Eric Prescott lost his appetite for the grilled chicken sandwich he’d just ordered from a Vietnamese food truck near the river across from his lab. He held his cell phone closer to his face and read the email from Holly Singer again.

He was used to receiving requests from postdocs saying they had exciting results and asking to meet with him, more often than not hoping to get a job in his research group. Usually what they had wasn’t all that exciting. But a message like this from someone in Pam Weller’s lab was unsettling.

I’ve got to find out more.

He threw a ten dollar bill on the counter, left the chicken sandwich behind, and made a beeline back to his office. As soon as he was alone, he called Mary O’Connor at the Langmere. She answered on the third ring.

“Hi Mary, it’s Eric Prescott. I’m calling because we’re organizing our seminar series for next year, and I was wondering if you had anything exciting that you’d like to come over and give a talk about?”

He knew she’d be flattered by the invitation, even though there probably wasn’t anything going on in her lab that would be worth presenting.

“Well, we do have some interesting things cooking, but nothing ready for public unveiling at the moment,” O’Connor said. “But I have an idea for you. Why don’t you invite Pam Weller over? I’ve noticed a lot of recent activity in her lab, and she could use the exposure.”

Prescott smiled to himself. This was perfect. Instead of accepting, she’d decided to play the role of generous senior scientist and mentor. Manipulating O’Connor was even easier than he’d anticipated.

“That’s a great idea,” he said. “What’s going on with Pam?”

“I don’t know the details, but I think she’s on to something hot. There’s a whole bunch of mouse work going on in her lab, so our Director must have given her an infusion of additional resources. Smells like something big, although she hasn’t told me what.”

Prescott knew Enrique DeSilva, and he didn’t think the Langmere director would put resources into anyone’s lab unless they had a major hit. This wasn’t good news.

“Good suggestion. I’ll definitely have Pam invited over here for a talk. And let me know how things are going for her. It’s great for a young woman to have hit on an important result, and I’d be delighted to do anything I can to help her along.”

Prescott ended the call and slammed his fist down on the desk. Damn it, it sounds like Weller really is on to something. That idiot O’Connor didn’t know what, but given the main thrust of Weller’s research, it seemed all too likely that she might have stumbled onto an Alzheimer’s drug. A discovery that could leave him out in the cold.

He got up and starting pacing his office. I’m not going to let that woman beat me.

He had two options. He could work behind the scenes to discredit Weller’s work and interfere with publication of her results. He had the connections and the influence, and doing some of that was worthwhile. But it could only go so far. If she had an effective drug, it would eventually be recognized by the scientific community and his efforts to sabotage her work could backfire and make him look bad. So he had to be careful and the gain would be limited.

The other possibility, the way he could win, would be to find out what Weller had and steal it. If he could credibly pretend to have independently discovered an effective drug, he’d share in the glory. But to do that, he had to learn what the drug was.

He thought of calling Weller. He could tell her that he’d heard about her exciting breakthrough and try to get the details from her. Then he could tell her that he’d discovered a similar drug, quickly repeat the experiments, and publish it as his own work.

Timing was a problem, but he could pull it off. The postdoc had said that Weller’s lab was writing their paper now, so it would probably be two or three months before it was published. With his resources, especially his extensive mouse colony, two months would be enough time to get the experiments done. And Donald Moore would be happy to use his stature as a Nobel laureate to get the paper fast-tracked. Published in just a week or two. Close enough to Weller’s paper to get joint credit for the discovery.

But Weller wasn’t as stupid as O’Connor. If she had a drug, she wouldn’t tell him what it was, and trying to pump her for information would only succeed in tipping his hand.

The email from her postdoc offered an intriguing opportunity. Why had she written to him anyway? Weller surely would have told her people to keep something like this confidential. Did the postdoc have some hidden agenda? Something he could use to his advantage?

She’d asked to meet him at the Gordon Conference two weeks from now, and Prescott thought that was a fine idea. Being together with her at a conference would give him plenty of opportunity to explore and hopefully exploit whatever Holly Singer had to offer. He turned to his computer and replied to her email, saying that he was looking forward to meeting her and hearing about her work.