The Doubt Factory

  Alix glanced sidelong at the girl sitting beside her. “She manipulated me.”

  “No. You helped her. She asked for help, and you helped her. The first day of school, she said she was lost at Seitz, and you took her in.”

  “That just says I’m a sucker.”

  “No.” Cynthia shook her head. “It says you’re kind.”

  “Oh, look, I’m kind and ethical. Nominate me for sainthood.”

  “There are worse things to be,” Cynthia observed, and before Alix had a chance to reply, she jumped down from their perch, leaving Alix sitting alone with Moses.

  “Cyn’s right, you know,” Moses said.

  “So why am I not feeling like I won the lottery?”

  “No one said being ethical was easy,” Moses said. “But that’s why you won’t lie to me now about whether you’re going to help us.” He shrugged. “It’s one of the things I always liked about you. You don’t take the easy way.”

  “I could still lie to you.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I might.”

  “You won’t.”

  It was irritating to have him sit there, looking smug and psychoanalyzing her. She gave him a sour look. “Okay, so if you’re so smart, why kidnap me? Why not just try talking to me instead? I mean, Christ, I’ve seen college recruiters who do a better job of selling than you do.” She laughed. “Most people, when they want to change your mind, they don’t resort to kidnapping.”

  “We tried, actually.”

  “That’s funny. I didn’t notice.”

  “You’re right,” Moses said with a laugh. “You didn’t. We put Cyn right next to you for eight months. She had all kinds of questions for you about your dad. But it was like you were asleep. Everything went right past you. You were too cozy. So I decided to shake you awake.”

  “And now I get to spend the rest of my life in a factory.”

  “It’s not about you.”

  “Right. It’s about my dad. I get it.”

  “No.” Moses jerked his chin toward Tank, who was still making runs at the ramp on his skateboard. “It’s about him. Kids like him.” He waved his hand toward the rest of the 2.0 crew. “Kids like them.”

  “They don’t really qualify as kids.”

  “We were all kids when this started. I was Tank’s age when my dad had his heart attack.”

  Alix felt awkward at the mention of Moses’s loss. “I’m sorry. I forgot—”

  “Don’t be. You didn’t do it. Like you said, it’s not your fault. You weren’t involved.”

  “Still…”

  “It’s not on you,” he said shortly. “You want to know what is on you, though? Whatever happens next. The next kid who sucks on Azicort like Tank’s sister did—that’s on you.

  “She died because of Azicort. Tank barely made it. Doctors stuck him with so much adrenaline that the kid should still be bouncing off the walls. And there are going to be more kids like him, because your dad’s working overtime to make sure Azicort doesn’t get blamed.”

  “I think someone would notice if an asthma drug was killing people.”

  “Oh, sure, they notice. And then your dad and his good buddy George Saamsi get to work. They blame other medications. They blame genetic defects. They say patients didn’t use the correct dose. They say it wasn’t used as directed—that’s what they said about Tank. I watched good old Santa Claus George get up in front of the FDA and show them studies that proved Azicort is as safe as houses.”

  “But you know better,” Alix said drily.

  “Damn straight.”

  “Because you’re so much smarter than anyone else in the whole world.”

  “No. Because I’m paying attention.”

  Alix could feel her annoyance rising again. “Not every company is evil, you know. Just because someone sues McDonald’s for having hot coffee, it doesn’t mean the company was bad. It just means people are idiots. I know you like your big conspiracy theory and all, but maybe it was something else that made Tank sick.”

  “You sound like your dad.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “You know what’s keeping Azicort on the market?”

  “Is there any way I can keep you from telling me?”

  “Doubt. As long as people are still in doubt about how dangerous Azicort is, it means no one has to do anything. Kimball-Geier gets to make another couple hundred million for the year, your dad gets a bonus, and everyone waits until next year to decide. As long as there’s doubt, we can always wait until next year.”

  “Maybe there’s legitimate doubt, though! Just because you want someone to blame doesn’t mean you’re right.”

  “I told myself that for a little while.” Moses laughed. “But people like your dad have been doing this for the last hundred years. If you dig back, you can see the playbook getting built. First, it’s DuPont and some chemical dye that’s killing workers in the nineteen thirties. Then it’s Big Tobacco fighting to keep their cigarettes from being blamed for lung cancer, and you’ve got asbestos fighting to keep themselves from being blamed for asbestosis, and then it’s the lead industry, trying to keep lead in paint from being blamed for screwing with kids’ brains. There’s a whole kitchen cabinet full of household drugs that are using the same tricks. You know the aspirin industry tried to stop aspirin from being labeled for Reye’s syndrome? Hell, even Tylenol used some of these plays. And then there’s the chemicals. Look up diacetyl sometime. It makes microwave popcorn taste like butter, and it literally obliterates people’s lungs when they breathe it.”

  “I don’t understand—” Alix tried to interrupt, but Moses was rolling now. He held up his hand and didn’t stop talking.

  “At first, you think all these things are different, but then you start to see a pattern. The same scientific experts show up on different witness stands. The same tactics get used in different industries. At first, you think you’re just obsessed because you’re pissed about losing your mom and dad, and this is looking like a conspiracy. But you’re a sane person, so you know conspiracies don’t really exist, and, anyway, conspiracies are for crazy people, right? And you definitely don’t want to think you’re going crazy, because that means not only did you lose your parents, but you’re also developing paranoid delusions.

  “But still, it’s right there in front of you like a neon sign. Every time a company gets in trouble, that company hires someone like Simon Banks, of Banks Strategy Partners. And you finally see it. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just business. As long as they can keep the people confused, they can keep selling. Doesn’t matter what it is. Microwave popcorn, Azicort, aspirin to little kids…”

  “You really do sound like a conspiracy theorist.”

  “Theory, hell. It’s just basic product defense. ExxonMobil spent a lot of money to try to make people doubt whether global warming was real. That’s documented. It’s not an accident people in the U.S. still can’t make up their minds about whether it exists or not. An oil company mounted a straight-up propaganda campaign to keep them confused. They gave six hundred thousand dollars to the Heartland Institute and two million dollars to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and if you’re a regular person, that sounds like a lot of money. But if you’re ExxonMobil, you make between fifteen and forty-five billion dollars in profit every year, so keeping people confused about global warming was actually dirt cheap to them.”

  He gave her a speculative look. “What would you be willing to do if you could make another forty-five billion in just one year? This is just an accounting problem for them.” He shrugged. “Anyway, you don’t need to believe me. It’s just the truth.”

  “The truth.”

  “There actually is such a thing as unimpeachable truth, Alix. Not ‘he said, she said.’ Not ‘in my opinion.’ Just facts. Documented facts.”

  “Documented on the Internet, you mean. Mostly by crazies.”

  “No. Real truth. Unimpeachable truth. I like to think of it as Information 2.0.”
r />   “Is that what your 2.0 symbol is all about?”

  “Sure. Right now, all we have is Information 1.0, right? And it makes it easy to obscure the truth about things. It makes it easy for your dad to make a living. But maybe there’s a way to make information more solid. Make it more trustworthy, you know? A way to cut through the lies to something so solid and true and real that people like your dad can’t undermine it. Real truth. Information 2.0. If you had that, it would change everything. You’d have a world where you could actually trust what people say.”

  “Sounds utopian.”

  “No. It’s not utopian. Truth exists, Alix. We just have to hunt for it more right now. Some of it’s sitting right in front of us. If you really believe your dad’s clients are so innocent, then you just have to help us crack the Doubt Factory to confirm it.” Moses jerked his head toward where Tank was sitting on his skateboard, resting. “Let’s take a peek at Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals. Let’s see if they really think Azicort is as safe as they say it is.”

  Alix stared down at the floor.

  Moses touched her arm gently. “My dad’s death isn’t on you. The next kid who goes into a coma from Azicort, though?” He nodded down at Tank, who was taking a hit off his inhaler. “The next one who dies? That is on you. Because now you know something is wrong, and you’re not doing anything about it.”

  Alix swallowed. Don’t believe him. He’s manipulating you. He’s just screwing with your mind.

  “This is my family,” she said. “You’re asking me to hurt my family.”

  “It was my family, too,” Moses said. “And Cyn’s and Adam’s and Kook’s and Tank’s, and lots more besides.”

  “What if there’s nothing in those files?” Alix asked. “What then?”

  Moses grinned abruptly. “Well, then you’re off the hook, aren’t you? That’s the beauty of the truth, right? Then we’re just a bunch of crazy kids with our heads full of conspiracy theories.” He looked at her seriously. “There really is truth, Alix. We don’t have to guess. If we can see those files, we’ll know. We’ll know the truth. And that’s all we want. Truth.”

  Truth. He was saying there was truth, but all Alix could feel was that she was surrounded by lies. How can you know who to trust? How can you know who’s trustworthy? Alix felt sick. “Okay,” she said. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  Moses straightened, looking surprised. “Really?”

  Alix closed her eyes, feeling wretched. “Don’t look so shocked. Yeah. Really. Tell me what I need to do. I’ll do it.”

  “Look at me and say that again,” Moses said. “Tell me you’re okay doing this.”

  Alix looked him in the eye and told him what he wanted to hear. It was easy to do.

  He’d made a good case.

  22

  MOSES WAS STRUCK BY HOW vulnerable Alix looked. Standing before him in her borrowed clothes, just at the edge of the warehouse, she looked isolated and adrift, and he was surprised at how much pity he felt for her—for the situation that he’d put her in, for the fact that her world was going to be forever different… for everything, really.

  Beyond the factory doors, Adam was waiting in the Dodge Dart, the engine already running. Moses held up the USB stick. It was tiny. Little more than the metal USB plug itself along with the barest bump of extra plastic. Kook and Tank had constructed it so that a person would hardly notice that something had been plugged into the computer. When it was inserted, it would hardly stick out at all.

  “All you need to do is put this in his work computer,” Moses said. “Just get this into his laptop, and you’re done.”

  “Nothing else?” She looked doubtful.

  “That’s all. It’s a lot, actually. The software on the stick will do the rest. Kook modified it. As long as it gets plugged in while he’s already logged in, it should be able to do the rest. All you need to do his get him away from his computer for two seconds. Spill some soda on him, get him to change his shirt. That’s it. Simple. It just takes a couple seconds for the software to run.”

  “And it won’t… you won’t point all this at him?”

  Moses looked at her sadly. “If we find what we think we’re going to find, people are going to be so busy suing Fortune 100 companies that no one’s going to be worrying about you or your family. People will go after the money; all the money is in the companies. Banks Strategy Partners is tiny in comparison to the whales they’ll be hunting.”

  He placed the USB stick in her hand.

  She looked crushed and overwhelmed. But then, everyone did, when they first got the download. He remembered how he’d felt when he and Cynthia had started piecing it together years ago. Then Kook and Tank and Adam. Each one of them with his or her own story of loss, and all of them connected. All of them with their memories of sitting in courtrooms, too late to do anything except sue. No eye for an eye. No pound of flesh. Nothing except a check from some class action, with the lawyers walking away rich and everyone else putting a dollar amount on the bodies that they’d put in the ground.

  Each time Moses had laid out the reality of their situation, they’d been shell-shocked at first, but they’d understood. But then, they’d all been predisposed to believe. They’d all felt the pain that Banks Strategy Partners dealt out to the world. It made them more than willing to step up.

  Alix, though?

  All she’d ever felt were the benefits of her father’s work. While other people were watching their moms die of cancer or their dads on dialysis machines, Alix was flying down to Saint Barts. How much harder would it be for a girl like that to take in this kind of information?

  What must it be like to find out that your father was involved in the dark business of zero-sum, balancing shareholder profits and executive bonuses against the ruin that they visited upon the people of the world?

  Moses had watched Simon Banks long enough to think the man looked like a pretty decent dad. Distracted, sure, but he might actually be a better parent than either of Moses’s own had been. For sure he was better than Tank’s. The man was good people—to the people who were his.

  But now Alix knew that her father was something more. The smiling facade hid dark bargains of power and influence and money.

  A part of Moses longed to comfort her.

  It’s not your fault you got born into the wrong family, he thought. She wasn’t responsible; her father was. She’d been born into the wrong place at the right time, and so now she was in her father’s evil up to her neck.

  Moses was surprised at how much empathy he felt for her, seeing her looking so wrecked.

  But he sure as hell wasn’t going to comfort her. That wasn’t his role. Cynthia was the one who was there to give Alix comfort. His job was to push the puzzle piece into place, just as he’d pushed every other puzzle piece into place, building a picture of the world that would finally make sense, that would finally let all his losses make sense.

  Cynthia rattled the doors suggestively. “We doing this?”

  Moses took out a strip of cloth. “Sorry,” he said. “We’ve got to do this.”

  Alix looked surprised.

  “Blindfold,” Moses said apologetically. “We don’t really want you leading people back here.”

  “You don’t trust me,” she accused.

  “We’re careful,” Moses said. “Stakes are high.”

  “But I already saw the warehouse when we drove here,” she protested.

  “That was night, this is day.” He shrugged. “Humor us. Cyn took you the long way last time. You’re going direct now. We need to get you back to your old man before he calls in the feds. It’s better if you don’t know exactly how to get back.”

  Alix looked like she was about to protest again, but Cyn said, “It’s safer for everyone like this.”

  Hesitantly, she nodded.

  Moses took the cloth and wrapped it around her head, aware of the wisps of her brown hair, seeing her breathing tighten as she lost her sight. He stepped closer, smelling Cyn’s shampoo
in Alix’s hair, so different from when he had stood behind her at Seitz when they’d started the cascade of events that had led to this moment.

  Standing this close to her was surprisingly electric. He felt his own breathing quicken. Even disheveled and dressed in Cyn’s clothes, Alix did something for him. Even with her veneer of upper-crust Connecticut stripped away, she made his pulse pound.

  Or maybe it was because all that garbage had been stripped away.

  In this moment, Alix seemed so much more real and normal, separated from the posturing of her wealthy suburbs. He remembered her in the cage. The way she’d seized on his wrist and yanked him into the bars. Surprisingly strong. So determined that he’d barely gotten away. As hard-core as Kook, as smart as Cynthia, as smooth as Adam. Moses liked her. Despite himself, he liked her.

  It worried him.

  “You keeping your eye on the target?” Kook had asked a few nights before. “You getting distracted?”

  “Hell if I know,” Moses muttered.

  “What’s that?” Alix asked, turning blindly toward him, reaching out.

  “Nothing,” Moses covered. “I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “You going to take all day?” Cyn asked pointedly. Her gaze was knowing. Moses glared at her and finished the knots, making them tighter than necessary, showing that he didn’t care. Proving to Cyn that Alix Banks wasn’t anything other than a puzzle piece for him.

  “All done,” he said. He stepped back and was instantly sorry for the distance.

  Cynthia took Alix’s hand. She pulled aside the sliding warehouse door and led her out into bright sunshine. Moses and Kook followed, watching as Cyn guided her into the back of the car. Cyn climbed in with her, keeping her company, making her feel safe, and also making sure she didn’t take off the blindfold.

  They slammed the door. The little orange car pulled out.

  “Here we go,” Kook said.

  “Yeah,” Moses muttered. “Here we go.”

  “Think she’ll do the right thing?”

  Moses gazed up at the sun. There wasn’t much to say. They’d made their choices. Moses was surprised to find the sun had moved so far across the sky. They’d been talking all day.