American Obsession td-109 Read online

  American Obsession

  ( The Destroyer - 109 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Fatted Calves

  The new body culture is finally bringing its rewards, thanks to a hormone treatment that rapidly restructures body fat to muscle - all overnight, during a true beauty snooze.

  But it's way-out expensive, and only the rich and famous can indulge. After all, what's a thousand bucks a day when the result is a body to die for?

  There are some side effects - no pain, no gain! But when innocent people start paying a steep price for the star's self-improvement regimens, CURE's Dr. Smith sends Remo and Chiun to infiltrate the Lycra crowd and the hallowed halls of the legalized drug trade. Soon their investigation is blocked by a greedy corporation, but the worst challenge is from an army of celebrities - lean, mean products of a killer diet...

  Destroyer 109: American Obsession

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  PROLOGUE

  From the top of the white granite campanile, a great bell tolled twice. The quavery tones echoed around the wide brick quadrangle that formed the core of the Purblind University campus. With its lecture halls' stately parapets, steeply sloping roofs, tall windows and ivy-covered walls, as well as its broad, curving walkways, Purblind seemed an idealized vision of an American institution of higher learning. Under the whistle of the winter wind, one could almost hear a sweater-clad glee club humming a rousing drinking song.

  But appearances could be deceptive.

  There was no glee club at Purblind University. Nor was there a tower bell. The peals came from a digital recording of a sixteenth-century church clock in Bruges, Belgium, and the recording was amplified and played through huge audio speakers concealed in the top of the campanile.

  Likewise, Purblind had no athletic teams. No school paper.

  No school colors.

  Purblind University was a research institution. A knowledge factory. Which meant it was devoted to the study of one subject: the making of money. Students, and particularly undergraduate students, were considered a regrettable annoyance by professors and administrators because they drained away time and energy that might have been more profitably spent on the development of patentable products and processes. Products and processes that could be licensed to commercial interests. The name of the game at Purblind was royalties.

  Most of the university's funding came from faceless corporate donors or research partners. The AgroChemical Information Council. The National Cybertronics Consortium. The American Meat Board. The Dairy Consumption Task Force. The International Society for Pharmaceutical Advancement.

  In its ten years of existence, P.U.'s basic-research successes had produced a parade of well-known consumer products: One Million Flushes Toilet Bowl Cleaner; Perpetu-Wrap, an infinitely reusable synthetic gift-wrap material; Your New Face, a noninvasive, do-it-yourself home-plastic-surgery kit based on Perpetu-Wrap technology; All-White Chicken, genetically engineered to have vestigial legs and thighs; and PG-5, widely used as a freshness stabilizer for processed food, as a UV protectant for outdoor house paint and, in high concentrations, as a chemical-warfare nerve agent. The school's individual triumphs could have easily stocked the shelves of a gas-station minimart.

  As the recorded bell tones faded into the distance, professors and their graduate-student assistants singlefiled, like so many families of white ducks, out of the cafeteria in their lab coats and into the chill, dark February afternoon. Inside the steamy warmth of the cafeteria, a few undergraduates lingered over the dregs of their cafe mochas. As they commiserated over the trials of life at old P.U., a scrawny, balding scarecrow of a man entered via a side door and passed through the turnstile into the food-service area. His skin was pale as milk and liberally dotted with brown moles of various sizes. The skinny scientist carried with him a truly awesome odor. Not quite as meaty as skunk. Not quite as fecal as civet cat. It crept through the cafeteria like a noxious fog.

  "Jee-zus!" one of the students gasped as he clamped a hand defensively over his nose and mouth. "How can that dweeb stand himself?"

  "Why don't you go over and ask him?" suggested the undergrad sitting on the other side of the table. "Uh-uh," the first student replied, sweeping his notebooks into his day pack and scraping back his chair. "If I don't get out of here quick, I'm gonna hurl."

  The sentiment was universal.

  Breathing through their mouths, the lunchtime stragglers rushed past the cash register for the exits. The hapless cashier remained trapped at her post. Her face flushed deep red as she watched the scarecrow man mull over the day's hot selections. The cafeteria servers, plump middle-aged women in disposable plastic hair caps and gloves, had already made themselves scarce, as they always did whenever "Professor Polecat" appeared.

  The scientist's campus nickname was, in fact, doubly erroneous. Carlos Sternovsky was a research assistant, not a professor, and he didn't work with Mephitis mephitis, the striped skunk, but rather with Gulo gulo, the wolverine. Same taxonomic family, Mustelidae, but different subfamily and species.

  Sternovsky helped himself from the stainless-steel tray of simmering pork goulash, then to steamed brussels sprouts, to a whole-wheat dinner roll and a dish of Jell-O fruit salad. For him, the food had no aroma and virtually no taste. A childhood virus had destroyed his sense of smell, and with it, the ability to distinguish complex flavors. Despite the loss, he still felt hunger, and he appeased it every five or six hours in as rational a way as possible, based on the prevailing theory of proper diet composition: the food pyramid.

  The cashier grimaced as he took the time to count out exact change. Her expression said, God, don't you ever wash? She was a simple, ignorant undergrad. Of course he washed. And he changed his lab coats daily. But washing and changing never did any good because of the chemical nature of the odor. The oil-based, superconcentrated musk spray had to wear off his skin, like layers of paint-and because he was constantly reexposed to it, that never happened.

  She took the money from him but didn't put it in the register. It went first into one airtight bag. Then that sealed bag went into another. As he turned away with his tray, she was looking frantically under the counter for something to wipe off her hands with.

  Though he could have sat down anywhere, Sternovsky took his usual seat at his usual table. He felt no anticipatory pleasure as he stared down at the paprika-seasoned meat stew. He got no enjoyment from chewing and swallowing the meat, either, but he did feel relief as the gnawing pains in his belly gradually subsided. The only sound in the cavernous hall was the scraping of a cheap metal knife and fork against a thick, institutional-ceramic plate. He finished the last spoonful of lime Jell-O and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. When he looked around, the place was deserted. The cashier had slipped away while his back was turned. That didn't surprise him. He was used to being shunned. For the year and a half he'd been employed by Purblind, he'd endured official and unofficial scorn on a daily basis.

  Six more months remained on his contract with the school's biochemistry department. According to the fine print in that eight-page, single-spaced document, for the princely sum of $16,500 a year the university held title to every thought in his head. Never mind the fact that his research supervisor had undermined his work from day one, and through funding cutbacks had tried to force him to abandon his chosen line of inquiry and move on to something more "promising."

  Sternovsky had swum alone and against the current for more than a year before achieving the initial breakthrough in his research. Despite the encouraging results, despite his monumental solo effort, on the recommendation of his supervisor the biochem department had fla
tly refused to underwrite the cost of a primate testing program. For Sternovsky, it was a teeth-rattling slap in the mouth.

  In the end, he had paid for Arnold, his pygmy chimpanzee, out of his own pocket, this by downgrading his transportation, by spending the last of a small inheritance and by maxing out all his credit cards. When the primate study began to bear fruit, the embittered scientist had kept the news from his supervisor. He knew if the department got interested in his research at this late stage, Purblind U. would steal all credit for the discovery. His doubting Thomas overseer would claim the Nobel. The university would suck up the commercial royalties, which could, over time, run into billions of dollars. And for all his trouble and pain, he would be put onto the street without so much as a thank-you when his employment contract ran out. Or even before, if they could prove he'd misappropriated so much as a rusty paper clip. Sternovsky bussed his tray and tossed his napkin into the recycle bin.

  It was his last lunch at good old P.U.

  AS THE BIOCHEMIST TREKKED back to his lab, an icy wind flapped his khaki slacks against a pair of calves as thin as flagpoles. On either side of him, columns of steam billowed like Yellowstone geysers from grated vents set in the sprawling lawns. Beneath the soggy sod and the winding brick walkway was an anthill of underground levels that housed the university's main laboratories.

  Because of the oppressive stench of his research animals, Sternovsky had been consigned to a temporary trailer on the outermost fringe of the campus, in the farthest corner of Parking Lot ZZ. Following the recent winter storm, the university's snowplow had scraped the asphalt clean, leaving piles of dirty snow heaped in the shade around the base of the trailer, blocking access to the wooden steps. Days had passed since the plow operator's little joke, but the compacted snow had yet to melt. To reach the trailer's door, Sternovsky had to follow the path he'd beaten through the waist-high slush.

  Though he normally kept his laboratory scrupulously neat and as sterile as an operating room, today the long, narrow room looked as though a whirlwind had swept through it. A tricolor of gore, excrement and yellow-green musk splattered the walls and tracked the aisles between worktables. Steel cage doors stood ajar, and already-sacrificed wolverines lay sprawled on countertops or in heaps on the sheet vinyl floor.

  The dead animals were roughly three and a half feet long, counting their short, thickly furred tails. Their coats were blackish brown, with light brown bands along both sides of the body from shoulder to rump; the light-colored bands joined each other across the base of the tail. The creatures had short, massive legs and wide feet tipped with huge claws. With their bony skulls, small, rounded ears and stubby muzzles, their heads looked almost bearlike. Native Americans referred to them as "skunk bears," for reasons obvious to anyone with a functioning nose.

  Before his lunch break, Sternovsky had harvested all but three of his lab subjects. Now it was time to finish the job. He donned a gray rubber smock and knee boots, a plastic face shield and leather gauntlets. From the steel sink, he retrieved an enameled tray that held a half-dozen loaded syringes. The fluid in the disposable hypodermics was the palest of pale blues. Blue as a cloudless summer sky.

  Heart-stopping blue.

  He moved gingerly down the slick aisle toward the last two cages in the row. Excited by the smell of blood and the sound of his approach, the surviving animals growled and screeched. The sixty-five-pound male wolverine he'd named Donny was well into his second hour of mating with the much smaller Marie. It sometimes took as long as two hours for the animals to complete the reproductive act. Prolonged and vigorous mating caused female wolverines to ovulate; as it turned out, the accompanying changes in levels of hormone production were the key to Sternovsky's breakthrough. To pin and hold the knotted wolverines hard against the inside of the bars, he pulled the lever on the cage's built-in trap, which provided safe access for superficial examinations-and injections.

  Donny kept humping even as Sternovsky slid the needle into his shoulder. When the scientist pushed in the plunger, the wolverine let out a scream, arched his matted tail and sprayed yellow-green gunk from his anal gland. Donny's wickedly curved fangs and four-inch claws scored the steel bars with fresh, bright scars. Like a wind-up doll ticking down, his frantic hip movements slowed, and his tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth. Then he began to quiver all over; not in ecstasy, but in the convulsive throes of death. Sternovsky made a luckier hit on Marie, injecting her in a vein, and she gave up the ghost at once.

  After moving their limp forms from the cage to the nearby countertop, Sternovsky quickly shaved their heads with an electric razor, doused the bare white skin with orange disinfectant, then sliced their skulls open with a battery-powered autopsy saw, leaving the cap of bone to hang back by an attached flap of scalp. The treasure he sought lay at the base of their brains, a bit of differentiated tissue called the hypothalamus. He deftly scooped out the tissue with a sterilized melon-baller and plopped the pair of warm, bloody gobbets into prelabeled plastic jars. He would trim away the unnecessary tissue later, at his leisure.

  The scientist paused in front of the last cage. He was breathing so hard he fogged up the inside of his face shield. He had to flip it out of the way in order to see the huddled, hairy form of Arnold at the back of the steel pen. Though Gulo gulo were powerful and fearsome creatures-on a whim, evolution had made dachshunds out of grizzly bears-the pygmy chimpanzee was the test animal that really scared him; in fact, he had recurring, wake-up-screaming nightmares about Arnold getting loose in the gradstudent dormitory.

  Barely three feet tall, the chimp currently weighed in at 160 pounds-twice the normal size for his species. Arnold was neither cute nor cuddly. He was a nearly perfect cube of densely corded, evil-tempered muscle. With Arnold, there was none of the sign language, sensitive-fellow-primate, Discovery Channel doo-dah. The glint in his squinty, root-beer brown eyes said only one thing: I want to hurt you.

  Sternovsky didn't reach for the cage's lever. Compressing the chimp with the built-in trap was no longer possible, as he'd learned to resist such efforts with his tree-trunk legs. Sternovsky didn't attempt to use a prod to administer the lethal injection. No hypodermic needle could penetrate Arnold's thick muscles without breaking off.

  And yet the job had to be done.

  The scientist put the tray of syringes down on the countertop and picked up a yard-long piece of Parkerized steel pipe he'd borrowed from the university's marine-sciences department. It was a bang-stick-a bare-bones, stockless 12-gauge designed to serve as an underwater defense against attacking sharks. The weapon had no visible trigger; instead, it fired one high-brass shotgun shell when the muzzle was rammed against its intended target. Holding the bangstick by its Hypalon grip, Sternovsky pulled the cotter-pin safety and let it dangle by its thong. From the back of the cage, Arnold glared at him.

  The scientist felt suddenly queasy. This chimp was no dim-witted shark. When you stuck something into his cage, he grabbed for it. And he was quick. His forearms were easily as big as Sternovsky's thighs; with hand strength alone, he had bowed the cage's braced, 440A stainless-steel bars. If he decided to, the chimp could easily pull the offending bang-stick away-or worse, use it to jerk his keeper within reach. The scientist didn't doubt that Arnold had the power to tear a human arm from its socket, and that he would do so with relish, if given the opportunity.

  From the side pocket of his rubber apron, Sternovsky took a large, misshapen fast-food sandwich. The grease on Arnold's favorite treat, long since congealed, had melted the bun to mush and turned the wrapping paper translucent. As Sternovsky waved the three-quarter-pound, triple-bacon-and-cheese burger back and forth, the chimp sniffed the air with keen interest.

  When Arnold stirred himself from the back of the cage, eyes on the prize, the scientist thrust the bangstick through the bars. Before the chimp could seize the barrel and bend it into a pretzel, Sternovsky rammed the muzzle between his burly pectorals. A rocking blast lifted the huge ape, bounced him off t
he bars at the rear of the cage and sent him crashing face first to the mesh floor. Amazingly, even though it was a contact wound, there was no through-and-through, no grisly splatter across the trailer's wall. Arnold's massive back muscles contained all the double-aught buckshot.

  With profound relief, Sternovsky watched the blood drain from the motionless body. He didn't open the cage door until he was certain that the beast was dead and his own hands had stopped shaking. Dragging the corpse from the cage, he quickly shaved and sawed open the skull, then used the power tool to make a Y-shaped incision below the powder-blackened entry wound. Working quickly, he took minute samples of various organs and tissues for later analysis.

  The lab seemed eerily quiet as he emptied the refrigerator, transferring small racks of glass vials of wolverine hormones-extracted for certain targeted neuropeptides-and the chimp-tissue sampler into a six-pack cooler marked Biological Specimens. After packing the cooler with dry ice, he sealed the lid with duct tape and affixed the necessary prestamped export documentation from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

  After stuffing his backpack with a six-inch-thick stack of floppy disks that held all his experimental data and research notes, he began erasing his laboratory computer's hard drive. While the autodestruct program was running, he stripped down to his jockey shorts in front of the sink and, using a gallon of tomato juice, scrubbed himself raw. Washing with tomato juice supposedly countered the stench of musk spray. Because he couldn't tell if it had worked or not, he doused himself liberally with Old Spice before putting on baggy tan corduroy pants, a rumpled brown cord sports jacket, a blue polyester dress shirt and a skinny red knit tie. Before Sternovsky left the trailer, to make extrasure that no one at Purblind could recover his research data, he reloaded the bangstick and blasted the drive tower into a thousand pieces.

  His Toyota was the only car in Parking Lot ZZ.