Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “So what went wrong, Doc? What caused such catastrophic organ failure in all these folks?”

  “Theoretically?”

  “Theoretically.” Caitlin nodded.

  Whatley went back to watching the next few floats pass, his expression turning sadly whimsical and reflective, before he returned his attention to Caitlin, picking up as if no time had passed at all. “From a biomechanical standpoint, I’d say something went drastically wrong with the cell surface marking. And, whatever it was, it sent the immune system into hyper-drive by making it appear that every single cell in the body was foreign. A massive overreaction that would be impossible to stop once it got going, what immune system specialists might call a cytokine storm. Hardly unprecedented given it’s believed that cytokine storms were responsible for the disproportionate number of healthy young adult deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed nearly a hundred million people worldwide. And this kind of massive overreaction on the part of the immune system is the only thing that can possibly explain what we’re facing here. Basically, the participants in this clinical trial had a ticking clock inserted into their bodies, just waiting for the alarm to go off.”

  “Any idea how long that would take?”

  “One of our San Antonio victims received their new organ six weeks ago, and the other eight, neither presenting as anything but positive until right up until the time they took sick. And, near as I can tell, they were dead within a matter of hours, between two and six being a fair estimate. Sit down in your favorite chair, turn on a football game, and by halftime all of your organs have failed so quickly and totally that you never even have the opportunity to call nine-one-one. I didn’t mention that, did I?”

  “Mention what?”

  “That in all the cases I’ve been able to find so far, not one of the victims managed to call for help.” Whatley started to look toward the parade again, but changed his mind. “You can see why I needed to see you about this right away.”

  “You thinking maybe this clinical trial had something else in mind? You think somebody was testing out a new bioweapon in a way nobody would ever suspect?”

  “Not exactly. I don’t suspect anything nefarious in the clinical trial itself. I think whoever tried developing the ultimate anti-rejection protocol ended up developing something else entirely.”

  “A drug capable of killing from the inside.”

  “Imagine that drug in pill form, Ranger,” Whatley advanced. “Imagine it as a liquid, gas, or aerosol. Imagine it baked into cake or sprinkled over neighborhood lawns like fertilizer.”

  “Is all that even possible?”

  “Oh, easily so. Once you’ve developed the mechanism to alter the body chemistry so drastically, any number of delivery methods could work.”

  “Then you’re saying…”

  “I’m saying that whatever pharmaceutical company was testing this drug inadvertently created a weapon that’s the biological equivalent of the Manhattan Project. A bioweapon for which there can be no vaccine or treatment. A bioweapon that would come with a one hundred percent kill rate.”

  Caitlin turned with Whatley toward a vintage Sherman tank being hauled as part of the Bluebonnet Fest Parade on a flatbed truck. Much smaller than the army’s more recent incarnations, but its big gun looking scarily formidable from this close up. A Cobra helicopter followed on another flatbed.

  “You need to prepare a presentation for Jones, Doc. We need to bring Washington in on this. Let me anticipate Jones’s first question for you: how do we find the pharmaceutical company that developed this drug in the first place?”

  “I already did,” Whatley told her, his features brightening as the last of the parade floats made their way toward them. “Redfern Pharmaceuticals and, get this, they’re based in Texas.”

  “Got an address for me, Doc?”

  PART EIGHT

  One thing that still distinguishes the modern Texas Rangers from most other law enforcement agents is that they do not wear uniforms. What is probably less well known, however, is that the famed lone-star-in-a-wheel badge worn by today’s Rangers was only recently adopted. In fact, Ranger badges weren’t commonly worn until the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and were virtually unknown before the Civil War. There were several reasons for this. One is that a Ranger rarely needed to show a badge to a hostile Comanche or border bandit in order to put the latter on notice that they were on opposite sides of the law. Another is that appropriations for Rangers were so meager that a Ranger felt lucky to get reimbursed for feed for his horse and ammunition for his guns. As Mike Cox points out in a chapter on the subject in Texas Ranger Tales, some Rangers also “felt that a shiny star on the chest made too tempting a target.”

  —“Lone on the Range: Texas Lawmen” by Jesse Sublett, Texas Monthly, December 31, 1969

  73

  WACO, TEXAS

  “So you don’t make the stuff anymore,” Armand Fisker said, once Davey Skoll had finished with his double-talk. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “It’s the way clinical trials work,” Skoll explained, making sure he was out of striking range.

  He had a golf putter in his grasp, but didn’t think for a moment it would be much use against Fisker as a weapon. The man must’ve had a skull full of rocks not to understand the way he’d already explained things to him.

  “You’re only allowed to manufacture as much of the drug as the trial requires,” Skoll tried again.

  “Says who?”

  “FDA.”

  “F-D fuck me. Government can eat my shorts.”

  “Not all of us can operate our business sub rosa.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Under the radar.”

  “Business works a lot better that way.” Fisker took a step forward, and Skoll matched him with a step back, keeping the distance between them where it was. “You should try it sometime.”

  “We’ll see,” Skoll said, and laid a golf ball down a full twenty feet from the pin.

  They were standing inside what had been the Redfern Pharmaceuticals break room, when there were enough workers to fill it. Since the facility was down to a mere handful to watch over and guide the work of the machines, Skoll had converted it to a practice putting green, so he’d have something to do when he came to the manufacturing plant. He wasn’t much of a golfer; wasn’t much of anything when it came to athletics. He’d made himself into a decent enough skier to try diamond-branded slopes because all the fashionable types skied diamonds. If you didn’t, you refrained from skiing altogether. In Skoll’s mind, the beginner and intermediate slopes were for losers who did their runs around the lowly masses.

  “How long will it take for you to get the production line for your magic juice up and running again, Davey?” Fisker asked him, still holding his calm.

  “Not long. A few months, maybe.”

  “Months?”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Skoll said and putted.

  The ball curved around the slight rise he’d had built into the practice green, dead on target with the hole, until Fisker stuck his foot out and stopped its roll.

  “You put the ingredients in one end, and the pills, or whatever it is you’re making, come out the other. What’s so hard about that?”

  “The measurements, specifications, and ingredients for every drug are different, Arm,” Skoll explained, trying to sound as casual as he could manage. “Retrofitting the line requires a substantial commitment and significant capital investment.”

  “In addition to the rest of my investment in Skoll Inc., you mean.”

  “Besides,” Skoll said, trying to ignore Fisker’s sarcasm, “we’re almost ready to begin producing those additional lots of Oxy. Your business’s lifeblood, Arm.”

  Skoll watched Fisker scoop up the ball from the stiff, fake grass surface, flinching when it looked like Fisker was going to fling it straight at him. “Don’t you be telling me anything about my business.”

  �
��Figure of speech, that’s all.”

  Fisker cupped his groin. “This is what I think about your figure of speech, Davey.”

  How’d I get involved with this Neanderthal? Skoll asked himself.

  But the way Fisker was looking at him made Skoll think maybe, somehow, he’d said it out loud, in which case he was about to need far more than just the putter he was still holding to defend himself.

  Skoll was spared contemplating the dilemma further, when his phone beeped with a call from the facility’s front gate.

  “There’s a woman here to see you, Mr. Skoll,” the guard on duty there told him.

  “A woman?” he asked, already trying to figure which of his many bimbos had tracked him here.

  “Yes, sir, a Texas Ranger.”

  74

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Guillermo Paz was waiting when Cort Wesley screeched the rental car to a halt in the Village School parking lot, lunging out with the keys still jammed in the ignition. The colonel had used Homeland Security’s chopper, loaned out most of the time to the Texas Rangers, to get here from San Antonio and had then sent it to pick Cort Wesley up from a vacant parking lot a mile from the Walls in Huntsville.

  “I want to go see my son, Colonel.”

  Paz blocked his path when he started toward the dormitory, Cort Wesley slamming into what felt like an invisible force field with a foot to spare between them. “We going to have a problem here, Colonel?”

  “Only if you want to answer the Houston police department’s questions about your role in this.”

  Cort Wesley stepped back. “Let’s get as close as we can.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley’s breath caught in his chest when he saw the three bodies on the grass around the side of the Village School athletic center that was named after some rich alumni. They were still covered by what looked like ordinary bedsheets, soaked through in patches with blood. Then he saw the dark, twisted shapes of motorcycles in the general vicinity and realized the victims could only be more of Armand Fisker’s private army comprised of the biker gangs he commanded from coast-to-coast.

  Like father, like son.

  “The men I had watching your son shot them,” Paz explained.

  Cort Wesley still had trouble catching his breath. He noticed a crime scene tech taking measurements around a broken window he thought was part of the boys’ locker room.

  “One of the bikers managed to throw a grenade.”

  “A frag?” Cort Wesley managed, wondering why no further damage was evident.

  “True vintage model, outlaw, so vintage it didn’t go off.”

  Cort Wesley looked at him through the darkness squeezed between two dormitory buildings. “You telling me one of those bikers managed to throw a grenade before your men killed him?”

  Paz nodded. “Albert Einstein once said that ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.’”

  “I guess I need to opt for the latter,” Cort Wesley said, trying not to picture Luke climbing into his clothes when the window shattered and a dark, knobby thing that looked like a piece of stale fruit hit the floor near him.

  He got his breath back and fixed his gaze on the massive shape beside him that looked as translucent as Leroy Epps in the darkness.

  “I didn’t ask you to put men on Luke.”

  “You didn’t have to, outlaw. And I put other men on your oldest before I came up here.”

  “Why is it I’ve got this feeling you saw all this coming?”

  “I saw, I felt … something, just as I have before. I misjudged it for darkness at first, but now I realize it was emptiness. A void cut out of mankind’s heart and soul.”

  Cort Wesley could only shake his head. “I’d say you were a piece of work, Colonel, but I can’t deny the world is looking like a much bigger place than I ever imagined. Reminds me of those video games my boys play that come with rising levels of difficulty. By the time you get up near the top, you’re seeing everything differently and seeing things you couldn’t see before.”

  Paz smiled tightly. “Thomas Edison once said, ‘There is no supernatural. We are continually learning new things. There are powers within us which have not yet been developed and they will develop. We shall learn things of ourselves, which will be full of wonders, but none of them will be beyond the natural.’”

  “I can relate to that, all right,” Cort Wesley said, moving in closer to the big man who swallowed him in his shadow. “Now, you want to take me to my son or do I need to find him for myself?”

  75

  WACO, TEXAS

  “You look familiar, Mr. Skoll,” Caitlin said to the man who was an inch or so shorter than she, even wearing his shiny new boots. He had a teenager’s floppy hair, longer than Luke’s and almost as long as Dylan’s. It looked more like a wig, right down to the way he raked a hand through it to flip the straying patches off his face, only to have it flop right back. “Have we ever met before?”

  Skoll shook his head. “I’m sure I would have remembered, Ranger.”

  The glint in his eyes, as he studied her in ways she hated, was enough to tell Caitlin everything she needed to know about David Skoll. “This your office, sir?”

  “The previous owner’s, actually. I haven’t had the opportunity to put my stamp on it yet.”

  “This would be the owner your hedge fund put out of business,” Caitlin said, letting her eyes roam the walls while repeating what Doc Whatley had told her about Redfern Pharmaceuticals.

  “Many business deals could be classified that way, Ranger. It’s called capitalism.”

  She turned toward him slowly, contriteness forced over her features. “I call it corporate theft.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “What would you call the price gouging you championed as soon as you took over, raising the cost of life-saving drugs by as much as ten thousand percent?”

  “Is that what’s brought you here, Ranger?”

  “No, sir, I’m only here about one drug.”

  * * *

  “It might help if you told me the name of this drug,” Skoll said, after Caitlin had failed to get the rise out of him she’d been hoping for.

  “I don’t know if it has a name, Mr. Skoll, because it’s still in the clinical trial phase.”

  “We have any number of drugs working their way toward approval. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “Specific? How about the anti-rejection drug that’s killed a whole bunch of people it was supposed to save? Eighteen and counting from coast-to-coast.” Caitlin checked the code Doc Whatley had provided, which she’d entered onto the Notes app on her smart phone, and read it out loud. “That would be Lot U-two-five-seven-F.”

  Skoll tried for a harsh glare that made him look like a man practicing his acting in a mirror. “How did you come by this information?”

  “So you’re denying these allegations are accurate?”

  “That’s between the FDA and myself. And, even assuming your allegations are true, any number of miraculous, life-saving drugs got off to less than auspicious starts.”

  “Less than auspicious? Is that how you’d describe the eighteen deaths that we know of, thanks to your clinical study? I’m guessing that’s going to turn out to be a very preliminary number, sir.”

  “I’ve seen some of the data and I dispute the results. Against the protocol for the study, some of those who died were treated post-surgery. Axiol, what you refer to as Lot U-two-five-seven-F, was never meant to work that way.”

  “Axiol. Your wonder drug’s got a peculiar-sounding name, Mr. Skoll.”

  “Something I inherited when I bought the company,” Skoll groused, adding, “Regrettably.”

  “If it had worked, would you have charged two arms and two legs for its use, sir, or just one?”

  “It does work, Ranger, it just needs to be tweaked. The case trials you’re referring to were anomalies and I’m
confident the FDA’s investigation will determine as such.”

  The path of Skoll’s pacing took him into the reach of perimeter floodlights trying to cut through the darkness beyond the windows. The way the light hit his face made Skoll look even more familiar, but Caitlin couldn’t place what it was, or what its significance might be. Whatever it was, she’d stuffed it into a different box she couldn’t put her hands on right now.

  “So how exactly was Axiol supposed to work?” Caitlin asked him.

  “I’m not at liberty say.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Unless you want to deal with my lawyers, and sign a boatload of nondisclosure agreements, I can’t disclose that information.”

  “Can’t or won’t, sir?”

  Skoll smirked, his teeth so gleaming white they reminded Caitlin of a freshly painted picket fence before it dried all the way through. “You could also come back with a warrant to try to force me to comply. But I’m afraid I’d have to challenge that warrant in court.”

  “I wonder if we could even get on the docket before you put Redfern into bankruptcy, the way you did three of the other companies you acquired. I imagine that’ll happen sooner rather than later, given the number of wrongful deaths you’ll be facing from your wonder drug.”

  “You mentioned eighteen deaths, Ranger. There are more than five hundred test subjects involved in the clinical trial. And if you knew anything about the survival rate of transplant patients, you’d know that’s well within the norm.”

  “I said eighteen deaths we know about so far, sir. The main reason I came out here today was to obtain the master list in order to get a more accurate number, as well as make sure the folks in your study who are still alive are warned appropriately.”

  Skoll frowned at the prospects of what she was proposing. “That information will require a warrant, too, Ranger.”

  “I didn’t think I’d need one, Mr. Skoll, given that we both want to save lives here. Don’t we?”

  He looked away from her again and Caitlin realized that every time he did so, he was looking at the same thing.