Jeff Buick - Lethal Dose

“Good afternoon, Gordon,” she said. She slid her reading glasses off her nose and set them on the brief.

Buchanan didn’t sit but paced back and forth as he spoke. “I’m not satisfied with where things are going, Christine,” he said. His voice was strong, his words clipped. “I want some action. It’s been four months since Billy died and we haven’t made any progress. These bastards at Veritas are treating us like a bothersome fly, just brushing us off. That’s not good enough.”

Stevens’s voice was equally curt. “What do you want me to do? There’s a certain legal protocol to follow. I can’t just go charging into their corporate offices and demand they pull Triaxcion off the market, then issue you a formal apology and a big check. Motions have to be filed and responded to. This takes time.”

“You’ve had time, Christine,” he said. “I’m not kidding. I want to move this to the next level. You’ve had this on your desk for almost four months. Billy died in April, and it’s August-September in another week.”

“How, Gordon? How do I move this to the next level? We have no definitive proof that Triaxcion causes clotting factors to fail in people with A-positive blood. We have suspicions, but that’s all.”

“That’s a load of shit and you know it. This drug is dangerous. It killed Billy and it’s killed at least eleven other people we know about.”

“There’s no solid proof,” Christine said, leaning on her desk and raising her voice. “And without proof, we’ll get killed in a court of law. Not one of the other lawyers representing clients who have died as a result of Triaxcion has filed for litigation. We just don’t have a winnable case.”

“So they get away with it?” he asked, his face taking on color.

His lawyer relaxed a bit, leaned back in her chair. “I told you from the start that these tort cases are difficult. They don’t happen overnight, and no matter what we do, Billy is not coming back. The best I can do, and I stress it’s the best, is that we get Triaxcion pulled off the market. You’re not going to get any personal satisfaction out of this, Gordon. No one from Veritas is going to end up in jail.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Christine was immediately struck by her client’s tone of voice. “What does that mean, Gordon?”

Gordon stopped pacing and placed his hands on her desk, leaning over so he was only a couple of feet from her. “I took the liberty of hiring a private investigator. He managed to dig up a woman, a Veritas employee, who agreed to work with me, collecting information from the company’s classified files.”

“You did what?” Stevens said, aghast. “That’s illegal.”

“I don’t care. I told you, I want answers.”

“I don’t want to know what they found. If they’ve stolen classified information from the company, I could get in serious trouble if you tell me.”

“Okay, Christine. If you can’t help me, I’ll have to take another approach. Outside the legal avenues available.”

“Again, Gordon, I don’t want to hear this.”

He withdrew from her desk and walked slowly toward the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned back to face her. “The woman who agreed to help me…” He opened the door and stood half in the hall, half in her office. He locked eyes with his lawyer.

“She’s dead,” he said, then left.

The mood in the room was somber.

The room in question was an office on the fifth floor of L’Enfant Plaza, the head office of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. Four men in suits sat on one side of the conference table, one woman and one man in lab coats on the other. The four men were handpicked from their agencies, the best merger of science and field experience from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. All four had file folders and glasses of water in front of them.

“What are we dealing with?” one of the suits asked. He was a wiry man, only five-ten and one-seventy, but his voice carried unmistakable authority. His close-cropped hair was graying slightly, the only indication he was over fifty. His name was J. D. Rothery, Under Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Science, and Technology. Appointed by the president to one of the top posts inside the agency, Rothery took his job seriously. A small plaque sat on his desk: Country comes first. Family comes second. His wife had it made for him. He took it as a compliment.

The man in the lab coat responded. He was Dr. Edward Henning, biological warfare specialist for the U.S. Army, on special assignment to DHS. Twenty-three years with the military, with postings in Iraq and Afghanistan to ferret out biological weapons, had made his name a household word around most mess halls. He was the first African-American with a Ph.D. to join the armed forces, and his tenacity and knowledge had paved the way for many more. “We’ve confirmed the two cases were caused by the same virus,” he said, consulting his folder. “The first victim was Elsie Hughes in Austin, Texas: female, age thirty-seven, employed in the accounting profession. She contracted the virus through licking a contaminated envelope at her local bank on May twelfth. She died four days later.

“The second victim was Robert English: male, forty-six years of age, resident of San Diego, California. He was a selfemployed computer programmer. The virus was found on postage stamps in his home office. One stamp was missing from the package of ten. We can’t be as sure of the exact date when English was infected, but we suspect on or about the seventh of July. He died on the tenth.”

“What about the virus?” Rothery asked tersely.

“It’s a virus that causes a hemorrhagic fever. To date, there are only two known hemorrhagic viruses, the most well known being Ebola. The other is Marburg. This one is neither.”

“So we’re dealing with an entirely new virus. And a deadly one.”

Henning took a sip of water and a deep breath. “Deadly is a gross understatement, Mr. Under Secretary,” he said. “This virus, if let loose inside our borders on any significant scale, would be absolutely catastrophic. It is communicable, terminal, and we do not have a cure.”

“Where the hell did this virus come from?” Rothery asked.

Henning shrugged.“No idea. I’ve checked with every government facility from Fort Detrick to Plum Island, but no one has been working on developing a new strain of hemorrhagic virus. This didn’t come from any of our labs.”

“Have we got ourselves another anthrax-type situation here?” he asked.

“I have no idea who is behind this, sir, just what kind of virus it is.”

Rothery turned to the man beside him.“Jim, what’s your take on this?”

Jim Allenby, Special Agent in Charge for the FBI out of the Washington, D.C., office, consulted his file. He was a lifer with the Bureau, six years from full pension. His face, like his body, was still lean, but taking on the vestiges of age: Small jowls were forming and the skin under his chin was sagging slightly. But his mind was as sharp as or sharper than when he had first joined the Bureau as a young recruit, wet behind the ears. His hair was graying, and age lines were forming on his forehead and at the edges of his intense blue eyes. “When we had Elsie Hughes’s body shipped to Fort Detrick,” he said, “we suspected we had some sort of hemorrhagic virus. We traced her movements for the week preceding her death and found the envelope in the recycling trash at the bank. We forwarded that envelope ahead to Dr. Henning after it had been initially screened at Fort Detrick. We took the same procedure with the stamps we found in Mr. English’s house. The two attacks, being so separate from each other with respect to geography and method of contamination, lead us to suspect some sort of conspiracy.”