Invasive Procedures

by Aaron Johnston

  “We went in in full biogear, contained the whole apartment. Then we took him to our infirmary. He’s been there ever since. But that’s not even the really bizarre part of the whole story. The bizarre part is this. According to tests we’ve conducted, he no longer has sickle-cell anemia.”

  Frank couldn’t hide his surprise. “You mean . . . he’s cured?”

  “I mean he no longer has sickle-cell anemia. Whether it was the virus or not, I don’t know. But the kid ain’t sick with sickle-cell anymore. That much I do know.”

  Frank put a hand to his head. This wasn’t making sense. A crazy religion, made up of bodybuilders, no less, had enlisted the help of a blacklisted geneticist and whipped up a gene-therapy virus that by one account, at least, might actually work.

  “You’re telling me this kid is in your infirmary right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “And he still has the virus inside him?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. And that’s why we needed the countervirus you created immediately, whether it was fully tested or not. We have to get it in this kid, not to mention the other patients we’ve picked up from this list.”

  “The others?”

  “There’s eight names on this list. We’ve collected all eight of them. They’ve all been to our infirmary. All in the last forty-eight hours. And they’re all waiting for you.”

  Frank sat forward in his seat. “You mean they all still have the virus in them, whatever strain they were given?”

  “No,” said Riggs. “Some of them were patients weeks ago—months ago, even.”

  “And they’ve been lying in bed in a containment curtain all this time?”

  “No, they’ve been living their lives normally,” Riggs said. “Better than normal, because they don’t show any symptoms of the genetic disease they once had.”

  “So they’ve been healed?”

  “So it seems.”

  Frank looked down at the list of names and then back up at Agent Riggs. “But how are they able to move about and interact with people in the world if they have the virus in them?”

  “That’s just it,” said Riggs. “They don’t have the virus in them. Three days after giving someone the virus, Healers return and administer their version of a countervirus, which cleans the virus out of the person’s system. They take down the plastic. The Healer leaves. And the person goes about his or her life again.”

  “So the Healers have a countervirus?”

  “A version of one. Apparently. That’s how they stop the virus in the people they treat. We, however, for the past six months, have only had a sample of the virus. We haven’t had a countervirus. Now, thanks to you, we do.”

  “Maybe,” said Frank.

  “Don’t say maybe,” said Riggs. “We’re counting on you.”

  Frank felt overwhelmed. “Okay. Let me get this straight. Healers walk into a person’s apartment. They hang a bunch of plastic around the bed and put an IV in the person’s arm.”

  “Right,” said Riggs.

  “Then they administer the virus.”

  “Which has been engineered for that person, so it helps them, not hurts them.”

  “Engineered for that person, yes,” said Frank. “Then the Healer tells this patient that the Healer will return in three days to administer a countervirus and stop the treatment.”

  “You got it.”

  “And all this you’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours?”

  Riggs handed the book back to Frank. “We have George Galen and his little book here to thank for that. Everything we’ve learned started there.”

  Frank leaned back and silently flipped through the book again, this time paying attention to any legible text. One passage read:

  Man has evolved into the captain of all living things, the product of time. And yet in his current state he is blind to his potential and enslaved to diseases that need not beset him. Only the Prophet can open him up and allow him to become something greater than himself.

  The Prophet

  This prophet, whoever he was, obviously thought very highly of himself. Here he was prophesying about his own future achievement: helping man reach his evolutionary potential.

  Frank shook his head. How could George Galen, the author of this book and a genius by anyone’s definition, believe this crap? How could he believe that such a prophet existed? Sure, Galen had run on hard times, but had his fall from fame been so severe that he had gone mental?

  They landed at LAX and got into a government-issued town car and drove north on the 405. Frank’s luggage and the case of countervirus were stored safely in the trunk of the car.

  Frank sat in the back, staring down at the closed charred copy of the Healer book of scripture.

  “If you know these Healers are responsible,” he said, “why not hit the streets and arrest the first Healer you find, take him in for questioning?”

  “We thought of that,” Riggs said. “Unfortunately, Healers have all but vanished since the explosion, like they knew we were on to them. We’ve got the LAPD keeping an eye out for them, but as far we as we can tell, they’ve all gone back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

  They took the Wilshire Boulevard exit and immediately came upon the Federal Building, a massive, white, impenetrable-looking structure. They drove past the long row of flagpoles out front and headed for the back parking lot.

  In minutes they were walking through the building’s entrance in the rear, passing through a security checkpoint designated for armed governmental employees. Frank flashed the ID card Riggs had given him to the security guard and followed the two agents to the elevator.

  As they waited for it to arrive, Frank realized that no one else was approaching this elevator. The lobby was fairly crowded with people, but everyone else used the elevators across the hall, the main elevators of the building, the ones going up.

  A chime sounded, and the elevator Frank and the agents were waiting for opened. They stepped inside, and Carter produced a key, inserted it into a hole, and turned. The doors closed and the elevator descended.

  “Welcome to the BHA, Dr. Hartman,” Carter said with a smile.

  Frank looked at the console and saw that there were no buttons for floors. Wherever they were going, there was only one stop.

  7

  CORE

  Galen led Monica down a series of corridors, talking constantly. Monica was doing her best to keep up, but the man had more energy than she’d expect of someone his age.

  “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” he said, waving his arms vaguely in the air. “It’s a work in progress. We plan on finishing all the construction eventually.”

  A long sheet of plastic hung across the hallway in front of them. They stepped through it, and Monica saw the mess to which he referred. This whole wing of the hospital, if it was indeed a hospital, was still under construction. Walls were unfinished. Electric sockets were open and unwired. Building supplies littered the floor: conduit, sheetrock, nails, buckets of plaster. Nor had any tile been laid. The floor was rough concrete.

  “Watch your step,” Galen said, leading her through the maze of hanging plastic sheets.

  “I know it doesn’t look like much now,” he said, “but you should have seen it before we got here. Awful. Just awful. Graffiti, trash. Really disgusting. We’ve come a long way. And we’re not normally this disorganized either. We wanted to have it all finished before you arrived, but we had an incident a few days ago, lost one of our labs, and we thought it safer to speed up the project. We stopped renovating out here and put all of the staff in the Core.”

  “Of course,” Monica said, as if this were all to be expected.

  In truth, she had no idea what he was talking about. But she didn’t want to let on. The man was clearly unstable. Angering him with unwanted questions would only worsen her situation.

  “Ah, here we are,” he said, parting the last sheet and approaching a pair of doors.

  He pulled one
open and motioned her inside.

  It was a vast room with vaulted ceilings. Blue lights hung along the walls and bathed everything in a deep blue hue. There were at least twenty people in white paper lab suits, moving about, looking into microscopes, sitting at computer terminals, labeling test tubes. Some looked up and noticed them, but most went about their business without paying them any attention.

  Galen smiled wide. “Impressive, don’t you think?”

  Monica said what she thought he wanted to hear. “It’s amazing.”

  He gave a soft laugh. “You’re humoring me. Please, Doctor. You’re safe now. You can speak your mind with confidence. I brought you in because I respect your opinion. What do you think?”

  She looked around at the workers. “It’s very . . . clean,” she said finally.

  He laughed heartily this time. “You amuse me, Dr. Owens. I suppose I can’t expect you to know what we’re doing here just by giving you a peek.” He spread his arms wide. “This is the Core. It’s where we work our magic, so to speak.”

  He lifted a test tube off one of the shelves and read the label. “Gary Miner. Santa Clarita, California. Thirty-six years old. Huntington’s disease.”

  He handed it to her. She looked at the label. “What is it?”

  “That, Dr. Owens, is Gary Miner, a young man with Huntington’s disease.”

  Monica looked at the milky liquid inside the tube.

  “Don’t look so concerned, Dr. Owens. We didn’t melt Mr. Miner down. What you’re holding is a tissue culture, a sample of Mr. Miner’s DNA. From the date on the side here I see that we extracted it only a week ago.”

  He took the sample from her and placed it back on the shelf. “Our sequencers here will identify the composition of his DNA and locate the faulty gene. Here, take a look.” He took her hand and led her to a large boxy computer where several men stood working. His hand lightly tapped the side of the computer. “It may not look like much, but these models pack quite a punch.”

  He pointed to a video monitor, where four letters raced repeatedly across the screen in random order. A, C, G, T.

  Monica understood what she was looking at. DNA was composed of four chemical components: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Each of the letters on the screen corresponded to one of those components. The order of the letters as they appeared must be the order of the chemical components along a single strand of DNA.

  “I see the wheels inside that head of yours turning, Dr. Owens.”

  “You’re decoding someone’s DNA.”

  He smiled. “At lightning speed. We have to dye the tissue sample prior to loading it into the sequencer. Each of the four base molecules reacts differently to the dye and turns a separate color. That’s how the computer knows what it’s looking at. The software then recognizes the colors of the sequence and, voila. Fascinating, don’t you think?”

  Monica nodded obediently.

  Galen rubbed his chin and looked at the sequence thoughtfully. “Hm, let’s see. It looks like we’ve got a female here. Red hair. Tall. A little on the heavy side . . . Oh no. Oh dear me. Poor girl.” He looked at Monica with a frown. “She’s got a bad liver,” he said sadly.

  Monica looked skeptical. “You know that just by looking at it?”

  He laughed loudly again. “I can’t fool you, can I, Doctor? I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. No, we can’t tell all that by simply looking at the sequence. In fact, we can’t tell much of anything from one segment. You see, about ninety-seven percent of it is fluff, or what we call non-coding DNA. Junk. It doesn’t seem to do anything. It’s just there. It’s the same with your DNA as well, not just this sample. Most of it doesn’t have any function at all. No, what we’re looking for are those special sections that control and organize necessary human functions.”

  “Genes.”

  “Precisely. The genes. But did you know that only a few of our genes are unique? It’s true. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of your genes are exactly like mine. Most people don’t know that, but it’s a fact. Genetically, all humans are nearly identical. Just a few little specks of you makes you you. And only a few little specks of me makes me me. That difference could be minute, even down to a single letter in the code. We refer to them as SNPs, or snips. That’s short for ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms.’ Many of these snips lead to genetic diseases. And if we can identify the snip as the source of the disease, we can replace it with a cloned, correct gene.”

  “Gene therapy.”

  Galen rubbed his hands together. “It’s very exciting, isn’t it? And it’s not that difficult. The slightest alteration in someone’s genetic sequence can make all the difference in the world.”

  “What are you looking for in this strand?” Monica said, surprised to find herself interested.

  Galen conferred with one of the workers. “Sickle-cell anemia, he tells me. This is the sequence of a little girl named Kimberly. We’re going to cure her if we can. And trust me, we can.”

  Monica didn’t know what to think. The lab seemed legitimate. The gene sequencers looked real. The lab workers sounded competent. But this was Galen, a criminal, a crazy old man. Could any of this be believable if he was running the show?

  She watched as Galen took a moment to speak to the workers manning the sequencer. He was kind to them, expressing gratitude for their hard work, patting them on the shoulder and telling them how fortunate he felt to have them involved. Monica could see how much his words meant to them, how they beamed with pride and valued his praise. He was more than the man in charge here. These people revered him.

  There was a sudden commotion at the other end of the lab. Monica heard footsteps, shouting, breaking glass.

  “Stop him!” someone shouted.

  Suddenly a teenage boy appeared, running around the lab equipment, knocking over workers, bumping into tables, desperate to get away, and heading straight for the doors Monica and Galen had entered through. He wore hospital scrubs and had a tattoo on his neck.

  “Jonathan!” Galen said. “What are you doing?”

  Another man was chasing the boy, a large Healer like Stone. He stopped, aimed a handgun, and fired.

  Monica screamed.

  The dart struck Jonathan in the back of the neck just as he was approaching the doors. His body went limp immediately, and he fell forward onto the tile, sliding across it and crashing into the doors with a terrible thud.

  Galen was furious. “Lichen! What the devil are you doing?”

  Lichen lowered his gun, looking suddenly embarrassed.

  Galen ran to Jonathan, who wasn’t moving, and cradled his head. “He could have fallen and broken his neck,” he said. “A lot of good he’d do us then.”

  “He was trying to escape, sir,” said Lichen.

  “Escape where? Into the hallway? He’s lucky you didn’t shoot him in the eye.” He waved Monica over. “Doctor, if you will.”

  She approached reluctantly. Lichen stood near Jonathan, and she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of getting any closer to him. She looked at the dart gun in his hand, his finger still resting on the trigger.

  Galen pointed a stern finger. “Put that away, Lichen, before you shoot someone else.”

  “Yes, sir.” He pocketed it.

  Monica knelt beside Galen and opened her pouch, which he had instructed her to bring with her from the clinic. She took out her stethoscope and listened to Jonathan’s heart. It was beating fast, but that was to be expected—he’d been running at top speed. Monica was simply relieved his heart was beating at all. She looked at his face and cleaned a cut on his forehead. There were probably scratches elsewhere, maybe even a broken bone, but she wasn’t about to begin a full examination right now.

  “He’s alive,” she said. Then she slowly turned his head and removed the dart. “What was in this?”

  “Ketamine,” said Lichen. “It’s a tranquilizer.”

  “Of course it’s a tranquilizer,” said Galen. “And it was completely unnecessary. You put eve
ryone in this lab at risk chasing him in here. You could have damaged the sequencers. That was foolish.”

  It was obvious Lichen hadn’t intentionally led Jonathan in here. Jonathan was the one leading, not the other way around. But Lichen said nothing.

  “And you frightened Dr. Owens as well. I doubt she appreciates that.”

  “Forgive me, Doctor,” said Lichen, bowing his head.

  “Here am I trying to give her a nice introduction to our work,” said Galen, “and you go and scare her silly. What kind of impression does that give? Look at her. Now she’s all flustered.”

  “Again, my apologies, Doctor,” said Lichen.

  Everyone in the lab had stopped what they were doing and stood staring.

  Galen stood, raised a hand, spoke in a loud voice. “Go on now. Back to work. All of you. Don’t be distracted. We have much still to do.”

  As the workers obeyed and shuffled back to their stations, Galen lowered his voice to Lichen and pointed to Jonathan. “Pick him up. I want him back with the others.”

  Monica tensed. Others? There were other people here like this boy? Other people being held against their will? Other prisoners like me and Wyatt?

  She watched as Lichen bent down and lifted Jonathan as if he weighed nothing.

  “Come, Doctor,” said Galen, “I’ll introduce you to the others.”

  Monica followed. Then came Lichen, carrying Jonathan. It made her nervous to have Lichen walking behind her. Not only was he large, but he also carried a weapon, one he clearly knew how to use with deadly accuracy. After all, Jonathan had been a moving target. And from Lichen’s reaction, Monica could tell it hadn’t been a lucky shot.

  Then there was the issue of ketamine. It must have been a dangerously high dose to knock the boy out so quickly. It made her wonder, What would a dose that high do to a smaller person?

  She put the thought out of her head. No one was going to shoot Wyatt. Not if she could help it. She would do precisely what Galen asked, anything and everything he wanted. If men like Lichen and Stone were at Galen’s disposal, then Monica wasn’t about to take a single risk.