by Jeff Buick
Another look on Kenga’s home computer would dispel these crazy thoughts.
19
Kenga’s condo was dark as Jennifer pulled up in front. She switched off the car ignition and fingered the keys for a minute, wondering if she really wanted to know what was on the dead woman’s computer. What if these crazy suspicions she had were true? What then? If Veritas was killing its employees to keep them quiet, what could she do about it? And if they were, wouldn’t that put her next in the line of fire?
Jennifer sucked in a couple of deep breaths. What were the chances her suspicions would play out? Marginal to nil. She found Kenga’s key and held it tight between her thumb and index finger. As she exited the car, she glanced furtively up and down the street. Parked cars, a couple walking hand-in-hand, lights on in most of the houses. Nothing sinister. She walked quickly to the front door and let herself in. The cat poked his head out, saw it was her, and came over to rub against her leg.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she said, crouching and gently stroking the animal.“Your master isn’t coming home. You’re a nice cat- someone will want you.”
She straightened and walked directly to the bedroom Kenga had converted to a home office. She approached the desk and stopped. The computer was not as she had left it. Every time she left the office or shut down her home computer, she centered the mouse on the pad and laid a pen across the mouse pad at a forty-five-degree angle. It was a quirk of hers, but now she was glad she had done it. The pen was not on the mouse pad but beside it, on the desk. Someone had been in the house since her last visit on Wednesday.
She turned her attention to Kenga’s house. Was the intruder still somewhere inside? The house suddenly seemed darker, more sinister. She snapped on lights as she moved from room to room, checking the closets and under beds. A broom shifted when she yanked the door to the utility closet open, and she let out a short scream. She replaced the broom, feeling silly. The back door to the house was locked, all windows were closed, and the basement, which was unfinished, was empty. She returned to the small office, still on edge but confident no one else was in the house.
She powered up the computer and searched for the file with the Triaxcion data in it. Nothing. It was gone. She closed her eyes and let herself drift. One reason Jennifer Pearce was such a valuable researcher was her ability to envision chemical reactions without using paper or a computer screen. It was like playing a game of chess in her mind, without moving any of the pieces. She scrolled down slowly, line by line, her mind computing the formula, adjusting the molecules as the drug would once inside a human body. Finally, her brain overloaded and refused to store any more information. She squeezed her eyelids even tighter and let herself drift.
Triaxcion targeted testosterone, of that she was sure. It prohibited the conversion of the male hormone to dihydrotestosterone, enlarging the hair follicles in the subcutaneous layer of skin. This in turn kept the hair follicle intact and producing new growth. But, in her opinion, the chemical reaction inside the body would not be limited to the conversion process. This process involved the liver, as what she was looking at required the medicine to be broken down by liver enzymes. Furthermore, the dihydrotestosterone, once metabolized, immediately bound to albumin. But what would happen to the small percentage of DHT left unbound and wandering about the body? She wasn’t sure.
She was preparing to sign off when she remembered the file she had found embedded in the Triaxcion file. What was the name? She used her memory to replay opening the file. Slowly, the letters came into focus and she saw the name. Gordon Buchanan, Butte, Montana. She signed on to the Internet and keyed in a search for Butte Montana Buchanan. There were thousands of hits, but only one found all three keywords. There was an article in the Montana Standard with the name Buchanan, and she went to the paper’s Web site and opened it.
BUTTE-Tragedy struck the Twin Pines Sawmill on April 20, 2005, when Billy Buchanan died of injuries incurred while cutting a firebreak with a chain saw. According to witnesses, Buchanan was cutting a stump when the saw kicked back and sliced into his leg. Medically trained mill staff were on the scene and attended to Buchanan, but were unable to stop the bleeding. A helicopter, only minutes from the gorge where the accident occurred, rushed Buchanan to the hospital but he died en route.
The victim’s brother, Gordon Buchanan, is the owner of Twin Pines, and one of the primary employers in the Butte area. He was unavailable for comment.
The article went on to give some history on both brothers and their contributions to the local economy. Both men were apparently highly respected by everyone they interviewed. Gordon was painted as a highly successful businessman with strong ties to the community through his philanthropic gestures. Jennifer sent the page to Kenga’s printer and sat back in the chair.
From all appearances, someone had signed on to Kenga’s computer within the last twenty-four hours. But that was highly improbable. Kenga’s family was in Transylvania, and none of the other staff at Veritas had a key to her house-at least none that Jennifer knew about. And surely Kenga would have mentioned it if she had given another person a key. Two people both showing up at the same time and neither knowing the other had a key would be heart attack material. But considering that the Triaxcion file was missing, it didn’t take her Ph.D. to figure out who had been in the house.
Someone from Veritas.
But why? What in that file was so damaging to Veritas that they would break in and remove it from Kenga’s computer? Triaxcion was an FDA-approved drug, which meant the medication had passed Phase III trials and met regulatory standards. The chemical formula, which Veritas kept under lock and key, was patented and couldn’t be replicated by any of the generics. So even if another company managed to steal the formula, they couldn’t bring it to market without making substantial changes or fighting Veritas in a court of law. No, that angle didn’t make any sense.
She lifted the papers off the printer and reread the article on Billy Buchanan’s death. What was the connection? Had Triaxcion somehow contributed to Buchanan’s death? And how did Kenga figure into all this? She wasn’t involved with Triaxcion other than as an employee of the company manufacturing it. Which meant that Kenga would have access to the Veritas mainframe. And with a little ingenuity, she could probably download everything Veritas had on Triaxcion and pass it along to a third party.
Gordon Buchanan.
She glanced again at the address. Butte, Montana. If she remembered her geography classes, Montana was one of the northern states, tucked up against Canada. Maybe visiting Gordon Buchanan was the thing to do. If there was a connection between Kenga and Buchanan, maybe she could figure out what, if anything, was going on.
Crazy thinking again. She shook her head at the total absurdity of it all. Her imagination was taking over, controlling her cognitive thoughts. She was wide awake and lucid, but thinking of taking a cross-country flight to talk to a man who’d probably look at her like she had two heads. Gordon Buchanan had probably never heard of Veritas or Triaxcion. He was a sawmill owner whose brother had recently died in a tragic accident. There was nothing to connect Gordon Buchanan to Veritas.
Except the fact that Buchanan’s name had shown up on Kenga’s home computer. How was that possible? It was highly unlikely that Kenga had just picked a name at random and stored it in a secure file. Gordon Buchanan’s name was stored on her system for a reason. And now Kenga was dead, killed when her driver missed a curve on a windy road through the St. Lucia rain forest. And the driver had survived. How did that happen? The driver would have been at the wheel, struggling to regain control of his vehicle. If he had enough time to jump out of the car, he had enough time to react to the curve and keep from crashing into the ravine. No, something was wrong. When a car went over a cliff, everyone went over, not just the passenger. And add in that this passenger had a classified chemical process worth hundreds of millions of dollars to her employer on her computer, and the waters were getting very murky indeed.
Jennifer stared at the mouse and the pen. Someone had visited Kenga’s house inside the last twenty-four hours and removed a solitary file from her computer. As much as she kept telling herself that this was simply her imagination, the evidence was pointing a different direction. It was pointing to Veritas. And right now, the way to find out if there was any basis to this insane line of thinking was to meet with Gordon Buchanan.
As she switched off the computer and replaced the mouse and pen on the pad, she made a decision. This weekend was open-nothing pressing at the office, no friends to visit.
She was going to Butte.
20
Gordon Buchanan took the back stairwell to the second floor, the wooden stairs groaning under his weight as he navigated them two at a time. He swept past Belinda who was on the phone setting an appointment for one of the firm’s lawyers, and strode into Christine Stevens’s office. He closed the door behind him in a single motion, causing the door to bang shut. Christine looked up from the brief on her desk.
“Good afternoon, Gordon,” she said. She slid her reading glasses off her nose and set them on the brief.
Buchanan didn’t sit but paced back and forth as he spoke. “I’m not satisfied with where things are going, Christine,” he said. His voice was strong, his words clipped. “I want some action. It’s been four months since Billy died and we haven’t made any progress. These bastards at Veritas are treating us like a bothersome fly, just brushing us off. That’s not good enough.”
Stevens’s voice was equally curt. “What do you want me to do? There’s a certain legal protocol to follow. I can’t just go charging into their corporate offices and demand they pull Triaxcion off the market, then issue you a formal apology and a big check. Motions have to be filed and responded to. This takes time.”
“You’ve had time, Christine,” he said. “I’m not kidding. I want to move this to the next level. You’ve had this on your desk for almost four months. Billy died in April, and it’s August-September in another week.”
“How, Gordon? How do I move this to the next level? We have no definitive proof that Triaxcion causes clotting factors to fail in people with A-positive blood. We have suspicions, but that’s all.”
“That’s a load of shit and you know it. This drug is dangerous. It killed Billy and it’s killed at least eleven other people we know about.”
“There’s no solid proof,” Christine said, leaning on her desk and raising her voice. “And without proof, we’ll get killed in a court of law. Not one of the other lawyers representing clients who have died as a result of Triaxcion has filed for litigation. We just don’t have a winnable case.”
“So they get away with it?” he asked, his face taking on color.
His lawyer relaxed a bit, leaned back in her chair. “I told you from the start that these tort cases are difficult. They don’t happen overnight, and no matter what we do, Billy is not coming back. The best I can do, and I stress it’s the best, is that we get Triaxcion pulled off the market. You’re not going to get any personal satisfaction out of this, Gordon. No one from Veritas is going to end up in jail.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Christine was immediately struck by her client’s tone of voice. “What does that mean, Gordon?”
Gordon stopped pacing and placed his hands on her desk, leaning over so he was only a couple of feet from her. “I took the liberty of hiring a private investigator. He managed to dig up a woman, a Veritas employee, who agreed to work with me, collecting information from the company’s classified files.”
“You did what?” Stevens said, aghast. “That’s illegal.”
“I don’t care. I told you, I want answers.”
“I don’t want to know what they found. If they’ve stolen classified information from the company, I could get in serious trouble if you tell me.”
“Okay, Christine. If you can’t help me, I’ll have to take another approach. Outside the legal avenues available.”
“Again, Gordon, I don’t want to hear this.”
He withdrew from her desk and walked slowly toward the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned back to face her. “The woman who agreed to help me…” He opened the door and stood half in the hall, half in her office. He locked eyes with his lawyer.
“She’s dead,” he said, then left.
21
The mood in the room was somber.
The room in question was an office on the fifth floor of L’Enfant Plaza, the head office of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. Four men in suits sat on one side of the conference table, one woman and one man in lab coats on the other. The four men were handpicked from their agencies, the best merger of science and field experience from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. All four had file folders and glasses of water in front of them.
“What are we dealing with?” one of the suits asked. He was a wiry man, only five-ten and one-seventy, but his voice carried unmistakable authority. His close-cropped hair was graying slightly, the only indication he was over fifty. His name was J. D. Rothery, Under Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Science, and Technology. Appointed by the president to one of the top posts inside the agency, Rothery took his job seriously. A small plaque sat on his desk: Country comes first. Family comes second. His wife had it made for him. He took it as a compliment.
The man in the lab coat responded. He was Dr. Edward Henning, biological warfare specialist for the U.S. Army, on special assignment to DHS. Twenty-three years with the military, with postings in Iraq and Afghanistan to ferret out biological weapons, had made his name a household word around most mess halls. He was the first African-American with a Ph.D. to join the armed forces, and his tenacity and knowledge had paved the way for many more. “We’ve confirmed the two cases were caused by the same virus,” he said, consulting his folder. “The first victim was Elsie Hughes in Austin, Texas: female, age thirty-seven, employed in the accounting profession. She contracted the virus through licking a contaminated envelope at her local bank on May twelfth. She died four days later.
“The second victim was Robert English: male, forty-six years of age, resident of San Diego, California. He was a selfemployed computer programmer. The virus was found on postage stamps in his home office. One stamp was missing from the package of ten. We can’t be as sure of the exact date when English was infected, but we suspect on or about the seventh of July. He died on the tenth.”
“What about the virus?” Rothery asked tersely.
“It’s a virus that causes a hemorrhagic fever. To date, there are only two known hemorrhagic viruses, the most well known being Ebola. The other is Marburg. This one is neither.”
“So we’re dealing with an entirely new virus. And a deadly one.”
Henning took a sip of water and a deep breath. “Deadly is a gross understatement, Mr. Under Secretary,” he said. “This virus, if let loose inside our borders on any significant scale, would be absolutely catastrophic. It is communicable, terminal, and we do not have a cure.”
“Where the hell did this virus come from?” Rothery asked.
Henning shrugged.“No idea. I’ve checked with every government facility from Fort Detrick to Plum Island, but no one has been working on developing a new strain of hemorrhagic virus. This didn’t come from any of our labs.”
“Have we got ourselves another anthrax-type situation here?” he asked.
“I have no idea who is behind this, sir, just what kind of virus it is.”
Rothery turned to the man beside him.“Jim, what’s your take on this?”
Jim Allenby, Special Agent in Charge for the FBI out of the Washington, D.C., office, consulted his file. He was a lifer with the Bureau, six years from full pension. His face, like his body, was still lean, but taking on the vestiges of age: Small jowls were forming and the skin under his chin was sagging slightly. But his mind was as sharp as or sharper than when he had
first joined the Bureau as a young recruit, wet behind the ears. His hair was graying, and age lines were forming on his forehead and at the edges of his intense blue eyes. “When we had Elsie Hughes’s body shipped to Fort Detrick,” he said, “we suspected we had some sort of hemorrhagic virus. We traced her movements for the week preceding her death and found the envelope in the recycling trash at the bank. We forwarded that envelope ahead to Dr. Henning after it had been initially screened at Fort Detrick. We took the same procedure with the stamps we found in Mr. English’s house. The two attacks, being so separate from each other with respect to geography and method of contamination, lead us to suspect some sort of conspiracy.”
“Terrorists?”
“It’s a definite possibility, Mr. Under Secretary. They could be testing the proverbial waters to see if there’s any collateral damage or if only the primary infected target dies. They may want to know how many strikes are necessary to infect our population before unleashing the main attack. Or they may be willing to play a game of terror by paralysis. If the news were to seep out that items we take for granted, like stamps, could be infected, panic would be sure to follow. And with that panic will come a huge blow to how efficiently we run the country. It could easily outstrip the anthrax scare of 2003.”
“So where did this virus come from? How is it possible that a new hemorrhagic virus just suddenly shows up? How was it created?” Rothery asked the pathologist.
“You’re sure you want an answer to that? It’s pretty technical.”
“Try me.”
“I suspect that some group has developed it by mutating Ebola or Marburg,” Henning answered. “But that said, the manner in which this virus binds to the host cell is quite different from Ebola or Marburg. We’ve isolated a unique set of proteins on the outer viral membrane, which we think are targeting chemokine receptors for the bonding process. But how it enters the host cell is a complete mystery at this point. Once it’s inside the victim, at the human cellular level, it uncoats and its nucleic acid undergoes transcription into mRNAs. Genome replication follows, which is standard, except we suspect it’s a DNA virus that uses only the de novo pathway and somehow does not require the salvage pathway.” He stopped for a moment to let the string of technical jargon sink in, then addressed Rothery’s question. “So how was it created? We’re not sure. There’s still a lot about the virus we don’t understand.”
