Side Effects

Chapter 24

The company's legacy was the death of millions. Hell, I guess that was my family's legacy too. Did my parents have any idea what Anna had been doing? I didn't even know what to do about this. Honestly, I wanted to go track my sister down and rage at her and drag her to the police, but right now I just needed to decide what to do. At a minimum, she and Ken needed to be in prison. We were sitting on so much evidence that it was going to be an easy case.

I felt Alaya's hand on my back, rubbing circles as I remained hunched over the toilet. "I'm so sorry," she said in a rough voice. "I'm sure this isn't easy to process." She reached over to me with my bottle of water, and I thankfully used it to rinse my mouth several times.

"I'm the one that's sorry. My damn sister was responsible for your grandmother, and so many others. I don't think I could ever be sorry enough." I turned and sat down, reaching out my hand just short of Alaya's, almost afraid to touch her.

"That wasn't your fault." She lifted her hands to mine and intertwined our fingers. I let out a sigh of relief at the contact, grateful that she and I still might make it through this news. "I told you I know your expressions, and you were just as shocked as I was. I know you had nothing to do with it."

"I can't believe she'd go that far." I truly was incredulous, but with the house and her reaction to the Malaysia incident, should I have been? Was everything for the corporate bottom line?

Alaya looked down at our hands and added a second hand to hold mine. "They're doing it again, Kian. They're going to release another one, and this time they'll have a vaccine ready. But they're still going to kill millions again."

I just stared in horror. They couldn't do it again, could they? Anyone looking at the statistics of deaths would be horrified, right? Or was she so upset that we missed out on the money, that she was going to go for it again and this time capitalize on it? "Show me."

She stood up, keeping a hold of my hand and leaning back to help me up. She led me to the bed, and we both got back into it before she silently handed me the first few pages from the third stack of papers. I was terrified to read it, but I knew I had no choice. With a sigh, I dove in to read. I wish I hadn't.

It was a series of emails between Ken and my sister, and they went over the plans to try a second time. They had hired someone from Pfizer who had worked on their vaccine, and he helped them make a better one for the new virus. They were confident that they could get the new vaccine into a test phase quickly, since they were already there, and already had a planned release point and day. We had about a month before the world was going to be at the beginning of another pandemic.

Evidently the rumors of the lab leak in China had made them think that it would be a perfect way to cripple a rival, and potentially buy them up, while also making billions at the same time. They were going to release it in the town of Groton, Connecticut, the home of one of Pfizer's research and development campuses. In their mind, the outbreak would instantly point to Pfizer as the culprit and cause them to be having to ignore making a vaccine, and instead deal with all kinds of investigations instead.

But the more I thought about it, the more I was terrified at how fast it might spread. Groton was located squarely on Interstate 95, between New York City and Boston, one of the busiest stretches around, and was also a Naval base where submarines were home porting. People on the road between the cities could easily pick up the virus if they stopped there, and then bring it with them to Boston, New York, Providence, and any number of other major population centers. If sailors caught the disease, they might infect an entire submarine, and if they had a port of call in a foreign city, then it could easily spread across the Atlantic, even if flights were stopped. Not to mention, if the armed forces were hit with a big outbreak at the base, it would make everything even more high profile, and my sister would come out looking like a damned hero for getting a vaccine out quickly.