Capitol Reflections (56 page)
Unlike her hero Frances Kelsey, who blocked the approval of Thalidomide and was decorated by a president, Gwen would never get widespread recognition for her role in averting a public health crisis that the country would never know about. However, she did get called down to the Humphrey Building on Independence Avenue, where the Department of Health and Human Services is headquartered. Once there, she was surprised to find herself escorted to the secretary’s suite. Sitting in the room were Attorney General Chase, along with the secretary of health, and the inspector general of the department.
The secretary opened the meeting, saying, “Captain Maulder, there’s no question that the country owes you a large debt—one that we will never discuss again. Let’s just say that you know, we know, and the president knows what you have done. You have been put in for the Surgeon General’s Lifetime Achievement Medal, which is the highest honor this department has to offer.
“Some folks, your friend Snyder included, have realized that it is time for them to leave public service. As near as we can tell, Snyder was keeping tabs on you just to curry favor with his bosses upstairs. He never knew what he was doing in trying to muzzle you. We did, however, pick up an interesting trail in Snyder’s office and it lead right through Gene McMurphy, all the way to the acting commissioner, Lionel Channing. By torpedoing Eddie Karn, the acting commissioner was kept in charge. A word here and a word there to Snyder was all it took for Channing to pull your strings. Our friend Channing, it turns out, did have a motive. He owned one hundred thousand shares of Pequod’s stock that Randall had given him before Channing went into government. Seems Randall could always spot a man on the rise and decided to invest in Channing. Randall had a change of heart once he started visualizing the wrong end of Leavenworth, Kansas, and told us all about the relationship.”
“So what?” Gwen said. “Channing loses his meager government pension and goes to work for General Mills. Sounds like there’s no proof he consistently or directly told Snyder to interfere with me. At any rate my activities were unauthorized and outside the scope of my job.”
“Ah, but you’re forgetting the Pequod’s stock,” said Chase.
“So he owned some stock he shouldn’t have. He wasn’t part of an insider transaction. The most you can do is fire him for it and he’s already resigned,” said Gwen.
“Well … yes and no,” said Chase. “The stock ownership wasn’t a felony. Unfortunately for our friend Channing, he signed multiple financial disclosure forms for both the White House and the Senate under penalty of perjury in which he made no mention of the Pequod’s shares. There’s quite a good chance that Mr. Channing will take up residence in Kansas under less luxurious circumstances than he is accustomed to.”
“What about McMurphy?”
“We’re still looking at him. We have already figured out that he goes way back with Senator Broome. Worked on his staff right after college,” said Chase.
“I see from the look on your face that you see some justice in this outcome,” said Chase. “Naturally, in your case, we hope you will stay. Once you return from your maternity leave, we hope you will consider taking up the newly created duties of deputy commissioner and chief safety officer at the FDA, with promotion to assistant surgeon general. That is,” the secretary added with a smile, “if you think your husband can stand having a rear admiral in the house.”
Gwen was stunned, though it only took her a moment to acknowledge that she deserved everything they were giving her.
“Thank you, sir.”
The secretary handed her a card. “Here’s the private phone number to this office. The one thing I ask is that the next time you spot a major public health disaster in the making, you call me before organizing your own army.”
Gwen, slightly embarrassed, looked down at the card. “Yes, sir.”
Chase took over where the secretary left off. “We don’t want that husband of yours feeling outranked or unappreciated. If he would like to keep his Treasury pension but come to work at the Justice Department, we can use his computer investigative skills at a senior level. Perhaps an assistant attorney general’s badge might make him feel more equal when he calls you admiral … ”
PART VI
79
They got together every Tuesday afternoon for lunch. There was nothing official about it. No one penned it into his or her calendar. But at the end of each lunch, they always made plans for the next. Mark hadn’t realized how important the group had become to one another until they prepared to split up after their last meeting with Gallagher. It was a ragtag team to say the least—even the most creative networking specialist would not have thought to bring them together—but Gwen, Jan, Peter, Eddie, and Rick had become the first group Mark felt he could rely on since his college days. That felt very good.
It was Rick’s turn to pick the restaurant, which meant overcooked burgers and soggy fries. In the three months they’d been doing this, Mark had learned when he could look forward to the food (Eddie seemed to have a direct line to the best chefs in the city) and when he should make sure to eat a big breakfast. Rick had always had terrible taste, and access to state dinners hadn’t refined it. His favorite part of campaigning was probably getting a chance to eat his fill of rubber chicken. Today, though, the food was an afterthought. The day before, Gwen had a follow-up meeting with Ted Gallagher and received astounding news—d-caffeine was showing up in the coffee of other roasters.
“How can that be?” asked Mark. “The d-caffeine plants are confined to Hawaiian plantations.”
“But that’s just it. I’m afraid they’re not. Gallagher analyzed beans from Central and South America. Many, though not all, are showing the genetic manipulation. If there were even one decent-sized coffee plantation south of the equator, the altered plant could have spread—and it looks as if that’s what happened.”
Mark was baffled. “How?”
Eddie interjected. “It could have happened in any number of ways. A competitor could have stolen some of the plants over the last few years. Or maybe scientists—corporate, academic, you name it—were experimenting with a new variety that turned up down there. Or simple cross-fertilization. Nature is now following what Jamie Robinson programmed the plants to do years ago. That’s what happens when man starts tampering with things.”
“So things are even worse than before,” Jan said.
Gwen shook her head. In the past few months, her face had filled out a bit, though she hadn’t put on much weight. Mark thought it made her seem warmer, more open. Jack Maulder and their future child were very, very lucky people. “Remember that we only ever connected seizure activity to titrated d-caffeine. Lower levels don’t seem to have the same effect and none of the samples Gallagher tested showed anything more than that.”
“It’s entirely possible they don’t even know what they have,” Eddie noted.
“Even Pequod’s has stopped doing it in new markets,” Gwen added.
Peter guffawed. “That’s because we scared the shit out of them.”
Gwen smiled. “We did something good, that’s for sure. Broome’s gone and Tassin’s gone. And even though Randall dodged prison—I’d love to know how the attorney general screwed that one up—he’s out of the coffee business. The only thing you ever read about him these days has to do with his new computer chip.”
It was time for Mark to make his announcement. He’d expected it to be the big story of the day, but Gwen trumped him. “Speaking of which, I got a call from Billy Hamlin this morning.”
“Hey,” Peter said, “what’s your best buddy up to?”
“Relocating. He’s leaving Pequod’s.”
“Please tell me he’s not going to one of the other brands where Gallagher found d-caffeine,” Jan said.
“Actually, he’s getting out of coffee entirely. He cashed out his options and is going to work for the Disney Corporation.”
“Makes sense,” Peter said wryly. “He’s already turned parents into addicts so it’s time to go after the kids.”
Everyone at the table chuckled and Mark let them have their laugh. “You know, I think he might actually have been entirely innocent in this. He told me that he’d spent the past few months trying to corroborate what I told him about Pequod’s. It wasn’t easy because, as we know, Randall doesn’t exactly run an open operation over there, but when enough of what he found supported our claims, he decided it was time to get out.”
Rick leaned forward in his chair, nearly landing his tie in a pool of ketchup. “That’s the angle for your story! You didn’t want to do it because you felt it didn’t lead anywhere, but now it does.”
Mark shrugged. “No, it really doesn’t. Everything I said about this a few months ago is still true. Billy Hamlin leaving Pequod’s doesn’t change it. Beyond the few documents we possess, the trail suddenly grows cold. We don’t have anything to support our conspiracy story, so I’m left with d-caffeine. The public isn’t going to respond to an article on receptor sites. If it’s not linked to a cover-up, it’s going to sound like I’m preaching, and people don’t read my pieces to hear a sermon.”
“But if Billy Hamlin is willing to talk about Randall, Broome, and Tassin—”
“Who says he would be? Would you be willing to rat out Randall if he knew where your wife and kids lived? And anything he said would throw suspicion on himself. It’s lose-lose for him.”
“So are you going to cover Hamlin’s move in any way?” Gwen asked.
“Nah. Billy called me first to give me the scoop. I sent him to my friend Charlie Nicholls at the
Journal
instead. I owe Charlie a few favors.”
Journal
instead. I owe Charlie a few favors.”
Gwen smiled. That answer seemed to please her.
After that, the lunch relaxed into the easy banter that Mark had come to appreciate. Jan and Peter made official what the rest of the group had surmised for some time—that they were a couple. Mark was hardly an authority on relationships, but even he knew there was some real heat between them.
Gwen told everyone about her upcoming ultrasound test. At this point, there was a good chance they’d be able to determine the gender of the child. Jack had come around to the notion that he could raise a female softball star as easily as he could a major league short-stop, but Gwen was still hoping he’d get his boy.
“If it’s a girl, we’re going to name her Marci,” Gwen said, her eyes misting a bit. Mark knew that Gwen did all she could to get to the cause of her best friend’s sudden death. Still, while she’d managed to address the mystery, she hadn’t yet fully addressed the grief. “If it’s a boy, we want to use some variation on her name for his middle name but we haven’t come up with it yet.”
“You could always use Mark,” Mark said coyly.
Gwen patted him on the hand. “Thanks for the suggestion,” she said with a little grin. “Jack and I will take that under advisement.”
In the past few weeks, Mark had stopped feeling uncomfortable hearing Gwen talk about her pregnancy and started enjoying how much she was enjoying it. He wasn’t quite ready to take her up on her dinner invitations to the Maulder home, but he was doing better with all of it.
Peter regaled everyone with a story about his latest client, a huge multinational—he wouldn’t mention the name (“confidentiality and all that”), but dropped enough clues to make it obvious to all—with a virus on its intranet “that would make a porn star blush.” That led to Rick, in can-you-top-this fashion, telling about a barely-unnamed congresswoman’s lewd diatribe after a five-martini lunch. He had everyone at the table laughing so hard that no one seemed to mind that he’d made yet another dreadful restaurant choice.
Rick would be getting ready to mount a reelection campaign soon. Peter hinted at a potentially months-long assignment in Istanbul. Eddie had just signed a deal with a publisher for a book on GMOs. Jan was getting her team ready to explore Phase Three of BioNet. Gwen was up to her neck in meaningful work at the FDA and planned to take three months at home after giving birth. And Mark had recently received a call from the
Chicago Tribune
that was far too interesting to ignore without some exploration.
Chicago Tribune
that was far too interesting to ignore without some exploration.
These Tuesday lunches might not last much longer. But Mark was convinced the friendships would continue indefinitely. They’d done something significant together. They probably saved lives—and nearly died trying. If that wasn’t the foundation for a lasting relationship, Mark didn’t know what was.
80
“Is everything under control?”
“I’ve done what I could, Wallace,” replied Lane Chase. “The irony is that I’ve pretty much told our troublemakers the truth. The caffeine is legal and can’t be regulated, plus people are going to smoke and drink coffee if they choose. Aside from creative bookkeeping, no real laws were broken as far as the coffee’s concerned. Even we didn’t realize the seizure problem created by the combination of nicotine and d-caffeine, at least not at first. We have Maulder, Menefee, and Tippett to thank for that. Our public servants certainly perform at exemplary levels sometimes. Hopefully, we’ve thrown them enough goodies to keep their minds off the last piece of the puzzle.”
“And the reporter?” asked Wallace Pembroke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in his raspy voice.
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