* * *
Three thirty, and I was with Jim Buchold, in his home office. “We’re tearing down both buildings,” he said, of Loudoun Pharma campus. “Well. We’re tearing down the office building, which the Loudoun County inspectors tell me is mostly cracked off its foundation. The labs are already gone. We’re just clearing the rubble for that.”
“What’s going to happen to Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.
“In the short run, tomorrow I’m going to a memorial for our janitors,” Buchold said. “All six of them at the same time. They were all each other’s friends. It makes sense to do it that way. Then on Monday I’m laying off everyone in the company and then taking bids for buyers.”
I cocked my head at that. “Someone wants to buy Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.
“We have a number of valuable patents and we were able to retrieve a good amount of our current research, some of which can probably be reconstructed,” Buchold said. “And if whoever buys the company hires our researchers, there’s a chance they’ll reconstruct it faster. And we still have our government contracts, although I’m having our lawyers go through those contracts now to make sure they can’t be withdrawn because of terrorism.”
“Then why sell at all?” I asked.
“Because I’m done,” Buchold said. “I put twenty years into this company and then it all went up in a single night. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Of course you don’t,” Buchold said. “You can’t know. I didn’t know until someone took two decades of my life and turned it into a pile of rubble. I think about trying to build it back up from nothing and all it does is make me feel tired. So, no. Time for me and Rick to retire to the Outer Banks, get a beach house, and run corgis up and down the sand until they collapse.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.
“It’ll be great,” Buchold said. “For the first week. After that I’ll have to figure out what to do with myself.”
“The night of my dad’s party, you were talking about the therapies you were developing to unlock people from Haden’s,” I said.
“I remember I dragged you into the argument,” Buchold said. “Rick gave me crap for that yesterday when he remembered it. Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I remember that night you also mentioned the drug you were developing.”
“Neuroulease.”
“That’s right,” I said. “How far along were you with it?”
“You mean, how long until Neuroulease was on the market?”
“Yes.”
“We were feeling optimistic that we’d have enough progress on the drug within the year to apply for clinical trials,” Buchold said. “And if those showed promise we were pretty much already guaranteed a fast track at the FDA for approval. You have four and a half million people suffering from lock in. Especially now that Abrams-Kettering’s on the books, the sooner we can unlock them, the better.”
“What about now?” I asked.
“Well, one of the principal investigators blew up the company, and with it a whole lot of our data and documentation,” Buchold said. “Then he killed himself, and however I feel about that at the moment, he was the one who could have most easily reconstructed that data from what we have left. From what we have now, it’ll take five to seven years before we’re at the clinical trial stage again. And that’s optimistic.”
“Anyone else as close to it as you were?” I asked.
“I know Roche has a combination drug and brain stimulus therapy they’ve been working on,” Buchold said. “But they’re nowhere close to clinical trials with that. No one else is even in the same ballpark.” He looked at me sourly. “You want to hear something funny?”
“Sure,” I said.
“That bastard Hubbard,” he said. “At your dad’s party he was tearing into me about Haden culture and how they didn’t want to be free of their disease and doing everything short of implying I was encouraging a genocide.”
“I remember,” I said.
“Yesterday that son of a bitch calls up and makes an offer on Loudoun Pharma!” Buchold said.
“For how much?”
“For fucking not enough!” Buchold said. “And I let him know. He said the offer was flexible but that he wanted to move quickly. And I said to him that a couple of days before he was telling me what a horrible idea our work was, and now he wanted to buy it? Do you know what he said?”
“I don’t know,” I said, although I had some idea.
“He said, ‘Business is business’!” Buchold exclaimed. “Jesus lord. I just about hung up on him then.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” Buchold said. “Because he’s right. Business is business. I have six hundred employees who are going to be out of work in three days, and even though Rick doesn’t think I should socialize with them”—Buchold rolled his eyes, and looked around to see if his husband was about—“I do feel responsible for them. It would be fine with me if some of them kept their jobs, and the rest had better severance pay than they would have otherwise.”
“So you would sell to him?” I asked.
“If no one else steps up with a better offer, I just might,” Buchold said. “Why? Do you think I should pass on the offer?”
“I would never tell you how to run your own business, Mr. Buchold.”
“What’s left of it anyway,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Agent Shane. You find me a good reason to keep my options open, and maybe I’ll do just that.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will see what I can do.”