by Warren Esby
As we looked around, she asked, “What do you think of my collection?”
“Very impressive,” I responded. “Where did all this come from?”
“Oh I have a very bad habit. I just love to go to yard sales and garage sales and flea markets and thrift shops because I always find something I like to collect.”
“It looks like it must have cost a lot to collect all this stuff.”
“Oh no. I never pay very much and I always find really good bargains. You’d be surprised how valuable some of the stuff is that people just have to get out of their house. And there are several antique dealers from around here who come in every few weeks and find something valuable they like. They give me far more for it than I paid, and I always have enough money from what they give me to buy more the following weekend. It’s a lot of fun and keeps me busy since my husband died, and I enjoy looking at all of it.”
“So your hobby pays for itself.”
“Well, almost. It used to pay for itself, but there are other people around here who are doing the same thing. There’s one lady who drives around in a big Buick with a little white poodle and she always seems to be one yard sale ahead of me. I don’t get around quite as quickly as I used to since I’m not getting any younger, and she often beats me to the good stuff.”
Anya was walking around and looking at everything. I went over to one of the large tables covered with little ceramic figurines. There was a little lamb figurine that I noticed immediately. I picked it up and sure enough it said Made in China on its underside. I asked our landlady if it was for sale and she said sure. She had two others just like it on another table. She said I could have it for a dollar, and I immediately bought it.
Those of you who have read my original memoirs will immediately appreciate the significance of that little lamb and how it contributed to my getting involved with the CIA in the first place. If you haven’t read the first one, then you won’t understand, and it isn’t very important. And if you’ve really hated reading this one so far, you probably are never going to read the first one anyway, so it still doesn’t matter. And if you’ve really, really hated this one, you’ve probably already stopped reading this, and I have wasted a lot of words I didn’t need to have written down. But if it does matter to you, go back and find one of the copies of the first volume of my memoirs. You can probably find a used copy for about as much as a ceramic lamb Made in China would cost. As for the lamb I bought, it would be sent parcel post within the week to my old neighbor back in Boston, carefully packed so that none of its legs would be broken.
I signed the month-to-month rental agreement and told our new landlady that I didn’t know how many months we would be there. She said it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to give out a long-term lease because she hadn’t decided yet whether to keep up with her collecting, and if she did, she might need the rental house to display more of her collection and would stop renting it out. She said the lady in the big Buick had a bigger house than she did, and I could almost see those competitive juices flowing. Anya and I then went across the street to our rental. A brief description is all that is necessary to describe it. It was quaint. That one word says it all.
Chapter 11
Anya and I got acclimatized to our new surroundings. Since the company that Gopang had been dealing with was located in Research Triangle Park, and animal balloons had showed up at UNC and Duke, we drove around and checked out all those locations. We noted that the company in the Research Park, which was called Prokaida, Inc., a nonsense name as far as I could tell, was one of several small companies in a small building in a far corner of the park.
Ben and Edy showed up a few days after we had scouted out the area, and we all went directly to the nearby ice cream shop, which also served lunch, so everyone could obtain their nutrition in whichever form they wanted. Edy filled us in on the three names we had obtained from Gopang. Rhong Dong was a Ph.D. and Assistant Professor at Duke with a National Institutes of Health grant to study cellular mechanisms. Clark Kentson was an M.D. and Clinical Research Professor in the Oncology Department at UNC Medical School and also had a National Institutes of Health grant to develop cancer treatments. Jack Doff was the CEO of Prokaida, Inc. which also had a National Institutes of Health grant, but mostly had private funding and was developing some secret new metabolism altering drugs and collaborating with both Kentson and Dong. Further investigation had ascertained that Doff had changed his name from Zakhar Dragunoff to Jack Doff when he had moved to the U.S. from Russia. So I was right to be suspicious of his name.
We started to brainstorm about how we could get close to any of these operations, to get a better idea of who was involved and how their work was progressing. I don’t really know how the phrase brainstorm came about, but to continue in a similar vein, my brainstorm produced a brain lightning strike first. Prokaida was housed in a small building that was used as an incubator facility for biotech start-ups. Basically an incubator nurtures start-ups until they grow big enough to go out into the world on their own, much like an incubator for baby chicks or human babies or human baby chicks. The start-up incubator provides a lot of common facilities and equipment that the individual small companies can’t afford on their own, but can if they all band together.
Each company has its own private offices and laboratories in the facility and doesn’t have to spend a lot of money setting up a complete facility by itself. Each start-up company gets what it needs as part of its rent and only pays for the portion it uses. I had experience working for a start-up in California, and under a very experienced entrepreneur, so I suggested that we should set up a company to do work similar to what Prokaida was doing and rent space in the same incubator as Prokaida. Because we would have supposedly common interests, I might, disguised as an entrepreneur, be able to keep an eye on them and possibly find out what they were up to. Just as at MUSC, Anya would work there and help and cover my back.
First, we decided we needed a name for the company that would cause Jack Doff to take notice. They say that lightning doesn’t strike twice, but my brainstorm had a second lightning strike.
I said, “Why don’t we name it Apoptosis, Inc.?”
And then I explained that apoptosis was the scientific name for a kind of programmed cell death that we knew Prokaida was working on. Now for those non-scientists who want to know how to pronounce scientific names so they will seem to be knowledgeable at cocktail parties, this is a good one to start with since it is not pronounced as it is written. You would think that it would be pronounced like “a-pop-toe-sis,” but it isn’t. The second p is silent for reasons I have never figured out, except maybe it was first used by a Southerner who dropped the p just like he was used to dropping other letters like ou in you all so it comes out y’all. Anyway, apoptosis is pronounced “a-pa-toe-sis,” and now you are ready for your first cocktail party of the new era.
When I first heard that name, I immediately assumed it was the scientific name for that common disease of middle-aged men that causes them to develop enormous pot bellies that hang over their belts. Anya likes to refer to those men as pot-bellied pigs. I always thought that apoptosis was a special subset of obesity with a special name since the other parts of those pot-bellied pigs did not look all that fat. Thinking of those afflicted men makes me laugh sometimes, especially when Anya walks by one of them, and they try to suck in that belly to make themselves look more attractive, and all that happens is that all that fat starts to quiver and jiggle. I know you’ve seen it, so don’t say you don’t know what I’m talking about. And as for you wives, if I’ve just described your husband, we are developing a cure for you. It’s called apoptosis.
Chapter 12
It took us a few weeks to incorporate a company with that name, register it with the state and rent space in the same building as Prokaida. The building was less than half full, so that wasn’t a problem. The economy wasn’t doing so well and few people were starting new companies. While this was going on, I kept my
eyes opened for news of lectures at Duke or UNC that either Kentson or Dong might give, so I could attend, see what they looked like and hear about what they claimed they were working on. We really didn’t know how they all fit together. I lucked out when I heard that Kentson was presenting at a Grand Rounds at UNC, and I attended. He talked about his research and it seemed that he was legitimately trying to see if he could reprogram cancer cells to self-destruct, but his methods seem to require direct injection of solid tumors, which would not be a good way to promote mass destruction because you would need masses of people carrying masses of hypodermic needles to cause mass destruction that way.
After we moved into our new company headquarters, we attended one of the TGIF parties that the facility manager held so that all the people in the start-ups could interact with each other and network and find out how each handled the problems that the others were encountering as they moved along to the point where they could be weaned from the incubator. There were only people from two other companies present and no one from Prokaida. No one had anything good to say about Jack Doff or Prokaida. The Prokaidians kept to themselves and were pretty secretive. Moreover, the people from the other companies were suspicions that Jack Doff was trying to sabotage the work that some of the others were doing, and some of their animal studies were turning out strangely.
We heard that the company in the space right next to Prokaida had moved out because they were being harassed regularly. Another company had moved out as well, which was the real reason that space was available, and one of the other two remaining companies was getting ready to move on since it was being bought out by another, bigger company that wanted to have all of their operations at one location elsewhere in the park. The other company was also looking to move. The facility manager told us that Doff had asked him not to rent out any more space until he got back from Saudi Arabia, where he had gone on a trip to raise more funds for his company. He said he wanted to expand and would be willing to rent the remaining empty space if he was able to raise the money, and he was very confident he could.
I had a discussion with Ben and Edy about what was going on. We realized that if Doff managed to get a hold of the entire building, then he could force us out, and we wouldn’t have a reason to be there and less of a chance to find out what Prokaida was doing.
“Any chance the CIA can get to the owner of the building and prevent that from happening?” I asked Ben and Edy.
They thought for a while and then Edy said, “Actually, we may be able to get the CIA to buy the building. We buy buildings of all sorts at secret locations all over the country and the world, and no one asks what they will be used for since no one outside of the CIA is supposed to know. The standard response is “If we tell you we’ll have to shoot you,” which would appear to be a joke, but no one wants to see if it is a joke, so no one asks. We’ve found out it’s pretty easy to buy a lot of things, including real estate, by just putting in a requisition and putting “need to know basis, only” on the justification line. No one knows what that really means, and the bureaucrat in charge, even if he or she doesn’t know about it, just presumes he or she isn’t on that particular “need to know” list and routinely approves it in case it is one of those situations for which he or she can get shot if he or she tries to know something he or she doesn’t need to know.”
It took Ben and Edy about a month of negotiations, and at the end of the month Ben said the CIA had a new investment company called Wantmo Investments that now owned the building, and Edy Dreyer was the CEO. She assured the facility manager that nothing would change, and he would still be in charge. By this time, Apoptosis, Inc. and Prokaida, Inc. were the only two tenants and Prokaida had leased all the space except for the space leased by Apoptosis, Inc. I had used my Department of Defense grant to order some laboratory rats that were to be housed in the common animal facilities of the incubator. I had ordered them through MUSC and had them shipped directly to our new home in what I now began calling Rat Park or Rat P, depending on my mood, since that was where we had parked our rats and what those rats did in their cages. I also asked another research laboratory I knew about that was working on an experimental model of Multiple Sclerosis known as Allergic Encephalitis to send me some of the material that can be injected into animals to cause this experimental disease. I intended to have sick animals around in order to convince Doff and his cohorts or dupes, whichever they were, that I was dealing with sick animals that I was trying to make better using programmed cell death.
But how was I going to convince them that I had value to them? Well I invoked the old brainstorm and lightning struck thrice. In this particular animal model of Multiple Sclerosis, the animals come down with symptoms of disease, but they recover spontaneously in about four or five days without any treatment. Researchers use them to test for potential treatments that would make them get better in only one or two days and hope that the decrease in sick days would indicate a potential treatment or cure in people.
I figured that Doff et al, who were in the field of cancer research, would probably not be familiar with this animal model and I could use whatever treatment I chose and the rats would go from looking like they were about to die, to rats that were perfectly healthy, in about four days after treatment. From what I understood, Doff’s group had a chemical that would induce programmed cell death, but they needed to actually inject animals directly with it or feed it to them in order to get their cells to self-destruct. I surmised that the best delivery system for a weapon of mass self-destruction like the one Prokaida was testing would be an aerosol.
I mean, if you were a terrorist and had a way to drop a bomb that would release an aerosol mist with the substance you wanted to deliver over a large area, and that no one could avoid breathing in; and the aerosol mist smelled innocuous but would lead to everyone who breathed it having the cells inside of them self-destruct, then wouldn’t that be a sight that would warm the cockles of your cold, cold heart. And the aerosol I had in mind for my ruse was diabolical in its simplicity. It was ordinary saline solution that comes in little aerosol containers and is used to spray up your nose to hydrate your nasal passages, especially if they dry out during airplane flights, or to help you when you have a cold. Every drug store sells them, some under a brand name Ocean, and they do have about the same salinity as sea water. I bought a vial of the saline solution on my way home and took the label off.
The animal facility, as I mentioned, was run by someone hired by the facilities manager, but Edy found out that he had been hired at the recommendation, almost the demand of Doff, who said that Prokaida’s animal studies were so important that he had to approve who was in that position. When I received the material I needed to inject, I injected a dozen animals and they all got sick on schedule. They just lay on the bottom of their cages and could barely drag themselves along, and anyone looking at them would think they wouldn’t last but a day or two before going to rat heaven. I brought in my vial of saline solution in the little aerosol container and asked the person in charge of the animal facility, his name was Frank, to hold each animal as I sprayed some of the aerosol solution in front of its face without touching the animal directly or trying to get the spray up its nose. The animal guy looked as if he thought I was nuts, and I knew he would tell the others that I was crazy.
I then left the facility and didn’t come back into the animal facilities for five days. I just asked the animal guy to let me know if there was any improvement in any of the animals. Well five days later every one of those rats was bopping around and Frank and everyone in Prokaida had told Doff about the miracle. I know they searched my lab that night because I had set out certain items in a way that had to be disturbed if there was a search, especially if anyone went into the refrigerator where drugs are usually kept. Of course I never intended to leave any of that treatment around for them to steal and have analyzed. I didn’t want them to know it was only saline.
As any good entrepreneur will tell you, the hype is al
ways more exciting than the reality, and I was an entrepreneur with a miracle drug for sure. And if I wanted more of my miracle cure to test, I only had to travel a short distance to one of the local drug stores. I had long since discarded the material I had used to inject them with in the first place, and I personally discarded the animals myself. I had them all “sacrificed for pathological examination” which, to put it bluntly, meant I killed them, not in the name of science, but in the name of anti-terrorism, and I packaged them in dry ice to be sent off for an autopsy. At least that’s what I told Frank. I didn’t want him or Doff to take any of the dead rats and send them off to another pathologist and be able to refute my story by having that pathologist report back to Doff that my rats had been given a self-healing disease to begin with. Did I really send the rats off for pathological evaluation? You bet your damn booties I didn’t. I burned them all at a real park where Ben, Edy, Anya and I went to have a picnic and a barbecue. No, we didn’t eat barbecued rat. We built a big campfire, and after dinner, we threw all the rats in and burned them while we sat around and discussed our plans and drank beer and Ben and Edy ate Dove Bars from the other container that had dry ice in it, not the one that we had taken the rats from the lab in. Burning rats, at least laboratory rats, don’t smell that bad. At least they don’t smell as bad as a pig farm.
Chapter 13
During all this time, we never really met anyone who was working at Prokaida. The facilities manager had told us that it was Prokaida’s policy not to have their workers talk to anyone else about what they were doing, which is the opposite of how most of these incubator companies operate. We watched them all coming and going every day and disappearing into the Prokaida part of the building. There were about a dozen of them and there was nothing remarkable about any of them. A few looked like they might have been Pakistani or Indian, but that was common at most of the companies of that size in Rat Park. Prokaida, even after renting most of the remaining space which doubled what they originally had, didn’t add any more staff or advertise that they were hiring.