“A-a-and let’s face it,” Edwards said. “We don’t make any money by not shipping, right? But this ran is about to turn. We won’t be able to start a new run until the weekend.”

“Perhaps I don’t have your attention. Yes? Is that it?” Milos said, thickening his accent. He turned, lifted a chair, and hurled it against the wall. “Now! Do you hear? I want Loki shipment now!”

His parents had brought him here from Herzegovina at age five. His father had been a Chetnik during World War Two who had found it impossible to live under the Communists afterward. He escaped and brought his family to Brooklyn, where they had never felt at ease. Milos had spent most of his childhood and adolescence scrubbing his speech of any trace of his foreign roots. He’d succeeded. By high school he could speak accent-free English. But as he’d moved into quasi-legal circles, he learned that a bit of an accent could be useful—for charming or threatening, depending on the context. So by age twenty Milos Dragovic had backpedaled and begun imitating his father’s English.

“It’s not there to give you!” Edwards wailed, cowering in his seat.

“Why not? You are selling to someone else? Yes? This is why you don’t give me shipment?”

“God, no!” said Garrison. “We’d never do anything like that!”

“You damn better not! If I find you give Dragovic’s Loki to someone else, I wring your necks like chickens!” He pressed his two fists together, thumb to thumb, and twisted.

Edwards winced.

“So,” Milos said, placing his hands on his hips. “If no one else has my Loki, where is it?”

“We don’t have it!” Edwards said. He looked like he was going to cry.

Milos hid a smile. He loved torturing these wimps. He knew they ran dry every month, knew damn well they weren’t selling to anybody else, but he couldn’t resist striking the fear of God—in this case, a vengeful god called Milos—into their blue-blooded hearts. He looked forward to these little meetings. And this windowless, soundproof, electronically secure boardroom was perfect. He could shout, throw things, and no one outside had a clue as to what was going on. Milos preferred to drop in without notice, sans bodyguards—he didn’t want anyone else in his organization knowing the origin of Loki—and terrorize the wimps for a few minutes, then take off, leaving them quaking in their brown-stained undershorts.

All except Monnet.

Keep up the game face, Doctor, Milos thought. I’ve got something special saved, just for you, something that will wipe that smug expression clean off your ugly little face.

Monnet sighed. “How many times do we have to go through this? The Loki molecule becomes unstable. When that happens we need to secure a new template. We will have that by tomorrow. We will start running it immediately. We will test its potency and then go into full-scale production.”

Milos leaned forward on the table, glaring at the smaller man. “Is Dr. Monnet”—he made sure to mispronounce it Moe-nett—”saying that I am stupid?”