Final Venture

by Michael Ridpath

  Art grunted, and reached for the top drawer of his desk, the only one I hadn't checked. He pulled out a small pistol, and pointed it at me.

  Jesus! ' Art . . . don't use that thing. It's not worth it. If you shoot me, you'll be in jail for – '

  'Shut the fuck up!'

  'OK,' I said, holding my hands in front of me in a calming gesture. ' OK – '

  'I said shut up!' he screamed.

  I shut up. I didn't know what Art was going to do. Neither did he. With the gun waving towards me, he bent down, and pulled out the half-empty bottle of whisky. Wincing from the pain of his injured hand, he managed to undo the cap and took a long slug.

  I backed towards the window, where a Lucite BioOne tombstone seemed my best chance for a weapon.

  'Stand still!' Art barked. He took another swig of the whisky. 'What's wrong with you? Are you trying to destroy this firm? We should have gotten rid of you months ago. I should get rid of you now– '

  'What the hell is going on here?'

  It was Gil. He stood in the doorway taking in the scene before him. 'Art, put that gun down! And the whisky.'

  Art turned slowly, looked at Gil, and put the gun down on the desk. He examined the bottle, as if deciding whether to take another pull, and then placed it next to the gun.

  'Will someone please tell me what is going on?'

  Art stabbed a finger towards me. 'This son-of-a-bitch was going through my desk. He broke into my locked drawers trying to steal confidential information. I caught him at it.'

  Gil glanced at my bloody mouth and Art's injured hand. 'Is this true, Simon?'

  I took a deep breath. 'Yes.'

  'You, go back to your office and wait. Art, come with me to my office. And give that damn thing to me.' He nodded towards the pistol.

  I left the room as Art handed the gun to Gil.

  Daniel was in the corridor staring. 'What was that all about?'

  'Art and I had a disagreement,' I said.

  Daniel glanced at my chest. 'Art's right. The tie sucks.'

  I ignored him and slumped in my chair, waiting for Gil's call.

  Twenty minutes later, I was in his office. 'I'm very disappointed in you, Simon,' he said, staring at me from the other side of his large desk. 'We should be able to come to work at Revere without worrying about one of our colleagues going through our belongings. And you know Art's health is in a very delicate state at the moment. What were you doing?'

  'I'm still trying to find out who killed Frank and John,' I replied. I had decided I shouldn't be specific about BioOne with Gil.

  'Isn't that the police's job?'

  'It is, but they're not doing it very effectively.'

  'So you say. But it's not them I'm concerned about, it's you!' He jabbed an angry finger at me. 'I've had to send Art home: I can't have people waving guns around. I told you the other evening how important you are to this firm, how much we need you more than ever now, and what do you do? Snoop around, antagonize one of my partners, put the firm in jeopardy.' Gil was red now. I had never seen him so angry.

  'Someone tried to kill me last night,' I said flatly.

  'What?'

  'Someone shot at me, just outside my apartment. They only just missed.'

  Gil paused, at a loss for what to say. Then he spoke in a low, determined voice.

  'You have your problems, Simon, and I have mine. You do what you have to do, and I'll do the best I can to ensure this firm survives. But I don't think you can be of any further help to the rest of us. As of this moment, you are suspended from this firm until further notice. Please leave the building. Now.'

  'But Gil – '

  'I said now!' Gil stood up, and leaned forward, his hands on his desk, his whole body shaking.

  'OK,' I said. 'I'm going.'

  28

  I walked home looking over my shoulder. There was someone following me, a blonde woman in jeans and a padded jacket. She was about thirty yards behind me, making no real effort to stay hidden. A policewoman, I presumed, although it annoyed me that I couldn't be sure. I turned and waved at her. She stopped, lit a cigarette, and watched me.

  My emotions were a turmoil. My confrontation with Art had played havoc with my already frayed nerves. Having an angry alcoholic waving a pistol in my face had scared the hell out of me. Art was unstable and dangerous, certainly to himself, probably to me.

  But I also felt angry with Gil. I understood his point of view. Going through your colleague's desk was not something that he expected of his people. Revere was in severe trouble, and I wasn't helping much. He had been decent to me, and I had let him down.

  But Gil's support was important to me. He had trusted me when others hadn't, given me his backing when I needed it most. He was a decent man, and I respected him. And now he wanted nothing more to do with me.

  I didn't know whether Gil would have me back. I enjoyed working at Revere, and I didn't want to leave, especially not this way. A month ago, Revere had meant everything to me. It was still important: a link with an untroubled past. The future didn't look good. No wife, no job, and unless I was very careful, a bullet in the head. I couldn't afford to sit around. I had to get whoever had killed Frank and John before they got me. Only then could I hope to get my life back into some kind of order.

  When I arrived home the light on my answering machine was flashing. For a foolish second I thought it might be Lisa. It wasn't.

  'Hi, Simon, it's Kelly.' Her voice, usually strong and confident, was subdued. 'I called you at work, but they said you'd left for the day. I'd like to talk to you if I can. Give me a call.'

  I dialled Boston Peptides' number straight away, and was soon put through. Kelly wouldn't say what she wanted to talk about. We agreed to meet for lunch at a café near Harvard Square, safely out of reach of her work colleagues.

  It was a vegetarian establishment, infested by students. Although I was early, Kelly was already waiting outside, nervously smoking a cigarette. We muttered greetings and then joined the end of the queue at the food counter in silence. I chose a salad, and Kelly some kind of quiche, and we sat down at the only free table.

  Kelly pulled out a cigarette, and then put it away again before the waiter had a chance to assault her. 'I shouldn't have come,' she said.

  'I'm glad you did.'

  'Lisa wouldn't want me to talk to you. Neither would Henry.'

  'You must have a good reason.'

  'I think I have.'

  I waited. Kelly picked at her quiche.

  'Lisa's in a bad way, and she holds you responsible.'

  'I know.'

  'I've been thinking a lot about it,' Kelly said, 'and I'm not sure she's right. I kind of trust you. And I think you should know what Lisa was worried about. What got her fired. I don't care what you do with the information as long as you don't use it against Lisa. Or me. You never heard any of this from me, OK?'

  'OK,' I nodded.

  As soon as BioOne took over Boston Peptides, Lisa wanted to get hold of some of the data on neuroxil-5. She wanted to see if she could use it in her work with Parkinson's.'

  'So Henry Chan told me,' I said. 'But he didn't tell me much more.'

  'At first Enema said no way. He runs everything with total secrecy, no one is allowed to know anything unless they absolutely have to. But Lisa can be pretty persuasive.'

  I smiled.

  'Somehow she got through to Enema. But he was very careful what data he would let her see. It was mostly just some of the early animal experiments, on aged rats.'

  Kelly took a bite of her quiche. I waited while she chewed.

  'The information was pretty useless, but it was all Lisa could get. As she studied it, she noticed something than Enema seemed to have missed.'

  'What was that?'

  'Several months after taking the neuroxil-5, quite a few of the rats died.'

  I raised my eyebrows. Kelly saw it. 'Nothing wrong in that. Old rats die. It's kind of what you'd expect. Except that a higher number than usual
died of strokes.'

  'Strokes? Do rats get strokes?'

  'Rats get many of the same kinds of diseases that we do. Especially in laboratories.'

  'I see.'

  'Do you know what a stroke is?' Kelly asked.

  'Some kind of blood clot in the brain, isn't it?'

  'Yes, it can be caused by that, or by the opposite, a haemorrhage in the brain. It can lead to paralysis, or death.'

  'So this was serious?'

  'Maybe.'

  'What do you mean, maybe? If all these rats died of strokes, doesn't that make neuroxil-5 lethal?'

  'It's not that easy. Most of the rats survived, or died of natural causes. It's just that a slightly higher proportion than usual died of strokes.'

  'But Lisa thought this was significant?'

  'She did. At first she spoke to Henry about it. He told her to talk to Enema. Which she did.'

  I could see where this was going. 'And he said there was nothing wrong.'

  'That's right. He said that Lisa's observations weren't statistically significant. When she asked for more data to check whether this was a real problem, Enema refused to give it to her. He said that it had been thoroughly analysed and there was nothing to be worried about.'

  'But that didn't satisfy Lisa?'

  Kelly smiled. 'You know her. She wouldn't be satisfied until she had seen the data itself. When Enema still refused to show it to her, she more or less called him a liar. She accused him of not checking the numbers carefully enough.'

  'So he fired her?'

  'Not surprisingly,' said Kelly.

  It didn't surprise me at all. I knew that she had given Henry Chan a similarly difficult time over the years, but he had much more patience than Enever. I now understood why he felt that Lisa wouldn't fit into the new BioOne culture.

  'Do you think Lisa was right to be concerned?' I asked Kelly.

  'I didn't see the data myself; this is all stuff I heard from Lisa,' Kelly said. 'And I'd guess that statistically Enema was right. But I've worked with Lisa for two years. I trust her hunches. There may be something there, I don't know.'

  'How can I find out?' I asked.

  'You?' Kelly looked surprised. 'You can't.'

  'Can you help me?'

  Kelly looked down at her plate, now almost empty. 'I can't. Unlike Lisa, I don't have another job to go to if I get fired. Thomas Enever is a powerful enemy that I don't need right now.'

  'Hmm. Have the clinical trials shown the same problem to be present in humans?'

  'I assume not,' Kelly said. 'I mean all that data is shown to the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA would be pretty unhappy if everyone who took neuroxil-5 had a stroke the next day.'

  'But what if it was just a few patients and it was several months later?'

  Kelly thought about it. 'I don't know. The Phase One and Two clinical trials probably involved only about a hundred people, total. It is possible that something that affected a small minority of patients might slip through unnoticed. That's why they have these massive Phase Three trials, with a thousand patients or more.'

  'And that's what's going on now, isn't it?'

  'That's right. They end in March next year.'

  'Do you have any idea about the results of these trials?'

  'Are you kidding?' Kelly snorted. 'Only Enever knows. And at this stage, even he isn't supposed to.'

  I remembered the note in Art's BioOne files about the trial being double blind.

  'Is there any way of finding out?'

  'No,' said Kelly. I paused to let her think. 'Not unless you actually go and talk to the clinicians who are conducting the trials themselves.'

  'Can you get me a list of them?'

  'No way,' Kelly said.

  I was disappointed. I was sure Lisa had been on to something, but it was hard to see how I, single-handedly, could break through BioOne's wall of secrecy.

  'There is one thing you could do,' Kelly said. 'I'm pretty sure that the Phase Two trial was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine. I remember the buzz in the industry when it was published.'

  'So do I. That was when the BioOne stock price shot up, wasn't it?'

  'Possibly. You're the money man. I just make the drugs.'

  I acknowledged the dig.

  'Sorry,' Kelly said. 'There will probably be a list of clinicians involved with the Phase Two trial there. Many of them will be signed up for the new trial. You could talk to some of them.'

  'Thanks,' I said. 'I'll try it.'

  We ate our food, Kelly hurrying so that she could get away without being seen.

  'How's Boston Peptides getting on without Lisa?' I asked.

  'We miss her. BP 5 6 is going well. We're getting the first responses from human volunteers. It looks like the drug is safe, although it seems to cause depression in some people.'

  'Depression?'

  'Yes. It can reduce the levels of serotonin in the brain. Kind of like the opposite of Prozac.'

  Depression.

  Lisa had been taking BP 56.

  I remembered her fragility a week or so after Frank's death, the way she had lost her temper with me, her uncharacteristic irrationality, her black moods, and most of all, my total inability to help her. A chemically induced depression, combined with all those other pressures, must have been very hard to cope with. No wonder she had cracked and run away.

  'What is it Simon?'

  Lisa had said she wanted to keep the fact she was taking the drug quiet from everyone at work. I wasn't sure whether that included Kelly, but it was probably up to Lisa to tell her, not me. 'Oh, I was just thinking,' I said, vaguely. 'It's not serious enough to fail the drug, is it?'

  'Oh, no,' said Kelly. 'There are ways around it. It may be as simple as prescribing Prozac in combination with BP 56.' She looked at her watch. 'I've got to go. Do you mind if you wait here for a couple of minutes before you leave? I really don't want anyone to see us together.'

  'OK,' I said, deciding that there was no need for Kelly to know that she was being watched as she spoke. 'You go. And thank you.'

  She smiled quickly and left.

  I waited a few moments, and sauntered round the corner to a bar I used to frequent, just on the Cambridge side of the bridge from the Business School. My female tail stayed outside. I ordered a beer, and thought through what Kelly had told me.

  So Lisa had been depressed. Not the kind of depression that comes from stress at work, and grief, and marital difficulties, but biochemically induced stress, which would make the world seem bleak even in the most normal of times. Given the pressure Lisa had been under, the world must have seemed a very dark place indeed.

  In some ways, this news made me feel better. Without the drug, I should have a much better chance of persuading her to come back to me. But I still needed to prove that I hadn't killed Frank.

  So the next question was, was there a problem with neuroxil-5 ? I had to admit that there was a chance that the answer was 'no'. That the numbers that Lisa had seen were not from a valid statistical sample, and just represented the kind of false coincidences that happened all the time. Well, if that was the case, then I was wasting a lot of time and effort.

  But what if Lisa's hunch was right? What if neuroxil-5 caused occasional strokes in rats? What would that mean?

  It could mean the drug was killing some of the people it was supposed to be curing. That would be a disaster. For the Alzheimer patients who were taking it, for BioOne, and for Revere.

  I wasn't sure what Frank and John had to do with this potential catastrophe. Frank had little involvement with BioOne, Art had always seen to that. But there was Art's cryptic comment that Frank had been asking questions about BioOne just before he died. And of course there was the message John had left, saying he had discovered something about BioOne that I would find interesting. Could that have been that neuroxil-5 was dangerous?

  At the moment it was a big if. What I needed to do was find proof one way or another. I polished off my beer and
took the 'T' home.

  The New England Journal of Medicine was on the Internet. I quickly found an abstract of the article Kelly had mentioned. I had to call the journal directly to have the full article faxed to me. The title was A Controlled Trial of Neuroxil-5 as a Treatment for Alzheimer's Disease'. There was a formidable list of authors, but the first name on the list was none other than Thomas E. Enever. It described the Phase Two clinical trial on eighty-four patients with Alzheimer's. The sample was too small to draw definitive conclusions, but the paper seemed to suggest that the results were encouraging. There were no statistically significant differences in the 'adverse-event categories' between the group that had taken neuroxil-5, and the group that had taken the placebo. At the end of an article was a list of six centres participating in the study, together with the clinicians responsible. Kelly had suggested that it was likely that most of these would also be involved in the larger Phase Three trial.

  It took an hour of fiddling about on the Internet before I had the names and addresses of these six centres. Four of them were in New England, one was in Illinois, and one in Florida, no doubt a prime Alzheimer's location. It was five o'clock. I resolved to see the four New England centres the next morning.

  I made myself a cup of tea, and picked up the pile of junk mail that had arrived that morning. There was one letter with an address in handwriting I knew very well.

  Lisa's.

  I sat on the sofa and opened the letter carefully, hardly daring to read it. It wouldn't be about BioOne: it must have been sent before Lisa's mother had passed on my message to her. It just might be something about how she was sorry, how she missed me, how she wanted to come back.

  Or it might not.

  It wasn't.

  Dear Simon,

  I have some news for you. I went to the drug store yesterday, and my family doctor today, and there is no doubt about it. I'm pregnant.

  I felt you had a right to know as soon as I did. But you should also know that it doesn't change my decision to stay away from you in California. I want to put Boston, you and Dad's death as far away as possible from me. There are issues I can't face right now – whether you were involved in Dad's death, and whether I can ever trust you again.