by Steven James
When I called Ralph, he informed me that Tessa was still in bed, which I was thankful for. After last night, she definitely needed the sleep.
I said to Ralph, “We have a few things to look into.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I want someone to talk with the owners of the car Basque drove to the plant, the apartment he used, and the garage where he left her car, as well as the people who work at the water treatment plant to see if anyone has seen him around there before. Find out aliases he might have used, forwarding addresses, phone numbers, the whole nine.”
“Right.” There was a pause and I assumed he was jotting down a few notes. “Hey, let me ask you something. Were you afraid of going in there after Basque last night? Heading into that plant alone?”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t Basque, was it.” It sounded more like a conclusion than a question. “Facing him wasn’t what you were afraid of.”
“Not primarily, no.”
“It was what you were going to do to him if you got him alone.”
That was partially true too. “You know, mostly I was afraid I wouldn’t catch him, that I wouldn’t stop him before he could escape to kill again.” Since I’d failed, we both processed the implications for a moment. “What about you?” I asked. “Would you have been afraid to go in there?”
“I eat the smell of fear for breakfast.”
“You eat the . . . ? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Maybe not, but it’d be a great line for a movie.”
Ralph was a huge fan of summer blockbuster films where guys his size pound aliens to a pulp, unleash wicked weapons at terrorists, and blow up secret hideouts to save the world, so his observation didn’t exactly surprise me.
“Let’s put this stuff into play,” I said, “see where it leads us.”
Returning to the awkwardly uncomfortable chair that I’d done my best to sleep in last night, I pulled up the video footage Angela had sent me. While Lien-hua rested, I traced the path Basque took yesterday to see if I could notice anything at all that might lead us to him.
19
7:54 p.m. India Standard Time
Baahir had been right.
With traffic and road conditions that were—to say the least—less than ideal, the drive to Kadapa took nearly four and a half hours.
When they arrived, Keith was definitely ready to be done traveling.
Vanessa ordered Baahir to park on the edge of town, just down the road from the slum where Keith and Vanessa had first tested the drugs to make sure they were effective. She told Baahir to keep his mobile on—that she would call him when she needed him—then she led Keith through the narrow, winding alley to the building.
The guard beside the door immediately recognized them and swung open the gate with a deferential nod.
Vanessa did not acknowledge him.
Keith proceeded with her inside.
The factory, if you could call it that, was small, but ever since his first time there, he’d been impressed with what they were able to accomplish.
It doesn’t take a lot of space or an elaborate setup to manufacture impressive quantities of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. As Keith had found out when all this got started, everywhere around the world people are producing pills by the millions in squalid apartments, warehouses, and back rooms.
You just need enough of the ingredients of the actual drug to avoid immediate detection (actually, with some cheaper drugs you don’t even need that), a few other ingredients to create the right consistency, a packaging machine, silk screens to imprint the logo of the name-brand pharmaceutical on the foil blister packs, and you’re ready to go into business.
Here, there were a dozen tables holding containers of pills and chemicals. Other tables held bottles, labeling equipment, and blister packs to produce the packaging. There were two ultra-high-end printers in the corner that could produce the imprinted 3-D holograms necessary for the packages for Calydrole, PTPharmaceuticals’ hallmark depression medication, to make them appear authentic.
Boxes containing tens of thousands of caplets and pills were piled against the wall to Keith’s left, waiting to be shipped.
Nobody produces a single counterfeit pill; the typical batch size is about fifty thousand. Despite this facility’s size, the workers were quite proficient and could produce nearly forty thousand pills each week. Not all were counterfeit Calydrole pills, but there were seventy thousand or so of them from the last couple months boxed up along the walls, ready for their blister packs.
Over the last decade, counterfeit pharmaceuticals had become one of the most lucrative commodities in the world. Produce a pill for less than fifty cents and sell it for, in the case of some cancer and HIV drugs, over forty-five dollars, and it was clear why.
That profit margin, along with the low risk of being caught, the slap-on-the-wrist sentences if you were, and the ease of distribution—just mail the pills to people who ordered them through Web sites that were designed to look like legitimate pharmacies—and it was no mystery why it was an eighty-billion-dollar-a-year industry, or why it was growing by twenty percent every year.
Because of the low-risk/high-reward ratio, many Asian gangs, the Russian Mafia, and some of the drug cartels in South America were switching from producing, selling, and distributing illegal drugs and controlled substances, to counterfeit pharmaceuticals.
Looking at the bottom line, there wasn’t much of a question about which choice made more financial sense.
Most Americans have no idea that eighty percent of the active ingredient in the drugs they buy comes from overseas and more than forty percent of the drugs are manufactured abroad. Only a fraction of those factories are ever inspected by the FDA, and the pharmaceutical supply chain in North America isn’t secure. At least five percent of the drugs used by U.S. consumers are counterfeit.
Which meant that at any given time, eight million U.S. citizens were unknowingly taking counterfeit drugs.
Unsuspecting consumers order off the Internet thinking they’re just saving money, never realizing that they might very well be purchasing drugs containing sawdust, floor wax, insect parts, chalk, industrial lubricants, brick dust from cement mixtures, paint, heavy metals, boric acid, or safrole—which is used to make Ecstasy.
Keith tended to overestimate people, but still he found it hard to believe that anyone would be foolish enough to order lifesaving medication from Web sites that don’t require a prescription or a doctor’s visit, or from sites that offer name-brand drugs at seventy percent off. If an offer is too good to be true, it almost always is. And yet Americans still used those pills. By the millions.
It was ironic to him, in a tragic sort of way: people in America will complain vociferously to their maître d’ if there’s a human hair touching their pasta, but will ingest hundreds of pills a year that were produced using water polluted with human waste without ever giving their legitimacy a second thought.
So far, counterfeit versions of more than four hundred different drugs had been found in more than a hundred different countries, including twenty of the world’s top-twenty-five bestselling drugs—two of which were produced in this very room.
• • •
Now, at this time of day, only two people were here—Eashan and Jagjeevan. Keith had never been able to pronounce—or remember—their last names, so he didn’t even try. Actually, it was confusing, because in India people sometimes told you their surnames first and sometimes they didn’t, so he just stuck to the names he knew.
Eashan, a slim, twitchy man who made Keith think of a fox, was in charge of the facility. Jagjeevan, who was husky, quiet, and wore a dark, bushy mustache, stood nearby, printing out labels that the women who worked here would be using in the morning when they came in.
The women had all been told that the drugs being produced here were
authentic, but almost certainly they knew the truth. However, with the scarcity of jobs in the area—especially for women—Keith and Vanessa were confident that they wouldn’t say anything to anyone. Career choices for women were pretty much limited to being a seamstress or working at a factory that produced goods for Westerners. Although some women, of course, had been forced into becoming street workers—that is, prostitutes—by family members.
The women who worked here were paid well to keep quiet about the specifics of their jobs.
But Keith and Vanessa had also paid off the local police, just in case.
Vanessa was a lawyer, but ever since Keith had known her, she’d only shown interest in circumventing the law, not operating inside it. The situation begged for a punch line about lawyers, but Vanessa was not a woman with a robust sense of humor and Keith had never been tempted to joke around with her about it.
• • •
When the two of them entered the room, Keith noticed Eashan gulp, and he took that to be a bad sign—perhaps the drugs weren’t ready to be shipped. But of course, that was primarily the reason they were here.
Primarily.
The products’ readiness to be shipped to America.
Eashan approached them and gave them a polite, albeit reserved, greeting. Jagjeevan nodded heavily to them but said nothing.
Vanessa didn’t waste any time. “We have a problem and we’ve come here to address it.”
“A problem?” Eashan said. “No. There is no—”
“Yes”—she produced two boxes and laid them on the table—“there is. See if you can tell me which is legitimate.”
“That’s not my specialty. I’m not an expert at—”
“Look at the holograms, Eashan.”
After a moment, he picked up the two boxes and inspected them. Even as he continued to object, claiming that he couldn’t tell, it didn’t take him long to identify which of the two boxes was the counterfeit one.
“The detail?” he said nervously. “Is that it?”
“Good for you. You have gifts you weren’t even aware of. The name of the drug company in the foreground of the hologram isn’t as well-defined.”
“I—”
“This will never pass an inspection by either PTPharmaceuticals or the FDA, not even a cursory one. Even pharmacists and doctors will be able to tell them apart. I thought we had this fixed?”
“I . . . I mean, we did. We do. Maybe this box is an earlier attempt.”
“It is not.”
Keith noticed Eashan’s fingers tremble as he asked, “What would you like me to do?”
“It needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed now. The shipment is supposed to be on the plane that leaves on Tuesday.” She nodded toward the boxes containing the counterfeit Calydrole. “Those drugs enter the supply chain on Friday.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Don’t tell me you know. If you knew, you wouldn’t have been so careless as to print these labels.” She threw the box against his chest. “And our employer would not have sent us here to assure that you fix things.”
“Miss Juliusson, that is not enough time to recalibrate the machine and print all the—”
“I’m afraid it is going to be enough time.”
“But those labels were designed in Hyderabad.” He indicated the printing press in the corner. “We don’t have the technology here to redesign it. All we do is print them.”
“I am well aware. Of the process. We go through. To print the labels.”
Almost imperceptibly, Eashan swallowed. “Yes, of course.” But then he paused. He had something more to say. “You could have called, perhaps, saved yourself the trip. And . . .”
“And?”
“And . . . forgive me for saying so, but did you come all this way just to tell me to fix this?”
“No.” She walked to the door, closed it, and locked it. Keith removed the pruning shears from his pocket. Both Eashan and Jagjeevan froze. Vanessa said, “We came all this way to punish you if you do not.”
Eashan cast a look toward Jagjeevan and the big man reached for his jacket pocket, but Keith was too quick for him. He was on him in an instant. He grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted it backward to control him, and had him on his knees before he could get the gun out.
Setting down the pruning shears for a moment, Keith retrieved the gun, tossed it to Vanessa, then took the shears and positioned them carefully around the base of Jagjeevan’s left ear, encircling the place where it attached to the side of his head.
He began to cry out for Keith to stop, not to do it, that he was sorry.
“Be quiet now, Jagjeevan,” Keith said to him. “Or your ear is going to end up on the floor.”
Properly motivated, the man managed to stifle his cries.
Vanessa directed the gun at Eashan’s right kneecap.
“No!” he cried.
She didn’t fire, but instead gestured toward Keith. “You do know what my associate did to Caleb three weeks ago? How things turned out for his wife and children?”
Eashan was stone silent. Jagjeevan begged again, this time reverting to Hindi, and Keith told him once more to hush, then squeezed the shears just enough to convince him to obey.
“It’s after office hours, ma’am.” Eashan was shaking. “We’ll have to wait until morning to make the calls and get started.”
She handed him her mobile phone. “Get started now. Either that, or we’ll get started with the pruning shears. On both of you.”
20
The morning passed and Lien-hua slept.
Saundra Weathers did not return my call, which worried me somewhat, but if she and her daughter had gone camping, it did make sense that she wouldn’t be checking her messages.
The team didn’t find any clue as to Basque’s whereabouts. However, inputting the sites from the video footage and using FALCON and my geographic profiling algorithms, I did come up with three possible hot zones Basque might be working out of.
One was in southeast DC; the second, about five miles north of the city; the third, twelve miles east of us past Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility, which most people around here still refer to as Andrews Air Force Base, or simply Andrews.
Distance decay refers to the diminishing likelihood of someone committing a crime as the distance from his anchor point and his awareness space surrounding it increases. Depending on the distance decay values I used for the calculations, the three areas came up with differing degrees of probability.
Just before noon, Lien-hua woke up and we made a few necessary phone calls to members of our families.
Last night I hadn’t taken the time to notify our relatives about what had happened, but I found out that Brineesha had sent out e-mails this morning. Fortunately, she hadn’t Facebooked about it or else I could only imagine how much we would have been inundated with messages.
As it was, I had received e-mail messages from Lien-hua’s two brothers, my parents, and my brother, all urgently asking how she was.
I’d sent them brief replies, but now Lien-hua suggested it would be best to talk with them.
Both of Lien-hua’s parents were dead—her mother from a car accident four years ago, her father from a heart attack a year before that. Her two brothers—Nianzu, who worked as a software designer in Beijing, and Huang-fu, a veterinarian who lived in the Houston area—both e-mailed that they would be glad to fly over here to be with her.
She wasn’t keen on the idea and arranged a three-way video chat on my phone—which was necessary, since Huang-fu had been born deaf.
Using both verbal communication and sign language she tried to convince her brothers that she was going to be okay, and that since they were both coming to her wedding next month, they didn’t need to come now. “Really, I’m going to be alright,” she signed. “There’s no need for you to fly in
.”
Huang-fu’s wife had recently left him, and he had sole custody of their young daughter. He was easier to convince than Nianzu, who definitely had the money to make two separate trips to the States, but at last Lien-hua was able to fend off his rebuttals and persuade him that she would be okay.
My parents, who lived in Denver, also offered to come to DC if there was anything we needed. I told them honestly that I would let them know if anything specific came up, but that for the time being we were fine.
Then it was time to contact Sean and Amber.
My brother, Sean, is an avid outdoorsman, doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s in the woods—or really, anytime—and doesn’t own a cell phone, so I dialed his wife, Amber, to tell her what was going on and waited somewhat anxiously for her to pick up.
My conversations with her were always a little bit stilted and awkward. Back when she and Sean were engaged—before I’d ever met Christie or Lien-hua—Amber and I had gotten a little too close. Nothing physical, but sometimes emotional affairs are harder to break off than physical ones.
Even after her marriage to Sean, our feelings for each other hadn’t evaporated immediately, and I’d had to categorically break things off with her for everyone’s sake.
At the time Sean never knew about it, and it seemed like telling him would’ve only hurt him, so neither Amber nor I had ever brought it up.
However, everything came out in the open last winter. At first it looked like the truth might rip their marriage apart, but in the end Sean accepted Amber’s apology and mine—after landing a fist that I deserved against my jaw—and providentially he and I were closer now than we’d been in years.
There wasn’t anything between Amber and me anymore, but still, we were both careful to keep a little distance between us so that no one got the wrong impression.
She picked up, I told her what was going on, and after she’d spoken with Lien-hua, I asked if Sean was there.
“He just got back from the shooting range. He’s out in the garage cleaning his gun. Do you want me to fill him in?”