He'd finally located some dental floss when a convoy of flashing red-and-blue lights started down the drive.
He paid them no mind. That's what lawyers were for.
Chapter 8
Carlos Sternovsky stopped for a much needed rest. After eight months in the Far East, he still wasn't used to the combination of high heat and humidity. He whipped out a cotton handkerchief, tipped back the broad-brimmed straw coolie hat he wore and mopped his dripping brow and cheeks. Ahead of him, trudging up the aisle between rows of elevated, shaded steel cages, a freshly drawn jug of wolverine blood in either hand, was a pair of half-naked Taiwanese laborers. They moved cautiously with their cargo; they knew to drop it might cost them their lives. Sternovsky's only burden was a notebook computer, a cybernetic log he used to keep track of which lab animals he had most recently phlebotomized. While he caught his breath, he watched the rag-diapered workers climb the shallow incline to where his electric golf cart sat parked.
All around him, covering the landscape in neat lines, were seventy rows of seventy cages each. The nearly five thousand live wolverines they contained had been imported illegally, and at tremendous expense, from Siberia by Family Fing Pharmaceuticals of Formosa. The cost of housing and maintaining the animals was equally staggering.
But the investment had already begun to bear fruit. Thanks to an ample budget, a large, well-trained laboratory staff and state-of-the-art equipment, Sternovsky had been able to chemically isolate the active neuropeptide agent from wolverine blood. Which made it unnecessary to sacrifice an animal to get the required raw material from its hypothalamus. At this stage of product development, the wolverines had become hormonal dairy cows, and were bled on a rotational basis. Long gone were the salad days of Donny and Marie; like prize Jerseys, the lab animals had code numbers tattooed into their ears.
Sternovsky stuffed his hankie back in his shorts and shuffled up the slope. As he approached the golf cart, the Taiwanese laborers set the rattan-wrapped jugs in the back, alongside a dozen others on a bed of flaked ice. When they turned toward him, he could see the plastic clothespins they wore clamped on their noses; the tips of which were tourniqueted a startling white against the brown of their faces.
Twenty-two acres of nothing but wolverines in sweltering tropical heat created a stench that was an instant emetic for most people. On top of that, a worker couldn't walk down the lines of cages without drawing a volley of musk spray-and the wolverines usually hit what they were aiming at. As Sternovsky got behind the steering wheel of the electric cart, the two laborers used a weak stream of water from a rowside hose bib to rinse the oily, yellow-green gunk off their arms and legs. The drawing of blood had become Sternovsky's job by default. No one else with the technical skill would go anywhere near the "Stink Ranch," as it was called. No one else was immune to the smell.
He putted the cart around the two men and up the hill, past the corrugated silo that held the wolverines' dry-pellet food. Everywhere he looked, he could see half-naked workers lugging buckets, shoveling, pushing wheelbarrows. Feeding, watering and excrement removal went on nonstop, from dawn to dark.
At the top of the low hill, the scientist drove around the trailer where he lived and did most of his work. He took the single-lane road down the other side of the slope. The company road was string straight. It ran along the top of a dike that separated two tracts of marshy scrubland. In the distance a mile ahead, the setting sun lit up the flanks of the main Family Fing Pharmaceutical complex, turning its alabaster walls, immense holding tanks and mazes of pipelines a rosy gold.
The Family Fing fortune had been built on sales of a product line called Imposter Herbalistics, which offered imitation black-bear gall bladder, white-rhino horn and Bengal-tiger pizzle in easily digestible, powdered form. The Fings specialized in making in quantity what nature or man had made scarce. They did this by first isolating the active agent in the folk medicine, then they used specially developed strains of bacteria as microscopic manufacturing plants. These bacteria were genetically tailored to give off the desired chemical compound as part of their ordinary waste. The synthetic end product was guaranteed to be chemically identical to the real thing and so, Family Fing's advertisements claimed, was just as safe and effective.
Imposter Herbalistics were sucked up on a daily basis by millions of Asians who could now afford to treat themselves with the best, and by holistically minded Westerners who were eager to sample the native cures of the Pacific Rim, but unwilling to have the death of a rare critter on their consciences. Of course no one asked where Family Fing got the raw material on which its bacterial magic depended. In point of fact, the company's ongoing experiments with endangered animals had pushed more than one species to the brink of extinction.
As Sternovsky and Family Fing well knew, the main difference between the Imposter Herbalistics line and WHE was that the new drug actually worked.
The research biochemist backed the golf cart up to a loading dock, where workers in crisp white jumpsuits and matching fiberglass hard hats were lined up, waiting to carry the blood to the preprocessing area. As the scientist got out of the cart, the foreman of the transfer crew stepped over to him and said, "Papa Fing, he want see you up top. He say you no wait. You go now."
Sternovsky nodded. But before he could enter the plant proper, he had to suit up. Inside a steel Quonset hut beside the front entrance, he kicked off his rope sandals and climbed into a sterilized jumpsuit with built-in booties and gloves. Since he sometimes made five trips between ranch and plant in a day, covering up the wolverine dirt was quicker than an antiseptic shower, and it accomplished the same thing. He traded his coolie hat for a white paper shower cap and headed for the complex's elevator.
The building's air conditioning was pure bliss, even through the plasticized-paper jumpsuit. He got out on the tenth floor. Though no pharmaceuticals were made in this part of the structure, the halls were kept spotlessly clean. The entrance to the office suite of Fillmore Fing, founder and CEO of Family Fing, was in the middle of the corridor and marked by an intricately carved ebony-and-ivory arch.
As he entered the reception area, Sternovsky could hear Fillmore Fing's voice booming from the boardroom. The biochemist understood very little of spoken Chinese, but he recognized these words because he had heard them so many times.
"What have I done to deserve this betrayal?" the elder Fing repeated as his private secretary ushered Sternovsky through the double doors. Dressed in a gray pin-striped suit from Savile Row, the plump drug tycoon stood nose to nose with his number-two son, Fosdick, who was the head research chemist for the family business. Except for the sad state of Papa's hairline, and the clear snot bubble blowing in and out of Fosdick's right nostril, their faces could have been mirror images.
Upon Sternovsky's arrival, Fillmore Fing ceased his tirade. He walked over to his desk and selected a massive Cuban cigar from a mahogany humidor. He immediately lit up, puffing hard.
Fosdick hurried to follow his father's lead. His hand trembled as he fumbled around in the humidor. "Hey, Fos, over here..."
Fillmore's oldest son, Farnham, sprawled on a white leather couch. He wore a gaudy Hawaiian print shirt under a baggy black silk sports jacket, baggy tan silk pants and a pair of handmade Italian loafers. Farnham Fing was the company's director of international sales. At present, he was enjoying being the son not on the hot seat.