Enhancement (Black Market DNA Book 1)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “I understand.”

  “I left you out to dry as soon as the PD came knocking. It wasn’t right, my man. I want to make it up to you. I want you to think about this. I don’t approve of you and that hot-tempered girl trying to bring down a genetic enhancement ring all by yourselves. I don’t think you can win.”

  Chris leaned back on the couch.

  Sitting down beside him, Jordan sighed and shook his head. “Still, I’m not going to let you do this alone. You’ve got my resources at your disposal, so long as we can maintain a certain level of inconspicuousness. Even though I don’t agree with finding this businessman, if you need anything, I’ll do my best to be there for you. Please, think this through.”

  Chris patted Jordan’s shoulder. “I appreciate it. I do. For now, could I just get a couple of aspirins?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The steam and heat encircled Chris, numbing the throbbing in his head. As a child, he’d experienced almost daily headaches. Children’s pain relievers could never quell the intense pain. His headaches rendered him bedridden on their worst days. Any amount of light would pierce his eyes like a thousand tiny daggers digging into his brain.

  He’d found respite in the shower’s embrace. Each drop of water contributed to a beautiful sonata of relief. The humid air expanded and cleared his sinuses, letting him breathe fresh, new air, and enjoined the constricted vessels beneath his skull to dilate, bringing with it the promise of fresh oxygen. No amount of medicine suited for children’s pain relief could produce the same effect.

  Now he sought to rid himself again of the pain in his head. His neurologist could never explain the root of his migraines, resorting to ancient myths of associations with a minor congenital heart defect that consisted of a tiny hole in his atrial septum. The hole allowed the mixing of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood but was not large enough to warrant percutaneous intervention. Because of this, the neurologist had referenced a few studies that claimed an association between an existing septal defect and migraines.

  The defect still existed. Without any kind of intervention, it had not magically plugged itself. Yet he had outgrown the migraines for the most part. Now they struck him at times like when he’d been convicted and sentenced to prison or when he’d left Veronica or when he’d found out his mother had died of treatable liver cancer because she’d refused nanotreatments, chemotherapy, and irradiation in favor of homeopathic remedies. His headaches hit him in times of extreme stress.

  Stepping out of the shower, he tousled his hair with a towel. Steam obscured the mirror, and only a vague pinkish shape stared back at him from the fog. The last remnants of his headache seemed to undulate like sirens from an ambulance racing into the distance. Slight, weak waves of this distant pain broke against his skull.

  Maybe this was what it would feel like to keep moving forward, to keep confusing himself as he sought more answers. More headaches, physical and otherwise.

  He opened the door, and a rush of cool air fought to beat back the escaping plumes of humidity from the bathroom. Tracy sat on the bed, her legs crossed and her shoulders scrunched, as she studied a leather notebook. Vincent’s notebook.

  “If Jordan won’t help us, we’ll have to do this on our own.” Tracy glared, though she didn’t look up at Chris.

  The towel wrapped around his waist, he sat beside her. “He said he would help. He doesn’t want us to get hurt, but he’ll help us.”

  She exhaled. “Sure, I guess that’s nice. But I still don’t trust him.”

  “You don’t trust him?” Chris folded his arms across his bare chest. “After he put us up here? After he risked his neck analyzing the samples?”

  Tracy put the notebook down in her lap. “It’s not that I don’t think he has good intentions. It’s just that we should keep anything else we find out, anything else we do, between ourselves. If we tell Jordan and the police interrogate him—or worse, the businessman does something to him—it’d be best if they know less about what we are up to.”

  “It’s not like we know anything anyway.”

  With an accusatory frown, she pursed her lips. “Seriously?” Her frown gave way to a triumphant smile.

  “I don’t understand you. One minute, you’re pissed and stomping off, and the next you have that goofy grin spread across your face.”

  She pointed at Vincent’s notebook. “It’s because I found something.”

  The letters A, U, C, and G lined the page. “What the hell is this?”

  Sticking her finger between the pages to hold her place, Tracy flipped through the other pages in the notebook. A smattering of doodles and words erupted across the pages. She stopped again at the entry littered with the random letters. “Every page but this one just seems normal.”

  “All right, so you think Vincent went through a crazy spell?”

  “Far from it,” Tracy said, the smirk spreading across her face again. She cocked a dubious eyebrow at Chris’s blank expression. “You don’t follow? Need me to walk you through your elementary biology again?”

  His eyes widened as he mouthed an “Oh.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I almost missed that. Holy shit.”

  “‘Holy shit’ is right. Looks like RNA, doesn’t it?”

  Chris nodded. “Does this translate to anything? It seems too short for any useful protein.”

  “It does seem to translate to something,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a protein.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I already checked it against our protein databases to see if it matched anything, but I came up with nothing. I think it’s a message.”

  Tracy’s infectious smile spread to his face. He squinted at the letters. “So, we just need to translate each three-letter codon into an amino acid.”

  She nodded. “I already knocked out the first few codons: arginine, glutamic acid, and asparagine. Then, he left a little space.” She squinted at the paper. “I think it’s a space, anyway. There are spaces that appear a little larger between the codons.” She pointed at another three-letter codon. “See, here? This is a stop codon. I’m guessing it’s at the end of the sentence because there’s another space here.”

  Chris studied the page. “I think you’re right.”

  They translated each codon into an amino acid, then identified each amino acid with its corresponding single-letter code. When they had completed the page-long code, both of them stared at the jumbled letters.

  “Ren kavfman has material in chris morgan, terrence hart, rrady allen, gqrdqn katz. If dead ask them.”

  Scanning the letters with his fingers, he mouthed the letters aloud. “This can’t be right.”

  “Yes, I’m certain it is,” Tracy said. “And those Qs in the code? Obviously, they’re actually Os, since there is no amino acid that translates to an O. And, I think we both know where we’ve seen a few of those names before.”

  “Randy’s list.”

  “Right. At least, most of the names are from Randy’s list. But there’s one that I don’t recognize: Ren Kavfman.”

  “Who do you think Ren Kavfman is?”

  She scoffed. “I don’t think it’s a Ren Kavfman, for starters. If I need to guess, it looks like Vincent subbed in an R in Brady Allen, since there are no single-letter codes for any amino acid that corresponds to B. So Ben sounds like a much more believable first name, doesn’t it?”

  Chris rolled his eyes. “I suppose you’re right. But, Kavfman?”

  “Maybe Kaufman, with a U?”

  He nodded. “Sounds better than Ren Kavfman. There’s no Ben Kaufman on Randy’s list.”

  “No. There isn’t,” Tracy said. “But what makes me shit my pants is that last sentence.”

  He cringed, both at her choice of words and at the phrase that she highlighted with her index finger. “‘If dead, ask them?’ It sounds like Vincent knew more than he ever let on. But if this was a cryptic warning, this is pretty lousy code.”

  “Yeah, you’ve
got that right.” Tracy sighed. “I bet he banked on the fact that your average prison guard—or prisoner, for that matter—would not have a frigging clue what the hell all those As, Us, Gs, and Cs meant. But he’d be smart enough to know that if anything did happen to him, if he did get murdered, county forensics would be able to decode that.”

  “He wanted whoever killed him, or whoever might be responsible, to get caught,” he said. “He suspected something, didn’t he? I mean, he knew all these names, for God’s sake.”

  “It seems to me like your roommate was guilty of more than just killing his wife and her lover, huh?”

  “Not my roommate. Cellmate.”

  Tracy scoffed. “Is there a difference?”

  Chris rolled his eyes and turned back to the message as they had translated it: “Ben Kaufman has material in Chris Morgan, Terrence Hart, Brady Allen, Gordon Katz. If dead, ask them.”

  He reasoned that the list of names here at least accounted for most of the names in Randy’s notebook. But he had never talked to Terrence or Brady or Gordon. He had no idea how they were connected with him.

  Not only did Ben Kaufman appear nowhere on Randy’s list, but enough Ben Kaufmans existed online to prevent them from identifying any particular suspect. They tried to filter their results with terms related to genetic enhancements, drug delivery, and any other biotech jargon they could conjure, but just as many questions remained. None of the Ben Kaufmans they found appeared to be their suspect. On the other hand, if their Ben Kaufman was related to the businessman, Chris doubted the man would be foolish enough to list himself in any public directory.

  Tracy fell back against the bed, her arms spread across the gray comforter. “Who the hell are you, Ben Kaufman?”

  He let his body drop beside her. “I want to know what Vincent meant by the part about the ‘material is inside’ me and those other guys.”

  With her index finger, she prodded his chest. “You have hidden superpowers. Kryptonite.”

  “Come on.” Chris swatted her hand away. He turned on his side. “Besides, kryptonite makes Superman weak, not strong.”

  Tracy raised an eyebrow. “Does it matter?” Then, her expression froze. Her eyes wandered away from him and seemed to stare at something far past the walls of the bedroom. “What if this Ben Kaufman is your businessman?”

  He raised himself up on an elbow. “How do you figure that?”

  “It might explain his interest in you. Let’s just operate under the assumption that ‘material in’ you could just be a mistake. Maybe, it should be ‘material on’ you.”

  “I don’t buy it. Vincent used Qs as Os.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t make a slight mistake.” She sat up on the edge of the bed again. “This issue’s trivial, anyway. What we can ascertain, I think, is that Ben Kaufman has an interest in you, Terrence, Brady, and Gordon. Since the other three are dead, all he has left is you. Don’t you think it’s odd that you get released from prison early, right after getting stabbed, and that businessman—let’s just call him Ben, now—shows up to offer you a job?”

  Chris shrugged. “Of course, I’ve always found it odd.”

  “I think you’ve got something he wants. Or know something that he wants to know.”

  With a disbelieving laugh, he shook his head. “I wish I knew what that was. I’d give it to him if it meant all this craziness would stop.”

  Tracy dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “I think he’s trying to protect you until he’s ready for something.”

  “The guy who threatens to hurt anyone I have an association with is trying to protect me?”

  “Absolutely. I think he wouldn’t care about hurting anyone else, but any threat against you is just hot air. He wants you scared so you’ll do what he says.”

  “Then how do you explain the guys chasing me down?”

  “Maybe they didn’t chase you down to hurt you.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I mean, the guy said he wasn’t going to hurt me, but why else would he chase me?”

  “They probably wanted to protect you from me.”

  Chris’s eyes widened as he stared at Tracy. Her lips drew tight and her eyes appeared cold. Then she grinned.

  “Okay,” she said. “Maybe not from me, but they might have thought something or someone threatened your life. That blue-eyed guy almost killed you, but he let you go.”

  His hand shot up to his bruised neck, and he massaged it. “Yeah, if I recall correctly, the other guy with him said something about me being the one.”

  “The one.” She grinned again. “See, you’re the One destined to save the world.” Her voice lifted in a majestic, throaty tone. “You have the kryptonite.”

  He frowned. “Please, let’s just focus on figuring out who Ben Kaufman is.”

  “You are being such a sour puss.” Tracy slapped Chris on the shoulder.

  He winced but forced a weak smile to subdue her humor. “I guess I just have a hard time finding all this funny when I saw a coworker murdered and the guy responsible is threatening to kill everybody I know.”

  Tracy’s smile faded. “Sorry.” She placed a hand on his leg, giving him a quick squeeze. “I’ve got a strong hunch that Ben wants something from you and he’s trying to protect you.”

  “Didn’t do such a good job of that if he let all the other guys die on his watch.” Chris furrowed his brow and shook his head. “In fact, those buffoons of his killed Randy.”

  “Yes, but his name was not in Vincent’s little code like yours. Ben doesn’t have materials on or in Randy, whatever that means. Maybe Randy was after you and they took him out for your benefit.”

  “That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

  “No shit. None of it does. I’m just trying to offer suggestions here.” Tracy crossed her arms across her chest. “What have you thought of so far?”

  Chris exhaled, closing his eyes. The throbbing in his head returned. He brushed his hair back and shivered. He got off the bed and knelt down next to the duffel bag with the clothing he had retrieved from his apartment. Digging around, he found a pair of boxers. He pulled them on and then grabbed a white t-shirt.

  The white scars along his sides, a few long, several jagged, stuck out against his olive complexion. Accompanying the dull pain in his head, fragmented memories of that day in the prison rushed back to him. He recalled the blur of arms reaching out at him, the pricks and tears, the wet, warm blood.

  Then, just as quickly as his attackers had fallen on him, they had been tackled and lifted from him by his ostensible protector. Lash.

  Lash’s hulking muscles, his blood vessels dilated and bulging, his eyes bloodshot. Beads of sweat rolling over his dark skin. For all the man’s aggressiveness, there was a gentleness in Lash’s eyes as the action subsided, as the guards beat back the riot.

  No, not just a gentleness, but a sorrow. Lash did not feel any sympathy for him. In fact, he recalled Lash barking at him to stay still. Nothing but rote duty showed in the way he’d treated Chris.

  “Oh God.”

  Tracy froze while tying her hair back behind her head. “What?”

  “Lash protected me. Not because he gave a shit about me, but because he needed to. He was supposed to. And the look on his face after the riot ended...he looked like he could cry.” He looked at himself in the mirror again. “He didn’t give a shit about me.” He turned to Tracy. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this Ben, or whoever, wanted to protect me. Maybe he tried to protect those others too. And Lash—I bet there were others—had been conscripted to protect us in the prison. Lash failed, though. You could see it in his face. I was the only one left after that riot. And he knew it. Oh, God. Yes. He knew it. If Ben threatened me, I bet he threatened Lash.”

  He plopped onto the edge of the bed, tracing his fingers over the stubble on his chin and cheeks. A shiver coursed down his spine and through his arms.

  “What’s Lash’s real name?”

  “What?” Chris’s head shot arou
nd to face her.

  “What’s his real name? I want to see if you’re right.”

  “How?”

  Tracy raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  Holding one hand up in a protective gesture, he scratched at his head. He hadn’t even known Vincent’s real name; how could he remember the name of a man he hardly knew? Then he recalled one man who had known Lash from outside prison. The man had taunted Lash, called him out, blackmailed Lash in front of other prisoners. He had yelled from the safety of his own cell.

  During recreation, Lash had silenced the man. But it wasn’t that man that had spoken Lash’s name. A couple of security guards had broken up the fight. One had announced Lash’s name loudly, telling Lash to come with him immediately. “I think it was Eli, or Elijah, Bierma.”

  “Unique enough.” Tracy input the name on her comm card. Her mouth fell open. Chris imagined he could hear her heart stop beating. “When did the riot happen?”

  “October twenty-second.”

  “Three dead in a fire that police suspect may have been a result of arson. Marianne, Beatrice, and Calvin Bierma. Survived by their husband and father, Elijah Bierma, incarcerated in Fulton State Prison. October twenty-third.” Her eyes left the comm card projection and caught Chris’s. “This can’t be a coincidence.”

  “No. No, it can’t be.” He grasped at his throbbing temples as his blood pulsed in his ears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lost deep in sleep, Tracy rolled to face him. Even in the darkness, her lips curled ever so slightly in a satisfied little smile. Chris draped an arm over her shoulder, hugging her warm body against his. He stared into the shadows cast by the dresser nearest the window, where the soft glow of streetlights plunged through the windows. No matter how hard he pressed his eyelids closed, he could not fall asleep.

  His thoughts drifted to the past. In high school, he had tried out for Spring Awakening and Into the Woods. He’d been first in line for The Crucible, too. But try as he might, he’d never scored a single part. Instead, the drama instructor would put him on set construction duty. Mrs. Sage had told him he wouldn’t ever amount to much of an actor. Tomorrow, he would need to forget her damning words. As the reality of his situation with Ben Kaufman—if that’s who the businessman really was—sank in, he realized that he would need to feign innocence the farther he delved into Kaufman’s illegal genetic enhancement exploits and the surrounding deaths.