by Steve Alten
I waited two days. Experiencing no ill side effects from the first shot, I gave myself a second injection. I was released from the hospital Tuesday afternoon, my cells now saturated with HGH.
I returned to school Wednesday morning. Principal Lockhart greeted me at the student drop-off zone with a warm smile and handshake and confirmed that I’d be going to the ANGEL lab after school. He told me Rachel Solomon was asking about me and I promised I’d stop by before the week was over.
With HGH flowing through my body, the school counselor with the penetrating eyes and mother’s intuition was the last person I wanted to see.
Anya came over to talk to me before first period started and told me I looked much better. Li-ling was her usual self, telling me I needed to eat more, that I had lost too much weight. She suggested that I stop at the local kennel for a snack—a crack about Koreans eating dogs (something I’ve never done). Stephen Ley ignored me, as did most of the other students . . . gotta love high school.
I didn’t. All I cared about was avoiding Rachel Solomon, making it through the day, and getting to the lab.
There was a brief moment of joy when I cut seventh period and met Jesse Gordon in the music room. The two of us jammed for almost an hour—me on my harmonica, him on his acoustic guitar. I impressed him with “Midnight Rambler” by the Rolling Stones, then we did Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and finished with the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues.”
When the bell rang, he escorted me outside where my van was waiting. “Dude, I’ll set up another band practice, just promise me—no more hospital stays. We got the makings of a great band. You were actually smiling when we jammed. I’ve never seen you smile before.”
Jesse was right. Playing music seemed to lighten my soul.
Maybe Anya would see me differently as a musician? But how could I play for her without seeming like a dickwad?
An idea popped into my head. Bill arrived and I challenged him to beat the ANGEL van to Miami. My plan was to be casually playing harmonica to the sharks when Anya arrived—that way it’d seem more natural.
Bill came through and we arrived at the lab ahead of the girls. Things were loose—Dr. Becker was away on business in Washington, DC, so I waited for Anya at the shark canal, serenading the circling predators on my harp as I awaited my audience.
Anya and Li-ling arrived while I was playing “Isn’t She Lovely.” It was meant to be a romantic offering—only Li-ling ruined the moment by snatching the harmonica from my lips midverse.
“Shut up with that squawk box, I already have a headache.”
Li-ling was assigned to work with Dr. Kamrowski in one of the two labs on a nocturnal schedule, while Anya worked in the two daylight labs changing out rat feed bowls and refilling water bulbs.
I was given a stack of files and told to enter the data.
I selected an empty computer station adjacent to the observation room. Before me glowed the luminescent-blue aquarium. The tank was empty, Taurus having been returned to the shark canal days earlier. I knew the bull shark’s harvested stem cells—or whatever was left of them—would be held in cold storage in one of the four labs’ walk-in refrigerators.
Timing was everything. I needed to grab as many IV bags as I could stow in my backpack without getting caught.
The staff broke for dinner at six fifteen. I told them I wasn’t hungry and continued to work until seven. With no one around, I hacked into the lab’s security system, bringing up the facility’s video monitors on my laptop. Sixteen black-and-white rectangular images appeared across my screen, each box a live feed taken from somewhere inside the ANGEL facility. I zoomed in on Anya in Lab A, then confirmed Dr. Kamrowski and Li-ling were still working in the darkened confines of BSL3-D. The Aussie was in his trailer—probably watching porn; the rest of the staff were gone for the day.
It was time.
Leaving the observation room, I headed for BSL3-C, one of the two labs on a daylight schedule. Entering through the anteroom, I waited for the door to seal, then entered the lab.
The rats were asleep. Rolling quietly past their cages, I approached the walk-in refrigerator at the end of the room. Gripping the handle, I yanked open the aluminum door and pushed myself inside.
The temperature was set at a chilly forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Wooden shelves held open file boxes of sealed plastic pouches, each stem cell sample coded by species and date.
It took me a few minutes to locate Taurus’s samples—only nine of them left. I grabbed three pouches. Then I heard the anteroom door open.
A moment later, I rolled out to find Anya pushing a cart holding rodent feed and a twenty gallon container of water. She looked up, startled, as I exited the refrigerator.
“Kwan, what are you doing inside the walk-in? The coolers are off-limits to interns.”
“Sorry. No one told me.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“Getting my dinner.” I unzipped my backpack, retrieving a turkey sub wrapped in plastic and a can of soda. I opened it wide so she could see my school binder and laptop, along with the vinyl bottom of the backpack—the three pouches of stem cells hidden beneath the false interior liner.
“You’re lucky Dr. Becker didn’t catch you. There’s a refrigerator in the staff kitchen, from now on use that.”
“I will. Uh, where exactly is the staff kitchen?”
“Exit the lab, turn left, and go to the end of the corridor.”
“Thanks.” I wheeled past her, sweat beads dripping down my face, despite the cold.
“Hey, Kwan . . . I enjoyed listening to you play. Maybe you could play for me again sometime when Li-ling’s not around.”
“That would be great. I’m playing in Jesse Gordon’s band; maybe you could come to our next Saturday jam session?”
“Okay.”
Leaving her to feed the rats, I exited through the anteroom into the corridor, the door sealing shut behind me. I rolled down the empty hallway toward the kitchen, detouring into the men’s bathroom.
Pushing my way inside a handicap stall, I pulled out my laptop and checked the security cameras in BSL3-C. Anya was inside the refrigerator, looking around for anything that appeared out of place.
Accessing the stored video, I replayed the time line from where I had entered the walk-in, erasing the minute and thirty-four seconds which showed me rooting through the stem cell inventory. With that section deleted, it now appeared as if I had rolled in and removed my sandwich and soda from a shelf—something I had done before leaving the walk-in. Hopefully, no one would notice the missing minute and a half of video.
Shutting down the laptop, I washed my hands and exited the bathroom. I ate my dinner in the staff kitchen, worked another twenty minutes mindlessly entering data, then took the elevator up to the main floor. I exited past the unmanned security desk and wheeled out to the circular drive where Bill was smoking a cigarette beside the van.
It took fifty minutes to drive back to my grandmother’s house. She was already in bed by the time I keyed in. I waited another ten minutes just to be sure, then set to work.
Sun Jung kept a second refrigerator in the garage. Before leaving for school, I had left a small Tupperware bowl of lettuce in the veggie compartment. Opening it now, I removed a handful of salad and hid two of the three stem cell pouches inside the plastic container, burying them beneath lettuce. Then I replaced the bowl and went to my bedroom, locking the door.
Inside my closet, hidden in the pocket of my varsity letterman jacket was a half-full IV bag of saline still attached to an intravenous needle. I had removed it from my arm during the last day of my hospital stay between staff shifts, informing the incoming nurse that I had finished my last bag an hour earlier and no longer needed fluids as I was leaving the next morning. She never bothered to check.
Using one of the empty HGH syringes, I methodically drained
needle after needle of the shark stem cells, injecting them into the bag of saline. When I was through, I hid the evidence in the false lining of my Doors backpack. Then I set my CD alarm clock to awaken me an hour earlier than usual.
I pulled myself out of my wheelchair and undressed, my upper body shaking with adrenaline. I rigged the IV bag of saline and stem cells to my bed’s overhead bar; then, using an alcohol pad, I sterilized the IV needle and the flesh along my left forearm.
I had spent eleven days in the hospital. The first twenty-four hours were almost unbearable. I was depressed, emotional, and trapped. Trapped in a body that anchored me to a wheelchair. Trapped in a house with a relative who was more caretaker than grandmother.
As the days passed, my thoughts turned to a place I had not visited since the accident . . . suicide. If there was an afterlife, then I welcomed it. If there was a price to pay for taking the easy road out, then I’d do my time in hell . . . anything had to be better than this.
On the seventh day Anya had come to see me, offering me a third option—an option of salvation. If the stem cell therapy worked, I would no longer be held a prisoner to my paralysis. If the HGH failed to prevent the mutation, a few hours of suffering and I’d be dead.
Either way, I’d be free.
I opened and closed my fist, causing my veins to become more pronounced. My heart raced as I slid the needle into the largest blood vessel in my forearm. Reaching up, I adjusted the drip, registering the cool sensation of a foreign fluid entering my bloodstream.
I tossed my T-shirt over the support bar, covering the IV bag just in case Sun Jung entered unannounced. Then I laid my head back on my pillow, anxious to see what card fate would deal me next.
14
Fate had dealt my father a card from the bottom of the deck—the bottom being the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean—a monstrous 497-mile-long gorge which marked the border between the North American and Caribbean sea plates.
Accessing the crate in several hundred feet of water had been a moderate challenge; retrieving the same object five miles beneath the surface was something altogether different. Water pressure increases at a rate of 14.7 pounds-per-square-inch for every thirty-three feet of descent—a unit of measure defined as an atmosphere. Unlike fish, mammals and submarines have air cavities, rendering them vulnerable to the effects of water pressure. A scuba diver equipped with the right combination of gases can descend to three hundred feet—beyond that, the pressure squeezing inward on his lungs and nasal cavity would be lethal.
Water pressure constricts equally around an air cavity. A diver enclosed in a JIM suit can venture as deep as 1,968 feet, while attack subs like the USS Philadelphia could barely descend beyond half that depth due to the oblong configuration of their hulls. The Alvin submersible, designed to explore the deep, is essentially a bathyscaphe—a round hull surrounded by a motorized chassis. While the Alvin can reach depths of 13,000 feet or more, a vessel lacking an air cavity, like the remotely operated tethered vehicle Jason, can descend even farther to 19,600 feet.
The Puerto Rico Trench plunged to a depth of 28,373 feet, exerting more than 12,600 pounds-per-square-inch of water pressure. The five-mile mark had only been achieved by a handful of piloted vessels, the last being movie producer James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenger, which had reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench—the deepest location on the planet—seven miles below the surface of the western Pacific.
My father was running a black ops mission—he was in no position to commission a privately owned sub, let alone one belonging to a public figure. His only option was to procure Nereus, a remotely operated hybrid untethered vehicle, developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to explore the planet’s deep-sea trenches.
While an elixir of shark stem cells were seeping through my body, my father was en route to Washington, DC, aboard a private jet, owned and operated by Mr. Nicholas Byron, an oil executive with British Petroleum. The Admiral needed Byron to act as his front man in order to rent the Nereus without drawing attention to Operation Strawman. Byron would contact Woods Hole, claiming his company had located a deep water drill site and required the use of a deep-sea underwater vessel to map out the ocean floor. For his role as an intermediary, the oil exec would receive half a million dollars in cash—half the sum Sabeen Tayfour had saved the Admiral when the teenager had murdered the two salvage divers.
My father considered the American commandos loose ends. While he needed their skills to locate the Philadelphia and salvage the missing package, he feared the former Navy SEALs might talk once they learned the identity of the downed submarine. Sabeen’s orders had been simple—kill the divers after they had recovered the package, then send the ship’s remains to the bottom of the trench.
The Syrian freedom fighter’s failure to retrieve the Iranian crate had jeopardized the entire mission, forcing my father to make other arrangements. As far as the Admiral was concerned, Sabeen owed him. The intoxicating beauty would have to make it up to him when he returned to the ship.
The private jet touched down in Washington at 7:25 a.m. Two hours later, Nicholas Byron had secured the delivery and rental of one of Woods Hole’s two operational Nereus subs. One problem—the next available vessel was being used in Guam and would not be free for at least two weeks.
Admiral Wilson was not a happy camper.
Having dealt with one “fire,” my father left the private jet, exited the hangar, and climbed in the back of an awaiting limousine to deal with the next challenge at hand.
Barbara Becker had flown to DC to procure far more than half a million dollars in funding. After years of intensive research, the ANGEL director believed she had finally resolved the genetics version of a perpetually mutating Rubik’s cube. Before she committed to entering the next phase of her cancer protocol—human trials—she needed capital.
Admiral Wilson stared down the sharp-tongued academic seated across from him in the back of his limo. “You’re asking for a lot of money, Barbara.”
Dr. Becker removed a three-page report from her briefcase and handed it to my father. “Genetics is expensive, Douglas. Preparing thousands of doses of an anticancer vaccine—assuming we now have it, is an even more expensive process.”
The Admiral glanced at her report. “I need to know how effective this vaccine will be on a surviving populace caught in a nuclear gray zone. How quickly can these stem cells neutralize lethal doses of radiation?”
“That’s the reason we’re using sharks, Doug. Their stem cells mobilize and mutate faster than any other donor subject we’ve tested. You need that when dealing with the survivors of a nuclear explosion.”
“I need a timetable.”
“How many doses of vaccine are we talking about?”
“Upwards of half a million.”
Dr. Becker swallowed hard. Was the Admiral planning an invasion? “That’s a lot of vaccine. Even with an expanded staff—eighteen months at best. That’s assuming you can ram the study through the Institutional Review Board.”
“Forget the IRB. We don’t need their approval on this one.”
Jesus, what have I gotten myself into? “Admiral, with all due respect, I can’t begin human clinical trials for a cancer cure without IRB approval.”
“The Defense Department overrides the Review Board. I need vaccines ready inside of thirty days.”
Becker smiled. “Thirty days? Douglas, this isn’t Tylenol we’re mass-producing. It’s an immune system booster using live shark stem cells—stem cells generated by real sharks. I’d need to hire local fishermen to net at least fifty more bull sharks—where do I put them? I’d need new tanks . . . filtration systems. I’d have to hire six more marine biologists just to administer the white cell stimulant.”
“Barbara—”
“Plus I’d need cold storage units and a dozen new apheresis machines—the list is endless.”
/> The Admiral gripped her arm. “We’re not bombing another country. Intel intercepted messages about a possible nuclear attack on US soil—a suitcase nuke, packing roughly fifteen kilotons. About the yield of Hiroshima.”
The blood drained from Dr. Becker’s face. “On American soil? Where?”
“A major city, that’s all we know. That and the fact that the uranium was produced from an Iranian nuclear reactor.”
“Sons of bitches.”
“Thirty days, Barbara. Every vial of vaccine saves a life.”
“Don’t put this on me, Admiral. You knew 9/11 was coming and you let that happen. Why don’t you and the rest of the assholes in the Pentagon do your jobs this time around and save them all?”
The limo stopped, the driver having arrived at Dr. Becker’s hotel.
“We’re doing our best, Dr. Becker. You do yours. Generate as much of the vaccine as you can. The funds will be wired into your account later this afternoon.”
“Yeah, well you can triple that figure and call it an early Christmas present. Maybe I’ll even add your son on full-time; we could use his brain.”
My father reached out and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back inside the limo. “What about my son?”
“Kwan was selected as an intern; we have him doing data entry. You didn’t know?”
“We don’t speak.”
“Well, maybe you should. He’s a smart kid. One day that vaccine you’re funding may just help him to walk again.”
“No! Nothing for Kwan. No vaccine . . . no internship.”
“Why the hell not?”
“For starters, he’s not to be trusted. Check your firewall—he’s probably already hacked into your computer files.”
“Come on, Admiral—”
“This is nonnegotiable, Barbara. I know my son. I want him off the project.”
