Colin Harrison - The Finder

How he wished he had a recording of this comment. It would prove that Tom Reilly was innocent of anything. A bit nasty, perhaps, but innocent. Send them a fucking message they won't forget. He'd said it to James Tonelli, his facilities and operations manager, an eager, overly aggressive forty-year-old who prowled the building constantly checking on heating, cooling, plumbing, fire alarms, you name it. James, who was from Brooklyn, had simply said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it," nodding as he did so, maybe some idea half hidden in his eyes, and so Tom had done just that, he had not worried, because James had said he'd take care of it.

They had not discussed how that might be accomplished, which Tom suspected would probably mean that James would have a ferocious little chat with the representative of the service company, a good-looking Chinese woman, he thought he remembered, having maybe met her once, and question the company's procedures and on-site supervision practices. The usual stuff. But then, a few days ago, he reads in the tabloid newspaper that two Mexican girls working for that same company have been found murdered out by the beach in Brooklyn? Still wearing the company uniforms? That sounded like a fucking message they won't forget. The girls had been recognized by some Good Pharma staffers, and the corporate relations office had confirmed they had worked in Good Pharma's offices that very night. Tom had simply nodded when told this and said, "If there's any inquiry, just please refer it to legal." At least the company name hadn't made it into the news. So far, anyway. And the next day James Tonelli calls in sick, and the day after that. Was this something to worry about? Was that a message Tom wouldn't forget? He wasn't sure. Well, yes, he was sure. He could construct rational reasons that might prop up his hopes, but his gut told him the two things were connected. There had always been a bit of talk about whom James knew in Brooklyn, whom his family was connected to. The Lucchese family, the Gambinos. These were just names, right? Did they really mean anything anymore? What was Tom, an expert in the Mafia? Wasn't the Mafia finished in New York, wiped out by RICO prosecutions? Just a joke that you enjoyed while watching reruns of The Sopranos? We actually kill people, ha-ha. Everybody thinks we are gone, ha-ha-ha. He realized that the Metro section of the paper sometimes had stories on organized crime. He should pay more attention to these things! The speculation about James had actually added a positive aura to his presence, and in general he got things done quickly-solved union issues, city inspector issues, anything that came up. He seemed to know whom to call and how to talk to them when he did. A very valuable skill set.

So Tom could worry about James. But Martz, the man who would be his host in ten minutes, didn't care about James or two dead Mexican girls. He cared about Good Pharma's stock price. In the last two weeks it had taken another dive, dropped another 17 percent. Why? Anyone's guess. Too many sellers! Usually companies knew why their stock was going up or down. Analysts issued reports, made recommendations, knowledgeable people commented in the newspaper, and companies themselves were required to make forward-looking comments about their projected earnings. It was a strange thing when a company didn't understand its own stock price, and by strange he meant very bad.

Why would so many people be selling Good Pharma's stock? Maybe they had a good reason to think his company was not as valuable as others thought it was. Maybe they had a good reason or maybe they had an excellent reason. And what could that be? Good Pharma had six major drugs in final development. Of these six, one was a major hit, three were minor duds, one was unknown as yet, and the sixth was a major wipeout. It had been Tom's intention to sequence the news of these developments very carefully. Unfortunately, the rate of progress of each drug in development did not match the optimal order of the announcement of its success or failure. So he had started to mess around with their progress, trying to speed up the big success, slow the duds a bit, and put the catastrophic wipeout into deep freeze: to be announced in fragments, even as the company also announced new initiatives, the ongoing successes of its major hit, and so on. He'd intended to play by the rules but certainly bend every opportunity to the company's advantage. There were things you could do — if you controlled your information! If you assumed that the data and reports in your office, lying around on people's desks, in their computers, and of course in their heads, were protected.

If not, hell's bells.

But what was he to do? If he started a formal internal investigation into how certain critical drug trial information had been stolen or released, then he might accidentally draw attention to the problem itself. He'd be creating more problematic information. That could be stolen, too, or leaked. All you needed was one Good Pharma exec chatting to an outsider at the wrong moment and you could have a hundred news stories inside a day, virally proliferating to the bloggers and investment websites. The stock price would crater. You would also draw attention to the company's information control processes-how faulty they were. How faulty the oversight was. Tom Reilly's oversight, that is.

Martz, of course, was already on to him, seemed to have sensed the problem, started to harass Tom. That's what this evening was all about, getting a chance to get close to Tom and make his threat even clearer. Tom saw that. Oh, yeah. But Martz would not be the last. Tom knew that the major shareholders-the mutual funds, the banks, the hedge fund operators-were not going to give him that opportunity. They had started to call, pressing for appointments. Lots of folks owned part of the company: German banks, French banks, English banks, their German pharmaceutical competitors, the Japanese conglomerates, South Korean real estate magnates, the Hong Kong shipping and manufacturing magnates. Lots of tough, unsentimental bastards. Cared not a whit for Tom Reilly and how many beta-blockers he was popping. Or anyone else at the company. Lose a quick 17 percent on $100 million, that's $17 million. Need to then get a 20 percent return to make yourself whole again. And Good Pharma didn't have a nice fat dividend protecting the stock price.

He felt the beta-blockers kicking in. He felt… well, calm. Cool, clear. His heart beating more slowly. Wow. Wow. He was calm enough to return to the unhappy topic of James Tonelli. Pretend for a moment that the cleaning service had in fact stolen some valuable information, such as the early rotten results on the synthetic skin trials. Pretend you can prove that. Now pretend that James spoke to somebody else who told somebody else to scare those two Mexican girls out of their minds-self-importantly intensifying the meaning of "send a message"-and they did something stupid, or something worse-like go and kill them. Then pretend you are the New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter and you find out that some kind of important secret research information leaked out of a company and the stock price cratered and then the company-a company in the health field-apparently somehow caused the murder of the people working for the company that took the information. What might be the outcome of that? Tom felt calm! The outcome? A blizzard of bad press, shareholder outcries, God knew what else. His career would be shit-canned. And no severance or golden parachute, if he was found to have broken federal laws or company policies. Prison, even, if people testified a certain way. Once there was a problem, companies cut people out of their ranks within hours, like a bad spot on an apple. Under questioning, James would report that he had done exactly what he had been told to do. Mr. Thomas Reilly, let me see if I got this right: You are the vice-president of a company doing cutting-edge research into how to save people's lives, your father was a doctor, your wife is a doctor, and you ordered or condoned or intimated that two helpless Mexican girls who cleaned your offices be asphyxiated by a tankload of human excrement?