Fillmore had waited long enough for an explanation. He turned to his attorney and said, "I thought you had an ample supply of the hormone extract on hand? Have recent sales been that brisk?"
"Sales have been excellent, exceeding even our most optimistic projections," Koch-Roche explained, "but in the last day or so, we've had some unexpected problems."
"I know, I know," Fillmore said. "But my youngest son assures me that he has worked the bugs out of the product. There will be no more unusual behavior from the users of WHE."
"That's not what I'm talking about," the attorney told him. "The problems aren't directly related to the recent violent public outbursts by my clients and your customers."
Fillmore's brow furrowed. "Go on."
"We've had a string of incidents that make it appear someone does not want WHE to become available, distribution-wise. Someone who is willing to kill in order to keep that from happening."
"You are certain of this?"
"Absolutely," Koch-Roche assured him. "I still have a good supply of patches at my home, but I couldn't retrieve them for fear of being killed myself. There has already been one attack on my residence. A successful attack in which a U.S. senator, the oldest user of the hormone to date, was kidnapped despite the protection of almost a dozen armed guards. He has not been seen again. Another of my clients was brutally murdered on a football field in broad daylight. Presumably by the same pair of hired assassins who kidnapped the senator."
"You may well have led the killers straight to us!" Fillmore exclaimed. "Why didn't you inform me of this before you came?"
The tiny attorney forced a smile. "Because I figured that they had already made the connection between me, the drug and Family Fing. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist, after all. We haven't been too concerned about covering our tracks. Since the drug hasn't been declared illegal yet, there was no need for that kind of secrecy. There was no way you, me or anyone could have anticipated a lethal response to the drug's test-marketing in the States."
"Certainly you don't suspect that this is an official effort of the government?"
"No, I don't think so," Koch-Roche said. "To date, these attacks have targeted individuals using WHE, but there have been no subsequent press releases, no mention of the existence of the drug itself. It seems to me that whoever is behind this campaign doesn't want to give our product any more publicity, positive or negative, but would much prefer to sweep the whole thing under a rug."
"This could be an organized attempt by a competitor to sink our development program, co-opt the discovery and bring out a rival product," the elder Fing speculated.
"That had occurred to me, too."
Fillmore Fing pulled at his silky smooth earlobe. He knew that any one of a half-dozen international rivals in the pharmaceutical trade could be behind the disruption.
And who could blame them?
The profits on global sales of WHE were going to be astronomical. And even if the U.S. FDA refused to approve the drug, even if it was declared illegal and dangerous, it would still turn a huge profit in the Third World, where bureaucrats were not so fussy about what they allowed their people to ingest.
Though he hadn't confided as much to his sons, the patriarch Fing already had a contingency plan in place. To move the heart and soul of the brand-new, state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in New Jersey would cost him a few tens of millions. He had had the entire operation designed so it could be disassembled, placed on a fleet of cargo ships and transferred to some more friendly country-all in a matter of a few weeks. Fillmore Fing had never been one to fail for lack of adequate foresight.
The reason he hadn't told his sons about this failsafe option was that he wanted to keep the pressure on them. He didn't want to lose so much as a dime on the deal if he could help it. His concern with his boys was that they were, at heart, slackers-especially Fosdick, the mama's boy. He had spared the rod, there, at the urging of the boy's late mother. And now, decades later, he was reaping the bitter reward.
Fillmore would never have reached his elevated position in the world without being an excellent judge of character. He put people into two main categories: the weak or the strong. Both types could be used and manipulated, if you knew how to pull the right strings. For example, this Dewayne Korb, the richest man in the world, wanted physical as well as financial power. He wanted to be able to intimidate others with a look, even if they didn't know who he was or how much money he had. This failing of character, this fatal flaw, led the man straight into the clutches of Family Fing.
Such vulnerabilities were part of the human condition. Fillmore himself was not immune. His own greed had undone him more than once. The difference between the elder Fing and Dewayne Korb was that Fing had mapped his own soft points.
And was ever on guard.
Fillmore pulled the cell phone from inside his suit jacket and, steering with his knees, punched in a number. When the party on the other end answered, he spoke in rapid-fire Chinese. Then he turned to the lawyer and said, "Can you describe the people who did all the damage in Los Angeles?"
Koch-Roche told him what he had been told by his security people. "There were two of them, both male. One was a white American, in his late thirties or early forties, average height and wiry build. The other was an Oriental, origin unknown, well over seventy, with a thin white beard and wearing a brocaded blue robe."
Fing passed this information on to his security force and broke the connection.
Ahead of them, Farnham pulled his golf cart up to the entrance to the wing that housed the plant's hospital facility. A pair of uniformed, armed guards in white steel helmets, white Sam Browne belts, white puttees and camouflage jungle boots, hurried to open the heavy door.
Which looked like it had come from a bank vault. "This is new," Koch-Roche commented, hooking a thumb at the massive steel barrier.
"I had it installed about a week ago," Fillmore said as he followed his oldest son through the portal. "We've been having difficulty containing some of the synthetic-drug-trial test patients. We don't want to risk their getting loose in the main plant. They'd be a nightmare to subdue and recapture."
On either side of them, floor-to-ceiling glass walls looked in on medical labs tightly packed with technical equipment. As they came to a much smaller window set in a section of cinder-block wall, Fillmore stopped the golf cart so his passenger could look through the glass to the cage enclosure it protected.
In the white tiled cell was a lone wolverine. The number 3271 was branded into its haunch. The top of its skull had been shaved, and from the pale skin a dense cluster of electrodes protruded. The tips of the electrodes were connected to a series of multicolored electrical wires bundled together three feet above the animal's head and disappearing up into the cage ceiling.
"What are you doing to this one?" Koch-Roche asked.
"We're using low-level electrical current to try and stimulate natural hormone production. It causes a stress reaction, which activates the glandular system."
Even as Koch-Roche looked on, the animal's eyelids began to flutter and it sagged down on its forelegs. The dark lips drew back from four-inch fangs in a grisly predator's smile.
"That looks like it hurts," the attorney said.
"Life hurts," the elder Fing philosophised. Then he punched the cart's accelerator, and with a whir they shot down the hall.
Fing's oldest son had already parked beside the medical station's high counter. As Fillmore pulled up behind him, Farnham said something to the nurse on duty, and she turned at once to a cabinet along the back wall. Beyond Farnham, medical personnel in green scrubs and white lab coats scurried back and forth between opposing, locked doorways.