For all that, Doyle still couldn't see where AdChem is doing anything that all the others don't do. Johnny G. sees big-time counterfeiting and even big-time heroin trafficking. Doyle couldn't see that either. Just because one plant in India sells a chemical that's essential to making heroin—among many other uses for it—that does not a criminal organization make. And if there's still all that money in their regular drugs, and if you keep the right kind of books, why should they bother with counterfeits?
On the other hand ... if they're more or less straight. . . why would they need an outfit like Parker Security Service, Inc.? Why would Lehman-Stone, an investment banker, need that bunch of thugs?
No Rasmussens at Lehman-Stone either.
He started on his second stack of documents.
An hour later, Doyle had finished his reading. He said, “I'll be damned” for perhaps the fifth time. He reached for his telephone, thought better of it, then picked up the cellular phone instead. He tapped out Arnie Aaronson's number.
“Tell me,” he said when Aaronson answered. “You brought your briefcase when you came to my office. Were those FDA articles in it?”
”I gather you went and got your own.”
“Yes, I did. Why didn't you save me the trouble?”
“Because I want no part of this.”
“But it's public record, Arnie. It's a magazine. How could sharing it possibly harm you?”
A slow exhalation of breath.
“That list I gave you? Those people I called? The ones with a checkmark called me back at least twice. They wanted a face-to-face meeting. The ones with two checks hinted very strongly that we might make some arrangement.”
”A payoff. You told me. But in return for what?”
“For telling them who's asking. And for helping to put a lid on it.”
“Arnie ... let me get this straight. Are you telling me that the entire pharmaceutical industry is engaged in a massive cover-up?”
“They're not felons, Brendan. Call it damage control.”
“To protect their business at the expense of the public?”
“Wrong, Brendan. It is to protect it from a massive and unwarranted loss of public confidence. It is to prevent the panic selling of pharmaceutical and biotech stocks and the damage that would do to this same public you're talking about. If spending a few bucks will accomplish that, they'll spend.”
It was Doyle's turn to be silent.
“Counterfeits are a fact of life, Brendan. I still don't think it's half but most of what's out there, by far, is probably just as good as the real thing. If you were the president of Merck or Pfizer, would you want to stand up and say that on television? Or at a congressional hearing?”
Doyle let him go.
He could understand Arnie's reluctance to be involved. It was not a matter of being afraid of the drug companies. Not at all. Nor was it anything like criminal complicity. It was more a fear that he'd never have a moment's peace once his name became associated with a subject so potentially explosive as this.
All those firms wondering what he's got. Badgering him, dangling carrots at him, offering him lucrative consulting contracts if he'll tell what he knows. If it's about a competitor, the deal still holds. Knowing that is worth money as well. On second thought, therefore, Arnie could indeed find himself exposed to charges of criminal conspiracy.
As if that were not enough, in Arnie's view, we now add Michael to the equation. Michael's involvement with AdChem means that the interest of Michael's lawyer is hardly academic. Add the knowledge that Jake Fallon was murdered. Add the killing of Bronwyn Kelsey, who was also involved in this industry. Might these not be related? And, finally, add in that the attorney of both Jake and Michael Fallon is also the attorney of the infamous Giordano brothers who control the Brooklyn docks and are therefore, prima facie, already involved in smuggling.
Arnie Aaronson is no coward. He's a good and decent man. Given the right thing to do, he'll do it. But he has no wish to be put on a witness stand and have a prosecutor say, “If you knew this and this and this, Mr. Aaronson, how are we to believe that you didn't know that? Or at least that you didn't see it coming?”
Back to the FDA papers.
What Doyle found in them was breathtaking.
Item:
Not long ago, in Nigeria, 109 young children died of kidney failure after ingesting a chemical solvent. The solvent was in a paracetamol syrup—sort of like Tylenol for children—which had been administered by several Nigerian hospitals. The product was counterfeit. A wholesale pharmacist had used the correct active ingredient, acetaminophen, and even in the right concentration.
But he had purchased an unmarked drum that supposedly contained propylene gíycol, the preservative used in the genuine syrup. The drum actually held diethyelene glycol, which is used in antifreeze. The pharmacist bottled this poison, slapped on phony labels, and sold it to the hospitals.
What was Arnie's argument? That no wholesaler would take such a risk for such a small reward? Here's one who clearly did. Ah, but that's in Africa he'd say. In corrupt and chaotic Nigeria. Couldn't happen here.
Item:
An Iranian counterfeiter, now in prison, was arrested by the U.S. Customs Service. They had been laying for him because he had once approached a broker with an offer to sell eight million pharmacy-sized bottles of three major prescription drugs. The drugs were Tagamet, an ulcer medication, three million bottles at $32.15 each; Anspor, an antibiotic, three million bottles at $47.70 each; and Napro-syn, for arthritis, two million bottles at $237.75 each.
His samples of Naprosyn, the arthritis medicine, contained mainly aspirin. They might well have killed patients who had ulcers. But otherwise they looked perfectly legitimate. According to the FDA, the Iranian, a man named Naghdi, had manufactured the counterfeit drug by obtaining tableting machines, bulk acetaminophen, aspirin, lactose, and coloring agents.
He bought tableting machines to press the bogus Naprosyn. He commissioned artwork that duplicated the Naprosyn package. He had the tooling to imprint the company trademark on the bottles, bottle liners, bottle caps, and the tablets themselves. Even the identical bar code.
He supplied fraudulent shipping documents, a fake insurance policy, and all the necessary paper, on company letterhead, to show that he had bought this stuff directly from the legitimate manufacturer.
What blew the deal? What tipped the Customs Service?
That broker, in his innocence, called the manufacturer to ask them if he was getting a good deal at the quoted prices. The Customs Service and the FDA then set up a sting to catch Naghdi. They wanted to buy the lot. He announced that the eight million bottles were already gone but, if they had the cash and were ready to deal, he could get them a million bottles of Tagamet at the bargain price of twenty-seven dollars each. The Tagamet was warehoused in Tampico, Mexico, ready to be smuggled in. Shipping would be arranged via someone called Five Star Distributors of Puerto Rico.
Doyle, at this point, had gone to his calculator. That first deal, just three drugs, which someone in this country bought, amounted to more than seven hundred million dollars. That's one deal. One time. The second deal, which never went through, was peanuts by comparison. Only twenty-seven million dollars.
The Naprosyn alone, two million bottles, totaled more than $475 million if the Iranian got his asking price. Naprosyn’ s legitimate sales that year, to the domestic market, were roughly the same amount.
Arnie? Do you still say half is horseshit?
No, I don't suppose you do.
Do you still say that few distributors would knowingly take the chance? I mean . . these distributors . . . one expects them to have names like Blue Cross Pharmaceuticals or Mount Sinai Medicines for the Afflicted. They don't. They have names like Five Star Distributors of Puerto Rico. Triple-A Cigars of Jersey City. Mucci & Son Sundries of Miami.
Doyle ran the numbers three times. He could scarcely believe them himself but there they were. One deal, one arrest. The Ir
anian, obviously, had not made this stuff in his garage and sure as hell wasn't in it alone. He was a broker, a salesman, for an immensely sophisticated operation. Just as clearly, that seven-hundred-million-dollar deal was only the tip of the iceberg.
Oh, and look at this.
There's a fairly new drug called Zantac, an ulcer drug that has pretty much replaced Tagamet. It doesn't cure ulcers; it just cuts down on the acid your stomach produces. Want to know what the annual sales are? Four billion dollars. Zantac is, right now, the biggest selling drug in the world. Four billion dollars on one fucking pill that's basically a Band-Aid.
What does cure ulcers? Antibiotics, it says here, because ulcers are caused by a viral infection. But they push drugs like Zantac because there's no money in antibiotics—their patents have all run out—and because if you cure a disease, where's the repeat business?
Okay, Zantac has the number one spot. Three out of the next four top sellers are for cardiovascular problems. Heart attacks. The number one killer. But you know what seems to ward off heart attacks best? Aspirin. Aspirin and garlic. Even the FDA says so. In fact, it says that popping an aspirin during a heart attack can save one in four lives. But no maker of aspirin has asked the FDA if they could market their own product for that purpose. Why should they? If they did, people might not buy their other patent-protected heart drugs that sell for a couple of hundred times the price.
An interesting ethical question, right? Here's a better one. When a drug like Tagamet hits paydirt, everyone else tries to jump on the bandwagon. But Tagamet was still under patent. So along comes a Zantac and about six other drugs, all of which do precisely the same thing but they do it through a different mechanism. This is how they get around the patent.
So here's the assignment for our next ethics class. Explain in a hundred words or less, how that is not the moral equivalent of counterfeiting.
No wonder Jake hated these clowns.
Do the drug lords of Colombia know about this? Wouldn't they like to stop being shot at? Hunted down? If caught, wouldn't they rather get fourteen years, which is what the Iranian got, and of which he'll probably serve five, than life without parole? Wouldn't they rather have a customer base that can't “just say no”? And whose enforced addictions are paid for by health insurance and Medicaid? And are a better class of people to boot?
Item:
Only thirty-five criminal investigators in the whole Food and Drug Administration. There are another twelve hundred field investigators but their tasks are more routine, such as trying to keep drug labs from fudging on test results and nabbing pharmacists who sell prescription drug samples that are intended strictly for doctors. Of the twelve hundred, a good many concentrate on agricultural products, veterinary medicines, and the like.
Veterinary medicines, thought Doyle, frowning.
The library computer had kicked out a few items on the subject. He almost hadn't bothered to copy them because they seemed no more than marginally related to the larger subject. Until this moment.
Item:
One firm, Johnson & Johnson, sells a colon cancer drug called Ergomisol. It was charging thirteen hundred dollars for a single fifty-milligram dose. But another firm sells a veterinary drug that has the same active ingredient— levamisole—-for just fourteen dollars a dose.
It would seem tempting for a cancer clinic to buy the animal drug in bulk, grind it up, then press it into the fifty-milligram tablets that would otherwise cost them almost one thousand percent more.
Item:
Something like that seems to be happening. The Customs Service seized thirty-two tons of adulterated, misbranded, or smuggled animal drugs. The article doesn't say what was ultimately being done with them. Perhaps the writer didn't wish to give people ideas.
If the DEA's experience is any guide, seizures representno more than two percent of the total that actually gets through. The bad news, therefore, is that another fifteen hundred tons or so would have actually reached the market, some of it reformulated for human consumption. The good news is that these are real drugs. They'll probably work as well as any.
One must learn, thought Doyle, to listen to one's inner voices.
Veterinary medicine.
That's the business Eagle Sales was in. The business that Michael's father was in. It's the business that Armin Rasmussen owned until Big Jake Fallon, baseball bat in hand, gave him twenty-four hours to leave the country or have every bone in his body broken. His office and plant were in flames at the time. And later his home. Moon had burned them to the ground.
Doyle suddenly remembered something.
In his mind he saw the thick brown envelope that Marty Hennessy had brought over to his office. In it were the contents of Jake's pockets on the night he died. It was still in the office safe.
The contents of his pockets had shed little light at the time. His billfold had been left intact, cash and credit cards still there. His keys, watch, and rings as well. The intruder had taken nothing. All he cared about, thought Hennessy, was getting away from there.
Jake's notebook was no help either. Doyle had gone through it page by page, with Hennessy, looking for any hint that Jake might have had cause to look over his shoulder. There was an entry here and there that might have raised an eyebrow if a reporter had gotten his hands on it ... notes of meetings with certain public figures . . . but no reference whatever to Lehman-Stone or AdChem.
Also in his pocket, however, was an AdChem annual report. Doyle hadn't thought much about it because Michael said that Bronwyn had given it to Jake that evening. She'd been bragging about Michael and touting AdChem as a stock to watch.
All things considered, maybe it was worth another look.
Moon?
Could you be right after all?
Could Armin Rasmussen have found his way into AdChem?
Moon, where the hell have you gone?
Chapter 18
It was a four-car garage. Moon entered it in darkness. He made no sound. The only light shone down from the apartment above it. It was enough.
He saw the white BMW. The initials ”BH” were written on the door in script. An electric golf cart, also white, sat at the far end. It bore the same initials. The remaining two spaces were empty. The garage, he noted, had its own supply of gasoline. An electric pump had been mounted on the wall nearest the driveway.
As he drew near the stairs that led to the apartment, he caught the scent of cheap perfume. He tested the stairs. They were made of wood but had runners of outdoor carpet. He readied the baseball bat and climbed, praying that the man had found no companion for this night. There was no one. The apartment was empty.
An ashtray by the bed held cigarettes with lipstick on them but these were dry and stale to the touch. The bed was unmade. It smelled of chlorine from the pool, of sweat, and of that perfume. The smell of those sheets, for some reason, made Moon think of Michael. He did not know why. Michael would never use a prostitute.
Moon searched the apartment. Between the mattress and box spring of the bed he found two automatic pistols and a spare clip for each. One was large caliber, the other small. He examined the small one, a Beretta, .22 caliber. This, more than the other, was an assassin's weapon. It was meant for close work, fired into the brain, several shots, little noise. The sound, if there was anyone to hear it, would resemble the popping of balloons. He placed both pistols in his belt and made his way back toward the pool.
The man was stretched out on a lounge chair. He was dressed in shorts and a flowered shirt. He lay, legs crossed, his hands clasped behind his neck, looking up as if enjoying the night sky. Moon had little doubt that this was the one called Walter. He would like to have been certain of that. But now he could not be. The man was dead.
Moon had not meant to kill him. He realized too late that he had.
Before he had lifted him into that chair, arranged his body in that pose, Moon had sat astride him, massaging his heart, trying to bring back a pulse. The only pulse he felt was his
own, throbbing at his temple.
He was disgusted with himself.
The choke hold was meant only to put him to sleep, give Moon a few minutes to study the security system. That done, he would have carried this man into the main house and he would have strapped him to a chair. He would have waited for him to wake up and see a black man sitting across from him. See the baseball bat in the black man's hands.
Moon would not have spoken. There would have been no need. He would have watched the man's eyes as his head began to clear. First, he would have looked for recognition. And then he would have watched them as they focused on the polished Louisville Slugger, bought new that afternoon from a store three towns away. The man's eyes would have told him the answer he was looking for.
He would have talked. And then he would have died hard.
But Moon had not been sure of his strength. What the stroke had sapped of it, all that therapy had restored, but in different ways and in different muscles. He should have known that his touch and timing would be off. He had squeezed just a little too tight and held or five seconds too long. He had neglected to make sure the man was breathing before he left him to look for others who might be there.
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