by Warren Esby
Edy asked for and received a list of all employees of all the companies in the building, now only two, and their contact information that the facilities manager was required to have. They had all been issued key cards that allowed them access to the building and to the restricted areas they were allowed to be in, and the facilities manager had a record of who they all were and where they were allowed to be in the building. Edy asked for and received a master card that allowed access to every place in the building. Aside from the facility manager, she was the only one allowed to have it. She used it one night to briefly allow a team of agents into Jack Doff’s office to place a tap on his phone. Was that illegal? You don’t need to know.
Ben and Edy checked out all the Prokaida employees. There were, actually, fourteen employees, although we had only counted twelve, five of which had Indian or Pakistani sounding names but we only remembered seeing three of these. Aside from them and the facilities manager, the only other people working in the building were Frank from the animal facility, the receptionist who had been hired by the facilities manager and doubled as his secretary, Anya and me. An outside firm provided janitorial services and they came three times a week at night, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Most of the employees that Ben and Edy checked out seemed unremarkable. They had graduated from known universities and had been employed elsewhere and had a history. Two with Indian-sounding names were recent immigrants who had come to the United States to do graduate studies.
Around the time I was performing my astounding act of rat-healing, several other events transpired that had significance. Dong gave a seminar at UNC at the invitation of Clark Kentson which I attended, the first human balloon showed up at the Durham Forest Nursing Home, and Doff asked to meet with me. When I went to the seminar, who should show up in the audience but Jack Doff. I don’t know if he saw me or not or even recognized me since we had only nodded to each other a few times in the incubator building. I was on the opposite side of the lecture room, so he may have just missed me, and I didn’t want to call attention to myself since I wanted to observe the three of them.
After Kentson introduced Dong, he went over and sat next to Doff and they talked quietly throughout the seminar which I thought was very rude. Dong’s seminar was very good, but had nothing to do with programmed cell death of any sort. It was all about a metabolic pathway in humans that preferentially deposited fat in the abdomen of males and the hips of females. He said if he could block that fat pathway, it might be a valuable contribution. Valuable is an understatement. I would estimate that there would be billions of dollars of sales for any drug that someone developed to block that fat pathway. Like all scientists who have made a good discovery, he had to satisfy his ego and propose that others call the new pathway Rhong Dong’s fat pathway.
And I could easily understand why he wanted to study fat metabolism because he was fat himself, and I overheard several others in the audience refer to him as the fat Dong which led me to believe that there may be other Duke Dongs that aren’t fat Dongs. And then I remembered that the Duke sports’ teams were known as the Duke Blue Devils and if this fat Duke Dong was really a member of Al Qaeda, then he really was a devil, a real fat Duke Blue Devil Dong. At the end of the seminar, after the question and answer period, I noticed that Kentson and Doff went off together, still in conversation, and didn’t even go up and try to say goodbye to the fat Duke Blue Devil Dong.
Ben and Edy were the local CIA representatives assigned to investigate the odd incident at the nursing home. They asked us to join them hoping we would be able to see anything they overlooked. Well I learned a whole lot about what life in a nursing home is like. It appeared that this was an upscale nursing home and all the elderly residents had their own rooms. Apparently, most of them are severely debilitated and end up spending most of their day sleeping in front of their television or in a wheelchair in the corridor in front of their room so they can get a larger view of the world or at least of one corridor of the world. Some of the residents, who wanted more interaction with other residents, would be wheeled into this big area where four corridors intersected and where there was a large-screen television in one corner and enough space for a whole gaggle of wheelchairs. At least that was what one of the aides said it was called. I had heard of a gaggle of geese and a herd of horses and a covey of quail and a pride of lions, but I didn’t know if a gaggle of wheelchairs was the correct term, but it sounded about right and fit better than most of the others, although a covey of wheelchairs sounded okay too.
Apparently as part of the daily routine, an aide would go up to each wheelchair around dinner time and poke the inhabitant until he or she woke up and then ask them whether they wanted to be wheeled back into their room, where they would be served their evening meal on a tray, or to the dining room where they could sit at a table with other residents. Sometimes the resident couldn’t be awakened, they said, and they just wheeled them back into their room. The trays would be delivered by a different set of aides and collected after an hour whether the resident ate or not. Sometimes the resident didn’t wake up to eat, but the aide who checked later never knew because the tray could have been delivered and picked up uneaten and the room aide would never know. This was a problem with the system, since many residents could be wheeled in and out several days in a row without eating.
All those residents wear adult diapers that need to be changed with the help of an aide, and apparently the aide on each shift hoped that the aide on the previous shift had done it or that the one on the next shift would do it. Usually they didn’t want to know and didn’t check unless the room smelled really bad, and then they would have to check and you know what they invariably found. But absent the smell they didn’t check. The foregoing description of the way this particular nursing home handled their residents created a situation that wasn’t really appreciated until it was brought to light when one of the residents had turned into a human balloon. When Mr. Harrison was poked to see if he wanted dinner, the poke ruptured the balloon and the liquefied Mr. Harrison made a real mess all over the corridor in front of his room.
Ben and Edy knew what had happened right away, because the CIA had been monitoring unusual occurrences at all medical facilities in the area after the appearance of the animal balloons. They had half expected this to occur, especially since the monitoring of Al Qaeda Internet and phone traffic had suggested that a test on humans was about to take place somewhere in that area around Duke and UNC. However, the occurrence also pointed out the problem with how the nursing facility was handling some of the residents because, when the CIA made them closely examine all the other residents, they found three others that had died between three and five days before and had just been wheeled in and out of their rooms on a daily basis. It was later found that they had all died of natural causes, but because they hadn’t begun to smell yet, no one noticed. It also explained the strange autopsy result that had been reported on one patient the year before. At the request of one family, who thought their loved one may have died of neglect, an autopsy was performed that showed that the patient had indeed died of natural causes, heart failure to be exact, and not from neglect, but the date of death as determined by the autopsy did not coincide with the date of death on the death certificate. For some reason the two dates were a week apart. I wondered how much extra money the nursing home made wheeling dead bodies back and forth into their rooms every day at a price of close to three hundred dollars a day.
Apparently there was no evidence of there being any other human balloon in the making and the CIA concluded that there may have been only enough material to inflate one balloon, if that is the correct term for the new menace. After we reviewed the scene of the inflation, Ben and Edy requested a list of the aides who worked in the facility. There was a bulletin board with pictures of all those on duty that day and that night, and one of the ones that was on the night shift looked like he might be Indian or Pakistani. They only had the first names by each picture and this one’s n
ame was Ghorzang.
I asked the supervisor what his last name was and she said, “Gopang.”
Now was that a coincidence or what? But it was a different first name from our Ghazan Gopang, and he definitely looked different, although Anya thought there might be a family resemblance. But what were the odds that two Gopangs were working at facilities that had resulted in animal or human balloons and they didn’t have anything to do with each other? Ben and Edy asked the CIA to investigate whether there were any other Gopangs working at either UNC or Duke. It turned out that Ghorzang Gopang had part time positions during the day working Monday and Wednesday at the animal facilities at UNC where the animal balloons had been found and Tuesdays and Thursdays at the animal facility at Duke where they had also appeared. By the time this information came back to us, however, events had transpired that made that information moot.
Chapter 14
After the miracle cure of the rats, Jack Doff finally acknowledged that we existed and stopped Anya and me as we were coming into work the following week. He introduced himself and asked if we could have a chat to get to know each other since we were the only two tenants left. He asked if I had time that morning, and I told him I could give him a few minutes and we agreed to meet in about a half hour in the conference room that was near his office. I told Anya to come after twenty minutes and tell me that I had an important call, even though no one would call me there because we didn’t even have a company phone. However, that would give me an excuse to leave. I came into the conference room and Jack was already sitting at the head of the table, the power position, with a cup of coffee in front of him. He didn’t get up to greet me so I remained standing just inside the door and waited. He did not have a friendly look on his face as someone who truly wanted to have a cordial discussion would have, and looked a little annoyed that I was still standing and he would either have to ask me to sit down or get up to greet me. I was forcing him to be polite and he didn’t like it. He looked like someone who was used to giving orders and being in charge but not in the way that most business people are.
He finally said, “Sit down.”
It was more of a command than an invitation so I ignored it to aggravate him a little and said, to aggravate him some more,
“What’s up Dude?”
He was flustered. I suddenly must have represented to him all that he hated about America. He didn’t realize that I don’t particularly like that aspect of America myself.
He kept control of himself and said, “Since we seem to be working on complementary things, I thought we could have a conversation about how we could work together since we are in the same building.”
I played dumb, which I should have because I wasn’t supposed to know what he was working on.
I said, “Are we? I don’t even know what you’re working on. How do you know what I’m working on?”
“It’s my business to know what people in the field are working on.”
Stupid me for not knowing that, I thought.
I replied, “So what am I working on that you think is worth collaborating on?”
“You appear to have an aerosol delivery system for drugs that seems promising.”
“I do. How do you know that?” I knew Frank must have told him. I had depended on it.
“Word gets around.”
“Rad,” I replied. That’s scientific jargon for great. “And what are you doing?” I continued.
“We are developing a cancer treatment that could benefit by the kind of systemic administration that an aerosol spray could provide.”
“Gnarly,” I said, showing him I was really up on scientific jargon. “But I don’t want to share my discovery just yet since I think it’s potentially worth a lot of money to a lot of people for delivering a lot of drugs, so I don’t see the benefit of working with you. However, if you can convince me that your technology is as bodacious as mine, then fill me in Bro.”
I don’t know why I started talking like this, but I often get into a mood to aggravate people I don’t like, and I like to do it in such a way that they may not be able to determine if I’m really a fool or just putting them on. It helps them to underestimate me if they assume I’m a fool. Because Doff was obviously a good deal older than me, and I looked rather young, I thought he might give me more information if he underestimated me and thought me to be a foolish kid.
He still wanted to have a serious discussion, I could tell, so he continued, “We have a drug that we think will be effective in causing apoptosis in cancer patients, but it’s useful only if injected into solid tumors. If we can deliver it systemically, then it could be quite useful in treating metastatic tumors as well.”
“Awesome possum,” I replied. “What other approaches have you been trying?”
“I can’t tell you that just yet. You must appreciate that.”
Of course I did. He told me about as much as we had already found out, and I realized that between his work and Kentson’s they had only determined that they could impact enough cells with ordinary injections to cause massive cell death, but they were waiting on other developments, such as the one they thought I had, in order to make it into a really dangerous biological weapon of mass destruction.
“But it seems having my system is essential to you. I mean, do you have any other way to deliver it?”
“We’re working on it, but your system may be better and it may be farther ahead, that’s why I’d like to get some more details and maybe make a deal.”
“I can’t give you the big skinny on that just yet. I don’t want you in my lunch. But I’m open. Give me more dope on what you’ve got and maybe we can ride together. I can make a splash using the disease models I’m working on, so you need to convince me that your stuff is just as good in order for me to jump the couch.”
He didn’t give up. “How are you set for funds? We might have resources that you need.”
I didn’t answer his question about the need for funds. Instead I said, “Tell me more about your experiments and maybe I’ll play ball. But I need more than you’re giving me.”
I really didn’t think we’d get anything more out of him than I had, but it was worth one more try before we shut him down.
He said, “Let me think about it. I may come up with an offer you’ll consider. Let’s meet Friday after work and see if we can work something out. I may be willing to tell you a little more about what we’re doing and convince you it’s just as rad as your stuff. Let’s make it around six in my office.”
“K,” I said and left.
I never sat down and Anya hadn’t needed to come and get me. I knew that we probably wouldn’t get anything else out of him, and I thought he was really talking about making me an offer I couldn’t refuse, but I thought it was worth one more shot and he probably underestimated me a little and thought me a fool which should give me an advantage. I also planned to take Anya with me to “take notes” so she could cover my back.
Our facility at Rat Park was a one-story building that was about two hundred feet wide by one hundred fifty feet deep. The middle of the front of the building facing the parking lot was almost all glass with fifty feet of brick wall on each side and a glass double door in the center serving as the entrance. As you came in the main door, you entered a space that was about one hundred feet wide by about twenty-five feet deep. The entire front of this area facing the outside front of the building was glass and faced the parking lot. The entire area surrounding this area on the inside of the building was mostly one-way glass that made the wall look like a giant mirror and gave the entire space a feeling of being larger than it was. Right in the center of the area facing the inside of the front double doors was a receptionist’s desk that was chest high behind which the facilities manager’s assistant usually sat. There were two similar, but smaller desks of the same sort, each facing inward at either end, each in front of the single door that occupied the side of the glass wall next to the front wall of the building. At the far left corne
r of the wall facing the front was a door to a small seminar room and placed in a similar position to the far right of the same wall was the door of the large conference room where I had met with Doff.
Apoptosis, Inc. occupied the offices accessed by the door on the far left wall with the receptionist’s desk in front of it that was never used. Similarly, Prokaida’s offices were behind the door on the far right wall, and they never had a receptionist at their desk either. Directly behind the main reception desk was a corridor that led to the back door and off which there was other space for other companies, but they were now unoccupied since Prokaida had rented them, except for the office belonging to the facilities manager.
We walked down to Prokaida’s end of the building at six on Friday afternoon and Jack was waiting for us. He invited us into his office which was the first one facing the door to the outside corridor when you entered his facility. We had ours similarly located at the other end. As we passed the conference room on our way to Jack’s office, we noticed that three Pakistanis or Indians were inside eating from containers of fast food. We only recognized one and surmised that the others were the ones on the payroll whom we had never seen before, but we didn’t know for sure. Ghorzang Gopang was not one of them. As I mentioned before, Ben and Edy had tapped Jack Doff’s phone and there was a van parked not far away in a parking lot of a nearby building, and it was monitoring Doff’s calls whenever he was there. Ben and Edy were in their black Cadillac Escalade Hybrid next to it and were in constant communication with those inside the van.