Alchemist (59 page)

‘What do I say to Anna Sterling, Conor?'

He watched the two cats eating hungrily from their bowls on Monty's kitchen floor. ‘I don't think you say anything right now,' he said, rattling the ice cubes in his whisky and drinking a slug.

‘She's going to die, isn't she?'

‘We don't know that for sure.'

‘We bloody well do.' She took a cigarette he offered without thanking him and lit it agitatedly. ‘That information in the Medici File records four deaths to date and no successful births. That's four out of four, Conor.'

He shook his head, holding his own unlit cigarette. ‘Four out of
seven
. There were three miscarriages recorded, and no information about the mothers, so I assume they're OK.'

‘Great. What do I do? Go round to Anna and punch her in the stomach. Say, “Sorry, this is for your own good”?' She pulled open the freezer door, and peered in angrily. ‘I was going to cook you a really nice meal tonight. I hadn't realized how late it is. Have to be a microwaved lasagne.'

Conor glanced at his watch. It was 10.15.

Monty had noticed that the message light on the answering machine was flashing, but she was too preoccupied to bother with it at the moment. Instead she voiced her fears. ‘This is too big for us, Conor, we're way out of our depth here. Don't you think we should go to the police?'

Conor looked evasive suddenly. ‘I'm not sure that's such a smart idea.'

‘Why not?' She put a corkscrew down on the table, and a bottle of red wine.

‘Well – I don't think it's really a police matter,' he prevaricated.

‘Four women are dead and another ten could die, and it's not a police matter?' She drew on her cigarette. ‘Look, the company's broken every rule in the book. They've changed the design of a drug without going through any of the proper channels. Christ, there's
no
mention of animal toxicity tests,
no
approaches to any ethics committee,
no
CTX …'

‘CTX?'

‘Clinical Trials Certificate Exemption.'

‘Oh – right,' he said.

‘What they're doing is a flagrant breach of the Declaration of Helsinki. This isn't just some minor protocol violation, this is criminal activity. They're doing Phase Four trials without appearing to have done Phases One, Two or Three. There's no mention of any reports to the Medical Control Agency. Nor the Committee for Safety of Medicines. Nothing!'

Conor nodded; he was well aware that every new or modified drug had to go through toxicity tests on rodents and sometimes on a range of different mammals. Then the local ethics committee would authorize Phase One tests on a small number of healthy volunteers. If that stage was successful, Phase Two trials would begin on a few hundred patients, to work out the efficacy and optimal dosage of the drug. Phase Three had to involve several thousand volunteer patients in efficacy and safety trials.

If the drug passed Phase Three, the firm concerned could apply to the Medicine Control Agency for a product licence in the UK; or to the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, in the USA. After the granting of the MCA licence, Phase Four trials had to begin: a post-marketing surveillance study carried out with hundreds of doctors monitoring thousands of patients, lasting around a year.

The success rate was minuscule. Only one in every ten thousand compounds selected ever made it through to a product licence; and it normally took between ten to fifteen years, with a development cost well in excess of one hundred million pounds, to bring a new drug to the market. The cost of failure was horrific; but the safeguards against anyone doing what Bendix Schere now appeared to be doing were stringent. Monty wondered how it was possible for a company the size of Bendix Schere to be up to such tricks, because such a lot of people would know about it.

‘Surely Bendix has internal auditors to prevent this kind of thing happening, Conor?'

He picked up the corkscrew and began to open the wine, thinking about the woman in charge of liaison with doctors. Linda Farmer. She had been cold and unhelpful concerning Maternox. He could now appreciate why.

‘You're thinking about companies that genuinely care about public welfare, rather than just giving a whole load of advertising bullshit about it. In Bendix Schere the only concern seems to be keeping the lid on.'

Monty sat at the table, feeling exhausted. ‘I still don't understand why you're against going to the police.'

‘Just think it through for a moment and work out what that
would achieve:
four
seems like a lot of deaths, but break it down into a percentage of the total women taking Maternox, and the annual figures of death in childbirth, and that four becomes very small. Not insignificant, but small.'

At last he lit his cigarette. ‘Altering the design of a drug isn't necessarily a criminal activity; it's unethical, sure, but we need to know just what the hell really
is
in those capsules before we have any real ammunition.'

‘Surely we could just give the police a copy from your computer of what's in the Medici File?'

‘And they could turn round and say it's a matter for the Committee for Safety of Medicines, right?'

‘So? We could go to the CSM, couldn't we?'

‘What about the consequences of going to the police with a printout I've obtained illicitly by hacking the company computer? For starters, I'm the one who's committed the criminal offence. If we go to the CSM, I'd be out on my ass – and no pharmaceutical company would ever employ me again. And then there's your own position.'

‘What's that?'

‘Maternox is a wonder drug. Bendix Schere gets almost half its profits from it.' He looked hard at her. ‘If a scandal took Maternox off the market, they could go bust overnight. And you and your father would be back to square one.'

‘As if that matters now!' She rested her face in her hands. ‘God,
if only
. I wish to hell I'd never got us into all this. I should have listened to Daddy – I –'

Conor shook his head. ‘You did the right thing. You just picked the wrong company.'

She smoked the stub of her cigarette down to the filter. ‘I think the sensible thing now is to go straight to Rorke. I reckon he'd be appalled by what's going on.'

Conor shook his head vehemently. ‘Think about it from his position. Look at what options he'd have. If he goes to the police or the CSM, he knows that the resulting publicity will blow his company out of the water. Melt-down. End of Bendix Schere. All the staff out on their asses and the end of your father's funding. With the name of Bannerman tarnished in the process. And –' He looked as if he was about to say
something even worse, then stopped for a moment. ‘Rorke, for all his Mr Nice Guy image, would realize exactly how he'd come out of all this. He's the Chairman, for Chrissake; and whether he works one day a week or seven, people are going to think him some kind of an asshole for not knowing what goes on.'

She looked at him, astonished. ‘Are you really advocating that we do
nothing
?'

‘Until we find out just what that DNA is. We have to know that to understand what territory we're into.'

She nodded reluctantly. ‘And what's your hunch? What do you
think
that DNA is?'

‘I really don't know. Maybe someone in Research and Development is running scared –' He tapped his fingers on the table. ‘The Maternox patents start expiring in three years, and they don't have enough new products to replace them. Maybe Crowe's behind all this: perhaps he's given out a load of bullshit to the company's shareholders, and now they're waiting to see some action which he can't deliver. The fastest way to get a patent and to get a drug on the market, either here or over the pond, is to modify an existing product.'

Conor glanced down at the newspaper on the table, distracted by something in it, then addressed Monty again. ‘I think the most likely thing is that Research and Development are trying to crash a modification of Maternox through. God knows what. I mean – the whole concept of using infertile women as unwitting guinea pigs is gross, but it does happen in this industry.'

‘And you think there might be a legitimate argument for letting sleeping dogs lie? For swallowing the fact that four women are dead and that my best friend might be next?
I'm
not going to sit around and let that happen.'

He squeezed her wrist lightly. ‘I'm not going to either, Monty, I promise you that. But we have to get someone to do an analysis on those goddamned capsules before we can make an intelligent decision, and there's one obvious person who can do that.'

Their eyes met. ‘My father?'

‘Charley Rowley tried to get some more Maternox. He was
spooked by how many waves it created, to the point of reckoning he was being followed? There's
no one
in the company we can trust. Except your father.'

‘Don't you have any friends in the States who could do the analysis? Or couldn't we go to some outside lab here in England?'

Conor took out another cigarette. ‘In all four of the women who died, an unidentified rash of pustular psoriasis type occurred at five months. So whatever it is that's happening to the mothers, it starts around or prior to that point. Your friend's baby is due 10th June. It's now 26th November. So she's two and a half months pregnant right now. If that foetus is carrying something that's going to transmit to the mother, every new day makes the danger worse – assuming it's not already too late.'

He puffed on his cigarette. ‘There aren't that many molecular biologists capable of doing the analysis we need and these tests are a slow process. We're talking about a good fortnight to get any kind of result. Sure I can start looking for someone else – I have to go to Washington some time soon, but we don't have the luxury of time.'

Monty nodded, thinking hard.

He leaned back in his chair and blew a thin plume of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Bendix Schere are not about to alert your friend, or anyone else, to the danger, that's pretty evident.'

‘Surely the medical profession is going to put two and two together at some point?'

He shook his head. ‘You have a very slow reporting system over here. It could take a couple of years before your civil servants reach any kind of connection.' He shrugged. ‘Ten, maybe fourteen cases spread over a year. And don't forget Maternox has a brilliant safety record around the world – numerous other factors could be seen as the problem. Like pollution. Even if they had enough evidence, no one's going to stick their neck out and risk a lawsuit from Bendix Schere over a puny number of figures like that.'

‘But a journalist like Hubert Wentworth armed with a copy of what's on your computer could.'

They faced each other in a charged silence.

‘What you have in that machine is dynamite, isn't it, Conor?'

‘Plutonium.'

‘Have you got a printout for safety?'

‘I've backed it on to a floppy disk which I've hidden in my apartment.'

‘Judging from the break-ins that have been going on, don't you think we ought to lodge a printout somewhere, maybe with a lawyer?'

‘I haven't actually got a printer – I use the one at Bendix if I need to. Obviously I don't fancy doing that with this, in case anyone sees it. How about giving a disk to your guy?'

‘Isn't that dangerous in another way – Wentworth might decide to go to press with it.'

‘You think he's on the level?'

‘Yes, in as much as I can judge. He's driven by a demon, but I think he's genuine.' She pulled a face. ‘I don't really know him – I've only met him a few times.'

‘He's not the editor of the paper, right?'

‘No – he's deputy news editor.'

‘OK – well, that Medici File isn't on Bendix headed paper, there are no names and no signatures. In theory anyone with a grudge against the company could have invented it. For it to stand up as a story, his editor would want pretty strong corroboration from some other source.'

‘What sort of corroboration?'

‘With something like this, I'd think at least a sworn affidavit from myself as an employee of the company. You see the problem? I'm thinking about our own backs, too, Monty. Just in case the going gets rough.'

She tacitly acknowledged his point.

‘Do you have a home number for this Mr Wentworth?' Conor asked next.

‘Yes, it's on his card.'

‘I think we should try and see him tomorrow.'

She looked at her watch. ‘I could ring him now – I don't think he'd mind.'

‘No, don't phone from here. We'll use a pay phone some place in the morning.'

She looked alarmed. ‘You think the phone here is bugged?'

‘I checked both your instruments on Monday night. They're clean.'

‘You what? You're pretty thorough, aren't you?' She said it half in jest, half in anger.

‘We
need
to be thorough, you and I right now, Monty. Your phone's clean, but there could easily be a wiretap somewhere on your line – the cable runs above ground; someone could pick up your conversations just by sitting in a parked car and pointing a beam at the wires. And if the company did have anything to do with the death of one of Wentworth's reporters, they could well be tapping
his
home line; so even from a pay phone, you should say very little. And try to avoid giving your name.'

Monty's head was pounding again, as it had been that morning, and what appetite she'd had was gone. She went over to the answering machine and switched it on.

There was a call from Anna saying there was a play in London she very much wanted to see and perhaps they could go either next week or the week after. There was a garbled message from Alice, her daily, saying she'd lost her key but had found it again now. The last call was from PC Brangwyn. He apologized that they'd had no luck with the lead he had been following up regarding her missing scarf, and he hoped she'd be getting in touch with the Crime Prevention Officer.