'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 developed 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 amp;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 facade 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?'
'What about her?'
'She found this.'
'Yes. And she came to me, of course, to blackmail me with it.'
'To give her Lentidra.'
'As if we could just circumvent trials and FDA approval and stick the thing in her son's arm. Even if we were willing to trust her, to float our product out into the world where any general practitioner in Antelope Valley could raise an eyebrow at the miracle cure of this one kid.'
'So you…?' Dolan wanted to know and was afraid to know at the same time.
'So I told her I have a number of relationships in the medical community. Including the executive director of the United Network for Organ Sharing. If Tess were willing to walk away after signing a full non-disclosure regarding any and all knowledge she might have acquired as related to her involvement with Beacon-Kagan and Vector, perhaps expedited treatment could be arranged for her son.'
Dolan could hear the rush of blood in his ears. 'That's why she dropped Sam from the Xedral trial. To make him available for transplant. You offered her a liver.'
'I tried to bring her into the fold-again. I tried to help her-again. And again she proved untrustworthy. She had a fit of conscience, backed out of our agreement, and was preparing to go public.'
A fit of conscience. Tess had been placed in an impossible moral position. An illegal liver, attained for her son, at a cost of contributing to a corporate cover-up that would cost twenty-seven thousand children their lives every year. From what he knew of Tess, even her love for her son wouldn't make her participate in a scheme that would mean hundreds of thousands of children dying unnessarily. She'd thought she could go through with it, yet in the eleventh hour she couldn't. But in preparation for the liver, she'd had to sign away Sam's place in the Xedral study. She was stuck. So she'd tried to take another route-a legal route. Whistle-blow. And hope Sam could hang on until Vector was forced to release Lentidra.
Dolan's voice came weak, throaty. 'So you ordered her killed.'
'And what if I did?' Dean rose, speaking with pent-up force. 'And what if I did? With what's at stake-the
