The car escaped the congestion of late-evening traffic onto 290 heading west. He tabulated the incoming tickets from the traffic cameras as he sped down the highway, if only to distract himself from how they would confront Jacqueline when they actually found her.
“You sure she’ll be there?”
Preston jumped at Matthew’s voice. “I can’t be absolutely certain. I do know that Harper helped run this company until LyfeGen bought it, but we never did anything with the facilities once we did buy it. Joel was always more concerned with the IP of ProlifiTEC. Anyway, it would be a perfect place to take the Sustain samples, if she intended to do anything with them without being watched.”
Matthew shook his head slowly. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s hard to believe she’d take the samples all the way out here for safekeeping.”
“I don’t think it’s about safekeeping anymore.”
Matthew slumped back into his seat.
“You and I both tore through the woman’s apartment. She was adamant about ensuring that we didn’t find her. There’s something tremendously suspicious going on.”
“Sure.”
“I’m not a dumb man,” Preston said. “It’s obvious you had a personal relationship with her, but you can’t let your emotions prevent you from seeing the reality of this situation.”
Matthew’s voice dropped again. “I hope you’re wrong.”
“So do I.” Preston pressed harder on the gas pedal. His heart thumped against his ribcage and thoughts of Jacqueline fading into the night haunted his mind.
Matthew spoke up again. “Besides, why would she go through all the trouble of taking the samples to a lab just to trash them?”
“Hopefully, she can answer that question.”
***
Preston turned into the parking lot. A scarlet Honda, illuminated by one of the lights on the otherwise empty asphalt sea, sat near the front entrance of the building.
At just four stories tall, the building didn’t exhibit the same elegance as the LyfeGen building. The façade of the defunct ProlifiTEC offices was dreary gray-and-brown slate, made only more bland and faded by the shadows that enveloped it. On the top floor, yellow light filtered between slatted blinds. The building must have been an early-twenty-first-century construction, lacking windows with electronic opacity controls. The last time Preston had visited the place, it had been alive with young researchers doubling as entrepreneurial businesspeople. The physical appearance of the building had been hidden behind the sense of excitement and enthusiasm that most of the employees had shared as they brought their gene delivery systems technology to fruition.
Tonight, the building was a desolate husk of its former self. Instead of walking into ProlifiTEC with a beaming Joel Cobb, he crept across the painted asphalt with a downtrodden and skeptical Matthew Pierce. Preston attempted to exude confidence, puffing his chest out. Truthfully, he shivered at the thought of Jacqueline’s possible motivation for running away with the samples and bringing them back to the ProlifiTEC facilities. At best, she was frightened and didn’t want Matthew to interrupt her work with some unwanted romantic advances. She might’ve been turned away at LyfeGen, given the entire building was likely still a crime scene. At worst, she had a more nefarious motive that Preston would rather not contemplate.
Matthew paused in front of the glass doors to the building. “You think it’s open?”
Preston shrugged and walked past the engineer. He tugged at the door. Sure enough, it was unlocked. “That’s got to be her up there.”
“Yeah, I know.” Matthew glanced at the Civic. “That’s her car, I mean.”
Jacqueline had left them a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of glowing hallway lights that led to a set of stairs in the eerily vacant building. They waded past cardboard boxes half-filled with abandoned office supplies and empty desks. They passed through another unlocked door into a laboratory. While most of the lights were off over the bulky, empty cell incubators, spectrophotometers, and lyophilizers, a couple of 3D fabrication machines buzzed. Their glowing control screens glared a chilling blue amongst the shadows that surrounded them.
The smell of fresh high-strength ABS plastic distracted Preston. He examined the machines cautiously. Matthew, too, sniffed at the smell of the hot plastic.
“She just printed something, didn’t she?” Matthew peered into the open box where the fabricators deposited plastic in tiny droplets according to the computer model inputs.
“It certainly would seem that way. That smell is all too familiar.”
“Really? We don’t really use these printers at LyfeGen.”
“No, that’s true,” Preston said, already heading toward a lit-up stairwell. “However, I made good use of the earlier versions of these printers back during my post-doc years.”
“I heard it would sometimes take hours to print something.”
“It was absolutely prehistoric.”
His words echoed in the empty lab, bouncing off empty cabinets caked in dust. The door at the end of the lab had clear handprints near the metallic PUSH letters. Matthew and Preston pushed through and peered up the winding stairway.
The humor that had passed between them evaporated. Preston’s optimistic hope that Jacqueline had sought refuge to solve the mystery herself gave way to the more frightening worry that she had been involved in the Sustain sabotages. It worried him more that she had made the trek to this particular facility to destroy evidence that could have easily been drowned in bleach and flushed down a toilet in her home. In fact, that would have been far simpler. Maybe that benefit of the doubt could prevail over his preconceptions of Jacqueline.
Behind him, Matthew trudged up the stairs. Each step appeared to age him and Preston gave him a silent but firm look of concern. Matthew waved him off, wrinkles etching his forehead.
Certainly, the younger engineer’s mind would be awash with confusion. He had almost lost his wife and was now abandoning her to follow his mistress. He was about to retrieve a sensitive biological package that could either guarantee or destroy his future. If he failed to reclaim the lost samples, Anil Nayak wouldn’t be the only person breathing down Matthew’s neck. The FDA would come down hard on him, turning him into an easy scapegoat to unleash their wrath upon and send him scurrying from the medical industry.
The two men, slightly out of breath from the climb and the fear of breathing too loudly, arrived at the fourth-floor landing. A column of light shone from the window at the end of the small walkway. Preston hugged the wall, concealing himself from the window, and tiptoed to the door.
With a deliberate slowness, he peered into the window. A dark-haired woman sat on a bench, huddled over a lab counter. Her blue-gloved hands gripped it. She was staring at a holodisplay, her head swiveling back and forth as she scanned the text.
He opened the door and moved into the middle of the laboratory, with Matthew quickly following behind him.
Jacqueline spun around. She jumped to her feet, eyes seething.
Sudden terror at being utterly unprepared for this confrontation gripped Preston. No weapons, no plan for how to confront this potentially dangerous woman. He and Matthew should definitely have refrained from playing detective.
Jacqueline rushed around the bench, placing the heavy countertop and the buzzing gray benchtop machines between herself and them. “What—what are you doing here?”
“I think I deserve to ask you the same question. This is LyfeGen property.”
“Then you shouldn’t be here.” Jacqueline’s eyes were wide and her lips pursed. “You were fired.”
“Not quite,” Preston said, “but let’s not argue semantics. You have with you something that we need to take a look at.”
“The samples? They’re not yours to take.”
“Come on, Jackie,” Matthew said, his voice soft. “Can’t we just take these back to LyfeGen? They could have my ass for this.”
“No.” Jacqueline raised her nose in indignation.
“Can’t we just go drop this stuff back off at the office, and go get a drink at Grape Street? I think we all need one.”
“Don’t come any closer.”
The machine in front of her stopped buzzing and a small plastic tray slid out with tiny liquid samples in individual wells.
Matthew stepped forward. “Did you isolate the RNA? Did you run them against the Sustain update predictions?”
Preston glanced at Matthew, scowling. The younger man ignored him, intent on Jacqueline.
“Did you find anything yet?”
Jacqueline’s eyes darted between the two men. “What do you want from me?”
“We just want the samples,” Preston said, “and that’s it. I think we all just want to put this behind us.”
“That’s exactly what you want! You want me gone and you want to destroy the samples.”
Preston shook his head and walked toward the bench where Jacqueline had been working. He held up his hands in a gesture to calm her.
“Stop,” Jacqueline said. “Stay away from me.”
Matthew laughed. “What a joke.”
Jacqueline gaped at him, taken aback. Preston, too, swung his head around to face Matthew.
“You can’t possibly pull this off any longer.” Matthew walked slowly toward her. “You’re the one behind all of this. Aren’t you?”
She shook her head, her hands clenching the benchtop as though it had some protective power. “No.”
“Why’d you run away, then? You have access to the production lines and you knew exactly where our research was headed. You fed me lines for Audrey to publish, to throw her off your trail.”
“No,” Jacqueline said. “That’s not true!”
“It isn’t?” Matthew said. “Then please explain why you would take the samples away. Why hide them here?”
“I was trying to get away from you,” Jacqueline said. “I know what you are, Matthew. What you’re trying to do. Whitney told me everything.” She swung her head around to Preston. “I never thought you’d be a part of this, too, though. God.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Preston said.
“Come on, Jacqueline,” Matthew said. “You don’t want to make this any worse on yourself.” He paused and looked away. “I can’t believe I ever trusted you.”
“You’re a fine one to be talking about lessons of trust.”
Matthew swung around and stomped toward her, fuming all the way.
Jacqueline reached under her blouse and pulled an object from her waistband. “Stop!”
For a moment, Matthew ignored her, continuing forward. Then he stopped, staring at the object she held. Adrenaline surged through Preston as he watched their standoff. Now, he knew exactly why the 3D fabricator had been on in the lab downstairs.
Jacqueline held one of the novelty firearms that floated around on the Net, easily downloaded and printed.
Matthew laughed mockingly. “That’s all fine and dandy. But you can’t print a bullet. And those things are notoriously failure-prone. You have two or three shots with that, if you’re lucky. I thought you were better than this.”
Jacqueline Harper...Preston whispered the name to himself. It wasn’t just as part owner of ProlifiTEC that he knew her or simply her role at LyfeGen.
She had personally asked Joel Cobb to enroll her son in the Sustain pediatric trials, a last ditch effort to save her son’s life. But Joel hadn’t agreed to it. Preston couldn’t recall exactly why, but he remembered that the Board had frowned upon too much charity participation in clinical trials. The company, under FDA stipulations, would have had to take on the cost of the child’s medical treatments, Sustain production and implantation, follow-up appointments, as well as paying a handsome sum of money to the parents should the product fail.
And there was something about the boy’s condition that was slightly different from the other children involved in the study. Plenty of people had sent personal letters to Joel and the Board and anyone they could reach at LyfeGen asking to have an organ implanted in them. Messages via comm card lines, old-fashioned post delivery, personal pleas from holos of people on friends’ and families’ comm cards in front of the LyfeGen offices and people who barged into the building, stopped physically by security, but their voices ringing down the halls and echoing into closing elevator doors.
People were desperate for the organ. Many, many people. There was little wonder that Preston had neglected to remember this particular detail about an employee that he had worked with minimally until shortly before his abrupt departure from the company.
That knowledge did him little good at that particular moment. He had pinpointed Jacqueline’s motive, understanding her irrational hatred for LyfeGen and even more so for all those responsible for allowing her son to lose his life. She must have developed a vindictive sense of justice, encouraging her to embark upon a solitary mission as a biotechnological angel of death. Even as a frightened mouse cornered in a kitchen, broom swinging at her face, she still denied the reality of it all, projecting all the blame on those who had discovered her clever, calculated method of vigilante sentencing and revenge.
A sudden buzzing interrupted the standoff. Jacqueline and Matthew broke their staring contest. Jacqueline’s arms remained unmoved and she kept the gun pointed squarely at Matthew’s chest. She recovered her intense focus as the buzzing and lights emanated from Preston’s comm card.
He ignored the call and silenced the card. “Please, no one needs to be hurt because of a misunderstanding.”
“I didn’t know you’d betray Cobb like this, but it makes sense now.” Jacqueline’s eyes were alight with a determined fierceness, glancing back and forth between the two men. “I ought to just shoot you both here.”
Preston considered Kyle and Erik at home. He’d promised Erik that he wouldn’t involve himself any further in the Sustain controversy. Truthfully, he had no compelling reason to solve a mystery that would only benefit a company anxious to send him scurrying away from its helm. The Board had neglected to thank him for a lifetime of leading research projects that had been instrumental in LyfeGen’s growth. And, now, he might be leaving Erik to take care of Kyle alone. He’d never see the boy enter high school or walk across the graduation stage in his long black robe or get married.
Every day that Preston had spent ten, twelve, even fifteen hours toiling away performing research or telling others how it should be done, brainstorming Sustain update product expansions, and organizing clinical trials, Erik, without major complaint, had supported him and had ensured that their son had someone to depend on for rides to and from school, to take him for ice cream from the automated “hand-dipped” vendors on the shores of Lake Michigan, to take him to watch the dolphins at Shedd Aquarium. Often, when Preston dropped into Kyle’s room to wish him a good night’s sleep, Kyle recounted the excitement of his day with Erik. And, then, there were times when Kyle had already fallen asleep. Preston could only kiss his son’s forehead, wondering how the boy felt about him.
Miserably, Preston considered that his family didn’t need him. If he died, he wouldn’t be removing much from their lives that wasn’t already gone.
“Fine,” Preston said. “Shoot us. What do you think the police will do with you when everyone finds out you’re wrong?”
Through gritted teeth, Jacqueline said, “I’m not wrong.”
Matthew threw up his arms, strangling the air with his hands in frustration. “Stop it. This is crazy.”
“Just—just leave me alone. Go back out that door and drive away. You’ll get a head start.”
Preston took a deep breath, already regretting his sentiment. “We’re not leaving without you. You’re coming with us. We’re going to straighten all of this out.”
“There is no way in hell I’m coming with you lunatics.”
In a flash, Matthew dodged to the right, preempting any shot that Jacqueline might take. She stepped back while readjusting her aim.
But her a
rms swung around too late.
With a grunt, Matthew tackled her, and they disappeared behind the lab bench. A brief scuffle took place while Preston waited, frozen. Sounds of shoes and fingernails scraping against the tiled floor were interrupted by a loud shot and a gurgling yell. The deep, throaty yell of a man in pain.
Preston backed away, inching toward the stairwell. He fought the urge to sprint out of the room, instead opting to be silent and avoid reminding Jacqueline of his presence. But his reasoning succumbed to fear, and he turned, crashing into a bench with a dusty PCR machine. His elbow smashed against it.
A sliding, gurgling sound emanated from behind the bench where Jacqueline and Matthew had clashed. Jacqueline must have been pinned under him, but now she was free and standing up.
She pointed the gun at Preston.
Again, his body slowed as if he was moving through a pool of molasses. He whirled around, trying to escape, but a punch tore into his shoulder, sending him toppling to the ground. His head smacked against the tile floor, and everything around him went black.
The sound of glassware clinking and the noisy clicks of metal against plastic roused him. Jacqueline had not left yet. Maybe he hadn’t even really been unconscious, just shocked. His vision tilted, and his thoughts swirled like a drunk’s.
He tried to focus on Jacqueline. Her long brown hair pulled up into a ponytail. Her blue blouse, with a strange burgundy pattern. Not a pattern, wine stains. Blood stains. His head rolled back to the floor. His left arm felt nonexistent, numb.
He slid himself closer to the lab bench and tried to pull himself up into a sitting position, but his shoulder screeched in agony when he twisted his body. He let out a grunt and Jacqueline turned to look at him.
“Don’t move,” she said.
Funny. He couldn’t move. He might’ve laughed. He didn’t have anything else to do. As another surge of pain tore through him, he grimaced. Blood seeped out from under his coat, soaking his shirt.
The Sustain cells would be working overtime, bolstering the thrombotic response to the open wounds, the exposed collagen in the blood vessels. Platelets would be activated. Thrombin and fibrin would be forming around the ruptures in his blood vessels. The Sustain cells would offer themselves up in the expedited production of thrombin at the sites of injury.
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