There was no reaching agreement with this woman. Frederick knew he had no option but to quit the field of battle... for now. He closed the laptop and tucked it under his arm. He reached for his coffee cup and silently marched toward the door. He did not wish Cindy a good day, either out loud or in his mind, and he paused when her office door clicked behind his back. He pivoted and went back to the coffee bar, where he selected another hazelnut pod for a refill. Surely he deserved this for putting up with her crap. Once his coffee was made and adulterated, he spun around, raised his cup in a salute to Patricia who had been watching him silently, and left the suite.
He didn't waste time fuming on the way back to his side of the campus. It wouldn't do any good, and it would just make him feel worse, not better. He felt like he had done what he could at this stage. From here he would still complete his project, exactly as he was tasked with doing, but now he also would make sure there was no easy way for Cindy to alter his conclusions once she and her team were submitting the new drug application to the FDA. He had no proof that she had ever done anything like that before, nor any tangible reason to believe that she would try, but today was not the first time Frederick had gotten the impression that she would do anything to turn a profit, possibly up to falsifying data to meet her thresholds for production.
By the time he arrived back at his own office, he had talked himself into and out of the notion that his conclusions and concerns would be invalidated before the NDA was even submitted. He arrived at a middle ground, where he decided she most likely wouldn't do anything, but it was worth embedding evidence of the severity of the side effects throughout the clinical data, in such a way that tampering would be evident. Did Cindy deserve to be thought of as someone who would cheat and risk the health of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people? Frederick tried to tell himself he was being unfair and an alarmist. But he had looked into Cindy's dead shark eyes and he couldn't detect a single whiff of a moral compass in there. Better to assume there wasn't one.
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