Chapter 1

I'd known her since we were both kids on the block together. Her mom lived four doors down from us. Her dad had been killed in some industrial accident, and the city had paid out big. Her mom and my mom played pinochle three times a week with the Simon sisters.

Samantha, known as Sam to all of us, grew up beautiful but mean. I don't know if it was her dad being killed, or being raised alone with her mom, but she was always mean to me growing up. I remember that the day I got glasses I was feeling terrible. As we all walked home from school that day, I'd hoped that I'd escape being teased about it. Instead, Sam set up her boyfriend Tommy to push me around and call me 'four eyes'. I don't think he meant for me to fall down, but I was klutzy at twelve, and I fell and broke my glasses. When I cried, he looked like he felt bad, but behind him, I could see her smirking.

That's just the way she always was, nasty and distant, like she was better than any of us. She grew up beautiful too. She ended up being five foot nine, thin, blond, and beautiful. Mind you, her natural color was dirty brown.

We never talked during high-school, probably not once during the entire four years. She was a cheerleader, played Lacrosse, and hung out with the college bound set. I associated with the chess club and the science nerds. She went to dances, I talked about comic books and chemistry. She spent a year studying in Europe and came back looking like some beautiful alien; I spent my junior year working at Franks BBQ in the evenings and always smelled like grease.

She applied to and was accepted at Barnard. She left the block and never looked back. Last I heard about her, she went to work on a law degree, her mom talking about Sam maybe getting into Yale.

Me, I got into city college, did good, and got a partial scholarship to Cal-Poly in Biology. I got my undergrad degree from there, after nearly six years and two extensions because I was working. I have a flair for plant sciences, so I got another partial scholarship, this time to Carnegie Mellon. I landed a part-time teaching position, and I got my MS in Cellular Biology. I stayed in their program and got my PhD a couple of years later. Later, I added a second PhD in Organic Chemistry. I had planned on getting a slot on campus, and I could see my life as a professor stretch out in front of me.

However, that was not to be. I didn't get the slot on campus, and ended up taking a summer research position with Fielding Bioscience as a field researcher. I had hoped that it would be good experience and I could go back to CMU later.

Fielding Bioscience was doing basic plant research for possible medical applications. The plants happened to be in the Amazon. I ended up on my hands and knees, sampling ferns in the Amazon rain forest in mid-summer.

My supervisor was a guy named Calcott, Dave Calcott. Dave was a big guy. He sweated like an upset pig in the heat. We had a team of ten porters, bearers, laborers from Peru, and four researchers. Oh, and Dave, who mostly cursed and sweated. That whole summer we worked deeper and deeper into the jungle, making contact with local people, paying them in goods and local currency, asking questions about plants. It was a blast.

I was having so much fun, its difficult to explain. Here I was, in the miserable heat, in the jungle, on my hands and knees, grubbing around, trying to explain myself to curious tribesmen, and I was thrilled. I'd go do it again in a heartbeat.

Anyway, some time around early September, we were starting to wind the field work down for the summer. I was planning on making sure Dave liked me enough to hire me to do some lab work on the samples, and then get back to campus by January with some decent cash in my pocket.

Late one afternoon, as we were setting up camp, a group of natives walked into the clearing. This is actually not that unusual. The locals love to trade, and they're generally pretty welcoming, chatty, friendly, happy. I'd made a specialty out of learning some of the local tongue.

These folks were a new group to us. They called themselves the Yasohurta, which as far as I could tell, meant something like 'Beautiful Ones'. It's hard to tell.

We had a nice evening together, up until Dave the fat pig, makes a pass at one of the female Yasohurta. She's probably all of fourteen, just post-pubescent. This is the jungle, and he might have gotten away with it, but he was a little drunk. He leaned over to her, laughed and groped at the girl.

"Here, pussy, pussy, pussy ... here little piece of ass." He chanted, being the drunk bastard that he was. He grinned at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the tribal Shaman grimace. One of the tribesmen spoke in fairly clear Spanish. Translated, it was simple. "Fuck these bastards."

The next thing I knew, there was a six inch long reed dart sticking out of my cheek. My face went instantly numb and I lurched to my feet. Dave was beginning to look like a he'd tried to hump a porcupine, and our laborers were running and screaming into the jungle.

Dave and I passed out, laying next to each other. I didn't know where the rest of the team ended up.

What I remember at this point is fragmentary, but clear enough. One of the native elders arrived some time later. They spent a lot of time talking to each other, probably trying to decide what to do with us. Killing Americans is a bad business, and they knew it. But they were pissed.

I got dragged over and propped up against a tree. So did the other members of the team and some of the laborers. They dragged Dave out to the center of the clearing and stripped him down. They painted his genitals with some kind of red ochre and performed some ceremony. There was a lot of knife waving. Even paralyzed, Dave looked terrified.

Then they fed each of us some really nasty herbal concoction. They slopped it into our mouths. Some splashed on my clothes. A few minutes later, I felt like I was living at the bottom of a well, looking up at life.

Someone came over and talked to us. Gave us orders. In broken Spanglish. Basically, they said. "Go away, never come back."

The next bit is important.

The one who spoke some English turned in Dave's direction, away from me and said. "Forget about us, forget about this, never come back."

Here's the thing. Dave and the rest of the crew completely forgot about the entire incident. Me, I know that I'll never, ever go back to that part of the Amazon again. Not that I don't want to, I just won't. I'd probably jump out of a plane to avoid it.

Six days later we were in Lima. We wrapped the project in record time and flew home. I got the gig with Fielding Bioscience that fall and made decent money.

In mid-October, our field gear arrived from the shipping company. In the third crate I opened was my personal field pack. In that field pack was the shirt I was wearing that night in the clearing. In the right hand pocket of that shirt was a plastic specimen envelope. The envelope was still partially open.

Dried in the bottom of that envelope was some kind of liquid residue. I knew instantly where it had come from. I saved it, very, very carefully.

Also in the field materials were some broken and shattered quills that had been used on us.

To this day I do not know exactly why I can remember and the others cannot. Maybe it was where I was sitting, maybe it was that no one looked at me when the command was placed. I don't know.

I'm not a stupid man though. What was on those quills, those darts, was a hyper fast acting, painless paralytic. What was on those quills was a fortune. What was in the plastic specimen bag was a very large secret.

Seven years later, Fielding Biosciences got FDA approval to test market a new surgical anesthetic called Embrogla. It was extremely fast acting, it paralyzed major muscle groups, had a low allergen incidence, and it revolutionized open heart surgery. I made a not-so-small fortune from it. We turned Embrogla into an entire field of paralytics. It could replace Botox, many local anesthetics, and perhaps even some general anesthetics.

One Sunday morning I was sitting at breakfast in my split-level Cape Cod outside Boston. I'd just broken up with a woman named Helen, and was happy to see that the last of her stuff was finally gone. I opened the Sunday edition of the Wall Street Journal and read that an acquisitions outfit named 'The Stoddard Group' had decided to make a merger play for Fielding.

I didn't really care. Who owns a publicly held company at any given time is not my concern. I work in the labs, I make things. I get paid well in cash and stock, and as long as I have a job, I'm in great shape.

The next morning, when I went into work, there was a voice mail waiting for me. It asked me to drop by the executive offices first thing. I grabbed a cup of coffee and walked over. The CEO's executive assistant ushers me into the boardroom, and our boss, Alan Godson the CEO, waves at me.