Free Excerpt from:
The Deadly Cure
Love, Lies, and a Cure Worth Killing For
C.A. James
Chapter 1
When I was in prison, I dreamed of this beach. Long, even waves curling and breaking into white foam. Warm southwest breeze. Blue ocean reflecting a blue sky. Gritty, brown-white sand. Bodies scattered here and there, soaking up the sun. Two seagulls staring at me, hoping I’ll toss something their way. The smell of kelp and ocean spray.
That dream kept me sane for eighteen months when all I had was grey walls and a regimented life.
A hundred yards off, a woman was approaching with an unhurried stroll. She wore a thin cotton beach robe, loosely closed by a sash around her waist, with a tiny bikini bottom showing through the translucent cotton. A wide-brimmed straw hat shielded her face from the sun. She had no bikini top under the robe.
Life is good.
I love remote beaches where people can be themselves, wear anything they like, or nothing at all. This beach welcomes everyone: nudists, hikers, surfers, young couples shyly disrobing, seniors so sun-darkened that their skin looks like leather. Nobody judges. You get here by clambering down steep cliffs on tricky trails, or by hiking for a mile and a half from the north. Nobody stumbles on this place unexpectedly.
Many years ago, my grandfather told me a story about a prisoner of war who faced deprivation and torture. The soldier knew, because he’d been trained, that to survive torture, he needed to escape into a dream of home. A mental anchor. Something to live for. So he fixated on the living room of his parents’ farmhouse: the oak rocking chair, hand-waxed redwood wainscoting, a Tiffany chandelier, the grandfather clock ticking its steady beat. Most of all, he visualized the stone fireplace, made of rocks his grandfather had gathered from the creek bed at the southern border of the farm.
And it worked. Torture, starvation, loneliness, seeing his fellow soldiers die … through it all, the soldier survived. He suffered, he was damaged, but he survived.
Until the day he got home.
He was fine when the enemy traded him back to the Americans. He was okay in the hospital where they fed him, poked him, gave him shots, and sent a psychiatrist to chat. He was fine when his parents greeted him as he got off the plane. They hugged and kissed and shed tears, but he was fine. He was talkative in the car as they drove home. He even reassured his mother through her tears, reaching over from the back seat to hold her hand as they turned into the driveway.
Then he walked in the front door and turned the corner into the living room. He saw the stone fireplace. He fell apart. He spent the next forty-eight hours crying and sobbing, and the next month pacing around the living room, sorting it all out. He hadn’t escaped the trauma, only put it off until he was safe.
My imprisonment was nothing like that soldier’s, but it had its own trauma. A prison is designed to be an awful, mind-numbing experience. I was away from everyone and everything I loved, forced to be a conformist … and suffer boredom that I never knew was possible.
You know the weirdest thing about prison? You keep expecting something to happen. You sit there in your cell, day after day, waiting. And it doesn’t make sense. Intellectually, sure, you know nothing is going to happen. But emotionally? No experience in life prepares you. Outside of prison, a wait means you’re waiting for something. A light to turn green. The dentist’s assistant to call you in. A play about to start. Your flight is delayed. Waiting has a purpose, an endpoint.
Not in prison. You just wait.
As my cell door clanged shut that first day, I knew where my mental anchor would be: this beach. The place I’d come in good times and bad to hike, swim, think, dream, lie in the blazing sun, play my ukulele, and once to make love under the stars. With grey walls around me and steel bars holding me, this beach became my dream, my escape from the waiting, the noise, the regimentation, the cruelty. Lying on my hard bunk, I spun fantasies of sand and surf, sky and wind, women strolling by, playing my guitar.
Six months ago, after I’d paid my debt to society and the prison gate clanged shut behind me, I took the redeye bus south. As the sun rose, I paid the Lyft driver and clambered down broken trail to the bottom of the cliff. Reaching the sand, I shucked my clothes and ran straight into the ocean, diving deep under the waves and swimming until my lungs burned. When I burst naked through the surface again, gasping for air, my salty tears mixed with the salty ocean. I knew I was safe. Free.
The Christians figured out baptism two thousand years ago. Wash away the past, clean the body, clean the soul, re-emerge from the womb. A new start. A rebirth. A new life.
My debts were paid, my soul was clean.
And I’ve come here nearly every day since. It’s my office.
Today, my umbrella was braced by my beach wagon against a pleasant summer breeze. A laptop computer and iPad graced the little bamboo folding table, and a compact satellite internet system was propped to one side, its antenna angled at the sky. The wagon held a portable lithium battery system to power my equipment all day, and even into the evening if I’m in the groove. The cooler held lunch and Diet Cokes—you’re not a real computer hacker unless you slam down at least four a day. My guitar and ukulele were at my feet on the beach towel. Everything I needed to get me through another day of work and play.
I snapped out of my reveries and picked up the ukulele. Still fifteen minutes until a scheduled business phone call, and I really wanted to work out some nice chord inversions to All of Me. It sounds like a simple melody, but there is beauty in its subtle complexity. I’ve become hooked on Django jazz (what we used to call gypsy jazz, but now we know better), and thought it might be clever to do All of Me on a Hawaiian ukulele in Django-jazz style. Weird, I know. I closed my eyes and began strumming, trying variations, looking for that perfect sound.
A shadow cut off my sunlight, startling me. I stopped playing and opened my eyes. The woman was silhouetted against the sun, making me squint to see her.
“Don’t stop!” she said, laughing. “That’s beautiful. Do you mind if I listen?”
“Please,” I replied, gesturing to my beach towel. She lowered herself, cross-legged, set her hat on the beach towel, and returned a smile.
She was beautiful in a natural, hippie sort of way. Maybe mid-thirties, strong and fit, like a woman who got that way with real work rather than at the gym. No makeup, beaded strings woven into her auburn braids, a silver-and-turquoise bracelet on one wrist, the other encircled by an intricately braided leather band. Her thin cotton robe was mostly open in the front, revealing lightly tanned skin. There were no tan lines on her small breasts. She was completely unconcerned by her lack of covering, exuding complete comfort with her body.
I started strumming the eight-bar opening chords of All of Me, and she smiled again and swayed lightly to the music. It was a surreal moment, almost a cliché, something out of a bachelor’s dream fantasy—a beautiful woman, semi-nude, invites herself to sit down on my beach blanket. But there she was, as real as could be, and her simple comfort made it all perfectly natural.
Then she started singing. My heart nearly stopped, and my ukulele faltered for a brief moment. Her voice rang out with subtle power and beauty, a mix of Lady Gaga and Janice Joplin. Sweet and strong, clear and full of emotion, but with underlying grit.
I’ve sung and played the song a hundred times, but she took me back to the raw emotions. She made me feel that song again.
When she finished the verse, she picked up my guitar while I took a ukulele solo, improvising in the Django-jazz style I was trying to learn. I’m a total musical amateur, but I had one of those rare peak moments where I played every note perfectly. She gave a happy laugh as I finished, then launched into singing again, matching my style with her own Django-inspired vocal riffs.
As the last note drifted away in the breeze, she clapped, laughing and smiling. I clapped too.
“Wow, you’re amazing!” I said.
“Thank you.” She laid the guitar down carefully, uncrossed her legs, and leaned back with her hands behind her in the sand, letting her robe fall open and the sun illuminate her body. She turned her face up to the sun, eyes closed. “You’re pretty good yourself,” she said. There was a long pause as she soaked in the sunshine, then, “Do you come here a lot?”
“Most every day,” I said. “This is my office.”
She opened her eyes, and her gaze fell on my computer and satellite antenna. “Seriously, you work here?”
“Why not? Gotta work somewhere, and this is a lot better than an office.”
“No kidding!” She cocked her head to one side. “Are you a musician or something? A songwriter? An author?”
“Ha, I wish. No, I’m a computer guy. I write programs. But everybody needs breaks, right? So along with this tech stuff, I bring my guitar and uke. Whenever my brain gets too full, I swim, play music, watch people, do yoga, and nap. Refreshes my brain.”
“And that works for you?” she asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“Huh,” she said, then went silent. She tipped her face up to the sun again and closed her eyes. It felt vaguely like I’d said something wrong. I let it stretch for a few moments, not sure if it was a shared moment of peace or an uncomfortable silence. Maybe I should have said I had a marijuana farm. Tiny beads of sweat formed on her stomach and breasts as the sun heated her skin.
“What about you?” I finally asked. “You come down here a lot?”
She opened her eyes, sat up, and crossed her legs again. She smiled at me, then looked around at the ocean, birds, and the towering bluffs behind me. “As often as I can. Not often enough. Hey, I’m Sage, what’s your name?”
“Wolf.”
Her eyebrows raised in amusement. “Wolf? For real?”
“Yeah. For real. Actually, my name is Wolfgang. My mother was French, and her grandfather, her mother’s father, was Wolfgang Zimmermann. He died the day before I was born, so she named me after him.”
“And everyone calls you Wolf?”
“Yeah. Mom had just immigrated to the United States when she got pregnant with me. She had no clue how ‘Wolfgang’ would sound to American school kids. Big surprise, my classmates called me Mozart. So I decided I was Wolf, not Wolfgang. It’s cooler. Meaner sounding.”
“Are you a mean guy?”
I laughed. “A mean kid could have gotten away with Wolfgang.”
“Okay, Wolf it is,” she said.
“Sage. That’s a cool name. Is that your real name?”
She tipped her head to one side and looked askance at me. “What’s a real name? Is Wolf any less real than the name your parents gave you?”
“Excellent point. Sage is a beautiful name.”
She smiled. “My name should be part of who I am, not just a label slapped on me when I was born. How could my parents know who I’d become? The indigenous people had the right idea—a person earns a name.”
It was my turn to smile. I’d never thought much about names, but I liked what she said.
“So Sage, what do you do?”
“I sing, I dance, I love, I eat, I grow vegetables, I wake up, I sleep. Sometimes I even walk on the beach!”
“Uh … I mean—”
She leaned forward and gave me a poke on the leg. “I’m just teasing you, Wolf! Everyone is defined by their job these days, but there’s so much more to each of us, right? Okay, I’ll answer your question. I’m a singer and songwriter.”
“For real?” I asked.
She gave a half-laugh, half scoff. “Yes, for real!”
“Sorry, it’s just … like every waiter in Hollywood is an actor, right? But I just heard you sing, so yeah. I should have known.”
“You’re forgiven! I get that a lot.”
“Do you sing around here? Got an album I can buy?”
“Yes, and yes. What about you? A programmer? That covers a lot of ground. What kind of software? Banking? Social media? Maybe you write code for atomic bombs?”
“Ha, no bombs!” I replied. “I’m in science. It’s a weird niche field that nobody’s ever heard of. I write molecular modeling software.”
She looked puzzled, like most people, so I offered my usual explanation.
“It’s literally what it says: we use computers to predict molecular properties to see what they’ll do in your body.”
“Molecules … you mean like, drugs?”
“Yeah, exactly. Except that we don’t call something a drug until it has proven medicinal properties. It’s just a chemical before that. My work is used at the very beginning of drug development, the discovery part.”
“What’s that mean, the medicinal properties? I mean, don’t you just want to know if a drug works?”
“Yeah, it’s useless unless it works. Cures you. But a drug isn’t much good if it cures one thing and kills you some other way. Like, is it poisonous? Will it damage your kidneys or liver? Does it break down into something else toxic? Does it cause cancer? Will you pee it out in an hour, or will it stay in your body long enough to do some good? Does it have side effects? That sort of stuff.”
“Wow. Okay, that makes sense. I never thought about that before. And you can do all that in a computer?”
“Most of it. Remember how people used to protest about animal testing, how cruel it was?”
“Of course, it’s horrible.”
“It was horrible. Past tense. Not much of it goes on anymore. We’re so good at computer modeling that we can figure almost everything out ahead of time, without ever sticking it in a mouse or rabbit.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that.” She looked at me for a long moment. I sensed that I’d redeemed myself a bit in her eyes. Not just your average programmer working for a big bank. “But … look, I don’t want to judge, but drug companies have a pretty bad reputation these days. Does it bother you?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “I try to separate the people inventing cures from the executives who only care about profits. Every one of the researchers I work with is dedicated to finding new drugs. They’re good people. Most of us forget how bad things used to be before modern medicine.”
Sage looked thoughtful for a moment, then started to speak again, but I interrupted. “Hey, I have a business video call in about one minute. It should take maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m really sorry, I’m really enjoying our chat, but—”
“Hey Wolfie, no problem.” She grabbed her big straw hat and put it on, scrambled to her feet, and pulled her robe closed again, loosely retying the sash. “I was just enjoying my walk up the beach. I’m gonna keep going, it’s such a beautiful day. I’ll be back in a while. Maybe we can go for a swim?”
I grinned. “That sounds a lot better than work. See you in a bit.”
I watched as she strolled away, her robe flowing in the breeze and hips swaying. The sound of my computer chirping finally interrupted my thoughts.
Chapter 2
“Hey Lester,” I said as my friend appeared on my screen.
“Hey Wolf. At the beach again, I see.”
“Life’s a beach, then you die, right?” I said.
“That’s not how it goes.”
I laughed.
Lester Morrison, biochemist extraordinaire and all-around genius, is not only my friend, he’s also my business partner. Seven years ago, Lester had a brilliant insight about some of the chemical damage that happens to the cells in our bodies as a by-product of our metabolic processes. Or more colloquially, the process of living makes you die. Lester figured out how to slow that down, a drug concept about blocking some of the metabolic damage. You’d live longer and stay healthier. But he was stymied by the sheer biochemical complexity of the human body, and an idea like that takes a whole team, not one guy, to turn it into a drug.
So he came to me. He knew I worked in computer drug modeling, the very thing he needed. And I’d been learning the latest on artificial intelligence, how it was helping make leaps and bounds in drug discovery. With AI, researchers were solving problems that were unsolvable just a few years ago.
But he also came to me because I had money. Lots of it.
I’d slaved for almost ten years, working sixty to eighty hours a week for biotech startups, hoping for that huge payout from a hot product. The get-rich pipe dream of naïve programmers. But unlike ninety-five percent of my peers, I got lucky and walked away with about six million dollars after Uncle Sam took his share. A hot stock market and wise investments by my “money witch,” the woman who manages my stock portfolio, had increased that to about seven million. That’s when Lester approached me.
Three years later, we’d burned through way more than I’d originally thought I’d invest. I started out planning to invest a couple million, after which we’d either have found the holy grail or attracted more investors. The research was looking really good, but … the money ran out. So another million went in, then another … and next thing you know, five million dollars was gone.
By then, Lester had turned his idea into a few thousand candidate molecules that we were testing, refining, modifying, and running again. We had a small office with an adjacent lab, fast lab robots, a bank of computers running drug-modeling programs, a cloud-based chemistry AI that I’d put together, and five enthusiastic PhD graduates who slaved night and day, running the robots and analyzing results.
I’d gotten a lot for my money. It was promising. In fact, we could be onto one of the biggest drug discoveries in pharmaceutical history.
But Lester couldn’t tell me when it would end. He didn’t have an answer when I asked how much more money he’d need. And with my seven million bucks having dwindled to two million, I was getting worried.
A couple million bucks sounds like a lot, right? But if you’re planning to live on it for the rest of your life, the future looks a bit frugal. Without more money, I’d have to, you know, budget. If you’re old, a couple million is great because you’ll die before you use it up. But at age thirty-nine? I could live to one hundred. I had to plug the money drain.
Luckily, Lester’s incredible enthusiasm and industry connections, on top of his legendary brain, had attracted an “angel investor,” a guy named Nick Savage, who put his money in and didn’t try to take over. Venture capitalists demand your soul and your firstborn before they’ll invest. Hard deadlines, performance goals, “senior” stock that’s sold first if things go bad so that they get their money back and you go broke. They’re soul-sucking vampires who use their money to extort profits from people who actually invent things.
So if you find someone who believes in you and wants to help, in return for a fair share of your stock, it feels like an angel has descended to answer your prayers. And that’s exactly what Savage did.
Lester and I traded Savage some of our stock for enough money to keep Lester going. I still owned the biggest chunk of the company, but they’ve been going for four years without my direct participation, albeit at a slower, more economical pace. I backed out and went to work as a consultant so I could rebuild my bank account. Lester and I still talk a lot; he keeps me abreast of progress and setbacks, and consults me before making big decisions.
It was all going great.
Then I landed in prison, which gave me a new appreciation for freedom, sunshine, wind, and this beach.
“So what’s up, Lester? I don’t hear from you much these days.”
“You got a couple minutes?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, glancing up the beach. Sage’s figure was in the distance now, slightly dimmed by a haze of wave-tossed ocean spray lit by the sunlight. I had time. “What’s up?”
“Wolf, something serious has come up. I got another visit from Schmidt-Becker.”
Crap. I thought we’d put that one to rest.
Schmidt-Becker Pharmaceutical. My mind went back.
Six weeks ago … I’d been on the beach, just like today, and my phone rang. It was a video call from Lester.
“Wolf, you know that breakthrough I’ve been telling you about?”
“Of course. How could I forget?!”
“Well, bad news and good. The bad news: somehow, word got out about our recent results. I don’t know how, everyone swears it wasn’t them.”
“That’s bad, Lester! You don’t have the patents in yet!”
“I know. But listen, Wolf. We’re being contacted about a buyout.”
“What? Seriously?” I asked.
“Seriously,” he replied. “As serious as a heart attack. Wolf, this is a pretty big deal!”
“As in this is a real company with real money? Not some gang of predatory investors?” I asked.
“Not just company. Companies, plural. And this is big-time stuff. AbbVie, Novartis, and Vertex.”
“No shit? Holy crap, Lester!”
“That’s what I said! They all made informal contact, asking us who our merger-and-acquisition partner is.”
“We don’t have one yet, do we?” I asked.
“We do. Tim Carney just signed one yesterday. But wait, Wolf. That’s not the biggest news.”
“Okay…” I waited.
“We also got an actual offer. And Wolf, they’re talking about a lot of money. You sitting down?”
“You can see my chair, Lester.”
“Nine figures.”
“Nine …” I had to pause to visualize a nine-figure number. “Nine figures? As in, one hundred million dollars?”
“One hundred million dollars.”
My heart started pounding and blood rushed to my head. There are moments in life when everything changes. A chance meeting, a car accident, a cancer diagnosis, catching someone’s eye across the room at a party and feeling a connection. Everything that came before is in the past, and the future is new. You have to remember these moments. Savor them. Cherish them. Because they don’t come very often in life, and each one is a pivot point.
“Give me some details here,” I said, recovering my wits. “A hundred million? That’s gotta mean you hit the jackpot with the drug, right?”
“I think so, Wolf. I think we did it.”
“Holy crap, that’s amazing! All this time, all the money—”
“Your money, Wolf,” he interrupted. “I’ll never forget that you started this.”
Then I asked the wrong question.
“So okay, so who is it? Cause that’s a shitload of money.”
“Schmidt-Becker Biotech.”
My blood rushed again, this time in anger. “Not Schmidt-Becker, Lester. Forget them. We’ll go with one of the other three.”
Lester was silent for a moment, mouth open as if to speak, his image seemingly frozen on the screen. Then he scowled. “Okay, Wolf. We’re not deciding right now, right? I’m just bringing you up to speed. There’s gonna be a lot of due diligence. Open kimono, as they say. We’re not making any decisions until the cards are all on the table.”
“Christ, Lester, how many metaphors do you need? I get it. But I’m telling you, it’s not going to be Schmidt-Becker.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Doesn’t the name Schmidt ring a bell? Former VP of Pharmhauser? You know they’re the ones I hacked, right? Sent me to prison? He got fired over that, and got some big investors to fund him for Schmidt-Becker Biotech. So yeah, same guy.”
He frowned. “Oh shit. Yeah.”
I thought about it for a moment. Lester couldn’t possibly know everything I knew about Schmidt, but he knew about my history with Schmidt. And he seemed willing to deal with Schmidt anyway. His oh-shit statement didn’t fool me. But this wasn’t the time. Maybe if we did due diligence, we could get the other three companies, and maybe more, to bid against each other, and one of the others would be the winner.
“Nah, you’re right Lester. We’ll get it all on the table, and then we’ll make the right choice.”
He nodded. “That’s great, Wolf. We’ve got our work to do, that’s for sure. But Wolf, no matter how this goes, it’s good. We won! We finally got to the finish line.”
“You did, Lester. I started off with you, but you pushed it over the line.”
“Wolf. Wolf! Are you listening? Wolf?” asked Lester. My mind came back to the present and realized it was the third time he’d asked.
“Yeah, sorry man. When you said Schmidt-Becker, it just sent me into a little tailspin. You know how I feel about them.”
“I know, I know. But I met with them today, and it was interesting. They understand what’s going on with you, why you don’t want to do business with them. But they’re hoping you can put that aside. Schmidt made a mistake, and paid the price. It’s history.”
“My mother’s dead, Lester.”
“I know, Wolf. And I’m so sorry. But turning them down isn’t going to bring her back. And Wolf, they upped their offer to a hundred fifty million. This is our dream, Wolf!”
I was quiet for a few moments as I stared off into the distance. Lester gave me respectful silence as I contemplated the surf and the beach. I finally looked back at him.
“Lester, there’s more. There’s a lot of shit about Helmut Schmidt that you don’t know. Let’s do it face to face, okay?”
“Wolf, did you hear me say a hundred fifty million dollars?”
“Yes. I heard.”
“Um, okay, sure, but can we meet next week? Things are crazy around here.”
“This week would be better, or else I’ll have to wait three weeks. I’ve got that dive trip to Mexico coming up, and I’m leaving on Sunday. I’ll be incommunicado for at least ten days.”
“Ten days? Where the hell are you going?” he asked.
“Ever hear of Socorro Island?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s way the hell off the coast of Mexico,” I said. “Like almost 400 miles from Cabo San Lucas or Puerto Vallarta. They take us out there on a live-aboard dive boat, it’s like twenty-four hours to get there. And once you’re there, it’s just you, the boat, and fellow scuba divers.”
“Don’t they have satellite internet?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure they do. But I don’t think we’ll be able to do video calls, just email and text messages.”
“Sounds like great diving.”
“They’re promising we’ll see all kinds of sharks, manta rays, tuna, dolphins, and lots of other fish. Maybe even a humpback whale.”
“I’m jealous already,” he said. “Okay, yeah, I can make time this week to meet you. How about lunch down in La Jolla?”
“What’s today, Monday? How about breakfast on my boat on Friday? I’ll fix you something good.”
“Okay, that works,” he replied with a smile.
“You remember where my boat is docked?” I asked.
“Sure do. Eight o’clock?”
“See you then.”
I clicked off and dialed another number. Lester’s news was distracting, but I have customers, and I like to keep my commitments. And Sage, the sexy singer I’d just met, had promised to return.