Miracle Cure (40 page)

He sat in the darkness, still pressed back against the steel door. There was no sound from below. Was someone there, waiting? How in the hell had they known where he was? There had to be a camera behind the ceiling grate. No other explanation made sense. One minute passed. Nothing. Brian slipped out of his lab coat and rolled it into a ball beneath him. Dark green scrubs might be harder to spot through the gloom than the white coat. Then, from the hallway, he heard a radio crackle to life and a brief exchange in Russian. Moments later, Leon passed by below him, pistol at the ready, glancing only briefly up the stairs.

Brian held his breath, reached above him, and grasped the metal bar that might open the door. Slowly, silently, he pushed it. The door gave just a bit. Fresh, damp air wafted toward him. Was it possible the door opened to the outside? He pushed a bit harder. There was a clank of metal as the door popped free of its casing. The sound echoed down the stairs. In an instant, Leon was below him, gun drawn. Brian fired first. The killer backed away, but then reached around the corner and fired wildly up the stairs. The bullet careened off the wall and slammed into the door. Still in a crouch, Brian pushed the door open and fired twice down the stairs. The first was a shot, the second an impotent click.

Leon stepped out and fired, but Brian was already
outside. A chilly rain was falling. He was in a shallow stairwell in an alley between buildings at the very fringe of the hospital. To his left, the alley appeared to dead-end. To the right, he could hear traffic noises. He dropped the revolver and ran down the pavement in that direction. Chest burning, he splashed across the deserted, rain-slicked street and past a construction site. There was no way he could keep running like this for much longer.

A shoulder-high row of dense hedge surrounded an apartment building ahead of him and to his right. He summoned all his remaining strength and hurled himself in an awkward roll, attempting to clear the bushes but missing badly. The dripping branches at the top of the hedge tore at him as he crashed through. Soaked and bleeding from a new set of scratches and gashes on his arms and face, he fell heavily to the ground on the other side, gasping for air.

H
IS
SCRUBS SOAKED THROUGH
, B
RIAN LAY IN THE RAIN
on the sodden ground for another fifteen minutes, peering through the hedges at the hospital two hundred yards away. There was no sign of Leon, but he knew that meant nothing. The Newbury Pharmaceuticals goons would already be mobilized and searching the area for him. Trying to make it back into White Memorial was out of the question. Weber and the powers at BHI would have the hospital’s own security force looking for him, and maybe the Boston police as well.

By now, some story about the man shot to death in the basement of BHI would have been concocted, and in all likelihood, Brian would be at the center of that tale.

He pushed himself to his feet and tried to flex some of the achiness from his arms and back. His knee was throbbing from the pounding run through the concrete tunnels. Rain spattered on the shallow gouges on his arms, keeping
them from clotting over. At that moment, his beeper went off. The clinical ward was calling him. In addition, he realized he had the code-call beeper for the entire hospital. Luckily, he also had his wallet in the back pocket of his scrub pants.

He made it to a nearby convenience store and ignored the curious looks of the clerk while he got change for a dollar. Then he called the unit secretary on the clinical ward.

“I’m out of the hospital and won’t be in again tonight,” he told her. “Notify the cardiology resident on-call at White Memorial. Tell her she’ll have to function without the code-call beeper.”

He hung up without giving the secretary a chance to reply, then he flagged a cab and took it to Freeman Sharpe’s place. His ring of keys, including the ones the Sharpes had given him to their apartment, was in his briefcase in the on-call room. If Freeman and Marguerite were out, Brian would be wandering around the tough Roxbury section of the city at night, soaked to the skin in a surgical scrub suit. At that moment, the boredom of his year at Speedy Rent-A-Car didn’t seem all that bad.

The street outside the apartment building was deserted.

“Hello?” Freeman said through the intercom.

“Freeman, it’s Brian.”

“Uh-oh.”

Freeman buzzed him in. Marguerite clucked at Brian’s appearance.

“Someday you’re going to show up at my door in a nice business suit,” she said. “They’ll have to revive me with smelling salts.”

Brian showered and donned the jeans and sweatshirt he had taken from his place. Then he sat in their living
room wrapped in a blanket, clutching a cup of steaming coffee, still trying to expunge the chill from his bones.

“I killed a man tonight at the hospital,” he said simply.

“One of them?” Freeman asked.

“The one from my house. I shot him in the chest with the gun I took from him this morning.”

“At least his head won’t hurt him anymore. I told you, Brian. These people have no soul, and they’re waging war on you. You’ve got to wage war right back at them; play by their rules, or lack of. Do you at least have a better understanding of what’s going on—why they’re so threatened by you?”

“Understanding, yes. Proof none. As for being threatened by me, they have every right to be.”

“Tell us.”

“There are still a few pieces missing, but basically, the key to the whole thing is that once a drug is on the market, it’s extremely difficult to get it off. And it’s virtually impossible to get a drug recalled just because it doesn’t work. In fact, most of the drugs on the market today don’t work all that well. Some of them don’t do anything at all. And the truth is, nobody cares. Nobody in research or even at the FDA has the time or the interest to run studies or follow-up research on most of those medications as long as they don’t hurt anyone. That’s the key.
Primum non nocere
is the Latin phrase they teach us in medical school—‘First do no harm.’ Most people get better from whatever’s wrong with them
regardless of
or even
in spite of
the medicine they take. Others, whose condition is more serious, are always on multiple treatments. It’s almost impossible to tell what’s working and what isn’t.”

“But this Vasclear drug does work,” Marguerite said.

Brian shook his head.

“That’s just it. It doesn’t,” he said. “The researchers at BHI have been faking their results. Vasclear doesn’t work
at all. In fact, it did bad things to people who took it. Some of the earliest patients who were put on it got better at first, but then they developed a fatal lung problem.”

“So, why did they push ahead?” Freeman said.

“I think you know the answer as well as I do. It costs a hundred million dollars or more to develop a new drug, test it, and get it to the marketplace. If your pal Cedric is right about the men behind Newbury Pharmaceuticals, and I have no reason to think he isn’t, I don’t think they’d take a hundred-million-dollar hit with much grace. All they have to do is get the drug on the market, and the money will start rolling in. It will be a year, maybe more, before people even begin to suspect that the drug isn’t working, and years after that before it gets pulled.”

“As long as nobody gets hurt,” Marguerite said.

“They don’t count people like my father, who end up not getting the surgery they need because they’ve hitched their wagon to the Vasclear star, but yes—as long as nobody gets hurt.”

“And the people from Phase One? The ones who got sick?” Freeman asked.

“Loose ends. The longer they hung around, the more likely it became that someone was going to start questioning their strange lung conditions and the role Vasclear played in their illnesses. So I think someone, probably Weber, has been monitoring the Phase One blood tests. As soon as patients’ counts begin to get wacky, they have an accident.”

“But you have no proof at all?”

“I had proof in my hand—two films from the cath-lab library at the hospital.” He told them about Nellie Hennessey’s faked pictures. “That’s when I almost got killed. Speaking of which, we should turn on the news.”

“I’ll do it,” Marguerite said, “although the news doesn’t come on for fifteen minutes yet.”

There was no need to channel surf or wait the fifteen minutes. There was a news special on the first Boston channel Marguerite turned to.
Mayhem at Boston Heart
, the headline above the anchorwoman read. Brian and his two friends sat in bleak silence, watching as the coverage was turned over to a reporter on the scene.

“This is Lina Fallin reporting live from White Memorial Hospital in Boston, where two men have been shot to death and a portion of the Boston Heart Institute has been destroyed by fire. White Memorial is where, in just two days, the President is scheduled to sign approval of a new wonder drug developed and tested at Boston Heart. It is unclear whether these murders are related to that presidential visit or not.

“The identity of one of the victims, a security guard found in a basement hallway, has not yet been released. But the other, burned almost beyond recognition in the fire, is believed to be Dr. Philip Gianatasio of Boston, a cardiologist at Boston Heart who was reported missing earlier today. Although there has been no official confirmation of this, one policeman on the scene said that Gianatasio’s death appeared due to a gunshot wound, and not the fire, which completely destroyed the cardiac film library in the basement of the institute. The fire was apparently contained in that one area.”

“Oh, Jesus, no,” Brian said, burying his face in his hands. “Oh, Phil. Oh, shit. No!”

Marguerite squeezed Brian’s hand and pulled him close to her. None of them doubted what was coming next.

“Lina, do police have a suspect and a motive?” the anchorwoman asked.

“Details are sketchy, Paula, but police say they’re looking for a physician, also a cardiologist, named Dr. Brian Holbrook, who was on duty tonight at the hospital, but
who called in a couple of hours ago to say he had abandoned his coverage at the hospital and wouldn’t be coming back.”

Brian changed the channel.

“… Superintendent of Police Dracut is on the scene now and will be making a statement to the media in just fifteen minutes. But to repeat, police have found what they believe may be the murder weapon—a handgun possibly dropped by the killer while fleeing the scene. There is a search underway for Dr. Holbrook, who apparently has had problems in the past with drugs, and who only recently got his medical license back from the Board of Registration in Medicine.”

“Bill, is there any word on whether the White House has been informed of this tragedy and how it will affect Saturday’s ceremony?”

“No. No word yet …”

Brian shut off the set, too shocked and too angry even to cry.

“Unlimited money, no regard for human life,” Freeman said. “It’s a bad combination.”

“Drug-crazed doctor goes berserk,” Brian said. “How perfect. You really have to hand it to them. You also have to believe that the moment I’m captured by the police, Weber and his friends will find some way to get to me.”

“I wish I could disagree with you,” Freeman said. “Do you have any cards to play? Any at all?”

“The charts are gone. The films are gone. Phil’s gone. And before I could ever get anyone to believe my story, I’ll be gone.”

He snatched up the phone and called Phoebe, who was asleep.

“Do your best to protect the kids,” he said, after begging her to believe that he wasn’t in relapse and had done
nothing more than shoot a gunman in self-defense. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. I’m sorry this is happening.”

There was a shocked silence, but at least she wasn’t hurling accusations at him.

Brian watched for another hour and a half, but learned little more. The fire in the video library had been carried out with calculated skill. The smoke detectors had been taped over, then hundreds of angiograms had been dumped from their containers onto Phil Gianatasio’s body and set ablaze.

Around midnight, Ernest Pickard read a brief statement deploring what had happened and urging Brian to come forward. Later, White House Chief of Staff Stan Pomeroy read a statement saying that unless more information surrounding the double murder came to light, the President expected to go through with Saturday’s ceremonies as planned. However, he added, additional security measures might be taken.

At twelve-thirty, Freeman and Marguerite went to bed. Brian switched off the set and called Teri. She was wide-awake.

“Brian! I’ve been worried sick about you. I just got a call about what happened.”

“I didn’t set that fire, Teri, and the only man I killed was someone who was trying to kill me.”

“Well, then, who set the fire and killed your friend Phil?”

“The people from Newbury Pharmaceuticals.”

“Brian, what are you talking about?”

He recounted the evening’s events for her. She listened patiently, but when she responded, her tone was urgent.

“Brian, you’ve got to turn yourself in,” she said. “If what you’re saying is the truth, people will believe you.”

“I have no proof. None at all.”

“I can order random samples of Vasclear to be pulled and analyzed. Would that help?”

“Maybe, but I suspect there’ll be some chemical close to the original in the vials. These people are very careful.”

“I don’t know what to say, Brian. We’ve only known each other a short time, and … I’m not sure what to think. I still say you’ve got to turn yourself in.”

“I’m not turning myself in. If I do, they’ll get to me, I know they will. Teri, you’ve got to convince people to believe me.”

“Do you have any proof? Anything at all?”

“No, but—”

“Brian, please. Don’t put me on the spot like this. Turn yourself in.”

“If I do get proof, how can I get it to you?”

“Just bring it down to Maryland.”

“When will you be up here?”

“Saturday. The ceremony will be at eight in the Hippocrates Dome.”