“The senator?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I heard one of the doctors calling for Senator Sharp. He was there, wasn’t he?”
Dellaporta turned away. “Well, the news streams are going to be reporting it soon anyway.” She faced him again. “Yes, we think he was lost in the blast.”
“You think?”
“It’s a mess up there.” She cringed. “His room...was just gone. Everything in it.” She sliced through the air with a cutting gesture. “Whoever wanted him dead knew what they were doing.”
“Someone out there doesn’t want his bill to restrict their black-market genetics business, huh?”
“That’s one of the thoughts,” Dellaporta said. She paced at the end of his bed. Stopping, she gripped the rails near his feet. “And that’s a problem for you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Listen, I was on my way here to meet with Dr. Haynes. She’s gone. No one saw her after the blast.”
Chris’s stomach twisted as his memories returned. “She got taken. I saw two guys lift her away.”
Dellaporta’s eyes widened, and her mouth fell open. “This is the first I’m hearing about it. What happened?”
“Two men in masks came out of nowhere and dragged her down the hall. There was a maintenance man, too, that I think was part of it.” Chris’s forehead wrinkled as he struggled to recover the images that now seemed so distant. “And I saw the same man entering the senator’s room minutes before the explosion. He was pushing a cart or something.”
“Damn it. This is worse than I thought.” Dellaporta pulled a hand through her hair and sighed. “You need to get the hell out of here as soon as possible.”
“I don’t think I’m in any shape to be going anywhere.”
Dellaporta moved to the side of his bed. “Look, you don’t really have a choice. I overheard the doctor talking to your nurse. You suffered a concussion, but besides the bruises and aches, you should be fine. But there are a couple detectives trying to appeal for another warrant for your arrest.”
“Why? Jordan posted bail. I haven’t tried to flee the country.”
“The bomb, Morgan,” Dellaporta said. “The hospital immediately released a record of visitors, patients, and employees on the floor at the time to help our department deal with this mess. It included your name as an approved researcher, and your badge was apparently issued today.”
“I was only there to help with the investigation.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. But I didn’t know someone meant to assassinate Sharp.”
“Damn it,” Chris said. “So your buddies think I tried to kill the senator to protect the enhancement business they still think I’m running?”
“That and a couple detectives are throwing around the idea that you used the blast to get rid of some sort of evidence regarding fatal gene mods you’ve supposedly been selling.”
He slammed a fist on the bed. His hand bounced off the mattress, and the gesture proved not nearly as satisfying as he had hoped. “And now you’re going to help me flee the police?”
“No,” she said. “They’d take my badge. I’m just here looking for Dr. Haynes.” She winked. “Now, please, get the hell out of here. Lie low while you do your research thing and I attempt to defuse this situation.” She handed him a sack containing his white undershirt and the slacks he’d worn coming into the hospital. “I just barely managed to sweet-talk the floor nurse into getting these for you.”
Chris pulled the IV from his hand. Dellaporta passed him a piece of gauze from a drawer. He stanched the bleeding and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His joints ached and creaked in protest. He slid his pants up under the hospital gown and then stood slowly, one hand on the bed rail.
“You’re going to risk your job to help me?”
Dellaporta nodded. “But not just you. There are a lot of people suffering now.”
When he unclipped the heart monitor from his finger, the EKG machine emitted a long beep. He peeled the hospital gown off and slipped on his white t-shirt. “Why are risking your tail to help me? What makes you think I didn’t do any of this?”
“I don’t think you’re that dumb.”
“Bullshit.”
Dellaporta grinned slightly. “I lied about being here to check on Dr. Haynes. I’ve been tailing you, Morgan. But really, I don’t think you’re stupid. Why would you put yourself so near the blast if you knew it was coming?” She held her index finger and thumb up, using them to emphasize her point. “You were this close to sustaining worse injuries. Possibly even dying.”
Chris thought to tell her he was already dying. Whatever was killing those others had now found its home in him. “Fine. Keep your dogs off me for as long as you can if you want me to have a shot in hell at figuring out what’s going on with these enhancements. I need to know something from you, though.”
Dellaporta arched her eyebrows to urge him to continue.
“Haynes planned to show me their early genetic sequencing experiments. Has your Bio Unit analyzed the sequences from any of the autopsies you all do have access to?”
“We have. But all we’ve found is genes associated with cancer. Our people haven’t been able to make sense of it yet.”
“Fantastic. And for some godforsaken reason, you and Robin—Dr. Haynes—thought I could figure this out?” Chris stood at the doorway glaring. Before he had started the TheraComp venture with Jordan, he had tirelessly searched for companies willing to hire an ex-con. The scarlet letter attached to his job application from his impetuous decision to peddle genies had prevented his resume from making it anywhere past the refuse bin. Now he had a renowned medical institution and Baltimore’s police department relying on his efforts to thwart a potential conspiracy tied to enhancements.
Dellaporta followed him out of the hospital room. “How likely do you think it is you’ll come up with something?”
“The doctors upstairs don’t think I have a chance. My brain’s probably fried between the concussion, lack of sleep, and the whole getting arrested thing.” He paused and turned to her. “But hell, what choice do I have? I have to figure out something.” He set his jaw and gritted his teeth. “And I will.”
Chapter 15
When Chris didn’t respond to her message, Veronica figured he’d chosen to ignore her. She could understand the sentiment.
But Trevor pressed her to squeeze out more and more information from Chris, and his impatience wouldn’t be good for her health—or that of her family.
She swung her legs as she sat on the stool at The Point. Most of her visits to the Fell’s Point restaurant occurred during Sunday brunches. She had not been able to spend another minute in her apartment, waiting for a response from Chris, while she forced herself to paint another failed landscape. Though she hadn’t torn the canvas from the easel, she had been close.
She had once enjoyed art, enjoyed the escape, enjoyed losing herself in its creation. Now everything she sculpted, everything she painted, everything she designed on her holodisplay felt as though she were dragging a plow through a rocky, barren field. The seeds of inspiration lay neglected, sick and shriveled, and she feared she’d never create anything new, anything pure again.
Veronica took another swig of the rum and Coke. She set it down and twirled the glass, the ice within it spinning in circles.
“Is your boyfriend joining you here?” A muscular man in a tight t-shirt leaned on the bar next to her.
“No, I’m enjoying a drink by myself.” She turned to him, her eyes narrowed. “And I’d prefer to keep it that way.”
The man held his hands up and backed away. “No need to bite.”
Because of Chris’s mess, she didn’t have time to meet anyone new. She’d been too busy tracking down her ex-partner on orders from Trevor. Then again, she didn’t particularly miss having a significant other. She took pride in her independence. When Veronica and Chris had been together, they were never attached at the hip
and maintained a relatively healthy relationship.
That had changed drastically when Chris jumped headfirst into the underground world of enhancements. She had listened to his reasoning and tried to accept the idea that consenting adults chose to purchase his wares with the full understanding these were not actual FDA–approved medical treatments. She’d once experimented with drugs designated as illegal, as was common in her artsy social circles, so it wasn’t as though abiding strictly by the law proved morally black and white to her.
But Chris’s work had never sat well with her.
She confronted him, and he only spurned her. He had turned into another beast entirely.
Veronica took another sip and flipped the comm card over in her hand. She tried to calm herself, still upset at Chris’s silence. But he didn’t know a criminal lord’s lackey had been treating her like a puppet. She couldn’t place the entire blame on him.
She chugged the rest of the drink and pushed the glass forward across the bar.
“Another?” The bartender asked.
Veronica shook her head and pressed the display on her comm card to pay her tab. She wanted to warn Chris somehow, to tell him someone was coercing her into relaying his every move. Hell, she didn’t even know what Trevor and his associates wanted from her amateur PI work. She wondered if Trevor even knew. From what she could tell, the man just did as his boss commanded, just like she did what Trevor told her to do.
She recalled Chris’s words to her when they had ended their relationship. He accused her of being carefree and floating through life directionlessly.
Not anymore. She’d find a way to identify these bastards and bring them down before they could touch her family. But she didn’t know enough about the world of organized biotech crime. She had no idea what she might be dealing with. The one person she knew who did was also the same person who had gotten her into this mess. She had to see Chris.
Chapter 16
The streets filled with cars. Rush hour had descended on Baltimore. Despite the autodriving vehicles, the roads had never been widened or adapted to handle the flux of commuting workers clogging the city during the day.
Chris cursed at the vehicles as they slogged through intersections on their way to the suburbs. He slumped in the back of the cab, craving an iced coffee or an energy drink. Really, anything unhealthy providing him the adequate amount of sugar and caffeine to sustain him for a while longer would satiate him. He worried he’d soon suffer from delirium brought on by his lack of sleep.
And his brief stay in the hospital bed hardly counted as rest. His head began to pound as the painkillers wore off. He needed a coffee and an aspirin.
Hell, who was he kidding? That wouldn’t be enough. What he needed was to wake and realize the entire past few days were a sick nightmare. Or at least a horrible prank someone had played on him. He’d settle for that.
He patted the box on the seat next to him. With all the confusion and emergency personnel clogging up the oncology ward, he’d managed to squeeze up the stairs and sneak his way into the evacuated research laboratory adjoining the department. He had located the biopsy samples Robin had saved for him in the freezer within fifteen minutes. There had been no need to convince any hospital staff why a frayed and bruised man was wandering around—they were all too busy to ask questions—and his temporary researcher badge granted him access to everything he needed.
But he hadn’t found the gene sequencing data she’d promised him and left without them.
His comm card buzzed with another message from Jordan: “How much longer before you get here?”
Chris glanced at the projected map on the taxi’s holodisplay. All the routes to the Tech Incubator glowed in red to indicate heavy traffic. The display estimated an arrival time of fifteen minutes.
Once the cab pulled up to the building, he strode through the entrance. He was glad to see two additional security guards roamed the lobby since the break-in. As fast as his aching body would let him, he sped up to his office.
Jordan beamed when he caught sight of Chris. “Nice to have you back. How was your meeting? You look a little ragged.”
“Very funny.”
Embroiled in their research, neither Hugh nor Jordan had been made aware of the bombing. Chris had needed to call Jordan and catch him up on the events that had transpired on his way to the lab.
Jordan threw an arm around Chris. “Seriously, I’m glad you’re okay. Without you, who would read my latest works? I think you might be about the only fan of my writing.” In his scrounged free time, Jordan wrote short stories and novels that Chris felt obliged to read and admit they weren’t half-bad.
“We’ll have something else for you to write about now.” Chris unloaded the vials and placed them in their freezer for temporary storage. “I managed to grab the samples Dr. Haynes prepared.”
“Without IRB approval?”
“With everything going on over there, I’m not sure we’re getting IRB approval anytime soon.”
“We’re risking our asses if we go ahead with analyzing them. Bad enough you brought them here.”
“I’m well aware,” Chris said. “At least it’s not like we’re manufacturing illegal enhancements.”
“Good point.” Jordan grinned. “I always enjoyed working on the boundaries of the law.”
Chris booted up the gene sequencer by tapping on its holoscreen. “On the boundaries? I think you’ve always preferred working well beyond any legal boundaries.”
“That might be a fair assessment.” Jordan turned to Hugh. “You’re not hearing any of this, right?”
“What’s that, boss?”
“Good man,” Jordan said.
Chris rifled through the samples in the freezer and selected a few for sequencing. “This should be a hell of a lot more pure than working with old, dried-up blood on my clothes.”
“Certainly should be.” Jordan prepared a solution to isolate the DNA. He tapped the small plastic tube to mix the reagents. “I do have a rather intriguing bit of news for you.” Jordan deposited a miniscule fragment of each tissue sample in its own tube.
“I hate suspense,” Chris said. “Spit it out.”
Jordan capped the tubes and deposited them in a centrifuge to spin them down. “Your tissue culture is looking healthier than ever.”
“The vectors I isolated from Novak’s blood and introduced to the cell culture were ineffective?” Chris asked.
“Not quite. I left the culture alone a while before I took a sample of the suspension liquid. To make a long story short, there were viral vectors in there. I separated two distinct populations out by weight using centrifugation.”
“Separate them by weight? So you mean, some were empty—presumably the lighter ones—and others had DNA content, making them heavier?”
Jordan nodded. “That would be a fair assessment. It seemed to me there were empty vectors because they’d already delivered their genetic load into the cells. Remember how we postulated the viral vectors might be replicating?”
“Yes...”
“I think we were right. But I also think these vectors were still transfecting cells. To test them, Hugh loaded the empty vectors with a gene encoding for a fluorescent protein. If it worked, we’d see cells fluorescing green.”
“Sure. Makes sense. Standard procedure for assessing any delivery vector.”
Jordan leaned against the lab bench as the centrifuge machine whined in its last few seconds before slowing. He took out the freshly spun-down samples. “The vectors did an excellent job at delivering the genes. Those cells lit up like stars in the night sky.”
“Okay, so the vectors work. Did you check to see if the cells became cancerous?”
“I did indeed,” Jordan said, clasping his hands behind his neck and leaning backward. “That’s where I’m a bit confused. So far, the cells seem as healthy as ever. I say it’s time we analyze the DNA again to see what’s going on with those cells.”
“Absolutely,” Chris sa
id. “Let’s compare those results with the samples I brought back from the hospital. I’m hoping we can figure out how the DNA from the vectors is affecting the cells on a genetic level.”
“Let’s just hope the damn sequencer decides to cooperate this time. Then we can work on a treatment.”
Chris nodded. “You really think we can do this in time?” Diagnosing and developing a treatment for an unknown disease required a process generally taking years, even decades. Granted, the regulatory hurdles, paperwork, and approval processes set by the FDA sucked up most of that time, but even without those challenges, creating a novel genetic therapy would be no small feat.
“Hell, when we were making enhancements, we pumped new gene mods out within weeks,” Jordan said. He didn’t mention the fact that these were designed with objectives like augmented muscular strength or increased rod cell production within the retina to improve night vision. Such enhancements didn’t require extensive experimentation outside of scouring scientific papers in professional journals, where they could steal existing research and subvert it for their own purposes.
“I’m ready to try just about anything at this point,” Chris said as he stood. With the police preparing to bring him in, Robin disappearing with all her data, and the malfunctioning DNA transfecting his own cells, he felt like a skydiver without a parachute. The best he could do was find a soft place to land.
“I can imagine.” Brow furrowed, Jordan turned and gazed out the window. “I’m just throwing this out there, but from what you’ve observed, these individuals are in for a brutal death.” He faced Chris again. “Would that be accurate?”
Chris nodded.
“Do you think...I know this sounds farfetched.” He rubbed his chin. “Do you think last night’s intruders were interested in our veterinary cancer therapeutics because they think it might treat the cancer afflicting these enhancers?”
“Hell, you might be right,” Chris said. “Dr. Haynes told me they’ve tried practically everything at the hospital. And our therapies have a higher rate of eliminating tumorigenesis than traditional chemo or radiation treatments. But our therapeutics aren’t made to work on humans.”
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 34