PARK LISTENED TO ONE OF THE TEN WEALTHIEST MEN IN THE world. A man who, if the world lasted long enough, would undoubtedly become the single wealthiest. Past seventy, once-broad shoulders with a wide chest now drifting toward portly, and apparently comfortable with the fact; his iron-gray hair was thick as ever, and sharply parted at the side, even at this hour. A man who, wealth aside, wore a thin cotton bathrobe, that dangled threads from the cuffs, over a pair of equally worn red flannel pajamas.
“I should be asleep, Officer Haas.”
The man tugged at one of the hanging threads and pulled it loose.
“But then, shouldn’t we all.”
He wrapped the thread around the tip of his left index finger.
“Officer Haas. The name rang a bell when I first heard it. So I dug up the most recent edition of Who’s Who.”
He pointed the now-purple tip of his finger at an open book resting on the brass-riveted black leather arm of a Colonial chair under a tulip glass reading lamp.
“Safe bet it will be the last edition. In any case, I was right about the name. I’d heard it before. In fact, I met your father once.”
He walked to the chair, unwrapping his finger, dropping the thread in one of the pockets of his robe as he went, and picked up the book.
“That was when he was ambassador to the UAE. I was conducting business in Israel. We met as Americans abroad, at a diplomatic function in Saudi. He was a cordial man. I read his book.”
He put a hand on the back of the black chair.
“Sitting in this chair. Read it straight through. I recall being alarmed by his predictions for the region. In retrospect, they seem optimistic.”
He referred to the open page in the copy of Who’s Who.
“Opportunistic Militancy and the Inevitable Loss of the Middle East. Published in 1988. Well ahead of the curve, your father. Must have been an interesting man to grow up around.”
Park knew a response was expected, but he didn’t have one. The complexities of growing up around his father not being a topic he was inclined to discuss with strangers under the best of circumstances.
Parsifal K. Afronzo Senior closed the copy of Who’s Who with a slight thump.
“Am I right that he was passed over for the 9/11 commission?”
Other complexities aside, Park had been raised in an atmosphere of scrupulous politesse, and he was almost relieved to be asked a question he could answer.
“No. He was asked.”
Afronzo Senior was at the bookshelves that covered the wall next to the wet bar.
“He declined?”
“Yes.”
Afronzo slipped the copy of Who’s Who onto the shelf.
“I’d think a man dedicated to public service would have jumped at that particular assignment.”
Park remembered the conversation he’d had with his father regarding the commission.
“He said they only asked him because they knew he would say no. And he didn’t want to disappoint them.”
Afronzo’s chuckle quickly turned to a cough.
“Excuse me. As much as I appreciated his book and enjoyed the brief conversation I had with him, I wouldn’t have expected him to have much of a sense of humor.”
Park shook his head.
“He didn’t.”
The rich man rubbed the back of his thick neck.
“When I was a boy, my father kept a copy of Who’s Who on the back of the toilet for bathroom reading. He said that when he was the same age it had been corn husks in a outhouse. Back in the old country that was. Said if you crumpled them enough they weren’t that rough at all. Said he kept the Who’s Who in the can in case an emergency should arise.”
He chuckled again.
“I don’t expect that sort of humor would have sailed in your house.”
Park shook his head again.
“No, sir, it would not.”
Afronzo rested a hand on the bar.
“Though this is not a regular drinking hour for me, I don’t believe I’ll have a chance of getting back asleep if I don’t have something.”
He went around the bar.
“I’m having cognac. Would you care for one?”
Again Park shook his head.
“No thank you, sir.”
Afronzo took a bottle of Pierre Ferrand Abel from under the bar and poured two fingers into a snifter.
“You are a very polite young man, Officer. A childhood in diplomacy seems to have served you.”
“Serious crimes are being committed within your company, sir.”
Afronzo placed the cork at the mouth of the bottle, settling it with a light slap of his palm.
“At the time I met your father, he told me that he thought the business I was conducting in Israel would likely put American citizens at risk. American workers I planned to hire and bring over. He told me that he opposed my proposal and had spoken out against it with his counterpart in our embassy in Israel. He was, as I said, very cordial, but also very direct.”
He took a small sip of his drink.
“It seems his son inherited that directness along with his good manners.”
He came from behind the bar and sat in the Colonial chair.
“Would you care to sit, Haas?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
Afronzo looked at the young man still standing just inside the door of the guest cottage den, the same spot he’d been delivered to a few minutes before.
“I was told that you might be sleepless. That you might either be unaware of your condition or in denial. But looking at you, I don’t believe that you are sleepless. I’ve seen a lot of them. Close up. From here, you just look very tired to me.”
He gestured at a couch that matched his chair.
“You’re just about out on your feet, Haas. Sit down.”
Against his will, Park rubbed his eyes. He nodded. And he sat down.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome. And by the way, I don’t get called ‘sir’ much. Mostly I go by ‘Senior’ these days. If you don’t mind.”
Park knew there was a distinction between the wealthy and the rich. He had grown up with wealth. While there had been abundance and quality in his upbringing, security was always viewed as the greatest benefit of the wealth his father had inherited, carefully tended, and added to. Never a threat that the cupboard might someday be bare. New clothes every school year. No fear of the wolf. Also weekend trips to Boston, D.C., and New York for dinner, concerts, or theater. Tastes of his mother. And his father’s sailboat, a 1969 Dufour Arpege 30. College funds for the children. Assurance of a secure old age should the fates not intervene. A life not so far removed from the general that they lost sight of just how great their blessings were and, as Park’s father often pointed out, how great the responsibilities that came with that wealth.
The rich were another matter. The amount of money required to elevate someone to that level provided a great deal of insulation. In conversation with rich schoolmates, Park could sense in them a confusion as to why everyone didn’t do the things they did, value what they valued, eat and consume what they ate and consumed. An implicit question they silently asked whenever subjects of want and need might come up: Why doesn’t everyone just live like this? As though these things were a matter of choice. As these classmates aged and gained experience, they began to affect a posture of ironic self-awareness. They knew they were rich, they knew most everyone else wasn’t, they knew it was unfair, but at least they cared that it was unfair, not. The final flourish was meant to indicate that of course they cared, but they cared in their own deeply personal way. Park thought that it indicated the opposite. The ability to make the joke only revealed the isolation in which they were sequestered by their money.
As usual, he aspired to make no judgments and made them nonetheless.
But Afronzo Senior was something else again. Beyond rich, he had ascended to superrich. And scaled yet higher to become a market force. In the post-SLP economy, Afronzo-New Day, holders of the DR33M3R patent, sat at the table with oil, water, power, telecommunications, health care, and munitions. They were at the foot of the table, but demand for their product was limited only by the rate at which SLP infected and killed. Based on current trends, the overall potential market might shrink, but market share would swell. DR33M3R was a reliable grower. And Afronzo-New Day’s voice at the table demanded attention.
As the personification and will of A-ND, Senior had become something other. More so than even his son, he was existing at another level of consciousness. Park suspected that it was difficult for him to focus within a one-to-one environment. The most alarming implication of that suspicion being the thought that whatever it was Park was digging into had drawn the man’s personal attention. Attention that implied that some part of what Park believed about the world frozen under a surface of lies must be true. Attention that promised only a bad ending, as much as it did hope.
Park wished for only one thing in that moment: that his father would open the door of the cottage just behind the main house of the Afronzo estate, that he would walk in, wearing his brass-buttoned navy blue suit, assess the situation, and tell his son that he should leave the room and go play while the adults talked over some business.
He looked at the door. It did not open. He remembered his father speaking on the topic of diplomacy as practiced in countries where monarchies still reigned.
Speak truth to power. Always. Kings and potentates will be coddled, don’t let it be by you. Speak truth to power and your voice will be heard. If it is disregarded, as is likely, still you will sleep better at night. And you will have done humanity some service. Which will comfort you when you are dismissed early from your post.
Park recalled that speech and the other memory it brought to mind: Rose and his father meeting for the first time.
Senior swished the cognac at the bottom of his glass.
“You look amused by something, Haas.”
Park, straightened the odd smile that had come to his lips.
“Just something that occurred to me, sir.”
“Asked if you’d call me Senior, please.”
“I think we’ll both be more comfortable if I call you sir.”
Senior nodded.
“Then I suppose I best call you Officer.”
Park nodded as well.
“Yes, that would suit the occasion.”
“The occasion being?”
Park sat forward on the couch, his back straight, hands on his knees, not allowing himself to lean into the soft leather, to assume the conversational demeanor of the older man.
“The occasion being that I have been kidnapped by men that I believe are in your employ. Who I can only assume did so at your behest. And until I am given some indication otherwise, I assume I am being held by you against my will.”
Senior waved his snifter toward the door.
“The door’s unlocked. No one will get in your way if you leave.”
He raised the snifter a little higher.
“If you do leave without our first having a talk, I’ll have to pursue some inquiries about you and your business with my son, through official channels. That is not a threat, simply what I’ll have to do. I’d just as soon have those questions answered here and now, face-to-face. And yes, that is to save my family and my business any awkwardness, as well as to save you any professional setbacks.”
Park kept his seat.
Senior lowered his snifter.
“All right, then, let’s talk. Safe to assume that when you mentioned ‘serious crimes’ you didn’t mean my men picking you up and bringing you here. Yes?”
“That is correct.”
Senior relaxed deeper into his chair and crossed his legs.
“Let’s start there, then. What is it you suspect has been happening with my business?”
Park thought about his family and spoke.
“With or without your knowledge, an organized, high-level operation within Afronzo-New Day is diverting large shipments of DR33M3R and distributing them outside of the venues and restrictions of a Schedule Z drug. This large-scale black market enterprise has accessed inventory at the warehouses. This is not a matter of a few bottles or cases but entire pallets, pods, even shipping containers, leaving the legal supply chain. These shipments are being broken down and parceled for retailers to be sold a bottle at a time. Bottles are cached individually so that retailers are rarely in possession of enough Dreamer at any one time to be accused of intent to distribute. GPS coordinates of the caches are logged and sold to buyers. Many of these buyers are never physically in proximity to the retailers. I believe that transactions are often carried out online in social networking and gaming environments, primarily in Chasm Tide. I believe that it is likely that most of these transactions are completed through the barter of virtual goods that are translated into money and valuables in secondary transactions. Additionally, as the market is controlled by elements within A-ND, they have the wherewithal to break up the large shipments in secret after they have left your warehouses. Thus, the top end of distribution is shielded by its proximity to official Dreamer trade; the midsection, when shipments are broken down, are hidden by the financial and physical resources of the A-ND participants in the operation; the bottom end is hidden by the cache distribution, virtual space transactions, and infrequent use of traceable currencies. Seeing as the only potential users of the drug are sleepless, there is little risk that customers will reveal the existence of this black market. They are in desperate need of access to the drug, and most will die within a year of becoming fully symptomatic, the point at which Dreamer can be of use to them. It is an effectively invisible black market. But I have physical evidence of its existence, have personally witnessed a portion of it in action, and have grounds to arrest one of the architects and primary operators of the entire trade in black market DR33M3R.”
Park’s fingers had begun to dig into his knees.
“Furthermore, I believe, I believe.”
Senior leaned slightly forward.
“Are you all right, Officer?”
Park shook his head violently once.
“Furthermore, I believe that the advent of the sleepless prion was somehow, intentionally or accidentally, a by-product of your company’s initial development of Dreamer. I believe that your labs experimented with the fatal familial insomnia prion, seeking to find an application for your over-the-counter sleep aid. I believe, intentionally or by accident, that your labs created a new prion, a designed material, and that, intentionally or by accident, that prion escaped the clean zone of your labs and entered and infected the general population. I believe that prion is the prion that has come to be known as SLP I believe that A-ND’s ability to develop and bring to market a drug such as Dreamer was only possible because A-ND is the creator of SLP. I believe that A-ND, realizing that the market for their drug will eventually die out and that they will have no engine for the profits currently generated by Dreamer, have created a black market to circumvent limits placed on trade when Dreamer was designated Schedule Z. I believe. I believe.”
Senior rose, walked to the bar, poured water from a cut-glass decanter into a matching glass, carried it to Park, and pressed it into his hand.
“I think you should take a moment to catch your breath, Officer. You’ve been carrying a heavy load. A load like that, you only realize how heavy it is when you set it down.”
Staring at the dark wainscoted wall behind the bar, Park’s mouth hung just slightly open, as if he were trying to weigh the implications of bad news that had just now been brought to him.
“My wife is dying.”
Senior patted his shoulder and walked back to his chair.
“Yes, I know.”
He sat.
“Mine died several years ago. My second wife. I was divorced from my first. Although she is dead as well. My second wife, it’s odd to call her that, I only ever think of her as my wife. You have a baby.”
Park spoke to the glass he held in his lap.
“A daughter.”
“I’d been told about your wife, but the baby, is she?”
“I don’t know. My wife doesn’t want her tested.”
“Yes, I can understand that. It was cancer that killed my wife. Lung cancer. We both smoked far beyond the point of reckless idiocy. To this day I refuse to have a lung X-ray. Afraid to know what may be waiting for me. Although at my age it hardly seems to matter. Something will finish me soon enough. Does your daughter sleep?”
Park took a sip of the water.
“She did, at first. But the last few weeks, it’s hard to say.”
“How’s that?”
“She cries all the time. Or it seems that way. But I’m not home very much. And my wife, she. I’m not sure how clearly she remembers if the baby is sleeping when I’m not there. The woman who helps us, she says the baby sleeps, but it never looks like sleep when I see it. Her eyes are usually open. And it never lasts.”
Senior looked at the ceiling.
“What I remember from having babies around, and I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t at home often when I had babies, but what I remember is that they can be that way. Cry nonstop, go days without sleep, crying the whole time. Hours and hours of crying. Could be your daughter is just colicky.”
Park didn’t say anything.
Senior looked down from the ceiling.
“What’s her name?”
Park ran a thumb up and down the facets on the side of his glass.
“Omaha.”
“The hell you say.”
“My wife said, ‘No one will fuck with a girl named Omaha.’”
Senior smiled.
“She had a point there.”
He dropped his smile.
“You should have her tested.”
Park nodded, looked for somewhere to put down his water glass, placed it on a bookshelf behind his shoulder, and faced the other man.
“Your son sold me Dreamer on two separate occasions. I’m going to arrest him. Is he at home?”
Senior cocked his head to the side.
“You’re going to arrest my son because he?”
“Charges of possession and sale of a restricted substance. But I have evidence that could lead to racketeering charges. Money laundering. Tax evasion. And charges relating to the murders of a man named Hydo Chang and several of his associates.”
“You think my son killed someone.”
“I believe that several young men found shot in gangland style were his Dreamer retailers and that they were killed over matters relating to the sale of Dreamer. I believe that it is likely Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior was involved in those killings.”
Senior drew his brows together.
“Then it is my son who you suspect as the mastermind behind the Dreamer black market?”
“I think it is possible. Although I think you are a more likely suspect.”
Senior pulled his brows apart.
“You are direct. You are direct. Well.”
He placed his hand on the snifter he’d set down earlier.
“In the interest of directness, I’d like to say a few words that might shed considerable light on these suspicions of yours. If you don’t mind?”
Park looked at the door. He was aware that a performance was taking place. He was aware that he was being manipulated. He knew that if he let it draw to its conclusion, he might never leave the cottage. He’d been trying to apply the principles he’d learned from the Hurtin’ Man. That there was danger in the room was not at all in doubt, but whether that danger was best dealt with by attacking its source or by running from it was unclear. And probably beside the point. Park had little hope that either option would be successful. And it didn’t matter. Because what Park was most aware of was the slippage of time. Dawn would be coming. He needed to be home.
But he also needed to stay to the end of the show so he could know what happened.
He lifted a hand from his knee and turned it palm up.
“I would like to hear anything you have to say that might clarify this matter.”
Senior picked up the snifter, swirled the contents, and swallowed them.
“Good. Good.”
He kept hold of the empty glass.
“To start, you are correct; there is a black market trade in Dreamer. You are also correct that A-ND is involved in that trade. But frankly, that is the price of doing business today. Distribution, Officer, is not an easy matter. Beyond the fuel costs, security contractors to escort the shipments, cross-state inspections, Homeland Security checkpoints, and occasional corrupt officials, there are also the Teamsters. In order to bring our product to market in a timely and efficient manner, we often find we must circumvent criminal and bureaucratic roadblocks. Hell, our trucks sometimes have to deal with physical roadblocks. We have to pay people off. A lot of people. A great deal of money. Usually cash. Not only do we have to get this money from somewhere, but we have to hide it. What we’re doing, the payments we’re making, it doesn’t matter that we’re greasing people so we can get the Dreamer out where it will do some good; the payments, most of them, are far from legal. We’re bribing officials at every level of government. We have no choice. It’s mostly just a collection of fiefdoms at this point. City, state, federal, interdepartmental. Dealing with the road gangs is easier. And there’s no telling who might get it in their head to blackmail us for more or, God forbid, look to prosecute us if they found traces of what we’re doing. So we need invisible money. Dreamer itself is better than cash money. We could just toss a few cases off each truck whenever we hit a snag. But then what? Chaos is what. Dozens of free agents trying to sell off little stashes of Dreamer. It would be a mess. And the trail would lead directly to A-ND. Also, we saw that a Dreamer black market was inevitable. Too much demand and not enough supply. We saw that inevitability, matched it with our need for cash, and chose to create and control a black market ourselves. Shipments move through the supply chain to the local markets. Every time a container of Dreamer is randomly scanned, the RFID chips are right where the manifest says they should be. And that’s because they are where they should be. We don’t break them out until they reach the local level. Grease the folks handling inventory in the dispensaries, and that’s that. We can pull what we need. We sell by the case and pallet to hospices that have raised money through donations from the families of their wealthier patients, medicinal marijuana outlets, and yes, to some very robust and well-structured open source drug operations servicing low-income neighborhoods that are not well policed these days. As you said, the Dreamer end user has no interest in endangering the supply chain. Some larger institutions get shorted, but I have to feel that’s offset by the fact that this system actually gets Dreamer to many folks who wouldn’t otherwise have access. We’ve had very few leaks in the months it’s been running. As for Junior being the architect of all this, well, does my son strike you as an architect?”
Park thought about Cager.
“He strikes me as a very intelligent person.”
Senior frowned into his empty glass.
“And he is, he is. Very intelligent. Off-the-scale intelligent if IQ tests matter a good goddamn. But unfocused. And not what you’d call a people person. Incapable of wrangling something on this scale. He couldn’t bring his full abilities to bear on a problem like this because the human relations would make him too uncomfortable. That boy, I tell you, more natural ability, pure talent, than a father could hope to see in a son, and just, just, he cannot apply it to anything useful. Business, I understand it’s not for everyone, and I could; he can paint. I mean, expressive, powerful images. So if it had been that, painting, I would have been all for it. An artist son? I would have been damn proud. But even art, he just.”
Senior floated one hand through the air.
“Drifted from it. Lost focus, lost interest. All that energy. That ability. And the only thing he has ever stuck with are the damn games. That one damn game. He. He builds his life around that game now. So I, well, I’m his father, so I want to understand, be a part of what he loves, show him support, take him seriously. And I was, frankly, proud when he showed up and he’d, on his own, just through observation of the market, the implications of peak oil, credit collapse, infrastructure erosion, the outright impotence of the federal government, he saw that A-ND must have an outlet for off-market Dreamer. We were just getting it started, but that kid, smart as hell, he knew it was happening just because he could put it together. And he wanted a franchise. For himself.”
He raised and dropped his shoulders.
“I have backed him in so many ventures. But he had a plan, a model that made a kind of sense. In this world. He showed me the numbers on sleepless players in Chasm Tide, showed me the online markets where in-game valuables were trading, the currency exchanges between virtual and real. That was an eye-opener. And I thought, well, maybe this is it, a business tied directly to his real passion, maybe this will be the thing that he locks into. So I supplied him with a couple pallets. Made sure the pricing was in line with the rest of the off-market trade. We don’t gouge these people, Officer.”
He leaned forward.
“That should be very clear. We set the price. And if we hear that one of our franchisers starts to spread the margin and pocket the difference, we take action. And I do not mean that in any metaphorical sense.”
He leaned back.
“I’m in the pharmaceuticals trade, not the human misery trade.”
He shook his head.
“Not the human misery trade.”
He pointed vaguely east.
“Those people. In Washington. That homunculus in the White House. When I think about who our president could have been, who it should have been. Know the man who shot him had his NRA membership card on him? Bought his weapon at a gun show. Barely had to flash his driver’s license. That day, I burned my own card. Hardly matters anymore. Person wants a gun, they can find a gun. Well, those people in Washington, they turned out to be about as useless as everybody knew they’d be when it really hit the fan. A plague of sleeplessness. Democrats and Republicans trying to deal with a plague of sleeplessness. If it wasn’t for the tears, you’d laugh yourself to death. A plague of sleeplessness. Any wonder all the zealots are going even crazier than before? Like it should come after locusts and frogs and the deaths of the firstborn.”
He touched the part in his hair.
“So it gets left to people like me, people with influence, with some infrastructure of their own, people with money, it gets left to us to, hell, to make sure something is, something is left. That’s not right. That’s not my job. No one elected me. But hell, it’s got to be done. Someone has to do something. We can’t just walk away from the table, throw up our hands, say, ‘I’m out.’ This is what’s fallen to me, this is my duty, and I won’t shirk it.”
He turned the empty glass in his hands.
“Sorry. It’s late. I’m tired. Sometimes the frustration just comes out. It’s. It’s hard to look at the world and. It’s hard.”
He set the glass on the little table next to his chair.
“We were talking about Junior. And his interpretation of business. Long story shorter, I should have paid more attention, trusted my gut, said no. He turned it into a game. That crazy distribution, the caches, making people, sleepless or their family members or friends, stumble around town with RFID scanners looking for hidden bottles of Dreamer. Like it was a damn Easter egg hunt. And of course he lost interest, anyway. Just let someone else run the whole thing for him. Supposed to turn the money around, put it back in, buy more Dreamer, put it on the market, take his margin and do whatever he wanted with it. Put it in that sad club. I don’t know. But he didn’t. None of that money came back, not to pay the advance I gave him to acquire the first pallets, not to buy more. It was a small loss in terms of A-ND, but it needed to be covered. I did it out of my own personal accounts. On principle. It was my mistake. I paid for it. And I confronted the boy, told him to return what hadn’t been sold. Make good his debts. He offered me a spreadsheet of GPS coordinates. Told me he wasn’t even getting paid for most of the Dreamer. He was trading it outright for goods to equip his gaming teams. Bartering for ‘character art.’ Other things I didn’t understand. To my shame, I slapped him. Never did that before. Don’t believe anything good comes of striking your flesh and blood. And, well, that was that. It didn’t matter much what he was doing with the Dreamer once I covered the loss. His distribution method is slow, inefficient, and cruel, but you are correct, it’s nearly invisible. I asked some people in law enforcement to keep an eye on the streets, told them that some Dreamer might have leaked from the system. They understood. Set something up so they’d know if rumors started spreading, make sure the general public didn’t find out. Word got out that my son was dealing Dreamer, half the country would likely get burned down by the other half. We’re just that close to the edge of what people can understand and endure without running mad in the streets. And. And that’s about it. Pathetic is how it sounds. When I say it all aloud.”
Park stared at the man.
“The murders.”
Senior nodded.
“The murders.”
He shrugged.
“I never met the people Junior was in business with. But they were doing the nuts and bolts for him. Maybe they stepped on another dealer’s turf without realizing it. Started selling to sleepless south of the Santa Monica. We supply some very aggressive Dreamer franchises down there. Very protective of their clientele. And very traditional in terms of how they deal with competitors. Gangland sound like their style. Maybe it wasn’t even about Dreamer. That gold farming, if the numbers Junior showed me are real, that’s serious money. Could have been a competitor in that space. But Junior? Pulling the trigger? Or having those two ex-SEAL supermodels of his do it for him? No. He’s a, a difficult boy, frivolous, but there’s no killing in him. I may not be best friends with my son, but I know him that well. That well, at least.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
Senior looked at the empty snifter again.
“I keep telling myself I may as well have another, but I hear my wife saying that one is enough.”
Park was slumping slightly, his elbow coming to rest on his thigh.
“Sir. SLP.”
Senior kept staring at the glass.
“No, you’re wrong about that. I wish I could tell you we poisoned the well. That there was a reason for it. Greed. It could be undone. But there is no peace of mind to be had there.”
He looked at Park.
“We did it, all right, people, I mean. We did it, but it wasn’t about greed. It was about hunger. Are you certain you want to hear this?”
Park didn’t move.
Senior closed his eyes.
“Not enough food. The people who were paying attention, they knew it was coming. No shock to a lot of us when the price of corn and beans and rice started to jump. Too many people. Not enough food. Poor distribution for what there is. The hungry getting hungrier. At its root, yes, it was market exploitation, seeking to take advantage of a massive demand, but it was also plain necessary.”
Park had straightened.
“What was necessary, sir?”
Senior opened his eyes.
“Know anything about transgenic plants, Officer?”
Park shook his head.
Senior nodded.
“GMOs?”
Park shook his head again.
Senior looked once more at his glass.
“Well, you’ve eaten a load of them. Genetically modified organisms. Unless you’re hooked up with an organic shared farming operation, you’ve eaten plenty of transgenic maize. Genetically altered corn. High-yield corn. More specific to this discussion, pest-resistant corn. Heard of a thing called a European corn borer? No, no reason why you should unless you’re a farmer. Far back as 1938, in France, they were spraying corn with something called Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt. A naturally occurring biotoxin that kills beetles, flies, moths, butterflies, and the European corn borer. Problem with a spray is, it wears off the surface. If you could get the stuff inside the corn, then you’d be set. Corn borer eats corn with Bt in it and it ends up with holes in its digestive tract. Dies. Bt, it contains two classes of toxins: cytolysins, or Cyt toxins, and crystal delta-endotoxins, or Cry toxins. Those are the ones that kill the corn borers. Smart people, they identified the genes encoding the Cry proteins.”
Park licked dry lips.
Senior picked a new thread from his bathrobe.
“Yes, proteins; it’s all about proteins. Cry9C is a pesticidal protein, a naturally occurring product of Bt. But it can be produced as a designed material. And introduced to the genetic code of regular old-fashioned corn. And it was. There were a few fusses about it, fears that people were reacting to the Cry9C, allergies, but nobody died, the fuss faded. And what people didn’t realize was that it was far too late to go back anyhow. Hell, by 1999 thirty percent of all corn, globally I’m saying, was Bt-modified. Sure, there were concerns around the turn of the century; Cry9C corn was supposed to be limited to nonhuman consumption. But if you use it for feed, and humans eat the animals, well, proteins don’t die. They don’t wear out. They just are. By 2008 it was all moot. Between world hunger and ethanol, the market for corn was booming. In August ’08 the FDA proposed eliminating all safety limits on Bt toxins in transgenic foods. And soon after it was so. Even if they hadn’t, the horse was out of the barn. In 2001, down in Mexico, transgenic artificial DNA had been found in traditional cornfields. It was spreading, cross-pollinating. Anyhow, Cry9C wasn’t the issue. It was Cry9E.”
He was wrapping his finger with thread again.
“They tried to make a super bug killer. A protein that would kill off all corn pests. Superresilient corn. That was in 2000. It worked. Too well. Killed off just about any bug that crawled on the corn, pest or not. Well, even the lab boys knew that wouldn’t fly in the ecosystem. But it was already out. Cry9E corn got mixed in with Cry9C, no one really knows how. And it got distributed. And it cross-pollinated. And there was what a white paper I read once called Lateral Transfer of Antibiotic Resistance Marker Genes.”
Park had leaned forward, focusing on the other man’s mouth. An insistent thrum, as if his hands were cupped over his ears, grew within his head.
Senior was pulling the thread tight, the tip of his finger becoming intensely purple.
“And that’s it. Cry9E, a designed materials pesticidal protein. We ate it. Or we ate something that ate it. Or we breathed it when it was burned as ethanol. And what it was meant to do to the digestive system of an insect, it did to our brains. It spread through conformational influence and ate holes in our brains. Innocent as all hell, trying to feed and fuel the masses, some asshole in a lab somewhere created a species-killing prion. Without even knowing it.”
He pulled the thread tighter.
“Took eight years from 2000 for it to spread, become recognizable as something clearly other than fatal familial insomnia or mad cow or CJD. And another two years for us to get here. One out of ten symptomatic.”
Park stood.
“What’s?”
He looked around the room.
“How do we? We have to.”
He looked at Senior.
“We have to. Symptomatic?”
Senior rose.
“Ten percent symptomatic. Infection rates are way beyond that level. And it’s still spreading.”
Park took one step and froze.
“People are, no one has said anything. Who knows? People are eating corn. People are.”
Senior took his empty glass to the bar.
“No one figured this out quickly. By the time anyone knew where SLP came from. It was. Hell. And what do you do? Tell people to stop eating corn? Tell them, ‘We know it’s all you have, all you can afford, and we know we can’t afford to distribute alternatives to you, so just be quiet and starve, will you?’ I saw a projection, one of these think tank types, a projection based on what would happen if someone could just kill off all the corn, spray it, something; this man’s projection combined an assumed zero yield in corn with the impact of drought on rice and ended up with mass cannibalism in less than a decade. Socially accepted cannibalism.”
He set his snifter on the bar.
“There’s no one to tell. There’s no one to save. There’s no going back. A lot of people, most of us, are going to die. It’s going to take some years, but that’s the endgame. Society, what’s out that front door, it’s going to keep breaking down smaller and smaller. People are going to get more and more afraid. They’re going to rely on what they know, what they can count on. It’s too big already, too big to stop. People, people who know, people like me, we’re just trying to tap the brakes, slow everything down, keep it as normal as possible, keep people as comfortable as possible. As long as possible.”
He took the stopper from the bottle of cognac, then put it back.
“The slower it happens, the better the chance it won’t all just crash and burn. The less people know, the lower the chance they’ll go crazy all at once and just tear everything down. And the projections on that scenario, you don’t want to know about those. If the statistics I’ve seen are half-right, there’s still a better than even chance that someone somewhere will set off a nuke before this all shakes out. And then all the models break down. No one can say who might start pushing buttons.”
He faced Park, the forgotten thread still around his finger.
“People in despair, Haas, they don’t curl up and die. They are foolish and dangerous. We’ve lost the fight against SLP It had won before we knew what it was. Now we’re fighting despair. Trying to convince people there’s a reason to watch TV, go to work, clean up after the dog, pay the bills, obey traffic laws, not go next door and kill your neighbor’s kid for playing his guitar too loud in the garage.”
He noticed the thread and began to unwind it.
“Just let them believe for a little longer that there is hope and a reason to live.”
He dangled the thread from between his fingers.
“Because some people will live. There’s an immunity. Something to do with alterations in the prion gene. Whether you’re heterozygotic plays into it. Some people are going to live.”
He pinched the ends of the thread and stretched it between his hands.
“And we have to make sure there’s something left for them.”
The thread broke.
Park finished taking the step he had started moments before.
“I’m going to arrest your son.”
Senior dropped the pieces of string.
“Haas. No. What is going to happen is my people, those former Mossad and Shabak agents that work for me, they are going to escort you from the property. At the Bel Air gates you will be photographed by the Thousand Storks contractors that handle security up here. Then you will be driven to your car. And you will go home. And you will never come back here again, or come near my son, or you will be killed. Now, I don’t expect you’ll accept anything from me. Not as a bribe, I mean, but in the way of help. Nonetheless, I would like to help you and your family. All you have to do is ask, but you must ask now.”
He stopped speaking, and nothing was said in the room for a moment, and he nodded and continued.
“As I expected. However, you had among your possessions when you were picked up, a bottle of Dreamer. It will still be with your possessions when they are returned to you at your car.”
He tightened the belt of his bathrobe.
“In this house, the main house, I mean, are many members of my extended family. They are here because I can care for them. Most of them are sleepless. Some are in the suffering. They have almost unlimited access to Dreamer. They can take a cap or two whenever they feel disoriented or in pain, and sleep and dream. And wake feeling almost like themselves. Unlike most anyone else in the world, they can do that for as long as several months, until they die. Not just the last few weeks like they do in the hospitals. Or, if they choose, if they are tired and spent and sad with the world, they can swallow twelve to eighteen caps of Dreamer at once and go deeply to sleep. The sleep lasts for several minutes to several hours, it is characterized by a general relaxation of all muscles, brain waves fall into continuous deltas, profound REM dreaming, no indications of unsettled or unpleasant dreams, and as the muscles relax further, the lungs slowly stop expanding, and the heart stops beating. From everything I have seen, it is a peaceful and merciful death.”
He stood at the door.
“As I say, that bottle of Dreamer will be with your possessions when you are sent home. It is yours. To do with what you will.”
He twisted the knob.
“Odd to think, I’d not have met you if it wasn’t for my son’s unwillingness to use a proper security detail. I’m forced to have my boys spy on him from a distance. That’s the only reason they caught wind of the man at your heels. If it had just been you, I don’t imagine I’d have gotten involved. But I saw the file on that man. Jasper. No last name. Never a good sign, no last name. Not someone you want near your family. Some of my people had it in their heads the two of you were working together. But I can see pretty clearly they were mistaken. Any idea why he was following you?”
Park was at sea now, barely treading water, so he saved his breath.
Senior patted his hair.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it was nothing to be concerned about, drawing the attention of such a man, but he won’t be an issue for you or yours. Or for anybody. And the world will be a better place without him.”
He opened the door.
“I’m grateful to him, in any case, for giving me an excuse to meet you. It was a pleasure, Officer Haas. I wish you peace of mind. Goodbye.”
He stepped out of the room, leaving Park alone in the new world.