Last Shot Page 39

  It was a bluff, but one Dean wouldn’t want to call with his paper shredder still throwing off BTUs.

  Dean studied Tim a few minutes, then said, “I’ll call him in.”

  “No,” Tim said. “We’ll talk to him alone.”

  Dean said, “He’s in his room. I don’t think you’ll find him informative.”

  Tim and Bear made their way through the mansion to the second floor of the south wing. A guard stood at the door to the Kagan brothers’ rooms like a bouncer, arms woven across a massive chest. A vein squiggled through the ball of his biceps, a firework’s dying flare. He wore a benign expression, but there was no question he was blocking the door. He didn’t move as they approached.

  Bear said, “Out of the way.”

  Prudently, he stepped aside. Tim threw open the door. Dolan was sitting on the pool table, feet drifting in circles as if stirring water.

  Bear said, “You’re coming with us,” and grabbed him by the arm, steering him out. Dolan whined and fired questions all the way to Bear’s rig but didn’t figure out simply to tell Bear to let go of him. Bear threw him in the front seat, and he and Tim climbed in on either side of him. The dashboard clock, at 1:32 A.M., had fallen back to an hour slow.

  Bear drove a few blocks and pulled over on the quiet, dark street. He bent down, reaching beneath the floor mat. Dolan’s concern changed to fear. He recoiled, practically scaling the bench seat, but there was nowhere to go.

  Bear tossed the confidential report into Dolan’s lap. Dolan took a moment to thaw. He looked at the top sheet, then turned a few more pages, rapidly, his interest growing. “Where did you get this?”

  Tim told him.

  Dolan held his stomach and leaned over as if contemplating throwing up. He said, “How do I know you didn’t generate this yourself?”

  “Because we don’t know what the hell it is. We can’t analyze this kind of scientific data.”

  “This isn’t science.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s accounting.” Dolan flipped through the pages, zeroing in on a few abbreviations with his finger—L12-AAT mapped for comparison beside X5-AAT.

  Tim noted his change in focus. “What?”

  “These are the trial names for the latest generation of viral vectors I created. Lentidra and Xedral. Lentidra was back-burnered.”

  Bear said, “The permanent-cure vector? That was far along in the pipeline, right? Tess was all over it, had a bunch of info gathered on her hard drive. Early trials, the press release about the animal study going south, all that.”

  Tim recalled Tess’s notation in the margin of the Xedral report stuffed into her bookshelf—Why Lentidra fall off map? Tim found himself, now at last, caught up to her inquiry. “Why was it back-burnered?”

  “They ran into problems during animal trials. I looked at the data, but…”

  “What?”

  “The trial data are all outside my lab.”

  Tim imagined that such a vague answer from Vector’s senior scientist would only have further fired Tess’s imagination.

  “And they withhold it from you?” Bear asked. “It’s your company.”

  Dolan cupped sweat off his forehead. “They gave me the data. In a variety of formats, actually. I’m just not certain how…complete it was. It’s something I’ve been looking into.”

  Tim said, “Are they similar? Lentidra and Xedral?”

  Dolan adjusted his glasses with a little lift. “You’re thinking if there was some problem with Lentidra, a design irregularity, something, it could reflect on Xedral, too? It’s possible.” He flipped to the next page. “But this looks more like—”

  His cell phone rang, Bach’s familiar Gothic trills. He caught himself, his shoulders rising in a half cringe.

  “What were you saying, Dolan?” Tim said. “What do you think this report is?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” Bear said. “These are your inventions, Dolan. You can read this.”

  Dolan tilted his head down so his chin wrinkled. He looked scared, and much younger than his thirty-two years. The phone finally stopped ringing. “Take me back, please.”

  “Listen—”

  “Take me back.” Dolan shoved the document out of his lap. “Arrest me or take me back.” Bear started to say something, but Dolan cut him off: “Then let me out!”

  Bear tugged the gearshift down into drive, and they coasted smoothly back across the wide Bel Air streets. They pulled up to the estate, and Tim got out.

  Dolan scooted across the seat, knocking the report onto the curb, and climbed out. He stood frail and bent; whatever he’d glimpsed had eaten away at his posture. At the end of the long walk, the giant house loomed, a few illuminated rooms granting it an uncanny vitality. He stared up at the house’s impressive mass as if awed by it. Tim waited for him to move, but he didn’t.

  Dolan turned back to them. “I’m not like them. I’m weak.”

  Tim stooped and picked up the report from the gutter. He rolled it and pressed one end to Dolan’s chest. “Don’t be.”

  After a few moments, Dolan took the pages and stuffed them into his waistband. He pulled his shirt down, hiding them, and shuffled toward the porch that just four nights before had been the stage for Ted Sands’s murder.

  Chapter 73

  Morgenstein stepped out of the shower with a shaggy bath mat wrapped around his waist, a stopgap towel that ended midthigh. He weaved a bit in front of the cracked mirror and took another pull from his fresh bottle of Bombay Sapphire. A used condom, infused with streetwalker-preferred strawberry flavor, stuck to the futon mattress behind him. He’d had a hell of a night, and still had seven hundred bucks of the snitch money hiding under the cap of his Speed Stick.

  He shook his head, throwing flecks of water onto the stained mirror, then traded the square blue bottle for a Q-tip. He’d just inserted the cotton tip into his ear when a shadow flashed from the open closet to his left and struck his elbow.

  He sagged back against the wall, a grasping arm knocking over toiletries and dirty glasses, the bath mat falling. He felt no pain, just a loud, constant rush, a seashell pressed to his left ear.

  A revolver came into focus first, then Walker behind it.

  Morgenstein’s fingers scrabbled up his left cheek, growing sticky, and then he unscrewed the bent Q-tip from his ear canal. Blood ran through the fingers of his cupped hand.

  He picked up the bath mat from the floor and secured it around himself, an incongruous act of modesty given what was at stake. The marks of his fingers were rendered on the cloth in crimson.

  They’d told him Walker was going to come. He wasn’t sure if he hadn’t believed them or simply hadn’t cared.

  Grim comprehension hit him, a cold, chest-high wave. He cleared his throat, but it still felt coated with gin and phlegm. He couldn’t hear himself well over the white noise permeating his skull. “Your father would never harm me.”

  Walker cocked the hammer with a thumb, the gun doing a tiny tilt and bob. “I’m not my father,” he said, and squeezed.

  Chapter 74

  I heard you got shot.”

  Bear took a turn too hard, and Tim braced against the door, almost dropping his cell phone. “Shit, Dray, I’m sorry. I just got grazed. Coupla stitches.”

  “For a few stitches I wouldn’t have bothered staying awake worrying.” Despite her tone, her voice was uneven. She blew out a shaky breath. “I figured if you were dead, Guerrera wouldn’t have mentioned it so nonchalantly.”

  In the background Tim heard Tyler fussing. “He’s not asleep?”

  “Same story.” She sounded exhausted. “This case goes on much longer, I’m filing for hazardous-duty pay.”

  “Our space between sightings is shrinking. I’d say we’re closing him down.”

  “Yeah? How many stitches has he got?”

  “He’s losing some blood.”

  “Do tell.”

  As Bear flew through stoplights
, not bothering to distinguish red from green, Tim described the events since the last time he’d checked in with her, shortly after Walker’s sniper attempt at Beacon-Kagan had hit the news channels. Caden Burke’s emergence, the shoot-out at Game, Tim’s visit to his father—this alone was met with stunned silence—the visit to Morgenstein, the raid on the apartment, Tim’s standoff with Walker, the trip to the hospital, and, finally, the failed interface with Dolan.

  Not surprisingly, Dray zeroed in on a detail he’d long dismissed as insignificant. “Walker dumped the Camry in the airport parking lot, right?”

  “We already checked, Dray. There were no other vehicles stolen out of there around that time.”

  “He drove away in something.”

  “He might’ve taken the bus. A cab.”

  “Covered in ash and reeking of trash? Maybe he wrote ‘fugitive’ across his forehead with a Sharpie, too?” Different tone: “No, you can’t have a Scooby-Doo Band-Aid. Go back to sleep or I’m gonna put my head in the microwave. Yes, I’ll send your daddy in when he gets home.” Back to Tim: “Plus, why bother when you’re gifted at boosting cars, which he clearly is?”

  “So?”

  “So check what cars were stolen in the surrounding area that night. He’s not gonna swipe a car from the lot claiming he lost the ticket. They ding you for two hundred bucks. He’d have to grab something a block or two away.”

  The Ram screeched up to Freed’s downtown high-rise. The doorman looked startled beneath his wannabe-Manhattan red cap.

  Tim said, “The task force is on overload. Will you get on it?”

  “Sure. Guerrera has the parking-lot ticket with the time stamped on it?”

  “Yes. Thank you. Gotta run.”

  “Oh, and Timothy? Let’s keep tonight’s count to those five stitches. In you, I mean.”

  An elevator operator rode with them up to the penthouse floor. Freed’s building was one of the crown jewels of downtown’s gentrification, twenty-five floors of luxury living for Japanese businessmen, Europeans who missed real city living, and the occasional East Coast star whose career required a seasonal transplant to within limo range of the studios.

  Freed answered the door in a silk kimono-looking robe that managed to be masculine but earned a behind-the-back eyebrow raise from Bear nonetheless. They crossed a marble floor to a granite table suspended from the ceiling by two centered steel cables. His copy of the confidential report had been laid out, page by page, across the surface. Post-its with notes and questions, rendered in blue ink from Freed’s Montblanc, lifted from the sheets like feathers. A floating fireplace magically burned logs. Someone rustled beyond the cracked bedroom door, but despite Bear’s nosy detour in that direction, the identity—and gender—of Freed’s visitor remained concealed. The wall-length window looked down on the rooftop bar and lounge of The Standard hotel. The pool cast a diffuse aqua glow over the scene-monkeys slurping bright name-brand drinks and rolling around on the waterbed cabanas. A projector Supersized Casablanca onto the side of the neighboring building.

  Tim nodded at the pages on the table. “Make headway?”

  “You could say that. I’ve got X5-AAT pegged as Xedral’s latest model, but I’ve been trying to figure out what L12-AAT is.”

  “It was the final model of Lentidra,” Tim said, “a viral vector they pulled back after they hit problems during animal trials.”

  “They pulled it back, all right, but not because of that.” Freed looked troubled. He sat at the end of the table and scooted his chair in. “This report is, among other things, a risk assessment. It provides a comparative cost-benefit analysis of both viral vectors.” He tapped a graph. “This part shows projected profit margins for Xedral, mapped against those for Lentidra.”

  Bear said, “Xedral’s projected profits are higher.”

  “Significantly higher. Initially.”

  “And this chart?” Tim asked.

  “The tipping point. For when the risks associated with Xedral outweigh the financial benefits.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Tim said. “What are these figures?”

  “The effectiveness quotient. It shows Xedral to be eighty-six percent effective.”

  “Sounds pretty good,” Bear said. “So what ‘risks’ are we talking about here?”

  Troubled, Freed jogged his Montblanc so it tapped the table’s edge. “Lentidra’s effectiveness is at ninety-five.”

  The guard came out of his chair when Dolan stormed into his father’s study. Breathing hard, Dolan threw the report on his father’s desk and crossed his arms. The guard, accustomed now to the pretense of discretion, dismissed himself quickly, leaving them alone. Dean held the report in a firm hand, perusing it at arm’s length. The cold still hadn’t left Dolan’s face; he’d sat on the porch for the past forty-five minutes, reading by the faint light cast through the parlor window. Dean set down the report without lifting the top page.

  “Well?” Dean said.

  “You want to tell me what that is, sir?”

  “An accounting scenario.”

  “That’s why you gave me false data for Lentidra,” Dolan said. “Not because it was flawed. But because it wasn’t.”

  “Neither vector is one hundred percent.”

  “I don’t see the same fail rate for Lentidra.”

  Dean’s aggravation reached critical mass. “You don’t see the same healthy profit margin either.”

  “Xedral is less effective. But you want it anyway.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  Dolan’s eyes pulled to the framed poster behind Dean. XEDRAL. THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED. THIRTY DAYS AT A TIME. “The boosters. You buried Lentidra because it was too effective. It achieves permanent transgene integration. There’s no need for a maintenance shot every month, like Xedral requires. You don’t want to cure AAT deficiency. You’d rather maintain a pipeline of sick monthly consumers.”

  “I don’t expect you to comprehend the intricacies.” And then, resigned to his disappointment: “You’re not your brother.”

  “No. And I don’t share his ethics either. We could have had Lentidra to market months ago. Saved who knows how many lives?”

  “There’s nothing illegal about what we’ve decided to do here. We own our research.”

  “Our research started with a grant from NIH. Taxpayer money.”

  Dean chuckled. “Do you know what your lab has spent since it opened?”

  “A hundred and twelve million.”

  “Right. Of which your NIH grant was what?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  “Correct. Your grant was a drop in the bucket. And you don’t care where the rest comes from, do you? You don’t bother to keep tabs. It could be from other people’s gold teeth, melted down at Auschwitz and stockpiled in Paraguay, right? Ethics! Where do you think your operating capital comes from?”

  “Investors.”

  “Right. Are the money managers bad people? No. Are their investors? No. They’re just spoiled rotten. They’ve come of age in a time when a three percent dividend and four percent appreciation doesn’t cut it. When stockholders see any equity that doesn’t grow fifteen percent every year as a turd not even worth flushing. For better or worse, you are married to them. Those beady-eyed fund managers. Those rapacious investors. Their money, not mine, is what will turn Vector into a success. So don’t you question my ethics until you can truthfully say you give a fuck how I’ve gotten my hands on that money for you.”

  “This isn’t about money, or funding, or business. It’s about putting people at unnecessary risk.”

  “Don’t be such a pessimist, Dolan. These people—terminal patients facing certain death—are being offered an eighty-six percent chance at having their lives saved. If I was sitting in their chair at the roulette table, I’d take that bet. Say our worst-case estimate is right. Fourteen percent of patients have a problem. So what? They were going to die anyway. Of liver failure—a slow, horrible way to go. Until you develo
ped Xedral. It’s a godsend.”

  “Not when there’s an alternative that provides a cure. With significantly less risk.”

  “An alternative that offers little incentive to this company to continue marketing and developing this and other lifesaving products. Grow up, son. This is part of doing business. We provide a service, and there are costs to providing that service. You want to…what? Bring one drug to market and not be able to fund the infrastructure to maintain it? Not to mention future R&D? How do you think that’ll get funded? You want to cure cystic fibrosis, Dolan? How are we going to do that without resources?”

  “How are you going to explain why you knowingly withheld a superior vector?”

  “Come on, Dolan. For every product we run dozens of models and sims like this. And thousands more showing potential problems and risks with all of our products.”

  “This report from your beloved accounting department is a bigger threat than you’re letting on.”

  “Would it be a threat if it leaked? Yes. Would that threat be inconvenient? Yes. Would it be unmanageable? No. We’ve provided for that.”

  Dolan leaned over the desk, jabbing a finger into the report. “We’re launching Xedral on Monday and going wide three months after that. To three hundred thousand humans. A nine percent effectiveness difference is what? Twenty-seven thousand dead? A year. Have you really got that accounted for?”

  Dean, a portrait of calm in the face of Dolan’s emotionality, studied him with something like enmity.

  Dolan examined his stone façade and said, “We have a responsibility to release Lentidra.”

  “And we will when the time is right.”

  “No way. I can’t let you sit on it.”

  “You can’t? What do you have? A contingency scenario? A few pieces of paper obtained through questionable legal means? You don’t have any hard data, do you? Do you? You don’t have a scrap of leverage, so don’t you dare threaten me.”

  “What about Tess Jameson?”