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“What?” Polten said to him. “I don’t need a pep talk.”
“How much do we have left in our budget?” Davis asked.
“Enough to keep the lights on for a few more months. Why?”
“And you have wide latitude for how to use it, right?”
“It’s my budget. I can use it however I see fit. What are you getting at?”
“I’ve got something to show you.”
Davis pulled up a video on his laptop. “This was shot a week ago in Bangkok, Thailand. It came from a police report about a drug deal gone wrong. Just found it this morning, so this is the first chance I’ve had to show it to you.”
He started the video, and it showed a room littered with bloody bodies. It was clear they’d been in some kind of gunfight, with bullet holes everywhere. Police officers and crime scene investigators picked their way over the corpses as they collected evidence.
“These are members of two drug gangs, one from Thailand and one from the Philippines. It seems the Filipinos came out of it better since most of the bodies are Thai.”
Polten could feel his blood boiling. “We’ve just had a major setback, possibly losing our jobs because of it, and you’re showing me the aftermath of a battle between rival drug gangs? What does this have to do with anything?”
“Remember when we were doing our literature review of World War Two drugs in the classified archives?”
Polten shrugged. “And?”
“We noticed one called Typhoon, a relative of steroids that we thought might help us in our work.”
“Yes, I remember that one. Typhoon would be revolutionary if it did everything it was reported to do, which is frankly hard to believe. But we didn’t have a formula or any idea how it was made. All we had was a photo of a pill, white with a typhoon cyclone symbol on it. Everything else about it was lost in the war.”
“Maybe,” Davis replied with a sly grin. “You know, I have a constant search going on the Internet for any mentions of unidentified drugs just to make sure we don’t miss anything that might be useful. Well, I think we’ve found something useful.”
He fast-forwarded the video to the point where one of the investigators was emptying the pockets of a victim.
“That’s one of the Filipinos,” Davis said.
The investigator stood up while looking at something in the palm of his hand. Someone asked him a question and he shook his head. He held a white pill up to the camera, and Davis paused the image.
The pill had the same symbol as the tablet of Typhoon they’d seen in the archives.
Polten looked at Davis in amazement. “Is it the same?”
Davis nodded. “Exactly the same. I checked. Someone found a cache of Typhoon pills somewhere.”
“Still intact after seventy years?”
“If they were vacuum-sealed, there’s no reason they wouldn’t be just as potent today as they were back then.”
Polten suddenly saw the opportunity to do something even bigger than Panaxim. If he was able to develop a contemporary analog of Typhoon, he could write his ticket in the chemical warfare community.
“We need to do this very quietly,” Polten said.
“I know. That’s why I waited until we were alone. And I expect to be a full partner in this.”
Polten smiled, though he had no intention of sharing the limelight once the project was a success. “Of course, I couldn’t do it without you. But first we need to know where these drug dealers got their supply.”
“I already dug into the Thai report. Since they don’t know what it is, the pill is locked up tight until they can get some answers. But the police didn’t capture any of the Filipinos who survived.”
“Then we need to send someone in to get the answers. Do the police know who they are?”
“Based on the identity of one of the men, they think it’s a radical member of a communist insurgency based in the Philippines.”
