Chapter 4: The Trojan Horse
The execution of their plan required an opportunity. It arrived a month later when I flew to Vancouver for an environmental policy conference.
I brought my junior associate, Zara, with me. Zara was brilliant. I had personally advocated for her promotion and, the previous year, quietly lent her $8,000 for her mother’s dental surgery. She had paid me back every cent, leaving a handwritten note of profound gratitude in my desk drawer.
On the second afternoon in Vancouver, during a walk along the seawall, I clumsily scraped the back of my right ankle against a rusted chain barrier. A shallow, stinging graze. Nothing more.
In the elevator back at the hotel, Zara stared at my ankle with a strange, hyper-fixated intensity. She insisted on fetching supplies from the gift shop. When she returned, she crouched before me, meticulously examining the broken skin, asking exactly where the metal had bitten into my flesh.
We flew home to Toronto on a Friday evening. My ankle was tender, but I brushed it off.
Two hours after Tristan brought me home, the buzzer rang. It was Pauline.
She stood in our entryway, wearing a chillingly placid smile. She claimed she’d heard from Tristan about my minor injury. Reaching into her handbag, she produced a small, unmarked glass jar.
“A friend in my building swears by this for skin abrasions,” she purred, looking directly at my bandaged heel.
Tristan beamed from the kitchen doorway. “See?” he said, his voice dripping with relief. “She looks after you. It’s an olive branch, Reese.”
Exhausted from years of trench warfare, I wanted to believe it. That night, sitting on the edge of my bed, I unscrewed the lid. The ointment smelled faintly metallic, a strange, clinical odor. But I rubbed a generous layer directly into the open scrape.
I didn’t know I was massaging a biological weapon into my bloodstream.
