“Grab a seat,” he said.
Alix hesitated, trying to decide if she should just make a break for the door.
Which door? A voice in her head mocked. The one with the chains on it?
She decided she wasn’t giving up anything to sit down. All of it was to her advantage, anyway. Time. Just keep using their time. She pulled out a chair. The others found perches on the counters or grabbed chairs of their own.
“How much do you know about your dad’s business?” Moses asked.
Alix shrugged noncommittally. “He’s in PR.”
“Public relations. Sure. But you know what kind of PR he does? You know what his work actually is?”
“It’s like ads and stuff.”
Cynthia leaned in. “Don’t sell your dad short. He’s a specialist. He works mostly in product defense and crisis communications. A lot of his focus is on science-litigation strategy and legislative outreach.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know what my dad did?” Alix accused.
Cynthia looked away. “I wanted to know if you knew. Do you understand what all that means?”
Alix shrugged, remembering what Dad had always said. “Nothing special. Just that he helps his clients tell their side of the story. A lot of times, people want to see things in black and white, so he helps make sure that they have the whole story. Otherwise, extremists—probably people like you—end up controlling the debate.” She looked pointedly at Moses. “Sometimes there are more sides to a story than some people want to accept.”
“Hot damn!” Moses started to slow-clap. “You’re good!”
“He should hire you,” Kook said. “Little Miss America PR sweetheart. You make him sound so reasonable.”
“He is reasonable,” Alix shot back.
“You believe that?” Moses asked, looking suddenly interested.
Alix started to answer, then hesitated. There it was again. That word.
Believe.
It was a fetish word for Moses. The guy just kept circling back to it.
“What do you think?” Alix said, instead of answering.
“I think you don’t have any choice,” Moses said softly. “You’ve got to believe him. He’s your dad. Every little girl believes her daddy.”
Kook snorted at that, but Moses ignored her. He laced his fingers across his stomach, watching Alix thoughtfully.
“What is it with you and belief?” Alix asked.
Moses smiled. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Like a fairy tale?”
“Once upon a time, there was a princess…” Adam started.
Moses cut him off with a grin. “Once upon a time, there was a huge company called Marcea Pharmaceuticals. Marcea made all kinds of drugs to make people’s lives better, and they made a lot of money doing it. But one day, people started saying that one of Marcea’s drugs was a killer. Rumor was that a cholesterol drug called Alantia was causing heart attacks. Not a lot. Not every person to who took the drug… but more than just a few. Maybe a couple in every hundred, but still, way more than if people didn’t take the drug.
“Now, this was a bad thing. Marcea had a lot of money riding on this cholesterol drug of theirs. Alantia was supposed to make people healthy, and it was killing them. And now the Food and Drug Administration was getting involved, threatening to force the drug off the market.” He paused. “So… what could the company do? They’d spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research and were looking to make billions on the upside. The news that their drug was dangerous was a disaster for them.
“So Marcea made a plan. They decided that Alantia wasn’t the problem. The problem was all the research reports that were claiming their drug caused heart attacks. The drug wasn’t the problem. The science was the problem. The science that was getting reported to the FDA, and that the FDA was starting to believe… that was the problem. The FDA was starting to believe”—Moses grinned at the word—“that Alantia killed people.”
“Marcea had to show that the health studies were biased,” Cynthia said. “Otherwise, the FDA was going to shut them down.”
Moses continued. “So Marcea Pharmaceuticals hired some scientists to test their drug some more. And they hired more scientists to go back and reanalyze the studies that showed Alantia was a heart attack in a pill. They needed to show that the old studies were flawed. If they could raise doubts about those studies, then they were safe. Of course, they knew if it was Marcea’s own scientists doing the work, nobody was going to believe them, so they hired outside people who weren’t directly connected to them to do the work. They paid university researchers. They paid private foundations—”
“So?” Alix interrupted. “It’s a free country. They can study what they want. If someone was trying to kill your business, you’d fight back, too.”
“Absolutely,” Moses agreed. “And luckily for Marcea, it turned out that every single one of Marcea’s new studies showed that their drug was safe and that the FDA was wrong to be worried. False alarm.”
Cynthia said, “The news got reported everywhere, and the FDA backed off.”
Kook added, “And, of course, Marcea Pharmaceuticals’ stock jumped through the roof. Sales kept rolling. Execs get their bonuses. Everybody’s happy.”
“So?” Alix asked. “What’s your point?”
“So?” Moses shrugged. “You should be proud.”
“About?” Alix pressed. “What’s this got to do with me?”
Cynthia sighed. “Your dad came up with the science strategy and got the word out. He let everyone know that Alantia was safe. It was a textbook case of successful product defense.”
“So? Then he did the right thing. If something is safe, people should know it’s safe. Why should I care about this?”
Kook flipped her chair forward and leaned in, grinning. “Three years later every one of Marcea’s studies was discredited.”
Cynthia said, “All those studies Marcea commissioned were flawed. Bad sample sizes, altered dosages, tons of problems. Every single study they commissioned was proved to be garbage. But the press didn’t see any of that. They didn’t catch it. Some journal of chemistry reports a study and it’s the truth and the news cycle rolled on, and the FDA didn’t regulate.
“Marcea made a billion dollars every year during those three years that they were touting their counterstudies and keeping Alantia on the market. Over a hundred thousand people had heart attacks. Half of them died. The drug finally got banned.”
Moses was looking at her. “Your dad got a performance bonus for keeping the drug on the market for those extra three years. Fifty thousand extra heart attack deaths and your dad got a million-dollar bonus.”
He paused.
“My dad was one of the ones who died.”
19
“THAT’S A LIE!”
“The hell it is!”
They had both surged to their feet. Now Cynthia interceded, putting herself between them.
“How about we keep the shouting to a minimum?”
“Fine.” Moses scowled. “You talk to her. Maybe she’ll listen to you.” He didn’t sit down but began pacing instead.
Cynthia gently pressed Alix back into her seat and motioned Moses to still himself as well. “Listen, Alix. I know this is a lot to take in. Every one of us had a hard time when we first heard it, but Moses is telling the truth. Banks Strategy Partners was the lead product-defense consultant for Marcea. Your dad ran their strategy, from the beginning, when they needed to defend the science, to the end, when they were in court and had to defend themselves from the lawsuits.”