The Delta Factor

by Thomas Locke

  “We’ll see about that,” Cofield snapped.

  “We certainly shall,” Cliff agreed, and decided he had just about had enough. He rose to his feet. “Anything else?”

  “Well, it certainly has been delightful to meet you, Mr. Devon,” Whitehurst said, rising with the others. “Now don’t you forget—anything you need, anything at all. Debs knows where to reach me night or day.”

  Cliff allowed Deborah to usher him out. When the doors were shut behind them, he stood and fumed, “You know those lower life forms you use in the labs? I think some of them escaped.”

  To his surprise, it was Blair Collins who responded. “He’ll do,” she announced to Deborah. “Okay for tomorrow night at seven?”

  “Perfect,” Deborah replied, and took his arm. “Come along, dear. You’re steaming up the windows.”

  * * *

  Daylight was just beginning to wane when Horace Tweedie showed up in front of the U.S. Patent Office headquarters in Washington. The air still smelled of its city imprisonment, hot and muggy and acrid. Ted Kelley was outside waiting for him, nervous as a new recruit arriving at boot camp. As soon as Horace’s car pulled up, Ted raced over and tried to crawl in through the side window. “What took you so long?” he hissed, dancing in place. “You’re almost half an hour late.”

  “Friday rush-hour traffic,” Horace replied, rolling toward a curbside parking place. He climbed from the car, clapped a hand on Ted’s shoulder, grinned broadly, and said in a quiet voice, “Calm down. You don’t want anybody to get suspicious, do you?”

  “I don’t know if I want to do this at all.”

  “That’s okay,” Horace said amiably, knowing the guy had to be nursed. His poker buddy was a gambler, mostly small stakes, but a lot of them. And he lost. Almost always. Like many gamblers, Ted gambled to reinforce his own self-hatred, something best accomplished by placing bets that had almost no chance of succeeding.

  Horace hated playing poker with Kelley. He didn’t like watching him gradually melt into a sweaty little puddle as he overbet and lost hand after hand, trying time and time again to fill inside straights and flushes missing two cards. The guy rarely lost more than a couple hundred, but for him it was almost a nightly ritual. Not to mention the football pools and the basketball and the golf and the hockey and anything else he could find to bet on.

  Needless to say, Kelley was perpetually in debt. And to the wrong sort of creditors. Ones who insisted on being paid. Insisted in the strongest possible terms.

  So Horace played it cool like he was still at the poker table with this guy. “It was just an idea. They really don’t need the information right now, and I’ll have it on file myself in a month or so.”

  Then he started back toward the car, his heart tripping a frantic beat.

  “No, wait.” Ted’s hand was on his elbow.

  Horace breathed a silent sigh and allowed himself to be turned back. “Yeah?”

  “I guess it’s okay.” The furtive glance up and down the street, then, “You got the money?”

  “Of course.”

  Shoulders hunched even further. “Can’t you ask for more? You know it’s worth a lot.”

  Horace made a worried pout. “They’re not the type you can ask for much of anything.”

  “But a lousy thousand bucks. That’s—”

  “A thousand more than you have now,” Horace pointed out.

  Kelley slumped in defeat. Probably thinking about the goons breathing down his neck. “Yeah, okay. Come on, let’s get it over with,” he muttered as he led the way toward the entrance.

  As soon as pharmaceutical companies began work on a new compound, and long before any positive or negative effect could be identified, a patent was applied for. The patent office did not require information as to what effect the product would have. That was the job of the FDA, and as many as five years might pass before final FDA approval was granted. But the only requirement for filing a patent was demonstrating that the product or the process was new.

  With new compounds being designed almost continually by pharmaceutical companies and independent laboratories, a U.S. patent was granted on the basis of two different types of information. The first was the molecular formula of the compound itself. The second was the process of how the compound was produced.

  For all molecular patents, this second type of information was essential because the compound itself was too small to be seen—and in some cases, when the application was made, only a microscopic amount might have been produced. So the production methods had to be spelled out in careful detail. The rule of thumb used by the patent office was, make the explanations so complete that a nonexpert would understand.

  Kelley pasted on a totally false smile as he approached the night-duty guard, an overweight black man engrossed in his crossword puzzle. “Can you believe it? Of all the luck, the boss has got me working Friday night.”

  “Tough,” the bored guard said, not even glancing up.

  Horace signed a false name in the book and felt only disgust for the guy and his nervous chatter. Small-time losers, he thought. I’m surrounded by small-time losers. When Ted wouldn’t shut up, Horace turned and started for the elevators on his own.

  In the elevator, Kelley wiped off the grin with the sweat beading his face. Silently they waited while the floors pinged away, then walked together down the hallway to Ted’s office. The hallway was completely silent. That was why Horace had taken the risk of going ahead and arranging this meeting before talking with the foreigner earlier that day. On Friday afternoons, downtown Washington was a ghost town.

  Kelley had to use both hands to get his key in the door, his hands were shaking so bad. Horace rolled his eyes as the guy did a final up-and-down-the-hall search before waving him inside. Talk about telegraphing the message to the world.

  “Okay,” Ted whispered, sweating so hard his shirt was matting to his back. He pointed a trembling hand at the top file on his desk and said, “I gotta go do something down the hall. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  “No problem,” Horace said, surprised at how calm he felt. Maybe Kelley’s nerves didn’t leave any room for his own. “I’ll leave the envelope in the file,” he said in a low voice.

  “The what?”

  “Envelope,” Horace said, drawing out the word.

  “Oh. Yeah. Right. Well, I’m off.”

  “See ya.” When the door was shut once more, Horace slipped the miniature camera from his pocket. The camera had cost almost as much as the bribe. Small time, Horace thought as he opened the file, arranged the desk lamp for maximum lighting, and began shooting pictures of each page. He would soon be leaving these small-time losers behind for good.

  4

  On Saturday morning, Deborah drove at a slow, steady pace through peaceful Edenton streets. She did not speak much, but allowed Cliff to take in the town bit by bit. Occasionally she would draw his attention to special sights: a pre-Revolutionary home with double balconies large enough to accommodate the entire family on hot nights. A blooming magnolia more than two hundred years old, its branches encompassing almost a quarter of an acre. An entire street of crepe myrtle trees frothing with pink blossoms. A Victorian house whose ground floor boasted seven great windows, each framed in a stained-glass pattern of flowering vines. An old stone house so overgrown with creeping wisteria vines that it looked from a distance to be painted green. Earlier in the spring, Deborah informed him, the whole house bloomed lavender.

  Everything moved slower here. Even the car’s blinkers ticked more deliberately in this small, hot town. There were so few automobiles that drivers greeted each other as they passed. The dogs saluted cars with their waving tails, lapping up the heat with lolling tongues.

  The trees had long since grown high and broad enough to create living canopies over all of Edenton’s streets. Deborah took him down the bayside road under a veil of sun-dappled green. The points of land jutting into the bay were anchored by houses older than the nation that c
laimed them.

  Deborah drove back inland several blocks and stopped before a solid, red-brick church building. She turned off the engine, sat back in her seat, and sighed softly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I had so hoped this weekend would be okay,” she murmured.

  “You’re not feeling well?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She gave her head a tired shake. “Stress can set off attacks, and there’s been a lot of that recently. Plus I was looking forward to your coming and sort of staying up nights thinking of everything I wanted to tell you.”

  “Do you need to rest?”

  “Maybe in a little while. First I need to wait and see what’s happening.” She turned to him. “I’m sorry, Cliff.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “But there was so much I still wanted to show you. The lab, my house, these latest trial results.”

  “This won’t be my only trip down, Debs.”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She let out a breath. “Okay, then we’ll just take this one step at a time. I want to show you around here a little more. I know that may sound silly, but it’s important to me. This little town is sort of becoming the center of my world.”

  “It doesn’t sound silly at all,” Cliff said. “I think the place is beautiful.”

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “This is a great place, Debs. I could learn to love it here. I know it already.” He looked around. “I just can’t help but think, though, that it’s a strange place to be making scientific history.”

  “We may actually be doing that, you know.” She slid from the car with visible effort. “Come on, let me show you the church.”

  She led him across the street at a slow but steady pace. “Scientific revolutions occur when paradigms, the framework we use to study the universe, are overthrown. The discovery of penicillin did this in medicine. A spiritual revolution occurs the same way, but one person at a time.”

  “That’s what has happened to you?” Cliff asked. “A spiritual revolution?”

  She was silent a moment. “It’s interesting to realize that we scientists tend to deal in mass and multitudes. The larger the group, the surer our findings. And yet the all-powerful Being deals with the world one person at a time. That should tell us something, shouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Debs. I’m not even sure what you’re talking about.”

  They passed through ancient wrought-iron gates and entered an old cemetery. “We know for a fact that more than two thousand people are buried here, but we can only account for four hundred graves.”

  “We?” Cliff smiled. “You were born a million light years from this town.”

  “Call me a recent transplant.” Deborah continued down the path. “The church was built over older graves, and there are people buried on top of other people—not hard to do when wooden tombstones had rotted and people fighting an epidemic didn’t have time to bother with records.”

  She stopped before a series of flat markers. “Three of these belong to colonial governors who ruled in the king’s name before independence. Charles Eden, the man this town was named after, was one of them. The first tombstone over there belonged to Mrs. Pollock, wife of another colonial governor. When she died, the governor told the engraver what he wanted written over his wife’s grave. After the tombstone was laid, he came back out to pay his respects, took one look at what the engraver had written, and blew his stack. The engraver had gone into a lot of intimate detail about Mrs. Pollock, things only her husband should have known. The governor decided that while his wife was living she had come to know the engraver a lot better than she should have. So he took a gravedigger’s pick and dug out all the parts he didn’t want anybody else to see. That’s why it’s all cracked like that.”

  “You’ve gotten to know this area pretty well.”

  “Just tapping at the surface,” she said, and led him toward the church. “This is the second oldest church in the state, and it took thirty years to build. Finished in 1766. There was an early law requiring churchgoers to tie their horses at least three hundred feet from the church door. If they didn’t, they were barred from ever holding public office.”

  She pushed open the ancient portal and stepped inside. “In the colonial era, each family would bring a footwarmer to church with them, something like a lidded shovel that held hot coals. The mother and father would place their feet on it, with the children spread down the pew. That was the building’s only heat.”

  Deborah unlatched one of the little gates blocking the pews and ushered Cliff into a seat. “A family would buy a pew and pass it down from generation to generation. The upstairs galleries were sectioned off. They held the servants, transients, and families too poor to afford a family pew. There were a lot of transients here, Edenton being a big port city.”

  “I’ve never been much for history,” Cliff confessed. “But somehow you make this stuff live for me.”

  “Too often people look at history and see only things. I’ve learned to look and see what my own world has lost. They are after a claim for themselves or their family; I am after values that never die. This town is full of people determined to justify their quirks and failings by finding refuge in the past. But there are a few here and there who acknowledge the past because it holds things they wish to keep for today. Blair’s aunt is a good example—I just met her a few days ago. When I discover someone like her, I feel like I’ve uncovered a special treasure.”

  Cliff inspected his friend’s profile and declared, “You’ve changed, Debs. A lot.”

  She did not deny it. “I was born with a restless spirit. And I’ve never minded that in the least. It has driven me to go and hunt and find and do.” She combed fingers through her close-cropped hair, then rubbed her neck. “I’m tired now, Cliff. My mind tells me it’s the disease. But my spirit stays restless. Questing, searching, and now condemning. I am so hard on myself and my weaknesses.”

  “You shouldn’t be.”

  “But I am. I am so ashamed of myself and everything I’m leaving undone.”

  “You can’t help it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I want so much to keep working my twenty-hour days. But I can’t. My restless spirit pushes me hard as ever, but my body stays still and simply says no, I won’t, not any more. The storm threatens to tear me apart sometimes.”

  “Debs—”

  “Wait, let me finish. But something is happening to me. As though all this storm has had a purpose. It has forced me to look beyond myself, beyond the world I have spent my entire life studying and analyzing and trying to control. Now control is lost. Now the power of analysis is gone. And what is left is vision.”

  Cliff shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  “I know. I know. The whole idea is alien. To me, too. I’ve been trained to hold everything at arm’s length, to tie everything down by the empirical method. But I can’t deny the power of my realization. No matter how hard I try.”

  Cliff tried for diplomacy. “It sounds like you’ve found a good source of strength.”

  “Yes, I have. And a reassuring knowledge of being accepted.” Her eyes held a gentle light of seeing beyond the church’s confines. “Warts and restlessness and MS and all.”

  * * *

  Of the luxury hotels lining New York’s Central Park, the Ritz-Carlton was the smallest and least ostentatious. The same was true for its restaurant, the Jockey Club. It looked like the paneled study of an old manor house, and attracted a conservative wealthy clientele. On any given night, at least half the tables were occupied by patrons with paintings on loan to the Guggenheim, the National Gallery, or the MOMA. Conversations were quiet, the service swift and discreet, the prices staggering. The Jockey Club was the sort of place where to ask the price meant not belonging.

  They met there because the chairman of Pharmacon lived in a Central Park triplex just up the street. Owen MacKenzie was a regular and was greeted
with discreet murmurs and bows from the maitre d’. He had ordered the meeting when Whitehurst had called to report on the press conference.

  Whitehurst watched as Cofield took in the surroundings and added them to the list of goodies he wanted for himself. Whitehurst had only contempt for Cofield and his size-fourteen ego. But a man as vain as this one was a man easily controlled, and Whitehurst needed a research director whom he could control. So he put up with the man’s insufferable vanity and his unbridled lust for perks and his drive to remain in the limelight. And he waited. One day his own power would be cemented, and then he could bring out the knife he kept hidden behind his smile.

  Owen MacKenzie wore his face like a comfortable old shoe, well-worn and long broken in. His clothes fitted his face. His suit cost two thousand dollars, yet looked slept in. His tie was canted at a forty degree angle. He continually spilled cigar ash over his sparkling white shirt. His shoes were hand-sewn, yet had never been polished and were scuffed down to the leather.

  Owen MacKenzie knew next to nothing about the pharmaceutical industry. He liked to say that before being offered this job, his only contact with the drug business had been taking two aspirin for a cold. But he was an expert at turning around sluggish companies. His last two employers had been a maker of spark plugs and the nation’s largest producer of tin cans. Then the Pharmacon board had brought him in to inject new life into the company. And Owen MacKenzie had responded by setting up Pharmacon’s new North Carolina facility.

  As was his habit, he kept the conversation light throughout their meal. Only when the plates were cleared away and the snifters of amber liquid set before each gentleman did his face settle into somber lines. “So how did the press conference go?” he demanded.

  “Fairly well,” Whitehurst responded, not looking at his companion. Cofield still had a short fuse on that one. “We managed to excite quite a bit of interest within the general press.”

  “Excellent. Nothing like a few journalistic fires to get the FDA into high gear. Especially if there’s any hint that Joe Public is missing out on a major new relief because of bureaucratic holdups.”