House Blood E-Book

Mike Lawson

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Orson Mulray, CEO of Mulray Pharma, has discovered a drug that could prevent a previously incurable disease and make him billions of dollars. But the drug needs to be tested on humans to prove its efficacy, and Mulray needs more than blood samples - he needs autopsy results. In naïve Lizzie Warwick, Mulray finds a solution. Warwick provides relief to victims of wars and natural disasters: in other words, people who'd make perfect test subjects. But Warwick's D.C. lobbyist discovers what Mulray is doing. Mulray has the lobbyist killed and frames his partner, Brian Kincaid, for murder. Two years later, Joe DeMarco is asked to look into the seemingly hopeless case. He has other worries on his mind: his girlfriend has left him, and his friend Emma may be dying. DeMarco doesn't expect to free Kincaid - or become the target of two of the most callous killers he and Emma have ever encountered...

Leseprobe

House Blood

Also by Mike Lawson

The Inside Ring

The Second Perimeter

House Rules

House Secrets

House Justice

House Divided

House Blood

A Joe DeMarco Thriller

MIKELAWSON

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2012 by Mike Lawson

This E-book edition published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

E-book ISBN: 978-1-61185-928-7

Grove Press Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

Prologue

Washington, D.C.~August 2009

Kelly and Nelson began by reviewing Brian Kincaid’s phone records and credit card statements and immediately saw the pattern—a pattern that had not changed in over a year. On the first Wednesday of the first week, they followed Kincaid and confirmed what the data had shown.

They spent several days analyzing the security procedures for the office building on K Street. It was an older building—built in the ­fifties—and only seven stories high. It didn’t have its own parking garage. Until a year ago, there was no general security for the building and if tenants wanted to protect their office spaces, they contracted with a private security company. But in 2008, two floors of the building were vacated by a law firm and temporarily leased by the Treasury Department to house federal employees displaced while a portion of the massive Treasury Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue was being renovated. The remaining five floors continued to be leased by private companies.

Because of whatever function the Treasury Department workers performed, there was now a metal detector in the lobby—something that had become almost a standard fixture in government buildings post 9/11—and during the day, two security guards screened people entering the building. Another requirement was that all the building’s tenants were required to wear security badges so the guards could distinguish tenants from visitors, and doors were secured in such a way that everyone one was forced to enter and exit the building via the lobby.

The building had three stairwells. The center stairwell exited onto a small loading dock, and the loading dock door was always kept locked when not in use. The two outer stairwells exited into the lobby. There was a security camera in the lobby and cameras in the elevators, but there were no cameras monitoring the loading dock behind the building or the stairwells. None of the doors that permitted access to the building were alarmed. Apparently protecting whatever Treasury was doing wasn’t worth the additional expense of wiring the building for alarms and adding more cameras.

At sixP.M., the two day-shift security guards were replaced by a single guard, and at eight o’clock, well after most of the building’s tenants had left for the day, the night-shift guard locked the lobby doors so he could use the restroom and go to other parts of the building if necessary. At midnight, for probably no good reason other than to keep himself awake, the guard made a floor-by-floor tour of the building that took approximately an hour. If a tenant needed to enter the building after eightP.M. he would buzz the guard and be required to show his security badge before being allowed to enter. Visitors were not allowed to enter after eightP.M. unless accompanied by a tenant.

It was hardly an airtight security system—not the type you’d see for a defense facility—but it was good enough to keep street people from wandering into the building and there were probably safes in the Treasury Department offices to further protect whatever documents were kept there. Kelly and Nelson, however, didn’t care about the Treasury Department. They concluded that the building’s security measures presented them no insurmountable problems, and the fact that there was a camera in the lobby actually worked to their advantage.

The background information provided on Brian Kincaid showed that he had a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver registered in his name. He didn’t have a carry permit or a concealed-weapons permit, and Kelly assumed that Kincaid kept the gun in his house. One day, after Kincaid left for work, Kelly put on gloves, picked the lock on the back door of Kincaid’s house, and entered to search for his pistol. Kincaid’s financial records had shown that he didn’t have a home security system and, since he didn’t have children, Kelly figured the gun would not be locked in a gun safe but would most likely be in the master bedroom on the second floor or in the den on the first floor. He searched the bedroom first and found the gun almost immediately in the nightstand on the right-hand side of Kincaid’s bed. He confirmed the gun was loaded, then placed it back in the nightstand and left the house.

On the following Wednesday, Kelly and Nelson followed Kincaid again to confirm he stuck to his routine. After Kincaid returned home, they went back to the building on K Street and, at approximately one A.M.—after the security guard had made his rounds—they went into the alley behind the building and Kelly picked the lock on the loading dock door. He then picked the lock three more times to make sure he could open the door quickly.

They jogged up the stairs to the sixth floor—both men proud they weren’t the least bit winded by the climb—entered the hallway, and walked down the hall until they reached a door labeled Downing and Kincaid, LLP. Kelly picked the lock on the door, but had a hard time with it; it took him almost two minutes. He picked it several more times but couldn’t open the door in less than a minute—and that wouldn’t do. He needed to be able to enter the office quickly, and if someone was inside the office—which there would be on the night of the operation—an occupant was likely to hear him picking the lock. They were going to have to make or steal a key.

For the next two days they observed Kincaid, his business partner, Phil Downing, and the secretary they shared. They noticed that the secretary wore a cloth lanyard around her neck like a necklace, and that on the lanyard was her security badge and two keys. They figured one of the keys was for the office and that the secretary kept it on the lanyard because she frequently ran errands for her bosses and was probably worried about forgetting her key and locking herself out. The other might be for a file cabinet or a safe, which they didn’t care about.

They followed the secretary that day when she left work and saw that she went immediately to a nearby bar. The next two days, she went to the same bar and each time had at least two drinks before she caught the Metro home. The secretary appeared to be a bit of a lush. As soon as she arrived at the bar, she would remove the security badge lanyard, drop it into her large purse, and plop the purse down on the floor on the right-hand side of her bar stool.

Kelly and Nelson had a brief, good-natured debate regarding which of them would be more appealing to the secretary. The next night when the woman went to the bar, Nelson approached her, standing on her left-hand side, and began talking to her. Kelly took a seat on the bar stool on her right, and when the woman appeared to be giving Nelson her full attention, he dropped his car keys on the floor. While picking them up, he used his big body to conceal what he was doing and plucked the lanyard from the secretary’s purse, then immediately went to the men’s room where he made a wax impression of the two keys on the lanyard. When he returned to the bar, the secretary was laughing loudly at something Nelson had said and had a hand on one of his muscular forearms. Kelly had no problem returning the security badge and keys to the secretary’s purse.

The next day Kelly went to a locksmith in a seedy part of Washington and placed the wax impressions of the keys on the counter. The locksmith looked down at the impressions, then into Kelly’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. Kelly placed four hundred-dollar bills on the counter and the locksmith picked up the money, put it in his pocket, and started making the keys. It was a completely wordless transaction.

That night, again at approximately one A.M., Kelly picked the lock on the loading dock door for the fifth time. He could now open the door in less than thirty seconds. He jogged up to the sixth floor, walked down the hallway to the offices of Downing and Kincaid, LLP, and tried the keys. The first key opened the door.

The next day, Kelly and Nelson wrote down on a large white board every action they would take and then analyzed the plan. What would they do if Kincaid deviated from his schedule? What if the guard left his post unexpectedly? What if there were other tenants in the building at nine o’clock at night? This was their biggest concern—that one of the tenants might decide to work late.

The building’s janitors left before seven P.M. each day except Friday, when they mopped and waxed the floors, and the Treasury Department’s civil servants poured out of the building at exactly five P.M., like somebody had set off a fire alarm. There were no law firms in the building, therefore no lawyers likely to be pulling all-nighters preparing for a case. There was an accounting firm on one floor but, as it wasn’t tax season, these folks wouldn’t likely be working late, and all the other tenants had occupations that typically allowed them to leave at the end of a normal workday. Kelly and Nelson finally concluded they would simply have to take the risk of one or two tenants staying late, but that the risk was small.

Their preparations were now complete.

They were ready to kill Phil Downing.

The next Wednesday, at approximately five-thirty P.M., they followed Kincaid from his office to his home in Arlington. As he had done every other Wednesday, Kincaid spent an hour inside the house, where they assumed he showered, shaved, and changed clothes. At seven P.M., he left his house and drove to a restaurant in Rosslyn—the same restaurant where, according to his credit card statements, he dined almost every Wednesday. As soon as Kincaid entered the restaurant, they drove back to his house. Kelly picked the lock on the back door, removed the .38 from the nightstand next to Kincaid’s bed, and then rejoined Nelson in the car.

At eight forty-five P.M., they were parked in front of a small parking lot a block from Kincaid’s office. The lot was where Kincaid parked every day and he had a sticker on his windshield that showed he paid monthly. The lot had no attendant. Customers who didn’t have monthly passes put their money in a box at the entrance and the money was collected twice a day.

At eight-fifty P.M., Kincaid drove into the parking lot. He exited his car, locked it, and headed in the direction of his building, and while Kelly followed Kincaid, Nelson parked their car in the lot where Kincaid had parked. Kelly watched as Kincaid buzzed the security guard, showed his security badge, and entered the building. Kelly looked at his watch. It was eight fifty-five P.M.

Nelson joined Kelly on the sidewalk in front of the building, and at nine-ten P.M. they watched Phil Downing buzz the security guard and enter the building. As soon as Downing was in the elevator, Kelly walked to the alley behind the building, picked the lock on the loading dock door, jogged up to the sixth floor, and cracked the stairwell door open so he could see down the hallway.

At nine twenty-six P.M., Kincaid exited his office. On all three Wednesdays that Kelly and Nelson had observed him, he’d left the building just a little before nine-thirty. Two minutes after Kincaid caught the elevator, Nelson called Kelly’s cell phone. The cell phone vibrated once, then stopped, and Kelly didn’t answer the phone. The phone call meant that Kincaid had left the building.

Now, unless Kincaid changed his routine, he would leave his car in the parking lot and walk to a nearby bar on M Street, where he would drink single-malt Scotch for approximately two hours and try to pick up a woman. If he did meet a woman it would not be ideal, but there wasn’t anything that could be done about that. Nelson would follow Kincaid to make sure he went to the bar and didn’t move his car. If Kincaid did remove his car from the parking lot and drove home or to some other establishment, Nelson would follow him. They needed to be able to gain access to Kincaid’s car after Kelly accomplished his task.

Kelly looked at his watch. It was nine thirty-two P.M. He had eight minutes. He walked down the hallway and used his key to open the door to the offices of Downing and Kincaid, LLP. Downing was, as expected, sitting at his desk. When he saw Kelly, he rose and said, “What the hell? Who are—”

Kelly shot Downing in the heart with Kincaid’s revolver. The gun wasn’t silenced and the shot was alarmingly loud within the confines of Downing’s office, but Kelly was confident the security guard in the lobby six floors below wouldn’t hear the shot.

Kelly knelt next to Downing’s body and checked for a pulse. Downing’s heart was still beating, but just barely. Kelly wouldn’t leave until he was dead. He knelt there looking down impassively at Downing, waiting for the man to die, and as he was waiting the phone on Downing’s desk began to ring. Kelly looked at his watch. Nine-forty P.M. The call was right on time. Kelly checked Downing again for a pulse and this time didn’t find one. Phil Downing was dead.

Kelly left Downing’s office and took the stairs down to the loading dock and left the building. He walked to the parking lot where Kincaid’s car was parked, checked to make sure no one was watching, and used a slim jim to open the driver’s-side door. It took him less than five seconds. He then popped the trunk latch, placed Kincaid’s gun beneath the spare tire, closed the trunk, and relocked the driver’s-side door.

Kelly pulled out his cell phone and called Nelson—who was still watching Kincaid to make sure he didn’t leave the bar—and five minutes later Nelson joined him in the parking lot.

“Everything go okay?” Nelson asked.

“Yep,” Kelly said.

They entered their car and pulled out of the parking lot.

“Are you hungry?” Nelson said.

“Starving,” Kelly said.

“You wanna go to Morton’s for a steak?” Three years ago they couldn’t have afforded a steak at Morton’s.

“You think they’ll serve us the way we’re dressed?” They were both neatly attired but wearing casual clothes: jeans, polo shirts, and tennis shoes.

“And who’s gonna refuse to serve us?” Nelson said.

Kelly laughed and high-fived Nelson. “Hooah!” he said.

Hooah is the phonetic spelling of the military acronym HUA, which stands for: Heard. Understood. Acknowledged. It’s a word particularly favored by U.S. Army Rangers. When a Ranger is told to march, to fight, to kill—the response is: Hooah!

The only thing was, Kelly and Nelson were no longer in the military. They worked for a pharmaceutical company.

1

Three years earlier Wilmington, Delaware~March 2006

Orson Mulray was fifty-three years old. He stood six foot two and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, but thanks to a broad chest and wide shoulders he carried the weight well and appeared powerful rather than obese. He had a full head of gray hair that was trimmed weekly by a stylist, a large, fleshy nose, and a blunt, determined chin. He was not a handsome man, but he looked confident, competent, and prosperous. One could envision him playing a corporate executive in a movie—CEO or Chairman of the Board—and he would have been perfect for the role because that’s exactly who he was.

Orson sat in a dark blue suit in one of half a dozen graveside chairs. Delaware’s governor sat on his right-hand side, and next to the governor was her husband and next to him was a retired Delaware senator. The senator had been one of his father’s oldest friends. On Orson’s left were his son and daughter—his father’s only grandchildren—two sullen-looking teenagers whom Orson had barely spoken to since divorcing his wife four years ago. The crowd standing behind the graveside seats consisted of over two hundred people, mostly wealthy businessmen and community leaders who had known his father and claimed to have admired him.

As his father’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the governor reached over and took Orson’s hand to convey her sympathy and support. He glanced over at her, gave her hand a small squeeze to let her know that he appreciated her being there, then looked straight ahead, his face appropriately solemn, as his father’s casket descended slowly into the grave.

What he wanted to do was leap to his feet and cheer.

He didn’t think the old bastard would ever die. There had been times when he had wondered, as illogical as it sounded, if Clayton Mulray had discovered an elixir for immortality. But finally, he was gone. Finally, at the age of eighty-four, his father’s small, hard heart stopped beating—and, as soon as this farce of mourning was over, Orson Mulray would move forward with his plan to become, quite possibly, the richest man on the planet.

Clayton Mulray founded Mulray Pharma in 1953, the same year Orson was born. He worked eighteen-hour days. He developed an effective sales force, established a research division, and bought patents on promising drugs with money borrowed from greedy lenders. He learned how to bribe doctors to push his products on their patients, he manipulated the FDA to get his drugs approved, and he hired lobbyists to influence Congress. He contributed handsomely to those politicians favorable to his endeavors, like the retired senator who attended his funeral. At the time of his death, Mulray Pharma was the twelfth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world, the eighth-largest in the United States, and number 435 on the Fortune 500 list. Its revenues in 2006 were eighteen billion, its net income four billion, and it spent three point six billion on research. It was a solid company.

The problem—at least from his son’s perspective—was that in the last five years of his life, the old man decided he wanted a legacy. After a lifetime of self-centered overindulgence, Clayton Mulray wanted to do something to help his fellow man, and he tasked Mulray Pharma’s R&D division to concentrate their efforts on cost-effective drugs for diseases that affect third world countries: malaria, tuberculosis, measles, sleeping sickness caused by tsetse flies. Orson attempted to get his father to work on drugs that were more profitable—and on one drug in particular.

“Who gets bitten by tsetse flies?” he screamed at the old man. Then he answered his own question: “Fucking Africans, that’s who! They don’t have any money, you old fool!” But his father could not be deterred, and Orson didn’t have the power to overrule him.

But now, Clayton Mulray was rotting in a fifty-thousand-dollar casket six feet beneath the ground.

Following the funeral, Orson, his ex-wife, his children, his ex-wife’s lawyer, and a few of his father’s oldest servants—the chauffeur, cooks, gardeners, and maids—went to the office of his father’s attorney to listen to a reading of the will.

Orson sat there stoically as the will was read, showing no emotion. His father had informed him a year earlier of his intentions and, of course, the company’s board of directors and the SEC had to be informed as well. The will left small amounts to the ­servants—a hundred thousand to each individual—and established a two-­hundred-million-dollar trust fund for Clayton’s grandchildren. The trust would be controlled by his father’s lawyer so that neither Orson nor his ex-wife could get their hands on the money. And all this was fine by Orson.

The bell ringer in the will—and the reason why the board and the SEC had to be notified in advance—was that half of Clayton Mulray’s stock in the company would be sold and the money used to establish a philanthropic organization. At the time of his death, Clayton Mulray owned one hundred and four million shares of Mulray Pharma stock, currently trading at twenty-seven dollars a share—and the value of half those shares was one point four billion dollars. The philanthropy would be called the Clayton Mulray Foundation.

The only good news from Orson Mulray’s perspective was that even after his father’s insane act of generosity, Orson would still be the largest shareholder in Mulray Pharma. And because he was CEO and chairman of the board—and because the board was a rubber stamp—this meant he had total control of the company. And control of the company was the only thing that really mattered.

Another condition of the will was that in order for Orson to inherit his father’s remaining stock, he had to agree to cap his salary as CEO at one million a year for the next five years. His father had wanted his only son to remain in charge of the company—he just didn’t feel that Orson needed to be as rich as he had been. Fortunately, even though Orson’s salary was capped at a million, his bonus was tied to the company’s stock price and, if his plan succeeded, the price was going to jump dramatically. In fact, dramatically was an understatement.

So Orson Mulray was still a wealthy man. His father had been number 147 on the Forbes 400 list but, because of the will, Orson was now 355. He was still a member of America’s most exclusive club—but just barely. He also inherited from his father a seventeen-thousand-square-foot mansion in the exclusive Montchanin section of Wilmington, a ski lodge in Vail, and a yacht worth two point five million.

The problem, at least temporarily, was his salary as CEO of Mulray Pharma. Half his salary went to his ex-wife, his taxes were mind-boggling, and there was no way he could get by on a mere five hundred thousand a year. If he needed cash he could, of course, always sell some of his stock—but the last thing he was going to do was sell stock. Not only didn’t he want to jeopardize his position as largest shareholder in the company, but more important, if his plan succeeded, the more stock he had the richer he’d be in the long run. So, thanks to his father, he was going to have to sell the yacht and the place in Vail to maintain his lifestyle for a few years.

What his father had done to him was cruel and humiliating, and if he hadn’t made his own funeral arrangements, Orson would have buried the old bastard in a cardboard box.

Orson went from the lawyer’s office to the luxurious Green Room in the Hotel du Pont, where Fiona West was waiting. On the table was a bottle of Dom Pérignon Oenotheque Rose in an ice bucket, the champagne purchased by Fiona to celebrate his father’s long-awaited demise.

Fiona raised her champagne flute in a toast as Orson sat. “Congratulations,” she said. “You’re now officially an orphan.” Then, seeing that he was still brooding over the will, Fiona said, “Oh, cheer up, Orson. Five years from now you’ll have more money than you can count.”

And that was true. But what Fiona didn’t understand was that he wasn’t really motivated by money or the things money could buy. Money was just a way of keeping score. What motivated him was Mulray Pharma being the twelfth largest pharmaceutical company in the world, and not the first. Being any number on the Forbes 400 list but No. 1. And, most important, that if he succeeded, people would no longer say: Orson Mulray? Oh! You mean Clayton’s boy. There was no point, however, in explaining any of this to Fiona.

He poured himself some champagne, and he and Fiona touched glasses. “To the future,” he said.

To execute his plan, Orson needed someone to help him. For one thing, he couldn’t do it all by himself and still manage the company. But the other reason he needed a partner was that he wanted to be at least one step removed from the crimes he planned to commit so that in the unlikely event those crimes ever came to light, there would be someone to blame. In Fiona West, he’d found the person he needed.

Fiona was a striking woman, almost six feet tall. She had a generous bosom, narrow hips, and shapely, mile-long legs. Her eyes were almond-shaped, the irises green, flecked with yellow. Her dark hair was cut short on top, close on the sides, and parted on the left. The hairstyle didn’t make her look mannish, however—just edgy. In fact, edgy may have been the best way to describe Fiona both physically and emotionally. And although she was striking, she wasn’t truly beautiful. Her face—a mirror to her personality—was too angular, too sharp, too severe. It reflected her coldness and her arrogance.

Fiona was Mulray Pharma’s chief in-house legal counsel. She had five lawyers working for her and managed the work that was farmed out to any outside law firms the company retained. Orson’s father had hired her—one of the few good decisions he’d made in his waning years—because she came with a well-deserved reputation for representing her clients in an absolutely feral manner: she ripped her opponents to shreds, using any tactic, ethical or otherwise, to win.

She became Orson’s mistress a year after coming to work for the company, but Orson ended the affair after only two months. For some reason, she was just awful in bed. She would lie there with her eyes tightly shut, barely moving, clearly relieved when the act was over. Copulating with a corpse would have been more satisfying. Orson suspected the only reason she went to bed with him in the first place was to help her career—and he actually admired her for this.

Fiona was bright, determined, relentless, and ruthless—and flawed in a number of ways. She was extremely paranoid, childishly vindictive, and absolutely vicious when she didn’t get her way. Orson suspected she was some variety of sociopath—and from his perspective, this wasn’t a bad thing. She was his sociopath. His main concern was that she was going to be difficult to control—but Orson’s job was controlling people.

He’d first approached her about his plan two years before his father’s death. The initial discussions were very general, very cautious—almost philosophical in nature—but once he explained the financial upside, he found that caution wasn’t necessary. For the amount of money he was talking about, Fiona, like himself, was willing to accept the risks. She finally decided she wanted to be paid one billion dollars if they were successful—and Orson agreed, because a billion was going to be a small percentage of what he expected to make. Had she asked for two or three billion he would have agreed, and the fact that she asked for only one meant that she didn’t really understand the potential payoff. They didn’t have a written contract, however, because Orson knew that if he reneged on his part of the deal Fiona would make sure that he served the remainder of his life in prison. As he came to know Fiona better, he realized she was more likely to just have him killed.

“When are you going to Princeton?” Fiona asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” Orson said. “There’s no reason to delay.”

Since they had been discussing the plan the last two years while they waited for his father to die, there really wasn’t anything more to discuss at this point. Orson would take care of the doctor-scientist while the rest of the preliminary actions would be Fiona’s responsibility: arranging security for the research facility, obtaining a doctor to administer field testing of the drug, invading the Warwick Foundation, and hiring the security specialists.

Security specialists sounded better than killers.

2

Princeton, New Jersey~March 2006

Orson Mulray drove himself to Princeton to meet Dr. Simon Ballard for the first time. Ballard was Orson’s Sir Galahad—he was going to bring him the Holy Grail of medicine. And although this would be the first time he would lay eyes on Ballard in the flesh, Orson knew everything there was to know about the man. He had hired a private investigator to delve into Ballard’s past, to see if he had any nasty habits, any skeletons in his closet. He didn’t. Ballard was an open book, a very boring open book. The only thing he cared about was his research.

Orson became aware of Simon Ballard when he asked himself the following question: What kind of drug could he produce that every civilized person in the world would buy and continue to buy, whether they needed it or not? When he answered that question to his satisfaction, he tasked Mulray Pharma’s R&D division to look for scientists who appeared to be taking the most unique approach to solving the problem—and they discovered Simon Ballard.

Ballard had written a grant proposal that was rejected when Clayton Mulray ran the company. In part, the proposal was rejected because it was so poorly written that it was almost incomprehensible. It was also rejected because even if Ballard’s theories were correct, it was going to take a decade for him to get the data he needed to prove his theories and, after that, at least another decade to get the FDA to approve the drug. But his approach to curing the disease was radically different from other cures being tried, and this is what appealed to Orson Mulray.

The other good thing about Ballard was that rival drug companies had chosen to ignore him. Not only were his theories unorthodox, but Ballard was horrible at self-promotion—he had the personality of a fence post—and, as Orson had seen from his grant proposal, the man had almost no communication skills. But were the other companies right? Was Ballard a man who should be ignored?

Orson had learned from his father that a successful CEO had to rely on his instincts. You listened to your advisers, you looked at the data, but in the end you had to go with your gut—and Orson’s gut told him to go with Ballard. He didn’t rely totally on instinct, however. He took all of Ballard’s research he could lay his hands on—including unpublished data hacked directly from Ballard’s personal computer—and parceled it out to scientists who were the best in their fields of study. He didn’t allow any of them to see the complete picture and he paid them an outrageous amount of money to confirm Ballard’s conclusions, but only after they had signed nondisclosure agreements that would turn them into homeless paupers if they ever violated them. In the end, he decided to gamble on Ballard. And it wasn’t a small gamble. Not only would he be risking a substantial percentage of Mulray Pharma’s R&D budget—he could end up in jail if things went wrong.

When Orson entered the laboratory, Simon Ballard was sitting in front of a computer monitor, squinting at the screen. Other than the two classes he taught, the man was almost always in the lab, and usually until one or two in the morning because he had virtually no social life. Every Tuesday he played chess with a colleague, and every Friday he had dinner with a woman who taught creative writing and spent the night at the woman’s house.

Orson had his private detective plant listening devices in the woman’s house because he was curious about her relationship with Ballard. Their conversations were mostly one-sided, with the woman either backstabbing her colleagues or going on for hours about a novel she’d been trying to get published for ten years. The two of them didn’t sound particularly intimate and they never discussed any sort of future together. When they had sex, the act was brief and mostly silent. Orson concluded they were just two lonely, unattractive people using each other for sex, and that Ballard had no deep feelings for the woman.

The man who was to be Orson Mulray’s salvation was forty-four years old and he was wearing what he wore almost every day: baggy, wrinkled khaki pants, a white short-sleeved shirt, and running shoes. During the winter he added a ratty blue sweater to his ensemble. He was six foot three, weighed one hundred and fifty-two pounds, and had long spindly legs, a short torso, and long tubular arms. He looked like an ungainly, unsymmetrical, four-legged spider. His wire-rimmed glasses were so smudged with fingerprints it was a wonder he could see, and he needed a haircut. He was as physically imposing as dirt.

But what a brain.

Orson walked over to Ballard and introduced himself, and he could tell that Ballard didn’t like being disturbed while he was working but was too meek to say so.

“Uh, what can I do for you?” Ballard asked.

Orson answered the question with a question. “Doctor, what do you want more than anything else in the world?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Ballard said, shaking his head, both irritated and confused. “I suppose I have everything I want. I make a decent salary and the university allows me to pursue my research.”

“No, Doctor, you don’t have everything you want. The first thing you want is unlimited funding for your research and the time to pursue it without interruption. Last year you were only able to obtain two hundred thousand in federal grants, and half the money went to the university to pay for its overhead instead of your research.” Orson didn’t bother to add that the reason he hadn’t received more funding was because his grant proposals were so poorly written that no one could understand what the hell he was talking about.

“How do you know . . .”

“And the university wastes your valuable time by making you teach two classes that could be taught by someone with half your intelligence, and the salary you’re paid is an insult.”

“What do you want?” Ballard asked again.

“Doctor, I’m the CEO of Mulray Pharma. Last year we spent almost four billion on research and if you come to work for me, I’ll quadruple your current salary.”

Although Orson’s salary as CEO was limited to a mere million, he could spend Mulray Pharma’s money however he pleased on anything directly related to the company.

“What?” Ballard said. He had heard Orson—he just couldn’t believe what he had heard.

“Obviously, the results of your research, if they come to fruition, would become the property of Mulray Pharma, but I’m also willing to structure your contract so that you’ll get a percentage of any profits the company makes on the drug.”

A different sort of man would have asked: How big a percentage? But Ballard didn’t ask that question. Instead he asked, “How much will you commit to my research?”

“Doctor, I will give you a laboratory designed to your specifications, but the lab needs to be in Delaware where Mulray Pharma is headquartered. And I’ll let you have as large a staff as you think you need but, for security reasons, we need to hold the number to the minimum required. Furthermore, I’ll let you pick your staff and I’ll throw enough money at the people you want to ensure they accept the job. However, and again for security reasons, I’ll need to approve and do background checks on every person you hire.”

Ballard just stood there with his mouth open. Judging by the expression on his face, one would have thought that he had just spoken to God.

“This . . . this . . . this is extraordinary,” he stammered. “Why are you doing this?”

“For the obvious reason, Doctor. For money. I think you’re going to produce one of the most valuable drugs ever manufactured.”

“It will help so many people,” Ballard said.

“Yes, that too,” Orson said.

“You understand, don’t you, that it will take years to get this drug approved. I mean, with the FDA’s procedures . . .”

“Doctor, you let me worry about the FDA.”

Before Ballard could say anything else, Orson said, “I asked what you wanted more than anything else in the world, and one of those things is the time and resources to pursue your research, as we’ve already discussed. But you want one other thing, Doctor. You want a certain prize for medicine, and I guarantee that if you produce the results I expect, I’ll get you the prize. I’ll buy you the prize.”

“The Nobel?” Ballard said.

“I guarantee it.

Dr. Simon Ballard was his.

3

Paris, France~April 2006

Fiona’s first task was obtaining the services of the right doctor to manage the field testing of Ballard’s drug. This person had to be extremely charismatic and had to be an English-speaking foreigner—a doctor who was a U.S. citizen could complicate some of the legal issues Fiona might encounter in the future. After working her way through the dossiers of eight likely candidates—dossiers compiled by a rather unique firm of headhunters she employed—she decided a French physician named René Lambert was the best choice.

Lambert was a general practitioner based in Paris. Judging by his scholastic records he was most likely a mediocre doctor, but his medical skills were irrelevant. He knew enough medicine to do what Orson Mulray needed done. He came from old money, but the money had evaporated in the last decade due to a global recession and the fact that Lambert spent far more than he earned. He was up to his neck in debt and would soon be in over his head.

René Lambert was thirty-eight years old and had a beautiful Swedish wife and two beautiful daughters. He also had a mistress; the mistress would have to go. But the fact that he was appealing to women was one of the reasons Fiona selected him. He was dark-haired, tall, slender, and well muscled. His face was lean, his jaw strong, his chin dimpled. His eyes were a startling shade of blue. The only feature he had that wasn’t perfect was his nose, which had a slight bump in the middle. The bump had been caused by a bicycling accident, but rather than detracting from his appearance the nose-bump actually enhanced it, making him appear more rugged and less pretty. Even Fiona—who had no interest in sex ­whatsoever—found his looks distracting.

She met Lambert in a suite at the Ritz Paris that cost twenty-two hundred euros a night. She wanted to impress upon him immediately that money was of no concern to his future employer. She poured him a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue without asking if that’s what he wanted; she already knew his favorite drink. She began by saying, “Doctor, my name is Fiona West and I represent Orson Mulray, CEO of Mulray Pharma. Mr. Mulray is willing to pay you one million dollars a year for a job that we expect will take four or five years.”

A million was a number that always got a prospective employee’s immediate attention, and for a company that measured its profits in billions, a million really wasn’t all that much. Lambert was shocked by the offer, but not as shocked as Simon Ballard had been. The expression on René Lambert’s handsome face indicated that he was a man who had always expected that grand things would happen to him—and it looked as if they finally had.

“And, may I ask,” Lambert said in wonderfully accented English—he was a TV producer’s dream—“what I have to do to be compensated so generously?”

“I wasn’t finished discussing your compensation,” Fiona said, and then told him that in addition to his annual salary, Mulray Pharma would purchase back for him the mountain chalet in Grenoble he had been forced to sell to stay ahead of his creditors.

“But you need to dump your mistress here in Paris. Having a mistress may be acceptable to your wife, but it won’t be to a number of other people. You need to have an untarnished image.”

Lambert made a face that only a Frenchman could make, his expression saying: C’est la vie. Fiona knew, however, that Lambert was incapable of remaining faithful to his wife, and that she’d have to deal with his rampant libido at some future date.

“When are you going to tell me what you expect me to do?” ­Lambert said.

“Now,” Fiona said.

First, she explained, he would have to convince Lizzie ­Warwick, founder of the Warwick Foundation, to partner with him. Fiona figured with his looks and his charm—and the secret and substantial financial backing of Mulray Pharma—that wouldn’t be hard to do. Lizzie Warwick was not to know about his association with Mulray Pharma, of course. She would assume the money that Lambert brought to her foundation came from his wealthy European friends.

“I don’t believe Lizzie will be a problem,” Lambert said.

Second, he would have to spend at least six months of every year for the next four or five years in the godforsaken places where Lizzie Warwick went. He would be living in miserable and sometimes dangerous conditions. Fiona could tell this didn’t appeal to him at all but, after a moment, he nodded his acceptance.

“Third,” she said, “it will be your job to select appropriate subjects for certain clinical trials, establish facilities to house those subjects for as long as necessary, and hire appropriate local talent to administer drugs and obtain biological samples.”

Before Lambert could respond, Fiona said, “And there’s one more thing.” After she told him what that was, Lambert emptied his Scotch glass in one swallow and said, “I don’t think I can . . .”

“You realize,” Fiona said, “that this drug will help millions of people. It will be a historic medical achievement, and you will have been part of that achievement.”

“That may be but . . .”

It took Fiona almost an hour to convince Lambert, during which time he had two more Scotches—they were going to have to watch his ­drinking —but he finally agreed to become an employee of Mulray Pharma after Fiona agreed to increase his annual salary by another quarter million.

And at that moment, Fiona knew exactly how the Devil must have felt when he shook hands with Dr. Faust.

Eastern Indonesia~May 2006

Orson Mulray needed human subjects in order to test Dr. Ballard’s drug, and the ideal subject was a person too poor and too ignorant to refuse anything supposedly being done for his or her benefit. Furthermore, these people would be required to sign documents stating that they consented to the testing, and it would begood if they were illiterate. Finally, the countries in which the test subjects resided had to have governments susceptible to bribery and without the resources to waste on issues as nebulous as drug testing. Lizzie Warwick and her foundation would provide subjects who met these criteria.

Now, almost all pharmaceutical companies do some clinical trials in third world countries these days, and although the practice may be frowned upon in some circles, it isn’t illegal. So Orson didn’t really need the Warwick Foundation to test Ballard’s drug, but he wanted it for two reasons. First, by using Warwick for cover, there was less chance that another pharmaceutical company would discover that Mulray Pharma was developing a new product. The second reason was that Lizzie Warwick, like Fiona West, would provide a barrier between Orson Mulray and his crimes.

Lizzie Warwick came from a Philadelphia family that made its fortune producing weapons for any country with the means to buy them. Land mines were a particularly profitable product line. In 2003, in her thirties, unmarried and childless and having no idea what to do with her life, Lizzie accompanied a church group as a volunteer to help rebuild homes destroyed by a hurricane—and found her calling. She turned the family fortune into the Warwick Foundation and thereafter took it upon herself to go to places afflicted by war and natural disaster to do what she could.

Lizzie was a brave, bighearted woman, but the relief business is a complicated one, dealing with the logistics of moving supplies to distant shores, negotiating with foreign governments, raising money, then accounting for the money raised. Organizations like the Red Cross hire professionals to deal with these complex issues—and pay them well—but Lizzie, a person with absolutely no managerial ability, relied primarily on people like herself, people who didn’t necessarily have the requisite skills but who were dedicated and willing to volunteer. This also made her and her foundation perfect for Orson Mulray.

Lizzie met Dr. René Lambert for the first time on an Indonesian island that had been struck by torrential rains and mud slides, and as if God wasn’t satisfied that these poor islanders had been sufficiently tested, a small earthquake demolished the few structures not swept away by the floods and slides. Ten villages were wiped out, hundreds died, and thousands were left homeless, starving, and dying of thirst and dysentery.

The night they met, Lizzie was sitting in her tent, so fatigued she could barely lift her thin arms. Her pale face was streaked with mud and sweat; her wiry red hair was plastered to her skull. Earlier that day, while passing out bottles of water to victims, she had heard a child crying, the sound coming from a hut so buried by mud that only the top of its tin roof was visible. Lizzie had joined the villagers’ frantic efforts to save the child, but when they’d reached her an hour later, the little girl was dead.

René Lambert patted Lizzie sympathetically on the shoulder and then told her about himself. He said he had been blessed with so much that he could no longer sit idly by watching others suffer while he did nothing, so he’d brought a planeful of medical supplies to Indonesia and was tending to the unfortunate as best he could. But, he told her, he could see that he had grossly underestimated the enormity of the task.

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Lizzie said.

Lambert worked with Lizzie for two weeks and, to impress her, he worked just as hard as she did—which was very hard indeed. One night, after a particularly long and frustrating day—a day when supplies Lizzie was expecting failed to arrive—Lambert proposed that they join forces. He would provide a medical arm for the Warwick Foundation. He would get other doctors and nurses to join him, à la Doctors Without Borders. More important, if they joined forces they could double their fund-raising efforts—and he was, he said with a self-deprecating smile, an excellent fund-raiser.

René Lambert bedazzled Lizzie Warwick.

“I can see, however, that we need a good administrator,” Lambert said. “You know, an experienced person to deal with all the logistical problems of getting things to places like this. And it would be good if this person was able to manage the money as well. I don’t know about you, but accounting is not one of my skills.”

Lizzie admitted it wasn’t one of hers, either. In fact, Lizzie rarely paid any attention to the money end of the business, and the accountant she used was a nice man who volunteered his time but really wasn’t in the best of health.

“We’re going to need some sort of security as well,” Lambert said. “We have to make sure the things we bring to help these poor people actually get to them. Half the drugs I brought with me have been stolen.”

“Do you know anyone who can do these jobs?” Lizzie asked.

“I believe I can find the right men,” Dr. Lambert said.

4

Leavenworth, Kansas~June 2006

Bill Hobson was sixty-one years old. He was five foot eight, wore a hearing aid in his right ear, and had a small paunch. His gray hair was cut short, the way he’d always worn it, and wire-rimmed bifocals covered weak blue eyes. He did not cut an imposing figure. He was currently residing in a thirty-eight-dollar-per-night motel room. He had been in the room for three days—contemplating suicide.

William Benedict Hobson had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Like most young men who graduate from that fine institution, he envisioned himself heroically leading battalions into battle, having four stars on his shoulders, maybe one day becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not to be. The army needed warriors but it also needed men to help the army run like the well-oiled machine it was. Somebody had to be responsible for getting the food, ammunition, and boots to the front lines; somebody had to make sure there were spare parts to maintain the tanks, helicopters, and personnel carriers. And Bill Hobson, over his strenuous objections, became that somebody.

He was a maniac for detail and could juggle numbers and complex schedules in his head when other men needed computers to assist them. He also had that rare ability to anticipate all the things that could possibly go wrong and develop contingency plans to address those things. He became, almost from the day he left the Point, the man his bosses turned to to handle the complex logistics of military operations. And, as is often the case in bureaucracies, Hobson soon found that excelling could actually become a hindrance to advancement: he filled a vital niche and was too good at what he did to be allowed to transfer to the war-fighting side of the service.

He advanced, of course, and ultimately reached the rank of colonel, but when it came to selecting men for the general staff, he was passed over. At the level where stars are affixed to a soldier’s uniform, the army has to consider the whole package and not just an individual’s experience and ability. They have to consider if a man looks like a general, whether or not he will be an appropriate poster boy for the service. They need to gauge his political skills. Will he be able to swim with the sharks at the Pentagon and the even bigger sharks on Capitol Hill? Can he communicate? Can he give a speech that will not only rouse the troops but will provide the necessary sound bite for the evening news? And William Hobson, to his great dismay—dismay that eventually turned to boiling rage—was found lacking in these more esoteric qualities of generalship.

The army gave Hobson the opportunity to serve three more years as a colonel before he would be forced to retire, and his initial reaction was to tell the army to shove its opportunity up its ass. Then he had another idea. He decided that since the army wouldn’t give him the star he deserved—and, more important, the pension that came with that star—he would steal enough to make up the difference.

Hobson waited until he was alone one night, then sat down at the desk of a staff sergeant who worked for him, entered the sergeant’s password into his computer, and modified the payment information for a certain vendor the army used. This particular vendor sold tires for certain army vehicles—and the army has a lot of vehicles.

On subsequent nights, and over a three-month period, Hobson did other things on the staff sergeant’s computer. He prepared a purchase order for four hundred and eighty thousand dollars’ worth of tires. (He had wanted to order half a million dollars’ worth but was worried about using such a round number.) The vendor never received the purchase order but, thanks to Hobson, all the required forms were electronically filed by the vendor, showing that the tires had been manufactured and inspected and would be sent to a dozen army bases around the globe upon receipt of payment. Then Hobson, as he was required to do in his position, authorized payment to the vendor, and the money was electronically sent on its way—it just didn’t end up in the tire vendor’s bank account, just as the tires never showed up in the supply system inventory.

Now, the Pentagon has a number of elaborate controls to prevent the type of crime Bill Hobson committed. There are checks and double checks, procedures to be followed that are subject to audit and review. But Hobson was intimately familiar with these procedures; he had, in fact, developed many of them. Also, an integral part of the army’s fraud protection program was that supervisors of a certain rank had to approve procurements above a certain dollar value. But in this particular case, Hobson was that supervisor.

And although half a million dollars might sound like a lot to ordinary folk, in terms of the Pentagon’s budget it was an amount that could literally be written off as a rounding error. That particular year, DOD’s budget was four hundred and onebilliondollars, and half a million was .000124% of that budget. It would be a miracle if an auditor noticed that half a million had disappeared, and if an auditor did notice, the chances of him tracing the loss back to Hobson was so small that . . . Well, put it this way: the auditor would be more likely to win the multistate mega-lotto with a single ticket than catch Bill Hobson.

The day four hundred and eighty thousand dollars was deposited into Hobson’s bank account, he treated himself to dinner at the most expensive steakhouse in Washington. He was arrested two days after his steak dinner.

What Hobson didn’t realize was that the night he changed the payment information in the tire vendor’s file, the Pentagon’s IT guys were doing one of their frequent, random security audits. They weren’t looking for anything specific, just funny business. Funny business like folks stealing identity information, or viewing pornography online, or, the biggie, someone e-mailing classified documents to places they weren’t supposed to go. The night Hobson replaced the tire vendor’s bank account number with his own, a bright-eyed sergeant from Clinton, Iowa, named Millie Cooper, sitting in front of a computer on the B ring of the Pentagon, saw the changes being made on her screen. And Millie said: Hmmm? I wonder what that’s all about? Why are these numbers being changed at nine o’clock at night? Millie noted that the person logged onto the computer was, per the password used, Staff Sergeant Henry Main, but when she checked the security guys’ computer, it showed that Sergeant Main had swiped his badge through a bar-code reader when he left the Pentagon at 1630 hours. Hmmm? Millie said again.

Millie called her boss and the next day her boss called the lawyers and the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The lawyers obtained a warrant to find out whom the bank account belonged to and discovered it was one Colonel William Hobson and then everybody—cops, lawyers, and Millie—just sat back and watched until Hobson completed his crime. And then they arrested him.

Hobson was dishonorably discharged, stripped of his pension, and given ten years in Leavenworth, of which he served six. His wife divorced him, took his house and what little savings they had, and his children wouldn’t speak to him. Maybe the worst thing that happened was that his dog died while he was in jail; Hobson had loved that dog more than he did his wife. On the day he left Leavenworth, his net worth, not counting his shoes and the clothes on his back, was three hundred and fourteen dollars. Considering his criminal record, Hobson figured he had two choices: he could get a job at a car wash or he could commit suicide—and suicide seemed more appealing.

As he sat there in his cheap, depressing motel room, there was a knock on the door, which puzzled him because he couldn’t imagine who would want to talk to him. He was certain it wasn’t a maid bringing him fresh towels. He opened the door, and standing there was a stunning woman. Her face was somewhat harsh and he didn’t like her punkish haircut, but she had the kind of body he’d fantasized about when he masturbated in prison.

“Bill,” she said, “my name is Fiona West and I have a job for you. May I come in?”

Hobson, too stunned to speak, stepped aside and allowed Fiona into his room, where she explained that the job entailed getting relief supplies to various third world countries and shipping biological samples to a lab in Delaware.

“I could do that with my eyes shut,” Hobson said.

“You don’t need to sell yourself, Bill. I know what you used to do and I know you were good at it. Until you decided to become a thief, that is.” She held up a silencing hand when Hobson attempted to explain his career-ending decision. “I don’t care why you did it,” Fiona said.

“How much does the job pay?” Hobson asked, although he knew he was in no position to negotiate and would accept whatever salary she offered.

“Mulray Pharma is willing to pay you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.”

“Jesus!” Hobson said, before he could stop himself. As a retired one-star general he would have made less than a hundred thousand a year.

“In return, you will volunteer your services to the Warwick Foundation, but you won’t tell them that Mulray Pharma is paying you to work there.”

“Okay,” Hobson said. He had no idea what the Warwick Foundation was. He was also bright enough to know that Fiona was hiring him to commit some sort of crime—and he didn’t give a shit. Whatever crime he was about to commit was preferable to suicide.

Two weeks later, René Lambert introduced Bill Hobson to Lizzie Warwick. Lambert told Lizzie about the fine job Hobson had done for the army and how he was the perfect man to manage the Warwick Foundation. Dr. Lambert then pulled out a copy of Hobson’s army personnel record—one that stopped at the point where he was arrested—and showed Lizzie the wide and varied experience he had. Then Hobson chimed in. He said he was willing to volunteer his time, as his army pension provided all the money he needed. He just wanted to do something meaningful, he said, for the good of his fellow man—and Lizzie had tears in her eyes as she hugged Bill and welcomed him to the Warwick Foundation.

Hobson now had a number of urgent things to do. He needed to find a place to live in Philadelphia and purchase a car. He needed to make himself intimately familiar with the Warwick Foundation’s accounts and methods of operation, and he needed to start working with Lambert to establish the facilities needed for conducting Mulray Pharma’s clinical trials. But the very first thing he was going to do was go out and buy a puppy to replace the dog he’d lost while he was in prison.