I looked at the photo again. Fleshy was smiling that big bright smile that hasn't been seen anywhere since the Fifties. Twelve years later, when he read about the rice oil in Kusho, I'll bet the smile wasn't there.
But there were plenty of smiles at Biotronics, at least for the first ten minutes or so. Laughlin actually sent a car around to pick me up. He said he'd feel terrible if I got run over riding my bike to their offices. Either he was indiscreet as hell, or he wanted to let me know that he knew a lot about me.
So it was high time for me to learn a lot about Laughlin, and I had a few ways of doing that. Most of them would have to wait until after the meeting, though, so I rode, relatively ignorant, in a big fat company car out to a high-tech office building along the river, not far from Harvard. Not even that for from where I lived. Took the elevator up to the top floor and found Biotronics easily, by following its smell. They were using solvents in there, mostly for cleaning and sterilizing stuff. Ethanol and methanol. Some kind of disinfectant with an aromatic perfume added to make it smell more impressive. Whiffs of hydrochloric acid, probably used for heavy-duty cleaning. Sweet acetone. None of this was unusual, just the basic lab odors. No wonder they were on the top floor; they'd use hoods to contain the toxic stuff, and then exhaust it all out vents in the roof.
Laughlin met me at the door, swooped his right hand around like a Stuka dive bomber and nailed me with a gym teacher's handshake and a game-show host's smile. And on top of all those other odors, a wave of familiar cologne rolled up my nostrils.
But he wasn't wearing a shoulder holster at the moment. And you could buy that perfume at any sufficiently pretentious store. Or, if you had access to a gas chromatograph, you could manufacture it yourself at a hundredth the price. So I had to take it easy here and not jump to any paranoid conclusions. Big guys and big revolvers didn't necessarily go together. I wiped my hand on my jeans, discreetly, then followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make. But somewhere back in here they had a lab, which made it a little better.
Not much of a lab, as it turned out. They had a gas chromatograph, sort of a cheapie, and some other analytical machines, and they had one very odd piece of work, up against a wall, called a Dolmacher. He held a printout in his hand and was moving his lips.
“S.T.!” he shouted, somewhat too loud, blinking spasmodically as his contact lenses tried to catch up. “Sorry we didn't see you on Saturday.”
“I was in Buffalo. Did you kill anyone?”
“Yeah! Nailed an R.O.T.C. cadet right behind the ear. From thirty yards. God, was he embarrassed.”
“Yeah. So this is where you work?”
“Part of the time.”
“Where's the DNA sequencer? Where are the big bug-growing tanks? Where's the tobacco that glows in the dark?”
“We're in Cambridge,” Laughlin said, managing to crank out a surprisingly throaty laugh.
“Oh, yeah. And people like me have ruined it for people like you.”
“God, S.T.,” Dolmacher said, not quite whining, “you guys really made it tough on us in this town. We can hardly even have offices here.”
“Wasn't me,” I said. “Genes aren't my bailiwick.” Years before, another bunch of duck-squeezers had rammed through some laws making life hard for genetic engineers in Cambridge.
“That might be true now, ST.,'” Laughlin said, “but it's about to change.”
“Yeah, I've been getting all kinds of dark hints to that effect.”
Laughlin jerked his head toward the exit, letting his politeness drop for a second. I guessed that meant we were leaving now. Dolmacher followed automatically.
“Where's the rest of it?” I said, killing time as we wandered down the hallway.
“Unfortunately we don't have a consolidated facility at this point in time,” Laughlin said. “Depending on various environmental regs, we have different parts of Biotronics scattered around the area. This is the headquarters. And as you saw, we have a small analytical lab.”
“Small molecules only?”
“Small molecules only,” Laughlin said, then turned and fixed me with a glare over his shoulder. “Sangamon's Principle.”
I couldn't believe this fucker. He'd been twisting my dick this entire time and I hadn't even figured it out until now. He was just begging me to punch him in the nose so that he could throw all those big uncoordinated Nautilus muscles into action. And then call his lawyers.
He ushered me into a conference room. I sat down with my back to the window. Laughlin closed the door and Dolmacher hovered.
“You know, Laughlin, you're the nicest guy who's ever hated my guts,” I said.
He laughed freely, the laugh of a man with a clear conscience. “I doubt it.”
Dolmacher just swiveled back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. Me, I was trying to avoid going into a fight-or-flight reaction. I drank some of their ice water - natural spring water, of course - and breathed slow, trying to keep my vocal cords nice and loose. I was wondering if Laughlin had done it - killed Scrounger - or those two pricks, Kleinhoffer and Dietrich. Or all three.
“Well! Shall we get started with the presentation,” Dolmacher hollered.
“Got any kids, Laughlin?” I asked.
“I think you're going to find this interesting,” Laughlin said.
“Should we tell him about the secrecy thing?” Dolmacher asked.
“This research is not generally known,” Laughlin explained, “for competitive reasons.”
“Competing with the police?”