I wished I could’ve apologized. Instead, I took her outstretched hand, helped her stand up, and supported her as we went down into the port hull. There, I helped her onto the big bed in the forward guest stateroom.
The room was stifling—the air somehow heavier than I remembered it ever being. After pulling the comforter over her, I opened the porthole across from the foot of the bed.
“Do you want the rest of your dinner?”
She’d turned away from me in the bed and said nothing.
“I’ll keep it in the fridge for you.”
I went back out to the cockpit and sat down.
“Don’t take it so hard, Jerry,” Alicia scooted next to me.
“In taking in Flor, and trying my best to help Gabriela, I knew I was doing a good thing,” I said. “All my life all I’d ever wanted to do was try to save lives and try to right wrongs. That’s why I’d become a PJ. Sometimes I feel like trying isn’t enough. No matter how hard I try, or how long I prepare, whether or not I succeed feels like a coin toss. The wrong breeze could change our fates for better or for worse.”
Alicia rested her head on my shoulder. Her fingers entwined with my own.
“You’re in one of your moods again.”
“I guess I am.”
“This is hard for all of us. You don’t have to beat yourself up, Jerry.”
“I know I don’t.”
“But you still do.”
I took a deep breath, then squeezed the back of my wife’s hand. She did the same back to me.
My episodes had become less frequent over the time I’d known Alicia—and she’d become better at taking them steadily, helping me navigate around my bigger, more dangerous emotions. I wasn’t a religious man, but I thanked God for sending her to me.
“I liked the dinner you made,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
Her arm hardened. A wave of tension seized Alicia’s body, and I knew she hadn’t come out here to hold my hand and compliment dinner.
“Jerry,” she said, my name resonating through her cheek bone and into my shoulder, “things are going to get more complicated. I know who had the Markels killed.”
All the blood went to my head. I sat up and faced Alicia.
“I found a compressed file on Dr. Markel’s laptop. White papers and abstracts. I think they were meant for Luc Baptiste.”
“White papers and abstracts? Dumb it down a little.”
Alicia tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled patiently at me. “Papers explaining the research Markel’s lab did. They were meant to be shared with the executives at Hildon.”
“That would follow,” I said.
“Remember what Gabriela said about Markel’s laptop? That he told her something important was on it? I think she was hoping for Flor’s cure.”
“Anthradone.”
“I don’t think it’s here. At least I haven’t found it yet. And the papers meant for Luc Baptiste had nothing to do with Anthradone.”
“How does that tip you off to who killed them? He probably worked on more than one medication.”
“Of course, he did,” Alicia said. “What tipped me off was—well, have you ever heard of something called pleiotropy?”
I gave her a look, and she knew the answer. Alicia rubbed her forehead, clearly struggling to come up with a way to explain this to me.
“It’s when one gene has control over several unrelated phenotypic traits.”
I didn’t move, except to raise my eyebrows.
“Let me rephrase that. Pleiotropy is—” she stopped herself and reconsidered. “So, you know what genes are, right?” She took a shrimp off Flor’s plate.
“Yeah.” I did graduate high school.
“Gene editing is the new big frontier for pharma companies. CRISPR is a buzzword all the big money junkies won’t keep out of their mouths—it’s a technique for gene editing. Naturally, a whole rash of research labs have sprung up to meet demand. They’re all researching the newest methods of gene editing.” She finally popped the shrimp into her mouth. “Did I tell you I can’t get enough of this shrimp?”
“I know, my baby,” I said. “But anyway, gene editing is a new field, and there’s a lot of money in it. I assume that means people are playing fast and loose, and paid in accordance?”
“Right. But with that reward comes a big risk. There’s a lot we don’t know about the human genome.”
I nodded. “That probably doesn’t stop many people from getting in there and turning knobs.”
“Exactly,” Alicia said. “That’s where pleiotropy comes in. Imagine a gene that has control over your eye color. One of those research labs comes up with a new therapy that interacts with that gene, and only that gene, to change your eye color from brown to green.
“They kick the therapy up to a big company like Hildon, who does all the paperwork and marketing, and after some number of years, you, Jerry Snyder, can go to a cosmetic surgeon and get an inert virus injected into you.”
I tilted my head. “Why would I want a viral injection?”
“That’s how this works, most of the time. A harmless virus is used to carry the genes for green eyes into your body. The virus goes into your healthy cells, deposits the green eyes gene, and before you know it, everybody calls you Paddy Murphy.”
“Can they really do that now?” I asked.
“Changing your eye color with therapy?” She shrugged. “Probably there’s a lab working on vanity pills. But that’s beside the point. Gene editing exists now.”
A finger of wind lifted a tuft of Alicia’s hair. She brushed it behind her ear, then picked up another shrimp.
“Let’s take the example of the eye color therapy,” she said. “I mentioned it takes years to go from the research phase to an actual therapy a patient can use. Those years are spent testing and re-testing the therapy on as many people as possible.
“In our hypothetical, the eye color therapy has been tested exhaustively. It has gone through about 10,000 people, a hundred testing groups, and all the side effects present in those testing groups are meticulously recorded and cataloged. Even if somebody has a cold, or gas, or any other thing that probably wasn’t caused by eye color therapy, it is recorded, just to be thorough. The FDA looks at the tests and approves the eye color drug for sale.
“When the eye color therapy hits the streets, it’s a big success. People love changing their eye color, and some big pharma company is making a mint.” She raised her eyebrows at me.
The other shoe was about to drop.
“Except for one tiny little detail.” She held up the shrimp. “Some people experience a side effect that wasn’t seen in the tests. Those people still have the eye color change, but at the same time, the roots of their teeth get thinner and their teeth fall out. After more research, it’s found out that the eye color gene that everyone has been switching around also has an effect on the thickness of tooth enamel. That’s pleiotropy.”
I shook my head slowly. “So, one gene controlled two unrelated things.”
“Exactly!”
“What does this have to do with Flor’s drug? Does that mean the cure Markel developed doesn’t work?”
“No, that’s not it.” She checked left, into the salon. “The info drop for Luc Baptiste was all about a discontinued Hildon Pharmaceutical gene therapy called Poraxim.”
My gut told me where this was going, but I let her continue.
“Poraxim was used to treat chronic indigestion. It turned off a gene that sometimes led the body to create too much stomach acid. Poraxim was groundbreaking in that it was one of the very first widely available gene therapies.
“For most people it worked. But, according to the information Dr. Markel was going to hand off to Luc Baptiste, about one in ten thousand patients experienced a serious side effect.
“How serious?”
Alicia tossed the shrimp back onto Flor’s plate.
“According to Markel’s research, for these people,
the stomach acid gene happened to be the same gene that inhibited the growth of cancer. When Poraxim interacted with that gene, it shut off both functions.”
Her eyes came to me, gleaming like hailstones. “Poraxim gave those people Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, and I think Luc Baptiste and Dr. Markel were going to tell the world.”
“Which would have done serious damage to Hildon.” I leaned against the stairwell going up to the flybridge. Luc Baptiste had made it his business to step in everything he could, but never in my wildest dreams did I think his murder involved one of the most powerful multi-national corporations in the world.
A company the size of Hildon Pharmaceuticals wielded immeasurable political clout. Name a first-world country, and Hildon likely had influence with someone at every level of government, whether through campaign donations, community grants, or outright bribery. That’s how Dad and Arlen did things, anyhow.
What had I stumbled into?
I had to call this whole thing off before it spun out of control—if that was possible. Hand it off to Armstrong, if they’d take it, then sail Wayward to Cuba or Venezuela. We needed a place to bug out. A place where a western corporation wouldn’t be able to throw cash around and get what it wanted.
But what about Flor? And Gabriela?
“Jerry?” My wife looked at me with enough gravity to pull me out of my spiral.
“Poraxim is what gave Flor all her tumors,” I said. “Right?”
“Gabriela had the Poraxim therapy done three years ago,” she said. “Four months after that, Flor was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with soft tissue sarcoma in her abdomen.”
I clenched my teeth. I couldn’t have forced myself to talk if I wanted to. What sort of insight could I add?
“Dr. Markel included some memos from high up in Hildon, too,” Alicia said. “I think to prove they knew exactly what was going on with Poraxim long before they yanked it out of pharmacies across the country.”
“Bastards.”
“It gets better,” Alicia said. “Li-Fraumeni is considered an orphan disease.”
“Does that mean something?”
“Means it’s rare. And it means Hildon has the FDA’s blessing to charge whatever the hell they want, which, in this case, is two hundred thousand dollars for a single dose of Dr. Markel’s cure—Anthradone.”
All I could do was shake my head. “Two hundred grand or a short, painful life with cancer. Hell of a choice.”
“Now,” Alicia said, “what do we do with this information?”
I glanced toward the door to the salon. “First things first. We might not be able to hide from trouble, but we need to make sure Flor can.”
Alicia looked around the anchorage. “We can see anyone coming for quite a way.”
“No,” I said, feeling the wind on the side of my face. “Vieques is still too close, we’re going back to St. Thomas tonight.”
DJ whiled away the early morning hours with slivers of broken sleep. First, in his unbearably quiet stateroom, the walls acting as a cast for the stale air, then on Reel Fun’s flybridge, where his heavy eyelids were lifted by the sounds of cars grinding over the bridge between San Juan Island and the mainland.
After the sun rose, he gave up. The day would not wait for him to be rested and ready, nor would it wait for DJ to sweep his mind clean of all the fragments of Officer Dos Santos’s final moments.
Showered, he pulled out a pair of work khakis—pants he hadn’t worn since he’d first visited the cay he’d bought outside Antigua, intent on clearing out a spot in some of the brush for a shack that he hadn’t built yet. Instead, he’d spent the days fishing and poking around the neighboring islands, watching pairs of white-cheeked pintails slip around mangrove roots and loiter in brackish inlets.
DJ pulled the pants on. He put on a decent T-shirt, then grabbed a Day-Glo orange vest out of the stateroom closet.
The vest was critical. Wearing one was like becoming a skeleton key. It let a man get behind the scenes; into sub-basements, parking garages, and dig sites. The average person rarely questioned a man in a safety vest, content to follow his directions in traffic, or let him poke around a backyard, despite the fact that the thing could’ve been bought at a thousand different places, by as many different people with as many different motivations.
Digging through the compartment beneath his bed, DJ found an old box of Winchester double-aught buckshot. In it, he’d stashed away a couple things; a dummy wallet and a GPS tracking device, which, like the orange safety vest, could be bought at an alarming number of places, granting a person the ability to prick the balloon of privacy everyone believed they lived in.
He put the wallet in his pocket, then dropped the GPS in a backpack on the floor, which he’d packed with tools like latex gloves, dark clothes, and his lockpick set. On his way through Reel Fun’s salon, he rummaged in his fridge, grabbing a couple beers, some leftovers locked in a plastic container and a loaded S&W 640—a snub-nosed .38 caliber wheel gun that he kept behind the milk. He stuck all of it in his backpack, save for one beer, which he opened as he disembarked.
Street side, DJ called for a cab, then sat on a bollard, watching the cars pass by while he sipped his beer. Within a few minutes, the cab arrived. Its front passenger side window rolled down, revealing an older black guy with straight, white teeth and wet eyes. He’d probably been up all night working.
“Cosgrove?” he asked in a Haitian accent.
“You’re looking at him.” DJ took the last sip of his beer, then tossed it in the flowers behind him. He told the cabbie to take him to the Hildon building, then took the phone out of his pocket, then pulled up the web browser and searched for “woman CEO Hildon.”
Her smiling face found him within seconds. DJ followed the link.
Hildon’s CEO was a stuffy-looking blonde named Rachel Little. She seemed the type that would curl her hair before walking to the mailbox, and she probably sucked alcohol like an E85 pump.
DJ found her headshot on Hildon’s website, right below an announcement for a big party the company was having in a couple days. He studied her face carefully. The inflammation cupping her cheekbones, the stiffness of her upper lip, the unnatural smoothness of her brow. It didn’t seem at all unreasonable that she would hire hitmen to murder anyone who dared to tarnish the image of the company she helmed.
Before long, the car slowed as the cabbie guided it to the shoulder of the road. DJ hadn’t noticed they were in the shadow of a tall, glass building across the street, with the word HILDON barnacled above the main entrance.
“What do I owe you?”
“$13.02.”
DJ pulled a fifty out of his wallet and slipped it into the cabbie’s waiting hand. “Thanks brother.”
He grabbed his backpack off the seat, got out of the car and hurried across the street.
The morning sun was glinting between the high-rises, reflecting off the tops of a scattering of cars, as he approached Hildon’s parking lot. He checked his watch—seven o’clock. He had gotten there plenty early.
Using his phone as a prop, he walked the perimeter of the parking lot, pretending to take measurements, while keeping one eye on the working stiffs rolling in to start the day. His bright orange vest was perfect camouflage. Men in their off-the-rack suits and ladies in solid-colored dresses never gave him a glance as he watched them exit their economy cars and lope into the front door of Hildon’s cubicle farm.
At 8:28, a sleek Mercedes-Benz SL convertible approached the entrance to the parking lot. The automatic barrier gate rose up, and the Benz slinked inside. A ribbon of blond hair flapped in the muggy San Juan breeze as the car moved toward the building.
A hundred meters off, DJ recognized Rachel Little when she got out of her car. She was taller than he’d imagined. As she came around the front of her car, stepping onto the sidewalk that ran across the front of the building, her eyes fixed on him.
Might be that a lesser man would feel a chill settle into his gut, but not DJ.
He smiled politely and nodded, then turned to inspect a downspout nearby.
After he’d silently counted to thirty, DJ made his move. Trying not to appear in a hurry, he moved toward Rachel Little’s car, stopping at a lamp post in the parking lot to peruse its wiring. He opened his backpack, took out the GPS tracker and held it up to the light post like it was a voltmeter. Then, keeping it in his hand, he moved on.
At the back of the Benz, he dropped to a knee, pretending to tie the shoe on his prosthesis. After checking left, then right, and seeing no one watching him, he pulled a plastic film off an adhesive pad on the back of the tracker, then slapped it on the underside of the car. His thumb flicked a toggle, and he walked away.
Once DJ was an appreciable distance from Rachel Little’s car, he pulled out the smart phone and checked that the tracker app was getting a signal. A green dot appeared on a map, along with a serial number corresponding to the tracker.
Done.
He headed for the exit and would’ve clicked his heels if it were possible.
As he crossed the street, moving away from the Hildon building, his phone rang. He checked the screen. Jerry.
“Morning, sweetie pie. I’m a little busy bringing home the bacon in San Juan, so I don’t have much time to talk.”
“I need to meet you face-to-face,” Jerry said. “It’s important.”
“You got my ear right now.”
“Face-to-face,” he insisted. “This doesn’t work over the phone.”
“Sorry, Dep, I don’t have the time to sit on your back porch and look at the water.”
“Neither of us has time for games, DJ. Cut it out and get back here.”
“Well, looky there! I think that’s the first thing the two of us actually agree on—I don’t have time for your games, amigo. I’m not giving up a lead to sail my happy ass back to Charlotte Amalie, so if you got something to say, best say it while you can.”
A long silence fed into DJ’s ear like a roofing nail. He should’ve known Jerry wasn’t serious about solving problems. He was just a rich kid trying to make a name for himself by bringing peace to the Middle East.
Wayward Sons Page 32
