by Thomas Locke
“Of course.” He kept his chin cocked to smooth out the loose skin on his neck. “There is a very serious breach of public trust over at FDA. I have always been certain that some of the people working there must be aware of this, and chaffing under the restrictions placed upon them by those who insist on playing games with their power.”
“That is exactly right,” she agreed, trying hard to keep her eagerness under wraps.
“Naturally, my colleagues and I are seeking allies within the FDA, people who can be trusted to act in the public’s best interest once our housecleaning begins.”
“I’d certainly like to be counted on your team, Congressman,” Sandra Walters replied, clenching one hand with the other. So close.
Larson examined her with a measuring gaze. “I thought I had identified such an ally in you, Ms. Walters.”
“Congressman, just this morning I was given some potentially explosive information. It appears that one of my subordinates has gone against every FDA guideline and offered confidential information on a new drug to an outside laboratory.”
Larson focused down tighter. “How did you learn of this?”
“I can’t say,” Sandra replied, which was literally the truth. The confidential caller had not given his name. He had simply passed on the information in a distinctly accented voice, then given the name of a person who could confirm it. Sandra had called the number of something called the Health and Medicine Advisory Council, whose director had cheerfully agreed that yes, Cliff Devon had delivered samples for inspection to him. Why, was something the matter? No, he was so sorry, he could not return the samples. They had unfortunately been stolen from the trunk of his car just the night before.
“No, of course, you must respect the confidentiality of your sources,” Larson said, masking his disappointment well. “And just which drug are we speaking of here?”
“One up for a new drug application. One that I understand is of particular interest to you,” Sandra said, letting the words roll deliciously off her tongue. “The echin drug.”
“You were right to bring this to my attention,” the congressman intoned, his voice taut.
“I couldn’t let them just sweep another one under the rug,” Sandra declared. “Which is exactly what they’d have done. Especially with this particular person. He’s the apple of the director’s eye, and he gets away with murder. As you can see.”
The congressman’s secretary chose that moment to knock, open the door, and announce, “Sir, you’re due at the hearing in five minutes.”
“Let them wait,” he snapped, his gaze not shifting from Sandra’s face. “And hold all calls.”
When the door had closed once more, Larson shifted his chair closer, and said, “So tell me, my dear. What is this subordinate’s name?”
* * *
Friday morning Deborah walked the halls of the veterans hospital, wrapped in a fog of frustration and futility. So many developments were screaming for urgent attention. She needed Pharmacon’s equipment. She needed the backing of her superiors. She needed to be heard. But everywhere she turned she faced a stone wall.
And everything pointed toward her worst fears being confirmed.
Somehow there had been a transfer from one plant species to another. Which everyone involved in microbiology knew was impossible. Genetic material simply did not transfer.
Yet there was no other explanation.
She knew what should be done. The drug’s clinical trials needed to be halted until a clear understanding was reached over exactly what was going on with the hallucinogenic characteristics of the neighboring rapeweed. But her warnings and pleas were simply being ignored. Nobody at Pharmacon even wanted to listen. And Deborah knew why.
The smell of profit was strong in the air.
Deborah was so steeped in thought that when she stepped through the main doors, she blinked in the bright sunlight and for a moment wondered where she was.
Then she saw Tom.
“Stop!” The word was out of her mouth before she even realized she had spoken. Or before she fully understood what was happening.
Then her brain slipped into gear, and she began to run.
“You! I see you! I’m calling the police! Let him go!”
The man looked vaguely foreign, and possessed the strength of a supple steel cable. He glared her way and continued to drag the feebly protesting Tom toward the dark car waiting by the main gates.
Deborah spun around, flew back up the stairs, pushed open the main doors, and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Cochise!”
Then back down the stairs to follow the hustling dark-haired man in the light-colored suit as close as she dared. Her white coat hampered her legs. She tore it off and flung it to the ground. “You let him go now.”
Behind her, the hospital’s entrance doors slammed back against the wall with the sound of a firing howitzer. She heard the Cochise roar.
The man dragging Tom looked up and hesitated.
“I see you!” she shrilled, not caring how little sense the words made. “They’ll track you down! Kidnapping is a federal offense! Let the man go!”
Features so finely sculpted they looked almost feminine drew back into a furious snarl. He shoved Tom toward her, wheeled about, and raced for the car.
Deborah ran forward and caught Tom as his legs faltered and began to give way. “I see you!” She screamed a third time, too caught up in the moment to wonder how smart it was to draw further attention toward herself.
The driver caught and held her in a look from dark, coldly fathomless eyes. Then the window powered up, and the car slid smoothly away.
“Take me on downtown,” the old man puffed. “Gonna tell ’em everything I know.”
“We need to get you back to bed,” Deborah soothed, and allowed Cochise to take up the old man’s weight.
“Been in bed. Been laying there too long, looking back at all the mistakes.” Tom fastened rheumy eyes on Deborah. “It’s time, Doc. Gotta start a new leaf while I still can. Take what’s owed me, least for this one. That’s all I could think of when he had me, how I’d left it for too late. Now the good Lord and you’ve done give me a chance. Well, this is one old fool who’s not gonna let it slip by. Not again, anyhow.”
Cochise knelt beside her, raised Tom to his feet with the ease of lifting a sack of feathers. “Everything’s all right, old man.”
“Take me on downtown, Doc,” he repeated. “Gonna tell ’em all I know.”
15
That Friday morning was a total wash for Cliff.
Conversations drifted off whenever he showed up. Appointments with colleagues became almost impossible to make. His name was on the lips of every gossip in the building. Madge could tell him that much, but little else, other than the fact that he was about to be erased and the bureaucratic herd instinct was shoving him out, pushing him to the edges, where the lions snarled and waited and hunted their prey.
Eventually the smirks and the almost audible snide remarks and the knowing looks became too much. Lunchtime he decided to call it quits for the day and head back down to Edenton.
Cliff cranked down the window of his Plymouth and took in great drafts of the humid summer air. At least out here he could breathe. He spent the drive down mulling over the Pharmacon mystery.
Prior to his departure, Ralph Summers had reported that Congressman Larson had scheduled a major news conference for Monday afternoon. He was going, according to scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill, to blow the FDA’s lid into high-altitude orbit.
Cliff still had difficulty believing Pharmacon was going to use the European trial data as a basis for pushing the release of echiniacin. But what else could explain the things that were going on? And what would be the consequences if the genetically altered drug was rushed to market before adequate testing could be done?
Cliff shuddered. To take a series of compounds and tinker with their molecular structure, then claim they were still basically the same, went against everything he felt was
right and true. Such pressure to release the drug prematurely brought to his mind the biggest pharmaceutical nightmare in modern history.
Thalidomide.
In the early 1960s, thousands of pregnant women in Europe had had this sedative prescribed to alleviate morning sickness. The early tests had shown no side effects whatsoever. The American drug company and the U.S. press had gone into fits of hand-wringing despair over the FDA’s refusal to accept the European clinical studies. The press had accused the FDA of distrusting the nation’s closest allies. The FDA had pointed out that none of the tests had actually been carried out on pregnant women.
Then disaster had struck.
Thousands and thousands of European babies had been born horribly deformed—armless or legless or both. Eventually it had been proven beyond the slightest doubt that the single cause was this supposedly tried and true drug.
Cliff had studied the thalidomide scandal very carefully during his first year with the FDA. He kept a file of clippings in his bottom drawer. They were never shown to anyone; they were for him alone. He kept them as a reminder of the responsibility he carried and the reason for responding to political posturings and journalistic pressure and corporate greed with caution and courage.
Now he was being cut off, hamstrung, and ignored. But the memory of his psychedelic hammering still lingered. He did not need scientific proof. He did not care that it was supposedly impossible to transplant altered genes from one species to another. His gut instinct told him that the genetically altered viroid was responsible for what he had experienced down there in Edenton.
And he was going to prove it. Then he was going to go public, stop this blind stampede for profit before more people got hurt.
He had to do it, no matter the cost.
But he had a feeling the cost might turn out to be staggering.
* * *
Cliff stopped at a service station on the outskirts of Edenton and called the Pharmacon facility. Deborah was still up at the Norfolk Veterans Hospital, he was told, and Blair had left for the day. He drove straight to Blair’s house.
Before he was even out of the car, Miss Sadie called down, “She’s just back from work, young man, but she’s gone to the store for me. Shouldn’t be more than a country minute. Come up and keep an old lady company, if you don’t mind settling for second best.”
“That’s one thing I’d never call you,” he said, climbing the front stairs. “Not ever.”
“Well, you’re very kind. Take this rocker here beside me. Would you care for something cool to drink?”
“No thanks, I’m fine.” Her hand continued to raise in greeting to every passing car as he settled in. Cliff asked, “Do you really know everybody driving by?”
“Of course not, don’t talk silly. My eyes are so bad I can scarcely make out the folks standing right in front of me.”
“Then why—”
“Now you just stop and use that head of yours for something besides holding up your hat. How do you think a friend might feel if they passed and waved and I didn’t wave back?” She started rocking once more. “Safest thing is to wave at everybody.”
Cliff began pushing himself back and forth. The rocker’s gentle reply was a comforting urge to let it go, settle back, relax, step away from the stress and the worry and the unanswered questions. “Sure is nice here.”
“Don’t let these pretty facades fool you, young man. If a body’s got a mind to be miserable, a small town doesn’t offer a bit more shelter than anywhere else.” She pointed down the street, toward a three-storied Victorian mansion of perhaps fifteen bedrooms. “One old woman lives in there with seven dogs as her only company.”
“Must get awful hollow around dark.”
“I would surely think so. Of course, there’s no escaping the tremors of loneliness if a body manages to tack on enough years.” She began rocking once more. “That house next to it but one used to be my aunt’s house. In all of my growing-up years, I hated that house. But it looks so different now, I’ve come to love it, at least a little bit.”
“Why did you hate it?”
“It was the town’s funeral parlor as well as their home. My uncle was the town mortician. The front parlor was where they held the services before everybody gathered in the church.”
“That’s a pretty good reason.”
“When I was a little girl, I always felt like there was somebody just out of sight, watching whatever I did.” She suppressed a very genteel shudder. “My granddaddy was laid out in that front window, my daddy and my momma as well. Got too many memories of that front room to ever sit comfortable in there.”
“Do you have any family left?”
“Just Blair. My folks both died young. Husband too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Still and all,” she went on, “I think I’ve been fairly lucky. Mama and Daddy raised me well. I had most of what a girl could ask for—a happy home, nice clothes, good friends, a family that loved me. In this big world, that’s saying a lot.”
“Sure is.”
“Even when they left me, they made sure I was well taken care of. Didn’t either one of them depart until I married Harry. That was a good man, Harry Atkins. As sweet a man as God ever set on this earth. The good Lord didn’t see fit to let us have children before He called Harry home. That’s about the biggest bone I’ve got to pick with Him when I arrive. Even then, I was allowed to have my Blair come and see me through my waning days.”
Cliff hesitated, then asked, “Can you keep a secret?”
She gave the single-note laugh of the very old. “Young man, around these parts a secret is something you only tell to one person at a time.”
“You don’t strike me as a gossip.”
“Small towns have a different way of dealing with the world. To a lot of folks around here, gossip is just another name for a telephone ministry.”
“Maybe I better keep this one to myself, then.”
“Oh, go ahead and speak your piece. You’re fit to burst as it is.” She reached over and patted his arm. “Think of it as a kindness to a lonely old lady, and remember that no good deed will go unpunished.”
He looked at her askance. “Are you sure you’ve got that right?”
“Wise as doves and harmless as serpents,” she replied. “That’s the way to survive in a small town.”
Cliff confessed, “I think I’m falling in love with your niece.”
She inspected him carefully, then asked, “Are you going to take her away from me, young man?”
“I don’t know,” Cliff said truthfully. “I’ve been thinking I’d be happier living around here than in DC, but I don’t know what I could do. Of course, the way things are moving just now, I don’t know how much longer I’ll have my job in Washington. A lot has been going on. If I lose it,” Cliff took a breath. “Well, maybe this would be a good place to put down roots.”
“An honest answer, sure enough. And a good one. Well, I shall keep you in my prayers.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“You’re welcome.” She nodded at a form that was hurrying through the gathering dusk toward them. “Now my nose tells me there’s another somebody who needs to hear what you’ve just told me.”
“Cliff!” There was genuine pleasure in Blair’s voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.” And then he saw her rush up the stairs and set down her bags and laugh when one spilled before she tumbled into his arms. He knew then, with the softness of her yielding to him and her hair spilling over his face and her fragrance filling his mind, he knew that somehow it was going to be all right.
* * *
“Last September, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies reported pretax earnings for the financial year of 2.5 billion dollars on sales of 7.4 billion dollars—a thiry-four percent profit level during the world’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Our per capita expenditure on health care is ten times what other W
estern nations are paying. Does that sound reasonable to you?”
“No,” she answered quietly, her gaze unwavering.
“Not to me either. The United States medical-industrial complex is so big it would qualify for membership in the G–7, which means that we spend more money on medical care than some of these other top seven countries even make.” He shook his head. “Something’s wrong with this picture.”
They sat on the front porch, coffee at their elbows, hands touching, sharing the night. After dinner Miss Sadie had smiled and said the night was meant for those younger than she. They had shared a shy look and not urged her to stay.
Lightning bugs illuminated the darkness, fairy lights that danced to the music of night breeze through pines. Their flickering ballet accentuated the heat and the humidity. The incense of honeysuckle and freshly watered roses invited him to sit, relax, and savor a quiet country evening.
Blair pulled from him the worries which had driven him south, listening with a quiet intensity that made the memories come alive. Perhaps it was another gift of a Southern upbringing, Cliff reflected as he spoke, this ability to listen and share in more than the words.
Blair asked, “So do you see a lot of this sort of injustice in your work?”
He laughed. “Are you really sure you want to get me started on this?”
“Did I just uncover a raw nerve?”
“You could say that.”
“Oh goody.” She reached over and stroked the hairs on his arm. “So tell me what it is that ruffles your feathers.”
He sighed and struggled to focus beyond her touch. “Pharmaceutical companies are running ads on television, saying how all they really want to do is find the cure for whatever ails you. At the same time, their industry body is lobbying Washington, warning how devastating it would be to have price controls on drugs. We are professionally responsible companies, they say. We can police ourselves just fine, thank you.”
