“First, I reread my notes on Vision Zone,” Barbie said. “I was trying to remember the details of what little I’d dug up on the possible foreign funding connection. And guess what? The suspected financier for Vision Zone back in the day was the Al-Rashid family. So, I looked up his family and, lo and behold, they invest heavily in energy, biotech, and defense contracting. They’re a quiet and private Saudi family with really, really deep pockets.”
My fingers flew over the keyboard. After few minutes, I found what I needed. “No kidding. Check this out. The Al-Rashid family controls about one-eighth of the nation’s oil reserves through various holdings and companies. Deep pockets indeed. This is not a coincidence.”
“No, it’s not,” Barbie said.
“Give me a few minutes to put this all together,” I said. “I feel like we’re close. Barbie, you just gave me a shining, golden thread I need to pull.”
Everyone gathered around me, including Basia who had awoken from her lap and wandered over to see what was going on. Fifteen minutes later, I sat back in my chair, satisfied.
“Guys, we’ve got ourselves the smoking gun,” I said. “It just so happens the Al-Rashid family owns controlling interest in Al-Nadir Nexus. This also confirms what we found earlier—one of their sons, Yahir Al-Rashid, is the director of operations in the US.”
Gwen’s jaw tightened. “Operations for experimental research on animals, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” I admitted. “No way to know for sure…yet. But this is the solid connection we were looking for. Al-Nadir Nexus and Al-Rashid to Tango Bio Research Solutions.”
Silence fell over the room.
Basia broke it first. “Do you think this Yahir guy is the one coming tomorrow morning see Ginger?”
I lifted my hands. “I don’t know. He could be the Al-Rashid coming to the lab tomorrow. It would make sense. If Ginger is Tango Bio’s prized prototype funded by Al-Nadir Nexus and by extension the Al-Rashid family, it might be why they needed her safely secured before he arrived.”
Basia crossed her arms, uneasy. “Or before she could disappear again.”
“Yes, or that.” I stared at the screen, following a new thread that had just surfaced. “Wait. This is interesting. There’s something else about this family.”
“What?” Barbie asked.
“The Al-Rashids are heavily invested in horse racing,” I said, reading through the material on my screen. “International circuits. Bloodstock breeding. Performance analytics.”
Basia frowned. “What does that have to do with Ginger?”
I sat back in my chair, interlocking my fingers behind my head and thinking. “We might have been wrong on our guesses as to why the lab is doing this research. It might not be for espionage. Not directly, anyway. That’s not to say it wasn’t how it started, like with the CIA, but it may have developed into something entirely different.”
“What are you getting at, Lexi?” Barbie asked. “What do you mean, entirely different?”
The pieces slid together in my head, cold and precise. “Think about it. If the Saudis could replicate what they did with Ginger, enhanced cognition, pattern recognition, emotional responsiveness, and apply it to horses?—”
“They’d dominate every race,” Gwen finished.
“And more than that,” I added. “They’d control a technology no one else has. A new category of bio-enhanced intelligence. Civilian, military, commercial—it doesn’t matter. Whoever owns it sets the rules.”
Gray exhaled sharply. “Whoa. That’s a stunning theory to contemplate. Stunning and worrisome. I even think it’s something my superiors at the CIA should know about.”
“You have superiors at the CIA?” Barbie asked, looking at Gray with wide eyes.
“That’s strictly off the record,” Gray said sharply, and Barbie nodded.
“Well, this is just our speculation at this point,” I said, waving a hand. “We have no definitive proof of any of this. We need to have more information or we’re just talking fantasy and conspiracies.”
“But, if we’re right, Yahir Al-Rashid could show at the lab in the morning,” Basia said. “And he could take Ginger away and do God knows what to her. They might hurt Tootsie again, too. We might never see either of them again.”
“There’s a worst-case scenario, too,” Gray said quietly. “If Ginger doesn’t perform up to expectations, they may put her to sleep on the spot. They might destroy all the dogs and any other animals they may have in there. Consider the experiment a failure and cut their losses because Al-Rashid would likely cut off their funding lifeline.”
The penthouse went dead silent as we all contemplated this horrific possibility.
“So, what do we do?” Gwen asked.
I glanced back at my laptop. “First, we build an airtight case against Tango Bio, as much as we can in the few hours we have left.”
