Aphrodite (37 page)

After September 11, however, he clashed with Kransten. KranMar held the patent for a drug that was extremely effective against anthrax. They did not have the facilities to make enough of it—or at least enough to satisfy a public that was panicking and desperately needed reassurance. During the first few months after the World Trade Center attacks, it was nearly impossible to determine potential threats. No one knew what the terrorists were capable of or willing to do. There was a legitimate fear that anthrax could be used, via mail or via the water supply, to wipe out millions of people. Manwaring lifted KranMar’s patent, allowing a Canadian company to make a generic version of the drug. The action enabled millions more people to have access to it. But Manwaring was called into the Oval Office and told, by the president himself, that this was never to happen again. Manwaring argued—never telling the president the truth behind the pressure that was being placed on him, strictly explaining the need for such actions—but his arguments did no good. It became clear to him that the lesser of two evils could quickly become, and might already have become, the greater danger.

Three months after that, KranMar introduced a pill that was marketed as one that caused fat to bypass the body’s system entirely. It was an extraordinary success from the first day the television advertisements ran. Within a year, twenty-eight people had died after using the pills. Manwaring ordered production held up so more testing could be done. He had an extraordinary clash with Chase Welles, who publicly hinted that Manwaring was being bribed by rival pharmaceutical companies who were developing similar products. The White House did not back Manwaring, instead siding with the Food and Drug Administration chief. False information was disseminated to the media and Manwaring found his integrity and judgment attacked from both the left and the right. Still he was a good soldier and said nothing. He kept trying to look at the bigger picture and the ramifications of going public with what he knew.

Then he was contacted by Maura Greer.

At this point in the story, Helen Roag stepped forward. She had changed into a pair of khaki pants and a cotton blouse. Manwaring still wore his robe.

Helen said that she had been working at the Aker Institute, a subsidiary of KranMar, for several years. She had a research background but was asked to assume more of a managerial role than she had anticipated. She was stunned at the raises she was given, so she rarely argued about the responsibilities they were assigning to her. She knew she was being paid two, three, even four times the amount someone in her position should have been paid.

At some point, she was asked to have lunch with Douglas Kransten himself. She was dumbfounded but, no question about it, flattered. He praised her work to the skies, and then, midway through the meal, he began to talk to her about a special assignment. One that he said was a little tricky. There was some risk involved, he said, but its scientific value was incalculable. He said that as early as 1970, he had become convinced that human growth hormones were the key to eradicating many of the problems that struck the human body as it aged. He’d had a team of scientists working on it since that time. Kransten told Helen that they’d done some experiments around the country, beginning as early as 1972. They’d had astonishing success with some of their subjects. He showed her that, in the northeast region alone, eighteen subjects—ten males, eight females—had lived to be over one hundred years old. Kransten was convinced—no, more than convinced, absolutely certain—that his people had discovered a way to slow down the aging process.

He showed her some of the experimentation. Groups of people had been fed and injected with various combinations of such supplements as L-arginine and glycine and L-ornithine and L-glutamine. There were some miraculous results at first. Wounds healed, immune responses to bacteria, viruses, and tumor cells improved. The loss of skeletal muscle diminished, as did fatigue. Gradually, the results became even more miraculous. Many of those who had participated in the experiments were living longer. The aging process had been delayed, in some cases substantially. Helen had looked at the data, agreed that it was interesting and impressive, but she disagreed with him that the proof was absolute.

It’s not ready to be released to the public, he told her. There are problems. But the problems are close to being solved.

We are on the verge of doubling the life span of the normal human being
, Kransten told her.
And there is absolute, undeniable proof.

She asked to see it, but he just shook his head. The proof is overseas, he told her. Someday she would see it. But not yet.

He told her what he wanted her to do and she agreed. The money he added to her salary was the main inducement, but so was the scientific value of his experiment. Everything had to be done in strict secrecy. They were doing a good thing, Kransten said, but the government did not agree. They will never allow this, he told her, until it’s absolutely safe and proven. But it was a Catch-22. The only way to reach that stage was to continue with the forbidden experimentation. She accepted his logic.

She was assigned to half of the eighteen survivors of the early 1970s testing. She saw each of them every three months. If they needed her they could contact her via Growth Industries, a shell corporation set up only to distance KranMar from the subjects. All of the elderly subjects were living at different old-age homes. Their expenses were fully paid. They were given anything they needed to make their lives easier and pleasurable. When she saw them, she not only collected new data, she was charged with giving them their hormone injections. The experiments had continued all these years. What was being injected varied, as testing and information had gotten so much more sophisticated over this period. But the ones who survived continued to survive. Several of them outlived the managers of their homes. She had one subject, in Vermont, who was now 122 years old—and healthy and vital.

But the more involved she became, the more misgivings she began to have.

The original series of experiments in 1972 was given the appellation Aphrodite, named after the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty. They were conducted in upstate New York, near Binghamton, in a private hospital owned by Kransten. As Helen learned more about them— from discussions with her subjects and, gradually, from the files she either had access to or managed to steal—she began to realize the extent of the damage that had been done. Yes, there were eighteen survivors of the initial experiments. But over a hundred subjects had died as a direct result of the treatments.

Then something happened that forced her into action. She had noticed that Kransten and his wife were spending much time in Europe, particularly at their house in England. She arranged a meeting with one of Kransten’s researchers, a young and attractive man named Lonnie Parker, who had been spending time in the England lab. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary; it was part of her job to remain current on research matters. But Dr. Parker was—and here Helen hesitated, had the grace to blush slightly, before continuing on with her story—interested in her. Romantically interested. Well—and Helen blushed again—sexually interested. She saw him several times. He would only give her minor details about the experiments taking place in England. She learned that the main lab was actually in Kransten’s home, which she hadn’t realized. But, although she sensed he wanted to talk, he shied away from revealing anything substantive. On their third date, however, he had too many margaritas and he began to talk about what he’d seen in England. He still wouldn’t come out and tell her exactly what was going on, but he used a strong word for a scientist. He used the word “ungodly” when he described the program known as Aphrodite.

The next morning, when Lonnie Parker sobered up, he begged her not to repeat anything he’d said. He told her it would be dangerous for her if any rumors were traced back to her. “Dangerous?” she asked, and she remembered laughing. Parker didn’t laugh. He told her he was going to resign. That he was not able to deal with what he had seen and done over the past few months. He was going to resign that very day.

“What happened to Dr. Parker?” Justin asked. “Where is he now?” Helen Roag shook her head. “I never saw him again,” she said. “We were supposed to have dinner that night. After he resigned. He never called.”

“Did you call him?”

“Of course I did. I left messages on his answering machine for two days. Then it stopped picking up. I went by his house one afternoon. There were two men in there. I only talked to one of them—he opened the door—but I could see the other one, off to the side in the den. He was looking through Lonnie’s bookcase. The man I spoke to said that Lonnie didn’t live there anymore. He asked if I wanted to leave my name, that he’d be speaking to Lonnie and would give him a message.”

“Did you?”

She shuddered. “Something told me that I didn’t want them to know who I was.”

“And you never heard from Parker again?”

“No.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I think they killed him,” Helen said. “I think they couldn’t let somebody walk away from Aphrodite, not someone who they sensed might talk about it. So they killed him.”

She went to the FBI after that, she said, to the Boston bureau and told her suspicions to the agent in charge, Wanda Chinkle. Wanda spoke to her superiors. She asked Helen to remain in Kransten’s employ, to keep doing exactly what she’d been doing, but to report in regularly to the FBI and to keep them informed of anything that happened with Aphrodite.

She did exactly as they asked. Partly, she said, out of fear. She was afraid to leave after what had happened to Lonnie Parker. But after a year of passing along information, of keeping her eyes open, her suspicions all began to seem foolish to her. Maybe Lonnie really had simply left town. Maybe she’d just become paranoid because of the odd nature of her job and the strange area of experimentation she was involved with. Then, her fear and suspicions rose again. Several of her subjects— and those tended to by Ed Marion—died. But that wasn’t all. There were other deaths, and many of those she was certain were connected to the Aphrodite project. People at the old-age home suddenly died in their sleep. Friends of the subjects were in fatal car accidents or fell down the steps of their home. She became certain that not only was Kransten protecting his secret by killing those who discovered it, she began to realize that the FBI was also protecting his secret. They were not using her information, she realized, to put Kransten in jail. The info she passed along was disappearing down a black hole. When she pressed her FBI contacts, they turned evasive, even threatening. And she noticed another pattern emerging: Drugs developed by KranMar that were not yet ready for public consumption were being approved by the FDA and released into the marketplace. She tried to tell herself she was being paranoid but couldn’t talk herself out of her conviction that some kind of huge web of deceit was being played out.

Helen had a close friend from college. They were two years apart, Helen the elder of the two. She got an e-mail from her friend saying that she was interning at the FDA. The friend came up to Boston for a weekend, for a reunion of college pals. On Sunday night, Helen got very drunk and told her friend all about her suspicions. The friend said that she might be able to sniff around and see what was what. She had access to a lot of people as well as a lot of information. She was just an intern, she told Helen, so no one took her seriously. She might really be able to find the truth and stay under the radar.

The intern was Maura Greer.

That was when Manwaring took center stage again. He explained that he had met Maura several times when he’d gone to meetings at the Hubert Humphrey Building, the home of the FDA. She was flirtatious, she was attractive. They’d begun an affair several months before Maura had spent the weekend with Helen. After a while, Maura came to Man-waring and told him about the conversations she’d had with Helen. This was exactly at the time when he was struggling with his own conscience and suspicions. He encouraged Maura to become Helen’s contact and to pass all information on to him. He didn’t know what to do with it; he didn’t know exactly to whom he could turn. But he knew he had to do something. And he knew he had to turn somewhere.

Then all hell broke loose. Maura was killed. He, Manwaring, was set up and his credibility destroyed. He explained that the powers that be even managed to provide women who told the media that he’d been having affairs with them, that he’d become violent when they had discussions about leaving his wife. He’d never even met any of those women, he told Justin and Deena. Never met them, never heard of them. They were complete and utter fabrications. But they were smart fabrications. Manwaring had been unfaithful, and with women other than Maura. It was his weakness, and they were able to exploit it to their advantage. He knew that the more he denied these specific affairs, the more likely it was that other women would step forward to denounce his credibility. Once the media jumped on board and he became the favorite topic of talking heads and tabloid headlines, he was fairly helpless to combat the smears. Everything was a brilliantly executed ploy, organized by masters of manipulation, to remove him from office and stop him from talking, and to install Chase Welles, who would go along with any and all cover-ups.

Helen was then close to panic mode, she said. She wasn’t sure whom she could talk to next. She waited for two weeks, then went to one person. One of her college professors. A mentor. His name was Joseph Fennerman. She showed him files she had stolen and notes she had compiled. He was the only person she knew who might have the scientific knowledge to perceive what was happening and the connections to do something about it. She was afraid he would laugh at her but after listening to her and studying the material she gave him, he didn’t laugh. He told her he had people he could see in Washington and that he would look into it. He called her to say that he had made two appointments. One was with a scientist who worked for one of the top pharmaceutical companies. It was someone Fennerman trusted. The second appointment was with the head of the FDA. He would get to the bottom of this, he told Helen. Don’t worry.