The Poison Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  The Dorylaus greeted the three warmly, swearing fealty to the young king and offering to host a banquet in his honor, but Mithradates declined. We can only speculate as to his motives but it seems most likely he did not want to make his whereabouts widely known.

  After a period of less than a week, the three travelers returned to the forests.

  CHAPTER 28

  Headquarters of Dystra Pharmaceuticals

  Suite 1720

  One Atlantic Center

  1180 West Peachtree Street

  Atlanta, Georgia

  8:27 the Next Morning

  Hands in the pockets of his tailored wool summer-weight suit, William Grassley stood at his office’s floor-to-ceiling window. Below was one of Atlanta’s true miracles. Where three high-rise office buildings and a multitude of shops, restaurants, and green spaces were encircled by apartments, town houses, and condos, a steel mill had operated for over half a century. Rather than risk the astronomical cost of remediating an ecological disaster, the plant had stayed open, if not actually operating, until, in the late 1990s, a developer, Jim Jacoby, had come along with a dream for 138 acres of prime Midtown Atlanta real estate, polluted or not.

  The mixed-use project opened in October 2003 amid the cheers of many and the doubts of even more.

  It had taken special help from the city, county, and state; help that would pay dividends in the increase of tax revenue in years to come.

  No such help would be coming Dystra’s way, Grassley thought sourly. The company would sink or swim without flotation devices from the government.

  There was a rap on the door behind him.

  Not waiting for a response, Ralph Hassler entered, looking at his watch. “Where’s Wright?”

  Grassley checked his diamond-encrusted Rolex, a gift from the company in greener times. “Not quite 8:30. Give him a few . . .”

  Past Hassler, Hugh Wright slunk into a seat in one of the pair of wing chairs whose brocade matched the colors of the Chinese export porcelain displayed between leather-bound books in the eighteenth-century biblotec opposite the window.

  That was the thing, Grassley thought, Wright always seemed to slink, creep, or prowl. There was something downright dishonest in the way the man moved, if that was possible. Like maybe he was avoiding being eaten by something.

  “Close the door,” Grassley ordered Hassler, remembered the man’s prickly disposition and added, “please” before sitting behind an elaborate Louis XIV reproduction table that served as his desk.

  There was a moment of anticipatory silence, what years earlier would have been described as a “pregnant pause,” before Grassley cleared his throat and begun.

  “The operations both here and in Turkey were complete busts. The burglars found nothing, and our people in Turkey had a plan that simply didn’t work.”

  “And that was?” Hassler asked.

  “Believe me, you are far better off not knowing.”

  “Any chance of getting all or some of our money back?” Wright wanted to know.

  “About the same success you’d have at your club sending back an empty bottle of wine.”

  “The funds came from a Cayman account that can’t be traced,” Hassler said. “Wouldn’t be smart to have a record of payments to this Gary . . .”

  “Gayrimesru,” Grassley supplied. “Turkish Mafia.”

  “Anyone consider the possibility of just making this guy Reilly and his foundation an offer to joint venture or simply buy this blood sample and whatever it implies?” Wright asked.

  Grassley was rolling a Bic lighter between his hands, a gesture with which the other two were quite familiar, but of which the CEO was probably unaware. “I’d guess buying a private blood sample is medically unethical.”

  “Unethical doesn’t bother me nearly as much as illegal,” Wright said. “As in criminal. Surely this Reilly guy has a price.”

  Grassley dropped the Bic, grabbing it before it could roll off the table’s inlaid top. “Not from what I understand. His foundation seems to mint its own money, spent nearly a hundred mil on research alone last year. Nobody I could find had a clue where the funding comes from. He doesn’t solicit contributions, and it’s run as a strict nonprofit.”

  “You can bet he doesn’t make that kind of money from the law practice,” Wright observed, drawing a glare from his boss who viewed the obvious as the province of fools.

  “I take it you have a plan,” Hassler said.

  The Bic was rolling between palms again. “I do indeed.”

  “Don’t suppose you care to share it,” Hassler observed, a statement, not a question.

  Grassley put the Bic down. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  CHAPTER 29

  472 Lafayette Drive

  Atlanta, Georgia

  At the Same Time

  Lang split the remaining blueberries between his and Manfred’s bowls of oatmeal as Grumps watched in eager, if unjustified, anticipation from below the table. Then Lang sprinkled brown sugar on both.

  “More?” the little boy asked.

  From the kitchen counter where Gurt was refilling an oversized coffee mug, she said, “Only a little amount is needed to sweeten. Any more and you might as well be eating pure sugar like those cereals that come in a box.”

  “Like Sugar Puffs?” Manfred asked. “All my friends at school have Sugar Puffs for breakfast,” he added resentfully.

  “All your friends will be dicke, fat, before they are twelve and be diabetic in their twenties.”

  “What’s ‘diabetic’?”

  Lang tried not to smile as Gurt explained. In the German custom, Frustuck, not breakfast, was the order of the household, a light snack of fruit or cereal with occasional cold cuts and cheeses. Gurt believed anything more substantial tended to make a person, particularly a child, sluggish in the morning, tending toward inattention in school or whatever the day held. She also was determined no one in her home would succumb to the national epidemic of obesity. Oatmeal’s supposed cholesterol-lowering abilities had added it to the lighter fare.

  Lang had grown up with the mantra that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Eggs, bacon, grits, biscuits to begin a day southern style. On occasion, the spartan nature of breakfast at home had detoured him to the local International House of Pancakes on his way to the office. It might make him sluggish, but a man couldn’t think clearly with his stomach growling, either.

  He was not sure what Gurt’s reaction would be were his dietary transgressions discovered, and he hoped not to find out.

  She ordered Manfred upstairs to brush his teeth, preparatory to his departure for summer day camp, before she sat down, watching Grumps shadow his small master toward the stairs. “You are going to see that man in Greece?”

  “Dr. Therodoplis, yes. I’m hoping to learn more about this Mithradates guy and, maybe, why someone is willing to kill over a blood sample.”

  “You cannot put the trip off? Someone must be here for Manfred’s camp pageant. He will be disappointed you are not there.”

  “Gurt, the house was ransacked while we were in Turkey, and you were kidnapped. Whoever these people are, they are serious. We will be looking over our shoulders until we do something.”

  “You have spoken to this man who wrote the book you borrowed from Francis, Dr. . . .”

  “Theradoplis. Yes, by video conference. Not a very satisfactory conversation. That’s why I’m going in person.”

  “He does not speak English?”

  “Only slightly better than I speak Greek.”

  “You do not speak Greek.”

  “That’s why I’m going.”

  Gurt contemplated her injured hand, an ugly red scar where the stiches had been removed the day before. “Remember your promise.”

  Lang didn’t need reminding. Shortly after Gurt and Manfred had entered his life for good, she had resigned from the Agency. Lang and Gurt had mutually promised that neither individual would take the risks that dogged t
heir relationship without the other coming along.

  “I remember just fine. I’m just seeking information.”

  She held the palm of her hand before his face. “That is what we said before leaving for Turkey. Surely the trip can wait a few days.”

  Lang stood and removed his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “You tell me how. Monday I’ve got a motions hearing in Fulton Superior. Tuesday is an arraignment in the Middle District, Macon Division in the morning and an arraignment that afternoon in . . .”

  Gurt waved her hands in a crisscross motion, in football, a referee signaling an incomplete pass. Here, a signal she gave up.

  CHAPTER 30

  37 Ch. Trikoupi Street

  Piraeus, Greece

  At the Same Time

  Only 12 kilometers from downtown Athens, Piraeus has served as the city’s port since the mid–sixth-century BC, though there is little evidence of its ancient past among the modern high-rises, narrow streets, and bustling wharves. Its three harbors make it Europe’s busiest passenger port and third in container traffic. Its maritime trade has made the Greek shipping magnate almost stereotypical.

  Alkandres Kolstas was both. From this intentionally shabby office on the third floor, next door to the city’s nautical museum, he had built an empire. Not a visible empire, nor one he would be willing to discuss, but an empire just the same.

  Starting with a leaky, coal-burning ship, the Aphradite, he had mortgaged everything he could find to buy, he had begun shipping fuel oil to the various Greek Islands. He had barely broken even on each voyage. He paid the crew (almost all of whom were illegal Pakistani immigrants) about half the minimum wage. Ignoring inconvenient maritime safety regulations, he found it far less expensive to pay off the government inspectors.

  Evading those regulations had probably been the reason he no longer owned the Aphradite. She had turned turtle in a storm, going down with all hands still aboard. By that time, it hardly mattered. Kolstas had a fleet of a dozen or so ships, all taking advantage of a scam peculiar to Greece.

  Since the country’s main industry was shipping, ship petroleum was, by law, not subject to the taxes placed on, say, automotive or heating fuel. Consequently, when a ship left Piraeus, its cargo could be untaxed and therefore relative cheap shipping oil headed for, say, Crete or Rhodes. Or even a return to the same port from which it had departed. When it arrived, it miraculously held not shipping oil, but fuel to run automobiles or heat homes during the brief Aegean winter. Slightly adulterated, true, but far less expensive than the government-taxed petrol. The oil black market had grown to a three-billion-euro-a-year industry. Paradoxically, Greece imports 99 percent of its petroleum needs but still manages to export more than it imports.

  The practice is no secret. Petroleum smuggling is institutionalized at the highest levels, resulting in what one newspaper called (before the government shut it down) a “parliamentary mafiocracy.”

  The practice was not without its costs.

  A majority of the 300 members that constituted the Hellenic Parliament in its former royal palace on Syntagma Square had to be persuaded that spot inspections of tankers’ cargo was as bad an idea as repealing the shipping oil tax exemption or placing GPS tracking devices on tankers. Those who didn’t have shares in their own shipping companies, anyway. That persuasion could take the form of anything from a week’s free use of the villa in the hills of Provence above Cap d’Antibes in France, to a visit from the illegal Pakistani immigrants who controlled Greece’s narcotics trade as well as extortion, kidnapping, and other enterprises Kolstas did not want to know about.

  It was this latter facet of his business, the Pakistanis, he supposed, that prompted the phone call from the American.

  Some years earlier, someone had put him in touch with someone who had introduced him to a man named Grassley, a man who needed a large favor and was willing to pay for it. Seemed Grassley had a pharmaceutical company and was trying to find a country in which to conduct . . . what did he call it? Clinical trials? Yes, that was it, clinical trials.

  Many, if not most, big U.S. drug companies conducted tests as far away from the U.S. FDA, tort lawyers, and the press as possible. Because the U.S. had no means of inspecting the test facilities, failed experiments remained secret. India was the country of choice. An existing medical infrastructure, English as the primary language, 40 percent illiteracy, and crushing poverty made the subcontinent near perfect. When someone died from a bad drug, a few hundred dollars bought silence.

  But Grassley had been seeking a little more than a place for clinical trials. He wanted guaranteed success in the form of government approval, with or without trials. That, he had said, would move the drug along the . . . quick track? No, fast track to U.S. FDA approval.

  And he understood Kolstas was not without influence in government.

  It was not Kolstas’s nature to ask questions. He had provided the influence to approve the drug until subjects started developing an annoying tendency to crave opium. Word got to the Greek press before Kolstas’s friends could bring pressure.

  “Disaster” would not be a word that exaggerated what followed, including the drug’s failure to win approval anywhere in the world that made approval of a drug a prerequisite for sale.

  Now Grassley was on the phone. The voice was as clear as though he was in the next room. “Alkandres! How are you?”

  “Well,” the Greek responded carefully.

  He remembered all too clearly “Greek Watergate” in 2004-2005. One hundred mobile phones of the Vodafone Greece network had been compromised, resulting in the tapping of devices of the Prime Minister, the Mayor of Athens, and members of the defense department and parliament. The culprit had never been identified, although the government accused the United States, claiming an over-zealousness in testing the security of the 2004 Olympics.

  Kolstas was not so sure it had not been a more sinister effort by Greek law enforcement. Either way, he wasn’t inclined to take chances.

  “And you are well also?”

  “Very,” came the reply.

  Kolstas waited. In spite of the obsession Americans seemed to have with each other’s health as indicated by the greeting, he was fairly sure his was not the reason for the call.

  The pause was short.

  “I’ve got a friend coming to Athens tomorrow. His name is Lang Reilly, and he will arrive via private jet at Athens Eleftherios Venizelos. He’s staying at the Bretagne.”

  Kolstas said nothing.

  “I was hoping your Pakistanis might sort of take him under their wings, if you get my drift.”

  Kolstas was not the only party to the conversation wary of electronic snooping. “You have something specific in mind? I mean, what can we do for your friend, Mr. Reilly?”

  “When you’ve picked him up, let me know.”

  “Treating someone in Athens is expensive.”

  “The cost is mine. Don’t worry.”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Old Tavern of Psara’s

  16 Erehtheos & Erotokritouv Str.

  Athens, Greece

  That Evening

  Platka is the old section of Athens, even though few buildings date further back than the Ottoman period. The Acropolis with its multiple crumbling temples is here, where restoration by modern equipment has been going on longer than it took the ancients to build the original Parthenon. There are a number of monuments left by invading Romans, Turks, and others long forgotten. Street markets vie for space to sell largely cheap souvenirs to passing tourists awaiting the departure of cruises to the Greek Islands or those just disembarked and headed for the airport the next day.

  Athens is not a city like Paris, Rome, or even London, where visitors tend to linger. They see the nearby sites, perhaps take the long cab ride to the very good archeological museum, and seek other destinations.

  The locals, however, do linger, usually at the various taverna, restaurants with short menus an
d few seats, which open mid-evening and serve until the last customer leaves. The establishments are normally small, family-owned, and specialize in the cuisine of their owner’s birthplace.

  Psara’s is all that and much more. Originating over a century ago, the founder’s two sons took over the business and their sons after them. The place became so popular it filled the original floor of the building in which it rented space, then the entire structure, followed by the house next door, and then the one across the street. Then the street itself. At dark, the winding street — far too narrow for any vehicle larger than a scooter — is filled with tables, including the steps that traverse the steep hill, as locals and the few visitors lucky enough to hear of the place sip Greek wine (which improves only with volume) poured from glass pitchers and feast on squid the size of footballs stuffed with vegetables, broiled fish, sardines grilled in vine leaves, and other seafood specialties.

  By the time at least half the crowd of diners have reached the end of the meal and are sipping ouzo, the oily, licorice-flavored liqueur, a party is in progress.

  Near the corner of the street’s intersection, two men were not joining in the fun. Both were dark-skinned, perhaps Middle Eastern, though dressed in Western attire of t-shirts and blue jeans. Each had only a fringe of a beard, barely enough to comply with The Prophet’s bidding. Both frequently took stock of the surrounding tables as though making sure their conversation was not being overheard. The sole light was the candle on the table flickering from a weak breeze. It was enough to show neither had touched the wine still in its pitcher and that the meal had been largely ignored. Someone might guess the two were here for the cover of the nightly crowd rather than the food.