She smiled. “I think I can work that out.
Chapter Seven
The club connected with the ball directly in the “sweet spot.” Josh Hohn watched it sail down the fairway, breaking left before landing and following the contour of the long par 5, as if the ball had been guided remotely. Josh smiled, knowing exactly what his boss, Francis Valère, would say.
He heard the older man standing behind him mutter a French curse word under his breath. “Must be that nice piece you are using.”
The TaylorMade SLDR driver was a gift from Valère, and the man tried as hard as possible to make Josh feel bad about it.
“Well, you picked it, old man.” Josh turned and winked at him.
Francis Valère grabbed a driver from his golf bag strapped to the back of their cart and marched up to the tee. Placing his ball carefully upon a bright pink tee, he took a few practice swings before launching the ball down the fairway. He watched it rise and get caught in a draft of wind that pushed it to the right. The ball landed close to a sand trap, bounced a few times, and came to a stop in the taller grass just before the tree line.
Josh laughed, and Valère turned to glare at him. Josh shrugged. “Should have bought one for yourself, I guess.”
“Look who’s still trailing me by three,” the man said. Valère returned to the cart, put his club down into the bag, and slid into the driver’s seat. “Come on, that one’s going to be hard to find.”
Josh was already sitting in the cart and checking his cell phone. “Woah, you’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Looks like a bomb went off at Yellowstone earlier. You’ve got to be kidding me…”
He scrolled through an article on his smartphone, skimming the news article that he’d pulled from his feed reader. “Yeah, it seems like there was minimal damage, minimal casualties…” he paused. “Shit, I don’t mean to be morbid, but if you’re going to bomb a place, wouldn’t you choose one a little more, uh, populated?”
Valère kept driving, keeping the cart on the path that stretched along the right side of Hole 13. “Wow, that’s unbelievable.” He finally slowed the golf cart to a halt and stepped out. “You want to help me find this thing?”
Josh returned the phone to his pocket and exited the vehicle. “I can’t believe it either. What were they hoping to achieve?”
“Terror, maybe. Making a point. Could be anything these days.” He poked around with his foot, trying to find where the white Nike ball had landed. The grass was perfectly trimmed, left a little long to differentiate it from the short-cropped blades nearby. “What do you think everyone else is working on?”
Josh thought for a moment. “Who knows? Maybe they’re actually taking a vacation, like you ordered them to.”
“Right! You know them as well as I do, Hohn — they are probably hard at work curing cancer or creating the next superfood.” He stressed the word “super” with his thick French accent. Josh knew he meant it as a joke, as they’d often made fun of America’s blind obsession with “super” fruits and vegetables. He loved creating hybrid plant fungi in their lab that included an extra dosage of a vitamin or two, then trying to get Valère to market it as the “next big thing.” It was a pretty nerdy game, but both men engaged in the pastime when they weren’t working on other projects.
Josh knew his boss was talking about the two lab assistants who also worked for Frontier Pharmaceuticals Canada. Valère had founded Frontier Pharmaceuticals Canada only a few years ago with a massive personal investment and some venture funding from a couple of his friends. He’d hired Joshua Hohn as his right-hand man and partner, and Josh had, in turn, hired the two part-time university students to help with data and organization. Together, the two men had spent the last three years finalizing a very real “super” drug — an organic shell that could be placed around the cell walls of microscopic organisms that acted as a sort of flexible and semi-permeable “armor.”
It was fascinating to Josh, to conceive of a lab-created chemical bonding molecule that actually fused to a cell’s outer wall and added an extra layer of protection. It would revolutionize the pharmaceutical world, and likely science in general. The world of nanotechnology was almost upon them, and Josh knew his career would be solidified if they were successful.
And they had been. It happened last week, at the end of a long stretch of over twenty hours in “The Dungeon,” the nickname they had given their dark, cluttered workspace. Josh had called Valère frantically, almost tripping over his words as the test results poured in.
The nanocoating they’d applied had finally done what it was supposed to do — it stuck.
“I don’t know, those two seem to be more interested in frat parties and coeds than doing actual science,” Josh said. “They’re probably in South Padre or Miami, drinking piña coladas and talking up some poor girl.”
Valère finally found his ball near a tree stump that was lined up perfectly between himself and the hole. He cursed again, grabbing a pitching wedge from his bag.
“Going up and over?” Josh asked, clearly surprised.
“I do not have it in me to waste three shots and let you catch up.” He took a few practice swings and set into his swing ritual.
The shot was beautiful — a perfect arc that carried the ball cleanly over the stump and straight to the middle of the fairway, mere inches from Josh’s first shot.
“Well, I’m glad I didn’t bet you that you couldn’t do it,” Josh said.
“I am not a betting man,” Valère said.
“No, you’re not, but you should be. With this product of yours, you could have been set.”
Valère turned and looked at Josh. “Rest assured, my friend, my exposure in this company is over and above anything I would wager out here with you. And do not forget, you have quite a stake in this as well.”
Josh nodded. He had signed on for a half-million-dollar salary, in Canadian dollars, and took an options contract as well. Further, he had a small percentage share in the company’s future profits.
Basically, both men were about to be rich beyond their wildest dreams.
“When I get back into the office next week, I have a call with our other two investors and patent lawyer, and from there I will make a decision about timing,” Valère said.
“What do you need me to work on, then?” Josh asked. They’d arrived at the mid-point of the hole and walked to where their balls lay in the grass. “I’m guessing we’ll need to set up some meetings with the bigger representatives and start on the marketing?”
“No, we will wait on the marketing side. First, I need to get the sample to the investors, and they will start production.”
“Production of what?” Josh asked.
“Do you remember the trip to the Northwest Territory that I took a year ago?” Valère asked.
Josh frowned, but nodded. It was an interesting and sudden change of subject.
“I visited the site of a native tribe of people who have long since perished. There, we also found the remains of a camp, and what we assumed was a Russian expedition.”
“We? I thought you went alone?”
“I met with my investors — as you know, we have been business partners for a long time.”
“So this was a business trip?” Josh asked. He was growing more and more confused.
“Of sorts, yes. Anyway, we discovered the cause of death for these poor explorers. It was an ancient plant that releases a small amount of its natural defense mechanism into the surrounding air when disturbed. The powdered form of its dried remains, I believe, was used by this native tribe as some sort of hallucinogenic substance. However, after many years of settling, that same defense mechanism turned into a lethal substance.”