Heart Stopper

by R J Samuel

  May - John Landon Seattle phone call

  June - Figures on Controller II to Priya

  July 1st week New York – Pacemaker, Controller I

  Makes copy, sends to Catherine 5th July?

  Back in Ireland, July 7th

  Priya filled in some more dates as she worked them out from the notes she had made.

  Last 7 years – attacks – pacemaker/controller I launched 2003

  attack 1 Singapore 2004 – death

  attack 2 Limoges 2006 – death

  attack 3 John Seattle 2006 – survived

  Priya stared at the additions. “The attacks seem to have stopped after 2006…? We don’t know for sure, do we?”

  She drummed her fingers on the table as she thought.

  “The Research Company started work on the development of the Controller II in 2004 after the launch of the Controller I. The Controller II replaced the Controller I in 2006. And what did Valerie say? They issued a software patch in 2008.”

  “Where were we?” Priya looked at the notepad. “Okay, Liam’s attack in December 2010.”

  She added it to the list.

  Last 7 years – attacks – pacemaker/controller I launched 2003

  attack 1 Singapore 2004 – death - Controller I

  attack 2 Limoges 2006 – death - Controller I

  attack 3 John Seattle 2006 – survived - Controller I

  Controller II launch 2006

  Controller II software patch 2008

  attack 4 Liam Galway 13th December 2010 – survived – Controller II (mistake – no patch)

  She said, “If Daniel started looking because of Liam’s attack, then he would have started after the 13th December 2010. I got back to work in the first week of January after my mum… Tara had done the typed report, I remember reading it, but I didn’t really take it in. Daniel would have received it. He didn’t discuss it with me, we were still very awkward with each other, but he was really kind to me. He really seemed to feel it.”

  Catherine made a small sound and Priya saw the pain in her eyes and realized why Daniel had been so affected by the loss of her mum. He had lost Catherine too, until the last few years. She rubbed Catherine’s hand, which had clenched on the table, and they both smiled.

  Reyna was looking at the list. “I’d say Daniel didn’t do anything till around March this year. Something must have triggered his request for the exact details of Liam’s attack and I don’t think he would have waited that long if he’d known about the deaths and heart attack before then. Let’s say something triggered his interest in early March and he asks Tara for the details. Then he starts searching online. It takes him until May to call Seattle. He probably called Singapore and Limoges too.”

  Catherine said, “I’m getting the impression that he was finding out all these things, but wasn’t telling anybody. He didn’t talk to me about it; he didn’t say anything to either of you until a few weeks ago when he went to New York.”

  “But he was definitely moody and withdrawn at work before that,” Priya said. “If he had found out something that he thought was dangerous, why didn’t he tell somebody? Why didn’t he work on getting a product advisory? Why didn’t he make sure no one else could get hurt? I mean, he couldn’t be sure all the Controllers were safe.”

  “Maybe he did.” Reyna’s voice was quiet. “Maybe he told the wrong person.”

  There was a note in Reyna’s voice that made Priya look at her. Reyna’s eyes were distant as if she was coming to some sort of realization.

  “Reyna, Daniel didn’t tell me any of this. He just gave me the figures and code on the Controller II and asked me to look through them.”

  “I didn’t accuse you. However, a lot of this seems to revolve around you.” Reyna leaned back and ran her hand through her hair. She had a look of distress on her face.

  Catherine said, “Rain, you’re holding something back. You can’t surely still think Priya has something to do with this?”

  Reyna said in a low voice, “I don’t. But I found something in Daniel’s papers that I didn’t show you.”

  She held her hands up at Catherine and Priya’s exclamations.

  “It was written across one of the pieces of paper. It said Priya was the key.”

  “So you’ve been thinking this whole time…!” Priya realized her behavior hadn’t helped, but she was furious.

  She continued in a quieter voice, “Can I see the paper, please.”

  Reyna took a folded sheet out of the pocket of her jeans. She handed it to Priya who unfolded it and laid it out on the table. She looked back up at Reyna.

  “It says ‘Priya’s key’. Not Priya is key.”

  Reyna nodded.

  “Key is a term used in security protocols. I did my PhD on the subject. I wrote algorithms for God’s sake! Did it occur to you that I might actually be innocent of all this, or do you just think all women are guilty?”

  Reyna looked guilty herself.

  Catherine said in a firm voice, “Enough. I said it before, you two with all that negative energy. Where do we go from here? Do you have the keys or whatever they are from your PhD?”

  Priya said, “I never went back to the Research Company. They still have all my findings. Though…” She got up and headed to the door. “I’m a devil for hoarding stuff.”

  She came down ten minutes later carrying an armful of books and folders that she added to the pile on the table and sat back down. Catherine had put on the kettle and was making coffee. Priya patted away the dust on the first folder and opened it as the kettle screeched its readiness. The touch in her hair startled her, though it was as slight as a feather settling on a quilt. She looked up. Reyna had a strand of cobweb in her hand. There was a look in her eyes that made Priya’s heart jump and then hurt. Catherine placed their coffees down and Priya broke the look and gazed back down at the folder waiting for her heart rate to return to normal and the pain to fade.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The folders contained mostly material on the new thesis. The literature search on the original thesis was there along with folders of printouts of Excel sheets. Priya hadn’t realized how much material she had hoarded away and never touched since. She had stored the material out of sight in the space she had built in the eaves of the room where she painted.

  Reyna asked, “I wonder why Daniel gave you the figures on the Controller II in June. I thought that product had been launched and was working fine.”

  Priya looked up. “I guess, apart from Gerry and perhaps Valerie, I would have been the one who knew the most about the wireless issues. When I started my PhD, I was concentrating on the communications between devices and their programmers. The coding, the frequencies. My original thesis was on the possible vulnerability of implanted devices to radio attacks.”

  “Original?” Reyna asked.

  Priya sighed, “Yes. I picked the area because of my dad’s work with Daniel’s grandfather. My dad suggested it actually. He must have trumpeted my IT and Science background to your grandfather because he said that it would be very useful if I worked on the software coding for security issues. Your grandfather had patented the alternative source of energy for the pacemaker and Daniel developed that to power his pacemaker. Before that, the security issues were affected by the available battery power. There was always a trade-off between draining the limited resources by using the battery power to implement security. With a different source of power, and the wireless communications between the Controller and the pacemaker, the study of security issues was coming more to the forefront.”

  Reyna said, “You said, ‘original thesis’. What happened, did you change it?”

  “Yes. I spent the first year gathering the literature on the area and then I did my second year with Gerry, and Valerie. It was strange; I was only allowed access to a restricted range of data. I would do my calculations and submit them. I worked on bits of controllers and pacemakers. It was hard to work without a sense of the context into which the figu
res fit. I developed some algorithms based on very specific technical specifications.”

  Priya leaned back in her chair. She remembered the sense of achievement, of pride at having solved some coding problems that the researchers had obviously been struggling with for some time. She felt the memory of despair, but she ignored its knocking.

  She said, “Everything started to fall apart, after Valerie, and then it completely blew up when Kathy died. I just sat on the couch for a month. And stared. A real couch vegetable. Until my father arrived. I hadn’t even told him how Kathy died. They had never considered it a real relationship because we were two women. They considered us just friends, but he knew from my silence that something was seriously wrong. He got very upset on the phone because I was on my own here according to him. So he came to visit. I had to get off the couch to pick him up at Shannon. Anyway, we talked. He talked to the Faculty. He can be very impressive, especially when he’s talking about me to other people. I went back to finish the PhD, but on a very theoretical basis. I changed my thesis statement to something about the use of IT in developing pacemaker communications, I can’t even remember, it bored me so much I was surprised I did enough to get the PhD, but I can be very good on auto-pilot.”

  Catherine and Reyna both started to say something, but Priya patted the notepad and spoke before they could.

  “I have been trying since then to wipe away some images. I need to go back on auto-pilot if we are going to figure this out.”

  They paused for a few seconds and then Catherine nodded.

  Priya said, “From what we’ve found, the problems were with the Controller I and the Controller II without the software patch. So the patch is the key. If I had access to the code for the software patch… I only have my notes; I had to leave the copy in the clinic.” She paused and looked at the mass of folders. “If Daniel’s right and it is my key then…I can look through the algorithms I developed and see what they could have been used for. Maybe the patch was based on my work, the timing would be right.”

  She saw Reyna check her watch.

  Priya asked, “What time is your dinner?”

  “They said to meet them around 8.30 at the restaurant. I’m going to have to take Catherine back home and then come back in so we’ll have to leave here at the latest… 6ish.”

  Priya checked her phone clock. It was just after 5 p.m. and the concert was at 8 p.m. She really didn’t want to go; it was more Michael’s scene. He had bought the tickets, and given her the program months ago. And she hadn’t seen him since the previous Saturday, hadn’t been able to tell him everything that had been happening.

  Priya realized that she hadn’t told Reyna about Valerie and Kathy. She felt reluctant. Reyna was going to dinner with Gerry and Valerie that evening. If there was something going on between Reyna and Valerie, Priya was not getting involved.

  Priya asked, “Have you found out anything from the financials of the Research Company?”

  Reyna searched through the box and pulled out a folder. “When I was in Dublin, I got the tax returns of the Company. I also managed to get hold of the tax returns of the three directors.”

  Reyna held out a list of the board of directors of the Research Company. Dr. Daniel Fairer III was the Chairman, Dr. Gerald Lynch and Dr. Valerie Helion were directors. Valerie was the Company Secretary and Gerry was the Technical Director. There was no mention of Daniel Fairer II.

  Reyna went through a set of sheets that showed the investors in the company. Here Daniel Fairer II featured prominently; the bulk of the investment was from him with significantly smaller amounts from the three directors. Priya had not been interested before in company structure or financing and she didn’t know whether the amounts detailed were unusual for this type of investment, but they were huge amounts to her.

  Priya looked through a summary of the accounts that Reyna had written. The licensing of the technology to TechMed Devices was the main source of income for the Research Company. The first tranche appeared in the first quarter of 2003 when the device was launched. Followed by large tranches over the next 3 quarters. After that, there seemed to be annual royalties.

  Reyna looked up from her notes. “Something is not adding up. I’ve written out the financial history of the clinic and the Research Company and something just isn’t adding up. Their tax returns show that Gerry and Valerie declared a reasonable income for the first few years. They had a dip in 2006, which I guess is when the replacement of the Controller I with the Controller II happened.”

  Priya said, “Yes, didn’t Valerie say they didn’t have a good return because it was offered at a deep discount to make sure the Controller I was replaced? That seems a bit unusual to me.”

  Reyna nodded. “It would be. The Controller II didn’t have to go through the full clinical trials because it was substantially equivalent to the Controller I. However, it is still strange that it would be offered at a discount to clinics. So someone had to have made the decision and pushed it through despite the financial consequences. Who makes the decisions? Gerry is more the research man while Valerie deals with the financials. Daniel dealt with the medical side. But it would be the marketing people and the administrators in TechMed that would normally have the power to make that decision.”

  “So, who owns TechMed?”

  Reyna shook her head. “I don’t know. I was never involved in dealings with them. Anything related to them was kept under lock and key in my grandfather’s study. From what I’ve studied about the industry, there are two huge players, both with facilities in Galway, and some smaller ones. TechMed Devices seems to have come out of nowhere and set up its manufacturing plant in the States despite the obvious benefits offered by Galway. It is still under private ownership, it never floated on the stock market so getting information on it is going to be difficult. It captured a large share of the global market for that particular class of pacemaker, but because it only has that one pacemaker product and the associated controllers, it would not be anywhere near the same scale of the other players.”

  Priya said, “And it is very dependent on one product then.”

  Reyna nodded.

  Priya continued, “So, if there was a problem with the Controller I and it had to be recalled, that would affect confidence in the pacemaker. As it is, we just know about the two deaths and one heart attack. We think it is the Controller. But it could be the pacemaker too. We are assuming that there have been no incidents after the Controller II with the software patch was used. But even if the pacemaker turned out to be completely blameless, there would be a huge loss of confidence in it. And considering what the recall of one family of products did to the profits of the leading player despite its huge range of products, if TechMed knew of this problem with the Controller and the potential impact on their only pacemaker product…”

  Catherine said, her voice brimming with anger, “That would be the end of TechMed and their millions of dollars. And enough of an incentive to murder my son.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Priya decided to go early to Michael’s apartment. Reyna and Catherine had left taking the box of financials and they had arranged to come back to Priya’s house the next day. Reyna was going to try to find out what she could at the dinner with Gerry and Valerie that night. Priya could not sit, could not study the figures. The thought of Reyna with Valerie kept intruding. Priya had gotten ready automatically and decided as she was leaving to stuff her PhD papers in with the other papers in her briefcase. The car would be locked and closer to her.

  It was the last Saturday evening of the Arts Festival and the weekend before the Galway Races, one of the busiest nights of the year in Galway. She could not find a free parking space in town despite driving around the Spanish Arch area for twenty minutes. There were spaces available at the Jury’s hotel, which hulked at the end of Quay Street, in its underground car park with its corners that a bicycle would have difficulty navigating. She hated the car park, but she had no choice, she knew she was lucky
to find a space at all. She left the car there and walked the hundred yards to Michael’s apartment building her jacket slung over her shoulder. The main street through Galway, Shop Street, trailed off and became Quay Street, which had become the Latin Quarter of Galway, a street lined with tourist shops and bars and cafes and restaurants with their maroon and blue and yellow awnings over the stone buildings, the creams and reds of the painted facades. The packed street was starting to empty into the pubs and restaurants.

  She turned into the alleyway that ran along Michael’s building. She tried the door expecting him to have left it unlatched for her. A little surprised to find it locked, she used her key. The staircase was ancient, its two ends twisted in opposite directions. She felt for the light switch in the relative gloom of the stairwell. The light bulb sprang to life shoving away the shadows and she relaxed. As she turned in the twist of the staircase she saw that Michael’s door was closed as well. She was fumbling for the key as she climbed the last few steps. The key turned and she pushed the door open.

  It was quiet. She found that strange and she felt reluctant to break the silence. The lights were not on in the apartment. The late evening sun sneaking in through the windows cast its fading light onto the dark wood floors and carried in the sound of laughter from the street below.

  She was about to step into the apartment when she saw a shoe sticking out from behind the couch. Which was also strange as Michael was so tidy. But it looked like it had a foot in it. She moved slowly towards the couch and around it. Michael was lying on his back, his eyes open, his lips blue, his hair clumped brown around his face. Her eyes continued to take in impressions; the knife sticking out of his chest, the handle familiar, the stain on his concert shirt. She’d given him that too. Funny, she seemed to have gotten him many things that he wore, or used. Her heart had slowed and she felt every painful thud like a stone dropping into a well, heard her heart beat in the deep well. So this is what my patients feel, bradycardia, a slow heart rate, am I going to faint? Another part of her mind was wondering how she could be thinking of such things when Michael lay there. And the smallest part of her mind just screamed his name over and over and over. And then over the roaring hiss of the screams in her head, her ears suddenly became aware of sounds from the bedroom. Her head turned and her eyes moved, still and sluggish, towards the bedroom. Her body was backing away, closer to the open door of the apartment. A man appeared at the door to Michael’s bedroom. He was short and tanned and he was wearing luminous yellow rubber gloves. His expression went from searching to shocked when he saw her standing half-in, half-out of the apartment. It was only a fleeting expression of surprise. The look in his eyes changed to those of a predator catching its first glimpse of its prey and the searing jolt of adrenaline jump-started her heart and she turned and ran.