Glow (18 page)

‘How long are you staying in London?’ she says.

Raf begins to relax. The tour has reached its epilogue of rote small talk. Now all he has to do is get to the exit. ‘Just until tomorrow morning.’

‘And then more travel?’

Raf remembers that town she mentioned earlier. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Straight back to Fehedou.’

Belasco frowns. ‘But I understood that Nostrand pulled out of Fehedou right after the truck bomb.’

A puff of liquid nitrogen in Raf’s guts. How bad was that slip? He can’t tell. But now Belasco is looking straight at him, and he knows that just because he’s got this far without fucking up, it won’t necessarily keep her from leaving him with a security guard while she calls Nostrand to check his credentials. He thinks of the order of service sheet in his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We did.’ If he tries to explain away the mistake he’ll just make another one. But Belasco has a fontanelle of her own, and Raf’s best option is to put his thumb on it. ‘By the way, Denise, the core scenario installation you showed me: I was wondering about the smell. Is that all artificial too?’

His guess is that if he’d asked any other question, Fehedou would still have been on Belasco’s mind. But instead she looks as if now she just wants this conversation to conclude as fast as possible.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘All artificial. We use the latest Biopac Scent Delivery System, with sixteen cartridge slots. I guess it might have been a little, uh, a little too thick in the air today!’

She smiles, and Raf smiles warmly back. Inside his polished black shoes all ten of his toes are clenched so hard they feel as if they might snap off.

4.15 p.m.

It’s about glow. It’s got to be about glow. This is what Raf says to himself as he unclips Rose’s leash after a trip to the Iranian corner shop for booze and dog food. Back at Lacebark’s doll’s house, when Belasco showed him the fake laboratory, the reason he asked about bombs in particular was that news footage from the War on Terror was looping in his head, satellite maps riddled with ‘black sites’ like tumours on a CT scan. But Belasco didn’t confirm that and he shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Instead, he needs to get to his computer and do some homework to batten his new hunch. He’s trying not to think too hard about the risk he took today, because now that the adrenaline’s turned to vinegar and he’s safely back in his flat, there’s some chance he might start whimpering to himself. And it’s funny that for comfort he’s turned instinctively to a bottle of whisky and a faithful hound, which makes him feel like some sort of red-faced country squire. But no one has invented a pill yet that does the job so well.

A laboratory is like a radio transmitter: if you have one in your flat you might just be a hobbyist but you are more likely a criminal. Most of the laws you can break with a glass pipette involve either drugs or weaponry. Once in a while the two coincide. There’s a synthetic opioid called 3-methylfentanyl that’s about six thousand times as strong as morphine and has its own small population of addicts dispersed across the Baltic States like an obscure and wretched religious sect, but which was also the basis of the aerosol spray that killed over a hundred hostages when the Spetsnaz pumped it into the air-conditioning system of that theatre in Moscow in 2002. In principle, an entrepreneurial terrorist planning an attack on the London Underground could wholesale half his 3-methylfentanyl to drug pushers in order to subsidise the production of the other half. But what rules out 3-methylfentanyl here, along with sarin and acetone peroxide and every other high explosive and nerve agent that Raf can find listed on the internet, is that none of them has organic precursors. If Lacebark are using herbicides against something that’s blossoming outside council estates, it must be for the same reason that Thai customs officers confiscate sassafras oil: they’re trying to scotch one of the ingredients in a drug recipe. And in this case it’s not going to be coca shrubs or opium poppies or sassafras trees. So what is it?

At first, Raf tries reasoning forward from the precursor to the drug. Thinking of that anonymous email, he wonders if the precursor might be one of the forty-three plants that Linnaeus listed for his flower clock. But none of them is known to have narcotic derivatives. The best he can do is the Icelandic poppy (7 p.m.), which has some of the same alkaloids as the opium poppy but not nearly enough to be useful, and the dandelion (5 a.m.), which makes dandelion wine. Raf feels pretty confident that Lacebark haven’t come to London for dandelion wine. He’s leaning too hard on a rickety clue. Perhaps the precursor is just some other plant with the potential to fill a slot in the
Horologium Florae
but that wasn’t necessarily known to Linnaeus. That could be any one of a few hundred thousand species.

So he tries reasoning backwards from the drug to the precursor. With real ecstasy so scarce, London is a salon of avant-garde compounds at the moment: ethylbuphedrone and DMBDB and MDPV and a lot of other pretenders. But there’s one that stands out. Glow. Cherish asked him about it at the rave. Ko offered to sell him some a few days later. That’s why he was wondering about it even before he started this research.

Fourpetal has estimated that Lacebark came to London around January. And Raf didn’t hear about glow for the first time until last week. But when he searches on Lotophage for the earliest mention of glow, it’s in a post from 28 October 2009. ‘Anyone heard anything about this new stuff “glow”? Haven’t been able to track any down yet but apparently it’s a very potent entactogenic :)’. (An emoticon like that is the closest anyone on Lotophage ever gets to a moan of anticipation.) In another post in a different thread, the same user happens to mention that he lives in London. The timing is exactly right.

Still, it can only be glow if glow does have a botanical precursor. As Rose dozes at his feet like a small black hole on loan from a particle accelerator, Raf reads through every single forum post about glow in chronological order to see what he can find out. Most of them are no help. Everyone wants to try glow, but almost no one can get hold of any, and no one knows for sure where it comes from. However, even though scholars at the University of Lotophage don’t usually have much tolerance for speculation, there’s something about glow that seems to give rise to a lot of competing tattle. One user says that all extant glow comes from a single batch of experimental medication that was stolen from a hospital in South Wales where the Ministry of Defence were using it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq War veterans. Another says that glow is rare but not new and he tried it for the first time in Ibiza in 1995. And another says that all this hype about glow is just more evidence of how the placebo effect is getting stronger every year in the feeble-minded populations of the developed world.

But there is one Lotophage user who seems to know a lot more than anyone else.

His username is ‘Fitch’, and rather than showing off his expertise, he steps in only when he wants to correct a misconception that he finds particularly irritating. In one thread, for instance, people are speculating that part of the difference in the respective effects of glow and ecstasy might result from a faster enzymatic conversion of dopamine to noradrenaline.

‘you think glow might feel like that “because” the dopamine/noradrenaline balance different???’ writes Fitch. ‘what the fuck you think you mean by “because”?! all you bitches need to read
L’Amour Médecin
by Molière. one doctor says “Most learned bachelor, whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why opium makes one sleep.” the other doctor says “The reason is that in opium resides a
dormitive virtue
of which it is the nature to stupefy the senses.” nothing changes in three hundred years except the terminology. “Most learned bachelor, whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why MDMA makes one dance.” “The reason is that through the brain gushes a
catecholic neurotransmitter
of which it is the nature to inflame the senses.” no explanatory power, no predictive power, no falsifiability . . . no real theory. there are >100 neurotransmitters in the brain. we don’t know shit about what most of them do. dopamine used to get all the research funding. now oxytocin. soon octopamine/enkephalin/substance P/something else. when we still so ignorant, none of this has any meaning!! anyone who uses an individual neurotransmitter to support an explanation of human emotion or behaviour is talking out of his ass. we all be old or dead before anyone get a handle on how subjective experience supervenes on brain activity . . . and, by the way, it’s obvious that anything with an N-methylyhio-tetrazole functional group gonna have an indirect inhibitory effect on dopamine
β
-hydroxylase, so your whole bullshit chain of causation backwards.’ There follows a GIF of a sailor in a tricorne hat looking the wrong way down a telescope.

It’s the final sentences of these posts that are especially intriguing to Raf – Fitch insists that these debates are pointless and yet he can’t resist winning them anyway. Compile the whole lot, and it becomes clear that Fitch is an expert on glow. He also makes occasional contributions to threads about some of the more esoteric new chemicals from China, concluding one dense post about the possible neurotoxicity of halogenated amphetamines with ‘so, yeah, all you guys playing russian roulette with your brain tissue.’ But he never mentions taking any drugs himself. As Raf sees it, there are two obverse reasons you might talk a lot about drugs without ever indulging in them: either you’re very distant from the drug world, or you’re deep inside it. Fitch might just be some pharmacology graduate student at a rural college in the US who enjoys making Lotophage users look stupid. Or he might be directly involved in the manufacture and distribution of glow.

So Raf makes a list of the exact times of every one of Fitch’s posts, hoping to triangulate him not in space but in time. This is going to be fuzzy at best, since most Lotophage users keep odd schedules. But Raf can’t find any statistical tendency whatsoever. Fitch has posted at least once at every different time of day. Could he have non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome? Could he work in a corner shop?

Rose, meanwhile, is up and yawning. Raf leans down to knuckle her under the chin. ‘All right, girl, what do we know?’ he says to her. ‘Lacebark’s “high-value target” is a Burmese chemist making something shady in his kitchen. That might be glow. Fitch might have something to do with making glow. So Fitch might be a Burmese chemist. Fitch might be Lacebark’s “high-value target”. Bark if you think that makes any sense at all.’ In that case, would Fitch’s written English be quite so good? Would he be quoting French playwrights? Cherish is fluent, but that’s because she moved to America when she was ten.

The only way to get any further is to contact Fitch directly.

But if Fitch is on the run from Lacebark, and he gets a message groping behind his alias, then of course he’s going to suspect Lacebark of sending it. They could have found him through Lotophage just like Raf did. And there’s nothing Raf can put in the message that will prove otherwise. Any collateral he offers for his identity could just be another meticulous Lacebark creation like the plastic fruit outside the ‘greengrocer’. Also, that goes in both directions. Even if Fitch says, ‘Yes, you’re right, I am a Burmese drug chemist, a thousand congratulations for finding me,’ it might still be a ruse. In fact, for all Raf knows, Fitch is a Lacebark operative himself, sitting in an office somewhere with carpal tunnel braces on his wrists, writing well-researched posts to win the trust of some other ‘high-value target’. Raf could ask Fitch to tell him something that only a Burmese drug chemist would know. But for any given datum that only a Burmese drug chemist would know, there will, by definition, be no means for Raf to confirm it.

For a moment he feels frustrated that most of the internet is only mutters in the dark, but then he thinks of Cherish and all her pretence. What difference do screens and keyboards make? You can be skin to scalding skin with a naked human being, you can feel them squirm in what you assume at the time is total abandon, without any inkling of who they really are. And every powder Raf has ever taken at a rave has been white and bitter like rat poison. You learn nothing from the surfaces of things. An anonymous email address, a pill capsule, a padlocked warehouse door, a joyful look in a girl’s eyes – you just have to push blindly through to the space behind them and hope there’s no void there to trap you.

‘Lacebark killed my friend. I don’t know what they’re going to do next, but I want to stop them. Can you help me?’ That’s the message Raf sends to Fitch through the Lotophage private message system. He finishes his whisky. Rose has fallen asleep again in that disconcerting way she sometimes does with her eyes half open and her pupils rolled back like someone having a 3-methylfentanyl overdose. He’s still in his funeral suit and he decides to take a long shower. When he returns in his dressing gown, he finds that Fitch has already replied.

His heart’s thumping as he opens the message. ‘sorry about your friend,’ it says. ‘but how you think I could help you?’

Raf writes: ‘Does glow have an organic precursor or not?’

This time the reply takes less than a minute to arrive. Fitch is still online. ‘meaningless question. any alkaloid can be made from laboratory chemicals without pestling shrubs. just an issue of whether the yield from known methods large enough to make it cost-effective. for glow, it ain’t.’

Raf: ‘Are Lacebark here because of glow? Why would they need to come all the way to London for that?’