Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “You’ve been assigned to Mr. Wohl’s office,” Bill informed me as I signed the guest sheet. “Dr. Azorini’s orders. Here’s the key. Do you remember where that is or do you need me to escort you?”

  “I know the way,” I assured him quickly.

  “My condolences about Mr. Wohl. He was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was,” I agreed and quickly made my way across the lobby, glad to have my encounter with Paramilitary Bill behind me.

  Compared to the plush clubbiness of Callahan Ross the utilitarian corridors of Azor Pharmaceuticals seemed stark and alien. My high heels clicked against the polished linoleum while the entire building seemed to throb with the pulse of unseen high-tech equipment. From behind closed doors I heard laughter and from the adjacent corridor that housed the ZK-501 labs I heard country music, sad and sweet.

  I turned the key and opened the door to Danny’s office, scrabbling in the dark until I found the light switch. In the two weeks since he’d left for Japan the place had taken on a desolate air. When the company made the move to the suburbs Danny’s old secretary had balked at the additional commute and taken another job downtown. Danny, busy with Takisawa, had not yet had time to replace her. As a result, unopened mail was piled high on his desk, and incoming faxes overflowed the machine spilling out onto the floor. A chain of Post-it notes trailed forlornly from the bottom of his computer screen and everything was covered with a thin layer of dust.

  I was just taking off my coat, wondering where to begin, when I heard a knock on the door. I looked up and saw Carl Woodruff leaning against the frame with a thin smile of welcome on his face. Carl, a high-strung Englishman, was the project manager for ZK-501. Originally trained as an organic chemist, he’d had his graduate studies derailed by a bout with Hodgkin’s disease. While he’d beaten his cancer, his illness had left him with a commitment to the practical side of pharmaceutical research. Still, his years at the laboratory bench stood him in good stead with the scientists whose work it was his job to oversee and I knew from Stephen that Carl commanded a measure of respect usually not granted to an administrator.

  “I’ve been sent to officially welcome you to the asylum,” Carl announced good-naturedly. He was about five foot seven, with a slight build and thinning sandy-colored hair that straggled over his collar. He wore a wrinkled white shirt and a pair of dust-colored corduroys. His aviator glasses seemed to be the biggest thing about him.

  “I wish I could say I was happy to be here,” I said, extending my arms as if to encompass Danny’s entire office.

  “Yes, shocking news about Danny and all that,” replied Carl. “What was it? Someone told me a ruptured appendix.”

  “I don’t think it was his appendix,” I said, pushing down the images of Danny’s apartment that were crowding themselves into my brain. “They won’t know until after they do the autopsy.”

  “Stephen tells me you will be joining us full time,” continued Carl. From his tone of voice I couldn’t tell how he felt about it.

  “Only until we’re done negotiating with the Japanese.”

  “So then under the circumstances I guess it would be fair to ask you how much you know about chemistry?”

  “Enough to know that I didn’t want to take a second semester of it in college,” I replied.

  The look on his face told me that all his worst fears about lawyers had just been realized.

  “Would it at least be safe to assume that you know what a molecule is?” he inquired dryly.

  “Yes, Carl, I may be a lawyer, but I’m not a moron. I know what a molecule is.”

  “Good. Then allow me to give you a ten-minute chemistry lesson. Since you understand what a molecule is then surely you realize that while all drugs are molecules, not all molecules are drugs. What makes drug molecules special is how they attach themselves—scientists, of course, use the word bind—to other molecules during the course of a disease. Right now ZK-501 is a very powerful drug, but it’s too toxic to be used in humans. What we’re trying to do is redesign the molecule, to actually alter its molecular structure in such a way as to eliminate those adverse side effects. Given that, what would you think is the first thing we’d need to know?”

  “The molecular structure of ZK-501?” I ventured, feeling that it was much too early in the morning for a pop quiz.

  “Good answer, but the molecular structure of ZK-501 has been known for several years. Right now, what we’re concerned with is trying to figure out the structure of ZKBP.”

  “What is ZKBP?”

  “It’s short for ZK-501 binding protein—that’s the receptor protein that ZK-501 attaches to in the body. I’m sure you’ve heard Stephen’s standard speech about how designing new drugs is like making keys for locks— diseases are the locks and drugs are the keys. In this case, ZKBP is an exact replica of the relevant lock. Since we’re trying to make a better key, knowing how the lock is put together is the critical first step. Ideally, a drug should fit its target perfectly, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” He clasped his hands in a token marriage to demonstrate his point. “That way there are no side effects. From the way it works we now know that ZK-501 doesn’t fit perfectly with its target because while I it works, it’s also practically poisonous. That’s why knowing the exact configuration of the target is so important. Once we know it, we can change the structure of ZK-501 to improve the fit and eliminate the side effects. Once we solve the structure of the receptor, the rest of what we have to do will be all mapped out and we’ll leapfrog ahead of the competition.”

  “So how close are you to solving it?”

  “Unfortunately the protein has been something of I a ball buster,” replied Carl apologetically. With his plummy Oxford speech he managed to make even this J sound like a refined observation. “So far we’ve been able to isolate only tiny amounts from human tissue, and crystallography’s attempts to divine its structure have so far been, shall we say, inconclusive.”

  “What about Mikos? Do they have the structure yet?”

  “Rumor has it that so far they have the receptor, I nothing more.”

  “Will you beat them to it, do you think?”

  “At the rate we’re going we’ll be lucky if we all emerge from this with our sanity intact.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let’s just say that so far everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. We’ve been plagued by failed experiments, power outages, scarce reagents, unduplicable results, and primary investigators who seem to spend more time at one another’s throats than they actually do in their labs.”

  “It can’t be as bad as all that,” I protested.

  “Let’s just put it this way. If it’s true that, in science, it is better to be lucky than to be good—this project has been doomed from the get-go.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, with a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “Stephen handpicked the scientists on this project because of what they can do. But when you put them all together and make them work together, you keep on bumping up against who they are.”

  “And who are they?”

  “Half of them are academic scientists. By that I mean researchers who until now have held university appointments and had their research funded by government grants. Most lay people think academic scientists are propelled by some kind of noble search for the truth.”

  “And are they?”

  Carl gave a derisive snort. “No,” he replied. “They are looking for something else entirely.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Oh, academic scientists want quite a lot of things.” Carl ticked them off on the fingers on his hand. “Important publications, more funding, bigger labs, travel, star power, tenure... But in the end it all boils down to the same thing—peer recognition. Believe me when I tell you we are talking about people who are willing to claw one another’s eyes out over who gets listed as first author on a research paper that only two hundred people in the entire w
orld are capable of understanding.”

  “What are the other half like?” I asked.

  “The rest of the investigators on the project are all experienced industrial scientists,” replied Carl. His respectful tone of voice indicated quite clearly with which group his allegiances lay. “For industry scientists, unlike their academic counterparts, success depends not on reckless self-promotion, but on keeping their best work secret. They are driven not to get their name in print, but to get the drag made.”

  “And get rich,” I interjected.

  “Definitely,” agreed Carl with a sly smile. “The trouble comes when you mix the two sorts. To industrial scientists, academics are glory-mad prima donnas. On the other hand, academic scientists think industrial scientists are whores.” Carl smiled at me serenely from across the mountains of papers that littered Danny’s desk.

  “Sounds like an interesting group,” I said, and wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into.

  The ZK-501 project council meeting was held in the first-floor lunchroom, which was the only place big enough to accommodate all the people working on the project. Carl walked me down the hall to show me the way. Then, as we helped ourselves to coffee from a heavy-duty industrial-size percolator at the back of the room, he discreetly pointed out the various investigators as they straggled in for the meeting.

  Watching the room slowly fill up, I was immediately struck by how young they all were—not to mention how scruffy looking. Rumpled and unshaven, the ZK-501 scientists looked for all the world like a ragtag bunch of graduate students rousted from the library at closing time. The younger scientists, true to their generation, looked like grunge-band refugees with Walkmen strapped to their belts and headphones slung around their necks. The older ones wore baggy corduroy pants that sagged in the seat and hand-knit sweaters of dirt-colored wool.

  The exception was a young woman with a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, her hair dyed a purplish black, who was holding court in the front row. She wore ripped jeans, motorcycle boots, and a T-shirt with one of those ubiquitous yellow smiley faces on the front. The only thing different about hers was that it had a small round bullet hole drawn on its forehead.

  “Who’s the Hell’s Angel?” I inquired.

  “That’s Lou Remminger,” replied Carl.

  “That is Lou Remminger?” I demanded incredulously. Remminger was the chemist from Yale who was the lead investigator of the ZK-501 project. According to Stephen, she was to organic chemistry what Michael Jordan is to basketball—the kind of natural talent that turns up only once a generation.

  “They say that if she’s able to turn ZK-501 into a usable drug they’ll have to give her the Nobel prize,” Carl whispered, his lips curling into a small smile.

  “I wonder what she’ll wear to the award ceremony,” I replied faintly, envisioning an auditorium filled with scandalized Swedes.

  Carl touched my arm. “You see that man with the turtleneck sitting off by himself? That’s Michael Childress, the X-ray crystallographer.”

  “I’ve met him. Stephen and I took him out to dinner while Azor was recruiting him from Baxter.” I shuddered inwardly at the recollection of that night. With arrogance that bordered on boorishness, Childress had bullied the waiters, monopolized the conversation with tedious monologues about his many accomplishments, and pointedly addressed all his remarks to Stephen as if I’d been invited along to merely fill a seat.

  “Michael Childress is a world-class pain in the ass,” announced Carl with real venom. “He thinks he was put on earth for the express purpose of telling everyone else what they’re doing wrong.”

  “That must make him very popular,” I observed.

  “You notice no one will even sit near him.” Sure enough, there was a ring of empty seats around Childress like some kind of quarantine. “Do you see the woman sitting behind him with the headphones?” Carl continued. My eyes settled on a large, raw-boned woman with a cap of dark curls and a very intense expression on her pale face. Her hands twitched nervously across her lap and there were dark circles under her eyes.

  “That’s Michelle Goodwin,” the administrator explained. “She’s the second crystallographer on the project.”!

  “Why do you have two?” Crystallographers were a rare and much sought-after specialty. A proven one like Childress was the scientific equivalent of a franchise athlete. “We have her on loan for a year from Purdue. She was originally hired to work on the integrase project, but after it folded Stephen moved her over here.”

  “So how do she and Childress get along?” I asked, remembering what Carl had said back in Danny’s office about the rift between academic and industrial scientists.

  “She tries to stay out of his way. Actually it’s not that hard because he’s almost never here.”

  “Where is he then?” I demanded, remembering how much Stephen was paying him.

  “Giving papers, going to site visits, getting interviewed on National Public Radio. It drives Remminger nuts.”

  “Who’s that over there?” I asked, chucking my head in the direction of a man with a wild head of brindle-colored hair and a tobacco-stained mustache.

  “That’s Dave Borland, our lead protein chemist,” replied Carl with a mysterious chuckle. “I’ll take you down to see his lab later, but I promise we won’t go before lunch.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s the one who isolates ZKBP, the receptor we were talking about back in Danny’s office. It’s a very complicated process that we fondly refer to as grind and bind. You start by taking human spleens and putting them into an industrial-size blender.”

  “Where do you get the spleens?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “From a medical supply house.”

  “You mean you can just call an eight-hundred number and get body parts?”

  “Yes. But they’re expensive. A spleen from a healthy cadaver costs four hundred sixty dollars. Ones that are discarded during transplantation of other organs we get at a discount. Same-day delivery is extra. It takes about forty spleens to make one gram of binding protein.”

  “I can see how that would add up,” I remarked faintly.

  “Believe me, Kate, one thing you learn in this busines is that there is no shortage of people who are worth more dead than they are alive.”

  CHAPTER 6

  When Stephen walked into the room conversation evaporated and all eyes turned toward him with the fluid certainty of magnetism. Even Lou Remminger stubbed out her cigarette on the pink frosting of a half-eaten doughnut and offered up the full measure of her attention. I didn’t care what Carl Woodruff had just said about the differences in their backgrounds and motivations, the truth was that the scientists in the room had one very important thing in common. They had all come to Azor because Stephen Azorini had promised them personally that it was here they would have a chance to do the best science of their lives.

  “What’s our status with respect to the receptor?” Stephen demanded without preamble, rolling up his sleeves and scanning the room with his pale blue eyes. His shirt was a small miracle of starch. The old Polish woman who did his ironing was in love with him and somehow she managed to channel all her ardor into his shirts.

  “Well, for one thing,” sniffed Childress unpleasantly, “there isn’t enough of it.”

  Stephen turned to Dave Borland, the protein chemist. “I thought the new process was producing higher yields,” he said, lifting one black brow to eloquently punctuate the question.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the supply of protein,” Borland shot back defensively. “The problem is that crystallography is pissing it away. So far they’ve gotten nearly a gram of pure receptor—twice what everyone else has gotten put together—and they haven’t produced a single viable crystal.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” ventured Michelle Goodwin timidly. “I’ve actually had some success with very small crystals.”

  “Considering the importance of sol
ving the structure I don’t understand why chemistry and imaging should be getting any at all,” Michael Childress said, talking right over her as if she’d never spoken.

  “There’s one more thing we need to factor into all this,” interjected Carl, trying to be heard above the others. “We’re still having problems with the power.” The ZK-501 labs were so crammed with high-tech equipment that, within three months of moving in, Azor Pharmaceuticals’ power demands had outstripped the available supply. For months Commonwealth Edison had been promising to install additional transformers, but in spite of twice-daily calls from Carl Woodruff, no date had as yet been set for the upgrade.

  “The electricity is not the problem,” announced Lou Remminger, glaring contemptuously at Childress. Despite her punk persona her voice was straight from the Smoky Mountains. The effect was as incongruous as her fingernails. “The supply of receptor is not the problem either. The problem is that Dr. Childress is doing every other goddamned thing in the world besides his job.”

  “How dare you!” sputtered Childress, obviously stung by such a direct attack.

  “Well,” drawled the chemist sweetly. “Would you mind telling me when was the last time you spent a weekend in the lab—or better yet, a full week? Let me see, last week it was a site visit at Johns Hopkins, the week before it was the small-molecules conference in Brussels....”

  “Enough,” announced Stephen, evidently deciding he had let things go too far. “As the saying goes, as of today all shore leave is canceled. That goes for you, too, Michael. Our friends the Japanese are coming. Takisawa is sending a dozen of their people to visit our labs a week from Monday. That gives us nine days to prepare for a full-blown site visit.”

  The scientists of the ZK-501 project received this news in stunned silence. Dave Borland, the protein chemist, looked like he’d just been punched in the stomach and I saw a flicker of something very close to panic cross Michelle Goodwin’s face. Only Michael Childress seemed unperturbed by the news. Sitting by himself, buffered by empty chairs, he stroked his chin with mandarin-like indifference.