By the time Huang had arrived and Dean had impatiently brought him up to speed on the impasse, Dolan had settled his nerves enough to remain calm and-he hoped-confident on the couch.
Huang turned to him with evident irritation and said, "Yes, we took a hit in X3 animal trials, two subjects gone. And one in X4. And their deaths aren't noted in the main body of data."
Dolan shifted to the edge of the couch.
Huang held the pause, stoking Dolan's anticipation. "It was simian hemorrhagic fever, Dolan. Not a conspiracy. This shouldn't be news to you. You know we lost two subjects to it at the outset of our X5s."
"Now three. If you count Grizabella."
"Grizabella reached through her cage and drank a beaker of sodium hypochlorite last night. I don't think that cause of death figures prominently in our areas of concern. Nor does SHF, which is why it's not factored into the stats for transgene effectiveness."
"Okay. Fine." Dolan caught himself backpedaling. "That begs the issue-"
"Which is?" Chase asked impatiently.
"Which is not that monkeys are dying-fourteen percent of our Xedral monkeys die-it's that they're disappearing from the subject suite and the staff refuse to tell me how."
"What is going on in that test-subject suite downstairs will reverberate around the world," Huang said, "both medically and financially. I hold my team to the highest level of confidentiality. They clear everything through me. That they won't answer the random questions of a scientist from another department-"
"I am the principal investigator and senior scientist of Vector Biogenics. I started this goddamned company, Chris. You're my employee. And your employees are my employees." Dolan felt his face growing hot. "I'll ask whatever questions and take whatever data I require to advance our work."
Huang glanced at Dean, and Dean offered him a patient tip of his head. "Of course you can. And of course you will," Huang said. "But you, like me, have to answer to a board. And adhere to corporate policies for internal communication. I would've been happy to tell you about Grizabella and the other test subjects we lost if you'd simply come to me and asked." A pause, and then Huang pressed on, "How did you get that data from earlier trials anyway?"
Dolan polished his glasses to give his hands something to do. "I pulled it off your computer."
Dean made a soft noise low in his throat, and Huang sank back in his chair.
"Well," Huang said after a measured pause, "I'll be sure to log off my computer every time I leave my station. Any more questions, or can I get back to my work?"
The door swung shut behind his angry exit. Dean ruffled papers at his desk, and Chase strummed a few chords before his cell phone chimed, summoning him into a Net meeting with investors in Asia.
After a few minutes, Dolan rose, mildly unsteady on his feet, and walked out.
Chapter 42
Tim screeched his Explorer around overburdened gardener trucks clogging Wilshire's left lane. With a swipe of his hand, Bear pulled the loose skin of his face into a droop, no doubt shoring up his enduring argument that himself at the wheel was the better default setting.
Tim screwed his cell phone's earpiece in another half turn, as if transmission were the problem. "You gotta be kidding me."
Denley's voice hid an element of amusement. "She will only do it in exchange for an exclusive interview with you."
"No way."
"She promised us the B-roll."
"I don't even know what that is."
"Neither did I, but now I like saying it. It's the tape that has all the background stuff for the segment or 'package'"-Denley's rustling, Tim figured, was his squiggling air quotation marks-"anything that might be a story element. In other words, lots of footage that may have wound up on the cutting room floor. Connective clips of Tess, with the kid, the Vector guy. Pretty critical nexus, that segment. I don't know that we can afford to pass it up."
Ever since Ginny's murder and Tim's highly publicized ouster from-and then reentry to-the Service, KCOM's Melissa Yueh had been determined to interview him. At various significant periods during the past four and a half years, she'd left him messages, FedExed written requests, even stooped to dating the Service's public information officer in an attempt to bring bureaucratic pressure to bear.
"Give me her goddamned number." Tim wrote it down angrily at a stoplight, the pressure of his notepad against the horn causing it to honk. His call-waiting was going, so he signed off and clicked over.
Dray's voice asked, "How attached were you to that vase on the coffee table?"
"Not very attached?"
"Good answer. Ty knocked it over." A pause. "With the other vase."
"We need to declaw him."
"I'll get some quotes. What gives with the case?"
He gave her the rundown. When he got to Melissa Yueh's request, his vehemence even drew Bear's interest from the UCLA girls bobbing on elliptical trainers behind LA Fitness's comprehensive windows. Tim waited for Dray to express her disbelief-which he presumed would caption Bear's expression-but instead she said, "Not a bad idea."
"I'm sorry, is my wife there, please?"
"Listen, Timmy"-she only led with the hated nickname when she knew she was charging uphill-"think of this as an opportunity."
"Come again?"
"Yueh's a ratings slut like the rest of the meat puppets. She wants a scoop and she wants your ass in her guest chair-that's all. Now, Walker's a strategist, as you pointed out. Put yourself on the board. You've got more pawns at your disposal. And rooks. And horses."
"Knights."
"Them, too. Get Walker to contact you. You've got information he wants. Use Yueh's show to tease him with it. Put out a phone number. Go through the command-post switchboard and use some detailed questions about the escape to screen out the wannabes. Use yourself as bait."
In the background he heard Tyler say, "Fishie bait! Fishie bait!"
Tim said, "It scares me that our child spends his whole day alone with a mind like yours."
"Me, too."
"What about all the National Enquirer shit she's gonna dredge up?"
"Set boundaries with her. It'll only up the wattage of her crush on you."
"You think Melissa Yueh has a crush on me?"
"Jesus. While we're at it, maybe I should point out that Freed owns the complete boxed set of Will amp; Grace."
"Freed is gay?"
"Aren't people in your line of work supposed to be observant?"
"But Freed was married," Bear said, straightening Tim's collar as they sat on the plush maroon couches of KCOM's third-floor lobby. Having already called in the Vector party's guest list to the command post, Bear had toted along the Beacon-Kagan files to ensure that they were as useless as they appeared.
Plasma TVs hung on the walls like works of art, offering best-of eye bites, the weeks' news strained through KCOM's yellow filter and abbreviated by flash cuts. A basketball brawl took to the-. A columnist at the Gray Lady under inspection for falsifying-. Four adult-film stars tested positive for-. Each tale conveyed with wild-eyed drama, thundering moral indignation, bereft pauses. The Endgame of Western Values. The Demise of America as We Like to Believe We Knew It. And viewers, tuning in from households with grown children on deployment and dying parents and windows overlooking homeless people foraging in trash cans, shook their heads and tut-tutted at all that packaged heartbreak.