Dellaporta remained silent, and he took it as a sign of her assent.
“Obviously, I don’t have the whole puzzle in front of me, but I do have a few of the corner pieces. We have Sharp’s mysterious disappearance and the high probability that he’s an enhancer. I’d guess Chris’s abduction is also part of whatever plot is afoot. Maybe the break-in at our lab and his abduction are all part of Sharp’s plan to try to fix this mess.”
“Strange, though, isn’t it?” Dellaporta said.
“The whole thing is strange, yes. But I get the feeling you’re insinuating something else.”
“Maybe.” She paused. “You pose some interesting questions, but why would the senator fake his own death in a bomb blast at a hospital? For someone whose public image is important to his success, I’m not sure how he’ll explain recovering from that. The news streams are reporting him dead, for the most part. If he is an enhancer, I don’t think he’d appreciate the scrutiny resulting from his miraculous second coming.”
Jordan paced around the lab. “So you’re saying there’s someone else pulling the strings here.”
“I’m not saying anything. The official department stance dictates we’re to remain close lipped on the whole thing.”
“That seems to be a departure from the standard ‘blame Christopher Morgan’ stance your comrades have been preaching.”
“Possibly,” she said. “Although interest in Chris hasn’t waned. Like I said before, you and I might think he was abducted, but everyone else thinks he’s part of this.”
Worry filled Jordan. “They don’t think Chris is the one behind the senator’s disappearance and this ploy, do they?”
Her lack of an answer told him everything he needed to know.
“Christ. This is out of control,” he said.
“You’re telling me. It’s frustrating as hell to know someone else could be at the helm of this madness. But without any evidence, it’s hard to sway anyone to consider other options. Especially when I don’t have an alternative suspect.”
Jordan rubbed his head. Neglected from his time spent in the lab with Hugh, the stubble poking out of his scalp scratched at his palm. “But what about the connections to Sharp? Surely your department found the same traces of IGT’s genetic delivery systems that we have. Add that to his disappearance and his suffering from the same affliction as the enhancers, and you’ve at least got a hell of a story.”
Dellaporta laughed. “A story isn’t good enough. Do you think the commissioner wants us to launch a misguided investigation into a supposedly dead U.S. Senator without a stronger case? If we turned out to be wrong—or, hell, if we just couldn’t scrounge up enough hard evidence to prove we’re right—then we’d look like a bunch of buffoons. I can see the news streams now, lambasting the department for being unable to control the genie problem in our city, so we’re blaming it on a dead senator whose big campaign promise is to crack down on street enhancements.”
“So you’re in a bit of a bind. But am I completely off base?”
Again, the detective hesitated. “God, you know I’ve already said too much. Why don’t you come in, make a statement on what you’ve found in the biopsied tissues?”
Now Jordan laughed. He and Chris hadn’t even received IRB approval to investigate the tissues taken from the cancer patients at the hospital. Besides, he had no intention of delivering any official statement to the police if he didn’t have to. His work in illegal enhancements might be buried in the past, but he didn’t want to offer anyone the chance to dig it up again. “You must be joking, detective. That would not work for a number of reasons I’d rather plead the Fifth on.”
She sighed. “I’ll be honest with you. I need something to help convince the others to start seeing things my way. Otherwise, I’m afraid Chris is going to be wasting away wherever these people have taken him—if he’s even still alive.”
A shiver crawled through Jordan’s skin. There was a time when he’d thrown lavish parties in his penthouse, when people clamored to be a part of his social circle, but those same individuals had disappeared when Jordan abandoned his illegal enterprises. As soon as he’d transformed his illicit business ventures into something drawing less legal scrutiny, lying low appeared more appealing than flaunting his unscrupulously obtained wealth. He’d ceased the exuberant lifestyle and, almost as quickly, he’d found himself alone in his own largesse. It was the cost of his business.
Now his only friend, the human being closest to him on this planet, was imprisoned somewhere, if he wasn’t already dead. “I will find him, whether your department is going to help or not.”
“My hands are tied,” Dellaporta said. “You know I’d help if I could.”
“There’s no need to feign sympathy, as if this is all an elaborate gesture of goodwill on your behalf.” His voice sounded sharper, less patient than before. But he didn’t try to restrain his frustration. “You’ve been trying to use Chris to help you uncover the real depths of this enhancement market. If he succeeded, if he discovered a cure for those patients, if you squeezed information out of them and found out what exactly is going on, you’d be the hero. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Now that he’s out of the picture and the days have gone by, you’ve lost hope in finding him, too.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I want to do my job. Of course I want to get to the bottom of this. If I could do something more, I would. I’ve already risked my ass by helping you and your lab tech out there. Good lord, I know what you used that facility for, and you better bet your ass my buddies at the office would have a field day if I told them about it. But there’s nothing more I can do. I’m sorry.”
Exhaling, Jordan willed himself to calm down. “No, you’re right. I can’t expect you to feel the same way I do about finding Chris. You’ve got your priorities; I’ve got mine.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and forced the words out of his mouth. “Thank you for your help. I do appreciate it.”
He ended the call before she could say anything else. Hugh looked at him with a questioning expression but said nothing.
IGT’s main office sat downtown, blocks away from the harbor. Maybe he could sneak in—but then what? He almost laughed aloud at the foolishness of such an action. He’d remained out of prison and out of sight by getting others to do his dirty work for him over the years. But he needed information; he needed something to help him find Chris.
He stared at Hugh’s face. The man had heavy bags under his eyes, but he offered up his characteristic cheerful smile. “What are you thinking?”
Jordan didn’t answer. Instead, he pictured the break-in at TheraComp. Those people had been after their samples; they’d been after Chris’s work. And now it became clearer than ever why they might be interested in it. They were desperate for a cure, just like everyone else, and they’d stolen both another product and an inventor they probably hoped would provide an answer.
But banking on the continued reports of increasing numbers of enhancers found on the streets dead or afflicted by the cancer, along with the prolonged absence of the senator, Jordan doubted a cure had been discovered.
He knew he didn’t actually possess the skills needed for breaking into IGT to scour the conglomerate for clues. Hell, he didn’t know what he was looking for and might not find anything that would lead him to Chris if he did.
But he did have an idea how to find someone who might know where Chris was.
Hugh sauntered over to Jordan. “What are we going to do?”
A grin spread across Jordan’s face. “We’re going to tell everyone we developed the cure, Hugh.”
The lab tech frowned, apparently nonplussed. “But we haven’t.”
“Exactly.”
Chapter 31
Chris had no idea what time it was. The walls of the laboratory-turned-hospital room were devoid of clocks. Day and night hardly mattered. Banks of LEDs burned constantly, bathing the place in unnaturally bright light. Without the stimulus of a setting or rising sun to d
ictate their biological clocks, they labored until exhaustion turned to deliriousness, and they took shifts sleeping as the other pushed on.
“This has to work.” Chris picked up a small plastic vial and squinted, peering into it.
“I hope so.” Robin took one of the tiny containers between her gloved fingers.
Each solution in the vials held microscopic particles targeting cancerous cells. Within the vectors, a dosage of modified CDXT awaited the cells. It had been adapted to completely reverse all changes made to human cells’ DNA via enhancements, and they had aptly named it HDXT—human DNA excision treatment.
Robin loaded a tiny drop of HDXT into each plastic dish under the flow hood. The dishes supported a variety of isolated cancerous cells from their patients and would be used to test the efficacy of their treatment.
After placing all the culture dishes back in an incubator, Robin slumped on the stool beside Chris. “What now?” she huffed.
He leaned in to study the holodisplay. “All the computational simulations suggest this should work.” He was all too familiar with the daunting figure that less than twenty percent of new drugs and medical therapeutics made it past the first set of FDA clinical trials. He and Jordan hoped to avoid a similar fate for their own products by targeting veterinary medicine, where the bar to entry stood much lower. Now he faced a challenge they had envisioned tackling only as an eventuality, something still existing in the realm of ephemeral dreams and nebulous talks of future business plans: adapting their technology to human subjects.
“I have no doubt they’ll work in these experiments,” Chris continued, “but you know as well as I do that translating any kind of research from a laboratory study to clinical medicine is dicey.”
“I have faith in us.”
“That makes one of us. In any case, these people’s enhancements have become so entangled, I hope the HDXT can remove all their damaged DNA mutated by their botched gene mods.”
“It’ll work.” She squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. “But if it does remove the mutated DNA, it should in theory eliminate the effects of the enhancements, too, right?”
“Right,” Chris said. “I hope they don’t mind waking up a bit weaker than before.”
“At least they’ll be alive.” She placed a hand on his wrist. Her eyes gleamed. “Are you serious about using yourself as an experiment, though?”
“I’m with you,” Chris said, closing his eyes. “I can’t in good conscience just throw an experimental treatment into any of your patients.” He gestured at the five laid out in their beds. “I mean, we know they’re enhancers, but we don’t know anything about them. They might all be terrible people, but I don’t feel comfortable taking that chance. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“Me neither,” she said. “The way I see it, they chose to use enhancements. They chose to risk their lives playing Russian roulette by buying a product from the street to alter their genes. If they die because we can’t stop the resulting cancer, so be it. But if we killed them because the treatment we developed has an unexpected deleterious side effect...”
“Trust me, I know.” He wanted to save these enhancers’ lives, but even more, he didn’t want to be responsible for their death. “This will work. I’ll be fine, and, once we can show it works in me, we can help them and all the others still in the UMMC.”
Robin’s shoulders dropped. Her head hung low, as if she could tell his words were disingenuous. “That assumes we’re let out of here or that we can at least distribute these therapeutics outside of wherever the hell we are now.”
Chris brushed his hands through his hair, frustration welling up in him again. Before he let himself succumb to the anger and fear of the unknown, he inhaled slowly.
One step at a time.
He needed to focus on developing this treatment. He couldn’t be distracted by thoughts of what would happen next.
After walking to the freezer, he rifled through its contents. “Do they have any genies in here?”
“I’m not sure,” Robin said. “I haven’t exactly been looking for enhancements—I’ve been more concerned with treating their effects.”
“Any way we can get some? I’m thinking I should ensure my cells are transfected and well on their way to uninhibited tumorigenesis if we’re going to test this treatment on me.”
She opened her mouth to respond when a voice crackled over the holodisplay on the wall behind her. “We’d be happy to provide you the necessary enhancements you need to ensure your therapy works.”
Raising an eyebrow at Robin, Chris found he was not entirely surprised their request had been so quickly granted. He had been certain they were under constant surveillance, and she’d said as much.
***
It took a few hours before a courier bot delivered a small plastic vial through the slot near the bottom of the lab’s door. That allowed them enough time to check the cell experiments they’d set up and confirm the therapy they’d developed worked—at least, it did so in a completely controlled environment outside the human body.
Chris examined the handwritten label claiming the contents were a muscle-mass enhancement and handed it to Robin. “Let’s do this.”
She loaded it into a hypodermic and then dabbed at a spot on his arm with rubbing alcohol. “Are you sure about this?”
“Not at all.” He forced a grin. “But I haven’t hit the gym since we’ve been down here, so I might as well give this a try.”
Robin slid the needle into his arm and pressed down the plunger. The liquid swirled in the syringe. Though she had warmed it in her palms, it still felt cold as it worked its way into his bloodstream.
She threw the needle and syringe into a red sharps container. “You feel stronger now?”
Chris forced a chuckle. “Ah, if only it happened that quickly. It usually takes several days, sometimes up to a few weeks before you start noticing anything.”
“You know from experience?”
“From research. Never took a gene mod before.”
“Until today.”
“Right,” he said with a smirk. “Until today. Still, it shouldn’t take long for the telomerase enhancements to mutate with the strength mods.”
For a moment, they were silent. “At least the cell culture experiments worked. That’s got to be a positive sign.”
For the next several hours, they waited. Robin monitored the patients as Chris watched. They swapped stories of their experiences in medical and graduate school, desperate to fill the time. But it seemed like they didn’t have enough entertaining anecdotes; a common theme in both of their educations was a commitment to hard work and study, which didn’t often offer the opportunity for the type of debauchery and adventure leading to stories worth telling.
“We’ve probably given it enough time for the DNA to mutate,” Chris said with a sigh.
Robin stuck another biopsy needle into his arm and took a sample.
Chris immersed the sample in detergents to disrupt the cell membranes and isolated the DNA. He deposited a small sample in the genetic sequencer. Robin rested a hand on his shoulder, giving him a reassuring squeeze, as the holodisplay projected the contents of the sample through the air.
It beeped to signal it had finished. They both held their breaths as Chris analyzed the data and compared his DNA to the sequences they’d identified in the other patients.
“It’s there,” Robin said, pointing to one of the genes. “There’s the mutation.” She gulped. “You are officially a rhabdomyosarcoma-afflicted enhancer.”
Chapter 32
Jordan picked up his comm card and spun it between his fingers. He leaned back against the counter behind him, his elbows propped on its surface. A few machines still buzzed, idling between their experiments. The whoosh of air through the flow hood fans droned on.
“Find the cure to this cancer?” Hugh asked. “Don’t you think that’s—I don’t know—a bit optimistic?”
“It’s not as bad as you think, my man.”
He clapped the tech on the shoulder. “We don’t actually need to find the cure. We just need to tell the right people that we did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I may have been a bit brash in destroying your comm card,” Jordan said. “I didn’t want to take the risk of these people tracking you through it and finding us here, but now I regret we don’t have a direct line of communications to your buddies who want to see me dead.”
Hugh winced at the words.
The man opened his mouth to say something, but Jordan cut him off with a wave. “Let’s let the past remain in the past for now. Do you have any other method of communicating with these people?”
“Maybe if we could connect to the Net, I could access my old contacts from the card.”
The only Net connection they possessed was through Jordan’s comm card. And he wasn’t about to use it to call any renegade enhancement groups potentially associated with a powerful politician. He didn’t need to give anyone else access to his direct line or inadvertently associate himself with a criminal organization.
“If we load up your contacts on a new card, you’ll be able to call these guys?”
Hugh nodded.
“Looks like we’re going to risk venturing outdoors, then.”
***
The bright sunlight provided a welcome change from the harsh lighting of the laboratory. Warm summer air bathed Jordan’s skin, and he took a deep breath. He stretched his arms as they walked down the cracked sidewalk.
Even in the middle of the day, the industrial neighborhood lay barren. Jordan had selected the location for his early work for that reason. But now, the untended brown grass and rusted chain-link fences around them seemed more depressing than protective.
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 43