Ronald looked at his hand in shock, wondering what he’d just rubbed on his skin, but before he could ask any more questions the elevator dinged again and the doors slid open. Decker heaved himself up from the railing and walked into the hall, Ronald close behind, and after a few short turns they entered a massive corner office, bigger than Ronald’s entire apartment and furnished like a mansion. This, more than anything else, is what finally started to make Ronald scared. He didn’t mind reporting on product tests: rival companies were always going to spy on each other, and Ronald figured somebody was going to get paid to do it so why not him? He honestly kind of liked the excitement. But he’d always dealt with intermediaries—burner phones and anonymous envelopes of cash—but this office was a whole new level of intrigue. This was a place for high rollers; this was a place for people who were ambitious and proud and ruthless. This had to be the CEO.
Ronald started to realize that this was a much bigger deal than he’d expected.
“Have a seat,” said Decker, plopping down on a couch by the wall, and gesturing for Ronald to join him. A few moments later another man walked in, tall and stern and flanked by two dark-suited giants whose skills, Ronald guessed, had little to do with cosmetics. They arrayed themselves in front of Ronald and stared at him a moment.
“Ira,” said Decker, “this is Ronald, one of our informants in the product testing program.” Ronald stood up to shake his hand, but the beefy man on Ira’s right pushed him back down. Ronald swallowed and tried to smile.
“How do you do, sir?”
“Welcome to Ibis Cosmetics,” said the man. “My name is Ira Brady, and I’m the CEO. You’re our man at NewYew?”
“Yes, sir,” said Ronald. “At least for today, sir. They were testing a new kind of hand lotion with some kind of antiaging—”
“I know what they were testing,” said Ira. “What we don’t know is the interior layout of the building. You’ve been in a part of NewYew none of us has visited.” He started pacing as he talked, gesturing broadly with his hands. “What floor did they take you to? How many doors did you pass through to get to the room where the test was held? How many turns did you take, and in what directions? And perhaps most importantly…” He turned back toward Ronald. “Did you happen to see any laboratories while you were there? And could you tell us accurately how to find them?”
“You’re going to steal the lotion,” said Ronald.
“Of course I’m not going to steal it,” said Ira, “that’s illegal. But a technology like that is bound to be stolen eventually, and I suspect that it may, through circumstances beyond our control, end up in my hands. Now: describe the building.”
4
Monday, April 2
8:15 A.M.
NewYew headquarters, Manhattan
256 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“An herbal supplement,” said Sunny, grinning. He threw a tennis ball at the floor, bounced it off the wall, and caught it again. “We can get away with anything in an herbal supplement. The FDA could care less about them.”
“Couldn’t care less,” said Lyle. “The FDA couldn’t care less, not could, that doesn’t make any sense.” Sunny was one of the few people at NewYew whom Lyle considered a friend, though even so, most of their interaction was business related. Now that he thought about it, Lyle didn’t interact much with anybody else at all.
“Could, couldn’t, the point is that they don’t care.” Sunny bounced and caught the ball again. “Listen to this: the FDA regulates the kinds of drugs and formulas and whatever that we’re allowed to sell, because they want to make sure those formulas are safe, right? You come up with something new, and they spend years and years testing it to make sure it doesn’t do anything it’s not supposed to do. But! Herbal supplements are different. The FDA keeps an approved list of ‘natural’ ingredients that they’ve already vetted, and as long as you stick to those you’re fine; they know those ingredients don’t do anything wrong because they don’t do anything at all, by definition. It’s just ground-up flowers and crap. The approval process for herbal supplements is zero days, because they literally don’t bother to look at them. If they’re labeled right, we don’t even have to submit them.”
“It’s a little more than ground-up flowers,” said Lyle.
“Totally,” said Sunny, throwing his tennis ball again, “but as long as nobody knows that, we can do whatever we want.”
Lyle tried to catch the ball as it bounced back to Sunny, hitting it at the wrong angle with his fingers and knocking it away. He swallowed, feeling stupid, while Sunny laughed and picked it up. “Listen,” said Sunny. “We label this new lotion of yours as an herbal product, we release it, we market it as this wonderful antiwrinkle lotion, but we never make any claims of structure or function—we never tell anyone, officially, what it does or how it does it.”
“But…” Lyle grimaced, queasy at the thought of giving up so much credit for his design. “I’ve been working on this for a year—for more than a year, if you count some of the early research. This is one of the most groundbreaking innovations in the entire health and beauty industry.” Lyle paused, trying not to say his next thought out loud, but somehow said it anyway. “I was going to get on the cover of Scientific American.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Sunny shook his head, waving his hands in a smoothing gesture. “We can still make that happen, we just have to wait a while. Take this same formula, tweak it a little in case anyone takes a good look at it, and submit it for FDA approval. It takes a few years, but if it’s as safe as you say it is they’ll eventually stamp it through and we can launch the technology officially. NewYew stays on the forefront of cosmetic innovation, you get the nerd accolades you crave, and meanwhile we’re earning money hand over fist with the exact same product under a different label.”
Lyle shook his head. “That’s sounds amazingly dishonest.”
“You’re adorable.”
“It’s not just a moral issue,” said Lyle, though the amorality did tickle at the base of his spine; Sunny was a shark, certainly, but this seemed uncharacteristically vicious. Even so, Lyle had learned over the years that appealing to the other executives’ morality was rarely a useful tactic—he had to hit them somewhere else. “Think about the marketing. You’re saying we’re going to make money hand over fist with a product we’re not even allowed to advertise effectively. ‘This product is awesome, but we can’t tell you why.’ I don’t think ‘Seriously, just trust us’ is a very good retail slogan.”
Sunny shrugged. “Word of mouth.”
“Word of mouth,” said Lyle with a snort.
“Yes,” said Sunny, “word of mouth, but we’re not going to just sit back and hope the right mouths start saying the right words. We’re going to manipulate the word of mouth—we’re going to create it.” He threw the ball again, missed the catch, and lost it under his desk. He dismissed it with a wave and looked back at Lyle. “Carl wanted a solution, so here’s the solution: a secondary marketing campaign. The company never talks about the plasmids or the collagen or the gene therapy aspects in the least bit—I know that delays your tell-all in Scientific American, but bear with me here. We don’t say a word. But we feed the right info to some science Tweeters and some ‘independent’ bloggers, and they start making some noise and talking about this revolutionary new science behind the product. Some hotshot reverse engineers it, and writes a big article about the unique combination of biological agents blah blah plasmids blah blah all-natural biomimetics. Our primary marketing stays as clean as a whistle, while our secondary marketing has all the good stuff, by pure word of mouth, in such a way that NewYew itself stays completely unaffiliated.”
Lyle raised his eyebrow. “So the scientific breakthrough I spent a year on is an accident from combining the wrong ingredients. Instead of a genius, I’m a buffoon.”
“It’s not an accident, it’s a … positive side effect.” Sunny put on his best placating face, which only made Lyle feel more patronized. “We’ll say it’s all part of the something something flower we use in some of our herbal stuff, what is it…” He flipped through the file on his desk. “Meadowfoam. That’s on the FDA-approved list of herbal ingredients. Everybody uses it.”
“These plasmids don’t come from meadowfoam,” said Lyle, “they come from Rock Canyon Labs. We have official invoices for the sale.”
“No,” said Sunny firmly, “I think you’re remembering wrong—we’re using those plasmids to develop a new gene therapy product to help burn victims. It’s still in testing, and we’re submitting it to the FDA for approval.”
“But—”
“Lyle.” Sunny looked at him, unwavering. “Let me be very clear about this: anything you say in public or in e-mail will agree with this story. It has to.”
“You’re asking me to lie.”
“Technically I’m telling you to lie. As far as this company is concerned, your new lotion is an herbal supplement with no genetic technology whatsoever.”
“Sunny,” said Kerry White, walking into the office, “I’ve got new bottle copy for you to review.” He handed Sunny a sheet of paper and leaned against the wall. “Hey, Lyle.”
Lyle pointed at Sunny, eager to have a new ally in the war against Sunny’s plan. “Have you heard about this?”
