“Have you any proof whatsoever?” Paula asked.
“Absolutely,” George said. He then described the lengths he had had to go to, to obtain Sal DeAngelis’s reservoir, which had been embedded under Sal’s abdominal skin.
Paula was aghast as George described going to the funeral parlor and rifling through the dead man’s clothes with the embalmed corpse lying in the coffin. “You really were motivated,” Paula said. “I can’t believe your nerve. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
“I wanted that reservoir,” George said with emphasis. “I thought it would be key. I had to make the effort to check the body in the hospital morgue, but I’d been turned away.”
“But you ended up getting it?”
“I did.” George then described the ordeal at the salvage yard and how he finally got hold of the chip after what seemed like a futile search.
“So this reservoir is your proof?”
“Not by itself.” George went on to describe how he had been able to get Sal’s phone as well as having Kasey’s. He explained that although Kasey’s iDoc had been wiped clean, Sal’s phone hadn’t been because it had been damaged in the crash and still retained some information. That was how George learned, with Zee’s help, that Sal’s phone had received a global-dump command.
“Did that jibe with what you already knew?”
“Absolutely. When I had examined the reservoir, I could see that it was completely empty. And this was a reservoir that was supposed to last for two years or more, according to the doctor who had implanted it. Sal’s had been under his skin for only a couple of months!”
“So this is what made you hire Zee?”
“Precisely,” George said. He went on to tell Paula that when Zee hacked into Amalgamated’s servers, he found no evidence that a dump command had been issued. Yet Sal’s smartphone itself showed exactly the opposite. Nor did Zee find a dump command in any of the other records from the other patients. “But when Zee looked more carefully he saw it!”
“Saw what?” Paula asked.
“What he called the artifacts! Some minuscule evidence of an overwrite on the records. Zee sensed that the record in each case had been overwritten to delete the dump command and the recorded vital signs showing the effects of a dump command. He saw the same artifact at the same critical juncture in all five of the records seventeen minutes prior to death. It was his feeling that there had been a cover-up of the dump command coming from outside the server.”
Paula was astonished, angered, disbelieving, and intrigued all at the same time. “Okay, what does all this mean?”
“With what proof I have, which is limited to DeAngelis’s phone data, I believe that the dump command was probably a hack job, which was then covered up by another hack job by someone else.”
“That’s too complicated,” Paula said, shaking her head. “In medicine, when you have confusing symptoms, the diagnosis is usually a single disease.”
“I admit, I can’t be certain, but Zee discovered something else. When he tried to trace the hacker it led him to two ‘high-anonymity proxy servers.’ He said on the other end of these proxy servers were very likely the sources of the hacks. One, he thought, was here in Los Angeles, possibly up in the Hollywood Hills, and the other was in Maryland.”
“Maryland?”
“The server in Maryland was the one that spooked Zee. He told me the server was part of an obscure government agency called URI, standing for Universal Resource Initiative. The only thing he could learn about the organization was that it was loosely associated with the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which, if you don’t know, was set up by the Affordable Care Act to advise Medicare and Medicaid on cost control.”
Paula appeared crestfallen. “You think this is all some kind of ill-conceived cost-saving plan engineered by the feds?”
George shrugged. “I don’t know. But that was one of the things that occurred to me. Either by the feds or Amalgamated.”
Paula leaned forward, head in hands, quietly saying no over and over again. Then, suddenly, pulling herself together, she sat back up, looking directly at George. Anger had trumped dejection. “If you are right about all this, it is a terrible, terrible subversion of probably the biggest innovation in medicine to date. iDoc is going to save people, not kill them! It’s going to revolutionize medicine, democratize it, taking it from essentially ‘sick’ care to true ‘health’ care, giving everyone their own twenty-four-seven doctor who intimately knows them and has access to the latest diagnostics and treatments available.”
George didn’t respond. Paula had flushed again with a wild look in her eyes. Enraged at the thought that iDoc might have been subverted, she had launched back into her sales presentation. He did not attempt to interrupt her. He understood that she was as shocked about it as he had been. He let her vent.
“You know as well as I,” she snapped, “iDoc is going to reduce unnecessary medical procedures and break the stranglehold of medical specialists!” She stared back at George challengingly.
“I agree,” George said, trying to calm her. “I agree with everything you’ve said. But there is a problem — these five suspicious deaths. It’s a situation that has to be looked into and either confirmed and exposed or proven to be somehow circumstantial, if that is even possible with what is known.”
“Okay, okay!” Paula said, struggling to get herself under control. “How can we look into it?”
George trod lightly; this step was crucial. “Your access makes you the only one who can confirm or deny the problem. How many people are there on the iDoc programming team?”
“I don’t know… Two hundred, I guess.”
“Is there anyone in that two hundred that you trust completely? Someone who would have full access and can definitively determine if the program has been compromised?”
She shook her head. “I’m not close to any of the programmers. Thanks to Langley, none of them have been made available to me. And to be honest, the only person among the key players I don’t trust completely is Langley.”
“Why?”
“Langley has implied on several occasions that I have been getting too much credit for iDoc. I wonder if he could be involved in some twisted scenario to discredit the first iteration, then rescue it.”
“Your intuition notwithstanding, Langley probably has too much to lose to be involved in discrediting iDoc. It doesn’t comport, at least in my mind. Let me ask you this: Who, if anyone, do you totally trust at Amalgamated?”
“Thorn. He is the only person I completely trust. And I think you are right about Langley having too much to lose, but I still wouldn’t want to approach him with this. I think we should go to Thorn and tell him about what you’ve learned and what we suspect.”
George grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t know about that, Paula. And for the similar reasons I would hesitate before going to Langley. The money, power, and celebrity involved with iDoc is so off the charts that it would be difficult for the businessman in Thorn to be able to be objective.”
“You don’t know Thorn like I do. The man has character.”
George shook his head again. “When I watch Thorn, I see the quintessential businessman, more interested in the bottom line than anything else,” George said.
“I’ve known him for almost four years now, and he has been like a father to me. He’s a businessman for sure, but with integrity. I trust him implicitly.”
“Maybe I should forget my paranoia about the government, and we should go directly to the FBI and have the agency either confirm my fears or lay them to rest?”