Fatal Reaction

projects who’d had the bad judgment to disagree with someone who happened to be carrying an assault rifle. When they brought him in he had holes in his stomach, his liver, his lung, and his spleen. As we’re wheeling him into the OR he looks up at me and asks ‘Will I be okay?’ Can you imagine, I looked that kid in the eye and told him I was going to take care of him. Then I watched him bleed to death on the operating table. And why? Because some brain-dead piece of shit had an advanced weapon capable of shooting someone eleven times in as many seconds. When I came home last night I had to throw my underwear away because it was so full of that kid’s blood. Now what kind of person would choose to see that kind of thing every day?” She looked at me as I if expecting some sort of answer, but there was none.
    “You have to remember all the times they don’t die,” I i said. “That and the fact that they don’t die because you ' were there to take care of them.”
    “Yeah,” she replied bitterly. “I patch them together and send them out onto the same shitty street.”
    “I’ll grant you that the idea of getting rich removing cataracts from nice little old ladies is sounding good this morning,” I ventured, “but I promise you you’d be bored out of your mind inside of six months.”
    “But would that be so bad?” sighed Claudia as her beeper went off. “Sometimes I think you and I have got it all wrong. Work is supposed to be boring. It’s your life that’s supposed to be interesting.”
     
    The drive from Hyde Park to Oak Brook takes forty-five minutes and is equally ugly in both directions. As I headed west on 1-55, which peels off Lake Shore Drive at McCormick Place, I saw the city fall away only to be replaced by a series of depressing industrial vistas—necrotic rail yards and crumbling factories—all punctuated by garish billboards advertising the riverboat gambling that is legal on the other side of the county line.
    Azor Pharmaceuticals had recently abandoned its tony corporate offices downtown in favor of more utilitarian digs in the suburbs. Not only did the move save Stephen a small fortune in municipal taxes, but it also allowed him to consolidate his far-flung research efforts under a single roof. The fact that the roof was in a soulless industrial park in the middle of a suburban wasteland did not seem to bother him at all.
    Oak Brook is one of those sterile subdivision cities carved out of cheap farmland and made attractive by its proximity to O’Hare airport. Home of McDonald’s Hamburger University and a mammoth shopping mall, it is popular with professional athletes, corporate transfers, and airline pilots—in short, nobody who is planning on sticking around for more than a couple of years. I couldn’t believe that Stephen was going to make me go there every day.
    Azor’s new home was in an antiseptic office building that seemed to have sprung from the asphalt of its parking lot. The outside of the building was shiny, coated with the same material used to make mirrored sunglasses. There was a very simple reason for this—whatever is of use to a legitimate drugmaker is of much greater value to an illegitimate one. Stephen was happy to have a darkly reflective surface be all that Azor Pharmaceuticals presented to the world.
    Inside the building the decor was generic and security tight. Besides the ZK-501 project, Azor Pharmaceuticals had several other experimental drugs under development and the threat of corporate espionage was very real. All visitors were carefully scrutinized by a uniformed security guard who checked their names against an approved list before they were allowed in. Employees had to run the magnetic strip on the back of their IDs through a card reader mounted beside the double doors that led into the ; interior of the building. All bags were searched whenever anyone left the building and every twelve seconds video cameras swept the lobby.
    When I arrived I was surprised to find Paramilitary Bill, one of the guards who usually worked the night shift, manning the security desk. He was twenty-four years old with a buzz haircut and a blank expression. Stephen and Danny used to joke that he spent weekends drilling with his militia group—nothing else could account for the combination of his rippling physique and rabid fanaticism. But all joking aside, there was something definitely creepy about Paramilitary Bill and the disconcerting intensity with which