House on Fire

38

I caught an evening flight out of the Albany International Airport and was back in Boston by midnight. I dozed on the short flight, but I remained on edge.

What would happen when Detective Goldman viewed the CCTV video? He’d see me creeping in and out of the Kimball place and know that I’d been lying to him. I had to be ready for that.

I was up early the next day, out of my loft and over to my office by seven. I had a lot to puzzle on, and this may be the part of my work I like best.

I had a tough problem to solve. How the hell was I going to get inside Phoenicia Health Sciences? I knew nothing about the company, so I did a bit of basic research. Pharmaceutical companies contract out to what are called CROs, contract research organizations, which do testing and human trials and commercial research for the drug companies. Phoenicia was one of these CROs. It turned out to be headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.

I called an old friend of mine — we’d been McKinsey interns together, before I joined the military — who was now a senior VP at Novartis, another big pharmaceutical company. I remember Kim Trepanier had set her sights on pharma from the outset. She was going to run a Merck or a Novartis or an AstraZeneca someday. I always believed it. She was also an excellent poker player. She was a triathlete, a slender woman with short blond hair in a Dorothy Hamill cut. We’d gone out a few times but never really clicked. We were friends anyway.

“I have a strange question for you,” I said.

“Okay.”

“How easy is it to bury a clinical trial?”

“What do you mean, ‘bury it’?”

“You’ve got a new drug and you test it and you get back some bad results. Like it’s super-addictive and hard to quit. But you don’t want the FDA to know about it. What do you do?”

“You’re supposed to register all clinical trials with the US government in an online database. You’re obliged to report the results, and the government goes after you if you don’t.”

“And does what?”

“Your drug doesn’t get approved. Plus you get a big fine.”

“What if you did the study abroad?”

“Western Europe has the same requirements. But you do a trial in Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe, you can do whatever you want.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. So there was this French company developing a drug, an antidepressant, and it turns out that if you inject it into your veins, it gives you a buzz, right? But if you don’t dissolve it properly, it starts to eat away at your flesh. Of course they never reported that. I’ve seen videos from Russia of people with their fingers necrosed, eaten away at the tips. I’ve seen people with the flesh on their arms eaten away, exposing the bone. Just horrible. And all because of a buried study.”

“Where’d they do the study?”

“Eastern Europe. Estonia.”

“They deep-sixed it?”

“Right. You can do that in Estonia.”

“But who? Who can bury it?”

“The CRO. You know what that is?”

“Yeah. Contract research organization.” Outsiders, my father had said. Vendors. It’s harder to erase their memories.

“Exactly. All it takes is someone complicit in the company. Money talks.”

“Is that the sort of thing Conrad Kimball might do?”

She laughed but didn’t answer.

“What’s your take on the old man?”

“Smart guy and a great marketer.”

“Dishonest?”

She hesitated. “I’d say the word is ruthless. Relentless. Apparently he still runs the company at eighty. I think I know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oxydone. Was there a study done on Oxydone that Kimball had buried? There’ve long been rumors.”

“I’ve heard the rumors too.”

“Is this a case you’re working on?”

“An interest of mine,” I said. “Sort of a side hustle.” I’d already said way too much. “I gotta run.”

I sent Gabe a text but didn’t hear back; he was probably asleep. The record store opened at eleven; he might not start work till noon.

Dorothy, meanwhile, was building my alias, the fake background of the fake McKinsey consultant named Nicholas Brown.

I’d started at the Kimball house under a notional cover, which wasn’t expected to withstand heavy scrutiny. But now Dorothy was working on creating a deeper, more durable cover.

A cover, in the intelligence business, is the collection of lies and false companies and such you’ve created to make a fictional entity — in my case, “Nick Brown” — checkable. We call it backstopping. I got in touch with the new head of the Boston office of McKinsey, who turned out to be a friend of a friend, and I asked him to backstop me if and when a call came. We set up a phone line. Turned out there were already several Nick Browns working for the firm. Now you called and someone answered and said I was traveling.

In the old days, the CIA hired forgers to create ID cards and driver’s licenses and birth certificates and school records. And fake passports, fake plane tickets, all that stuff.

But it’s not so easy these days. Not in the age of Facebook and Google and LinkedIn. Now you’ve got to be able to survive a Google search. Anyone checking up on you, if they can’t find your digital vapor trail, they know you’re a fraud. You have to create a credit history. Dorothy set up my LinkedIn account so it looked like it had been up for seven years. It couldn’t look like it just went up yesterday. She even put up a convincing Facebook page that looked like it had been around for five years or so. There were tricks to the trade, and Dorothy knew a lot of them.

Usually those tricks are enough, but not always.