Hugh chewed his bottom lip. His forehead scrunched as he appeared to be deep in thought. His eyes lit up and his face brightened, reminiscent of his usual jubilant self. “Did you try matching the vectors up to legitimate companies? Maybe see if there’s a biotech group using these in medicine, in hospitals and clinics.” He motioned to the card Jordan held. “An actual legal company wouldn’t be in your database full of illegal groups, right?”
“Damn,” Jordan said. “Maybe it’s lack of sleep, but I wish I would’ve thought of that earlier.”
Hugh lifted his shoulders. “Exhaustion is a hell of a drug.”
Jordan synced his comm card up with a holodisplay on the lab bench. He gestured so a large projection showed with the chemical structure of the vector Hugh had identified. “Well, since this was your idea, where should we search first?”
Scratching his head, Hugh opened his mouth to offer a suggestion. Then his expression dropped again. “I just realized something...if the chemical structure isn’t proprietary, we aren’t going to find a match at all. It might’ve been a protected trade secret.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jordan said. “We have to try.”
“In that case, let’s assume some company is trying to protect its intellectual property and do a search to see if the chemical structures here match up to any patents.”
“Great idea, my man,” Jordan said. He opened up the U.S. Patent & Trade Office database and plugged in the formulas they’d found.
Several positive results floated on the top of the list. Motioning above the projected image, Jordan scanned the first patent. He didn’t recognize any of the inventors’ names, but the intellectual property was registered under Integrative Gene Therapies. He recognized IGT’s name but couldn’t immediately place how.
He input the company name into another search. Several news streams popped up along with the IGT site on the Net.
Hugh pointed to the list of board members on a company page. “Check that out.”
With a quick gesture, Jordan zoomed in to view the names. His heart stopped. “This has to be more than a coincidence.”
Hugh’s head bobbed up and down. “There’s got to be a link.”
Jordan scanned the board member’s profile. Senator Arthur Sharp. The man lauded for his stringent efforts to combat illegal enhancement activities. The man that he and Dellaporta suspected of being a closet enhancer. The man that had been a patient, that had disappeared from the UMMC. And now his company might be tied to the genies found in enhancers suffering from an uncontrollable, ruinous cancer.
Rubbing his face with his palms, Jordan guessed it was about time for him to go above ground again and find out what else this senator might be hiding.
Or who the man might be hiding.
Chapter 27
Before he opened his eyes, the sterile smell of a hospital stung Chris’s nostrils. He blinked the haziness away and tried to make sense of his surroundings. He sat up, and the sheet fell from his chest. A feeling of déjà vu crept through him, and he glanced down a row of other white-sheeted beds in parallel with his. It reminded him of when woke up in prison with stab wounds in his side after an unsuccessful attempt on his life.
A sudden itching cropped up in his ribs. He probed the old scars with his fingers. But this time there were no lacerations, no pierced organs gradually healing. And even in the prison, sunlight had filtered in through a window and warmed his skin. Here only the glow of LED lights illuminated the painted cinder-block walls of the narrow room.
A dull pain throbbed in his head, the lingering reminder of the sedatives used to knock him out. Vague images of being shot by a tranquilizer and falling to the grass crept into his mind’s eye. Adrenaline surged through him as he patted his sides for a comm card, desperate to reach Jordan, to call for help.
He found nothing, but the shock of his reality pierced through the rest of the fog muddling his thoughts. Holodisplay monitors stood sentinel over the five other beds lying parallel with his. The machines beeped, tracking jagged lines on the EKG screens.
A person lay in each bed. All slept. One woman. Four men. Thick metal cuffs secured their wrists to the bedframes. Their faces appeared red and swollen, similar to that of Novak, the enhancer that had died outside his condo building. Chris shuddered.
Gingerly, he swung a leg over the side of his bed. He felt weak as he slid out from the bed and wavered before standing on the concrete floor. When his legs stopped trembling, he walked up to one of the beds and stared at its inhabitant. The man’s arm, mottled with bruises, looked as big as Chris’s torso.
Despite their impressive size, the muscles roped around the unconscious man’s bones unevenly. Lumps pressed against his skin in unnatural, deformed curves.
“Chris,” a feminine voice called from behind.
He whipped around. “Dr. Haynes.”
Her face appeared ashen and her hair oily. The dark bags under her eyes seemed deeper than when he last saw her. Though he’d only known her for a short while, seeing her in this unfamiliar place provided a small bit of solace.
“Just call me Robin. Please.”
“You’re okay? I saw those men take you.” He stepped toward her and took her wrist in his hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything.”
“It’s not your fault.” Robin wiped a hand over her cheek as if to brush away the exhaustion evident in her attractive features. “I’m not exactly okay, though. This place is wearing me down.”
“Where the hell are we?”
“I’m not sure.” She held a hand out, palm up, and waved it around the room. “But I’ve been stuck down here the whole time.”
Chris indicated the other beds with a nod. “What about these people?”
“More patients. Like in the hospital.”
Chris walked toward the door and tugged on the handle. It didn’t budge. “We’re locked in?” He figured he should be more alarmed, more frightened, but the sluggishness from waking up seemed to prevent him from any drastic mood swings.
Robin nodded and then gestured to a lab bench on the opposite side of the room stocked with equipment buzzing and humming in the cool air. “They want me to cure these people.”
“The people in the beds?” Chris motioned to the sleeping forms. “It looks to me like they’re suffering from the same rhabdomyosarcoma or whatever you mentioned before. Is that right?”
“I think so,” Robin said. She combed her hands through her hair and sat on a stool near the lab bench. “But I can’t treat them. I’m barely keeping them alive as it is.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Me neither.” She forced a laugh. “After that explosion in the hospital, I woke up down here. I don’t know who the hell these patients are, and I don’t know who the hell wants me to fix them, and I don’t know why.” She cradled her head in her hands. A clump of dark-brown, matted hair fell in front of her face.
“There’s a holoprojector there.” She pointed at a small black nodule on the wall. “They use that to communicate with me. I never see their faces, and their voices are garbled, but they’ve gotten everything I asked them for—chemical reagents, medicines.” She spoke in a lowered voice. “I think they’re also keeping me under surveillance from there. Anytime I need something, they deliver it almost as if they’re reading my mind.”
Chris dragged one of the stools closer to her and slumped onto it.
“They said they’ll kill me if these people die.” She motioned to the patients. “I’ve been working for days, but they aren’t getting any better.”
“Days? The hospital was bombed yesterday.” Chris shook his head. “You haven’t been down here that long.”
“I have,” she said. “Apparently, they pumped too many sedatives into you. They put you in a coma. I was worried you wouldn’t recover. You, me...we’ve been down here for a while...I have no idea exactly how long because it’s impossible to track time.”
His heart stopped. His immediate
disbelief faded at Robin’s sympathetic but sincere expression. “So what the hell are we supposed to do?”
***
Chris opened the refrigerator and scanned the bottles of solutions. Suspensions of nanotherapeutics sat next to anticancer drugs and containers of liquid cell media for the tissue cultures growing in the incubator next to the lab bench. The setup, crammed in with the patient-care area of the narrow room, was small but stocked.
“They’re generous when it comes to supplies.” He closed the door and straightened next to Robin. “But do they honestly think we can help these people?”
“They wanted me to do it on my own.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it at the hospital. How the hell am I going to cure anything stuck in this dungeon?”
Chris placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
“I don’t know how that’s going to work,” she said. “They demanded to know how I planned to develop a workable treatment. But that’s the problem. I’m a doctor. I’ve done everything I know how to do. I’m not a researcher, not a scientist. And when they finally listened to me, finally realized I couldn’t do this on my own, they brought you in.” She shrugged. “So I’m not going to be of much help to you, Chris. And I’m sorry for unintentionally dragging you into this.”
Scratching his head, Chris desperately wished he’d had one more chance to talk with Jordan. He wanted to know what his friend had found after sequencing the biopsied tissues. Then he realized where those tissues came from. “What happened to the data you had on the patients at the medical center?”
“That’s all inaccessible. The data hadn’t been deidentified, so patients’ names were still attached to the individual reports. They’re all still stuck at the hospital.”
“Have you run biopsies on these people?”
“I did. And, from what I can remember, the cells and tissues in these patients—particularly the tumors—appeared much like they did in the hospital patients.”
“Okay.” Chris folded his arms across his chest. “Did you sequence the DNA? Find anything odd?”
She tapped on a holodisplay and brought up a 3D image. Long lines of nucleotides—the building blocks of DNA—were projected in the air between them. Gesturing over the display, she zoomed in a particular subset. “Here’s the same genes we found back in the hospital, I think.”
Chris gave her a skeptical look. “You sure?”
“Not one hundred percent, but can you memorize a sequence of a thousand base pairs and identify them with complete certainty?”
“No, no.” Chris held his hands up defensively. The mere fact that she had recognized a sequence demonstrated she’d been scrutinizing that particular genetic defect for an inordinate amount of time. Such a feat was reminiscent of those old contests he’d read about in which individuals without neural enhancements would memorize an entire deck of cards and recite each card in order in the shortest time possible.
“Then what’s with the look?”
“You’ve done half my work for me,” he said. “One minute, you’re telling me you haven’t done hard research for almost a decade, and then the next, you pull up the exact sequencing data we need. You’ve got awfully high standards for yourself.”
“It’s not worth bragging about unless we actually save these people.”
“And ourselves,” Chris said. He leaned in closer to the hologram of the DNA sequence. “So do you know what proteins these code for?”
“Despite the fact I can’t check any genetic sequencing databases on the Net, they’ve at least given me access to a database of bioinformatics data stored on a local computer. All they told me is that these genes are completely unnatural. They don’t normally occur in humans.”
“Jordan and I suspect the genes causing this type of cancer were introduced by poorly designed enhancements.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Robin said. She pulled up a new list on the holoprojection. “So I did a nephrological biopsy.”
“You took kidney tissue samples?”
“Right,” she said. “I figured if any of these patients received enhancements recently, I’d have the best chance of finding out from the kidney.”
“Brilliant,” Chris said. “That makes sense. You’d expect to see the kidney filtering out nanoparticles or whatever was used to deliver the enhancements.” The bleariness and disorientation of waking up in this cramped Frankenstein’s laboratory gave way to a hope that he and Robin might actually make progress in discovering the root of the mysterious cancer plaguing the enhancers.
“Yep. In three of the patients, I found evidence of enhancements.” She pointed at three of the items projected on the holodisplay. “Silica nanoparticles in one, metal-composite nanoparticles in another, and nanoscale graphene oxide sheets for gene delivery in a third. I’m betting the other two also had enhancements.”
“Sure,” Chris said. “They could’ve been biodegradable vectors that disappeared after delivering the DNA, right?”
“Right again,” Robin said.
He squinted at the notes she’d written next to the delivery methods. “And am I reading this right? Each of those delivery methods contained genetic material encoding for muscle cell growth and proliferation.”
“Essentially,” she said.
“But none of these enhancements were identical.”
She shook her head, and her brown hair rolled in waves over her shoulders. “Somehow, these people ended up with different enhancements, albeit all were designed for increased strength, but they’re now presenting the exact same symptoms.”
Leaning forward on the table with the holoprojection, Chris furrowed his brow. “And none of the unidentified genes you showed me are different than the ones that were supposed to have been delivered to them?”
“Yep,” Robin said. “And that’s why I’m stumped.”
Chris dropped down on a stool. He rubbed the back of his neck. “How much longer do you think these patients have?”
The doctor leaned against the counter. “At this stage, I’m guessing no more than a few weeks.”
“What’s so important about them that we’re supposed to save their lives?”
“I don’t think our captors give a rat’s ass about them.” Robin gestured to the patients. “I think these people are our guinea pigs.”
Chris’s mouth dropped as he stared, wide eyed, at the unconscious bodies with tubes and wires snaking from them to the medical equipment beside their beds. A mixture of horror and disgust filled him, and he had to shake himself out of the resulting mental stupor as he almost staggered backward. “We’re...we’re supposed to test a treatment on them? No complex computer models, no lab-on-a-chip to test for tissue response? Just inject these people with whatever the hell we come up with?”
Robin hesitated before she spoke. An unseen weight seemed to drag her shoulders down and pull at the already-tired features on her face. “I’m afraid so.”
“Are these people mad?” Chris balled his hands up into fists until his forearms trembled. “So instead of treating this disease out in our own labs, where we have access to all our research equipment and resources, someone decided to hold us captive so we could test a cure on these people. This is just...sick.”
“You’re telling me.” Robin spoke in a low voice. “I think they—whoever they are—want us to hurry our work up. They don’t want us bridled by things like Institutional Review Boards or the ethical considerations we follow in the real world, and this is how they do it.”
“Why?” But as Chris asked the question, he realized the answer. “Like you said, we’re not supposed to heal these people.” He looked at the holoscreen from where Robin had said she’d communicated with their captors. “We’re supposed to find a cure to heal someone out there. Someone whose prognosis is looking pretty bad.”
The doctor nodded. “Right. Someone very important and very unscrupulous must be suffering from the same aggressive cancer afflicting these en
hancers.”
Chapter 28
An alarm screamed from one of the patients’ beds. Robin rushed to the enhancer’s side as the bruised man erupted into a series of violent tremors. His skin rolled in waves, and several pops sounded as muscles and ligaments tore. The bed shook, and its metal posts clattered on the cement floor with each forceful shake.
“I need your help!” Robin cried.
Chris rushed to her side. “What do you want me to do?”
“Hold him still.”
Using his body weight, Chris pressed down on the man’s shoulders. The invalid, despite his unconsciousness, thrashed like a fish on land. His limbs strained against the cuffs holding him to the bed. The seizure reminded him of how Novak had uncontrollably flexed and writhed at his feet that fateful day outside his condo.
Robin scrambled to a cabinet of drawers. From it, she grabbed a syringe then ran to the refrigerator before returning to the enhancer’s side. “The muscles,” she said, stabbing a needle into a glass vial. She pulled back on the syringe plunger. “In the later stages of disease, the muscles start spontaneous contractions.”
Novak’s muscles had roiled and quaked just like this before the man collapsed into a bleeding heap. How long did this patient have left to live? He imagined the tendons and muscle fibers contracting against each other, tearing from the man’s bones.
As if in reply to his fears, the EKG monitor beeped wildly.
Robin’s nose scrunched in a snarl. She stabbed the needle into the man’s bulging biceps. As she pushed down on the plunger, another tremor shook his arm. Chris pressed down as hard as possible, but he couldn’t keep the man’s limbs still. The writhing knocked Robin back, and her head slammed into a concrete wall.
She crumpled to the floor.
“Robin!” Chris let go of the man’s shoulders. He ran to the doctor’s side. Her eyelids were shut, her breathing shallow.
“Robin!” he cried again. He grabbed her forearms and lifted them. Her arms hung limp.
Behind Chris, the comatose enhancer seized and buckled. The EKG machine screamed. He knew enough about clinical medicine to know the man’s heart was in fibrillation. The cardiac muscles controlling his pulse were probably experiencing the same violent twitching that his skeletal muscles were exhibiting. His blood wouldn’t be flowing properly, and it would be a matter of minutes before his brain died due to lack of fresh oxygen, if he didn’t tear himself apart at the seams first.
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 41
