Jeff Buick - Lethal Dose

All but one.

Gordon was half listening to the sound when something struck him. He sat up and concentrated on what the newscaster was saying. It was a recap of how the threat had initially been delivered to them and how the team had pooled its resources to find the lab. After the anchor was finished, Gordon said, “I’ve got an idea. We need to use one resource we already have and we need to secure one more. If we do, I think we can get inside the same room with those men and maybe figure out who it is.”

“I’m listening,” she said, rolling over to face him.

The last of the four, Tony Warner, arrived at just after five o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, apologizing for being late but blaming it on traffic coming in from Crypto-City. He accepted a coffee from Rothery’s executive assistant and thanked her. He stirred in some sugar and a touch of cream and glanced about the office. Allenby, Simms, and Rothery were all sitting in easy chairs with coffee or drinks.

“What’s going on, J.D.?” he asked. “What’s with the sudden meeting? We did the big press conference yesterday morning.”

Rothery shrugged. “I received a call from the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning. They were adamant we meet this afternoon. She insisted that the entire task force be here. I don’t know what it’s about.”

“The SEC?”Warner asked.“What the hell do they want with us?”

“That’s been the big question since we arrived,” Jim Allenby said.

“Anybody cheat on last year’s prospectus?” Simms asked wryly.

All heads turned as the door opened and a mid-fifties woman entered. She wore a blue pantsuit and carried an expensive leather briefcase. She set the briefcase on a table in the center of the room and approached each man individually, introducing herself as Elizabeth Ripley and thanking them for coming. When she had finished the introductions, she reached into her briefcase and pulled out a file. She sat in the last open easy chair and addressed the room.

“Gentlemen, we’ve got a bit of a quandary over at the SEC. We are concerned about the effect this crisis might have on the market. Not just New York, but also Tokyo, Toronto, and some of the European stock exchanges. We suspect the terrorists may have hedged against the possibility of failure by purchasing shortterm options on some of the larger pharmaceutical companies. I’d like to hear from each one of you as the representative for your various agencies as to if there has been any discussion about possible market manipulation. If there has, I’d like you to describe the actions you’ve taken to ensure that the markets will remain solvent. Mr. Rothery, perhaps we could start with you.”

Rothery sounded a little confused as he spoke. “Well, I’m not sure this line of thinking has ever reared its head at DHS. We are concerned about the safety of the markets from a physical sense, but we didn’t touch on market stability as it related directly to this particular crisis.”

“Thank you. Mr. Allenby?”

“The FBI is a law-enforcement agency, Ms. Ripley. I can’t recall ever worrying about the boys on Wall Street. I think they do quite fine without us looking over their shoulders.”

There was a chuckle at his response, but Ripley continued on unfazed. “Mr. Simms. Did the CIA see fit to give this issue any thought?”

“I can’t say we did, Ms. Ripley. Our main area of concern was and still is gathering intelligence from around the world that may affect American interests. We have no dealings inside the continental United States, nor do we monitor the international markets on a daily basis. We watch for general trends, but in this particular case, we didn’t look for anything out of the ordinary.”

“Mr. Warner?”

“Well, yes, we did watch for any one person or organization buying large chunks of stocks that we felt might be affected by the crisis. That’s standard policy. We look closely at situations by inputting data into our computers and analyzing the output. But we didn’t notice anything that we considered out of the ordinary.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth Ripley said. A moment later, her cell phone rang and she said, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but this is one call I must take.” She answered, said “okay” twice, and hung up. She looked over at the door to Rothery’s office and said, “I’m going to turn over the meeting to someone else.”

The door opened and Jennifer Pearce entered, followed by Gordon Buchanan and Keith Thompson. Thompson was carrying a large and apparently heavy black case. Gordon remained by the door while Jennifer and Keith walked directly to the table where Elizabeth Ripley had left her briefcase. Keith set his case on the carpet and retrieved a recording device from Elizabeth Ripley’s briefcase.

“What’s going on here, Keith? And who the hell are you?” Rothery asked Jennifer. She didn’t answer, and Rothery turned to Elizabeth Ripley. “This meeting isn’t about the SEC, is it?”

“No, it’s not, Mr. Rothery,” Ripley said. “After I heard what these people had to say, I agreed to set up the meeting for them. I think you’ll find this is not a waste of your time.”

“This had better be pretty damn good,” Rothery snapped. “What are you doing here, Keith?”

“I was asked along to run a little test, Mr. Rothery. At the request of the SEC. Sorry.” He busied himself with opening his case and setting up a strange-looking two-sided television screen and a computer. He hooked the recording device from Ripley’s briefcase into a USB port and powered up the system. “Ready to roll,” he said to Jennifer.

“My name is Jennifer Pearce. I’m a research scientist in the Alzheimer’s division of Veritas Pharmaceutical. I work for Bruce Andrews, the same man who just discovered the drug to combat the virus. But there’s a bit of a twist to this whole thing that three of you four gentlemen have missed. And that twist is that there was never a crisis. We were never in any jeopardy.”

Rothery’s tone was icy as he responded, reaching for the phone on the table beside him. “This is preposterous,” he said. “I want you out of here immediately.”

“Elizabeth Ripley was correct, Mr. Rothery. This is not a waste of time. If you allow me just a minute, three of you gentlemen are going to find what I have to say very interesting.”

“That’s the second time you’ve referred to three of us, Ms. Pearce,” Jim Allenby said. “What are you implying?”

“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Bruce Andrews over at Veritas develops a drug that he considers to be the next big thing. This baby is going to generate his company billions of dollars in sales. He’s so sure of its success that he manipulates the company books in order to assure himself the capital he needs to send the drug through Phase II and Phase III trials. Ms. Ripley has looked into the illegal use of tax credits by Veritas, and she assures me that there will be civil actions arising from her investigation.

“But this goes so much deeper than just stock manipulation. Bruce Andrews had two Veritas employees killed and he wiped out a family in Denver. He tried to kill me three times, but obviously he missed. And here’s the part you guys are going to love.

“Bruce Andrews actually developed the virus threatening our country. It makes coming up with a cure so much easier when you’re the one creating the problem. Andrews or one of his associates distributed the virus to random locations across the country at carefully selected intervals to let the tension build. Finally, when your task force decided to ask the private sector for help in finding a cure, he was ready. Andrews bided his time, waiting for the fuse to burn down a bit, then handed the cure to Rothery with one condition. Get the drug through the New Drug Application stage and get FDA approval. And that, gentlemen, is what it was all about. Getting a potentially dangerous drug on the market.”