“The PDUFA,” Maggie said dully.
Dan looked pleased that she’d been paying attention, had played the part of devoted pupil. “Those fat fees were all at the organizational level. Not enough to filter down to the people actually doing the work. So I started taking personal contributions to accelerate approvals. Suddenly, I’m doing quite well by not being so…picky. Then I got a new boss, a Mr. Goody Two-Shoes who liked to do things by the book. He didn’t seem to care that I had bills to pay, a lifestyle to keep, a wife to satisfy.” He fingered a gold-colored picture frame from which his wife smiled. “He was always hovering over me to make sure everything was aboveboard, that we were acting as bastions of public safety. He made things difficult, but not impossible. So I upped the ante for an even bigger win with Rxcellance.”
“Mexico,” Maggie said.
Dan hugged himself in delight. “You never fail to impress. Yes, Ms. O’Malley, Mexico. Where bonuses like human rights aren’t all the rage like they are here. Such a shame we had to pull the plug.”
“If you were working for MediPrixe, which was working for Rx,” Maggie said slowly, “what role did Maxwell Simmons play?
“Simmons played dead,” Dan said, fingering a pencil on his desk. “The founder of MediPrixe was a ghost, a name on a form I stole from a dead colleague. I figured he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. The rest was easy. Fill out some forms, invent a digital profile and poof, you’re a corporation.”
Maggie nodded, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. “You thought Rx’s new vaccine sounded like a sure thing. You created MediPrixe and hired subcontractors south of the border to run the trial. But then you ran into a snag. Pneumonia.”
Dan released the pencil and straightened the cuffs on his Easter egg-hued shirt. Bored. Distant. Ready to move on. He looked at his nails.
Disgust threaded its way through Maggie’s body like a living thing. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to scream or cry. “Didn’t it sicken you knowing you were giving those people something that could cause pneumonia?”
Dan looked at her with mild, amused surprise. “Of course not,” he said. “We were counting on it.”
Chapter 44
They wanted the vaccine to cause pneumonia?
Before Maggie could make sense of what Dan said, his hands were at her throat.
Instinct drove her hands to his and she began clawing, her feet kicking as she tried to scramble backward and away from the pain. Evidently, he was done soliloquizing.
The chair toppled. Maggie crashed to the floor, pulling Dan on top of her. His grip tightened. Something flashed through his eyes as his fingers clenched. Satisfaction. Pleasure.
Maggie’s vision dulled around the edges, blurring the office like a distant, televised memory. She stopped fighting for her life and instead fought for self-control. She forced herself to focus on self-defense, to remember the training she’d sought out after a rash of rapes erupted on campus during her junior year.
Maggie stopped flailing. She took her thumbs and dug them into Dan’s eyes. His hands flew to his face. She brought her knee squarely to his crotch. He heaved forward and fell off her and onto the floor.
Maggie grabbed her phone from Dan’s desk and ran for the door. Her fingers, jittery with fear and adrenaline, fumbled with the lock. The lock turned. She turned the door knob. It slipped from hands slicked with sweat. She tried again, bearing down on the metal, focusing on grasping and turning the knob. The door opened. She bolted from the room.
Maggie heard him coming behind her. A sick swoosh-thunk, swoosh-thunk as he limped from his office and into the stubby hallway. Like Jack chasing Danny in The Shining.
The groin shot had hurt him, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. Maggie glanced over her shoulder. Dan was portly, out of shape, yet somehow continued to gain on her, his face contorted into a mask of murderous determination as he took each lumbering step. Maybe if she’d taken an Advil after she’d hurt her shoulder at Ethan’s she’d feel more spry. Or maybe if she’d been getting uninterrupted sleep, good nutrition. None of that mattered now. She needed to move.
Maggie skidded to a stop in front of the elevator and lunged at the call button. She hit the down button repeatedly with the palm of her hand, knowing it might confuse the elevator’s computer but unable to stop herself.
Dan was a few steps away, swoosh-thunking toward her in his foppish golf wear. The elevator light was illuminated. Maggie could hear the metallic grind of the car slowly ascending to her floor. There was no indicator showing the elevator’s progress. Was it at the second floor? Third? Maggie pounded on the elevator button again. Come on.
Dan grew closer. She could almost feel waves of rage coming off him. Maggie tore herself away from the elevator and ran to the stairwell door.
She grasped the handle and yanked. The door wouldn’t budge. She pulled again. It was locked. She felt irrational outrage tear through her. That was a safety hazard. Stairways should be accessible in the event of a fire. Maggie pulled again and again, futility colliding with desperation. It held fast.
Dan had picked up speed, his listing walk taking on a new spring as he closed in. In another moment, he’d be there. Hands at her throat. Splitting her head like a piñata to release a gruesome prize.
Maggie again changed course and ran down the hall, trying doors at random. Locked. Locked. Locked. Locked. Feck. The panic came on fast, its tiny red claws digging into her spine, crawling into her brain where it would erase all reason in one electrifying stroke.
“Help,” she called out. “Help me!”
Downstairs she could hear the cleaning crew’s vacuums and floor polishers humming. No one could hear her over the equipment’s whirring motors.
The last door on the right was topped by the kind of glass Maggie associated with TV detectives’ doors. The ladies’ room. She tried the handle.
Unlocked. Thank God.
Maggie shouldered her way inside, threw the narrow lock closed and slammed her body against the door. She fumbled for her phone, swiping and stabbing buttons to initiate a call.
The door crashed into her back, knocking the phone from her hand. Maggie watched it skip across the floor like a stone over a pond. Dan hurtled his body against the door again and Maggie heard the snap of wood cracking against its hinges. She whimpered, looking around for something to defend herself with, heels digging in to keep the door closed and the wolf at bay.
And then he was in. On top of her. Pushing her to the ground, her knapsack mashed between her body and the hard tile. She wondered how the vials in the pack were faring, worried the evidence would spill, be lost forever.
He pinned her hands to the side of her head with his knees, his patella grinding against her flesh. “Gotcha,” he said with a grin. She stared at him, still trying to comprehend how her beloved professor had become a sick parody of a monster. Was he a monster all along, hiding behind the mask of his profession, his role as affable, bumbling, nerdy professor?
Maggie writhed beneath him. Dan fumbled in his pocket and produced a knife. He pointed it at Maggie’s eye and she froze. Dan jingled through his pocket like a father digging for pocket money for a Fudgsicle from the ice cream truck. He extracted a small rectangular black bag. He opened it with his teeth. A syringe, a vial and a rag bounced out.
Dan uncapped the vial with his teeth. He placed the vial on the floor and filled the syringe with his free hand. “Should’ve done this back in my office. Much tidier. But you’re a slippery one. Just like Mia Rennick. She was handy with the IPO, then proved most troublesome when she wanted more than her fare share.” He tapped the side of the syringe. “Heroin. Not the good stuff, though.” He wrinkled his nose. “Probably cut with bleach and who knows what else. It’ll be no surprise when they find you with a needle in your arm and smack in your bloodstream. All those drugs found in your desk. The stealing. Suspicion of murder. With so
much hopelessness and remorse, it would be a wonder if you didn’t kill yourself by accident—or by design. Not that the cops will be looking too closely. They’re busy with the strike, and it’s not like you’re their best friend.”
“You won’t get away with this. People know I’m here. I signed in downstairs. I have a pass.”
Dan laughed. “Oh you have a pass? A pass? Then I guess I can’t kill you.” He moved his face closer to hers. “Don’t be stupid, Maggie. I’ll wait until the cleaning crew is done and drag your body out the back door. It’s early. No one’s here. Then I’ll return your pass and sign you out during the shift change. No one will remember you. You’ll be a distant signature on a page destined for shredding.”
“Wait!” she screamed. “You don’t have to do this!”
He held the knife against her throat with one hand and palpated the inside of her elbow with the other. “Yes, I do,” he said calmly. “You know I do. I have to eliminate witnesses. Or don’t you watch the movies?”
Then he raised his arm and plunged the needle into her vein.
Chapter 45
Pain seared through Maggie’s arm. She bucked and flailed, determined to stop Dan from pushing the syringe’s plunger and forcing its lethal cocktail into her bloodstream. He held onto her just as her rodeo boyfriend had held onto his bronco for the required eight seconds. One. Two. Three. She could feel her arms tire, lactic acid burning through fatigued muscles. Four. Five.
The door of the ladies’ room flew open. Ethan, wild-eyed and breathless and sweaty, filled the doorway.
Dan looked up. “Ah, Mr. Clark. You’re early. You can help me with the clean-up.” He gave Ethan an appraising look. “I hope that’s not a problem?”
A shadow crossed Ethan’s face, turning his eyes black and unreadable. A strange smile sprang to his lips. It crawled slowly across his face. “Not at all.”
Ethan crouched next to Dan, eyes fixed on Maggie. She tried to scream, to plead, but only strangled sobs came out. Ethan’s eyes, turgid, bottomless, inscrutable, locked with hers as she struggled against the encroaching blackness of unconsciousness. Her strength bled away. There was no more fight in her. She tried to summon a fresh burst of adrenaline, of will. The leaden certainty of her death rendered her muscles useless. She steeled herself, bidding her father, Fiona and Constantine a silent goodbye.
Then Ethan’s fingers closed around the syringe protruding from Maggie’s flesh, plucked it out and drove it into Dan’s neck.
It was Dan’s turn to scream. Then gurgle. His hands grasped for the hypodermic as wet, useless sounds escaped his mouth. But Ethan held the needle fast, pushing the plunger with his thumb until the liquid was gone.
Maggie rolled away as the men continued to struggle, an obscene parody of Friday night WWF. Dan slashed with his knife, slicing through the air, dicing against tile, as if demonstrating the latest in late-night TV cutlery. Ethan bashed Dan’s head against the floor, stunning the older man.
Dan began thrashing, the drug that had been injected into his bloodstream finally taking effect. Then he went still, the needle protruding from his neck, knife nestled against his leg like a child’s cherished blanket.
Ethan grabbed the knife and rounded on Maggie.
She shrank against the base of a stall door. “Please, Ethan,” she whimpered. “Please don’t.”
Ethan walked heavily toward her. A red line materialized through the breast pocket of his white button-down, then spread and ran. Blood. Dan’s knife had found its mark after all.
Ethan dropped heavily to his knees and extended his hand. Dan’s knife tumbled from his fingers.
“Get out of here,” he said huskily. “Now.”
Maggie hesitated. “I thought…”
Ethan pitched sideways and dropped heavily into a sitting position. His head lolled against the doorjamb of the bathroom stall. “I know. I wouldn’t trust me, either.”
Indignation swelled inside Maggie. “You participate in these…these atrocities…then murder one of your brothers in arms, then expect me to buy your good guy act?”
“The only atrocity I was involved in was the Ghana necrosis cover-up. And I did save your life.”
Maggie laughed bitterly. “After you tried to frame me.”
Ethan didn’t say anything for a moment, then: “The cover-up was my contribution to the bottom line. My first step up the corporate escalator, especially when I found the drug’s skin-firming properties.” He laughed, put his hand to his side. Winced. “Then Zartar told me her suspicions about the flu vaccine. Her theory about breaches in protocol, in morality. She started snooping after what happened with her brother, looking for any bargaining chip she could find. At first I thought she was trying to play some kind of angle. I knew she was pissed about being coerced into hiding the GN cure, over threats to her family. But science experiments on unwilling participants? It seemed—”
“Impossible?” Maggie finished, using Constantine’s word.
He nodded. “Then I started looking around, sniffing in places I wasn’t supposed to. Turned out she was right.” Ethan flopped onto his uninjured side, pulling his knees toward his chest. “Once I knew the score, I gave her everything I’d dug up on the vaccine and the trials. She was already fired up about Ghana necrosis. I figured I’d let her fight the good fight.”
“So you let her put her career, her life on the line while you sat safely in the shadows, telling yourself you were doing the right thing.” She was shaking now.
“I did want to do the right thing,” he said, his voice going sulky. “But I didn’t want to flush my career down the toilet. I thought she could blow the whistle, end the whole thing.”
“Well, you did manage to end something: Zartar’s life.”
Pain that had nothing to do with his injuries shot across Ethan’s face. “I know,” he said softly. He closed his eyes. “I made mistakes, Maggie. Big ones. I thought I could control things. Handle the situation. Maybe even come out smelling like a rose. I didn’t know anyone was going to die.”
Maggie’s jaw worked as she tried to hold back tears. “Zartar wasn’t the only one who died. There was a social worker. A reporter. Mia Rennick, a friend of yours. Don’t deny it. I saw her picture in your home office.”
“She was a friend of Miles and a financial advisor to James Montgomery. I knew her because of the Rx IPO.”
“And because you were friends with Miles. He was in that picture, too.”
Ethan sagged. “Miles and I used to be friends. A long time ago, before I knew what he was. Mia’s murder was my first hint that Zartar was right. By then, it was too late.”
“It was too late the second you started lying. Then you kept right on lying. Deceiving everyone. Yourself. Me. Making me think you cared about me when all you wanted was to protect yourself and keep Rx’s money machine running.”
Ethan reached for her hand. Maggie yanked it away. “I did care about you. I do.” Maggie turned away. “I know you don’t believe me, and I don’t blame you. There’s only one person who’s at fault for that.”
Ethan reached for her hand again, his fingers cold and white. “I tried to warn you in the Rx garage, when you and Constantine were in the van. They’re coming for you, Maggie. And they’ll keep coming until they’re satisfied that you can’t say anything. Go to the police. Stop them before it’s too late.”
Maggie’s fingers danced over the keys of her phone as she raced down the stairs and out of the FDA building. She told 911 where to find Ethan, guilt tugging at her conscience despite Ethan’s insistence that she go, despite all that he had done. Then she disconnected and began thumbing her way to Constantine’s number.
A hand closed roughly around her arm. The smell of sickly sweet cologne assaulted her nose. She spun around expecting to see Miles.
James Montgomery stood there.
“Maggie,” he said c
heerfully. “A little bird told me you’d be here.”
Maggie blinked. “Mr. Montgomery?” What was he doing here? Why was he wearing Miles’s cologne? Did they share toiletries? Why was she even thinking about that?
He gripped her arm more tightly and pulled her close to him. “Hey,” she said, trying to shake off Montgomery’s arm. “What are you doing?”
“Now, now,” he said, a smile spreading across his face. “Don’t be like that. We have things to discuss.”
His smile broadened. You’re gonna need a bigger boat.
He grabbed the phone from her hand, dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath a designer oxford. Italian leather as executioner.
Maggie twisted her arm, struggled to break free. Montgomery’s grip tightened, fingers penetrating flesh. Maggie cried out in pain. “It must be terrible to be so weak.” James shook his head sadly. “Miles is weak, too. Not physically. Mentally. Socially. Doesn’t know how to handle things. Women. His temper. That little gift he left on your door was a prime example.”
“Little gift?” Maggie heard herself say.
“The hamster,” he said impatiently. “Not what I would have done. None of it was. His little campaign to intimidate you—to punish you for brushing him off—was childish. Following you. Printing things from your computer. Posting your number on craigslist. All of it was so reckless.”
“He did all that—and you knew about it?” Maggie asked hollowly.
“The moron told me.” he said wearily. “He was so proud of himself, like when he told Mia all about the vaccine. He got involved with her beyond a professional capacity. Idiot.” He shifted his gaze to somewhere in the middle distance. Remembering. “The only idea that was actually worth a damn was convincing Ethan to infect your computer and plant those drugs. That almost made up for all his other screw-ups. Almost.”
He jerked her closer. He was incredibly strong for a man his age.
Protocol Page 29