“Really? Because I was thinking I might not submit any report at all.”
“How much do you want?”
“Not a cent,” I said. “Just your resignation.”
“Oh, really? This gets buried. You’ll see. You’ve got a lot to learn about how the world works, Sergeant . . . Sergeant, what’s your name again?”
“Heller,” I said. “Nicholas Heller.”
“Sergeant, you’re making the mistake of your life. I’ve got friends.”
“Today, as a four-star general in good standing, sure. But as the subject of a disciplinary probe? Suddenly your calls aren’t returned. The conversation switches from what a good guy you are to who gets what you’ve got. Your car, your driver, your epaulets? They’re not yours. You’re just renting them. And there’s a hundred people who think they can put them to better use than you can.”
I enjoyed seeing him deflate like a blow-up doll in a nail factory. I returned home and made some calls. I knew people too. Some of the newer compliance officers in the Pentagon, some of them younger and female. They weren’t going to bury this, I knew. Times had changed.
38
I caught an evening flight out of the Albany International Airport and was back in Boston by midnight. I dozed on the short flight, but I remained on edge.
What would happen when Detective Goldman viewed the CCTV video? He’d see me creeping in and out of the Kimball place and know that I’d been lying to him. I had to be ready for that.
I was up early the next day, out of my loft and over to my office by seven. I had a lot to puzzle on, and this may be the part of my work I like best.
I had a tough problem to solve. How the hell was I going to get inside Phoenicia Health Sciences? I knew nothing about the company, so I did a bit of basic research. Pharmaceutical companies contract out to what are called CROs, contract research organizations, which do testing and human trials and commercial research for the drug companies. Phoenicia was one of these CROs. It turned out to be headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.
I called an old friend of mine—we’d been McKinsey interns together, before I joined the military—who was now a senior VP at Novartis, another big pharmaceutical company. I remember Kim Trepanier had set her sights on pharma from the outset. She was going to run a Merck or a Novartis or an AstraZeneca someday. I always believed it. She was also an excellent poker player. She was a triathlete, a slender woman with short blond hair in a Dorothy Hamill cut. We’d gone out a few times but never really clicked. We were friends anyway.
“I have a strange question for you,” I said.
“Okay.”
“How easy is it to bury a clinical trial?”
“What do you mean, ‘bury it’?”
“You’ve got a new drug and you test it and you get back some bad results. Like it’s super-addictive and hard to quit. But you don’t want the FDA to know about it. What do you do?”
“You’re supposed to register all clinical trials with the US government in an online database. You’re obliged to report the results, and the government goes after you if you don’t.”
“And does what?”
“Your drug doesn’t get approved. Plus you get a big fine.”
“What if you did the study abroad?”
“Western Europe has the same requirements. But you do a trial in Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe, you can do whatever you want.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. So there was this French company developing a drug, an antidepressant, and it turns out that if you inject it into your veins, it gives you a buzz, right? But if you don’t dissolve it properly, it starts to eat away at your flesh. Of course they never reported that. I’ve seen videos from Russia of people with their fingers necrosed, eaten away at the tips. I’ve seen people with the flesh on their arms eaten away, exposing the bone. Just horrible. And all because of a buried study.”
“Where’d they do the study?”
“Eastern Europe. Estonia.”
“They deep-sixed it?”
“Right. You can do that in Estonia.”
“But who? Who can bury it?”
“The CRO. You know what that is?”
“Yeah. Contract research organization.” Outsiders, my father had said. Vendors. It’s harder to erase their memories.
“Exactly. All it takes is someone complicit in the company. Money talks.”
“Is that the sort of thing Conrad Kimball might do?”
She laughed but didn’t answer.
“What’s your take on the old man?”
“Smart guy and a great marketer.”
“Dishonest?”
She hesitated. “I’d say the word is ruthless. Relentless. Apparently he still runs the company at eighty. I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Oxydone. Was there a study done on Oxydone that Kimball had buried? There’ve long been rumors.”
“I’ve heard the rumors too.”
“Is this a case you’re working on?”
“An interest of mine,” I said. “Sort of a side hustle.” I’d already said way too much. “I gotta run.”
I sent Gabe a text but didn’t hear back; he was probably asleep. The record store opened at eleven; he might not start work till noon.
Dorothy, meanwhile, was building my alias, the fake background of the fake McKinsey consultant named Nicholas Brown.
I’d started at the Kimball house under a notional cover, which wasn’t expected to withstand heavy scrutiny. But now Dorothy was working on creating a deeper, more durable cover.
A cover, in the intelligence business, is the collection of lies and false companies and such you’ve created to make a fictional entity—in my case, “Nick Brown”—checkable. We call it backstopping. I got in touch with the new head of the Boston office of McKinsey, who turned out to be a friend of a friend, and I asked him to backstop me if and when a call came. We set up a phone line. Turned out there were already several Nick Browns working for the firm. Now you called and someone answered and said I was traveling.
In the old days, the CIA hired forgers to create ID cards and driver’s licenses and birth certificates and school records. And fake passports, fake plane tickets, all that stuff.
But it’s not so easy these days. Not in the age of Facebook and Google and LinkedIn. Now you’ve got to be able to survive a Google search. Anyone checking up on you, if they can’t find your digital vapor trail, they know you’re a fraud. You have to create a credit history. Dorothy set up my LinkedIn account so it looked like it had been up for seven years. It couldn’t look like it just went up yesterday. She even put up a convincing Facebook page that looked like it had been around for five years or so. There were tricks to the trade, and Dorothy knew a lot of them.
Usually those tricks are enough, but not always.
39
Who was it you want me to write a letter to?” I asked Dorothy. “Some guy on a co-op board, right?” She was wearing an earth-toned silk blouse and a brown skirt and looked unusually professional once again.
She gave me the name and an email address. I jotted it down on my little black pocket notebook. She wanted a letter—an email would do—affirming that she would be employed by Heller Associates for the foreseeable future.
I didn’t plan to write such a letter, though, but she didn’t need to know that. I had other plans.
A couple of emails had come in from the City of Boston with attachments.
They concerned John Warren, the chairman of the co-op board at the Kenway Tower in Boston. The man who was giving Dorothy a hard time and who had “concerns” about her income and credit history. I knew if I bore down I’d find some dirt. You almost always do.
Was the guy a racist? Was he trying to keep her out because she was black? Possibly. Ma
ybe even probably, but sometimes it’s hard to prove bias.
Well, I wasn’t trying to make a case. I just wanted to help Dorothy.
And I’d figured out a way. I’d gotten a copy of the assessed value of the guy’s apartment, and like I suspected it would be, the figure was ridiculously low, way below the value of a high-floor apartment in a tower in the city of Boston. I punched out the phone number for Mr. Warren, and while it rang, I quickly rehearsed what I was going to do. I’m no real estate guy, I’d say, but I can see the assessed value of your co-op is less than half what it should be. If a concerned citizen, say, were to make a phone call to the city tax authorities, your property taxes will double. And I’d hate for that to happen.
Yeah, I could do that. I could probably make the guy fold instantly. He’d let Dorothy buy in, once his finances were challenged. No matter what color her skin was, his self-interest would prevail.
I could do that. But then I was thinking of Maggie and something that happened with her years ago.
I hung up.
Instead, I put the printouts in a file folder and walked them over to Dorothy’s cubicle. I dropped the thick folder on her desk.
“Do with it what you want,” I said.
“What’s this?”
“Check out John Warren’s property taxes. How low they are.”
“That asshole John Warren from the co-op board?”
“The very one. I almost set up a meeting with him. But it’s your fight. Not mine.”
“Thank you,” she said.
* * *
• • •
I decided it was a good time to pay a visit to Phoenicia Health Sciences, just as the morning rush hour was beginning. Do a little surveillance while people were arriving at work. I threw on a suit jacket and headed out the door.
I retrieved the Defender from the garage where I parked it to protect it from the Boston snow and salt. I took the Mass. Turnpike out to I-95 into Waltham. The tree-lined road—the leaves were russet and gold—gave way to a sleek, futuristic seven-story chrome-and-glass building surrounded by cedar trees, with a couple of connected parking lots on the back side, nicely set in the landscape.
This gleaming structure was the world headquarters of Phoenicia Health Sciences. I guess there was a lot of money to be made from testing drugs. I drove around the lots. There was reserved parking for certain executives. Part of a lot was reserved for clinical study patients. The rest were unmarked.
I didn’t want to enter the building yet. I was beginning to formulate a plan, which meant I’d have to come back, and I didn’t want to be recognized on a return visit. On the way home I placed a couple of calls. One was to my old friend George Devlin, who’d been on my Special Forces A-team, a communications sergeant. Devlin now made his living as a TSCM guy, which stands for technical surveillance countermeasures. Helping companies protect against being spied on. He called himself a hacker, a label he was proud of.
I told him what I wanted to do and arranged for him to come by my office later in the week. That didn’t mean he’d actually come into my office. He lived in an immense RV, a combo home and office, and rarely emerged from it. He was terribly mutilated, from an IED. I would meet with him inside his vehicle.
When I got back to my office, Dorothy rose from her desk and said, “I’ve been doing some more digging into Kimball Pharma, and I found something interesting. I found a scientist who was fired from Kimball a couple of years ago after complaining about Oxydone. About the company’s role in pushing millions of prescriptions. Kind of a whistle-blower. But after he got fired, he stopped talking. Maybe he’ll talk to you. You might want to give him a call.”
“You think? Hell, yeah. Great. Now, I’m going to need blueprints of the Phoenicia headquarters building in Waltham. You know, the architect’s plans.”
“Why not just call the city of Waltham’s building department, see if they have building plans?”
“Because it’s a small town and people talk, and I don’t want someone there calling over to the CEO’s office at Phoenicia and saying, hey, someone was asking for the plans for your headquarters.”
“I doubt that would happen.”
“Maybe not. But I don’t want to take the chance,” I said. “I think I have a better idea.” I explained it to her. “But first, do you think you can find the whistle-blower’s phone number?”
Dorothy rarely disappointed. In one of her many databases she quickly found a home phone number for the man, whose name was Dr. William Sossong. She also emailed me a couple of articles about him. Pieces from the Washington Post and the New York Times and The Guardian that called him the “Kimball Pharma whistle-blower.” They were all from around five years ago. He had been Kimball’s principal scientist and lived in Port Chester, New York.
I pulled up a piece about him from the New York Times.
ORIGINS OF AN EPIDEMIC: KIMBALL PHARMA KNEW ITS OPIOIDS WERE WIDELY ABUSED
Former Lead Scientist Claims Company Ignored Reports.
Kimball Pharmaceuticals, the company that helped plant the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of its Oxydone inhalers, has always claimed to be unaware of abuse of the powerful opioid painkiller until years after it went on the market.
But the former top medical officer at Kimball claims that the company has known of “widespread” abuse of Oxydone for years. “These officers knew that people were snorting Oxydone and getting addicted, but they continued to tell doctors that it was less addictive than OxyContin,” said Dr. William Sossong, who was recently fired by the company. “Yet they claim they were unaware it was being abused. And they concealed it. I mean, we got reports about how people were stealing it from pharmacies, and some doctors were selling prescriptions.”
Over 200,000 people have died from opioid overdoses, much of it attributable to Kimball Pharma’s widely prescribed Oxydone inhaler. A spokesman for Kimball Pharma, however, said—
There had been dozens of articles quoting Dr. Sossong, calling him a whistle-blower.
And then five years ago he stopped doing interviews.
Normally I much prefer talking to people in person, and not on the phone. But I didn’t have time to get to him.
I dialed his number. A woman answered the phone and then put it down and called his name. A minute later, a man got on the line. “This is Bill Sossong,” he said. “Who’s this?”
I gave him the name Ben Ellison and told him I was writing a book about Kimball Pharma. He cut me off right away. “I can’t talk to you. I signed an NDA.”
As I figured.
“I can assure you right now I will protect your name and not quote a word of what you say.”
“What kind of book are you writing about Kimball?”
“It’s about the opioid epidemic and Kimball Pharma,” I said, plunging right into it, figuring the direct approach would work best with him. Most whistle-blowers risk their jobs and their livelihoods out of a sense of moral outrage. Dr. Sossong seemed to be one of those people. A guy who did the right thing and got fired for it.
“Yeah, well, I can’t discuss it.”
“No one at Kimball is willing to talk,” I said.
“I wish I could help you.”
“Let me tell you what I’m mostly interested in. There are reportsthat Kimball Pharma knew how powerfully addictive its blockbuster drug was, but hid the evidence.”
He exhaled loudly into the phone. “I’ve said all I’m gonna say on that subject. They got all kinds of reports on how people were abusing Oxydone. They knew.”
“I see.”
The man who couldn’t talk went on. “I mean, these sons of bitches knew that people were snorting Oxydone and getting addicted, but they continued telling doctors that it was less addictive than OxyContin. People were stealing it from pharmacies. Doctors were selling prescriptions. I told th
em about internet chat rooms I visited where drug users were talking about snorting it recreationally. But Conrad Kimball ignored it.”
“I’ve heard there was a clinical trial that Kimball somehow buried.”
“True. The FDA would never have approved Oxydone if they’d seen that study.”
“And I’m trying to find it. Apparently the study was done by a CRO called Phoenicia Health Sciences.”
“You’ll never get that out of them. Conrad Kimball wanted it to disappear, and Phoenicia obliged.”
“You think a bribe was involved?”
“Oh, for sure.”
“Did you ever see that study?”
“No. I just remember hearing it was done in Eastern Europe somewhere.”
“You think Phoenicia has a copy?”
“Absolutely.”
“Where?”
“Damned if I know.”
“What about people there who might have saved a copy? The CEO, do you think?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You know who’s likely to have a copy is a guy named Dr. Arthur Scavolini. He’s been there forever. But if he does, he’s going to keep it under lock and key.”
I asked him to spell the name. He said, “He’s their CSO, their chief scientific officer.”
“You think he got bribed?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s got the juice to make the study disappear. But you can’t quote me on any of this. You hear me? I cannot be connected in any way.”
I thanked him and quickly got off the phone. I had a lot to do that afternoon.
40
At a few minutes after one o’clock I pulled up to the used record store on Mass. Ave. in Central Square. The place was cluttered with signs advertising vinyl new and used, current records, reissues, CDs, VHS, eight-tracks. Everything retro except Victrolas. Albums in the display window by Black Sabbath and Pure Prairie League. Otis Redding was on the loudspeaker, sittin’ on the dock of the bay.
I walked in, past milk crates full of one-dollar LPs, a wall of used cassette tapes. In the back of the shop, I found Gabe opening a box of LPs.
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