Lethal Dose Read Online Free PDF

against Haldion had already been initiated and settlements reached, and his company was now fighting an attack by hundreds of small law firms with one or two clients. The power of numbers was lost now that the large tort suits had been dealt with, and the image spin doctors sent a clear message to the press. Sue Veritas and you’ve got a fight. The Kansas lawyers took one look at their return on the suit and dropped the case. One by one the lawsuits disappeared as legal firms across the country realized they would have to face Veritas in court. The bleeding was stemmed. Two hundred million dollars a year in savings. Investors liked what they saw, and Veritas’s stock shot up.
    The new image that Veritas and its market-savvy consultants began pumping out to the public was that they were a modern-day Marcon, taking over where the pharmaceutical giant had once stood. They were sympathetic to the little guy and committed to bringing down the price of drugs, especially for seniors and those on fixed incomes. Andrews coaxed his legal hound dogs to get creative and find new ways of extending patent lives on three of the company’s existing drugs. When they did, by patenting the metabolite synthesized by the drugs once in the patient’s body, it guaranteed Veritas over seven hundred million in income for another three years.
    Wall Street noticed. A new and aggressive Marcon had been born, and investors lined up like lemmings to grab chunks of Veritas before it punctured another hole in the ozone layer. Veritas surged into the Fortune 500 list, and Bruce Andrews’s face was plastered on the covers of Financial Times, Forbes , and Time. Life at Veritas was perfect. Except for one small detail.
    Everything about Veritas was a lie.
    Haldion did cause palpitations, and those palpitations sometimes led to cardiac arrest, which in turn occasionally led to the morgue. The claims against Veritas, while now ineffective, were often legitimate. And while the image Veritas portrayed to the public was one of a corporation that cared, people were dying because of the drug. And that wasn’t the only FDA-approved drug with problems. Triaxcion was a disaster looking for a home. The antibalding drug, which halted the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, also caused clotting factors to fail in some people with A-positive blood. So far, the image experts had held their fingers in the proverbial dike, but the waters were threatening to overflow the dam itself. And now, as Andrews sat at his keyboard, he knew they had a problem inside the company.
    Being a cautious man, he had covertly asked one of his programming staff to insert a packet sniffer into the company software. It ran a constant stream of cross-correlations and nonlinear filters, looking for any employee who accessed the confidential research files on any drugs, whether FDA approved or in Phase IV or later development. Andrews wanted to know who the whistle-blowers were before they had time to type up a demand letter. And now he had one.
    Albert Rousseau. One of the research rats working in their statin department on the latest cholesterol drugs. His computer had accessed a number of restricted files over the past few weeks. On each occasion, he had inserted a few lines of code in his search engine, spoofing the detection software to other terminals belonging to other employees. But the sniffer was one byte smarter than Rousseau. Because it was nonlinear, it recognized patterns otherwise untraceable. And the one thing Andrews was certain of was that Albert Rousseau was positioning himself to deliver a pay-or-suffer letter to Veritas. That was something that Bruce Andrews could not allow to happen.
    He picked up his phone and dialed a number from memory. It was time for Albert Rousseau to take a vacation.
    A permanent one.

5
    Evan Ziegler hit the mute button on the television remote and gave his wife a quizzical look. She was standing at the end of the couch