“I wouldn’t call it perfection.” Valentine stuffed the papers back into the envelope, too much of a temptation — his lunch would grow cold.
“The attending psychologist — Rand is her name — has been in Denver since last weekend. She returned him there herself. She’s agreed to file weekly progress reports with Arizona Associated Labs. Of course I’ll have access to these. And this, mmm, this brings up the matter… the matter of — ” He began to clear his throat harshly, at last popping another cherry lozenge and looking so reluctant that Valentine was tempted to just let him squirm.
“The matter of a weekly retainer?” he prompted.
Wyzkall appeared greatly relieved.
“How much?”
“Twenty-five hundred per week seems reasonable.”
“Two thousand is the limit at which I’m prepared to keep from being
“Two thousand will be sufficient.”
Valentine settled back into his seat. He bluffed well but would never hurt Wyzkall. You did not hurt the goose that laid the golden eggs; although if you could scare it into shitting out a little extra gold now and then, so much the better.
“Drink your coffee, Stanley,” he said, “and we’ll decide the best way to launder in the new cash flow.”
Theirs was a business relationship based on the two primary commodities in the modern world: money and information. Over the past four years, Valentine had paid $20,000 apiece for his own copy of the file on each identified Helverson’s syndrome subject. He had an insatiable need to know the limits of the mutation that had marked his own chromosomes; the private sector lab for which Stanley Wyzkall served as research director had an equal need for monetary reserves.
MacNealy Biotech, in addition to its indigenous research projects, was one of numerous labs the world over involved in the Human Genome Project, the inner-space equivalent of landing the first man on the moon. Discussed in think tanks and on scientific symposia for years, and finally decided to be technologically feasible, the Project was launched in the fall of 1990 with the fifteen-year goal of mapping every strand of human DNA. Each of the three billion nucleotide base pairs, charted. Each chromosome identified, its function labeled.
The resource needs were staggering. Entire supercomputer data banks would have to be constructed to contain the sequenced information. New technologies needed refining to speed up the process of deciphering the protein codes. Human effort was estimated at upwards of 30,000 man-years of labor. And the financial requirements would be almost endless.
Patrick Valentine felt that, in some small way, he was doing his part. Stanley Wyzkall wanted none of the covertly allocated funds for himself, instead insisting they be directed, through foundations that existed only on paper, into MacNealy Biotech.
It all worked out well, and shaped direction in a life that had for its first forty years seemed to him to be absolutely without meaning.
Chicago-born, Chicago-bred, Patrick Valentine had grown up, if not the toughest boy in his surrounding neighborhoods, at least the fiercest. His furies knew no logic, they were just there, so much a part of him that childhood acquaintances who committed no mayhem seemed another species entirely. Life was something to be consumed, not savored, then shit out as quickly as possible. Years of turmoil and restless energy and a formless anger had brought him nothing but welts across the back from a distraught father who continually threatened disavowal, and a succession of run-ins with the law.
What a strange, strange lad. What a disappointment. He was educated, but not civilized. He looked in the mirror and saw only the dimmest capacity for greatness, buried in the roughest ore.
Great men must first become great masters of themselves, and connections eventually formed in his mind. The blue uniform that had heretofore meant only trouble gradually took on an air, not of mystique, but of practicality. Here was a channel for his violent exuberance. Here was a job he could love.
The Chicago Police Department was a most unexpected choice to those who knew him.
He applied. He was accepted. He was amazed.
The feel of the baton, the comforting weight of the service revolver… these became extensions of himself. They were the distillations of potent rage given a vessel to contain it. That he represented law and order was incidental. Far better was that he had been given both a license to inflict controlled miseries upon those whose word could never stand up to his own, and a support system that backed him up when there were doubts. Valentine knew no fatigue when it came to subduing the guilty with bruising ferocity. He was respected by some, reviled by many, and feared by all, but the opinions of others had always been of low priority.
Six years it lasted, this urban bounty of bleeding heads and broken bones, cowering lowlifes and intimidated lovers. Six years before termination for repeated use of excessive force; you
As well, he had long since taken measures to ensure a bonus to his income, a supplement with the potential to far surpass any paycheck the city of Chicago would ever cut him.
He had found the streets and weedy lots and decayed tenements to be a blue-steel cornucopia. Guns were everywhere, yet it seemed there was no end to the demand — a fine paradox. No gun made it to the evidence room if it could be avoided. Even those that did were occasionally misplaced. Shakedowns of suspects led to confiscations, as easy as picking apples from a tree.
It was a good racket. Investment was nil; the proceeds, 100 percent clear profit. His day job was such that he was in frequent touch with those who made the best customers, and some of them led him to connections greater still. By the time Valentine was fired from the police department, he was already masterminding break-ins at National Guard armories and manufacturer warehouses to truck away heavyweight hauls. Within another three years, he was plugged into an underground pipeline capable of supplying demolitions ordnance, rockets, mines, mortars, nearly everything that dealt a lethal blow short of nuclear.
Eternal demand, infinite supply. He had stumbled upon the one business that remained untouched by the whims of fickle economies. So long as one took precautions to avoid federal scrutiny, it was a seller’s market. The groups all but lined up and took numbers: slothful insurrectionists and supremacist militants, international terrorists, private mercenary armies out to create third-world bloodbaths, and, after he had relocated operations to Boston, the IRA.
He took no sides, took only the rewards, but even the money paled beside the hypnotic thrill of tuning in news footage of some trouble spot in the nation or halfway around the world and knowing he might have contributed. Here, the flaming wreckage around a car packed with a quarter ton of plastique; there, the stilled body of some leader cut down by an assassination squad.
All things tend toward entropy.
His prayer: Let them burn and let them bleed, but most of all, let them go their way.
Had he believed in the divine at all, Valentine could surely have seen himself as its instrument; but he did not. He was but a man of his world and his times — to an extent a self-made man, but augmented, he came to understand, by deviant biology.
A decade ago, while in his mid-thirties, he had survived another facet of the world’s patterned chaos. A malignant tumor had taken root in his scrotum and claimed both testicles before being excised. In the years to
