SIXTY-NINE
Sacramento
FRANK CLOSED his cell phone. He couldn’t reach Elizabeth on hers but had left her a message, which she was either not hearing or unwilling to return.
Tom walked up to the nurses’ station, distracting Frank from his worry about Elizabeth. “Frank, sorry about security. I told them to hurry up.” Tom glanced to the side.
“Thanks,” Frank said, but he wasn’t buying it. How could it take a month to reset some access codes? The Epidemiological Research Unit was finding something that they didn’t want others to know. Frank knew from playing poker with Tom that he was a terrible bluffer. His eyes always looked to the side when he was lying.
Tom turned to fill out a prescription. His card key was in the pocket of his white coat. Frank clasped his hand on Tom’s shoulder affectionately. “I want to thank you for your and Jenny’s help during this trying time for me and Elizabeth.”
“It’s nothing,” Tom said, seeming a little uncomfortable with the physical intimacy.
“No, really, Tom, it’s meant a lot to me.” As he looked into Tom’s eyes and held his shoulder, Frank used his other hand to pluck Tom’s card key from his pocket.
“Anytime,” Tom said.
Frank started down the hall. “Hey, wait a minute,” he heard Tom say. Frank froze and then slowly turned around. “You forgot your coffee.”
Frank sighed and smiled. “You can have it.”
Tom tipped the Styrofoam cup to his lips and drank it in one gulp like a shot, then lifted it in the air as if toasting Frank. “The coffee hasn’t gotten any better.”
“Some things never do,” Frank said, hurrying down the hall.
He looked both ways to see if anyone was coming. The hall was empty. He slid Tom’s card key into the reader and heard the door unlock. Frank slipped inside quickly and closed the door.
On Tom’s desk was a picture of his family in front of their large vacation home in Hawaii. Tom, Jenny, and their two boys beamed with almost unnatural wholesomeness and all-American good looks. Obstetricians weren’t buying big vacation homes in Hawaii—plastic surgeons or dermatologists, maybe, but not obstetricians. Tom must have either come from money or been moonlighting.
There was another photo on the desk of Tom’s softball team. Tom and Jenny had been nothing but kind to him, and Frank felt guilty about suspecting his friend. But something was suspicious. When he had asked security about his key, they said he had not been authorized to get a new one.
Frank pressed the power button on the computer, and the monitor flashed to life. An external hard drive resting on the desk hummed as its light turned red and then green. Frank swiped Tom’s card key on another reader next to the computer, but then it asked for his password.
Frank sat back in his chair. How am I ever going to figure out his password? He was not particularly good at code cracking—that was always Elizabeth’s skill. Her mind was always good at puzzles. His was not. Come on, think. Children? Everyone uses their children’s names. Frank typed in the names of Tom’s two boys, but neither worked. He slumped in the chair, defeated. He stared at the picture of Tom’s softball team. He knew Tom was a passionate—his wife said obsessive—softball player. Some doctors lived for golf. Tom lived for softball. What’s the name of his team? The Hawks? No, no…the Eagles!
Six little black circles appeared in the dialogue box as Frank typed “Eagles.”
He was in.
Frank looked up the birth defects statistics that the research unit was collecting for the regional health registry. The summary page listed two stats.
“Prematurity as a percentage of all births: 12.3%.”
“Birth defects as a percentage of births: 3.5%.”
Frank sighed with a combination of relief and frustration. He knew these numbers were consistent with the national averages, and he was relieved that there was no great epidemic of prematurity or birth defects. But his gut told him these statistics were wrong. He had witnessed more than his share of abnormal births.
He clicked on the icon for the database of birth defects and began to navigate through the records. Under the child’s name each electronic record had the diagnosis and a picture of the condition. There was everything from a slightly cleft palate to spina bifida, and this was just in the first two letters of the alphabet. He started in on the C’s. Frank stopped. Where’s the Bradley baby? He recalled the missing hand and the heart defect of the baby he had delivered a month before. Did I skip over it?
He looked back through “B,” but there was no Bradley. Could they be almost a month behind in entering data? The record in front of him was of a tiny preemie born the week before. Many of the other records were more recent. He started to check for other patients of his and discovered that some of them had not been entered into the epidemiological database, either.
Frank looked around nervously. Someone was clearly falsifying the data to make it look like there was a normal incidence of prematurity and birth defects. He looked back at the main database of all births and checked the coding for the Bradley baby. It said: “Birth outcome undetermined.” That’s crazy, Frank thought. The diagnosis is right there in the record. Quickly, he checked several other babies who had been born with birth defects and found that they, too, were labeled “Birth outcome undetermined.”
Frank saved the databases to the external hard drive and then unplugged it from the main computer. He looked around for something to hide the hard drive in. Sticking out of the garbage was a small pizza box.
Frank left the office and closed the door behind him.
“Are you stealing my pizza?”
Frank turned around and saw Tom standing there.
Before Frank could respond, they were paged overhead: “Dr. Neumann and Dr. Lombardi, please report to the birthing center.”
SEVENTY
Liberty Slough
APOLLO’S EYES were clouding over—and he was seeing through an increasingly white film—
He could hear the splashing of flippers and feel the ripples of the creatures approaching—
He continued singing—the waters vibrating—
Still he did not move—
Then he felt the net around his flukes—like those that had caused so many whales to drown—
His heart began to beat faster—and he began to thrash his tail—
Suddenly he heard the roaring of a boat and was being dragged backward—
He continued thrashing and resisted with all of his strength—
His backward slide stopped—the roaring increased—the whining sharp in his ears and the net straining where it circled his flukes—
ELIZABETH STOOD ON the concrete bridge, watching the disaster unfold in front of her. Apollo was thrusting his mighty tail, straining against the tether of the industrial-gauge rope being used to drag him out. The divers had fastened a padded rubber harness around the caudal peduncle, the part of the stalk just before the tail. Elizabeth looked behind her at the muscular forty-seven-foot motor lifeboat on the other side of the bridge from Apollo. It had been brought in for the operation and was pulling at full throttle. But it was not moving forward. The rope was taut and lurching back and forth, straining to the point of breaking.
Elizabeth felt helpless. She had no better ideas, and even if she had, there was little chance that anyone would have acted on them. The television reporters had shown little interest in her when she had arrived at the slough. A Dr. Dolittle was one thing; an insane graduate student was another. Even Lieutenant James had told her that he’d been ordered to take her off the whale rescue team. She was here simply as a private citizen, an ordinary spectator. Fortunately, after a court order, the owner of the land was once again allowing people to use the levee road, which was public property.
She looked out at the levee wall on one side and the line of trees hugging the shore on the other. While the landowners were not preventing the public from entering, they were not making it easy. Black security cars blocked off
the road, and people had to walk quite a distance. Even with this barrier and the discouraging news broadcasts, there were still two or three hundred people standing or sitting along the levee. A troop of young Cub Scouts wearing blue uniforms and bright orange neckerchiefs held up a banner that said: SAVE APOLLO. They hadn’t lost hope. The white television vans were still there, and a helicopter circled like a buzzard, waiting for the whale to die.
Elizabeth was startled by a sound like a shotgun. The rope had snapped, and the eighty-ton shock load had turned it into a deadly coil. Ducking quickly behind the concrete barrier, she heard it come flying toward where she stood on the bridge. The rope lashed in fury and continued toward the boat, rearing up like a serpent and tearing off the antennas mounted on top of the wheelhouse before finally shattering the glass of the back windows into countless pieces. Several of the Coast Guard seamen had dropped to the deck. All, including Lieutenant James, were still moving and did not seem to be seriously hurt. Even at this distance, she could hear James’s voice saying, “Dammit. Damn that stubborn whale.”
In the brown water below the bridge, Elizabeth saw her faceless reflection. The rescue efforts had failed. She had failed. It was just a matter of time before they euthanized the whale. Someone wanted this whale out now—whether alive or dead. When she had arrived at the slough, she’d discovered that her laptop was missing—stolen. Whoever had put the dead fish in her car had taken her laptop out. Maybe Connie was right. Maybe it was the whalers. Well, they had won, and she and Apollo had lost.
“Aren’t you supposed to be saving this whale?”
Elizabeth looked over and saw Teo walking up the bridge.
SEVENTY-ONE
“I THOUGHT YOU had left,” Elizabeth said, even as she herself was turning to leave.
“I decide to stay around and keep an eye on you til Frank come home. Connie say I could stay a few days at her place.”
“What makes you so sure he’ll come back?”
“He see it right, don’t you worry.”
Elizabeth kept walking toward the bank.
“Where you going?”
“Home.”
“Giving up?”
“There’s nothing more I can do for Apollo.”
“You can find out what wrong with that calf. Is no whaling if the whale all covered in diseases.”
Elizabeth hadn’t heard from Pete Sanchez, but she wasn’t sure how those test results would make any difference to Apollo. “I have to think about my own baby now.”
Teo followed Elizabeth back across the bridge. “If is true what you say about the whale warning, you think your baby’ll be safe?”
“They threatened my child, Teo.” She stopped at the bank where the bridge started, trying not to look at him. “I’m afraid.”
“Of course you afraid. Courage don’t mean you not afraid. I been scared plenty. Courage mean doing what you must though you never been more afraid in your whole life.”
Elizabeth heard Teo’s words, but she had made up her mind. She was giving up being a scientist, giving up on her quest to understand the whales. She had sacrificed so much already, and she was not going to sacrifice her child, too. Stepping off the cement bridge and onto the gravel path, she turned to say goodbye to Teo, knowing she was also saying goodbye to the whales and to eight years of her life.
Elizabeth saw the sun glittering on the water. She felt a dull, gnawing ache in her stomach and bit her lip to stop herself from crying. She looked into Teo’s face and then looked down, ashamed of her failure.
In the mud next to his dirty white sneakers, she saw something. It was a dead frog. She stooped down and turned it over with her finger. It had a double pair of back legs, the extra set growing out of its stomach. Its mouth hung agape. She looked closer. Something in its mouth was shiny, reflecting the low sun. With her forefinger, she opened its mouth. On the frog’s tongue, an eye stared back at her.
SEVENTY-TWO
12:05 P.M.
Sacramento
FRANK AND TOM stood along the wall of the birthing room wearing blue surgical gowns, white latex gloves, and pink paper masks over their faces. Frank listened to the moans of the young woman struggling to bring her first baby into the world. The mother gripped the hand of the labor nurse as if her reassuring grasp could help her baby come into the world sooner.
The baby was premature, and the heart tracing had been irregular. Frank glanced around the room for family. There was no father in the room, no grandparents, no sister, not even a friend. The young unwed mother was not over sixteen and clearly terrified. Frank thought of the statues of the Virgin Mary in his childhood church.
He glanced over at Tom, who was scrupulously avoiding his eyes. “I can’t believe you would do it!” Frank whispered forcefully, careful to keep the nurse at the bedside from hearing them.
“Do what?” Tom said, glancing at Frank for only a brief moment.
Frank could see that he was sweating under his mask, and it was not just because the birthing room was heated. “What you did to the database.”
“What are you talking about?” Tom asked, looking to the side again.
“You miscoded the birth defects.” Frank was getting angry at his friend’s denial. The woman’s cries intensified.
“So mistakes were made in the data entry.”
“You knew exactly what you were doing. You were falsifying the data to make it look like there were a normal number of birth defects.”
“It’s just a research study.”
“This is not just a research study. These are our patients. We use that information to diagnose and treat them.”
“I had no choice.”
Frank sighed. At least Tom was admitting that he had done it. “What do you mean?”
“They have me.”
“Who?”
Tom stared at Frank. His eyes looked nervous but also strangely relieved, as if he had been desperate to tell someone the truth. “I just wanted to do research. The hospital said there was no way without a funding source. That’s when they called.”
The laboring woman’s primal groans filled the room with each contraction. Tom glanced down at where the labor nurse was checking the young woman. Almost ready but not yet.
Frank asked again, “Who’s ‘they’? The Environmental Stewardship Consortium?”
“Yeah. They offered to support my research if I made a few cosmetic changes to my design, and I didn’t think much about it. I figured that’s how you get ahead in the field. You do research. You get funded. You publish articles. I was willing to play ball, but I didn’t realize the game they were playing.”
“What did they want?”
“They started to redline my articles and to change my conclusions. When I told them I wouldn’t do it, they started to threaten me. They know what I’ve already done. Now I can’t get out.” Tom’s eyes looked fearful above the mask. “What are you going to do, Frank, now that you know?”
“What are you going to do?”
“This could ruin my career.”
“Yeah, it could.”
“Jenny doesn’t work. I’ve got kids to feed.”
“What about these kids?” Frank said, tilting his head toward the child about to be born.
Tom pushed his gloved palms together in front of his scrubs, as if he were praying. Frank could see that Tom was trying to stop their shaking; he wasn’t succeeding.
Leaning over Tom’s shoulder, Frank asked, “Who is the Environmental Stewardship Consortium? Who are they, really?”
Tom did not have a chance to answer. He had to move swiftly into action as the baby began crowning. He gently started to stretch the membranes around the head. “No empuje, señorita, no empuje.”
The new mother uttered one long, last groan, and the baby’s head pushed through the birth canal, followed quickly by the shoulders, torso, and four limbs, whole and complete. The little boy had a full head of black hair and a reddish-brown face. He was screaming with life and health.
Dorothy came huffing into the room, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. “Mr. Gates is in your office, Dr. Lombardi. He says he needs to talk with you immediately. Says it’s urgent.”
Is something wrong with Justine? Frank wondered, and glanced back at the newborn.
“The baby’s fine,” Tom said. “I’ll take care of him. Go.”
SEVENTY-THREE
GATES WAS HOLDING a photo of Frank and Elizabeth that he had picked up from the desk.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Gates? Is it Justine?”
Gates looked up and then carefully placed the picture frame back on the desk. “There is something wrong. But it’s not just Justine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Lombardi, we’re not making anything in our factories that the other large chemical companies around the world aren’t making—hell, we’re a lot better than some about following environmental regulations. The problem is, we’re creating things that have never existed before, so no one really knows what the long-term effects will be. Much of the time, companies are left in a gray area.”
“I’m not following you, Mr. Gates.”
“We didn’t always live in Blackhawk, Dr. Lombardi. I worked my way up through the company. I started out at the West Sacramento plant, got my MBA at night. I wanted to show my boss that I could play the game, maximize profits. I decided to build employee houses on land owned by the chemical plant. It was cheaper. I made the decision to build the house where my baby got sick.”
Frank wondered why Gates was telling him all of this. Had he come for absolution? Many people treated doctors like priests and confessed their sins. “Mr. Gates, no one man caused this problem,” Frank said, trying to console him.
Eye of the Whale Page 23
