The Delta Factor (3 page)

What no one had expected, not even Deborah, was that they would hit pay dirt so fast. And in such a major way.

Deborah wheeled herself into the outer office and stopped before the desk belonging to Blair Collins, newly appointed secretary to the vice president for research and development. “Is his highness in?”

Blair made a face. “Unfortunately. So is Whitehurst.”

“Do you know what this is all about?”

“Nobody tells me anything.” Graceful fingers pulled honey-colored hair behind her ear.

It still amazed Deborah that she and Blair were becoming pals. Looks like Blair's were normally synonymous with hostility from both sides. “Maybe somebody lost a bean.”

Blair nodded. “You found a place for me yet?”

“You're asking the wrong person, sister. I've got to rely on the grand high poobah in there for funding.” She spun her chair toward the doors leading to the inner sanctum. “Besides, moving you downstairs would cause riots and mayhem. Best to let my overheated techies dream from afar.”

“I'll wear sackcloth and ashes,” Blair offered.

“In your case it wouldn't help,” Deborah replied, and opened the door.

“Deborah!” Angrily Dr. Harvey Cofield raised both hands over his head. “Where on earth have you been?”

“Exploring the outer reaches of science,” she answered. “Good morning, all.”

Deborah's boss was a sleek-suited tyrant. At some point in the distant past he had collected several degrees and still considered himself to be a capable scientist, although he had not spent quality lab time in years. These days, the only journals Dr. Cofield opened contained stock tips and money-market trends. Dr. Cofield considered himself to be an extremely capable administrator. His staff considered him an overpaid clown.

Dr. Cofield loved toys. He loved perks. He loved power. He loved everything that bore the scent of success. He drove a Lexus with leather interior and a bumper sticker that read, “My other car is a Lear.”

If Dr. Cofield did anything well, it was play the corporate game. His talent for infighting was legendary. He swam through the murky waters of company politics and scientific credit-grabbing like a hungry shark.

Dr. Cofield demanded, “Is it too much to expect my staff to check in from time to time?”

“Let's see. Today is Friday, right?” Deborah said crossly. “Since you were the one who sent me to the Philadelphia conference for the past four days, I assumed you might know where I was. Then this morning—”

“Never mind,” Dr. Cofield snapped. “There's been a leak. Somebody on your team must have opened their big yap.”

“Now just a doggone minute, Harvey,” Deborah started.

“What Dr. Cofield meant to say,” Pharmacon's executive vice president, James Whitehurst, interrupted smoothly, “was that we have been forced to play our hand sooner than we would otherwise would have liked.”

“Nobody from my staff talked,” Deborah fumed. “Not a soul, not a word.”

“Be that as it may,” Whitehurst continued, pouring corporate oil on the stormy waters, “we have ourselves a problem that will not go away of its own accord and which will require us all to pull together as a team.”

Deborah subsided, dispatching a baleful glare in Cofield's direction. “I'm listening.”

“Rumors have begun appearing in the most unlikely places.”

“What sort of rumors?”

“The worst kind,” Harvey Cofield snapped, irritated as always when his scapegoating was not going as planned. “Ones with a shred of truth.”

“It appears that some members of the press have been led to believe we are further along in our process than is the case.”

“We are,” Deborah announced smugly.

“We are what?”

“Further along,” Deborah replied. “That's where I was this morning. It looks like—”

“Never mind,” Whitehurst interrupted. He disliked anyone else speaking once he began. Whitehurst considered himself to be a prime example of urbane leadership. Deborah had not yet formed a final conclusion, but she was tending to think that the new exec VP most resembled an eel—slippery and hard to pin down, but dangerous when cornered.

Whitehurst had assumed the executive vice-president role at their Edenton facility scarcely two months before. The former ranking exec's wife, a born and bred New Yorker, had loathed North Carolina and commonly referred to the little bayside community as a time warp to Tobaccoville. The exec had taken early retirement and moved back to their Fifth Avenue condo, leaving Pharmacon's new Edenton labs to be run by Whitehurst.

Pharmacon was considered a second-tier ethical pharmaceutical firm. Ethical because it did original research into new drugs. Second tier because it was far outranked in both size and research potency by the giants—Squibb, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer, and the others.

Back in the seventies, Pharmacon had come up with the vanguard treatment for heart attack and stroke victims, also used in lesser doses for treatment of high blood pressure. The incoming revenue had quickly swollen Pharmacon's coffers to the bursting point. But instead of enabling new research breakthroughs, success had turned Pharmacon into a corporate pachyderm—slow and ponderous and unwieldy. Occasional modifications and add-ons to existing products, as well as aggressive advertising campaigns for its over-the-counter drugs, managed to keep Pharmacon financially afloat. But for industry watchers and those in the know, Pharmacon was a company going nowhere fast.

Three years earlier, Pharmacon's aging board had finally agreed that something radical was required to resuscitate the firm. Something bold. Something that would shake the company from its complacent slumber.

The Edenton facility had been that bold new step.

As far as the New York City-based board was concerned, Edenton, North Carolina was only a half step away from the Third World. Tucked snugly along a little bay in the backwaters of Albemarle Sound, it did not even have a decent airport. Anyone visiting from headquarters had to copter over from either Norfolk or Raleigh. This was exactly what the board had wanted. By selecting a site next to a village of some six thousand people, it had hoped to discourage most of the New York staff from coming within a hundred miles of the new factory.

They had succeeded almost too well. The only way top administrators like Cofield and Whitehurst had been enticed to sacrifice a New York lifestyle for Edenton was with promises of untold wealth and power and eventual returns to civilization. But scientists, Deborah Givens among them, had been far more willing to go where called on the promise of sparkling new labs. The research staff had been given a relatively free reign and encouraged to tackle new problems. Promising initial developments had been made in several directions. The reports filtering north had been sufficiently positive to frighten some of the New York staff into actually getting some work done—another hoped-for result.

But no one, neither in New York nor in Edenton, had ever expected the payoff to come so soon. Or from the direction it did.

“We have no choice,” Whitehurst told them. “We have been forced to call a press conference.”

Deborah sat up straight. This was serious damage control. “We've barely started the FDA approval process.”

“You let me handle that,” Dr. Harvey Cofield replied smugly.

“Allow
us
to handle it,” Whitehurst corrected.

“Whatever.”

Deborah swung her gaze from one man to the other. “What are you two talking about?”

“Perhaps you don't understand the significance of what we are dealing with,” Whitehurst said.

“I should,” Deborah countered. “I discovered it.”

“Yes, well, there is a tremendous latent demand for your discovery.”

“Not to mention a tidal wave of political pressure once this thing gets out,” Cofield added with evident satisfaction.

“This already
is
out,” Whitehurst replied. “From which source no longer matters. What we must now do is make sure we are able to state the facts clearly and precisely before the rumors are printed as fact and this whole affair is blown completely out of proportion.”

Deborah kept her eyes on Cofield. “You're planning to pull some political strings, aren't you. Do an end run around the FDA.”

“Not in the least,” Whitehurst demurred. “We simply intend to speed things up a bit. In the interest of all the patients who shall benefit from your marvelous discovery, my dear.”

Eel, Deborah decided. Definitely an eel. “So when do we put on the song-and-dance act?”

“In,” Whitehurst glanced at his watch, “precisely one hour and eleven minutes.”

“What?” Deborah gaped. “I don't have anything prepared. No press kits, no data, no—”

“Save it,” Cofield ordered. “This is the prelim only. We go out, say we're working on the drug, close up shop.”

“There shouldn't be more than a handful of media hounds,” Whitehurst soothed. “We kept the invitations to a very few people only.”

“Hard to say how many exactly,” Cofield warned. “Things like this tend to spread through the press like wildfire.”

“A dozen at most,” Whitehurst assured her, and rose to his feet. “What say we meet back here and go down together?”

There were two fist fights and a dozen bruised egos before the higher-ups admitted the conference room was too small. The press conference was delayed an hour for the auditorium to be prepared, for tempers to be cooled, and coffee to be served.

Dr. Cofield opened and directed his address specifically to the scientific journalists, which meant he talked over the heads of the popular press. Whitehurst watched in horror as the initial hostility returned in force. He sat there and visualized the kind of coverage that would be generated.

Finally he could bear it no longer. He stood and moved up beside Cofield, and said into the microphone, “Thank you very much, Dr. Harvey Cofield, for that most engaging introduction. Now perhaps we should allow Dr. Deborah Givens to proceed.”

Deborah jerked in surprise. She had not expected to speak at all. Feeding piranha would normally be easier to disengage than Harvey Cofield from a microphone.

Whitehurst realized he had just made a major gaff by the venomous look Cofield shot him. But it was too late to turn back. “After all,” he said, smiling nervously. “It was Dr. Givens who made this discovery.”

Deborah hid her grin by lowering her head. Another glorious blooper. Cofield would be fit to be tied.

“Dr. Givens?”

Deborah pushed herself erect and walked toward the microphone. She had left her wheelchair to one side of the stage, but now she wondered if that had been such a good idea. She was feeling increasingly weary. But no time to worry about that now. Deborah rubbed her nose hard to cover her smile as Cofield spat a little venom her way on his way back to his chair.

She approached the microphone, smiled briefly, and said, “Good morning.”

“For several generations,” she went on, “Central Europeans have been taking a root extract called echiniacin—”

“How do you spell that?” someone called out.

She did so, then went on, “Echiniacin was said to strengthen the immune system. Some doctors scoffed at it, while others swore by it. The reasons are obvious.”

“Maybe to you,” muttered someone in the front row.

Deborah kept her cool. “We have well-established lab methods for measuring how well a particular substance acts in fighting a particular illness once the ailment has been identified. There is no way, however, for us to prove that a solution might
prevent
a certain individual from contracting a specific disease. None whatsoever.”

“Can you explain that?” called a voice from the back.

Whitehurst rose from his chair to call for order. Deborah stopped him with an upraised hand. When the exec had subsided, she said, “Okay. Let's say for example that from a thousand healthy people, an average of seventy-five will suffer from one form of cancer or another within a twenty-year period. Any test of a preventative medicine would be inconclusive, even if we found a thousand people willing to report to our lab every morning for twenty years so that a technician could give them a dose and record the data. Remember, these would all have to be
healthy
people, so there would be no illness as an impetus to their being willing subjects. No, strike that, there would have to be two thousand. We would need a control group taking a placebo to ensure reliability.”

“A what?” called an impatient voice.

“Placebo,” Deborah repeated. “Usually a water-sugar solution, something to make sure that the medicine itself and not the act of taking a medicine has made the difference. For instance, having to show up every day at a lab may make the subjects more conscious of their health, so they might stop smoking and drinking and eat a more balanced diet. That sort of thing. As I was saying, though, even if we
could
do this type of study, the results would be inconclusive.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and felt a sudden wave of fatigue rise with the movement. “Because we would have no way of knowing who out of that thousand would have developed the illness
without
the drug. Maybe we chose the wrong segment of the population. Maybe a hundred different reasons. The only way to be sure that a group
might
have become cancerous would be by starting the experiment with all participants already ill. And then, of course, we would no longer be studying prevention.”

There was a pause, then someone asked, “So what did you do in your testing?”

“Instead of trying to study how to keep healthy people healthy, we studied the drug's effect on viruses. We restricted our initial studies to infected patients.”

“And?”

“We managed to identify several potentially active ingredients within the echin root,” Deborah replied. “And by recombinant DNA experimentation we raised their potency through growing new strains of the plant.”