“From having talked with Chan Ho for many hours, there’s no way he’d be able to add to our technical knowledge.”
What about his companion?” Marissa asked.
“The one who died.”
“”Chan refused to talk about him,” Tristan said.
“I asked him on many occasions. All I learned was that he was not a martial arts expert like Chan.”
“Maybe he was an acupuncturist,” Marissa suggested.
“Or an herbalist.”
“Possibly,” Tristan said.
“But I can assure you that FCA did not start doing acupuncture as part of the in-vitro protocol. But Chan did lead me to believe that he had felt responsible for his companion since he was afraid he would be sent back to the PRC after the bloke died.”
“Sounds like the companion was the more important of the two,” Marissa said.
“Maybe he did provide some knowledge or skill.”
“It would be tough to get me to believe that,” Tristan said.
“They were all quite primitive fellows. What I started to think about was drugs.”
“How so?” Marissa asked.
“Heroin smuggling,” Tristan said.
“I know that Hong Kong has become the heroin capital for moving heroin from the Golden Triangle to the rest of the world. I came to think that the explanation for all this weird activity was the movement of heroin, especially since TB is endemic in the Golden Triangle.”
“So these Chinese duos were couriers?” Marissa asked.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Tristan said.
“Maybe the one who didn’t know martial arts. But I wasn’t sure. Yet it was the only thing that seemed to justify the money that had to be involved.
” “That means the FCA has to be in the drug business,” Marissa said. In her mind’s eye she remembered the surprising opulence of the clinic. That lent a certain credence to what Tristan was saying. But if that were the case, how did TB salpingitis fit in?
“I was planning on investigating it,” Tristan said.
“I intended to use my next vacation to go to Hong Kong and trace the trail back to Guangzhou if necessary.”
“What made you change your mind?” Marissa asked.
“Two things happened,” Tristan said.
“First, the chief of pathology came back, and second, my paper came out in the Australian
Journal of Infectious Diseases. I thought I was about to become professionally famous for describing a new clinical syndrome.
Instead it turned out to be a king hit on me. As I said, I’d never cleared the paper with the administration. well, they went crazy. They wanted me to recant the paper, but I wouldn’t. I got on my academic high horse and bucked the system.”
“The cases in your paper were real patients?” Marissa finally asked.
“You didn’t make them up?”
“Of course I didn’t make them up,” Tristan said indignantly.
“I’m not a complete alf. That’s the story they put out. But it wasn’t true.”
“Charles Lester told us you’d made them up.”
“That lying bastard!” Tristan hissed.
“All twenty-three cases in that paper were real patients. I guarantee it. But I’m not surprised he told you differently. They tried to force me to say the same. But I refused. There were even threats. Unfortunately, I ignored the threats, even when they were extended to my wife and my two-year-old son “Then Chan Ho disappeared and things got ugly. My pathology chief wrote to the journal and said I’d manufactured the data, so the paper was officially discredited. Then someone planted heroin in my car which the police found following an anonymous tip. My life became a living hell. I was indicted on drug charges. My family was intimidated and tormented. But like an idiot, I stood up to it all, challenging the clinic to deny the existence of the patients whose names I had saved. Drunk on idealism, I wasn’t going to give up. At least not until my wife died.”
Marissa’s face went ashen.
“What happened?” she asked, afraid to hear the rest.
Tristan looked down at his beer for a moment, then took a swig. When he looked back at Marissa his eyes were filled with tears.
“It was supposedly a mugging,” he said in a halting voice.
-Something that doesn’t happen too often here in Australia. She was knocked down and her purse was taken. In the process, she broke her neck.”