Michael Palmer - Side Effects

"Look, " Willoughby said, "I want you to take a few days off. Rest.

After this coming weekend we can talk."

"But-"

"Kate, I'm taking you off the schedule for a while. Now I don't want you coming back into work until after we've had a chance to discuss things next week. Okay? " There was uncharacteristic firmness in the man's voice. Meekly, she nodded. "Okay, but-"

"No buts. Kate, it's for your own good. I'll call you at home and check on how you're doing. Now off you go."

Kate watched her colleagues leave, Stan Willoughby, head down, shuffling a few feet ahead of Liu Huang, who turned for a moment and gave her a timid, but hopeful, thumbs-up sign. Then they were gone. For a time she sat, uncertainly, isolation and self-doubt constricting every muscle in her body, making it difficult to move or even to breathe. With great effort, she pulled the telephone over and lifted the receiver. "I want to place a long-distance call, please, " she heard her voice say. "It's personal, so charge it to my home phone… I'm calling San Diego."

It had taken narcotic painkillers and amphetamines along with his usual pharmacopoeia, but in the end, Becker had prevailed. Now he ached for sleep. He could not remember his last meal.

Catnaps at his desk, cool showers every six or seven hours, bars of chocolate, cups of thick coffee for four days, or was it five?

These had been his only succor. Still, he had endured. In the morning, a messenger would hand deliver his manuscript and box of slides to the editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. The letter accompanying the manuscript would give the man ten days to agree to publish the Estronate studies in their entirety within four months and to oversee the appointment of an international commission to assume responsibility for the initiation of Beckerian population control. The study was in a shambles, with reference books, scrap paper, coffee cups, discarded drafts, candy-bar wrappers, and dirty glasses covering the furniture and much of the floor. Like a prizefighter at the moment of triumph, Willi Becker, more skeleton than man, stood in the midst of the debris and pumped his fists in the air. After forty years and through hardship almost unimaginable, he had finished. Now there was only the matter of gaining acceptance. It was ironic, he acknowledged, that decades of the most meticulous research had come down to a few frenetic days, but that was the way it had to be. With the pathologist Bennett snooping about the Omnicenter and Cyrus Redding's antennae up, time had become a luxury he could no longer afford. Studies in Estronate 250.

Becker cleared off his easy chair, settled down, and indulged in thoughts of the accolades, honors, and other tributes to his genius and dedication certain to result from the publication and implementation of his work. He was nearing receipt of a Nobel Prize when the phone began ringing. It took half a dozen rings to break through his reverie and another four to locate the phone beneath a pile of journals. "Hello?"

"John? Redding here."

The voice brought a painful emptiness to Becker's chest. For several seconds, he could not speak. "John?"

Becker cleared his throat. "Yes, yes, Cyrus. I'm here."

"Good. Fine. Well, I hope I'm not disturbing anything important for you."

"Not at all. I was just… doing a little reading before bed."

Did his voice sound as strained, as strangled, as it felt? "What can I do for you? " Please, he thought, let it be some problem related to their myasthenia. Let it be anything but… "Well, John, I wanted to speak with you a bit about that business at the Omnicenter." Becker's heart sank. "You know, " Redding continued, "the situation with these women having severe scarring of their ovaries and then bleeding to death."

"Yes, what about it?"

"Have you learned anything new about the situation since we spoke last?"

"No. Not really." Becker sensed that he was being toyed with. "Well, John, you know that the whole matter has piqued my curiosity, as well as my concern for the safety of our testing programs. Too many coincidences. Too much smoke for there not to be a fire someplace."

"Perhaps, " Becker said, hanging onto the thread of hope that the man, a master at such maneuvers, was shooting in the dark. For a time, there was silence from Redding's end. Becker shifted nervously in his chair.

"Cyrus? " he asked finally. "I'm here."

"Was there… anything else?"

"John, I won't bandy words with you. We've been through too much together, accomplished too many remarkable things for me to try and humiliate you by letting you trip over one after another of your own lies."

"I… I don't understand."

"Of course you understand, John." He paused. "I know who you are. That is the gist of what I am calling to say. I know about Wilhelm Becker, and even more importantly, I know about Estronate Two-fifty."

Becker glanced over at his manuscript, stacked neatly atop the printer of his word processor, and forced himself to calm down. There was little he could think of that Redding could do to hurt him at this stage of the game. Still, Cyrus Redding was Cyrus Redding, and no amount of caution was too much. Stay calm but don't underestimate.

"Your resourcefulness is quite impressive, " he said. "John, tell me truly, it was Estronate Two-fifty that caused the problems at the Omnicenter, wasn't it?"

"It was."

"The hemorrhaging is an undesirable side effect?"

Becker was about to explain that the problem had been overcome and that his hormone was, to all intents, perfected. He stopped himself at the last moment. "Yes, " he said. "A most unfortunate bug that I have not been able to get out of the system."

"You should have told me, John, " Redding said. "You should have trusted me."

"What do you want?"

"John, come now. It is bad enough you didn't respect me enough to take me into your confidence. It is bad enough your uncondoned experiments have put my entire company in jeopardy. Do not try to demean my intelligence. I want to extend our partnership to include that remarkable hormone of yours. After all, it was tested at a facility that I fund."

"Work is not complete. There are problems. Serious problems."

"Then we shall overcome them. You know the potential of this Estronate of yours as well as I do. I am prepared to make you an onthe-spot offer of, say, half a million dollars now and a similar amount when your work is completed to the satisfaction of my biochemists. And of course, there would be a percentage of all sales."

Sales. Becker realized that his worst possible scenario was being enacted. Redding understood not only the chemical nature of Estronate, but also its limitless value to certain governments. How?

How in hell's name had the man learned so much so quickly? "I… I was planning eventually on submitting my work for publication, " he offered.

Redding laughed. "That would be bad business, John. Very bad business.

The value of our product would surely plummet if its existence and unique properties became general knowledge. Suppose you oversee the scientific end and let me deal with the proprietary."

"If I refuse, " Becker said, "will you kill me?"

Again Redding laughed. "Perhaps. Perhaps I will. However, there are those, I am sure, who would pay dearly for information on the physician whom the Ravensbruck prisoners called the Serpent."

For a time there was silence. "How did you learn of all this?" Becker asked finally.

"Why don't we save explanations, Dr. Becker, for a time after our w business arrangement has been consummated."

"I need time to think."

"Take it. Take as much as you need up to, say, twenty-four hours."

"The intrinsic problems of the hormone may be insurmountable."