Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

“I am!” Jonah whispered back. “When did you become such an expert at sneaking around?”

The question gave Alix pause. When did that happen, exactly? At some point, she’d become a spy in her own family’s house. Some kind of screwed-up mole, planted in deep cover. Alix couldn’t help but be reminded of Cynthia—the perfect friend whom Moses had planted right beside her. She remembered how betrayed she’d felt when she found out.

And now you’re doing the same thing to Dad .

It hadn’t felt so clear-cut as that before. But with Jonah trailing right behind her as she found Dad’s keys on the kitchen island and then began opening his filing cabinets in his study, she suddenly felt weirdly exposed. With Jonah watching her do this, it wasn’t just a game anymore. It was real.

Alix forced down her rising anxiety. “Here. Check this out. This is a whole file on how Dad has a rapid-response group for negative articles about his clients on the Internet. They’ve got searches that help them catch bad news, and then they pay people to swarm the comments using sock-puppet names.” She rifled through more files. “This one is all about a plan to put news releases into small-town newspapers. Ones that don’t have good editorial controls. Cost estimates. Number of readers.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t evil, Alix.”

“Read it,” Alix said. “Wait till you get to the part where he and George are practically salivating over the weak fact-checking. They keep saying it. It’s a pitch they’re putting together for their clients. Weak fact-checking is a plus for them.”

“Still…”

Alix kept rifling through the familiar files. She’d been through all of them before. “These are just some of the things they work on. I’ve done searches on client names—” She broke off, frowning.

“Kimball-Geier…”

She pulled the sheet. It was a legal opinion. She went back into the files looking for more, but all she had was the single sheet. She checked the date. It was recent, but there wasn’t anything else.

“See if you can find any more sheets like this,” she whispered to Jonah, then she went and checked Dad’s briefcase as well. Nothing. She went back and studied the paper again.

“What is it?” Jonah asked.

“Azicort. It’s an asthma drug. I heard Dad and George and Mr. Geier talking about it on that yacht a while back.”

“You were spying on Dad all the way back then? You’re like that Russian spy…. What’s her name? The superhot one who grew up pretending to be an American and then got caught?”

“I just got tired of people lying to me, okay?”

Jonah held up his hands. “I’m not judging.”

Alix went back to the memo. “It looks like they’re going to settle another lawsuit. They’ve got this asthma drug, Azicort. Moses told me it was killing people…. The kid… Tank. It puts people into comas. Sometimes it kills them if a doctor doesn’t figure it out fast enough.” She read over the letter again.

“Dad wants them to settle this case….” She frowned. “The people who were suing are giving up.” She remembered the members of 2.0 comparing monetary settlements.

“Geier was the guy with the fancy yacht, right?”

“The CEO,” Alix said absently, as she read more. The papers were dense with legal jargon. “It looks like they’re talking about studies they did on rats, and that they knew there were dangers. Coma. Death. Dosages.” She shuffled through her dad’s files, frustrated. “There should be more, but I’m not finding it. I think Dad’s advising them to settle because there’s a new, more definitive study about to come out, and it’s bad for Azicort. He thinks it’s better for them to settle and then get the FDA to reapprove them for a different respiratory use. They’ve gotten friendly hearings at the FDA….” She looked up from the paper, frowning. “I wish I could see what he keeps on his computer. If I could get on his client files, this would be clear.”

“You don’t already know?” Jonah snarked.

“We don’t have the girl, Kook. The hacker,” Alix explained. “She wrote a program to break Dad’s laptop open. If we could get on that…”

“You wouldn’t get anything at all,” Jonah said.

“How would you know?”

Jonah smirked. “Because I happen to know that Dad doesn’t keep anything valuable on it. All his important files are stored on servers at his offices down in DC. They’ve got it completely hived off from the Internet for security. Even his laptop doesn’t connect to that other network.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m serious! Lisa was making Dad and George game out different ways that 2.0 might try to hurt them and their clients. I was right there. I heard them talking.”

“So how do you know about Dad’s laptop?”

“Lisa got worried once they figured out that 2.0 had hackers working for them, and she started asking about data theft. Dad and George said they keep all their sensitive client data off the Internet, so it can’t be accessed by anyone who doesn’t work inside the actual BSP offices. Maybe they’ve got a couple files with them on their laptops, but mostly it’s at BSP, and there’s all kinds of check-in, check-out trackers. Dad and George kept saying you’d have to be inside the actual offices to get anything.”

“What happened then?”

“Not much. Lisa got paranoid that 2.0 would try to hold you hostage, maybe make Dad release his client files that way. She was real uptight about the client files.”

“What did Dad say?”

“Beats me. They closed the door on me when they started talking about”—Jonah lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“ hostage scenarios .” He made a face. “Lisa was freaking about that idea, though. She didn’t want any of Dad’s clients getting exposed.”

“I’ll bet she didn’t.” Alix stared at the legal memo, thinking about the strange crew that Moses had once assembled. “The kid’s name was Tank,” she said. “The one who took Azicort.”

“You told me that already.”

“Yeah. I know. It’s just…” Alix trailed off. “It was kind of a joke name, right? Like the kid was big and tough, even though he wasn’t. I think Azicort maybe did something to him. I never got a chance to ask, though.” She frowned, tapping the file on the table thoughtfully. “Moses would know.” She snapped a pic of the memo with her phone and then carefully put the paper back where she’d found it. “I’ll bet the lawyers in this class action would give a lot to know what’s in Dad’s files.”

“You’d seriously sabotage Dad like that?” Jonah asked.

Alix didn’t know how to respond.

Jonah looked pained. “Come on. You can’t be serious.”

“What would you do if you were walking past someone on the sidewalk who was bleeding and you were the only person in the world with a bandage? Would you let them bleed out?”

“What kind of a screwed-up question is that?”

Abruptly, Alix realized she’d said too much. Don’t get him more involved. Get him out. Make him forget about all this . She made herself smile. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking.”

“Oh, no you don’t. You’re planning something, aren’t you?”

“I think we’re done for the night. It’s three AM.”

“I’m your brother.”

“You’re my little brother.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Seriously. Let it go, Jonah.”

“I could still tell Dad,” he threatened.

“You could,” she admitted. “But you won’t.”

“How do you know?”

Alix smiled. “Because if you do, I’ll let everyone know that you’re the one who called in the bomb threat last fall.”

“That’s not fair!”