by Alan Glynn
Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘OK, what’s this about?’
‘Well, like I said … MDT.’
‘What do you know about MDT and where did you first hear about it?’
He was very direct in his approach, and obviously intended to interrogate me as he would a witness. I decided that I would play along with this until I had him in a position where he couldn’t just walk. In the way I answered his questions, I got several key ideas across to him. The first was that I knew what I was talking about. I described the effects of MDT in almost clinical detail. He was fascinated by this, and had pertinent follow-up questions – which also confirmed for me that he knew what he was talking about, at least in terms of MDT. I let it be known that I could supply the names of possibly dozens of people who had taken MDT, subsequently stopped and were now suffering acute withdrawal symptoms. There would be enough cases to establish a clear pattern. I let it be known that I could supply the names of people who had taken MDT and had subsequently died. Finally, I let it be known that I could supply samples of the actual drug itself for analysis.
When we got to this point, I could see that Morgenthaler had become quite agitated. All of the stuff I’d told him would be dynamite if he could bring it out in court – but of course at the same time I had been tantalizingly non-specific. If he walked away now, he’d be walking away with nothing more than a good story – and this was precisely where I wanted him.
‘So, what next?’ he said. ‘How do we proceed?’ And then added, with the merest hint of contempt in his voice, ‘What’s in this for you?’
I paused, and looked around. There were some people out jogging, others walking dogs, others pushing strollers. I had to keep him interested, without actually giving him anything – not yet, at any rate. I also had to pick his brains.
‘We’ll come to that,’ I said, echoing Kenny Sanchez, ‘but first, tell me how you know about MDT.’
He crossed his legs, folded his arms and leant backwards in the bench.
‘I came across it,’ he said, ‘in the course of my research into the development and testing of Triburbazine.’
I waited for more, but that seemed to be it.
‘Look, Mr Morgenthaler,’ I said, ‘I answered your questions. Let’s build up a little confidence here.’
He sighed, barely able to hide his impatience.
‘OK,’ he said, assuming the role of expert witness, ‘in taking depositions relating to Triburbazine, I spoke to a lot of employees and ex-employees of Eiben-Chemcorp. When they described the procedures for clinical trials, it was natural for these people to give me examples, to draw parallels with other drugs.’
He leant forward again, obviously uncomfortable about having to do this.
‘Several people, in this context, made reference to a series of trials that had been done on an anti-depressant drug in the early Seventies – trials that had gone disastrously wrong. The man responsible for the administration of these trials was a Dr Raoul Fursten. He’d been with the company’s research department since the late Fifties and had worked on LSD trials. This new drug was said to enhance cognitive ability – to some extent anyway – and at the time, it seems, Fursten had spoken endlessly about his great hopes for it. He’d spoken about the politics of consciousness, the best and the brightest, looking towards the future, all of that shit. Remember this was the early Seventies, which were still really the Sixties.’
Morgenthaler sighed again, and exhaled, seeming to deflate in the process. Then he shifted on the bench and got into a more comfortable position.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘there had been some serious adverse reactions to the drug as well. People had apparently become aggressive and irrational, some had even suffered periods of memory loss. One person intimated to me that there had been fatalities and that this had been covered up. The trials were discontinued and the drug – MDT-48 – was dropped. Fursten retired and apparently drank himself to death in the space of a year. None of the people I spoke to can prove any of this, no one will confirm anything. It has the status of hearsay – which of course, in terms of what I’m trying to do, is of absolutely no use.
‘Nevertheless, I talked to some other people in the weird, wonderful world of neuropsychopharmacology – try saying that when you’ve had a couple of drinks – people who shall remain nameless, and it turns out that there were rumours floating around in the mid-Eighties that research into MDT had been taken up again. These were only rumours, mind …’ – he turned and looked at me – ‘… but now, what, you’re telling me this stuff is practically on the fucking streets?’
I nodded, thinking of Vernon and Deke Tauber and Gennady. Having been quite evasive about my sources, I hadn’t mentioned anything to Morgenthaler about Todd Ellis, either, and the unofficial trials he’d been conducting out of United Labtech.
I shook my head.
‘You said the mid-Eighties?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And these trials would be … unofficial?’
‘Clearly.’
‘Who’s in charge of research now at Eiben-Chemcorp?’
‘Jerome Hale,’ he said, ‘but I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with it. He’s too respectable.’
‘Hale?’ I said. ‘Any relation?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, and laughed, ‘they’re brothers.’
I closed my eyes.
‘He worked with Raoul Fursten in the early days,’ Morgenthaler went on. ‘He took over from him, in fact. But it’s got to be someone working under him, because Hale’s more of a front-office guy now. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it’s Eiben-Chemcorp – it’s a pharmaceutical company withholding selective information in the interests of profit. That’s the case we’re making. They manipulated information in the Triburbazine trials, and if I can prove they did the same with MDT and show a pattern … then we’re home free.’
Morgenthaler was allowing himself get excited about the possibility of winning his case, but I couldn’t believe that in his excitement he had so easily passed over the fact that Jerome Hale and Caleb Hale were brothers. The implications of that seemed enormous to me. Caleb Hale had started his career in the CIA in the mid-1960s. In my own work for Turning On, I had read all about the CIA’s Office of Research and Development, and of how its MK-Ultra projects had secretly funded the research programmes of various American drug companies.
The whole thing suddenly took on an unwieldy, headachy scale. I also saw just how far out of my depth I was.
‘So, Mr Spinola, I need your help. What do you need?’
I sighed.
‘Time. I need some time.’
‘For what?’
‘To think.’
‘What’s there to think? These bastards are—’
‘I understand that, but it’s not really the point.’
‘So what is the point, money?’
‘No,’ I said emphatically, and shook my head.
He hadn’t been expecting this, obviously assuming all along that I had wanted money. I sensed a growing nervousness in him now, as if he had suddenly realized that he might be in danger of losing me.
‘How long are you staying in town?’ I asked.
‘I have to get back this evening, but—’
‘Let me call you in a day or two.’
He hesitated, unsure of how to answer.
‘Look, why don’t—’
I decided to head him off. I didn’t like doing it, but I had no choice. I did need to get away and think.
‘I’ll come up to Boston if necessary. With everything. Just … let me call you in a day or two, OK?’
‘OK.’
I stood up, and then he did as well. We started walking back towards East Fifty-ninth Street.
This time I was the one stage-managing the silence, but after a few moments something occurred to me and I wanted to ask him about it.
‘That case you’re working on,’ I said, ‘the girl who was taking Triburbazine?’
&
nbsp; ‘Yeah?’
‘Did she … I mean, was she really a killer?’
‘That’s what Eiben-Chemcorp is going to be arguing. They’re going to be looking for dysfunction in her family, abuse, any kind of background shit they can find and dress up as motivation. But the fact is, anyone who knew her – and we’re talking about a nineteen-year-old girl here, a college student – anyone who knew her says she was the sweetest, smartest kid you could meet.’
My stomach started churning.
‘So, basically, you say it was the Triburbazine, they say she did it.’
‘That’s what it comes down to, yeah – chemical determinism versus moral agency.’
It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.
‘Do you believe that’s possible?’ I said. ‘That a drug can override who we are … and can cause us to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do?’
‘What I think doesn’t matter. It’s what the jury thinks. Unless Eiben-Chemcorp settles. In which case it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. But I’ll tell you one thing for free, I wouldn’t like to be on that jury.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you get called in for jury service and you figure, OK, a few weeks’ break from my crappy job, and then you wind up having to make a decision on something of this magnitude? Forget it.’
After that we continued in silence. When we got back to Grand Army Plaza, I told him again that I’d phone him soon.
‘A day or two, yeah?’ he said. ‘And please do, because this could really make a difference. I don’t want to push you, but—’
‘I know,’ I said firmly, ‘I know.’
‘OK.’ He held up his hands. ‘Just … call me.’
He started looking around for a taxi.
‘One last question,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Why all this outdoor, park-bench stuff?’
He looked at me and smiled.
‘Do you have any idea what kind of power structure I’m up against in Eiben-Chemcorp? And what kind of money is at stake for them?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Well, it’s a lot, on both counts.’ He stuck his arm out and hailed a taxi. ‘I’m under constant surveillance from these people. They watch everything I do, my phones, e-mail, my travel itinerary. You think they’re not watching us now?’
The taxi pulled up at the kerb. As he was getting into it, Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘You know, Mr Spinola, you may not have as much time as you think.’
*
I watched the cab drive away and disappear into the flow of traffic on Fifth Avenue. Then I took off in that direction myself, walking slowly, still feeling a bit nauseous – not least now because I realized that my plan was unworkable. Morgenthaler may have been slightly paranoid, but it was nevertheless clear that threatening to play hardball with a huge pharmaceutical company was not a good idea. Who would I be approaching in any case? The Defense Secretary’s brother? Apart from how complicated that made things, I couldn’t see a company like Eiben-Chemcorp standing for blackmail in the first place, not with all of the resources they’d have at their disposal. This, in turn, made me think of how Vernon had died, and of how Todd Ellis had left United Labtech and then conveniently been run over. What had happened there? Had Vernon and Todd’s little scam siphoning off and dealing supplies of MDT been found out? Maybe Morgenthaler wasn’t being paranoid after all, but if that was how things really were I was going to have to come up with another plan – something a little less audacious, to say the least.
I arrived at Fifty-seventh Street, and as I was crossing it I looked around. I remembered that one of my earliest blackouts had occurred here, after that first night in Van Loon’s library. It’d been a couple of blocks over, on Park. I’d been overcome with dizziness, and had stumbled, and without any explanation found myself a block further down, on Fifty-sixth Street. Then I thought about the major blackout I’d had the following evening – punching that guy in the Congo down in Tribeca, then that girl in the cubicle, then Donatella Alvarez, then the fifteenth floor of the Clifden …
Something had gone seriously wrong that night, and just thinking about it now caused a stabbing sensation in the pit of my stomach.
But then it struck me … the whole sequence here – MDT, cognitive enhancement, blackouts, loss of impulse control, aggressive behaviour, Dexeron to counteract the blackouts, more MDT, more cognitive enhancement – it was all tinkering with brain chemistry. Maybe the reductionist view of human behaviour that Morgenthaler was going to pitch to his jury was right, maybe it was all down to molecular interaction, maybe we were just machines.
But if that was the case, if the mind was simply a chemical-software program running in the brain – and pharmaceutical products such as Triburbazine and MDT were simply rewrite programs – then what was to stop me from learning how all of that stuff worked? Using the supply of MDT-48 I had left, I could focus my powers of concentration for the next few weeks on the mechanics of the human brain. I could study neuroscience, and chemistry, and pharmacology, and even – goddammit – neuropsychopharmacology …
What would there then be to stop me from making my own MDT? There had been plenty of underground chemists in the old LSD days, people who had sidestepped the need to cultivate supply sources in the medical or pharmaceutical communities by setting up their own labs in bathrooms and basements all around the country. I was no chemist, for sure, but before I took MDT I hadn’t been a stock-market trader, either – far from it, in fact. Excited now at the prospect of getting started on this, I quickened my pace. There was a Barnes & Noble at Forty-eighth Street. I’d stop in there and pick up some textbooks and then get a cab straight back to the Celestial.
Passing a news-stand I saw a headline on a paper referring to the proposed MCL–Abraxas merger and remembered that I still had my cellphone powered off. As I walked along, I took it out and checked it for messages. There were two from Van Loon, the first puzzled, the second slightly irritated. I would have to talk to him soon and come up with some pre-emptive excuse for my absence over the coming weeks. I couldn’t just ignore him. After all, I owed the man nearly ten million dollars.
*
I spent an hour in Barnes & Noble, browsing through college textbooks – enormous tomes in fine print, with charts and diagrams and a blizzard of italicized Latin and Greek terminology. Finally, I picked out eight books with titles like Biochemistry & Behaviour, Vol. 1., Principles of Neurology and The Cerebral Cortex, paid for them by credit card and left the store weighed down with two extremely heavy bags in each hand. I got a cab out on Fifth Avenue, just as it was starting to rain. By the time we pulled up at the Celestial, it had turned into a downpour, and in the ten or so seconds it took me to hobble across the plaza to the main entrance of the building, I got soaked. But I didn’t care – I was excited and dying to get up to the apartment so I could make a start on these textbooks.
When I was inside, walking across the lobby, the guy on the desk, Richie, waved over at me.
‘Mr Spinola. Hi. Yeah … I let those guys in.’
‘What?’
‘I let them in. They just left about twenty minutes ago.’
I walked over towards the desk.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Those guys you said were delivering something. They were here.’
I put the bags down, and looked at him.
‘I didn’t say anything to you about any guys delivering … anything. What are you talking about?’
He swallowed and looked nervous all of a sudden.
‘Mr Spinola, you … you called me about an hour ago, you said some guys were coming to deliver something and that I was to give them a key …’
‘I called you?’
‘Yes.’
Water was dripping now from my hair down into the back of my shirt collar.
‘Yes,’ he repeated
, as though to reassure himself. ‘The line was bad, you said so yourself, it was your cellphone …’
I picked up the bags and started walking very quickly towards the elevators.
‘Mr Spinola?’
I ignored him.
‘Mr Spinola? Are… are we OK about this?’
I got into an elevator, pressed the button and as the car climbed up to the sixty-eighth floor, I could feel my heart beating so hard that I had to take deep breaths and bang my fist on the side panels of the car a couple of times to steady myself. Then I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. Drops of water sprayed everywhere.
At sixty-eight, I picked up the two bags and slid out of the car before the elevator door was even fully open. I rushed along the corridor to my apartment, dropped the bags on the floor and fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. When I got the key out, I had a hard time getting it into the keyhole. I eventually managed to get the door open, but the second I stepped inside the apartment I knew that everything was lost.
I’d known it downstairs in the lobby. I’d known it the second I heard Richie say the words, I let those guys in …
I looked around at the damage. The boxes and wooden crates in the middle of the living-room had been knocked over and smashed open, and everything was strewn about the place. I rushed over and searched through the mess of books and clothes and kitchen implements for the holdall bag where I’d been keeping the envelope with the stash of MDT pills in it. After a while I found the bag – but it was empty. The envelope with the pills in it was gone, as was Vernon’s little black notebook. In the vain hope that the envelope was still around somewhere – that it had maybe just fallen out of the bag – I searched through everything, and then I searched through everything again. But it was no use.
The MDT was gone.
I went over to the window and looked out. It was still raining. Seeing the rain from this high an angle was weird, as though a couple more floors up and you’d be clear of it, looking down through sunshine at grey blankets of cloud.
I turned around and leant back against the window. The room was so large and bright, and there was such a small amount of stuff in it, that the mess in the centre wasn’t even that much of a mess. The room hadn’t been trashed, because there was so little in it to trash – just my few belongings from Tenth Street. They’d done a much better job on Vernon’s place.
