by Tom Grace
The driver parked the car in a space marked for visitors. The station chief accompanied Nolan and Roxanne into the reception area. Once cleared by security, they were led to the prison superintendent’s office. The bulldog of a man rose with some effort from behind a desk that looked original to the prison’s construction.
“Welcome to Fresnes Prison,” the superintendent offered perfunctorily. “Please, have a seat.”
Like the superintendent’s desk, the wooden guest chairs were sturdy and ancient.
“It is most unusual to receive a request such as yours,” the superintendent said as he returned to his seat. “Our prisoners are rarely of interest to anyone outside of France. Some, like Martineau, are of little interest to anyone at all, aside from their lawyers.”
“Her crimes aside, Dr. Martineau is not your typical prisoner,” Nolan offered.
“Very true.”
“How has she been?”
“Quiet,” the superintendent replied. “Of the thirteen hundred prisoners housed here at Fresnes, roughly one hundred are female. Among those, she is the most reserved. She keeps to herself, tends to her duties in the hospital and does not cause trouble.”
“A model prisoner then?”
“In a way, she behaves like a woman in mourning.”
“Considering what her crimes cost her, that’s understandable,” Roxanne said.
The old-fashioned intercom on the superintendent’s desk emitted an electronic buzz. He pressed a black button on its face.
“Oui.”
The combination of his atrophied high school French and the overlay of static on the disembodied voice dashed any hope Nolan had of understanding the brief conversation.
“Martineau has been moved to an interview room,” the superintendent reported. “If you will follow me.”
The superintendent led them through the administrative wing to a barred entry. Beyond a pair of interlocked gates, Nolan saw the long corridor that formed the spine of the prison complex. The near side gate automatically slid open, and the superintendent motioned for Nolan and Roxanne to step into the space between the gates. The station chief shook his head to indicate he would not participate in the interview. A uniformed guard stood on the opposite side of the far gate.
The first gate slid closed with a metallic clang and, once secured, the next gate rattled open. Nolan immediately felt his skin crawl, a visceral response as he recalled his recent, albeit brief, incarceration in Chifeng prison. Though a world apart, the claustrophobic gravity of both prisons was the same.
Nolan and Roxanne followed the guard down the main corridor, their footsteps echoing loudly off the concrete floor and solid masonry walls. They turned onto the first intersecting hall, and then stopped at a windowless, gray steel door. Using a two-way radio, the guard called for the door to be unlocked. They heard a dull buzz as the dead bolts retracted from the steel frame and the guard pulled the door open.
Inside, they saw a woman dressed in jeans and a pullover sweater. She sat on a metal chair at a metal table, both anchored to the floor, with her forearms resting on the tabletop. Chrome steel manacles encircled her wrists, bound by a chain fastened to a steel loop in the center of the table.
Martineau looked up as they entered the interview room and arched an eyebrow quizzically but said nothing. Nolan nodded to the guard, who called for the door to be closed. They studied each other for a moment before Nolan sat down opposite her. Roxanne remained standing.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with us, Dominique.”
“I agreed to no such thing,” Martineau replied. “I had little choice in the matter. Had I known it was you—well, I would prefer solitary.”
“If you felt coerced, I apologize. That was not my intent. I had hoped to solicit your professional opinion voluntarily.”
“My professional opinion?”
“I had planned to make a shameless appeal to your intellectual vanity.”
“Oh. Is that the Nobel Prize in your pocket, or are you just excited to see me?”
Nolan smiled. “This isn’t a conjugal visit.”
“But you could have enjoyed me here on this table,” she said, stroking the cold steel surface seductively. “Though as I recall, our roles were reversed last time.”
Nolan recalled the dingy room in the Montmarte. “I’m still not a fan of bondage.”
“Pity. Your lovely friend could watch or—”
“Thank you, no,” Roxanne firmly closed the door of Martineau’s provocation.
“As enticing as your physical charms still remain, despite your incarceration,” Nolan said, “my interests lie with your brain and not your body. I need your opinion on a matter of science—your field of expertise to be exact. Are you interested?”
“I,” she hesitated for a moment, “I am no longer on—how do you Americans put it—the cutting edge.”
“Given how far ahead you were when we last met, the rest of the world may only now be catching up with you.”
Martineau momentarily dropped her guard and blushed at the compliment. But as quickly as the crack appeared, it was gone.
“And for me?”
“Quid pro quo? In exchange for your expert opinion, I would submit a letter on your behalf to the Ministry of Justice. It may mean nothing, but it might help shorten your sentence.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked, incredulous. “At my trial, you demanded the harshest possible sentence for me. I was thankful France did away with the death penalty or you might have sent me to the guillotine.”
“My position on the death penalty remains unchanged, even for people who so thoroughly deserve it,” Nolan replied. “I was very angry with you then for what you and your associates had done.”
“And now?”
“I recently spent some time with a man who lost half his life in a prison that makes this place look like one of the world’s finest five-star hotels. He doesn’t have an ounce of bitterness toward those who wrongly imprisoned him, and he even prays for them every day.”
“He sounds like a saint,” Martineau said skeptically.
“That remains to be seen, but he’s got a good shot at it.” Nolan leaned in close to Martineau. “You are paying for your crimes and, for what it’s worth, I forgive you.”
“How very generous of you.”
“On the contrary, my motives are very selfish.”
“But why come to me? As I recall, you were very well connected in the scientific community. Your associate Ames, perhaps?”
“Oz is good,” Nolan admitted, “but you are far and away my first choice for this particular problem. It has to do with reproduction.”
“And you said this was not to be a conjugal visit,” Martineau said playfully.
“I think the techniques required for this particular reproductive method are well beyond what we could accomplish in this room.”
“I see,” Martineau said, intrigued. “What exactly is the problem?”
Nolan pulled a file from his briefcase and set it on the table between them. Martineau opened the file and began skimming the pages. After a few moments, she looked up and arched an eyebrow at Nolan.
“Paternity?”
He nodded.
“Yours?”
“No.”
“This analysis appears to be in order.”
“Yes, it does,” he agreed. “The problem is, the parents of the child have never met.”
“It is a question of acquiring the genetic material,” Martineau mused, “Does the father have an identical twin brother?”
Nolan shook his head. “He also has not participated in any artificial insemination procedures, nor has he made any donations to a sperm bank.”
“Has he undergone any recent surgical procedures, something requiring a general anesthetic?”
“Routine colonoscopy,” Nolan replied as he considered the questions. “You think his doctors might have masturbated him while he was unconscious?”
“It is possibl
e that some method of extraction was employed. But this doesn’t really make sense.”
“How so?” Nolan asked.
“The doctor who performed the colonoscopy would have a very different field of specialty from one involved in infertility and reproduction. Then there is the matter of the surgical team—you could not do such an extraction in front of your colleagues.”
“Unless they were all in on it,” Roxanne offered, “which violates the KISS rule.”
“The KISS rule?” Martineau asked, unfamiliar with the term.
“Keep It Simple, Stupid,” Nolan explained. “Over complication is the enemy of proper planning, so you should always try to keep things as simple as possible in order to compensate for the things that will inevitably go wrong.”
“Ah, I understand. You are correct. For the surgical team to possess any knowledge of the conspiracy would be a dangerous complication. Is this gentleman married or otherwise involved sexually?”
“He’s a widower of several years and, to the best of my knowledge, his only sexual partner was his late wife.”
Martineau noted the certainty in Nolan’s voice but withheld comment.
“Ejaculated material, from nocturnal emission or masturbation, does not survive well outside the human body,” Martineau said. “Genetic material can be recovered from sheets or clothing, but the sperm would not be viable unless it is collected immediately and preserved properly.”
Nolan suppressed a shudder at the thought of his father in a sexual context. He recalled his father once saying that every generation thinks they invented sex and cannot imagine their parents involved in such an activity. Considering his father as just a man felt disrespectful.
“Time is the enemy,” Martineau continued, “if you are employing conventional means for conception.”
“Which brings us back to your specialty: unconventional means.”
Martineau smiled wryly. “The people who produced this child of questionable origins, what did they want?”
“Money. The alleged father is a successful businessman who has quietly amassed a modest fortune over the past fifty years. Once paternity was established, they offered to absolve the man of his paternal obligations in exchange for a one-time payment of five million dollars that would be placed in trust for the child.”
“What about the mother?”
“We know nothing about her, not even her name,” Nolan replied. “According to her lawyer, she accepted responsibility for her part in the liaison that produced the child and would raise him on her own. That’s where the story breaks down.”
“How so?”
“The boy recently surfaced due to a genetic defect. Immediately after the paternity issue was resolved, he was given up for adoption. The birth mother apparently kept the money, but not the child.”
“I see,” Martineau said, her thoughts racing. “So the objective was blackmail: money in exchange for silence.”
Nolan nodded.
“Does the child’s genetic illness run in the family, or was this the first occurrence of this particular defect?”
“There was a problem with the boy’s liver and, to the best of my knowledge, there is no family history on the father’s side. So it could be maternal—perhaps we can use that to identify the mother.”
“Assuming the defective gene originated with her,” Martineau said. “At the time of my arrest, I was following several very promising lines of research into reproductive technologies. But for each of my successes, I endured many failures. DNA has the power to define the fabrication and operation of an incredibly complex organism, yet it is itself both elegantly simple and extremely delicate.”
“Do you think the genetic defect might be a problem of how the child was made?” Roxanne asked.
“It is quite likely. My research in human reproduction evolved from the breeding of prized animal lines. And while I was able to fabricate human sex cells artificially, I never initiated conception in the lab.”
“Why?” Roxanne asked.
“The error rate with the cells was too high. I could fabricate sperm cells that would pass a DNA test but would not result in a viable embryo. I was making progress, but—c’est la vie.”
Nolan knew that all of Martineau’s research at her Vielogic lab ceased at the time of her arrest, though others may have resumed it in the intervening years.
“Can you tell from the DNA test where the error is?” Nolan asked.
Martineau shook her head and pointed at the paternity test report on the table. “These tests have a narrow purpose only, and they survey just a small fraction of the genome. This gives me a glimpse of a few discrete segments of DNA. That is like trying to understand Paris by looking at handful of small streets scattered across the city. If I had a complete genome readout of both father and child, I could determine if there were any fabrication errors.”
“I think that can be arranged. So you think this is possible, that a child could be produced this way?”
“I was on the verge of it a few years ago, but my method was for a different purpose. To do what you suggest would be simpler in that you would only want one offspring rather than breeding a valuable bloodline. A clean sample of the paternal DNA and a donor egg are all that would be required.”
“What would you need to do something like this?”
“A decent biological laboratory and someone with advanced training in molecular medicine, genetics and human reproduction,” Martineau replied with a trace of admiration.
“In short,” Nolan said, “I’m looking for someone like you.”
TWENTY-TWO
VATICAN CITY STATE
6:45 PM
“So Nolan, this woman you met with,” Cardinal Donoher began, “this French scientist, she said that what you think’s been done to your father is actually possible?”
“While not easy to do, she believes it’s scientifically feasible,” Nolan replied.
Donoher sat with Nolan at a rounded end of a peninsula table flanked by Roxanne Tao and Sean Kilkenny. The four were in a secure teleconference room in the sleek, modern offices of Vatican Intelligence. The clandestine facility was located beneath the building that housed the Vatican Mosaic Studio, and it was known to those who labored there as the Catacombs.
Where the conference table abutted the wall, an image of Bill Grinelli gazed out at the quartet from a large flat screen monitor. He sat in a similar conference room in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he presided as resident technology guru at MARC. Grinelli possessed a keen intellect, a mischievous sense of humor and a zest for life that earned him the sobriquet “Grin” that he wore like a badge of honor. He was a few years older than Nolan and wore what remained of his receding mane in a brown-gray ponytail. A pointed goatee encircled his beaming smile and, on his forearm, Grin sported a tattoo of an impish elf seated on a crescent moon scattering pixie dust.
“Quite a thing to wrap my head around,” Grin admitted.
“Try being accused of it,” Sean said.
“It’s one thing for the truth of an indiscretion to rear up and bite you in the arse,” Donoher said, “that’s just poetic justice—but this takes lying to a whole new level of evil. To unnaturally fabricate a child solely for the purpose of monetary gain, what has this world come to?”
“Just because you can do a thing does not mean you should,” Roxanne waxed philosophic.
“That has always been the danger when humanity’s intellect outpaces its wisdom, particularly in the realm of life science,” Donoher said. “Human life is a miraculous gift from the moment of conception, not a disposable commodity.”
“While it’s all well and good that an expert confirms what we suspect is theoretically possible, the immediate question is how do we prove it?” Sean asked. “How do we prove that I was not this child’s father, at least not in any conventional sense.”
“There’s nothing at all conventional about what we’re discussing,” Donoher offered.
“Follow the money,”
Nolan said. “Zeke Oakley’s adoption didn’t include a five million dollar trust fund, so your money went somewhere else. If we can find the money, we can find out how this whole con was engineered and who was responsible.”
“Start with the lawyer,” Roxanne said. “He brokered the deal and took the money.”
“Assuming he was in on the deal,” Grin said. “He may have been unaware of Zeke’s unusual origins and simply a legal front for this scam.”
“Regardless if he was in on it or not,” Roxanne countered, “he can still point us to the mother.”
“What about adoption records?” Grin asked. “Might be some useful nuggets of data there.”
“Can you handle that?” Nolan asked.
“With my usual discretion, of course.”
“If you require—how did you put it—some electronic camouflage for your digital inquiries,” Donoher offered, “I believe you know your way around our network from your recent stay at the Vatican.”
“A kind offer that I’ll keep in mind,” Grin said.
Sean nodded gratefully to Donoher, who replied with a conspiratorial wink. The bond between the two old friends was unbreakable.
“And while you’re sifting data, take a run through the lawyer’s finances and see if you can find any links between him and the adoption agency. If he was involved in placing Zeke, that goes a long way toward proving his role in this affair.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Sean asked.
“Your job is to be the ambassador, and if we need some high level assistance, we’ll call,” Nolan replied. “And while Grin does his digging, Roxanne and I will head to New York to have a chat with the lawyer.”
TWENTY-THREE
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
THURSDAY, MARCH 19; 8:25 AM
Peng walked through the security doors in the cavernous Arrivals Hall at JFK Airport. The Igloo cooler he collected in Hong Kong hung from his right hand, and a small-wheeled suitcase trailed from his left. He quickly spotted a man in a dark gray suit holding up a sign with Peng Shi spelled out in English and Chinese.