by Todd Borg
It was like metal hitting metal. Or metal clinking on glass.
I stood and walked over to the front door. I could send Spot out to do a search. But that might be just what someone wanted.
“Lock the door behind me,” I said as I opened the door.
ELEVEN
The breeze was cold. In the driveway sat the Douglas County Sheriff’s SUV, engine running, lights off. It was still an official presence. The off-duty moonlighting wouldn’t start until the morning. I stood motionless until my eyes adjusted. Then I walked to the patrol unit.
The driver’s window rolled down. It was Deputy Praeger.
“Heard a clinking sound from inside,” I whispered.
“Didn’t hear anything out here,” he said. “But I had to turn on the engine for some warmth. The night breeze off the lake feels like winter.” He got out of the vehicle and shut the door.
“I’ll walk around the house,” I said. “Best if you stay here.”
I walked around to the lake side of the house, stepping carefully, feeling my way, watching the shadows. In the distance I heard the soft lap of waves against the shore. Nothing moved. I went back around the other direction.
A clinking sound came from the trees near the road.
I ran along the side of Ryan’s house, took a shortcut through dense, dark bushes, letting my footfalls be loud, hoping to startle and flush out anyone who was near.
A small animal, a raccoon maybe, scurried into brush.
I stopped and listened. The clinking had stopped.
I went back, made contact with Deputy Praeger, and knocked on the front door, calling out, “It’s me.”
Ryan opened up.
“Find anything?”
“No. All looks calm.”
We sat down. Ryan’s chest was still rising and falling with worry. I knew he would calm if I brought the subject back to his high-altitude research.
“Why come all the way to Tahoe?” I asked. “Couldn’t you make a room in your Bay Area lab where the atmospheric pressure is lower? Compression pumps or something?”
“Yeah. That’s what our forty-percent investor advocated. He said that our workers were there and our other facilities were there. But there are two reasons why I chose Tahoe. First, it was cheaper. Building a hypobaric chamber is very expensive. It has to be perfectly sealed against air leakage, and you need airlock rooms for people to come and go. Just reinforcing the walls and ceiling of a two thousand square-foot lab is an engineering nightmare. The increased load to handle an atmospheric reduction of thirty percent works out to over seven hundred pounds per square foot, or one and a half million pounds for two thousand square feet. It would be building a room that can withstand the weight of twenty fully-loaded semi-trucks on each wall. Even the floor would have to be hugely reinforced. Not to handle weight on the floor, but air pressure from below trying to push the floor up.”
“Got it,” I said. “Would you have to worry about the bends when people go inside such a chamber?”
“No. The bends happen when you reduce surrounding pressures by fifty percent or more, as when a scuba diver spends a long time at depths greater than thirty-three feet and then comes up to the surface. The reduced pressure allows dissolved nitrogen to bubble out of the blood. Like when you open a Coke and the carbon dioxide bubbles out of the liquid. We’re talking about reducing pressure by only thirty percent. But going in and out of a hypobaric chamber is still uncomfortable on the ears. Standing in the airlock while the pumps equalize the pressure would be like riding an elevator in a building seven or eight times as high as the Empire State Building.”
“How high is your facility?”
“Ten thousand, one hundred feet.”
“Where is it located?”
Ryan hesitated.
“If you can’t trust me, then why am I here? The kidnapper no doubt already knows the location of your lab.”
Ryan stood silent for a time. He chewed on his lower lip. “I’m sorry. It’s an adjustment for me. We went to great lengths to keep this place secret. The financial stakes are very high. The lab is up near the Mount Rose Meadows. Near the pass, there’s a dirt road. A good distance up from the highway is a locked gate that the Forest Service put in to close the road. One of our lawyers found some language in the land lease and used that to get us a key.
“The road climbs up toward a utility building that a power company built years ago. About twenty years ago, the building was sold to a cell phone company, which was in turn bought out by one of the major carriers. They still use the nearby tower, but the building sat vacant for several years. We were able to buy it relatively cheap because it’s on Forest Service land with only thirty-one years left on a ninety-nine year lease. The Forest Service is unlikely to renew the lease, and when the term is done, the building will have to be torn down. It’s just a plain concrete block box in the woods, painted forest green, out of sight. They originally built it for big electrical equipment. No interior walls. It was easy for us to retrofit it for our use. And it’s very secure. We added steel doors and barred windows.
“The end result is a high-altitude lab only forty minutes from Reno’s airport. Reno is a thirty-minute flight from San Jose. We can even get in there in winter on snowmobiles. It’s as perfect a location as we could hope for.”
“You said there were two reasons to do your research up here instead of down in the Bay Area. One was the ease of obtaining a low pressure facility. What was the other one?”
“Privacy,” Ryan said with emphasis. “We hired a Reno contractor to make modifications to the building, but he had no idea what the purpose of the building was. We personally hauled in our own equipment. If we’d built a hypobaric lab in the Bay Area, the unusual construction would have advertised our intentions to the entire world. As you know, corporate espionage is a big problem. Because of the enormous value of certain drugs, some disreputable companies will pay huge dollars to a spy who can bring them insider info.
“Putting this research lab up on the mountain kept us out of sight. Also, it reinforces the privacy issue to our own researchers. If they were in Palo Alto lunching every day with their colleagues, eating dinner with friends who work at other bio-tech companies, casual slip-ups would be much more likely. Being physically removed from the corporate centers creates more of an awareness of how precious our intellectual property is.”
“Who works there?”
“We moved four of our scientists up from Palo Alto. We bought a house in Incline Village, and three of them live there. The fourth, Selena, lives with her parents who retired to Incline.”
“What exactly do they do? Work with viruses and such?
“Some. Everything is designed to fall under what the National Institutes of Health calls their Section Three-F experiments. Those are exempt research projects that don’t require registration with the Institutional Biosafety Committee.”
“Meaning you aren’t using hazardous materials,” I said. “None of the yellow Hazmat suits we see in the movies.”
“Right. Nevertheless, we use bio-safety cabinets, and we have accident protocols in place. We have our Biological Safety Officer review all of our experiments and procedures just to be sure. He’s very thorough. Plus, he likes to get out of the Bay Area and come up to the lake.”
Street and Lily and Spot came up the stairs from the basement level and turned into the kitchen.
“Snack break,” Street said. “Need anything?”
Ryan and I both shook our heads.
“Is your Tahoe lab making any money for you?” I asked.
Ryan shook his head. “Like most of bio-tech research, it costs millions. Until we get a really successful biological drug, our main revenue stream is the development and production contracts with big pharma. But we have some promising projects for ourselves to market in the future.
“Our investor wants to take us public because he believes that other investors across the spectrum will see our potential. He thinks a giant
cash infusion will allow us to do our research much faster. I’m his biggest irritation because I disagree. I think that our future breakthroughs will come from original insight and not pharmacological number crunching.”
“You think your company will eventually make big money?”
Ryan’s grin turned to a look of terror when a scream came from the kitchen.
TWELVE
“Sammy!” Lily screamed.
I bolted from my chair and ran into the kitchen. Lily stood by the center island, hiding behind it, her fingers gripping its top edge as she stared over it toward the big window above the sink. Street stood next to her, holding her head, trying to comfort her.
Ryan rushed in behind me and grabbed Lily up into his arms.
The squirrel with the shock of white hair hung from its neck by a tiny white thread, just outside of the kitchen window, lit from the inside by the canned lights above the sink and adjacent countertops. It swung slightly in the breeze.
“Spot, come!”
I ran out the front door. Spot loped after me.
The yard on the right side of Ryan’s house was open to the back. On the left side, it was planted in with bushes. Good cover. I went left.
The plantings were thick. I charged through them, hoping to startle anyone hiding in the dark. I spun around the far corner of the house. Spot had caught up to me. I went over to the kitchen window. The squirrel and the cord that suspended it was too high to reach unless the person was very tall or had something to stand on.
Nearby was a wheelbarrow, on its side, pushed away in haste. I brought Spot over, had him sniff the handles.
“Do you have the scent? Do you, Spot?” I shook his chest to indicate that he was to get excited about the scent.
“Okay, Spot, find the suspect! Find the suspect!”
I patted him on his rear.
He spun around the other direction and ran off.
I sprinted after him. He went through the bushes at the side of the house, past the construction site, down the street.
Fifty yards down, he stopped, put his nose to the dirt at the side of the road. Then he lifted his head high, turned a circle. Air-scenting. He went down the street several paces, came back, put his nose back to the ground.
Spot’s motions suggested that whomever had last moved the wheelbarrow had gotten into a car at that point in the road. We went back to the driveway.
Praeger was out, flashlight in hand.
“I saw you and your dog,” he said.
“We followed a scent down the street to a point out of sight from you. I think a person got into a vehicle there, and left. Come around to the back side of the house.” I brought him around, pointed up at the squirrel.
“I’ll boost you up,” I said.
I found a stick, handed it to Praeger, locked my fingers for his shoe and boosted him up.
He got the stick inside the loop of thread, lifted the thread up. It appeared to have been hooked over a piece of window moulding. I lowered Praeger down. He shined his light on the squirrel.
“It’s got something around its neck with writing on it, but I can’t see what,” he said.
“Let’s bring it around, put it in your headlight beams,” I said.
Praeger carried the stick with the suspended squirrel around the house.
I reached inside his patrol unit and turned on the headlights.
Praeger angled the squirrel.
“It’s a twisty label like the ones you write the food number on in the healthfood aisle at the grocery store. This says DRTX-thirty-three.”
“No word?” I said.
“Here, look,” Praeger said.
I leaned in close. The DRTX-33 was written in careful block letters.
“Got a plastic garbage bag in the back,” he said. “Not much else to check for, right? Looks like the thread is dental floss. Maybe that can tell us something?” He was looking to me for guidance.
“Maybe,” I said. “But not likely. Hold onto the squirrel just in case.” I opened the rear hatch of his SUV, found a bag in a box, pulled it out. We bagged the squirrel.
I went back to the front door. I assumed Ryan had locked it behind me.
I knocked again, worried that I was wrong and that the person outside had stepped indoors right after I came out, locking the door behind them. My heart pounded.
THIRTEEN
“Who is it?” came Ryan’s voice.
“Owen.”
He opened the door.
I went inside, thinking that one cop on guard duty outside wasn’t enough. But Street’s thought to have motion lights installed would make a difference.
“Where are Lily and Street?” I asked Ryan.
“Street took her into her bedroom,” Ryan said. “Did you see anybody?”
“No. Somebody turned your wheelbarrow over and stood on it to get up and tie the squirrel. Spot smelled the wheelbarrow handles, and followed the scent down the street to a scent dead-end. The suspect probably got into a car and drove off. There was a twisty around the squirrel’s neck. It had writing on it.”
“What? A message like the obituary?” His voice was tense.
“No. It makes no sense to me. Maybe it will to you. It said DRTX-thirty-three.”
Ryan started shaking.
“You know what it means?”
Ryan backed up, reached out, collapsed into a chair. He bent over, head between his knees. He started bobbing, crying.
“Tell me, Ryan.”
He lifted up his head, looked at me with terrified eyes.
“It’s about Lily.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“DRTX-thirty-three is a gene on chromosome eleven. It’s a type of gene that prevents runaway cell growth. We call genes like this tumor suppressors. If it is damaged, it can lead to a nephroblastoma, a tumor in the kidney. A guy named Babbett first discovered it. It’s now called Babbett’s Syndrome.” Ryan lowered his head to his knees again, made a deep sob, raised up again. “It’s a rare genetic defect, but children who have it usually develop cancerous tumors before the age of five.”
“Lily has the genetic defect,” I said.
He nodded, his eyes and cheeks wet. “She lost her left kidney and part of her right kidney three years ago, a month after her third birthday. A year later, they went in to take out more. Maybe they got it all. Probably not. She’s got enough of her kidney left to function, but just barely.”
“Does she understand?”
“She knows she’s sick. She remembers her hospital stays for the surgeries in great detail. She remembers the chemo. But I don’t think she understands how serious it is.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
“For most children who have a tumor in just one kidney, it’s quite good. But she got it in both kidneys, a stage five cancer when they found it. She’s been in remission since the chemo. But one of the bad indicators was up in her blood tests this last month. There is a substantial risk that the cancer will metastasize to her lungs or her brain. They want to start another round of chemo, but the last time it nearly killed her.”
Ryan paused. He was panting.
“I’ve got a large team that’s spent the last three years working on a biological treatment. That’s part of the reason why I can never lose majority control of CBT. I can’t risk that someone else would pull that team off of their research.”
“When do you expect results?”
“We’ve had a new trial going the last six months. We expect to get a preliminary report in a week or so.” Ryan looked at me, his eyes pinched with fear. “If the results are good, I believe I can get her doctor to administer it under the terms of the FDA clinical trial protocols. If he won’t, I’m going to give it to her myself.”
“The penalties are substantial either way,” I said.
Ryan nodded, his eyes twitching. “If the FDA finds me breaching the law, they could destroy my company’s future. But if Lily’s cancer spreads, she dies.”
&nbs
p; Ryan looked away.
“Who besides a scientist would know about the DRTX-thirty-three gene?” I asked.
“Anyone who knew that Lily was sick.”
“How many people know that Lily is sick?”
“Lots. All of the medical people who’ve worked on her. The people on the team at CBT. No doubt others at CBT as well. When the boss’s kid sister gets cancer, word gets around.”
“Who named the squirrel Sammy?”
“Lily did. She liked him hanging around our front step.”
“Who knows that she named him?”
“No one but me,” Ryan said. “Wait. Hannah, our nanny would know. And Herman, the piano tuner neighbor might know. Anybody they talked to.”
“Either way, it’s a message designed to terrorize you.”
He nodded, tears flowing. He stood up.
I followed Ryan into Lily’s bedroom, where Street was reading to her. He sat down next to Lily and hugged her hard.
“I’m sorry about Sammy,” he said as he cried.
She nodded. “I’ll try not to be sad if you try, Ryan.”
Ryan wiped the heels of his hands over his eyes.
“What are you reading?”
“Street got one of your books. What’s it called again?”
“de Botton’s ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’,” Street said.
“A bit much for a six-year-old,” I said.
Lily looked at me.
“She’s smart,” Street said.
Lily looked at Street.
“No wonder people think you ivory-tower scholars are out of touch,” I said.
“It’s not like Ryan has The Cat In The Hat lying around,” Street said.
“That’s true,” Ryan said.
“I already read that at the library,” Lily said.
I said, “If Proust doesn’t keep her satisfied, I have my Matisse book in the Jeep. We can always fall back on the tried-and-true of picture books.”