It took only minutes to escape the area and plunge into a more populated neighborhood. People rested on porch steps, fanning themselves and sipping drinks from glasses and beer cans. A few children took turns spraying each other with a hose.
Hugh seemed on edge, his eyes darting between Jordan and the residents of the area.
“Relax, my man. Nobody here’s going to kill you.” He lifted his shoulders and grinned. “At least, nobody in this neighborhood. It’s your friends we’re about to call who you’ve got to be concerned with, and I haven’t seen any signs we’re being tailed yet.”
“I’d feel more comfortable taking my car than walking.”
“Oh, we will. But you need to stretch your legs every once in a while. Fresh air’s good for the soul, and we’ve been breathing sterile laboratory air for so long, I feared I’d forgotten what the real world smells like.”
The interior of the corner store proved to be no cooler than outside. A clerk sat behind a barred window at the counter. A lone fan blew in his face as drops of perspiration rolled down his dark skin.
Jordan scanned the aisles. “Ah, there.” He pointed at one of the shelves stocked with batteries, portable speakers, holocomputer charging stations, and a myriad of other cheap electronic devices. From the shelf, he pulled off a tracker card.
“What’s that?”
“Prepaid comm card,” Jordan said. “You pay for the data ahead of time, it gives you a number. It tracks the data you’ve used, and you can throw it away when you’re done. Cheap, and it works.”
He paid for the card at the counter and handed it to Hugh.
“Once you boot it up, you can load all your old contacts on there.”
Hugh raised an eyebrow. “And then do what?”
“We’ll call your old buddies. Or, more accurately, you’ll shoot them a message. Just tell them I’ve made a breakthrough. Tell them I think I’ve got a therapy to help the enhancer patients. That’s the kind of stuff they wanted to hear, right?”
“I guess,” Hugh said. “They said they wanted to know about your research, but they didn’t tell me what exactly.”
“I have a feeling this will be right up their alley.” He tapped on his comm card to call Hugh’s car. As they approached the intersection, the car rolled up and idled near the sidewalk. They ducked into it.
“But we’re not actually going to have any working medicine or therapy or anything?” Hugh asked.
“Nope. That won’t be necessary. Hopefully, one of them will decide a visit to our lab is in order.”
Hugh’s eyes widened. “And you want to—”
“Exactly.” He wrung his hands together. “We’ll be waiting to welcome them.”
***
When they returned to the artificial light and sterile white walls of the underground lab at Equest Advantage, Jordan brushed his hand over the electric stunner tucked into his waistband and hidden under his shirt. Hugh walked in front, tapping away at his comm card to restore his contacts. Their brief foray outside had left Jordan with a longing to return to his penthouse and his mahogany bar, where he could whip up a mojito. He could lose himself in his library, reading a book or writing his latest short story. He chided himself for his daydreaming and felt guilty for yearning for such selfish pleasure when Chris remained unaccounted for.
“Recovered their number,” Hugh said.
“Okay,” Jordan said. “Time to send them a message.”
“What do I tell them?”
“Just say it looks like I’ve got the first working samples of a therapy for the patients at the UMMC.”
Hugh bit his bottom lip as he typed on the tracker card. He tilted it so Jordan could see the text. “Does this look good?”
“Send it.”
“What if they’ve been trying to contact me the past couple of days? What if they’re suspicious? What about—”
Jordan held up a hand. “If they question you, just tell them the truth. Tell them I caught on to you, destroyed your old comm card, and held you captive here while avoiding another run-in with them at TheraComp. Believable enough, right?”
“I suppose, but how do I explain the sudden contact again?”
“You escaped. How’s that work?”
Hugh nodded emphatically, a grin across his face. “When I was a kid, I used to think I’d be the next Houdini. I’d have friends tie me up or handcuff me.”
“Great. You can tell them that.”
“How long do you think they’ll be?”
“My guess is they’ll show up at night again,” Jordan said. “Although I suppose each day passing without a cure makes them more desperate. They might be visiting sooner than I’d anticipated.”
Though Jordan’s work beside the tech had stretched on for almost two weeks, he remained uncertain where Hugh’s allegiances lay. Maybe he’d been too quick to trust the man again. Initially, he’d kept his eye on Hugh as they toiled at the lab equipment, but doing so distracted him from his work and became exhausting. Jordan believed the man sincerely didn’t want to cause him or Chris harm, but he also worried the threats levied against Hugh’s life might make him reconsider such notions.
He already expected to be outnumbered when and if Hugh’s puppet masters made a visit to procure the genetic therapy Jordan had allegedly developed. While he had a home-turf advantage and the element of surprise, the last thing he needed was Hugh betraying him again.
“What do we do now?” Hugh asked.
“I’ve got one last idea.” Jordan walked to the rear of the laboratory to a freezer towering above even him. “I need help.”
Hugh joined him.
“Grab the other side and pull. We need to move it back a bit.”
The tech furrowed his brow.
“It’ll make sense soon.” Jordan unlocked the wheels at the bottom of the heavy freezer. “Go ahead.”
Jordan grunted as they maneuvered it away from the wall. Despite the aid of the wheels, the sheer weight of it and its top-heavy balance prevented them from moving it too quickly.
“Good enough,” Jordan said. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. From his pocket, he withdrew his comm card and waved it near the center of the revealed wall. A rectangular section of the whitewashed wall slid back, revealing another dark room.
“Cool,” Hugh said. “Secret passage. This place is awesome.”
The schoolboy-like enthusiasm Hugh exhibited made Jordan feel guiltier for what he planned to do. He guided the tech down into the passageway. Instead of the whitewashed decor of the laboratory, drab gray concrete covered this space, devoid of equipment and furniture.
At a steel-plated door on the opposite end, Jordan slid his comm card over the handle. The door clicked open, and they followed another narrow passageway. Weak lights flicked on, diffusing a yellowish hue as they walked.
“What is this place?” Hugh asked.
Most who came through this passage hadn’t walked back out. If they had, they’d left without their memories. Jordan had since disposed of his stock of neuromodulation and memory alteration drugs responsible for selectively cleansing the minds of those individuals; he now wished he had kept a backup supply.
The last lights in the passage sputtered on in front of a barred door. Jordan had never taken Chris into this part of the enhancement facility. During their business together, Chris had been blissfully unaware Jordan ever used such a place to ensure their underground biotech outfit retained its notoriety in the streets of Baltimore.
The crude space had held Jordan’s prisoners, much like Jordan figured Chris was being kept now. Backstabbers and rats, individuals who tried to sell him out or have him killed, landed back here. And if Jordan and his associates needed information, the spot served as a prime location for interrogations.
Jordan withdrew the stunner from his waistband. “Hugh, I hope you understand the predicament I’m in. You’ve been an enormous help, and I appreciate your assistance. But I’m not willing to bet my life, or Chris’s life
, on your loyalty if those buddies of yours visit tonight.”
“They’re not my—”
“Don’t try to persuade me otherwise. I can’t take those risks. It’s the only reason I’ve survived in this business.” He raised the stunner. “Now, make this easy and go on in there.” With a nod, he indicated the concrete chamber behind the barred door. “Once this is all over, I’ll come back for you.”
Hugh’s face drew up in concern, but he walked into the chamber.
“Please, don’t take this personally.” Jordan flipped the latch in the door and closed the lock. He sauntered back down the narrow passage. Once in the main laboratory, he couldn’t put the freezer back in place by himself, so he settled for nudging it over just enough to obscure the entrance from anyone who happened to bound down into the lab.
Besides, he planned on intercepting Hugh’s acquaintances aboveground. He didn’t need anybody else discovering the old enhancement lab, whether they’d been invited or not.
Jordan went upstairs to the old Equest Advantage portion of the building. While laboratories made up the majority of the floor, a hall of offices lined the east-facing section of the complex. He turned on the lights in his old executive suite. In truth, the corner suite wasn’t much more than a room slightly larger than the other offices down the corridor.
Covered in a layer of gray dust, his heavy old desk stood in the middle of the floor. All the books, the holocomputers, and framed art pieces that once lined the walls were either in the library in his penthouse or adorning his new desk at TheraComp. He left the light on to attract the attention of his anticipated visitors as he plodded back toward the front entrance.
At the rear of the main floor’s lab, there were two emergency exits wired to an alarm. The entrance to the tiled lobby also connected to an alarm, as did all the building’s windows. He made his way into the small lobby. An empty vending machine stood vigil, guarding the reception desk and burgundy chair. He slumped into the chair and considered which entrance might be the most likely for their visitors to use.
The sun was setting. Long shadows, cast by the trees and streetlamps out front, stretched over the floor. He doubted they’d come through here.
Maybe they would cut off the security system and use one of the emergency exits connected to the labs. That might be optimal if they wanted to make a quick getaway and had surveyed the building before they attempted their grab and dash.
His eyes shot wide open. He realized that if they were scouting out the area, he had picked the worst possible place to contemplate their plan of action. With its expansive windows, he would stand out in the lobby. He chalked up his foolishness to the exhaustion nagging at him despite the excitement of his imminent confrontation.
Jordan walked back toward the lab and disappeared in the shadows. He chose a corner hidden from the windows and any immediate views from the emergency exits and crouched.
He toyed with the stunner in his hand. It should be easy. Knock them out, tie them up, drag them into the room where Hugh lay now. He cracked his knuckles. It would be just like the old days. He’d squeeze out the information he needed from them; he’d find Chris. His research skills were rusty, but he hoped his interrogation techniques hadn’t atrophied in kind.
Chapter 33
Robin couldn’t recall a time when she had been more stressed. Maybe stressed was an understatement.
When she’d first woken up in this cramped laboratory, she had spied the other five unconscious bodies hooked up to monitors and IV lines next to her. She thought she would become a human experiment, and these were her fellow subjects. Fear for her life paralyzed her when she’d first heard the enigmatic voice over the speakers near the holodisplay call her name. She’d been even more frightened when that voice told her the lives of those five patients were her responsibility and her life depended on saving theirs.
Now, exhaustion inexplicably replaced fear. She felt almost delirious, surviving on less sleep than she had during those weeks in her medical residency when she’d worked up to eighty hours a week or spent thirty straight hours on shift. Then, she’d wondered how hospitals didn’t get sued more often for the mistakes of an exhausted resident at the end of one of those hellish shifts.
When she wasn’t gripped by the overwhelming anxiety and responsibility of treating these patients and finding a cure for a seemingly incurable disease, she’d tried to close her eyes on one of the empty beds, but the throes of a seizing patient succumbing to another violent muscle spasm often woke her and reminded her of their bodies’ assured self-destruction.
Chris’s presence had been reassuring. She figured a fresh mind with scientific talents complementing her clinical experience might help solve the medical conundrum the rhabdomyosarcoma presented. For a moment, she forgot her hopelessness, forgot the utter inescapability of her imprisonment.
But now she prepared to inject an experimental treatment into him after minimal laboratory testing. It was not as though they had the luxury of spending their time performing exhaustive experiments to ensure the safety and efficacy of the treatments. They’d been watching the other five men and women die before their eyes. She wondered, even if the treatment did take, even if it helped Chris, was it already too late for these enhancers? Was the disease too far progressed? Were their bodies too ravaged?
“You’ve got to do it,” Chris said. The glinting silver needle disappeared into his skin.
“This better work.”
“It will.”
But she could see the uncertainty in his eyes. Dullness glazed his pupils, and his skin appeared paler. She wanted to believe these signs of his degrading health existed due to her imagination or maybe just the fatigue they’d both come to know so well.
As confident as Chris was after the cell culture experiments and the computational simulations, she saw something in his expression she recognized. It reminded her of the look a colleague, a surgeon, had once exhibited when he’d finished a procedure to remove the tumors around a patient’s stomach. After he’d sutured the incision closed, he remembered he’d neglected to remove the small gauze piece used to stem the bleeding from a particularly stubborn vessel. Though not common, those mistakes did happen, even though the surgeon had rectified it immediately.
But now she feared Chris’s own thoughts were just as muddled and confused as her own. If he had forgotten something in the design of the genetic therapy, it could be disastrous.
A failed therapy meant the lives of all the people in this room, including hers, would be at risk. And if, God forbid, it killed Chris, she’d be left alone again, no better off than before. She needed his scientific and engineering skills as much as he needed her clinical prowess.
“How long do you think we need to wait?” she said.
“I don’t know.” He grimaced. “I hate to say it, but I think it might be helpful to take a biopsy every hour or so. Quantify the number of cells successfully treated over time. With that, we can predict how long it’s going to take on the others and when we can expect to see improvements.”
“You have to remember the others are far worse off than you are. They started out with higher concentrations of the gene mods, and their cells have had much longer to replicate and spread the disease. I bet you’ll get better exponentially faster than they will.”
“I know you’re right,” he said. “But maybe it will be somewhat helpful to know nonetheless.”
As they’d agreed, Robin took another sample each hour as best as she could estimate. Their captors hadn’t provided them any clocks, but they’d at least had the foresight to allow her access to stopwatches to keep track of time points for experiments and research protocols. For the first couple of hours, Chris showed no significant side effects from the genetic therapy. Each time she ran an analysis to assess the change in expression of the mutated genes, the amount of those genes decreased.
“HDXT seems to be working,” she said.
“That’s good.” His bottom lip seemed to quiv
er, and his pale skin shimmered under the bright LED. He struggled to keep his eyelids open.
Robin’s physician instincts kicked in. She pressed the back of her hand against his forehead. “You’re hot.”
“Thanks,” he said, a wry grin spreading across his face.
“I’m serious. Do you feel okay?”
He shrugged. “I mean, I think I’m fine. Maybe a little warm, but this room’s pretty damn stuffy.”
“It’s freezing down here, Chris.”
A thousand nagging thoughts plagued her mind. Something was going wrong.
“Open up.” She placed a thermometer under his tongue. It read ninety-nine point seven degrees Fahrenheit. The treatment seemed to have been working on a cellular level, but Chris had a fever. Nothing life threatening yet. Then again, such a reaction wasn’t unheard of when applying a genetic therapy housed in a virus shell. The body sometimes exhibited an immune response to those treatments.
But Chris had promised his treatment wouldn’t do that. He had used the available equipment to create a material design he claimed yielded him success both in the black market and in legitimate biotech business. He asserted it minimized the body’s negative response to genetic therapies.
Yet his symptoms, mild as they were now, evoked an ominous foreshadowing of a more violent immune reaction to come.
While the changes over time in Chris’s DNA samples proved HDXT was still eliminating mutated genes, his temperature continued to rise. His matted hair glistened under the LEDs in sweaty clumps, and his skin had an unmistakably ghostly appearance.
“I made a mistake,” Chris said, squinting through half-closed eyelids.
“You don’t know that yet.” She dabbed a cool cloth over his forehead, her own brow creased. “HDXT seems to be working. My guess is your tissues will be cancer free in a matter of hours.”
Chris closed his eyes. He offered a weak smile before his lips straightened.
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 44