F. Paul Wilson - All the Rage

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've 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.