Shadow of Eden (38 page)

“Not if we catch him alive. Men at this level don’t work in a knowledge vacuum. They are far and away more effective as partners in the operation.”

“So they’re not just hit men hired in a smoky club on Van Buren.”

Valenti laughed. “Maybe they go there, but it’s for a piece of ass.”

“So we catch them and they talk.”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“Well, what’s the first thing?”

Valenti leaned over and fished inside a leather athletic bag on the floor. He slid three things across the table to Steve, a pair of dark sunglasses, a fake moustache and an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap.

“You’re going incognito, my man.”

Chapter 80

H
HS Secretary Castell had one thing on his mind as he walked into the White House for an early morning appointment with the President. The housing bill, the one that Castell had personally supported, was now in House committee and not faring well. He wanted to talk the President into lobbying for it. So far, President Dixon had shown only tepid support, mindful of his congressional budget compromise. Castell, convinced of the political benefits it could buy the President, wanted the bill. Besides, Castell had friends depending on its passage.

Castell grew up in moneyed Boston where he attended Tufts Medical School and finished his residency in internal medicine at Northwestern University. He joined the Food and Drug Agency where he rose to prominence, not in science, but in management, becoming the Assistant Director of the Food and Drug Administration. It was then that he began moving in Washington circles. His ability to interact effectively with the influential elite assured him the director’s role once the position opened.

As director, most observers judged Castell a capable administrator, successfully pushing key drugs for approval while keeping costs in line. He also promoted the director’s position relentlessly; making it clear to Congress and the nation that he was on the side of reduced bureaucracy in government, and had a no-nonsense approach to approving needed medications. A year after Dixon had won the White House, in a surprise move, he had asked Castell to head the Department of Health and Human Services following the scandal and resignation of his predecessor.

Following Joan Pascal, he passed chief White House aide, Wesley Rojas, who was just leaving the Oval Office. Castell nodded in passing. “Morning, Wesley.”

Rojas dipped his head. “Good morning, Mr. Secretary,”

“Jake, welcome,” Dixon said, putting a white pharmacy sack into his top desk drawer. He took Castell’s outstretched hand. “Come in. Sit, sit.”

“Thank you, sir.” Castell sat in one of the chairs opposite the mahogany desk. To Castell’s relief, the President seemed to be in a good mood.

“I’m sorry I had to keep postponing our meeting, Jake, but this damn China thing, you know.” Dixon looked at a printed schedule on his desk and looked back up at Castell. “So my party needs help with the housing bill, does it?”

“Yes, sir. The provision for continuing the discount on mortgage rates and mortgage insurance for under-employed people is making some members of Congress nervous. The cost, you know. But it would be a tremendous boost to you and some of your key—”

“Right, right, I remember.” Dixon seemed uncharacteristically distracted and kept rubbing his temples. “We can afford it?”

It was a softball question that gave Castell plenty of room. “Of course, sir.” He leaned forward to press his carefully rehearsed points. “And with the election season on us, we need this bill. In fact—”

“Sure, sure.” Dixon waved his hands abstractly, interrupting the speech Castell had started. “Whatever you think.”

Castell peered carefully at Dixon. While it was going better than he expected, something wasn’t right.

“Jake, are you a religious man?”

Castell blinked at the President. “Uh, yes, sir.”

“Then let’s pray for the right answer. I find it makes things more clear.”

“Certainly, sir.” He hesitated, but Dixon was already kneeling, holding the desk for support. He looked at Castell raising his eyebrows, making the secretary distinctly uneasy. “Uhh, I’ll pray at my office, sir.”

“Come join me, Jake. Please.”

“I’m a little uncomfortable with this, sir.”

Dixon shrugged and closed his eyes. Castell looked at the secret service agent—D’Agostino was it?—for a clue as to how to behave, but saw only an impassive face. Dixon stood up and seemed refreshed with a new alertness.

“Well, Jake, I think we need to push for the insurance provision if you think that’ll help the bill.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Let them know I support it.”

“Can we have some of the leadership over for a lunch, sir?” Castell remembered almost belatedly the instructions of his strategist.

“I’ll see. China, you know.” The President’s face twitched visibly.

There it is!
He had been warned to expect it. Although a physician, he could not tell what it was. It was not a simple tic, nor was it a tremor. Neurology had been his least favorite rotation during medical school and he had stayed away from it since.

The President smiled and sat down. The meeting was over and Castell had to be satisfied. As he left through the east entrance, he couldn’t remember a time when the President had prayed during a meeting like that. But then, the President had given him much more latitude than he had expected. Castell’s step picked up. He had calls to make.

Chapter 81

“T
ell me about Eden, how it works, and how it got approved,” Valenti asked. They had just visited another of Valenti’s underground specialists, this time on the west side. The product they had ordered would be ready in time for their trip to Washington in three more days. They drove east on Olive Avenue, back towards Steve’s motel near the Phoenix airport.

Valenti had just finished a sliced turkey sandwich for lunch and sucked on the straw that led to his bottle of water. It wasn’t enough to hold body and soul together, he had bemoaned, but was determined to mend his overeating ways. Steve, slumped low in the seat, stuffed Valenti’s wadded up trash back into the paper sack and tossed it onto the floorboards at his feet. Steve had already finished his tuna sandwich, eating in the swift, methodical way doctors learn to do, after long experience with interrupted meals.

As he thought about the answer, he watched the passing streetlights silhouetted against the brilliant azure of the afternoon sky, contrasted only by wispy white jet contrails crossing high overhead.

“Actually, prion stuff aside, Eden is the miracle drug of the new millennium.”

“You sound like an ad.”

“Well, yeah.” He shifted, feeling his tailbone grind uncomfortably against the front edge of the bucket seat. “A really effective drug for weight loss was the holy grail of drug research for decades and Eden is it.”

“I know it’s good, but it’s that good?”

“Better than you could hope for. Everybody who takes it gets to their ideal lean body weight without going on a diet. In fact, they can eat pretty much whatever they damn well please. Trident hit a home run on their baby and no one else has anything close, either now or on the horizon.”

“Until the patent runs out. So how does it work?”

“By a primitive hormonal system little known until Trident pounced on it. The system helped our anthropological ancestors to regulate their body weight and heat production.”

“Huh?”

“Okay. Suppose you are a Cro-Magnon man.”

“My best feature according to Maria.” He glanced at Steve. “My wife, by the way.”

“Okay, Cro-Magnon man, your diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and plants with a little meat thrown in for good measure.”

“You mean salads.” Valenti’s face showed his disapproval. “No pasta?”

“Actually I’m getting to that. Now the Cro-Magnon diet isn’t high in calories, so the body trained itself to store every scrap of excess energy it could to see us through periods of famine. Now when we eat our pasta, refined sugars, and Big Macs, the body, acting on its age-old habits, stores every excess calorie as fat.”

“So wives get big hips and we get pot bellies, storing up for a famine? The calorie savings and loan plan.”

“Mostly savings, but that’s half of the story,” Steve explained. “The other half is the body’s capability to burn calories at will. Exercise physiologists—”

“Who?” Valenti asked.

“Exercise physiologists. They study the body when it exercises.”

“I’d be a black hole to them.”

“Most likely.” Steve smiled, despite himself. “Anyway, they’ve known for some time that elite athletes burn energy much more efficiently than you or me. In addition, people who live in very cold climates also burn energy efficiently. For a long time, it was assumed that variations in the circulation were responsible.”

“You mean their hearts delivered blood better than regular people?”

“Something like that, yes,” Steve agreed. “What Dr. Blumenthal, the original founder of Trident, found was that the basic cellular process that converts food into energy could be manipulated at its most fundamental level. Athletes more effectively utilize energy, turning it into muscle output. People in cold climates literally burn energy at rest like a stove to keep the body at a constant warm temperature, a burn rate much higher than we thought.”

“So our bodies can adapt to their special conditions.”

“Right. What science just recently realized was that these two systems are linked and are under the control of the same hormone system, which in turn, is controlled by low-level brain operations. While it takes us months of training or living in a cold climate to change our energy usage, our Cro-Magnon ancestors probably adapted in a single week.

“But then, we discovered agriculture with rice and wheat, delivering a high carbohydrate diet. It overwhelmed the system with excess calories and it shut down. Except in extreme circumstances, like intense training and living in a cold climate, it’s dormant.”

“I think that’s really something, but I’m not sure what you just told me.”

“Fair enough. It means, through the administration of a hormone like Eden, we can tell the body to burn off excess calories until we reach our highly-trained body weight.”

“Without a diet or exercise?”

“Correct. Although there are good reasons to exercise, weight loss doesn’t have to be one of them. But there’s more.”

“More?”

“When a person reaches his or her lean body weight, they have several unanticipated benefits. For one, it reduces or eliminates the requirement for insulin or diabetes drugs in adult onset diabetics. It normalizes cholesterol and thereby reduces stroke and heart attacks. It may also reduce certain types of cancer, if another study we did for Trident was positive.”

“This sounds good. Everyone would want to take it.”

“Well, there’s more.”

“More? You’ve just summarized four years of Cosmo articles on this stuff.”

Steve raised his eyebrows.

“My wife buys them at the supermarket.” Valenti shifted uncomfortably. “She leaves them by the toilet. So what?”

Chapter 82

M
orloch lounged in his favorite media room chair with Vivaldi playing in the background. A steaming cup of English Breakfast Tea sat next to him on the occasional table and three untouched newspapers lay in a pile on the floor. The manila folder resting in his lap contained the background material he had requested on Dr. James. It was pedantic, speculative, and too often laudatory, but Morloch found reading about Dr. James a reasonably interesting, if necessary, homework assignment.