Russell Andrews - Aphrodite

"I told them I wanted two masseuses," Manwaring said, agitated, as they set the tables down. "I didn't want a man."

"Are you going to make me quote the words of the immortal Mick Jagger?" Justin said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's a good lesson for you to learn. 'You can't always get what you want,'" Justin told him and, pulling out his gun and pointing it at the ex-secretary, the next thing he told him was to sit down and shut up.

Deena went into the bedroom, came out dragging a woman, who also wore nothing but a terry-cloth robe. The woman was attractive in a plain and simple way, about five foot five, straight black shoulder-length hair. She was thin and fragile looking, and right now she appeared terrified.

Manwaring immediately started telling Justin that he was making a huge mistake, that there were police all over the place, that if he was part of the protest group it was all an error, that nobody knew what was really going on.

"We actually know what's going on," Justin told him. "Or at least a big chunk of it. And we're not part of the protest group. We're here to get some answers and I have to say, if we don't get them I'm going to use this gun."

"If you pull that trigger you will never get past the lobby. You'll be committing suicide."

"Mr. Manwaring, you may be right but I can't say it scares me any. You don't have any idea of the kind of shit we've fallen into. If I pull this trigger, my guess is the only thing it can do is make me a lot more popular than I am right now."

"I know your voice," the woman in the robe now said to Justin. She had a soft, whispery tone that Justin thought could never become too harsh or too loud. "I recognize your voice."

"Congratulations," Justin told her. "Now please sit down and keep quiet while I ask my questions."

"You don't understand," she said now, her voice rising to a higher pitch as she got more excited. "I recognize your voice. You left messages for me. Warnings. I know you!" Turning to Manwaring, her soft voice as loud as it could get, she said, "He's the policeman, Frank." And turning back to Justin she said, "We've been trying to find you!"

"Who are you?" he asked.

"You've been looking for me," she told him. "I'm Helen Roag." "Jesus Christ," Justin said to Manwaring. "Are you guys all the same? Does every politician think with his dick?"

"This is not what it appears to be," Manwaring said.

"That's good. Because what it appears to be is that you're a sleazeball married guy who's being investigated for murdering his mistress, who flushed his career down the toilet, and who's now fucking an FBI informant who everybody thinks is dead! What am I missing here?" Justin knew he was on the verge of losing it. His anger was overwhelming him. He remembered the breathing exercises Deena had taught him, part of her yoga session. He slowed down his breath, concentrated on slowing his whole body down. He felt himself getting calmer. The anger was still there, but he was in control of it. "Why were you trying to find me?"

"Because I suspected they were doing the same thing to you that they've done to me," Manwaring said.

"Which is?"

"Distort the truth. Destroy your credibility. Make sure you're unable to reveal the things you know."

"We thought you could help us," Helen Roag said.

"We thought you could do the same for us," Deena said.

Justin walked over to a tray set on top of the television set. He took a bottle of water off the tray, opened it, and took a long sip. "I need to know what's going on," he said. But before Manwaring could respond, the anger erupted again. "Christ," Justin said, and he stood up, looked around the room for something to throw, to destroy, couldn't find anything, and forced himself to stop moving. "You're one of them! Why the hell should I believe anything you tell me?"

Manwaring didn't say a word. Helen Roag reached over to him, touched his knee. He looked up at her and she nodded. Her eyes turned sad, deeply sad, and she nodded again. Manwaring patted her hand, turned to face Justin and Deena. "I'm a married man who cheats on his wife," he began. "Nothing else that you think is true is even remotely true."

Douglas Kransten was a bona fide visionary, Frank Manwaring said. That fact was indisputable. Almost everything else about his life could most definitely be disputed. But to understand what was going on, everything had to start with Doug Kransten.

He grew up in pre-Revolutionary Cuba. His father was American, his mother Cuban. His father, a lawyer, went down to Cuba to work for an American oil company. He wound up running the company and, knowing the money to be made in the island paradise, eventually left to become a real estate developer. The Kranstens lived the life of privileged aristocrats down there. Their splendid home was in the Miramar section of Havana, and they owned a country plantation forty miles down the coast near Trinidad. Then Castro came to power. Both homes were taken away. Kransten's father was imprisoned and then killed in an uprising. Kransten and his mother escaped to Florida, leaving behind every possession they owned. They spent three months in Miami, but Kransten couldn't stand it there. He didn't like being a member of the Cuban ghetto. He felt as if he had far more American blood in him, so he left his mother behind and went farther north. He settled in Georgia and started over, penniless. He was twenty-four years old.

In Atlanta, he landed a job at a pharmacy as a clerk. Fascinated by the business, he went to school, got his license, and became a pharmacist. Several years after that he went to work for Maxwell Enterprises, a small pharmaceutical company, as a sales trainee. Within seven years he was president of the company.

When he made his ascension to become head of Maxwell, Doug Kransten looked around and saw the future. What he saw was a baby-boom generation that was young and fit and spirited. They were marching in the streets and doing drugs and defying every mode of accepted fashion. And they were getting instant gratification-sexually, politically, financially. What Kransten also saw, as he looked toward the end of the century, was that these baby boomers would age. They would eventually become a dominant financial power in the societal structure and they would want the same things they wanted when they were young. They were used to instant gratification, this generation, and Kransten didn't believe age would alter that. If anything, it would intensify that urge.

He ordered the scientists working for Maxwell-its name would soon change to Kransten International-to spend their time developing pharmaceutical products that would feed into this generation's desire for youth and pleasure. They did. They began to develop drugs that would improve sexual gratification in the elderly. By the mid-nineties they had a pill that gave previously impotent men erections. Three years after the pill was introduced on the market, it generated net sales of $600 million per year-and Wall Street research showed that they had managed to tap into only approximately seven percent of the potential market. Over the years, the company made hundreds of millions of dollars easing arthritic pain with anti-inflammatories and pills that claimed to aid in cartilage regeneration. Their research department worked on creating a generic pain-relief pill. The marketing department decided to target it especially to golfers. They spent years building up brand-name recognition, knowing that all the young tennis players would one day turn to the more sedentary sport in droves-and reach for the pill whose name had been drilled into their brains via commercials and billboards. Fortunes were made with weight-loss and hair-growth products. As early as the mid-seventies, Kransten, the company, had become a corporate force to be reckoned with. By the end of the twentieth century they were a dominant global economic power.