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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

Gina slowly made her way over to where the artifacts were arranged on the ground. She fell to her knees and examined the ceramic bowl in front of her. It was ten inches round at the bottom and angled out to as much as fifteen. It looked like a large salad bowl, though it must have weighed seven or eight pounds.

Gina glanced nonchalantly over her shoulder, then, seeing that all the soldiers were still huddled near the tent, Gina gently rolled the bowl backward with her left hand.

With a small stick she’d found nearby, Gina scratched three words into the soft earth.

She had just replaced the bowl when someone shouted, “What are you doing?”

Gina turned to Patrick.

“Just admiring the craftsmanship of this bowl. They really knew what they were doing back then.”

Patrick glared at her for a long second, then said, “I need you to fix this guy’s memory. He thinks Ronald Reagan is president.”

Gina fought back a smile.

40

40

base camp
august 21, 5:13 p.m.
days since abduction: 16

Even with the edges softened by the moisture of the rains, the words written in the dirt were unmistakable: Belippa, Nsé-Eja, and Gina.

I glanced up from Andy’s phone and said, “They weren’t looking for Paititi.”

“It would appear not,” he said. “I’m assuming you’re familiar with Belippa.”

I nodded. “My sister has MS. Belippa makes two of her medications.”

Belippa is a pharmaceutical giant. It was started in the mid-1990s and over the past twenty-five years it had grown into the sixth largest pharmaceutical company in the world, with average yearly revenues of more than $55 billion.

Two years earlier they’d increased the price of one of Lacy’s medications by more than 400 percent. We had enough money to cover the costs, but several people who Lacy knew in the MS community were no longer able to afford their medications.

After this huge price hike, I’d spent my fair share of time researching the company. Belippa didn’t perform well until 1997, when they released one of the first groundbreaking drugs to treat HIV. Three years later, at the turn of the millennium, the company went public with one of the largest IPOs in history.

Over the next decade, they developed several medications to treat MS, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Their most profitable product was released in 2003: an autoimmune suppressant called Mireva. Mireva had been the most profitable pharmaceutical drug on the market for the last eight years running.

Four years ago, Belippa released a new drug to treat hepatitis C. And now, according to the most recent article I had read, Belippa had their sights set on the holy grail of diseases.

I said, “Cancer.”

Andy nodded. “Yup, cancer.”

The article I read theorized the cure for cancer would be worth an estimated fifty trillion dollars—that’s more than half the money that exists in the world today.