Repairman Jack 04 - All the Rage

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Propping up the price? Why would they do that?"

  "I can't imagine. But I can imagine why they'd be secretly hoarding a load of stock. Think about it: if you had insider knowledge that the stock price was going to jump, wouldn't you want to pick up as many shares as possible—without tipping anyone off, of course."

  "But that's not only illegal, it's stupid. And as the principals in the company, they each must hold a ton of shares already."

  He shrugged. "Since when does greed know limits? The important thing is that they must think the stock is going to be very valuable. And that, my dear, is a good thing to know."

  Nadia caught herself running through the sources she might tap for a loan and pulled up short.

  "Why?" She couldn't keep the note of reproach out of her tone. "So we can use this stolen information and load up on shares?"

  Doug glanced away, then back at her. "Does sound tacky, doesn't it." He sighed. "Easy money… it's such a high. I suppose I'm as vulnerable as the next guy. Seemed like a great idea… get that start-up money and go to work for myself. Now, sitting here with you, it seems kind of sleazy."

  "I can't quite take on the holier-than-thou role. For a few moments there I was thinking about how a windfall from a sure thing like that could affect my mother's standard of living—and my own."

  "What's that make us?"

  "Human, I guess. Though some people would call us stupid humans for not jumping on it."

  Doug caressed the back of her hand. "I'll never feel stupid if I'm with you."

  She laughed. "How many scotches have you had?"

  He only smiled and she knew the love in his eyes was reflected in her own.

  They sat in silence for a while. Finally Nadia voiced a question that had been bothering her. "What I'd like to know is what do they have up their sleeves that makes them so sure the stock is going to jump?"

  "Only two things I can think of." Doug held up a finger. "They're expecting a takeover bid." Another finger popped up alongside the first. "Or… they're expecting a major breakthrough, like a new product that's going to take the market by storm." He pointed both fingers at Nadia. "Hey… maybe it's the project you're working on. Maybe you're the key to the company's future."

  Me? A queasy feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. The best she could say about the status of the project under her captaincy was that it was becalmed and rudderless.

  "If that's the case," she said, "I think we'd be better off leaving our money in the bank. And maybe I will have that chardonnay."

  8

  "I don't know how you manage it," Kent Garrison said with a note of hostility as Luc stepped into the conference room. Kent was stuffed into a pink golf shirt that matched the flush of his ample cheeks. "But somehow you always manage to be the last to arrive."

  Up yours, Luc thought, but managed an ingenuous smile instead. "Just lucky, I guess."

  Kent had called about an hour ago, saying, "We've caught the culprit," and that they needed an emergency meeting. He'd say no more, but Luc knew what he meant: the software people had tracked the hacker who'd broken into the GEM system.

  Kent sneered. "What were you doing—counting your wine bottles?"

  That brought Luc up short. Did they know? He glanced quickly at the usually dapper Brad Edwards. He looked terrible. Wrinkled shirt, half-combed hair, glazed eyes, slack expression—was he on tranquilizers?

  "Counting his wine bottles," Brad said with a dull laugh. "That's a good one."

  "I had to cancel plans," Luc said. A lie. His only plans had been to continue packing his wine. "Plus I was up late at the test session."

  "Oh, right," Brad said, looking apologetic. "How'd it go?"

  Kent held up a hand before Luc could answer. "Close the door first."

  "It's Saturday morning," Luc said. "We're the only ones here."

  Kent shook his head. "Not quite. Your new researcher is signed into the lab."

  "Really?" Luc had to smile. "Amazing what the offer of a million-dollar bonus will do." He pulled the door shut and latched it, then sat down. "Couldn't we have discussed this in a conference call?"

  "Our computer's been hacked," Kent said, leaning back and stretching the fabric of his golf shirt over the bloat of his belly. "How do we know our phones aren't tapped?"

  The possibility startled Luc, especially in light of the uninvited guest at the test session. He told his two partners about it.

  "Someone was spying on us?" Brad said, his lower lip jutting.

  "I can't say for sure," Luc said. "He may simply have been some sort of squatter who thought the building was deserted. After all, we only use it once a month."

  Brad turned to Kent. "Do you think he's connected to Gleason?"

  "Gleason?" Luc said, alarm tugging at the inner wall of his chest. He knew only one Gleason. "You don't mean our sales rep, do you? What about him?"

  "He's our hacker," Kent said.

  Luc slumped back in his chair. "Oh, no."

  "Yeah," Kent said, his face reddening. "One of our own."

  "Whatever happened to loyalty?" Brad was saying, looking around as if the answer were going to pop out of the air. "First Macintosh, now Gleason. I can't stand it."

  "Has he made any demands?" Luc said.

  Kent shook his head. "Not yet. But he will."

  "How do we know that?"

  "He broke the financial codes."

  "Damn it!" Luc said, anger burning through the alarm. "I thought the software people said they'd stop him!"

  Brad fidgeted. "We told them to trace him, then stop him. They spent all night trying to trace him. The sysop in charge overnight said Gleason's very good. The only way they managed to identify him was through a signature code transmitted by his computer."

  "I don't understand," Luc said.

  "He was using a company laptop!" Kent shouted, hammering the table. "That's how he got through the fire wall. He used the goddamn computer we gave him, the sonovabitch!"

  "Why would he do such a thing?" Brad said.

  Luc ignored him. "Then you think he knows about the repurposing of the R & D funds?"

  Listen to me, Luc thought. Repurposing. What an inane euphemism.

  "Who knows?" Kent said. "The sysop said he was in the middle of all the numbers. If that was what he was looking for, he found it."

  "What'll we do?" Brad said.

  "Same thing we did with Macintosh," Kent said, fixing Luc with his gaze. "We hire your buddy Ozymandias Prather."

  "No," Luc said. He wouldn't be a party to another death. "You yourself said he hasn't made any demands or any threats. He—"

  "Only a matter of time," Kent said.

  Brad was nodding. "Why else would he be snooping around in our computer?"

  Luc didn't have an answer for that.

  "I have a worse scenario," Kent said. "Gleason and the spy in the warehouse could be working together—for Glaxo or Roche or who knows."

  "Aren't we getting a little paranoid?"

  "With good reason!" Brad said. "We've got that crazy Serb on one side and the DEA on the other. We've got nowhere to turn!"

  Kent slapped his hand on the table. "Look. It doesn't matter if Gleason's an industrial spy, a greedy bastard, or a goody-two-shoes potential whistle blower, he's got to go."

  "You're talking about a man's life here," Luc said.

  "Damn right I am!" Kent shouted, reddening as he leaned forward. "Mine! And if I have to choose between my skin and some disloyal nosy bastard's, guess who gets my vote!"

  "Listen to us," Brad said softly as he pressed the heels of his palms over his eyes. "Voting on killing a man like we're voting on some minor corporate policy change."

  "You know something?" Kent said. "It's not so hard the second time. We've done it once already. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say." He raised his hand. "I vote yes."

  Brad lifted his hand. "Me too, I guess. I don't see any other way." He shifted his watery gaze between Luc and Kent. "You know what we'v
e become? We've all become Dragovics."

  Luc's inability to deny the awful truth of those words sickened him. "I wish I'd never heard of Loki."

  "You wish?" Kent said, jabbing his finger at Luc's face. "How about us? This is all your fault! If you hadn't started fucking around with that goddamn thing's blood, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

  Luc's thoughts flashed back to the strange phone call he'd received last fall. Someone calling himself Salvatore Roma, saying he was a professor of anthropology and telling Luc he should pay a visit to a traveling "oddity emporium" that was stopped for the weekend in the village of Monroe on Long Island. Professor Roma had said there was an odd creature there with extremely interesting components in its blood. "Look into them, Doctor," the soft, cultured voice had said. "I guarantee you will find them most interesting."

  Luc had made a few calls and had learned that indeed there was a tent show in Monroe for the weekend. Suspecting he was being hoaxed, but curious nonetheless, he'd made the trip and bought a ticket. When he saw the strange creature he assumed it was a fake, but it was an awfully good fake. So he introduced himself to Prather who seemed almost desperate to identify the creature. Because of this, he allowed Luc to take—for a fee—a sample of its blood.

  And in that sample Luc found what he would later dub the Loki molecule. He isolated it, synthesized it, and began testing the blue powder on mice and rats. The results were disturbing. The mice, who usually clustered together in friendly piles for mutual warmth, began running around in bursts of frenzied activity and attacking one another. Their cages became miniature slaughterhouses. The rats, who were caged singly, would chew at the wire mesh of their cages until their mouths were bloody ruins, and leap to attack whenever one of the techs opened a cage door.

  Luc had tried to reach this Professor Roma but could find no trace of him at any New York college. He cursed himself for not finding out how to contact the man.

  Unknown to Luc, one of his research techs had a cocaine habit. To curry favor or perhaps to work a deal on a buy, the tech pilfered samples of the Loki powder and gave them to his supplier. These somehow found their way to Milos Dragovic.

  Luc had known nothing of this at the time. As it was, he couldn't devote the time he needed to delve fully into the properties of this strange molecule, and perhaps he should have kept closer track of the Loki stock, but he'd been distracted by GEM Pharma's financial crisis.

  "I also wish I'd never heard of TriCef!" Luc shouted, anger surging as he snapped back to the present. "I didn't put this company on the brink of financial ruin by wagering its future on the success of a single product!"

  "The vote to invest in TriCef was unanimous," Brad reminded him.

  "Yes, I went along," Luc admitted, "but only because I couldn't get on with my work with you two badgering me constantly."

  GEM had been doing well, extremely well, with generic Pharmaceuticals, but Kent and Brad wanted to boost the company from its small-time, also-ran status into a major. Luc had reluctantly agreed to their plan to buy world rights to a new third-generation cephalosporin that was supposed to blow all the other broad-spectrum antibiotics out of the water. They put the company deep into debt to launch TriCef. And TriCef tanked.

  Then, to their shock, Milos Dragovic appeared and offered to buy the blue powder Luc had been experimenting with. He said he would take all they could produce for an undisclosed market overseas. They'd been wary, but not wary enough. What they'd known of Dragovic then came from the papers where he was portrayed as a rather glamorous if shady character. And he was offering a lot of money…

  "If GEM had been solvent when Dragovic approached us," Luc said, "we could have—we would have laughed him off. But as it was, we were faced with the choice of either throwing in with him or going Chapter Eleven."

  The Dragovic money would pull them back from the brink, so they agreed to gear a percentage of their production facility to the stuff Luc called Loki.

  "The proverbial offer we couldn't refuse," Kent said.

  "We had a choice," Luc said. "We could have bit the bullet and refused. But we didn't."

  Luc knew he had been right there on the line with his two partners, voting an enthusiastic yes—anything to save their financial hides.

  Brad moaned. "But if we'd only known what the stuff could do, what he'd do with it."

  "Let's not kid ourselves," Luc said. "You knew from my reports that it increased aggression tenfold in rodents; and none of us was so naive as to believe someone like Dragovic had a legitimate use in mind."

  Luc later learned that Dragovic had performed impromptu human studies with the samples. He'd discovered that a little of the blue powder imparted an intense euphoria, an on-top-of-the-world feeling. A larger amount elicited outbursts of mindless violence at the slightest provocation, sometimes with no provocation at all.

  Dragovic had found an instant market in his gunrunning customers, so he sent the first shipments to his contacts in the various Balkan militias. Word spread like wildfire through the military underground and soon every military and paramilitary organization—from the Iraqis and the Iranians to the Israelis and Hamas—wanted a supply.

  Dragovic set up a dummy corporation in Rome where he received bulk quantities of Loki shipped from GEM as TriCef. There his people filled capsules and pounded out tablets to distribute Loki throughout the world.

  "Yeah," Kent said, "but we thought his market was a bunch of Third World military crazies who'd kill each other off and that would be it."

  "Right," Brad said. "Who ever dreamed it would become a street drug right in our own backyards?"

  Luc couldn't help laughing.

  "What's so fucking funny?" Kent shouted.

  "I ought to call Mr. Prather and see if he has use for ethical contortionists!"

  "Don't push me, Luc," Kent gritted through his teeth.

  "That's not fair," Brad said. "I've been tortured by this."

  "Really?" Luc said. He didn't know why he was feeling so hostile. Almost as if he'd taken some of that damn drug himself. "I haven't noticed a big surplus in your draw account."

  Brad averted his gaze.

  The truth was that the huge profits from Loki had salved all their consciences. The drug had turned GEM Pharma into a money machine—a self-laundering money machine from which all the income derived from Loki was cleaned up by declaring it as profit from international sales of TriCef.

  Kent had devised an almost perfect system. GEM synthesized the drug in its heavily automated Brooklyn plant where the few employees needed to maintain the production line thought they were manufacturing an antibiotic. GEM records showed bulk shipments of TriCef to Rome. From there the drug traveled such a tortuous path of cutting and packaging and repackaging that by the time the pills reached America their trail was so attenuated that it would be virtually impossible to trace them back to GEM.

  Atop all that was the added safety factor of the un-consumed Loki spontaneously converting to an inert compound every new moon.

  Loki had made them all very rich, but also guilty, trapped, and desperate.

  And paranoid.

  Dragovic's mercurial moods were not their only worry. A few months ago Brad had brought up the possibility of a hostile takeover by another corporation. The purchase of a controlling percentage of GEM stock would inevitably lead to exposure of their secret. To head that off they had been funneling the funds earmarked for basic research into the repurchase of their own company's stock.

  What a catastrophic mess.

  Luc sighed and closed his eyes; he pictured himself in a tiny rural cafe in Provence, sipping dark, rich coffee while the owner's cat basked nearby in a sunny window.

  In three weeks I'll be out of this. Just three weeks.

  But if Gleason blew the whistle… Luc's bucolic vision shifted from rural France to a jail cell right here in Manhattan.

  He opened his eyes and fixed Brad, the company comptroller. "Prather will want cash, in advance. It's Saturday. How wi
ll you—?"

  "I'll get it," Brad said. "Same amount as for Macintosh, I assume. I'll have it for you by this afternoon."

  "One more thing we need to consider: Gleason has some sort of relationship with our new researcher."

  Kent clapped his hands against the sides of his head and tugged on his red hair. "Aw, shit! How close?"

  "I can't say. I do know he recommended her for the job, but beyond that…" Luc shrugged.

  "Dear God," Brad said. "Can't anything be simple? What if they're close? We don't want to do anything to distract her from her work! You've got to find out!"

  Luc rose. "I'll do my best."

  "In the meantime," Kent told Brad, "get the cash together."

  As Luc turned and reached for the door, Brad's voice was a low moan behind him. "How long can we keep this up?"

  Brad was unraveling before their eyes.

  Hang on just a little longer, Brad, Luc thought. Just a few more weeks. After that, you can dissolve into a quivering mass of Jell-O for all I care.

  9

  "If Abe vouches for you," Tom Terrific said, "that's good enough for me. But I'd like my consultation fee up front if you don't mind."

  'Take a check?" Jack said.

  Tom Terrific acknowledged the patent absurdity with a smile that revealed small yellow teeth spaced like kernels on a stunted ear of corn. His forehead went back even farther than Abe's, but he was much thinner, and the long salt-and-pepper hair growing off the rear half of his scalp was twisted into a single braid. He looked to be in his late forties, slightly hunched posture, painfully thin, wearing torn jeans and a sleeveless Mighty Ducks sweatshirt that revealed a showroom of tattoos up and down his arms. The Harley-Davidson insignia clung to his wasted left deltoid; a big red "1%" was engraved on his right. If Uncle Creepy had been a Hell's Angel, he'd have looked like Tom Terrific.

  "I see you're into ink, Mr. Terrific," Jack said as he pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his back pocket. "You into bikes too?"