by Rene Fomby
THE
CHI RHO
CONSPIRACY
RENE FOMBY
Book Ness Monster Press
4530 Blue Ridge Drive
Belton, Texas 76513
Copyright © 2018 by Rene Fomby.
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-947304-06-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental and is not intended by the author.
Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.renefomby.com
Fomby, Rene. The Chi Rho Conspiracy. Book Ness Monster Press. Kindle Edition.
To Kara.
Contents
Prologue
the broken mirror
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
the partnership
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
the secret in the sand
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
the devil in the details
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
the templar treasure
63
64
65
66
the shell game
67
68
69
70
71
the last librarian
72
73
74
75
76
77
the deadliest end
78
79
80
81
82
83
the chi rho conspiracy
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
acknowledgments
other books by rene fomby
coming soon
Prologue
Three Years Earlier
The night air was crisp and clear, a waxing crescent moon the only light shining out across the blowing desert sands as the four Bukkehave heavy duty trucks rolled out of Tataouine toward the Tunisian military zone south of Remada. Sameer leaned forward anxiously, praying for Allah to show him a safe path through the dark, dangerous wasteland. His running lights barely illuminated the fine sands, shifting like gray ghosts across the highway, leaving the edges of the road almost impossible to make out. The other trucks were running with their lights off, as ordered, following the taillights of the lead truck, creating dim shadows in the night.
Sameer fought to stay near the very center of the roadway, gripping the steering wheel tightly and doing his best to keep the truck on a straight course. Just one small mistake and they could easily get bogged down in the soft dunes on either side. And Sameer knew that in the bleak and unforgiving landscape of the northern Sahara Desert, that one mistake could very easily be fatal.
Two men sat in the cab of each truck, their faces wrapped loosely in cloth to protect them from the blasts of sand that gusted in through the open windows. And, they hoped, protecting them as well from the unknown and likely dangerous cargo they were carrying in the truck beds just behind them.
Once past Remada, Sameer steered them off the main highway leading to Dehibat, then veered slightly westward onto a one lane road, into the open desert and well away from the squalid towns along the Libyan border. Sand devils wove across their path, and even the heavy trucks couldn’t help being slapped sideways by the force of the miniature tornados that tore the paint from their sides and pitted their windscreens. The desert itself was featureless, and only the GPS units mounted temporarily to their dashboards kept the drivers safely on course.
Finally, after driving in silence half the night through the bleak and unforgiving landscape, Sameer saw lights shining straight ahead, and the GPS map showed they had finally reached their destination. Waiting for them in the very center of the lights was an enormous tan-colored earth mover that had been working nonstop throughout the day and night, fighting an oft-times losing battle against the shifting sands, struggling to open a hole deep enough to bury the contents of the four trucks far away from prying eyes. And questions that could not be answered.
One by one the drivers backed their trucks up as close as they dared to the gaping hole, its edges already giving way slowly, ominously, collapsing back into the dark and ravenous maw of the earth. Pulling levers on the outside of their cabs just behind the driver’s doors, they quickly dumped their cargo out into the black, bottomless hole, the lights in the compound carefully angled to keep whatever had fallen down into the hole in shadow. But the lights couldn’t hold back the sickening stench that rose up from the depths every time a truck emptied its load, a smell that seemed to hang wetly in the night air, clinging to everything it touched.
When all four trucks were finally empty, Sameer and the other drivers drove them back to the eastern side of the compound, parking them safely on the roadway where the ground was firmer, then walking back toward the light. Sitting at a small portable desk off to their right was a small, gray-bearded man in a faded Tunisian military uniform, light tan with dark brown buttons and two rows of service ribbons plastered to his left breast. The three stars on each shoulder marked him as a captain, but to Sameer and the other drivers he was simply their paymaster for the job. As the lead driver, Sameer stepped forward first and the others lined up swiftly behind him. The captain held up a finger and told them he needed a few more moments to prepare their pay envelopes, then gestured toward a pitcher of ice cold lemonade sitting on the right side of his desk, dripping with sweat in the cooling desert air.
The captain smiled broadly as he watched the eight men cluster together in front of a small fire just a few feet from his desk, sipping on their glasses of lemonade and playfully arguing with each other over how best they should spend the promised money. It was almost a year’s wages for just two long days driving down from Tunis, plus two more days for the return trip before catching the flight back to Yemen. Still smiling, the ca
ptain pushed up from his seat, pulled a semiautomatic nine millimeter pistol out of the center drawer of the desk, and smoothly squeezed off eight shots.
the broken mirror
1
La Jolla, California
“What do you mean, we have a problem?” Peter Boucher was already late catching his plane for the east coast, and the last thing he needed right now was another delay. “Talk while we walk. I’ve got a helicopter waiting on the roof.” He punched the button on his private elevator, and the door popped opened immediately. Both men stepped in and Boucher stabbed the “R” button for the short ride to the heliport on the roof.
Robert Kelley was breathing heavily, his words coming broken and rapid fire. “Sir, our monitoring staff—say they’re getting reports—of a massive spike in hospitalizations—all across the country, people showing up at ERs—with symptoms of severe arrhythmia. Just after taking Allurea.”
The elevator dinged and they stepped through the door onto the roof of the company’s headquarters. Boucher instinctively ducked down and put a hand over his head to ward off the backwash from the rotor blades, already spinning up in anticipation of a quick launch. “So, why is that news? We’ve seen some of that before, always pretty minor.”
The R&D Vice President had finally caught his breath, and had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the turbines. “That’s just it, sir. We saw a grand total of only two cases pop up in all of our clinical trials, and even those were of no real medical consequence, and limited to our preliminary Phase II studies. But what we’re looking at right now isn’t just a few isolated cases, it’s an epidemic. And this time it’s not resolving by itself in an hour or so. We’ve got people dying.”
That finally got Boucher’s attention. He spun around to face his VP, grabbing him forcefully by the shoulders. “What do you mean, dying? From an allergy drug? That’s impossible!”
“No, sir, it’s not. It’s very real, and it’s happening right now. We’re talking hundreds of cases, maybe even thousands.” Kelley pointed to his cell phone. “The incoming lines in R&D are all jammed up with calls, so we have no idea yet just how big the problem really is. But we need to do something. And we need to do it right now!”
Boucher had made his career as a master of crisis management, starting with his handling of a pharmaceutical plant explosion just outside of Paris. So he knew first hand that the key to managing any crisis was to get in front of it fast, before it spiraled out of control. “The media?”
“Nothing is showing up on the news feeds at the moment. The cases are spread out pretty wide, so other than my people, it may be hours before anyone on the outside puts all the pieces together—”
“Okay, Kelley, get your team leaders together in the boardroom in—” Boucher checked his Rolex. “Ten minutes. And make sure legal and corporate affairs checks in, too. We need to put together a plan to slap a lid on this bitch tout suite.”
“Sir, your helicopter?”
“To hell with the helicopter. I’m not going anywhere until we know what’s happening. Now run!” Boucher watched as Kelley raced back toward the elevator. It can’t be, he thought, shaking his head in denial. We got that all worked out during clinicals. There’s just no way…
And yet, apparently, it had. The genie had escaped the bottle one more time.
2
Houston, Texas
As it turned out, it took the media minutes, not hours, to catch on to the crisis. Alden Lantanna was just finishing his second cup of coffee and was pouring over the opening statement for an upcoming trial when Larry Bowser rushed in from the outer office.
“Alden, turn on the news! CNN’s breaking a story you have got to see!”
Lantanna reached over his desk for the remote and clicked on the flat screen television hanging on the opposite wall. It was already tuned to the news channel. Lantanna was a busy man, and had no use for television other than as a ready source of information for rapidly emerging stories. Like the story that was breaking right now.
News anchor Blake Fannon was onscreen, apparently doing a wrap-up on developments that had already been covered by the network’s reporting team. But the scrolling news at the bottom of the screen gave Lantanna everything he needed to know: thousands of patients had been hospitalized with heart attacks after taking the allergy drug Allurea earlier that morning. And hundreds were already dead.
Lantanna was incredulous. “How in the hell could this happen, Larry?” Lantanna had become one of the world’s leading experts on pharmaceutical lawsuits at a very early age, and in the process had learned quite a bit about the industry, including its clinical trial process. “This drug sailed through clinicals, and has been on the market for almost a year now, with not a hint of any problems. How can this suddenly be popping up now?”
Bowser looked thoughtful. “Boss, the only thing I can come up with is some kind of manufacturing glitch. A batch got out that was tainted somehow.”
“But the pharma guys are the top manufacturers on the planet. Nothing gets by them. They even have to account for every single label that gets printed. So how in the world could Labarum’s testing miss this?”
“Maybe it wasn’t Labarum. Maybe the tainting occurred post-shipment.” Bowser was grasping at straws at this point. “Could someone have doctored the bottles at the wholesaler?”
“Not on this scale, Larry. And with the geographic spread we’re seeing, they’d have had to hit every major drug warehouse across the country simultaneously.” Lantanna tried to work through all the possibilities, but only one made any sense. Something bad had happened at Labarum, somebody had screwed up big time. And now the world’s number one prescription allergy drug had become a Doctor Kevorkian nightmare. “Well, whatever happened, it’s lock and load time. Call in the troops and order up some pizza. We’ve got work to do. Lantanna and Associates has a new case, maybe our biggest yet. This might just be the motherlode we’ve all been waiting for.”
3
La Jolla
Peter Boucher stormed into the boardroom like a lion, his thick silvery mane and flashing sapphire eyes commanding respect and attention from everyone in the room, even if his well-muscled body and square set jaw didn’t all but dare anyone to stand up to his fury. And not a soul in the room was prepared to do that. Not today.
He didn’t bother to sit down. He glanced around the room, noting the bright pastel walls, courtesy of a psychologist hired by the previous tenant, who insisted that bright colors were the key to improving productivity. But if there was anything Boucher had learned from His Grace, it was that real productivity gains only came from fostering a culture of fear. And he was now a master of that.
“Okay, people, we’ve had three days to dig through the rubble on this, and I hear Alden Lantanna is already on this like a dog on a bone. I don’t need to explain to you that the entire future of this company is on the line. And, I might add, all of your futures, as well. So what have you got for me? Legal.”
Alan Carson jumped to his feet. His dark grey wool gabardine suit looked uncharacteristically crumpled, like he’d been wearing the same outfit for several days. Which he had.
“Sir, until we get a grip on what caused all this, we’re completely in the dark on this one. Lantanna looks like he’s putting together a classic mass tort case—”
“You mean a class action?” Boucher snapped.
“No, sir, it’s a mass tort. They’re pretty similar, really, but here we have a limited, manageable number of litigants with a variety of slightly different complaints, which lends itself better, I suppose, to a mass tort. Plus there are some med mal issues that the courts still haven’t completely worked through regarding class actions, so in the end, a mass tort is the best way to handle this.”
Boucher held up a hand. “Gotcha. I won’t pretend that I understood one word of what you just said, so I guess we’ll just leave that in your wheelhouse for now. You got anything more for us before we move on?
”
“No, sir. We’re just waiting for Lantanna to file something, then we can put together our legal strategy on how to get this whole thing quashed.”
“All right, then.” Boucher turned to face Robert Kelley. “R&D, tell me you’ve made some headway on the medical front?”
Kelley cleared his throat and glanced down at his notes. “Well, just like Legal, everything we’ve got is all prelim at this point. Nothing yet to pinpoint why this problem popped up literally overnight.”
“But we’ve seen evidence of this before? Of heart problems from people taking Allurea?” Boucher was stalking back and forth at the head of the room, holding a silver pen in a tight grip like he was ready to reach out and stab somebody.
Kelley stayed focused on his notes, unwilling to look up and face his boss’s glare. “Yes, sir. We had two small cases show up in Phase II clinicals, but they were both very minor and easily managed, nothing like what we’re seeing now. Certainly not fatal. In fact, if we hadn’t been tightly monitoring those patients at the time, watching for any toxic effects at all from the drug, we might never have caught the changes in the cardio wave forms in the first place. And of course, when we scaled up to Phase IIIs, with mass trials of the drug, we didn’t see a single cardio problem, so we just wrote off the Phase II incidents as random noise.”
Boucher stopped pacing and slapped his pen down hard on the table, the report from the impact ringing off the walls of the crowded conference room. “So we’ve had three whole days to get a grip on this, three whole days and we’re no fucking further ahead than we were when we started? Is that what I’m hearing? Do I have any goddamned person working for this company who’s actually done something for Christ’s sake?”
Sales VP Trevor Wommack cleared his throat and rose slowly, tentatively, to address his boss. “Sir, as you know, we mobilized the entire sales team to execute a nationwide recall of Allurea. That wasn’t exactly legal, but FDA okayed it as an emergency response to the crisis. Every bottle at the wholesale and retail levels has been locked down and isolated, and we’ve asked the public to return all of the product still in their possession to a pharmacy—any pharmacy—for full credit. That was probably overkill, but we thought the Tylenol model of crisis management was the most prudent course to follow for the long term image of the brand. And for our company, as well.”