"I got more security men than you can shake a stick at over in Korbtown. I can round them all up and we can take an M-1 tank over to your place if you want."
"No, I'm not going back there until I know who's behind all this. Tanks can be blown up."
"Not real satisfactory," Korb said. His fingertips were leaving indentations in the tropical hardwood. "I got to tell you, Jimmy, I'm real disappointed in you. I need some more of the hormone and I need it right away. I'm starting to feel funny. Sort of bloated. My fingertips feel swollen. How are we going to fix this problem?"
"It's going to cost you more."
"Am I surprised? Do I care? It's only money. Come on, you greasy little bastard, out with it before I turn your head into a paperweight."
Koch-Roche was thinking fast. He liked his head right where it was. He needed to put a few thousand miles between himself and the pursuers, whoever they were. An entire ocean would do very nicely, thank you.
"The only other supply of the drug is in Taiwan," he said, "at the manufacturer. If we can get over there, you'll have no problem. They've got lots of it in storage at their plant. They'll sell you all you want."
"Taiwan? That's no big deal. I thought this was going to be hard. Grab your passport and let's go."
The attorney patted the breast pocket of his pinstriped suit. "My passport's right here."
When Koch-Roche didn't step down from the dais quickly enough, Korb reached over and picked him up by the scruff of the neck, like a kitten. He gave the attorney a brisk shake, then said, "I've got a private 757 sitting on the runway at LAX, fueled and ready to fly. We're outta here."
Chapter 27
As Remo and Chiun swept through the glass entry doors to Jimmy Koch-Roche's office suite, they nearly collided with a tall, thin man with an attache case.
"Can I help you gentlemen?" the thin guy asked. "I'm afraid the office is closed for the day."
"We're looking for Mr. Koch-Roche," Remo said. "Then you just missed him. Perhaps you could call for an appointment tomorrow? As I said, the office is closed for the day. I've already locked up my desk. I was just on my way out the door."
Remo read the nameplate on the desk. "Leon," he said, "we need to get in touch with your boss at once. It's an emergency."
Leon scrutinized the ancient Oriental, who stood with a placid expression on his wrinkled face and both his hands buried up the sleeves of his silk robe.
"You're not one of Mr. Koch-Roche's current clients," Leon said. "I'm sure I'd remember you if you were. And even if you were, I am under strict instructions not to give out my employer's whereabouts once he leaves the office. I'm sure you can appreciate that. Being such a high-profile attorney, he gets all sorts of unwanted attention, often from well-meaning individuals who are not the least bit insane."
"This is a matter of life and death," Remo told him.
Leon was thoroughly unimpressed. "In case you never watch TV or pick up a newspaper, the people who come in here are always in trouble."
"No, you don't understand, Leon," Remo said. "We're not the ones in trouble. He is."
"Maybe you'd better identify yourselves and state your business with Mr. Koch-Roche." From the sudden brittleness in his voice, it was evident the executive assistant was losing his patience.
"Of course," Remo said, reaching in his back pocket. He opened the leather DD holder and held it up for Leon to read.
The big blue letters stenciled across the documentation said FBI.
"Remo Reno?" Leon said dubiously. "Who's your friend--Charlie Chan?"
The slender hands slipped out of the baggy cuffs. Lucky for Leon, the alarm bells were already going off in Remo's head. The name Chan, of course, reflected negatively on the width of nose-and general tendencies toward barbarism, pillage and rape.
"No," Remo said, stepping between the Reigning Master of Sinanju and the attorney's assistant. "But you're close. It's Charlie Chiun."
"I have to be frank with you," Leon said. "Neither one of you looks like Bureau material to me."
"We left our gray suits at home. Lighten up, Leon. We're here to do your boss a favor."
"First, it's life and death, then it's he's in trouble, now you're offering a helping hand? I think both of you should leave immediately." Leon put his briefcase on top of the desk and picked up the phone. "Leave now or I'm going to call security and have you arrested for trespassing."
"Bad idea," Remo said.
"Oh, really?" Leon hit one of the buttons on the console.
Chiun reached over and jerked the cord connecting the handset to the receiver. It parted with a snap. Leon looked at the broken cord in astonishment. Then he carefully replaced the handset in its cradle. "If this is a robbery," he said, "you are welcome to everything I have on me. The office keeps no cash except what is in my center drawer."
"Leon, baby, don't blow a gasket on us," Remo told him, "we're not interested in your petty cash or your cuff links. We just want to know where your boss is."
Leon stared at Chiun's long fingernails. "I don't know. He left a few minutes ago."
"Alone?"
"No, he was with a client."
"Don't make us wring the information out of you."
Chiun took a half step toward the executive assistant.
"It was Korb," Leon squeaked. "Dewayne Korb, the computer tycoon. Look, I've had more than enough excitement for one day, thank you. You should see what Korb did to the door. The man's a maniac."
"Where did they go?" Remo asked him.
"I have no idea."
"Why don't you show us Mr. Koch-Roche's office."
Leon obliged reluctantly. And with a little prodding, even opened his boss's wall safe.
"If you tell me what you're looking for," Leon offered, "maybe I could help you find it. Then you wouldn't be leaving me quite such a mess to clean up."
Remo stopped dumping papers from the open safe onto the floor. "We're looking for a list of names of all the clients he's provided drugs to."
"I know nothing about that."
"No, of course not. People come in here one week as ninety-pound weaklings, and the next they look like the Incredible Hulk. Get a bit real, Leon."
"Mr. Koch-Roche has never told me anything about that. I've never seen a list of names."
"Boomtower? Baculum? Chiz Graham?"
"I'm sorry. They are just his legal clients, to my knowledge. If my employer is doing anything against the law, I am not a party to it."
"I can make this one speak," the Master announced.
Chiun backed the tall, thin man into a corner with hand gestures like a snake charmer.
"Don't waste your time, Chiun," Remo said. "He doesn't know anything. I believe him." Then he asked Leon, "Does Koch-Roche keep his passport in the office?"
"Center drawer of his desk."
Remo opened it and looked. "It's not here," he said.
"That's where he keeps it, unless he's using it."
"You've been a big help to us, Leon," Remo said. "Now we're going to need for you to spend some quiet time in a closet."
"I'm claustrophobic," the thin man confessed.
"Is there an office rest room?"
"Yes, of course."
"Then you can wait in there."
After they had locked Leon in the men's bathroom, Remo and Chiun returned to the attorney's private office.
"Time to call Smith," Remo said, picking up the phone.
"Yes," Chiun agreed, "the Emperor in his wisdom will surely guide us."
Remo punched in the code to CURE's scrambled line. He didn't know exactly how the thing worked, but when he dialed the number, his call was somehow rerouted by the Folcroft mainframes, sent through a few hundred thousand other phone numbers from all over the world, making it impossible for anyone to pull up the Koch-Roche phone records and find out whom he'd called.
Smith picked up on the first ring. "What have you got for me, Remo?" he demanded.
"Looks like we just missed our
boy Jimmy," Remo said. "Apparently, he's flown the coop with Dewayne Korb, the billionaire nouveau muscle man. We have no idea where he's gone, but his passport isn't here."
"Let me run a quick check through the FAA in Los Angeles," Smith said. "See if Korb's filed a flight plan." After a pause, the director of CURE said, "I'll have that information momentarily. Did you get any break on a list of WHE users?"
"We got nothing there, either."
"That's too bad."
"The hormone heads will turn up eventually, won't they?"
"Yes, but probably only after they've committed some kind of atrocity. We could've saved a lot of innocent people a lot of pain and suffering if we'd isolated the current users.
"The FAA data is scrolling up now," Smith continued. "It shows a Korb-owned Boeing jet at LAX with a flight plan filed to Taiwan, nonstop."
"We'd better get on it, then," Remo said.
"No, it's too late. Their scheduled departure is in ten minutes. You'll never get there in time to stop them from taking off."
"What now?"
"We proceed according to plan. We have to stop the production of the drug at the point of manufacture, which means taking down Family Fing Pharmaceuticals of Formosa. And we have to do it before they have a cheap synthetic version of WHE ready to mass market. Bottom line is, you're going to Taiwan, too."
"So, how're we gonna handle that?"
"Your tickets and documents will be waiting for you at LAX. I'll book you on the next flight out."
"Aisle seat," Remo said.
"What?"
"Chiun likes an aisle seat. He claims it gives him a better view of the in-flight movie."
Chapter 28
Fosdick Fing touched the LCD screen of his notebook computer, making the densely packed table of five-digit numbers shift to a bar graph. "Now, that's a welcome sight!" he said. An expression of profound relief on his face, Fing showed his American colleague the newly correlated data. "I think Test Subject Three is definitely responding to the change in her diet," he told Carlos Sternovsky.
The American reviewed the computer-generated graph, then looked up at the video monitor bolted to the wall above the patient's locked door. The connection that Fosdick was making seemed tenuous at best to him. Like connecting bad luck with the presence of a black cat, or good luck with the position of the stars. The bar graph was a mathematical construct; it presented facts subject to interpretation. And interpretations were subject to being one hundred percent wrong.
True enough, the game-show hostess turned talk-show hostess turned opera star, known professionally as Okra, seemed to have calmed down. Only minutes before, she had been in the midst of a gibbering, foaming-at-the-mouth rage. Alone in her hospital suite, she had pounded on the walls, kicked at the steel-reinforced door and turned one hundred thousand dollars' worth of medical monitoring equipment into so much twisted wreckage. In her fury, Okra had even de-stuffed her own mattress. The empty ticking lay rumpled on the bed frame like the discarded skin of some enormous, gray-and-white-pin-striped fruit. Ankle-deep drifts of white polyester padding covered the floor of the room.
Since she'd started in on Fosdick's new food regimen, she hadn't moved from her position on the floor. She knelt in front of the jury-rigged feeding tube that had been slipped through a hole the staff had drilled in the wall.
Lips to the clear polyethylene, Okra sucked down a light brown substance, barely pausing for breath. "I'm positive," Fosdick said, "that the tantrums we've been seeing are related to too low a dietary-fat content. Think about it, Carlos. If the synthetic hormone is making greater and greater demands for fat intake over time, and that additional fat isn't provided, it could cause the test subjects terrible discomfort. And the violence they've exhibited may be directly related to the internal pain they are feeling."
"That may be so," Sternovsky said. "But what you're doing now proves nothing. Except that she likes peanut butter more than she likes tearing the bejesus out of her hospital room."
"True, it's not a double-blind study," Fosdick admitted, "and the data from this subject isn't fully calibrated yet, but these results certainly give us reason to hope that the negative effects of the drug can be lessened to market-acceptable levels."
"Without actually going to the trouble of changing the formulation," Sternovsky said.
"My father was adamant. You were there. The future of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals hangs in the balance."
Sternovsky watched the test subject as Fosdick used the remote control to zoom the camera in on her face. Okra's cheeks hollowed as she nursed on the end of the tube. Her eyes were shut in apparent rapture. She paused in her sucking only for the occasional belch.
Sternovsky had no formal training as a physicist, but he knew that to draw creamy peanut butter through a one-inch tube required an awesome amount of force. And Okra was accomplishing the feat without the aid of a pump. With just a little help from gravity-the five-gallon peanut-butter bucket was elevated about five feet off the floor--Okra was pulling in peanut butter by the foot, all on her own. Based on Fosdick's calculations, she was intaking 3420 calories per yard of suck, and in that yard, 2300 calories came from fat. Roughly estimating Okra's suck rate, Sternovsky figured she was taking in a human male's recommended daily allowance of calories every ten to twelve minutes. And after more than a half hour of the new regimen, she showed no sign of slowing down on the peanut-butter pipeline.
"I'm not sure we aren't opening an even bigger can of worms here, Fosdick," Sternovsky said.
The youngest Fing waved him off. "Results are what my father wanted, and results are what I'm going to give him."
Fosdick turned to the waiting medical support staff and gave them a crisp order punctuated with jabs of his stubby index finger. "I want you to switch all of the test subjects over to Skippy immediately," he told them. "I think we finally have our answer. Let's use the big containers, people."
Sternovsky scanned the faces of the nurses and attendants. They all looked haggard. Frightened. Like they'd been working in a combat zone or a natural catastrophe. The situation on the ward was that overwhelming. They had seen their fellow workers torn limb from limb, and the bellows and roars of the other less tranquil test subjects were constant reminders that the same thing could happen to them. The staff was still willing to feed the drug-trial lab animals through holes drilled in the walls, but if Fing asked them to confront their patients face-to-face, he was going to have a full-scale rebellion and walkout on his hands. "The only way we're going to know for sure what effect the peanut butter is having," Sternovsky said, "is to draw blood samples from her."
"Sure," Fosdick said. "You're the expert on drawing blood. You know where the hypos are. Why don't you do the honors?"
The American scientist shook his head. "I'm serious, Fosdick. Pump some tranquilizer in through the feeding tube, knock her out and let's get a blood-level reading on her."
Fosdick wouldn't hear of it. "A tranquilizer will negate the experiment completely. Think about it. We can't build up people's muscles but in the process turn them into tranked-out zombies who can't get out of bed. Our most recent demographic studies show that eighty-three percent of the fun of having a hard body is showing it off."
"Tails are okay, though," Sternovsky said sarcastically.
"For all we know, the new diet might affect that, too. We could even get a complete reversal."
Sternovsky gawked at the research chemist. For a moment, he was speechless. When he recovered, he asked, "Where did you say you did your graduate work?"
"I didn't."
"You didn't do graduate work?"
"No, I didn't say. Actually, I had a two-year fellowship at Lever Brothers."
Oh, God, Sternovsky thought as a lump the size of a cantaloupe rose under his breastbone. Now it all became clear....
"You were in the floor-wax division?" he asked.
"No, I was with the Wisehart Center for Unguent Development."
Sternovsky was aghast.
A balmer! The WHE project was being run by a fucking balmer!
"Fing," he said, barely controlling his understandable anger, "for Pete's sake, open your eyes. Our subject there has got a real corker of a tail going for her and, the change in diet notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be getting any smaller."
The appendage in question, a stout, furry bit of baggage with a funny curl at the tip, trailed across the floor. As Okra nursed on the hose, it twitched and flipped around as if it had a mind of its own.
"We'd have to measure it to know for sure," Fosdick said. "It looks smaller to me."
Sternovsky had no intention of explaining the basic theories of biology to his Asian counterpart. "Do you expect her fur to fall out, too?"
Fosdick shrugged. "We believe that the fur is a fully manageable side effect. A daily depilatory application should handle that."
Sternovsky squinted at the monitor. The nursing woman had an all-over pelt. It was especially long and luxuriant on the backs of her legs and the insides of her arms, like a golden retriever or Irish setter.
"She's going to have to bathe in Nair to get rid of that coat," Sternovsky said.
Behind him, the medical-wing staff was already carrying out Fosdick's orders. A couple of female attendants were using cordless drills to bore holes through the walls of the test subjects' rooms. And from the other end of the hallway came a daisy chain of gurneys pushed by nurses and orderlies. Balanced on each hospital cart was a huge drum of peanut butter.
Carlos Sternovsky sagged against the corridor wall and stared at his empty hands. Had it really come down to this? he asked himself. All the dreaming since he was a small boy, all the hard and unrewarded work? Had he suffered the scorn and rejection of his peers for this idiocy? Like a man possessed, he had fled from his own country and sold his soul to the Fings in order to keep his precious line of research alive. And what were they doing with it? They were destroying it. If the Fings released the drug prematurely as they planned, it would undermine everything he had worked for. The drug's future usefulness would be tainted, its scientific and medical reputation ruined.
American Obsession td-109 Page 17