Luc had known nothing of this at the time. As it was, he couldn’t devote the time he needed to delve fully into the properties of this strange molecule, and perhaps he should have kept closer track of the Loki stock, but he’d been distracted by GEM Pharma’s financial crisis.

“I also wish I’d never heard of TriCef!” Luc shouted, anger surging as he snapped back to the present. “I didn’t put this company on the brink of financial ruin by wagering its future on the success of a single product!”

“The vote to invest in TriCef was unanimous,” Brad reminded him.

“Yes, I went along,” Luc admitted, “but only because I couldn’t get on with my work with you two badgering me constantly.”

GEM had been doing well, extremely well, with generic Pharmaceuticals, but Kent and Brad wanted to boost the company from its small-time, also-ran status into a major. Luc had reluctantly agreed to their plan to buy world rights to a new third-generation cephalosporin that was supposed to blow all the other broad-spectrum antibiotics out of the water. They put the company deep into debt to launch TriCef. And TriCef tanked.

Then, to their shock, Milos Dragovic appeared and offered to buy the blue powder Luc had been experimenting with. He said he would take all they could produce for an undisclosed market overseas. They’d been wary, but not wary enough. What they’d known of Dragovic then came from the papers where he was portrayed as a rather glamorous if shady character. And he was offering a lot of money…

“If GEM had been solvent when Dragovic approached us,” Luc said, “we could have—we would have laughed him off. But as it was, we were faced with the choice of either throwing in with him or going Chapter Eleven.”

The Dragovic money would pull them back from the brink, so they agreed to gear a percentage of their production facility to the stuff Luc called Loki.

“The proverbial offer we couldn’t refuse,” Kent said.

“We had a choice,” Luc said. “We could have bit the bullet and refused. But we didn’t.”

Luc knew he had been right there on the line with his two partners, voting an enthusiastic yes—anything to save their financial hides.

Brad moaned. “But if we’d only known what the stuff could do, what he’d do with it.”

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Luc said. “You knew from my reports that it increased aggression tenfold in rodents; and none of us was so naive as to believe someone like Dragovic had a legitimate use in mind.”

Luc later learned that Dragovic had performed impromptu human studies with the samples. He’d discovered that a little of the blue powder imparted an intense euphoria, an on-top-of-the-world feeling. A larger amount elicited outbursts of mindless violence at the slightest provocation, sometimes with no provocation at all.

Dragovic had found an instant market in his gunrunning customers, so he sent the first shipments to his contacts in the various Balkan militias. Word spread like wildfire through the military underground and soon every military and paramilitary organization—from the Iraqis and the Iranians to the Israelis and Hamas—wanted a supply.