Chapter 6
The cop on phone duty in the 9th precinct said to his buddy, who was sitting on his desk passing time, “Man, you know Big-O’s gonna want a piece of that one.”
He was talking about Detective Steven O’Brian, who was standing in his office, absorbed in the final seconds of a television news alert describing the theft of a Level Four pathogen from the New York Biomedical Research Center.
The phone duty cop’s friend stuffed a handful of vending machine popcorn in his mouth and said, “Big O’s big IQ ain’t gonna protect him against flu germs.”
“Ain’t that the truth, brother.”
The phone rang.
The phone cop, Jon Ferguson, answered it, “Ninth precinct, Ferguson.”
“Detective O’Brian.”
“Who’s calling?”
“I’ve got information on the whereabouts of the archeologist. The one who stole the virus. Please put Detective Steven O’Brian on the phone.”
“Hold.” Ferguson gently pushed the hold button, then quickly rose, went over to O’Brian’s office and tapped on the window.
“What’s up, Fergie?”
“Guy on line one says he knows where the perp in the virus theft is.”
“Thanks.” O’Brian shut his door, sat down, and picked up the phone.
“How can I help you?”
A low, scratchy voice said, “Steven O’Brian?”
“Yes.”
“McAlister’s at the Dakota. Fourteenth floor. Taylor Fullbright’s apartment.”
“Okay, and why should I believe that?”
“Taylor, his friend, just collapsed at Neptune in Midtown. He’s being quarantined.”
“The fuck you say.”
“McAlister doesn’t know how to handle the virus, he’s already infected someone.”
O’Brian quickly said, “Who are you and why are you telling me?” But the line was dead before he finished the sentence.
He cleared the line and immediately called the head of the New York City first responder team and told him to be ready at Central Park West and West Seventy-First, one block south of the Dakota, with H5N1 virus detection equipment.
Next, he flung his door open and yelled to Ferguson, “Get me the number for Taylor Fullbright’s apartment. It’s in the Dakota. I need it yesterday! I’m going down to the car; bring the number with you. We need to get over to the Dakota now!”
Chapter 7
Mortimar turned toward Joel. “The healthcare industry is unlike any other industry. Simply stated, we sell hope. Patients buy our products because they hope our products will help them get well.
“The problem with selling hope is it’s easy to do. A cancer patient will use anything--crystals, magnets, or holy water--with the hope that it will make them better. Each of those bogus products displaces revenue that could, and should, be flowing to our companies.
“Our industry is wide open to new discoveries, disruptive technologies that could instantly change our business and our cash flow. A new herb could be found in a jungle in South America and we could have a cure for diabetes tomorrow. If that actually happened, it would cripple each of our companies.” He paused. “Do you agree, Joel?”
“I suppose that’s right.”
“Of course it’s right! Very few industries are so vulnerable. Take the automotive industry, for example. The internal combustion engine has been around for over a hundred years. Very little improvement. That industry is a joke. It’s about styling, image. They haven’t even figured out reliability yet. There’s no real technology there, like in healthcare.
“Up until now the auto industry has been good at one thing: squashing threats. And that’s exactly what we do here. We find threats to our companies and squash them like a bug on a sidewalk.”
“What kind of threats are you talking about, Sam? Genetic engineering? Cloning? New drug development?”
“Yes, yes, and yes. All of those. Watching those is part of all of our companies’ business plans. The three you mentioned are part of the basic threat analysis our research and marketing people do every day.
“The real danger lies elsewhere. Let me give you an example. A few years ago an obscure author said he’d found an instance of a shaman using DNA from one object to communicate with and alter, I say alter, the DNA of another object. He was talking about healing at micro, sub-cellular levels. At atomic levels, Joel.
“That means understanding and managing chaos theory. It means using a quantum-physics-like approach to healing, where you’re dealing with actions taking place inside an atom. You can’t see what’s happening, so you have to make hypotheses about them.
“Even with today’s supercomputers, this is next to impossible. But this author proposed that after generations of trial and error, a shaman somewhere had done it.
“He was proposing if you have the right elements, and mix them properly, you can heal people by altering and repairing their DNA, their actual chromosomes.”
Mortimar looked closely at Joel for a reaction. There was none. Joel was disbelieving.
Mortimar continued, “In his book, this author recounted a case where a shaman in South America mixed tobacco with a few other indigenous herbs, creating a compound. He then lit them in a pipe, so they were burning, which altered the compound’s DNA. The shaman inhaled them so they mixed with his breath and blood in his lungs, altering their DNA again, and then exhaled them onto a dying patient.”
“The patient inhaled the smoke, changing it yet again. This final product then coursed through the patient’s body. God knows what the mixture was, and what process it went through, but when its DNA was inhaled into the sick person’s body, it either killed or repaired the sick cells in the patient’s body. The author claimed patients with all sorts of ailments were healed after using this technique for two weeks.
“Is it real? Did it happen? Was it all in the patient’s mind? Or did some real medical healing take place? I don’t know. But I want to know. I have to know because if some backwater shaman has stumbled onto the cure for one of the primary illnesses that drives my business, I either want it, or I want him eliminated.”
“You can call our meetings here threat analysis and prevention. We’re under constant threat, Joel. We must keep our ears to the ground. We must know about all the threats. We must monitor them to ensure we don’t get blindsided. And then, most of all, we must take decisive action to avert a crisis in our own business.”
The eye bored into Joel, making him feel slightly nauseous. He looked away and saw the other men had turned toward him. They were waiting for his reaction.
He wanted to question them on ethics but instead said, “So what do you monitor?”
“You mean what do we monitor, correct? Are you with us, Joel?”
“Yes, yes, of course. We.”
Mortimar nodded to Casey who took over. “Our five companies represent eighty percent of healthcare industry revenue. We’re fifteen percent of the total GDP of this country. If anything happened to one of us, or god forbid, all of us, it would be an international crisis. We monitor everything.”
Joel nodded.
Casey continued, “The areas we track fall into two categories. The first is conventional medicine, where the threats usually come from small start-up type operations. These are usually run by scientists who’ve made a discovery, patented it, and are trying to test it so they can go for FDA approval. ImClone is a good example of this. If it threatens our existing lines of business, or even something in the pipeline, we either buy it or block it.”
“I get the buy option. How do you block them?”
“FDA.”
“How?” Joel asked.
“It costs about $100 million to bring a new drug to market. Most of the smaller companies raise just enough to get the drug through. If the process drags out, they run out of funding. All we have to do is file a bogus patent infringement lawsuit and their legal fees bankrupt them.”
Joel nodded.
&nbs
p; “We also have . . .ah . . . how should I say this? considerable influence with the FDA.” Casey rubbed his fingers together, the universal sign for money.
“The FDA is a cinch. All they care about is money. There are also more . . . forceful means,” Mortimar added with a leer.
Casey continued, “The second category we track is unconventional healing. This covers everything else, including acupuncture, homeopathy, crystals, magnets, energy healers, and all varieties of unregulated herbs and supplements. Extraterrestrial incidents, witchcraft, religious or faith-based claims, multicultural findings like Sam’s shaman example, and any related historical stories, fall into this group.
“Most are hoaxes, but you just never know. Some of the religious incidents and also some of the crude healing methods used in other cultures have merit. Some work. We don’t know how, and some aren’t repeatable, so it’s often hard to get a statistically significant sample, but they do occasionally work so we try to learn more about them.”
“Like what? Can you give me an example?”
Casey looked at Sam Mortimar, who nodded and said, “Eventually, Joel will have access to all historical data. He must understand what we do. He is part of it now.”
Casey said, “Well, for example, the shaman Sam talked about earlier. That was a true story. We tried to spy on him, but the village was literally in the middle of a jungle and we couldn’t get close enough. So . . . we brought him to the States.”
Mortimar picked up the story. “Provided him with access to all of his indigenous flora and fauna, and tried to get him to replicate what he had been doing in his village, in a laboratory. The project was unsuccessful.”
“What happened to him? Did you take him home?” Joel asked.
“Actually, he died while he was in our custody. One day his heart stopped. There was nothing we could do. Autopsy inconclusive. Could’ve been a hundred different things.” Casey looked at Mortimar, who seemed to be smiling again, and shrugged.
Joel thought about suggesting maybe they shouldn’t have taken the man in the first place, but thought better of it.
“Another example is stigmata. We can find no biological or medical reason for it, yet we’ve all seen it occur before our eyes. In the past we’ve collected some stigmata specimens.”
“Specimens?”
Mortimar spoke up, impatiently, “We call the people specimens because we analyze them as such. Listen Joel, what you need to know is one overriding principle. When we come across anything that threatens our industry, we analyze it, and then we either capitalize on it or obstruct its existence. It’s very simple. Do you understand?”
Joel paused. The ghoulish eye was glaring at him. Intense and angry.
“Got it. Understand the concept,” Joel said. “Let’s talk about the second thing you do. Making people sick. Emerging Markets or Market Development or whatever William called it. What is that?”
Mortimar looked at Casey, “William, you want to take it?”
“Sure, Sam. Joel, people are living longer, and that is a good thing for us because it gives them more of an opportunity to get sick.”
Joel nodded; he’d seen the research. Average human life expectancy in North America was at an all-time high: seventy-five years. Up significantly in the past forty years.
“But many people, particularly the baby boomers, are healthier than previous generations. Incidences of new cancer have slowed, and less people are getting diabetes and heart disease. Or they’re getting them under control through diet, exercise, and existing medicine.
“That’s all bad news for us. The revenue from the drugs we use to treat those illnesses is steady or declining. Worse still, many of our cash cow drugs are losing patent protection soon. Not good for us.”
“We need new kinds of sick people. We need new revenue streams, Joel,” Mortimar said, a twinkle in his eye.
Casey looked at Mortimar, who nodded. “Joel, we faced these exact same issues back in the mid-seventies. Back then it was just Sam and me. But the issue we faced then was exactly the same as the issue we face now. Mature drugs and a declining rate of illness.”
“What did you do then?” Joel asked.
Silence fell over the room and Joel perceived an odd current of negative energy. The other men in the room exchanged glances.
Casey again looked at Mortimar. Joel could tell he was seeking permission.
The other men shifted in their chairs; tension rose. This was some sort of decision point in their acceptance of Joel as part of the group.
Mortimar nodded and Casey looked back at Joel and said, “We created the HIV virus.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” Clearly Casey didn’t want to say it again.
Joel had a deep knowledge of the history of the HIV virus. Or so he thought. “HIV originated in southern Cameroon, Africa.”
Casey shook his head. “Joel, HIV was created in a laboratory at the United States Army’s Biological Warfare Research Unit, Fort Detrick, Maryland. HIV is a combination of a virus called HTLV-1 and Visna, a sheep virus. Both are T-cell killers; combined, they’re lethal.”
Joel began to feel dizzy, then felt his lunch rising in his stomach. These men were sicker than he could have imagined.
“Scary thing was, Joel, it wasn’t really even that hard to make. Put an immunodeficiency together with a T-cell attacker, and voila.”
“Damn, we’d never seen T-cells killed so fast. I’ll never forget looking through the microscope that day. Unbelievable. That’s when I knew we really had something.”
Joel’s heart rate accelerated. He didn’t want to believe what he was hearing. If it was true, he didn’t want to be part of it. He had to say something, anything. He didn’t want his shock to register. “Going from a petri dish in a laboratory is a far cry from twenty-eight million dying of an infection.”
“It was released to homosexual men starting in 1977 disguised as a hepatitis B vaccine. By the mid-eighties, over fifty-percent of all homosexual men in New York and San Francisco were infected.”
“Heathens,” Mortimar hissed.
“Then we started the myth that HIV was sourced from Africa. HIV wasn’t even discovered in Africa until 1982, years after thousands of gay men in America already had it.”
“How did it get over there if it was an American invention?”
“Some of the monkeys used to develop both the HIV virus and the hepatitis delivery trials were set free in Africa in the late ‘70s.”
The room was silent. They were all looking at him. Waiting to gauge his reaction.
Joel shook his head. “So you’re saying that . . . you’re saying . . .”
Mortimar leaned forward and looked at Joel. He had a deviously proud smirk on his face. In a low raspy voice, he said, “We created AIDS, Joel, and we released it into two subcultures that deserved everything they got.”
“There are eighteen million AIDS orphans in Africa right now,” Joel said.
“Joel, with HIV came millions, billions of dollars worth of research grants, clinical trials, drugs, jobs, and money. It turned out to be bigger and better than any of us ever dreamed it could. A true pandemic.”
Joel, shook his head, sickened. He’d been to the AIDS wing of many hospitals. So many of the victims were children.
“Joel, when we unleashed HIV we did more for the economy of this country than any other event since World War II.”
“And you lined your pockets doing it.”
“Of course we did! What do you think we are? Not-for-profit? We became rich and so did our shareholders. Your shareholders, Joel.”
Joel involuntarily shivered.
Mortimar whispered, “Joel, we need to make people sick. It’s the only way for us to survive. The only way to grow.”
Joel’s mouth opened but he quickly shut it and forced himself to adopt a neutral expression.
Smith said, “Joel, we’ve made one change. After HIV we changed one thing. Now, we’re only going to make people
sick if we already have a cure. That way, we maximize both market saturation and revenue per consumer. If they’re not sick they buy the vaccine; if they don’t buy the vaccine and they get sick, we offer the cure.”
Unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice, Joel said, “So everyone is happy.”
Mortimar glared at him and hissed, “Yes, Joel, yes. And you get to keep your job, provide for your family in a way that you never dreamed, and make millions from stock and options.”
Joel knew the cabal he was sitting with was insane, but they (especially Mortimar) were also powerful and dangerous; and he was afraid to challenge Sam the Ghoul. “Okay,” he said, “I understand.”
Mortimar banged his hand on the table and said, “Good! Then let’s talk about the first case. Its top priority, has been for a while, and Joel, we think this will solve all the problems we’ve been discussing. We’re very, very excited about it.”
Joel nodded and showed them his best fake smile. He was a CEO; he’d perfected The Smile.
Mortimar said, “H5N1. We’ve got it. In our labs we’ve gotten it to jump from human to human and we’ve created a strain that is super HP, super-highly pathogenic. Problem is, Joel, we have not figured out the goddamn cure yet.”
Casey opened the folder that was sitting in front of him and looked at the first page. “Plan is in motion, Sam, plan is in motion.”
Casey looked up at Joel, smiled and said, “Plan is in motion, Joel. Open your folder. It’s time for you to learn just how you’re going to blow your company’s three-year growth plan completely out of the water.”
Joel did as he was told.
Chapter 8
The man McAlister had nicknamed Undertaker was sitting comfortably while McAlister frantically collected and packed only the most necessary travel items.
Someone had taken extreme care to frame him, and it was obvious that unless he left Taylor’s apartment as soon as possible, he would likely be arrested. He always stayed at Taylor’s when he was in New York, and it wouldn’t take the police long to figure that out.
Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2) Page 4