Chinese, and this wasn't the team's product, so St. Gall wasn't rushing to run trials on it. I told you, this is how corporate science works.”
“So you gave it to Steinhardt.”
Telling the story seemed to calm her. “It was only when Vaxtek filed its lawsuit and the head of my lab at St. Gall looked at Vaxtek's patent that he realized it was the same as my work.” She stifled a laugh. “Of course it was the same. It was my discovery! So they picked up my work and threw a lot of money at trials and got to market first.” “Does St. Gall know it was your sample that Steinhardt used?”
Lily shook her head. “After Vaxtek gave them the security guard's report, about my being in Alan's lab, they wouldn't believe anything I told them. They thought the results were Alan's, not mine. They thought I stole Alan's work.”
Seeley had to get back to the trial. “Did Steinhardt promise you credit for your work?”
“He said we'd be co-inventors-him for his work at Vaxtek, and me for my work at UC before I went to St. Gall.”
“But when the patent issued,” Seeley said, “there was only one name on it. His. St. Gall stipulated priority and dropped you as a witness. And they had the vaccine in their lab all the time.”
Seeley saw at once how the trial had to end. If a story in the Chronicle that Steinhardt had lied about the dates of his discovery would give any juror who saw it second thoughts about the validity of Vaxtek's patent, then an article that Steinhardt had in fact stolen the discovery from another researcher would effectively destroy the company's case. But only Lily could make that happen.
Seeley said, “Why did you decide to work in this field?”
The emotion of moments earlier had dissolved and the tears disappeared. Quietly, she said, “To save lives,” and then after a moment, “the same reason you're trying to destroy your own client's case.”
“Do you have any idea how many lives you could save by giving your story to the Chronicle?”
“I'm not a hero like your Dr. Cordier. I'm just a scientist.”
“For God's sake, Lily, this is your invention that Steinhardt's putting his name on. How is that different from some party hack in China doing the same thing?”
“Even if I told Gail the story, why would anyone believe me?”
“Because it's true.” Even as he spoke, Seeley knew that she had appraised the situation more astutely than he had. Gail Odum might believe her, and Odum's editor might let her run a story with only one source. But Vaxtek and St. Gall would drown the story in a flood of press releases and news conferences. And quietly they would arrange for Lily's deportation.
Seeley said, “You have to do this for yourself.”
“I liked you a lot better when you were letting me seduce you.” She traced the bruises on his face with a finger, hurting him. “I worry about you. You remind me of the dissidents at home. My parents. Beaten, exiled, sent to prison.”
“This isn't China.”
“There are people who create trouble for themselves wherever they are. I think you're one of them.”
Seeley said, “You have to trust me.”
“I trust you, Mike, but I don't trust the real world to come through the way you want it to.”
“I need your help. Just talk to Gail Odum.” As he spoke, Seeley watched his reflection in her eyes, and found himself listening to his own words. What he saw and heard was that he was as much a dissembler and user of people, as much an avoider of reality, as was his brother. For the briefest moment, he felt weightless, as if the earth had been pulled out from under him.
Seeley said, “We can make this work.”
She pressed a finger to his lips. “Can you really promise that?”
Seeley saw the pain in her eyes. “No, I can't.”
“That's better. If you really care about me-and I think you do-you'll trust me with this.”
“You're right.”
“About caring for me?”
“About both.”
TWENTY-ONE
At four in the morning, Seeley was still awake, stretched out on his bed in shirt and trousers, too restless, but also too exhausted, to get under the covers. He left Lily fifteen hours ago. If it took her two hours, even three, to call Gail Odum, the story exposing Steinhardt and Vaxtek's fraud could appear in this morning's edition of the Chronicle. She and Odum had talked before; this was no stranger calling with a wild tale. Big stories made it from street to press in less than half the time.
He had left a message at the hotel front desk for the Chronicle to be delivered to his room as soon as it arrived, and when there was a sharp metallic rap of a key against the door, he knew it was the bellman with the paper. The man was sullen and reeked of off-hours cigarettes. Seeley handed him a twenty-dollar bill from the night table, as if it were a bribe to ensure that the story would be in the paper.
The Chronicle front page was as crammed with color as the Sunday comics. A political opponent charged the city's youthful mayor, recently out of rehab for alcohol abuse, with using cocaine. An article explained step by step how a middle-class Bay Area resident could pay for an otherwise unaffordable home. Conditions in an Iraqi orphanage were squalid, and circumcision was falling into disfavor among American parents. But nothing on the crowded page told the story of a Chinese researcher whose discovery of a major AIDS breakthrough had been stolen by a world-renowned scientist and patented by his employer.
Christmas and birthday gifts were rare when Seeley was growing up, but he experienced the same electric sense of anticipation as he turned over one page to the next, scanning each quickly but carefully. Is there any cocktail more potent than the expectation that your every desire is just around the corner and the simultaneous certainty that it will not be there?
There was nothing in the paper's first section or in the regional news, but Seeley's heart caught when Odum's byline jumped out from the third page of the business section. The headline seemed a jumble, and the story, when he looked more calmly, was about not Lily but the Silicon Valley executive whose trial had been under way in the federal courtroom next to Seeley's. In the photograph that accompanied the story, Seeley recognized the handcuffed defendant as the man who had moved quickly past him in the corridor last week.
Seeley paged through the rest of the business section and, his hope rapidly dwindling, the sports and entertainment pages, even the classifieds. Then he examined the entire paper again, running his index finger down the columns of each page until it was stained black. By the time he put the paper down, he realized that the sadness he felt was not so much for the missing story, as for his selfishness in pressing Lily to tell it. He was just a lawyer caught up in a miscreant case. This was her entire future.
He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, then collapsed onto the bed, falling at last into a dreamless sleep.
The rest of the day slipped by like a familiar nightmare. A microbiologist, the first of Thorpe's two remaining infringement witnesses, took the stand in the morning. As deliberately as Seeley framed his questions for the scientist-adjusting their pace, hiding traps-the futility of the effort ground down what little hope remained in him. Once, when his concentration broke, his thoughts veered to Lily and his rash surrender to her of the decision whether to go to the newspaper. His tone when he returned to the witness was so harsh that Barnum gave him a puzzled look, Palmieri a worried one. Who, Seeley asked himself, was he so angry at? Candidates filed through his thoughts like figures in a police lineup. Who was he not angry at?
Midway through the afternoon cross-examination of Thorpe's last infringement witness, an immunologist, Seeley's thoughts again wandered. Tomorrow would be the last day of testimony. Charles Weed, a prominent New York patent lawyer who was on Thorpe's witness list to sustain the illusion of a vigorous attack on the Vaxtek patent, would testify that he had long ago advised St. Gall that the AV/AS patent was invalid, so that the company was free to copy it. How was Thorpe going to slant Weed's testimony to advance the fraudulent lawsuit? Perhaps he wouldn't try. Closing arguments were on Friday, when Seeley would attempt an illusion of his own: arguing for
