Dragovic set up a dummy corporation in Rome where he received bulk quantities of Loki shipped from GEM as TriCef. There his people filled capsules and pounded out tablets to distribute Loki throughout the world.

“Yeah,” Kent said, “but we thought his market was a bunch of Third World military crazies who’d kill each other off and that would be it.”

“Right,” Brad said. “Who ever dreamed it would become a street drug right in our own backyards?”

Luc couldn’t help laughing.

“What’s so fucking funny?” Kent shouted.

“I ought to call Mr. Prather and see if he has use for ethical contortionists!”

“Don’t push me, Luc,” Kent gritted through his teeth.

“That’s not fair,” Brad said. “I’ve been tortured by this.”

“Really?” Luc said. He didn’t know why he was feeling so hostile. Almost as if he’d taken some of that damn drug himself. “I haven’t noticed a big surplus in your draw account.”

Brad averted his gaze.

The truth was that the huge profits from Loki had salved all their consciences. The drug had turned GEM Pharma into a money machine—a self-laundering money machine from which all the income derived from Loki was cleaned up by declaring it as profit from international sales of TriCef.

Kent had devised an almost perfect system. GEM synthesized the drug in its heavily automated Brooklyn plant where the few employees needed to maintain the production line thought they were manufacturing an antibiotic. GEM records showed bulk shipments of TriCef to Rome. From there the drug traveled such a tortuous path of cutting and packaging and repackaging that by the time the pills reached America their trail was so attenuated that it would be virtually impossible to trace them back to GEM.

Atop all that was the added safety factor of the un-consumed Loki spontaneously converting to an inert compound every new moon.

Loki had made them all very rich, but also guilty, trapped, and desperate.

And paranoid.

Dragovic’s mercurial moods were not their only worry. A few months ago Brad had brought up the possibility of a hostile takeover by another corporation. The purchase of a controlling percentage of GEM stock would inevitably lead to exposure of their secret. To head that off they had been funneling the funds earmarked for basic research into the repurchase of their own company’s stock.

What a catastrophic mess.

Luc sighed and closed his eyes; he pictured himself in a tiny rural cafe in Provence, sipping dark, rich coffee while the owner’s cat basked nearby in a sunny window.

In three weeks I’ll be out of this. Just three weeks.

But if Gleason blew the whistle… Luc’s bucolic vision shifted from rural France to a jail cell right here in Manhattan.

He opened his eyes and fixed Brad, the company comptroller. “Prather will want cash, in advance. It’s Saturday. How will you—?”

“I’ll get it,” Brad said. “Same amount as for Macintosh, I assume. I’ll have it for you by this afternoon.”

“One more thing we need to consider: Gleason has some sort of relationship with our new researcher.”