Chris’s heart sank. “Are they talking about what caused this? Do they mention me?” He flipped through the channels on his holodisplay in search of the story.
“Not that I’ve seen yet, but this means you’ve got to be careful. If you’re determined to figure this out and see what’s going on with those enhancers, it’s probably best you try to do so quietly. You don’t need the news streams hounding you and interrogating you about this whole mess.”
Even if his name stayed out of the media, even if the police didn’t come after him for something he didn’t do—or at least didn’t know he had done—he would be haunted by the bloodshot eyes of that enhancer. In his mind’s eye, he saw the man reaching out for him, calling his name, accusing him.
He couldn’t shake the doubt clouding his mind. If the enhancer was right, if Chris had somehow caused his death, he needed to find out why. Hundreds of people had purchased his enhancements. They might be walking around Baltimore, Maryland, or anywhere else in the world, unaware they had a horrific, biological bomb within them.
Chapter 6
“Looks like you’re probably clean,” Dr. Haynes said as she sidled up to his bed and flashed a smile. She had let her hair down, and it flowed over the collar of her white coat in alluring waves. Her appearance made Chris all too aware of his unflattering hospital gown and uncombed hair.
“Probably?” Chris raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t think this disease is communicable, but a couple of my colleagues do.” She leaned in. “So I think you’re going to be fine, but we couldn’t take any chances. I hope the temporary quarantine wasn’t too rough on you.”
His stay in the hospital room had felt like being stuck in prison again, although this time it seemed even more eyes were on him. Like he was a lab experiment. An unwitting test subject. If she’d thought he was fine, he could’ve already been scrounging for reasons for this disease’s outbreak in the enhancer community. But maybe he shouldn’t be looking for answers alone. “Why hasn’t the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention been involved in this?”
Haynes gazed away. “I really am not supposed to say anything else.”
He opened his mouth to demand more, but she held up a single finger.
“The CDC tends to agree with me. But we needed to play it safe.”
“What’s with all the secrecy? Isn’t it a patient’s right to know what’s going on with their body?”
“We don’t want to start a panic over something not worth panicking over.” Dr. Haynes gripped the sides of her white coat and shrugged. “And besides, I think you’re going to be fine.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I sincerely hope that’s not the case.”
“Why?”
“I suppose you at least deserve to know this...” She dragged a stool closer to Chris and sat. “I talked with the coroner and medical examiners about the man whose blood you came in contact with.” She gulped. “His case was probably the mildest I’ve seen.”
***
Exiting his cab, Chris stepped up to the sheer-glass building containing Maryland Biotech Incubators. The sliding doors opened as he approached, and a holodisplay projected near the entrance welcomed him by name. He waved as he rushed past the security guard seated behind a round desk in the center of the lobby. Once inside the elevator, he scrolled through the list of start-up company names until he found his and Jordan’s: TheraComp.
The elevator buzzed to life, the interior lighting shifting from red to orange, yellow to green, blue to purple as it rose to the fourteenth floor. When the steel doors opened, he stepped out into the familiar narrow hallway and followed it to another glass door with his company’s name on it.
“Chris! You’re back! How are you?” Margot Durand stood from behind her desk and bounded over. She looked him up and down. “You’re not contagious?”
Chris shot a look at Jordan. He tore the blue nitrile gloves from his hands and threw them in the wastebasket. As he exited the lab, he ducked under the doorway. A wide grin spread across his lean face. “Sorry. I had to tell her.”
“I’m fine,” Chris said, looking back at Margot. He didn’t want to involve the administrative assistant in all his troubles and did his best to emulate the humor Jordan was so good at. “But who knows? I might still be a walking disease carrier.” He feigned a cough. “Got the plague, probably.”
Narrowing her eyes, Margot put her hands on her hips. “Very funny.” She sauntered back to her desk in the room serving as their office space.
Through the glass walls cordoning off their lab space, Hugh, a lanky lab tech with a face eager as a puppy’s, waved.
After nodding a greeting back, Chris tugged on Jordan’s sleeve. “We need to talk.”
Jordan motioned to the conference room. Closing the door behind him, Chris sat down in one of the leather chairs across the table from Jordan. While everything else in the startup space was small enough to warrant an attack of claustrophobia, the windows here looked out over the city toward the harbor. Huge transport ships and cruise ships lumbered through the water, their horns bellowing over the bay.
Chris rehashed his last conversation with Dr. Robin Haynes at the hospital and his lingering worries. This disease was decimating the enhancer population, and he feared he knew the cause. “What concerns me more than anything was that this guy knew who I was,” Chris said. “How the hell did an enhancer find out who I am? He seemed so certain it was our fault. And the fact that he knew my name makes me think he might know what he was talking about. Our enhancements could’ve done this.”
Jordan shrugged. “After last year’s debacle with the Kaufman brothers, you ended up in the news streams, too. Doesn’t matter whether the news streams called you a hero or a villain; your criminal records are out there, my man. Frankly, I’m surprised this is the first time a former customer had tried to contact you.”
“Maybe you’re right, but if I did something wrong, if I’m at fault...It’s hard enough living with all the damage I caused to Veronica’s life.” He peered out the window, staring off at the skyline over Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It hadn’t been just Veronica’s life he’d risked. Jordan’s close friend Greg had died, too. The man had given his life to protect Jordan from an attacker associated with the Kaufman case. “And to your life. To Greg’s. I don’t mean this to sound like a pity party for me, but I want to fix this.”
“Maybe there’s nothing you can do.”
“Don’t say that.” He slammed a fist on the table. “If my enhancements killed that guy, I need to fix it.”
“I understand you feel responsible, but these people also willingly injected themselves with unregulated genies. They chose to take those risks. You didn’t force them to.”
“Don’t give me a way out of this.” He pointed to his chest with his thumb. “I screwed up.”
Jordan held up his hands in a placating gesture. “All right, my man. If that’s what you think, fine. I never heard a complaint about your enhancements until this incident, but maybe later we can do a little follow-up to see what’s become of our former clients.”
“I thought you said all our customers were anonymous.”
A grin spread across Jordan’s face, revealing shining white teeth. “That’s what I told them.” His eyebrows drew together. “But a good businessman must always be on top of his market research.”
He leaned across the table. “I know how you function. So I’m going to make this request with the understanding that I will, in all likelihood, be ignored. Could you try to push these thoughts from your mind for the day? We’ve got work to do, and I need your refocused efforts to make up for the time we lost in the past two days.” With his hands behind his head, he leaned back. “Then, tonight, we’ll look into this side project of yours. Deal?”
***
Chris injected a fresh batch of nanoparticles into the bioreactor. He imagined the submicroscopic particles rushing through the plastic tubes of the bioreactor with the f
low of the media, providing liquid sustenance to his experimental canine carcinoma cells. The particles functioned like tiny pills designed to home in on diseased cells—in this case, dog cancer cells—and deliver a dose of therapeutics.
As each nanoparticle found a cell, it emitted a flash of radiation—nothing harmful, but just enough to be picked up by the detection sensor. A mere blip signaled successful genetic transfection in the cells. The sensors tallied the number of transfections, and a green bar rose in a neighboring holodisplay with each delivery.
“Happy, Jordan? It works.” He knew he sounded dour, but thoughts of people suffering from botched enhancements percolated through his mind like a macabre parade.
Jordan sauntered over and clapped Chris’s back. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Proving we can target a couple of tumor cell populations in the lab hardly translates to curing cancer.”
Chris gestured across the holodisplay to command the device to analyze and store the results of the experiment. “I know, I know. At least I’m actually working on something that’ll help someone—or some dog.”
“That it does.”
“And we don’t need to worry about going through the FDA. If we get this stuff to work soon, we can start adapting it to provide cheap genetic therapies for all types of canine cancer.”
The therapy they’d developed was able to identify and cut out the abnormal, mutated DNA in dogs’ cells leading to cancer. They called the treatment CDXT—canine DNA excision therapy.
“For once,” Jordan said, “you had an idea that wasn’t too half-baked. Revolutionize veterinary medicine with CDXT and use it as a stepping-stone to developing treatments for people.”
Chris nodded. His reputation in the scientific community had disintegrated due to his involvement with illegal gene enhancements. And despite his talents, he found work was difficult to come by for an ex-con.
Jordan had evaded prison time but hadn’t quite pulled himself from the seedier sides of genetic manufacturing. Over time, he had developed gene mods for unscrupulous horse racing teams wanting a synthetic edge over their competition. The business crumbled when other companies, lured by Jordan’s success, crowded the market.
Developing genetic therapeutics seemed like a worthwhile venture for both of them. Jordan had the experience in adapting genetic technologies for animals, and Chris had a talent for designing effective delivery systems. His delivery particles—called vectors—could transport new DNA into target cells and tissues while thwarting the immune system and providing almost one hundred-percent transfection rates. He felt confident he could develop a vector to target just about any type of cell, human or animal. So it had seemed natural to Chris to propose starting a veterinary medicine company with Jordan, and thus began Therapeutics for Companion Animals—or TheraComp for short.
“Great, great, great!” Across the lab, Hugh shook his fists in a gesture of victory. “It looks like things are working out great.”
Chris tried to refrain from shooting down the tech’s buoyant enthusiasm, but his pessimism crept back through his mind. “Things would be even greater if we could scale the vector fabrication up quicker. Even if I get the vectors to work, we need to produce them faster and in bigger batches. Or else we won’t keep up with demand.” He shrugged. “Then it won’t matter how great I’ve done with my little cell cultures, huh?”
The other lab tech, Mandy, stepped away from the barrel-shaped, high-output bioreactor she worked on. “Come on, Hugh. I need your help here.”
Jordan gestured to her, imploring Hugh to focus on his research with Mandy. He gave Chris a disapproving look as Hugh practically skipped toward the other lab tech. Outside of work, they’d often compared the tech to a spirited and eager-to-please puppy. His energy seemed boundless.
“What do you guys think about Sharp’s bill?” Hugh asked. “Are we going to have a new face around here?”
Trying to lose himself in his work again, Chris ignored the question.
“I hope not,” Jordan said. “You two are enough to keep us busy in the lab.”
Mandy raised an eyebrow as if to indicate she knew who actually kept them busy, and Jordan winked back.
Delving into his research allowed Chris a brief mental escape from the strange circumstances he had found himself in the past couple days. He could focus on taking his experiments one step at a time, from calculating concentrations of nutritional supplements for their cells to revisiting his vector designs or something as simple as injecting an experimental therapy into their cell populations. Each experiment required his undivided attention and ensured his mind stayed on the task at hand.
“Crap!” Hugh called out. “Did you guys see what just came out of the news streams?”
Chris cringed. So much for focus.
Hugh bounded around the lab bench toward Chris and Jordan. He showed them a story projected across his comm card.
Chris’s heart stopped. The stream described another recent mysterious death similar to the one he had witnessed, and this time the reports unabashedly claimed a connection between the two incidents.
Jordan squinted at the words. “What the hell? They can’t possibly be serious. These reporters are claiming these deaths were a kind of cancer.”
“And they says it’s contagious,” Hugh said.
Chris shook his head. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“More ridiculous than a man practically exploding on the street because his skeletal muscles tore from his bones and his smooth muscle cells grew and contracted until they ripped apart his arteries?” Mandy pursed her lips and stared hard at him. “Weird shit is going on, you guys.”
If this reporter was right, if a source from the hospital had leaked these suspicions, this story would tear through Baltimore and the rest of the country. Contagious cancer? So much for Dr. Haynes’s worries about containing a public panic.
Chapter 7
They walked past the looming ivory columns in the apartment lobby that gave the place a gaudy Grecian look. The façade obscured the modern workings of the building. Like a child, Chris dragged his fingers through the massive fountain in the center of the walkway. Jordan glanced at him and laughed.
“Can’t say you aren’t tempted every day you walk by,” Chris said.
Jordan shrugged as he gestured over the holodisplay controls at the elevator. The white-painted doors slid back to let them on, and they took a short ride to his penthouse. A color-changing fountain illuminated by underwater lights and as garish as the lobby adornments greeted them. Darkness covered the rest of the apartment until Jordan gestured on the lights via his comm card.
As Chris flopped onto the massive L-shaped suede sofa in the living area, his friend meandered behind the mahogany bar.
“Mojito?”
Maybe alcohol would allay the guilt threatening to overwhelm him like an impending avalanche. “Fine.”
Jordan crushed fresh mint leaves. “I’m not sure I buy the speculation.”
“About the cancer, about it being contagious, or something else?”
“The cancer, I believe.” He shook up the mixed drinks. “Contagious? There’s a reason it’s spreading, but it’s not contagious in the normal sense.”
“What do you mean?” Chris clasped his hands behind his neck and stared out the wide windows. Dark clouds choked the brightest stars, even the ones with enough brilliance to pierce the light pollution emitted by Baltimore. It seemed like a foreboding omen of events to come, a storm riding up on him, ready to strike him down for his past hubris in dealing genetic enhancements to an unwary customer base.
“It doesn’t seem like something transmitting between patients other than enhancers. So it’s staying within the community of people modding their genes, right?” Jordan brought over two tall glasses and placed them on the massive preserved tree trunk serving as a coffee table.
“I suppose so.” Chris sipped from his glass. A pit formed in his stomach as he thought back to the enh
ancer. “And a pattern of symptoms supports the notion that one type of enhancement is malfunctioning in a predictable way. Kind of points to the idea it’s my crappy enhancements causing this mess.”
“I already promised I’d help prove this isn’t something you—” Jordan shook his head and set his glass down. “This isn’t something we did. Do I think it’s our fault? No. Could it be? There’s a remote possibility, but I don’t think it’s at all as likely as you seem to think. Either way, I’m ready to help you figure out why the enhancer suspected you were responsible for his condition. But I don’t want us to be dragged into this mess and unnecessarily put the blame on ourselves. That might only attract suspicion.”
“You sound more worried about our safety rather than the harm we might’ve caused.”
“I’m being practical.”
They both drank to fill the following silence.
Letting out a slow exhale, Chris synced his comm card to the holodisplay in the living area and booted it up. “Well, let’s at least see who might’ve died according to these reporters.”
He perused several stories and gathered a list of names. Each reported death weighed down on him like another defensive lineman joining an unceasing dog pile. “Most of these victims seemed to have the same symptoms the enhancer I saw had.”
Jordan scanned the list. “It’s a bit hard for me to believe all this hyperbole and tabloid gossip when so many of the names come from ‘anonymous sources’ or ‘insiders.’”
“Well, I’m assuming most of the medical professionals that have the info we really want are bound by HIPAA. They can’t reveal any patients’ identities or medical records, so we’re going to have to wade through some speculative journalism.”
Jordan tapped away on his comm card. “Seems like many of those with confirmed identities also have their fair share of arrests and convictions.” He shook his head as he read another story. “A few of these people were found homeless, lying dead and bleeding in an alleyway or a doorway. Imagine stumbling on that.”
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 29
