F. Paul Wilson - All the Rage

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 will 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.