Gregg Hurwitz - Last shot

"Not when there's an alternative that provides a cure. With significantly less risk."

"An alternative that offers little incentive to this company to continue marketing and developing this and other lifesaving products. Grow up, son. This is part of doing business. We provide a service, and there are costs to providing that service. You want to…what? Bring one drug to market and not be able to fund the infrastructure to maintain it? Not to mention future R amp;D? How do you think that'll get funded? You want to cure cystic fibrosis, Dolan? How are we going to do that without resources?"

"How are you going to explain why you knowingly withheld a superior vector?"

"Come on, Dolan. For every product we run dozens of models and sims like this. And thousands more showing potential problems and risks with all of our products."

"This report from your beloved accounting department is a bigger threat than you're letting on."

"Would it be a threat if it leaked? Yes. Would that threat be inconvenient? Yes. Would it be unmanageable? No. We've provided for that."

Dolan leaned over the desk, jabbing a finger into the report. "We're launching Xedral on Monday and going wide three months after that. To three hundred thousand humans. A nine percent effectiveness difference is what? Twenty-seven thousand dead? A year. Have you really got that accounted for?"

Dean, a portrait of calm in the face of Dolan's emotionality, studied him with something like enmity.

Dolan examined his stone facade and said, "We have a responsibility to release Lentidra."

"And we will when the time is right."

"No way. I can't let you sit on it."

"You can't? What do you have? A contingency scenario? A few pieces of paper obtained through questionable legal means? You don't have any hard data, do you? Do you? You don't have a scrap of leverage, so don't you dare threaten me."

"What about Tess Jameson?"

"What about her?"

"She found this."

"Yes. And she came to me, of course, to blackmail me with it."

"To give her Lentidra."

"As if we could just circumvent trials and FDA approval and stick the thing in her son's arm. Even if we were willing to trust her, to float our product out into the world where any general practitioner in Antelope Valley could raise an eyebrow at the miracle cure of this one kid."

"So you…?" Dolan wanted to know and was afraid to know at the same time.

"So I told her I have a number of relationships in the medical community. Including the executive director of the United Network for Organ Sharing. If Tess were willing to walk away after signing a full non-disclosure regarding any and all knowledge she might have acquired as related to her involvement with Beacon-Kagan and Vector, perhaps expedited treatment could be arranged for her son."

Dolan could hear the rush of blood in his ears. "That's why she dropped Sam from the Xedral trial. To make him available for transplant. You offered her a liver."

"I tried to bring her into the fold-again. I tried to help her-again. And again she proved untrustworthy. She had a fit of conscience, backed out of our agreement, and was preparing to go public."

A fit of conscience. Tess had been placed in an impossible moral position. An illegal liver, attained for her son, at a cost of contributing to a corporate cover-up that would cost twenty-seven thousand children their lives every year. From what he knew of Tess, even her love for her son wouldn't make her participate in a scheme that would mean hundreds of thousands of children dying unnessarily. She'd thought she could go through with it, yet in the eleventh hour she couldn't. But in preparation for the liver, she'd had to sign away Sam's place in the Xedral study. She was stuck. So she'd tried to take another route-a legal route. Whistle-blow. And hope Sam could hang on until Vector was forced to release Lentidra.

Dolan's voice came weak, throaty. "So you ordered her killed."

"And what if I did?" Dean rose, speaking with pent-up force. "And what if I did? With what's at stake-the future of Vector, of Beacon-Kagan, the lives we save every day and will continue to save. You'd let one woman bring down the whole enterprise?"

"If she was right. Yes."

"Then why didn't you? You were in a position to know, Dolan. But you didn't want to. Instead you slurped at the teat all these years."

"Not anymore."

"Please. You may be naive, but you're not a fool. You're not going to walk away from Vector, from your work. You're emotional right now, sure. But you'll calm down, see the road ahead. We'll work this out."

Dolan summoned a reserve of strength he never knew he had. "No, sir, we won't. I'm leaving. Now."

"You'll be killed." Dean's eyes pulled to the guard who had reappeared at the door, and Dolan felt a coldness run through his veins. His father might have been talking about Walker Jameson, but then again he might not have. Keeping his eyes on Dean, Dolan backed up into the hall. Immediately another guard appeared, flanking him. He tried to turn toward the foyer but was blocked, the men filling the breadth of the hall.

"Get the hell out of my way!"

But they remained, maddeningly mute, eyes downturned in a meretricious display of deference. Dolan moved back toward his room, and they permitted him, matching him when he jogged, safeguarding wrong turns, guiding him, a rat through a rigged labyrinth. He burst into the game room and slammed the door behind him, locking it.

He doubled over, hands on his knees, breathing deeply to stave off a panic attack. Finally he straightened. He picked up the telephone, pressed the receiver to his ear until the dial tone started bleating. What would he say? He had no proof, no hard data.

Setting the phone down, he pushed open the door to Chase's room. On the desk the termini of numerous computer cables shaped the blank space where the laptop had been. Dean must have had it removed in the past hour while Dolan was with the deputies. Under the circumstances the computer's absence struck Dolan as vaguely grotesque, an organ ripped free of its connective tissue. Dean had been at this game too long; he could think five moves ahead. Dolan didn't stand a chance.

He stared at the faint indentation in Chase's pillow, a remnant of his brother's final night of sleep. He tried to personalize his sense of loss, but it had little to do with Chaisson. It was more a diffuse sadness that his life and their brotherhood had amounted to nothing more than this.

A series of chirps came from the closet, disrupting Dolan's thoughts. He crossed and opened the door but was greeted with silence. After about thirty seconds, the sound repeated. He sourced it to a cell phone weighing down the pocket of Chase's favored leather jacket along with a set of keys. Dolan listened to the waiting message, but it was from a woman (screechy, loquacious, inebriated) berating Chase for not calling her.

He sat on the bed, clicking through the saved numbers. A lot of initials, in case Chase's fiancee got ahold of it. He came upon an unnamed entry-22498352. A string of random digits, clearly not a phone number.

Vector's computer log-in security codes were eight digits long.

Dolan stared at the numbers, feeling his heartbeat grow louder until he sensed it pulsing at his eardrums. With renewed purpose he rose, sliding on Chase's jacket and stuffing the phone in his pocket. On his way out, he tapped the pillow, disintegrating the hollow where Chase's head last rested.

He jogged around the pool table, undid the various locks on the bulletproof window overlooking the backyard, and climbed out into the night. A guard stirred at his station near the rear gate and scanned the dark house. Dolan flattened against the second-story lattice until the guard turned back to the street. He'd require a more elaborate exit than the down-and-out he'd planned on. Honeysuckle scraping his face, he struggled his way to the next room.