“Can I help with anything, Whitney?”

“Not at the moment.”

“How about a cup of coffee?”

“Maybe later.”

With a smile, the fact-checker was gone.

3.

Over the coming days, I printed off articles about Rubicon Tech and took them to the Donut Shop. That was a place on 8th I liked for no better reason than it was the first place I’d gone after starting at the Bystander. Everything you could buy there was bad, the coffee harsh, the donuts dry, the tomato slices stiff as Frisbees in the sandwiches, but it had such a supreme basicness, it felt like the donut shop you’d find in a perfect democracy. I’d order one large coffee and one shredded coconut and sit at a table, its red laminate flaking at the edges, feeling totally serene in everlasting fluorescence.

Rubicon Tech was a subsidiary of Inland Medical, a mammoth corporation that had been part of American health care since the Second World War. The largest cache of articles on Inland concerned their troubles in the late ’80s. The corporation manufactured medication for slowing the advent of AIDS in HIV-positive people, and came under fire for the exorbitant price of the drugs. I found dozens of pieces about the protests, photos of ACT UP activists hanging pink triangles, SILENCE=DEATH, on Inland’s corporate headquarters on 3rd. I guess the bad publicity taught Inland what Baker Watt called corporate citizenship.

Only one piece in Medical Businessweek covered Rubicon Tech’s quiet establishment in 1998, dubbing it “the high-risk, high-reward incubator of Inland Medical.” The article had quoted Kenneth Sample, the CEO of Rubicon, who’d come out of retirement to helm the enterprise for Inland:

“If someone had asked me to run just any start-up biotech company, I wouldn’t have been interested. But we might have the best doctors in the world.”

I assumed he thought Dr. Eva Kriss was one of them—“she has the brains to answer anything,” Baker Watt had said—but there was next to nothing on her in the public record. I found an archived website from when she’d taught at Duke in ’94. It said she’d earned her medical degree at the University of Washington and had been a resident in emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and Boston Children’s Hospital before enlisting in the navy in 1990. Then she’d been deployed in Desert Storm. The lone photo I found was from a scanned navy brochure. Dr. Kriss wore fatigues and a surgical mask, blond hair pulled back from her forehead. The caption identified her as being assigned to the USNS Mercy, which had been positioned off the coast of Saudi Arabia. “Every member of the Mercy’s crew has been blood-typed,” said the brochure. “The crew can function as a walking blood bank at a moment’s notice.”