Targeting the Telomeres, A Thriller

by R. N. Shapiro

  From: Birdie234@gmail.com

  Re: Embassy

  You must first establish an encrypted account through software available online. Download Zapped. Once you do so, you will be able to open and view my next email.

  Solarez downloads the software, establishes the necessary account, and clicks on the next email from the same fictitious name.

  I suppose you’ve had time to think about how valuable my information may be. I have access to information you can only dream about. As I said, we begin with Ron Michaels and his son. The world believes he’s dead, and there are few people outside of American intelligence who know this.

  Wire instructions: $100,000 USD

  Bank Account: BTR8-67312 A, Commerce Bank of Eritrea

  Account Name: Steve Solars

  SWIFT CODE 56134.

  Once the deposit is confirmed I will provide the first installment of information about Michaels’ son, Justin. Next will be about our asset at Sherwood, with more to follow.

  —Birdie

  “What could they possibly know about Justin?” Director Isaacson asks Solarez after he fills him in on the email. “Even if they know he exists, he’s protected at our Sherwood facility.”

  “No idea. But if they planted an asset inside Sherwood or hacked into our servers, this intel could be very valuable. Whoever they might be.”

  “I’m trying to think of something we could ask this contact to verify they work inside the Chinese embassy and have appropriate clearance. But if we drag our feet, it might be too late for the information to be relevant. Or he or she may change their mind or demand even more cash.”

  “Anyone who’s willing to take these kinds of risks has an agenda that goes beyond making money. Their value to us is their alleged access to the Chinese embassy. I am assuming Chinese embassy, not Russian or some other embassy.”

  The director swivels slightly in his chair, thinking things through for a few seconds. “Let’s do it. We have too much riding on this operation for the research to land in the hands of the Chinese. We’ll know if this is worth pursuing further once we receive the initial information. Send Birdie a one-line email confirming the wire transfer when it’s complete. And advise me as soon as you get the info on the kid.”

  Chapter 19

  Jonathan

  Amanda had trolled Jonathan's Facebook page and learned he would be playing lacrosse for Johns Hopkins against College Park in their annual rivalry. College Park’s stadium in Maryland is one of the finest lacrosse venues in the nation according to their website, and it should be packed. She bought her ticket in advance on the Johns Hopkins side and is taking her seat when Jonathan enters the field as the starting attacker for his team. The score seesaws back and forth, and is tied after two periods, but Maryland ekes out a 3-2 victory. One of the Hopkins’ scores is Jonathan’s, fired from outside the goal crease.

  Immediately after the game, Amanda presses through departing fans to a metal fence dividing the stands from the visitors' bench. The dejected Hopkins players begin to walk from the sidelines to the locker room at the far end of the field. About that time, she notices Amber Fields and another girl standing in the aisle about 30 feet to her right. From various social media posts, Amanda knows Amber and Jonathan are in a relationship and she turns and quickly walks away, not wanting to cause trouble. Jonathan spots her and takes off after her just as Amber recognizes her as well.

  He catches up to her and calls out. "Amanda! Amanda, hey, stop!”

  She keeps moving, but he continues following her on the other side of the fence, one level down from the walkway. She finally stops and turns to face him. He puts both arms upward against the chain link and laces his fingers through the holes.

  "Why didn't you say hello? You didn't tell me you were going to be here."

  "I wanted to see you play, and I was going to talk to you, but I chickened out. You didn't have to come after me."

  "I'm glad to see you. Was there something in particular you wanted to say?"

  A bunch of people curiously pause, then walk around her as she looks down at him, deciding whether or not to tell him.

  "I remembered something."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Something about you and me. I still can't remember anything else, you know, from before.”

  “I didn’t realize that, we haven’t talked in a long time. Not really since graduation.”

  "I saw Amber, and you’re seeing each other, so I ran. I’m not trying to get in between you two.”

  "Well, I tried to forget what we had. You pretty much crushed me after the crash when you blew me off like I was nobody.”

  "I'm sorry. I couldn't reinvent what I couldn't remember."

  “Did you expect me to wait? Or to keep believing in something you told me didn’t exist anymore? Put yourself in my shoes.”

  Amanda doesn't say anything. The memory of him holding her tightly had touched her so deeply. She clings tightly to any shred of her pre-crash memory.

  Jonathan says, "I still have some of the letters you sent me when I was at lacrosse camp the summer after junior year. I was reading them not long ago."

  "I would like to read them. Could you scan them and send them to me?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m staying at Crossroads until I go back to school.”

  “Will do.” He stares an extra second, both oblivious to the many noises surrounding them.

  “Anyhow, great seeing you Jonathan. You played great, really.” She locks eyes with him again, searching for meaning.

  “Thanks for coming. Let's stay in touch."

  With that, he turns and trots toward the visitors' locker room.

  Seconds later, tears well up and fall down her face. She wipes them with the sleeves of her hoodie. As she finds her way to her car, not twenty feet behind is the FBI agent trying not to interfere or look too obvious. Amanda stops abruptly and the agent almost bumps into her from behind. I’m emotional enough to cry, she suddenly realizes, brushing tears from her cheeks, over a memory that likely was before the crash.

  I may not be a lost cause after all.

  Chapter 20

  Presentations

  Ron Michaels pulls the key card out of his lab coat pocket and swipes it over the reader, and a large glass door slides horizontally. He feels the rush of the airlock as the first door closes and the second door opens into the research area housing the rodents used in many of the projects. Their small cages line one entire wall. Wearing his less-than-designer hair cap and nylon gloves, he strides several steps past the guinea pigs to the mice. Grasping one small container with five mice, he walks out of the room.

  He makes it a practice to be involved in certain aspects of the experimental trials rather than relying exclusively on his research teams. On the second floor, he exits the elevator, holds his card up to the security reader, clears the airlock doors, and passes several large freezers and refrigerators. Upon entering the room where a dozen researchers have their workstations with microscopes and other various lab equipment, he takes a seat at his workstation, which is no more different than any of the others on the floor—at his insistence. He looks at his watch—1:00 p.m. The weekly progress meeting isn’t until 2:00 p.m., giving him a little more time for research.

  Right before the meeting, he grabs a seat in the center of the room. A massive flat-screen TV hangs on one wall and his team is crowded inside.

  "All right, let's start with the heterochronic parabiosis group. Bob, you’re up."

  Though it sounds like a Frankenstein-type experiment, fusing the circulatory systems of live young and old mice allows some of the older animals’ organs to be rejuvenated, most likely due to some type of molecular factor present across the blood types. The simple transfusion of blood from younger ones to older ones has shown health benefits in past studies. Much of the current research in this field isolates and identifies what factors cause this phenomenon in the hopes of reversing age-associated organ functi
on declines.

  Bob heads to the front of the room and slides his small flash drive into a laptop. His PowerPoint presentation addressing the specific procedures and methods of the experiment appears on the screen. The team discusses their means of isolating potential anti-aging factors present in younger blood. Most of the questions arise from researchers not privy to the project, curious about different specifics or conceptual implications. Then they discuss the results. Some molecular factors in the blood of the young mice didn’t seem to cause a significant change in health when provided to some of the older mice, but in others, the trends were more promising. Ron poses several questions about the concentrations his researchers used, why they decided on certain methods, and, in the more positive trials, suggests a higher concentration of the factors or a larger sample of mice might bump the findings into the statistically significant range.

  "So, on the suggestion of Dr. Michaels, we are trying to move away from having to stitch together the skins of the young and the old mice to join their circulatory systems, because he says it's unrealistic as a commercially viable delivery system in humans. I guess I have to agree." The junior researcher smirks toward Ron.

  "Yes, you do. Clearly we're not going to sew people to each other to commercialize this breakthrough. The method needs to be simple."

  "Exactly, so what we've been doing is injecting the plasma with our cocktail of enzymes into the young mouse, then withdrawing it and re-injecting it in the older one, eliminating the need for the circulatory connection or contemporaneous transfusion.”

  “Thanks Bob.” Ron turns to James, the leader of the free radical group. James replaces Bob and starts his slide show.

  Prior research has established that free radicals produced by routine mitochondrial cell function inexorably leads to genetic degradation—the symptoms of the aging process. Though far from proven, the same could be said for many theories of aging. The free radical group aspires to reduce free radical proliferation in cells by supplementing them with antioxidants, or working with mutant mouse strains that produce less free radicals. Then, the researchers carefully study their tissue and age-associated changes. The slide show shows some promising prospects, but as with most lab experiments, there is both supporting and contrary evidence. Several antioxidant interventions reduced aspects tied to the aging process, while others did nothing at all, even though in the conceptual framework of the free radical theory, they should have.

  Par for the course, Ron thinks to himself. The free radical project is still getting off the ground, so he doesn’t grill them too hard. Instead, he obtains clarification on a few of the results and offers suggestions on the future direction of the research. He then reminds the team to scour the current telomere research online and to include it in their report for the next meeting.

  Next up is the genetic engineering group. Samuel, the leader, begins his presentation. Ron is particularly interested in this project, though he gives no indication. With the advent of supercomputers and more efficient genome analysis, it is becoming increasingly simple to identify genes that accomplish different tasks, even if researchers didn’t grasp how or the why at first.

  By taking genetic samples from a bunch of people who lived past 100 and comparing them to the public at large, researchers can identify the genes that are more pronounced in a centenarian and examine the molecular factors associated with them. The synthesis of computer science and biology will likely pave the way for many biomedical advancements like this in the future. With that in mind, Ron pays close attention to what genes seem to be implicated in permitting longevity and their known functions, and correlates this with whether the centenarians have longer or shorter telomeres.

  He notes the genes associated with those over 100 years old often seem random, nonsensical, or previously associated with processes wholly removed from aging. However, if the data suggests a random protein linked with some obscure biochemical pathway slowed the aging process, then it is certainly worth investigating this and any connection with short or longer telomeres. The most difficult question for the researchers to explain is how and why these obscure genes profoundly impact the aging process. When Ron poses this question, he gets a chance to see who’s been doing their homework.

  Finally, the last group addresses gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9, the type of gene editing methodology that allows biologists to hone in on and modify one or two of 22,000 genes or more. Bart, the team leader, explains how the team is working to delete certain gene expressions to prove whether gene editing could control muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis, diseases with no known cures. Another goal of this gene-editing research is to determine whether it can be useful in teasing out longer telomeres in human stem cells and if they can be reproduced throughout the body.

  All in all, the presentations show forward progress, although meeting the 18-month mandate remains highly uncertain. Ron’s own research on devising a unique delivery system has not even arrived at a launch pad. His dream of targeting the telomeres requires a convenient, patient-friendly method of ingesting the telomere therapy to be successful. Transfusions or shots won’t suffice.

  Chapter 21

  Distortion

  "Boss, we tracked the email IP address to the internet café you asked us to and we confirmed ”Birdie” used one of the desktop computers. There's a row of five of them and we know which one he used. Unfortunately there's no surveillance footage."

  "You told me they had a surveillance camera trained on the front exterior of the café and one directed inside the store," Solarez says.

  "Yeah, I did tell you that. So what happened was once we went to the store owner and sat in the back of the store with him reviewing footage on the date that we're looking for, all of a sudden the camera image blurs, My guess is our target sprayed some kind of solution on the video camera. They had no clear footage for days before one of the store clerks realized there was something on the lens and they cleaned it off.”

  "So you're saying you've got nothing."

  “Unfortunately. We also checked all the outside camera surveillance for hours before the time of the email and hours after and there's nothing we can find that gives us a clue.

  "This guy is good. And he probably won't go back to that café again."

  Chapter 22

  Crossroads Trot

  Amanda studies the miniscule lines meandering horizontally from the outer corner of each eye. Have they changed? No, they seem the same. Will I age normally? How will I tell? Maybe I am now a freak of nature. A freak of my dad’s telomere transfusions. I don’t know, it makes me cray crazy sometimes.

  She opens the medicine cabinet looking for nothing in particular and briefly ponders the words on the small water-stained paper inside the door:

  Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view. - Horace

  Money often costs too much. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Next, her eyes drift to the rectangular piece taped right below the other scrap removed from Kent’s bedroom wall:

  Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering souls, not amid joy. -Felicia Hemans

  Strength. Yeah. A near smile forms as she considers the words, and how they bring back a rush of thoughts. After softly touching the scrap of paper with her fingers, like a caress, she eases the cabinet door shut, ready to see David for his first visit to the farm in quite a while.

  Amanda greets David on the front porch of the farmhouse, ignoring the FBI agent standing beside his unmarked SUV. She gives him a big hug.

  "You ready to do some riding today?"

  "I'm not exactly an equestrian."

  "We’ll keep it at a walk. I'll ride Voodoo and you’re on Francine. I think you'll like her."

  David takes in the pungency of the stable. Strong odors. He mentally contrasts them with the absence of noticeable scents in the FBI HQ. Manuel helps him with the necessary tack, and within a few minutes he and Amanda are side by side on horseback, on a slow trot down a well-worn path under a can
opy of trees.

  "How's the interning?"

  "Fine. I’ve seen Solarez a few times, but not every day."

  "I guess it would be a nice change for you from all that science at MIT."

  "Yeah.”

  They continue riding in silence. David still feels a little awkward around Amanda since their lunch at the FBI, and he’s not sure what else to talk about. He decides to ask a few questions about some of their mutual acquaintances and the car Kent Perless was killed in, which he noticed was no longer on the property.

  “Have you seen Charlyne much since you moved to the apartment? I haven’t seen her since we graduated.”

  Amanda thinks back to her binge-drinking days and Charlyne having to call her uncle to intervene.

  “Not as much. She’s probably happy to not have me screwing up her world.”

  “Whaddya mean by that?”

  “You know I was a basket case freshman year. Hell, I guess I’m still a basket case. I ran into her on Rugby Road one night a few months ago, but she was with a guy so we only talked a minute.”

  “What happened to the Alfa Romeo, did you sell it?”

  “I paid a foreign car mechanic to fix it up. It’s in a storage place in Middleburg. I didn’t like looking at it every day, but I did learn how to drive a stick shift, in case I ever decide to drive it one day.”

  “That’s cool. My dad taught me when I was 17, but I don’t remember how. What about Britt Hayes, the pretend drug-addict, undercover agent?”

  “Of course not. For all I know she’s assassinating some third world leader for the CIA, assuming she’s still alive.”