The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark (The Nadia Tesla Series Book 3)

by Orest Stelmach

  “So you know who I am,” Johnny said. “I know who you are. I travelled here to meet you. You’re calling the shots, but I may or may not play along. What do you suggest we do now?”

  Nakamura slid a flash drive memory stick across the table to Johnny.

  “What’s this?” Johnny said.

  “A token of good faith. When you see it on a computer monitor, you’ll understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “That the second half of the formula exists.”

  Johnny’s heart thumped. “After I take a look at it, I’d like to meet with Genesis II.”

  Nakamura straightened the lapels of his jacket. “I’m sure you would. But that’s not going to happen. He will only meet with the boy. He will only meet with Adam. Adam must come to Fukushima. He must come immediately. And he must bring the locket.”

  Nakamura stood up, knocked back the rest of his whiskey, and left.

  Johnny went to the business center to use one of the computers. He slipped the flash drive into the USB port. It contained a single file. The file was called “Genesis II.”

  The file consisted of two strings of chemical symbols. Each string contained four hexagons and a chemical formula. It could have been gibberish or proof the second half of the formula existed. There was only one way to find out.

  Johnny rushed to his room to call Nadia.

  CHAPTER 6

  NADIA SAT OPPOSITE Dr. Eric Sandstrom in his office at Columbia University on Monday afternoon. He was a professor emeritus, a respected radiobiologist who taught one class a week to keep his mind active at age eighty-five.

  “This is interesting,” he said, after studying the symbols Johnny had e-mailed from Tokyo.

  “What is?” Nadia said.

  “It’s a modified version of Five-Androstenediol, just like the one you showed me three weeks ago. Except it contains an additional enhancement. The formula you showed me before had a partial description of two new proteins. This one further describes those two proteins but doesn’t fully define them.”

  “Meaning some symbols are still missing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you draw any conclusions from what you do see, Professor?”

  He removed his glasses, sprayed a lens cleaner on them, and began wiping them with a soft tissue. “Five-Androstenediol is a direct metabolite of a steroid produced by the human adrenal cortex. That steroid is called DHEA. The Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute discovered Five-AED, as it’s called, in 2007. They performed clinical trials using primates with the pharmaceutical company Hollis-Eden. Their initial results were excellent. Close to 70 percent more monkeys treated with Five-AED survived acute radiation syndrome than those that were not treated.”

  “I remember being told about that,” Nadia said. Karel, the zoologist in Chornobyl, had explained Five-AED to her. “I never quite understood why the research project was dropped a short time later when the trials were so successful.”

  “No formal explanation was given,” Sandstrom said. “But it’s a major leap to treating humans from treating monkeys. The scuttlebutt in the scientific community was that the production of white blood cells and platelets was insufficient. White blood cells are essential to life. Platelets promote blood clotting. To increase production of platelets and white blood cells, an additional protein or proteins needed to be introduced to the formula.”

  “Thus creating a modified version of Five-AED.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And could the symbols you’re looking at be part of these missing proteins? Could they be part of the solution?”

  Sandstrom put his glasses on and studied the paper again. “They might be. On the other hand, they might not be. Regardless of how promising the formula looks—and it does look interesting to me—you would simply never know until clinical trials were conducted. No one could answer that question for you by simply looking at chemical data.”

  “Why do you say the partial formula looks interesting?”

  “For the simple reason that it appears to be relevant—incomplete but consistent with the formula that you brought in a week ago. And given you have come here twice, I’ve inferred you’ve gotten them from two different sources. All of which leads me to believe the results of a prior experiment—perhaps in a different country—are being recovered piece by piece.” His eyes widened. “Am I right?”

  Nadia had been afraid of confiding in anyone—even a stately old professor—but what choice had she had? She needed to trust a scientist to understand the formula.

  “Can you at least tell me the scientific source of your discovery?” Sandstrom said.

  Nadia hated to say no, but she had no choice. She remained mute.

  Sandstrom nodded with understanding. “Can you tell me the country of origin?” When Nadia didn’t answer, he leaned forward in his seat. “The former Soviet Union, perhaps? There was an old recluse there. A genius there by the name of Arkady Shatan.”

  Nadia lost her breath for a moment. Arkady Shatan was the name of the Russian scientist who’d conducted experiments in the Zone and supposedly given the formula to Bobby’s father, her uncle Damian. Like Damian, however, Arkady was dead, leaving the partial formula Bobby had been given a mystery.

  “It’s best for both of us if I don’t elaborate any further,” Nadia said. “I have to ask you to trust me, Professor. And in turn, I have to put my trust in you, sir.”

  “You have it, my dear.”

  “Have you spoken to anyone about my previous visit? About the partial formula you’ve seen before today?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not. To what benefit? You asked me to keep our discussions confidential. And I have done so. Besides, at my age, if I told anyone about what you’d shown me, they would assume I was suffering fantasies. It was in my best interest not to discuss your discoveries with anyone.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “Do you understand the medical implications of such a formula? If the risk of radioactive contamination were mitigated, it would open up an entire new world of medical treatments. Millions of lives would be prolonged and saved.”

  “Yes,” Nadia said. “But there may also be military implications, if one country were to get a hold of the formula and keep it from others.”

  Sandstrom frowned. “That could not be allowed to happen. If you disseminated the formula to the world at large that risk would be eliminated. Surely that is your plan, is it not?”

  “Yes,” Nadia said, honestly. “That may be a bit trickier than it sounds, but that’s the plan.”

  Before that plan could even be contemplated, another one would have to be carried out. Nadia and Bobby would have to travel to a country where they didn’t speak the language or know anyone. Nadia wished there were an alternative solution, but there wasn’t one.

  The stakes were too high.

  They had to go to Japan.

  CHAPTER 7

  BOBBY RAN HIS hand along the sleek black suitcase Nadia had just bought him. It was one of those Swiss Army designs, with a neat aluminum handle that popped out with the press of a button. Nadia said it was made for the young business traveler. It looked like something James Bond would stick in the boot of his Aston Martin after a night of gambling. The Swiss sure knew how to make cool things. Bobby imagined closing the trunk of his own sports car . . .

  Come on, focus, man. Focus.

  He wheeled the suitcase to the corner of his room and left it there like a piece of modern furniture he could admire. Then he pulled his old duffel bag out from his closet and began to pack.

  From the moment he read the e-mail his thoughts had been consumed with Eva. Bobby had grown up living with his father’s friend, a disgraced former hockey player. The man became Bobby’s guardian, hockey instructor, and personal tormentor. Bobby simply referred to him as the Coa
ch. Bobby had thought Eva was the Coach’s daughter, but he later learned she was his niece.

  As a fifth grader, he’d looked up to her. She was only a year older, but that year seemed like ten in grade school. Eva didn’t want anything to do with him. They walked to school together, but once they got close she made him wait so she wasn’t seen entering the playground with him. They never talked about anything personal. They only discussed who was going to do what chores around the house.

  When Eva started secondary school, things got worse. She started wearing purple lipstick and makeup, and dressing in black from head to toe. Bobby turned fourteen and started to dream about kissing those lips. He became tongue-tied in her presence. On the rare occasion she looked at him across the dinner table and asked him a question—such as to please pass the butter—his heart would start beating so fast he feared his chest would explode. But she wanted even less to do with him.

  Bobby was known as the freak in school, with his shorn ears and introverted personality. Everyone knew he suffered from radiation syndrome. No one wanted to touch him for fear of getting infected. This was a superstition, carried over from the days following the reactor’s explosion. But superstitions died hard. Radiation syndrome sufferers were shunned by society. Not even his teachers wanted to come near him.

  The secret he and Eva shared was that she suffered from the same disease. Initially, Eva didn’t have a physical handicap like Bobby. She was able to keep her condition a secret. Eventually she had to have surgery on her thyroid, however, and the other kids in school noticed the scar at the base of her neck. Her friends stopped talking to her. She became a freak, too, the female equivalent of Bobby. A month after Eva’s illness was exposed, she started walking into school with Bobby by her side. No longer did he have to wait until she was out of sight so that her friends didn’t see them together. She didn’t have any friends left to worry about except for Bobby.

  On the last Friday of each month, the Coach would pick them up in his car after school and drive them sixty miles to the Division of Nervous Pathologies in Kyiv. The radiation in their bodies was measured and recorded in their dosimetric passports. Then they received physical exams. Most patients went home after the checkup was completed. But not Bobby and Eva.

  Instead, the Coach drove them to the office of a retired radiobiologist named Arkady Shatan. Dr. Arkady, as Eva and Bobby called him, injected them with a special serum. Dr. Arkady insisted that if the serum stayed in their bloodstreams long enough, it would counteract the radiation in their bodies and cure them of their illness. In fact, not only would the serum cure them, Dr. Arkady said it would make them stronger than the average person. The Coach and the doctor swore Eva and Bobby to keep their injections a secret.

  If the treatments brought them closer, the side effects made them inseparable. They shared nightmares, anxiety, and occasional hallucinations. Dr. Arkady said the effects would fade over time. He was right. They faded but never disappeared completely. Attacks came randomly, and still persecuted Bobby, as they had in jail two weeks ago.

  Throughout this ordeal, the Coach had his own problems, and Eva and Bobby suffered accordingly. He drank and gambled his pension away. Sometimes toward the end of the month they wouldn’t have enough money left to buy food. Eva and Bobby became scavengers, scrounging what they could. Stealing radioactive car parts from the Zone of Exclusion was their specialty. They were strong, lean, and agile, and could slip in and out of vehicle graveyards with ease.

  Then one night, life changed forever. They were scavenging in the Zone when a group of hunters stumbled upon them. It wasn’t unusual to find a poacher roaming Chornobyl in search of game for a local restaurant, but these were different kinds of hunters. Their prey was human. Criminals on the lam often hid in the Zone, and these hunters must have thought they were doing society a favor and enjoying a hobby at the same time. Scavengers were by definition criminals, too.

  Bobby saved Eva and accidentally killed one of the hunters by pushing her into the radioactive cooling pond. Eva suffered a severe injury to her leg, and died of a staph infection at the hospital. Bobby was so heartbroken he had trouble getting out of bed for the next six months.

  As he wedged a roll of toilet paper into his duffel bag, Bobby wondered who else knew the phrase Genesis II. Dr. Arkady had died two years ago. There were two possibilities. First, Dr. Arkady’s personal assistant might have heard it. Her name was Ksenia Melnik. She was a sweet woman. Bobby had liked her. And she had a son, Denys, a few years older than Bobby. He was a jerk. Bobby had liked him less.

  Could Dr. Arkady have given Ksenia Melnik the second half of the formula? Could the e-mail have come from Denys? Why would Dr. Arkady divide the formula in two? Because he was an eccentric old man, Bobby thought. Or, for some more logical reason that wasn’t clear yet. There was a method to the madness of brilliant old men. There was still another possibility.

  There could have been another patient. Another boy.

  The problem with both those possibilities was they didn’t explain why the e-mail came from Fukushima. He couldn’t shake the explanation he and Nadia had imagined. That there was a second scientist in Japan, conducting the same experiments as Dr. Arkady, the two of them in constant correspondence until Dr. Arkady’s death. The timeline of events suggested the two scientists would have begun their collaboration before the Fukushima accident took place, but that didn’t make it less likely. Japanese fears of nuclear disaster ran deep. Bobby knew this from school. They were rooted in Japan’s World War II experiences in two cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  “What are you doing?” Nadia appeared in his doorway holding the handle to an older suitcase on wheels.

  “I’m done.” Bobby zipped the duffel bag, slung it on his back, and let the strap fall across his chest.

  “That’s not what I mean. Why are you taking that ratty bag when I bought you a beautiful piece of luggage?”

  Bobby didn’t want to tell her the truth. He didn’t want to scare her. “Because it’s so beautiful. I don’t want to scuff it up. I’d rather look at it for a while and then use it once the novelty wears off.”

  Nadia flashed a smile. “Oh sure. That makes sense.” She sealed her lips tight. “Unpack. I bought it so you could use it, not look at it. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not taking the suitcase. Please. Let’s not argue over this.”

  “Why? You can’t seriously be concerned you’re going to nick it.”

  Bobby had already lied to her about Genesis II. He didn’t want to lie to her again. He took a deep breath and exhaled. “It’ll be hard to run with a suitcase.”

  “What?”

  “It’s easier to run with the bag.”

  “Run? What are you talking about? Who’s going to be running?”

  “We are.”

  Nadia frowned. Suspicion spread across her face. “Why do you say that?”

  “If the formula is real, someone else probably wants it. And if someone else wants it, we’re going to have to run. Just like we had to run from Ukraine.”

  “We’re going to Japan. Not Ukraine.”

  “Doesn’t matter where we’re going. The formula’s the thing. Right?”

  “If it’s real.”

  “Yeah. Right. If it’s real.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

  Bobby shook his head. “No.”

  Bobby kept a straight face but he could feel her eyes penetrate him. They’d only known each other for a year but they’d endured the trip to New York from Chornobyl and his murder charge. Nadia could read Bobby better than his teammates’ parents could read their kids.

  “You were excited when you first got home from jail,” Nadia said, “talking to me like normal. But ever since the e-mail came you’ve clammed up. And now you’re packing as though you’re going to need to run.”

  Bobby trie
d to hold her eyes but couldn’t. His father had been a master con artist. Bobby was discovering he was his father’s son, capable of concocting plots and lying to anyone necessary to extricate himself from a dangerous situation. But he couldn’t stand lying to Nadia. He owed her his life.

  “You do know something,” Nadia said. “Don’t you?”

  Bobby saw the knowing look in her eyes. On the one hand he didn’t want to discuss the treatments with her, relive the horrors he’d shared with Eva. On the other hand, he longed for her to push him a little more so he’d tell her the truth.

  Nadia walked up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. He’d told her never to touch him when she’d done the same thing at the Kyiv train station. But now he didn’t mind it so much. In fact, although he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, he found it comforting.

  “All we have is each other,” she said. “If you know something it has to be related to the e-mail.” Bobby could see her mind working furiously. She was so smart. “The name. Genesis II. You recognized it. It means something to you. Doesn’t it?”

  Bobby nodded before he could decide whether he wanted to or not. He held his breath, waiting for her to yell at him, but she didn’t.

  Instead, she patted his shoulder. “That’s okay. I’m sure you had your reasons. The important thing now is we’re getting on a plane in two and a half hours to go to Tokyo. I need to know if we’re in danger. If Johnny’s in danger. Who or what is Genesis II?”

  Bobby told Nadia about Dr. Arkady, Eva, and the treatments.

  “Genesis II was what Dr. Arkady called us,” Bobby said. “Eva and me. He said we would be a fresh start for mankind. The person with the second locket, who signed the e-mail, the one Nakamura is calling Genesis II, has to be someone who knows about us. Who knows about our treatments.”

  Bobby told Nadia about Ksenia Melnik, Dr. Arkady’s assistant, and her son, Denys.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this right away?”

  Bobby felt himself blushing. “The treatments. We promised Dr. Arkady to keep them confidential. I didn’t want anyone to know. I had some kind of injections. I don’t even know what they were.” He didn’t mention the side effects. They weren’t relevant to their trip and the mere thought of them made him nervous. And he didn’t need to be nervous before a fourteen-hour flight.