Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

I nodded. “But how?”

“No man is a hero to his own valet.”

“Companies don’t have valets.”

“They have vendors . Your valet does the stuff you don’t want to do. Vendors do the stuff a company doesn’t want to do or can’t manage. And it’s harder to erase their memories.”

“Contractors,” I said.

“Outsiders. Exactly.” He blinked steadily, lizard-like.

“All right,” I said. “Lovely to see you as always.”

“I expect to see Gabe within a week.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

Seven years ago

After Maggie told me about her rape, I became laser-focused. I made it my business to learn everything I could about the man who raped her, General Garrett Moore. For a while I even staked him out.

There were seven four-star generals in the army, and apparently it’s a pretty cushy gig. General Moore had a chef, a personal valet, and four enlisted guys tending his lawn. He lived like a pasha. But even for a four-star, he pushed the envelope. And it turned out, he had made a few enemies in his rise to the top.

After a while I found an estranged former military aide to the general who told me to look into the general’s GTCC, his government travel charge card. I might find something interesting there. When I pushed for details, the aide revealed that General Moore used his travel card in strip clubs overseas. The more I dug, the more great stuff I found. Moore had gone to the Boom Boom Room in Rome and spent almost two thousand dollars. He’d gone to the Kit Kat Klub in Seoul, South Korea, and paid three thousand.

But he wasn’t just paying for overpriced champagne and big tips. He was using his card to pay for massages with happy endings. Then he made the mistake of disputing the charges with Citibank — declaring, in writing, that the charges were fraudulent.

A couple of months after Maggie and I began seeing each other, I had had enough. It took a lot of self-restraint to keep from telling her, along the way, what I’d found out about General Moore.

I tried to make an appointment with the general’s office to see him. I asked for five minutes of the general’s tightly scheduled time. I said it was personal business. But because I wouldn’t reveal my agenda in advance, he wouldn’t see me.

So one Friday night I trailed him to his weekend cabin in Delaware. My intel told me that his wife didn’t like the cabin and rarely went, and that was where he had the occasional assignation. When I got out of my vehicle, I called out to him.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

I gave him my name, told him my former rank.

“I don’t know what you think you’re up to, but I suggest you get the hell out of here before I make a call.”

“I will, sure. I just want five minutes of your time. In private.”

“You want to talk to me? We can talk right here.”

“You’ll want this to be in private. I can assure you of that.”

Looking more aggrieved than curious, he went to his car, opened the door, and said to his driver, “Don’t go anywhere.”

Then he walked to the front door of his cabin and unlocked it. The cabin smelled strongly of burnt wood. He switched on a light and folded his arms. “Now, what the hell do you want, sergeant?”

I told him what I’d found. “I don’t think your wife knows about the Boom Boom Room,” I pointed out.

“You trying to blackmail me? You really think you’ll get away with that?”

“Depends on how we handle this. Just know that your bogus statement to Citibank violates Article 107 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Oh, and my favorite, Article 133. Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”

His face turned red, and he spoke slowly, baring his teeth like fangs. “You’re not doing this through channels, sergeant. You want to go after me, go after me. But go through the chain of command.”

“Really? Because I was thinking I might not submit any report at all.”

“How much do you want?”

“Not a cent,” I said. “Just your resignation.”

“Oh, really? This gets buried. You’ll see. You’ve got a lot to learn about how the world works, Sergeant... Sergeant, what’s your name again?”

“Heller,” I said. “Nicholas Heller.”

“Sergeant, you’re making the mistake of your life. I’ve got friends.”

“Today, as a four-star general in good standing, sure. But as the subject of a disciplinary probe? Suddenly your calls aren’t returned. The conversation switches from what a good guy you are to who gets what you’ve got. Your car, your driver, your epaulets? They’re not yours. You’re just renting them. And there’s a hundred people who think they can put them to better use than you can.”

I enjoyed seeing him deflate like a blow-up doll in a nail factory. I returned home and made some calls. I knew people too. Some of the newer compliance officers in the Pentagon, some of them younger and female. They weren’t going to bury this, I knew. Times had changed.

I caught an evening flight out of the Albany International Airport and was back in Boston by midnight. I dozed on the short flight, but I remained on edge.

What would happen when Detective Goldman viewed the CCTV video? He’d see me creeping in and out of the Kimball place and know that I’d been lying to him. I had to be ready for that.

I was up early the next day, out of my loft and over to my office by seven. I had a lot to puzzle on, and this may be the part of my work I like best.

I had a tough problem to solve. How the hell was I going to get inside Phoenicia Health Sciences? I knew nothing about the company, so I did a bit of basic research. Pharmaceutical companies contract out to what are called CROs, contract research organizations, which do testing and human trials and commercial research for the drug companies. Phoenicia was one of these CROs. It turned out to be headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.

I called an old friend of mine — we’d been McKinsey interns together, before I joined the military — who was now a senior VP at Novartis, another big pharmaceutical company. I remember Kim Trepanier had set her sights on pharma from the outset. She was going to run a Merck or a Novartis or an AstraZeneca someday. I always believed it. She was also an excellent poker player. She was a triathlete, a slender woman with short blond hair in a Dorothy Hamill cut. We’d gone out a few times but never really clicked. We were friends anyway.

“I have a strange question for you,” I said.

“O kay .”

“How easy is it to bury a clinical trial?”

“What do you mean, ‘bury it’?”

“You’ve got a new drug and you test it and you get back some bad results. Like it’s super-addictive and hard to quit. But you don’t want the FDA to know about it. What do you do?”

“You’re supposed to register all clinical trials with the US government in an online database. You’re obliged to report the results, and the government goes after you if you don’t.”

“And does what?”

“Your drug doesn’t get approved. Plus you get a big fine.”

“What if you did the study abroad?”

“Western Europe has the same requirements. But you do a trial in Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe, you can do whatever you want.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. So there was this French company developing a drug, an antidepressant, and it turns out that if you inject it into your veins, it gives you a buzz, right? But if you don’t dissolve it properly, it starts to eat away at your flesh. Of course they never reported that. I’ve seen videos from Russia of people with their fingers necrosed, eaten away at the tips. I’ve seen people with the flesh on their arms eaten away, exposing the bone. Just horrible. And all because of a buried study.”