Read Online Perilous Panacea by Ronald Klueh - Free Book Online Page B

Bookbinders. Then more drinks at some dark bar she knew down the street. Next thing he knew, her hands were between his legs, his zipper open, hands inside his shorts massaging his cock. Then, at her apartment, her face was between his legs. An hour later, he was fucked in more ways than one. That’s when he was introduced to Lormes and a tall monster with cameras and a gun. Screwed good by a Philadelphia lawyer.
    No way would he give an account to this young twerp about how that whore did him in. He hadn’t explained it to himself yet, especially after he turned over a new leaf when he met June. She was to be his one and only, another one and only. How many new leafs had to be turned over by a dirty-old man?
    He told Reedan about Philadelphia, a gun, and a threat. He told how they made him call his wife and say he’d be on a consulting job for six-to-eight weeks. After that, the trip here, probably three hours on the same plane. “We’re not in the northeast. It was hotter than Philadelphia when I got off the plane.”
    “We’re probably not in the deep south, either. It wasn’t as humid as Miami.” Like a hiker lost in a forest on a cloudy night, Reedan, the scientist working without his computer, finally deduced that they were in one of the south-central states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Kentucky.
    Surling stood, went to the table, and grabbed a khaki shirt from the pile of work clothes left by the big goon. They’d be dressed for this job, he thought. No theoretical studies, unless you worked on computers like Reedan. “So we’re south of New York and east of the Mississippi River. So what? The question is, how the hell do we get out of here?”
    “There’s no way. I tried that in Miami, and they stopped me cold. They’ve got guns, and one of them is outside the door day and night.”
    “Find a way, because we’ve got to escape. If we’re still here when they finish their job, we’re dead.”
    Surling watched Reedan’s head snap back as if suddenly awakened. Obviously, he’d have to have his head extracted from his ass.
    “They said they’d pay us and turn us loose if we cooperate,” Reedan said.
    “And you’ll cooperate? You’ll help those crazy bastards build an atomic bomb?”
    “We don’t have a choice. They’ll kill us if we don’t.”
    “You mean you’ll help them build a bomb, take their money, and leave? You’ll never worry about how those ten or fifteen bombs we make will be used, how many people they might kill? In other words, if they let you go, you wouldn’t run straight to the police?”
    “But they said…”
    “They’ll kill us,” Surling said quietly. “They don’t have a choice.”

Chapter Seven
    Rick Saul listened to the vocal squirming of the outwardly calm men on the other side of the table as they went into cover-your-ass mode. According to agents who did this all the time, in Washington, somebody—Democrat or Republican—was always trying to save face. Saul knew what came next: whenever trouble surfaced for anyone with power, the immediate reaction was to try to tie the hands of the investigators.
    “It’s simple,” George Spanner said from Saul’s side of the table. “Lie-detector tests for anybody and everybody who could be involved. That’s what, fifteen, maybe twenty people?”
    Bart Kraft shook his graying, sand-colored head, but not a hair moved. “We can’t,” he said, his calm, blue-eyed gaze on Spanner. “Involve twenty people and the story will be in the Post and Times within twelve hours. Besides, it’s not an internal problem.” Although they were in Kraft’s office, sitting at a small conference table across the room from his paper-free desk, the slim Kraft wore his light-blue sport coat buttoned.
    Saul waited for the mundane details of a typical SGP—stolen government property—report. Because government agencies like DOE and DOD were into everything from food and office supplies to gold bullion,