Shadow of Eden (18 page)

On the landing, Mallis looked into the open door to his right and saw Samantha sleeping on her left side, flannel covers pulled up to her neck. He nodded to Doug who slowly pulled the door closed and held it.

Mallis walked into the master bedroom and saw Ari with Janice curled up around him. He padded up to Janice and watched her slowly breathe as he inserted his earplugs. Mallis placed the gun against her forehead and pulled the trigger.

Ari screamed as he jerked awake.

Mallis watched him strain to see in the darkness. “Janice!” Ari shouted. Struggling to get up, he flopped comically off the bed and onto the floor. Ari found the bedside light and turned it on. Mallis pulled his goggles off.

Ari recoiled in terror as he stared into the barrel of the pistol. He then looked at his wife. “Janice!” Ari leaped onto the bed and held his wife’s head tenderly. Looking up at Mallis, he yelled, “You killed my wife!” Ari’s fear turned into anger.

Anger was dangerous
.
Mallis would have to change that. Mallis pulled his earplugs out. “And you will die, too, Dr. Brown,” Mallis said steadily, locking his eyes onto Ari’s.

“But . . .” he held up his finger to silence Dr. Brown, “I will spare the life of your daughter if you cooperate.” He could hear the muffled shouts from Samantha’s room.

“Samantha!” Ari yelled jumping off the bed.

“Stop.” Mallis said loudly and authoritatively. “Don’t move.”

Don’t move or you’ll spoil everything.
Mallis leveled the gun at Ari who got the message. He stopped short, standing naked except for his briefs, confused, scared and angry. Mallis knew the look. How could my life that was so perfect moments ago turn into this nightmare?

“But why?”

“You made some very powerful people afraid. Now, you want to save Samantha’s life? Then cooperate with me.” Mallis’s voice was low, sounding calm and detached without any hint how much he enjoyed this.

“You won’t kill her?”

“She has not seen us and doesn’t know what we look like.” Mallis said. “There’s no reason to kill her.”

Ari looked at his wife and began to shake. “Please, why?” he whispered.

Mallis motioned with his gun. “Get on the bed.”

Ari slowly climbed into the bed. “Why?” he repeated.

“This is where you earn your daughter’s life.”

Ari looked at his wife and began to weep. “Why her, why her?” He picked up Janice’s hand and kissed it; and then looked at Mallis.

“Can I hold my daughter before . . .?” Ari choked.

“Nope. Spoils everything.” Mallis walked around the bed to Ari’s right side. Ari was right-handed. Everything had to fit.
No fuck-ups.
Mallis placed Ari’s gun against his temple, angling up ever so slightly. His hand was rock steady.

“Who?” Ari’s eyes narrowed in desperate thought. Mallis’s finger tightened on the trigger. Ari’s eyes suddenly lit up with recognition, “Tride—” The gun fired, stopping the word, the most dangerous word. Samantha screamed again.

Mallis turned around and walked to the master bedroom doorway. He nodded to Doug who opened Samantha’s door. Samantha ran into her parent’s bedroom, but stopped short by the sight of the blood and death. Her scream was cut off by another gunshot.

Walking back to the bed, Mallis placed the grip of the gun into Brown’s hand, aimed it at Janice’s head and pulled the trigger one last time. Mallis left the gun in Dr. Brown’s hand and looked at his results.
Good.
Looking around one last time he and Doug walked back down the stairs. Brown had guessed Mallis’s client.
Smart doc
, Mallis thought. Too bad.

As he put on his boots at the bottom of the stairs, he felt the euphoric rush he always did after an operation. He walked out the front door followed by Doug.

Mallis radioed Joe. “Coming home.”

Chapter 37

“M
ary,” Paul Tobias said quietly, “I want to tell you something.” Paul sat on the side of their built-in bathtub watching his wife get ready for bed. He had been dreading this conversation ever since he had made up his mind about Eden. She would find out soon enough, far better for it to come from him.

Mary stopped brushing her hair and looked at him in the mirror. Seeing his serious expression, she turned around to fully face him. “About what?”

“Eden may have been responsible for someone dying.”

“Really?” She looked puzzled. “Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not, but we know that Eden causes a serious brain disease in test animals. I now believe it can do the same in people.”

“A brain disease?” She shook her head, unbelieving. “How? You told me it was perfectly safe.”

“I did tell you that.” He bit his lower lip, “and I thought it at the time. We all did. Trident hid the animal information from the FDA because if they had known what we knew, Eden would probably never have been approved.”

“But—” She sagged against the marble countertop.

“Let me explain.” As he spoke, Paul felt a lifting of the enormous burden he had carried for so long. “At first, when we were just getting started in animal testing, we got some abnormal mouse brain results, just a few. We repeated the studies and then lots of other studies like it. We found that, in certain circumstances, Eden caused an incurable brain illness. We thought that was the end of Eden, but Morloch had us do more experiments.”

“While we were pursuing the additional studies,” Paul continued, “Morloch said we had to support the stock price by keeping the analysts happy. He assured us we would stop development if we got to a point where we thought it would pose a threat to people. Because of his personal assurance and without us maintaining the stock price Trident would fold, we agreed. Remember how we took a big gamble to join Trident? I was looking at unemployment and a trashed career. I couldn’t face that, not after all we went through deciding to take the job, moving, and everything. I just couldn’t.”

Mary’s face showed no sign of what she was thinking. Certainly no sympathy for him.

“So we sent diluted samples to different contract laboratories for more animal tests. That way, we had clean reports to show investors. The doctored studies made it look as though we were progressing according to plan and everybody was happy.

“With the time that bought, Oscar and I did several other studies in secret. We determined that only a very rare patient would be at any risk and even that risk was only theoretical. Based on these estimates, we started human trials.”

Mary shook her head in disbelief. “How could you have possibly thought it was safe?” She sank down onto her bathroom chair.

“Fair question and one we thought about a long time. Keep in mind that animal studies are only a so-so predictor of human results,” Paul said. “Here’s how the data came out. In the repeated mouse studies, we saw that a fraction, about seven to twelve percent, would get the brain changes. We then gave it to gerbils. Only about a four to seven percent got the brain changes. Marmots did not get it at all. In dogs, we only got one case and that only after a year and at much higher doses than people would take. It seemed that the more complex the animal, the longer it took for any brain changes to occur and fewer animals experienced this, most not at all.

“We next put Eden in human brain tissue cultures and a few developed the changes, but only rarely and then only at the highest concentrations. So, we reasoned that the possibility of a human experiencing encephalitis was very remote. Based on that analysis, we started human trials.”

“And what happened?” Mary asked sharply.

“And nothing. It worked as well as we had hoped—better, really—and no one got even a whisper of a problem with the encephalitis during all our clinical trials.”

“How did you know what to look for?”

Paul shrugged. “If the conditions were at all like our animals, it would not be hard to spot. Based on what we saw, we had a pretty good idea of what we would see in humans. We did MRI scans, EEGs, and memory testing in all our early subjects and found nothing unusual. We even used a number of neurologists as our investigators for their expertise in those assessments. And,” Paul sighed, “after all our worries, the entire research program was clean.”

“Then, isn’t that good?”

“Well, yes and no. It comes back to something called latency. It took longer to get the disease in the larger animals—the maximum duration of exposure was for a year during our long-term human clinical trials. If they got it after that, we wouldn’t likely hear about it. That’s why Morloch set up Oscar as the safety officer. He would be the first to know if any doctor called in with the symptoms we were looking for.”

“And—?”

“He says he has never heard of any. So, since we hadn’t heard of anything, now, after almost three years, we felt like we had made it.”

“But now you think differently.”

Paul nodded yes. “Ari Brown called a few days ago and told me about one of his patients that had been on Eden. I think it’s probably one of ours. I can’t be sure, you know, but it fits the pattern.”

“But this is the only one. Right?”

“I don’t know. And after all we’ve been through—I can’t believe I’m saying this—I don’t know if Oscar’s really telling me the truth. In his position, he would get all the calls like Ari’s. It just happened that Ari knew me and called me first.” Paul shrugged, “I just don’t know.” He looked at his wife in anguish. “Ari’s patient was your age and . . . I just can’t live with that.” He desperately wanted Mary’s absolution.

His wife’s eyes had hardened as Paul told his story. “Paul, I thought I knew you, but . . .” She shook her head disapprovingly. “You’re telling me you rolled the dice with the life of every person who has ever taken Eden. How did you justify that all these years—how? How could you sleep at night? After Sara?” She choked.

“I didn’t—” Paul ached, seeing the tears running down Mary’s face.

Mary regained her voice. “How could you bear it when you knew that people could possibly die from a drug you personally knew might not be safe?” She brushed her hair in quick angry strokes.

“I have a plan,” Paul said quietly.

She didn’t hear him. “You’d better do everything you can right now to stop this thing—you have to.” She pointed her brush at him. “I only hope it isn’t too late to keep anybody else from dying. You have to do something tomorrow.”

“I already have a plan.”

She knitted her brow as his words registered. “You do? What?”

He had decided what to do after his second conversation with Ari. “I’m going to collect everything I can about the research—the doctored reports, the hidden data—and I’m going to an attorney. I’m planning to go public with this.”

Chapter 38

“S
it down already,” Steve ordered.

Doreen, the EEG technician, was hovering over his shoulder as he prepared to read Shirley’s electroencephalogram.

“Okay.” She smiled self-consciously and pulled up a rolling chair.

Steve opened the first page of the z-fold EEG paper of Shirley’s most recent tracing. The hospital had not yet sprung for the latest digital EEG technology, so they did EEGs the old fashioned way on paper. On the tabloid-sized sheets were twenty rows of squiggly ink lines running across the two pages, each one representing an electrode placed on the scalp to record the underlying brain activity.

He stared at the page.
Shit.
He turned another page. It was the same. He rapidly flipped through the next twenty pages before he reached something that looked close to normal. But it wasn’t, not really. The background rhythm was too slow and disorganized, considerably worse than on her admission EEG, but that was not what bothered him. It was the sharp waves coming from all over her brain. Steve’s heart sank. On the last page, the edge of the paper caught his index finger and sliced deeply into it. He was so upset by the tracing that he barely noticed until he started dripping blood on the EEG. He put his finger in his mouth.

“Looks bad,” Doreen surmised.

“Yep.” He closed the last page and sighed aloud. “PLEDs.”

“I thought so.” Doreen had finished her EEG training about six months ago and was still green.