Final Venture

'Good. Well, now we've got that over with, I take it Lisa isn't back from Stanford yet?'

'No. And she won't want to see you.' He took one bottle of beer out of the refrigerator, opened it, and drank. 'So fuck off.'

'I'd like to wait for her.'

'She doesn't want to see you. Fuck off.' He took a couple of steps towards me. He was about my size, but I was confident I could handle him. I had intended to avoid it if I could, but at that moment, beating the living daylights out of Eddie Cook didn't seem such a bad idea.

'Eddie! Simon! Stop it!'

I turned round. Lisa stood in the doorway. She looked very small. Her eyes were tired, her shoulders weary. I wanted to pull her to me and hold her tight, tight until she felt safe under my protection.

'Simon, get out,' she said, matter-of-factly.

'That's what I was just telling him to do,' said Eddie.

I knew there was no chance of talking her round now, and I hadn't planned to. I handed her an envelope with the note I had written at Marsh House that morning. 'Read this.'

I held the envelope out to her. She stared at it, and then reached out slowly to take it from my hand. Our skin didn't touch. Then, deliberately, she ripped it once, and threw it into the wastepaper bin.

I kept my cool. 'That letter contains instructions for how to get access to BioOne's files on the neuroxil-5 trials. You were right, Lisa, there is something wrong with the drug. Aunt Zoe had a stroke a couple of days ago as a result of taking it. I can't analyse the information. You can. It's all there.'

Her eyes widened. 'Aunt Zoe? No. Really?'

I nodded slowly.

'Is she going to be all right?'

'Carl doesn't think so.'

'Oh, no!' She glanced down at the bin, and then, with an effort, composed herself. 'I won't read your letters, Simon. I won't listen to what you have to say. I want you out of my life. Now go back to Boston.'

It was painful to hear these words from someone I loved so much, and someone who needed me so much. But I had expected them.

'All right, I'm leaving now. But read the letter. And meet me in the coffee shop round the corner at ten o'clock tomorrow morning.'

'I won't be there, Simon.'

' 'Bye,' I said, and without waiting for a reply that would not have come, I left the apartment.

32

I arrived at the coffee shop half an hour early, after an appalling night's sleep in a cheap hotel worrying about whether Lisa would come. The cafe walls were orange, adorned with posters of dolphins and whales gliding through shimmering seas. The food was vegetarian and organic, and the coffee came in the standard forty different combinations. The place was almost empty. There was a cool banker type with a fancy briefcase and a raincoat and hair slightly longer than the market average, two young women with metal-studded faces and short white-blonde hair, and an old man dressed in a beaten-up overcoat pretending to be a bum. The double latte he had ordered and the Scientific American he was reading gave him away as something else.

I asked for a simple cup of coffee and opened the Wall Street Journal. BioOne stock was down four to fifty-nine. Daniel had probably sold by now. In fact, knowing him, he had probably shorted the stock. I wondered if I could be implicated if he had dabbled in some insider trading. But that was the least of my worries.

I finished the coffee and ordered another. Ten to ten. Would she come? It wasn't even ten yet, and I was beginning to panic.

Ten o'clock came and went, then ten thirty, then eleven. I drank cups of coffee nervously, and my nerves jangled at the result. I tried to read and reread the same pages of the. Journal. She wasn't coming. Lisa could sometimes be a bit late, but not that late. She obviously wasn't coming. But I couldn't leave. I was rooted to my chair; I couldn't even dash out of the cafe to a news-stand to get something else to read. Then I'd never know whether I'd missed her or not.

Another coffee, decaf this time. And an organic Danish. My stomach needed something for the coffee to bite into.

She wasn't coming, but I couldn't accept that. Everything I had done over the last month, the risks I had taken, the trouble I had caused, had all been with the intention of winning Lisa back. But what if she didn't want to be won back? Lisa was a strong-minded woman. What if I couldn't convince her? Even if I showed her that I hadn't killed her father, that she was right all along about BioOne, what if even then she didn't come back to me?

I couldn't accept that. I stayed put, as though remaining in that cafe was the only thing left I could do.

It started to rain. Big San Franciscan drops of water, that swiftly turned the street into a landscape of streams and lakes. Umbrellas rose outside, the windows fugged up, cars swished water at dancing pedestrians.

The cafe was beginning to fill with the lunch crowd. The waiters looked as if they were about to throw me out, so I ordered a grilled vegetable sandwich.

At two o'clock, I gave up. I barged out into the waterlogged street, raindrops cooling my overheated skin, and splattering my hair on my scalp. I didn't know where I was walking.

'Simon!' I almost didn't hear it, didn't believe it. 'Simon!'

I turned. It was Lisa running towards me, her bag swinging in the rain.

She stopped in front of me, panting. I tried a smile. She returned it quickly, nervously. Water dripped off her nose and chin.

'Thank God you waited. It's been hours. I thought you'd go back to Boston.'

I shrugged. I allowed myself to smile again.

Lisa glanced up at the rain. 'Let's go inside.' She looked back towards the cafe.

'I can't go back in there,' I said. I noticed a scruffy diner further down the street. 'How about that?'

She grimaced. 'OK. Actually, I'm starving.'

She ordered a hamburger; I was relieved to get away with nothing.

We sat in silence as we waited for the food. There was so much to say. So much could yet go wrong. For now I was just pleased to be with her.

'I read those files,' she said at last.

And?'

And I'm almost certain that neuroxil-5 causes strokes in some patients if used over a six month period or longer.'

At first I felt a wave of relief. Then I remembered the thousand or so patients who were taking the drug in the Phase Three trial. Including Aunt Zoe.

'Almost sure?'

'The statistics are difficult. I didn't have time to go through the data thoroughly, but my gut feeling is that when the analysis is done it'll show the drug is dangerous.'

'Why hasn't BioOne discovered that yet?'

'Good question,' she said. 'It's not that easy in an Alzheimer's trial. The patients are old, and a number of them will die anyway. It looks like the incidence of strokes doesn't increase until at least six months after the patients start to take the drug, possibly longer.'

Aunt Zoe had been taking it for seven months.'

Lisa nodded. 'Poor Aunt Zoe. I'll really miss her. She was a great woman. I just wish they'd listened to me.'

'I don't think Carl will ever forgive himself.'

'Is there no hope?'

I shook my head. 'Not according to Carl.'

We were both quiet for a few moments, thinking of Zoe.

'Didn't Enever pick any of this up?' I said.

'Nowhere does he mention the problem directly. But from his actions, I'd say he began to notice that the stroke adverse events were getting out of line. He might have thought this was just a blip. But he persuaded some clinicians to reclassify their patients as suffering from mini strokes rather than Alzheimer's, then removed the strokes from the statistics.'

'So he knowingly fiddled the figures?'

'I wouldn't say that, exactly. He may have genuinely believed the patients were misdiagnosed, or he may have convinced himself. I can't tell.'

'Hm. Anything from Catarro?'

'Yes. There were some e-mails about the two stroke deaths. Enever suggested the patients might have suffered from mini strokes. There's nothing from Catarro about the autopsies.'