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The Monkey Handlers

St. Martin's Press

The jarring ring of the telephone snapped Michael Stone awake, adrenaline pumping. Before he moved a muscle, he forced himself to be sure of exactly where he was: at home, in bed, no apparent danger.

The phone rang again, and he brought it to his ear. Stone moved no other portion of his body, nor did he switch on the lamp. From long habit, he sought to preserve his night vision.

"Yes?" he said into the speaker. His voice was low, strong, controlled. There was not a hint that he had been sound asleep a moment before.

"Michael Stone?" It was a woman's voice — youthful, anxious.

"Speaking."

"The lawyer?"

Stone cocked his left wrist. A black rubberized watertight digital watch was on it. All Stone could see were the numbers glowing softly out of the dark: 0423:12.

"Yes. But I don't usually practice at four A.M. The office is open at eight-thirty. Call then for an appointment. Good night."

"Please! Please don't hang up! I'm sorry to wake you, but I don't know what else to do. I can't come to see you because I'm in jail. They've got me charged with burglary! I wasn't trying to steal any —"

"Wait," Stone commanded. "Hold it right there. I don't know who gave you my name, but you've got bad information. I don't practice criminal law. I specialize in real estate. If you've been busted for burglary, I'm the last person you want. Get a hold of the public defender. He'll give you the names of some heavy hitters in the criminal bar. I'm sorry I —"

"No! I can't trust them. I can't trust anyone in this town. Except you."

"You don't even know me."

"My brother said I could."

"Who's your brother?"

"Barry Rosen."

Stone paused to search his memory. "I don't think I ..."

"He changed his name to —"

"Saul," Stone supplied. "Saul Rosen."

"Yes."

"All right. Where are you, Mohawk County Jail?"

"Yes."

"Have you been before a magistrate? Any bail set, anything like that?"

"No. I'm supposed to go to city court at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. I mean this morning."

"All right, tell anyone who asks that I'm representing you. At least for now. Has anyone tried to question you?"

"No. Down the Riegar plant, when I was arrested? They read me my rights. I said I wanted to call a lawyer."

"Good girl. Don't —"

"I'm a woman."

"Right. Good woman. Don't discuss this with anyone. Not just the police, anyone — other prisoners, chaplains, I don't care who. Keep it to yourself. Anyone tries to talk to you, just keep telling them you want to see your lawyer."

"I thought you said you weren't a criminal lawyer?"

"I'm not. I watch a lot of television. Good ni ... Hey! What's your name?"

"Sara — without the h — Rosen."

Stone felt for the cradle and hung up the phone. You never told me you had a sister, Saul, he mused. But, then, Saul never really told anybody much of anything.

Stone checked his watch again: almost 4:30 A.M. No chance of going back to sleep now. For too many years, his day had begun at zero-dark-early. Only within the past year had life afforded him the luxury of sleeping in until six, and he still felt guilty about it.

Michael Stone felt guilty about a lot of things. Now he could add to the list this Rosen girl. Either way he decided about representing her, he would have felt guilt. Viewed objectively, he had no business representing Sara Rosen. It had been years since he had passed the bar exam and had even that tenuous claim to expertise in criminal law. While it was quite legal for Stone to represent her, he couldn't help feeling that it was hardly moral. On the other hand, the woman had invoked a powerful emotional claim upon him from his former life, the military. Saul Rosen had cross-trained with Stone's outfit and once, in combat, taken a wound in order to warn Stone and his men of an ambush. How could anyone with a shred of honor walk away from a debt like that?

"Shit," Stone said quietly, into the night. He raised both legs simultaneously and kicked back the covers, then swung up to sit on the side of his bed. What was done was done. He was due in city court in three hours.

Part of Michael Stone's clinging to the past was his voluntary continuation of a formerly mandatory program of two hours of "killer PT" every morning, six days a week. He wasn't all that much under forty, and he was fighting it every inch of the way. Today was running. He left the light off. There was enough fog-filtered street light coming through the window for him to find his running gear laid out on the chair the night before. He went to the bathroom down the hall, took a towel and wrapped it around his neck, stuffing the loose ends into the front of his T-shirt, then slipped quietly downstairs to the vestibule, where he stretched.

Feeling sufficiently warmed up and loose, Stone slipped out the door and began running easily down the darkened streets of the city of Rhinekill, seat of the government of Mohawk County, New York.

Rhinekill sat on the east bank of the Hudson River, about midway between New York City and the state capital at Albany. Even at 4:45 A.M., the streets, though in immediate pre-dawn darkness, were not deserted. The midnight-to-eight shift of the city of Rhinekill police department, the Mohawk County Sheriff's office, and the nearby barracks of the New York State Police had patrol cars out. Early-morning delivery trucks moved. An ambulance took an emergency patient to St. Martin's Hospital.

At a corner, Stone elected to run through a puddle rather than break his stride to avoid it. The cool splash of water against his shins refreshed him. Another puddle, this one of light from an ancient street lamp, loomed ahead. As he ran through the yellow glow, Stone checked the timer function on his digital watch. He was moving much faster than usual, without the slightest labor to his breathing. Then it dawned on him why; he had been running almost entirely downhill. "Down the Riegar plant ..." Sara Rosen had given as the site of her arrest. Unconsciously, Stone had been heading for it. Rhinekill and its suburbs ran steeply uphill from the valley through which the Hudson flowed. The Riegar plant, once the century-old Hudson Drug Company, was located at the lowest and oldest point in the city, on the bank of the river. Now by default the city's main employer, it had been taken over by West Germany's giant Riegar Farmakologie, GmbH.

At a decrepit, potholed street overlooking the railroad tracks that ran north and south along the river's edge, Stone turned left toward the plant. He wasn't far from it now, but the dark and the fog rolling off the river obscured it from his view. Stone knew what it would look like. A citizen's group, seeking to save the plant "from being gobbled up by foreigners" had successfully petitioned to have the hideous nineteenth-century red-brick building declared an architectural landmark for historical preservation. It did them little good. The practical Germans, noting that the building was only slightly less solid than the pyramids, simply gutted it, left the facade, and added an eighteen-story tower. Then they filled the inside with the Medusa-like monster-scale nest of pipes and retorts that make up a modern drug research and manufacturing plant.

Stone heard and smelled the place before he could see it. The strange odors rose out of the fog and spread down the dirty old streets. Great machines rumbled and hissed in the night. The first thing he could see was the glow of lights, diffused through the smelly mist. Then the outlines of the building could be made out: huge, looming out of the dark. Catwalks, twelve stories high, dully lit. So oppressive was the place that Stone, without thinking about it, slowed his pace to a jog in instinctive caution lest he play the fool, rushing in where a prudent angel would pause.

A sudden noise, like a combination of the sound of escaping steam or a released air brake and a high-speed electric motor, drew Stone's attention down and to his right. There, railroad tracks glistened dully and bifurcated to form a series of sidings between the plant and a shipping dock that disappeared into the blackness of the river. One of the sidings appeared to run right up against the near wall of the plant, which formed part of the foundation of the tower. The wall seemed to split open, and the crack, straight up and down, glowed with light as it grew.

A small switch-engine diesel barked to life, then moved slowly toward the lighted opening. As the two great steel doors completed their electrically driven run and the opening was complete, the light coming from within the bowels of the building glowed so intensely it reminded Stone of the door to a furnace. The small diesel murmured forward into the maw of the furnace and out of sight. There was a clanking and hissing. Moments later, the switch engine emerged pulling a black tanker car. Even as it did so, the huge hangarlike doors started to close. The timing was perfect. The doors whined shut just after the rear of the tanker cleared them. It was as if the diesel and its load had just barely escaped great jaws trying to snap shut upon them.

Stone cut left again to run along the front of the plant. At the building side of the sidewalk, a six-foot wrought-iron picket fence guarded a thirty-foot perimeter lawn that ran up to the side of the building. Whether from the foggy light or the chemicals in the air attacking it, the grass looked to be dying. He gazed up at the tower, which disappeared into the night and fog. What in God's name would Sara Rosen be doing down here? he thought, then leaned forward to start the long running climb back to his home.

* * *

Not long before Michael Stone asked himself the question about Sara Rosen, an inquiry into that very question had begun in an expansive office at the top of the tower he had just passed. Inside it, behind a broad Danish Modern desk, sat a thickset middle-aged man with eyebrows so dark and dense, one didn't notice he was nearly bald. His shirt and tie looked as if he had worn them yesterday and hastily thrown them back on. His name was Georg Kramer, and he was trying to control his anger long enough to get all the information he could from the frightened young uniformed security guard who stood before him.

"Let me see if I have this correctly," Kramer said, leaning forward and glaring at the guard. "At two o'clock in the morning —"

"One fifty-eight, sir," the guard interrupted, taking refuge in useless precision.

Kramer rolled his eyes heavenward. "One fifty-eight," he repeated in exasperation, "you detected a person having no employee identification of any kind lock a bicycle to the perimeter fence, use it to climb up and go over the fence onto company grounds, then run to the lobby downstairs, where you were posted, and from which you have seen all this, and who then sends you on a wild-goose chase ..."

"It was a cat, sir. She said it was a cat ..."

"All right, then! A wild-cat chase! The point is, you were distracted long enough for her to disappear for more than twenty minutes before you found her again, in a most sensitive area, with a camera. Am I correct so far?"

"Yes, sir," replied the hapless guard.

"Whereupon you detain her, ask her nothing about what she was doing here, just called the police and promptly delivered her,and her camera and bicycle, to them, and then, then and only then, do you call me!"

"Sir" — the guard tried to defend himself — "I figured she was one of them outside agitators. I mean she was young an' all, and like on a bicycle an' all, you know? And she kept yellin' about how the scientists are torturin' all the animals in the labs downstairs doin' all them experiments, an' she goes, 'You're not gonna do that to my cat!' An' with all the trouble we been havin' with the agitators and all, I just figured —"

"But you didn't figure, did you," Kramer replied icily, "that if she was an agitator and she took pictures in the labs, we'd be seeing the pictures, poster-size, in the hands of the pickets tomorrow? And you didn't figure that it might be a good idea to retain that film? Or that she might be using all this antivivisection nonsense as a ruse to cover that she was really from a competitor seeking proprietary secrets? That that's what she might have been filming? And that there was plenty of time to turn her over to the police, and I might want to question her first?"

"But, sir, it was a Polaroid camera. An' ya have to give suspects in custody their Miranda warnings —"

Kramer exploded. "You're not the police!" The futility of further discussion overwhelmed Kramer. He sank bank in his chair and waved his hand at the guard. "Get back to your post. Go on!"

The guard gone, Kramer glanced at his wall clock and made a quick time-zone calculation, then picked up a telephone. He punched in two digits, then spoke: "Overseas operator, please."

"What country, sir?"

"West Germany."

"You can dial that country directly, sir."

Kramer wasn't used to placing his own calls, but with no secretary available at this early hour, he had no choice. Irritably, he asked, "Can't I give you the number and be connected?"

"Yes, sir, but you can save —"

"Just connect me," Kramer snapped, and read off the number.

Moments later, a secretary answered the phone in German. Kramer spoke to her in English, which she understood perfectly, and asked to speak to Walter Hoess, chairman of Riegar. Hoess recognized that it was the middle of the night in the eastern United States and his top man there wouldn't be calling at this hour if something wasn't wrong. He was sharply attentive.

"Yes, Kramer. What is it?"

"There has been a penetration, sir. Middle of the night. Person with a camera."

"The explanation?"

"Unknown at this point, sir. Unfortunately, the guard made an assumption it was connected to the animal-rights protesters and delivered the person, a woman, to local police. They have the camera and, presumably, the film. In any event, we were fortunate in that there were no subjects in the apparatus at the time. The last series of tests had been concluded, and the new series not yet begun, awaiting new subjects —"

"But a knowledgeable person, seeing the apparatus, might ..."

"Yes, sir. I am sure we can regain any photographs from the police on a claim of proprietary intellectual property. The city government is cooperative. It will be handled."

"It had better be. What of the product?"

"Still unsatisfactory. The latest batch and the contaminated test subjects had been disposed of in the usual way prior to the entry. Security will be increased substantially before the new tests begin."

"I want this matter resolved promptly. We have a deadline for development of the new product. It is urgent, you understand? Now, I want to know who was responsible for this incident, what they were after, what was photographed and why. And I want them discouraged permanently from any repetition of such conduct."

"Yes, sir. But it may well be just those animal fanatics. They can be embarrassing, but I doubt that they're intelligent enough to be dangerous —" "Now you're thinking like your guard! The stakes are too high to make any assumptions but the worst. I'll send Metz over on the next plane. You are to cooperate with him fully. Keep me advised until he arrives; after that, Metz will communicate with me directly. Good day, Kramer."

Hoess hung up. Kramer noticed that his hand holding the now-dead telephone was wet with sweat. The last thing he wanted was Metz. Chief of security for Riegar worldwide, Metz would have felt right at home in his native land fifty years ago.

* * *

As Stone was running and Kramer was on the phone with Hoess, Sara Rosen was yawning. Out of habit, she tried to stifle it by putting a hand over her mouth. She was prevented from doing so by the handcuff chain looped inside a belly chain around her waist. She was yawning because she had not slept all night. As she had been led back to the women's detention pen from the matron's office at the conclusion of her telephone call to Stone, the female deputy sheriff guarding her said, "Don't get too comfy, sweetie. Chow for court cases is five o'clock."

"What happens then?" Sara asked.

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Excerpted from The Monkey Handlers by G. Gordon Liddy. Copyright © 1990 G. Gordon Liddy. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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