“Hi. I didn’t know when you were coming back,” she said in a sullen voice.
“What’s wrong,” he asked halting their customary embrace.
She looked in his eyes and knew she could not keep it from him. It was too big for her to keep to herself. “I have something to show you. In fact, it’s something that needs to be shown to everyone here.”
“Okay, so show me,” he said agreeably.
She removed a thumb drive from one of her pockets, and went to a laptop they kept in the room. Once it was turned on, she plugged in the memory stick, and entered the code necessary to open the file it contained. At first, he did not know what he was looking at. It was obviously medical data.
“What exactly am I looking for,” he asked her as he scanned through the pages.
“Here,” she said as she scrolled to what she wanted him to see.
He read it. At first glance, it did not register with him. He reread it. This time it dawned on him. They found a cure for cancer. “Hey, this is great. Is it true? I mean, does it really work?”
“Yes,” she said without much enthusiasm.
“Then what are you upset about. I agree, everyone should know about this.”
“Look,” she said as she scrolled back to the top of the report, “Look at the date.”
He did. The report was almost fifty years old. “That can’t be right,” he said.
“It is,” she replied as she replaced that thumb drive with another.
“What’s on that one,” he asked.
“Wait and see,” she said seriously. After she opened this file, she explained what it contained while he viewed its contents. “After I came across these records by accident, I noticed several references to what I later learned was a secret government project called ‘Artifice.’ I didn’t know what connection it had with the cancer studies, so I asked somebody to do some checking for me.”
While she was talking, Keith was putting things together as he read the reports.
“You know Lisa,” Terri said keeping his attention, “Her husband Greg works with those supercomputers in the archives and records department. I asked him if he could locate anything on some project called Artifice. He did, that’s what you’re looking at now.”
“This stuff has to be classified,” Keith interjected.
“It was. Even with his security clearance, he said he had to use a decryption program to access it. He only knows what he copied for me, he doesn‘t know the other part.”
As he continued to read, it became clear as the story unfolded. It started to display in his mind like a nightmare. The government found a cure for cancer. But instead of making it available to the public, they chose to profit from it. For decades, they collected money from cancer research and programs. Universities, treatment centers, pharmaceutical companies, and other institutes paid large sums of untraceable funds to a government account. A portion of legal taxation was also funneled into this account. What he was looking at now was a detailed log of where that funding went. It was used to build facilities like the one they had been confined to for more than a decade. The government took advantage of one of the worst diseases known to man and used it as a source of revenue to fund projects that were not only ‘off the books,’ but also away from any oversight or scrutiny. Then he thought of his mother. She was one of the millions to die from this horrible disease. And yet, here he was not only alive because of her suffering, but working to further the effort. He looked her in the eyes, “Who else knows about this?”
“Nobody, only you. Greg knows about the money trail, where it came from and where it went to, but that’s it.”
He was trying to think, but his anger was growing and interfering with any rationality.
“What should we do,” she asked with a desperate note in her voice.
“I don’t know just yet. Don’t say anything to anyone. I’ll talk to my father and see if I can’t come up with more information or some better explanation. He might not know anything, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.”
“Keith, this is despicable. I’ve spent the last week going over this to see if it was all a misunderstanding. I haven’t been able to function at work, and I’ve only been able to sleep with help,” she said referring to sleeping pills. “I wanted to be a doctor all my life. Now that I find out what that means for some people, I no longer want anything to do with it. Martin knows something is bothering me, but I can’t say anything to him.”
“Don’t. Let me handle it. I just need some time to think,” he said as he took her in his arms.
Keith went to his father’s office the next morning. He told Terri to go to work and do her best to put it out of her mind. The outer office was empty. Lucas was most likely running errands for his father. He stepped inside, went to the inner office door and knocked. “Come,” he heard from behind the door.
“I thought I might see you today,” Frank Bishop said from behind his desk. “I heard you brought back a dog, or at least a dog like creature.”
“Yeah, but that isn’t what I came to talk about,” Keith said seriously as he took a seat.
“Oh? Something bothering you?”
“You could say that; something that should bother you too.”
“Keith, if you have something on your mind, then say it. Contrary to what you may think, I actually do have a lot to do around here and I don’t have a lot of time for melodramatics,” he said stiffly.
That was enough to start Keith off a bit more abruptly than he had originally prepared in his mind. “What do you know about a project called Artifice,” he said in a challenging manner.
“I’m not sure what you are talking about,” his father replied a bit too easily.
Keith detected the pretense. “You know, Artifice, Cancer, money, underground bases, that kind of stuff.”
“Where did you hear about this ‘Artifice’ and what did you hear about it?”
“You first. Did you know about it,” Keith challenged.
Frank Bishop’s face was unreadable. He sat there looking at his son for some time before he replied. “I know about ‘Artifice.’ I know what it was, and why it was. I wasn’t part of it other than functioning here as an end product.”
“And you’re okay with that? The ends justify the means?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it doesn’t seem to matter to you.”
“It’s in the past. Nothing can be done about it now.”
“Yes there can. People have the right to know.”
“Don’t be foolish. What good can that do? All it would do is to stir up a lot of hard feelings and old memories. Those people are dead. Nobody here will ever have to deal with that disease again.”
Keith looked at his father in surprise, “You don’t think they have the right to know?”
“We are not talking about rights. We are talking about necessity. What good can come of it?”
“Did you know about this when Mom was diagnosed?”
Frank Bishop looked directly at his son, “No. I didn’t learn anything about it until a few years ago when performing a review of all the classified files. Which brings me to the question, how did you find out about it? I remember having all of those files encrypted.”
Keith knew it would not take his father long to figure out Terri was involved. She was the practical medical connection, but he would not let on to who had assisted her in retrieving the other files. “Terri came across some old medical records which were not encrypted,” he answered hoping it would satisfy that issue, “She showed them to me. I guess you could say she was pretty upset by what she found.”
His father accepted what he was told, but made a note to do some further checking. He decided to let Keith know he was aware of not being told everything. “And those medical records mentioned military bases, did they?”
They locked eyes, but Keith did not respond to the statement. “People have the right to know Dad. I told her to keep it to herself for now, but it’s going to come out one way or another. This is just too big to keep hidden.”
His father sat there in silence as if considering a course of action. Just when Keith thought he was about to
