by Alex Ryan
Nick could see Zhang nodding with unrestrained satisfaction in his peripheral vision as Agent Ling spoke. The mood in the conference room had shifted now, from outright hostility to one of tentative collaboration. Nick listened, without interruption, as Ling shared her findings—the most notable of which was that the company’s CEO, Yao Xing Jian, had left the country two hours before the events at the Terracotta Warrior Museum, and his current whereabouts were unknown. Ling went on to say that none of the employees questioned thus far admitted to having any knowledge of Feng’s black-market operation or the secret hospital ship. She concluded by pointing at Dash’s gruesome photographs, still untouched on the conference table, and saying, “Which brings us back to this—an illicit organ-harvesting ring being run by a respected company in Xi’an right under our noses. It’s despicable.”
“What I’m about to say might come as a shock to everyone,” Dash said, “especially given what happened to me on that ship, but I believe that Feng’s organ-harvesting operation is the red herring in this case.”
Ling screwed up her face at the comment. “How can you say such a thing? You’ve just proven that Nèiyè Biologic had an entire supply chain established for the harvesting, sale, and transplant of organs on a grand scale.”
“And not just regular organs,” Zhang added. “We now know that they were selling genetically modified organs for a premium price. Would that not be worth a fortune?”
“Fortunes are relative,” Dash said. “Nèiyè Biologic is a billion-dollar company. They made more revenue last year on biomedical technology sales than they could make in a decade selling designer organs on the black market. The risk-reward proposition is completely upside-down. Why risk billions to make millions? And besides, if the goal is really to sell designer organs, why not make it a legitimate business unit? Why lie, cheat, murder, and steal your way into the segment when you could create an entirely new industry? They have the infrastructure in place to do it.”
“Because Feng was clinically insane,” Zhang said.
“Insane, but not an idiot,” Nick countered.
Dash nodded. “There has to be something more going on. Feng hinted as much when I was strapped to that operating table.”
“You didn’t mention that before,” Zhang said, looking surprised. “What did he say to you?”
“I can practically hear him,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut. “He said, ‘Editing genes in transplant organs is only phase one . . . Phase two is where the real transformation occurs.’”
“Then what the hell is phase two?” Nick asked.
“I can’t prove this yet, but I believe that everything Feng was doing—both legal and illegal—was wrapped up in a quest for immortality. When we were at the Terracotta Warrior Museum, before he kidnapped me, he spoke with great authority about the First Emperor and his obsession with the Elixir of Life. I think Feng was modeling his life and work after Chancellor Li Si, the architect of the Five Pains and steward of the First Emperor’s quest for eternal life. The mutilated, tattooed bodies we’ve collected are evidence of Feng’s pathological channeling of Li Si. The rest is evidence of his obsession with immortality.”
“What are you saying—that his plan was to stop aging by replacing people’s old, worn-out organs with healthy, young organs?” Nick asked.
“In phase one, yes,” she said. “In fact, that was his plan for me. He intended to gift my organs to his dying mother. But as far as what phase two entails, I need more time with the documents and patient records we recovered from the hospital ship. Give me another twelve hours to continue digging, and I should have some answers.”
Zhang leaned forward. “While Dr. Chen conducts her investigation, I think the three of us have our own digging to do. I’m not ready to let Yao Xing Jian off the hook. The timing of his disappearance is practically an admission of guilt. With Feng out of the picture, we need to learn everything there is to learn about Yao.”
“And there is also the matter of Major Li’s murder to be investigated. There are political implications that must be considered in both cases,” Ling said.
“Agreed, but something else has been bothering me,” Zhang said, fixing his gaze on Ling. “How was it that your team arrived at the museum at just the right moment to interrupt our covert operation and enable Feng to kidnap Dr. Chen and escape? This could not have been coincidence.”
Ling pursed her lips and leaned back. “We were conducting a counterespionage sting.”
“You were chasing Lankford?” Zhang asked.
“Yes, and Mr. Foley,” she said with a quick glance at Nick before looking back at Zhang. “We had intelligence implicating them in the murder of a young female Nèiyè employee in Xi’an. Naturally, we linked Major Li’s murder to them as well. I was tasked with finding them and bringing them in, and my group received a tip that morning as to their whereabouts.”
“Are you responsible for the hit on our safe house in Hong Kong?” Nick asked, turning back to glare at Ling and making no effort to conceal his rising anger.
“No,” she said. “My orders were to locate, apprehend, and interrogate—period.”
“If not the MSS,” Nick said, “then who has been trying to kill me?”
“Undoubtedly, the same people who killed Major Li,” Ling said coolly. “Mercenaries, I suspect, hired by Feng.”
“No way it’s that clean. I went black,” Nick said. “Hired guns don’t have access to the type of pooled intelligence necessary to pull off the hits they did.”
“Just what are you implying, Mr. Foley?” Ling said, her voice hardening.
“That one of your agents is compromised, Agent Ling,” Zhang said, beating Nick to the punch. “And before we do anything else, we need to find out who and rectify the problem.”
CHAPTER 35
Dash stepped back from the wall and looked at the product of her labor.
This was the first time she’d ever made a “case wall,” similar to the variety depicted on television shows about detectives solving long, complex, conspiratorial murder cases. She was a doctor; she was a CDC emergency responder and epidemiological researcher. She was not a detective . . . and yet looking at her handiwork from the past day and a half, she might be able to convince people otherwise. Photographs, maps, autopsy reports, research notes, patient files, Nèiyè Biologic laboratory documents, and on and on—all connected by different-colored lines. And in the middle was a picture of Xue Shi Feng. She stared at his picture with contempt. To think that he had literally been within seconds of harvesting her organs, cutting her liver, kidneys, pancreas, lungs, and heart out of her while she was alive and conscious.
She shuddered, which made her incision sting.
She pinched her silk blouse and held it out away from her stomach. It was the lightest, softest blouse she owned, but even the slightest touch along the wound was an irritant. She looked down the V-neck at the bumpy, ugly suture work that ran down her stomach and disappeared below the waistband of her pants.
“I look so ugly now,” she said and let go of her shirt.
It could be worse, she reminded herself, looking at the section of wall with photographs of the corpses. I could be one of them.
She looked back at the photograph of Feng. She knew much more about the man now than she had eighteen hours ago. By far, the most fascinating medical file she’d gained access to from the hospital ship data server was Feng’s electronic health record. She was excited to brief the rest of the team on her findings and equally excited to hear the new intelligence they had unearthed. She’d heard from Nick that Ling had identified the MSS leak, but he’d only hinted about the rest.
The door to the conference room abruptly flew open, startling her, and in strode Zhang, Nick, and Ling. Zhang had “found” a recently vacated space in a two-story civilian office complex within a mile of the Xi’an MSS building. The previous tenant had not moved out their furniture and workstations. Personal mementos and office decorations still adorned a few of th
e offices, making Dash wonder if the tenant had actually moved or if Zhang had simply commandeered the facility for the week.
“Nèiyè Biologic is on fire,” Nick said, walking straight up to her. “The entire facility is burning to the ground. It was burning when we got there with our team. We got nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“Then it’s arson,” Dash said, looking from Nick to Zhang. “No other explanation.”
“Agreed,” Zhang said.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Unclear. Initial reports indicate the fire started before the office opened, but it will take time before we know how many employees, if any, were inside.”
“What now?” she asked.
“Now we brief,” Zhang said, taking a seat at the table. “With our investigation hitting a brick wall, it’s probably best that we all share our findings and then decide next steps as a group. Dr. Chen, would you like to go first?”
She nodded as the others took a seat. “Probably the most interesting thing that I’ve discovered,” Dash said, walking over to her case wall, “is that Feng had Prader-Willi syndrome.”
“What is Prader-Willi syndrome?” Agent Ling asked.
“Prader-Willi is a rare genetic mutation in which several important genes are missing on the fifteenth chromosome. A host of issues are associated with this syndrome, but the hallmark characteristic is incessant, insatiable hunger—a gnawing, visceral hunger that cannot be quelled no matter how much or how frequently the patient eats.”
“That sounds horrible,” Nick muttered, his stomach rumbling as if in agreement.
“Oh, yes,” Dash said. “It would be a life of torture. I believe Prader-Willi was the source of Feng’s psychopathy. Suddenly, his low-empathy, sadistic tendencies and his preoccupation with punishment begin to make sense. I cannot imagine the lens he must have perceived the world through. For someone with Prader-Willi, life would seem a great injustice, and ordinary people, spoiled and undisciplined.”
“That makes total sense, but what does Feng having Prader-Willi have to do with organ harvesting?” Nick asked.
“Excellent question, Nick,” she said. “And I’m not sure I have a complete answer yet, but the short one is this: Prader-Willi syndrome has nothing to do with organ harvesting but a great deal to do with CRISPR. I believe Feng’s ultimate goal was to leverage the research Nèiyè Biologic has been conducting on CRISPR Cas9 so that he could someday use CRISPR on himself to repair his defective chromosomes by editing back in the genes he’s been missing since birth.”
“Then why hadn’t he done it?” Zhang asked. “Why hadn’t he used CRISPR to fix his genetic defect already?”
“Because CRISPR Cas9 editing is tricky. The mechanism was discovered in bacteria only a few years ago, and like every new technology, there are glitches that need to be worked out. The problem that all CRISPR practitioners face is preventing off-target mutations and unintended manipulations. Feng understood the implications of living with a faulty genetic code better than anyone. The last thing he’d want to do is use CRISPR to try to edit back in genes on chromosome fifteen but in the process inadvertently delete other critical genes elsewhere in his genome. Feng was a man of discipline. His entire existence was about discipline. Most people with Prader-Willi become morbidly obese from constant eating. Not Feng; his health record shows he’s been practicing calorie control his entire adult life. I cannot imagine the self-control necessary to live that way.”
“A fascinating finding,” Ling said. “Thank you, Dr. Chen.”
“Oh, I’m not finished,” Dash said, shooting the agent a wry smile. “Feng was experimenting with CRISPR on the transplant organs. The organ recipients were already very sick people. They were the perfect test subjects because they had nothing to lose, and because they were receiving black-market organs, they were willing accomplices to the crime. He didn’t have to worry about any of these clients suing him or going to the police if the CRISPR therapy went wrong. Equally important, the genetic modification he was trying to perform on the organs—relatively speaking—was an easy one. He was only trying to manipulate one thing: the alleles needed to ensure major histocompatibility complex matching between the transplant organ and recipient. Think of it as practice before the actual game.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Zhang said, “but I’m still confused about the big picture. Why risk the company? Why not just practice CRISPR on rats until he was confident enough to use it on himself?”
Dash sighed. “I don’t have an answer to that, Commander, only a theory—and my theory might sound a little crazy.”
“Feng is dead, Nèiyè Biologic is burning to the ground, and Yao is missing,” Nick said. “At this point, Dash, I think we’re okay with crazy.”
“Okay,” she said with a little shrug. “Everything I’ve just described dovetails neatly into the Elixir of Life hypothesis I proposed before. I believe Yao and Feng had been working on this together from the beginning. In fact, did you know that Yao and Feng are the same age? They went to the same primary school together. I found a magazine interview from last year, in which Yao talks about founding the company. Feng was employee number two; he’s been Yao’s right-hand man for nearly two decades. When I combine this information with bits and pieces of the conversation I had with Feng, a very clear picture emerges. Some time ago, Yao and Feng embarked on a grand quest together, a quest that dates back over two thousand years to the First Emperor of China and his chancellor.”
“History repeating itself?” Ling asked, looking dubious.
“Yes, as it tends to do. The quest for the Elixir of Life has seduced many rich and powerful men over the millennia,” Dash said, eyeing them each in turn. “The quest for immortality. I think this was what Feng meant when he talked to me about phase two of the project. The organ transplant and reprogramming was simply a baby step toward the ultimate goal of life extension via CRISPR. If they could figure out how to use CRISPR to fix Feng’s Prader-Willi syndrome and program cellular histocompatibility in people after organ transplant, then why not shoot for the moon? Why not tackle all the genes responsible for chronic disease and aging? Even now, some of the greatest minds in medicine are postulating that aging is nothing more than a genetic disease, one that we pass down from generation to generation. It’s not so different from Prader-Willi syndrome, just more complex. For Nèiyè Biologic, CRISPR is the chalice that holds the Elixir of Life. Once they solved the problem of off-target mutations, Yao and Feng would have the power to decide who lives and who dies in this world.”
Nick and Zhang stared at her in silence as they processed the implications of her theory. Even the normally argumentative Agent Ling had no rebuttal or rebuke for her this time.
Finally, Nick spoke, and all he said was, “Whoa.”
“I know,” she said. “It even sounds crazy to me.”
“Assuming you’re right, what is the end goal here—a new generation of designer babies that grow up to be immortal?” Ling asked with the hostility in her voice absent for the first time since Dash had met the woman.
“Modifying the germ line is certainly a possibility, but this technology would not be constrained to zygote modification. Mature adults could be altered; certainly, this was their intention. I believe that Feng and Yao were seeking the Elixir of Life not for their progeny but rather for themselves.”
“And for anyone willing to pay enough to join them,” Nick added. “Maybe it’s time we start wondering about their client list.”
“Yes, Nick,” Zhang said with a cynical smile. “I think you have just had an epiphany that changes the nature of this case.”
“Don’t look at me,” Nick said, staring with admiration at Dash. “This was all Dash—all I did was suggest the obvious.”
An electric silence filled the room until Dash took a seat, smiled, and said, “Your turn.”
“First and foremost, we found the leak,” Zhang said. “And our initial suspicions were correct. A technician in Ling’s office
has been passing confidential data to a third party in exchange for bribes. That third party has been identified as a paramilitary black ops unit for hire known as OTK. We have communications linking OTK to Feng, and we believe this outfit is responsible for both the attempts on Nick’s life and Major Li’s murder. The compromised MSS technician has been taken into custody, and we’re putting together a team to root out and take down OTK in China. But as satisfying as these developments are, Yao is still missing.”
“What do we know about Yao?” Dash asked, looking at Ling.
“Yao is a charismatic self-made billionaire with a reputation for shrewdness. Interviews with Nèiyè Biologic staff reveal him to be inspiring when he’s on the public stage and yet insular and unapproachable during the course of regular business. According to Feng’s assistant, Yao left the management of day-to-day company operations entirely to Feng, rarely venturing from the executive floor. She also said that Yao was never in the office—he spent his time traveling abroad weekly to meet with investors and business partners. She paints a picture of Yao as nouveau Chinese royalty—the king of Nèiyè Biologic, intent on building a biotechnology empire. This depiction is very much in keeping with your analogy of Feng channeling Chancellor Li Si. Both men seem to have taken their roles literally. Attempts to extract personal information on Yao from his personal assistant have been frustrating, as she is tenaciously loyal to him, even under the threat of prosecution.”
“The Nèiyè headquarters didn’t burn down by accident,” Nick said, looking at Zhang. “I think it’s safe to assume he gave the order.”
“Which means that despite uncovering Feng’s organ-harvesting operation and finding the hospital ship, Yao has something else to hide. Something so valuable that he would rather destroy the company than let us discover it,” Zhang said.
