“I knew it!” I crowed. Harry looked startled, but he approached as I slipped the key into the slot and turned it. I pushed open the door.
And I was shocked to the core, as if I’d stuck my worst expectations into a water-soaked light socket.
“Tandy… what is this?” Harry asked, peering inside.
This was no secret closet. It was a secret room, maybe fifteen feet long and five or six feet wide, with a low, slanted ceiling. It was lined with built-in cabinetry and countertops that were crammed with beakers and scales and computer equipment. I saw what seemed to be a centrifuge in one corner.
It was astounding, beyond the limits of my imagination. This hidden room was a laboratory.
Old Victorian buildings like the Dakota sometimes have eccentric architecture, and odd rooms-behind-rooms are often walled off during renovations. But Malcolm had preserved this, the forgotten space under the stairs.
“Am I hallucinating?” I asked Harry. Given how strange I’d been feeling and acting since my parents’ deaths, I thought there was a fair chance that I was.
“If you’re tripping, then both of us are,” Harry replied. “I believe we’ve found Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.”
There was just too much to absorb in one glance. Harry and I gaped until I finally thought to close the closet door behind us, and then we gaped some more as we ducked into the room and walked the length of it.
I stopped dead in my tracks when I spotted something that clearly wasn’t just about business or science.
It was about us.
There was a chart rail on one wall, lined with graphs labeled with the Angel kids’ names. I think I stopped breathing as I advanced toward the chart bearing my name.
This is what my chart looked like, friend. Along the bottom line, the X-axis, were all the years of my life. Down the left-hand side, the Y-axis, were letters and acronyms that I didn’t recognize—XL, Num, SPD, HiQ, Znth, ProMax, and Lazr. A zigzagging trend line tracked unnamed data points from the bottom left to the top right.
“Harry,” I called out to my twin. He came to my side, and I didn’t even need to look at him to register his disbelief. “Malcolm was tracking something about us here. The lines in this chart show some kind of growth or volatility. And tell me what you think of the letters on the Y-axis. It’s code. And I don’t get it. At all.”
My brother wasn’t listening to me. He had pulled a chair up to a computer and was tapping at the keyboard, saying, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
I went to Harry and looked over his shoulder.
“Put your nerd brain on this, will you, Tandy? It’s the key to the colored lines, and also to those letters. They have to be acronyms for some kind of chemicals.”
He had to be right. It came to me in a flash.
“Those chemicals are drugs, Harry. Our drugs. These letters stand for the names of our pills. The colors match the colors of our pills. And these data points indicate how we responded to those pills. Gotta be our performance. Our aptitude. Whatever Malcolm was trying to track. God—he was studying us like a family of little rats.”
Harry had enlarged his chart on the monitor. “It looks like Malcolm changed my pills all the time,” he said. “See?”
I saw what he meant. Where my chart had staggered lines and a rising trend line, the lines on Harry’s graph crisscrossed, shot up into peaks, plunged into troughs, and then staggered again.
“He was experimenting with my life,” Harry said. “He switched out my pills regularly. I always thought…”
“That they were vitamins,” I finished for him. “Maybe steroids for Matty and Hugo.”
“He was trying out new formulations,” Harry said, pointing out the numbers and combinations of colored lines. “No wonder I’m so emotional. Apparently he just couldn’t figure out how to fix me. How to make me right. Like a real Angel.”
I wanted to soothe Harry and tell him it wasn’t true, but in my gut I knew he was right. “Well, then, Harry, you were a perfect experiment.”
“He loved a challenge, didn’t he?” Harry shook his head. “He was running experiments on us. And with me… Well, he never did end up fixing me. And now he never will.” Harry grunted woefully. “We’re doomed, aren’t we, Tandy?”
57
Harry and I were breathless, panting like marathon runners near the end of the race. We were freaking out—because we were freaks.
We’d always known it, but until now, we hadn’t known why we were so different from everyone else. And now we knew.
Our parents had been dosing us with pharmaceutical drugs, messing with our minds and bodies our whole lives.
Harry stayed at the computer, opening files and reviewing them and sending things to his own e-mail address. And then he stopped on one file.
“Tandy, listen to this. Here’s a memo from dear old Uncle Peter to dear old Dad.”
So Uncle Peter knew about this, too?
“ ‘Regarding escalating drug protocols and increasing the percentage of SPD for Matthew.’ SPD for Matthew. Do you think that stands for speed?”
“XL could be excel,” I said, reading farther down the open page. “It says here that I was taking XL, Znth, Num, ProMax, and Lazr. Maybe Lazr stands for laser.”
“As in laser focus?”
“Could be, right?” I said.
“What did they do to us, Tandy? What did they do? ‘Are we not Men?’ ” Harry was quoting one of his favorite writers, H. G. Wells. In his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, animals were changed into humans in a laboratory called the House of Pain—and if the animals didn’t obey the laws of the lab, they got really Big Chops.
So the Angel kids are bona fide characters in a science-fiction story? Even though I already had my suspicions about the pills, I felt dizzy with the shock of the truth. I grabbed a countertop to steady myself against the rush.
No, we were not men.
We’d been exploited, used without our knowledge or permission. We were lab rats to Malcolm and Peter, scientific works in progress, and there was no excuse in the world for it, even if they thought the drugs were for our own good.
Harry pulled up Matty’s chart and checked the uptick in SPD against the date of Peter’s memo. They matched. The drugs had been increased, and the line on Matty’s chart rose accordingly. The chart was still open on the computer screen when the door to the lab suddenly opened.
Harry and I both jumped guiltily—we were in Malcolm’s private room, and we still had the instinctive fear of a Big Chop.
Hugo stood in the doorway, and he didn’t seem very surprised at what he saw. “So,” said my little brother, “you guys finally found out Malcolm’s secret. It’s about time.”
58
We didn’t have time to question Hugo about his knowledge of the room until we were in the car. Harry and I agreed that we had to get to Matty right away, so Virgil was driving us to the Meadowlands, the Giants’ practice field, an enormous indoor enclosure next to the new stadium. Never mind that it was a Wednesday and that before all this happened, Virgil would have been driving us to school instead. I rubbed my temples with both hands. I couldn’t even think about going back to school.
“Hugo, how did you know about Malcolm’s secret lab? And why didn’t you tell any of us about it? How many times have you been down there?” I was firing off questions as quickly as I thought of them.
“I’d seen Malcolm go in the closet lots of times. One time he forgot to lock the door behind him and I followed. It wasn’t hard.”
“But why didn’t you say anything?” Harry asked.
Hugo just shrugged. “I never went into the lab. I just knew about it. Who cares about a stupid lab? Dad was a scientist, after all.”
This sounded suspicious to me, but I wasn’t sure how to reframe the question so I could pry some answers out of Hugo. We sat in silence as I thought, Harry brooded, and Hugo amused himself by hanging his head out the window.
When we finally arrived at the field, we quick
ly headed for where the “Ginats” were working out in full pads—running plays, butting heads. I saw Matthew catch a long pass, after which his coach motioned to him to wrap it up and head to the locker room.
He was trotting off the field as Harry, Hugo, and I ran toward him.
Matthew pulled up short and squinted at us. He had his fighting face on. “What are you guys doing here?”
“We need your help, Matty,” I told him firmly.
“Really? You need help from a killer?”
“Can you blame me for trying to find out who killed them?”
“What was it that Malcolm used to say? That you’re as sensitive as a truck?”
“Sure. I get high praise for my insensitivity.”
“Well, that’s certainly true.” He smiled. And when Matthew Angel smiled, he outshined any movie star you can name. “Look, Tandy. I adore you. You’re my sister. But the further I get from the Angel family tree, the fewer nuts will fall on my head.”
He turned toward the locker room again, and the three of us went after him like a pack of mutts running after a car.
“Matty, we need your help because… well, it’s just like you said in the beginning: One for all and all for one is the best way to proceed now,” I said. “The only way. So hear me out.”
“Keep me out of it. I have enough problems of my own.” He waved us away like we were gnats.
“Hey.”
Matthew stopped walking and turned to face me. “You’re not going to change my mind.”
I put my mad face on.
“If you don’t help us, we’re going to have to go public with what we know. I mean it, Matthew.”
“Get serious. I’m not afraid of you, Tandy.”
“We know about the pills. We found the charts. We’ll find the formulas, too—I’m sure of it. But even now I can say with confidence that those pills have been behind your success, Matty. Your speed and agility. It’s called performance enhancement.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s only because drug screens don’t catch Malcolm’s formulas that you haven’t been caught, but now we know. And if we talk, your career is over.”
Matthew said, “You’d go that far? You’d actually blackmail me? If you go public, all of us will be exposed. You, Hugo, and you, too, Harry. I guess you won’t be playing Lincoln Center again.”
Harry had been teetering on the brink of a meltdown for days, and at Matthew’s words, he finally lost it. He opened his mouth and let out a high C note. And held it. And held it some more.
If a shooting star could make music, it would sound like Harry’s high note. The other football players stopped short. Everyone on the field froze and pinned their eyes on my twin.
When Harry finally ran out of air, I said to Matthew, “With your help or without it, we’re going to clean up this mess. We’re going to do it right now. Are you with us or against us, big brother?”
59
Angel Pharmaceuticals occupies a daunting, slate-gray, nine-story building on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, in the heart of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen district.
As we got out of the car, Matthew said to me, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“You have to ask? This is going to be the grand finale, Matty. You can thank me later.”
We climbed two flights of metal steps to a landing. I pressed the buzzer on the wall and looked up at the camera mounted above the door. A moment later the door opened, and we entered the building onto a factory floor.
The action on the floor was mesmerizing. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high. On one side of the vast warehouse, ice cream–colored pills poured down chutes and were funneled into bottles that moved along a conveyer belt like little soldiers. The bottles were then stacked into cartons by faceless people in powder-blue masks, caps, and paper gowns.
This mechanized operation, those rivers of pills—just like the ones I’d been taking since I was old enough to hold a sippy cup—gave me the creeps.
“It smells like pills in here,” Hugo said. “Gross.”
On the other side of the floor, backup alarms sounded as forklift operators drove back and forth with pallets stacked with cartons, wheeling, reversing, and placing the cartons high up on shelves.
The cartons were labeled in Chinese.
And it might not surprise you at this point to learn that I can actually read Chinese.
The shipping address was Beijing, China. And the cartons were labeled with product names: “Strong As Ox Pills”; “Very Smart Children Pills”; and one I had to think about for a moment… and then I had it: “No Worries Pills.”
Even if I hadn’t been able to read the labels, I could have guessed at the contents of the cartons; I could smell ylang-ylang and viburnum in the air—and a particular fragrance that I thought of as “yellow.”
If I was right, the drugs that had been tested on us—XL, Lazr, SPD, and the others—were soon going to be dispensed far and wide. Angel Pharma was shipping our drugs overseas.
Had that always been the Angel brothers’ plan?
Hugo was taking pictures with his cell phone, and he didn’t care who saw him. He had no inhibitions. He was a certifiable genius and as strong as a wrestler. What would he have been like without the pills?
What would any of us be like without the pills?
Could I ever be normal?
And the most difficult question: Did I even want to be?
60
I led the charge with an electric, righteous anger that I could feel all the way to the ends of my hair. We piled into the elevator, looked up at the rising numbers without speaking, and then poured out on the executive floor as soon as the doors opened. Even Matty looked determined as we marched directly into the main conference room without knocking.
Uncle Peter sat in a large chair at the head of a long glass table, and he was bent over his laptop. He looked up when we walked in.
“Take your seats,” he said. “Try not to smudge the table. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait, Tandoori?”
Just looking at my uncle’s smug and unpleasant face made my insides smolder. I thought about the memos he’d exchanged with my father, discussing our pills as if we lived in cages and would die in them, too. I waited until Matthew, Harry, and Hugo were all seated. I remained standing, pacing the conference room as I prepared to speak. I made sure to leave the door wide open so everyone nearby would hear what I was about to say.
“We have evidence that you and Malcolm used us as lab animals, that you pumped us full of performance-enhancing drugs.”
There was a long silence as Uncle Peter took that in. Then he said, “You’re not joking, are you? That’s seriously what you think?”
“And then, so that you could own the patents on these drugs and, of course, take over the whole company, you killed our parents.”
Uncle Peter cringed. It was just a quick flicker across his features, like a flash of heat lightning. Then his face closed like a fist. He shot up from his chair and slammed his hands down on the table.
“I killed Malcolm? You’re accusing me of killing my own brother?”
“We have pictures of the factory,” I said, standing my ground. “We still have pills squirreled away in our apartment for comparison. Our parents’ deaths will make you close to a billionaire, Uncle Peter. That means you’re the only person with both access to our parents and the motive to kill them,” I went on, feeling the whole blazing truth setting me free. “If you admit your role in this scheme, if you confess to the killings, we’ll give you a chance to go to the police on your own. I think Philippe will be able to cut you a deal. Just confess.”
61
Peter rolled up his shirtsleeves and sat down again in his oversized chair. He wheeled it forward and clasped his hands on the table in front of him. He’d gathered himself during my speech, and his smirk was back, as if it had been riveted to his face.
“This ugly speech you’ve just given, T
andoori, is entirely speculation, and based on circumstantial evidence at best.” There was an angry thrum in his voice, like the lethal sound of a downed power line. The man was scary. “You have a theory based on a hypothesis. No witnesses. No physical evidence. And you expect anyone to believe this utterly libelous fabrication?”
“So you’re not denying it?” Matthew asked, clenching his fists.
“I could go into more detail about the memorandums between you and my father,” I said, “but we asked our driver to wait. Our next stop, Uncle Peter, is the Twentieth Precinct.”
“First of all, you little termites,” Peter said, staring at each of us in turn, “the pills aren’t drugs. They’re natural ingredients, supplements that are manufactured for export and sale outside of the USA. They don’t even have to be FDA approved. There’s nothing illegal about them, do you understand?”
“You expect us to believe that those pills we took our entire lives are made of rainbow dust and flower petals? Really?” Harry asked. I was proud of him for joining in the fight.
“I’m speaking, Harrison. My turn. Second, your father loved you. I don’t know why; it makes no sense to me at all. You’re all snots. But then, snottiness runs on your mother’s side of the family. The bottom line is that your father would never hurt any of you. You all did very well on rainbow dust and flower petals. I’d say that you excelled, in fact. You’re welcome, Tandoori. Children.”
He nodded at us, still sneering.
“Third, here are the facts. I founded Angel Pharmaceuticals. Me. I brought your father in as a consulting partner. He owned twenty percent of the firm when he died. That’s twenty percent of the debts, too, and right now, we’re underwater. So I would have been happy for Malcolm to have bought me out, understand? His death only adds to my problems.
“And last, Tandy, you self-important twerp, eighteen people were having dinner with me when your parents were killed. In my apartment. All eighteen of them swore to the police that I was with them until you called me that night.”