“I’m just telling you what I know. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s all just a bunch of rumors, but yeah. I’d be very careful.”
I chewed on my cheek and wanted to grill her more—where’d she hear this and from whom? But my phone began to buzz. It was Palmira, and she swore only to call when necessary.
“Sorry, I should take this.”
“Right, sure. If it’s that Nervosa guy, tell him you don’t need to sleep with him for industry connections.”
“I’m sure he’ll be very disappointed.”
She grinned as I stepped into the hallway. “Palm? What’s going on?”
Palmira’s voice was deadly calm and that made the hairs on my neck stand straight up. “I saw two men lurking around your dorm five minutes ago.”
“Two men? Where?”
“Near the south side of the building. I tailed them, but I think they spotted me. They left campus.”
“What were they doing?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Watching students. Lurking. If I thought this was no big deal, I wouldn’t bother you.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“Whatever you’re doing with Nervosa, be careful. I don’t like where this is headed.”
I hung up and leaned my head against the wall. Music filtered out from a nearby room but I was otherwise alone in the dorm hallway. I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths.
This was exactly what I wanted to avoid. Oligarch drama was dangerous and deadly, and I’d hoped I could keep my head down.
Nervosa had made sure that wasn’t going to happen by dragging me into their world from the very start.
I couldn’t ever be free of them. Coming to Stanford was about trying to be normal, or at least as normal as I could get. I thought maybe I could find myself here, or some semblance of the person I wanted to be. Instead, I found the Oligarchs, like always.
There was more. Always more. My mother’s past, the fortune she lost, and my uncle’s involvement in my grandfather’s death—it all swirled around in the mists. I told myself I wanted to escape that world, and yet I plunged back into it with both feet, nose pinched, ready to drown.
I slipped back into the room. I tossed my phone onto my bed, ready to grill Sarah about Nervosa—
But she was fast asleep, snoring softly, and drooling on her pillow.
I smiled to myself and decided to let her rest.
Chapter 6
Nervosa
“I’m glad you changed your mind, brother.” Silvano’s smile was as big as his ego. It stretched his lips like a grotesque skin mask. I shrugged and made a dismissive gesture.
“I haven’t decided anything. I’m only here for the tour.”
“Right this way then.” He led me down a long hallway, deeper into the facility tucked into the mountains of northern California. It was well hidden and rural, in a town I’d never heard of before, and it’d taken me a few hours to find it. But as soon as I pulled up front, I felt a sinking, disgusted feeling in my chest.
The place was state of the art, and it was big. Steam and smoke belched from the stacks. Cars clogged the lot and people streamed in and out, a humming, buzzing hive of activity. The plant was active, and it was busy cooking.
“Foreman says you have to wear this,” Silvano said, shoving a white hardhat in my hands. He shoved his own over his coiffed hair. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t talk to the workers.”
“Can’t ask them questions? You think I’m going to unionize them?”
He barked a laughed and scanned a keycard. A massive iron door slid open, and we stepped onto the factory floor.
Machinery clogged the space. It was a maze of pipes, conveyor belts, moving parts, robots and people. The humans were dressed in clean-room clothes, the big baby blue suits and booties and hairnets from crime scene dramas. They hurried around with trays and buckets, filling and refilling, removing pallets and replacing spent cartridges. I couldn’t follow everything, but the actions looked choreographed and practiced.
It looked like they’d been doing this for a while.
“Here’s where the stuff’s mixed up,” Silvano said, waving a hand as we wandered along a catwalk twenty feet above the action below, like kings looking down on their subjects. The metaphor wasn’t too far from the truth. “I don’t know what the hell goes in there, but my chemists swear it’s good.”
“How much are you producing per day?”
“Tons,” he said, grinning. “I can get you exact figures.”
“Send it to my office.”
“I will.” He made a note in his phone. “Check this out.” He took me to the far end of the machinery and pointed at a group of people boxing and sorting piles and piles of little white pills. “There it is, the end product. Best long-acting opioid on the market. Well, on the market soon, once we get approval.”
“How much did you bribe the FDA for this one?”