Lethal Dose

sense.

She lifted the papers off the printer and reread the article on Billy Buchanan’s death. What was the connection? Had Triaxcion somehow contributed to Buchanan’s death? And how did Kenga figure into all this? She wasn’t involved with Triaxcion other than as an employee of the company manufacturing it. Which meant that Kenga would have access to the Veritas mainframe. And with a little ingenuity, she could probably download everything Veritas had on Triaxcion and pass it along to a third party.

Gordon Buchanan.

She glanced again at the address. Butte, Montana. If she remembered her geography classes, Montana was one of the northern states, tucked up against Canada. Maybe visiting Gordon Buchanan was the thing to do. If there was a connection between Kenga and Buchanan, maybe she could figure out what, if anything, was going on.

Crazy thinking again. She shook her head at the total absurdity of it all. Her imagination was taking over, controlling her cognitive thoughts. She was wide awake and lucid, but thinking of taking a cross-country flight to talk to a man who’d probably look at her like she had two heads. Gordon Buchanan had probably never heard of Veritas or Triaxcion. He was a sawmill owner whose brother had recently died in a tragic accident. There was nothing to connect Gordon Buchanan to Veritas.

Except the fact that Buchanan’s name had shown up on Kenga’s home computer. How was that possible? It was highly unlikely that Kenga had just picked a name at random and stored it in a secure file. Gordon Buchanan’s name was stored on her system for a reason. And now Kenga was dead, killed when her driver missed a curve on a windy road through the St. Lucia rain forest. And the driver had survived. How did that happen? The driver would have been at the wheel, struggling to regain control of his vehicle. If he had enough time to jump out of the car, he had enough time to react to the curve and keep from crashing into the ravine. No, something was wrong. When a car went over a cliff, everyone went over, not just the passenger. And add in that this passenger had a classified chemical process worth hundreds of millions of dollars to her employer on her computer, and the waters were getting very murky indeed.

Jennifer stared at the mouse and the pen. Someone had visited Kenga’s house inside the last twenty-four hours and removed a solitary file from her computer. As much as she kept telling herself that this was simply her imagination, the evidence was pointing a different direction. It was pointing to Veritas. And right now, the way to find out if there was any basis to this insane line of thinking was to meet with Gordon Buchanan.

As she switched off the computer and replaced the mouse and pen on the pad, she made a decision. This weekend was open-nothing pressing at the office, no friends to visit.

She was going to Butte.

20

Gordon Buchanan took the back stairwell to the second floor, the wooden stairs groaning under his weight as he navigated them two at a time. He swept past Belinda who was on the phone setting an appointment for one of the firm’s lawyers, and strode into Christine Stevens’s office. He closed the door behind him in a single motion, causing the door to bang shut. Christine looked up from the brief on her desk.

“Good afternoon, Gordon,” she said. She slid her reading glasses off her nose and set them on the brief.

Buchanan didn’t sit but paced back and forth as he spoke. “I’m not satisfied with where things are going, Christine,” he said. His voice was strong, his words clipped. “I want some action. It’s been four months since Billy died and we haven’t made any progress. These bastards at Veritas are treating us like a bothersome fly, just brushing us off. That’s not good enough.”

Stevens’s voice was equally curt. “What do you want me to do? There’s a certain legal protocol to follow. I can’t just go charging into their corporate offices and demand they pull Triaxcion off the market, then issue you a formal apology and a big check. Motions have to be filed and responded to. This takes time.”

“You’ve had time, Christine,” he said. “I’m not kidding. I want to move this to the next level. You’ve had this on your desk for almost four months. Billy died in April, and it’s August-September in another week.”

“How, Gordon? How do I move this to the next level? We have no definitive proof that Triaxcion causes clotting factors to fail in people with A-positive blood. We have suspicions, but that’s all.”

“That’s a load of shit and you know it. This drug is dangerous. It killed Billy and it’s killed at least eleven other people we know about.”

“There’s no solid proof,” Christine said, leaning on her desk and raising her voice. “And without proof, we’ll get killed in a court of law. Not one of the other lawyers representing clients who have died as a result of Triaxcion has filed for litigation. We just don’t have a winnable case.”

“So they get away with it?” he asked, his face taking on color.

His lawyer relaxed a bit, leaned back in her chair. “I told you from the start that these tort cases are difficult. They don’t happen overnight, and no matter what we do, Billy is not coming back. The best I can do, and I stress it’s the best, is that we get Triaxcion pulled off the market. You’re not going to get any personal satisfaction out of this, Gordon. No one from Veritas is going to end up in jail.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Christine was immediately struck by her client’s tone of voice. “What does that mean, Gordon?”

Gordon stopped pacing and placed his hands on her desk, leaning over so he was only a couple of feet from her. “I took the liberty of hiring a private investigator. He managed to dig up a woman, a Veritas employee, who agreed to work with me, collecting information from the company’s classified files.”

“You did what?” Stevens said, aghast. “That’s illegal.”

“I don’t care. I told you, I want answers.”

“I don’t want to know what they found. If they’ve stolen classified information from the company, I could get in serious trouble if you tell me.”

“Okay, Christine. If you can’t help me, I’ll have to take another approach. Outside the legal avenues available.”

“Again, Gordon, I don’t want to hear this.”

He withdrew from her desk and walked slowly toward the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned back to face her. “The woman who agreed to help me…” He opened the door and stood half in the hall, half in her office. He locked eyes with his lawyer.

“She’s dead,” he said, then left.

21

The mood in the room was somber.

The room in question was an office on the fifth floor of L’Enfant Plaza, the head office of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. Four men in suits sat on one side of the conference table, one woman and one man in lab coats on the other. The four men were handpicked from their agencies, the best merger of science and field experience from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. All four had file folders and glasses of water in front of them.

“What are we dealing with?” one of the suits asked. He was a wiry man, only five-ten and one-seventy, but his voice carried unmistakable authority. His close-cropped hair was graying slightly, the only indication he was over fifty. His name was J. D. Rothery, Under Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Science, and Technology. Appointed by the president to one of the top posts inside the agency, Rothery took his job seriously. A small plaque sat on his desk: Country comes first. Family comes second. His wife had it made for him. He took it as a compliment.

The man in the lab coat responded. He was Dr. Edward Henning, biological warfare specialist for the U.S. Army, on special assignment to DHS. Twenty-three years with the military, with postings in Iraq and Afghanistan to ferret out biological weapons, had made his name a household word around most mess halls. He was the first