by Tom Grace
After closing the cooler lid, the doctor stripped off his gloves and looked in on his patient.
“How is she?” the doctor asked.
“Groggy, but coming around,” the nurse replied. “Pulse and blood pressure are normal.”
“Good. Have water and ice chips ready,” the doctor advised. “She will be very thirsty.”
The doctor retrieved the cooler from the lab and exited the suite into the residential portion of the apartment.
“Here are the samples,” the doctor said.
Peng set down his teacup and met the doctor in the middle of the waiting room. He stood a full head taller than the man who appeared relieved that his part was now complete. Peng also noticed that the doctor had left the door he had passed through open, exposing portions of the private area. Years of training as a spy taught him to quickly take in his surroundings, and his eyes reflexively surveyed what he could see of the medical suite. Two curious items caught his attention. The first was a rolling suitcase with new airport baggage tags bearing the route identifiers FCO (Rome), CDG (Paris), and HKG (Hong Kong). The second hung from a wire hanger beneath a clear, plastic dry cleaner bag—the religious habit of a Roman Catholic nun.
SIXTEEN
GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA
5:00 AM
Nolan’s pre-dawn rousing came in the form of a matronly nurse dressed in floral scrubs, who summoned him from a dreamless sleep with a soft voice that danced in his ears like a siren call to a Caribbean island. His consciousness surfaced slowly, drawn to the sound of his name.
“I know it’s early, Mr. Kilkenny, but we don’t want to be keepin’ that poor child waitin’ any longer, now do we?”
His mind quickly recalled the who, what, where, how, and why of his present situation.
“No, we don’t,” Nolan replied.
“Praise the Lord, he speaks.” The nurse’s face beamed in the dimly lit room. “If you would, please take care of any business you might have in the bathroom, and change into these while I call up an orderly.”
Nolan rolled out of bed and collected the hospital gown and ankle socks from the nurse. By the time he changed and completed his abbreviated morning ablutions, Roxanne arrived with a tall latte.
“You really didn’t have to get up for this,” he said. “I know you’re as jet lagged as I am.”
“I’m still on Rome time, so it’s not all that early,” Roxanne countered. “And I promised your father that I would hold your hand from start to finish.”
“I hope you brought a good book because I’ll be out until sometime this afternoon.”
“I have a couple new thrillers on my iPad.”
The nurse had returned with a wheelchair powered by an orderly who looked like a candidate for the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
“I don’t really need that,” Nolan said. “I can walk.”
“Hospital rules,” the nurse countered. “That and you might hurt Tyrell’s feelings.”
Nolan surveyed the mountainous man standing behind the chair. “And I wouldn’t want to do that, would I?”
“No,” Tyrell replied with a drawl that was heavy as molten lead. “Plus that gown you wearin’ gets a bit drafty up the backside.”
Nolan quickly grabbed the gown slip behind his back and sat in the chair. “Good call. The last thing anybody needs to see is my sorry behind first thing in the morning.”
“I think it’s kind of cute,” Roxanne said.
“Take Mr. Kilkenny and his lady friend down to pre-op,” the nurse said, suppressing a giggle. “And treat him nice, he’s doin’ a very kind thing today.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tyrell replied.
Under Tyrell’s steady hand, the wheelchair moved effortlessly through the hospital corridors. The whole place was beginning to stir as the night shift prepared to cede the reins to those who toiled by day. As they neared the area of the hospital that housed the operating rooms, Nolan saw other patients en route for surgery.
“You really here to help that boy with the bad liver?” Tyrell asked.
“Yeah.”
Nolan felt a bear paw of a hand land on his shoulder and give him a gentle squeeze.
“That’s cool.”
Tyrell slapped a circular plate on the wall, activating a pair of automatic doors labeled authorized personnel only in large red letters. Nolan felt a rush of air as the doors swung open; the space beyond was pressurized to keep any airborne germs from wafting in from the corridor. He recalled accounts of battlefield medics from the Civil War and World War I and realized barely a century had passed since physicians even washed their hands between patients. Infection was the enemy and even a draft of air could carry death for the gravely ill.
Inside pre-op, he saw several other patients lying on gurneys. Some were talking with concerned loved ones. Others were already sedated. Nurses and doctors moved purposefully about the room, checking charts and schedules. The room felt tense with anticipation.
“How are you this morning?” Irwin asked as she entered from the opposite side of the room.
“I slept well.”
“That’s good. Let’s get you up here,” she said, patting an empty gurney.
“Thanks, Tyrell,” Nolan said as he stepped out of the chair.
Tyrell gave a quick nod and turned back the way he came. Nolan sat on the edge of the gurney and spun himself into a supine position. Roxanne stepped to the side as a nurse quickly checked Nolan’s vital signs and Irwin recorded the results on his chart. Everything was all within the norms. The nurse then swabbed Nolan’s hand and inserted an IV catheter.
“You’re being prepped for an IV,” Irwin explained. “Just a saline drip to start. As it gets close to show time, the anesthesiologist will give you something to take the edge off. Once you’re in the operating room, he’ll send you off to Never Never Land. Then my team and I will get busy.”
“Just remember, you’re only taking a piece,” Nolan said.
“Always save the liver,” Irwin said in a passable imitation of Dan Aykroyd’s SNL parody of Julia Child.
Nolan smiled. “I loved that sketch. Is Monty Python’s Live Organ Transplants bit in your repertoire?”
“Memorized. It’s a required part of training for this specialty.”
“Then I am truly in good hands.”
The pager clipped to a lanyard around Irwin’s neck emitted a sharp alarm. She silenced the device and quickly scanned the text message scrolling across its LCD screen.
“Damn,” Irwin cursed.
“What?” Nolan asked.
“Zeke just coded,” Irwin replied, her mind racing into overdrive. “Sit tight and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Roxanne clasped Nolan’s hand as they watched the doctor race through the doors. He recalled the same pained look of concern on the faces of the physicians who tended to his wife and son in their last moments. He closed his eyes and prayed.
Nolan and Roxanne patiently waited for Irwin to pass through the automatic doors. She returned a little more than an hour later with eyes red and dark with grief. He sat up as she approached his gurney.
“We lost Zeke,” she said numbly.
“I can tell.” Nolan placed his free hand on her arm.
“We were so close. If only we’d found you sooner.”
“If—that’s a lot of responsibility for such a small word,” Roxanne said. “We know, and I’m certain Zeke’s parents know, that you moved heaven and earth for their little boy.”
Irwin nodded, choking back her sorrow.
“Are his folks still here?” Nolan asked. “I’ve been where they are now, and I’d like to pay my respects.”
“That’s kind of you. I’ll have a nurse unplug your IV while I scrounge up a wheelchair and get you discharged. Once you’re dressed, I’ll take you to them. It was so kind of you to come all this way for Zeke.”
“It was the right thing to do,” Nolan replied.
SEVENTEEN
Nolan revisited his own gri
ef with the Oakleys and spoke with them in a way that only common experience could allow. The loss of a child leaves a scar like no other, and only those who bear that particular wound understand the extent of the damage. As Nolan prepared to take his leave, Zeke’s mother offered him a photograph of their son, a pensive black-and-white of a boy with eyes wise beyond their years.
He slipped the photo into his shirt pocket and left the grieving parents with a heavy heart. Outside the counseling room, he found Irwin and Roxanne waiting for him.
“How’d it go?” Roxanne asked.
“All things considered . . . ”
“There’s something that has just been brought to my attention that you should be made aware of,” Irwin said.
“What?” he asked, curious.
“Something about you and Zeke. Please come with me.”
The doctor led them through the labyrinthine corridors of the clinical research level to a suite titled Molecular Genetics. Inside, she rapped on the frame of an open door and the young woman inside beckoned them to come in.
Millie Pugh stood just a hair over five-four in a simple blue A-line shift dress and comfortable flats. Upon entering her office, they saw that she was standing in front of a large screen wall monitor and viewing a dizzying image through a pair of electronic goggles.
“That is blinding,” Nolan said.
“It’s beautiful,” the young woman countered. “You just aren’t looking at it properly.”
She pulled the goggles from her face and handed them to Nolan. He held them in front of his eyes and the image resolved into an elegant, spiraling, three-dimensional double helix.
“I stand corrected.” Nolan said then handed the goggles to Roxanne, who was clearly stunned as well by what she saw.
“I’d like to introduce Millie Pugh,” Irwin offered. “Millie is the one who found your needle in the genetic haystack of the donor registry.”
“A pleasure to meet you both.” Pugh said. She then motioned them to a circular conference.
“Dr. Irwin says there’s something about Zeke Oakley and me that I need to know,” Nolan said to Pugh.
“Yes. To start, you were a great match for Zeke Oakley. In fact, you were an amazing match, possibly the best non-familial match I have ever seen. To work in genetics and bioinformatics, you have to have a head for numbers, and I do. I took a closer look at your numbers and you were such a fantastic match that the odds pushed beyond the realm of statistical probability. That image I was looking at,” Pugh motioned to the monitor, “is you, or to be precise, a piece of your genetic code. Once I got your blood samples, I began mapping your genome.”
“Did I sign a release for that?” Nolan asked.
“It’s in the boilerplate for screening,” Irwin replied.
“So you’re poking around in my DNA, and you found what exactly?”
“I haven’t mapped your entire genome yet, but I’ve done enough to say with an eight-digit certainty that you are not a non-familial match for Zeke.”
“I thought you just said Nolan was a great match for Zeke,” Roxanne said.
“He is. He’s just not a non-familial match. Mr. Kilkenny, you are a familial match. It’s a combination of luck and hard work that we found you, but you were a fabulous match for Zeke because you are a very close blood relative.”
“How is that possible?”
“Let me show you.” Pugh went to her wall monitor and tapped a few commands into the keyboard to display a two-dimensional image of a bar chart. “What we’re looking at is a map of a specific piece of DNA in yours and Zeke’s genomes. In this snippet, I can trace bits of information that are passed essentially unchanged from father to son.”
“Are you saying I’m Zeke’s biological father?” Nolan asked. “That’s not possible.”
“I am not suggesting that you are Zeke’s biological father, and other aspects of your respective genomes bear this out. What I am very certain of is that you and Zeke share a common parentage.”
“So he’s my brother? Again, it’s impossible.”
“Is your father dead?” Pugh asked.
“No, but my mother is, and long before Zeke was born.”
“Your mother doesn’t factor into this. The common elements indicate only that you and Zeke share a common father. Zeke Oakley is your half-brother.”
EIGHTEEN
ROME, ITALY
9:45 PM
Aldo Vezzali carefully loaded fifty sealed blood vials into the hematology analyzer. The bench top device was smaller than a commercial espresso maker yet contained a sophisticated laboratory capable of accurately analyzing one hundred blood samples per hour—a feat that just a decade earlier would have taken days. It reduced Vezzali’s job to that of a technician who loaded and unloaded samples and kept the device operational.
As an altar boy in his youth, Vezzali recalled counting the Sunday collection with his father and the other ushers. While the men sorted and counted the bank notes, he and the other boys carefully fed baskets of coins into a machine that sorted them into metal bins by denomination. These were then counted and wrapped by another machine for ease of depositing at the bank after the morning mass on Monday. His present job in this medical lab was essentially the same except that instead of coins he was counting the various types of cells found in human blood.
Vezzali’s lab was in a modest, windowless building in an industrial area. He had a handful of employees, and the building’s only visitors were couriers delivering either blood samples or lunch orders. The work was repetitive but very steady, providing Vezzali with a reliable stream of income that lately he’d increasingly diverted to his more exciting interest in gambling.
He was alone in the lab this evening. This happened whenever there was a backlog of samples to be processed—quick turn-around was crucial to keeping his clients happy and maintaining his cash flow. A few batches of samples had arrived near the close of business today, but not so many that they couldn’t have been dealt with tomorrow and their results transmitted before the physicians finished their morning cappuccino. Vezzali remained tonight because he had no choice.
A buzzer droned, indicating someone was at the receiving door. He started the analyzer and a pipette stabbed into the first vial in the tray. He rose as the buzzer droned again and arrived at the door as the person outside impatiently depressed the button for a third time.
Vezzali checked the security camera and saw an immense man standing alone in a halo of light in front of the door. Matteo Molfetta wore a black leather jacket and dark pants, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He had a thick head of black hair with matching eyebrows and mustache and a full beard that descended down his abbreviated neck to the collar of his shirt. Vezzali opened the door.
“About time,” Molfetta complained, his voice gravelly.
“Your cigarette, please,” Vezzali said. “I cannot have any smoke contaminate my lab.”
Molfetta glared but dropped the butt on the concrete walk and ground it under his heel.
Vezalli stepped back to admit his guest then closed the door.
“Do you have it?” Molfetta demanded.
Vezzali nodded. “This way.”
He led Molfetta to an area of the lab occupied by rows of refrigerators with glass doors and hulking freezers. Digital LED displays atop each of the units indicated the precise temperature inside to a tenth of a degree. Vezzali stopped in front of one of the refrigerators, unlocked the door and retrieved a small rack holding several test tubes of blood.
“That is his blood?” Molfetta asked.
“Si, the blood of the new pope.”
“Prove it.”
Vezzali pulled one of the test rubes from the rack and took a picture of the barcode label with his phone. The application in the phone tied into the lab’s wireless network and retrieved the identification information linked to the barcode.
“Physician: Leone, Romolo,” Vezzali read. “He is the pope’s physician. Patient: Yin,
Daoming—the man’s given name before becoming Pope Gousheng. It says here that the patient is a seventy-three-year-old male who resides in the Vatican. I have processed blood from this patient for Leone once a month since November. This is vial number two of five containing this month’s sample of the pope’s blood. Three vials are sufficient for the battery of tests we do on the blood. The rest are extra, in case one of the tubes breaks or becomes contaminated.”
Vezzali handed the test tube to Molfetta. “Hold on to that carefully.”
“This tube is empty,” Molfetta said.
“Yes, it is,” Vezzali replied as he tapped the touch screen on his phone and made an entry.
“What are you doing?” Molfetta asked.
“Recording that the vial you are holding cracked due to temperature change—it happens sometimes—making the sample useless. We destroy damaged samples: they go out weekly in our biomedical waste for incineration. Our waste will be collected tomorrow morning, so by midday this vial will officially cease to exist.”
“Show me.”
Vezzali held his phone up for Molfetta’s inspection. The entry indicated the vial in his hands was rendered useless and destroyed by the lab.
“Satisfied?” Vezzali asked.
“Si.”
Vezzali pocketed his phone, took the vial from Molfetta and discarded it into a biomedical waste container. He then led his guest to a lab bench to retrieve a small cylindrical container made of stainless steel. He unscrewed the container’s lid to reveal the clear sealed top of an inner chamber. The inner chamber looked like the cylinder of a revolver, only with small test tubes in place of bullets. Vezzali refastened the top of the container and then pulled an empty fifty-milliliter tube from the box on the lab bench, holding it for Molfetta to see.
“I loaded six tubes just like this one with ten milliliters of the pope’s blood. Each tube was frozen for two days at minus-eighty degrees Celsius. The container holding the tubes will maintain that temperature and keep the samples viable for up to one month, as long as the inner chamber is not opened.”