Capitol Reflections (19 page)

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Authors: Jonathan Javitt

Tags: #Thriller

BOOK: Capitol Reflections
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“Take care, Mark.”
Mark hung up the phone and glanced at the notes he’d taken. This wasn’t what he expected at all.
Now he needed to track down Billy Hamlin.
 
Subj:
RE: compromised
Date:
7/27/05 8:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
 
 
Got your voicemail. BioNet is compromised. File in question uploaded to re-mailer outside U.S. Calling in outside party for advice. Problem appears to be internal, which is scarier than the seizure stats. Can only trust “I & thou.” What’s going on in Rockville?
 
 
Subj:
RE: reassignment
Date:
7/27/05 9:27 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
 
 
Have been reassigned to Adverse Event files. No real explanation. Best guess: someone knows I asked you to use BioNet to uncover information that’s supposed to remain buried. Public health just took a hard jab in the solar plexus. I concur on use of third party. Pretty sure Jack thinks I’ve gone round the bend. Maybe he’s right. Start looking over your shoulder. Any idea where the file’s final destination was?
 
 
Subj:
RE: sources
Date:
7/27/05 11:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
 
 
I’m hoping the third party will be able to answer your last question. (He’s quite handsome, btw.) May take time.
Have also rethought tobacco angle. You may be right. As Ray Bradbury said, something wicked this way comes. A major investigation should be taking place. Obviously, it isn’t. I’m slowly becoming a conspiracy theorist. Help!
 
 
Subj:
RE: hypothesis
Date:
7/27/05 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
 
 
Agree on tobacco. Hypothesis: additive, maybe legal, or else modified tobacco plant. Perhaps the bastards found a way to circumvent lab inspections and are manipulating nicotine levels again. (And to think private practice seemed stressful!) Keep me informed on your progress as time permits. Inquiring minds want to know.
 
 
Subj:
RE: ???
Date:
7/27/05 3:44 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
 
 
Are we in danger?
 
 
Subj:
RE: (no subject)
Date:
7/27/05 5:26 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
 
 
Probably.
 
24
 
Gwen sat at a computer networked with Medwatch, the FDA Safety Information and Adverse Event reporting program. The FDA instituted the reporting of adverse events for patients taking approved drugs in the 1980s as a part of its drug safety initiative. Every physician and medical staffer was duty-bound to report adverse events suffered by a patient taking any medicine. Medwatch even had a slick website the public could use to report and to gather information on drugs and other medical products regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Reality, of course, was quite different. Reports on adverse events were sporadic and poorly policed. Searching through Medwatch was like searching through a haystack for the proverbial needle.
Gwen stared at the form for reporting problems stemming from hundreds of drugs, including heart medications, birth control pills, cholesterol-lowering drugs, and acid reflux meds. For every ailment, there was a drug and for every drug, there were unintended consequences—adverse events—not identified in the original testing. The Office of Drug Safety was supposed to identify those adverse events and protect the public’s safety. Unfortunately, since all of the reports in Medwatch were anecdotal, there was no real way to link particular problems with specific drugs.
Gwen perused the standard reporting form, her mind in free-association mode. All the routine info was there … age, sex, and weight of the patient, outcome of the event—death, life-threatening illness, hospitalization, or disability. Items five and six asked for a description of the actual adverse event and relevant laboratory data. All basic stuff.
Box number seven, however, reminded Gwen of Fitz Rule Number Six: Turn adversity into strength; turn disadvantage into advantage.
7. Other Relevant History, Including Preexisting Medical Condition (e.g., allergies, race, pregnancy, smoking and alcohol use, hepatic/renal dysfunction, etc.)
 
That could be an opening. Maybe she could use Medwatch to help in her investigation of Marci’s death. Instead of searching the AEs one by one, she could compile a list of all AEs that involved seizures in healthy people and start to look for patterns. She could even match the Medwatch database to the cities Jan had listed in BioNet’s findings. It might be time-consuming, but at least it was a place to begin.
Since her superiors assumed they’d assigned her to an exercise in tedium, Gwen didn’t think they’d monitor her computer. To be safe, though, she reset her computer for one-time passcodes. It was simple, once you got the hang of it. The password would always be the day of the year, minus the day of Gwen’s birthday. Simple, but nearly impossible to crack.
Snyder and the “higher powers” had no idea what they’d done by putting her on this project. “Bureaucrats,” Gwen said to herself, smiling. “Once in a while, they actually do you a favor.”
Jack Maulder sat at his desk in Garrett Park, staring blankly at Haydn104. If Gwen wasn’t going to be honest with him, he would redouble his own efforts and find out why his wife had gone from preoccupied to deceitful. He assumed that whatever was claiming her attention had something to do with the death of Marci Newman. Had Gwen found something? If so, she might be hiding it because he had been so adamant about her dropping the investigation. That didn’t say good things about the trust levels in their marriage. Jack was going to have to do something about that. He didn’t want genuine concern for Gwen’s emotional health to put up walls in their relationship.
He went back to Haydn104, which, truthfully, had him stymied. He prided himself on his ability to find patterns in even the most random information typed, coded, and double-clicked into the cyber world, but there just didn’t seem to be anything here. Spammers, hackers, and phishers were able to disguise their activities in a dozen different ways, and the world of cyber spying was infinitely more sophisticated than the viruses and worms used by these online nuisances. Jack had encrypted files for defense contractors, and decrypted codes used by foreign governments trying to forward messages to terrorist cells through the pixels of a photograph. If there was something to Marci’s ridiculously simple list of numbers, he should have detected it by now.
Suddenly, Jack sat up. As with all epiphanies, Jack’s came out of the blue. What if Marci’s series of numbers was just a red herring, meant to fool someone into thinking there was nothing more in Haydn104? He gave himself a quick slap with his palm on the side of his head, reminding himself to be a little less immodest next time.
Humility keeps a person in the game, he reminded himself.
It couldn’t be, though. Marci was a lawyer, not a programmer.
Jack studied the rows of numbers on his computer screen. “She was a bookworm, though, wasn’t she, and smart as a whip. Little social life. Reclusive. Or might have gotten some info on hiding and retrieving files from a barrister buddy.” Jack was aware that lawyers encrypted information all the time. Opposing counsel was sometimes very naughty, in fact, trying to hack into confidential files to gain a competitive edge.
It was a long shot, but if the numbers were a decryption program, what file or files would it open? And what was so important that Marci had felt the need to bury information?
On the spur of the moment, Jack decided he had to go to New York to have a look at Marci Newman’s computer.
The phone rang as Roberta Chang applied the last bit of make-up to her cheeks. She usually got to Henry’s office by 7:30, a full hour before the senator himself arrived, in order to brief her staff on scheduling, appointments, policy changes, e-mail responses to constituents, and a dozen other matters that made for a hectic workday. A call at 6:20 in the morning wasn’t unusual given that Henry was one of the most important people in the country.
There was nothing routine about this call, however. Roberta’s father, his voice quivering, said that her mother had died unexpectedly during the night. The preliminary indications pointed to a heart attack. That was all he knew now. Understandably, he wanted to know if Roberta could come home as soon as possible.

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