Capitol Reflections (25 page)
And two hours after that.
31
Peter and Jan sank into the plush captain’s chairs in the rear of his van, positioned in the parking lot of a fast-food joint down the street from the CDC. It looked like a miniature version of the interior of the Starship
Enterprise
. Jan thought this was slightly hilarious—she encountered a lot of “geekdom” in her line of work, but this beat it all—and more than a little dazzling. From what she’d come to know about Peter, she guessed there weren’t any extraneous bells and whistles here. Just raw technological power. Rows of wireless laptops lined both sides of his vehicle. A chair installed on a track ran down the center of the van so its occupant could slide freely from one computer station to the next.
Enterprise
. Jan thought this was slightly hilarious—she encountered a lot of “geekdom” in her line of work, but this beat it all—and more than a little dazzling. From what she’d come to know about Peter, she guessed there weren’t any extraneous bells and whistles here. Just raw technological power. Rows of wireless laptops lined both sides of his vehicle. A chair installed on a track ran down the center of the van so its occupant could slide freely from one computer station to the next.
“This is utterly amazing,” said Jan, gazing in wonderment at the almost supernatural glow emanating from the ten laptop screens that surrounded them. “It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie, or James Bond.”
The security specialist turned to her and smiled confidently. He had a great smile.
Jan laughed as Peter unlocked a cabinet at the front of the van and selected several CDs from its shelves. The CDs shared space with laptop batteries, cables, routers, and other equipment arranged neatly on dozens of small metal shelves. The man seemed prepared for anything.
“What now?” asked Jan.
“Keep your eyes on the magic fingers at all times,” he said, imitating a carnie huckster running a shell game. He put disks into the three laptops directly in front of him, two of which he hooked together with a slim cord. His hands moved with quickness and agility, indicating supreme confidence in his abilities. “I’m going to knock on BioNet’s door again. I’ll be denied, of course, but that’s no problem. I just want to establish an interface so that I know BioNet is communicating with the laptop, even if it’s merely to say ‘Go away.’”
“And then?”
Peter didn’t answer. He performed his digital ministrations, then turned to Jan and said, “Okay now. Ready to see where File 23789.626 ended up?”
Gwen stared at the Medwatch computer in her office. She rubbed her eyes and yawned. It was late, and the corridors outside her sanctuary were empty. She’d spent the entire last week searching Medwatch’s database like Diogenes searching for an honest man, ostensibly looking for evidence that terrorist cells within the United States were contaminating the nation’s drug supply.
Rolling her chair back from the terminal, she concluded that she’d found everything she needed in the AE files, although she would continue to massage them in order to satisfy her superiors. The seizure patterns Gwen noted in Ann Arbor and Trenton were not isolated events. Seventeen drug companies and 352 physicians had independently reported seizures in 789 patients. She discovered that sixty-three of the reported seizures had fatal outcomes, fifty-seven required hospitalization, twenty resulted in long-term illness, and the rest were resolved through intervention and short-term treatment. Although each adverse event was associated with a particular drug taken by the seizure victim at the time, there was no discernable pattern. Most of the drugs had no real potential for causing seizures. With numbers like these, though, Gwen didn’t need any more corroborative data from Medwatch to know that something strange was happening. The signal was off the charts. There was a massive cover-up underway, and what she wanted to know more than anything was who in the FDA was responsible for shutting down a legitimate investigation into what could potentially be the greatest health risk to affect the country since the AIDS epidemic.
Gwen heard a light tap on her door, as if someone had accidentally brushed against its surface. She got up, opened the door, and peered into the corridor. It was empty.
Turning around, she noticed the miniature china bird she kept on the table near the doorway had slipped to the carpet. That must have been what she heard—not a brush against the door.
She was becoming more than a bit paranoid lately.
But perhaps with justification. Had the china bird been tipped over by someone snooping in her office? Had she simply not noticed it until now? If so, maybe someone had brushed up against the door a few minutes earlier.
Returning to her chair a little more subdued, she once again focused on the cover-up. She shot an e-mail to Jan.
| Subj: | RE: access |
| Date: | 8/03/05 10:14 p.m. Eastern Standard Time |
| From: | [email protected] |
| To: | [email protected] |
Need advice on getting into the personal filing cabinet of my boss’s PC. Have any interesting toys that might be of help? Seizure stats are widespread according to Medwatch. I need to find out who’s trying to divert my attention.
Gwen received a reply thirty minutes later.
Your timing is impeccable. I’m with the third party nowand just checked my mail using one of ten PCs here inthe … well, later—long story. Should have info on BioNet soon. In the meantime, try this upload. But you can only use it once. Hope it helps.
The attached file was named “Gwen’s Toy.” Gwen assumed it came from Jan’s computer whiz, Peter Tippett. She opened the file and saw the name PASSBREAK. The instructions were simple: “Type name of PFC user into box and hit ENTER. When results appear, make hard copy or transfer to floppy or CD.”
With adrenaline removing any trace of her former fatigue, Gwen typed “Ralph Snyder” into PASSBREAK’s box and hit the ENTER key. A few seconds later, Ralph Snyder’s PFC appeared as if by incantation, with a column of dates, senders, and subject headings.
Gwen wasn’t particularly interested in reading Snyder’s correspondence, especially when she learned that her boss actually had e-mail from porn sites on his work computer. Well, if he needed to add a few inches, that was his business. She didn’t have to scroll very long to find a subject line that pertained to her.
7/19/05 [email protected] … … re: Dr. Maulder
Gwen double-clicked the highlighted line and stared, mouth open, at the memo. “The goddamned bastard,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief.
Remembering the file’s instructions, she printed out a hard copy of the message. Snyder’s PFC disappeared from the screen five minutes later. She would like to have checked other memos sent to or from “gmcmjr,” but the self-destruct mechanism kicked in too fast.
Gwen looked over her shoulder at the china bird. First, reassignment. Now, a breach of her privacy.
“That goddamned bastard,” she repeated. “Unbelievable.”
“Know anyone in Panama?” Peter asked Jan.
“Is that where the file went?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
Jan read the results of Peter’s handiwork on the nearest laptop.
The destination for BioNet File 23789.626 was 9546transfer@panama/transpac.gub. “What do you make of it?”
“Hard to say. Let me cross-reference the Panamanian address with a file of foreign outfits known to be operating illegally.”
A few taps on the keys of a fourth laptop revealed nothing.
“Did we just hit a deadend?”
“There aren’t any real deadends in my line of work. I need to see if the Panamanian address is the ultimate destination, or just one more stop along the—” Peter broke off his remark abruptly.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jan.
“Everything.” Peter looked alarmed, which chilled Jan immediately since she had never seen this expression on his face before.
“The blinking red light on that laptop at the end of the row—that’s trouble. The laptop is essentially a wireless scanner to make sure no one knows what we’re doing.”
“You mean—”
“I’m afraid it has detected an RB, probably GPS in origin.”
“Huh?”
“It means that we’ve been had, to use the vernacular. Somebody’s figured us out. They used a Global Positioning Satellite to establish an RP—a reverse probe. We have just gone from hunters to hunted.”
“We need to get the hell out of here!”
Peter had already climbed into the driver’s seat and started the motor. “Indeed!” he shouted. “Hold on!”
Only seconds behind, a Chevy Caprice with blackwall tires followed them out of the lot and onto the road.
Gwen paced back and forth across her office. She couldn’t believe what she was reading. “Gmcmjr” was none other than Gene McMurphy, Jr., the associate commissioner for policy at the FDA. His memo to Ralph Snyder had been brief and to the point. It read, “Assign GMM to Adverse Event files. Present duties temporarily suspended pending investigation of recent activities.”
Recent activities? This was an obvious reference to her contact with Jan and their use of BioNet. But what interest did the commissioner’s office have in the Epidemiology Division? That particular office was staffed with political appointees who generally came and went with each administration and worried about broad policy issues, not the type of research in which Gwen was engaged. Furthermore, how did McMurphy find out about her request to use BioNet in the first place?
But the million-dollar question weighed heaviest on Gwen’s mind: why was the commissioner’s office seemingly oblivious to the seizure stats? If anything, McMurphy should have been grateful that Gwen had brought a serious problem to light. It seemed unlikely that this was a simple case of bureaucratic wrangling over divisional jurisdiction. It was a downright obfuscation of the truth. And the truth was that people were dying. Gwen felt that she was going farther and farther down the rabbit hole.
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