Out in the corridor, Lindstrom turned right, hurried along until he reached a door with a pebbled glass panel. The panel was dark gray, indicating the room beyond was unoccupied. Lindstrom unlocked the door and they went inside.

St. Vincent took out a long gray metal box, walked around the periphery of the room.

“What are you doing?” Lindstrom asked.

St. Vincent put a warning forefinger across his lips. When he had completed his circuit, pointing the box at all the light fixtures and switches, the telephone, in particular, he pocketed the box and returned to stand in front of Lindstrom.

“Okay,” he said, “the only ones who can overhear us are the mice, and unless you’ve done something extraordinary to them they won’t pay us any mind.” He opened his hands wide. “To Mobius, Doctor. Hemingway may find your obfuscating charming but let me assure you that I do not. Cut the crap.”

The Mobius Project took Lindstrom’s SUBNETS hypothesis several steps further. Lindstrom had—almost by accident—stumbled on an alkaloid extracted from Papaver laciniatum called ‘Przemko,’ a virtually unknown cultivar of the opium poppy. It was lost in the shadows because of its very low concentration of morphine content—less than 1 percent, as opposed to 10 percent in the Papaver somniferum variety that was grown in profusion in parts of Southeast Asia. Przemko contained so little morphine because other, more complex and unstudied alkaloids crowded it out.

SUBNETS had started out extracting alkaloids from Papaver somniferum in an attempt to use them in the project, but to no avail, and that avenue of scientific inquiry was soon abandoned for others. However, the last batch of poppies Lindstrom received was adulterated with a half-dozen Przemko specimens. In an idle moment, he began extracting alkaloids from them, and discovered that one, tripentylheliorphine, contained all the qualities he’d been looking for, and more—far more. He experimented, tweaking its atomic structure again and again until he was satisfied. He anointed the alkaloid triptyne as soon as his experiments with mice gave every indication it was going to work.

He reported to Omar Hemingway at NSA, and the Mobius Project was born. It quickly became a totally dark project, whose funding was piggybacked onto Lindstrom’s advanced SUBNETS initiative.

St. Vincent clapped his hands impatiently. “Snap out of it, Doc. I’m about to get pissed, and believe me you don’t want to see that.”

A sense of purpose slowly overlaid his fear of this terrifying man. “Yes, well, I have good news and bad news.”

“I’m not interested in bad news, Doctor, so please refrain from including same.”

“But you need—”

“I know what I need, Doctor, not you, not anyone else. You have progressed onto the monkeys, yes?”

“I have. But—”

“No buts, Doctor. You are to move on to human trials.”

“What? But we haven’t finished with—”

“No matter,” St. Vincent pressed. “Your subjects will be arriving tomorrow. You will begin then.”

“But, you must understand, this is against all scientific procedure.”

St. Vincent leaned in again, his face close to Lindstrom’s. “Are you telling me you refuse to move on with the trials?”