by Mike Lawson
“The Nobel?” Ballard said.
“I guarantee it.
Dr. Simon Ballard was his.
3
Paris, France~April 2006
Fiona’s first task was obtaining the services of the right doctor to manage the field testing of Ballard’s drug. This person had to be extremely charismatic and had to be an English-speaking foreigner—a doctor who was a U.S. citizen could complicate some of the legal issues Fiona might encounter in the future. After working her way through the dossiers of eight likely candidates—dossiers compiled by a rather unique firm of headhunters she employed—she decided a French physician named René Lambert was the best choice.
Lambert was a general practitioner based in Paris. Judging by his scholastic records he was most likely a mediocre doctor, but his medical skills were irrelevant. He knew enough medicine to do what Orson Mulray needed done. He came from old money, but the money had evaporated in the last decade due to a global recession and the fact that Lambert spent far more than he earned. He was up to his neck in debt and would soon be in over his head.
René Lambert was thirty-eight years old and had a beautiful Swedish wife and two beautiful daughters. He also had a mistress; the mistress would have to go. But the fact that he was appealing to women was one of the reasons Fiona selected him. He was dark-haired, tall, slender, and well muscled. His face was lean, his jaw strong, his chin dimpled. His eyes were a startling shade of blue. The only feature he had that wasn’t perfect was his nose, which had a slight bump in the middle. The bump had been caused by a bicycling accident, but rather than detracting from his appearance the nose-bump actually enhanced it, making him appear more rugged and less pretty. Even Fiona—who had no interest in sex whatsoever—found his looks distracting.
She met Lambert in a suite at the Ritz Paris that cost twenty-two hundred euros a night. She wanted to impress upon him immediately that money was of no concern to his future employer. She poured him a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue without asking if that’s what he wanted; she already knew his favorite drink. She began by saying, “Doctor, my name is Fiona West and I represent Orson Mulray, CEO of Mulray Pharma. Mr. Mulray is willing to pay you one million dollars a year for a job that we expect will take four or five years.”
A million was a number that always got a prospective employee’s immediate attention, and for a company that measured its profits in billions, a million really wasn’t all that much. Lambert was shocked by the offer, but not as shocked as Simon Ballard had been. The expression on René Lambert’s handsome face indicated that he was a man who had always expected that grand things would happen to him—and it looked as if they finally had.
“And, may I ask,” Lambert said in wonderfully accented English—he was a TV producer’s dream—“what I have to do to be compensated so generously?”
“I wasn’t finished discussing your compensation,” Fiona said, and then told him that in addition to his annual salary, Mulray Pharma would purchase back for him the mountain chalet in Grenoble he had been forced to sell to stay ahead of his creditors.
“But you need to dump your mistress here in Paris. Having a mistress may be acceptable to your wife, but it won’t be to a number of other people. You need to have an untarnished image.”
Lambert made a face that only a Frenchman could make, his expression saying: C’est la vie. Fiona knew, however, that Lambert was incapable of remaining faithful to his wife, and that she’d have to deal with his rampant libido at some future date.
“When are you going to tell me what you expect me to do?” Lambert said.
“Now,” Fiona said.
First, she explained, he would have to convince Lizzie Warwick, founder of the Warwick Foundation, to partner with him. Fiona figured with his looks and his charm—and the secret and substantial financial backing of Mulray Pharma—that wouldn’t be hard to do. Lizzie Warwick was not to know about his association with Mulray Pharma, of course. She would assume the money that Lambert brought to her foundation came from his wealthy European friends.
“I don’t believe Lizzie will be a problem,” Lambert said.
Second, he would have to spend at least six months of every year for the next four or five years in the godforsaken places where Lizzie Warwick went. He would be living in miserable and sometimes dangerous conditions. Fiona could tell this didn’t appeal to him at all but, after a moment, he nodded his acceptance.
“Third,” she said, “it will be your job to select appropriate subjects for certain clinical trials, establish facilities to house those subjects for as long as necessary, and hire appropriate local talent to administer drugs and obtain biological samples.”
Before Lambert could respond, Fiona said, “And there’s one more thing.” After she told him what that was, Lambert emptied his Scotch glass in one swallow and said, “I don’t think I can …”
“You realize,” Fiona said, “that this drug will help millions of people. It will be a historic medical achievement, and you will have been part of that achievement.”
“That may be but …”
It took Fiona almost an hour to convince Lambert, during which time he had two more Scotches—they were going to have to watch his drinking —but he finally agreed to become an employee of Mulray Pharma after Fiona agreed to increase his annual salary by another quarter million.
And at that moment, Fiona knew exactly how the Devil must have felt when he shook hands with Dr. Faust.
Eastern Indonesia~May 2006
Orson Mulray needed human subjects in order to test Dr. Ballard’s drug, and the ideal subject was a person too poor and too ignorant to refuse anything supposedly being done for his or her benefit. Furthermore, these people would be required to sign documents stating that they consented to the testing, and it would be good if they were illiterate. Finally, the countries in which the test subjects resided had to have governments susceptible to bribery and without the resources to waste on issues as nebulous as drug testing. Lizzie Warwick and her foundation would provide subjects who met these criteria.
Now, almost all pharmaceutical companies do some clinical trials in third world countries these days, and although the practice may be frowned upon in some circles, it isn’t illegal. So Orson didn’t really need the Warwick Foundation to test Ballard’s drug, but he wanted it for two reasons. First, by using Warwick for cover, there was less chance that another pharmaceutical company would discover that Mulray Pharma was developing a new product. The second reason was that Lizzie Warwick, like Fiona West, would provide a barrier between Orson Mulray and his crimes.
Lizzie Warwick came from a Philadelphia family that made its fortune producing weapons for any country with the means to buy them. Land mines were a particularly profitable product line. In 2003, in her thirties, unmarried and childless and having no idea what to do with her life, Lizzie accompanied a church group as a volunteer to help rebuild homes destroyed by a hurricane—and found her calling. She turned the family fortune into the Warwick Foundation and thereafter took it upon herself to go to places afflicted by war and natural disaster to do what she could.
Lizzie was a brave, bighearted woman, but the relief business is a complicated one, dealing with the logistics of moving supplies to distant shores, negotiating with foreign governments, raising money, then accounting for the money raised. Organizations like the Red Cross hire professionals to deal with these complex issues—and pay them well—but Lizzie, a person with absolutely no managerial ability, relied primarily on people like herself, people who didn’t necessarily have the requisite skills but who were dedicated and willing to volunteer. This also made her and her foundation perfect for Orson Mulray.
Lizzie met Dr. René Lambert for the first time on an Indonesian island that had been struck by torrential rains and mud slides, and as if God wasn’t satisfied that these poor islanders had been sufficiently teste
d, a small earthquake demolished the few structures not swept away by the floods and slides. Ten villages were wiped out, hundreds died, and thousands were left homeless, starving, and dying of thirst and dysentery.
The night they met, Lizzie was sitting in her tent, so fatigued she could barely lift her thin arms. Her pale face was streaked with mud and sweat; her wiry red hair was plastered to her skull. Earlier that day, while passing out bottles of water to victims, she had heard a child crying, the sound coming from a hut so buried by mud that only the top of its tin roof was visible. Lizzie had joined the villagers’ frantic efforts to save the child, but when they’d reached her an hour later, the little girl was dead.
René Lambert patted Lizzie sympathetically on the shoulder and then told her about himself. He said he had been blessed with so much that he could no longer sit idly by watching others suffer while he did nothing, so he’d brought a planeful of medical supplies to Indonesia and was tending to the unfortunate as best he could. But, he told her, he could see that he had grossly underestimated the enormity of the task.
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Lizzie said.
Lambert worked with Lizzie for two weeks and, to impress her, he worked just as hard as she did—which was very hard indeed. One night, after a particularly long and frustrating day—a day when supplies Lizzie was expecting failed to arrive—Lambert proposed that they join forces. He would provide a medical arm for the Warwick Foundation. He would get other doctors and nurses to join him, à la Doctors Without Borders. More important, if they joined forces they could double their fund-raising efforts—and he was, he said with a self-deprecating smile, an excellent fund-raiser.
René Lambert bedazzled Lizzie Warwick.
“I can see, however, that we need a good administrator,” Lambert said. “You know, an experienced person to deal with all the logistical problems of getting things to places like this. And it would be good if this person was able to manage the money as well. I don’t know about you, but accounting is not one of my skills.”
Lizzie admitted it wasn’t one of hers, either. In fact, Lizzie rarely paid any attention to the money end of the business, and the accountant she used was a nice man who volunteered his time but really wasn’t in the best of health.
“We’re going to need some sort of security as well,” Lambert said. “We have to make sure the things we bring to help these poor people actually get to them. Half the drugs I brought with me have been stolen.”
“Do you know anyone who can do these jobs?” Lizzie asked.
“I believe I can find the right men,” Dr. Lambert said.
4
Leavenworth, Kansas~June 2006
Bill Hobson was sixty-one years old. He was five foot eight, wore a hearing aid in his right ear, and had a small paunch. His gray hair was cut short, the way he’d always worn it, and wire-rimmed bifocals covered weak blue eyes. He did not cut an imposing figure. He was currently residing in a thirty-eight-dollar-per-night motel room. He had been in the room for three days—contemplating suicide.
William Benedict Hobson had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Like most young men who graduate from that fine institution, he envisioned himself heroically leading battalions into battle, having four stars on his shoulders, maybe one day becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not to be. The army needed warriors but it also needed men to help the army run like the well-oiled machine it was. Somebody had to be responsible for getting the food, ammunition, and boots to the front lines; somebody had to make sure there were spare parts to maintain the tanks, helicopters, and personnel carriers. And Bill Hobson, over his strenuous objections, became that somebody.
He was a maniac for detail and could juggle numbers and complex schedules in his head when other men needed computers to assist them. He also had that rare ability to anticipate all the things that could possibly go wrong and develop contingency plans to address those things. He became, almost from the day he left the Point, the man his bosses turned to to handle the complex logistics of military operations. And, as is often the case in bureaucracies, Hobson soon found that excelling could actually become a hindrance to advancement: he filled a vital niche and was too good at what he did to be allowed to transfer to the war-fighting side of the service.
He advanced, of course, and ultimately reached the rank of colonel, but when it came to selecting men for the general staff, he was passed over. At the level where stars are affixed to a soldier’s uniform, the army has to consider the whole package and not just an individual’s experience and ability. They have to consider if a man looks like a general, whether or not he will be an appropriate poster boy for the service. They need to gauge his political skills. Will he be able to swim with the sharks at the Pentagon and the even bigger sharks on Capitol Hill? Can he communicate? Can he give a speech that will not only rouse the troops but will provide the necessary sound bite for the evening news? And William Hobson, to his great dismay—dismay that eventually turned to boiling rage—was found lacking in these more esoteric qualities of generalship.
The army gave Hobson the opportunity to serve three more years as a colonel before he would be forced to retire, and his initial reaction was to tell the army to shove its opportunity up its ass. Then he had another idea. He decided that since the army wouldn’t give him the star he deserved—and, more important, the pension that came with that star—he would steal enough to make up the difference.
Hobson waited until he was alone one night, then sat down at the desk of a staff sergeant who worked for him, entered the sergeant’s password into his computer, and modified the payment information for a certain vendor the army used. This particular vendor sold tires for certain army vehicles—and the army has a lot of vehicles.
On subsequent nights, and over a three-month period, Hobson did other things on the staff sergeant’s computer. He prepared a purchase order for four hundred and eighty thousand dollars’ worth of tires. (He had wanted to order half a million dollars’ worth but was worried about using such a round number.) The vendor never received the purchase order but, thanks to Hobson, all the required forms were electronically filed by the vendor, showing that the tires had been manufactured and inspected and would be sent to a dozen army bases around the globe upon receipt of payment. Then Hobson, as he was required to do in his position, authorized payment to the vendor, and the money was electronically sent on its way—it just didn’t end up in the tire vendor’s bank account, just as the tires never showed up in the supply system inventory.
Now, the Pentagon has a number of elaborate controls to prevent the type of crime Bill Hobson committed. There are checks and double checks, procedures to be followed that are subject to audit and review. But Hobson was intimately familiar with these procedures; he had, in fact, developed many of them. Also, an integral part of the army’s fraud protection program was that supervisors of a certain rank had to approve procurements above a certain dollar value. But in this particular case, Hobson was that supervisor.
And although half a million dollars might sound like a lot to ordinary folk, in terms of the Pentagon’s budget it was an amount that could literally be written off as a rounding error. That particular year, DOD’s budget was four hundred and one billion dollars, and half a million was .000124% of that budget. It would be a miracle if an auditor noticed that half a million had disappeared, and if an auditor did notice, the chances of him tracing the loss back to Hobson was so small that … Well, put it this way: the auditor would be more likely to win the multistate mega-lotto with a single ticket than catch Bill Hobson.
The day four hundred and eighty thousand dollars was deposited into Hobson’s bank account, he treated himself to dinner at the most expensive steakhouse in Washington. He was arrested two days after his steak dinner.
What Hobson didn’t realize was that the night he changed the payment information in
the tire vendor’s file, the Pentagon’s IT guys were doing one of their frequent, random security audits. They weren’t looking for anything specific, just funny business. Funny business like folks stealing identity information, or viewing pornography online, or, the biggie, someone e-mailing classified documents to places they weren’t supposed to go. The night Hobson replaced the tire vendor’s bank account number with his own, a bright-eyed sergeant from Clinton, Iowa, named Millie Cooper, sitting in front of a computer on the B ring of the Pentagon, saw the changes being made on her screen. And Millie said: Hmmm? I wonder what that’s all about? Why are these numbers being changed at nine o’clock at night? Millie noted that the person logged onto the computer was, per the password used, Staff Sergeant Henry Main, but when she checked the security guys’ computer, it showed that Sergeant Main had swiped his badge through a bar-code reader when he left the Pentagon at 1630 hours. Hmmm? Millie said again.
Millie called her boss and the next day her boss called the lawyers and the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The lawyers obtained a warrant to find out whom the bank account belonged to and discovered it was one Colonel William Hobson and then everybody—cops, lawyers, and Millie—just sat back and watched until Hobson completed his crime. And then they arrested him.
Hobson was dishonorably discharged, stripped of his pension, and given ten years in Leavenworth, of which he served six. His wife divorced him, took his house and what little savings they had, and his children wouldn’t speak to him. Maybe the worst thing that happened was that his dog died while he was in jail; Hobson had loved that dog more than he did his wife. On the day he left Leavenworth, his net worth, not counting his shoes and the clothes on his back, was three hundred and fourteen dollars. Considering his criminal record, Hobson figured he had two choices: he could get a job at a car wash or he could commit suicide—and suicide seemed more appealing.