I show you?”
A few minutes later, wearing yellow jumpsuits but still shackled, Robie and Reel were led out of the cell and down a long corridor where a golf cart awaited them.
They climbed onto the cart along with three guards, Fitzsimmons driving.
“Lambert has a golf cart to get around his missile site too,” observed Robie.
“It’s where I got the idea,” admitted Fitzsimmons.
“So Lambert is involved in this?” said Reel.
“Hell no. He’s a legit guy, which means I have no use for him. And he’s also a drunk. Loose lips sink ships, as they used to say.”
Fitzsimmons started the cart and drove down a long tunnel with dim lights that appeared to be battery powered. After a ten-minute ride Fitzsimmons stopped the cart, and they all climbed off.
He unlocked a door that had a biometric reader similar to the one they had seen right before Bender had been murdered. They passed through the door, and Robie and Reel had to blink their eyes rapidly to adjust to the heightened level of light.
The room they were in was large, with numerous stainless steel workbenches and sophisticated automated equipment and machinery neatly arrayed around the space. There was also a conveyor belt assembly line down which packages and plastic trays were moving. The place was spanking clean. The tiled floor looked as though you could eat off it. The air was pure with no residual chemical smell and the temperature was comfortable.
Robie counted twenty workers dressed in blue scrubs with masks over their mouths, goggles over their eyes, and latex gloves on their hands. This was obviously a manufacturing line of some sort.
Reel’s observations had gone even further. She said, “You’re making drugs.”
Fitzsimmons glanced over at her and smiled encouragingly. “That’s exactly what we’re doing, and on a grand scale if I might say so.”
“What sort of drugs?” asked Robie.
In answer Fitzsimmons strode over to a bench and picked up two plastic bottles and a small baggie. He carried them back over and held them up.
“We have a diversified product line. Just like Apple, you have to have many things to entice your customers.” He indicated one of the plastic bottles. “Oxycodone, as fine a quality as anything manufactured by Big Pharma.” He indicated the other bottle. “Fentanyl. Some really powerful shit. The plastic bag, on the other hand, contains meth, but of a quality that is light-years ahead of the typical product you can buy on the street. And for that we charge a premium.” He swept a hand over the workspace. “We have four rooms just like this one sprawled across the missile complex. And living quarters for the staff, as well as other essentials.”
“How does a Caltech chemist end up doing this?” asked Robie.
Fitzsimmons looked sheepish. “I have to admit, I was a huge fan of Breaking Bad. And I thought, why not? I’m a smart guy with special skills. I was making peanuts at my old job. Why not go for the brass ring? I just decided to do it on a much bigger scale.”
“How did you manage to build out all this without anyone noticing you rehabbing the space?” asked Reel.
“Oh, we didn’t do it on the scale that Roark Lambert did. We weren’t building out luxury condos, after all. So we used the tunnel from the quarry to bring in all the equipment and other materials. And we did it all at night. We actually didn’t have far to go. Some research showed us that the Army Corps of Engineers had tunneled pretty far into that ridge to increase the amount of usable space for their operations. So we just connected up on the other side.” His gaze swept over some of the workers in blue scrubs.
Robie noted that not one of them had looked up from their tasks when he and the similarly shackled Reel were led into the room. Also arrayed around the space were men with guns.
Fitzsimmons followed Robie’s gaze. “We take security very seriously.”
“I can see that.”
“We also brought sophisticated business, manufacturing, and distribution protocols to the illicit drug market. There’s too much crap out there. It can kill you. There’s this stuff going around now, heroin laced with carfentanil, or elephant tranquilizer. It’s lethal if you smoke it, swallow it, or even inhale it. Hell, it can make you really sick if you just touch it. And then there’s this shit called gray death, which is just a mixture of crap that’ll be the last hit you take. You got
all these idiots trying to mix anything with stuff like fentanyl to give the big bang and they don’t know what they’re doing and they end up snuffing people left and right. And what business survives by killing its clients?”
“Ask Big Tobacco about that,” retorted Reel.
“Anyway, you have all these drug sites on the Dark Web. Remember Silk Road? They took that down years ago, but it was small potatoes compared to what’s out there now. There are hundreds of sites up now that are far bigger and trade only in synthetic drugs. Although the South American cartels are catching on to it, most are manufactured in China, shipped through to Hong Kong, and then mailed to the U.S.”
“Mailed?” said Robie incredulously.
Fitzsimmons smiled. “Heroin, coke, and pills are bulky. And easily tracked. Fentanyl on the other hand? You can ship enough Fentanyl to OD a hundred thousand people in a manila envelope. Two flakes of the stuff are lethal to an adult. But the thing is, the Feds are onto the Dark Web stuff and the use of the postal service. And they’re looking hard at shipments coming in from overseas. That gives homegrown manufacturers like us a huge leg up. American made, right? People want manufacturing jobs to come back here, right? Well, baby, here we are.”
“I don’t think they had what you do in mind,” pointed out Reel.