by Nate Kenyon
For a moment the feeling thrilled her, filled her with hope and a sense of coming struggle. She would have to go up against Wasserman again. She would have to be very careful.
But Shelley was still Sarah’s court-appointed guardian, and that carried a lot of weight. And Shelley would have to do something when the truth was out in the open.
She would have no choice but to listen now.
—28—
Three men and a woman stood in a small room filled with electronic equipment and leather bucket chairs. The room resembled the cockpit of a submarine with a viewing window that opened up over a vast, black space that appeared as deep as an ocean trench.
At the moment, all eyes were on one of the flat-screen monitors bolted to the wall, where a flurry of activity had reached its end. The sound was low, but the quality was such that they had no trouble hearing everything.
On the screen, several technicians moved into view, eclipsing the figure on the floor save for one pale hand and part of an arm. They watched in silence as the hand flopped once, like a fish out of water, and lay still.
“That’s better,” Philippa Cruz murmured, flipping through the pages of her chart and jotting down more notes. “She’s like a light when the power’s cut. I think we’ve got something, right there. Run it back and play it again.”
The monitor blinked gray static before the camera picked up the little girl again. She was surrounded by a fine, white mist that made it difficult to see. At first this had been a very unsettling thing to witness. They knew now that it was caused by the rapid acceleration of subatomic particles and the wicking of moisture and heat from the air, which in turn caused an intense drop in temperature and condensation to form in the surrounding space.
Simple physics, Cruz thought. Just like anything else. There are no miracles, only science.
When discussing the phenomenon of the psi gene and its effects with others, Cruz had found it helpful to present it in terms of conventional versus microwave heat. Most people are at least somewhat familiar with how a microwave oven works when heating food. Conventional heating requires contact by an object with another warmer one, like a pan on a hot stove. Energy is passed between the two in the form of heat. Microwave heating does not require direct contact, but accomplishes much the same thing.
To put it another way, Cruz thought, to push someone, most people would have to reach out their hand and make physical contact. A person with an active psi gene could accomplish the same thing through a process that utilized wave energy.
There was much more to it, of course, so much that they still didn’t understand. But they were getting closer. Blue light leaped in staggering jagged flashes across the screen as the scene played out once more. Cruz glanced at several other monitors displaying heart rate and brain wave activity at the time the video had been filmed. Right here, they had administered the inhibitor; see how quickly it had taken effect. She counted less than thirty seconds. It was remarkable.
She made more notes. “Have you been taking blood samples at precisely the right time?” she asked. “You know how important this is. Within three minutes before and after the event, and no later.”
Evan Wasserman bobbed his head. He had combed his thinning hair back and used a light oil to calm the wisps that tended to float in a halo about his scalp. “It’s all in the latest report.” He handed her a file.
What a strange bird, she thought. He was so anxious today, as if anticipating something tremendously important. She hadn’t seen him in person in over a month; she hadn’t had to be so personally involved in the testing until recently, which was fine. She preferred the lab setting. But now that they were so close to a breakthrough, she needed to be on-site.
Her boss’s dependence on this man was a mystery to her. At one point, Wasserman’s influence over the girl and his ability to persuade her to cooperate had made him useful to them, but now that they had a viable drug candidate his usefulness was mostly gone, and he had to know it.
He was so jumpy she thought perhaps he was finally breaking down. She had always supposed it would be a matter of time, but with the added pressure they were all under, there was actually a reason for it.
She thought back to the dinner meeting at the heliport. It had gone spectacularly well. After viewing the second video clip, the two men had fallen all over themselves to express their interest. They were efficient brokers and already Helix had received partnership inquiries from three other companies, and an outright buyout offer from one.
Clinical trials were expensive; prostituting themselves was a necessary evil when they needed to come up with another five hundred million. To get that kind of money they would have to produce more concrete results, of course, and eventually demonstrate the new compound’s effectiveness in another subject.
But from the looks of this latest video, they were well on their way to something truly special.
“Hmmm…” Cruz flipped through pages. She noted something else that excited her a great deal. “Expression is tight as a drum. PSI-526 blood levels jumped over three hundred percent by half an hour after dosing, and then we dialed it back down to almost nothing. That’s very good.”
“Talk dirty to me, my dear,” Steven Berger said, smiling up at her from his seat on one of the bucket chairs.” Tight as a drum.’ I love it.” His thick head of white hair was very carefully groomed today, and he had an extra bounce in his step. He had insisted on coming here, even though he didn’t have much to offer in terms of expertise. He simply wanted to be a witness to their future. Here was a man who was motivated by greed, and had no problem letting everyone know it. And yet he held a certain poetic sense of the moment in history.
Berger certainly had a reason to be giddy with their recent success, even if he didn’t understand the technical details. Structure-based drug design was always a slow process; much of the work done under the microscope and through computer-assisted modeling, and potential molecules had to be tested, tweaked, and tested again. It was necessary to identify and validate the drug target using functional genomics, chemical genetics, and proteomics, and it required an encyclopedic knowledge of biology, chemistry, and genetics.
But the potential payoff was huge. The purpose was to throw out the old hit-or-miss way of drug discovery in favor of the intelligent and informed design of synthetics. If you studied the structure of a protein carefully enough, you could create a molecule that bound very tightly and selectively to its target, thus creating more potent and effective results.
Designing a drug that would tightly control the psi gene’s expression was essential, of course. It was no good to just turn the gene on and let it go like a runaway train. They had already seen what could happen without an effective “off” switch, and the accident and the deaths that resulted from it had forced them to shut down testing for nearly a year. The next attempt had yielded a compound that, along with the other drugs she had received as a precautionary measure, had caused a nearly complete catatonic state. The new compound had brought her out of it, and so far it looked like a winner.
But this was only the first step, and Cruz knew it. The psi gene was carried naturally by one in approximately five hundred thousand people in the world, as far as they had been able to estimate. There were markers to help identify them, but it was still a very small pool. To create something truly revolutionary, they needed to take the next leap forward. They needed to be able to deliver that gene into the general population.
Cruz stepped closer to the observation window. With the lights off inside the adjoining room, she could see nothing clearly now except her reflection. But she knew what lay beyond the specially coated glass. It was, in essence, their safety valve, constructed shortly after the fire incident. Wave energy interacts with various forms of matter that absorbs it, reflects it, or passes it through. This was why they had lined the testing room with a material that first absorbed that energy and then served to disperse it.
The whole thing was perfectly conta
ined. And they had several other rooms just like it, along with better equipment and more space, at a facility in Alabama. Empty now, and waiting for them to arrive.
“You want dirty talk, imagine this,” she said, studying the mirror images of her own ice-blue eyes, her nose, the rather sensual curve of her lips. “A stripped adeno-associated virus is loaded with the cloned psi gene and a transcription factor. This is injected into anyone you like; a construction worker, scientist, doctor, member of the U.S. Marine Corps, perhaps. The virus acts as a gene delivery vehicle into muscle cells, where it waits in a dormant state, until we decide to ‘turn it on.’ We do this using a small-molecule drug that activates the transcription factor, and which can be taken orally. The level of gene expression depends on the amount of the small-molecule drug administered, giving us complete control over the result.”
“I don’t know exactly what you just said, but I liked it.” Berger sat up in his chair. “Evan, did you get all of that?”
Cruz turned to Wasserman, who had paled visibly. “Exogenously regulated expression of a transferred gene,” he said. “Can you really do it?”
“U Penn researchers did it years ago with erythropoietin,” Cruz said. “They demonstrated sustained and precisely controlled expression in rhesus monkeys over a period of months, with only one injection to deliver the gene. The regulating drug was in oral form, a simple pill, dial it up, dial it down. Easy as pie.”
“Incredible,” Wasserman said. “But you can’t do that in this case. You know what it will mean. A member of the Marine Corps? You’re talking about a weapon.” He turned to Berger with his hands out and palms up in a gesture of supplication. “Steven, you can’t be serious.”
“Why not? Every single person in the world would kill to have an ability like this. The military applications alone are limitless. And we’ll be the only ones able to give it to them. At a fairly hefty price, of course.”
“No, no, no.” Wasserman moaned. He shook his head. Beads of sweat had broken out across his brow. He looked ill. “Listen to me. You haven’t been here when it’s been let loose, you haven’t seen all of what she can do. You haven’t seen her lose control.”
“We’ve seen the tapes.”
“That’s not the same!” Wasserman shouted. The sound was deafening in the cramped space. “I was there, I saw the damage firsthand. I saw those men die, I heard their skin crackling, for God’s sake. What if that kind of power fell into the wrong hands? It could make the atom bomb look like a firecracker.”
“Hold on now,” Berger said. He was still smiling, trying to placate. “The system we’re talking about is very tightly regulated, that’s the beauty of it—”
“I won’t let you do it,” Wasserman said. “This has gone far enough. I can’t let…my own—feelings—” He stopped. “I found her,” he said. “I earned her trust the first time around. Don’t forget that.”
“And without our help, you would have been moldering away in an adjunct position at the local community college by now,” Cruz said. “A place like this, there’s a lot of overhead. We’ve bankrolled you for too long, let you have your way, working everything from your own location. It’s a wonder anything’s been accomplished at all.”
“All right, Phillipa.” Berger waved his hand. “Let’s not get carried away here….”
A knock came at the door. Wasserman’s eye twitched frantically. He swiped at a trickle of sweat rolling down his cheek. “Come in,” he said.
“Sorry to interrupt,” the big orderly who stuck his head in said. “But we’ve spotted the woman you asked about coming in at the gate.”
Wasserman blinked. “She’s here now?”
“May already be inside.”
“All right. Thank you. Please take her directly to my office to wait for me.”
The orderly left. All three of them stood in silence, considering each other, each realizing something irrevocable had happened and not sure where to go next.
“This conversation isn’t over,” Wasserman said finally. “I have to see to something important. I’ll be right back.”
After the door closed, Cruz and Berger exchanged a look. It had happened a bit more abruptly than they might have liked, Cruz thought, but it was time now. In fact, it was past due. They had made all the progress they could with her here, and Wasserman was a liability.
Alabama was waiting. Now all they had to do was tie up a few loose ends.
“Would you like to make the call, or shall I?” Berger said.
—29—
The guard at the gatehouse was not one of the regulars, but Jess had seen him once or twice before. He waved her ahead in Charlie’s car with barely a glance at her temporary pass, and a smile that was a little too friendly. She stopped and backed up. “Excuse me. Is Dr. Wasserman around?”
“Don’t know that he’s arrived as yet, but I just got on duty ten minutes ago. Say, I know you, I never forget a face like that. You wouldn’t want to grab a drink with me when I get off shift, say, around five o’clock?”
She smiled vaguely. “I’ve got a class.”
“No kidding? That late, huh? You in school? I would’ve thought you were another of them specialists. People coming and going, I gotta open the gate every goddamn three minutes—”
“Sorry, I’m sort of in a hurry.”
“Some other time, then. Be seeing you.”
Good Christ Almighty. She parked in a space behind the hospital and went around to the front. No point in letting Wasserman know she was here too quickly.
But inside the doors she noticed an unusual silence. The playroom was empty. Her footsteps were too loud in the deserted hallway.
At the elevator, something made her pause. There were four floors in this building. The third, she knew, held bedrooms for the children. But what was above them? She stepped in and pressed the fourth-floor button, but nothing happened. She noticed a slot for a key next to the button. Curious. As she was jamming the button hard with her thumb, an orderly she didn’t recognize hurried around the corner and stuck his arm in the door to keep it open. “You there! The doctor wants to see you in his office as soon as possible.”
She thought of protesting. The orderly was big, heavy through the shoulders. He had her by the elbow. “Come on, Miss Chambers. Right this way.”
He knew my name, she thought. They were looking for her. Why? Did Wasserman know she had taken Sarah out of the facility? Of course he knows. If not, it could only be a matter of time; though Jeffrey had done his best to get them out without being seen, cameras could have caught something, someone would have talked.
The orderly steered her down the hall into Wasserman’s office and closed the door. She found herself alone with the memory of him. Desk swept bare, coat hanging in the corner, a lingering scent of shoe polish and Old Spice aftershave. For a moment she saw him at home in a spotless and slightly outdated apartment, decorated to hide the absence of a woman’s touch. Wasserman was bright and proud and completely socially inept. She wondered briefly if he had trouble finding dates and thought his awful aftershave would help.
All right, okay, let’s put this time to use.
She cracked open the door and checked the hallway; empty. The file cabinets were locked. She found the key in the center drawer of his desk. She found the patient files kept alphabetically by name and flipped through them. Her fingers paused for a moment on Brigham, Dennis, and she thought rather fondly of the poor, sad boy in his baseball hat and white socks; and then she moved on to H.Sarah’s file seemed no fatter than before. Jess scanned it quickly and saw nothing that hadn’t been there the first time. She replaced the file and tried the other drawers on his desk. Locked. A wire end of a barrette would do the trick. You’re getting in pretty deep. But judging from the behavior of that orderly out there, things couldn’t get much worse. This might be her only chance.
She found a barrette in her shoulder bag, crouched, and slipped the lock in twenty seconds flat. Inside the top left drawer was an a
ssortment of pens and pencils, a tape recorder, three pads of legal paper, a Snickers bar wrapper, a half-empty bottle of bourbon, and in the back, a handgun, curled like a blackly oiled snake. She checked it; loaded. What the hell is that fort
No time now. In the bottom drawer were more file folders done up in plastic slipcases and rubber bands. One of them was stamped PROJECT SV-ALPHA. Sarah Voorsanger? Jess took it out and carefully undid the rubber bands, slid it away from static-free plastic. Here were the missing PET scans from a number of intensive tests using radioactive dye to study glucose metabolism and regional cerebral blood flow. Several areas were circled in red marker and labeled.
PET scans were expensive, and the use of radioactive tracers in children was unusual. There were scans from more than fifteen separate tests. She slipped one into her bag.
There was more: the missing family history, transcripts from interviews with Cristina and Ed Voorsanger, a medical diagnosis on Annie Voorsanger…
And then this, the last. A series of charts that seemed to track medication levels. But they were nothing she recognized.
The sound of a doorknob made her skin prickle. She slid the drawer closed but did not have time to lock it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Wasserman stood red-faced in the doorway, wearing a white starched shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He was sweating profusely.
“Get away from my desk. Do they teach snooping in graduate school, Miss Chambers?”
“Excuse me. I dropped my barrette—”
“You’re out of line. I know you took Sarah off the premises yesterday afternoon. That was a very stupid thing to do. It went against my explicit orders, it violated countless number of state and federal laws, and it put my patient in danger.”
