79
They got together
every Tuesday afternoon for lunch. There was nothing official about
it. No one penned it into his or her calendar. But at the end of
each lunch, they always made plans for the next. Mark hadn’t
realized how important the group had become to one another until
they prepared to split up after their last meeting with Gallagher.
It was a ragtag team to say the least—even the most creative
networking specialist would not have thought to bring them
together—but Gwen, Jan, Peter, Eddie, and Rick had become the first
group Mark felt he could rely on since his college days. That felt
very good.
It was Rick’s turn
to pick the restaurant, which meant overcooked burgers and soggy
fries. In the three months they’d been doing this, Mark had learned
when he could look forward to the food (Eddie seemed to have a
direct line to the best chefs in the city) and when he should make
sure to eat a big breakfast. Rick had always had terrible taste,
and access to state dinners hadn’t refined it. His favorite part of
campaigning was probably getting a chance to eat his fill of rubber
chicken. Today, though, the food was an afterthought. The day
before, Gwen had a follow-up meeting with Ted Gallagher and
received astounding news—d-caffeine was showing up in the coffee of
other roasters.
“How can that be?”
asked Mark. “The d-caffeine plants are confined to Hawaiian
plantations.”
“But that’s just it.
I’m afraid they’re not. Gallagher analyzed beans from Central and
South America. Many, though not all, are showing the genetic
manipulation. If there were even one decent-sized coffee plantation
south of the equator, the altered plant could have spread—and it
looks as if that’s what happened.”
Mark was baffled.
“How?”
Eddie interjected.
“It could have happened in any number of ways. A competitor could
have stolen some of the plants over the last few years. Or maybe
scientists—corporate, academic, you name it—were experimenting with
a new variety that turned up down there. Or simple
cross-fertilization. Nature is now following what Jamie Robinson
programmed the plants to do years ago. That’s what happens when man
starts tampering with things.”
“So things are even
worse than before,” Jan said.
Gwen shook her head.
In the past few months, her face had filled out a bit, though she
hadn’t put on much weight. Mark thought it made her seem warmer,
more open. Jack Maulder and their future child were very, very
lucky people. “Remember that we only ever connected seizure
activity to titrated d-caffeine. Lower levels don’t seem to have
the same effect and none of the samples Gallagher tested showed
anything more than that.”
“It’s entirely
possible they don’t even know what they have,” Eddie
noted.
“Even Pequod’s has
stopped doing it in new markets,” Gwen added.
Peter guffawed.
“That’s because we scared the shit out of them.”
Gwen smiled. “We did
something good, that’s for sure. Broome’s gone and Tassin’s gone.
And even though Randall dodged prison—I’d love to know how the
attorney general screwed that one up—he’s out of the coffee
business. The only thing you ever read about him these days has to
do with his new computer chip.”
It was time for Mark
to make his announcement. He’d expected it to be the big story of
the day, but Gwen trumped him. “Speaking of which, I got a call
from Billy Hamlin this morning.”
“Hey,” Peter said,
“what’s your best buddy up to?”
“Relocating. He’s
leaving Pequod’s.”
“Please tell me he’s
not going to one of the other brands where Gallagher found
d-caffeine,” Jan said.
“Actually, he’s
getting out of coffee entirely. He cashed out his options and is
going to work for the Disney Corporation.”
“Makes sense,” Peter
said wryly. “He’s already turned parents into addicts so it’s time
to go after the kids.”
Everyone at the
table chuckled and Mark let them have their laugh. “You know, I
think he might actually have been entirely innocent in this. He
told me that he’d spent the past few months trying to corroborate
what I told him about Pequod’s. It wasn’t easy because, as we know,
Randall doesn’t exactly run an open operation over there, but when
enough of what he found supported our claims, he decided it was
time to get out.”
Rick leaned forward
in his chair, nearly landing his tie in a pool of ketchup. “That’s
the angle for your story! You didn’t want to do it because you felt
it didn’t lead anywhere, but now it does.”
Mark shrugged. “No,
it really doesn’t. Everything I said about this a few months ago is
still true. Billy Hamlin leaving Pequod’s doesn’t change it. Beyond
the few documents we possess, the trail suddenly grows cold. We
don’t have anything to support our conspiracy story, so I’m left
with d-caffeine. The public isn’t going to respond to an article on
receptor sites. If it’s not linked to a cover-up, it’s going to
sound like I’m preaching, and people don’t read my pieces to hear a
sermon.”
“But if Billy Hamlin
is willing to talk about Randall, Broome, and Tassin—”
“Who says he would
be? Would you be willing to rat out Randall if he knew where your
wife and kids lived? And anything he said would throw suspicion on
himself. It’s lose-lose for him.”
“So are you going to
cover Hamlin’s move in any way?” Gwen asked.
“Nah. Billy called
me first to give me the scoop. I sent him to my friend Charlie
Nicholls at the Journal instead. I owe
Charlie a few favors.”
Gwen smiled. That
answer seemed to please her.
After that, the
lunch relaxed into the easy banter that Mark had come to
appreciate. Jan and Peter made official what the rest of the group
had surmised for some time—that they were a couple. Mark was hardly
an authority on relationships, but even he knew there was some real
heat between them.
Gwen told everyone
about her upcoming ultrasound test. At this point, there was a good
chance they’d be able to determine the gender of the child. Jack
had come around to the notion that he could raise a female softball
star as easily as he could a major league short-stop, but Gwen was
still hoping he’d get his boy.
“If it’s a girl,
we’re going to name her Marci,” Gwen said, her eyes misting a bit.
Mark knew that Gwen did all she could to get to the cause of her
best friend’s sudden death. Still, while she’d managed to address
the mystery, she hadn’t yet fully addressed the grief. “If it’s a
boy, we want to use some variation on her name for his middle name
but we haven’t come up with it yet.”
“You could always
use Mark,” Mark said coyly.
Gwen patted him on
the hand. “Thanks for the suggestion,” she said with a little grin.
“Jack and I will take that under advisement.”
In the past few
weeks, Mark had stopped feeling uncomfortable hearing Gwen talk
about her pregnancy and started enjoying how much she was enjoying
it. He wasn’t quite ready to take her up on her dinner invitations
to the Maulder home, but he was doing better with all of
it.
Peter regaled
everyone with a story about his latest client, a huge
multinational—he wouldn’t mention the name (“confidentiality and
all that”), but dropped enough clues to make it obvious to all—with
a virus on its intranet “that would make a porn star blush.” That
led to Rick, in can-you-top-this fashion, telling about a
barely-unnamed congresswoman’s lewd diatribe after a five-martini
lunch. He had everyone at the table laughing so hard that no one
seemed to mind that he’d made yet another dreadful restaurant
choice.
Rick would be
getting ready to mount a reelection campaign soon. Peter hinted at
a potentially months-long assignment in Istanbul. Eddie had just
signed a deal with a publisher for a book on GMOs. Jan was getting
her team ready to explore Phase Three of BioNet. Gwen was up to her
neck in meaningful work at the FDA and planned to take three months
at home after giving birth. And Mark had recently received a call
from the Chicago Tribune that was far
too interesting to ignore without some exploration.
These Tuesday
lunches might not last much longer. But Mark was convinced the
friendships would continue indefinitely. They’d done something
significant together. They probably saved lives—and nearly died
trying. If that wasn’t the foundation for a lasting relationship,
Mark didn’t know what was.