Pattern Recognition
Nava Moseyik, Ch 6 of 23
In the previous chapter, we saw how NVS won the commission to work on the Nava Moseyik virus and learned that Geo has some disquieting news for Manni.
In chapter 6, below, Geo’s findings are revealed, and the stakes are raised.
Nava Moseyik is a 23-chapter near-future science fiction suspense series that spans continents, decades, and styles. If you missed earlier posts, the story starts here.
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Ch 6: Pattern Recognition
July 31st, 2026
“You wanna know what’s killing me, Manni?” Geo objected, after Manni said he was too busy for an initial face-to-face. “Family loyalty is killing me. I swear to God.”
Of course, Geo said yes, he would look into his request, and after the call, he sat in his lounge mulling over the next steps. In his experience, whenever someone came to him seeking help, they usually told the story they wanted to believe, not necessarily the one he needed to hear.
“Humans are hard-wired to find patterns – pattern recognition,” he would often explain to prospective clients. “We see what we see, then fill in the blanks with what we want. But what we want is not always the truth. In fact, it rarely is. I deal in facts, not supposition, not extrapolation, and certainly not your worst nightmares.”
So, while Geo listened to the client’s story—in this case, his nephew’s suspicions that his wife was having an affair—and would use it as a guide, he knew it was based on fear, and loaded with assumptions; needless to say, Manni was not a reliable source. He trusted nothing until he saw it for himself. The first step was establishing his own version of the plot, based on the six golden questions; who, what, why, where, when, and how. All he had was the “who”—Charlie—and a likely “where”—Manni and Charlie’s home. That would be where he would start.
Surveillance was dull, but then again, so was living alone; in both instances, audiobooks were his friends. Oliver Sacks was his current favorite, always offering him insight into how the mind works. While sitting in his car, 50 yards up from Manni’s house, he also ran standard background checks. He had quickly gotten over the discomfort of investigating family, had settled in, and now regarded this as just another job. He looked at known email addresses and phone numbers and could see nothing out of the ordinary. But after tailing her on her commute to the Institute of Neurology at St Barnabas,’ watching her engaged in a heated phone conversation the entire trip, then finding no record of the call on her known accounts, he’d found the “how”: a second phone.
It took another week of standard commutes to work, each with her consumed in phone conversations the whole way, before Geo finally got a break. He had broken into her car that first night, to see if she had kept the phone there: No luck. Charlie was a great listener whenever Geo shared pro tips at their family get-togethers. She probably knew most of the tricks in the book, but not all of them. A week after he’d started following her, bingo; a different route to work.
Charlie made a one-hour stop at a residence in Madison, New Jersey, before emerging from the home visibly upset, getting in her car, and continuing to her office. The house belonged to one Nathan Benedict. He was 54, a good-looking guy, nice car, a lawyer; great income, and married. Of course, his wife wasn’t around.
Geo was closing in.
The following week offered no clues at all. Except, it did, by omission. Charlie had hunkered down. She worked from home and rarely stepped outside except to take out the trash. Geo had seen this type of behavior a thousand times; she was nervous.
He took a trip back out to Madison to see if he could strike up a conversation with this Nathan Benedict guy. But if Charlie’s low-key week was odd, Benedict’s residence revealed highly suspicious activity: His house had been sold. What looked like moving trucks were emptying the place, and the company knew nothing about where the seller had gone.
“No idea,” one of the drivers said when asked about the previous owners. “We are not a moving company. We buy and sell the contents of houses. We gave the guy cash, and he gave us the deed. Are you looking to sell? Here’s my card.”
Benedict had sold up, liquidated his assets, and disappeared. His wife, Sarah, had gone, too. Their extended families were tight-lipped and didn’t give anything away, but info on Sarah wasn’t hard to find by other means. But just because it was easy to find didn’t make it easy to understand.
Dr. Sarah Benedict had, just three weeks prior, received a significant promotion to become the Director of Plant and Agricultural Sciences at the Neovita Seria Labs in Short Hills—Manni’s Lab.
Sarah Benedict had replaced Anthony Green, who had fallen ill in recent months. And Green himself had only been in the position around four months after taking over from Gupta, who had fallen sick under similar circumstances. Geo began to conside the possibility Charlie hadn’t gone to Madison to see him; she had gone to see her.
Under the guise of an insurance claims investigator, Geo stopped by to visit Gupta and Green separately. Each suffered from blurred vision, digestive issues, physical and mental fatigue, inability to think straight for more than a couple of minutes, paralysis, and severe cognitive decline. Their families confirmed that both were taken to St Barnabas when they fell sick, and both was seen by none other than Dr. Alexandra Cortez—Charlie—the attending physiotherapist at the St Barnabas Neuroscience center.
And now, Sarah Benedict was missing; visited by Charlie, and now gone.
It was after learning this that Geo called his nephew.
“Manni, shut up and get over here,” he had insisted.
Manni did shut up, and he did go over to Geo’s, and he remained shut up for a good few minutes after Geo had updated him.
“You accepted the promotion?” Geo asked of Manni, who had been offered the position of Director of PAS in place of Sarah Benedict, who was now M.I.A.
“Yes,” Manni confirmed.
“What happened to her?” Geo pressed.
“Family problems, I believe. Her mom,” said Manni, reiterating the company memo that had announced her departure.
“You need more independence from this lab, not more ties to it. Did you consult Charlie about the opportunity?” Geo probed.
“Work chat isn’t really an ice breaker these days,” Manni admitted. “She wasn’t enthusiastic.”
“This is big, Manni,” Geo explained, trying to make him see the context, in which his wife was front and center. And the picture was not flattering. “She may or may not be having an affair; I’ve found no evidence to support that, but whatever. You need to put on your big boy pants. This is bigger than that. Pattern recognition: First Gupta, then Green, gets sick. They are both critically ill. Charlie is up at the sharp end in both medical cases. Then Sarah gets the job only to be, at best, intimidated, and at worse, taken out completely, not two weeks after Green goes down, again with Charlie at the leading edge of the case, knocking on Benedict’s door days before she went missing. And now, you get the job. What the hell is going on?”
“All this to get me a promotion?” Manni asked in a moment of either supreme naivety or denial. Either way, Geo needed to snap Manni out of his fog so that he could grasp the severity of his situation, and he chose a reality check as the way to do it.
“Manni,” he yelled, “Wake up, or you are going to die!”
End of Chapter 6
In chapter 7, Sunny Side Up, we will flash back to when Charlie and Manni first met.