by Mike Lawson
“Don’t you understand, Fiona? I wasn’t worried about them finding anything in Peru, not at this point. The only concern I had was them finding some way to tie us directly to Downing’s death.”
“But if they went to Peru, they might have been able to figure out why we killed Downing.”
Orson shook his head; she still didn’t understand. “It doesn’t matter if they figured out why we killed Downing, not unless they could actually prove we had him killed.”
“But if they learned what Downing learned …”
“Fiona, we had to kill Downing because of when he learned what he did. If he had talked at that point, it could have interrupted the trials before we had the data we needed. But at this point … well, it just doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t.” Before she could say anything else, he said, “What’s Nelson’s status?”
“He’s in bad shape, but unfortunately he’s going to live. I wish that cop had killed him. I got him a good lawyer, but the lawyer says there’s no doubt he’ll be convicted. They have him on video trying to rob a liquor store, not to mention three eyewitnesses. If he talks, we have a major problem.”
“He’s not going to talk,” Orson said. “Right now, the worst thing that will happen to him is he’ll be convicted for attempted armed robbery, but if he tells what he did for us, he’ll have to confess to multiple homicides. So he’s not going to talk, but you need to get the word to him that as long as he keeps his mouth shut we’ll do everything we can for him and we’ll be there for him when he gets out of prison.”
Fiona nodded.
“I wonder if DeMarco knows he was the target,” Orson said.
“I don’t see how he could,” Fiona said. “He was just a customer in the store when someone tried to rob it, and he’s never met Nelson.”
“I hope you’re right about that. What about Kelly?”
“He called me once from Peru and when I told him about Nelson, he about went nuts. But I haven’t heard from him since and I don’t have a clue what he’s doing or where he’s at.”
“My God, you’ve fucked this up,” Orson muttered. “Is Emma back from Peru?”
“I don’t know. Kelly may have killed her.”
“What about DeMarco?”
“After Nelson was shot, I told Hobson to put that private detective back on DeMarco. And we’ve still got the tap on DeMarco’s landline. Anyway, according to Hobson, DeMarco’s been mostly staying at home, making a lot of phone calls. It looks like he’s trying to find out if Congressman Talbot is getting kickbacks from the Warwick Foundation.”
“Then he’s wasting his time,” Orson said. He didn’t say anything for a moment as he pondered everything. “Tell that detective to back off DeMarco and start watching Emma’s house to see if she comes back from Peru. And keep trying to reach Kelly.”
“I will, but I need to find somebody to replace Kelly and Nelson.”
“Why?”
“Because right now Nelson’s useless to us and Kelly’s AWOL. And whether you want to or not, Orson, we may need to deal with DeMarco in the future, and right now I don’t have anyone to do that.”
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“There’s a guy who provides on-site security for Lizzie Warwick. His name’s Earl Lee. Lambert told me once that if we ever needed someone else like Kelly and Nelson, Lee would probably do. He’s in Africa right now with Lizzie, and I’m going to fly him back here and talk to him.”
Orson shook his head.
“What?” Fiona said. “Do you have a better idea?”
“No, unfortunately not.” When he couldn’t think of anything else to say—or anything else to do to make up for Fiona’s debacle—he said, “Just leave, Fiona. And see if you can restrain yourself from trying to kill anyone else in the near future.”
26
When DeMarco walked into Neil’s high-tech sanctuary and saw Emma, he could see she was exhausted; she’d come straight from Dulles and obviously hadn’t slept much on the long flight from Peru. At least he hoped she was just tired from the flight and that he wasn’t seeing evidence of something related to her medical condition. Now he really did feel guilty for letting her take a trip he should have taken.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You look beat.”
Emma ignored the comment. “I think the Warwick Foundation is working with some pharmaceutical company to develop a new drug, and they’re testing the drug on the people Lizzie Warwick is supposedly helping.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Neil said.
“How do you know that?” DeMarco said.
Emma explained that when Lizzie Warwick went to Peru four years ago to help the earthquake victims, René Lambert culled out of the population people without families and then relocated them to an area away from the disaster site. He set up a facility in which to house them and surgically implanted a small RFID chip in each person so test results could be tied unerringly to specific subjects; Emma found that particularly macabre. Then Lambert hired a medical technician—not a doctor—to administer the drugs and take samples and mail the samples back to a lab in the U.S. so the efficacy of the drug could be evaluated.
“Well, that sounds kind of … slimy, using people that way,” DeMarco said, “but are they doing anything illegal?”
“I think they killed some of the test subjects,” Emma said.
“Killed them? Do you mean with the drug they’re testing?”
“I don’t know. Nine people have died at the facility in Peru in the last four years, and the man running the place believes they died of natural causes. But the death rate seems high to me, and the deaths occurred in … in clusters. A short time ago three people died on the same night. And four years ago, six months after the testing started, one person died every month in a four-month period. That just seems too regular, like people dying to suit a schedule.”
“Well, it seems to me you’re jumping to a whole bunch of conclusions without any evidence,” DeMarco said.
“I may be,” Emma said, “but Phil Downing was killed for a reason. And that man followed me to Peru and aimed a gun at my head for a reason. And the only thing I can think of is that Warwick—or somebody—is trying to cover something up. Something serious, like murder.”
“What drug are they testing?” DeMarco asked. “I mean, what are they trying to cure?”
“I don’t know. The drugs are simply marked with a number. And the technician administering the drugs—he’s a good man—doesn’t have any idea what he’s giving those people. He trusts Lambert. And you’re right, Joe. Warwick may be doing something slimy, as you put it, but she may not actually be breaking any laws. I have no idea what the laws are for doing drug testing in a place like Peru. But I know something is wrong down there. I know it.”
“From what I’ve heard about Lizzie Warwick,” DeMarco said, “it’s kind of hard to imagine she’d be involved in something like this.”
“I know. I can’t believe she’d do this either, but it appears as though she is. So we need facts. What did you get, Neil?”
Neil cleared his throat, usually an indicator that they were about to be treated to one of his long-winded, semidramatic presentations. “You asked me to find out if the Warwick Foundation is connected to a pharmaceutical company. The answer is … several.”
“Several?” Emma said.
“Yes. The foundation’s donation records were easy to access. Unlike contributions given to politicians, most people want it known that they’re charitable folk giving money to help the unfortunate. And, of course, they get a tax break for their donations. Well, in the case of the Warwick Foundation, several pharmaceutical companies donate money and drugs to support Lizzie’s overseas missions.”
“What sort of dr
ugs?”
“About what you’d expect. Painkillers, antibiotics, things to treat infection, dysentery, that sort of thing. And if the pharmaceutical company has ties to some company that makes bandages, splints, crutches, whatever, they donate those, too. Eight pharmaceutical companies have donated very generously to Warwick.”
“Does one company appear to be more generous than the others?”
“Yes, Mulray Pharma. But they’re not significantly more generous.” Neil tapped his keyboard. “They donated ten percent more than Merck, five percent more than Pfizer. But other donors, like Gates and Buffett, have donated more than Mulray. Now, you have to keep in mind that these are the recorded donations. Somebody could have mailed Warwick a boxful of cash that wasn’t reported. Or if a drug company is conducting legitimate trials, they could be funding the trials directly and the money wouldn’t pass through Warwick.”
Emma rubbed her hand over her face as if trying to scrub away her fatigue. “The man who runs the Warwick facility in Peru told me he mails bio samples to a lab in Delaware, and I saw a mailing label addressed to Delaware, to a company called Biomed something, Inc. I can’t remember the second word.”
The fact that Emma couldn’t remember was an indicator of how tired she was.
Neil turned to his computer and tapped on a keyboard; Google made Neil’s job even easier. “Biomed Futures, Inc.,” he said, “is located in Smyrna, Delaware, not far from Mulray Pharma’s headquarters in Wilmington. But Celgene, Incyte, Agilent, and AstraZeneca all have offices in Delaware, and since the state’s the size of a postage stamp, they’re all within a short drive of the lab. I’ll do some more digging.”
“What about you, Joe?” Emma said. “What did you find out about Congressman Talbot and his aide?”
“In the four days you’ve been gone, I’ve found zip,” DeMarco said. “The bill that Hobson, Downing, and Linger were planning to talk about the night Downing died was a massive foreign aid bill, and it included aid for countries where Lizzie Warwick had operated in the past. But there wasn’t anything in the bill that was Warwick-specific; it was just your generic foreign aid bill. And because the bill was initiated by the Democrats, naturally all the Republicans were going to vote against it. The only thing that made Talbot different from the other sixteen Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee was that two years ago, he was the ranking Republican member.”
“Great,” Emma said. “Another dead end.”
“Yeah, but that conference call still smells wrong,” DeMarco said. “What I mean is, there was no reason for it. The bill was going to pass whether Talbot voted for it or not, so I still find it suspicious that Hobson would set up a call with Linger when Congress was out of session and at the exact time Kincaid was in the office with Downing. But the bottom line is, I didn’t find anything to prove Linger or Talbot were involved in some kind of conspiracy with Hobson or Lizzie Warwick.”
“Neil,” Emma said, “when you figure out which pharmaceutical company runs that lab in Delaware, see if you can tie Congressman Talbot to the company.”
Neil made a note on a Post-it sticker and pasted the note on one of the three monitors on his desk.
“And what about the man with two passports I encountered in Peru?” Emma asked. “What did you find out about him?”
“I haven’t made a lot of progress on him yet,” Neil said. “The two numbers he called from the sat phone went to untraceable, prepaid cell phones, so I don’t know who owns the phones. I did call the numbers. One went to voice mail, but the voice mail didn’t identify who received the call, not even a first name. The second number was answered by a woman, but she wouldn’t identify herself. She just said I had called the wrong number and hung up. Maybe she’s the guy’s girlfriend, I don’t know.”
“But what did you find out about the man himself? Kelly, Shaw, whoever the hell he is.”
“Well, nothing yet. I’ve been working mostly on the pharmaceutical company question.”
“You need to get moving on this thing!” Emma snapped. “I need to know everything you can find out about everyone associated with Lizzie Warwick’s foundation. I need to know what drug company is hooked in with Warwick, and I definitely need to know about the man I killed in Peru. So step up, Neil! Work all night if you have to.”
Neil looked sheepish and said, “Okay, I’ll get right on it.”
DeMarco couldn’t believe it. If he had told Neil to work all night, Neil would have laughed in his face. He was dying to know what kind of hold Emma had over the man.
Emma stood up. “I need to go home and get some sleep—I’m so tired I can’t think straight. We’ll regroup after Neil gets more data and then figure out the next step.”
“Hold on,” DeMarco said. “We’ve got another problem.”
“What’s that?” Emma said.
“You said the guy you killed in Peru left D.C. two hours after you did. How did he know where you were going?”
“I thought about that,” Emma said. “You must have tripped an alarm when you went to see Kincaid in prison. Or maybe you tripped it when you went to see Hobson, and somebody started following you.”
“And then what?” DeMarco said. “They started following every person I came in contact with? And if that guy followed you to the airport, the most he would have been able to figure out is that you were flying to Lima. How did he know you were going to Pinchollo?”
“My brain must be turning to mush,” Emma said. “Neil, have Bobby see if my phones or Joe’s are tapped or if we have bugs installed in our houses.”
Bobby was a young man who worked for Neil. He had a black belt in computer hacking, but he also installed listening devices for Neil when Neil wanted to bug somebody, like the other tenants in his building. Bobby, consequently, had the skills and equipment to tell if anyone was monitoring DeMarco’s and Emma’s conversations.
“And you and I,” Emma said to DeMarco, “need to start watching our backsides to see if we’re being tailed.”
Emma and DeMarco left Neil’s office together, and as they were walking back to their cars, DeMarco said, “By the way, you weren’t the only one who was almost killed,” and he told her about the attempted robbery in the liquor store and how the robber’s bullet had missed his head by about six inches. He concluded with, “If I hadn’t decided to go look at the Absolut, I would have been standing right in front of that bullet.”
Emma stopped walking. “Who was the robber?”
“I don’t know. Some guy in a ski mask. An ambulance carted him off, and he’s probably dead by now.”
“Where did this happen? Which liquor store?”
“The ABC store on Harrison in Arlington. Why are you …?”
Emma took her cell phone off her belt, called Neil, and told him to find out everything he could about the man who tried to rob the liquor store. She hung up before Neil could say anything.
“What?” DeMarco said. “You think that guy was in the store to kill me?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like coincidences. And if you wanted to kill somebody who was poking into what happened to Phil Downing but you didn’t want anybody to know why the person was killed, killing him in a liquor store robbery would provide pretty good cover.”
“I can’t believe the way your mind works sometimes,” DeMarco said.
When Emma arrived home, Christine said, “Oh, my God. Look at you. You look awful.”
“I’m just tired. I haven’t slept in—”
“You’ve got to take care of yourself!” Christine said. “If you get run-down, you could …” Christine began to cry.
Emma took her into her arms and said, “Christine, you have to stop worrying about me. I’m all right. I’m the same as I was before.”
And then a thought occurred to her. Would she have survived the cancer if some drug comp
any hadn’t experimented on human beings to develop the drugs? Most likely not.
27
Keeping one hand on the hospital bed for support, Kelly took a few tentative steps. His right hip hurt like a bastard and there were bruises all over his torso, but at least he could walk. He also had a headache from the concussion he’d suffered when his head hit a rock, but the doctor said the headache would probably go away in a few days. The major problem was that his left arm was useless. His left ulna was broken, his forearm was in a soft cast, and his left shoulder had been dislocated.
He was one lucky son of a bitch.
He didn’t know how long he’d remained unconscious after the fall, but when he first woke up, it felt like every bone in his body was broken. To make matters worse, the ledge he was lying on was so narrow that if he moved and lost his balance, he’d roll off and plummet into the ravine. He could see his car about a hundred yards below him—Emma must have pushed it off the road—but he couldn’t see any way that he was going to be able to climb back up to the road in the condition he was in. He knew he had to do something, though; if he didn’t, he’d die of exposure or internal injuries.
He lay there thinking about what to do next, thinking about Nelson, thinking about the pain, thinking how that bitch had completely surprised him. It was humiliating the way she took him out.
His eyes were closed when a rope hit his chest, and when he opened them he saw a little Peruvian guy climbing down the rope toward him. When the little guy reached him, Kelly couldn’t understand him, but based on the way he gestured, Kelly understood he was going to leave him where he was and go for help. He gave Kelly some water and threw a blanket over him, then climbed back up the rope.
An hour later, half a dozen little Peruvian guys appeared on the road above the ravine. They climbed down, put him on a makeshift stretcher, and used ropes to pull him up to the roadway. He must have passed out after that because when he woke up again he found himself in a small clinic in Chivay, where he was pumped full of fluids and antibiotics and his left forearm was put in a cast. It wasn’t until the following day that he recovered enough to get out of bed.