Cure (9 page)

“Yeah, I get it,” Jack said.

“Was the driver bent on running into Don?” Laurie asked.

“Nobody knows,” Lou admitted. “Either that or it could have been a mistake on his part, putting the van in drive rather than reverse in the excitement. But that’s something we’ll never know. Anyway, with the van lurching forward toward Don, Gloria pulls off a single round through the windshield, hitting the driver in the chest. He doesn’t die immediately; instead, he stops, then backs out into the 47

street and dies a few yards down the road.”

“So what’s the problem?” Jack asked with a furrowed brow.

“The problem is the two other kids. They both insist the van never pulled forward. They say that the driver was looking back at them as they were climbing into the van via the open sliding door. They even insist he had his arm over the van’s bench front seat.”

“Okay, I got it,” Jack said. “If the dead driver was backing up the whole time, the cops are in deep doo-doo, using unnecessary lethal force, whereas if he drove forward it would be justifiable homicide.”

“Exactly,” Lou said. “And to make it more interesting, the bullet’s core jacket was on the front seat and the victim has a wound on his forearm.”

“That makes things even more interesting,” Jack said happily. “Vinnie, let’s get a move on. We got work to do.” Then, glancing at Laurie, he added, “Get a case and come on down. I’ll save the neighboring table like we talked about.”

“Great,” Laurie responded, as Jack, Lou, and Vinnie disappeared back through the communications room, where operators sat waiting for death call-ins. She went over to Arnold. “Do you have a case for me yet? Perhaps it could be a straightforward case rather than something controversial. I’d like to get my feet wet rather than jumping into the deep end. I’m anxious about avoiding screwing up.”

“No case for you today, Laurie,” Arnold said. “Bingham’s orders. He left word that unless there was an absolute flood today, I was to give you a free day to allow you some time to acclimatize after such a long absence. So you’re free.

Welcome back!”

Laurie let out an audible breath through pursed lips. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. On the one hand, there was something to be said about getting up to her office and getting things organized since she’d not been there for almost two years, but on the other hand it was putting off the inevitable, and now she’d have to go through the anxiety all over again tomorrow. “You sure he was insistent, or did he say anything about what my preference might be?”

“He was insistent as only Dr. Harold Bingham can be. You know the boss. He is never wishy-washy. He did say for you to come by his office first thing so he could welcome you back.”

48

“Okay,” Laurie said with resignation. She left Arnold to his charts and headed after Jack and the others. She thought she’d descend to the morgue and tell Jack she was not going to be in the pit for the day. When she got to the back elevator, she changed her mind. Knowing Jack and his strong penchant for interesting cases, which Lou’s GSW certainly was, and how absorbed he’d be, she decided to tell him later. Instead, she turned around and headed for administration to see if Harold Bingham had arrived yet. As she walked she took out her mobile phone to make the first of many checks on JJ.

4

MARCH 25, 2010

THURSDAY, 9:05 a.m.

B
en Corey commuted into the city almost every weekday in his prized 2010

Range Rover Autobiography from his home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Despite the usual traffic, he enjoyed the drive, especially across the George Washington Bridge. He always made it a point to be in the far-right lane on the upper deck so that he could appreciate the view of the Manhattan skyline and the expanse of the Hudson River. It didn’t even bother him when the rush-hour traffic occasionally stopped dead, since it allowed him to appreciate the view even longer. To enhance the experience, he always loaded his CD player with classical music. It was the one time during the day that he allowed himself to be alone, even turning off his cell phone.

On that particular day, the commute had done its job. By the time he drove into the parking garage just west of 57th Street, he was feeling very rested and happy, as well as wonderfully ignorant of what had occurred the previous evening.

Ben walked less than a block to the office building where iPS USA had rented space on the eighth floor facing Fifth Avenue. The day was warm, in the high fifties, and the sun was out, all in sharp contrast to the misty, chilly, cloudy weather of the previous day. All in all, it promised to be a glorious day in every respect.

Ben pulled off his coat as he passed the receptionist, Clair Bourse, whom his assistant, Jacqueline, had recently hired. He said good morning, and she returned the greeting.

Entering his corner office, Ben hung up his coat and sat himself at his desk.

Front and center was a fully signed and notarized copy of Satoshi’s contract with 49

a yellow Post-it note saying “for your files.” There were also wills for Satoshi and his wife, and the trust documents Satoshi had signed concerning his infant son, Shigeru, with another Post-it note saying Satoshi had to get his wife’s signature on both her will and the trust document. There was also a reminder for Ben to ask Satoshi if he wanted to take physical possession of them all or whether he’d like to have them put in iPS USA’s safe-deposit box in the vault at JPMorgan Chase or in the safe there in the office. Finally, there was a current copy of an obscure biomolecular journal titled Reprogramming Technologies. On its glossy cover was a third yellow Post-it, also in Jacqueline’s handwriting: Check out the article on page 36. I think we’d better move on this. The suggestion was followed by several exclamation points.

Ben put the papers for Satoshi on the corner of his desk, intending to give them to the researcher when he saw him, which he thought would be within the hour.

Nine-thirty was Satoshi’s usual time of arrival, and Ben had no reason to believe it wouldn’t be as usual that morning. The only way he thought he might not see the man until afternoon would be if Satoshi had decided to indulge in some serious celebrating the previous night. From Ben’s trip to Japan to rescue the now-famous lab books, Ben knew what sake could do.

“Did you read that article?” Jacqueline questioned. She’d poked her head in from the neighboring office through the connecting door.

“I’m looking at it at the moment.”

“I think you’d better,” Jacqueline encouraged, “and before we sign the deal with Rapid Therapeutics up in Worcester, Massachusetts.”

“Oh?” Ben questioned. He didn’t like the sound of that. He and Carl Harris had been negotiating with Rapid Therapeutics over the course of many months to license their patents on increasing the efficiency of creating induced pluripotent stem cells. A deal was finally imminent, so there was no time to waste if something better was in the pipeline.

With his feet perched on the corner of the desk, Ben proceeded to read the article, realizing as he did so that Jacqueline was certainly correct. The article was about a small start-up company in California named iPS RAPID that had recently licensed a mechanism that dramatically raised by hundreds of times the efficiency of producing human induced pluripotent stem cells, a heretofore stumbling block in their use. The new technique involved what were termed small molecules.

Ben was shocked, not that the breakthrough was so astounding, although it was, but that it had gotten to the point of licensing without there even being a 50

whisper of its discovery. Usually such an invention would first appear in Nature or Science, as its importance was obvious as a giant step in the direction of the commercialization of stem cells, but here it was showing up in an essentially unknown journal as a patented process already licensed, meaning that iPS USA was going to have to join the fray late and pay hundreds of times more to corner it. Although he was in a very real way adding to it, Ben recognized it was an unfortunate sign of the times. Universities now all had their own patent offices and considered filing for patents associated with the researchers’ work more important than the research itself, and the behavior was definitely slowing the progress of science. Before the patent mania, it was the immediate publication of advances that kept the investigative pot boiling. Of course, adding to the problem was the fact that government patent offices, both in the United States and Europe, were also granting patents for life processes, which they weren’t supposed to do by law, with Europe better than the United States in this regard.

Ben could not believe some of the patents that he had recently seen emanating from the U.S. patent office. Often he marveled how anyone could justify a patent on a process that had developed by evolutionary forces over millions if not billions of years. The current patent mania would not only slow research but might also bring it to a halt. No one will be able to do anything without impinging on someone’s patent, which will result in ever more lawsuits, of which there were already enough today. Ben saw it as being akin to throwing sand into the gears of progress in medical research, a consequence that iPS USA was trying to avoid, at least in the arena of induced pluripotent stem cells.

“Put in a call to this iPS RAPID!” Ben called out to Jacqueline through the open connecting door. “You’re right about this article. Get the CEO’s name and get him on the line!”

Jacqueline’s head poked through the doorway, her red hair back-lit from the sun streaming into her office.

“Didn’t you notice that iPS RAPID is in San Diego, where it’s just after six in the morning?” Jacqueline said patiently.

For a moment Ben just stared at her without being able to make out her facial features in the glare. It took him a moment to comprehend that it was far too early on the West Coast to get anyone on the line. “Then get me Carl,” he said.

“And what do I have scheduled for this morning?” He was thinking of canceling everything to get right on the issue of iPS RAPID.

“Other than in-house meetings, you are supposed to meet with Michael Calabrese in his downtown office at ten-forty-five. Did you forget?”

“I forgot,” Ben admitted. He thanked himself for having hired someone as good 51

as Jacqueline to keep tabs on his schedule. He considered himself more of a concept guy. Although it was important to deal with the issue of this new company, in the long run it was more important to deal with Michael and break off the Mafia-Yakuza connection. Intuitively, he understood that the longer the association went on, the harder it was going to be to stop it. He also knew that if the connection were ever leaked he’d probably have to resign, or at the very least he’d have to kiss good-bye any chance of launching an IPO anytime soon.

What he didn’t let himself even consider was the possibility of an indictment.

With Jacqueline off to find Carl, Ben went back to the article, musing over what class of small molecules was involved. He guessed it was probably some kind of suppression of growth factor inhibitor, but that was only the obvious. As he read he marveled over the speed of biomedical discoveries, especially knowing that such discoveries invariably pointed to other possibilities, which spawned even more discoveries, in a quickening self-fulfilling process. He also knew there were discoveries and there were discoveries, meaning some were huge steps and others not so huge. He considered this present discovery to be one of the relatively big ones, at least in relation to the commercialization of iPS cells.

“You wanted to see me?” a voice called from the doorway to the hall a few minutes later.

Carl was standing there with his tie loosened, the top button unbuttoned on his shirt, and his sleeves rolled up to just above the elbows. He was the picture of the hard-working accountant rather than the CFO, which was why he was so good at what he did. There was nothing beneath him. He was involved in every aspect of the business’s finances from the mundane to the conceptual, and Ben trusted him implicitly and relied on him completely.

“Come in! Sit down and take a look at this!” Ben said, handing Carl the article.

Ben watched his chief financial officer’s expression as he read, noticing a frown develop. Then, in an apparent moment of frustration when he was finished, Carl slapped the journal down onto the surface of Ben’s desk and lifted his face to him. “There’s something I have to come clean about. It’s a confession of sorts.”

“What in the blazes are you talking about?” Ben asked, while in his mind he was concerned about being blindsided by some kind of major financial problem just when things were looking so rosy.

“This is something I should have admitted a year or two ago,” Carl said so contritely that Ben’s concerns soared.

What now? Ben thought silently, trying to prepare himself for the worst, such as 52

that the company had run out of money from having been embezzled or from some other disaster. With the contract signing yesterday, he’d been confident their financial situation was solid, especially with the contract certainly upping their market value.

“I hate to admit it, but I just don’t know enough about stem cells,” Carl said guiltily. “I understand up to a certain point, but when you hand me something really technical like this, it’s just beyond me. I’m sorry. As the CFO of this company, I should be more knowledgeable with it, but the fact of the matter is that I’m better on the financial side than the scientific side. Remember! You recruited me from the financial world, not biotech.”

For a moment Ben was stunned into a brief silence by a combination of relief and surprise. As a biomolecular scientist, he was so familiar with the material that he had trouble believing everyone else wasn’t equally well informed. Quickly the relief and surprise turned to humor, and Ben found himself laughing. At that point it was Carl’s turn to be confused. “Why are you laughing?” he questioned, genuinely bewildered. He had expected surprised irritation from Ben, not laughter.

“I can’t help it,” Ben admitted. “You’ve always convinced me you understood the field as much as anyone. Hell, I’ve asked you your opinion on a lot of issues, and I’ve always felt you gave me solid advice. How could that be?”