The Scioneer (3 page)

Lek felt his
pulse quickening. ‘Of course.’ he croaked, ‘Is this the reason you
wanted to see me, Mr Pechev?’

‘No, no.
I felt we needed a catch up, you and I. And since we were meeting,
I thought you wouldn’t mind extending me this service.’

‘Of
course. Midday at the South Bank Lion. No problem, sir.’

‘I need people
I can rely on, Gorski.’ Pechev smiled, cocking his head to one
side. ‘And I told you, call me Lyubomir.’ Abruptly, he stood up,
peeled a twenty cred note from his cashclip and laid it on the
table. He put his four-fingered hand on Lek’s shoulder momentarily,
and then left.

Chapter 4

Lek
counted to sixty after Pechev disappeared from view, before
half-running, half-stumbling to the toilets. He checked the room
was empty before locking himself inside a cubicle to examine the
contents of the bag. Sure enough, it was filled with
s
tacks of crisp 100 cred
bills. ‘This has to be a test. This has to be a test!’ Lek
whispered manically. For the thousandth time in the last twenty
years, he cursed his fortune. ‘I’m a scientist for Lennon’s sake! A
scientist! Not a damn drug dealer! How did I let this happen? How
did I let this happen?!’

Scion
drugs were legalised in 2020, under the huge weight of public
demand. Like all medicines, however, they were subject to clinical
testing and human-trails before reaching the market, which only the
giant drug companies could afford to perform. When Lek produced
evidence of his ground-breaking ‘building-block’ research, he was
flooded with offers from these giants: superb contracts from
Steiner-Lorenz, QIC, and Pharmacorp - loaded with business perks
and founded upon vast amounts of money. In a period of carefree
indecision, already basking in his future success, Lek was
approached and wooed by an associate of a small family-run Estonian
company who were looking to expand aggressively into Western
Europa.

Lek was
won over by their hands-on, down-to-earth attitude to business, and
driven by the challenge to be part of a new venture rather than a
cog in an already huge machine, he signed on the dotted line. The
money was good, and his brand new laboratory overlooking the Thames
was his own domain. He had everything he needed for his research
and, left to his own devices, began producing formulae for new
scions and testing their effects on his mice. He felt he was making
a difference in this new scientific age.

The world had
finally, thankfully, turned its back on Fleming’s antibiotic curse,
after the rise of the superbugs in the early twenty-twenties, when
MRSA, Ci-Dificile and the seemingly unstoppable Hydra-virus wiped
out the poorest populations of Africa and decimated the peoples of
South East Asia. Natural remedies, homeopathy, herbal treatments,
reiki, acupuncture and even laughter therapy all saw a huge rise in
popularity. The police turned a blind eye as the public turned to
Celtic faith-healers and Cuban witch-doctors for ancient cures
containing rhino-horn, snake’s blood and bull’s pizzle. Bars began
to serve psychotropic mushroom tapas. Meanwhile, marijuana and
cocaine, long since legalised, were made readily available to all
and sundry as ailing health services across the world felt their
long-established foundations shifting beneath their feet.

Riding on
the crest of this new wave came the so-called ‘scioneers’, the new
breed of medical professional, toting their wonder-drugs for any
ailment or illness. For indeed, who could complain about a
headache, period pain or the sniffles when they felt they were an
eagle soaring over the Mojave Desert, or a gazelle outstripping big
cats on the Masai Mara. Scions were breathing new life into old
limbs, fighting back against mental illness, Alzheimer’s, strokes
and most notably, cancer and heart disease.

While
such noble work was going on in Berlin, Manila, and Dehli however,
from the solitary confinement of his lab, Lek Gorski was
unknowingly helping to flood the black market with cheap natural
highs. His first assignment was to produce an anti-depressant to
rival the old favourites –
imipramine, phenelzine and
mazindol. Within a month, he had created the perfect mix – blending
replica strands of moon jellyfish with albatross extracts. In the
laboratory it was called FQ17K.88.4. On paper, it was Albagel. On
the street, it was Chillax. Users described its high as the
glorious sensation of floating on the currents of an endless
oceanic blue sky. It was a worldwide phenomenon and in less than a
year had punched a hole in the heroin trade that no agency in the
history of drug-enforcement had ever thought possible. From on
high, Lyubomir Pechev smiled and gave Lek, his little lab-rat, a
pat on the head. Life was good.

It wasn’t until Lek naively began to question
the value of producing such vast quantities of Chillax scions, the
formula of which had yet to be approved, in a laboratory which had
not yet passed the standards of the Europan Pharmaceutical Agency,
for a company which, as far as he could tell didn’t appear on any
drug-company registers or government lists, did he realise his
mistake. When he raised these questions to one of his few contacts
within the company, a man named Sergei Bellhaus, he genuinely
thought Lek was joking. Taking pity on an innocent, Bellhaus sat
him down in a booth at the back of the Moo Bang Steakhouse on
Jerome Street and over several drinks, told him the whole truth
from top to bottom: Pechev and the Russian mafia, the Jakarta
connection, the Bogota payoff, the corrupt police officials and
politicians in their pockets.

Bolstered by alcohol and high on knowing more
than somebody else for the first time in his life, Bellhaus
continued to help Lek connect the dots until there were none left
to connect. Lek felt his world sliding out from under him. He went
home wishing he had never asked. Two days later, Bellhaus’
decapitated body was found at dawn, impaled on the railings outside
the restaurant. His head had been placed in Lek’s laboratory
refrigerator with a note pinned to the forehead, reading, ‘Now you
know who we are. Now you know who you are.’

Somebody walked into the toilets and every
muscle in Lek’s body tensed in fear. He was being irrational, he
knew, but never before had he been asked to perform a task so
clearly beyond the remit of his work. He had never been expected to
handle either the money or the drug-packets. ‘I’m a scientist!’ Lek
cried out involuntarily before remembering his whereabouts. 100,000
cred – a year’s salary in a bag. A sudden thought occurred to him,
a thought so clear, so striking, that Lek was convinced of its
truth before he discovered it for sure. Driven by a strange desire
to validate his worst fears, Lek began to fan through the thick
stacks of used banknotes, until he found what he already knew was
there. Buried within the eighth bundle of tightly bound creds was
something that to the untrained eye would have seemed nothing more
than an innocuous strip of translucent plastic. Lek held it between
his thumb and forefinger as though it were a deadly scorpion – he
had read enough GEEK magazines in his time to recognise an iHare
transponder – sending out a digi-radio signal or electro-magnetic
pulse to whoever Pechev was paying to keep tabs on the money. Lek
was filled with disgust: twenty years of loyal service, albeit many
of those lived in fear, for this? They must have sensed his desire
to break free of the constant threat; his yearning to use his
skills for good, rather than for the benefit of the criminal
underworld. His mind skipped over all the dark-alleyway deaths he’d
seen as a result of his work, the gangland killings he’d been
forced to witness to make sure he was toeing the line and the
thought of joining their ranks brought the bitter taste of bile to
his throat. All these years when he could have been pushing science
in new directions, had been wasted getting junkies high on animal
cracker drugs.

This is a test, he thought.

Suddenly, Lek Gorski saw an escape route from
the prison his life had become. He had waited too long. This was
his opportunity… but he had to get it right, had to approach the
problem logically, scientifically. No margin for error. No false
hypotheses. Limited time frame. Shit or bust.

Without really thinking, Lek opened his
briefcase and emptied its contents – the gel-caps, hypos, vials of
extracts, bases and scions into Pechev’s doctor’s holdall.
He frantically pulled out his
papers and notebook and stuffed them into his side-pockets. He
found a used envelope, slipped the iHare inside it, and placed it
inside the otherwise empty case. Lek stepped out of the cubicle,
made sure he was alone and splashed his face with cold water and
ran his fingers through his hair. He took a long, hard long at
himself and saw steely determination in his eyes for the first time
in years. Then he ran back into the stall and vomited violently.
When he emerged again, he felt better still, and with a bag in each
hand walked out of the bathroom, out of the bar, and into the heat
of the city. He was a man on a mission.

‘Wez!’ Lek
called, his eyes scanning the street, ‘Where’s your sister? Never
mind. Do you want to make some money?’

‘How much?’
asked Wez, suddenly suspicious of his new breakfast buddy.

‘A
thousand cred?’ Lek blurted out, then immediately regretted his
benevolence.

‘Yes.’
Wez replied, without blinking, only the slight tremor in his voice
giving his emotions away.

‘Good.
See this briefcase? I want you to take it to the South Bank Lion by
midday. No earlier, so don’t rush. A man named Delić will be
waiting there for me. All you need do is tell him I sent you, and
give him the case. Can I trust you?’

‘Yes.’
Again with a tremor. This has to be a joke, thought Wez, as he
watched the Doctor counting out ten one-hundred cred notes. ‘What’s
inside? Is it empty?’

‘Not
quite, but there’s nothing of value to you. You’re a good boy. It’s
been a pleasure doing business with you. Don’t forget: Delić, South
Bank Lion, Noon. No earlier.’

‘How will I
know it’s him?’

‘Uh... he’ll be
eating goji berries.’

Lek
walked back into The Mash-Up and was about to order another
hash-cake when the gravity of his actions struck him like a
sledgehammer and his heart near stopped beating from the shock. He
rushed back outside but Wez was nowhere to be seen. The briefcase
is probably already floating in the Thames, thought Lek. He looked
down at the doctor’s bag, his hand gripped tightly around the
handle as though his life depended on it. And it did – 999,000 cred
was his ticket to safety now. He had just turned his back on the
most dangerous drug baron in the country and in less than an hour,
the hounds would be hunting him. The thought of facing them alone
left him cold, in spite of the heat.

***

In his
office
in the Square
Mile, Pechev sat down in his chair, switched on his iWall and
called up a map of the city. He drew an @ symbol in the air with
the index finger of his disfigured hand and typed in the tracking
code of the transponder in the doctor’s holdall. A small red cursor
and notation reading ‘The Mash-Up, Southwark Street’ appeared on
the map. He nodded sedately and returned to his game of chess. He
had been playing against himself for years, since nobody he knew
could provide enough of a challenge to his prowess. This particular
match had been going on for nearly a fortnight. The odds were
always in his favour, obviously, but Pechev only considered it his
victory when black won.

Chapter 5

Lek put
his head down and started walking across town. His destination
was
The IKEA Victoria
International Station and he hoped to get there without the
slightest hitch in his plan. He debated staying in the shadows –
creeping along beneath the UV awnings and canopies, but found
himself veering towards the safety of broad daylight. His hopes of
remaining inconspicuous were however dashed when he bumped into
somebody backing out of a cafe with a quatray of large cups in one
hand and a thick sheaf of documents in the other.

‘Watch
were you’re going, blud!’ the lady shouted in a voice which belied
her gender. She was over two metres tall, with an unnaturally
elongated face, a pair of wide flaring nostrils and huge square
teeth bared in anger. Lek caught himself staring at her in
disgust.

‘Yeah?
What are you looking at?’ she snorted, before bending to pick up
the few papers she had dropped, tossing her long unkempt hair from
her face and striding away. Equinox, thought Lek: half the city
must be addicted to it. He looked around – people were staring, and
every face he saw was unfamiliar, unfriendly and inhuman.
Everywhere he turned he saw freakish chimeras of once normal
people. A man with greenish skin, licking his lips involuntarily,
was gliding through the pavement grass. Outside an Urban
Fashionista store, a woman of indescribable beauty was standing
with perfect poise on one leg, the other tucked under the folds of
her skirt. A group of chattering teenage boys, swinging on
lampposts, slapping each other playfully and then running away on
all fours through the traffic.

Lek
rarely came down to street level anymore, at least not at this time
of day, and to see the results of his own work at face value, so to
speak, was often disconcerting to say the least. There were so few
pure humans around these days. The pull, range and accessibility of
scion-medicines and their black market counterparts was so great
that virtually everybody indulged. Although under normal
circumstances the effects of a single chemically-balanced scion
wore off within a few hours, a day at most, overexposure to animal
extracts, even synthetic replicas like those Lek’s company
produced, could lead to complications. The buzz, the artificial
high of scion drugs was simply too addictive for most to resist,
and in spite of the warnings printed on the side of even
over-the-counter extract-based medicines, people continued to
overdose day after day, until irreparable damage had been done. The
horse-faced woman was just one of the millions of examples walking
the streets of the Capital. ‘Scion abuse can lead to permanent DNA
scarring’, ‘Remember: scions CAN bind’, the warnings read. Few
people took heed. Lek himself didn’t touch the stuff. He preferred
those old school stimulants: cigarettes and alcohol, knowing as he
did the fate of Spiro Dimitriadis who at the age at 27, eight years
after his legendary performance at the Olympics and subsequent fall
from grace, broke both of his legs trying to jump a fence six-feet
high, and died of shock in his sleep that night.