Lock In (Lock In, #1)(76)

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Dad said, and waved me off. He set down his drink and looked at me.

“What is it?” I said.

“Tell me what I should do,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that son of a bitch tried to kill you,” Dad said, loudly, forcefully. “My only child. My flesh and blood. Tell me what to do, Chris. If you told me to shoot him, I would go do it right now.”

“Please don’t,” I said.

“Stab him,” Dad said. “Drown him. Run him over with my truck.”

“They are all tempting,” I said. “But none of those is a good idea.”

“Then tell me,” Dad said. “Tell me what I can do.”

“Before I do,” I said. “Let me ask. Senate?”

“Oh. Well. That,” Dad said, and reached for his scotch. I picked it up and moved it out of his reach. He looked at me quizzically, but accepted it and sat back. “William came over this morning, first thing,” he said, referring to the state party chairman. “He was all concern and sympathy and told me how much he admired me standing up for my home and family, and somehow all that puffery ended up with me being told that there’s no way the party could support me this election cycle. And perhaps it was just me, but I think there was the implication I wouldn’t be supported in any election cycle that might come up.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Dad shrugged. “It is what it is, kid,” he said. “It saves me the trouble of pretending to be nice to a bunch of *s I never really liked.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “So. Dad. I need to you do something for me.”

“Yeah?” Dad said. “And what is that, Chris?”

“I need you to do a business deal,” I said.

Dad furrowed his brow at me. “How did we get to a business deal?” he asked. “I thought we were talking revenge and politics.”

“We still are,” I said. “And the way it will get done is through a business deal.”

“With whom?” Dad asked.

“With the Navajo, Dad,” I said.

Dad sat up, uncomfortable. “I know you’ve been busy,” he said. “But I just shot one of their people last night. I don’t think they’ll want to do business with me today.”

“No one blames you for it.”

“I blame me for it,” Dad said.

“You didn’t shoot him because he was Navajo,” I said. “You shot him because he was about to shoot me. He wasn’t there because he was a bad man. He was there because bad men were using him.”

“Which means I shot an innocent man,” Dad said.

“You did,” I said. “And I’m sorry about that, Dad. But you didn’t kill him. Lucas Hubbard did. He just used you to do it. And if you hadn’t, it would be me who was dead.”

Dad put his head in his hands. I let him take a moment.

“Bruce Skow was innocent,” I said. “Johnny Sani was innocent. Neither of them are coming back. But I have a way you can punish the person responsible for both of their deaths. You’ll also get to help out a lot of people in the Navajo Nation in the bargain. Something really good can come out of this thing. You just have to do what you already do better than anyone else. Do some business.”

“What kind of business are we talking about here?”

“Real estate,” I said. “Sort of.”

* * *

Three thirty, and I was with Jim Buchold, in his home office. “We’re tearing down both buildings,” he said, of Loudoun Pharma campus. “Well. We’re tearing down the office building, which the Loudoun County inspectors tell me is mostly cracked off its foundation. The labs are already gone. We’re just clearing the rubble for that.”

“What’s going to happen to Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“In the short run, tomorrow I’m going to a memorial for our janitors,” Buchold said. “All six of them at the same time. They were all each other’s friends. It makes sense to do it that way. Then on Monday I’m laying off everyone in the company and then taking bids for buyers.”

I cocked my head at that. “Someone wants to buy Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“We have a number of valuable patents and we were able to retrieve a good amount of our current research, some of which can probably be reconstructed,” Buchold said. “And if whoever buys the company hires our researchers, there’s a chance they’ll reconstruct it faster. And we still have our government contracts, although I’m having our lawyers go through those contracts now to make sure they can’t be withdrawn because of terrorism.”

“Then why sell at all?” I asked.

“Because I’m done,” Buchold said. “I put twenty years into this company and then it all went up in a single night. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Of course you don’t,” Buchold said. “You can’t know. I didn’t know until someone took two decades of my life and turned it into a pile of rubble. I think about trying to build it back up from nothing and all it does is make me feel tired. So, no. Time for me and Rick to retire to the Outer Banks, get a beach house, and run corgis up and down the sand until they collapse.”