Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  “Who are you calling?” Tim asked when I pulled out the cell phone.

  “Remember the lady we saw in the hospital?” He nodded. “I just want to make sure she’s feeling better.”

  The ward clerk answered the phone, took my name, and found the resident on duty. The hospital had my name as a contact and so the resident was willing to part with information.

  “Transfer orders are in,” the resident told me. “Ms. Michaels went to Sequoia a few hours ago.”

  I got the number from him.

  “What’s the insurance situation?” I asked. Nothing’s scarier than health care bills these days. Fibrosarcoma afoot in the population? Missing TV celebrity? Ha. Try five grand for a transfer between hospitals. That’s terror.

  “Dr. Nathanson came up with some justification. I don’t know if there will be a fight with the insurance company over the transfer or not.”

  I made a note to do something very nice for Jenna. I could always set her up with Ravi, but that had as much chance to be punishment as gift.

  I called Sequoia Hospital—“Who are you calling now?” Tim wanted to know—and confirmed that Brooke had arrived. She was doing well, they said. May even extubate her tomorrow, they said.

  “You make too many phone calls,” Tim observed as I dialed the next number.

  “There are a lot of things going on.”

  “Can I go over there?” He pointed to the railing. I told him not to fall off as I punched the Talk button.

  “You have sent me on a wildest of wild-goose chases, my friend, but I’m about to snare the crafty fowl.” Miles Pikar’s voice cracked over the cell.

  “Good—”

  “But I’m not quite there.”

  “How close?”

  “Don’t know. Best guess is not that long. We got some pretty wily dudes on our hands. Shell corporations, on-and off-shore. Dummy front companies. You’d of thought these guys worked at Enron. One more thing. It seems that one of the companies holds a big interest in…Guess.”

  “Ah, Jesus, you’re going to tell me it’s Tetra, aren’t you?”

  “You are a man of wisdom and prescience, Dr. Nate.”

  I took a mental breather, tried to assimilate this. “Miles, see if you can tie any of this to a man called Garheng Ho and something called the South Chinese Merchants’ Association. It’s a tong in San Francisco.”

  “Tong?”

  “A Chinese-American gang…or, not really a gang. It’s complicated. Look, I’ll try to get back to you later tonight. If I don’t, give Jack Tang at the San Francisco Police Department a call—”

  “Whoa. Whoa. I’m doing this for you, dude. Not for the cops.”

  I wanted to protest, but decided against it. I didn’t want to be responsible for any flack he caught for helping me out. Besides, I was exhausted, loaded down with greasy chalupa, and worried about too many people. “Okay, Miles,” I said, “whatever you want.”

  “That’s it? You letting me off the hook that easily?”

  “You don’t owe anything to me,” I said halfheartedly. “It’s my mess. Besides, the police are working on this. They already know Dragon East is a shell.”

  He laughed. “How long do you think it will take the cops to piece this together? To trap the beast, you have to understand the beast, Doctor, you have to be the beast.”

  I began to see where this was going; I began to see my role in this little waltz. “Don’t be a beast, Miles. Go run your company.”

  “Look, dude, I’m already the beast,” he said, sounding a little deflated. “You know, I started Paladin fifteen years ago. Security stuff for the little man, originally, before we branched into database work. Now, we have contracts with DoD Intelligence, the NSA, some big, privacy-snooping companies. I compromise myself every day I walk into work. I build things that would have made the Stasi proud. Why? Because we got shareholders and we got customers.”

  “Everybody does, I guess.”

  “You know what a paladin is?”

  “Kind of.”

  “He’s a knight. A paragon of virtue and chivalry. We ain’t knights anymore, dude. We play footsie with the devil now.”

  “Even so, this isn’t your problem.”

  “Whether it is or not, I don’t have to compromise on it. I talk a good game, but it’s been a long time since I put my values where my mouth is.”

  “So what do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to twist my arm to do this. Guilt me. Remind me I’m a corporate hack who’s lost his values. Then I got something to hide behind when Angel gives me grief or if the shit really hits the fan.”

  I smiled. “All right, you valueless, soulless corporate hack. I’m giving you the chance to redeem your soul and you spit in my face. You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That’s the sound of shoulder popping while I twist your arm.”

  South of town, the motel where I was supposed to meet Bly rose like a Styrofoam cooler sandwiched between another motel and the now-dark coastal scrub of a protected stretch of beach. It looked no different than the Holiday Inns you see scattered like refuse around the country, except that this one faced the Pacific instead of a strip mall. Bly’s choice wasn’t bad: if you’re on a budget and have to hide out, this seemed like a decent place to do it.

  I parked Dorothy’s car in a dark public lot as far as I could from the brightly lit entrance of the motel. The Holiday Inn’s sodium lights were fifty yards away, and cast long, sharp shadows around us. Combined with the low vehicular census, they gave the place a lonely, eerie feel.

  I cut the engine and took the keys from the ignition. I sat for a second, thinking about Tim and next steps, finally deciding to go for a little partnership parenting, lead him to his own correct decision.

  “We both know you shouldn’t leave kids alone in cars, right?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “But we both know that I want to protect you, too, right? That’s something adults do for kids, they protect them.”

  “I know.”

  “So, we have a decision to make. It might not be safe where I’m going—”

  “No, no. You can’t—”

  “I mean, it might not be safe for kids. I’ll be fine.” This was getting a little more complicated than I’d planned. “What would you do in my position, Tim?”

  He didn’t have to contemplate his response. “I’d take the kid with me,” he said immediately.

  Wrong answer.

  “But maybe,” I persisted, “maybe it would be better if the kid stayed in the car than for him to go into a place where it might be dangerous for kids.”

  “I want to go with you. I’ll be good. I promise I will.”

  I sighed. “You have to stay here. No more debate.”

  Tim began fooling with the power window—up and down, up and down. Sea air washed into the car, smelling of brine. “You can’t leave a kid in the car. It’s against the law.”

  “I have to leave this kid in this car. Only for a little while.” Up and down, up and down. “You’re going to break the window,” I said.

  “No I won’t.”

  “Stay in the car, Tim. Put the seat back and lie down so no one can see you.”

  He didn’t move—except for the index finger that kept toggling on the power window switch—so I got out of the car, rounded to the passenger’s side. I opened the door and lowered the seat. He continued to sit bolt upright.

  I walked across the polished, dun-colored floor of the lobby, nodding to the young woman on the phone behind the desk. I took the elevator to the second floor. I was nervous, but didn’t really see the reason for it. Jonathan Bly wanted my help as much as I wanted his. In fact, when I called him he’d said, “You have to help me. I’m in deep.”

  I tried to make him tell me how deep and in what, but he refused. “Not over the phone,” he’d insisted, and hung up.

  So, here I was. I knocked on the door, watched the peephole darken, listened to the voic
e that came from the other side of the door, asking who it was. I told him.

  I heard a lock being undone, then the door opened a crack. The slide lock was still engaged. “You’re alone?” he asked, his face only a slice behind the door.

  “Yes.”

  “How do I know it’s you?”

  I sighed, then pulled out the CDC badge and thrust it at the crack. His eyeball roved up and down, matching the picture on the ID to my face.

  The door closed, then opened wide. “Come in,” he said.

  Bly looked awful, as if his tall, wiry body had been run through a dozen rounds of chemo. His skin was yellowish, his red eyes sunken. The little hair he still possessed tufted uncombed from random places on his head. He looked worse than I did after a night on call. I wondered how long he’d been here: sweating, worrying, not sleeping. I asked him.

  “Three days,” he said.

  Seventy-two hours in this suite—a large room with a sitting area broken away from the bed. The place was about as welcoming as a third-rate frat at Penn State—synthetic fabrics everywhere, pizza boxes strewn about, opened containers of Chinese food stacked next to the sink. The funk of human habitation—that and something else—stung my nose.

  Bly sauntered across the room to an open window. On the window sash, a cigarette smoldered on top of a plastic cup. He brought it to his lips, and I could see his hand tremble. “I refuse maid service,” he said, perhaps explaining the mess in the room, the smell. He sucked deeply on the cigarette and blew out the window. “Jesus, I haven’t smoked since high school.”

  Since I didn’t really care about Bly’s health habits, and as I didn’t have time to waste on small talk, I asked, “Why am I here?”

  “You were Paul Murphy’s boy.”

  “Paul Murphy’s boy?”

  “His boy. His fall guy.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Paul came to me for help.”

  Bly lit another cigarette from the first, and dropped the first into the cup. Water covered the bottom, and the cigarette hit it with a hiss. “Yeah,” he agreed sarcastically. “He came to you for help. Just what kind of help did he come to you for, Dr. McCormick?”

  “He found out something about Regenetine and Tetra. He found some connection between what you guys were doing with FGF and the stem cells and an analog called Beautiful Essence, which—”

  “Beautiful Essence. Stupid fucking name.”

  “—which was being distributed through a clinic in San Francisco, and which was resulting in people getting tumors. Maybe Paul knew that an earlier, dirtier version of Regenetine had been stolen from Tetra and was on the black market.” Yet even as I whitewashed Paul Murphy, my doubts about him grew. There was the money that had found its way into Murph’s account; there was Jonathan Bly calling me Murph’s boy. Murph’s fall guy.

  Bly continued to smoke, not saying anything. The whole situation began to feel very wrong, the disheveled room too small. I wondered how long the power window would occupy Tim. “I’m leaving,” I said, and turned toward the door.

  “Wait.” He took a beat, then began bargaining. “I tell you what’s going on, you help me.”

  This tactic took me by surprise. I remembered Wei-jan Fang’s stab at negotiation in the clinic, his desperate attempts to get “protection.” Now Bly was making a similar play. Both of them, rats jumping from a sinking ship. This told me that whatever secrets enveloped Tetra and Beautiful Essence were fraying quickly.

  “Help you how?”

  “Help me get out of the country if I need to, help me get some immunity from prosecution, depending on what happens.”

  I laughed. I mean, come on, who did this guy think I was? “I can’t do that.”

  “Help, Dr. McCormick, help. I know you’re not a prosecutor, but you can help me. You can put in a good word.”

  “All right. Whatever. I’ll help you the best I can.” I stepped back into the middle of the room, cleared a pizza box from the loveseat. “Talk,” I said.

  105

  “REGENETINE IS SAFE,” BLY TOLD me. “The process of using the growth factor to stimulate fibroblast growth is safe. The ratio we had for Regenetine and the stem cells is safe. There are no problems with the biological or the process. But we had an earlier version…”

  “And that earlier version was not safe,” I said.

  He coughed. “It was still FGF-1, but we hadn’t modified the molecule. It was too powerful. It caused the stem cells to proliferate like crazy.”

  “How could you not pick that up?”

  “Because we didn’t have the results from the longitudinal studies in animals yet. The long-term studies showed it was mutagenic.”

  Mutagenicity is the property of some substances to cause mutations in cells.

  “I saw your paper on PubMed,” I said.

  “It was a good paper,” he said absently.

  “And this earlier version—the one that caused the mutations—is Beautiful Essence?” I asked.

  “Yeah. As far as I know. Anyway, I started getting word about how to tweak our FGF-1. I followed my orders and I tweaked and, lo and behold, no problems. Whatever they were telling me worked. The mutations stopped.”

  “Who was telling you to make the changes?”

  “It came from the CEO, of all people. Dustin Alberts.”

  “How did Alberts know what changes to make? He’s not a scientist.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. He kept telling me not to ask any questions. So I kept plugging away, keeping Regenetine on track. But I guess I have that curiosity-kills-the-cat thing, so I started poking around. I found a bunch of tissue samples. Human tissue, marked ‘Affected’ or ‘Non-affected.’”

  “Where were the tissue samples from?” But I already knew the answer.

  “From the Fang clinic.”

  Dorothy had told me they’d taken biopsies of her tumor. I thought back to the small plastic tube of tissue Tim had found at Fang’s clinic. “Fang’s patients—they were guinea pigs. To work out the problems with the first product. That’s why Alberts knew to tell you how to change the protein.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was analyzing the tissue? Who told Alberts what to tell you?”

  Bly looked at me with a half-smile on his face, as if he were waiting for me to acknowledge a joke. When I didn’t, the smile broadened. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  It took me a second to track this, then I realized. “Oh, God…”

  “Not God, even though he probably thought he was.” Bly was grinning now. The bastard was enjoying this. He’d probably spent his three days here waiting for a moment like this. “Yes, Dr. McCormick. Your good pal Paul Murphy.”

  My gut felt hollow. “Why would he do it?”

  “Oh, he had his reasons. Paul always had his reasons, right? You live in Paul’s head and you could justify almost anything. You know that old joke? The one about the kid who murders his parents?”

  Bly’s cigarette was gone, and he lit another. If he kept going like that, he’d have bigger things to worry about than immunity from prosecution, things like emphysema and cancer. “There’s this kid who murders his parents, then gets up before the judge and asks for leniency because he’s an orphan. That’s Paul. I’ve been thinking about that joke a lot. Hilarious, right?”

  “What were Paul’s reasons?”

  “You know about his company? The one that crashed and burned?”

  “No.”

  “His biotech venture out of grad school?”

  “No,” I repeated, anger simmering in my voice.

  “Paul figured he’d found the Holy Grail—the answer to cancer. Problem was, his answer was wrong. He couldn’t get venture or angel funding, so he went to family and friends. He blew through a couple hundred grand from these not-rich people before he had to close shop. Paul felt terrible. He really wanted to pay it back.”

  “So?” I asked weakly.

  “So, the bosses at Tetra tapped him for the extracurr
iculars with the tissue. Paul did the analysis for Tetra, got some cash on the side. But some cash wasn’t enough. You know how these things go.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “He went down that slippery slope.” He coughed—an annoying raspy thing that dissolved into uncontrolled hacking. “They needed someone to get the Chinese guys and their clinic out of the picture. They chose Paul.”

  “Who needed?”

  “Alberts, Tetra’s CEO. He was the only one who knew about Fang’s clinic. He got Paul to think on it. He gave him lots of money to think. And Murphy thought and, eventually, he found a niece of one of the Chinese guys—”

  “Oh, no,” I whispered. “Goddamn it.”

  “Yeah, it stinks, right? Paul finds this niece, who also happens to be real attractive, and tries to pump her for information on what they’re doing. She doesn’t know much, but she gets sick, and she gets pissed off. Paul and she hatch a plan to bring down the Chinese. This all has to be very quiet because there’s a big wall between Tetra and the Chinese guys. The only connection was the tissue and the Chinese investment in Tetra. With Regenetine coming on line, Alberts was fuming that the Chinese would get a piece of the pie. Alberts thought the Chinese were parasites.”

  “Paul seduced Dorothy Zhang as part of this? Deliberately?”

  Bly smirked.

  “And what about me? How did I fit in?”

  “Paul said you weren’t the most…um, moral guy on the planet. If you didn’t play along, he said you’d go for the money they were going to offer you. You get your money, you call in all your CDC friends and shut down the Chinese, you channel whatever investigation away from Tetra so that everyone there can say, ‘What Chinese? What’s going on here? We had no idea about the Chinese or people with tumors all over them.’”

  “What if I couldn’t be bought?”

  “Paul didn’t see it as a problem. As long as he could influence you to channel the investigation, Tetra would be okay. And if things went really wrong, Alberts could give the word and the Chinese would take care of you. That’s how your buddy put it: take care of you.”