The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Robin pulled a hand through her hair. “I know, I know. But we can’t just let them get away with this.”

  When she opened her eyes, a devilish grin spread across her face. She stifled it and glanced at the holodisplay through which their captors had communicated with them before.

  “Help me with him,” she said, pointing to a patient at the other end of the room. “I need another sample.”

  Confused, Chris followed her as she prepped a needle. “What’s this for?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

  “Placebo,” she said in a low voice. “What if we alter the cure? Could you design something to excise the wrong genes or maybe make it somehow weaker than the actual therapy?”

  “You want us to deliver something to kill our good friends on the other side of that holodisplay?”

  She nodded as she slipped the needle into one of the patient’s vessels.

  “Maybe.” A ray of sunlight burst through the dark clouds of pessimism hanging over his mind. Preserving their lives and the lives of the others afflicted with this enhancement-caused cancer while bringing down the bastards behind this mess would be perfect. They had to at least try. “Maybe I can come up with something.” The thought percolated through his mind. Maybe he could alter HDXT to trim off a few extra genes from their target’s DNA—a few extra genes necessary for proper cell function. He didn’t have a good genetic template to guide which genes would be removed, but he could come up with something.

  But he feared their exhaustion had caught up to them. The plan seemed ridiculous and had an undoubtedly high chance of failure.

  Robin had already gotten back to work, analyzing a second batch of HDXT.

  As Chris joined her, his brow creased in concentration. What did he have to lose? If their plan failed, if their captors killed them, who would miss him? He watched the chest of one of the enhancer patients rise and fall with each labored breath.

  Chris might have a better impact on this world if he risked it all in a last-ditch effort to disrupt the organization purportedly responsible for causing the spread of this disease. Maybe it would be worth it. And then, if it worked, if he made it out alive, that would just be a bonus.

  As he started to accept the idea, he stared into Robin’s brown eyes. Nothing but cold fury and determination radiated from them. Chris’s certainty that the proposed sabotage would be worth risking his life faded as the thought of imperiling Robin weighed heavy on his conscience. She scowled back at him as if she sensed his trepidation.

  “We have to do it,” Robin said. “We can’t let these bastards win.”

  Chapter 37

  A hiss sounded as the door to the room slid open for the first time since Chris had been awake. He and Robin twisted around as someone else entered.

  “Nobody’s tricking anybody,” said a swarthy man with a barrel of a chest and arms as thick as Chris’s torso. He sauntered up to Chris and held out a hand. “You can call me Trevor.”

  The optimism buoying Chris disappeared as a wave of despair rolled over him. He glared, his jaw gritted, and took a step back, reminding himself that lunging at this man would do nothing to help their situation.

  “Fair enough.” Trevor clenched his outstretched fingers back into a fist. He folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned against the wall. “Congratulations and all that for discovering a working treatment. It took you a bit longer than expected, but I’m glad you pulled through. After all, I gave the boss my word you’d both be capable of fixing this mess.” He winked. “I’m usually not wrong.”

  He walked to the freezer and peered inside. “Ms. Haynes, do you care to show me where the therapies are?”

  “Doctor Haynes,” she said.

  “Still so stubborn? How about you, Mr. Morgan? Or would you prefer the title doctor as well? In my experience, PhD engineers aren’t as snooty as these medical quacks.”

  Chris narrowed his eyes but didn’t move. Maybe Robin was right. Maybe they should destroy the HDXT samples. Let these assholes suffer.

  Trevor lifted his shirt to reveal the black grip of a pistol tucked into his waistband. “Come on now, you two.”

  Chris stomped over to the freezer, Robin trailing him. He opened the door and grabbed the tray of tiny glass containers holding the new HDXT. Trevor reached for them, but Chris pulled them away. “I will not hesitate to destroy these. Tell us who the hell is responsible for this, tell us what the hell is going on, or we will let your boss die.”

  “Look, you two aren’t so off the mark,” Trevor said. “The boss is sick, and we need you to fix him right up. But there’s no need to play goddamned heroes.”

  He pulled a comm card from his pocket. He tapped on it, and the holodisplay lit up. A projection glimmered to life.

  Chris’s heart stopped, and his mouth fell open. He staggered backward, and Robin caught him. “Oh, God. What the hell are you people doing?” At once, he felt sick, ready to collapse.

  “Look familiar?” Trevor smirked.

  The holoprojection displayed Veronica, her mouth gagged and her arms strung up over her head with a rope. She sat on a stool. The scene reminded Chris of how he’d found her that day in her apartment, after she’d been tortured and almost killed.

  But she wasn’t in her apartment now. And her eyes were wide open. They twitched in fear.

  “What the hell are you doing with her?”

  “Insurance,” Trevor said. “There won’t be any fooling around. If you mess with the therapies or refuse to treat our boss, then Veronica will pay for your choices. Whatever silly notion you had of saving your own ass should be reconsidered, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Chris...” Robin said, her voice weak, her eyes imploring. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist. Her touch settled the furious thoughts roiling in his mind. “Think about this.”

  “I can’t let them hurt Veronica again.” He handed the samples to Trevor.

  “That’s a very wise decision, because we have another surprise for you.” Trevor prodded Chris’s chest. “We injected your lady friend there with the same enhancements you took for your little experiment. You know what that means, don’t you?” He smirked. “Interestingly, even her LyfeGen Sustain didn’t keep up with the rabid cancer cells overwhelming her muscles.”

  A lump formed in Chris’s throat. If he had dashed the therapeutics across the floor, he would’ve condemned Veronica to die a slow, agonizing death.

  Trevor directed his gaze at Robin. “So, these patients are in the green now, right?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Come on, don’t play coy. Are they getting better or not?”

  “They are,” she said. “Exponentially so.”

  “So they’ve proven everything in these little glass vials works?”

  Robin’s nose wrinkled into a snarl, but she gave him a curt nod. “I would say so.”

  “Fantastic.” Trevor transferred the samples into a jacket pocket. He whipped out the pistol from his waistband. Five gunshots exploded in sequence.

  Chris staggered backward, his eyes wide and heart thumping wildly. Robin threw a hand over her mouth and screamed.

  Five separate EKG machines whined loudly, all screaming a long, high-pitched whine.

  The individuals whose lives they’d toiled to save were dead. Chris’s body trembled with hatred for Trevor, and Robin clamped her hand around his wrist when he took a step forward, ready to strike the man. It took tremendous fortitude to prevent his disgust from physically manifesting itself by attacking Trevor.

  “Well, that’s an annoying sound,” Trevor said, tilting his head at the wailing EKG machines. “Why don’t you both follow me, and let’s get out of here?”

  ***

  Trevor led them down a hallway appearing no more ominous than one in any typical office building. Bland cream-colored walls stood over speckled tiled floors. All the terrors of what had happened in that laboratory-turned-hospital suite suddenly seemed to exist only in Chris’s mind. Trevor’s face immedi
ately adopted the calm, self-assured countenance he’d displayed moments before he murdered the five patients.

  “Everything good in there?” another man wearing a suit asked Trevor as he passed.

  “Peachy,” Trevor said. “Can you send a cleanup team? The five patients didn’t make it.”

  The other man gave a thumbs-up. The top buttons of his collared shirt lay undone, and he flashed a smile that reminded Chris of the marketing personnel he’d worked with in the biotech industry. However, there was one blatant difference: none of those salesmen or women openly wore a chest holster complete with a sidearm.

  Another woman joined them as they walked down the brightly lit hallway. She eyed Chris and Robin. “God, they stink. Are you sure the boss won’t be offended if you bring them in there like this?”

  Trevor laughed. “I’m not sure how much he cares about smell at this point.” He spoke in a lower voice to the woman. “He’s not looking good, that’s for sure. Getting the red skin all over.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Damn. Didn’t know it progressed that far already.” She fell back beside Chris. “By the way, how does it feel to have killed your old girlfriend?”

  Chris set his jaw, his brow furrowed. He kept his face still, desperate not to give this woman the satisfaction of seeing him explode.

  “Come on, everyone around here knows how you got rid of Tracy. Back when you were running out of the Kaufmans’ laboratories last winter, you shot her.”

  “She betrayed me,” Chris said with as much calmness as he could muster. He replayed the scene in his head, reminded of how Tracy had lied to him, how she’d hidden the fact she was involved in the black-market enhancement business. And she’d never warned him she planned to kill Jordan.

  He’d had no choice. He had to shoot Tracy; he couldn’t let her kill his friend. And now he finally came face to face with the people that had once employed her and used her to track down their old business rivals, the Kaufman brothers.

  The woman shrugged. “Eh, whatever works for you.” She held a hand up to her mouth and acted as if she had a secret to tell. “To be honest, I thought she was kind of a jerk, so I don’t mind that she isn’t working for us anymore.”

  Chris ground his teeth. She’d been the first person he’d ever actually killed. No matter how he tried to justify it, no matter if it was the right choice or not, he had pulled the trigger and watched her fall.

  “You still miss her?” the woman said, sneering.

  “Screw you,” Chris said.

  She laughed, her hand on the grip of a pistol holstered at her side. “No thanks. I’ve seen what happens to the people you screw. Poor Tracy and Veronica.” She eyed Robin. “I hope you haven’t touched the doctor yet.”

  Robin glowered and appeared ready to break her Hippocratic Oath by slamming a fist into the woman’s face.

  After they rounded a corner, Trevor nodded at a man and woman standing guard outside a door. They let the group pass.

  The door closed behind them, and a lock clicked shut. Tiles covered the floor, and gray, bare walls lined the cavernous room, bathed almost entirely in darkness. In the middle, Veronica sat on the stool illuminated by what looked to be operating room lights. Her eyes shot open wide as she caught Chris’s gaze.

  “Veronica!”

  Trevor grabbed Chris’s shoulder when he took a step toward her. “Not now, buddy.” The man lifted him with one hand and shoved him down onto a chair.

  “You’re an enhancer,” Chris said.

  “Very astute,” he said.

  “But you didn’t take the telomerase enhancements everyone else did,” Robin said.

  “Of course not. Most of us aren’t stupid enough to insist on our—” He hesitated a moment. “Let’s just say I prefer to wait until the market has proven our products work.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t test your enhancements before you sell them?” Robin asked.

  “We do, but let’s be honest,” Trevor said. “There’s always more money for whoever’s first to market. Less testing means less delay in cashing in.”

  “Your boss must be pretty incompetent to have injected himself with unproven enhancements, huh?” Robin said. “Why the hell are you working for someone foolish enough to do something like that?”

  “Lianna, would you be so kind as to shut this doctor up?”

  The woman who had joined them in the hall nodded and backhanded Robin. The doctor’s eyes widened, and she threw a hand over the crack in her lip. She glared but seemed to restrain herself from acting out further.

  “Look,” Trevor said, “you ever give someone a nickname? They teach you about that in med school? Maybe, just maybe, the boss ain’t anybody’s boss even though he acts like he is.”

  Trevor winked. “We like to let him think he’s in control around here, but he most definitely isn’t. But that’ll be our little secret. We’ll keep our mouths closed, won’t we? The consequences for talking can always be”—he glanced at Robin—“worse than a light tap on the lips.” He wrung his hands. “Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to set up a little experiment. You two make the good boss all better. That’s all you have to do, and then you’re out of here.”

  Chris found it hard to believe. Robin and he had seen too much. These people sauntered around in the open under bright lights and wore no masks. They made no attempt to obscure their identities. He wasn’t naive enough to believe Trevor would just let him walk outside and call it a day.

  But what choice did he have?

  “Now we’re going to be wheeling in all the equipment you should need,” Trevor said. “And I won’t be going anywhere. In fact, I’ll be spending some time getting to know Veronica. If either of you slip up, she’ll enjoy the punishment for your mistakes.” He prodded Chris’s chest with a meaty finger. “And you get a first-row seat to see what you missed out on last time we had Veronica strung up like this.”

  His face heating up, Chris glared at Trevor.

  “All right, now everyone’s on the same page. Let’s get this show on the road.” He clapped his hands.

  A door on the back wall opened, and two lackeys wheeled in a hospital bed much like the ones in the room Chris and Robin had toiled in for so long. The man lying in the bed coughed and groaned in pain.

  Dilated vessels throbbed on his forehead and bare arms. A red hue lit up his skin, and splotches of bruises spread along bumps pressing up from his muscles.

  Despite the man’s discolored and deformed flesh, Chris recognized him.

  Robin glanced at Chris, her expression telling him she too knew their patient. After all, the man had once been a resident in her wing at the hospital.

  Blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, Senator Arthur Sharp coughed again.

  Chapter 38

  “You’re not lying to me again, are you?” Jordan eyed his captive.

  The man panted, backing up against the locked car door. Jordan clicked the settings on the stunner back and forth, and he lifted the pistol-shaped weapon in front of the man’s face. He’d borrowed a few of Hugh’s interrogation tricks. The man had long since decided answering Jordan’s questioned proved less painful than a shock from the stunner—which Jordan now knew felt akin to what it must be like to have an orgy with a slew of electric eels.

  Sweat trickling down his jaw, the man shook his head. “No, I swear. I’m not.”

  In the sedan’s leather side seat, Jordan toyed with the stunner. He’d engaged the car’s safety locks to prevent his quarry from fleeing. “I haven’t turned this thing up all the way. So I’m going to ask you again, are you sure Senator Sharp is at Tallicor, along with Christopher Morgan and Robin Haynes? And there’s nothing else you can tell me about IGT?”

  The man’s lips quivered. “Please, no more. I’m telling you the truth. Senator Sharp is at Tallicor. Alive. The others, too.” He groaned and held his side as he twisted. “Everything’s based out of Tallicor, okay? Our whole business is out there. Integra
tive Gene Therapies—IGT—is where we stole our tech from, right?”

  “I don’t know. Is that right?” Jordan slipped his finger over the trigger of the stunner and ensured the man caught full sight of the gesture.

  “Please, please, it is right. It is. I don’t know much about the whole science side of things.” He held his hands in front of him in surrender. “All I know is that one of our contacts, one of the bigwigs, stole the blueprints for several of IGT’s DNA delivery systems, and we use that in the genies we make or something.”

  “Or something?” Jordan tilted his head. He wondered if Senator Sharp had something to do with this. He might indeed be the “bigwig,” considering his position on IGT’s board and his increasingly suspect connections with the black-market genetics industry. “I don’t want to make the trip out to Tallicor based on an answer as uncertain as ‘or something.’”

  “I’m not wrong. Please,” the man said. He wrapped his bulky forearms protectively in front of his chest like a child frightened of a ghost story. Singed skin covered his flesh where the arc of electricity from Jordan’s stunner had touched. Just a couple jolts from the device turned the man from a hulking behemoth thug into the sniveling wreck whimpering in the passenger seat. “That’s where we took your friends. I promise.”

  “Great. You tired?”

  The man’s bottom lip quivered, and he appeared nonplussed. “What?”

  “You look like you could use a nap. And good thing for you, because we’ve got a long car ride ahead of us.” He shot the stunner at his hostage once more, and the man turned rigid before falling unconscious.

  The car rolled out of the city as it merged onto Route Forty. Office buildings and high-rise apartments gave way to townhouses and then tall green trees lining the roadway.

  Jordan slipped his comm card from his pocket and called Dellaporta.

  “Thompson, I’m at your lab. What the hell happened here?”

  “How’s Hugh?”

  “On his way to the hospital. Paramedics said he’d make it.”