“You’re not talking about Salgado?” Grace said.
“You know him? Frank Salgado?”
“All I know is that he drowned.” Grace explained what Ada Gleeson had said at the Cinasat party.
“His body was found in Galle. There was something fishy about his death. The police closed the investigation, but two friends of his contacted our paper.” Shalini studied the dials on the dashboard. They were moving fast, and the car was making fitful rattling sounds.
“You’re a journalist?”
Shalini nodded. “Sorry, I haven’t even properly introduced myself. I work at the Daily News. A few days ago, I got an envelope in the mail. The return address was in Galle. Salgado couldn’t have mailed it. He was dead by then. But there are documents with the Cinasat letterhead that show he was there at that address. A house called the Maya. I don’t know why the envelope was sent to me. I showed it to one of my colleagues. She’s investigating the Salgado death. We did some digging, found out the house is owned by a Mr. Kumar Fernando, but he hasn’t been in the country for months. Some big-shot retired venture capitalist—spends most of his time in the States.” She gestured at the glove box, her bangles tinkling. “There are two maps in there. Take out the Southern Province one. I know the street address.”
Grace peered inside the glove box, which was cluttered with tangled rubber bands, pens, a flashlight, a cracked magnifying glass, a small bottle of Dettol, and an unsanitary-looking roll of gauze bandage. She retrieved the maps under the mess and opened the one for the Southern Province. It was limp and torn at the creases, and she had trouble holding it together in one piece.
“Actually, this is better than trying to get to your parents’ house,” Shalini said, nodding decisively. “They’ll be watching that. We’ll take the E01 to Galle.”
Grace ran her finger along the map, tracing the way south to Galle. “Why was it fishy, Salgado’s death?”
“He didn’t swim, apparently, his friends said. He was afraid of the sea, never went out in a boat. They said there was no reason for him to drown. And his body was all bruised and lacerated. As if he had been thrown against rocks maybe.”
“Are you saying he was killed?” Another death in connection with Cinasat. There was no way all this could be coincidence. “My God. Duncan and Janie . . .”
“Look, no sense worrying, men. We’ll get to the house and see what we can find out. Then we can see how to get help.”
Shalini took a look in the rearview mirror and exited the E03 expressway. They drove along Biyagama Road, slowing to a crawl behind a line of noisy lorries, shiny European-made cars, and dusty buses lurching forward. Small shops with gaily painted grimy walls and corrugated metal roofs were open to the road, some with makeshift awnings made of plastic sheeting. Inside their dim interiors, Grace could see familiar wares: baked goods in glass-fronted cabinets buzzing with the occasional fly, soaps and incense sticks arrayed neatly on shelves, luxurious stalks of bananas hanging from ceilings, clusters of orange king coconuts piled by doorways. Inside one thatch-roofed shack, a butcher in a fresh white sarong was sharpening a cleaver near great slabs of red meat that hung from hooks. A shopkeeper was just folding back the metal doors of the adjoining fabric shop, where rolls of patterned cloth were stacked tidily against the walls. Men gossiped in amiable groups on the brick pavement. Drivers relaxed in the shade of their tuk-tuks, watching life go by. The road widened as they passed into a more prosperous residential area, with balconied, terra-cotta-roofed houses, some with high brick garden walls to keep out the rabble.
“All this is . . . What is going on?” Grace said “How are you involved in this . . . all this Cinasat business?”
“Angie Osborne was a good friend of mine,” Shalini said. Grace saw her lip tremble a little. “I didn’t hear about the death until the day of the funeral. Although I couldn’t have gone anyway. The cost of the plane ticket . . .” She shook her head. “I met her years ago in DC when I was in college at George Washington University. Through an internship I did at the Washington Post. She was my mentor.”
“She was working on a Cinasat story?”
Shalini nodded. “We’d been working on the story together. A couple of years ago, I got some information from a source here about some medical research being done. Studies being done in the village areas. People were going and recruiting poor uneducated folk to take part. Some local doctors were involved. We don’t know, still, how many were doing this with good intentions. But at least some of them were taking bribes. Villagers were getting paid to take drugs—bloody big sums they couldn’t refuse—and nobody was telling them details about what they were taking.”
“These were Cinasat studies?”
“In the beginning, I didn’t know that. I thought it was local research. Angie was the one who helped me to find that out. Anyway, in the middle of digging into that story, I came across sources who told me about other fishy things. Research studies getting repeated over and over until they got the result they wanted.”
“That happens everywhere,” Grace said. They were crossing the rippling green expanse of the Kelani River, few buildings visible through the thick vegetation along its banks. A woman in a dripping diya redda was climbing out of the shallows, her long hair clumped into tendrils down her back. “Not ethical, and bad science, but that’s not just here.”
“True,” Shalini said. “But the sources who were talking about that were the ones who led me to a new drug Cinasat was developing.”
“Symb86?” Grace said, and then wondered if she should have said the name.
But Shalini nodded immediately. She had obviously heard about it. “While I was digging around here, Angie had been looking into a story in the States about corruption at your FDA. She found evidence that some pharmaceutical companies had a lot of influence on the FDA. Drugs being approved without proper review. Our stories looked like they were linked. The pieces didn’t fit, but. We were digging and digging. For a long time. Then Angie got ahold of a woman called Minowa Costa who used to work at Cinasat.”
“We found a photo of her,” Grace said. “The one who died.”
Shalini frowned. “What photo?”
“My friend Mo—Angie also knew him well—he found a photo of Angie when he was at her house for the funeral. This woman, Minowa Costa, was in the photo. It’s a long story—how we found out.” She explained how the pendant and Bent’s reaction had made Mo suspicious, and how they had identified the woman as Minowa Costa.
“Angie definitely didn’t know Minowa Costa six months ago, men,” Shalini said. “She only contacted Angie about a month ago. She’s the one who helped us to connect the dots in the story. She took Angie to Cinasat one night about two weeks ago—that must have been when Angie took the picture, to document that they had been there. Minowa said she had a way to get hold of documents that would prove everything she told us.”
“Wait, that doesn’t make sense,” Grace said, remembering. “How did she get into Cinasat? She wasn’t working there two weeks ago. She had already moved to a different company by then. Novophil.”
Shalini frowned. “Novophil? I thought Angie said she didn’t have a job at the moment.”
“That’s what Mortensen said. The police officer who’s working on Angie’s case.”
Shalini pursed her lips. “Maybe Angie made a mistake then. Or maybe I’m not remembering. Anyway, doesn’t matter, men. She managed to get into Cinasat because she had a friend there, and she knew all the security guards. But then, not long after that—only a few days before Angie died—Minowa died in a car accident.”
“I know about that,” Grace said. “We just found out—my friend Marla and I—on Tuesday.” They were passing a stretch of uncultivated land, lush with vegetation. On the other side, gray buffalo grazed in a field, white egrets perched on their backs. More egrets lurked nearby, pecking at the ground. In the distance, trees grew thickly, drooping plantain leaves and palm fronds standing out against the dark green of
teak. How different these vibrant trees looked from the single struggling one that had borne the memorial to Minowa Costa.
Shalini nodded. “You know it was a hit and run? Angie called me. She thought Cinasat had had her killed. I thought that was too far-fetched. But Angie said she was going to talk to Bentley Hyland at your school reunion. She thought he might know something. We’d thought he was involved for a while. She said she was also going to try to talk to you and your husband, to ask how you’d both feel about helping with the investigation. She said she could trust you to keep it secret.”
“So that’s why she called me.”
“You spoke to her about this?”
“No, she left me a message and I tried to call her back, but I never got through to her.”
“She wasn’t sure Duncan knew anything, but she thought he might help.”
Sure Duncan knows, Angie’s message had said. But maybe Angie had actually said, not sure Duncan knows, Grace thought. “Did Angie really have a heart attack?” she said.
“I don’t know, but I just can’t believe that, men. I only found out she had died through another friend, someone Angie and I both knew. I called Angie’s mother, but I didn’t want to say anything about what I thought. It would have been too hard for her mother to bear, no? I tried to get in touch with an intern who worked at Cinasat. Olivia Garwick. Danibel, I mean. She went by Danibel at Cinasat.”
“I found out she also died,” Grace said. “Someone sent me an email . . .”
“That was also me,” Shalini said. “I couldn’t get in touch with her, so I was trying to get you or your husband to talk to her. After I found out she died, I didn’t want to use that email address again. I think it got intercepted somehow.”
“Are you saying Danibel was killed?”
“Don’t know, men. That’s what I’m thinking. I never met her, but Angie had been in touch with her. Minowa was the one who had referred Danibel to Cinasat, and Minowa had introduced Angie to her. When I found out Danibel also had died, then I really started to get frightened.”
“There’s a police detective who’s investigating all this,” Grace said.
“I don’t know if that helps,” Shalini said. “The police have to be in on this somehow. In the States and also here. Otherwise how would they not see the links to Cinasat? Why are all these deaths being ruled accidents? A few days ago, I got an anonymous email—to the email address I used to contact you about Danibel—warning me to get off the story. A threat, actually. Whoever this bloody email was from, they said you and your friend Mohammed had to stop poking around. They seemed to think you were poking around on my behalf. I’ve been hiding out here since all the deaths. I got out of my house and went to my parents’ house in Negombo for a while. Now I’m staying at a friend’s in Colombo. Janice Perera. She’s also a journalist, but she’s doing a story in Jaffna. This is her car.” She chuckled a little. “My car is even worse than this. Anyway, I found out that Bentley and your husband were coming here, and I got worried that they might try to hold your husband as leverage to get you to give up searching for information. That’s when I emailed you. I wasn’t sure if your emails were being monitored. That’s why I emailed you in Sinhala. I thought it would be harder for them to catch it.”
“I think I was being followed,” Grace said. “I got mugged on Saturday, the night before I left New Jersey. At least that’s what I thought. But I’ve been thinking . . . the guy didn’t take my purse. Didn’t even try.”
“You think he was trying to hurt you?”
“I don’t know.” Grace shivered, looking out at the landscape beside the road. On one side, a tall cliff of red rock loomed. On the other side, bright saris and sarongs were laid out to dry along a chicken wire fence. Beyond it she caught glimpses of tile-roofed houses set in a thicket of teak trees. Farther away, a plume of smoke drifted up from someone’s bonfire. “There was another thing. I don’t know how it could be related to all this, but I got an email from someone who said I should meet them. But when I got there, there was a shooting. Not at me. It was in a bad neighborhood so I thought it was random, but I don’t know.”
“What did the email say?”
“Something about why Duncan was fired.” She looked over at Shalini. “I never told Duncan.” There was something hovering at the edge of her consciousness, something she had not realized before. Something about an animal . . . A dog? She fished around in her memory, but nothing came up.
Shalini slowed as a lorry, honking loudly, barged into the lane ahead of them. The car sputtered, and Shalini looked anxiously at the dashboard dials. “This bloody car is heating up too much. I hope it can get us there.” Something was rattling under the hood. Shalini craned her neck, listening. “I don’t know what that is, men. We may have to dump the car.”
“Dump it where?”
“I have an uncle near Baddegama. He’s bound to be at home. He never goes anywhere these days. It’s right on the way. If this rattling keeps on, we’ll stop there and see if we can borrow his car.”
This seemed far-fetched to Grace. “What if your uncle isn’t there? What if the car isn’t available? We need a backup plan. We have to get to Duncan.”
“Don’t worry, men,” Shalini said. She patted Grace’s arm. “Tell me about Duncan. What does he know?”
“He doesn’t know anything. As far as I know. He’s been studying some videos of thovil. Apparently Cinasat did research on patients who had thovil done. To test whether the drug works. Symb86.”
Shalini snorted grimly. “It doesn’t.”
“What do you mean? That’s the drug they’ve been testing for years. It doesn’t work?”
“This is deception on the grandest scale you can imagine.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace said.
“This bloody drug is supposed to mimic the placebo effect. Did you know that? What Cinasat is claiming is that they have found the biochemical basis for the placebo effect. That they’ve made that into a pill.”
“Yes, I knew that.”
“But the thing is, men, there is no such drug. Symb86 is essentially a bloody myth. It is a placebo. Of course they had a very cleverly designed drug for the purposes of going through the approval process, doing the paperwork. They obviously had to describe the chemistry and so forth. But it’s completely inert. And they know that. What they’re doing is marketing a placebo, telling people it’s a real drug that works on the immune system like a placebo does. Very clever idea but completely unethical.”
“That can’t be . . . What about all the studies?”
“Some of the studies they only claimed, they never did. Other studies they repeated over and over, until they got enough of an effect to report. Just by chance. True, Symb86 works sometimes, but that’s because placebos work. They have done real research, but. To find ways to maximize the placebo effect. That is why they were studying all these ceremonies. To see how to manipulate belief to get the biggest effect. The power of suggestion. That is what they’re really studying.”
“My God,” Grace said, staring blankly out at the verdant paddy fields stretching beside the expressway. A small creek meandered through a weedy field to a patch of towering rubber trees. Up ahead, a long red kite fluttered against the sky, pulled by some unseen child. “How . . . I don’t see how they could possibly manage to pull this off.”
“Some very powerful people have to be involved. That is the only way they could have got FDA approval. That is why they had to have absolute secrecy, men. They had to make everyone who didn’t know the truth believe the drug was real. They are going to market this so-called drug as a cure-all. For all kinds of difficult-to-treat conditions. Can you imagine the bloody revenue? All of it hinges on no one knowing the truth. Only a select few, anyway. Some of the people who know are in danger, probably. Once the drug is on the market, those people could be history.”
“My God,” Grace said again. She couldn’t believe all this could be true. “I’m sure Duncan doesn
’t know anything about all this.”
“Who knows how much he knows? We have to figure out how to get the police, the right parts of the police, involved. Once everything’s out in the open, he will be safe.”
“What about Bent?”
“I think Bentley is the one masterminding this, but I have no proof still.”
Grace shook her head. “I’ve known Bent since I was in school. He can’t be involved. And what about Janie? He wouldn’t have his own daughter kidnapped. Put in some risky situation.” They were passing a hillside where only stumps of rubber trees were left. On the other side, gargantuan power towers loomed, their orange-and-white girders defacing the countryside.
Shalini drummed her fingers on the wheel. “True. I don’t know. Maybe he’s only being used. Other people could be the ones . . . Angie said someone at the FDA is also involved, and the head of Cinasat. Hammond Gleeson.”
“Him, I know,” Grace said. “He, I can—”
Shalini touched her on the arm, veering off the expressway. “Wait, this is the exit. We’re going to get off here. My uncle’s house is very close.”
They drove down a two-lane road that ran first through a small commercial area and then wide swathes of overgrown, uncultivated fields interrupted by copses thick with foliage. Tall grasses and unruly lantana bushes reached toward the road, and huge trees cast patches of shade ahead. Everywhere, coconut trees towered. A few women in pastel cotton dresses were strolling along the narrow pavement, umbrellas raised against the sun, which was already beating down. Very few cars were on the road, although scooters and motorbikes putted by, loaded with packages and passengers. At a corner sheltered by the massive fan-shaped leaves of a talipot palm, Shalini turned down a small lane and into the front yard of a pale-green house. It was built in the old style, set back from the road, its terra-cotta-tiled roof shaded by avocado and jackfruit trees. Only a few clumps of grass were scattered across the packed earth of the front yard, but masses of brilliantly hued crotons grew in a sunny spot by the open front door.
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