Reuven was silent. He wasn’t accustomed to being lectured on Hebrew theology by an American who was hardly religious, let alone Christian, to begin with.
“What do you need?”
“Time. Buy me time. Buy us time to manufacture millions of doses of vaccine and antibiotics. Give us time to place a biomedical shield over Israel. If you can slow them down, delay the start of their countdown clock, we’ve got a fighting chance.”
“How much time?”
“Twelve weeks.”
“Eight.”
“I’ll take eight.”
“If they attack us with tularemia and we’re not ready, not vaccinated… if there’s no biomedical shield over Israel… the Jericho missiles go in. I can’t stop that.”
“Understood.”
Reuven stood up and left cash on the table as Camp followed him out of Molly Bloom’s to the street curb. Reuven handed him a note.
“If you need me call this number. They will give you information. Follow it closely, and I will contact you. Separate taxis, okay, I’m sure you can find your way home.”
Reuven got into the first taxi as Camp leaned in to say goodnight.
“Do you want my number?”
“I have it.”
Camp shut the car door as Reuven lowered the window.
“Hey Molly Bloom, just so you know, I would have taken six weeks.”
Reuven laughed.
“That’s good because I would have granted 10.”
27
Biotech Park
Lyon, France
Leslie Raines waved and smiled at Thierry Gaudin as she passed by the glass walls of the executive offices on the way to her lab and office.
In the heart of the Rockefeller University Hospital Center, LyonBio was one of 19 other health science companies in the biotech corridor of southern France, including a business incubator designed to move basic scientific discoveries to full-scale production and consumer products.
LyonBio had built its reputation on developing vaccines and ‘one medicine’ biologicals, drugs that uniquely measured and targeted an individual’s specific genetic make-up and DNA. With an African lion as its logo, LyonBio had attacked market share and opportunities with unrivaled aggression and passion since it broke onto the world’s biotech landscape in 2003.
Thierry Gaudin was identified in Le Monde daily newspaper’s business section as one of the nation’s top 10 up-and-coming chief executive officers in 2007 before he took his company public in 2009. LyonBio climbed to the top of the Euronext 100 and quickly became the darling of the French stock exchange, formerly known as Bourse de Paris.
Gaudin never forgot his humble beginnings and continued to reinvest in the revitalization of Lyon’s industrial district which Gaudin helped transform into a technology corridor.
What Silicon Valley meant to hi-tech computer-based discovery, research and development in California, BioTech Park in Lyon meant to life sciences-based discovery, research and development in southern France.
Though wealthy by all standards, the 45-year-old Gaudin was a family man and a devout Catholic. His oldest son Bernard was 15 and an avid downhill skier and swimmer. Thirteen-year-old Marie was a vocalist in the school choir and had taken ballet training since she was four years old. Philippe was only six, but his passion was football, soccer as the Americans called it, and he wanted to be on the team that brought the World Cup back to France.
But the glue that kept his family together and fueled his business was his wife of 22 years, Rochelle. For the first seven years of their marriage, Rochelle worked day and night next to Thierry to help transform his dream into a reality. She worked two jobs to put him through graduate school. When LyonBio rocketed to success, Rochelle kept him grounded. No fancy cars, no exotic villas and no public displays of wealth were allowed as jewelry around her neck or on her fingers.
Rochelle’s influence on Thierry was personified in the culture of LyonBio. Universities, corporations and even world governments wanted to do business with LyonBio, including the United States Department of Defense.
No one at LyonBio knew that Leslie Raines was, in fact, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Raines. She dressed casual, but smart. She didn’t have a pretentious attitude, but she was deliberate and expected order. Her demeanor was steady keel, never too high up, and never the least bit down. She had only been occupying the “developer’s” office for three days, but the 540 employees were already talking about the “American woman” that Thierry Gaudin was trying so desperately hard to please. They didn’t realize the financial potential of “the project” let alone the catastrophic risk of its failure.
Raines got the call shortly after 9:00am. She hustled down to shipping and receiving where two large GEFCO freight trucks were backing into the docks. It had taken an additional 48 hours since the project received a “green light” at Fort Detrick before a ground shipping company could be found that was willing to deliver almost 200 NHPs, non-human primates. The transportation of research animals, especially monkeys, was becoming a global nightmare and a hot-button issue, especially in Europe.
France, like much of Europe, wasn’t real keen on the notion of using animals in research. Rats, mice, rodents, fruit flies and zebra fish were not as big of a deal as beagles, cats — and worst of all — monkeys. Less than half of LyonBio’s 540 employees had any clue that the company they worked for needed to use rats and rodents in order to test the targeting and safety of the vaccines and drugs they were developing.
Word of almost 200 rhesus monkeys housed on the premises spread through LyonBio — and the rest of the second largest city in France — like wildfire.
But if everything went according to plan, Raines knew that she and her monkeys would be long gone in less than three months. She only hoped that she had that much time.
LyonBio didn’t have a BSL-4 facility like Raines used at Fort Detrick, but their BSL-3 equivalent was deemed adequate, given Raines’ amazing work in developing a vaccine product candidate. Biocontainment was classified by the relative danger to the surrounding environment in terms of “biological safety levels.” Since tularemia occurred naturally, the Government of France gave “the project” a waiver on the grounds of it being an agricultural hazard. LyonBio’s BSL-3 was appropriate for their clinical, diagnostic, teaching, research, and production facilities for all work done with indigenous and exotic agents which could cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation.
Laboratory personnel at LyonBio had specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and it took less than three days for Raines to assess that they were supervised by competent scientists who were experienced in working with these agents. If the work Raines did at the BSL-4 on Fort Detrick was valid, then she knew they only needed to build a neutral or warm zone for tularemia in Lyon, France.
Thierry Gaudin walked up to Raines as the handlers unloaded the NHPs and moved them to the vivarium.
“This is a great day, Mademoiselle Raines… I assure you that you will be greatly happy you selected us as your partners,” Gaudin said in stilted English. “We will duplicate and verify the vaccine components today and make sure the adjuvants are as you have directed. We will replicate the lethality of the bacterium first to make sure that… you know, to make sure.”
Raines did know. At least four more monkeys needed to die, just to make sure the vaccine recipe was creating an immune response against a truly lethal bacterium.