Next: A Novel (26 page)

Her son was holding a silver canister with a little plastic cup at the tip. They were in the living room of his parents’ house in Scarsdale. Outside, workmen were hammering on the garage.

Making repairs: getting the house ready to sell.

“What’s in the tube?” she said again.

“It’s a new genetic treatment, Mom.”

“I don’t need it.”

“It rejuvenates your skin. Makes it young.”

“That’s not what you told your father,” she said. “You told your father that it would improve his sex life.”

“Well…”

“He put you up to this, didn’t he?”

“No, Mom.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “I don’t want to improve my sex life. I have never been happier than I am right now.”

“The two of you sleep in separate rooms.”

“Because he snores.”

“Mom, this spray will help you.”

“I don’t want any help.”

“It will make you happier, I promise…”

“You never did listen, even as a child.”

“Now, Mom…”

“And you never got any better, your whole adult life.”

“Mom, please…” Ellis was starting to get angry. He wasn’t supposed to be the one doing this to her, anyway. His brother Aaron was supposed to do it. Aaron was his mother’s favorite. But Aaron had a court date, he’d said. So Ellis was stuck with it.

He moved toward her with the canister.

“Get away from me, Ellis.”

He continued to approach.

“I amyour mother, Ellis.”

She stamped on his toe. He howled in pain, and in the next moment grabbed her by the back of the head, pushed the canister over her nose, and squeezed. She writhed and twisted.

“I will not! I will not!”

But she was breathing it in. Even as she protested.

“No, no,no! ”

He held it there for a while. It was as if he were strangling her, the same sort of grip, the same sensation, as she struggled in his arms. It made him incredibly uncomfortable. The flesh of her cheeks against his fingers as she twisted and protested. He smelled the powder of her makeup.

Finally Ellis stepped away from her.

“How dare you!” she said. “Howdare you!” She hurried from the room, swearing.

Ellis leaned against the wall. He felt dizzy, to have physically accosted his mother like that. But it had to be done, he told himself.It had to be done.

CH043

Things were notgoing well, Rick Diehl thought, as he wiped puréed green peas off his face and paused to clean his glasses. It was five in the afternoon. The kitchen was hot. His three kids were sitting at the kitchen table screaming and hitting one another. They were throwing hot dog relish and mustard. The mustard stained everything.

The baby, in the high chair, refused to eat and spat her food right back out. Conchita should have been feeding her, but Conchita had vanished that afternoon. She had become increasingly unreliable ever since Rick’s wife left. Broads stick together. Probably he would have to replace Conchita, which was a big pain in the neck, to hire somebody new, and of course she would sue him. Maybe he could negotiate a settlement with her before she went to court.

“You want it? Take it!” Jason, his oldest, mashed the hot dog with the bun into Sam’s face. Sam howled and acted like he was choking. Now they were rolling on the floor.

“Dad! Dad! Stop him! He’s choking me.”

“Jason, don’t choke your brother.”

Jason paid no attention. Rick grabbed him by the collar and pulled him off Sam. “I said, don’t choke him.”

“I wasn’t. He asked for it.”

“You want to lose TV tonight? No? Then eat your own hot dog and let your brother eat his.”

Rick picked up the spoon to feed the baby, but she closed her mouth stubbornly, staring at him with beady little hostile eyes. He sighed. What was it that made kids in high chairs refuse to eat, and throw all their toys on the floor? Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for his wife to have gone away, he thought.

As for the office, the situation was even worse. His ex–security guy had been humping Lisa, and now that he was out of jail, he was undoubtedly humping her again. That girl had zero taste. If Brad was convicted of pedophilia, that would be bad publicity for the company, but even so, Rick hoped for it. Josh Winkler’s wonder drug was apparently killing people. Josh had gone way out on a limb, doing his own unauthorized human testing, but if he were sent to jail, that would reflect badly on the company, too.

He was poking at his daughter with the spoon when the phone rang. And things became much, much worse.

“Son of a bitch!”

Rick Diehl turned away from the banks of security screens. “I can’t believe it,” he said. On the screens, the hated Brad Gordon was swiping open doors to the labs, touching Petri dishes everywhere, and moving on. Brad had been recorded as he went methodically through all the labs in the building. Rick bunched his fists.

“He came into the building at one in the morning,” the security temp said. “He must have had an admin card we didn’t know about, because his was disabled. He went to all the storage points, and he contaminated every single culture in the Burnet cell line.”

Rick Diehl said, “He’s an asshole, but there’s no problem. We have off-site bio-storage in San Jose, London, and Singapore.”

“Actually, those samples were removed yesterday,” the security temp said. “Someone picked up the cell lines and left. They had proper authorization. Secure e-transmission of codes.”

“Who authorized it?”

“You did. It came from your secure account.”

“Oh Christ.” He spun. “How didthat happen?”

“We’re working on it.”

“But the cell line,” Rick said, “we have other sites—”

“Unfortunately, it seems…”

“Well, then we have customers who have leased—”

“I’m afraid we don’t.”

“What are you saying?” Rick said. He was starting to scream. “Are you saying every fucking Burnet culture is gone? In the entire fucking world? Gone?”

“As far as we know. Yes.”

“This is a goddamndisaster. ”

“Evidently.”

“This could be the end of my company! That was our safety net, those cells. We paid a fortune to UCLA for them. You’re saying they’re gone?” Rick frowned angrily, as the reality hit him. “This is an organized, coordinated attack on my company. They had people in London and Singapore; they had everything arranged.”

“Yes. We believe so.”

“To destroy my company.”

“Possibly.”

“I need to get those cell lines back. Now.”

“No one has them. Except, of course, Frank Burnet.”

“Then let’s get Burnet.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Burnet seems to have vanished, too. We can’t seem to locate him.”

“Great,” Rick said. “Just great.” He turned and yelled to his assistant, “Get the fucking lawyers, get fucking UCLA here, and get everybody here by eight o’clock tonight!”

“I don’t know if—”

“Do it!”

CH044

Gail Bondfell into a routine. She would spend the night with Yoshi, then come home at six in the morning to wake up Evan, give him breakfast, and see him off to school. One morning, as soon as she unlocked the door, she saw that Gerard was gone. His cage stood uncovered in the hallway, his perch unoccupied. Gail swore. She went into the bedroom, where Richard was still sleeping. She shook him awake.

“Richard. Where’s Gerard?”

He yawned. “What?”

“Gerard. Where’s Gerard?”

“I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

“What accident? What have you done?”

“The cage was being cleaned in the kitchen, and the window was open. He flew out.”

“He did not. His wings were clipped.”

“I know that,” Richard said, yawning again.

“He did not fly out.”

“All I can tell you is that I heard Nadezhda shriek, and when I came to the kitchen, she was pointing out the window, and when I looked, the bird was fluttering awkwardly to the ground. Of course I ran downstairs to the street at once, but he was gone.”

The bastard was trying not to smile.

“Richard, this is very serious. That is a transgenic animal. If he escapes he may transmit his genes to other parrots.”

“I am telling you, it was an accident.”

“Where is Nadezhda?”

“She comes in at noon now. I thought I would cut back.”

“Does she have a cell?”

“You hired her, pet.”

“Don’t call me pet. I don’t know what you have done with that grey, but this is extremely serious, Richard.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

Of course it ruinedall her plans. They had intended to publish online the following month, and inevitably there would be cries from around the world that their claim was untrue. Scientists would call it the Clever Hans effect, mere mimicry, God knows what else. Everyone would demand to see the bird. And now the bird was gone.

“I could kill Richard,” she said to Maurice, the head of the lab.

“And I will hire the bestavocat for your defense,” he said, not smiling. “Do you think he knows where the bird is?”

“Probably. But he’ll never tell me. He hated Gerard.”

“You’re having a custody fight over a bird.”

“I’ll talk to Nadezhda. But he has probably paid her off.”

“Did the bird know your name? The name of the lab? Phone numbers?”

“No, but he memorized the tones for my cellular phone. He used to make them as a sequence of sounds.”

“Then perhaps he will call us, one day.”

Gail sighed. “Perhaps.”

CH045

Alex Burnetwas in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. He hired notorious D.C. attorney Abe (“It Ain’t There”) Ganzler to defend him.

It turned out that Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but Ganzler—

as was his custom—tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)

It was in the midst of frantic preparation for the third day of the trial that Amy, Alex’s assistant, buzzed her to say that her father was on the phone. Alex picked up. “Pretty busy, Dad.”

“I won’t take long. I’m going away for a couple of weeks.”

“Okay, fine.” One of the other lawyers came in and dropped the latest newspapers on her desk.

TheStar was running photographs of the raped child, the hospital in Malibu, and unflattering pictures of Alex and the kid’s mother, squinting in hard sunlight. “Where are you going, Dad?”

“Don’t know yet,” her father said, “but I need some time alone. Cell phone probably won’t work.

I’ll send you a note when I get there. And a box of some stuff. In case you need it.”

“Okay, Dad, have fun.” She thumbed through theL.A. Times as she talked to him. For years theTimes had fought for the right to access and print all court documents, however preliminary, private, or speculative. California judges were extremely reluctant to seal even those documents that involved the home addresses of women being stalked or the anatomical details of children who had been raped. TheTimes’ policy of publishing everything also meant that attorneys could put gross and unfounded allegations in their pretrial filings, knowing theTimes would print them.

And it invariably did. The public’s right to know. Yes, the public really needed to know exactly how long the tear was in the poor little boy’s—

“You holding up all right?” her father said.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m okay.”

“They’re not getting to you?”

“No. I’m waiting for help from the child welfare organizations, but they’re not issuing any statements. Strangely silent.”

“I’m sure you’re shocked by that,” he said. “The weasel is politically connected, right? Little dickhead. Gotta go, Lexie.”

“Bye, Dad.”

She turned away. The DNA matches were due today, but they hadn’t arrived yet. The samples obtained had been small, and she was worried about what they would show.

CH046

The lightsdimmed smoothly in the plush presentation room at Selat, Anney, Koss Ltd., the preeminent London advertising agency. On the screen, an image of an American strip mall, blurred traffic rushing past a wretched cluster of signs. Gavin Koss knew from experience this image was an immediate rapport-builder. Anything critical of America was surefire.

“American businesses spend more on advertising than any other country in the world,” Koss said. “Of course, they must do, given the quality of American products…”

Snickers floated through the darkness.

“And the intelligence of the American audience…”

Mild, muted laughter.

“As one of our columnists recently noted, the great majority of Americans couldn’t find their own behinds with both hands.”

Open laughter. They were warming to him.

“A crude, cultureless people, slapping each other on the back as they drift ever deeper into debt.”

That should suffice, he thought. He changed his tone: “But what I wish to draw to your attention is the sheer volume of commercial messages, as you see them here, arranged in space along the motorway. And every vehicle driving past has its radio on, sending out even more commercial messages. In point of fact, it’s estimated that Americans listen to three thousand messages every day—or what is more probable, they don’t listen to them. Psychologists have determined that the sheer volume of messages creates a kind of anesthesia, which becomes ingrained over time. In a saturated media environment, all messages lose impact.”

The image changed to Times Square at night, then Shinjuku, in Tokyo, then Piccadilly, in London. “The saturation today is global. Huge messages, including large-screen video, appear in public squares, along motorways, in tube stations, train depots. We place videos at point-of-sale in retail stores. In toilets. In waiting rooms, pubs, and restaurants. In airport lounges and aboard aircraft.