commented in the newspaper, and companies themselves were required to make forward-looking comments about their projected earnings. It was a strange thing when a company didn't understand its own stock price, and by strange he meant very bad.
Why would so many people be selling Good Pharma's stock? Maybe they had a good reason to think his company was not as valuable as others thought it was. Maybe they had a good reason or maybe they had an excellent reason. And what could that be? Good Pharma had six major drugs in final development. Of these six, one was a major hit, three were minor duds, one was unknown as yet, and the sixth was a major wipeout. It had been Tom's intention to sequence the news of these developments very carefully. Unfortunately, the rate of progress of each drug in development did not match the optimal order of the announcement of its success or failure. So he had started to mess around with their progress, trying to speed up the big success, slow the duds a bit, and put the catastrophic wipeout into deep freeze: to be announced in fragments, even as the company also announced new initiatives, the ongoing successes of its major hit, and so on. He'd intended to play by the rules but certainly bend every opportunity to the company's advantage. There were things you could do — if you controlled your information! If you assumed that the data and reports in your office, lying around on people's desks, in their computers, and of course in their heads, were protected.
If not, hell's bells.
But what was he to do? If he started a formal internal investigation into how certain critical drug trial information had been stolen or released, then he might accidentally draw attention to the problem itself. He'd be creating more problematic information. That could be stolen, too, or leaked. All you needed was one Good Pharma exec chatting to an outsider at the wrong moment and you could have a hundred news stories inside a day, virally proliferating to the bloggers and investment websites. The stock price would crater. You would also draw attention to the company's information control processes-how faulty they were. How faulty the oversight was. Tom Reilly's oversight, that is.
Martz, of course, was already on to him, seemed to have sensed the problem, started to harass Tom. That's what this evening was all about, getting a chance to get close to Tom and make his threat even clearer. Tom saw that. Oh, yeah. But Martz would not be the last. Tom knew that the major shareholders-the mutual funds, the banks, the hedge fund operators-were not going to give him that opportunity. They had started to call, pressing for appointments. Lots of folks owned part of the company: German banks, French banks, English banks, their German pharmaceutical competitors, the Japanese conglomerates, South Korean real estate magnates, the Hong Kong shipping and manufacturing magnates. Lots of tough, unsentimental bastards. Cared not a whit for Tom Reilly and how many beta-blockers he was popping. Or anyone else at the company. Lose a quick 17 percent on $100 million, that's $17 million. Need to then get a 20 percent return to make yourself whole again. And Good Pharma didn't have a nice fat dividend protecting the stock price.
He felt the beta-blockers kicking in. He felt… well, calm. Cool, clear. His heart beating more slowly. Wow. Wow. He was calm enough to return to the unhappy topic of James Tonelli. Pretend for a moment that the cleaning service had in fact stolen some valuable information, such as the early rotten results on the synthetic skin trials. Pretend you can prove that. Now pretend that James spoke to somebody else who told somebody else to scare those two Mexican girls out of their minds-self-importantly intensifying the meaning of 'send a message'-and they did something stupid, or something worse-like go and kill them. Then pretend you are the New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter and you find out that some kind of important secret research information leaked out of a company and the stock price cratered and then the company-a company in the health field-apparently somehow caused the murder of the people working for the company that took the information. What might be the outcome of that? Tom felt calm! The outcome? A blizzard of bad press, shareholder outcries, God knew what else. His career would be shit-canned. And no severance or golden parachute, if he was found to have broken federal laws or company policies. Prison, even, if people testified a certain way. Once there was a problem, companies cut people out of their ranks within hours, like a bad spot on an apple. Under questioning, James would report that he had done exactly what he had been told to do. Mr. Thomas Reilly, let me see if I got this right: You are the vice- president of a company doing cutting-edge research into how to save people's lives, your father was a doctor, your wife is a doctor, and you ordered or condoned or intimated that two helpless Mexican girls who cleaned your offices be asphyxiated by a tankload of human excrement?
Maybe he had said something more to James. Was it possible? Maybe he had said something like, 'Play rough, if you have to.' To which James had given a solemn, tight-faced nod. Had Tom said that? Could he have actually said that? (He felt calm!) 'I know people who know some people.' Why could he now hear James saying that to him? Why did it sound like something James would say, with a touch of the Brooklyn streets in his voice? They'd talked early one morning, at around eight a.m., when the caffeine was pushing Tom along, jacking him up. I know people who know some people. That was bad. Play rough. That was bad, too. Had these things really been said?
Tom looked over at Ann. She spent the day with patients. Blissful. Had no idea what he was walking into. He felt calm.
As soon as she'd stirred that morning, they'd come to her: Mrs. Thompson, with the heart disease; Mr. Bernard with the bad liver; Harriet Gorsky with end-state renal failure; her patients, all 1,690 of them, a milling, shuffling, coughing, anxious crowd in her mind, divisible by age and sex and of course illness as well as probable illness. Her lung cancer patients, for instance: the patients who in all likehood might have it, pending tests; did have it and were realizing they would die before too long; and those who were in the bed now, coughing weakly. Or there were the many women with anxiety disorders, who ranged from mildly obsessive to those needing immediate hospitalization. Put her in a room with all of these people (no, please don't) and she would be able to drift from one to another sensing disease in many cases, suddenly recalling the string of data that came with each patient, the hemocrit level, the path report, even height and weight at the last checkup. And their histories, their secrets-an enormous psychic burden she tried not to carry but always did. She cared for them, she found them interesting, this selection of humanity, skewed of course toward those who had health insurance and women (men so obstinate about caring for themselves). A few she genuinely didn't like, a few she might cry over when the end came, and a few she even loved, from afar, mostly, chastely, no hint betrayed, of course. Some of the older men who'd lost their wives came in wearing a coat and tie, as if still working, and they often were stoical and silent as she described their conditions, what the problem was. They pursed their lips and nodded, rubbed their dry hands together like it was just a financial matter requiring they write out a very large check. Broke her heart. Maybe they reminded her of her father in his last years. How could they not? They were human beings. They stood nearly naked before her (the men with their loose underwear lowered as she felt for hernias, common in older men and potentially quite serious if infection set in, or testicular swellings), they had odors (women generally wore perfume and cleaned themselves better), they burped softly, farted, grunted. Very occasionally they urinated by accident, especially during an anal exam. She never betrayed any emotion at this, never showed that such behavior was in any way shameful. Because it wasn't. We are animals and subject to the mortification of the flesh. Born so that we may die.
She looked over at Tom in the car. Lost in his thoughts. Seemed calm-for him, anyway. Hadn't asked her about her day. Had barely kissed her hello when she got into the car. Was she angry with him? Yes, but more than that, discouraged. They each worked too hard, they carried too much… and with that the day came back to her… after lunch she'd seen a young married man who complained of chest and stomach pain but admitted that he had just had an affair with his wife's divorced younger sister and probably given her herpes. Ann nodded patiently but thought, You creep. Ann had handed the man a prescription and told him to tell his wife, who was also her patient. Next was a young woman who'd asked to have her antidepressants adjusted upward. The woman was clinically obese, so much so that the fat had reached the last knuckle on each of her fingers, and was a heavy smoker. Ann had spoken sternly to her about her lungs and heart but doubted it would have any effect. The next patient had been an elderly woman whose lower spine and pelvis were deteriorating because of severe arthritis. She moved slowly, apologizing unnecessarily as Ann inspected her lumbar region.
So different from one another, these human beings. If you are a doctor, you have secret knowledge of these differences. And if you have secret knowledge, then you are always at risk of knowing things about people you love, knowing the very thing that you prefer not to know. And now there was something about Tom that was bothering her. She didn't know if she felt this or knew it, or if she felt it as his wife or as a doctor. He was, to all outward appearances, an utterly healthy forty-two-year-old man, six foot one, perhaps 230 pounds, which was too heavy, but vigorous. Yet there was something, a twitch in his eye, a distracted irritability. The animal was under stress, unusual stress. He'd said nothing. Either he knew what was wrong or he didn't. But she sensed that he knew
