I decided it might not be best to leave a voicemail that I was the one who’d found Mindy Wells’s body in the tree house all those years ago, so I avoided that topic and just told her I was with the FBI and that this concerned an ongoing investigation.
When I called Ralph, he informed me that Tessa was still in bed, which I was thankful for. After last night, she definitely needed the sleep.
I said to Ralph, “We have a few things to look into.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I want someone to talk with the owners of the car Basque drove to the plant, the apartment he used, and the garage where he left her car, as well as the people who work at the water treatment plant to see if anyone has seen him around there before. Find out aliases he might have used, forwarding addresses, phone numbers, the whole nine.”
“Right.” There was a pause and I assumed he was jotting down a few notes. “Hey, let me ask you something. Were you afraid of going in there after Basque last night? Heading into that plant alone?”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t Basque, was it.” It sounded more like a conclusion than a question. “Facing him wasn’t what you were afraid of.”
“Not primarily, no.”
“It was what you were going to do to him if you got him alone.”
That was partially true too. “You know, mostly I was afraid I wouldn’t catch him, that I wouldn’t stop him before he could escape to kill again.” Since I’d failed, we both processed the implications for a moment. “What about you?” I asked. “Would you have been afraid to go in there?”
“I eat the smell of fear for breakfast.”
“You eat the…? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Maybe not, but it’d be a great line for a movie.”
Ralph was a huge fan of summer blockbuster films where guys his size pound aliens to a pulp, unleash wicked weapons at terrorists, and blow up secret hideouts to save the world, so his observation didn’t exactly surprise me.
“Let’s put this stuff into play,” I said, “see where it leads us.”
Returning to the awkwardly uncomfortable chair that I’d done my best to sleep in last night, I pulled up the video footage Angela had sent me. While Lien-hua rested, I traced the path Basque took yesterday to see if I could notice anything at all that might lead us to him.
19
Baahir had been right.
With traffic and road conditions that were — to say the least — less than ideal, the drive to Kadapa took nearly four and a half hours.
When they arrived, Keith was definitely ready to be done traveling.
Vanessa ordered Baahir to park on the edge of town, just down the road from the slum where Keith and Vanessa had first tested the drugs to make sure they were effective. She told Baahir to keep his mobile on — that she would call him when she needed him — then she led Keith through the narrow, winding alley to the building.
The guard beside the door immediately recognized them and swung open the gate with a deferential nod.
Vanessa did not acknowledge him.
Keith proceeded with her inside.
The factory, if you could call it that, was small, but ever since his first time there, he’d been impressed with what they were able to accomplish.
It doesn’t take a lot of space or an elaborate setup to manufacture impressive quantities of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. As Keith had found out when all this got started, everywhere around the world people are producing pills by the millions in squalid apartments, warehouses, and back rooms.
You just need enough of the ingredients of the actual drug to avoid immediate detection (actually, with some cheaper drugs you don’t even need that), a few other ingredients to create the right consistency, a packaging machine, silk screens to imprint the logo of the name-brand pharmaceutical on the foil blister packs, and you’re ready to go into business.
Here, there were a dozen tables holding containers of pills and chemicals. Other tables held bottles, labeling equipment, and blister packs to produce the packaging. There were two ultra-high-end printers in the corner that could produce the imprinted 3-D holograms necessary for the packages for Calydrole, PTPharmaceuticals’ hallmark depression medication, to make them appear authentic.
Boxes containing tens of thousands of caplets and pills were piled against the wall to Keith’s left, waiting to be shipped.
Nobody produces a single counterfeit pill; the typical batch size is about fifty thousand. Despite this facility’s size, the workers were quite proficient and could produce nearly forty thousand pills each week. Not all were counterfeit Calydrole pills, but there were seventy thousand or so of them from the last couple months boxed up along the walls, ready for their blister packs.
Over the last decade, counterfeit pharmaceuticals had become one of the most lucrative commodities in the world. Produce a pill for less than fifty cents and sell it for, in the case of some cancer and HIV drugs, over forty-five dollars, and it was clear why.
That profit margin, along with the low risk of being caught, the slap-on-the-wrist sentences if you were, and the ease of distribution — just mail the pills to people who ordered them through Web sites that were designed to look like legitimate pharmacies — and it was no mystery why it was an eighty-billion-dollar-a-year industry, or why it was growing by twenty percent every year.
Because of the low-risk/high-reward ratio, many Asian gangs, the Russian Mafia, and some of the drug cartels in South America were switching from producing, selling, and distributing illegal drugs and controlled substances, to counterfeit pharmaceuticals.
Looking at the bottom line, there wasn’t much of a question about which choice made more financial sense.
Most Americans have no idea that eighty percent of the active ingredient in the drugs they buy comes from overseas and more than forty percent of the drugs are manufactured abroad. Only a fraction of those factories are ever inspected by the FDA, and the pharmaceutical supply chain in North America isn’t secure. At least five percent of the drugs used by U.S. consumers are counterfeit.
Which meant that at any given time, eight million U.S. citizens were unknowingly taking counterfeit drugs.
Unsuspecting consumers order off the Internet thinking they’re just saving money, never realizing that they might very well be purchasing drugs containing sawdust, floor wax, insect parts, chalk, industrial lubricants, brick dust from cement mixtures, paint, heavy metals, boric acid, or safrole — which is used to make Ecstasy.
Keith tended to overestimate people, but still he found it hard to believe that anyone would be foolish enough to order lifesaving medication from Web sites that don’t require a prescription or a doctor’s visit, or from sites that offer name-brand drugs at seventy percent off. If an offer is too good to be true, it almost always is. And yet Americans still used those pills. By the millions.
It was ironic to him, in a tragic sort of way: people in America will complain vociferously to their maître d’ if there’s a human hair touching their pasta, but will ingest hundreds of pills a year that were produced using water polluted with human waste without ever giving their legitimacy a second thought.
So far, counterfeit versions of more than four hundred different drugs had been found in more than a hundred different countries, including twenty of the world’s top-twenty-five bestselling drugs — two of which were produced in this very room.
Now, at this time of day, only two people were here — Eashan and Jagjeevan. Keith had never been able to pronounce — or remember — their last names, so he didn’t even try. Actually, it was confusing, because in India people sometimes told you their surnames first and sometimes they didn’t, so he just stuck to the names he knew.