Mutation

by Robin Cook

  “Well, we’ll talk about this again,” said Victor. Then he and Marsha left VJ’s room and retreated down the back stairs.

  “Well,” Victor said, “at least he didn’t lie.”

  “I can’t get over it,” Marsha said. “I was sure he was going to deny it.” She retrieved her glass of wine, freshened it, and sat down in one of the chairs around the kitchen table. “He’s difficult to anticipate.”

  “Isn’t it a good sign that he didn’t lie?” Victor asked, leaning up against the kitchen counter.

  “Frankly, no,” said Marsha. “Under the circumstances, for a child his age, it’s not normal at all. Okay, he didn’t lie, but he didn’t show the slightest sign of remorse. Did you notice that?”

  Victor rolled his eyes. “You really are never satisfied, are you? Well, I’m not convinced this is so important. I skipped a bunch of days back in high school. I think the only real difference was that I was never caught.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” Marsha said. “That kind of behavior is typical of adolescent rebellion. That’s why you didn’t do it until you were in high school. VJ is only in fifth grade.”

  “I don’t think forging a few notes, especially when he is doing okay in school, means the boy is going to grow up to a life of crime. He’s a prodigy, for God’s sake. He skips school to be in a lab. The way you’re acting, you’d think we’d discovered he was on crack.”

  “I wouldn’t be concerned if it were just this. But there’s a whole complex of qualities that are just not right about our son. I can’t believe you don’t see—”

  A crashing sound from outside froze Marsha in mid-sentence.

  “Now what?” said Victor.

  “It sounded like it came from near the garage,” Marsha answered.

  Victor ran into the family room and switched off the light. He got a battery-driven spotlight from the closet and went to the window that looked onto the courtyard. Marsha followed.

  “Can you see anything?” Marsha asked.

  “Not from in here,” Victor said, starting for the door.

  “You’re not going outside?”

  “I’m going to see who’s out there,” Victor said over his shoulder.

  “Victor, I don’t want you going out there by yourself.”

  Ignoring her, Victor tiptoed onto the stoop. He felt Marsha right behind him, holding on to his shirt back. There was a scraping sound coming from near the garage door. Victor pointed the spotlight in the direction and turned it on.

  Within the bright beam of light, two ringed eyes looked back at Victor and Marsha, then scampered off into the night.

  “A raccoon,” said Victor with relief.

  9

  Friday Morning

  BY the time Victor got to work, he had himself worked up to a minor fury over the killing of the family cat. With Marsha’s concern for VJ deepening, all they needed was the added problem of harassment. Victor knew that he had to act, and quickly, to prevent another attack, especially since they were progressively worsening. After killing the cat, what was next? Victor shuddered as he considered the possibilities.

  He pulled into his parking place and killed the engine. VJ and Philip, who had been riding in the back seat, piled out of the car and took off toward the cafeteria. Victor watched them go, wondering if Marsha was right about VJ fitting a potentially dangerous psychiatric pattern. Last night after they’d gotten into bed, Marsha had told him that Mr. Remington said that VJ had been involved in a number of fights at school. Victor had been more shocked by that news than by anything else. It seemed so unlike VJ. He could not imagine it was true. And if it was, he didn’t know how he felt about it. In some ways he was proud of VJ. Was it really so bad to defend yourself? Even Remington seemed to have some admiration for the way the boy handled himself.

  “Who the hell knows?” Victor said aloud as he got out of the car and started for the front door. But he didn’t get far. Out of nowhere a man dressed in a policeman’s uniform appeared.

  “Dr. Victor Frank?” the man questioned.

  “Yes,” Victor responded.

  The man handed Victor a packet. “Something for you from the sheriff’s office,” he said. “Have a good day.”

  Victor opened up the envelope and saw that he was being summoned to respond to the attached complaint. The first page read: “Sharon Carver vs. Victor Frank and Chimera, Inc.”

  Victor didn’t have to read any further. He knew what he was holding. So Sharon was moving ahead with her threatened sex-discrimination suit. He felt like throwing the papers to the wind. It just made him fume all the more as he climbed the front steps and entered the building.

  The office was alive with an almost electric intensity. He noticed that people eyed him as he approached, then murmured among themselves after he passed. When he got into his office and as he was removing his coat, he asked Colleen what was going on.

  “You’ve become a celebrity,” she said. “It was on the news that you were the one to discover the Gephardt family murder.”

  “Just what I need,” Victor said. He went over to his desk. Before he sat down he handed the Carver summons over to Colleen and told her to send it to the legal department. Then he sat down. “So what’s the good word?”

  “Lots of things,” Colleen said. She handed a sheet of paper to Victor. “That’s a preliminary report concerning Hurst’s research. They just started and have already found serious irregularities. They thought you should know.”

  “You are ever a bearer of good news,” Victor said. He fingered the report. Based on Hurst’s reaction to his decision to look into the matter, he wasn’t surprised, though he hadn’t thought the irregularities would show up so quickly. He would have guessed Hurst to be a bit more subtle than that.

  “What else?” Victor asked, putting the report aside.

  “A board meeting has been scheduled for next Wednesday to vote on the stock offering,” Colleen said, handing over a reminder slip for Victor to put in his calendar.

  “That’s like getting invited to play Russian roulette,” Victor said, taking the paper. “What else?”

  Colleen went down her list, ticking off myriad problems—mostly minor ones, but ones that had to be dealt with nonetheless. She made notes, depending on Victor’s reaction. It took them about half an hour to get through.

  “Now it’s my turn,” Victor said. “Have I gotten any calls from security firms?”

  Colleen shook her head.

  “All right, next I want you to get on the phone and use your considerable charms to find out where Ronald Beekman, William Hurst, and Sharon Carver were around noon yesterday.”

  Colleen made a note for herself and waited for more instructions. When she saw that was it, she nodded good-bye and slipped out of the office back to her desk.

  Victor started to work through the pile of papers in his in-box.

  Thirty minutes later, Colleen returned with her steno pad from which she read: “Both Dr. Beekman and Dr. Hurst were here in Chimera all day, although Dr. Hurst did disappear for lunch. No one saw him at the cafeteria. Heaven only knowns where he went. As for Miss Carver, I couldn’t find out a thing.”

  Victor nodded and thanked her. He picked up the phone and tried one of the numbers of the security firms, one called Able Protection. A woman answered. After he had been put briefly on hold, a deep-voiced man got on the line, and Victor made arrangements to have his home watched from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M.

  Colleen returned with a sheet of paper which she slipped under Victor’s nose. “Here’s an update on the equipment that Gephardt managed to have disappear.”

  Victor ran down the list: polypeptide synthesizers, scintillation counters, centrifuges, electron microscope . . .

  “Electron microscope!” Victor yelled. “How the hell did that vanish? How did this guy get the equipment off-site, much less fence it? I mean the market for a hot electron microscope has to be small.” Victor looked at Colleen questioningly. In his mind’s eye he saw
the van parked in Gephardt’s driveway.

  “You’ve got me,” was all she could offer.

  “It’s a disgrace that he was able to get away with it for so long. It certainly says something about our accounting methods and our security.”

  By eleven-thirty Victor was finally able to slip out the back of his office and walk over to his lab. The morning’s administrative work had only agitated him to an even more exasperated state. But, stepping into his lab, he began to unwind. It was an immediate, almost reflexive response. Research was the reason he’d started Chimera, not fussy paperwork.

  Victor was walking to his lab office door when one of the technicians spotted him and hurried over. “Robert was looking for you,” she told him. “We were supposed to tell you as soon as we saw you.”

  Victor thanked her and began to look for Robert. He found him back at the gel electrophoresis unit.

  “Dr. Frank!” Robert said happily. “We had a positive on two of your samples.”

  “You mean—” Victor asked.

  “Both blood samples you gave me were positive for trace amounts of cephaloclor.”

  Victor froze. For a moment he couldn’t even breathe. When he handed those samples over to Robert, he’d never expected a positive finding. He was just doing it to be complete, like a medical student doing a standard work-up.

  “Are you sure?” Victor voiced with some difficulty. “That’s what Harry said,” said Robert. “And Harry’s pretty reliable. You didn’t expect this?”

  “Hardly,” said Victor. He was already considering the implications if this were true. Turning to Robert he added, “I want it checked.”

  Without another word, Victor turned and went back to his lab office. In one of his desk drawers he had a small bottle of cephaloclor capsules. He took one out and walked back through the main lab, through the dissecting room, and into the animal room. There he selected two compatible smart rats, put them in a cage by themselves, and added the contents of the capsule to their water. He watched as the white powder dissolved, then hooked the water bottle to the side of the cage.

  Leaving his Department of Development Biology, Victor walked down the long hall and up one flight to the Department of Immunology. He went directly to Hobbs.

  “How are you doing now that you’re back to work?” Victor asked him.

  “My concentration isn’t one hundred percent,” Hobbs admitted, “but it is much better for me to be here and busy. I was going crazy at home. So was Sheila.”

  “We’re glad to have you back,” Victor said. “I wanted to ask once more if there was any chance at all that your boy could have gotten some cephaloclor.”

  “Absolutely not,” Hobbs said. “Why? Do you think that cephaloclor could have triggered the edema?”

  “Not if he didn’t get any,” said Victor in a manner that conveyed case closed. Leaving a somewhat confused Hobbs in his wake, Victor set out for Accounting to question Murray. His response was the same. There was no way that either child had been given cephaloclor.

  On the way back to his lab, Victor passed the computer center. Entering, he sought out Louis and inquired about the evening’s plans.

  “We’ll be ready,” Louis said. “The phone company representatives will be here around six to start setting up. It’s just up to the hacker to log on and stay on. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

  “Me too,” Victor said. “I’ll be in my lab. Have someone get in touch with me if he tries to tap in. I’ll come right over.”

  “Sure thing, Dr. Frank.”

  Victor continued on to his lab, trying to keep his thoughts steady. It wasn’t until he was sitting down at his desk that he allowed himself to consider the significance of cephaloclor in the two unfortunate toddlers’ bloodstreams. Clearly the antibiotic had somehow been introduced. There was no doubt it had turned the NGF gene on, which when activated, would effectively stimulate the brain cells to the point at which they’d begin dividing. With closed skulls unable to expand, the swelling brain could swell only to a certain limit. Unchecked, the swelling would herniate the brainstem down into the spinal canal, as discovered in the children at the autopsy.

  Victor shuddered. Since neither child could have gotten the cephaloclor by accident, and since both got it at apparently the same time, Victor had to assume that they’d both received the antibiotic in a deliberate attempt to kill them.

  Victor rubbed his face roughly, then ran his fingers through his hair. Why would someone want to kill two extraordinary, prodigiously intelligent babies? And who?

  Victor could hardly contain himself. He rose to his feet and paced the length of the room. The only idea that came to mind was a long shot: some rapid, half-baked moralistic reactionary had stumbled onto the details of the NGF experiment. In a vengeful attempt to blot out Victor’s efforts, the madman had murdered the Hobbs and Murray kids.

  But if this scenario were the case, why hadn’t the smart rats been disposed of? And what about VJ? Besides, so few people had access to the computer and the labs. Victor thought about the hacker who had deleted the files. But how would such a person gain access to the labs, or even the day-care center? All at once, Victor understood that it was only at the day-care center that the Hobbs and Murray babies’ lives intersected. They had to have received the cephaloclor at the day-care center!

  Victor angrily considered Hurst’s threat: “You’re not the white knight you want us to believe.” Maybe Hurst knew all about the NGF project and this was his way of retaliating.

  Victor started pacing again. Even the Hurst idea didn’t fit well with the facts. If Hurst or anyone wanted to get back at him, why not old-fashioned blackmail, or just exposure to the newspapers? That made more sense than killing innocent children. No, there had to be another explanation, something more evil, less obvious.

  Victor sat down at his desk and took out some results from recent laboratory experiments and tried to do some work. But he couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts kept circling back to the NGF project. Considering what he was up against, it was too bad he couldn’t go to the authorities with his suspicions. Doing so would require a full disclosure of the NGF project, and Victor understood that he could never do that. It would amount to professional suicide. To say nothing of his family life. If only he had never done this experiment in the first place.

  Leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head, Victor stared up at the ceiling. Back when VJ’s intelligence had dropped, Victor had never even considered testing him for cephaloclor. Could the antibiotic have been sequestered in his body since birth, only to leach out when he was between two and four years old? “No,” Victor voiced to the ceiling, answering his own question. There was no physiological process that could cause such a phenomenon.

  Victor marveled at the storm of events whirling around him: Gephardt’s murder, the possible purposeful elimination of two genetically engineered children, an escalating series of threats to himself and his family, fraud, and embezzlement. Could these disparate incidents be related in some fantastic, grisly plot?

  Victor shook his head. The fact that all these things were happening at once had to be coincidence. But the thought they were related nagged. Victor thought again of VJ. Could he be at risk? How could Victor prevent him from receiving cephaloclor if there was some sinister hand trying to effect just that?

  Victor stared blankly ahead. The idea of VJ’s being at risk had disturbed him since Wednesday afternoon. He began to wonder if his warnings about Beekman and Hurst had been adequate. He got up from the desk and walked to the door. Suddenly he didn’t like the idea of VJ wandering around Chimera on his own.

  Starting out in the lab just as he had done on Wednesday, he began asking if anyone had seen VJ. But no one had seen either him or Philip for some time. Victor left the lab building and went to the cafeteria. It was just before lunchtime and the cafeteria staff was in the final countdown in preparation for the noontime rush. A few people who preferred to get a jump on the other
s were already eating their lunches. Victor went directly to the manager, Curt Tarkington, who was supervising the stocking of the steam table.

  “I’m looking for my son again,” Victor said.

  “He hasn’t been in yet,” Curt said. “Maybe you should give him a beeper.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Victor said. “When he shows up, would you ring my secretary?”

  “No problem,” Curt said.

  Victor checked the library, which was in the same building, but there wasn’t a soul there. Stepping outside, he debated going to the fitness and day-care centers. Instead, he headed for the security office at the main gate.

  Wiping his feet on a straw mat, Victor entered the small office that was built between the entrance and the exit to the Chimera compound. One man was operating the gates, another sat at a small desk. Both wore official-looking brown uniforms with the Chimera insignia patch on the upper sleeves. The man at the desk jumped to his feet as Victor entered.

  “Good morning, sir,” the guard said. His name tag gave his name: Sheldon Farber.

  “Sit down,” Victor said in a friendly tone. Sheldon sat. “I have a question about protocol. When a truck or van leaves the compound, does someone take a look inside?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sheldon said. “Always.”

  “And if there is equipment on board you make sure it is supposed to be there?” Victor asked.

  “Certainly,” Sheldon said. “We check the work order or call electronic maintenance. We always check it out.”

  “What if it is being driven by one of the Chimera employees?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sheldon said. “We always check.”

  “What if it is being driven by one of the management?”

  Sheldon hesitated, then spoke. “Well, I suppose that would be different.”

  “So if a van is driven out of here by one of the executives, you let it go?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” Sheldon said nervously.