Monkey Games
By Vince Coyner
Chapter 14. Felix
Smiling at their good fortune, but knowing that they probably had less than an hour before the van was discovered, Laura quickly drove the three miles back to the hotel, parking the car in an underground lot below a shopping mall two blocks from the hotel. She started to head back to the room when Jonathan stopped, “Why are we going back to the hotel?” he asked. “There’s nothing there.” Laura thought about it for a moment and realized he was right. They needed clothes and phones to replace the ones they had left at the bank. She realized they were in a mall and could get whatever they needed more quickly than walking back to the hotel. First they went to a men’s clothes store and purchased a two changes of clothes for Jonathan along with socks, underwear and shoes. He wore his new jeans and a shirt out of the store, leaving his half of a police uniform on the dressing room floor. They then went next door and did the same for Laura, picking up a dress as well as a couple of pairs of comfortable jeans. Finally they went to a mobile phone store and picked up a collection of phones that mirrored what she had purchased that morning. The saleswoman stood in awe as Laura paid the 4,000 Euro bill with cash. As she was counting the money Laura wished she had remembered to pick up her phones back at the bank because the police could trace her call to Felix earlier that day. She had to reach him now. As soon as she finished paying the bill she dialed Felix’s number.
Immediately after he had hung up with Laura that morning, Felix started to get dressed. Tabitha protested. They had been awake only a few minutes when the phone rang. It was enough that she was disconcerted when he decided to answer it in the middle of what for her was such an earthshaking moment. Now she was truly angry that he decided he had to go into work at this hour on a Saturday. “What are you doing?” she asked as he walked away from the bed, letting the sheet slip from his waist. He leaned over and grabbed his pants and pulled them up. He turned to her and said, “I’m sorry Tabitha, something important has come up and I have to go to the office.” With something more than a pout on her face as she was sitting up in the bed now with her arms draped over her bent knees which were under the sheet. “Does that mean that I’m not important?” Realizing that if he did not soothe her feathers he might end up having a fight on his hands which he didn’t have time for right now. “Listen, Princess” as he sometimes called her, although she never did realize that it was always when he was in some kind of hot water, “You are very important, but I’ve got to go.” He leaned down and sat beside her on the side of the bed. “Do you remember that Mr. Cooke, the man who owns my company and was injured in an accident about a week and a half ago?” She nodded that she did, although it was obvious she was not going to be happy with where this conversation was going. “Well, I have to go in and gather some very important data for his doctors and unfortunately it cannot wait.” He rubbed his hand on her leg and kissed her knee. “I promise, I’ll be home as soon as I can,” as he said the words he knew that he didn’t’ know if they were true and he didn’t really care at that moment, he just knew he needed to get out of there right now. He got up and finished dressing. He walked back over to Tabitha and leaned over and kissed her. Clasping her head in his hands he whispered in her ear, “I’ll be back soon, I promise”. With that he was out the door and into his Saab 9-5 sedan, one of Saab’s top of the line. Rolling down the windows he loved the feeling of the wind as it circulated behind him. The 9-5’s rear seat compartment was uniquely shaped so that at 85 miles per hour the wind would rush in and circulate in such as way that those in the front seats would get a gentle breeze rather than a tornado. He loved his car, although it was really much too expensive for him to afford, as was the house in which he had just left Tabitha and the clothes he was wearing. Frankly he was never sure how he managed to actually pay all of his bills each month but somehow he always seemed to get through.
Arriving at his office he quickly picked up his financial statement book for the previous year. Although he had been working at Alexander Resources for over two years, he was still an analyst in the accounting department rather than a manager who actually wrote the financial requests and put his name on the reconcilliated budgets. From what he had seen he was smarter than just about everyone in the department, particularly the people for whom he worked. Nonetheless, he knew that eventually he would get his shot at doing the budget for one facility and by doing so he would finally show them what he was capable of. In preparation for that opportunity Felix had studied the consolidated budgets for the entire company for the past four years. On his computer he had copies of the company’s budgets for the last decade.
Just as Laura had thought, there were no records that corresponded to the name Aislado. He searched for the names Jonathan and Monkey Games with similar results. He tried different combinations of the words to no avail. He mixed in the words La Playa Arena and still came up with zero. Frustrated, he decided to look into the budget of La Playa Arena itself to see if it might provide a clue. He figured that if the facility Laura was talking about was a support facility for La Playa Arena then there might be some kind of line items suggesting where he should look. Unfortunately the facility at La Playa Arena had been in existence for over twenty years, which meant that there were a lot of budgets to search through. He decided to start at last year and work backwards. After the third year he found something of some interest. Once he noticed the pattern it was easy to find what he was looking for. The key was the consistency of their budgets.
While the budgets of virtually every facility in the company were highly erratic, jumping or falling depending on the level of success of a new drug or program, each of the budgets for these five anomalous facilities increased at an almost constant rate of 2% a year for at least a decade, some going back almost twenty years. In the ebb and flow world of scientific experiments, that kind of consistency is not only highly unusual, it’s virtually non-existent. For someone searching through a haystack of budget numbers, this anomaly was like a giant sized needle. Given the nature of their existence (ostensibly biological diversity studies) the budgets should have fluctuated greatly from one year to the next and should have had distinctly different patterns from one another. While the islands were no doubt very similar given their geographic proximity to one another, the fact is that they would have involved different species, different tests and different lengths of time. Had everything been the same the research could have been done at one facility. The data suggest that the research was almost identical, yet carried out on five different islands. Once he identified the five facilities, which were rather inconspicuously named C1 through C5 finding the rest of the data should have been rather easy. Each line item on the budget, or in this case, each facility was hyperlinked to a database that included all relevant bookkeeping and accounting data for that facility. Oddly, for the islands of interest there was no database to which he could connect. Outside their line items under La Playa Arena, there seemed to be no information available about them. Laura had said the thing she was most interested in was their location. Under the best of circumstances that was a difficult task to accomplish given simple accounting files, although with most facilities the location was simply a phone call or map away. These facilities had been purposely named in such as way as to make it impossible to find them on a simple map.
Felix decided there might be one other way to find out their locations. Alexander Resources pilots were required to log their origin and destinations and any stops in between if they were flying to or from research facilities. This requirement was established in response to an error in the early 1980s in which research samples from one facility were accidentally picked up and labeled as having come from another facility. The mistake cost the company approximately $30 million to fix, but more importantly it resulted in nine months of data being lost and the forced replication of dozens of experiments over the following two years. The company’s universal transport database was very thorough and was set up in such a way that a user could search for flights to or from any destination. In addition, it could query via dates of arrival or departure, by the pilot’s name or by the name of the research series.
Felix decide that he would start with the most obvious, flight numbers. After that multi-million dollar snafu, every facility in the Alexander Resources empire was given a three character designation. The first three characters of any flight number were the designation for the departing facility. The last three numbers of the flight number indicated the location of the destination facility. By sorting the flight data by number designation Felix was able to isolate all of the flights to and from La Playa Arena, which was designated by the number 241. Once isolated Felix sorted the La Playa Arena flights by destination. It became clear that there were five facilities where the travel patterns were almost identical. The date seemed to suggest flights between La Playa Arena and each of the five islands generally occurred on a bi-monthly basis. Armed with the location codes Felix was able to access the transportation logs and cross-reference the dates. This data mining allowed him to access a complete flight record for each of the five islands. The records were required by the Peruvian government in case of an emergency and were filed with the Lima air traffic control centers electronically. From records of those filings Felix was able to get both the name and coordinates for all five of the islands. He went to a map and quickly had all five islands plotted, as well as La Playa Arena. He thought to himself as he was looking at the map that this was the most convoluted research he had done in years.
He quickly dialed Laura at the number she had called him from while he was at home. Nothing, the phone simply rang and rang and no one picked up. He tried twice more thinking he might have dialed the wrong number. Nothing. Damn. He no way of knowing that the phone was sitting in a drawer in Christine’s and he could have let it ring for a day and no one would have heard it. He hit the off button and slammed the phone back into his pocket. Moments later when as he was heading back to the maps his phone rang. “Felix” he heard the voice on the other end say. “Laura?” he replied. “Yes” said Laura as she was walking down the street towards Zurich’s business district. “What did you find?” she asked. “Exactly what you thought I would” “Really, how many are there? she said. “There are five islands that are anomalies and located very close to La Playa Arena. One of them happens to be Aislado.” “Good. What do you have on them?” she queried. “I have their names, budgets and locations” “Excellent.” She said, “Thank you.” She hesitated, trying to figure out how to get the information. Although she could write the coordinates for the islands down, she imagined she would have to look at the data in order to figure out the next step. It was not feasible to have Felix e-mail all of it to her and there was no way to have it sent by courier in a timely fashion. She decided she needed to go and pick it up. “Felix” Laura said, “I need you to do something for me.” “Anything.” Felix chimed in before she could even begin to explain. “I need you to meet me with the information in Lyon. Tonight” “No problem. I’ll catch the next TGV and I should be there before eight. Realizing that things might get a bit hotter as soon as the police were discovered in the bank’s parking garage, she added “I have to tell you, it might be a little dangerous to be seen with me right now” “I don’t care” came Felix’s response. “Seriously” she repeated, “It could be very dangerous.” “Like I said, I don’t care.” “Thank you. I’ll explain everything to you tonight” “There is a McDonalds in the station in Lyon. Meet me there at 10:30.” “I’ll see you then.” “Thank you” said Laura Felix wondered what he was getting himself into. It didn’t matter. Laura had infatuated him since the day they met. He had just started working at Alexander Resources when Laura came storming into the office of his boss Edgard. Felix had been sitting in the chair listening to what was Edgard’s “Welcome” speech. Before she opened the door you could hear Edgard’s secretary, Madeline, arguing. “Mr. Alsee cannot see you right now. He is with someone.” “I don’t care, I want to speak with him right now!” said an obviously angry woman. “Well, I’m sorry, you can’t.” responded Madeline just before the door burst open and Laura came walking into the office. Madeline came scurrying after her “Ma’am! You can’t!” then finally, simply looking up at David she said “I’m sorry Mr. Alsee, I tried to stop her.” “It’s OK Madeline. Thank you.” Addressing Laura, Edgard said “Hello Laura, how are you today. I’d like to introduce you to Felix, he has just joined the financial team.” Laura quickly looked over at Felix, gave a fake smile and said “Hello” rather curtly. Felix smiled and nodded his head. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Laura asked Edgard, or more accurately threw at him with the velocity of a fastball to the head. “I’ve got a dozen people on my staff who are still out of pocket because of that damn bank change.” “I’m sorry,” said Edgard. “Bullshit! That’s exactly what you said last time and you told me then it would be fixed.” Glaring at him, she continued: “Not only is it not fixed, but now rather than three people having paychecks that bounced, I have a dozen.” “I’m sorry for the mistake. I obviously thought the problem was solved. I’ll have the problem solved by tomorrow.” “No, you’ll have the problem solved today. I want checks from a working account written and delivered to all twelve of my employees before they leave today, with an extra 150 Euros for their inconvenience and whatever fees they might have incurred.” “But” Edgard started to protest. “No buts!” Laura said as she walked closer to Edgard’s desk. “Do it. Do it today, and do not let this happen again. I don’t know what kind of an operation you are running here Edgard, but you had better fix this problem, and fast.” Finished, she simply turned and left without saying another word. Felix looked up at Edgard who was trying to smile, and was only half-successful. He had said nothing because there was nothing he could say. In every respect he was no match for Laura and he knew it. He always felt like the next time they had a confrontation that he was going to come out on top, but inevitably their confrontations always seemed to play out as this one just had. While something of a bookish man, he was far from sheepish, but there was something about that woman which he simply could not compete with.
Edgard looked at Felix, and said rather sheepishly “I’m sorry about that” “Ah... no problem” replied Felix, who was mesmerized by the woman he had just met, or more accurately had not met. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew he was going to find out. Ever since that day Felix had carried a candle for Laura, but while they had become great friends, she never gave him a second look romantically. Although he had made a number of rather thinly veiled attempts at romance, she never once accepted them. They ended up spending more time with one another out of work than they did in work yet still nothing ever developed, regardless of how hard he tried. It was not that there was someone else, it simply seemed that love was something that she had neither the time nor the desire for. Perpetually frustrated, Felix remained forever hopeful. Now, whatever the situation she found herself in was, perhaps it would be the event that caused her to see him in whatever light was necessary for her heart to open up to him. He didn’t even go home, although it was on the way to the train station and he had enough time. Knowing she was still there, he called Tabitha from the car. I’m sorry sweetheart; I can’t go with you to have dinner with your parents. I have to go to Lyon tonight. Right now as a matter of fact. I’m on my way to the train station.” “Maybe we can do it next weekend.” It was not that he was lying to her. He never felt like he was using her, he knew that she was not Laura. She was nice, very nice actually, and beautiful and fun and fantastic in bed, but the bottom line was that she was not Laura. Objectively he knew how difficult it was for a real person in a real relationship to measure up to the imagined romance of a longed for love, but that was life and if he was close to finally getting the woman of his dreams he was not letting anyone get in the way. He would do anything for Laura and today seemed like it might be that day. As he was saying “I’m sorry” to Tabitha, Felix’s phone rang. He had a call on the other line. “Sweetheart, I’ve got to go. Enjoy dinner with your parents” Quickly he clicked over the line to catch the other call. It was another number he did not recognize, it must be Laura. It wasn’t.
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