"Boomtower? Baculum? Chiz Graham?"
"I'm sorry. They are just his legal clients, to my knowledge. If my employer is doing anything against the law, I am not a party to it."
"I can make this one speak," the Master announced.
Chiun backed the tall, thin man into a corner with hand gestures like a snake charmer.
"Don't waste your time, Chiun," Remo said. "He doesn't know anything. I believe him." Then he asked Leon, "Does Koch-Roche keep his passport in the office?"
"Center drawer of his desk."
Remo opened it and looked. "It's not here," he said.
"That's where he keeps it, unless he's using it."
"You've been a big help to us, Leon," Remo said. "Now we're going to need for you to spend some quiet time in a closet."
"I'm claustrophobic," the thin man confessed.
"Is there an office rest room?"
"Yes, of course."
"Then you can wait in there."
After they had locked Leon in the men's bathroom, Remo and Chiun returned to the attorney's private office.
"Time to call Smith," Remo said, picking up the phone.
"Yes," Chiun agreed, "the Emperor in his wisdom will surely guide us."
Remo punched in the code to CURE's scrambled line. He didn't know exactly how the thing worked, but when he dialed the number, his call was somehow rerouted by the Folcroft mainframes, sent through a few hundred thousand other phone numbers from all over the world, making it impossible for anyone to pull up the Koch-Roche phone records and find out whom he'd called.
Smith picked up on the first ring. "What have you got for me, Remo?" he demanded.
"Looks like we just missed our boy Jimmy," Remo said. "Apparently, he's flown the coop with Dewayne Korb, the billionaire nouveau muscle man. We have no idea where he's gone, but his passport isn't here."
"Let me run a quick check through the FAA in Los Angeles," Smith said. "See if Korb's filed a flight plan." After a pause, the director of CURE said, "I'll have that information momentarily. Did you get any break on a list of WHE users?"
"We got nothing there, either."
"That's too bad."
"The hormone heads will turn up eventually, won't they?"
"Yes, but probably only after they've committed some kind of atrocity. We could've saved a lot of innocent people a lot of pain and suffering if we'd isolated the current users.
"The FAA data is scrolling up now," Smith continued. "It shows a Korb-owned Boeing jet at LAX with a flight plan filed to Taiwan, nonstop."
"We'd better get on it, then," Remo said.
"No, it's too late. Their scheduled departure is in ten minutes. You'll never get there in time to stop them from taking off."
"What now?"
"We proceed according to plan. We have to stop the production of the drug at the point of manufacture, which means taking down Family Fing Pharmaceuticals of Formosa. And we have to do it before they have a cheap synthetic version of WHE ready to mass market. Bottom line is, you're going to Taiwan, too."
"So, how're we gonna handle that?"
"Your tickets and documents will be waiting for you at LAX. I'll book you on the next flight out."
"Aisle seat," Remo said.
"What?"
"Chiun likes an aisle seat. He claims it gives him a better view of the in-flight movie."
Chapter 28
Fosdick Fing touched the LCD screen of his notebook computer, making the densely packed table of five-digit numbers shift to a bar graph. "Now, that's a welcome sight!" he said. An expression of profound relief on his face, Fing showed his American colleague the newly correlated data. "I think Test Subject Three is definitely responding to the change in her diet," he told Carlos Sternovsky.
The American reviewed the computer-generated graph, then looked up at the video monitor bolted to the wall above the patient's locked door. The connection that Fosdick was making seemed tenuous at best to him. Like connecting bad luck with the presence of a black cat, or good luck with the position of the stars. The bar graph was a mathematical construct; it presented facts subject to interpretation. And interpretations were subject to being one hundred percent wrong.
True enough, the game-show hostess turned talk-show hostess turned opera star, known professionally as Okra, seemed to have calmed down. Only minutes before, she had been in the midst of a gibbering, foaming-at-the-mouth rage. Alone in her hospital suite, she had pounded on the walls, kicked at the steel-reinforced door and turned one hundred thousand dollars' worth of medical monitoring equipment into so much twisted wreckage. In her fury, Okra had even de-stuffed her own mattress. The empty ticking lay rumpled on the bed frame like the discarded skin of some enormous, gray-and-white-pin-striped fruit. Ankle-deep drifts of white polyester padding covered the floor of the room.
Since she'd started in on Fosdick's new food regimen, she hadn't moved from her position on the floor. She knelt in front of the jury-rigged feeding tube that had been slipped through a hole the staff had drilled in the wall.
Lips to the clear polyethylene, Okra sucked down a light brown substance, barely pausing for breath. "I'm positive," Fosdick said, "that the tantrums we've been seeing are related to too low a dietary-fat content. Think about it, Carlos. If the synthetic hormone is making greater and greater demands for fat intake over time, and that additional fat isn't provided, it could cause the test subjects terrible discomfort. And the violence they've exhibited may be directly related to the internal pain they are feeling."
"That may be so," Sternovsky said. "But what you're doing now proves nothing. Except that she likes peanut butter more than she likes tearing the bejesus out of her hospital room."
"True, it's not a double-blind study," Fosdick admitted, "and the data from this subject isn't fully calibrated yet, but these results certainly give us reason to hope that the negative effects of the drug can be lessened to market-acceptable levels."
"Without actually going to the trouble of changing the formulation," Sternovsky said.
"My father was adamant. You were there. The future of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals hangs in the balance."
Sternovsky watched the test subject as Fosdick used the remote control to zoom the camera in on her face. Okra's cheeks hollowed as she nursed on the end of the tube. Her eyes were shut in apparent rapture. She paused in her sucking only for the occasional belch.
Sternovsky had no formal training as a physicist, but he knew that to draw creamy peanut butter through a one-inch tube required an awesome amount of force. And Okra was accomplishing the feat without the aid of a pump. With just a little help from gravity-the five-gallon peanut-butter bucket was elevated about five feet off the floor--Okra was pulling in peanut butter by the foot, all on her own. Based on Fosdick's calculations, she was intaking 3420 calories per yard of suck, and in that yard, 2300 calories came from fat. Roughly estimating Okra's suck rate, Sternovsky figured she was taking in a human male's recommended daily allowance of calories every ten to twelve minutes. And after more than a half hour of the new regimen, she showed no sign of slowing down on the peanut-butter pipeline.
"I'm not sure we aren't opening an even bigger can of worms here, Fosdick," Sternovsky said.
The youngest Fing waved him off. "Results are what my father wanted, and results are what I'm going to give him."
Fosdick turned to the waiting medical support staff and gave them a crisp order punctuated with jabs of his stubby index finger. "I want you to switch all of the test subjects over to Skippy immediately," he told them. "I think we finally have our answer. Let's use the big containers, people."