Somehow—a careless word from Dustin Alberts? a threat?—the Chinese find out about Murph’s gambit. Millions are at stake. Murder and mutilation and all other sorts of hell break loose. At that point, wayward Nate McCormick is safe because he doesn’t know much. He’s safe because he’s still a civilian. But wayward Nate McCormick, as Brooke Michaels said, never could leave well enough alone. So he rejects all things wayward, and makes it his job to find out what happened to the Boy Scout and his slaughtered kin. He finds the images of people with their faces gnawed apart by tumor. He’s finally found a mission. He’s happy, damn him. As the rest of his life falls apart, he’s absolutely thrilled.
There was more to the picture, though, tendrils extending much farther back than Murph’s call to Nate or even Murph’s acceptance to do a little tissue analysis for Tetra’s chiefs. The Chinese were on Tetra’s back. Why? Did it start back before the inception of Tetra, in a lab at the University of Illinois?
I thought about Tom Bukowski and his postdoc, Peter Yee. I thought about them being killed in a boating accident. “Accident.” Right.
My mind continued to drift, again back to Murph. How had the Boy Scout justified this? Paul loses big money in a botched business venture, he wants to pay it back. Moral, right? The right thing to do. He wants to keep the house in Woodside, keep the nice cars. Not as moral, but what the hell? Wife likes the house. To pay back Mom and Dad, to keep the wife in her castle, all he has to do is close down an illegal clinic that just happens to be pumping cancer into people. That’s good, no? Sarcoma is bad; what sort of Boy Scout wouldn’t try to stop it? And so what if he gets a greased palm in the process? He’ll just ask his old pal Nate McCormick to run interference with the Chinese, set public health loose on them. Nate, if he plays along, will get something, too. Everybody wins. The really bad guys go to jail, Mom and Dad get their nest egg replenished, even Nate gets a little spending cash, maybe to replace that rusting heap he’s driving. Oh, and if things go wrong, if Nate doesn’t play along, the Chinese can take care of him. But what does that matter? McCormick fudged data in his PhD; he should have been hauled in front of the firing squad ten years ago.
How long had Paul Murphy sat with these ideas? How much justification did he work his way through until he was able to pick up the phone and call me? How much time before these ideas simply felt natural to him? Before he got used to it, and became a beast?
There was a sick inevitability to this: whether or not Murph had been murdered, I would be in the same position—legs bound, looking forward to awful things. Murph probably knew all along I would need to be “taken care of.” From the instant I answered his phone call, I was destined for this. I should have showed up here the first day, offered myself for sacrifice, saved myself a lot of trouble.
A door to the loading bay—on the side opposite the outside doors—swung open.
Two men walked into the room. One was my tattooed pal, looking mighty dashing in his black suit, cream-colored shirt, gelled hair. The other man was older. He too wore a black suit—well tailored, conservative—but sported a tie loosened at the neck. It was the same man who’d answered the door in Napa the first time I visited Tim. Uncle Tony.
Underneath a No Smoking sign, he pulled out a cigarette and blazed up. Kwong stood silently next to him.
“You’ve made life somewhat difficult for us, Dr. McCormick,” Tony said.
“I’m just repaying the favor, Garheng. Or Tony. Or Mr. Ho. What do you want me to call you?”
Tony found a chair near a pallet stacked with boxes of pipette tips, and dragged it over. He sat facing me.
Goody, I thought, we’re going to have a real face-to-face now. Maybe a counseling session. Talk therapy led by Uncle Tony.
“Who have you told and what have you told?” he asked.
“Oh, well, there’s a lot of things I’ve told to a lot of people. I once told a guy in high school I could bench-press two hundred pounds. I couldn’t, though. One ninety was all I could get. How much can you bench, Tone?”
He stared at me, then shot a look over his shoulder to Kwong. Unfortunately, the look didn’t mean “Boy, isn’t Dr. McCormick hilarious?” It meant “Kick his ass.”
Kwong was happy to obey. Crossing to me, he drew back his arm and hit me with a closed fist across the face. Pain lanced through my jaw and my bruised neck. My head snapped to the side. I spat a gob of bloody saliva on the floor.
“Who have you talked to, Dr. McCormick?” Tony asked quietly.
“His name was Ed Scarborough,” I sputtered. “He sat next to me in band. It was a long time ago—”
Tony’s henchman hit me again. More pain. More blood.
“You like this, Dr. McCormick?”
I was quickly learning the man didn’t appreciate my wit. “Not much,” I confessed.
He laughed, and pulled out a cell phone. My cell phone, I realized. “Some of these numbers we recognize, some we do not. Who are they, Doctor?”
“My broker. My masseuse, who’s very good, by the way. You should call her. You look a little tense—”
“I’m growing weary of your jokes.”
Didn’t the guy know that I dealt with stress by cracking jokes? Come on, Tony, I’m coping here. I spat another gob of blood on the floor.
“What do you think will happen to those you care about?”
“I don’t care about anyone.”
“Is that true?” He nodded toward Kwong. “You do not care for my great-nephew? You do not care for my niece? So be it. But I have trouble believing that you do not care for Dr. Michaels.”
My mouth remained shut. Inside, though, I screamed at the man. Brooke? They’d pulled Brooke back into this?
“You have been speaking to Inspector Tang and Dr. Ravinder Singh.” Tony studied the tip of his cigarette. “We know all about that, Dr. McCormick. And we will find who else you’ve been speaking to. When we do, you will call these people. You will tell them that you have discovered evidence that directly links Paul Murphy and Jonathan Bly to Wei-jan Fang and his most unfortunate clinic.”
“Yeah. All that evidence I discovered.”
“We will provide that to you and you will provide it to the authorities. You will be paid handsomely for your efforts, and you and Dr. Michaels can go live your American Dream.”
I would be lying if I didn’t find the offer seductive: help these guys out, buy that big pad in Santa Barbara, spend my days sipping margaritas and watching the sun dip into the Pacific? Or, fight this, risk having something happen to Brooke, to Tim, to Dorothy. Guarantee that something ugly would happen to me. An easy choice, right?
Only if you believed Uncle Tony.
“What will happen to the people with the fibrosarcoma?” I asked. “The ones you’ve been scaring into keeping quiet.”
Tony nodded. “You are a true humanitarian, Dr. McCormick. Do not worry about them. We will ensure they receive the proper treatment.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it under his foot. “Although one could argue that they—in their vanity—brought it upon themselves.”
“Exactly,” I agreed cheerfully. “Like your wife. Joan, that’s her name, right? She had the treatments done?”
“My wife is a vain woman.” He shrugged in a what-can-you-do way, and I could tell he was not entirely displeased with his wife’s vanity. What I wouldn’t give to have Auntie Joan wake up one morning with a bugger of a tumor gnawing through her lip.
“Where’s Dorothy?”
“She’s safe.”
“And Tim?”
“Quite safe. I sympathize with you. You have been betrayed. You were betrayed by the same man who betrayed us. You were even betrayed by a little boy.”
“Bullshit.”
“Tim told us about your last meeting with Ravinder Singh. The boy told us Dr. Singh had taken items that belonged to us back to his offices. He told us you spoke with Inspector Tang, who we know well.” I didn’t see how this rose to the level of betrayal, but to each his
own. Tony continued, “You cannot trust a child. You should know that.”
“I’ll make a note of that.”
“You owe nothing to Paul Murphy, you realize that. We are simply attempting to redress the wrongs he committed. No one enjoys what has happened here.”
“That’s good to know.”
“So, I ask you again, who have you spoken to?” Tony was hitting me from every angle: threatening, cajoling, trying to establish common goals. He was throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick. He was also throwing it against the wall to keep me off balance, to keep me confused. All in all, he was pretty good, pretty smart. But I’d been in enough investigations, I’d seen enough hidden agendas, to know where this was ultimately going.
“And I’ll tell you again, in different words this time: Fuck you, Tony.”
Then, just as I was about to rip through the cable ties, just as I was about to unleash a flurry of kung fu and use my brain waves to burn Tony to a crisp, Kwong strode up to me. In his hands, he carried a length of two-by-four. I didn’t think he was going to whittle me a toy pagoda.
Tony said something to Kwong in Chinese, then stood. He dragged the chair back a few feet to give his man room. Kwong smiled at me, flapped the wood in his hand like a Mafia heavy. He positioned himself in front of me, drew back, and swung. The sound of the wood slamming into my left knee was like a Louisville Slugger knocking one over the wall.
The knee exploded in pain. I felt the rending and destruction of tissue, felt the electric surge of pain. The impact traveled up my leg, jamming the femur into my hip joint. In spite of my best efforts, I cried out. Then Kwong hit me across the face with the two-by-four. I felt a bone crack, felt my brains scramble.
“It is unfortunate,” Tony said, “that you and Dr. Fang had such a difficult meeting. It is unfortunate he had to do this to you.”
At first, I didn’t understand what he was saying. But then it made sense. Tony was giving me the line I was to use: Fang had tied me up. Fang had beaten me. That would be my story. The only glimmer of hope I had is that they were still unsure about whether they were going to let me live or not. If they’d decided to kill me, it wouldn’t have been a two-by-four across the mouth. It would have been something worse. A knife in the eye, for example. I could explain away bruises and broken bones. I couldn’t explain blindness.
But they would decide soon. They would play the angles. They would look at my recent past and would realize they couldn’t trust me to keep quiet. It was only a matter of time.
Or maybe they’d already decided. And maybe they just weren’t telling me yet.
Tony held up my phone. “We will find out who you called,” he told me. “We will be back. And then you will help us.”
He and Kwong disappeared through the door, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the blossoming pain in my body.
110
THE AGONY IN MY FACE and my knee had lost its edge. It had become instead a persistent throb, still intense, but allowing me to clear my head a bit. As I did, I began to see the impossibility of my situation. The cable ties might be cut, I might be afforded a reprieve to call Jack Tang, Ravi Singh. They would pull Miles Pikar’s number from my phone. I would call him. I would lie and tell him everything was fine. I would tell him about the evidence I discovered about Wei-jan Fang.
Goddamn you, Paul Murphy. Damn the day I met you.
I have always had this belief that rage—absolute fury—would enable me to move mountains. That I would be able to break through walls, bend metal, all that. It was a foolish thought, planted, perhaps, by childhood TV, by the show That’s Incredible, in which men were able to lift cars off pinned family members. I was not even trying to lift a car. I was trying to break three millimeters of goddamned plastic.
I pulled at my restraints until I felt the cable ties bite into the flesh of my wrist, until I felt blood roll into my palms and slick my fingers.
When the struggle proved fruitless, I tried to calm myself. Assess, I thought, and began to probe the inside of my mouth with my tongue. Three loose teeth. A lot of blood, making my mouth taste like metal. I thought my left cheekbone was fractured, but couldn’t be sure. I tensed the quadriceps in my left thigh, and felt pain sear through my knee. I didn’t think the kneecap was broken, but it hurt. God, did it hurt.
No atheists in foxholes, I thought. Though I wasn’t in a foxhole, I said a few prayers—bargains, actually, with the Big Guy. God, if you let me get out of this, if you let Brooke be okay, if you let Dorothy and Tim be okay, I promise I won’t fuck up like this again. I promise to get a good job and a 401(k), and a sensible car. I promise, I promise.
The door opened.
Wei-jan Fang’s face was still black-and-blue from his encounter with Ravi, but I was sure it looked a hell of a lot better than mine. He stood, taking me in.
“They got you good,” he observed.
Ya think?
There was a sink in the loading dock. Fang crossed to it, ripped out a few paper towels, wet them. Then he walked to me, pulled the chair close.
He began to wipe the side of my face.
“Check the zygoma,” I said.
Fang paused. “This will hurt,” he warned, then he prodded my cheekbone with his fingers; I could feel the bone grind and crackle. It hurt.
“Broken,” he said.
“My knee? Left one.”
His hand went to my knee and pushed into the bone, moved the patella back and forth. No cracking, which meant that the kneecap wasn’t shattered, which meant I would be able to walk if I ever got up from this chair. “That’s okay, I think,” he said. “Hurts, though?” I nodded, which hurt, too. He finished wiping my face and tossed the crimson-stained towels to the floor.
“You should have taken my deal.” His breath smelled sweetly of alcohol.
“If I could do it over again…”
“Yeah, well…” He stood. “Who else have you told about…”—he waved his hand around in the air—“our little arrangement?”
I said nothing.
He sat in the chair again, rested his fingertips lightly on my left knee. “Please don’t,” I said.
“Dr. Singh, Inspector Tang. Who else?”
“No one.”
“What does Inspector Tang know?”
“He knows enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough that he can help us,” I said. “They’re setting you up, you realize that. You are going to take the fall for all of this.”
Fang took his hand from my knee. “I know.”
“You know?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then help me. Get me out of here.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then call the police. Call Tang. They want me to tell everyone that you and Paul Murphy were working together. That the buck stopped with you.”
“I know. I helped them put the story together.”
I didn’t comprehend.
“You should have taken the deal, Dr. McCormick. You should have helped me when you could.”
“Help me now,” I pleaded. “It’s not too late.”
Fang gave me a sympathetic smile. He shifted in the seat and pulled something from his back pocket. A wallet. He opened it and showed me a picture inside: a pretty woman in jeans and a leather jacket holding what looked to be a five-year-old girl. Fang was in the picture, too, hand on the child, kissing the woman. “That’s my wife and my little girl.” He stared at the picture for a moment. He put the wallet back in his pocket. “I’m sorry, Dr. McCormick.”
Things began to make sense. “They have your family?” I asked.
“I’m going to go to jail for a long time,” he said. “But that way my wife and daughter will be safe.” Fang stood. “This was me, you know that? They said you pieced together a lot of what was going on, but did you know this was mine?” He raised his hands. “Beautiful Essence, Regenetine, Tetra Biologics. Have you ever had anything stolen from you, Dr. McC
ormick?”
I seemed to remember having my lunch money taken once, but I don’t think that was his point.
“Do you know how hard it was to come up with the perfect ratio? To change the FGF so that it fastened to stem cells in the test tube but didn’t disperse through the body? Then to figure out its market? Do you know how hard it is then to have your life’s work stolen from you?”
“Tom Bukowski and Peter Yee,” I said. “They ripped off your idea.”
Fang was silent.
It was coming together. Peter Yee and Bukowski had stolen Fang’s work, or at least that’s what Fang thought. Perhaps Fang worked with Yee in Bukowski’s lab all those years ago. Maybe the falling-out between Yee and Bukowski had something to do with that, with the two scientists fighting over the spoils of Wei-jan Fang’s work.
“You killed them,” I said. “For stealing Beautiful Essence. Regenetine.” I took his silence for agreement. My left eye was swollen, but I managed a good fuck-you stare. “Then you’re getting what you deserve, Dr. Fang.”
“Tom Bukowski got what he deserved.”
“And Peter Yee? Or was his death just collateral damage?”
“Peter Yee is alive and not so well, Doctor.”
“Yee is dead,” I said. “He died when the boat blew up.”
Fang smiled faintly. “Peter Yee, Dr. McCormick, is standing in front of you.”
111
“YOU WORKED IN A LAB, you know what it’s like.” Fang was pacing now. “I sweated for years in Tom’s lab at UIC. I published like mad. I figured out the peptide tail to stick the FGF to the cells; I perfected the process for making the altered FGF. I figured out that if you add it to stem cells in the test tube, instead of injecting it straight into tissue, you would get a more robust and controlled response. I perfected a process that would be worth a billion dollars on the cosmetics market.
“I trusted Tom. He was my principal investigator, last author on all my papers, my mentor, my damned friend. So I told him my idea. Within a month, he had filed a patent, without telling me. Six months later, he brought me into his office and offered me a staff position at a little company he was putting together to exploit the potential of my idea.”
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