Ossley and Emeline stare at me as if I’ve just uncovered the great secret that will send their souls screaming all the way to Hell. Which I have, maybe.
“We were—y’know—together,” Ossley says. “And I lowered my head to, um—and anyway, the bullet went right over my head.”
“We hid for a while,” says Emeline. “And then we ran away.”
I look at Ossley. “What chemical experiments have you been doing,” I say, “to get both the DEA and a sniper after you?”
Ossley flaps a hand at me. “Well,” he said. “You know.”
Somehow I keep a hold on my patience. “No,” I say, “I don’t.”
Emeline looks up at me. “You know,” she said. “Like with the wine.”
I nod. “He’s making a reactor vessel—”
“Reactant,” Ossley corrects.
“You’re going to print drugs,” I tell him.
He shakes his shaggy head. “I just lay down the precursor chemicals,” he says. “They’re like prodrugs in nature—they’ll produce drugs once they’ve finished reacting with the vessel.”
“The vessel,” I say, “which you also print.”
“Yeah.”
“Which drugs?” I ask.
He gives a hapless shrug. “The opiates are easier,” he says. “I mean, they’re all closely related, you just decide how many acetyl groups or whatever you want to tag onto morphine …”
“Oxy?” I ask. “Dilaudid? Heroin?”
“Diacetylmorphine hydrochloride,” Ossley says. “But that’s not …” He shrugs, nods, and concedes the point. “Well yeah, it is heroin, yeah.”
“And how much of this stuff have you made?”
He seems surprised by the question. “Um,” he says. “None. My gear isn’t good enough. If you’re aiming at producing drugs, your printer needs to be really precise, and you have to control temperature and humidity and light really well. I’ve never been able to afford a printer that good. And even if I get one, I’ll have to run tons of experiments before I can produce anything like a pharmaceutical-grade product.”
“So why is the DEA …?”
“I put some stuff on the Internet.”
I nod. “Of course you did,” I snarl. “Because the conventions of social media demand that you announce your growing criminality on an electronic forum searchable by law enforcement. What else could you possibly do?”
He spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. “The narcs showed up. They started talking about ‘criminal conspiracy to distribute narcotics.’ I decided it was time to leave town, so I cashed in the Ramirez identity and created a new one.”
“You had a backup identity just lying around.”
“I printed it. And then I got a job here because I know some people.”
At this point I am beyond surprise, so I just nod. Ossley gives a superior grin. “I named myself after the greatest drug dealer of all time.”
I’m blank. “There’s a famous drug dealer named Ossley?”
“Owsley. Augustus Owsley Stanley. He practically created the Psychedelic Sixties. Made millions of tabs of acid back when it was still legal.”
I rub my forehead. “I really don’t care what your grandparents got up to,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to do with you.”
Ossley’s alarm is clear even behind his thick glasses. He and Emeline exchange looks.
“You can’t tell the cops,” he says. “I mean, everything I did was just theoretical.”
“Someone,” I say, “is shooting at you. Another innocent person could get hit.” I looked up at him. “Maybe you should just disappear.”
Ossley and Emeline exchange looks again. “We thought about it,” he says. “But shit, we’re sitting right here in the middle of this huge police presence. I figure we’re safer here than outside.”
“Tell that to Loni,” I say.
There is a long silence. “Look,” he says finally. “Nobody’s going to shoot with all these cops around. It’s just not going to happen.”
“No?” I point at the drapes drawn over his window. “Then why don’t you open your drapes? Stand out on your patio and drink a beer?”
Ossley licks his lips. He looks desperate. Emeline, who is still standing behind him, gives his shoulders a little push.
“Tell him about the paradigm shift,” she says.
“I—”
She pushes him again. “Tell him,” she insists.
His eyes blink behind the thick glasses. “Well, see, it’s a shift in how everything’s going to be manufactured, right? Little 3D printers in kiosks and garages, making all the tools you need.”
“Including drugs,” I say.
“Right. Most of the stuff now that they need big factories and assembly lines to create.” He licks his lips again. “But see, if you can make—or someone in your village can make—stuff that used to need a factory, then nobody’s going to need that factory, right?”
“So,” I say, “factories go out of business.”
“Drug factories,” says Ossley. “Because once the formula gets out, people can make their medication on their own. Not just the illegal stuff, but everything else—statins for cholesterol, beta-blockers for hypertension, triterpenoids for kidney disease, antibiotics for infection …”
“It’s a paradigm shift,” Emeline says. She’s desperate to be understood.
“So drug companies go crash,” I say. “I get it.”
“Not just drug companies,” Ossley says. “But the whole mechanism by which drugs are distributed, or, um, not distributed. Suppressed.” He gives a desperate little laugh. “See, the DEA’s job becomes impossible if anyone can make the drugs they want.” He grins. “It’s a new world. Prohibition will go away because there will be too many ways around it.”
“That’s why the DEA wants to put Ossley away!” Emeline cries. “He’s not breaking the law, he’s threatening their jobs.”
I try to put my mind around what Emeline is trying to tell me. “You’re saying it was the DEA who tried to shoot you?” I say.
“No,” Ossley says, just as Emeline shouts “Of course!” They glare at each other for a minute, and then Ossley turns back to me.
“See, it’s not just the cops who are out of business,” he says. “It’s the criminals.”
“Ah,” I say. Because right now there are elaborate networks that take coca or opium poppies or whatever, and refine the raw vegetable matter down to powerful alkaloids, and smuggle that stuff across borders, and then cut it and break it into small packages and distribute it around neighborhoods … and of course there are a lot of really hard men with guns whose job it is to make sure that business is successful and protected from competition.
Whole organizations, reaping billions of dollars in profit, for whom violence is a first response, and every member of which will have to go back to shining shoes, planting beans, or working at the convenience store if Ossley perfects his technology.
“You’ll put the cartels out of business,” I say.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people, yeah?” he says.
“And in the meantime they’re trying to kill you.”
“I still think it’s the damn cops,” Emeline says. “How would the cartels even know you’re here?”
I don’t have an answer for that, or for much of anything else. I stand.
“Better print a new identity and plan your escape,” I say. “You can’t stay here much longer.”
He chews on that while I leave.
I’m sitting in my cabana that afternoon when Hadley, the director, comes to see me. He doesn’t bring me food.
“Jesus Christ, we’re in such fucking trouble,” he says.
I’m almost grateful that he’s not oozing sympathy. He wanders over to one of the baskets of fruit I’ve been given and starts popping grapes into his mouth.