The Last Goodbye (27 page)

“R01?”

“The big NIH grants, the ones for millions. Four point one million, in this case.”

“That's a lot of money.”

“Yeah. I had sixteen grad students under me, spinning hepatitis-infected blood like crazy. The university was committed, the resources were there, and we were making progress. The key was isolating a particular enzyme in the blood that had an affinity for hepatitis.”

“An affinity?”

“It's lab talk. When cells bind together, we say they have an affinity for each other.” I nodded. “But obviously this wasn't happening in nature. If it had been, T cells would bind to it and hepatitis would be like a cold. We would just get over it.”

“So what did you do?'

Robinson shrugged. “Ideally, you find an enzyme that occurs naturally you can work with. You tinker with it, engineer it. If you can get it to bind, you're halfway there. Then you try to combine the agent that kills the virus with the enzyme that binds to it, and you have a guided missile to the disease.”

“The silver bullet.”

“Silver bullet, miracle drug, whatever. That's the dream the scientific community uses to get the public to come up with the funding.
Give us this money, and we'll cure your cancer with one shot.
Only one problem: we're just two guys sitting in a restaurant talking about it. To get this enzyme to bind to this virus, whatever, sounds easy. But it's actually incredibly hard to do. A lot depends on starting with the right enzyme in the first place, and then modifying it. But there are hundreds to choose from.”

“So what happened?”

Robinson leaned forward. “We did it, and it was nothing but hard work. We worked around the clock for so long I had students quit the program. I was a
bastard.
But finally, we made a huge breakthrough. The fact is, there is already an enzyme in the body which is very close to ideal, called P137. Nobody had considered it because it occurs in almost undetectably low levels. It hides in the blood stream, just taking up space. As far as anybody knows, it doesn't do anything. It's a holdover from our genetic past, something that we might have needed a hundred thousand years ago. So it's there, buried deep in the molecular shadows, a trace of a trace.”

“And then?”

“We needed to have more of it. A lot more. For a while, I tried to stimulate natural production in the body, but it didn't go anywhere. The breakthrough was in figuring out how to synthesize it. And once we did that, we didn't need to worry about how much the body made. We would make as much as we wanted, and we could manipulate it any way we chose.”

“I see.”

Robinson looked at me. “I hope you do. We were in a race with death at that point, and suddenly, we can see the finish line.” He paused. “You have to realize, we were just seeing the real numbers from urban centers. The AIDS thing was getting a lot of people tested. And we were beginning to grasp that hep C was going to ultimately be just as damaging. It didn't have the clout in the public's mind, because AIDS seemed so much scarier. But the truth was, at least in North America, hep C had the potential to kill more people. There are already three million people with it, you know.”

“I didn't.”

“Right. So there we are, just on the verge of the thing. But we can feel it. Like there's a little fog, and in just a few seconds exactly the right wisp is going to move to the left and there it's going to be, what we've worked years to discover.” Robinson's eyes were wide. He was high on the pure ecstasy of science, drawn back into his love of his work. “Then,” he said, “I made my fatal error.”

“Which was?”

Robinson looked out the window, suddenly listless. There was fatigue in his eyes, the long suffering of a terrible defeat. “Ralston,” he said. “Charles Ralston, king of thieves.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“Hubris. Ego. Stupidity. All mine, as it turned out.” He looked down into the coffee, retreating into the past. “I was at a seminar up at Columbia.”

“Where Ralston was working.”

“Right. Look, I was excited, okay? I mean . . . We were going to save a lot of people from dying. It's pretty hard to keep that to yourself.”

“My God. You mean you—”

“Not much,” Robinson interrupted. He rubbed his temples, deep in regret. “Just the slightest little bit. But I lost my head. I remember my words exactly. ‘P137 has suddenly become very important in my life.' I think I even smiled when I said it. I thought it was wonderfully cryptic.”

“It is, actually.”

Robinson shook his head. “Not to Ralston. I didn't know it, but he had been working on the same thing at Columbia. And they were getting nowhere. He was headed in the wrong direction, naturally. I told you he's mediocre.”

“So you said.”

“Mediocre, but not an idiot. I had given him the keys to the kingdom. He knew a lot about enzyme synthesis, but nothing about where to take that knowledge. Once he knew where to look, it was only a matter of weeks before he had it wired.”

“Wasn't your research patented?”

Robinson shook his head. “The disclosure form was sitting on my desk. And I had made an enabling statement.”

I reached back into my law school memory. “A public utterance, which, to a person of reasonable expertise, allows them to duplicate your technology.” I shook my head, stunned. “You voided your patent before you even got it filed.”

Robinson nodded. “Ralston got on the phone to Stephens, who was living in New York. He was already famous for patent expertise, especially in the area of pharmaceuticals. On Stephens's advice, Ralston resigned from Columbia the next day.”

“So Ralston beat you to it?”

“By the time I knew what happened, Stephens had a beautiful, airtight package.” He shrugged. “The rest, including my career, is history.”

“I take it Emory wasn't amused.”

“It was the single greatest humiliation in their history. Those grad students had slaved, and I'm talking twenty-four-seven, for months. They were going to be a part of something historic. And boom, one stupid statement from me and it's up in smoke. I couldn't show my face.” Robinson picked up his cup, drank a sip. “I vanished for a while. I was mud in the academic world, and no labs would take a risk on me. It got so bad I took a job as a rep, calling on doctors.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah. That was hell. Horizn was making a fortune on my research, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Stephens didn't make my mistakes, obviously. Their patents were untouchable.”

“What kind of fortune are we talking about?”

Robinson shrugged. “There's an exploding patient population, reaching epidemic proportions in the third world. Ralston has a treatment that every one of those people needs to take for the rest of their lives. So you can call it billions.”

“So let me get this straight. Your career is in tatters. Ralston is riding high. And somehow, you get resurrected. How did you get connected to Grayton?”

“Look, I like to heal people, okay? It means everything to me. But this is an ego game. You say Ralston was riding high? Don't forget it was on
my
research. So I went to Grayton. I told him that what Ralston was doing was fine, as far as it went. But there was a way to beat him.”

“Which was?”

“Go deeper. Forget treating the disease as a chronic condition. Mount a serious attempt at a cure.”

“And Grayton bought that?”

Robinson nodded. “You have to be willing to take chances or you lose. Grayton was trying to hang on, but it's hard to compete with the multinationals. And I knew more about hepatitis than anybody, including Ralston and his team. For all its beauty, Horizn's drug is one generation removed from the most cutting-edge proteomics. I ought to know, since I invented it. So I told Grayton that if he wanted to try, I could take years off his start time. Somebody like Eli Lilly wouldn't bite on me, not with my past. But Grayton has to take different risks. So we made a deal.” Robinson looked past me, his eyes focusing on an unknown place in his mind. “And it was beautiful. The old man lined up everything I needed. People, equipment, every resource. It was going to be my resurrection.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And then everything went to hell.”

“Do you have any idea what happened?”

Robinson shook his head. “I've gone over it a thousand times. I've checked our data and rechecked. And I'm telling you, those people should be walking around right now without a hepatitis molecule in their bodies. Instead, they're in morgues.”

I sat thinking quietly awhile. “Let's assume Ralston is behind the hack into your system,” I said after a moment. “What's behind that? Is he just trying to steal your drug, like he did the last time?”

Robinson looked up in surprise. “Steal it? Robinson wouldn't want Lipitran if I gave it to him.”

“I don't follow.”

“Lipitran is a
cure
, not a chronic treatment. Who wants to cure people when you can just treat them forever?”

“So what is it, then?”

“If we come to market, his company is worth zip. If Lipitran goes wrong, he gets to keep selling his drug for the next twenty years.” He looked down into his coffee. “Seven dead people takes care of that, don't you think? Lipitran is as dead as those patients.”

Robinson was fading back into his depression. “So here's what we have,” I said, forcing his attention back on me. “We've got your computer, downloaded for Ralston. He knows exactly what you're doing. He desperately wants to stop you.”

“Okay.”

“But we have no idea how.”

Robinson shook his head. “Which is where the air comes out of your idea,” he said bitterly. “Believe me, I want you to be right. But we're just throwing around theories in a coffee shop. I was there, in the lab. There are only two ways for this to go wrong. He'd either have to alter the compound itself or change the dosage to toxic levels. And he couldn't have done either.”

“Start with the compound.”

“Strike one, pal. There is no place—and I mean
no
place—where Ralston could have compromised the purity of that compound. It was made completely in-house. I checked its purity myself, repeatedly. It was continuously monitored until the moment it was given to patients.”

“All right. Then how about the dosage?”

Robinson shook his head. “Strike two. I supervised every treatment. Nothing went wrong, and there were no adverse reactions at the time.”

I nodded. “That still leaves us one strike.”

Robinson smiled grimly. “Wrong. Strike three is that maybe this is just fate. Maybe those eight people were just unlucky enough to have the worst doctor on earth. Me.” He stared at me, anger and disappointment etched on his face. Then he pounded his fist on the table. A few people around us glanced over, and I motioned for him to calm down.

“No,” he hissed. “No. I'm telling you, the science on this is perfect. The compound was right. The dosages were on the money. There must be some other way for him to have screwed me.”

“You mean screwed them, don't you, Doctor?” I said quietly.

Robinson looked down. “Yeah, them,” he said. “Screwed them.”

“Look,” I said, “my agenda is a little different. I want justice for one person, and that's Doug Townsend.”

Robinson looked at me. “You've got a problem there,” he said. “I can understand that Ralston might have hired him to break into Grayton's computers. And I can follow that after he outlived his usefulness, they would want him dead. But if all that is true, they would have known Doug was in the clinical trial. And if they knew that, they would never have bothered to shoot him full of fentanyl.”

“Because they would have known he was dead already.”

“Who screws up the perfect crime? Killing him again is pointless.”

“Agreed. And murder involves the police, the last thing they would want.”

“Okay, then. Maybe you ought to start considering the possibility that somebody else killed your friend.”

“I'm taking this one day at a time. But we're fighting the same war. If you really have a cure for hep C, you have to fight. You can still save all those lives.” I paused. “And get the man who destroyed your life for the second time.”

Robinson looked at me. “I'll do anything I can, but I've given you what I know. If these people figured out how to screw with that test, they're operating on a level so high it's unprecedented.” He stood, picking up his bag of seeds. “Right now, we got nothing,” he said.

“We?”

Robinson looked down at me, wary optimism struggling through a mass of defeat. He wanted to believe in what I was telling him down into his fibers. But he also knew he couldn't take another shock. If he let himself connect with me and we went down in flames, whatever was left of him was going to land in a psychiatric ward. He was dangerously close to there already. But he pulled himself together enough to say what I needed to hear: “When you get more, you know where to find me.”