by Thomas Locke
“You’ll be the first to know,” she assured him, and wheeled herself inside.
She found her two best men, as she called them, so deep in concentration that they did not notice her arrival.
There was no chance of anyone’s ever getting the pair mixed up. Kenny Griffyn was a techie, a nerd’s nerd, all bony angles and bottle-bottom glasses and speech that was lifted from a computer magazine. Cochise was an entirely different matter. He stood six feet ten inches tall, had hands the size of breakfast skillets, and outweighed Kenny by at least two hundred pounds.
Cochise was a Carolina east-coast Indian, which meant that not even he knew the name of the Native American tribe from which he sprang. He bore the lines and grimness of a hard life, even though he was only twenty-nine years old. Deborah knew his real name was John Windover only because she had seen it when registering his social security number. He had been dubbed Cochise in some long-forgotten bar, he had explained with the blank-faced take-it-or-leave-it attitude he used whenever talking about himself, and had never seen any reason to change back. Deborah thought him the find of the century, the best lab assistant she had ever worked with. The fact that the remainder of the Pharmacon staff found him tremendously frightening disturbed her not at all.
She wheeled up beside the pair and demanded, “So what is so all-fired urgent that it couldn’t wait two days?”
As usual, when anyone else was there and willing to take on the burden of speaking, Cochise remained mute. “We have some good news,” Kenny announced. The techie’s eyes were glazed as marbles, a clear signal of no sleep, excitement, and continuous infusions of coffee that had been cooking all night. “Very, very good news.”
Deborah responded as she usually did when others threatened to go off the deep end. She retreated into skepticism. “You want to quantify that?”
“How high do you feel like flying?” Kenny Griffyn demanded, refusing to give in this time. “Interplanetary orbit? Beyond Jupiter? We’re talking major news here.”
Deborah glanced at Cochise. The massive, fatigue-smudged features were blank as ever. “I’m already sitting down,” she replied. “So hit me.”
“Okay, the control group.” Continuous sheets of computer graphics were unfolded and slapped down on the cluttered desk before her.
Deborah studied them and declared, “No change.”
“Zip. Across the board.” Kenny began stabbing a finger at individual patients, identified only by numbers. “Stable, stable, uh-oh, here’s a bad one. Another stable. Roller-coaster downslide on this one. Stable, stable, stable, look here, free fall from twenty thousand feet. No parachute, either.”
“These are people we’re talking about,” Deborah reminded him sharply. “People in pain. Sick people.”
“Right. Exactly.” The techie tossed the control data aside. He was taut as an electric power cable. “Now check this out.” A second graph was accordioned out with a flourish.
Deborah bent over the tables, squinted her eyes, felt her own nerves start humming. She leaned back, took a couple of deep breaths, rubbed her eyes, then checked the figures a second time. “You’ve made a mistake.”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
“You goofed.”
“This is the third time we’ve run the figures. Want to see the others? Carbon copies.”
She looked at him, her heart rate zinging up to maximum velocity. “No patient showed a decline in condition? Not one?”
“Not one. And three remissions. Three. Count ’em.” He grabbed two handfuls of his hair and tried to pull it out by the roots. “Want to tell me the odds of that happening? In twenty-two days?”
“Three remissions?”
“Take a look out the window. We got two meningitis patients out there with less than a week to live dealing blackjack.”
“They’ve cleaned half the night shift outta next week’s pay,” Cochise rumbled, speaking for the first time since her arrival that morning. As always, his voice sounded like a bear growling from the back end of a very deep cave.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” the techie insisted. “Major.”
“I’ve got—” Deborah broke off as a strange pucka-pucka- pucka sound droned through the window, growing louder by the second. She wheeled herself over, searched the sky, then demanded, “Did either of you order the company helicopter?”
“Me?” Kenny’s eyes widened. “Since when did I rate perks like that?”
The lab door opened for the duty nurse, who announced, “Dr. Cofield just called.”
Kenny and Cochise chimed in with groans.
“The message was for you, Dr. Givens. He says there’s an emergency. He needs you to leave immediately for Edenton.”
“Thank you,” Deborah said, folding up the printouts. “Tell the pilot I’ll be right there.”
“Just like I said, we’re talking major league here,” Kenny told her as she started for the door. “So big the word’s getting out by osmosis.”
“One of you will have to drive my car back,” Deborah told them. “I hereby order you to keep four wheels on the road at all times.”
Deborah wheeled herself outside, then allowed the pilot to push her chair up to the chopper’s passenger door and help her alight. She kept her countenance composed throughout. It was only when they were airborne that she leaned back in her seat and gave in to the one luxury she had refused herself for seven long years.
Hope.
* * *
Tom shuffled out the veterans hospital’s doors and made his slow way down the drive. The guard at the main entrance, almost as old as Tom, gave him a friendly wave. Tom did not return it because he did not see it. His eyes remained fixed upon the road at his feet.
The car was parked right where it had been the last time. It was one of those foreign jobs, low to the ground and built without any corners. The windows were almost as dark as the black paint job. Tom steeled himself and kept going.
The window powered down as he approached. “Well?”
“First things first.” Tom stuck out his hand.
“Tell me,” the man inside the car insisted.
“Look, bud. I don’t like doing this one bit. The only thing that’s keeping me standing here ‘stead of running for the cops is I’m broke as a sharecropper in a ten-year drought. So if you want what I got, hand it over.”
A longish pause, then an envelope slid through the window. “What do you have?”
“They found it,” Tom replied, tearing open the envelope and ruffling the bills.
“Found what?”
“Whatever it is they been looking for,” Tom snapped. “You’re bound to know that much, or you wouldn’t be wasting time around a dump like this.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as sure can be. Them lab fellers was holed up in there all night. Took ’em coffee at dawn, and they was all but dancing round their computer. Then Dr. Debs arrives in a roar of dust and takes off twenty minutes later by copter.” Tom nodded in solid certainty. “Yep, whatever it is they was after, they got it.”
As the window powered back up, the man inside said, “We never met.”
“Been through two wars and more’n seventy years,” Tom crabbed at the departing car. “Never met a foreigner I’d care to remember a second longer’n I had to. And that includes you, mister.”
* * *
Deborah Givens hated going into what the scientists and techies called the Tombs. The Pharmacon executive office suites were connected to the labs by a plushly carpeted, domed hallway whose air conditioning sucked up every sound as soon as it was emitted. Deborah’s colleagues insisted the effect was intentional.
The scientists were always nervous around the bean counters, which led to adolescent jokes and overloud laughter. The execs loathed levity almost as much as they did the scientists’ casual dress code. The execs could not insist that their lab rats wear ties and shirts with collars, but they could try for what they called “proper decorum” and the lab rats described
as a mental vacuum. The techies said the bean counters couldn’t gain respect through scientific knowledge since they didn’t have any. So the suits demanded deference by making the lab rats grovel for every research dime and by dragging them down to the Tombs from time to time.
Rare was the senior bean counter who ever made his way into the labs. Conferences were limited to the Tombs, or as some techies called it, the Tower of Money. Summonses were issued via junior bean counters who could not be arm-twisted while in alien territory to opening up the corporate wallet.
One of the few positive sides to her illness, as far as Deborah was concerned, was that her visits to the Tombs had grown few and far between. As the illness progressed, she had been released from duties as chief researcher on one of the firm’s major projects. The execs had been understandably terrified of investing sizable chunks of corporate dough in a project their top scientist might be unable to finish.
Deborah had allowed herself to be replaced, but for a price. In return for going peacefully, she had forced the bean counters to grant her lab space and funding. She had decided to check out a possibility that Deborah called intriguing and the bean counters considered far beyond left field.
What no one had expected, not even Deborah, was that they would hit pay dirt so fast. And in such a major way.
Deborah wheeled herself into the outer office and stopped before the desk belonging to Blair Collins, newly appointed secretary to the vice president for research and development. “Is his highness in?”
Blair made a face. “Unfortunately. So is Whitehurst.”
“Do you know what this is all about?”
“Nobody tells me anything.” Graceful fingers pulled honey-colored hair behind her ear.
It still amazed Deborah that she and Blair were becoming pals. Looks like Blair’s were normally synonymous with hostility from both sides. “Maybe somebody lost a bean.”
Blair nodded. “You found a place for me yet?”
“You’re asking the wrong person, sister. I’ve got to rely on the grand high poobah in there for funding.” She spun her chair toward the doors leading to the inner sanctum. “Besides, moving you downstairs would cause riots and mayhem. Best to let my overheated techies dream from afar.”
“I’ll wear sackcloth and ashes,” Blair offered.
“In your case it wouldn’t help,” Deborah replied, and opened the door.
“Deborah!” Angrily Dr. Harvey Cofield raised both hands over his head. “Where on earth have you been?”
“Exploring the outer reaches of science,” she answered. “Good morning, all.”
Deborah’s boss was a sleek-suited tyrant. At some point in the distant past he had collected several degrees and still considered himself to be a capable scientist, although he had not spent quality lab time in years. These days, the only journals Dr. Cofield opened contained stock tips and money-market trends. Dr. Cofield considered himself to be an extremely capable administrator. His staff considered him an overpaid clown.
Dr. Cofield loved toys. He loved perks. He loved power. He loved everything that bore the scent of success. He drove a Lexus with leather interior and a bumper sticker that read, “My other car is a Lear.”
If Dr. Cofield did anything well, it was play the corporate game. His talent for infighting was legendary. He swam through the murky waters of company politics and scientific credit-grabbing like a hungry shark.
Dr. Cofield demanded, “Is it too much to expect my staff to check in from time to time?”
“Let’s see. Today is Friday, right?” Deborah said crossly. “Since you were the one who sent me to the Philadelphia conference for the past four days, I assumed you might know where I was. Then this morning—”
“Never mind,” Dr. Cofield snapped. “There’s been a leak. Somebody on your team must have opened their big yap.”
“Now just a doggone minute, Harvey,” Deborah started.
“What Dr. Cofield meant to say,” Pharmacon’s executive vice president, James Whitehurst, interrupted smoothly, “was that we have been forced to play our hand sooner than we would otherwise would have liked.”
“Nobody from my staff talked,” Deborah fumed. “Not a soul, not a word.”
“Be that as it may,” Whitehurst continued, pouring corporate oil on the stormy waters, “we have ourselves a problem that will not go away of its own accord and which will require us all to pull together as a team.”
Deborah subsided, dispatching a baleful glare in Cofield’s direction. “I’m listening.”
“Rumors have begun appearing in the most unlikely places.”
“What sort of rumors?”
“The worst kind,” Harvey Cofield snapped, irritated as always when his scapegoating was not going as planned. “Ones with a shred of truth.”
“It appears that some members of the press have been led to believe we are further along in our process than is the case.”
“We are,” Deborah announced smugly.
“We are what?”
“Further along,” Deborah replied. “That’s where I was this morning. It looks like—”
“Never mind,” Whitehurst interrupted. He disliked anyone else speaking once he began. Whitehurst considered himself to be a prime example of urbane leadership. Deborah had not yet formed a final conclusion, but she was tending to think that the new exec VP most resembled an eel—slippery and hard to pin down, but dangerous when cornered.
Whitehurst had assumed the executive vice-president role at their Edenton facility scarcely two months before. The former ranking exec’s wife, a born and bred New Yorker, had loathed North Carolina and commonly referred to the little bayside community as a time warp to Tobaccoville. The exec had taken early retirement and moved back to their Fifth Avenue condo, leaving Pharmacon’s new Edenton labs to be run by Whitehurst.
Pharmacon was considered a second-tier ethical pharmaceutical firm. Ethical because it did original research into new drugs. Second tier because it was far outranked in both size and research potency by the giants—Squibb, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer, and the others.
Back in the seventies, Pharmacon had come up with the vanguard treatment for heart attack and stroke victims, also used in lesser doses for treatment of high blood pressure. The incoming revenue had quickly swollen Pharmacon’s coffers to the bursting point. But instead of enabling new research breakthroughs, success had turned Pharmacon into a corporate pachyderm—slow and ponderous and unwieldy. Occasional modifications and add-ons to existing products, as well as aggressive advertising campaigns for its over-the-counter drugs, managed to keep Pharmacon financially afloat. But for industry watchers and those in the know, Pharmacon was a company going nowhere fast.
Three years earlier, Pharmacon’s aging board had finally agreed that something radical was required to resuscitate the firm. Something bold. Something that would shake the company from its complacent slumber.
The Edenton facility had been that bold new step.
As far as the New York City-based board was concerned, Edenton, North Carolina was only a half step away from the Third World. Tucked snugly along a little bay in the backwaters of Albemarle Sound, it did not even have a decent airport. Anyone visiting from headquarters had to copter over from either Norfolk or Raleigh. This was exactly what the board had wanted. By selecting a site next to a village of some six thousand people, it had hoped to discourage most of the New York staff from coming within a hundred miles of the new factory.
They had succeeded almost too well. The only way top administrators like Cofield and Whitehurst had been enticed to sacrifice a New York lifestyle for Edenton was with promises of untold wealth and power and eventual returns to civilization. But scientists, Deborah Givens among them, had been far more willing to go where called on the promise of sparkling new labs. The research staff had been given a relatively free reign and encouraged to tackle new problems. Promising initial developments had been made in several directions. The reports filtering north had been sufficient
ly positive to frighten some of the New York staff into actually getting some work done—another hoped-for result.
But no one, neither in New York nor in Edenton, had ever expected the payoff to come so soon. Or from the direction it did.
“We have no choice,” Whitehurst told them. “We have been forced to call a press conference.”
Deborah sat up straight. This was serious damage control. “We’ve barely started the FDA approval process.”
“You let me handle that,” Dr. Harvey Cofield replied smugly.
“Allow us to handle it,” Whitehurst corrected.
“Whatever.”
Deborah swung her gaze from one man to the other. “What are you two talking about?”
“Perhaps you don’t understand the significance of what we are dealing with,” Whitehurst said.
“I should,” Deborah countered. “I discovered it.”
“Yes, well, there is a tremendous latent demand for your discovery.”
“Not to mention a tidal wave of political pressure once this thing gets out,” Cofield added with evident satisfaction.
“This already is out,” Whitehurst replied. “From which source no longer matters. What we must now do is make sure we are able to state the facts clearly and precisely before the rumors are printed as fact and this whole affair is blown completely out of proportion.”
Deborah kept her eyes on Cofield. “You’re planning to pull some political strings, aren’t you. Do an end run around the FDA.”
“Not in the least,” Whitehurst demurred. “We simply intend to speed things up a bit. In the interest of all the patients who shall benefit from your marvelous discovery, my dear.”
Eel, Deborah decided. Definitely an eel. “So when do we put on the song-and-dance act?”
“In,” Whitehurst glanced at his watch, “precisely one hour and eleven minutes.”
“What?” Deborah gaped. “I don’t have anything prepared. No press kits, no data, no—”
“Save it,” Cofield ordered. “This is the prelim only. We go out, say we’re working on the drug, close up shop.”
