It would take a little work, he would have to call in a few favors, pull a few strings, but if he could arrange it he was certain it would be interesting to watch how things would all play out.
Yes, to get things rolling, Richard Basque would be needing a good lawyer, and Valkyrie knew just the person. He phoned and caught her as she was getting in line to rent a car from Avis at Dulles International Airport.
“This is Vanessa.”
“Yes, dear,” he said, keeping up the facade that she meant something to him. “There’s something I would like you to take care of for me.”
Ever since we caught Basque back on Tuesday, I’d spent whatever free time I could scrounge up researching counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and now I collected my thoughts in preparation for my one-o’clock meeting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jason Kantsos.
I reviewed a few notes from the documents I’d assembled:
• Thousands of Web sites sell substandard, tainted, counterfeit, misbranded, unapproved, contaminated, and adulterated pharmaceutical products. Half of the drugs sold by rogue Internet pharmacies are counterfeit.
• According to World Health Organization estimates, one out of three drugs for sale worldwide is counterfeit.
• Nearly every type of prescription pharmaceutical is available as a counterfeit: antibiotics, psychotropic meds, seizure medication, and drugs to treat cancer, hypertension, and diabetes. Some of the most common are weight-loss drugs and those meant to control high blood pressure.
• FDA doesn’t test drugs per se, at least not for consumption, but it can do tests on drugs to determine if they’re counterfeit or not, as its analysts were doing this week with the Calydrole pills that’d been found in Montana.
• The authenticity of a drug can be established by superimposing the imprint on the pill (the symbol, number, or name) in question with one known to be genuine, also by studying its chemical composition and biological effects. Sometimes analysts use forensic light sources to compare the ink on the packaging or on the bottles.
• Back in 2008 when the CEO of the company that produces heparin testified before Congress, he said the counterfeit version “was able to evade the quality control systems and regulatory oversight of more than a dozen companies and nearly a dozen countries.” A dozen agencies in close to a dozen countries. That didn’t bode well for my hopes of determining if the Calydrole we’d found was counterfeit.
Last year, one pharmaceutical company tried to circumvent the infiltration of counterfeit copies of their drugs by printing alphanumeric codes on their packages. Before consumers used the drugs, they were told to enter the code on the company’s Web site and verify that it was legitimate. Then, if it wasn’t, to return the product to the pharmacy where they’d purchased it. Or, if it’d been ordered through the Internet, to contact the FDA and the pharmaceutical company to report the product as counterfeit.
But there were ways around that as well. Counterfeiters had hired hackers to get into the firm’s authentication Web site and enter in codes of their own that would come up as legitimate when customers entered them.
Move.
Countermove.
The never-ending dance of law enforcement and crime.
Reviewing the different ways of determining whether or not a product was legitimate gave me an idea.
I called to leave a message for Dr. Neubauer at the FBI Lab, and since he was almost always in his laboratory instead of his office, I was a little surprised to catch him at his desk.
“Doc, this is Pat. I’m wondering if you can look into something for me.”
“The pills?”
“You heard about them? The ones from Montana?”
“The boys down the hall are working on them as we speak.”
“Well, I was thinking: pollen is everywhere, right?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“So, would it get on pills? I mean, while they were being produced?”
He contemplated that. “You’re thinking a palynological analysis of the drugs?”
“We have FDA and PTPharmaceuticals studying their composition, but I’m not interested just in what the pills contain, but in—”
“Where they were produced.”
“Precisely. If you could extract spores or pollen grains from them—”
“Yes”—he cut me off again, but it was good to know he was tracking so closely with me—“of course, I might be able to tell the region in which they were produced and perhaps the season of the year — if the pollen of certain flowering plants was present.”
Timing and location. It’s always about timing and location.
“Right. We’re thinking the shipment came from India. If you can narrow down the section of the country, we might be able to find out, at least generally, where the drugs are being produced. Then we can compare that to the facilities PTPharmaceuticals uses to produce Calydrole. We might be able to zero in on their point of origin.”
“Hmm… I’ve lectured at a couple of conferences with two doctors from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany in Lucknow, India. There are more than fifteen thousand different types of flowering plants in India, but if anyone can help identify the flora there, they can. I’ll take a look at the pills, see if I can extract spores from them, and contact my cohorts at the institute. I’ll call you.”
“Great.”
After we hung up, I went back to work, but thoughts about the rest of the day distracted me. Tessa was going out tonight with a boy I’d never met, and that always made me uneasy.
A little over a year ago, when we were visiting San Diego, a man in his early twenties tried to sexually assault her, and if it hadn’t been for her quick thinking, he would have likely succeeded. Since then, the thought of her being alone with boys I didn’t know had made me uneasy.
I recalled my conversation with her a week ago, when she’d asked me, somewhat in good humor, not to do a background check on Aiden.
I didn’t know his family, had no idea who he was.
No, don’t do this, Pat. If Tessa finds out she’ll feel betrayed.
But, truthfully, she didn’t need to know it. I could make a few calls, and if nothing came up I wouldn’t need to mention it at all. And if anything bad did show up, she might be upset at first, but she would thank me in the end.
Since Aiden was in high school with her, a complete background check seemed too over-the-top even for me, however I did put a call through to the school’s safety patrol officer to see if Aiden had ever had any run-ins with the law or if there were any red flags I should know about, but the officer was away from his desk.
After leaving a short message and my cell number, I hung up and worked on the counterfeit drug research and lost track of time until my ringing phone alerted me that Agent Kantsos was at the reception desk, waiting for me to escort him into the Academy’s administration building.
59
Jason Kantsos was a weary-looking man whom I guessed to be about my age. He’d put on a little too much weight, the gray hair that he still had left was thinning, and the goatee he’d chosen to grow actually made him look older than he would have without it.
Kantsos had worked undercover for eight years posing as a counterfeiter bringing drugs from Asia into the U.S. He seemed like the perfect guy to talk to.
Rather than return to my office, we went outside to the Academy’s 9/11 Memorial Courtyard, situated between the library, the Crossroads Lounge, and the Washington and Madison dorms.
Flower beds surrounded us, as well as a six-foot-tall sculpture of the twin towers in a pentagon enclosure. The towers had an engraved outline of Pennsylvania that overlapped both of them with a star in the lower left-hand corner to indicate where United Flight 93 had gone down.