Leonard said, “St. Gall used her to try to get a look at Alan's notebooks. They were desperate to develop a vaccine strategy. From the papers he was publishing, they knew he was onto something, but they didn't know what.”
Seeley said, “How do you know that?”
“One of our security guards found her in Steinhardt's lab alone, after hours.” Leonard chewed as he spoke. “You've got a first-year lawyer on your team who made herself a hero on this. She was going through our security reports, trying to find evidence of industrial espionage, and when she sees Warren's name on one of the reports, she remembers that she was on St. Gall's witness list. That's why St. Gall agreed to stipulate priority. They'd look like common thieves if this came out at the trial.”
First the stipulation, then the story behind it. What else was his client hiding from him? “Barnum never told me this.”
Renata had finished her dinner and risen from her place. “I have an early day tomorrow. Like Mike.”
Leonard didn't hear her. “Ed must have forgotten. Our deal with St. Gall is, they don't challenge our priority, we don't go to the DA with criminal charges.”
Seeley felt Renata standing behind him. “Did Pearsall know about the deal?”
“Of course he did,” Leonard said. “He brokered it.”
“I'm glad you came,” Renata said. “Are we going to see you tomorrow night?”
Before he could answer, Leonard said, “Joel Warshaw's having a benefit at his house tomorrow night. He wants to meet you.”
Warshaw was Vaxtek's chairman, but that didn't mean Seeley had to go to parties at his house. “I have a trial to prepare for.”
“Joel doesn't come in to the office,” Leonard said. “He works out of his house. This is a command performance.”
All the more reason not to go, Seeley thought.
“Come by here first,” Renata said. “We'll drive over together. It's just a few blocks.”
“I'll see if I have the time.”
Leonard gave Renata a brusque wave as she left the room. Seeley, although she hadn't touched him, had for the briefest moment the sensation of her hands lifting from his shoulders.
In the living room, Leonard added a log to the fire and took the easy chair across from Seeley. “This is how it used to be, isn't it? The Seeley boys, taking care of each other.”
Seeley didn't know if it was the wine, or the end of what was probably a long day, or maybe just the person Leonard had become-altogether, they hadn't spent more than two or three days with each other in the thirty-two years since Seeley left home-but it occurred to him, as it had in Buffalo, that there was an unquenchable hole at the center of his brother's life, one that for some reason he thought he could fill with family.
“I haven't done anything for you yet. The thought of Steinhardt on the witness stand bothers me.”
“And that's the only problem?”
“I don't like how broad your patent is.” Patents can be broad or narrow, and Steinhardt's patent claimed that the invention included not only AV/AS but anything remotely similar to it. The problem was that, like any other target, the broader a patent is, the easier it is for a competitor like St. Gall to shoot it down in court.
“That wasn't Steinhardt's call. The decision came from the top. Joel.”
Warshaw was an entrepreneur, not a scientist. From a business-magazine cover story two or three years ago, Seeley knew that Warshaw had founded and sold three software companies in less than ten years. Six months before the dot-com crash, when everyone in Silicon Valley, including the guys who waxed and detailed his car, were making paper fortunes on Internet stocks, Warshaw sold all of his holdings and with part of the proceeds bought a controlling stake in Vaxtek. At the time, it was a struggling biotech with neither products nor patents, but with huge sums of money invested in research. Seven years later, with a small portfolio of patents and two drugs on the market that hadn't yet paid back their investment, Warshaw was beginning to realize that the human immune system is considerably more resistant to quick fixes than computer software.
“Joel wants a blocking position. That way, if anyone comes within a mile of us, we can nail them. If all we got out of our investment in AV/AS was a patent that anyone could copy if they made the smallest change, we'd be out of business anyway. Joel knows it's a crapshoot. All or nothing.”
“What happens if you lose?”
“We have other drugs, but, like I told you, this is the big one. If we lose, the stock will take a hit and Joel will sell the company to one of the big pharmas-Pfizer, Merck, Novartis-for whatever he can get.”
“And if you win, you'll be rich.”
“Believe it or not, Mike, this isn't about money. If we wanted to get rich we wouldn't have gone after a vaccine. The real money is in therapies. A therapy you can sell to a patient week after week, but a vaccine's a onetime deal. How many times did you have to get vaccinated for measles? Once, and that was it. Even the flu vaccine you get only once a year. Clinical trials take longer for vaccines than for therapies. It's almost impossible to get insurance. Give a therapy to a patient who's sick and he's so grateful he won't complain about the side effects. But give a vaccine to someone who's healthy and ten years later, if he has a stomachache, you've got a lawsuit on your hands.”
The glass room had grown dark, illuminated only by the fire, but neither man moved to switch on a light. For some time they sat by the fire without speaking. Backlit by the moon, the branches of a giant oak that overhung the skylight danced in shadows across the polished floor.
On the other side of the glass wall, moonlit figures moved slowly through the yard, first together, then apart.
Leonard turned to see what Seeley was watching. “Deer,” he said. “They love the roses. By the end of the summer, there's nothing left to eat in the hills, so they come down to forage. Two, three in the morning, you'll find them walking down the middle of Atherton Avenue like they owned it.”
Seeley was thinking about how much Leonard had and hadn't changed from the twelve-year-old boy he'd left at their parents' house. Somewhere he had acquired a passion to help people-even in the 1980s, no one went to medical school to get rich-and Seeley admired him for this. Still, Leonard was someone who never stopped manipulating people and events to get what he wanted.
Leonard said, “Do you ever think about the distance we've come? Leroy Avenue. St. Boniface. The Broadway Market with the old ladies in their babushkas. And here we are, talking about a drug that could save tens of millions of lives, two professional men, one who had a hand in creating it, the other who will be defending it in court.”
“The American dream,” Seeley said.
Leonard was almost invisible in the dark. When he rose, Seeley saw the reflection of firelight in his eyes. He came around to behind Seeley's chair. “You were what-fifteen? That's a long time ago.” As he spoke, Leonard kneaded his brother's shoulders with soft fingers. “If we're going to win,” Leonard said, “we need to be working as a team, everyone pulling in the same direction.”
Seeley wondered what else his brother and Barnum had forgotten to tell him. “Sure,” he said. “That would be helpful.”
FOUR
Seeley let down the window as he backed out of Leonard's driveway and the fragrance of eucalyptus again flooded into the car. Turning onto the main road back to the freeway, he thought about how careful Leonard had been with his money long before he haggled with caterers over wedding bills. Into a pickle jar in their bedroom closet he would deposit the coins and dollar bills that he collected from babysitting neighbors' children and making deliveries for the corner grocer. The squat barrel-shaped jar left the closet only when the little miser carried it to the grocer's to change coins for bills. So when, one night, Lenny offered Seeley every penny, the entire hoard, in return for his help, Seeley knew that his easily panicked brother had this time truly blundered into catastrophe.