The receptionist — who had the improbable name of Mrs. Daisy — gave me a look that I was sure could cause some kind of liver damage. She called Mr. Bishop and looked pained when she found out I was expected. Her nails, as long and dark as a wicked witch’s should be, tapped some keys, and a temporary I.D. came out of the printer. As I peeled off the back and pasted it to my shirt, two large security types came and flanked me.
I let Frick and Frack escort me to the elevator. They pushed all the buttons. They rode with me to the thirty-ninth floor. They didn’t say a word.
Fine with me. Chris Tillman would be throwing the first pitch and the crowd at Oriole Park at Camden Yards would be yelling instead of me. I wasn’t feeling chatty.
As we soared upward I thought about Myron Bishop.
He was, by everyone’s estimation, a very bad man.
Brilliant, sure. Borderline supergenius, with more biotech patents on file than I’ve had hot dinners. His company, Accelerator Biologics, was at the absolutely bleeding edge of performance-enhancement science. And we’re not talking about a new kind of Viagra. Bishop and his mad scientists were building better soldiers and better athletes. No human growth hormones or anabolic steroids. Nothing that crude. He was using transgenic science to rebuild the DNA so the right genes code for lean-mass builders, increase the natural β2-adrenergic receptor agonists, and new ways for the body to self-regulate testosterone so that the subjects were real manly men capable of greater feats of strength, speed and endurance but without having their nuts shrink to acorns or their brains turn to mush. In theory.
He started out doing this way off the radar for sports teams and got caught. That led to six years of litigation and rulebook burning to decide if genetic manipulation was covered under the standard doping rules. It wasn’t. It is now.
By the time the court case was settled, Bishop had sold his interest in sports and was inking contracts with the military.
Not our military, though.
He was taking obscene amounts of money from Russia, from China, from North Korea, from Iran, and from a bunch of little countries who had more money than ethics.
The result? A new breed of super soldier.
Not exactly on a par with Captain America but pretty damn tough. On average, thirty percent more muscle density, fifteen percent greater potential for speed. Enhanced reaction time. Amped-up wound-repair system.
My guys in Echo Team had tussled with some of these jokers and very nearly had our asses handed to us. The whole “subdue and restrain” thing had to get tossed out the window. Instead we had to up the game on them in ugly ways that left a lot of hair on the walls.
Bishop and his company came under a lot of fire. We froze his accounts, had him audited, hacked his email, tapped his phone, and hauled him in front of subcommittees and judges.
We did that a lot, with enthusiasm.
He skated every goddamn time.
Apparently the thing he’s smartest about is planning ahead. Before he went into the super-soldier business he hired enough lawyers to sink the Titanic. They were able to establish a lack of illegality because none of the customers in any of the named countries were in any way attached to the military nor were they associated with terrorist organizations. What Bishop had done, you see, was break the research into pieces and sell those pieces to medical researchers, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies whose primary customers were kids and the elderly.
Fucker used a variation on the nuns-and-orphans gambit.
His lawyers put the burden on our State Department lawyers to prove that any single action Bishop took or sale he made could, in any way, be construed as a terrorist act. No, they could not. Could anything he did be construed as actions taken against the national security of the United States? No. Not really, because each single action was carefully tied to a humanitarian target market. The designer β2-adrenergic receptor agonists, for example, were only sold to hospitals and labs researching asthma and pulmonary disorders.
So, no one was able to prove within reasonable doubt that Bishop was anything more than a good businessman whose love of humanity transcended national borders and political agendas. Bishop’s PR people tried the government in the court of public opinion, succeeding in painting us as the bad guys and him as a saint. There was even a picture on the cover of Time that showed him handing a puppy to sick kids in a rural Chinese hospital. The kids were smiling and cute, the puppy was adorable, and Bishop contrived to look like fucking Santa Claus.
Good place to pause and vomit.
Here’s the truth that we knew but couldn’t prove. Whereas the science was apparently innocent when viewed piecemeal, when combined those bits added up to biotech that could — and indeed did — create superior soldiers with significant physical enhancement.
That’s who I was going to meet.
I’d met him before. Outside of a federal courthouse once. And again at one of his labs we raided. That raid, by the way, was based on bad intel. We busted the place up pretty good, and he handed us our collective asses in court to the tune of eleven million for repairs and a variety of nebulous damages.
When I saw him a third time at a sidewalk café in New Orleans where I knew he’d be, I had Top and Bunny with me, and they kept Bishop’s bodyguards entertained while we had a chat. Over coffee and some very nice pastries I told him that we were, at that moment, in the process of dismantling the labs of several of his clients. It was a global, coordinated hit. Very illegal, very off the radar, and very well coordinated. Our boys plus some day-players from Mossad, Barrier in the U.K., the Belgian Pathfinders, an Austrian Jagdkommando team, and even Iceland’s Víkingasveitin. Bunch of others. We didn’t target the hospitals or civilian research labs, but we’d spent two years making a hit list of covert labs that were actually making super soldiers for sale to private contractors like Blackwater and Blue Diamond.
There was not one shred of actionable evidence to link Bishop to these labs, though everybody knew he was involved. He was just too good with burning any bridges that led to him. The best we could do was cut his client list by at least half — call it a thirty-billion-dollar annual loss — and maybe put the fear of God into the other half.
I had the job of making sure that Bishop didn’t take any calls while this was happening. I wasn’t in the field because I was healing from some injuries I’d taken on a gig. This was not long after I got shot during the Majestic Black Book affair.
So, it was a couple of guys sitting at a table drinking café-au-lait and eating beignets while half of Bishop’s empire burned.
I made sure that we were photographed at that table. That photo was leaked to the right people.
Were we setting him up as the guy who sold out his own people to the Feds?
Fuck yeah, we were.
It was less than four hours before he started getting death threats.
Over the next few months there were sixteen separate attempts to assassinate him. His car was blown up — he wasn’t in it, alas. One of his lawyers went to meet Jesus, so we all put it in the win column. Couple of snipers took shots at him, and for a fun five minutes we thought Bishop was down, but the wily bastard actually had doubles. Not clones or anything that cool. Just actors hired to impersonate him and, as it turned out, die for him. Someone torched his house, and someone else mailed him a birthday card filled with anthrax.