by John Farrow
“We’re done.” She lifted up the tube with his blood. “Fine colour, Wendell.”
“I wouldn’t wish it on a vampire. So, no carousing?”
She shook her head lightly. “Do me a favour?” Lucy told him about the motel clerk in Paramus, whose name was Evan, and Wendell promised to give him a call.
In the truck, dressed in her grey wool coat against the chill, warmed also by an electric heater she had connected to the house power by running a line across the sidewalk, Lucy assessed each patient in turn. She administered an intravenous dosage and, after the consultation, selected the new cocktail. Pills were divided by size, shape and colour. Those whose illness was full-blown, who had not been brought back to good health by her previous visit, just kept alive, were placed on one sort of regimen. The healthiest went onto another, and those who were having manageable problems were given a variety of supplements. The work was tedious, as she had to be careful what she prescribed, and equally careful to note the dosage accurately. Each man checked and rechecked the prescription, the number of reds and blues, to be taken with what frequency and at what time of day. Each schedule was clearly written out, and although no patient was likely to be negligent, she stressed the importance of discipline. For some, the number of pills exceeded forty, while Wendell, relatively healthy, got off lightly with seventeen.
“Two less than last time,” he noted. “A couple are big mothers, though.”
“Wash them down with a shot of vodka, that’s my advice.”
“Will Camille be coming?”
“Tracing my steps, as usual. Expect her in a week. Maybe less. She’ll call.”
“Someday, Saint Lucy, when all this is over and we can go public, you’ll be enshrined.”
“I wish I could do more.”
“You’ve saved so many!”
“You’re saving lives, too, by agreeing to this.”
“That’s true.” He put his hand on his chest. “I should be enshrined. Someday, I want my head on a quarter. I want monuments and universities named after me—streets, hospitals! Is it asking too much to have my own day?”
“You want to be a national holiday?”
“What do you think? Be honest. Is it too much?”
Lucy laughed, and kissed him, smack between the eyes.
On the drive home to Paramus, Luc and Lucy were quiet. She was weary, while he was preoccupied with all that he had witnessed. They agreed to hook up in an hour, which gave them time to freshen and change and catch a nap. Dinner was found down the road, a noisy walk along the edge of the highway. Luc opted for steak, Lucy, a shrimp pasta. Talked out from her day, she was just as happy to adopt Luc’s quiet, grumpy demeanour.
After dinner, Luc walked Lucy back to the motel, then left again to return to a bar they’d passed. Lucy watched a little television until she couldn’t keep her eyes open and switched it off. She snuggled in under the covers.
The rage of traffic would not make it a quiet night. She was still awake, listening to the trucks, a distant siren, the endless rush of cars, when someone knocked on her door. She looked through her peephole first, then admitted the motel clerk into her room.
He paced the floor after she had closed the door behind him. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is nuts.”
She recognized the fear, the conditioned and rational aspect of any patient worried about treatment outside the usual medical boundaries. Her patients, however, were desperate men, grasping for hope, and all she ever had to do was to allow that desperation to supersede the old and useless logic.
“I’m not here to force you.”
“I feel like I’m at a medicine show, buying snake oil.”
“No snake oil, Evan. More importantly, I’m not here to sell you a damn thing. Was that not made clear?”
He was a bitter man, she could tell, angry and prepared to die while shaking a fist at the sky. To have hope and life and health sprung upon him upset his way of being. He now didn’t know how to behave, or how to believe.
He looked at her finally, standing still, the shabby pear-shape of him exhausted, resentful and yet, ultimately, still longing for the miracle. Had the miracle come? His eyes appeared to wobble in their sockets. “I can’t believe this,” he said.
“You’re here. In my room. Give me the word, Evan, and everything will change.”
“You’re not some nutcase with a lab in your kitchen? That’s not what this is all about?”
“I represent a multinational, multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical corporation. What we will do here, in this room, is illegal and would land me in jail, not to mention the corporate executives. But we have advanced immune-system therapies. You can wait a year and a half for further testing and government approval, although you might die by then, or you can start to be relieved of your pain right now. Tonight. I’m tired, Evan. I’ve been saving lives all day. What do you say?”
His shoulders slumped, his lower lip trembling, Evan said, “I’m willing.”
“Good. I need to take your blood. Then I’ll plan the best scheme for you. After that, I’ll give you a shot, which will knock you off your pins. Everybody today found the shot hard to handle. I’ll give you your dosage, which you’ll have to follow without any variance, to the letter.”
“And that’s it? No strings?”
“When it comes onto the market, it’ll cost a fortune. For doing this now, it’s free for you forever. It’s also your best chance to live.”
Reduced to working at a seedy hotel to keep going, perhaps a professional career ruined, and expecting only to eke out a brief existence until he died, the man was having to deal with the possibility of salvation. She had seen it so often before.
He sat down beside her. “If I didn’t work here, in this shit-hole, I never would have met you.”
Lucy put a hand on his forearm. “No guarantees,” she said. “But everyone I’ve treated has improved or beaten the odds. All you have to do is agree to let my people follow up, and to keep your mouth shut.”
““All right.”
“What are you taking now?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. I can no longer afford anything. Anyway, what’s the point?” He was not the tough receptionist he had been yesterday. He was on the verge of weeping.
She held his forearm on her lap and gently applied the cool rubbing alcohol to his arm with cotton batting. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “You’ll get used to the idea of being well again.”
“Oh, Lord,” he nearly wailed, and the tears flowed. “Oh, Lord.”
“Shhh, don’t wake the other guests. Remember, you’re going to feel weak and sick for a while. That’s only natural.”
“I’ve felt weak and sick for a year, but only on my good days.”
He tried to laugh amid his tears. His body was shaking as she drew blood.
“How about that?” he asked. “I didn’t think I had any of that shit left.”
The next day, Thursday, January 13th, 1999
“Explain them to me,” Luc Séguin asked.
The pharmaceutical array was impressive for its variety and colour.
Lucy smiled. “At the border, Brad thought I was smuggling beads, giving Indians a bad name. What he didn’t know, those beads could probably buy back Manhattan.”
“You think so?”
“Health is big money.”
“Each one does something different?”
“Some of the pills are blockers, they simulate how the immune system protects cells. Others are fiercely strong anti-virals. Others protect the body from the pills, especially the stomach. Others cheat the body into attacking foreign organisms even when they’re not there, again, taking the place of the immune system. Others treat the blood, feed the red cells to make them vigorous. Others—”
“Okay,” he interrupted her, “I got you.”
She wasn’t ready to stop. “The large purple oblong pill? It works with the intravenous dosage I give. It’s anti-viral, though it’s still in devel
opment. Stops a host of illnesses. In its physical form, a virus is three-dimensional, with sharp angles. The pill works by seeking out a virus, then sliding into its grooves, gumming it up so that it can no longer feed. Isn’t that amazing?”
Luc was duly impressed.
They were having breakfast in a small café attached to their motel busy with tradesmen and contractors. Lucy was having cereal and fruit, while Luc had opted for the eggs-and-sausage special. Dressed for another busy day, she wore a rose sweater over a checked shirt, beige pants, and cowboy boots. Never before, though, had she seen Luc wear such a fine shirt. Olive, it needed pressing but still looked smart. As usual, he had stuck to wearing jeans.
“When we move that one along,” Lucy explained, “we’ll not only be treating AIDS, we’ll be curing everything from meningitis to the common cold. Like I said, there’s big bucks if we can win the race. But for you, the news is you’ll be okay if you develop full-blown AIDS.”
“If?” he asked.
“When,” Lucy acknowledged. “One of the problems we’re facing is that the drugs lose their edge over time. The AIDS virus adapts. What we’re going after now is called integrase. It’s an enzyme with a bad job. It knits together the HIV genetic material with the victim’s DNA, right inside the cells. You hijack trucks, Luc, integrase hijacks cells. Only after it does that can HIV begin to reproduce as fast as it does.” She stopped to take a bite and give Luc a moment to process this information. “We already have protease-inhibitors, which block another HIV enzyme called protease and work at the later stages of replication, and we have AZT and ddI, which block an enzyme called reverse transcriptase and work at the early stages of infection. We’ve been trying like mad to devise a integrase-inhibitor to help people through the long and developing middle stages. What we’re looking for is to find the spot, the exact spot, where we have to nail integrase, where we have to stop it, in order to shut it down. We’re on it, Luc. Nobody knows this. But we’re on it.”
“That’s good. I’ll show you why that’s good.” Luc raised his shirt slightly to display a lesion on his stomach.
Lucy put down her spoon. “I didn’t know.”
“I used to be fifty pounds more weight. In prison, English guys they called me Fat Face. They won’t call me that name no more.”
“Luc,” she said, leaning forward, “let me treat you. Let me get you early.”
He sliced his sausage. When he had finished chewing, and thinking, he said, “You are a beautiful woman. It is for me to protect you.”
“Luc—”
“It’s not early for me. I am just doing pretty well right now.”
“Let me stop it in its tracks.”
He gazed at her awhile. “Yes. I will let you.”
As if he was doing her a favour, indulging her fancy.
“All right,” Lucy agreed, returning to her own breakfast, “I’ll cure you, Luc. If you don’t believe me, just watch.”
“I know this you have done before. In my life, I never had a luck like that. I don’t know what that is, luck. If I am wrong now, I hope you are right.”
“Well, Luc, you’ll be out of luck if you ever show me anything like that again while I’m eating.”
He was puzzled, but after thinking through what she had said, Luc cracked a smile, and for the first time in her company, chuckled.
6
CLOSE WATCH
Five days later, Tuesday, January 18, 1999
Under special circumstances, drug companies were allowed to treat the terminally ill with experimental therapies, a rule that had been instituted since the onslaught of AIDS, given that the devastation of the plague demanded a more aggressive approach. It was not permitted, however, to treat the merely sick with drugs that had not come through government channels and had scarcely been tested on live rats, let alone humans.
For those in the executive suite, letting kittens out of the bag by administering new therapies to the public was perceived as dangerous. Competitors could embark on similar designs, and the advantage of a head start might slip away if a rival happened to get lucky. Any spectacular result hoisted a red flag and brought attention where it was not desired. Competitors had been known to buy drug cocktails from test patients to jump-start their own research. Secrecy was preferred in treating those who were not yet terminal, and secrecy was desired at all times to keep the competitive wolves at bay.
For Werner Honigwachs, President and CEO of the BioLogika Corporation, covert testing provided a unique opportunityoutside the realm of science. BioLogika was a publicly traded company. Stockholders needed to be kept happy. And yet Honigwachs was not inclined to share the full bounty of his company’s potential with them. He was also a secret, silent partner and the majority owner of Hillier-Largent Global Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He had devised a plan whereby he would permit one company to flourish, driving up the market price of BioLogika, with the intention that ultimately, handed the right product or product-set, he’d allow Hillier-Largent to trump BioLogika. In this way he would be immunized from sharing the immense benefits, projected to be in the billions of dollars, with the riffraff—his word for stockholders.
The manoeuvres demanded finesse.
Compounding his troubles, the nature of the investors in his company was unusual. Honigwachs had begun his career as a scientist but had soon understood that nothing significant could happen in the lab without proper financing. He devoted his attention to attracting and, if necessary, extracting government research grants, which helped him to establish BioLogika in partnership with both Randall Largent and Harry Hillier. His next mission was to mine private funding. Biochemical research was difficult for banks to assess. They considered his projects wildly speculative, his results too far downstream. Confident that his people were moving into cutting-edge work, Honigwachs pioneered the field of contract research, doing the messy tests on human lab rats for his competitors in order to finance his own programs. Contract research was quick money, and so the banks were willing to finance his need for start-up capital in buildings and equipment, but he still needed bundles of cash for his more ambitious projects. He was engaged in a race in which winners ascended to enormous wealth while losers became blips on a computer screen, soon to be forgotten.
In his search for investors, Honigwachs fell upon an untapped and bottomless pool of funds. He developed methods whereby his company would assist certain illicit flows of hard currency, which drew him into a circle that included the criminal elite and their financial advisers. Laundering money advanced his company’s research. The next step, both in terms of keeping his financiers happy and moving his company forward, was an Initial Public Offering. Revenues from the stock sale benefitted both his secret partners and his company’s research, and put him in a position to be able to participate in laundering ever larger sums.
On the positive side of the transaction, he had created cash flow. As a negative aspect, he now had to share his future profits in BioLogika with millions of shareholders, and these included mobsters. A ruthless biker gang that operated in Quebec, a chapter of the Hell’s Angels, which did its business in cocaine, marijuana, prostitution and extortion—Honigwachs could only guess what else—generated millions, and the gang’s greatest problem was sanitizing truckloads of cash.
Honigwachs obliged them.
His relationship with the gang meant being subject to their supervision. Vice-presidents came and went, and no one understood why, or what they did while they were around. In fact, they were envoys from the mob. As his plans progressed toward fruition, he was assigned someone who, unlike the others, had particular expertise and also status in the mob. Honigwachs had controlled how Andrew Stettler came into his company, first as a lab rat, then soon after as a security guard and an internal spy. The full range of his talents was at his disposal. That Stettler had appeared at all, however, had not been his doing. The young man had been imposed upon him as the price to be paid for the value of his connections. Werner Honigwachs needed to make
BioLogika a success, not only to participate in the immense profit potential of biotechnology, but also to stay healthy, free from the hazards of chainsaws and car bombs. Others with a vested interest were keeping a close watch.
He called Stettler in to see him. The young man lounged in one of the guest chairs, slouching down, putting his feet up on the desk. Honigwachs didn’t reprimand him. “What’ve you heard?” the company president asked.
“Lucy’s moving south, finally, but she needs more product.” A glitch had slowed her progress. In Greenwich Village, more patients had turned up than they’d planned for, probably due to a breach in security. The unexpected numbers required that she see people over a three-day interval, and that extra day had inflicted changes on her timetable. Lucy had then contacted Camille Choquette back in Montreal to alert everyone down the line, but when she was finally through in the Village, Newark messed up the alternate date, setting her back further.
“How about delivering it yourself?” Honigwachs said.
“Me?” This was a surprise, given the risks.
Honigwachs sat in his own chair and leaned back with his hands behind his head. He hated feeling intimidated by this callow youth. “What better excuse to go down there and check things out? Delays bother me. I don’t want Lucy hanging around any one place too long.”
“I could catch her in Baltimore.”
“Excellent.”
“Anything else?”
“Why not go through New York? Check on things there first.”
“Isn’t—?” Andy stopped, and waited.
“Camille? Yes. But Camille … Well, I’d like to hear your perspective, as well as Camille’s.” Honigwachs put his hands down and swivelled around in his chair, looking out at the ice-covered lake beyond his window. “Keep your eyes and ears open, Andy. You don’t understand the science, so I’d run everything by me when you get back. This is an important move, the last link in the puzzle. I don’t want anybody to know more than they should, and that includes Lucy and Camille.” Andy nodded. He understood now why the mission was worthy of his talents. That Honigwachs might also appreciate having him out of his hair for a few days didn’t bother him. It was understandable. “I’ll pack a bag.”