His backers had kept the property, a former tractor factory that had been haphazardly renovated for the original trials. The limited-liability company listed in the Register of Deeds office had been dummied up until it was four layers removed from the true owners-CRO Pharmaceuticals.

Briggs appreciated the seclusion, and although the Research Triangle had grown rapidly in the meantime, twenty acres of pine forest and a chain-link fence separated the massive brick building from the surrounding parcels.

Instead of the cornfields and soybean fields that once sprawled in the Piedmont belt between Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham, high-tech companies and research firms like IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, and Cisco Systems had placed labs or headquarters here.

While a complex body of world-changing research and development was underway in a sixty-mile radius, Briggs considered himself the heart of the beast, a man who held the keys that would unlock the human mind’s potential.

A pager buzzed on Briggs’s belt. The metal framing, high flat ceiling, and thick block walls inhibited cell-phone signals, and neither Briggs nor his backers wanted to be vulnerable to wiretapping or signal hijacking. The pager meant someone was ringing in on the satellite phone, and Briggs hurried to his office to plug the phone into an antenna that snaked its way up the side of the building and into the North Carolina humidity.

“Hello,” Briggs said.

“It’s done,” the voice said.

“Good. He’s the farthest away, so it was important to start with him. How is he?”