Shadow of Eden (41 page)

“If it follows previously known prion latency patterns, yes. So far as I’ve seen, the range is about eighteen months for Captain Palmer and four years for Shirley. I did not find out how long the third woman took it before she got sick, but my guess it took at least a year.”

“And Trident could have finished its testing, gotten FDA approval and never seen a case.”

“It’s possible.” Steve remembered Sheridan’s cell culture results. Some cell lines converted, but most did not. Probably there were differential susceptibilities in people and different time lines for each person.

“Don’t they follow their research patients long enough to see those things?” Valenti asked.

“It sounds really short,” Steve said, “but it’s only thirty days after their last visit unless someone becomes pregnant during a study.”

“Thirty days? That’s all?”

Steve shrugged. “That’s what the regulations say. They have to do some long term studies, but as I recall in Trident’s case, it only lasted a year, no longer.”

“Well then, maybe Trident doesn’t know? You know, about the disease, because no one has made a connection there.”

Steve had already considered this. No, too many things pointed at Trident. Like the timing of the events following his reporting of Eden to Trident’s Safety Officer, what was his name? Then there was the likelihood that Eden had been tested in nerve cell cultures and other lab animals. “I don’t think so,” Steve said. “Too many coincidences.”

“I think you’re right. In my field, there are no such things as coincidences.” Valenti grinned. “But then, I believe in all sorts of conspiracies. You know, X-files and stuff.”

“This latency thing is important,” Steve said. “If three hundred million people are taking Eden and it has a latency of, say, one to five years, we could be looking at the beginning of something huge.”

“How do you figure?” Valenti asked.

“Take a disease, say avian flu or an outbreak of plague, which still occasionally crops up.”

“Here you go again, spoiling my appetite.”

Steve grinned, enjoying the teaching and Valenti’s discomfort. “Plague starts within days after exposure. As soon as people know it’s out there, they go on a rat eradication campaign and quarantine all cases. The exposure stops and the outbreak runs its course fairly rapidly. There is a bell shaped curve from the first case to the peak incidence and back down to the last case, all in a matter of weeks.”

“Okay, I now know not to be a rat and not to associate with rats.”

“You clearly have a stunning intellect. With a long latency, lots more people get the disease before they show symptoms. Only then can you look for the cause and stop the exposure, but for lots of people, that’s too late. In this case, the bell curve is much wider and more protracted.”

Valenti whistled. “So we have three hundred million blissfully ignorant people taking Eden every day.”

“And that scares the crap out of me. We may just be on the early part of the bell curve. It could get much worse.”

“All three hundred million?”

“Probably not, but—”

“Why wouldn’t everybody get it?”

Steve thought about the question before answering. “All sorts of things. Even with the plague, not everybody who was exposed died. Natural resistance, genetic factors, duration of exposure, size of each dose and so on all play parts in triggering the disease. Only a few of Sheridan’s cell lines converted, so there is something that make some people more susceptible or resistant than others.”

“How do you find out?”

“More research. Like Sheridan was going to do.”

“But not if Trident keeps whacking them.” Valenti shifted the subject. “Tell me about Trident and Eden.”

“Trident had to test Eden in animals before they got to humans, including cell cultures.”

“Nerve cell cultures?”

“I think so, yes.”

So they would have seen the prions like Sheridan did.”

“Right.”

“Can you check on that?”

“Sure. I think so.”

“And what about animals?”

“Here, I’m less certain. One prion disease called Scrapie infects only sheep. You can’t catch it even if you eat the meat. That’s why when cattle came down with Mad Cow Disease, people didn’t believe you could get it by eating it. But this time they were wrong. It jumped species from cow to human.”

“Is it important if Eden can’t cause the disease in animals?”

“Not really. We have evidence that it causes conversion in human brain cells and in humans. It would be nice to see it in animals, but it would not change the evidence we already have.”

“Trident will claim no knowledge of this whole thing,” Valenti mused. “They’ll tell the world that they had no way of knowing. Plausible deniability.”

Steve thought back to his conversation with Trident’s safety officer. Valenti was right. It would be hard to pin prior knowledge on Trident. “If they destroyed their offending records, then it would be nearly impossible.”

“We need to find a live witness, someone who can name names and make it stick.” Valenti said. “Something else bothers me, though. If they have over a hundred patients with this Eden’s thing, and you stumbled onto it, others have also figured it out or will. What’s Trident’s end game?”

“What do you mean?”

“Trident can’t go around killing every doctor who thinks Eden is a problem. There’s got to be more to it than that. Or something we don’t know.”

“What do you think?” Steve asked.

“I was going to ask you. Is there something about who gets this or do only selected people get it? How can Trident figure there is any long-term future if their drug kills off its customers? Do they have a replacement drug in the works?”

That last comment made Steve sit up. “That may be exactly it. My last studies for Trident tested a new version, a shorter chain of amino acids that they said would have the same effect, but better absorption.” Unconsciously rubbing his chin, he tried to remember the details of the new formulation. “I wonder,” he said after a minute, “if they think this new version won’t cause the same damage.” If only Sheridan wasn’t out of commission, Steve thought, he could test some of this new medication in nerve cell cultures. He sat back stunned by the implications of a possible cover-up.

“Trident knows that its multi-billion dollar drug is a problem.” Steve said. “I bet they’re keeping it under wraps by hook or by crook until the new formulation gets approved. Then they do a switch for the new, improved version and, voila, problem solved. Ordinarily a company would wait for their previous drug’s patent to wear off before finalizing its replacement.”

“Makes sense to me,” Valenti said. “In the meantime, they knock you guys off until their replacement drug is up and running.” He grinned. “You’re pretty good at conspiracy theories, Doc. What happens if their new formulation doesn’t work?”

“They lose. Somebody will figure Eden out and make it stick.”

Chapter 86

D
ixon woke up in a panic, drenched in sweat, his body racked with shivers. “Elise?” He reached over to the other side of the king size bed and touched her shoulder. “Elise,” he said louder.

Elise rolled over and peered at her husband in the dim light. “What is it, Honey? What’s wrong?” Her hand sought out his.

“Another nightmare,” he said, almost embarrassed now. But his heart was still pumping hard in his chest like he had been on one of his runs. It was that dream again.

Elise slid over in the bed towards her husband. “Want to talk about it?”

Dixon felt her warm arms encircle him. It was exactly what he needed; then as his mind recalled the dream, he stiffened up again.

“What is it?” Her soft soothing Virginia accent encouraged him. “Tell me, Honey.”

“A trip to hell,” he started to say and then stopped as it came flooding back again. Instead of getting more fuzzy and indistinct like most dreams did after waking, it stayed vivid.

Elise rubbed his back as if trying to pull the tension out of him. “Go on. It’ll help if you tell me.”

“It was nothing—literally nothing. A small, empty room, nothing else.” He tried to find the words to describe the feeling. “No people, forever, understand? Not you, nobody, and I knew it would be like that . . . forever.” His arm twitched again and it all flooded back. “I must pray,” he said, overwhelmed by the image and desperate for reassurance. “Only God can save me.”

“It’s okay,” Elise said calmly. “It’s just a dream. You’re not going to hell, Honey, you’re too good a man. I know that for a fact. You’re just too good. You listen to me, Mr. Robert C. Dixon. God’s going to bring you home when He’s ready. Just not yet. I want more time with you first.”

Dixon had immediately known the source of his horror since his first flashback—but only now confronted it. He was back in that laundry room. As an asthmatic child, his parents had sent him to Utah for a summer to live with his Aunt Bonnie in the dry desert air. Without any children of her own and, while well meaning, she had never seemed to know the right thing to say or do with eight year old Robert. Instead of taking him with her to the store or shopping, she would lock him in the laundry room, sometimes for hours at a time. Once, she had left Robert inside throughout a long, terrifying night, later professing forgetfulness.

That room was small with just enough space to stand in front of the washer and dryer, or in his case, to curl up on the warped, speckled-green linoleum floor. He could still smell the laundry detergent and the Clorox, the Pine-O-Pine and the Borateem soap, sitting on the bare wooden shelf over the appliances. The gas hot water heater in the corner and the shelves of Del Monte canned beans and peas and the jars of pickles and peanut butter, were all burned into his memory from hours staring at them.

Without a window, the bare light bulb determined whether he could see or not. When immersed in darkness he would panic, his mind filled with frightening visions of monsters and wild animals, or scorpions and spiders creeping in to get him.

Robert became fearful of being alone for any length of time even back at home. He had consciously arranged his life to always be with people, running for school president, joining social clubs and fraternities, having roommates all through college—and eventually running for public office. And now, the images he saw in his dreams were of that feared room in Utah, images he had blocked out of his conscious mind for decades, had for some reason reared up again.

Looking back, he recalled that his only avenue of salvation after his aunt shoved him, screaming and crying, into the laundry room was praying to God for his rescue. He would pray fervently for hours and each time his aunt let him out, he came to feel personally delivered by the hand of God. To Robert, that laundry room was hell with all the isolation, loneliness, claustrophobia, and separation from human companionship that hell represented.

But why was all this coming back now and after he had successfully buried the memory for so many years? Dixon took a deep breath feeling the conviction of his wife’s words settling him down. He had not told her that the vision recurred more and more frequently now, even when he was awake, and that he saw glimpses of it nearly every time he twitched. His fear drove him to pray—as his only hope of deliverance. But Elise was right; it was only a dream. He became aware of Elise gently stroking his chest as she pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it.

Chapter 87

W
ith the morning breakfast crew assembled, President Dixon walked in, forcing a smile. “Good morning,” he said, shaking hands all around. He settled comfortably in his chair. “I read the PDB,” he began. “Lots of activity. What’s China up to, Augie?”

“Two options,” said the National Security Advisor. “One is they are working on some internal issue, possibly more suppression of religious groups or something similar. Option two is they are getting ready for an external military objective.”

“So which is it?” Dixon asked.

Crusoe chewed on his cold pipe a minute before replying. “We don’t know.”

“George?”

“I have already ordered new deployments for our ground assets, but it’ll take time. People there are not so mobile, particularly not in the countryside where most of this is happening.”