Vaccine Nation (17 page)

Ellison made a big Texas face, shocked and amazed. “Y’all said you had it handled.”

“I’m working on it, but my people haven’t tracked her down yet.”

Merkle spoke for the first time, said, “Maguire was well known to us. He was our primary contact with you on our HIV vaccine joint venture.”

Madsen said, “He was our point man overseeing all our vaccine joint ventures.”

Ellison leaned forward. His voice was low and menacing. “What we all hear is that it’s worse than that. Y’all know what she has could destroy us.”

D
ANI COULDN’T SHAKE A SENSE
of doom. She found her way to a diner and sat in the back, drinking tea, thinking. She’d cried herself out in the back yard of the brownstone. Now she felt numb. Still, she couldn’t avoid the memory of Richard shot, the killer’s gun in his outstretched hand. He made a sound like a grocery bag being dropped on the pavement as he fell. The sight of his crumpled body came back to her. This was different than Maguire, as awful as that was. She had been with Richard, not only let him enter her body, but her heart. He was a good man and now he was dead.

She closed her eyes, tried not to think about him, but he kept coming back to her. Sitting in silence, his newspaper in his lap on the train when she’d met him. Sharing her triumph after
Face the Press.
Admiring her in bed after they’d made love. She remembered wondering what she meant to him, asking herself if he was open to starting something with her. And then the guilt came. Strange bedfellows, he’d called them. He on the opposite side of the political aisle from her, minding his own business, yet allowing himself to be sucked into her situation. If she’d left him alone, hadn’t involved him, he’d be alive today. A good man, now dead because of her.

She felt as if her nerves had been sandpapered raw. Everything she’d done in the last two days had ended in disaster. She began
to cry. Maguire was dead. A cop at her apartment was dead. McCloskey was dead. And now Richard. That crazy, blue-eyed man was still out there. He would find her, and she would die, too.

Then, as if things couldn’t get worse, she saw on a TV in the Starbucks a news report about the dead bellhop in Richard’s room at the Willard. The woman had been bludgeoned to death “in cold blood,” as they put it, with no apparent motive. The man who had been registered into the room, Richard Blum, was missing. Police would have additional information as it developed. Now that scene came back to Dani: of the woman in that ridiculous bellhop’s hat, the gun in her hand, her skilled moves and her well-toned body.

A few hours later Dani moved to another Starbucks. But that’s all she could do. On 15
^th
Street NW, again sitting in one of the rear tables, she concentrated on what to do next. With Richard gone, the only person she could think of to call was Denise. She dialed.

“Denise, it’s Dani.”

The line cut off.

Dani re-dialed. Voicemail. She tried again. Futile.
How could she?
So much for their mutual cause. Dani turned on her BlackBerry and found Denise’s address.

Dani had the taxi drop her at Denise’s Georgetown brownstone. She found the buzzer. Four apartments, one each floor. Not too shabby for a woman whose sole mission in life was volunteer work.

“Yes?”

“Denise, it’s Dani. I’m here, and you can’t hang up on me or send me to voicemail.”

“I hadn’t bargained for any of this,” Denise said, clearly terrified. “Do you know what they’re saying about you on the news?”

“Same as they’ve been saying about me for the last two days. Are you letting me in, or am I smashing the glass?” The front door buzzed. Dani pushed it open.

“This is awkward, to say the least,” Denise said, standing away from her apartment door.

“I was about to say the same thing.”

Denise showed Dani to a chair in her living room, then sat across from her.

“I’d ask you why you wouldn’t take my call, but at this point it’s irrelevant. All I’m interested in is how I can get in touch with Salisbury. Then I’ll be out of here and we can consider ourselves strangers forever.”

Denise showed the sympathetic, loving smile Dani had seen for years. “Oh, Dani, this is a misunderstanding.”

Dani was beyond playing. “No it isn’t,” she said. “I’m in deeper trouble than I thought, and it’s clear I have very few people I can rely on. Like I said, help me get in touch with Salisbury, and I’ll be out of here.”

Denise shifted in her seat, said, “Have you tried to call him?”

“Come on, Denise. Cut the bullshit. You’re not the only one who isn’t taking my calls.”

Denise looked at the floor. Now all her poise, her mastery of the spontaneous moment seemed to have abandoned her. “On the news they’re saying you and your friend Richard murdered a bellhop in your room at the Willard.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Denise spread her arms. “How could I know anything? I’m finding this whole thing scary and mystifying. And I don’t know what to believe.” She pleaded with her eyes.

Pathetic.

“I don’t want to get involved.”

Dani wasn’t listening. “Salisbury,” she said.

“If he isn’t taking your calls, he must not want to speak with you.”

Dani stood up. “I know you have his address. My life is on the line. I need to get to him. So if you don’t want me creating a ruckus that will connect me to you, I suggest you give it to me now.” Dani stared into those confident eyes and saw them flinch. Denise walked across the room to her desk like a chastened middle-schooler. She typed into her computer, wrote the address on a piece of paper, and handed it to Dani, averting her eyes. Dani took it, looked at the address and without a word, went downstairs and hailed a cab.

Faint and needing the fuel, Dani decided to stop for dinner. The center of Georgetown was alive with college students. Carefree kids, their voices and laughter filled the air, scented with the smells of an eclectic mix of foods wafting from the restaurants. Pedestrians weaved in and out of traffic. Dani had forgotten what fun was. She pressed on past the main strip of restaurants to find a Greek diner on 36
^th
Street.

She found a seat near what appeared to be an emergency exit with a clear line of vision to the door. She ordered a salad.

Afterward, when she got into a taxi, the driver sighed. “It’s two blocks from here, Miss. You wanna ride or walk?” She opted to walk and found Salisbury’s building on 34
^th
Street easily. It was a seven- or eight-story apartment house at the end of a side street a few notches below Denise’s neighborhood. Salisbury’s apartment was on the 4
^th
floor. She buzzed 7J. No answer. She
tried 7G. “Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked. Dani said, “It’s me.” She had to try three more times before someone buzzed her in.

When she got to Salisbury’s apartment she knocked as softly as she could, making sure she stood in the center of the peephole. “Miss North?”

“Yes, it’s Dani.”

“Please go away.”

“I’m not going away, Mr. Salisbury. I need to talk to you about the data.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Maybe, but your being here puts me in danger.”

“That data is crucial if it says what I think it does. It’s also my only chance to save my life. I can use it to get protection from the federal whistleblower program.”

“The whistleblower program couldn’t protect John McCloskey. The police are saying he was murdered in his apartment.”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“What about the bellhop at your friend’s hotel room?”

“She was a professional sent to kill Richard and me, and to retrieve the data file.”

“Where is your friend?”

Dani felt her pulse stutter. “He’s waiting for me a few blocks away—Mr. Salisbury, please if you’re worried, having a conversation from the hall is exposing you to more danger than if you let me in.” A moment later he opened the door, and backed up without taking his eyes off her. He was tentative about his movements in his own apartment as he’d been at the Willard. The apartment was jammed with knickknacks, furniture and memorabilia, everything perfectly ordered. She detected the scent of cooking. “I won’t keep you long.”

“I really don’t want to get any further involved. I hope you understand.”

“May I sit down?”

Salisbury pointed to the sofa. He took a seat on a chair across from her.

“Can we talk about the data?” Dani said.

Salisbury nodded. “I didn’t tell you this before, because I’m not supposed to have it, but I kept all the data from the original Project Epsilon study. That is, the five-year data from all twenty vaccine manufacturers. I compared the five-year data for Pharma International and it’s a match with the first five columns of the file Maguire gave you.”

Dani felt the news like a jolt. That’s what Maguire must’ve meant when he talked about the “right side” just before he was shot. Not the right side of the issue, the right side of the spreadsheet. He must have either sent her the names of the children in the study in the first column—the “left side”—in an e-mail, or planned to give it to her in a separate file. “So that means the file Maguire gave me had ten years of data for the children in Pharma International’s portion of the study?”

“I can’t think of any other explanation. Five columns of data for 27,432 rows are an exact match in the two files.”

“And did you analyze it?”

“I did.”

Dani leaned forward, as if getting closer to him would spur him on. “And what did it tell you?”

“The regression analysis on Maguire’s file shows a .83 correlation between the vaccine group and Autism Spectrum Disorders: clear statistics linking vaccines to autism.”

Dani heard it like a cannon blast. “What are you saying?”

“The children in the vaccine group on Maguire’s file were 5.3 times more likely to have ASD symptoms than the unvaccinated children over the ten year measurement period.”

Now Dani’s brain felt like it was on fire. “And the pharmaceutical industry covered this up?”

“Not exactly. Remember, the correlation coefficient for the first five years of data was .62 when the industry shut down the study.”

“But do you think they knew where the study was headed?”

“I can’t speculate on that, except that the correlation coefficient rose every year.”

Dani thought. “But it makes sense. The longer the study would run, the higher the likelihood that ASD symptoms would be diagnosed.”

Salisbury smiled appreciatively. He said, “That’s a solid hypothesis, one that’s borne out in the data.”

Dani stood. “I need to get this data to the Office of the Special Counsel.”

“Ms. North, these data are not my property, and I’m not supposed to have them.”

“Exposing information like this, whether you’re supposed to have it or not, is precisely what the federal whistleblower program is about.” Dani was winging it, although she was pretty sure what she was saying was true. “And you and I both have a responsibility to make this information public.”

Salisbury stood, too. He suppressed a smile, as if he wanted her to lead him where she was going. “I’d like my name kept out of this.”

“Eventually someone will need to know where the data came from.”

“The source can remain anonymous.”

“I’m sure.” Salisbury took another USB flash memory drive out of the desk drawer and handed it to her. “Remarkable, this technology. That one can store sixteen gigabytes of data.” Dani put it in her windbreaker pocket and zipped it shut.

S
TILES LOOKED OUT HIS OFFICE
window and checked his watch: 6:29 p.m. He walked into the conference room to catch the news on one of the TVs he’d had installed when “The Girl” project, as he called it, commenced. With most of the team out of town, it was only the senior PIs he was interacting with today, so the conference room was unusually clean and devoid of the skeletons of sandwiches. It still smelled like stale coffee and perspiration, though.
Eyewitness News
reported on McCloskey’s murder, along with the back story on his status as the federal whistleblower on the painkiller, Myriad. His feet started itching, that curious sensation he always got when he knew something was wrong.

Murdered in his apartment.
The news said the coroner estimated it had happened on Friday. Stiles thought back. Madsen had started this crazy weekend late on Friday morning. In the early afternoon Stiles had brought Madsen to this very conference room, and briefed him on their progress. They’d talked about McCloskey, and he remembered Madsen leaving the room without saying much.
Weird. Disturbing.
Maguire gets murdered on Friday in what had to be a professional hit by a guy the police are now circulating sketches of with an acne-scarred face, blue eyes and curly blonde hair. Shave off the hair and it could be the same guy on the train to Washington chasing the girl that one of their team identified.

From the outset, Madsen had said someone in the industry must have killed Maguire to keep him from disclosing information that was damaging to the industry. That made sense. What didn’t make sense was that after Stiles told Madsen that Blum and the girl were staying at the Willard, some bellhop gets murdered in Blum’s room. Put that together with Madsen’s desperate need to find the girl but unwillingness to call Blum to fish around for information, and this started to stink. It was as though every time Stiles gave Madsen a crucial piece of information about the girl’s whereabouts, something happened. Was this blue-eyed man working for someone else or Madsen? The thought of that horrified and fascinated Stiles at the same time. Then pissed him off. Imagine him being a patsy, feeding information about the girl to Madsen, who was then trying to have his hired man kill her.

Back in his office, Stiles dialed Madsen’s cell phone.

“Yeah,” Madsen said, “what you got?”

“I’m in the office, covering things. I just saw on the news that McCloskey was murdered in his apartment, possibly as long ago as Friday. You know anything about that?”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m wondering if maybe something’s going on here that I don’t know about.”

“You need me to repeat my last question?”

“I’m wondering if I’m an unwitting accomplice to murder.”

Madsen was quiet for a moment. “Steve, what’s this about?”

“I’m starting to see a pattern. Maguire gets murdered by an obvious professional as he’s probably passing information to Dani North in her office on Friday. Some cop winds up mysteriously dead in the girl’s apartment shortly after. McCloskey, who we believe the girl visited before she skipped town, gets murdered
on Friday. And then on Saturday, one of our PIs says some guy is on the Amtrak train to DC trying to chase down the girl.”

“Is all this supposed to mean something?”

“What are you doing with the information I’m feeding you on the girl?”

“Who the fuck do you think you are, asking me a question like that?”

“I’m the guy who’s going to the cops with what I know if I don’t get an answer from you.” Madsen didn’t answer. Stiles could feel perspiration beading his forehead.

“All right I’ll tell you what I know,” Madsen said. I got word a few days ago from Bolton in R&D that Maguire was about to disclose Project Epsilon data just before the vaccine hearings in Washington.”

“I thought Epsilon had been killed five years ago.”

“It was, because I killed it. Because the whole industry, working on a study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, was unethical in the first place, even if it was to prove that vaccines were beneficial.”

“Unethical?”

“Yeah, how do you restrict kids to the unvaccinated control group when you know that not giving them vaccines puts their lives at risk?”

“I thought the industry shut down Epsilon because it didn’t want to have facts uncovered that it couldn’t live down.”

“The old, ‘what you don’t know can kill you.’ ”

“In this case, only if you find it out,” Stiles said. “So you stop the research if you’re afraid you won’t like the answer.”

“Whatever, I shut down Epsilon. But that’s not the point. Bolton told me that Maguire kept the study going by figuring out a way to hide the cost of it in his R&D budget.”

“How the hell’d he do that?”

“What the fuck, Steve, you know better than me our R&D budget’s $10 billion a year. How the hell could he
not
hide it? So five years later, here we are, with Maguire finding something out that he feels the public needs to know.”

Stiles felt a tremor in his chest. “I think that establishes motive.”

“For who?”

“You know who I’m talking about.”

“Be very careful what you say next.”

“You know me, Grover, I’m always careful. So what’s your answer? What’s going on here?”

“We’ve been together a long time. Don’t let this get ugly.”

“I need an answer. Am I feeding you information to help you snuff out the girl?”

“You ask me another question like that and I’ll have no choice but to fire you.”

It was enough to take Stiles aback. He’d never challenged Madsen like this before, and he realized his hands were shaking. Now Stiles felt his anger, and his courage, bleeding off. “I need to know,” he said, but he could tell Madsen heard the resignation in his voice.

“Steve,” Madsen said, his tone friendly now. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure, and I’m sorry I came back at you the way I did. I can’t think of anybody but you I could rely on. How about we just forget about this conversation?”

Stiles didn’t answer.

Madsen said, “I’ll call you later if I learn anything new. Thanks, my man.”

Madsen hung up, thinking he’d gotten Stiles back on the reservation. But he realized he’d need to do something about Stiles eventually. If this whole thing ended with the girl dead, Stiles would never buy into Madsen’s version of what happened to her. Stiles would undoubtedly make good on his threat to go to the cops.
What a bitch.
Stiles had been his right-hand man for a long time. But in any war there were casualties, even collateral damage. This was a just cause Madsen was fighting, so he needed to do what was necessary. It was a test of mettle, sacrificing Stiles if he needed to. The kind of decision that heads of state were faced with. You were either tough enough and committed enough to make the right decision—even in the face of emotion—or you weren’t. Lesser men would wilt in situations like this.

This little tree-hugger could bring down a century of progress in medicine if he didn’t stop her. It looked like Stiles could stand in the way of that, too. Madsen knew what he had to do, and that he was up to it. He poured himself a Grey Goose.

Then he dialed Xavier.

“Allo?”

“It’s Madsen.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to need another asset for another job.”

“Very well. How can I help?”

“It’s a man in New York. Someone who works for me. His name is Stephen Stiles, and he’s the CFO of my company.”

Xavier didn’t respond. Madsen had dealt with him enough to know Xavier was shocked by very little in his business.

Madsen continued, “It needs to happen immediately after our current deal is concluded. I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll make the arrangements. Any unusual circumstances?”

“It would be better…,” and Madsen cleared his throat before continuing, “if it appeared to be an accident.”

“I understand. Compensation and down payment will be the same as for the existing transaction, same wire transfer arrangements.”

“Right.” Madsen hung up. He put his drink down on the end table, then slid it away.

Fucking shitty business, this.

Stark was cleaning his Ruger when the cell phone rang. He saw the number, and pulled off his latex gloves. It was hard for him to muster the off-hand attitude. “Xavier, my man.”

Xavier didn’t respond right away.
Here we go again.
Stark’s antennae were up.

“It would seem you still have a problem.” “I never said I didn’t have my share of demons.” “I am not speaking about you. I am speaking about your client.”

It wasn’t time for Stark to be a smart-ass. “And?” “Your client has again requested an additional asset.”
Fuck.
Here in DC? He couldn’t believe it. “He may be covering multiple hotels. He and I talked about that possibility.” “No. He has another job in New York.” “That’s New York. I’m here in DC.”

“The timeframe on this is following completion of your transaction.”

Stark didn’t have an answer, so he didn’t offer one. Xavier said, “Do you have any idea why he would be dissatisfied with you?”

Because he’s a fucking asshole.
“He isn’t dissatisfied. I’m on this, and I’m the only guy who can get it done for him. So I guess he can’t spare me for anything else.”

Xavier didn’t answer.

Stark said, “Ask him.” When he heard the line cut off he wished he hadn’t said it. He also wished he’d never taken on this assignment. And he wished he could do something to Madsen, like tie him to a chair and rip his fingernails out with pliers. He walked into the bathroom to flush his eyes out with saline.