Whiplash (2 page)

"Hey, babe, let's forget this stuff. You look so hot I can't wait to put my mouth on you."

Good grief, Alvarez and Royal? Lovers? She hadn't picked up a whiff of that when she'd done her research on Royal and his management team. Did anyone else know?

Carla said, "Maybe it won't take the FDA long to jump on Schiffer Hartwin. You'd have to be an idiot to believe the shortage of Culovort is just poor planning and-how did they put it-connected to an expansion of our production facilities? Couldn't they come up with a more believable excuse? Aren't they worried we'll soon be hated as much as bankers?"

They were close now, not ten feet from his office door. Any moment they'd be waltzing in, headed toward that big leather sofa. "That's the beauty of it," she heard him say, chuckling, "Even if it's our production and distribution labs in Missouri that are having the expansion problems, it's Schiffer Hartwin who'll get all the blowback, if there is any-and they're way the hell over in Germany. Carla, stop worrying about it tonight. We don't have that much time-"

"But what about-"

There was a whoof of surprise from the woman, the sound of scuffling, then a low moan.

She heard hard breathing, a suck-air kiss, and raunchy groaning. Evidently the time for business talk was past, a pity. She'd studied the floor plans, knew her escape route if disaster struck. Disaster was readying itself to strike in under a minute unless they decided to have sex against a corridor wall. She ran to the adjoining bathroom, slipped inside, and quietly closed the door again. She stepped into the glass-block shower and looked up at a small window near the top that had looked larger and lower on the plans. How the devil would she get up there? She heard the office door open.

Showtime.

She sucked in a deep breath and jumped. She managed to grab the windowsill with one hand, the window latch with the other, and pulled herself up. The window was cracked open enough for her to grab the rough stone edge of the building outside the bathroom window. She shoved at the latch with her other hand, but the sucker didn't budge. Not good. As her heart thumped louder and faster, she heard her father's voice in her head,
"When you're butt-deep in trouble, you focus and you get it done."
She shoved as hard as she could on that latch, once, twice. The window flew outward.

She eyeballed the opening above her. It wasn't very wide, but on the other hand, thank the good Lord and the gym, she wasn't either.

She heard Royal and Carla Alvarez fumbling with each other not twenty feet away, laughing, kissing, sex-walking, she knew, toward that sofa. She had to be quiet.

She got both hands outside, one on the edge of the outside wall, the other on the window frame, and pulled herself up and through the opening. She hung upside down, looking at bushes a galaxy away.

She heard Caskie Royal say something, then his footsteps coming toward the bathroom.

No choice. She wiggled through and did a lovely tuck into the bushes.

She landed on her shoulder, the shrubbery cushioning her fall, and lay there, breathing slowly, querying her body parts. She was okay, she hoped.

She turned her head and looked up. Would he notice the wide-open window? Would he wonder? Would he be suspicious?

With her luck, he and Carla would probably take a pre-sex shower. She heard them still laughing and talking, coming closer. The shower was small, but not that small.

She rolled off the bush, bent nearly double, and took off running toward the dark woods of Van Wie Park at the back of Schiffer Hartwin's American headquarters.

She ran faster when she heard a yell coming from the bathroom.

Okay, so they knew someone had gone through the window, but they'd have no clue who it had been. It was okay. The cops would want to know if anything had been taken. Royal would search his files and see the date stamp on the Project A file. He'd know someone had read it. Would he know it had been copied? Would he tell the cops? No, he couldn't risk it. On the other hand, if he thought it through, he'd realize that someone probably had those files, and there'd be no way to keep the fabricated Culovort shortage from getting out. There'd be hell to pay.

For that, she couldn't wait.

She hoped it scared the crap out of him.

If the cops were called in, they'd know only one thing for sure. The thief was a small boy or a female, because no male over the age of twelve could have squeezed through that window.

Once inside the Van Wie Park woods, she went down on her knees, sucked in air, and looked back. Lights now flooded the bathroom and the office.

She heard what she hoped was a cop car screech into the parking lot in front of the building. In that moment she knew the guard had called the cops, not Caskie.
What are you going to say, Caskie?

She was grinning as she ran through the trees and out the back to the back road that led to the main highway that ran through Stone Bridge.
No sex for the wicked tonight, Caskie
.

With the cops there, Caskie would have to go on record. On record with what, that was the question. He'd also have to explain to his wife what he was doing in his office late on a lovely Sunday night with Carla Alvarez.

Once she'd hiked half a mile to her baby, a muscular light blue Hummer H3, she fastened her seat belt and turned the ignition. She loved the sound of the powerful engine. She drove slowly down the road for a bit, realized her heart was still pumping too fast and her hands were still shaking. She pulled over to get herself some time to calm down. She sat back, closed her eyes, and thought back to her client, Dr. Edward Kender, professor of archaeology at Yale in New Haven. He'd been a friend of her father's, someone she'd known from her earliest years. Dr. Kender wasn't an emotional man, but she could imagine him grinning from ear to ear in excitement when he read the Culovort files she had tucked in her jacket, as he recognized the power the contents of the files gave him. The media blitz could even force Schiffer Hartwin to start up full production of Culovort again. She'd done good.

It was because he'd known her father that he'd come to her small office the previous Wednesday afternoon. It was nearly three years since she'd seen him, since her father's funeral in fact. He'd arrived unannounced at her small office on Birch Street in Stone Bridge, and told her that, just like her father, his father was undergoing chemotherapy, not for the lung cancer that had killed her father, but for Stage 4 colon cancer. In the middle of it all, he'd been told by his oncologist that the supply of Culovort had been drastically cut. Dr. Kender didn't know what she could do to help him, but he'd been trying to pressure Schiffer Hartwin Pharmaceutical to start up full production of Culovort again.

"Culovort isn't a cancer drug, but it's used in conjunction with other chemo drugs for a wide range of cancers," he'd explained to her. "The kicker is that Culovort is critical in treating colon cancer. It's used along with another cancer drug, Fluorouracil, or 5-FU, as it's commonly called. Think of 5-FU as a grenade that masquerades as a component of DNA and explodes inside the cancer cells. Culovort is an accomplice that helps it get past the guards. Without the Culovort, you've got all the toxic poison of 5-FU, but fewer cancer cells getting killed."

He steepled his long thin fingers together, and looked over them as he spoke. "The problem is, Culovort is off patent and therefore it's cheap."

Erin said, "That's a problem? Oh, I see."

Edward Kender nodded. "Schiffer Hartwin Pharmaceutical makes only a negligible profit off it. Without it, the people suffering from colon cancer are the biggest losers, like my father. With no Culovort, they'll be forced to use the new oral drug-Eloxium. Some believe the oral drug is better-but the thing is, Eloxium can cost twenty thousand dollars for the treatment course.

"Most insurance companies do not cover the oral treatment, or only a small part of it, which means that many colon cancer patients will have to come up with thousands of dollars to pay for the Eloxium. Dad's oncologist is furious about it because she'll have to force patients over to the oral medication. There'll be simply no choice once there's no supply. Even worse, if a patient begins the Eloxium, there's no going back, even if Culovort becomes available again."

Erin said slowly, "So mortgage your home to pay for the treatment of a life-threatening disease, and have a nice day."

"Can you imagine, Erin, not only dealing with chemotherapy and all the brutal side effects, the possible prospect of dying, your family's grinding fear, the unending stress, and then being told that one of the major components of your chemotherapy course isn't available anymore because of unexpected production problems? And, oh, yes, sorry, but on top of all that, it's going to cost you a bundle out-of-pocket to switch over to a new chemo drug."

Oh, yes, she could imagine it. She remembered all too well her father's final months, the soul-draining helplessness they'd all felt watching her father become a frail old man, so ill he couldn't eat, so weak he could barely stand. She remembered how he'd told her late one night that this damnable cure made you forget the disease, you felt so rotten. She swallowed down tears, shook her head. "What I really can't picture is a group of people actually sitting down and deciding to simply stop making an important medicine for cancer patients, people who may already be staring at death from the doorway and trying to deal with it."

Dr. Kender smiled at her, a charming smile that for an instant erased the terrible fatigue and worry from his eyes. "Ah, you're forgetting the bankers on Wall Street. They purposely set out to make all the money they could, and they didn't seem to give a damn about the consequences."

Erin sighed. "I'm beginning to wonder if greed has any limits at all."

He said, "We are the ones who have to set those limits. Controlling and manipulating access to drugs for profit is wrong, but at least it affects a finite number of people. The bankers have damaged the entire world."

He drummed his fingertips on the arm of his chair. "At any rate, Erin, I went to see Mr. Caskie Royal, the CEO of the U.S. subsidiary of Schiffer Hartwin Pharmaceutical, located right down the road in Stone Bridge. He agreed to see me because he fancied I was some sort of big-wig professor from Yale."

"You are."

He tried to laugh, but only dredged up a small smile. "Disease is the great leveler, Erin. If you're facing death, nothing else exists-money, fame, power all cease to be important. As for Caskie Royal, he said he was sympathetic, then actually threw his hands in the air. Told me he was trying his best to solve the unexpected production line problems brought on by overenthusiastic expansion, was the way he put it." Dr. Kender lowered his eyes to his clasped hands. "As if any moron would believe that. I mean, a company wants to expand and it doesn't determine the effects of said expansion on its current production of drugs?

"It's a lie, of course. I'll admit it, I wanted to pull him out of his big executive chair and choke the life out of him.

"There is another Schiffer Hartwin production laboratory for Culovort in Spain. Their PR folk came up with a new reason for aborting production-quality-control issues, they said, and even the possibility the production line might have been sabotaged. It will take them some time to ramp up production again, blah, blah, blah."

"What about the media?"

"The fact that a cancer drug isn't available isn't sexy enough for the national media to make a big issue of it, since there's a different drug on the market.
The Wall Street Journal
and
The Washington Post
reported on the shortage and Schiffer Hartwin's response, but that's it. No digging, no real questioning of the company, and those two newspapers usually take an interest in medicine."

Dr. Kender looked like he was at the end of his rope. There was anger in his gaunt face, but more than that, there was a sheen of hopelessness. He said on a sigh, "My dad, you never met him, Erin. He's old school, tough as nails, determined to take care of himself. We've discussed going on the oral cancer drug, but he's heard too many horror stories about the side effects, and he can't afford it in any case. If he's forced to go on it, he'll probably sell his house, and he's already told me there's no way he'll let me help. I've wanted to choke him for his misplaced pride, even though I completely understand it."

He paused a moment. "I hate that he's suffering, and now this worrying about having to come up with twenty thousand dollars when the Culovort runs out. It's breaking his will. I don't want him to die like this." He looked down at his tasseled loafers, his shoulders bowed, like a man who's gone up against the giant and gotten smashed. Erin wanted to weep.

He said quietly, "Do you know that in the U.S., about one hundred and fifty thousand people are diagnosed with colon cancer every year? I've written letters, sent e-mails, made phone calls to my elected representatives, to the FDA, until all I wanted was to shoot myself. No one seems to care except for the oncologists, the patients, and their beleaguered families, and they're powerless. I don't really know why I'm here. I knew you'd understand, Erin, but what can you do? What can anyone do to force the drug company to start up Culovort to full production again?"

"What we need," Erin said, drumming her fingertips on the little banged-up desk she'd bought from Goodwill in her sophomore year at Boston College, "is to get hold of solid proof they know damned well what they're doing, and that they are profiting from it. Then the media will sit up and pay attention. They love drug company scandals, but they like them much more when they're presented on a nice big platter complete with fines of hundreds of million dollars."