Receptor Read online

  But none of it shows up in the records.

  Nevertheless, I persist. I know from experience that unexpected patterns usually emerge after I’ve pushed my way through a certain tedium threshold.

  And, sure enough, one does.

  Scanning the material I’ve accumulated on Proctor, I keep coming across references to Eiben-Chemcorp. They were there at the beginning—as Eiben Laboratories—when that CIA-led “medical intelligence unit” was being set up. They were there in the 1960s collaborating on various research projects with the RAND Corporation. In the early seventies, when Proctor was defense secretary, they signed a major biotech deal with the Pentagon. Later, in the eighties—how did I not know this?—Proctor served as CEO of Eiben for five years. And, in retirement, he sat on the board as a member emeritus. But really, the details here, the sliding contours, are unimportant—the point is that the man’s very close association with Eiben-Chemcorp, the third largest producer and distributor of pharmaceuticals in the world, spans more than half a century.

  But in all of that time … no gossip, no stories, no anomalies, no weird shit.

  I order up pizza around four-thirty, call it a late lunch. For dinner, some time after midnight, I cook pasta—olive oil, garlic, and jalapeños—and open a bottle of wine. I pour a glass, but end up not drinking it. When I hit a certain level of focus, food is fuel, but anything else is trouble in the making. Music is somewhere in the middle. I can’t have lyrics, or showing off, but if it’s down tempo, minimalist, repetitive, I’m fine with it. There’s the usual noise from outside, too, traffic and sirens and stray voices. But along with the shifting gradations of light, it’s all just texture, familiar and reassuring—perfect for work.

  And, at around 2:00 a.m., there it is—the anomaly, the weird shit.

  I’m looking at clips of Proctor’s appearances on Meet the Press from a couple of years ago, and one of these—what turned out to be his last appearance on television—strikes me as pretty odd. In the lead-up to the 2012 election, David Gregory is conducting a roundtable discussion with Proctor, David Axelrod, and Marco Rubio, when Proctor appears to lose track of what he’s saying and goes off on a tangent that no one can follow and that Gregory eventually has to interrupt. For the remainder of the segment, Proctor sits in silence, looking a little confused, with Gregory skillfully directing the rest of his questions to Axelrod and Rubio. Proctor looks really old—older, in fact, to my eyes, than he looked this morning in Peter Detmold Park.

  But how is that possible?

  I watch the clip again. It was recorded more than two years ago.

  Curious, I start checking and it seems there was even something of a minor controversy around the incident. Or at any rate, there was a general consensus that the poor old bastard was probably suffering from some early form of dementia.

  He was nearly ninety, after all.

  But I push further into the deep Web and worm my way through a dense nexus of electronic health-care records and soon find what appears to be a preliminary diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, linked to the name of Clay Proctor.

  At this point, I just sit there, bewildered, staring at the screen. As I understand it, Proctor’s next public appearance—actually the next reference to him that I can find anywhere—is eighteen months later, at a fund-raiser for the governor of Connecticut.

  But eighteen months? With Alzheimer’s the decline in cognitive function is progressive and irreversible. There’s no cure for it, no effective treatment. You don’t go into remission.

  I stay at my desk, slumped in the chair, for another half an hour—thinking, or trying to, sliding into what feels like a cognitive decline of my own.

  Then I sit up straight again and take a few sips of water from the bottle next to my laptop. I can’t put this off any longer.

  I look up MDT-48.

  * * *

  A few minutes after 9:00 a.m., my phone buzzes and jolts me awake. I’m still at my desk. I answer the call with a grunt.

  “Ray, hi. Are you coming in today?”

  “Uh … Rosie.” I look around, trying to rewind the last few hours in my head, unsure of when to press play. There’s a mug of cold coffee and a banana peel on my desk, as well as a few printed-out pages, some marked up in red pen, others stained with coffee rings. My laptop is open, but the screen is dead. It needs to be charged.

  “Ray? Are you okay?”

  “I’m … fine.” Then I remember what I was doing. “But not that fine. Look, I’m probably not going to make it in today.” I make a run at some damage control, but Rosie doesn’t seem too convinced. It’s not that she can’t handle the extra work—Rosie could handle anything—it’s that she’s not used to me going AWOL like this. I never call in sick, and she knows I’m not sick now, so what the fuck is up with me? Not that she asks directly—or at all, really, because what would be the point?

  “I’m here if you need anything, Ray.”

  “Thanks, Rosie. And I might.”

  I put my phone down. Really? I might? Like what? I don’t have a clue what I’m doing at the moment and even less about what I’m supposed to do next. This is unlike anything I’ve ever had to deal with.

  None of it makes sense.

  Clay Proctor’s being spry and alert two years after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s doesn’t make sense. Nor do any of the references to MDT-48, a drug or pharmaceutical product that in all probability doesn’t even exist. Most of the relevant “information” I tracked down was on extreme, conspiracy-theory websites, and very little of it was credible. I started with reputable scientific and medical sites, but drew blank after blank. Then I moved on to the world of underground pharmacology and nootropics. Here, MDT was alluded to in what seemed like hushed tones, as though it were a sort of lost elixir, a mythical compound of the gods. There were plenty of substitutes on offer, so-called brain supplements with science-y sounding names such as Cerebral Max and MetaCog 50. Most of these claimed to be the “real” version of a fictional smart drug that had been featured in a recent movie. Finally, I hit sites like reddit and 4chan. MDT narratives occasionally popped up, but hard facts about it were thin on the ground, and there was little or no agreement about its origins.

  Although everyone identified MDT as a smart drug, and an extraordinarily powerful one, no one seemed to have any direct experience of it. It’s also doesn’t seem possible to buy it anywhere, not even in the shadiest corners of the dark Web. So I can’t shake the suspicion that the whole thing is bogus, that it’s little more than an urban legend.

  But I can’t really dismiss it, either. Not yet. Because if you ask me what my job is, I won’t say I run a business, or conduct opposition research, I’ll tell you I’m a fact-checker. And so far, most of the “facts” here remain unchecked. Up until last night they weren’t really even facts, they were assumptions, and there were enough of them to draw down the deadly swish of Occam’s razor—the notion that the least complicated version of events is probably the right one, i.e., in this case, the conclusion that Clay Proctor is simply out of his mind.

  But I know a little more now than I did last night, and some facts I’ve checked have only led to further assumptions—so many that I wonder what the opposite of Occam’s razor might be, and if it would accommodate a maximal version of events, like the one I’m currently being forced to consider: that MDT-48 is real, that it is produced by Eiben-Chemcorp, and that Clay Proctor is taking it.

  * * *

  The next time I talk to Proctor, I’ll clearly have to be better prepared, and with this in mind I contact a source I sometimes use when I hit a wall.

  I have little or no patience with people who trade in extreme conspiracy theories, but occasionally they have their uses—and they’re not all the same. Some are essentially entertainers, carnival barkers, while others are true believers. The first group cynically foment discord and paranoia, whereas the second group draw you in with apparent logic and then proceed to suffocate you with their conviction. Kasper Higgs belongs i
n the second group. His breadth of knowledge is impressive, but this is offset by an utter lack of discrimination. Moon landings? Check. Crop circles? Check. Chemtrails? Check. The Federal Reserve? Check. Big Pharma? Check. Vince Foster, Princess Diana, Andrew Breitbart? Check, check, check. The fatal tendency here is that if you believe one of these theories, you’ll end up believing all of them.

  Kasper is a structural engineer who works for a construction company in Brooklyn. The batshit-crazy stuff—long Twitter threads, contentious blog posts, guesting on fringe podcasts—he does on the side. I met him a few years ago at a political event in Washington, liked him, and have used him as an occasional backup source ever since. Kasper looks and sounds like a corporate executive, and you can have several perfectly rational conversations with him before it becomes apparent that he’s a certifiable nutjob. So I’m wary of dealing with him. But Kasper sees more dots out there than almost anyone else, and he does a good job of connecting them, too. Admittedly, most of his conclusions are easy to dismiss, but now and again he’ll stumble onto something significant.

  I send him a text using an encrypted messaging app—Kasper won’t talk on the phone—and we arrange to meet at a bar in Carroll Gardens at seven. I then go to bed for a few hours to catch up on the sleep I lost last night.

  * * *

  Duma is a retro dive bar on Smith Street that serves a bewildering array of vodkas, as well as a selection of dumplings, blinis, and dried fish. Kasper is in a booth at the back. He’s fortyish and wiry, with dark eyes and thinning brown hair. He’s wearing a gray suit. There’s a cocktail and a small plate of pickled green tomatoes waiting for me as I sit down.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he says, a slight Southern twang to his accent. “I went ahead and ordered.”

  “Not at all.”

  The accent thing has always puzzled me, because I know that Kasper is originally from North Dakota. The ordering thing, I reckon—because who does that—is some form of behavioral compulsion, a need to control his environment.

  “The vodka?” Kasper indicates my drink. “It’s Beluga.”

  “Oh.”

  “With horseradish, pepper, and honey.”

  I take a sip. “Nice.”

  It isn’t.

  “Siberian.” Kasper raises his own glass. “It’s the best.”

  “I’m sure. So. Look. Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Uh…” I’m not being cagey. I’m apprehensive. Any time I’ve used Kasper as a source it’s been for something grounded in traceable fact—a pattern of transactions I know no one else had seen, say, or some undisclosed intel connection that needed an unofficial confirmation. This is different. This doesn’t have that kind of a safety net. “I wanted to run something by you.”

  Kasper nods.

  “How much do you know about the company Eiben-Chemcorp?”

  “Some, I guess. It depends.” He makes a face.

  “What?”

  “I’m just surprised is all. Big Pharma isn’t exactly your beat, is it?”

  “No, I suppose not.” I’ve had dealings with pharmaceutical companies in the past, but mostly over personnel issues. “I have this client now, though … and…”

  I want to groan. This is harder than I thought it would be.

  Kasper takes a sip from his drink. “Well, would you care to elaborate?”

  There’s no point in putting it off any longer. “Have you ever heard of a drug called MDT-48?”

  “Whoa.”

  I lean forward. “You have?”

  “Sure.”

  “And?”

  Kasper laughs. “Jesus. Who’s your client?”

  This is a fairly obvious question that I should have anticipated. I need to be careful here. “Oh, it’s nobody. I mean … it’s just a guy. He worked at Eiben years ago, twenty years ago. I was doing a routine background check and came across a reference to MDT. It was in a letter. I asked him what it was and he couldn’t tell me. He was actually kind of weird about it. So I got curious and looked it up. Then I got more curious.”

  Is that going to be enough? I’m not sure, but I catch a flicker of disappointment in Kasper’s expression. It was probably the twenty-years-ago part that did the trick.

  “As far as I know,” Kasper says, “it dates back to the seventies. It’s what we’d now call a smart drug or a cognitive enhancer, but believe me, whatever DARPA was calling it back then, there’s no smart drug or cognitive enhancer on the market today that comes even close to what MDT reputedly does. And there’s a reason for that. They don’t want you or me or John Q. Citizen getting within a mile of the stuff. Why? Because it’s too dangerous. And I mean dangerous as in a threat to them, to the establishment.”

  “How so?”

  This elicits the inevitable, pitying tsk. Am I really that naive?

  “I could give you a list of at least five Nobel Prize winners in the last thirty years where if you go back and look at their résumés, if you dig deep, in each case you’ll be able to chart a point where, I don’t know … something happened, where suddenly all their careers started to skyrocket, and consistently. I mean, I’m not saying these people were dumb beforehand, but they were nothing special, they were average. Then boom. There’s a bunch of examples out in Silicon Valley, too. And that’s not to mention some of the big hedge funds, the ones you don’t hear much about that have annual returns north of sixty and seventy percent. Who runs those? I’m telling you, this stuff is out there. But it’s very tightly controlled.”

  So give me the list, I think. Though I know that would be pointless—intriguing maybe, an invitation down a rabbit hole for sure, but far from proof of anything. Which is how this usually goes.

  “What about Eiben?” I ask.

  Kasper swirls the vodka in his glass, then takes a sip. “There are different theories about when and where MDT was first discovered, the depths of the Amazon jungle or a pristine lab in Switzerland, who knows where, but once DARPA got their hands on it, one of the pharmaceutical giants was never going to be far behind, because they have the resources and the time and the money to put into something like that.”

  “But the seventies, that was forty years ago, surely they would have developed it by now, got something out on the market, no? If it’s such a powerful smart drug, wouldn’t it be the biggest money-maker of all time?”

  Tsk, tsk.

  “You might assume so, Ray, but think about it: Why would they want people to be smart? That goes against every instinct and principle of the free-market capitalist system.”

  “O-kay…” I feel this could do with a little unpacking, but maybe not right now. “What was in it for Eiben, then?”

  “They broke open the compound. They repatterned it, adapted it. I mean, some of their blockbuster drugs from that period, like Phenalex, and Triburbazine, and Narolet … these were game changers.”

  I look across the table. Broke open the compound? Is that even a thing? I’m no chemist, but this sounds like some high-grade bullshit to me.

  “It’s all documented,” Kasper goes on. “Phenalex alone helped pull Eiben out of what was pretty much a slump in the seventies, then Triburbazine and Narolet came along and pushed it into the number three position worldwide.”

  “Yes, but they’re not … these are not…” I stop myself. What was I going to say? They’re not cognitive enhancers? They’re … antipsychotics, or benzodiazepines maybe? Do I really want to start using words I don’t fully understand? This is an area that it’s clear neither of us is qualified to talk about, so why waste time on it? “Okay, look,” I say, “just on MDT itself, they’ve what, kept it under wraps all this time? Is that what you’re saying? I don’t—”

  “There have been leaks. Now and again stuff has gotten out. There was a guy in the late nineties, I can’t remember his name, Eddie something, who ended up with a sizable batch. Spinola. Eddie Spinola. He lit a pretty big fire there for a couple of months, got into trading on the sto
ck market and managed to do what these AI algorithms are doing for the big quant funds today. On his own. It was incredible. He made a killing, but then he disappeared. No one ever heard from him again.”

  Of course.

  I’m getting tired of this. “How do I know that any of what you’re telling me is true?”

  “It’s on record,” Kasper says calmly. “Eiben almost went under at the time. They were being sold by their parent company, the Oberon Capital Group, and then these rumors started going around about protocol breaches at a lab in New Jersey.”

  So? That proves nothing. I don’t know what I expected to hear by coming out this evening, but it certainly wasn’t rumors.

  “Also,” Kasper goes on, “at different times over the last fifteen years there’s been talk of ‘bootleg’ MDT being in circulation, watered-down versions, some kind of MDT Lite.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I say. “MDT Lite? What is that? A joke? A new brand of soda?”

  “No, not exactly,” Kasper says, a little defensively, “and I don’t think it’s called that, but what I’ve heard—and I talk to these guys all the time—is that Eiben has been anxious for a while now to get ahead of the curve, to develop a product before a competitor or some rogue operation with a bootleg stash comes along and beats them to it.”

  I have a hard time not rolling my eyes at this. “There’s nothing out there, Kasper. There isn’t even anything on the dark Web about it. It’d be easier to buy plutonium. Does this shit even exist?”