The Delta Factor

by Thomas Locke

  “There shouldn’t be more than a handful of media hounds,” Whitehurst soothed. “We kept the invitations to a very few people only.”

  “Hard to say how many exactly,” Cofield warned. “Things like this tend to spread through the press like wildfire.”

  “A dozen at most,” Whitehurst assured her, and rose to his feet. “What say we meet back here and go down together?”

  * * *

  There were two fist fights and a dozen bruised egos before the higher-ups admitted the conference room was too small. The press conference was delayed an hour for the auditorium to be prepared, for tempers to be cooled, and coffee to be served.

  Dr. Cofield opened and directed his address specifically to the scientific journalists, which meant he talked over the heads of the popular press. Whitehurst watched in horror as the initial hostility returned in force. He sat there and visualized the kind of coverage that would be generated.

  Finally he could bear it no longer. He stood and moved up beside Cofield, and said into the microphone, “Thank you very much, Dr. Harvey Cofield, for that most engaging introduction. Now perhaps we should allow Dr. Deborah Givens to proceed.”

  Deborah jerked in surprise. She had not expected to speak at all. Feeding piranha would normally be easier to disengage than Harvey Cofield from a microphone.

  Whitehurst realized he had just made a major gaff by the venomous look Cofield shot him. But it was too late to turn back. “After all,” he said, smiling nervously. “It was Dr. Givens who made this discovery.”

  Deborah hid her grin by lowering her head. Another glorious blooper. Cofield would be fit to be tied.

  “Dr. Givens?”

  Deborah pushed herself erect and walked toward the microphone. She had left her wheelchair to one side of the stage, but now she wondered if that had been such a good idea. She was feeling increasingly weary. But no time to worry about that now. Deborah rubbed her nose hard to cover her smile as Cofield spat a little venom her way on his way back to his chair.

  She approached the microphone, smiled briefly, and said, “Good morning.”

  “For several generations,” she went on, “Central Europeans have been taking a root extract called echiniacin—”

  “How do you spell that?” someone called out.

  She did so, then went on, “Echiniacin was said to strengthen the immune system. Some doctors scoffed at it, while others swore by it. The reasons are obvious.”

  “Maybe to you,” muttered someone in the front row.

  Deborah kept her cool. “We have well-established lab methods for measuring how well a particular substance acts in fighting a particular illness once the ailment has been identified. There is no way, however, for us to prove that a solution might prevent a certain individual from contracting a specific disease. None whatsoever.”

  “Can you explain that?” called a voice from the back.

  Whitehurst rose from his chair to call for order. Deborah stopped him with an upraised hand. When the exec had subsided, she said, “Okay. Let’s say for example that from a thousand healthy people, an average of seventy-five will suffer from one form of cancer or another within a twenty-year period. Any test of a preventative medicine would be inconclusive, even if we found a thousand people willing to report to our lab every morning for twenty years so that a technician could give them a dose and record the data. Remember, these would all have to be healthy people, so there would be no illness as an impetus to their being willing subjects. No, strike that, there would have to be two thousand. We would need a control group taking a placebo to ensure reliability.”

  “A what?” called an impatient voice.

  “Placebo,” Deborah repeated. “Usually a water-sugar solution, something to make sure that the medicine itself and not the act of taking a medicine has made the difference. For instance, having to show up every day at a lab may make the subjects more conscious of their health, so they might stop smoking and drinking and eat a more balanced diet. That sort of thing. As I was saying, though, even if we could do this type of study, the results would be inconclusive.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged and felt a sudden wave of fatigue rise with the movement. “Because we would have no way of knowing who out of that thousand would have developed the illness without the drug. Maybe we chose the wrong segment of the population. Maybe a hundred different reasons. The only way to be sure that a group might have become cancerous would be by starting the experiment with all participants already ill. And then, of course, we would no longer be studying prevention.”

  There was a pause, then someone asked, “So what did you do in your testing?”

  “Instead of trying to study how to keep healthy people healthy, we studied the drug’s effect on viruses. We restricted our initial studies to infected patients.”

  “And?”

  “We managed to identify several potentially active ingredients within the echin root,” Deborah replied. “And by recombinant DNA experimentation we raised their potency through growing new strains of the plant.”

  Deborah shifted to ease the growing ache in the back of her neck. She knew she had lost some of the journalists on that last stretch, but she did not have the energy to explain herself. “Our initial findings indicate that the concentrated solution retards the growth of virus-related illnesses.”

  There was a moment’s stunned silence, then a roar of demanding queries.

  “All viruses?”

  “We have only worked about a dozen viruses so far,” Deborah answered, struggling to keep her voice steady. “And not all subjects have been healed. But the natural progression of the virus-related illness appears to have been curtailed, or perhaps even stopped.”

  “Does this mean you’ve found a cure for the common cold?”

  “No cures,” she said. “Remember, we are talking about prevention here.”

  “What about AIDS?”

  “No evidence on that one yet.” Suddenly Deborah visualized all her remaining energy being sucked down an open drain. “All we can say at the moment is that if a person were to take this solution on a regular basis, it appears that they would be much less likely—”

  Suddenly Whitehurst was there at her elbow. “I believe we should wait to discuss our specific findings once all the results are in,” he said, forcing the words around a pasted-on smile.

  Deborah was only too happy to relinquish the podium. “Thank you,” she said to the mike, then walked on faltering legs toward her wheelchair. Camera flashes lit her way like a flickering strobe.

  2

  Cliff Devon closed the door on the organized clutter of his office and said to his secretary, “I won’t be in this afternoon.”

  “I know,” Madge answered, her voice filed to a raspy edge by heavy doses of cigarettes and city life. The ruling that ended all smoking in federal buildings had been a tough one on old Madge, but she wasn’t a quitter. Her desk bore a massive five-year calendar, which she was halfway through on the way to winning her very own thirty-year pension. She asked, “You get the okay from Sandra?”

  “Yes.” Sandra was his boss and the scourge of Cliff’s existence, an overly ambitious climber of the federal power ladder.

  “Let’s see, that Pharmacon facility is in Edenton, right?”

  Cliff nodded. “Have you ever been there?”

  “Don’t need to.” Madge could sneer better than anyone Cliff knew. “You seen one dull little Southern town, you’ve seen them all. It hasn’t changed a bit since the Civil War and has the population of a small petting zoo. The inhabitants all bear striking resemblances to each other.”

  “You’re always such a ray of sunshine,” Cliff said.

  “No mall, no nightlife, no liquor by the drink. A Baptist’s idea of heaven.” Madge gave him her smug little smirk and added, “Enjoy.”

  Just outside his doorway, Cliff ran into Ralph Summers, Sandra’s boss and the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s division dealing with applications
for new drugs. “Sandra tells me you’re off to see a friend at Pharmacon this weekend.”

  “That’s right.” Cliff was hardly surprised to hear that Sandra had checked with the higher-ups before giving her okay. Sandra checked the political winds before blowing her nose.

  “I assume you have run it by their coordinator down there. Who is it, by the way?”

  “Cofield,” Cliff replied. “Harvey Cofield. He’s supposedly their research director, but this discovery caught everybody by surprise. He’s handling the application personally. I guess the new facility doesn’t have its coordinating team in place, and something this big he wanted to cook at home.”

  All the major pharmaceutical companies, Pharmacon included, had teams whose sole purpose was to steer new drug applications through the FDA maze. Cliff had met Cofield on several occasions and decided Harvey Cofield was a true control freak.

  Ralph Summers asked, “Who is this friend of yours?”

  “Dr. Deborah Givens. We met when I was in college. She’s one of Pharmacon’s top researchers.”

  Summers scrunched his forehead in concentration. “Haven’t I seen her name somewhere lately?”

  Cliff could not help but be impressed. The man dealt with more than two hundred drug-approval applications per year, most listing as many as sixty researchers as co-discoverers. “Her team came up with that immune-system strengthener they’ve got undergoing clinical trials in Norfolk.”

  “That’s it. You’re handling that application, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Cofield is letting you traipse around on your own?”

  Cliff grinned. “I think Debs can handle Cofield.”

  “Well, just be sure you don’t let them host you in any way that might look questionable under scrutiny.”

  “Don’t worry.” Cliff genuinely liked Ralph Summers. He was a political appointee, but one who tried hard to do his job well and keep his cumbersome operation moving ahead as swiftly as any federal operation possibly could. “I’ll pay for everything out of my own pocket. I’ve already talked to Deborah about that.”

  “Fine.” Summers gave him a friendly nod. “You should have an enjoyable weekend. From what I hear, that new Pharmacon facility is really something else.”

  The Food and Drug Administration occupied one large portion of the federal rabbit warren in Rockville, Maryland, situated about an hour’s drive north of Washington, D.C. The building housed various departments of Health and Human Services of which the FDA was one. Almost six thousand people worked in the concrete beehive. His first week on the job, Cliff had gotten lost between the main entrance and his office, then again between his office and the cafeteria—even finding the restroom had been a major feat. The FDA building was about as user-friendly as a tax form.

  The elevator doors were closing when a munchkin-sized co-worker squeaked inside. “Made it!”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Cliff said. “Where do you buy those ties?”

  Horace Tweedie touched his trademark red bow tie. “State secret.”

  Cliff nodded amiably. Horace held some job in filing—he forgot exactly what. He had a reputation as a purebred grouch, but Cliff managed to get along with him fairly well. Cliff was able to get along with about anyone. Except, that is, with his boss. “Got big plans for the weekend, Horace?”

  The little man ran a hand over his graying crewcut. “Plan to work in my garden if the weather stays nice. You off on your trip? Where was it you’re going?”

  “Edenton, North Carolina,” Cliff replied, no longer amazed at the trivia passed along in federal gossip. There was an invisible network akin to jungle drums that somebody had forgotten to teach him during his indoctrination. “I have a friend who works at Pharmacon’s new facility.”

  “Take it easy,” Horace told him as the doors opened on the ground floor. “I don’t envy you, out in Friday afternoon traffic.”

  “That’s why I’m leaving now.” Cliff gave him a friendly smile and headed for the front door. He faltered momentarily when the backside of a familiar head appeared at the coffee shop’s counter. He then speeded up as fast as humanly possible without actually breaking into a run.

  He almost made the main doors before a voice called out, “Oh, Cliff.”

  He heaved a silent groan and swung around. “Hello, Sandra.”

  A meticulously made-up woman tap-tapped her high heels down the corridor toward him. Sandra Walters was a dedicated soldier in the endless battle with middle age. She swore by every diet book that hit the New York Times bestseller list. She owned every exercise machine known to modern science and used them all. She biked, she jogged, she rowed, she climbed stairs, all without leaving the comfort of her basement. Cliff knew this because she bragged every morning about just how far she had not gone.

  To Cliff’s mind, Sandra Walters represented everything that was wrong with the federal government. Her hours were filled with schemes and plots and intrigues, none of which had anything to do with serving the people who paid her salary. She saw everyone with whom she worked from the standpoint of what they could do for her. Big names got the big hellos, potentially useful up-and-comers got the schmooze, peons got the heel of her high-powered pumps. She made a big production out of everything. Cliff thought she was meant for the stage.

  She stopped in front of him. “I see you are leaving early.”

  “Just like I said,” he agreed. “Three different times.”

  “Be sure and dock the extra hours from your vacation time.”

  “I already did.”

  “Oh, I meant to tell you.” A blood-red fingernail adjusted one earring. “Ralph finally approved your going down this weekend. I really had to twist his arm on this. He was incredibly opposed to the whole idea, but I eventually talked him into seeing things my way. You owe me big time on this one.”

  “Funny,” Cliff replied. “I just spoke with Ralph, and he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by my trip.”

  Anger flared at being caught out. “You talked with Ralph directly?”

  “I’m a big boy, Sandra. I can talk with whoever I like.”

  “You’ll go through proper channels like everyone else, mister, or you’ll wind up in hot water. Again.” She wheeled around and tap-tapped away.

  Cliff gave her back a little two-finger wave and called out, “I hope you have a nice weekend too, Sandra.”

  He started for the doors once again, not bothering to hide his smile. A solid base hit for the home team.

  * * *

  A sliver of light pierced the darkness. “Debs?”

  She worked her way up through several layers of sleep. “Yes?”

  “Can I turn on the light?”

  Deborah struggled to sit upright. “Go ahead.”

  The light showed a very concerned Blair. She looked into the basement chamber which the techies had furnished with thrift-shop furniture and claimed as a sort of unofficial parlor, away from the bean counters’ prying eyes. “Are you all right?”

  Deborah did a swift internal inventory and was delighted to reply, “I am now. What time is it?”

  “Almost two. Are you hungry?”

  “Starved. Haven’t you eaten?”

  Blair shook her head. “They had a load of work for me to do, all of it urgent. Most of them are all huddled together discussing the future of your project. Don’t you think you’d better be up there keeping the bean counters in order?”

  “Not hardly. And you better watch it,” Deborah said, rising to her feet from the battered old sofa. “You’re beginning to sound like a techie.”

  “Do you need your wheelchair?”

  “No, it looks like the attack has really and truly passed.” She followed Blair into the hallway. “Where do you want to go?”

  “How about the usual?”

  “Sounds good. I’ll drive.”

  Dr. Cofield’s new secretary was the talk of the entire laboratory section, especially among the males. Initially Deborah
had assumed with the others that Harvey Cofield had offered the position to Blair precisely two and one-half seconds after she had opened his outer office door.

  Women who had the ability to reduce men to drooling idiots had long aroused Deborah’s deepest suspicions. But the week before, after Blair had been on the job for ten days, Deborah had found herself facing an impossible deadline. Cofield had been off at some conference, Deborah’s own secretary had been sick, the files had been lost, and things had been generally coming apart at the seams. In panic she had asked Blair for help, and Blair had proved to be as efficient as she was beautiful. She typed well over a hundred words a minute, had a memory like a mainframe, and relished challenges. She also brooked no nonsense whatsoever from any of the men who ventured near her office. Beneath that honey-coated Tidewater accent rested a perception as keen as a surgeon’s scalpel and a patience as thin as piano wire.

  Since the deadline scramble, Deborah and Blair had made it out for a lunch and a dinner together. To their mutual surprise and pleasure, a friendship appeared to be in the making.

  “I don’t understand your illness at all,” Blair confessed.

  “Join the club,” Deborah said. She wheeled the jeep into a parking lot beside an antebellum mansion. “Multiple sclerosis isn’t something anyone understands. You just endure it.”

  The Peterby Country Cafe was a hidden surprise in the countryside near Edenton. A Chicago couple had fallen in love with the scenery surrounding Carolina’s Inland Waterway and opened a city-style eatery in the mansion’s two front rooms. Blair had heard about it from her aunt, with whom she lived in Edenton. She and Deborah had tried it for the first time together and immediately claimed it as their own.

  As they walked toward the entrance, Blair said, “I just feel like a friend ought to have a better handle on something this important.”

  Deborah smiled her thanks. “The best description I can give you is in a name they gave MS a while back. They called it the invisible disease. There are no symptoms that anyone can see, and even the internal symptoms vary so widely that experts cannot always pinpoint the cause.”