House on Fire

68

By the time the session had broken for dinner, I had located Dr. Zubiri. He was a tall, spindly man of around sixty, with silver hair and wire-framed glasses with thick lenses. He was wearing an aquamarine polo shirt and neatly pressed chinos, and he was seated up front, in what I realized was the VIP section.

“Excuse me, Dr. Zubiri?” I said.

“Yes?”

“A moment?”

Wary. “What’s this about?”

I lowered my voice. “It’s about the lovely country of Estonia and its beautiful capital, Tallinn.”

He blinked a few times. “Do I know you?”

“No, but you might want to. Why don’t we talk in private?” I pointed to an unoccupied spot off the path by the amphitheater wall.

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy who’s doing some investigation into Oxydone.”

“Get the hell out of here. I don’t have to talk to you!”

“You’re right, you don’t have to talk to me,” I said. “You don’t have to. You want to. You want to talk to me the way a drowning man wants a life preserver. Look, you want me to walk away from you right now, I’m gone. And then you’re going to have fifteen to twenty years in federal to think about whether you made the right call. Because you’re the one person the family is going to hang out to dry.”

“The — family?”

“The Kimballs. Let me assure you of one thing: the family will look after its own. And that means that you, my friend, are going down.”

“If you’re some kind of activist shareholder or something, you can forget it. I am absolutely loyal to this company.”

“Oh, I respect your loyalty. And they’re banking on it. You are taking the fall for the Tallinn study.”

Zubiri’s expression was frozen, but I could see the facial muscles twitching, a blood vessel pulsing. He said nothing.

I went on. “Is it too late for you? I’m not sure. There might be a play.”

“What exactly do you want from me?” he said feebly.