The Delta Factor (16 page)

“Then I'm on my way,” Cliff replied.

“If you can get down before six, come straight to the lab. And Junior—”

“Yes?”

“If anybody up there asks where you're going,” Deborah told him. “Lie.”

“Too late,” Cliff said. “I've already mentioned where I was headed.”

“Then just come, okay? And hurry.”

James Whitehurst strode into Harvey Cofield's outer office. Normally he took time for a verbal pass at Blair, something to the effect that the environment in his office was much more stimulating now that she was working here. Blair Collins was one trophy he had no intention of allowing Harvey Cofield to keep. But today all he said was, “He in?”

“All by his lonesome,” Blair replied, not looking up from her console.

Whitehurst pushed through the door and said, “This friendship between Devon and Givens is growing very dangerous.”

Cofield's eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“He's coming down here again today, for the third weekend in a row.” Whitehurst flung himself down in a chair and scowled. “I didn't even hear it from her. I've just spoken to Devon's superior, a woman by the name of Sandra Walters. She's no happier about it than I am. Devon simply took a day's vacation. I checked with Givens. She confirmed he was expected here later this afternoon. She said she saw no need to inform us, since we had okayed his first visit. Did you know he had returned last weekend as well?”

“No.” Cofield's eyes narrowed. This was all news, and dangerous news at that. Scientists were notorious for throwing roadblocks in the way of bringing new products to market. Their ears were deaf to the ticking of the profit clock. “Have you asked her why?”

“Yes,” Whitehurst sniffed. “She said they were just two friends getting together and it had nothing to do with Devon's regulatory work.”

“I don't believe that for an instant,” Cofield snarled.

“Nor I.” Whitehurst was on his feet again, pacing the carpeted expanse. He stopped abruptly. “On second thought, perhaps we should allow this visit to go ahead.”

“But this is highly irregular,” Cofield protested. “What if she passes over information that we don't want the FDA to have?”

“The time is almost ripe,” Whitehurst replied. “Why not turn this to our advantage and strike now?”

There was no levity when Deborah met him at the entrance door to Pharmacon's lab. “Thank goodness you've arrived.”

“What's the matter?”

“No time, no time.” She led him through the first pair of automatic doors and said to the guard, “You remember Cliff Devon. He'll need another three-day pass.”

“Sure, he's down okay. Have to ask you to go through the routine again, sir.”

“No problem,” Cliff said, sobered by Deborah's mood. He placed his hand on the scanner, repeated the voice identification sentence, accepted the card, and followed her into the hall. “What's the matter?”

“Somehow Whitehurst caught wind of your visit and insisted on this meeting,” she replied, leading him urgently down the hall, her voice tight, “For both our sakes, whatever it is they say, answer yes.”

“Cliff Devon!” James Whitehurst rose from the conference table and walked forward, smile and hand extended. “How great to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Cliff said, trying hard to match the man's false friendliness. “How are things?”

“Couldn't be better. Come on, have a seat right here. That's it. Get you anything?”

“I'm fine, thanks.”

“Hey, that's swell. What say we get right down to business?”

“Fine.”

“Splendid, splendid. Look, Cliff, we're growing concerned with the holdup over the echin drug approval.” His gaze turned sorrowful. “We feel like we've gone out of our way to supply everything your people have requested, and yet we're not receiving very much in return.”

“A great big zip,” Harvey Cofield growled. “And it's getting under our skin. Seems to me like it's about time—”

“Harvey, please,” Whitehurst soothed, “Devon here is on our side, I'm sure. Aren't you, son.”

Cliff was far too baffled to be angry. He opened his mouth to ask, approval for what? Then he caught sight of Deborah's worried frown across the table, and changed his reply to, “I'd certainly like to be.”

“Hey, didn't I tell you?” Whitehurst beamed at all and sundry. “Devon here is willing to play ball. And let me tell you, son, we don't forget our friends. Nossir, not us. Pharmacon always has room at the top for a bright young man in a hurry. Why, you just say the word and I'll have you flown up to New York to meet our chairman. He's looking for a new assistant right this minute.”

“Just what exactly is it you need, Mr. Whitehurst?” Cliff asked.

Harvey Cofield barked, “An end to this bureaucratic stalling.”

“But we've just received the first preliminary trial data,” Cliff protested. “You can't be thinking—”

“We're under considerable pressure here, son,” Whitehurst said around his semi-permanent smile, “and it's mounting every day. Between the press and these pressure groups representing the various ailments who want to start using our drug, why, it's a wonder I get any sleep at all.”

“If you ask me,” Cofield snapped, “it's time to go back up to Washington and light a few fires of our own.”

Cliff decided they had the good-cop, bad-cop routine down perfectly. “But you're looking at two, maybe three years of testing before we can even think about granting full approval. Do you want to apply for a restricted license?”

“We want action,” Cofield demanded.

“Exactly,” Whitehurst soothed. “And we are delighted to give the FDA anything they require in order to have them act swiftly, aren't we?”

Cofield muttered something to the effect that there was something else he wanted to give them.

“But what we don't understand,” Whitehurst went on, “is why a tentative approval can't be given while more clinical data is collected.”

“You did it with AZT,” Cofield snapped. “You can do it for us. And fast.”

“AZT was a drug dealing with one limited group,” Cliff pointed out, speaking as mildly as he knew how. “HIV positive patients were faced with the prospect of either trying this drug or dying. Echiniacin, on the other hand, is a product that will potentially be used by millions of patients—”

“Exactly!” Cofield exploded, and slammed his fist on the table. “And it's nothing but you Washington bureaucrats sitting on your hands that's keeping us from getting our drug out there in the market!”

Cliff caught sight of Deborah's desperate look out of the corner of his eye. It was enough to check his immediate reaction. Instead he stood and said quietly, “I will check on this Monday.”

“We can't ask for more than that, now, can we?” Whitehurst rose with him and Deborah, while Cofield remained seated. “Great to see you again, Cliff. Anything you need, you just have old Debs give me a call. And hey, have a great weekend, you hear?”

When the door was shut behind them, Deborah leaned her back on the wall and closed her eyes with a sigh.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so. Give me a minute.”

“Can I get you something? A glass of water, maybe?”

She shook her head and pushed herself erect. “I want to show you my lab. With all the strangeness in the air around here, I don't know if I'll have another chance.”

“What are you saying, Debs?”

“I don't know what they're up to,” she replied. “They've sort of shut me out of things. But something's not right. They're making plans in there.”

“To do what?”

“I don't know. That's what scares me.”

He looked around the empty outer office. “Where's Blair?”

“Running for cover, if she's smart. Come on, let's get out of here.”

“Hang on a second,” Cliff said. He grabbed a pen and pad from the desk and wrote a swift note, suggesting plans for that evening. “Okay, let's go.”

Entrance to the laboratory complex was completely automated. They took a second tunnel, this one lined with the clutter that to his mind had always meant scientists at work. Machines neatly stowed away beneath plastic dust covers. Computer printouts strung from girder to girder, decorated with caustic comments only a techie could understand. Opposing blackboards filled with violently scrawled mathematical arguments, punctuated with exclamation points and swirls and lightning bolts and a pause where the group left for beer. Cliff considered the hall a perfect example of what he called the First Law of Scientists—give them lab space the size of Arkansas, and within a week they would be spilling over the edges.

“I'm afraid my own lab arrangements aren't very impressive,” Deborah said as they walked. “The only reason the suits let me chase down this lead in the first place was because I was on the way out. They got all oozy with fake sympathy when I told them about MS, but you could see the little adding machines at work behind their eyes. They took me off the research team I was heading and herded me into this little cubicle, a way station until their consciences would let them fire me. So I came up with this idea, and they did their bean-counting routine and decided since the numbers I was talking about were relatively tiny, they'd let me go out and play.”

“For a while,” Cliff said grimly.

“I figure I had maybe a year to come up with something,” Deborah agreed. “Which in this business is nothing. I was just laying the groundwork, sort of going over the first trials, when I struck gold.”

One at a time, they passed through yet another set of inch-thick glass doors and entered a miniature copy of the front enclosure—carpeted floors, walls, and ceilings, with another metal pillar at its center. Cliff passed his card through the slit running down one side, then set his right hand on the black surface. A scanner zittered, then a recessed screen lit and gave him the same sentence to read he had said at the entrance. A ping, and the doors in front of him slid open.

When Deborah joined him on the other side, Cliff asked, “Whose idea was the security arrangement, anyway?”

“Dr. Strangelove,” she replied. “Otherwise known as Harvey Cofield.”

Deborah led him through a series of interconnecting halls whose glass walls displayed labs, each more spectacular than the last. Up a set of stairs, a pause to observe a lab that resembled command control center at NASA, more stairs, and at the crown of the lab globe was yet another door. As Deborah tapped a code into the electronic lock, Cliff asked, “What happens if you don't feel like scaling Mount Everest?”

“Oh, there's an elevator. But taking the stairs is a reminder to be thankful for the good days.” She pushed open the door. “Welcome to my lair, said the spider to the fly.”

Cliff entered a miniature chaos.

The only reason the cramped quarters did not feel as claustrophobic as a coffin was that every tiny room had a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. There were five chambers in all, each separated by a wall of half fiberboard, half glass. “This was supposed to be files,” Deborah said. “They got moved to the Tombs, and I was given their space. It was the bean counters' way of putting me as far as possible from the action without setting my lab in the parking lot.”

The room they had entered contained four computer terminals, two tables piled to the roof with printouts, and a crawl space barely wide enough for Cliff to pass through sideways. The farthest terminal was occupied by a young man wearing tabi socks, Japanese house slippers, the bottom half of a very weary tux, and a surfer's T-shirt proclaiming the mysteries of tube riding.

“This is Kenny,” Deborah said.

“Hi.”

“Nice outfit,” Cliff said.

“Kenny likes to dress up for work,” Deborah explained.

“It's the only way I know of keeping the suits at bay,” Kenny explained. “Otherwise I might catch the bean counter's disease, start staying up late worrying about numbers on a balance sheet.”

“Kenny Gryffin manages my team of semi-housebroken computer techies,” Deborah said.

“Yeah, even take them out on a leash a couple of times a day.”

“The others put up with him because he's twice as fast as they are at the keyboard. They call him The Great Kensteennie.”

“I have a degree in anthropology,” Kenny announced proudly. “It makes me uniquely qualified to run a computer team for a drug firm.”

“Any prevalent problems or issues?” Deborah asked Kenny. “Or can I take my guest on through with his limbs still intact?”

“Just mostly stuff of a general nature.” Fingers tapped a computer keyboard at a speed faster than a drumroll. “This new data collation program is really user surly.”

“Oh my,” Deborah said, her face grave.

“Yeah. The search routine is prehistoric. Installation hassles, compatibility problems, and the worst thing of all, it's a real bear to uninstall.”

“Horrors,” Deborah agreed. “How can you sleep nights?”

“Hey, who sleeps? I just plug myself in for an hour and rejuice.” He pointed at a screen that had begun scrolling through graphs. “Watch and you'll see for yourself.”

“I leave all such problems in your capable hands,” Deborah assured him. She grasped Cliff by the arm. “Come along, Junior.”

When they were into the next room he asked, “What was that all about?”

“Rule one of surviving in a modern lab,” Deborah replied. “Never worry about what your computer techies say. Just toss in a bucket of new gadgets and software magazines every other day or so and keep their cages clean.”

A miniature hall led them by a glass-enclosed jungle. “This is where we grow our test plants,” she explained.

“It looks like they're about ready to take over,” Cliff said. The plants were almost as tall as he was and jammed up hard to the glass.