by Mike Lawson
It just wasn’t a big deal as far as he was concerned.
The day after he told Downing he was firing him, Downing came to his office, and he got there after Hobson’s secretary had left for the day. And when Downing entered the office, he had been on the phone with René Lambert and he had the phone on the speaker because he was loading shit into his briefcase, getting ready to leave. But he couldn’t remember exactly what he and Lambert had talked about. He remembered they talked briefly about Juan Carlos, the guy they had in Peru managing the facility, and Lambert complaining about some dumb thing Juan had done. They also talked about a bunch of other stuff—how things were going at the facility in Pakistan; how Simon Ballard wanted a different kind of container for shipping some samples, something with better temperature control; and how they needed a new propane-fueled refrigerator for storing drugs at the facility in Uganda—but he couldn’t remember anything he said that could have tipped Downing off to exactly what they were doing. Whatever it was, though, it had been enough.
When he’d finished talking to Lambert that day, he was surprised to find Downing standing in the reception area, outside his office door. And he remembered wondering at the time about how much of his conversation with Lambert Downing had overheard. He talked with Downing for ten minutes after that, listening patiently while Downing begged him not to dump him, and him giving Downing some bullshit spiel about how it was time for a change. Then, five days later, Downing comes back, says he’s been to Peru, and he’s figured out what they’re doing—and if they don’t keep him on as their lobbyist, he’s going to blow the whistle on everything. And, by the way, he doesn’t think he’s getting paid enough.
Phil Downing didn’t know it, but he was a dead man walking after that.
Hobson had always thought that the way they killed Downing was too complicated, too … elaborate. He didn’t say so at the time because Fiona didn’t give a damn about his opinion, but if it had been up to him, he would have had Kelly just shoot the son of a bitch, take his wallet, and let the cops think that Downing had been killed in a mugging. But that’s not what Fiona wanted. She said they were dealing with billions of dollars—she said that every time any issue came up—and that she wanted absolutely no investigation into Downing’s death. She wanted to kill him and immediately give the cops his killer.
And it worked. Brian Kincaid was in the can thirty-six hours after Downing died and the cops never looked at another suspect. And two years later, it had looked like Kincaid was a closed book—until this cluck DeMarco comes along and starts asking questions.
Fiona stood up, signaling that the meeting was over. “I need to talk to Orson,” she said. Looking at Kelly, she added, “But I want you two to start personally watching DeMarco and this woman in McLean.” She paused and muttered, “I wish you hadn’t used that private detective.”
“Hey, we were in Africa when this first came up, and then we had to go to Peru. It seemed prudent at the time,” Kelly said.
“Yeah, I know,” Fiona said. “But now the detective’s a loose end. If it’s necessary to take care of DeMarco, you may need to get rid of him, too.”
“The detective’s the father of a guy we served with,” Nelson said.
“I guess you should have thought of that before you hired him,” Fiona said.
“What about Downing’s old secretary?” Kelly asked.
Fiona shrugged. “Maybe her, too.”
“Jesus!” Hobson said. “You’re overreacting. DeMarco doesn’t know anything.”
“Shut up!” Fiona said. “I don’t want to hear another fucking word from you. You have no idea how close we are. Another three months, maybe less, we’ll be ready to go public. So I don’t care how many people have to die.”
“What a surprise,” Nelson muttered.
“Hey!” Fiona said, pointing a slim finger at Nelson. “I’m not in the mood for any of your crap, either.”
Nelson just looked at her, a smile playing on his lips, probably thinking he could snap her neck with one hand.
“Anyway,” Fiona said to Kelly, “I want you guys watching DeMarco and the woman. Based on that one phone call, it sounds as if she knows everything he does. And start thinking about ways to take these people out if we need to.”
As Hobson left the hotel room a thought occurred to him, a thought that sent a shiver down his spine. When the project was complete—Orson Mulray’s project, that is—Fiona would no longer need him, and he wondered if, when that day came, she would tell Kelly and Nelson to take him out.
Fiona had said that in less than three months Mulray would be ready to go public—which meant Bill Hobson had less than three months to make himself bullet-proof.
19
Fiona paced Orson Mulray’s office, telling him about the meeting with Kelly, Nelson, and Hobson. As she paced, her right hand, with its long red-painted fingernails, moved up and down her left forearm—scratching, scratching, scratching like she was trying to plow furrows into her skin. Orson didn’t recall her having that particular mannerism when he first met her, but in the last year—as they got closer to the finish line—he noticed that whenever she got upset, she’d start with the scratching, her right hand just raking her left forearm as she paced the room. He had never seen her draw blood, but he wouldn’t be surprised if one day she did.
“Let’s be logical about this,” Orson said. “The likelihood of DeMarco discovering anything is small. The only reason Downing did was because he heard Hobson talking to Lambert and because he went to Peru to see for himself what was going on.”
“But what if DeMarco does discover something?” Fiona said.
“Then we’ll deal with the issue when the time comes. I mean, for God’s sake, Fiona. You’re talking about killing DeMarco, this woman in McLean, a private detective, and Downing’s old secretary. The last thing we need is a pile of dead bodies that could lead back to us. For now, let’s just watch these people. My guess is that DeMarco will give up pretty soon and tell Kincaid’s mother that nothing can be done for her son.”
“I don’t know,” Fiona said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Maybe we should monitor these people the way we do the geeks in Ballard’s lab. Cell phones, e-mails, everything.”
“No. To do that would take a dozen people—and then you’d have a dozen more people who might discover something we don’t want them to know. Just relax.”
He said this knowing Fiona didn’t know how to relax.
“When will we be ready to go public?” Fiona said.
“Now that’s a problem,” Orson said. “Ballard was ready to conclude that everything was finished, but then we got those anomalies from the Thai study and now we have to wait until he finishes analyzing the autopsy samples from Peru. The problem with Ballard is … well, it’s like he’s just looking for an excuse to do more research. If I leave it to him, he’ll be conducting research until we’re both dead.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ll deal with Simon. You just make sure that DeMarco doesn’t become a problem. But I don’t want anyone killed, Fiona. Not without my authorization. Do you understand?”
When Orson Mulray joined forces with Simon Ballard five years earlier, he had four major hurdles to overcome. The first was the scientific hurdle: Ballard had a theory on how to prevent the disease, but that’s all it was—a theory. It was a sound theory, a logical theory, and Ballard had done an enormous amount of research to back it up, but in order to proceed from theory to marketable drug, Ballard needed to test his theory.
It was rather like the first folks who decided man could fly. It appeared reasonable to some that gluing feathers to their bodies and flapping their arms like wings might work. It worked for birds; why not for humans? After some daring person tested this particular theory—and ended up broken and bloody at the bottom of a cliff—other theories
were developed.
Such was the case with Ballard’s drug—until it was actually tested on human beings, he couldn’t be sure it would fly.
Which led to the second problem. The conventional, safe, and legal way to conduct human trials was for Ballard to do all he possibly could to validate his theory in the laboratory, proceed to tests on mice, monkeys, and so forth, then develop an überconservative protocol for clinical trials and submit that protocol to the cautious, slow-moving bureaucrats at the FDA for their approval. And if Orson Mulray went that route it would take eight to twelve years to get the drug to the marketplace—and he had no intention of taking twelve years.
Then there was the third hurdle—the highest one of all. The only way to really prove that Ballard’s drug was effective was via tissue samples—and in the case of the particular disease involved, one could only obtain those samples during an autopsy. With other drugs, a little blood, piss, and shit, a harmless biopsy or a CT scan, and doctors would be able to tell if a particular treatment worked. Not so with Simon Ballard’s drug. To get to the part of the body he needed to examine, it was necessary to wait for the patient to die—and, once again, Orson had no intention of waiting. He was working to his own timetable—not God’s.
The final hurdle was potential legal problems. In many countries, including the United States, there were many people willing to participate in risky drug trials provided the drug was their only salvation or if they were compensated in some way. It may have sounded ghoulishly mercenary, but it was a fact that people were often paid to be medical guinea pigs. Underlying all this, however, was the confidence that the doctors knew what they were doing and that the drugs being administered wouldn’t actually kill them. And therein lay the rub: if a few patients died testing Simon Ballard’s theory, then—no matter what medical waivers the test subjects had signed—the deaths would make the news, Mulray Pharma would be sued by rapacious lawyers, and it would be more difficult than ever to bring the drug to market.
Orson decided that rather than go over all these high hurdles, he would simply run around them. He would skip much of the tedious R&D phase and immediately inject Ballard’s drug into people—people who would have no idea why they were being injected. Which was how Lizzie Warwick came into the picture. The people she cared for—trusting, ignorant, and helpless—were virtually invisible. And they dwelled in places where government officials could easily be bribed to look the other way, and if a few of them died during clinical trials, no one would really care—much less contact a lawyer.
Phase I testing of Ballard’s drug was conducted in Peru on people whom Lizzie pulled from the rubble of an earthquake. This was the most critical of all the phases, because this was the first time Ballard would have definitive proof that his theory was viable. Fifty-five people meeting Ballard’s criteria were selected by René Lambert and placed in a Warwick “care center,” and a medical technician, the ever-cheerful Juan Carlos, was trained to administer the drug. For six months, the drug was given and appropriate, nonlethal biological samples were taken. At the end of six months, four people were killed—one per month—autopsies were performed, and the Phase I testing was determined to be an enormous success. Not only was Ballard’s drug working as predicted, there was no evident damage to other healthy organs: liver, kidneys, lungs, et cetera.
Following Phase I, a second phase was needed, because early results showed that certain refinements could be made to improve the drug’s effectiveness. Phase II testing would validate these refinements. Fifty unfortunates rendered homeless by another earthquake, in Pakistan, were chosen for Phase II. As was done in Peru, these people were isolated, a local nurse was hired, and the Phase II drug was administered for a six-month period. During this time, with a little assistance from Kelly and Nelson, three people perished—and Dr. Ballard’s drug was declared to be completely effective; it even exceeded the good doctor’s own expectations.
Phase III testing was required to enhance the delivery mechanism for the drug. In Phase I and II testing the drug was injected—and this was fine for test purposes. But, for economic rather than medical reasons, Orson wanted a delivery mechanism that didn’t involve needles. People were squeamish about needles. Orson wanted a pill, a nasal spray, a gum, a patch—anything other than needles—and Ballard ultimately concluded that a nasal spray would work best. The nasal spray was tested on the folks in Uganda who had been dislocated due to war, but it did take three more corpses to validate the effectiveness of the spray. It was purely coincidental that a toxin-laden nasal spray was also used to euthanize the test subjects.
The last thing Orson Mulray needed to do was perform legitimate clinical trials—or at least semilegitimate trials. To do this, Ballard did a little thing known as dry-labbing, a term familiar to most engineers and scientists. In dry-labbing, a scientist already knows the results he wants and then designs tests that will produce exactly those results. And that’s what Ballard did: based on all the human trials previously conducted in Peru, Pakistan, and Africa, he designed a series of laboratory experiments that proved exactly what he wanted to prove. The result of all these experiments was a mountain of data, and a report—filled with charts and graphs and images taken with electron microscopes—was issued. There were twenty-eight appendices to the report.
Now, had Orson Mulray chosen to do so, he could have given this document to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin the long road to clinical trials in the United States. But Orson Mulray had no intention of dealing with the FDA. Instead he chose Thailand, where there was a medical institution run by a Harvard-educated Thai physician. The brother of this physician was—and not coincidentally—the Thai minister of health. So, in accordance with the laws of Thailand—laws bent somewhat, but not too much, by generous donations from Mulray Pharma—legitimate clinical trials commenced after the Phase III testing. The trials were expected to take approximately one year and would include one thousand people, some of whom would be given placebos. If any of these people died of natural causes, their bodies would be autopsied—and of the thousand patients selected, one hundred and fifty were chosen because the likelihood of them living less than a year was extraordinarily small. The test results and samples from the subjects in Africa, Pakistan, and Peru were mixed in with those from the Thailand trials.
After ten months, when the clinical trials in Thailand were nearing completion, a minor glitch occurred: a previously unseen test result raised some questions about the safety of the drug. Ballard decided he needed a bit more data, and he wanted the data obtained from the subjects in Peru—that is, from the subjects who had been receiving the drug the longest time.
This was the reason Kelly and Nelson had been rerouted from Africa to Peru to acquire three corpses.
Orson Mulray called Ballard to his office the day after meeting with Fiona. He wanted to wrap up the trials in Thailand and go public—after which he would become extraordinarily rich.
Ballard, of course, didn’t want to meet with him. He said he was too busy. So Orson sent a car to Ballard’s lab and told the driver to throw Ballard into the trunk if that’s what it took to get him to the meeting. The driver asked if he was joking; Orson told him he wasn’t.
“Well?” Orson said as soon as Ballard stepped into his office.
Ballard looked like he always did, with his smudged glasses, wrinkled white shirt, wrinkled khaki pants, and scuffed running shoes. No one would ever guess this man was paid more than half a million dollars a year.
“Well, what?” Ballard responded, genuinely confused by the question.
“The autopsy results from the Peru subjects. What did they tell you?” Orson said.
Then Ballard did what he always did when Orson asked about the drug—he launched into a seemingly endless discussion filled with words that Orson didn’t understand.
“Goddamnit, man!” Orson screamed. Even a person who prided himself on always
remaining calm could be pushed over the edge by Simon Ballard. “I want to know if the results from the Peru autopsies show that the drug is still safe.”
Once again, Ballard began to tell him about the relationship between the anomalous Thai test results and the other testing that had been done to date. Before he’d mumbled more than three sentences, Orson slammed his hand down on his desk.
“No! I don’t want to hear any more scientific mumbo jumbo. I want you to answer a simple yes-or-no question. I want you to tell me if the weird test results we got in Thailand invalidate your previous conclusions regarding the safety of the drug. Yes or no?”
“Well, when you put it that way, no,” Ballard said.
Orson closed his eyes—feeling both gratitude and relief—and the urge to throw Simon Ballard through a window somewhat abated.
“Then if that’s the case,” Orson said, “I’m going public next month. By then we’ll have more than eleven months of data from the trials in Thailand, and that’s enough.”
“Well, I would like to do just a bit more testing on one aspect of—”
“No,” Orson said. He didn’t scream the word this time, he just said it very firmly. Then he added, “Dr. Ballard, you need to think about what you want to do with the rest of your life. You need to think about another disease to cure. And I will get you the Nobel as I promised, but that can’t happen until we go public with the drug. You do understand that, don’t you?”