BLIND TRIAL by Brian Deer (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📗

“Answer my question. Who else have you been speaking with? Tell me.”

“You know you’re talking gibberish. You been necking the sacrament?”

“It doesn’t matter then. It’s getting late here. I’ve got to get home and I’m going for lunch with Bessie.”

“Obviously it does matter. What is it? It’s something about Mr. Hoffman. How d’you know him then? I mean, if you know him, maybe you can help me with something.”

“Look Ben, it’s better… Not now… I really have to go… Let’s deal with all this later. I’ve got to go.”

Eleven

IN A GRAY linoleum corridor on Level 4, Building 30, of the San Francisco General Hospital, white fluorescent tubes buzzed above Sumiko Honda as she tapped letters and numbers into a keyboard. Access denied. She tried a second time. Access denied. A third time. Access denied.

The only explanation: they’d canceled her password. And it was only Sunday morning. They moved fast.

She’d fired her best shot and probably missed. For certain, they’d now fire back. What she needed—and quick—was better ammunition: something to nail Wilson for good. In a trial of that size, there was bound to be something. With Wilson, it wasn’t whether. It was what.

She headed to his office. But his door was locked. Then she heard her iPhone ringing in reception. She hurried down the corridor, pulled open an embroidered handbag, and checked the last call. It was Ben.

After the Metro incident, he’d been so attentive, and so free with the most gratifying support. At least he believed her. He’d said, “You’re right.” He’d even escorted her to Dulles an hour early. They sat so close in the back of the taxi she got a whiff of that wonderful smell.

“Maybe he put a contract on your life,” he’d suggested, as she scanned her boarding pass at the airport.

That made her snigger. A contract on her life? Wilson couldn’t put a contract on his lawn. But she wouldn’t return the call yet. That would look too keen. Best wait until she’d gathered more facts.

She slumped on a chair and stared across the waiting area: forty green seats with too-flexible backs, scattered with old Vogues and Vanity Fairs. Ardelia Chambers, the center’s tidy-minded manager, must have taken Friday afternoon off.

Sumiko massaged her left ankle, mildly inflamed from the fall, and smiled with affection for her injury. She wouldn’t have died. The train wasn’t that close. And she hadn’t spent years at yoga and tai chi to lack the suppleness to climb that platform. It was more the shock than anything. And her reward had been worth it: the way he scooped her up was just… wow.

But what to do now, with everything locked, at 09:22 Pacific?

A GRAY STEEL shutter was pulled down on the reception desk. Ah-ha. The shutter. A solution? It had never locked right. Sumiko leaped and dug her fingers, and, with pressure, it rattled up in her palms. She hopped onto the counter, swung her legs across it, dropped the other side, and stabbed a switch.

More white tubes lit three workstations, each with a monitor and swivel chair. She felt underneath Ardelia’s desk drawers and pulled out a yellow sticky Post-it note with a reminder of the manager’s password.

On the flight back from Washington, she’d had an idea: she would check which no-shows were Wilson’s. As she’d tried to explain to Trudy Mayr on the Mall, if it was the clients he insulted who most often dropped out, that might impact the trial’s results. If they were gay men, MSMs, sex workers, or needle-sharers, then he might have scared off those most at risk from HIV, making the vaccine look better than it was.

She tapped Ardelia’s password into the secure data system, waited for the server to deliver a welcome screen, then clicked on a brown-and-yellow box.

Fifty-six volunteers were coded lost to follow-up. She raised the list and clicked on the first. Up came WV000847: Noah James Greenspan, with an address in Mill Valley, California. A summary screen appeared with the client’s picture—a good-looking African American with a Cupid’s bow smile—and boxes of personal information. Age at enrollment: twenty-two. Self-reported heterosexual. Bar tender.

Now, to business. She’d see what was what. And, more important, she’d see what wasn’t. The company had gotten a grant from a federal research study: the Sustaining Participation, Involvement, and Retention Endeavor, “SPIRE,” which attempted to find lost to follow-up participants on medical trials of all kinds across the United States.

At the foot of Noah’s summary, she clicked on a link. The federal study might yield valuable information. The system hung with an hourglass icon, then a screen screamed:

ACCESS NOT AVAILABLE

Blast. Damn. She covered her mouth. Her own permissions in the system didn’t extend to SPIRE, and now it seemed that neither did Ardelia’s.

She returned to the summary. The client wasn’t Wilson’s. Noah was enrolled, consented, and managed by Dr. Abhilasha Dutta, one of eleven physicians who’d worked fulltime, part-time, or occasional sessions since the mayor formally opened the center. Two shots were administered by the date of the trial’s unblinding, when Noah was revealed as randomized to placebo. He was consistently found to be HIV-negative on both antibody and antigen tests.

She closed the file and opened the next: WV003977, Isabelle Dada, aged thirty-five. Residence: downtown Oakland. Also two shots. Final virology: HIV-negative. Unblinded again as placebo.

SPIRE access: not available. Again, not a Wilson. Sumiko saw Isabelle herself.

She checked a third and fourth client. A fifth and sixth. But none were listed as the center director’s. She checked two more: one of her own and one of Abby’s. Then, at last, she hit on a Wilson. It was one of the two deaths she’d found online: the boy she learned from Google had drowned.

Here was Ed C. Bernstein: eighteen when enrolled. WV004001. Nothing unusual in his notes. Randomized to WernerVac, HIV-negative, bloodwork as expected. Events: colds and flu. Nothing. Nanimo. Zilch. She noted a few wrong keystrokes and time-stamped corrections, but nothing worse