Rentboy

it was the same as when I had first looked at the study. I went over everything with Atherton
    the week before you ordered your son to approach him. I never gave Atherton permission to change
    anything.”
    “Then he did it on his own!” Mr. Maputwa threw himself down in the armchair so hard that it
    slid backward, pinning Fox against the wall. One more inch and he would have difficulty breathing.
    “When Atherton presented me with his data, it showed that the compound was killing laboratory
    test animals quickly, even in very small quantities. I told him to do nothing with it for now. I told him
    I needed further permission from Comtrex to use the grant money to keep working on the pesticide.
    The man is a complete idiot. It’s not like him to act on his own. I’m surprised he went ahead without
    my approval.”
    “Then you need to change the compound back to its original, lethal state.” It was William
    Baillie’s voice. “I’m ready anytime to go out to Uganda.”
    “I can’t do it,” Howard said. “I don’t have a copy of the data. Atherton has it, assuming he didn’t
    destroy it, though I doubt he did. He keeps copies of everything. We have to show a paper trail of
    every piece of work we do to keep the grant money.”
    “Get it!” Maputwa bellowed. “I paid you a fortune, Dr. Howard, to get me a biological weapon
    that would get rid of the opposition in the outlying villages and the jungles. I must win the next
    election! I paid you, Baillie, to launch guerrilla attacks using a poison, not a pesticide. I expect my
    money’s worth. Now get Atherton to give you the data on the lethal version of Lintrane without
    alerting him as to what it will be used for. I want it manufactured as quickly as possible, and I want
    you, Baillie, in Uganda on the ground leading my militia.”
    So the Dr. Howard Fox had served tea to was the same man Eddie worked for. The man the
    elder Dr. Atherton had never liked.
    And now Fox knew how William Baillie was supporting his family so lavishly on his military
    pension. He had retired from the army and gone to work as a mercenary soldier. Even though he
    wanted the man out of the house and preferably out of the country, he didn’t want him killing innocent
    Ugandan farm families. Fox did not want to live off the spoils of war, and he knew Eddie wouldn’t be
    thrilled that his pesticide was being used as a bioweapon.

    * * * *
    It was late afternoon the following day when Fox walked through the double glass doors of the

    London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine after an hour of watching for Eddie to come out.
    Only when Dr. Howard trotted out of the building with his Charlie Chaplin walk did Fox feel safe to
    enter. It was imperative Howard did not see him since he seemed to have a hotline to William
    Baillie. But if Eddie was not coming out, Fox would have to find him.
    In a disguise of sorts he wore no makeup, ordinary jeans, a plain gray long-sleeved T-shirt, and
    a loose gray woolen hat pulled low over his forehead. At the lift he read the board with the list of
    office numbers and labs. Dr. Edward Atherton was on the third floor. Looking around, Fox located
    the stairs and ran up two at a time. Eddie’s office was at the end of the corridor, but he wasn’t in
    there.
    “Are you looking for Dr. Atherton?” The man who spoke was closer to Eddie’s age than his own
    and equally conservative in dress, reminding Fox that this was a postgraduate institution, unlike
    Wimbledon College of Art, which was hectic with blooming youth of the more happening kind.
    “Yeah.”
    “You’ll find him in his lab.”
    “Right. Thanks, dude.”
    Looking left and right in case Howard returned, Fox followed the man’s directions down to the
    basement level and entered the lab. With no windows and old yellow paint on the walls, it must be
    incredibly depressing to work in. At the far end, standing at a workbench, bent over a microscope,
    was Eddie, wearing a white lab coat over his usual garb. Glass cases held plants in various stages of
    growth. Rats and mice in cages scurried back and forth. Fox had to suppress an overwhelming urge to
    release them like Elliott releasing the frogs in E.T. He’d loved that movie when he was little,
    imagining having a flying bike that would take him away from his father.
    Silently he walked up to Eddie until he was about two feet away and waited. He didn’t expect
    Eddie to be happy to see him, but he hoped he wouldn’t be