who was willing to talk to me if I granted her confidentiality.
The new source met me at a little brewery called Trappist Provisions
on College Avenue in Oakland. She was a young woman by the name
of Erika Cheung. Like every other former employee I’d spoken to,
Erika was very nervous at first. But as I filled her in about how much
information I’d already gathered, she visibly relaxed and began telling
me what she knew.
As someone who had worked in the Theranos lab, Erika had
witnessed the December 2013 lab inspection firsthand. Like Alan, she
felt the state inspector had been misled. She told me lab members had
been under explicit orders not to enter or exit Normandy during the
inspection and that the door leading down to it had been kept locked.
She also told me about her friendship with Tyler and about the dinner
she’d attended at George Shultz’s house the night Tyler had resigned.
Like Tyler, she was appalled by the lack of scientific rigor that had
gone into validating the assays on the Edisons. She said Theranos
should never have gone live testing patient samples. The company
routinely ignored quality-control failures and test errors and showed a
complete disregard for the well-being of patients, she said. In the end,
she had resigned because she was sickened by what she had become a
party to, she told me. These were strong words, and it was clear from
how distraught Erika was that she meant them.
The next day, I drove to Mountain View, home to Google’s
headquarters, and met Tyler at a beer garden called Steins. It was early
evening and the place was packed with young Silicon Valley
professionals enjoying happy hour. We couldn’t find seats, so we stood
around a wooden beer barrel on the terrace outside and used it as a
table. Over a pint of cold ale, Tyler gave me a more detailed account of
his time at Theranos, including the frantic call from his mother
relaying Holmes’s threat the day he resigned and his and Erika’s
attempts to talk sense into George Shultz that evening. He had tried to
follow his parents’ advice and to put the whole thing behind him but
he’d found himself unable to.
I asked him whether he thought his grandfather was still loyal to
Holmes. Yes, there was little doubt in his mind that he was, he replied.