Next
Next
Michael Crichton
The Number One international bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Congo and Sphere blends fact and fiction to create a near-future where genetic engineering opens up a whole new world of terrifying, page-turning possibilities…
Is a loved one missing body parts?
Are blondes becoming extinct?
Has a human already cross-bred with a monkey?
We live in a GENETIC WORLD. Fast, frightening and potentially VERY lucrative. There are designer pets; a genetic cure for drug addiction; a booming market in eggs and sperm. But is there also a talking ape in Borneo? Has a 'master' gene for controlling others been found? Could an innocent man and his family be hunted cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes
Are you ready for what comes NEXT in Michael Crichton's stunning new thriller?
MICHAEL CRICHTON
NEXT
A Novel
Copyright
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organisations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9 GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Publishers by HarperCollinsPublishers
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Crichton
Cover photograph of lens flare © Rob Casey/Getty Images (http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/)
Michael Crichton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007330621
Source ISBN: 9780007240999
Version: 2017-05-08
Epigraph (#u62a2cda1-d339-5b26-b19e-5cae1628defc)
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
—STEVEN WEINBERG
The word “cause” is an altar to an unknown god.
—WILLIAM JAMES
What is not possible is not to choose.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Contents
Cover (#ue76852ec-b7a4-5f99-b7ec-09ef6e397c66)
Title page (#u1df61ccd-95b9-5beb-a63b-2a94730e2699)
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Author’s Note
Read on for an extract from the gripping new novel from Michael Crichton (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Michael Crichton
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Vasco Borden, forty-nine, tugged at the lapels of his suit and straightened his tie as he walked down the plush carpeted hallway. He wasn’t used to wearing a suit, though he had had this one, in navy, specially tailored to minimize the muscular bulk of his body. Borden was big, six-four, two-forty, an ex–football player who worked as a private investigator and fugitive-recovery specialist. And right now, Vasco was following his man, a thirty-year-old balding postdoc, a fugitive from MicroProteonomics of Cambridge, Mass., as he headed right for the main room of the conference.
The BioChange 2006 Conference, enthusiastically entitled “Make It Happen Now!” was being held at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. The two thousand attendees represented all sorts of biotech workers, including investors, HR officers who hired scientists, technology transfer officers, CEOs, and intellectual property attorneys. In one way or another, nearly every biotech company in America was represented here.
It was the perfect place for the fugitive to meet his contact. The fugitive looked like a dink; he had an innocent face and a little soul patch on his chin; he slouched when he walked and gave the impression of timidity and ineptitude. But the fact was, he’d made off with twelve transgenic embryos in a cryogenic dewar and transported them across country to this conference, where he intended to turn them over to whomever he was working for.
It wouldn’t be the first time a postdoc got tired of working on salary. Or the last.
The fugitive went over to the check-in table to get his conference card to drape around his neck. Vasco hung by the entrance, slipping his own card over his head. He’d come prepared for this. He pretended to look at the event roster.
The big speeches were all in the main ballroom. Seminars were scheduled for such topics as “Fine-Tune Your Recruiting Process,” and “Winning Strategies to Keep Research Talent,” “Executive and Equity Compensation,” “Corporate Governance and the SEC,” “Patent Office Trends,” and “Investor Angels: Boon or Curse?” and, finally, “Trade Secrets Piracy: Protect Yourself Now!”
Much of Vasco’s work involved high-tech firms. He had been to these conferences before. Either they were about science or business. This one was business.
The fugitive, whose name was Eddie Tolman, walked past him into the ballroom. Vasco followed. Tolman went down a few rows and dropped into a seat with no one nearby. Vasco slipped into the row behind and sat a little to one side. The Tolman kid checked his cell phone for text messages, then seemed to relax, and looked up to listen to the speech.
Vasco wondered why.
The man at the podium was one of the most famous venture capitalists in California, a legend in high-tech investment, Jack B. Watson. Watson’s face was blown up large on the screen behind him, his trademark suntan and striking good looks magnified to fill the room. Watson was a young-looking fifty-two, and assiduously cultivated his reputation as a capitalist with a conscience. That appellation had carried him through a succession of ruthless business deals: all the media ever showed were his appearances at charter schools, or handing out scholarships for underprivileged kids.
But in this room, Vasco knew, Watson’s reputation for tough deal making would be foremost in everyone’s mind. He wondered if Watson was ruthless enough to acquire a dozen transgenic embryos by illicit means. He probably was.
However, at the moment, Watson was cheerleading: “Biotechnology is booming. We are poised to see the greatest growth of any industry since computers thirty years ago. The largest biotech company, Amgen, in Los Angeles, employs seven thousand people. Federal grants to universities exceed four billion a year on campuses from New York to San Francisco, Boston to Miami. Venture capitalists invest in biotech companies at a rate of five billion a year. The lure of magnificent cures made possible by stem cells, cytokines, and proteonomics are drawing the brightest talent to the field. And with a global population growing older by the minute, our future is brighter than ever. And that’s not all!
“We’ve reached the point where we can stick it to Big Pharma—and we will. Those massive, bloated companies need us and they know it. They need genes, they need technology. They’re the past. We’re the future. We’re where the money is!”
That drew huge applause. Vasco shifted his bulk in his seat. The audience was applauding, even though they knew that this son of a bitch would cut their company to pieces in a second if it suited his bottom line.
“Of course, we face obstacles to our progress. Some people—however well intentioned they think they are—choose to stand in the way of human betterment. They don’t want the paralyzed to walk, the cancer patient to thrive, the sick child to live and play. These people have their reasons for objecting. Religious, ethical, or even ‘practical.’ But whatever their reasons, they are on the side of death. And they will not triumph!”
More thunderous applause. Vasco glanced at the fugitive, Tolman. The kid was checking his phone again. Evidently waiting for a message. And waiting impatiently.
Did that mean the contact was late?
That was sure to make Tolman nervous. Because somewhere, Vasco knew, this kid had stashed a stainless steel thermos of liquid nitrogen that held the embryos. It wasn’t in the kid’s room. Vasco had already searched it. And five days had passed since Tolman left Cambridge. The coolant wouldn’t last forever. And if the embryos thawed, they would be worthless. So unless Tolman had a way to top up his LN2, by now he must be anxious to retrieve his container, and hand it over to his buyer.
It had to happen soon.
Within an hour, Vasco was sure of it.
“Of course, people will try to obstruct progress,” Watson said, from the podium. “Even our best companies find themselves embroiled in pointless, unproductive litigation. One of my startups, BioGen, in Los Angeles, is in court right now because some guy named Burnet thinks he doesn’t need to honor the contracts he himself signed. Because now he’s changed his mind. Burnet is trying to block medical progress unless we pay him. An extortionist whose daughter is the lawyer handling the case for him. Keeping it in the family.” Watson smiled.
“But we will win the Burnet case. Because progress cannot be stopped!”
At that, Watson threw both hands up in the air, waving to the audience as applause filled the room. He almost acts like a candidate, Vasco thought. Is that what Watson was aiming for? The guy certainly had enough money to get elected. Being rich was essential in American politics these days. Pretty soon—
He looked over, and saw that the Tolman kid was gone.
The seat was empty.
Shit!
“Progress is our mission, our sacred calling,” Watson cried. “Progress to vanquish disease! Progress to halt aging, banish dementia, extend life! A life free of disease, decay, pain, and fear! The great dream of humanity—made real at last!”
Vasco Borden wasn’t listening. He was heading down the row toward the side aisle, scanning the exit doors. A couple of people leaving, nobody looking like Tolman. The guy couldn’t have gotten away, there was—
He looked back just in time to see Tolman moving slowly up the center aisle. The kid was looking at his cell phone again.
“Sixty billion this year. Two hundred billion next year. Five hundred billion in five years! That is the future of our industry, and that is the prospect we bring to all mankind!”
The crowd suddenly rose to its feet, giving Watson a standing ovation, and for a moment Vasco could no longer see Tolman at all.
But only for a moment—now Tolman was making for the center exit. Vasco turned away, slipping through the side door and out into the lobby, just as Tolman came blinking into the bright lobby light.
Tolman glanced at his watch and headed down the far corridor, past big glass windows that looked out on the red brick campanile of San Marco, re-created by the Venetian hotel and lit brilliantly at night. He was going toward the swimming pool area, or perhaps the courtyard. This time of night those spaces would be crowded.
Vasco stayed close.
This was it, he thought.
In the ballroom, Jack Watson paced back and forth, smiling and waving to the cheering crowd. “Thank you, that’s very kind, thank you…” ducking his head a little each time he said it. Just the right amount of modesty.
Rick Diehl snorted in disgust as he watched. Diehl was backstage, taking it all in on a little black-and-white monitor. Diehl was the thirty-four-year-old CEO of BioGen Research, a struggling startup in Los Angeles, and this performance by his most important outside investor filled him with unease. Because Diehl knew that despite the cheerleading, and the press releases with smiling black kids, at the end of the day, Jack Watson was a true bastard. As someone put it, “The best I can say about Watson is, he’s not a sadist. He’s just a first-class son of a bitch.”
Diehl had accepted funding from Watson with the greatest reluctance. He wished he didn’t need it. Diehl’s wife was wealthy, and he had started BioGen with her money. His first venture as CEO had been to bid on a cell line being licensed by UCLA. It was the so-called Burnet cell line, developed from a man named Frank Burnet, whose body produced powerful cancer-fighting chemicals called cytokines.
Diehl hadn’t really expected to land the license, but he did, and suddenly he faced the prospect of gearing up for FDA approval for clinical trials. The cost of clinical trials started at a million dollars, and went rapidly to ten million a pop, not counting downstream costs and after-marketing expenses. He could no longer rely solely on his wife’s money. He needed outside financing.
That was when he discovered just how risky venture capitalists considered cytokines to be. Many cytokines, such as interleukins, had taken years to come to market. And many others were known to be dangerous, even deadly, to patients. And then Frank Burnet had brought a lawsuit, casting doubt on BioGen’s ownership of the cell line. Diehl had trouble getting investors to even meet with him. In the end, he had to accept smiling, suntanned Jack Watson.
But Watson, Diehl knew, wanted nothing less than to take over BioGen and throw Rick Diehl out on his ass.
“Jack! Fantastic speech! Fantastic!” Rick extended his hand, as Watson came backstage at last.
“Yeah. Glad you liked it.” Watson didn’t shake his hand. Instead, he unclipped his wireless transmitter and dropped it in Diehl’s palm. “Take care of this, Rick.”
“Sure, Jack.”
“Your wife here?”
“No, Karen couldn’t make it.” Diehl shrugged. “Thing with the kids.”
“I’m sorry she missed this speech,” Watson said.
“I’ll see she gets the DVD,” Diehl said.
“But we got the bad news out there,” Watson said. “That’s the point. Everybody now knows there’s a lawsuit, they know Burnet is a bad guy, and they know we’re on top of it. That’s the important thing. The company’s now perfectly positioned.”
Diehl said, “Is that why you agreed to give the speech?”
Watson stared at him. “You think I want to come to Vegas? Christ.” He unclipped the microphone, handed it to Diehl. “Take care of this, too.”
“Sure, Jack.”
And Jack Watson turned and walked away from him without another word. Rick Diehl shivered. Thank God for Karen’s money, he thought. Because without it, he’d be doomed.
Passing through the arches of the Doge’s Palace, Vasco Borden moved into the courtyard, following his fugitive, Eddie Tolman, through the nighttime crowd. He heard his earpiece crackle. That would be his assistant, Dolly, in another part of the hotel. He touched his ear. “Go,” he said.
“Baldy boy Tolman has reserved some entertainment.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right, he—”
“Hold on,” Vasco said. “Just hold that thought.”
Up ahead, he was seeing something he could not believe. From the right side of the courtyard, he saw Jack B. Watson, accompanied by a beautiful, slinky, dark-haired woman, merging with the crowd. Watson was famous for always being accompanied by gorgeous women. They all worked for him, they were all smart, and they were all stunning.
The woman didn’t surprise Vasco. What surprised him was that Jack Watson was heading directly toward Eddie Tolman, the fugitive. That made no sense at all. Even if Tolman were doing a deal with Watson, the famous investor would never meet him face-to-face. And certainly never in public. But there they were, on a collision course in the crowded Venetian courtyard, right before his eyes.
What the hell? He couldn’t believe it was going to happen.
But then the slinky woman stumbled a bit, and stopped. She was wearing a short, skintight dress and heels. She leaned on Watson’s shoulder, bent her knee, showing plenty of leg, and inspected her shoe. She adjusted her heel strap, stood up again, and smiled at Watson. And Vasco glanced away from them and saw that Tolman was gone.
But now Watson and the woman crossed Vasco’s own path, passing so close to him that he could smell her perfume, and he heard Watson murmur something to her, and she squeezed his arm and put her head on his shoulder as they walked. The romantic couple.
Was all that an accident? Had it happened on purpose? Had they made him? He pressed his earpiece.
“Dolly. I lost him.”
“No prob. I got him.” He glanced up. She was on the second floor, watching everything below. “Was that Jack Watson that just walked by?”
“Yeah. I thought maybe…”
“No, no,” Dolly said. “I can’t imagine Watson’s involved in this. Not his style. I mean, Baldy boy is heading for his room because he has an appointment. That’s what I was telling you. He got some entertainment.”
“Namely?”
“Russian girl. Apparently he only likes Russians. Tall ones.”
“Anybody we know?”
“No, but I have a little information. And I got cameras in his suite.”
“How’d you do that?” He was smiling.
“Let’s just say Venetian security isn’t what it used to be. Cheaper, too.”
Irina Katayeva, twenty-two, knocked on the door. In her left hand she held a bottle of wine, encased in a velvet gift bag with drawstrings at the top. A guy of about thirty answered the door, smiled. He wasn’t attractive.
“Are you Eddie?”
“That’s right. Come on in.”
“I brought this for you, from the hotel safe.” She handed him the wine.
Watching all this on his little handheld video monitor, Vasco said, “She gave it to him in the hallway. Where it would be seen on the security monitor. Why didn’t she wait until she was in the room?”
“Maybe she was told to do it that way,” Dolly said.
“She must be six feet. What do we know about her?”
“Good English. Four years in this country. Studying at the university.”
“Works at the hotel?”
“No.”
“So, non-pro?” Vasco said.
“This is Nevada,” Dolly said.
On the monitor, the Russian girl went into the room and the door closed. Vasco turned the tuning dial on his video monitor, picked up one of the inside cameras. The kid had a big suite, close to two thousand square feet, done in the Venetian style. The girl nodded and smiled.
“Nice. Nice room.”
“Yeah. So, you want a drink?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really have time.” She reached behind her back and unzipped the dress, left it hanging from her shoulders. She turned around, pretending to be puzzled, allowing him to see her bare back all the way down to her buttocks. “Which way is the bedroom?”
“This way, baby.”
As they went into the bedroom, Vasco again turned the dials. He saw the bedroom just as she was saying, “I don’t know anything about your business, and I don’t want to know. Business is so boring.” She let the dress fall. She stepped out of it and lay down on the bed, naked now except for high heels. She kicked them off. “I don’t think you need a drink,” she said. “And I know I don’t.”
Tolman threw himself on her, landing with a kind of thud. She grunted and tried to smile. “Easy, boy.” He was panting, gasping. He reached for her hair, to caress her. “Leave the hair alone,” she said. She twisted away. “Just lie down,” she said, “and let me make you happy.”
“Aw, hell,” Vasco said, staring at the tiny screen. “Do you believe that? He ain’t even a minuteman. When a woman looks like that, you’d think—”
“Never mind,” Dolly said, over the headset. “She’s getting dressed now.”
“So she is,” he said. “And rather hurriedly, too.”
“She’s supposed to give him half an hour. And if he paid her, I didn’t see it.”
“Me neither. But he’s getting dressed, too.”
“Something’s up,” Dolly said. “She’s walking out the door.”
Vasco thumbed the tuner, trying to change to a different camera. All he got was static. “I can’t see shit.”
“She’s leaving. He’s still there. No, wait…he’s leaving, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And he’s taking the wine bottle with him.”
“Okay,” Vasco said. “And where’s he going with it?”
Frozen embryos in liquid nitrogen were transported in a special stainless steel thermos lined with borosilicate glass called a dewar. Dewars were mostly big affairs, shaped like milk jugs, but you could get them as small as a liter. A dewar didn’t have the shape of a wine bottle, because they had a wide-mouth cap, but it would be about the same size. And would fit in a wine sack for sure.
“He must be carrying it,” Vasco said. “It must be in the sack.”
“I figure,” Dolly said. “You see ’em yet?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Vasco picked up the couple on the ground floor, near the gondola stand. They walked arm in arm, the guy carrying the wine bottle in the crook of his arm, keeping it upright. It was an awkward way to carry it, and they made an odd-looking pair—the beautiful girl and the diffident, slouchy guy. They walked along the canal, hardly glancing at the shops as they passed them.
“On their way to a meeting,” Vasco said.
“I see ’em,” Dolly said. Vasco looked down the crowded street and saw Dolly at the far end. Dolly was twenty-eight, and completely ordinary-looking. Dolly could be anybody: an accountant, girlfriend, secretary, assistant. She could always pass. Tonight she was dressed Vegas-style, teased blond hair and a sparkly dress with cleavage. She was a little overweight, which made the impression perfect. Vasco had been with her for four years now, and they worked well as a team. In private life, they got along only okay. She hated that he smoked cigars in bed.
“Heading for the hall,” Dolly said. “No, they’re doubling back.”
The main hall was a huge oval passageway, high gilded ceiling, soft lights, marble pillars. It dwarfed the crowds that moved through it. Vasco hung back. “Change their mind? Or they made us?”
“I think they’re being careful.”
“Well, this is the big moment.” Because even more than catching the fugitive, they had to know whom he was turning the embryos over to. Obviously someone at the conference.
“Won’t be long now,” Dolly said.
Rick Diehl was walking back and forth along the shops by the gondola canal, holding his cell phone in his hand. He ignored the stores, which were filled with expensive stuff of the sort he never wanted. Diehl had grown up as the third son of a Baltimore physician. All the other boys went to medical school and became obstetricians, like their father. Diehl refused, and went into medical research. Family pressure eventually drove him to move West. He did genetic research at UCSF for a while, but he was more intrigued by the entrepreneurial culture among the universities in San Francisco. It seemed like every professor worth his salt had either started his own company or was sitting on the boards of several biotech firms. At lunch, the conversation was all about tech transfer, cross-licensing, milestone payments, buyouts and payouts, foreground and background IPRs.
By then Karen, Rick’s wife, had come into a substantial inheritance, and he realized he had enough capital to get started. The Bay Area was crowded with firms; there was intense competition for space and hiring. He decided to go to the area north of Los Angeles, where Amgen had set up their huge facility. Diehl built a terrific modern plant, put bright research teams in place, and was on his way. His father and brothers came to visit. They were duly impressed.
But…why wasn’t she calling him back? He looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock. The kids should be in bed by now. And Karen should be home. The maid said she had gone out an hour before, she didn’t know where. But Karen never left without her cell phone. She must have it with her. Why wasn’t she calling him back?
He didn’t understand it, and it just made him nervous as hell. Here he was, alone in this damn city, with more beautiful women per square foot than he had ever seen in his life. True, they were plastic, lots of surgery, but they were also sexy as hell.
Up ahead, he saw a schlumpy guy walking with a tall chick who was striding along on spike heels, and she was just a knockout: black hair, smooth skin, and a hot, lean body. The schlumpy guy must have paid for her, but even so, he clearly didn’t appreciate her. He was clutching his wine bottle like it was a baby, and appeared so nervous he was almost sweating.
But that girl…Jesus, she was hot. Hot, hot…
Why the hell, he thought, wasn’t Karen calling him back?
“Hey,” Vasco said. “Looky look. It’s that BioGen guy. Walking around like he has nothing to do.”
“I see him,” Dolly said. She was about a block ahead of him.
“Nope, never mind.”
Tolman and the Russian girl walked right past the BioGen guy, who did nothing but flip open his phone and dial. What was his name? Diehl. Vasco had heard something about him. Started a company on his wife’s dough, and now maybe she was in control of their marriage. Something like that. Rich broad, old Eastern family, lots of money. Those broads could wear the pants.
“Restaurant,” Dolly said. “They’re going in that Terrazo place.”
Il Terrazzo Antico was a two-story restaurant with glassed-in balconies. The décor was whorehouse modern, gilded everything. Pillars, ceiling, walls: every surface covered with decoration. Made Vasco jumpy just to look at it.
The couple walked in, right past the reservation desk, heading for a side table. And at the table, Vasco saw a heavyset guy who looked like a thug, dark-skinned and heavy-browed, and the thug was looking at the Russian girl and practically licking his lips.
Tolman marched right up to the table and spoke to the dark-skinned man. The guy looked puzzled. He didn’t invite them to sit. Vasco thought, Something’s wrong. The Russian girl had stepped back a pace.
At that moment a flash went off. Dolly had snapped a picture. The Tolman kid looked, took it all in, and bolted.
“Shit, Dolly!”
Vasco started running after Tolman, who was heading deeper into the restaurant. A waiter held up his hands. “Sir, excuse me—”
Vasco knocked him flat, kept right on going. Tolman was ahead, moving slower than he might, because he was trying not to shake his precious wine bottle. But he didn’t know where he was going anymore. He didn’t know the restaurant; he was just running. Whang through swinging doors, into the kitchen, Vasco right after him. Everybody was yelling at them, and some of the cooks were waving knives, but Tolman pushed on, apparently convinced there was some sort of rear entrance to the kitchen.
There wasn’t. He was trapped. He looked around wildly. Vasco slowed. He flashed one of his badges, in an official-looking wallet. “Citizen’s arrest,” he said. Tolman cowered back by two walk-in freezers and a narrow door with a slim vertical window. Tolman went through the narrow door and it closed behind him.
A light blinked by the door.
It was a service elevator.
Shit. “Where does this go?”
“Second floor.”
“Anywhere else?”
“No, just second floor.”
Vasco pressed his earpiece. “Dolly?”
“I’m on it,” she said. He heard her panting, as she ran up stairs.
Vasco positioned himself in front of the elevator door and waited. He pressed the button to bring the elevator down.
“I’m at the elevator now,” Dolly said. “I saw him; he went back down.”
“That’s a tiny elevator,” Vasco said.
“I know.”
“If he’s really got liquid nitrogen with him, he shouldn’t be in there.” A couple of years back, Vasco had chased a fugitive into a laboratory-supply warehouse. The guy had nearly suffocated after he locked himself in a closet.
The elevator came down. As soon as it stopped, Vasco yanked the handle to open it, but Tolman must have pushed an emergency switch, because the door wouldn’t open. Vasco could see the wine sack on the floor. The velvet had been pushed down to reveal the stainless steel rim of the dewar.
And the top was off. White steam around the opening.
Through the glass, Tolman stared at him, wild-eyed. “Come out, son,” Vasco said. “Don’t be foolish.”
Tolman shook his head.
“It’s dangerous,” Vasco said. “You know it’s dangerous.”
But the kid pushed a button, and the elevator started back up.
Vasco had a bad feeling.
The kid knew, all right. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“He’s up here,” Dolly said, standing on the second floor. “But the door won’t open. No, he’s going down again.”
“Go back to the table,” Vasco said to her. “Let him go.”
She realized at once what he was talking about. She hurried back down the plush red velvet staircase to the ground floor. She was not surprised to see that the table where the thuggish man had sat was now empty. No thug. No beautiful Russian girl. Just a hundred-dollar bill tucked under a glass. He’d paid in cash, of course.
And vanished.
Vasco was now surrounded by three hotel security guys, all talking at once. Standing half a head above them he yelled for quiet. “One thing,” he said. “How do we get the elevator open?”
“He must have hit the override.”
“How do we get it open?”
“We have to kill the power to it.”
“Will that open it?”
“No, but then we can wedge it open, once it’s stopped.”
“How long will that take?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Doesn’t matter, this guy isn’t going anyplace.”
“Yes, he is,” Vasco said.
The security guy laughed. “Where the hell can he go?”
The elevator came down again. Tolman was on his knees, holding the glass door shut.
“Get up,” Vasco said. “Get up, get up. Come on, son, it’s not worth it, stand up!”
Suddenly, Tolman’s eyes rolled up into his head and he fell onto his back. The elevator started to rise.
“What the hell?” one of the security men said. “Who is he, anyway?”
Ah shit, Vasco thought.
The kid had pushed some override that had jammed the elevator circuits. It took them forty minutes to get the doors open and haul him out. He was long since dead, of course. The instant he fell, he was immersed in 100 percent nitrogen atmosphere, from the liquid nitrogen that was streaming from the dewar. Because nitrogen was heavier than air, it progressively filled the elevator from the bottom up. Once the kid flopped on his back, he was already unconscious, and he would have died within a minute.
The security guys wanted to know what was in the dewar, which was no longer smoking. Vasco got some gloves and pulled out the long metal stick. There was nothing there, just a series of empty clips where the embryos should have been. The embryos had been removed.
“You mean to say he killed himself?” one of the security men said.
“That’s right,” Vasco said. “He worked in an embryology lab. He knew about the danger of liquid nitrogen in a confined space.” Nitrogen caused more laboratory fatalities than any other chemical. Half the people who died were trying to rescue co-workers who had collapsed in confined spaces.
“It was his way out of a bad situation,” Vasco said.
Later, driving home with him, Dolly said, “So what happened to the embryos?”
Vasco shook his head. “No idea. The kid never got them.”
“You think the girl took them? Before she went to his room?”
“Somebody took them.” Vasco sighed. “The hotel doesn’t know her?”
“They reviewed security cameras. They don’t know her.”
“And her student status?”
“University had her as a student last year. She didn’t enroll this year.”
“So she’s vanished.”
“Yeah,” Dolly said. “Her, the dark-skinned guy, the embryos. Everything vanished.”
“I’d like to know how all this goes together,” Vasco said.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Dolly said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Vasco said. Up ahead, he saw the neon of a roadhouse in the desert. He pulled over. He needed a drink.
CH001
Division 48 of Los Angeles Superior Court was a wood-paneled room dominated by the great seal of the state of California. The room was small and had a tawdry feeling. The reddish carpet was frayed and streaked with dirt. The wood veneer on the witness stand was chipped, and one of the fluorescent lights was out, leaving the jury box darker than the rest of the room. The jurors themselves were dressed casually, in jeans and short-sleeve shirts. The judge’s chair squeaked whenever the Honorable Davis Pike turned away to glance at his laptop, which he did often throughout the day. Alex Burnet suspected he was checking his e-mail or his stocks.
All in all, this courtroom seemed an odd place to litigate complex issues of biotechnology, but that was what they had been doing for the past two weeks in Frank M. Burnet v. Regents of the University of California.
Alex was thirty-two, a successful litigator, a junior partner in her law firm. She sat at the plaintiff’s table with the other members of her father’s legal team, and watched as her father took the witness stand. Although she smiled reassuringly, she was, in fact, worried about how he would fare.
Frank Burnet was a barrel-chested man who looked younger than his fifty-one years. He appeared healthy and confident as he was sworn in. Alex knew that her father’s vigorous appearance could undermine his case. And, of course, the pretrial publicity had been savagely negative. Rick Diehl’s PR team had worked hard to portray her dad as an ungrateful, greedy, unscrupulous man. A man who interfered with medical research. A man who wouldn’t keep his word, who just wanted money.
None of that was true—in reality, it was the opposite of the truth. But not a single reporter had called her father to ask his side of the story. Not one. Behind Rick Diehl stood Jack Watson, the famous philanthropist. The media assumed that Watson was the good guy, and therefore her father was the bad guy. Once that version of the morality play appeared in the New York Times (written by the local entertainment reporter), everybody else fell into line. There was a huge “me, too” piece in the L.A. Times, trying to outdo the New York version in vilifying her father. And the local news shows kept up a daily drumbeat about the man who wanted to halt medical progress, the man who dared criticize UCLA, that renowned center of learning, the great hometown university. A half-dozen cameras followed her and her father whenever they walked up the courthouse steps.
Their own efforts to get the story out had been singularly unsuccessful. Her father’s hired media advisor was competent enough, but no match for Jack Watson’s well-oiled, well-financed machine.
Of course, members of the jury would have seen some of the coverage. And the impact of the coverage was to put added pressure on her father not merely to tell his story, but also to redeem himself, to contradict the damage already done to him by the press, before he ever got to the witness stand.
Her father’s attorney stood and began his questions. “Mr. Burnet, let me take you back to the month of June, some eight years ago. What were you doing at that time?”
“I was working construction,” her father said, in a firm voice. “Supervising all the welding on the Calgary natural gas pipeline.”
“And when did you first suspect you were ill?”
“I started waking up in the night. Soaking wet, drenched.”
“You had a fever?”
“I thought so.”
“You consulted a doctor?”
“Not for a while,” he said. “I thought I had the flu or something. But the sweats never stopped. After a month, I started to feel very weak. Then I went to the doctor.”
“And what did the doctor tell you?”
“He said I had a growth in my abdomen. And he referred me to the most eminent specialist on the West Coast. A professor at UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles.”
“Who was that specialist?”
“Dr. Michael Gross. Over there.” Her father pointed to the defendant, sitting at the next table. Alex did not look over. She kept her gaze on her father.
“And were you subsequently examined by Dr. Gross?”
“Yes, I was.”
“He conducted a physical exam?”
“Yes.”
“Did he do any tests at that time?”
“Yes. He took blood and he did X-rays and a CAT scan of my entire body. And he took a biopsy of my bone marrow.”
“How was that done, Mr. Burnet?”
“He stuck a needle in my hipbone, right here. The needle punches through the bone and into the marrow. They suck out the marrow and analyze it.”
“And after these tests were concluded, did he tell you his diagnosis?”
“Yes. He said I had acute T-cell lymphoblastic leukemia.”
“What did you understand that disease to be?”
“Cancer of the bone marrow.”
“Did he propose treatment?”
“Yes. Surgery and then chemotherapy.”
“And did he tell you your prognosis? What the outcome of this disease was likely to be?”
“He said that it wasn’t good.”
“Was he more specific?”
“He said, probably less than a year.”
“Did you subsequently get a second opinion from another doctor?”
“Yes, I did.”
“With what result?”
“My diagnosis was…he, uh…he confirmed the diagnosis.” Her father paused, bit his lip, fighting emotion. Alex was surprised. He was usually tough and unemotional. She felt a twinge of concern for him, even though she knew this moment would help his case. “I was scared, really scared,” her father said. “They all told me…I didn’t have long to live.” He lowered his head.
The courtroom was silent.
“Mr. Burnet, would you like some water?”
“No. I’m fine.” He raised his head, passed his hand across his forehead.
“Please continue when you’re ready.”
“I got a third opinion, too. And everybody said to me that Dr. Gross was the best doctor for this disease.”
“So you initiated your therapy with Dr. Gross.”
“Yes. I did.”
Her father seemed to have recovered. Alex sat back in her chair, took a breath. The testimony unrolled smoothly now, a story her father had told dozens of times before. How he, a scared and frightened man, fearing for his life, had put his faith in Dr. Gross; how he had undergone surgery and chemotherapy under the direction of Dr. Gross; how the symptoms of the disease had slowly faded over the course of the following year; how Dr. Gross had seemed at first to believe that her father was well, his treatment successfully completed.
“You had follow-up examinations with Dr. Gross?”
“Yes. Every three months.”
“With what result?”
“Everything was normal. I gained weight, my strength came back, my hair grew back. I felt good.”
“And then what happened?”
“About a year later, after one of my checkups, Dr. Gross called to say he needed to do more tests.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said some of my blood work didn’t look right.”
“Did he say which tests, specifically?”
“No.”
“Did he say you still had cancer?”
“No, but that’s what I was afraid of. He had never repeated any tests before.” Her father shifted in his chair. “I asked him if the cancer had come back, and he said, ‘Not at this point, but we need to monitor you very closely.’ He insisted I needed constant testing.”
“How did you react?”
“I was terrified. In a way, it was worse the second time. When I was sick the first time, I made my will, made all the preparations. Then I got well and I got a new lease on life—a chance to start over. Then his phone call came, and I was terrified again.”
“You believed you were sick.”
“Of course. Why else would he be repeating tests?”
“You were frightened?”
“Terrified.”
Watching the questioning, Alex thought, It’s too bad we don’t have pictures. Her father appeared vigorous and hearty. She remembered when he had been frail, gray, and weak. His clothes had hung on his frame; he looked like a dying man. Now he looked strong, like the construction worker he had been all his life. He didn’t look like a man who became frightened easily. Alex knew these questions were essential to establish a basis for fraud, and a basis for mental distress. But it had to be done carefully. And their lead lawyer, she knew, had a bad habit of ignoring his own notes once the testimony was rolling.
The lawyer said, “What happened next, Mr. Burnet?”
“I went in for tests. Dr. Gross repeated everything. He even did another liver biopsy.”
“With what result?”
“He told me to come back in six months.”
“Why?”
“He just said, ‘Come back in six months.’”
“How did you feel at this time?”
“I felt healthy. But I figured I’d had a relapse.”
“Dr. Gross told you that?”
“No. He never told me anything. Nobody at the hospital ever told me anything. They just said, ‘Come back in six months.’”
Naturally enough, her father believed he was still sick. He met a woman he might have married, but didn’t because he thought he did not have long to live. He sold his house and moved into a small apartment, so he wouldn’t have a mortgage.
“It sounds like you were waiting to die,” the attorney said.
“Objection!”
“I’ll withdraw the question. But let’s move on. Mr. Burnet, how long did you continue going to UCLA for testing?”
“Four years.”
“Four years. And when did you first suspect you were not being told the truth about your condition?”
“Well, four years later, I still felt healthy. Nothing had happened. Every day, I was waiting for lightning to strike, but it never did. But Dr. Gross kept saying I had to come back for more tests, more tests. By then I had moved to San Diego, and I wanted to have my tests done there, and sent up to him. But he said no, I had to do the tests at UCLA.”
“Why?”
“He said he preferred his own lab. But it didn’t make sense. And he was giving me more and more forms to sign.”
“What forms?”
“At first, they were just consent forms to acknowledge that I was undertaking a procedure with risk. Those first forms were one or two pages long. Pretty soon there were other forms that said I agreed to be involved in a research project. Each time I went back, there were still more forms. Eventually the forms were ten pages long, a whole document in dense legal language.”
“And did you sign them?”
“Toward the end, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because some of the forms were releases to permit the commercial use of my tissues.”
“That bothered you?”
“Sure. Because I didn’t think he was telling me the truth about what he was doing. The reason for all the tests. On one visit, I asked Dr. Gross straight out if he was using my tissues for commercial purposes. He said absolutely not, his interests were purely research. So I said okay, and I signed everything except the forms allowing my tissues to be used for commercial purposes.”
“And what happened?”
“He got very angry. He said he would not be able to treat me further unless I signed all the forms, and I was risking my health and my future. He said I was making a big mistake.”
“Objection! Hearsay.”
“All right. Mr. Burnet, when you refused to sign the consent forms, did Dr. Gross stop treating you?”
“Yes.”
“And did you then consult a lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you subsequently discover?”
“That Dr. Gross had sold my cells—the cells he took from my body during all these tests—to a drug company called BioGen.”
“And how did you feel when you heard that?”
“I was shocked,” her father said. “I had gone to Dr. Gross when I was sick, and scared, and vulnerable. I had trusted my doctor. I had put my life in his hands. I trusted him. And then it turned out that he had been lying to me, and scaring me needlessly for years, just so he could steal parts of my own body from me and sell them to make a profit. For himself. He never cared about me at all. He just wanted to take my cells.”
“Do you know what those cells were worth?”
“The drug company said three billion dollars.”
The jury gasped.
CH002
Alex had been watching the jury all during the latest testimony. Their faces were impassive, but nobody moved, nobody shifted. The gasps were involuntary, evidence of how deeply engaged they were with what they were hearing. And the jury remained transfixed as the questions continued:
“Mr. Burnet, did Dr. Gross ever apologize to you for misleading you?”
“No.”
“Did he ever offer to share his profit with you?”
“No.”
“Did you ask him to?”
“Eventually I did, yes. When I realized what he had already done. They were my cells, from my body. I thought I should have something to say about what was done with them.”
“But he refused?”
“Yes. He said it was none of my business what he did with my cells.”
The jury reacted to that. Several turned and looked at Dr. Gross. That was a good sign, too, Alex thought.
“One final question, Mr. Burnet. Did you ever sign an authorization for Dr. Gross to use your cells for any commercial purposes?”
“No.”
“You never authorized their sale?”
“Never. But he did it anyway.”
“No further questions.”
The judge called a fifteen-minute recess, and when the court reconvened, the UCLA attorneys began the cross-examination. For this trial, UCLA had hired Raeper and Cross, a downtown firm that specialized in high-stakes corporate litigation. Raeper represented oil companies and major defense contractors. Clearly, UCLA did not regard this trial as a defense of medical research. Three billion dollars were at stake; it was big business, and they hired a big-business firm.
The lead attorney for UCLA was Albert Rodriguez. He had a youthful, easy appearance, a friendly smile, and a disarming sense of seeming new at the job. Actually, Rodriguez was forty-five and had been a successful litigator for twenty years, but he somehow managed to give the impression that this was his first trial, and he subtly appealed to the jury to cut him some slack.
“Now, Mr. Burnet, I imagine it has been taxing for you to go over the emotionally draining experiences of the last few years. I appreciate your telling the jury your experiences, and I won’t keep you long. I believe you told the jury that you were very frightened, as anyone would naturally be. By the way, how much weight had you lost, when you first came to Dr. Gross?”
Alex thought, Uh-oh. She knew where this was going. They were going to emphasize the dramatic nature of the cure. She glanced at the attorney sitting beside her, who was clearly trying to think of a strategy. She leaned over and whispered, “Stop it.”
The attorney shook his head, confused.
Her father was saying, “I don’t know how much I lost. About forty or fifty pounds.”
“So your clothes didn’t fit well?”
“Not at all.”
“And what was your energy like at that time? Could you climb a flight of stairs?”
“No. I’d go two or three steps, and I’d have to stop.”
“From exhaustion?”
Alex nudged the attorney at her side, whispered, “Asked and answered.” The attorney immediately stood up.
“Objection. Your Honor, Mr. Burnet has already stated he was diagnosed with a terminal condition.”
“Yes,” Rodriguez said, “and he has said he was frightened. But I think the jury should know just how desperate his condition really was.”
“I’ll allow it.”
“Thank you. Now then, Mr. Burnet. You had lost a quarter of your body weight, you were so weak you couldn’t climb more than a couple of stairs, and you had a deadly serious form of leukemia. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Alex gritted her teeth. She wanted desperately to stop this line of questioning, which was clearly prejudicial, and irrelevant to the question of whether her father’s doctor had acted improperly after curing him. But the judge had decided to allow it to continue, and there was nothing she could do. And it wasn’t egregious enough to provide grounds for appeal.
“And for help in your time of need,” Rodriguez said, “you came to the best physician on the West Coast to treat this disease?”
“Yes.”
“And he treated you.”
“Yes.”
“And he cured you. This expert and caring doctor cured you.”
“Objection! Your Honor, Dr. Gross is a physician, not a saint.”
“Sustained.”
“All right,” Rodriguez said. “Let me put it this way: Mr. Burnet, how long has it been since you were diagnosed with leukemia?”
“Six years.”
“Is it not true that a five-year survival in cancer is considered a cure?”
“Objection, calls for expert conclusion.”
“Sustained.”
“Your Honor,” Rodriguez said, turning to the judge, “I don’t know why this is so difficult for Mr. Burnet’s attorneys. I am merely trying to establish that Dr. Gross did, in fact, cure the plaintiff of a deadly cancer.”
“And I,” the judge replied, “don’t know why it is so difficult for the defense to ask that question plainly, without objectionable phrasing.”
“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you. Mr. Burnet, do you consider yourself cured of leukemia?”
“Yes.”
“You are completely healthy at this time?”
“Yes.”
“Who in your opinion cured you?”
“Dr. Gross.”
“Thank you. Now, I believe you told the court that when Dr. Gross asked you to return for further testing, you thought that meant you were still ill.”
“Yes.”
“Did Dr. Gross ever tell you that you still had leukemia?”
“No.”
“Did anyone in his office, or did any of his staff, ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Then,” Rodriguez said, “if I understand your testimony, at no time did you have any specific information that you were still ill?”
“Correct.”
“All right. Now let’s turn to your treatment. You received surgery and chemotherapy. Do you know if you were given the standard treatment for T-cell leukemia?”
“No, my treatment was not standard.”
“It was new?”
“Yes.”
“Were you the first patient to receive this treatment protocol?”
“Yes. I was.”
“Dr. Gross told you that?”
“Yes.”
“And did he tell you how this new treatment protocol was developed?”
“He said it was part of a research program.”
“And you agreed to participate in this research program?”
“Yes.”
“Along with other patients with the disease?”
“I believe there were others, yes.”
“And the research protocol worked in your case?”
“Yes.”
“You were cured.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. Now, Mr. Burnet, you are aware that in medical research, new drugs to help fight disease are often derived from, or tested on, patient tissues?”
“Yes.”
“You knew your tissues would be used in that fashion?”
“Yes, but not for commercial—”
“I’m sorry, just answer yes or no. When you agreed to allow your tissues to be used for research, did you know they might be used to derive or test new drugs?”
“Yes.”
“And if a new drug was found, did you expect the drug to be made available to other patients?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sign an authorization for that to happen?”
A long pause. Then: “Yes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Burnet. I have no further questions.”
“How do you think it went?” her father asked as they left the courthouse. Closing arguments were the following day. They walked toward the parking lot in the hazy sunshine of downtown Los Angeles.
“Hard to say,” Alex said. “They confused the facts very successfully. We know there’s no new drug that emerged from this program, but I doubt the jury understands what really happened. We’ll bring in more expert witnesses to explain that UCLA just made a cell line from your tissues and used it to manufacture a cytokine, the way it is manufactured naturally inside your body. There’s no ‘new drug’ here, but that’ll probably be lost on the jury. And there’s also the fact that Rodriguez is explicitly shaping this case to look exactly like the Moore case, a couple of decades back. Moore was a case very much like yours. Tissues were taken under false pretenses and sold. UCLA won that one easily, though they shouldn’t have.”
“So, counselor, how does our case stand?”
She smiled at her father, threw her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Truth? It’s uphill,” she said.
CH003
Barry Sindler, divorce lawyer to the stars, shifted in his chair. He was trying to pay attention to the client seated across the desk from him, but he was having trouble. The client was a nerd named Diehl who ran some biotech company. The guy talked abstractly, no emotion, practically no expression on his face, even though he was telling how his wife was screwing around on him. Diehl must have been a terrible husband. But Barry wasn’t sure how much money there was in this case. It seemed the wife had all the money.
Diehl droned on. How his first suspicions arose when he called her from Las Vegas. How he discovered the charge slips for the hotel that she went to every Wednesday. How he waited in the lobby and caught her checking in with a local tennis pro. Same old California story. Barry had heard it a hundred times. Didn’t these people know they were walking clichés? Outraged husband catches wife with the tennis pro. They wouldn’t even use that one on Desperate Housewives.
Barry gave up trying to listen. He had too much on his mind this morning. He had lost the Kirkorivich case, and it was all over town. Just because DNA tests had shown that it wasn’t the billionaire’s baby. And then the court wouldn’t award him his fees, even though he had cut them to a measly $1.4 mil. The judge gave him a quarter of that. Every damn lawyer in town was gloating, because they all had it in for Barry Sindler. He had heard that L.A. Magazine was doing a big story on the case, sure to be unfavorable to Barry. Not that he gave a crap about that. The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to a divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. And Barry Sindler was without a doubt the most ruthless, unscrupulous, publicity-hungry, self-aggrandizing, stop-at-nothing son-of-a-bitch divorce lawyer in Southern California. And proud of it!
No, Barry didn’t worry about any of those things. He didn’t even worry about the house he was building in Montana for Denise and her two rotten kids. He didn’t worry about the renovations on their house in Holmby Hills, even though the kitchen alone was costing $500K, and Denise kept changing the plans. Denise was a serial renovator. It was a disease.
No, no, no. Barry Sindler worried about just one thing—the lease. He had one whole floor in an office building on Wilshire and Doheny, twenty-three attorneys in his office, none of them worth a shit, but seeing all of them at their desks impressed the clients. And they could do the minor stuff, like take depositions and file delaying motions—stuff Barry didn’t want to be bothered with. Barry knew that litigation was a war of attrition, especially in custody cases. The goal was to run the costs as high as you could and stretch the proceedings out as long as you could, because that way Barry earned the largest possible fees, and the spouse eventually got tired of the endless delays, the new filings, and of course the spiraling costs. Even the richest of them eventually got tired.
By and large, husbands were sensible. They wanted to get on with their lives, buy a new house, move in with the new girlfriend, get a nice blow job. They wanted custody issues settled. But the wives usually wanted revenge—so Barry kept things from being settled, year after year, until the husbands caved. Millionaires, billionaires, celebrity assholes—it didn’t matter. They all caved in the end. People said it wasn’t a good strategy for the kids. Well, screw the kids. If the clients cared anything about the kids, they wouldn’t get divorced in the first place. They’d stay married and miserable like everybody else, because—
The nerd had said something that jogged him back to attention.
“I’m sorry,” Barry Sindler said. “Run that by me again, Mr. Diehl. What did you just say?”
“I said, ‘I want my wife tested.’”
“I can assure you, these proceedings will test her to the limit. And of course we’ll put a detective on her, see how much she drinks, whether she does drugs, stays out all night, has lesbian affairs, all that. Standard procedure.”
“No, no,” Diehl said. “I want her tested genetically.”
“For what?”
“For everything,” he said.
“Ah,” Barry said, nodding wisely. What the hell was the guy talking about? Genetic testing? In a custody case? He glanced down at the papers in front of him, and the business card. RICHARD “RICK” DIEHL, PH.D. Barry frowned unhappily. Only assholes put a nickname on the card. The card said he was CEO of BioGen Research Inc., some company out in Westview Village.
“For example,” Diehl said, “I’ll bet my wife has a genetic predisposition to bipolar illness. She certainly acts erratic. She might have the Alzheimer’s gene. If she does, psychological tests could show early signs of Alzheimer’s.”
“Good, very good.” Barry Sindler was nodding vigorously now. This was making him happy. Fresh, new disputed areas. Sindler loved disputed areas. Administer the psychological test. Did the test show early Alzheimer’s or not? Who the fuck could say for sure? Wonderful, wonderful—whatever the test results, they would be disputed. More days in court, more expert witnesses to interview, battles of the doctorates, dragging on for days. Days in court were especially lucrative.
And best of all, Barry realized that this genetic testing could become standard procedure for all custody cases. Sindler was breaking new ground here. He’d get publicity for this! He leaned forward eagerly. “Go on, Mr. Diehl…”
“Test her for the diabetes gene, breast cancer from the BRCA genes, and all the rest. And,” Diehl continued, “my wife might also have the gene for Huntington’s disease, which causes fatal nerve degeneration. Her grandfather had Huntington’s, so it’s in her family. Both her parents are still young, and the disease only shows up when you’re older. So my wife could be carrying the gene and that would mean a death sentence from Huntington’s.”
“Umm, yes,” Barry Sindler said, nodding. “That could render her unfit to be the primary caregiver to the children.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m surprised she hasn’t been tested already.”
“She doesn’t want to know,” Diehl said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance she may have the gene. If she does, she’ll eventually develop the disease and die writhing in dementia. But she’s twenty-eight. The disease might not appear for another twenty years. So if she knew about it now…it could ruin the rest of her life.”
“But it could also relieve her, if she didn’t have the gene.”
“Too big a risk. She won’t test.”
“Any other tests you can think of?”
“Hell yes,” Diehl said. “That’s just the beginning. I want her tested with all the current panels. There are twelve hundred gene tests now.”
Twelve hundred! Sindler licked his lips at the prospect. Excellent! Why had he never heard of this before? He cleared his throat. “But you realize that if you do this, she will demand you be tested, as well.”
“No problem,” Diehl said.
“You’ve already been tested?”
“No. I just know how to fake the lab results.”
Barry Sindler sat back in his chair.
Perfect.
CH004
Beneath the high canopy of trees, the jungle floor was dark and silent. No breeze stirred the giant ferns at shoulder height. Hagar wiped sweat from his forehead, glanced back at the others, and pushed on. The expedition moved deep into the jungles of central Sumatra. No one spoke, which was the way Hagar liked it.
The river was just ahead. A dugout canoe on the near bank, a rope stretched across the river at shoulder height. They crossed in two groups, Hagar standing up in the dugout, pulling them across on the rope, then going back for the others. It was silent except for the cry of a distant hornbill.
They continued on the opposite bank. The jungle trail grew narrower, and muddy in spots. The team didn’t like that; they made a lot of noise trying to scramble around the wet patches. Finally, one said, “How much farther is it?”
It was that kid. The whiny American teenager with spots on his face. He was looking to his mother, a largish matron in a broad straw hat.
“Are we almost there?” the kid whined.
Hagar put his finger to his lips. “Quiet!”
“My feet hurt.”
The other tourists were standing around, a cluster of bright-colored clothing. Staring at the kid.
“Look,” Hagar whispered, “if you make noise, you won’t see them.”
“I don’t see them anyhow.” The kid pouted, but he fell into line as the group moved on. Today they were mostly Americans. Hagar didn’t like Americans, but they weren’t the worst. The worst, he had to admit, were the—
“There!”
“Look there!”
The tourists were pointing ahead, excited, chattering. About fifty yards up the trail and off to the right, a juvenile male orangutan stood upright in the branches that swayed gently with his weight. Magnificent creature, reddish fur, roughly forty pounds, distinctive white streak in the fur above his ear. Hagar had not seen him in weeks.
Hagar gestured for the others to be quiet, and moved up the trail. The tourists were close behind him now, stumbling, banging into one another in their excitement.
“Ssssh!” he hissed.
“What’s the big deal?” one said. “I thought this was a sanctuary.”
“Ssssh!”
“But they’re protected here—”
“Ssssh!”
Hagar needed it quiet. He reached into his shirt pocket and pressed the Record button. He unclipped his lapel mike and held it in his hand.
They were now about thirty yards from the orang. They passed a sign along the trail that said BUKUT ALAM ORANGUTAN SANCTUARY. This was where orphaned orangs were nursed to health, and reintroduced into the wild. There was a veterinary facility, a research station, a team of researchers.
“If it’s a sanctuary, I don’t understand why—”
“George, you heard what he said. Be quiet.”
Twenty yards, now.
“Look, another one! Two! There!”
They were pointing off to the left. High in the canopy, a one-year-old, crashing through branches with an older juvenile. Swinging gracefully. Hagar didn’t care. He was focused on the first animal.
The white-streaked orang did not move away. Now he was hanging by one hand, swinging in the air, head cocked to one side as he looked at them. The younger animals in the canopy were gone. White-streak stayed where he was, and stared.
Ten yards. Hagar held his microphone out in front of him. The tourists were pulling out their cameras. The orang stared directly at Hagar and made an odd sound, like a cough. “Dwaas.”
Hagar repeated the sound back. “Dwaas.”
The orang stared at him. The curved lips moved. A sequence of guttural grunts: “Ooh stomm dwaas, varlaat leanme.”
One of the tourists said, “Is he making those sounds?”
“Yes,” Hagar said.
“Is he…talking?”
“Apes can’t talk,” another tourist said. “Orangs are silent. It says so in the book.”
Several snapped flash pictures of the hanging ape. The juvenile male showed no surprise. But the lips moved: “Geen lichten dwaas.”
“Does he have a cold?” a woman asked nervously. “Sounds like he’s coughing?”
“He’s not coughing,” another voice said.
Hagar glanced over his shoulder. A heavyset man at the back, a man who had struggled to keep up, red-faced and puffing, now held a tape recorder in his hand, pointing it toward the orang. He had a determined look on his face. He said to Hagar, “Is this some kind of trick you play?”
“No,” Hagar said.
The man pointed to the orang. “That’s Dutch,” he said. “Sumatra used to be a Dutch colony. That’s Dutch.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Hagar said.
“I would. The animal said, ‘Stupid, leave me alone.’ And then it said, ‘No lights.’ When the camera flashes went off.”
“I don’t know what those sounds were,” Hagar said.
“But you were recording them.”
“Just out of curiosity—”
“You had your microphone out long before the sounds began. You knew that animal would speak.”
“Orangs can’t speak,” Hagar said.
“That one can.”
They all stared at the orangutan, still swinging from one arm. It scratched itself with the free arm. It was silent.
The heavyset man said loudly, “Geen lichten.”
The ape just stared, blinked slowly.
“Geen lichten!”
The orang gave no sign of comprehension. After a moment, he swung to a nearby branch, and began to climb into the air, moving easily, arm on arm.
“Geen lichten!”
The ape kept climbing. The woman in the big straw hat said, “I think it was just coughing or something.”
“Hey,” the heavyset man yelled. “M’sieu! Comment ça va?”
The ape continued up through the branches, swinging in an easy rhythm with its long arms. It did not look down.
“I thought maybe it speaks French,” the man said. He shrugged. “Guess not.”
A light rain began to drip from the canopy. The other tourists put their cameras away. One shrugged on a light, transparent raincoat. Hagar wiped the sweat from his forehead. Up ahead, three young orangs were scampering around a tray of papayas on the ground. The tourists turned their attention to them.
From high in the canopy came a growling sound: “Espèce de con.” The phrase came to them clearly, surprisingly distinct in the still air.
The heavyset man spun around. “What?”
Everyone turned to look upward.
“That was a swear word,” the teenager said. “In French. I know it was a swear word. In French.”
“Hush,” his mother said.
The group stared up at the canopy, searching the dense mass of dark leaves. They could not see the ape up there.
The heavyset man yelled, “Qu’est-ce que tu dis?”
There was no answer. Just the crash of an animal moving through branches, and the distant cry of a hornbill.
CHEEKY CHIMP CHEWS OFF TOURISTS
(News of the World)
AFFE SPRICHT IM DSCHUNGEL, FLÜCHE GEORGE BUSH
(Der Spiegel)
ORANG PARLE FRANÇAIS?!!
(Paris Match, beneath a picture of Jacques Derrida)
MUSLIM MONKEY BERATES WESTERNERS
(Weekly Standard)
MONKEY MOUTHS OFF, WITNESSES AGAPE
(National Enquirer)
TALKING CHIMPANZEE REPORTED IN JAVA
(New York Times, subsequent correction printed)
POLYGLOT PRIMATES SIGHTED IN SUMATRA
(Los Angeles Times)
“And, finally, a group of tourists in Indonesia swear they were abused by an orangutan in the jungles of Borneo. According to the tourists, the ape swore at them in Dutch and French, which means it was probably a lot smarter than they were. But no recordings of the cursing chimp have turned up, leading us to conclude that if you believe this story, we have a job for you in the current administration. Plenty of talking apes there!”
(Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC News, no correction)
CH005
Get this,” Charlie Huggins said, looking at the television in the kitchen of his house in San Diego. The sound was turned off, but he was reading the crawl beneath. “It says, ‘Talking Ape Cited in Sumatra.’”
“You mean it got a speeding ticket?” his wife said, glancing at the screen. She was making breakfast.
“No,” Huggins said. “They must mean the ape was ‘sighted.’ With an ‘s.’”
“The ape was sighted? Meaning the ape could see?” His wife was a high school English teacher. She liked these jokes.
“No, honey. The story says…some people in Sumatra encountered an ape in the jungle that talked.”
“I thought apes can’t talk,” his wife said.
“Well, that’s what the story says.”
“So it has to be a lie.”
“You think? Uh, now…Britney Spears is not getting divorced. I’m relieved. She may be pregnant again. From the pictures it looks like it. And Posh Spice wore a nice green dress to a gala. And Sting says he can have sex for eight hours without stopping.”
“Scrambled or over easy?” his wife said.
“Tantric, apparently.”
“I mean your eggs.”
“Scrambled.”
“Call the kids, will you?” she said. “Everything’s almost ready.”
“Okay.” Charlie got up from the table and headed for the stairs. When he got to the living room, the phone rang. It was the lab.
In the laboratories of Radial Genomics Inc., in the eucalyptus groves of the University of California at San Diego, Henry Kendall drummed his fingers on the countertop while he waited for Charlie to pick up. The phone rang three times. Where the fuck was he? Finally, Charlie’s voice: “Hello?”
“Charlie,” Henry said. “Did you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“The ape in Sumatra, for Christ’s sake.”
“That has to be bullshit,” Charlie said.
“Why?”
“Come on, Henry. You know it’s bullshit.”
“They said the ape spoke Dutch.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“It might have been Uttenbroek’s team,” Kendall said.
“Nah. The ape was big, two or three years old.”
“So? Uttenbroek could have done it a few years ago. His team’s advanced enough. Besides, those guys from Utrecht are all liars.”
Charlie Huggins sighed. “It’s illegal in the Netherlands to do that research.”
“Right. Which is why they would go to Sumatra to do it.”
“Henry, the technology’s much too difficult. We’re years away from making a transgenic ape. You know that.”
“I don’t know that. You hear what Utrecht announced yesterday? They harvested bull stem cells and cultured them in mouse testicles. I would say that is difficult. I would say that is fucking cutting edge.”
“Especially for the bulls.”
“I don’t see anything funny here.”
“Can’t you imagine the poor mice, dragging around giant purple bulls’ balls?”
“Still not laughing…”
“Henry,” Charlie said. “Are you telling me you see one report on television about a talking ape, and you actually believe it?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Henry.” Charlie sounded exasperated. “It’s television. This story’s right up there with the two-headed snake. Pull yourself together.”
“The two-headed snake was real.”
“I have to get the kids to school. I’ll talk to you later.” And Charlie hung up.
Fucker. His wife always took the kids to school.
He’s avoiding me.
Henry Kendall walked around the lab, stared out the window, paced some more. He took a deep breath. Of course he knew Charlie was right. It had to be a fake story.
But…what if it wasn’t?
It was true that Henry Kendall had a tendency to be high-strung; his hands sometimes shook when he spoke, especially when he was excited. And he was a bit of a klutz, always stumbling, banging into things at the lab. He had a nervous stomach. He was a worrier.
But what Henry couldn’t tell Charlie was that the real reason he was worried now had to do with a conversation that had taken place a week ago. It seemed meaningless at the time.
Now it took on a more ominous quality.
Some ditsy secretary from the National Institutes of Health had called the lab and asked for Dr. Kendall. When he answered the phone, she said, “Are you Dr. Henry A. Kendall?”
“Yes…”
“Is it correct that you came to the NIH on a six-month sabbatical four years ago?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Was that from May until October?”
“I think it was. What’s this about?”
“And did you conduct part of your research at the primate facility in Maryland?”
“Yes.”
“And is it correct that when you came to the NIH in May of that year, you underwent the usual testing for communicable diseases, because you were going to do primate research?”
“Yes,” Henry said. They had done a battery of tests, everything from HIV to hepatitis to flu. They’d drawn a lot of blood. “May I ask what this is about?”
“I am just filling out some additional paperwork,” she said, “for Dr. Bellarmino.”
Henry felt a chill.
Rob Bellarmino was the head of the genetics section of NIH. He hadn’t been there four years before, when Henry was there, but he was in charge of things now. And he was no particular friend of either Henry or Charlie.
“Is there some problem?” Henry asked. He had the distinct feeling there was.
“No, no,” she said. “We’ve just misplaced some of our paperwork, and Dr. Bellarmino is a stickler about records. While you were at the primate facility, did you do any research involving a female chimpanzee named Mary? Her lab number was F-402.”
“You know, I don’t remember,” Henry said. “It’s a long time back. I worked with several chimps. I don’t recall specifically.”
“She was pregnant during that summer.”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.”
“That was the summer we had an outbreak of encephalitis, and they had to quarantine most of the chimps. Is that right?”
“Yes, I remember the quarantine. They sent chimps all around the country to different facilities.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kendall. Oh—while I have you on the phone, can I verify your address? We have 348 Marbury Madison Drive, La Jolla?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Thanks for your time, Dr. Kendall.”
That was the entire conversation. All Henry really thought, at the time, was that Bellarmino was a tricky son of a bitch; you never knew what he was up to.
But now…with this primate in Sumatra…
Henry shook his head.
Charlie Huggins could argue all he wanted, but it was a fact that scientists had already made a transgenic monkey. They’d done it years ago. There were all kinds of transgenic mammals these days—dogs, cats, everything. It was not out of the question that the talking orang was a transgenic animal.
Henry’s work at NIH had been concerned with the genetic basis of autism. He’d gone to the primate facility because he wanted to know which genes accounted for the differences in communication abilities between humans and apes. And he had done some work with chimp embryos. It didn’t lead anywhere. In fact, he had hardly gotten started before the encephalitis outbreak halted his research. He ended up back at Bethesda and working in a lab for the duration of his sabbatical.
That was all he knew.
At least, all he knew for sure.
HUMANS AND CHIMPS INTERBRED UNTIL RECENTLY
Species Split Did Not End Sex, Researchers Find a Controversial Result from Genetics
Researchers at Harvard and MIT have concluded that the split between humans and chimpanzees occurred more recently than previously thought. Gene investigators had long known that apes and human beings both derived from a common ancestor, who walked the earth some 18 million years ago. Gibbons split off first, 16 million years ago. Orangutans split about 12 million years ago. Gorillas split 10 million years ago. Chimpanzees and human beings were the last to split, about 9 million years ago.
However, after decoding the human genome in 2001, geneticists discovered that human beings and chimps differed in only 1.5% of their genes—about 500 genes in all. This was far fewer than expected. By 2003, scientists had begun to catalog precisely which genes differed between the species. It is now clear that many structural proteins, including hemoglobin and cytochrome c proteins, are identical in chimps and humans. Human and chimp blood are identical. If the species split 9 million years ago, why are they still so alike?
Harvard geneticists believe humans and chimpanzees continued to interbreed long after the species split. Such interbreeding, or hybridization, puts evolutionary pressure on the X chromosome, causing it to change more rapidly than normal. The researchers found that the newest genes on the human genome appear on the X chromosome.
From this, researchers argue that ancestral humans continued to breed with chimps until 5.4 million years ago, when the split became permanent. This new view stands in sharp contrast to the consensus view that once speciation occurs, hybridization is “a negligible influence.” But according to Dr. David Reich of Harvard, the fact that hybridization has rarely been seen in other species “may simply be due to the fact that we have not been looking for it.”
The Harvard researchers caution that interbreeding of humans and chimpanzees is not possible in the present day. They point out that press reports of hybrid “humanzees” have invariably proven false.
CH006
BioGen Research Inc. was housed in a titanium-skinned cube in an industrial park outside Westview Village in Southern California. Majestically situated above the traffic on the 101 Freeway, the cube had been the idea of BioGen’s president, Rick Diehl, who insisted on calling it a hexahedron. The cube looked impressive and high-tech while revealing absolutely nothing about what went on inside—which is exactly how Diehl wanted it.
In addition, BioGen maintained forty thousand square feet of nondescript shed space in an industrial park two miles away. It was there that the animal storage facilities were located, along with the more dangerous labs. Josh Winkler, an up-and-coming young researcher, picked up rubber gloves and a surgical mask from a shelf by the door to the animal quarters. His assistant, Tom Weller, was reading a news clipping taped to the wall.
“Let’s go, Tom,” Josh said.
“Diehl must be crapping in his pants,” Weller said, pointing to the article. “Have you read this?”
Josh turned to look. It was an article from the Wall Street Journal:
SCIENTISTS ISOLATE “MASTER” GENE
A Genetic Basis for Controlling Other People?
TOULOUSE, FRANCE—A team of French biologists have isolated the gene that drives certain people to attempt to control others. Geneticists at the Biochemical Institute of Toulouse University, headed by Dr. Michel Narcejac-Boileau, announced the discovery at a press conference today. “The gene,” Dr. Narcejac-Boileau said, “is associated with social dominance and strong control over other people. We have isolated it in sports leaders, CEOs, and heads of state. We believe the gene is found in all dictators throughout history.”
Dr. Narcejac-Boileau explained that while the strong form of the gene produced dictators, the milder heterozygous form produced a “moderate, quasi-totalitarian urge” to tell other people how to run their lives, generally for their own good or for their own safety.
“Significantly, on psychological testing, individuals with the mild form will express the view that other people need their insights, and are unable to manage their own lives without their guidance. This form of the gene exists among politicians, policy advocates, religious fundamentalists, and celebrities. The belief complex is manifested by a strong feeling of certainty, coupled with a powerful sense of entitlement—and a carefully nurtured sense of resentment toward those who don’t listen to them.”
At the same time, he urged caution in interpreting the results. “Many people who are driven to control others merely want everybody to be the same as they are. They can’t tolerate difference.”
This explained the team’s paradoxical finding that individuals with the mild form of the gene were also the most tolerant of authoritarian environments with strict and invasive social rules. “Our study shows that the gene produces not only a bossy person, but also a person willing to be bossed. They have a distinct attraction to totalitarian states.” He noted that these people are especially responsive to fashions of all kinds, and suppress opinions and preferences not shared by their group.
Josh said, “‘Especially responsive to fashions’…Is this a joke?”
“No, they’re serious. It’s marketing,” Tom Weller said. “Today everything is marketing. Read the rest.”
Although the French team stopped short of claiming that the mild form of the master gene represented a genetic disease—an “addiction to belonging,” as Narcejac-Boileau phrased it—they nevertheless suggested that evolutionary pressures were moving the human race toward ever-greater conformity.
“Unbelievable,” Josh said. “These guys in Toulouse hold a press conference and the whole world runs their story about the ‘master gene’? Have they published in a journal anywhere?”
“Nope, they just held a press conference. No publication, and no mention of publication.”
“What’s next, the slave gene? Looks like crap to me,” Josh said. He glanced at his watch.
“You mean, we hope it’s crap.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. We hope it’s crap. Because it gets in the way of what BioGen’s announcing, that’s for sure.”
“You think Diehl will delay the announcement?” Tom Weller asked.
“Maybe. But Diehl doesn’t like waiting. And he’s been nervous ever since he got back from Vegas.”
Josh tugged on his rubber gloves, put on safety goggles and his paper face-mask, then picked up the six-inch-long compressed-air cylinder, and screwed on the vial of retrovirus. The whole apparatus was the size of a cigar tube. Next, he fitted a tiny plastic cone on top of that, pushing it in place with his thumb. “Grab your PDA.”
And they pushed through the swinging door, into the animal quarters.
The strong, slightly sweet odor of the rats was a familiar smell. There were five or six hundred rats here, all neatly labeled in cages stacked six feet high, on both sides of an aisle that ran down the center of the room.
“What’re we dosing today?” Tom Weller said.
Josh read off a string of numbers. Tom checked his PDA listing of numerical locations. They walked down the aisle until they found the cages with that day’s numbers. Five rats in five cages. The animals were white, plump, moving normally. “They look okay. This is the second dose?”
“Right.”
“Okay, boys,” Josh said. “Let’s be nice for Daddy.” He opened the first cage, and quickly grabbed the rat inside. He held the animal by the body, forefingers expertly gripping the neck, and quickly fitted the small plastic cone over the rat’s snout. The animal’s breath clouded the cone. A brief hiss as the virus was released; Josh held the mask in place for ten seconds, while the rat inhaled. Then he released the animal back into the cage.
“One down.”
Tom Weller tapped his stylus on the PDA, then moved to the next cage.
The retrovirus had been bioengineered to carry a gene known as ACMPD3N7, one of the family of genes controlling aminocarboxymuconate paraldehyde decarboxylase. Within BioGen they called it the maturity gene. When activated, ACMPD3N7 seemed to modify responses of the amygdala and cingulate gyrus in the brain. The result was an acceleration of maturational behavior—at least in rats. Infant female rats, for example, would show precursors of maternal behavior, such as rolling feces in their cages, far earlier than usual. And BioGen had preliminary evidence for the maturational gene action in rhesus monkeys, as well.
Interest in the gene centered on a potential link to neurodegenerative disease. One school of thought argued that neurodegenerative illnesses were a result of disruptions of maturational pathways in the brain.
If that were true—if ACMPD3N7 were involved in, say, Alzheimer’s disease, or another form of senility—then the commercial value of the gene would be enormous.
Josh had moved on to the next cage and was holding the mask over the second rat when his cell phone went off. He gestured for Tom to pull it from his shirt pocket.
Weller looked at the screen. “It’s your mother,” he said.
“Ah hell,” Josh said. “Take over for a minute, would you?”
“Joshua, what are you doing?”
“I’m working, Mom.”
“Well, can you stop?”
“Not really—”
“Because we have an emergency.”
Josh sighed. “What did he do this time, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but he’s in jail, downtown.”
“Well, let Charles get him out.” Charles Silverberg was the family lawyer.
“Charles is getting him out right now,” his mother said. “But Adam has to appear in court. Somebody has to drive him home after the hearing.”
“I can’t. I’m at work.”
“He’s your brother, Josh.”
“He’s also thirty years old,” Josh said. This had been going on for years. His brother Adam was an investment banker who had been in and out of rehab a dozen times. “Can’t he take a taxi?”
“I don’t think that’s wise, under the circumstances.”
Josh sighed. “What’d he do, Mom?”
“Apparently he bought cocaine from a woman who worked for the DEA.”
“Again?”
“Joshua. Are you going to go downtown and pick him up or not?”
Long sigh. “Yes, Mom. I’ll go.”
“Now? Will you go now?”
“Yes, Mom. I’ll go now.”
He flipped the phone shut and turned to Weller. “What do you say we finish this in a couple of hours?”
“No problem,” Tom said. “I have some notes to write up back in the office, anyway.”
Joshua turned, stripping off his gloves as he left the room. He stuck his cylinder, goggles, and paper mask into the pocket of his lab coat, unclipped his radiation tag, and hurried to his car.
Driving downtown, he glanced at the cylinder protruding from the lab coat, which he had tossed onto the passenger seat. To stay within the protocol, Josh had to return to the lab and expose the remaining rats before five p.m. That kind of schedule and the need to keep to it seemed to represent everything that separated Josh from his older brother.
Once, Adam had had everything—looks, popularity, athletic prowess. His high school days at the elite Westfield School had consisted of one triumph after another—editor of the newspaper, soccer team captain, president of the debating team, National Merit Scholar. Josh, in contrast, had been a nerd. He was chubby, short, ungainly. He walked with a kind of waddle; he couldn’t help it. The orthopedic shoes his mother insisted he wear did not help. Girls disdained him. He heard them giggle as he passed them in the hallways. High school was torture for Josh. He did not do well. Adam went to Yale. Josh barely got into Emerson State.
How times had changed.
A year ago, Adam had been fired from his job at Deutsche Bank. His drug troubles were endless. Meanwhile, Josh had started at BioGen as a lowly assistant, but had quickly moved up as the company began to recognize his hard work and his inventive approach. Josh had stock in the company, and if any of the current projects, including the maturity gene, proved out commercially, then he would be rich.
And Adam…
Josh pulled up in front of the courthouse. Adam was sitting on the steps, staring fixedly at the ground. His ratty suit was streaked with grime and he had a day’s growth of beard. Charles Silverberg was standing over him, talking on his cell phone.
Josh honked the horn. Charles waved, and headed off. Adam trudged over and got in the car.
“Thanks, bro.” He slammed the door shut. “Appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
Josh pulled into traffic, glancing at his watch. He had enough time to take Adam back to their mother’s house and get back to the lab by five.
“Did I interrupt something?” Adam asked.
That was the annoying thing about his brother. He liked to mess up everyone else’s life, too. He seemed to take pleasure in it.
“Yes, actually. You did.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry? If you were sorry, you’d stop doing this shit.”
“Hey, man,” Adam said. “How the fuck was I supposed to know? It was entrapment, man. Even Charles said so. The bitch entrapped me. Charles said he would get me off easy.”
“There wouldn’t be any entrapment,” Josh said, “if you weren’t using.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself! Don’t lecture me.”
Josh said nothing. Why did he even bring it up? After all these years, he knew nothing he said mattered. Nothing made a difference. There was a long silence as he drove.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said.
“You’re not sorry.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Adam said. “You’re right.” He hung his head. He sighed theatrically. “I fucked up again.”
The repentant Adam.
Josh had seen it dozens of times before. The belligerent Adam, the repentant Adam, the logical Adam, the denying Adam. Meanwhile his brother always tested positive. Every time.
An orange light came on on the dashboard. Gas was low. He saw a station up ahead. “I need gas.”
“Good. I got to take a leak.”
“You stay in the car.”
“I got to take a leak, man.”
“Stay in the fucking car.” Josh pulled up alongside the pump and got out. “Stay where I can fucking see you.”
“I don’t want to pee in your car, man…”
“You better not.”
“But—”
“Just hold it, Adam!”
Josh put a credit card in the slot and started pumping gas. He glanced at his brother through the rear windshield, then looked back at the spinning numbers. Gas was so damn expensive now. He probably should buy a car that was cheaper to run.
He finished and got back in the car. He glanced at Adam. His brother had a funny look on his face. There was a faint odor in the car.
“Adam?”
“What.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
He started the engine. That smell…Something silver caught his eye. He looked at the floor between his brother’s feet and saw the silver cylinder. He leaned over, picked up the cylinder. It was light in his hand.
“Adam…”
“I didn’t do anything!”
Josh shook the cylinder. It was empty.
“I thought it was nitrous or something,” his brother said.
“You asshole.”
“Why? It didn’t do anything.”
“It’s for a rat, Adam. You just inhaled virus for a rat.”
Adam slumped back. “Is that bad?”
“It ain’t good.”
By the time Josh pulled up in front of his mother’s house in Beverly Hills, he had thought it through and concluded that there was no danger to Adam. The retrovirus was a mouse-infective strain, and while it might also infect human beings, the dose had been calculated for an animal weighing eight hundred grams. His brother weighed a hundred times as much. The genetic exposure was subclinical.
“So, I’m okay?” Adam said.
“Yeah.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry about that,” Adam said, getting out of the car. “But thanks for picking me up. See you, bro.”
“I’ll wait until you get inside,” Josh said. He watched as his brother walked up the drive and knocked on the door. His mother opened it. Adam stepped inside, and she shut the door.
She never even looked at Josh.
He started the engine and drove away.
CH007
At noon, Alex Burnet left her office in her Century City law firm and went home. She didn’t have far to go; she lived in an apartment on Roxbury Park with her eight-year-old son, Jamie. Jamie had a cold and had stayed home from school. Her father was looking after him for her.
She found her dad in the kitchen, making macaroni and cheese. It was the only thing Jamie would eat these days. “How is he?” she said.
“Fever’s down. Still got a runny nose and a cough.”
“Is he hungry?”
“He wasn’t earlier. But he asked for macaroni.”
“That’s a good sign,” she said. “Should I take over?”
Her father shook his head. “I’ve got it handled. You didn’t have to come home, you know.”
“I know.” She paused. “The judge issued his ruling, Dad.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“And?”
“We lost.”
Her father continued to stir. “We lost everything?”
“Yes,” she said. “We lost on every point. You have no rights to your own tissue. He ruled them ‘material waste’ that you allowed the university to dispose of for you. The court says you have no rights to any of your tissue once it has left your body. The university can do what it wants with it.”
“But they brought me back—”
“He said a reasonable person would have realized the tissues were being collected for commercial use. Therefore you tacitly accepted it.”
“But they told me I was sick.”
“He rejected all our arguments, Dad.”
“They lied to me.”
“I know, but according to the judge, good social policy promotes medical research. Granting you rights now would have a chilling effect on future research. That’s the thinking behind the ruling—the common good.”
“This wasn’t about the common good. It was about getting rich,” her father said. “Jesus, three billion dollars…”
“I know, Dad. Universities want money. And basically, this judge held what California judges have held for the last twenty-five years, ever since the Moore decision in 1980. Just like your case, the court found that Moore’s tissues were waste materials to which he had no right. And they haven’t revisited that question in more than two decades.”
“So what happens now?”
“We appeal,” she said. “I don’t think we have good grounds, but we have to do it before we can go to the California Supreme Court.”
“And when will that be?”
“A year from now.”
“Do we have a chance?” her father said.
“Absolutely not,” Albert Rodriguez said, turning in his chair toward her father. Rodriguez and the other UCLA attorneys had come to Alex’s law offices in the aftermath of the judge’s ruling. “You have no chance on further appeal, Mr. Burnet.”
“I’m surprised,” Alex said, “that you’re so confident about how the California Supreme Court will rule.”
“Oh, we have no idea how they will rule,” Rodriguez said. “I simply mean that you will lose this case no matter what the court holds.”
“How is that?” Alex said.
“UCLA is a state university. The Board of Regents is prepared, on behalf of the state of California, to take your father’s cells by right of eminent domain.”
She blinked: “What?”
“Should the Supreme Court rule that your father’s cells are his property—which we think is unlikely—the state will take ownership of his property by eminent domain.”
Eminent domain referred to the right of the state to take private property without the owner’s consent. It was almost always invoked for public uses. “But eminent domain is intended for schools or highways…”
“The state can do it in this case,” Rodriguez said. “And it will.”
Her father stared at them, thunderstruck. “Are you joking?”
“No, Mr. Burnet. It’s a legitimate taking, and the state will exercise its right.”
Alex said, “Then what is the purpose of this meeting?”
“We thought it appropriate to inform you of the situation, in case you wanted to drop further litigation.”
“You’re suggesting we end litigation?” she said.
“I would advise it,” Rodriguez said to her, “if this were my client.”
“Ending litigation saves the state considerable expense.”
“It saves everyone expense,” Rodriguez said.
“So what are you proposing as a settlement, for us to drop the case?”
“Nothing whatever, Ms. Burnet. I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. This is not a negotiation. We’re simply here to explain our position, so that you can make an informed decision in your best interest.”
Her father cleared his throat. “You’re telling us that you’re taking my cells, no matter what. You’ve sold them for three billion dollars, no matter what. And you’re keeping all of that money, no matter what.”
“Bluntly put,” Rodriguez said, “but not inaccurate.”
The meeting ended. Rodriguez and his team thanked them for their time, said their good-byes, and left the room. Alex nodded to her father and then followed the other attorneys outside. Through the glass, Frank Burnet watched as they talked further.
“Those fuckers,” he said. “What kind of world do we live in?”
“My sentiments exactly,” said a voice from behind him. Burnet turned.
A young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses was sitting in the far corner of the conference room. Burnet remembered him; he had come in during the meeting, bringing coffee and mugs, which he had put on the sideboard. Then he had sat down in the corner for the rest of the meeting. Burnet had assumed he was a junior member of the firm, but now the young man was speaking with confidence.
“Let’s face it, Mr. Burnet,” he said, “you’ve been screwed. It turns out your cells are very rare and valuable. They’re efficient manufacturers of cytokines, chemicals that fight cancer. That’s the real reason you survived your disease. As a matter of fact, your cells churn out cytokines more efficiently than any commercial process. That’s why those cells are worth so much money. The UCLA doctors didn’t create anything or invent anything. They didn’t genetically modify anything. They just took your cells, grew them in a dish, and sold the dish to BioGen. And you, my friend, were screwed.”
“Who are you?” Burnet said.
“And you have no hope of justice,” the young man continued, “because the courts are totally incompetent. The courts don’t realize how fast things are changing. They don’t understand we are already in a new world. They don’t get the new issues. And because they are technically illiterate, they don’t understand what procedures are done—or in this case, not done. Your cells were stolen and sold. Plain and simple. And the court decided that was just fine.”
Burnet gave a long sigh.
“But,” the man continued, “thieves can still get their comeuppance.”
“How’s that?”
“Because UCLA did nothing to change your cells, another company could take those same cells, make minor genetic modifications, and sell them as a new product.”
“But BioGen already has my cells.”
“True. But cell lines are fragile. Things happen to them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cultures are vulnerable to fungus, bacterial infection, contamination, mutation. All kinds of things can go wrong.”
“BioGen must take precautions…”
“Of course. But sometimes the precautions are inadequate,” the man said.
“Who are you?” Burnet said again. He was looking around, through the glass walls of the conference room, at the larger office outside. He saw people walking back and forth. He wondered where his daughter had gone.
“I’m nobody,” the young man said. “You never met me.”
“You have a business card?”
The man shook his head. “I’m not here, Mr. Burnet.”
Burnet frowned. “And my daughter—”
“Has no idea. Never met her. This is between us.”
“But you’re talking about illegal activity.”
“I’m not talking at all, because you and I have never met,” the man said. “But let’s consider how this might work.”
“Okay…”
“You can’t legally sell your cells at this point, because the court has ruled you no longer own them—BioGen does. But your cells could be obtained from other places. Over the course of your life, you’ve given blood many times in many places. You went to Vietnam forty years ago. The army took your blood. You had knee surgery twenty years ago in San Diego. The hospital took your blood, and kept your cartilage. You’ve consulted various doctors over the years. They ran blood tests. The labs kept the blood. So your blood can be found, no problem. And it can be acquired from publicly available databases—if, for example, another company wanted to use your cells.”
“And what about BioGen?”
The young man shrugged. “Biotechnology is a difficult business. Contaminations happen every day. If something goes wrong in their labs, that’s not your problem, is it?”
“But how could—”
“I have no idea. So many things can happen.”
There was a short silence. “And why should I do this?” Burnet said.
“You’ll get a hundred million dollars.”
“For what?”
“Punch biopsies of six organ systems.”
“I thought you could get my blood elsewhere.”
“In theory. If it came to litigation, that would be claimed. But, in practice, any company would want fresh cells.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“No problem. Think it over, Mr. Burnet.” The young man stood, pushed his glasses up his nose. “You may have been screwed. But there’s no reason to bend over for it.”
From Beaumont College Alumni News
STEM CELL DEBATE RAGES
Effective Treatments “Decades Away” Prof. McKeown Shocks Audience
By Max Thaler
Speaking to a packed audience in Beaumont Hall, famed biology professor Kevin McKeown shocked listeners by calling stem cell research “a cruel fraud.”
“What you have been told is nothing more than a myth,” he said, “intended to ensure funding for researchers, at the expense of false hopes for the seriously ill. So let’s get to the truth.”
Stem cells, he explained, are cells that have the ability to turn themselves into other kinds of cells. There are two kinds of stem cells. Adult stem cells are found throughout the body. They are found in muscle, brain, and liver tissue, and so on. Adult stem cells can generate new cells, but only of the tissue in which they are found. They are important because the human body replaces all its cells every seven years.
Research involving adult stem cells is for the most part not controversial. But there is another kind of stem cell, the embryonic stem cell, that is highly controversial. It is found in umbilical cord blood, or derived from young embryos. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can develop into any kind of tissue. But the research is controversial because it involves the use of human embryos, which many people feel, for religious and other reasons, have the rights of human beings. This is an old debate not likely to be resolved soon.
SCIENTISTS SEE A BAN ON RESEARCH
The current American administration has said that embryonic stem cells can be taken from existing research lines, but not from new embryos. Scientists regard existing lines as inadequate, and thus view the ruling a de facto ban on research. That’s why they are going to private centers to carry out their research, without federal grants.
But in the end, the real problem isn’t simply a lack of stem cells. It’s the fact that in order to produce therapeutic effects, scientists need each person to have his or her own pluripotent stem cells. This would allow us to regrow an organ, or to repair damage from injury or disease, or to undo paralysis. This represents the great dream. No one is able to perform these therapeutic miracles now. No one even has an inkling how it might be done. But it requires the cells.
Now, for newborns, you can collect umbilical cord blood and freeze it, and people are doing that with their newborns. But what about adults? Where will we get pluripotent stem cells?
That’s the big question.
TOWARD THE THERAPEUTIC DREAM
All we adults have left is adult stem cells, which can make only one kind of tissue. But what if there were a way to convert adult stem cells back into embryonic stem cells? Such a procedure would enable every adult to have a ready source of his or her own embryonic stem cells. That would make the therapeutic dream possible.
Well, it turns out that you can reverse adult stem cells, but only if you insert them into an egg. Something within the egg unwinds the differentiation and converts the adult stem cell back into an embryonic stem cell. This is good news, but it is vastly more difficult to do with human cells. And if the method could be made to work in human beings, it would require an enormous supply of human egg cells. That makes the procedure controversial again.
So scientists are looking for other ways to make adult cells pluripotent. It is a worldwide effort. A researcher in Shanghai has been injecting human stem cells into chicken eggs, with mixed results—while others cluck in disapproval. It’s not clear now whether such procedures will work.
It’s equally unclear whether the stem cell dream—transplants without rejection, spinal cord injuries repaired, and so on—will come true. Advocates have made dishonest claims, and media speculation has been fantastical for years. People with serious illnesses have been led to believe a cure is just around the corner. Sadly, this is not true. Working therapeutic approaches lie many years in the future, perhaps decades. Many thoughtful scientists have said, in private, that we won’t know whether stem cell therapy will work until 2050. They point out that it took forty years from the time Watson and Crick decoded the gene until human gene therapy began.
A SCANDAL SHOCKS THE WORLD
It was in the context of feverish hope and hype that Korean biochemist Hwang Woo-Suk announced in 2004 that he had successfully created a human embryonic stem cell from an adult cell by somatic nuclear transfer—injection into a human egg. Hwang was a famous workaholic, spending eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, in the lab. Hwang’s exciting report was published in March 2005 in Science magazine. Researchers from around the world flocked to Korea. Human stem cell treatment seemed suddenly on the verge of reality. Hwang was a hero in Korea, and appointed to head a new World Stem Cell Hub, financed by the Korean government.
But in November 2005, an American collaborator in Pittsburgh announced that he was ending his association with Hwang. And then one of Hwang’s co-workers revealed that Hwang had obtained eggs illegally, from women who worked in his lab.
By December 2005, Seoul National University announced that Hwang’s cell lines were a fabrication, as were his papers in Science. Science retracted the papers. Hwang now faces criminal charges. There the matter stands.
PERILS OF “MEDIA HYPE”
“What lessons can be drawn from this?” asked Professor McKeown. “First, in a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims. For years the media have touted stem cell research as the coming miracle. So when somebody announced that the miracle had arrived, he was believed. Does that imply there is a danger in media hype? You bet. Because not only does it raise cruel hopes among the ill, it affects scientists, too. They start to believe the miracle is around the corner—even though they should know better.
“What can we do about media hype? It would stop in a week, if scientific institutions wanted that. They don’t. They love the hype. They know it brings grants. So that won’t change. Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins promote hype just as much as Exxon or Ford. So do individual researchers at those institutions. And increasingly, researchers and universities are all commercially motivated, just like corporations. So whenever you hear a scientist claim that his statements have been exaggerated, or taken out of context, just ask him if he has written a letter of protest to the editor. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he hasn’t.
“Next lesson: Peer review. All of Hwang’s papers in Science were peer-reviewed. If we ever needed evidence that peer review is an empty ritual, this episode provides it. Hwang made extraordinary claims. He did not provide extraordinary evidence. Many studies have shown that peer review does not improve the quality of scientific papers. Scientists themselves know it doesn’t work. Yet the public still regards it as a sign of quality, and says, ‘This paper was peer-reviewed,’ or ‘This paper was not peer-reviewed,’ as if that meant something. It doesn’t.
“Next, the journals themselves. Where was the firm hand of the editor of Science? Remember that the journal Science is a big enterprise—115 people work on that magazine. Yet gross fraud, including photographs altered with Adobe Photoshop, were not detected. And Photoshop is widely known as a major tool of scientific fraud. Yet the magazine had no way to detect it.
“Not that Science is unique in being fooled. Fraudulent research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, where authors withheld critical information about Vioxx heart attacks; in the Lancet, where a report about drugs and oral cancer was entirely fabricated—in that one, 250 people in the patient database had the same birth date! That might have been a clue. Medical fraud is more than a scandal, it’s a public health threat. Yet it continues.”
THE COST OF FRAUD
“The cost of such fraud is enormous,” McKeown said, “estimated at thirty billion dollars annually, probably three times that. Fraud in science is not rare, and it’s not limited to fringe players. The most respected researchers and institutions have been caught with faked data. Even Francis Collins, the head of NIH’s Human Genome Project, was listed as co-author on five faked papers that had to be withdrawn.
“The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special—at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do—lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change.”
CH008
In the BioGen animal lab, Tom Weller was going down the line of cages with Josh Winkler, who was dispensing doses of gene-laced virus to the rats. It was their daily routine. Tom’s cell phone rang.
Josh gave him a look. Josh was his senior. Josh could take calls at work, but Tom couldn’t. Weller stripped off one rubber glove and pulled the phone from his pocket.
“Hello?”
“Tom.”
It was his mother. “Hi, Mom. I’m at work now.”
Josh gave him another look.
“Can I call you back?”
“Your dad had a car accident last night,” she said. “And…he died.”
“What?” He felt suddenly dizzy. Tom leaned against the rat cages, took a shallow breath. Now Josh was giving him a concerned look. “What happened?”
“His car hit an overpass around midnight,” his mother said. “They took him to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, but he died early this morning.”
“Oh God. Are you at home?” Tom said. “You want me to come over? Does Rachel know?”
“I just got off the phone.”
“Okay, I’ll come over,” he said.
“Tom, I hate to ask you this,” she said, “but…”
“You want me to tell Lisa?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to reach her.” Lisa was the black sheep of the family. The youngest child, just turned twenty. Lisa hadn’t talked to her mother in years. “Do you know where she is these days, Tom?”
“I think so,” he said. “She called a few weeks ago.”
“To ask for money?”
“No, just to give me her address. She’s in Torrance.”
“I can’t reach her,” his mother said.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Tell her the funeral is Thursday, if she wants to come.”
“I’ll tell her.”
He flipped the phone shut and turned to Josh. Josh was looking concerned and sympathetic. “What was it?”
“My father died.”
“I’m really sorry…”
“Car crash, last night. I need to go tell my sister.”
“You have to leave now?”
“I’ll stop by the office on my way out and send Sandy in.”
“Sandy can’t do this. He doesn’t know the routine—”
“Josh,” he said, “I have to go.”
Traffic was heavy on the 405. It took almost an hour before he found himself in front of a ratty apartment building on South Acre in Torrance, pushing the buzzer for apartment 38. The building stood close to the freeway; the roar of traffic was constant.
He knew Lisa worked nights, but it was now ten o’clock in the morning. She might be awake. Sure enough, the buzzer sounded, and he opened the door. The lobby smelled strongly of cat piss. The elevator didn’t work, so he took the stairs to the third floor, stepping around plastic sacks of garbage. A dog had broken one sack open, and the contents spilled down a couple of steps.
He stopped in front of apartment 38, pushed the doorbell. “Just a fucking minute,” his sister called. He waited. Eventually, she opened the door.
She was wearing a bathrobe. Her short black hair was pulled back. She looked upset. “The bitch called,” she said.
“Mom?”
“She woke me up, the bitch.” She turned, went back into the apartment. He followed her. “I thought you were the liquor delivery.”
The apartment was a mess. Lisa padded into the kitchen, and poked around the pans and dishes stacked in the sink, found a coffee cup. She rinsed it out. “You want coffee?”
He shook his head. “Shit, Lise,” he said. “This place is a pigsty.”
“I work nights, you know that.”
She had never cared about her surroundings. Even as a child, her room was always a mess. She just didn’t seem to notice. Now Tom looked through the greasy drapes of the kitchen window at the traffic crawling past on the 405. “So. How’s work going?”
“It’s House of Pancakes. How do you think it’s going? Same every fucking night.”
“What did Mom say?”
“She wanted to know if I was coming to the funeral.”
“What’d you say?”
“I told her to fuck off. Why should I go? He wasn’t my father.”
Tom sighed. This was a long-standing argument within the family. Lisa believed she was not John Weller’s daughter. “You don’t think so, either,” she said to Tom.
“Yeah, I do.”
“You just say whatever Mom wants you to say.” She fished out a cigarette butt from a heaping ashtray, and bent over the stove to light it from the burner. “Was he drunk when he crashed?”
“I don’t know.”
“I bet he was shitfaced. Or on those steroids he used, for his bodybuilding.”
Tom’s father had been a bodybuilder. He took it up later in life, and even competed in amateur contests. “Dad didn’t use steroids.”
“Oh sure, Tom. I used to look in his bathroom. He had needles.”
“Okay, so you didn’t like him.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “He wasn’t my father. I don’t care about any of it.”
“Mom always said that he was your father, that you were just saying it, because you didn’t like him.”
“Well, guess what? We can settle it, once and for all.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, a paternity test.”
“Lisa,” he said. “Don’t start this.”
“I’m not starting. I’m finishing.”
“Don’t. Promise me you won’t do this. Come on. Dad’s dead, Mom’s upset, promise me.”
“You are a chickenshit pussy, you know that?” That was when he saw she was near tears.
He put his arms around her, and she began to cry. He just held her, feeling her body shake. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
After her brother had gone, she heated a cup of coffee in the microwave, then sat down at the kitchenette table by the phone. She dialed Information. She got the number for the hospital. A moment later, she heard the receptionist say, “Long Beach Memorial.”
“I want to talk to the morgue,” she said.
“I’m sorry. The morgue is at the County Coroner’s Office. Would you like that number?”
“Someone in my family just died at your hospital. Where would his body be now?”
“One moment please, I will connect you to pathology.”
Four days later, her mother called back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, going down to the hospital and asking for blood from your father.”
“He’s not my father.”
“Lisa. Don’t you ever get tired of this game?”
“No, and he’s not my father, because the genetic tests came back negative. It says right here”—she reached for the printed sheet—“that there is less than one chance in 2.9 million that John J. Weller is my father.”
“What genetic test?”
“I had a genetic test done.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“No, Mom. You’re the one who’s full of shit. John Weller’s not my father, and the test proves it. I always knew it.”
“We’ll see about that,” her mother said, and hung up.
About half an hour after that, her brother, Tom, called. “Hey, Lise.” Real casual, laid-back.
“Just got a call from Mom.”
“Yeah?”
“She said something about a test?”
“Yeah. I did a test, Tommy. And guess what?”
“I heard. Who did this test, Lise?”
“A lab here in Long Beach.”
“What’s it called?”
“BioRad Testing.”
“Uh-huh,” her brother said. “You know, these labs that advertise on the Internet aren’t very reliable. You know that, don’t you?”
“They guaranteed it.”
“Mom’s all upset.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“You know she’ll do her own test now? And there’s going to be lawsuits? Because you’re accusing her of infidelity.”
“Gee, Tommy, I don’t really give a damn. You know that?”
“Lise, I think this is causing a lot of needless trouble around Dad’s death.”
“Your dad,” she said. “Not mine.”
CH009
Kevin McCormick, chief administrator of Long Beach Memorial, looked up at the chubby figure coming into his office, and said, “How the hell did this happen?” He pushed a sheaf of papers across his desk.
Marty Roberts, the chief of pathology, glanced quickly through the document. “I have no idea,” he said.
“The wife of the deceased, Mr. John J. Weller, is suing us for unauthorized release of tissue to the daughter.”
“What’s the legal situation?” Marty Roberts said.
“Unclear,” McCormick said. “Legal says the daughter is a family member and has a clear right to be given tissues to test for diseases that may affect her. Problem is, she did a paternity test and it came back negative. So she’s not his daughter. Arguably that makes our release of tissues unauthorized.”
“We couldn’t have known that at the time—”
“Of course not. But we’re talking about the law. The only important question is, can the family sue? The answer is yes, they have grounds to bring a suit, and they are.”
“Where’s the body now?” Marty said.
“Buried. Eight days ago.”
“I see.” Marty flipped through the pages. “And they are asking for…”
“Besides unspecified damages, they’re asking for blood and tissue samples to conduct further testing,” McCormick said. “Do we have blood or tissue samples from the deceased?”
“I’d have to check,” Marty said. “But I’d presume that we do, yes.”
“We do?”
“Sure. We keep a lot of tissue these days, Kevin. I mean, everybody that comes into the hospital, we collect as much as we possibly can legally…”
“That’s the wrong answer,” McCormick said, glowering.
“Okay. What’s the right answer?”
“That we don’t have any tissues from this guy.”
“But they’ll know that we do. At the very least, we did a tox screen on the guy because of the accident, so we have his blood—”
“That sample was lost.”
“Okay. It was lost. But what good does that do? They can always dig up the body and get all the tissues they want.”
“Correct.”
“So?”
“So let them do that. That’s Legal’s advice. Exhumation takes time, permits, and money. We’re guessing they won’t have the time or the money—and this thing will go away.”
“Okay,” Marty said. “And I am here because?”
“Because I need you to go back to pathology and confirm for me that, unfortunately, we have no more samples from the deceased, and that everything not given to the daughter has been lost or misplaced.”
“Got it.”
“Call me within the hour,” McCormick said, and turned away.
Marty Roberts entered the basement pathology lab. His diener, Raza Rashad, a handsome, dark-eyed man of twenty-seven, was scrubbing the stainless steel tables for the next post. If truth be told, Raza really ran the path lab. Marty felt himself burdened by a heavy administrative load, managing the senior pathologists, the residents, the medical student rotations, and all the rest. He’d come to rely on Raza, who was highly intelligent and ambitious.
“Hey, Raza. You remember that forty-six-year-old white guy with crush injuries, a week back? Drove himself into an overpass?”
“Yeah. I remember. Heller, or Weller.”
“The daughter asked for blood?”
“Yeah. We gave her blood.”
“Well, she ran a paternity test, and it came back negative. Guy was not her father.”
Raza stared blankly. “That right?”
“Yeah. Now the mother’s all upset. Wants more tissues. What’ve we got?”
“I’d have to check. Probably the usual. All major organs.”
Marty said, “Any chance that material got misplaced? So we couldn’t find it?”
Raza nodded slowly, staring at Marty. “Maybe so. Always possible it could be mislabeled. Then it would be hard to find.”
“Might take months?”
“Or years. Maybe never.”
“That’d be a shame,” Marty said. “Now, what about the blood from the tox screen?”
Raza frowned. “Lab keeps that. We wouldn’t have access to their storage facility.”
“So they still have that blood sample?”
“Yeah. They do.”
“And we have no access?”
Raza smiled. “It might take me a couple of days.”
“Okay. Do it.”
Marty Roberts went to the phone and dialed the administrator’s office. When McCormick came on the line, he said, “I have some bad news, Kevin. Unfortunately, all the tissues have been lost or misplaced.”
“Sorry to hear that,” McCormick said, and hung up.
“Marty,” Raza said, coming into the office, “is there a problem with this Weller guy?”
“No,” Marty said. “Not anymore. And I told you before—don’t call me Marty. My name is Dr. Roberts.”
CH010
At the Radial Genomics lab in La Jolla, Charlie Huggins twisted his flat-panel screen around to show Henry Kendall the headline: TALKING APE CLAIMED FRAUD. “What’d I tell you?” Charlie said. “A week later, and we learn the story’s a fake.”
“Okay, okay. I was wrong,” Henry said. “I admit it, I was worried about nothing.”
“Very worried…”
“It’s in the past. Can we talk about something important?”
“What’s that?”
“The novelty-seeking gene. Our grant application was denied.” He began typing at the keyboard. “Once again, we’ve been screwed—by your personal favorite, the Pope of Dopamine, Dr. Robert A. Bellarmino of the NIH.”
For the last ten years, brain studies had increasingly focused on a neurochemical called dopamine. Levels of dopamine seemed to be important in maintaining health as well as in diseases such as Parkinsonism and schizophrenia. From work in Charlie Huggins’s lab, it appeared that dopamine receptors in the brain were controlled by the gene D4DR, among others. Charlie’s lab stood at the forefront of this research, until a rival scientist named Robert Bellarmino from the National Institutes of Health began referring to D4DR as the “novelty gene,” the gene that supposedly controlled the urge to take risks, seek new sex partners, or engage in thrill-seeking behavior.
As Bellarmino explained it, the fact that dopamine levels were higher in men than women was the reason for the greater recklessness of men, and their attraction to everything from mountain climbing to infidelity.
Bellarmino was an evangelical Christian and a leading researcher at the NIH. Politically skilled, he was the very model of an up-to-date scientist, neatly blending a modest scientific talent with true media savvy. His laboratory was the first to hire its own publicity firm, and as a result, his ideas invariably got plenty of press coverage. (Which in turn attracted the brightest and most ambitious postdocs, who did brilliant work for him, thus adding to his prestige.)
In the case of D4DR, Bellarmino was able to tailor his comments to the beliefs of his audience, either speaking enthusiastically about the new gene to progressive groups, or disparaging it to conservatives. He was colorful, future-oriented, and uninhibited in his predictions. He went so far as to suggest that there might one day be a vaccine to prevent infidelity.
The absurdity of such comments so annoyed Charlie and Henry that six months before, they had applied for a grant to test the prevalence of the “novelty gene.”
Their proposal was simplicity itself. They would send research teams to amusement parks to draw blood samples from individuals who rode roller coasters time and again during the day. In theory these “repeat coasters” would be more likely to carry the gene.
The only problem with applying to the NSF was that their proposal would be read by anonymous reviewers. And one of the reviewers was likely to be Robert Bellarmino. And Bellarmino had a reputation for what was politely termed “appropriation.”
“Anyway,” Henry said, “the NSF turned us down. The reviewers didn’t think our idea was worthy. One said it was too ‘jokey.’”
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said. “What does this have to do with Robbin’ Rob?”
“Remember where we proposed to conduct our study?”
“Of course,” Charlie said. “At two of the biggest amusement parks in the world, in two different countries. Sandusky in the U.S., and Blackpool in England.”
“Well, guess who’s out of town?” Henry said.
He hit his e-mail button.
From: Rob Bellarmino, NIH
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: Travel
I will be out of the office for the next two weeks. If you need immediate assistance please contact my office by phone…
“I called his office, and guess what? Bellarmino is going to Sandusky, Ohio—and then to Blackpool, England.”
“That bastard,” Charlie said. “If you’re going to steal somebody else’s research proposal, you should at least have the courtesy to change it a little.”
“Bellarmino obviously doesn’t care if we know he stole it,” Henry said. “Doesn’t that piss you off? What do you say we go for it? Put him up for ethical violations?”
“I’d like nothing better,” Charlie said, “but, no. If we formally charge misconduct, it means a lot of time and a lot of paperwork. Our grants could dry up. And in the end, the complaint goes nowhere. Rob’s a major player at NIH. He’s got huge research facilities and he dispenses millions in grants. He holds prayer breakfasts with congressmen. He’s a scientist who believes in God. They love him on the Hill. He’d never be charged with misconduct. Even if we caught him buggering a lab assistant, he wouldn’t be charged.”
“So we just let him do it?”
“It’s not a perfect world,” Charlie said. “We have plenty to do. Walk away.”
CH011
Barry Sindler was bored. The woman before him yammered on. She was an obvious type—the rich-bitch Eastern broad who wore pants, Katharine Hepburn with an attitude, a trust fund, a nasal Newport accent. But despite her aristocratic airs, the best she could manage was to hump the tennis pro, just like every L.A. fake-tit dimwit in this town.
But she was perfectly suited to the dumb-ass attorney by her side—that Ivy League jackoff Bob Wilson, wearing a pinstripe suit and a button-down shirt with a rep tie and those stupid lace-up wingtips with the little perforations in the toes. No wonder everyone called him Whitey Wilson. Wilson never tired of reminding everyone he was a Harvard-trained lawyer—as if anybody gave a shit. Certainly Barry Sindler didn’t. Because he knew Wilson was a gentleman. Which really meant he was chickenshit. He wouldn’t go for the throat.
And Sindler always went for the throat.
The woman, Karen Diehl, was still talking. Jesus, these rich bitches could talk. Sindler didn’t interrupt her because he didn’t want Whitey to state on the record that Sindler was badgering the woman. Wilson had said that four times already. So, fine. Let the bitch talk. Let her tell in full, exhausting, incredibly stupefyingly boring detail why her husband was a lousy father and a total shit heel. Because the truth was, she was the one who’d had the affair.
Not that that could ever come out in court. California had no-fault divorce, which meant there were no specific grounds for divorce, just “irreconcilable differences.” But a woman’s infidelity always colored the proceedings. Because in skilled hands—Barry’s hands—that fact could easily be turned into the insinuation that this woman had more important priorities than her darling children. She was a neglectful parent, an unreliable custodian, a selfish woman who sought her own pleasure while she left the kids all day with the Spanish-speaking maid.
And she was good-looking at twenty-eight, he thought. That worked against her, too. Indeed, Barry Sindler could see his central theme shaping up quite nicely. And Whitey Wilson looked a bit anxious. He probably knew where Sindler would take this.
Or maybe Whitey was troubled by the fact that Sindler was attending the depo at all. Because ordinarily Barry Sindler didn’t conduct spousal depos. He left those to the jerkoff peons in his office, while he spent his days downtown, racking up expensive courtroom hours.
Finally, the woman stopped to catch her breath. Sindler moved in. “Mrs. Diehl, I would like to hold this line of questioning and go on to another issue. We are formally requesting that you undergo a full battery of genetic tests at a reputable facility, preferably UCLA, and—”
The woman sat bolt upright. Her face colored swiftly. “No!”
“Let’s not be hasty,” Whitey said, putting his hand on his client’s arm. She angrily pushed him away.
“No! Absolutely not! I refuse!”
How wonderful. How unexpected and wonderful.
“In anticipation of your possible refusal,” Sindler continued, “we have drafted a request that the court order these tests”—he passed a document to Whitey—“and we fully expect the judge to agree.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Whitey said, thumbing through the pages. “Genetic testing in a custody case…”
By now Mrs. Diehl was full-bore hysterical. “No! No! I will not! It’s his idea, isn’t it? That prick! How dare he! That sneaking son of a bitch!”
Whitey was looking at his client with a puzzled expression. “Mrs. Diehl,” he said, “I think it’s best if we discuss this in private—”
“No! No discussion! No test! That’s it! No!”
“In that case,” Sindler said, with a little shrug, “we have no choice but to go to the judge…”
“Fuck you! Fuck him! Fuck all of you! No fucking test!”
And she stood up, grabbed her purse, and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
There was a moment of silence. Sindler said, “Let the record show that at three forty-five p.m. the witness left the room, thus ending the deposition.”
He began to put his papers into his briefcase.
Whitey Wilson said, “I’ve never heard of this, Barry. What’s genetic testing got to do with child custody?”
“That’s what the tests are intended to find out,” Sindler said. “This is a new procedure, but I think you’ll find it’s the coming thing.” He snapped his briefcase shut, shook Whitey’s limp hand, and left the office.
CH012
Josh Winkler closed the door to his office and started toward the cafeteria when his phone rang. It was his mother. She was being pleasant, always a danger sign. “Josh, dear, I want you to tell me, what have you done to your brother?”
“What do you mean, done to him? I haven’t done anything. I haven’t seen him in two weeks, since I picked him up from jail.”
“Adam had his arraignment today,” she said. “And Charles was there, representing him.”
“Uh-huh…” Waiting for the other shoe to drop. “And?”
“Adam came to court on time, in a clean shirt and tie, clean suit, hair cut, even his shoes polished. He pleaded guilty, asked to be put in a drug program, said he had not used in two weeks, said he had gotten a job—”
“What?”
“Yes, he’s got a job, apparently as a limo driver for his old company. Been working there steadily for the last two weeks. Charles says he’s gained weight—”
“I don’t believe this,” Josh said.
“I know,” she said. “Charles didn’t either, but he swears it’s all true. Adam’s like a new man. He’s acquired a newfound maturity. It’s like he suddenly grew up. It’s a miracle, don’t you think? Joshua? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” he said, after a pause.
“Isn’t it a miracle?”
“Yes, Mom. A miracle.”
“I called Adam. He has a cell phone now, and he answered right away. And he says you did something to help him. What did you do?”
“Nothing, Mom. We just had a talk.”
“He said you gave him some genetic thing. An inhaler.”
Oh Jesus, he thought. There are rules against this kind of thing. Serious rules. Human experimentation without formal application, meetings of the approvals board, following the federal guidelines. Josh would be fired in an instant. “No, Mom, I think he must be misremembering. He was pretty whacked out at the time.”
“He said there was a spray.”
“No, Mom.”
“He inhaled some mouse spray.”
“No, Mom.”
“He said he did.”
“No, Mom.”
“Well, don’t be so defensive,” she said. “I thought you would be pleased. I mean, you’re always looking for new drugs, Joshua. Big commercial applications. I mean, what if this spray gets people off drugs? What if it breaks their addiction?”
Joshua was shaking his head. “Mom, really, nothing happened.”
“Okay, fine, you don’t want to tell me the truth, I get it. Was it something experimental? Is that what your spray is?”
“Mom—”
“Because the thing is, Josh, I told Lois Graham about it because her Eric dropped out of USC. He’s on crack or smack or—”
“Mom—”
“And she wants to try this spray on him.”
Oh Jesus. “Mom, you can’t talk about this.”
“And Helen Stern, her daughter is on sleeping pills; she crashed her car; they’re talking about putting her baby in foster care. And Helen wants—”
“Mom, please! You can’t talk about it anymore!”
“Are you crazy? I have to talk about it,” she said. “You gave me my son back. It’s a miracle. Don’t you realize, Joshua? You have performed a miracle. The whole world is going to talk about what you have done—whether you like it or not.”
He was beginning to sweat, to feel dizzy, but suddenly his vision became clear and calm. The whole world is going to talk about it.
Of course, that was true. If you could get people off drugs? It would be the most valuable pharmaceutical in the last decade. Everybody would want it. And what if it did more? Could it cure obsessive-compulsive disorders? Could it cure attention-deficit disorders? The maturity gene had behavioral effects. They already knew that. Adam sniffing that aerosol was a gift from God.
And his next thought was: What’s the state of the patent application on ACMPD3N7?
He decided to skip lunch and head back to the office.
“Mom?”
“Yes, Josh.”
“I need your help.”
“Of course, dear. Anything.”
“I need you to do something for me and not to talk about it to anyone, ever.”
“Well, that’s difficult—”
“Yes or no, Mom.”
“Well, all right, dear.”
“You said that Lois Graham’s son is on smack, and dropped out of college?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he now?”
“Apparently,” she said, “he’s downtown in some godawful flophouse off campus—”
“Do you know where?”
“No, but Lois went to see him. She told me it was squalid. It’s on East Thirty-eighth, some old frame house with faded blue shutters. Eight or nine addicts are there sleeping on the floor, but I can call Lois and ask her—”
“No,” he said quickly. “Don’t do anything, Mom.”
“But you said you needed my help—”
“That’s for later, Mom. For now, everything is fine. I’ll call you in a day or so.”
He scribbled on a pad:
Eric Graham
E 38th Street
Frame hse blue shutters
He reached for his car keys.
Rachel Allen, who worked in the dispensary, said, “You still haven’t signed back in one oxygen canister from two weeks ago, Josh. Or the virus vial that was with it.” The company measured remaining virus in returned vials, as a way of keeping a rough track of dosages to the rats.
“Yes,” he said, “I know, uh, I keep forgetting.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my car.”
“In your car? Josh, that’s a contagious retrovirus.”
“Yeah, for mice.”
“Even so. It must remain in a negative-pressure laboratory environment at all times.” Rachel was a stickler for the rules. Nobody really paid attention to her.
“I know, Rach,” he said, “but I had a family emergency. I had to get my brother”—he dropped his voice—“out of jail.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
He hesitated. “Armed robbery.”
“Really.”
“Liquor store. Mom is crushed. Anyway, I’ll bring the canister back to you. Meanwhile, can I have one more?”
“We only sign out one at a time.”
“I need one more now. Please? I’m under a lot of pressure.”
Light rain was falling. The streets were slick with oil and shimmered in rainbow patterns. Beneath low, angry clouds, he drove down East Thirty-eighth Street. It was an old section of town, bypassed by modern rebuilding farther north. Here houses built in the 1920s and 1930s were still standing. Josh drove past several wood-frame houses, in various states of disrepair. One had a blue door. None had blue shutters.
He ended up in the warehouse district, the street lined with loading docks. He turned around and headed back. He drove as slowly as he could, and finally he saw the house. It was not actually on Thirty-eighth but on the corner of Thirty-eighth and Alameda, tucked back behind high weeds and ratty bushes. An old mattress streaked with rust lay on the sidewalk in front of the house. There was a truck tire on the front lawn. A battered VW bus was pulled up to the curb.
Josh parked across the street. He watched the house. And waited.
CH013
The coffin rose into sunlight. It looked the same as it had when buried a week earlier, except for the clumps of dirt that dropped from the underside.
“This is all so undignified,” Emily Weller said. She stood stiffly at the graveside, accompanied by her son, Tom, and her daughter Rachel. Of course, Lisa was not there. She was the cause of all this, but she could not be bothered to see what she had done to her poor father.
The coffin swung slowly in the air as the graveside workers guided it to the far side of the pit under the direction of the hospital pathologist, a nervous little man named Marty Roberts. He should be nervous, Emily thought, if he was the one who had given the blood to Lisa without anybody’s permission.
“What happens now?” Emily said, turning to her son. Tom was twenty-six, dressed in a sharp suit and tie. He had a master’s degree in microbiology and worked for a big biotech company in Los Angeles. Tom had turned out good, as had her daughter Rachel. Rachel was a senior at USC, studying business administration. “Will they take Jack’s blood here?”
“Oh, they’ll take more than blood,” Tom said.
Emily said, “What do you mean?”
“You see,” Tom said, “for a genetic test like this, where there is a dispute, they ordinarily take tissues from several organ systems.”
“I didn’t realize,” Emily said, frowning. She felt her heart pounding, thumping in her chest. She hated that feeling. Soon there was a squeezing feeling in her throat. It was painful. She bit her lip.
“You all right, Mom?”
“I should have taken my anxiety pills.”
Rachel said, “Will this take long?”
“No,” Tom said, “it should be only a few minutes. The pathologist will open the casket, to confirm the identity of the body. Then he’ll take it back to the hospital to remove the tissues for genetic analysis. He’ll return the body for reburial tomorrow or the next day.”
“Tomorrow or the next day?” Emily said. She sniffled, wiped her eyes. “You mean we have to come back here? We have to bury Jack again? This is all so…so…”
“I know, Mom.” He patted her arm. “I’m sorry. But there is no other way. You see, they have to check for something called a chimera—”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said, waving her hand. “I won’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, Mom.” He put his arm around her shoulder.
In ancient mythology, chimeras were monsters composed of different animal parts. The original Chimera had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. Some chimeras were part human, like the Egyptian Sphinx, with the body of a lion, the wings of a bird, and the head of a woman.
But true human chimeras—meaning people with two sets of DNA—had been discovered only recently. A woman needing a kidney transplant had tested her own children as possible donors, only to discover that they did not share her DNA. She was told the children weren’t hers, and was asked to prove she had actually given birth to them. A lawsuit ensued. After considerable study, doctors realized that her body contained two different strands of DNA. In her ovaries, they found eggs with two kinds of DNA. The skin cells of her abdomen had her children’s DNA. The skin of her shoulders did not. She was a mosaic. In every organ of her body.
It turned out that the woman had originally been one of a pair of fraternal twins, but early in development, her sister’s embryo had fused with hers. So she was now literally herself and her own twin.
More than fifty chimeras had since been reported. Scientists now suspected that chimerism was not as rare as they had once thought. Certainly, whenever there was a difficult question of paternity, chimerism had to be considered. It was possible that Lisa’s father might be a chimera. But to determine that, they would need tissues from every organ of his body, and preferably from several different places on each organ.
That was why Dr. Roberts was required to take so many tissue samples, and why it would have to be done at the hospital, not at the grave site.
Dr. Roberts raised the lid and turned to the family on the opposite side of the grave. “Would one of you make the identification, please?”
“I will,” Tom said. He walked around the grave and looked into the coffin. His father appeared surprisingly unchanged, except the skin was much grayer, a dark gray now, and the limbs seemed to have shrunk, to have lost mass, especially the legs inside the trousers.
In a formal voice, the pathologist said, “Is this your father, John J. Weller?”
“Yes. He is, yes.”
“All right. Thank you.”
Tom said, “Dr. Roberts, I know you have your procedures, but…if there is any way you can take the tissues here…so my mother doesn’t have to go through another day and another burial…”
“I’m sorry,” Marty Roberts said. “My actions are governed by state law. We’re required to take the body to the hospital for examination.”
“If you could…just this once…bend…”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could.”
Tom nodded and walked back to his mother and sister.
His mother said, “What was all that about?”
“Just asking a question.”
Tom looked back and saw that Dr. Roberts was now bent over, his body half inside the casket. Abruptly the pathologist rose up. He walked over to speak in Tom’s ear, so no one else could hear. “Mr. Weller, perhaps we should spare your family’s feelings. If we can keep this between us…”
“Of course. Then you’ll…?”
“Yes, we’ll do everything here. It should take only a few moments. Let me get my kit.” He hurried off to a nearby SUV.
Emily bit her lip. “What’s he doing?”
“I asked him to do all the tests here, Mom.”
“And he said yes? Thank you, dear,” she said, and kissed her son. “Will he do all the tests that he would do at the hospital?”
“No, but it should be enough to answer your questions.”
Twenty minutes later, the tissue samples had been taken and placed in a series of glass tubes. The tubes were placed in slots in a metal refrigeration case. The casket was returned to the grave, disappearing into shadow.
“Come on,” Emily Weller said to her children, “let’s get out of here. I need a damn drink.”
As they drove away, she said to Tom, “I’m sorry you had to do that. Was Jack’s poor body very decayed, dear?”
“No,” Tom said. “Not much, no.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Emily said. “That’s very good.”
CH014
Marty Roberts was sweating by the time he got back to Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Because of what he had done at the cemetery, he could lose his license, no problem. One of those gravediggers could pick up the phone and call the county. The county could wonder why Marty had broken protocol, especially with a lawsuit pending. When you take tissues in the field, you risk contamination. Everybody knew that. So the county might start wondering why Marty Roberts would risk that. And before long, they might be wondering…
Shit. Shit, shit, shit!
He pulled into the emergency parking, next to the ambulances, and hurried down the basement hallway to Pathology. It was lunchtime; almost nobody was there. The rows of stainless steel tables stood empty.
Raza was washing up.
“You dumb fuck,” Marty said, “are you trying to get us both in jail?”
Raza turned slowly. “What is the problem?” he said quietly.
“The problem,” Marty said, “is that I told you, take the bones only on the cremations. Not the burials. The cremations. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”
“Yeah, well. That’s what I do,” Raza said.
“No, that’s not what you do. Because I just came from an exhumation, and you know what I saw when I dug the guy up? Very fucking skinny legs, Raza. Very skinny arms. In a burial.”
“No,” Raza said, “that’s not what I do.”
“Well, somebody took the bones.”
Raza headed to the office. “What’s the name of this guy?”
“Weller.”
“What, that guy again? He’s the guy we lost the tissues for, right?”
“Right. So the family exhumed him. Because he was buried.”
Raza leaned over the desk, keyed in the patient name. He stared at the screen. “Oh yeah. You’re right. It was a burial. But I didn’t do that one.”
Marty said, “You didn’t do that one? Who the fuck did?”
Raza shrugged. “My brother came in, that’s all. I had an appointment that night.”
“Your brother? What brother? Nobody else is supposed to be—”
“Don’t sweat it, Marty,” Raza said. “My brother comes in from time to time. He knows what to do. He works at Hilldale Mortuary.”
Marty wiped sweat from his forehead. “Jesus. How long has this been going on?”
“Maybe a year.”
“A year!”
“Only at night, Marty. Late night only. He wears my lab coat, looks like me…We look the same.”
“Wait a minute,” Marty said. “Who gave that girl the blood sample? That girl Lisa Weller.”
“Okay,” Raza said. “So sometimes he makes mistakes.”
“And sometimes he works afternoons?”
“Only Sundays, Marty. If I have appointments, is all.”
Marty gripped the edge of the desk to steady himself. He leaned over and breathed deeply. “Some fucking guy who doesn’t even work for the hospital gave unauthorized blood to a woman because she asked for it? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not some fucking guy. My brother.”
“Jesus.”
“He said she was cute.”
“That explains everything.”
“Come on, Marty,” Raza said, in a soothing tone. “I’m sorry about the Weller guy, I really am, but anybody could have made the switch. Fucking cemetery could have dug him up and taken the long bones. Gravediggers working as independent contractors could have done it. You know it happens all over. They got those guys in Phoenix. And the ones in Minnesota. And now Brooklyn.”
“And they’re all in jail now, Raza.”
“Okay,” Raza said. “That’s true. The thing is, I told my brother to do it.”
“You did…”
“Yeah. That particular night, the Weller body came in, we had a stat call for bone, and the Weller guy typed right. So do we fill the order or what? Because you know those bone guys can take their business elsewhere. To them, now means now. Supply or die.”
Marty sighed. “Yeah, when they call stat, you should fill it.”
“Okay, then.”
Marty slid into the chair and began typing at the keyboard himself. “However,” he said, “if you extracted those long bones eight days ago, I don’t see any payment transfer to me.”
“Don’t worry. It’s coming.”
“The check is in the mail?”
“Hey, I forgot. You’ll get your taste.”
“Make sure of it,” Marty said. He turned to go. “And keep your fucking brother out of the hospital from now on. You understand me?”
“Sure, Marty. Sure.”
Marty Roberts went outside to move his car from the emergency space. He backed out and drove to the Doctors Only section of the parking garage. Then he sat in his car for a long time. Thinking about Raza.
You’ll get your taste.
It seemed that Raza was starting to believe that this was his program, and that Marty Roberts worked for him. Raza was handing out the payments. Raza was deciding who should come in to help. Raza was not behaving like an employee; he was starting to behave like he was in charge, and that was dangerous for all sorts of reasons.
Marty had to do something about it.
And he had to do it soon.
Or losing his medical license would be the least of his problems.
CH015
At sunset, the titanium cube that housed BioGen Research shimmered with a blinding red glare, and bathed the adjacent parking lot in a dark orange color. As president Rick Diehl stepped out of the building, he paused to put on his sunglasses, then walked toward his brand-new silver Porsche Carrera SC. He loved this car, which he had bought the week before in celebration of his impending divorce—
“Fuck!”
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
His parking spot was empty. The car was gone.
That bitch!
He didn’t know how she had done it, but he was sure she had taken his car. Probably got her boyfriend to arrange it. After all, the new boyfriend was a car dealer. Moving up from a tennis pro. Bitch!
He stomped back inside. Bradley Gordon, his chief of security, stood in the lobby’s waiting area, leaning over the counter, talking to Lisa, the receptionist. Lisa was cute. That was why Rick had hired her.
“Goddamn it, Brad,” Rick Diehl said. “We need to review security tapes of the parking lot.”
Brad turned. “Why? What is it?”
“Somebody stole my Porsche.”
“No shit,” Brad said. “When did that happen?”
And Rick thought, Wrong guy for this job. It wasn’t the first time he had thought it.
“Let’s check the security tapes, Brad.”
“Yeah, sure, of course,” Brad said. He winked at Lisa, and then headed back through the keycard-swipe door, into a secure area. Rick followed, fuming.
At one of the two desks in the little glass-walled security office, a kid was minutely examining the palm of his left hand. He ignored the bank of monitors before him.
“Jason,” Brad said, in a warning tone, “Mr. Diehl is here.”
“Oh shit.” The kid snapped upright in the chair. “Sorry. Got a rash. I didn’t know if—”
“Mr. Diehl wants to review the security cameras. Which cameras are they exactly, Mr. Diehl?”
Oh Jesus. Rick said, “The parking lot cameras.”
“The parking lot, right. Jason, let’s start forty-eight hours back, and—”
“I drove the car to work this morning,” Diehl said.
“Right, what time was that?”
“I got here at seven.”
“Right. Jason, let’s go back to seven this morning.”
The kid shifted in his chair. “Uh, Mr. Gordon, the parking lot cameras are out.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Brad turned to Rick. “The parking lot cameras are out.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. We think there’s a cable problem.”
“How long have they been out?”
“Well—”
“Two months,” the kid said.
“Two months!”
Brad said, “We had to order parts.”
“What parts?”
“From Germany.”
“What parts?”
“I’d have to look it up.”
The kid said, “We can still use the roof cameras.”
“Well, then show me the roof cameras,” Diehl said.
“Right. Jason, bring up the roof cameras.”
It took them fifteen minutes to rewind the digital storage and begin to run it forward. Rick watched his Porsche pull in. He watched himself get out and enter the building. What happened next surprised him. Within two minutes, another car pulled up, two men jumped out, broke into his car quickly, and drove it away.
“They were waiting for you,” Brad said. “Or following you.”
“Looks like it,” Rick said. “Call the police, report it, and tell Lisa I want her to drive me home.”
Brad blinked at that.
The problem, Rick reflected, as Lisa drove him home, was that Brad Gordon was an idiot, but Rick couldn’t fire him. Brad Gordon, surf bum, ski bum, travel bum, recovering alky and college dropout, was the nephew of Jack Watson, a principal investor in BioGen. Jack Watson had always looked after Brad, had always seen that he had a job. And Brad invariably got into trouble. It was even rumored that Brad had been fucking the wife of the vice president of GeneSystems up in Palo Alto—for which he was duly fired—but not without a big stink from his uncle, who saw no reason why Brad should be let go. “It’s the vice president’s own fault,” Watson famously said.
But now: No security cameras in the parking lot. For two months. It made Rick wonder what else was wrong with security at BioGen.
He glanced over at Lisa, who drove serenely. Rick had hired her to be the receptionist soon after he discovered his wife’s affair. Lisa had a beautiful profile; she could have been a model. Whoever had refined her nose and chin was a genius. And she had a lovely body, with a narrow waist and perfectly enhanced breasts. She was twenty, on her summer break from Crestview State, and she radiated healthy, all-American sexiness. Everyone in the company had the hots for her.
So it was surprising that whenever they made love, Lisa just lay there. After a few minutes she seemed to notice his frustration and would begin to move mechanically, and make little panting sounds, as if she had been told that was what people did in bed. Sometimes, when Rick was worried and preoccupied, she would talk to him, “Oh baby, yes, baby, do it, baby,” as if that was supposed to move things along. But it was only too obvious that she was unmoved.
Rick had done a little research and discovered a syndrome called anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Anhedonics exhibited a flat affect, which certainly described Lisa in bed. Interestingly, anhedonia appeared to have a genetic component. It seemed to involve the limbic system of the brain. So there might be a gene for the condition. Rick intended to do a full panel on Lisa one of these days. Just to check.
Meanwhile, the nights he spent with her might have made him insecure, if it were not for Greta, the Austrian postdoc in the microbiology lab. Greta was chunky and had glasses and short, mannish hair, but she fucked like a mink, leaving them both gasping for breath and covered in sweat. Greta was a screamer and a writher and a howler. He felt great afterward.
The car pulled up at his new condo. Rick checked for his keys in his pocket. Lisa said matter-of-factly, “You want me to come up?”
She had beautiful blue eyes, with long lashes. Beautiful lush lips.
He thought, what the hell. “Sure,” he said. “Come on up.”
He called his lawyer, Barry Sindler, to report that his wife had stolen his car.
“You think so?” Sindler said. He sounded doubtful.
“Yeah, I do. She hired some guys. I have it on security tape.”
“You have her on tape?”
“No, the guys. But she’s behind it.”
“I’m not so sure,” Sindler said. “Usually women trash a husband’s car, not steal it.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Okay, I’ll check into it. But right now, there are a few things I want to go over with you. About the litigation.”
Across the room, Lisa was stepping out of her clothes. She folded each item of clothing and placed it on the back of the chair. She was wearing a pink bra and pink briefs that skimmed her pubic bone. No lace, just stretchy fabric that molded smoothly to her smooth body. She reached behind her back to release the bra.
“I’ll have to call you back,” Rick said.
BLONDES BECOMING EXTINCT
Endangered Species To “Die Out in 200 Years”
According to the BBC, “a study by experts in Germany suggests people with blonde hair are an endangered species and will become extinct by 2202.” Researchers predicted that the last truly natural blonde would be born in Finland, a country that boasts the highest proportion of blondes. But the scientists say too few people now carry the gene for blondes to last much longer. The researchers hinted that so-called bottle blondes “may be to blame for the demise of their natural rivals.”
Not every scientist agrees with the prediction of impending extinction. But a study by the World Health Organization does indicate that natural blondes are likely to become extinct within the next two centuries.
More recently, the probability of extinction was reviewed by The Times of London, in light of new data about the evolution of the MC1R gene for blondeness.
CH016
The jungle was completely silent. Not a buzzing cicada, not a hornbill cry, nor a distant chattering monkey. Utterly silent—and no wonder, Hagar thought. He shook his head as he looked at the ten camera crews from around the world now clustered in little groups on the jungle floor, protecting their lenses from the dripping moisture as they peered upward into the trees overhead. He had told them to be silent, and indeed nobody was actually talking. The French crew smoked cigarettes. Although the German crew maintained silence, the cameraman kept snapping his fingers imperiously as he gestured to his assistant to do this and that. The Japanese crew from NHK was quiet, but beside them, the CNN crew out of Singapore whispered and murmured and changed lenses, clanking metal boxes. The British Sky TV crew from Hong Kong had come inappropriately dressed. They now had their running shoes off and were plucking leeches from between their toes, swearing as they did so.
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Michael Crichton
The Number One international bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Congo and Sphere blends fact and fiction to create a near-future where genetic engineering opens up a whole new world of terrifying, page-turning possibilities…
Is a loved one missing body parts?
Are blondes becoming extinct?
Has a human already cross-bred with a monkey?
We live in a GENETIC WORLD. Fast, frightening and potentially VERY lucrative. There are designer pets; a genetic cure for drug addiction; a booming market in eggs and sperm. But is there also a talking ape in Borneo? Has a 'master' gene for controlling others been found? Could an innocent man and his family be hunted cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes
Are you ready for what comes NEXT in Michael Crichton's stunning new thriller?
MICHAEL CRICHTON
NEXT
A Novel
Copyright
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organisations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9 GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Publishers by HarperCollinsPublishers
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Crichton
Cover photograph of lens flare © Rob Casey/Getty Images (http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/)
Michael Crichton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007330621
Source ISBN: 9780007240999
Version: 2017-05-08
Epigraph (#u62a2cda1-d339-5b26-b19e-5cae1628defc)
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
—STEVEN WEINBERG
The word “cause” is an altar to an unknown god.
—WILLIAM JAMES
What is not possible is not to choose.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Contents
Cover (#ue76852ec-b7a4-5f99-b7ec-09ef6e397c66)
Title page (#u1df61ccd-95b9-5beb-a63b-2a94730e2699)
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Author’s Note
Read on for an extract from the gripping new novel from Michael Crichton (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Michael Crichton
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Vasco Borden, forty-nine, tugged at the lapels of his suit and straightened his tie as he walked down the plush carpeted hallway. He wasn’t used to wearing a suit, though he had had this one, in navy, specially tailored to minimize the muscular bulk of his body. Borden was big, six-four, two-forty, an ex–football player who worked as a private investigator and fugitive-recovery specialist. And right now, Vasco was following his man, a thirty-year-old balding postdoc, a fugitive from MicroProteonomics of Cambridge, Mass., as he headed right for the main room of the conference.
The BioChange 2006 Conference, enthusiastically entitled “Make It Happen Now!” was being held at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. The two thousand attendees represented all sorts of biotech workers, including investors, HR officers who hired scientists, technology transfer officers, CEOs, and intellectual property attorneys. In one way or another, nearly every biotech company in America was represented here.
It was the perfect place for the fugitive to meet his contact. The fugitive looked like a dink; he had an innocent face and a little soul patch on his chin; he slouched when he walked and gave the impression of timidity and ineptitude. But the fact was, he’d made off with twelve transgenic embryos in a cryogenic dewar and transported them across country to this conference, where he intended to turn them over to whomever he was working for.
It wouldn’t be the first time a postdoc got tired of working on salary. Or the last.
The fugitive went over to the check-in table to get his conference card to drape around his neck. Vasco hung by the entrance, slipping his own card over his head. He’d come prepared for this. He pretended to look at the event roster.
The big speeches were all in the main ballroom. Seminars were scheduled for such topics as “Fine-Tune Your Recruiting Process,” and “Winning Strategies to Keep Research Talent,” “Executive and Equity Compensation,” “Corporate Governance and the SEC,” “Patent Office Trends,” and “Investor Angels: Boon or Curse?” and, finally, “Trade Secrets Piracy: Protect Yourself Now!”
Much of Vasco’s work involved high-tech firms. He had been to these conferences before. Either they were about science or business. This one was business.
The fugitive, whose name was Eddie Tolman, walked past him into the ballroom. Vasco followed. Tolman went down a few rows and dropped into a seat with no one nearby. Vasco slipped into the row behind and sat a little to one side. The Tolman kid checked his cell phone for text messages, then seemed to relax, and looked up to listen to the speech.
Vasco wondered why.
The man at the podium was one of the most famous venture capitalists in California, a legend in high-tech investment, Jack B. Watson. Watson’s face was blown up large on the screen behind him, his trademark suntan and striking good looks magnified to fill the room. Watson was a young-looking fifty-two, and assiduously cultivated his reputation as a capitalist with a conscience. That appellation had carried him through a succession of ruthless business deals: all the media ever showed were his appearances at charter schools, or handing out scholarships for underprivileged kids.
But in this room, Vasco knew, Watson’s reputation for tough deal making would be foremost in everyone’s mind. He wondered if Watson was ruthless enough to acquire a dozen transgenic embryos by illicit means. He probably was.
However, at the moment, Watson was cheerleading: “Biotechnology is booming. We are poised to see the greatest growth of any industry since computers thirty years ago. The largest biotech company, Amgen, in Los Angeles, employs seven thousand people. Federal grants to universities exceed four billion a year on campuses from New York to San Francisco, Boston to Miami. Venture capitalists invest in biotech companies at a rate of five billion a year. The lure of magnificent cures made possible by stem cells, cytokines, and proteonomics are drawing the brightest talent to the field. And with a global population growing older by the minute, our future is brighter than ever. And that’s not all!
“We’ve reached the point where we can stick it to Big Pharma—and we will. Those massive, bloated companies need us and they know it. They need genes, they need technology. They’re the past. We’re the future. We’re where the money is!”
That drew huge applause. Vasco shifted his bulk in his seat. The audience was applauding, even though they knew that this son of a bitch would cut their company to pieces in a second if it suited his bottom line.
“Of course, we face obstacles to our progress. Some people—however well intentioned they think they are—choose to stand in the way of human betterment. They don’t want the paralyzed to walk, the cancer patient to thrive, the sick child to live and play. These people have their reasons for objecting. Religious, ethical, or even ‘practical.’ But whatever their reasons, they are on the side of death. And they will not triumph!”
More thunderous applause. Vasco glanced at the fugitive, Tolman. The kid was checking his phone again. Evidently waiting for a message. And waiting impatiently.
Did that mean the contact was late?
That was sure to make Tolman nervous. Because somewhere, Vasco knew, this kid had stashed a stainless steel thermos of liquid nitrogen that held the embryos. It wasn’t in the kid’s room. Vasco had already searched it. And five days had passed since Tolman left Cambridge. The coolant wouldn’t last forever. And if the embryos thawed, they would be worthless. So unless Tolman had a way to top up his LN2, by now he must be anxious to retrieve his container, and hand it over to his buyer.
It had to happen soon.
Within an hour, Vasco was sure of it.
“Of course, people will try to obstruct progress,” Watson said, from the podium. “Even our best companies find themselves embroiled in pointless, unproductive litigation. One of my startups, BioGen, in Los Angeles, is in court right now because some guy named Burnet thinks he doesn’t need to honor the contracts he himself signed. Because now he’s changed his mind. Burnet is trying to block medical progress unless we pay him. An extortionist whose daughter is the lawyer handling the case for him. Keeping it in the family.” Watson smiled.
“But we will win the Burnet case. Because progress cannot be stopped!”
At that, Watson threw both hands up in the air, waving to the audience as applause filled the room. He almost acts like a candidate, Vasco thought. Is that what Watson was aiming for? The guy certainly had enough money to get elected. Being rich was essential in American politics these days. Pretty soon—
He looked over, and saw that the Tolman kid was gone.
The seat was empty.
Shit!
“Progress is our mission, our sacred calling,” Watson cried. “Progress to vanquish disease! Progress to halt aging, banish dementia, extend life! A life free of disease, decay, pain, and fear! The great dream of humanity—made real at last!”
Vasco Borden wasn’t listening. He was heading down the row toward the side aisle, scanning the exit doors. A couple of people leaving, nobody looking like Tolman. The guy couldn’t have gotten away, there was—
He looked back just in time to see Tolman moving slowly up the center aisle. The kid was looking at his cell phone again.
“Sixty billion this year. Two hundred billion next year. Five hundred billion in five years! That is the future of our industry, and that is the prospect we bring to all mankind!”
The crowd suddenly rose to its feet, giving Watson a standing ovation, and for a moment Vasco could no longer see Tolman at all.
But only for a moment—now Tolman was making for the center exit. Vasco turned away, slipping through the side door and out into the lobby, just as Tolman came blinking into the bright lobby light.
Tolman glanced at his watch and headed down the far corridor, past big glass windows that looked out on the red brick campanile of San Marco, re-created by the Venetian hotel and lit brilliantly at night. He was going toward the swimming pool area, or perhaps the courtyard. This time of night those spaces would be crowded.
Vasco stayed close.
This was it, he thought.
In the ballroom, Jack Watson paced back and forth, smiling and waving to the cheering crowd. “Thank you, that’s very kind, thank you…” ducking his head a little each time he said it. Just the right amount of modesty.
Rick Diehl snorted in disgust as he watched. Diehl was backstage, taking it all in on a little black-and-white monitor. Diehl was the thirty-four-year-old CEO of BioGen Research, a struggling startup in Los Angeles, and this performance by his most important outside investor filled him with unease. Because Diehl knew that despite the cheerleading, and the press releases with smiling black kids, at the end of the day, Jack Watson was a true bastard. As someone put it, “The best I can say about Watson is, he’s not a sadist. He’s just a first-class son of a bitch.”
Diehl had accepted funding from Watson with the greatest reluctance. He wished he didn’t need it. Diehl’s wife was wealthy, and he had started BioGen with her money. His first venture as CEO had been to bid on a cell line being licensed by UCLA. It was the so-called Burnet cell line, developed from a man named Frank Burnet, whose body produced powerful cancer-fighting chemicals called cytokines.
Diehl hadn’t really expected to land the license, but he did, and suddenly he faced the prospect of gearing up for FDA approval for clinical trials. The cost of clinical trials started at a million dollars, and went rapidly to ten million a pop, not counting downstream costs and after-marketing expenses. He could no longer rely solely on his wife’s money. He needed outside financing.
That was when he discovered just how risky venture capitalists considered cytokines to be. Many cytokines, such as interleukins, had taken years to come to market. And many others were known to be dangerous, even deadly, to patients. And then Frank Burnet had brought a lawsuit, casting doubt on BioGen’s ownership of the cell line. Diehl had trouble getting investors to even meet with him. In the end, he had to accept smiling, suntanned Jack Watson.
But Watson, Diehl knew, wanted nothing less than to take over BioGen and throw Rick Diehl out on his ass.
“Jack! Fantastic speech! Fantastic!” Rick extended his hand, as Watson came backstage at last.
“Yeah. Glad you liked it.” Watson didn’t shake his hand. Instead, he unclipped his wireless transmitter and dropped it in Diehl’s palm. “Take care of this, Rick.”
“Sure, Jack.”
“Your wife here?”
“No, Karen couldn’t make it.” Diehl shrugged. “Thing with the kids.”
“I’m sorry she missed this speech,” Watson said.
“I’ll see she gets the DVD,” Diehl said.
“But we got the bad news out there,” Watson said. “That’s the point. Everybody now knows there’s a lawsuit, they know Burnet is a bad guy, and they know we’re on top of it. That’s the important thing. The company’s now perfectly positioned.”
Diehl said, “Is that why you agreed to give the speech?”
Watson stared at him. “You think I want to come to Vegas? Christ.” He unclipped the microphone, handed it to Diehl. “Take care of this, too.”
“Sure, Jack.”
And Jack Watson turned and walked away from him without another word. Rick Diehl shivered. Thank God for Karen’s money, he thought. Because without it, he’d be doomed.
Passing through the arches of the Doge’s Palace, Vasco Borden moved into the courtyard, following his fugitive, Eddie Tolman, through the nighttime crowd. He heard his earpiece crackle. That would be his assistant, Dolly, in another part of the hotel. He touched his ear. “Go,” he said.
“Baldy boy Tolman has reserved some entertainment.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right, he—”
“Hold on,” Vasco said. “Just hold that thought.”
Up ahead, he was seeing something he could not believe. From the right side of the courtyard, he saw Jack B. Watson, accompanied by a beautiful, slinky, dark-haired woman, merging with the crowd. Watson was famous for always being accompanied by gorgeous women. They all worked for him, they were all smart, and they were all stunning.
The woman didn’t surprise Vasco. What surprised him was that Jack Watson was heading directly toward Eddie Tolman, the fugitive. That made no sense at all. Even if Tolman were doing a deal with Watson, the famous investor would never meet him face-to-face. And certainly never in public. But there they were, on a collision course in the crowded Venetian courtyard, right before his eyes.
What the hell? He couldn’t believe it was going to happen.
But then the slinky woman stumbled a bit, and stopped. She was wearing a short, skintight dress and heels. She leaned on Watson’s shoulder, bent her knee, showing plenty of leg, and inspected her shoe. She adjusted her heel strap, stood up again, and smiled at Watson. And Vasco glanced away from them and saw that Tolman was gone.
But now Watson and the woman crossed Vasco’s own path, passing so close to him that he could smell her perfume, and he heard Watson murmur something to her, and she squeezed his arm and put her head on his shoulder as they walked. The romantic couple.
Was all that an accident? Had it happened on purpose? Had they made him? He pressed his earpiece.
“Dolly. I lost him.”
“No prob. I got him.” He glanced up. She was on the second floor, watching everything below. “Was that Jack Watson that just walked by?”
“Yeah. I thought maybe…”
“No, no,” Dolly said. “I can’t imagine Watson’s involved in this. Not his style. I mean, Baldy boy is heading for his room because he has an appointment. That’s what I was telling you. He got some entertainment.”
“Namely?”
“Russian girl. Apparently he only likes Russians. Tall ones.”
“Anybody we know?”
“No, but I have a little information. And I got cameras in his suite.”
“How’d you do that?” He was smiling.
“Let’s just say Venetian security isn’t what it used to be. Cheaper, too.”
Irina Katayeva, twenty-two, knocked on the door. In her left hand she held a bottle of wine, encased in a velvet gift bag with drawstrings at the top. A guy of about thirty answered the door, smiled. He wasn’t attractive.
“Are you Eddie?”
“That’s right. Come on in.”
“I brought this for you, from the hotel safe.” She handed him the wine.
Watching all this on his little handheld video monitor, Vasco said, “She gave it to him in the hallway. Where it would be seen on the security monitor. Why didn’t she wait until she was in the room?”
“Maybe she was told to do it that way,” Dolly said.
“She must be six feet. What do we know about her?”
“Good English. Four years in this country. Studying at the university.”
“Works at the hotel?”
“No.”
“So, non-pro?” Vasco said.
“This is Nevada,” Dolly said.
On the monitor, the Russian girl went into the room and the door closed. Vasco turned the tuning dial on his video monitor, picked up one of the inside cameras. The kid had a big suite, close to two thousand square feet, done in the Venetian style. The girl nodded and smiled.
“Nice. Nice room.”
“Yeah. So, you want a drink?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really have time.” She reached behind her back and unzipped the dress, left it hanging from her shoulders. She turned around, pretending to be puzzled, allowing him to see her bare back all the way down to her buttocks. “Which way is the bedroom?”
“This way, baby.”
As they went into the bedroom, Vasco again turned the dials. He saw the bedroom just as she was saying, “I don’t know anything about your business, and I don’t want to know. Business is so boring.” She let the dress fall. She stepped out of it and lay down on the bed, naked now except for high heels. She kicked them off. “I don’t think you need a drink,” she said. “And I know I don’t.”
Tolman threw himself on her, landing with a kind of thud. She grunted and tried to smile. “Easy, boy.” He was panting, gasping. He reached for her hair, to caress her. “Leave the hair alone,” she said. She twisted away. “Just lie down,” she said, “and let me make you happy.”
“Aw, hell,” Vasco said, staring at the tiny screen. “Do you believe that? He ain’t even a minuteman. When a woman looks like that, you’d think—”
“Never mind,” Dolly said, over the headset. “She’s getting dressed now.”
“So she is,” he said. “And rather hurriedly, too.”
“She’s supposed to give him half an hour. And if he paid her, I didn’t see it.”
“Me neither. But he’s getting dressed, too.”
“Something’s up,” Dolly said. “She’s walking out the door.”
Vasco thumbed the tuner, trying to change to a different camera. All he got was static. “I can’t see shit.”
“She’s leaving. He’s still there. No, wait…he’s leaving, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And he’s taking the wine bottle with him.”
“Okay,” Vasco said. “And where’s he going with it?”
Frozen embryos in liquid nitrogen were transported in a special stainless steel thermos lined with borosilicate glass called a dewar. Dewars were mostly big affairs, shaped like milk jugs, but you could get them as small as a liter. A dewar didn’t have the shape of a wine bottle, because they had a wide-mouth cap, but it would be about the same size. And would fit in a wine sack for sure.
“He must be carrying it,” Vasco said. “It must be in the sack.”
“I figure,” Dolly said. “You see ’em yet?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Vasco picked up the couple on the ground floor, near the gondola stand. They walked arm in arm, the guy carrying the wine bottle in the crook of his arm, keeping it upright. It was an awkward way to carry it, and they made an odd-looking pair—the beautiful girl and the diffident, slouchy guy. They walked along the canal, hardly glancing at the shops as they passed them.
“On their way to a meeting,” Vasco said.
“I see ’em,” Dolly said. Vasco looked down the crowded street and saw Dolly at the far end. Dolly was twenty-eight, and completely ordinary-looking. Dolly could be anybody: an accountant, girlfriend, secretary, assistant. She could always pass. Tonight she was dressed Vegas-style, teased blond hair and a sparkly dress with cleavage. She was a little overweight, which made the impression perfect. Vasco had been with her for four years now, and they worked well as a team. In private life, they got along only okay. She hated that he smoked cigars in bed.
“Heading for the hall,” Dolly said. “No, they’re doubling back.”
The main hall was a huge oval passageway, high gilded ceiling, soft lights, marble pillars. It dwarfed the crowds that moved through it. Vasco hung back. “Change their mind? Or they made us?”
“I think they’re being careful.”
“Well, this is the big moment.” Because even more than catching the fugitive, they had to know whom he was turning the embryos over to. Obviously someone at the conference.
“Won’t be long now,” Dolly said.
Rick Diehl was walking back and forth along the shops by the gondola canal, holding his cell phone in his hand. He ignored the stores, which were filled with expensive stuff of the sort he never wanted. Diehl had grown up as the third son of a Baltimore physician. All the other boys went to medical school and became obstetricians, like their father. Diehl refused, and went into medical research. Family pressure eventually drove him to move West. He did genetic research at UCSF for a while, but he was more intrigued by the entrepreneurial culture among the universities in San Francisco. It seemed like every professor worth his salt had either started his own company or was sitting on the boards of several biotech firms. At lunch, the conversation was all about tech transfer, cross-licensing, milestone payments, buyouts and payouts, foreground and background IPRs.
By then Karen, Rick’s wife, had come into a substantial inheritance, and he realized he had enough capital to get started. The Bay Area was crowded with firms; there was intense competition for space and hiring. He decided to go to the area north of Los Angeles, where Amgen had set up their huge facility. Diehl built a terrific modern plant, put bright research teams in place, and was on his way. His father and brothers came to visit. They were duly impressed.
But…why wasn’t she calling him back? He looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock. The kids should be in bed by now. And Karen should be home. The maid said she had gone out an hour before, she didn’t know where. But Karen never left without her cell phone. She must have it with her. Why wasn’t she calling him back?
He didn’t understand it, and it just made him nervous as hell. Here he was, alone in this damn city, with more beautiful women per square foot than he had ever seen in his life. True, they were plastic, lots of surgery, but they were also sexy as hell.
Up ahead, he saw a schlumpy guy walking with a tall chick who was striding along on spike heels, and she was just a knockout: black hair, smooth skin, and a hot, lean body. The schlumpy guy must have paid for her, but even so, he clearly didn’t appreciate her. He was clutching his wine bottle like it was a baby, and appeared so nervous he was almost sweating.
But that girl…Jesus, she was hot. Hot, hot…
Why the hell, he thought, wasn’t Karen calling him back?
“Hey,” Vasco said. “Looky look. It’s that BioGen guy. Walking around like he has nothing to do.”
“I see him,” Dolly said. She was about a block ahead of him.
“Nope, never mind.”
Tolman and the Russian girl walked right past the BioGen guy, who did nothing but flip open his phone and dial. What was his name? Diehl. Vasco had heard something about him. Started a company on his wife’s dough, and now maybe she was in control of their marriage. Something like that. Rich broad, old Eastern family, lots of money. Those broads could wear the pants.
“Restaurant,” Dolly said. “They’re going in that Terrazo place.”
Il Terrazzo Antico was a two-story restaurant with glassed-in balconies. The décor was whorehouse modern, gilded everything. Pillars, ceiling, walls: every surface covered with decoration. Made Vasco jumpy just to look at it.
The couple walked in, right past the reservation desk, heading for a side table. And at the table, Vasco saw a heavyset guy who looked like a thug, dark-skinned and heavy-browed, and the thug was looking at the Russian girl and practically licking his lips.
Tolman marched right up to the table and spoke to the dark-skinned man. The guy looked puzzled. He didn’t invite them to sit. Vasco thought, Something’s wrong. The Russian girl had stepped back a pace.
At that moment a flash went off. Dolly had snapped a picture. The Tolman kid looked, took it all in, and bolted.
“Shit, Dolly!”
Vasco started running after Tolman, who was heading deeper into the restaurant. A waiter held up his hands. “Sir, excuse me—”
Vasco knocked him flat, kept right on going. Tolman was ahead, moving slower than he might, because he was trying not to shake his precious wine bottle. But he didn’t know where he was going anymore. He didn’t know the restaurant; he was just running. Whang through swinging doors, into the kitchen, Vasco right after him. Everybody was yelling at them, and some of the cooks were waving knives, but Tolman pushed on, apparently convinced there was some sort of rear entrance to the kitchen.
There wasn’t. He was trapped. He looked around wildly. Vasco slowed. He flashed one of his badges, in an official-looking wallet. “Citizen’s arrest,” he said. Tolman cowered back by two walk-in freezers and a narrow door with a slim vertical window. Tolman went through the narrow door and it closed behind him.
A light blinked by the door.
It was a service elevator.
Shit. “Where does this go?”
“Second floor.”
“Anywhere else?”
“No, just second floor.”
Vasco pressed his earpiece. “Dolly?”
“I’m on it,” she said. He heard her panting, as she ran up stairs.
Vasco positioned himself in front of the elevator door and waited. He pressed the button to bring the elevator down.
“I’m at the elevator now,” Dolly said. “I saw him; he went back down.”
“That’s a tiny elevator,” Vasco said.
“I know.”
“If he’s really got liquid nitrogen with him, he shouldn’t be in there.” A couple of years back, Vasco had chased a fugitive into a laboratory-supply warehouse. The guy had nearly suffocated after he locked himself in a closet.
The elevator came down. As soon as it stopped, Vasco yanked the handle to open it, but Tolman must have pushed an emergency switch, because the door wouldn’t open. Vasco could see the wine sack on the floor. The velvet had been pushed down to reveal the stainless steel rim of the dewar.
And the top was off. White steam around the opening.
Through the glass, Tolman stared at him, wild-eyed. “Come out, son,” Vasco said. “Don’t be foolish.”
Tolman shook his head.
“It’s dangerous,” Vasco said. “You know it’s dangerous.”
But the kid pushed a button, and the elevator started back up.
Vasco had a bad feeling.
The kid knew, all right. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“He’s up here,” Dolly said, standing on the second floor. “But the door won’t open. No, he’s going down again.”
“Go back to the table,” Vasco said to her. “Let him go.”
She realized at once what he was talking about. She hurried back down the plush red velvet staircase to the ground floor. She was not surprised to see that the table where the thuggish man had sat was now empty. No thug. No beautiful Russian girl. Just a hundred-dollar bill tucked under a glass. He’d paid in cash, of course.
And vanished.
Vasco was now surrounded by three hotel security guys, all talking at once. Standing half a head above them he yelled for quiet. “One thing,” he said. “How do we get the elevator open?”
“He must have hit the override.”
“How do we get it open?”
“We have to kill the power to it.”
“Will that open it?”
“No, but then we can wedge it open, once it’s stopped.”
“How long will that take?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Doesn’t matter, this guy isn’t going anyplace.”
“Yes, he is,” Vasco said.
The security guy laughed. “Where the hell can he go?”
The elevator came down again. Tolman was on his knees, holding the glass door shut.
“Get up,” Vasco said. “Get up, get up. Come on, son, it’s not worth it, stand up!”
Suddenly, Tolman’s eyes rolled up into his head and he fell onto his back. The elevator started to rise.
“What the hell?” one of the security men said. “Who is he, anyway?”
Ah shit, Vasco thought.
The kid had pushed some override that had jammed the elevator circuits. It took them forty minutes to get the doors open and haul him out. He was long since dead, of course. The instant he fell, he was immersed in 100 percent nitrogen atmosphere, from the liquid nitrogen that was streaming from the dewar. Because nitrogen was heavier than air, it progressively filled the elevator from the bottom up. Once the kid flopped on his back, he was already unconscious, and he would have died within a minute.
The security guys wanted to know what was in the dewar, which was no longer smoking. Vasco got some gloves and pulled out the long metal stick. There was nothing there, just a series of empty clips where the embryos should have been. The embryos had been removed.
“You mean to say he killed himself?” one of the security men said.
“That’s right,” Vasco said. “He worked in an embryology lab. He knew about the danger of liquid nitrogen in a confined space.” Nitrogen caused more laboratory fatalities than any other chemical. Half the people who died were trying to rescue co-workers who had collapsed in confined spaces.
“It was his way out of a bad situation,” Vasco said.
Later, driving home with him, Dolly said, “So what happened to the embryos?”
Vasco shook his head. “No idea. The kid never got them.”
“You think the girl took them? Before she went to his room?”
“Somebody took them.” Vasco sighed. “The hotel doesn’t know her?”
“They reviewed security cameras. They don’t know her.”
“And her student status?”
“University had her as a student last year. She didn’t enroll this year.”
“So she’s vanished.”
“Yeah,” Dolly said. “Her, the dark-skinned guy, the embryos. Everything vanished.”
“I’d like to know how all this goes together,” Vasco said.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Dolly said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Vasco said. Up ahead, he saw the neon of a roadhouse in the desert. He pulled over. He needed a drink.
CH001
Division 48 of Los Angeles Superior Court was a wood-paneled room dominated by the great seal of the state of California. The room was small and had a tawdry feeling. The reddish carpet was frayed and streaked with dirt. The wood veneer on the witness stand was chipped, and one of the fluorescent lights was out, leaving the jury box darker than the rest of the room. The jurors themselves were dressed casually, in jeans and short-sleeve shirts. The judge’s chair squeaked whenever the Honorable Davis Pike turned away to glance at his laptop, which he did often throughout the day. Alex Burnet suspected he was checking his e-mail or his stocks.
All in all, this courtroom seemed an odd place to litigate complex issues of biotechnology, but that was what they had been doing for the past two weeks in Frank M. Burnet v. Regents of the University of California.
Alex was thirty-two, a successful litigator, a junior partner in her law firm. She sat at the plaintiff’s table with the other members of her father’s legal team, and watched as her father took the witness stand. Although she smiled reassuringly, she was, in fact, worried about how he would fare.
Frank Burnet was a barrel-chested man who looked younger than his fifty-one years. He appeared healthy and confident as he was sworn in. Alex knew that her father’s vigorous appearance could undermine his case. And, of course, the pretrial publicity had been savagely negative. Rick Diehl’s PR team had worked hard to portray her dad as an ungrateful, greedy, unscrupulous man. A man who interfered with medical research. A man who wouldn’t keep his word, who just wanted money.
None of that was true—in reality, it was the opposite of the truth. But not a single reporter had called her father to ask his side of the story. Not one. Behind Rick Diehl stood Jack Watson, the famous philanthropist. The media assumed that Watson was the good guy, and therefore her father was the bad guy. Once that version of the morality play appeared in the New York Times (written by the local entertainment reporter), everybody else fell into line. There was a huge “me, too” piece in the L.A. Times, trying to outdo the New York version in vilifying her father. And the local news shows kept up a daily drumbeat about the man who wanted to halt medical progress, the man who dared criticize UCLA, that renowned center of learning, the great hometown university. A half-dozen cameras followed her and her father whenever they walked up the courthouse steps.
Their own efforts to get the story out had been singularly unsuccessful. Her father’s hired media advisor was competent enough, but no match for Jack Watson’s well-oiled, well-financed machine.
Of course, members of the jury would have seen some of the coverage. And the impact of the coverage was to put added pressure on her father not merely to tell his story, but also to redeem himself, to contradict the damage already done to him by the press, before he ever got to the witness stand.
Her father’s attorney stood and began his questions. “Mr. Burnet, let me take you back to the month of June, some eight years ago. What were you doing at that time?”
“I was working construction,” her father said, in a firm voice. “Supervising all the welding on the Calgary natural gas pipeline.”
“And when did you first suspect you were ill?”
“I started waking up in the night. Soaking wet, drenched.”
“You had a fever?”
“I thought so.”
“You consulted a doctor?”
“Not for a while,” he said. “I thought I had the flu or something. But the sweats never stopped. After a month, I started to feel very weak. Then I went to the doctor.”
“And what did the doctor tell you?”
“He said I had a growth in my abdomen. And he referred me to the most eminent specialist on the West Coast. A professor at UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles.”
“Who was that specialist?”
“Dr. Michael Gross. Over there.” Her father pointed to the defendant, sitting at the next table. Alex did not look over. She kept her gaze on her father.
“And were you subsequently examined by Dr. Gross?”
“Yes, I was.”
“He conducted a physical exam?”
“Yes.”
“Did he do any tests at that time?”
“Yes. He took blood and he did X-rays and a CAT scan of my entire body. And he took a biopsy of my bone marrow.”
“How was that done, Mr. Burnet?”
“He stuck a needle in my hipbone, right here. The needle punches through the bone and into the marrow. They suck out the marrow and analyze it.”
“And after these tests were concluded, did he tell you his diagnosis?”
“Yes. He said I had acute T-cell lymphoblastic leukemia.”
“What did you understand that disease to be?”
“Cancer of the bone marrow.”
“Did he propose treatment?”
“Yes. Surgery and then chemotherapy.”
“And did he tell you your prognosis? What the outcome of this disease was likely to be?”
“He said that it wasn’t good.”
“Was he more specific?”
“He said, probably less than a year.”
“Did you subsequently get a second opinion from another doctor?”
“Yes, I did.”
“With what result?”
“My diagnosis was…he, uh…he confirmed the diagnosis.” Her father paused, bit his lip, fighting emotion. Alex was surprised. He was usually tough and unemotional. She felt a twinge of concern for him, even though she knew this moment would help his case. “I was scared, really scared,” her father said. “They all told me…I didn’t have long to live.” He lowered his head.
The courtroom was silent.
“Mr. Burnet, would you like some water?”
“No. I’m fine.” He raised his head, passed his hand across his forehead.
“Please continue when you’re ready.”
“I got a third opinion, too. And everybody said to me that Dr. Gross was the best doctor for this disease.”
“So you initiated your therapy with Dr. Gross.”
“Yes. I did.”
Her father seemed to have recovered. Alex sat back in her chair, took a breath. The testimony unrolled smoothly now, a story her father had told dozens of times before. How he, a scared and frightened man, fearing for his life, had put his faith in Dr. Gross; how he had undergone surgery and chemotherapy under the direction of Dr. Gross; how the symptoms of the disease had slowly faded over the course of the following year; how Dr. Gross had seemed at first to believe that her father was well, his treatment successfully completed.
“You had follow-up examinations with Dr. Gross?”
“Yes. Every three months.”
“With what result?”
“Everything was normal. I gained weight, my strength came back, my hair grew back. I felt good.”
“And then what happened?”
“About a year later, after one of my checkups, Dr. Gross called to say he needed to do more tests.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said some of my blood work didn’t look right.”
“Did he say which tests, specifically?”
“No.”
“Did he say you still had cancer?”
“No, but that’s what I was afraid of. He had never repeated any tests before.” Her father shifted in his chair. “I asked him if the cancer had come back, and he said, ‘Not at this point, but we need to monitor you very closely.’ He insisted I needed constant testing.”
“How did you react?”
“I was terrified. In a way, it was worse the second time. When I was sick the first time, I made my will, made all the preparations. Then I got well and I got a new lease on life—a chance to start over. Then his phone call came, and I was terrified again.”
“You believed you were sick.”
“Of course. Why else would he be repeating tests?”
“You were frightened?”
“Terrified.”
Watching the questioning, Alex thought, It’s too bad we don’t have pictures. Her father appeared vigorous and hearty. She remembered when he had been frail, gray, and weak. His clothes had hung on his frame; he looked like a dying man. Now he looked strong, like the construction worker he had been all his life. He didn’t look like a man who became frightened easily. Alex knew these questions were essential to establish a basis for fraud, and a basis for mental distress. But it had to be done carefully. And their lead lawyer, she knew, had a bad habit of ignoring his own notes once the testimony was rolling.
The lawyer said, “What happened next, Mr. Burnet?”
“I went in for tests. Dr. Gross repeated everything. He even did another liver biopsy.”
“With what result?”
“He told me to come back in six months.”
“Why?”
“He just said, ‘Come back in six months.’”
“How did you feel at this time?”
“I felt healthy. But I figured I’d had a relapse.”
“Dr. Gross told you that?”
“No. He never told me anything. Nobody at the hospital ever told me anything. They just said, ‘Come back in six months.’”
Naturally enough, her father believed he was still sick. He met a woman he might have married, but didn’t because he thought he did not have long to live. He sold his house and moved into a small apartment, so he wouldn’t have a mortgage.
“It sounds like you were waiting to die,” the attorney said.
“Objection!”
“I’ll withdraw the question. But let’s move on. Mr. Burnet, how long did you continue going to UCLA for testing?”
“Four years.”
“Four years. And when did you first suspect you were not being told the truth about your condition?”
“Well, four years later, I still felt healthy. Nothing had happened. Every day, I was waiting for lightning to strike, but it never did. But Dr. Gross kept saying I had to come back for more tests, more tests. By then I had moved to San Diego, and I wanted to have my tests done there, and sent up to him. But he said no, I had to do the tests at UCLA.”
“Why?”
“He said he preferred his own lab. But it didn’t make sense. And he was giving me more and more forms to sign.”
“What forms?”
“At first, they were just consent forms to acknowledge that I was undertaking a procedure with risk. Those first forms were one or two pages long. Pretty soon there were other forms that said I agreed to be involved in a research project. Each time I went back, there were still more forms. Eventually the forms were ten pages long, a whole document in dense legal language.”
“And did you sign them?”
“Toward the end, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because some of the forms were releases to permit the commercial use of my tissues.”
“That bothered you?”
“Sure. Because I didn’t think he was telling me the truth about what he was doing. The reason for all the tests. On one visit, I asked Dr. Gross straight out if he was using my tissues for commercial purposes. He said absolutely not, his interests were purely research. So I said okay, and I signed everything except the forms allowing my tissues to be used for commercial purposes.”
“And what happened?”
“He got very angry. He said he would not be able to treat me further unless I signed all the forms, and I was risking my health and my future. He said I was making a big mistake.”
“Objection! Hearsay.”
“All right. Mr. Burnet, when you refused to sign the consent forms, did Dr. Gross stop treating you?”
“Yes.”
“And did you then consult a lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you subsequently discover?”
“That Dr. Gross had sold my cells—the cells he took from my body during all these tests—to a drug company called BioGen.”
“And how did you feel when you heard that?”
“I was shocked,” her father said. “I had gone to Dr. Gross when I was sick, and scared, and vulnerable. I had trusted my doctor. I had put my life in his hands. I trusted him. And then it turned out that he had been lying to me, and scaring me needlessly for years, just so he could steal parts of my own body from me and sell them to make a profit. For himself. He never cared about me at all. He just wanted to take my cells.”
“Do you know what those cells were worth?”
“The drug company said three billion dollars.”
The jury gasped.
CH002
Alex had been watching the jury all during the latest testimony. Their faces were impassive, but nobody moved, nobody shifted. The gasps were involuntary, evidence of how deeply engaged they were with what they were hearing. And the jury remained transfixed as the questions continued:
“Mr. Burnet, did Dr. Gross ever apologize to you for misleading you?”
“No.”
“Did he ever offer to share his profit with you?”
“No.”
“Did you ask him to?”
“Eventually I did, yes. When I realized what he had already done. They were my cells, from my body. I thought I should have something to say about what was done with them.”
“But he refused?”
“Yes. He said it was none of my business what he did with my cells.”
The jury reacted to that. Several turned and looked at Dr. Gross. That was a good sign, too, Alex thought.
“One final question, Mr. Burnet. Did you ever sign an authorization for Dr. Gross to use your cells for any commercial purposes?”
“No.”
“You never authorized their sale?”
“Never. But he did it anyway.”
“No further questions.”
The judge called a fifteen-minute recess, and when the court reconvened, the UCLA attorneys began the cross-examination. For this trial, UCLA had hired Raeper and Cross, a downtown firm that specialized in high-stakes corporate litigation. Raeper represented oil companies and major defense contractors. Clearly, UCLA did not regard this trial as a defense of medical research. Three billion dollars were at stake; it was big business, and they hired a big-business firm.
The lead attorney for UCLA was Albert Rodriguez. He had a youthful, easy appearance, a friendly smile, and a disarming sense of seeming new at the job. Actually, Rodriguez was forty-five and had been a successful litigator for twenty years, but he somehow managed to give the impression that this was his first trial, and he subtly appealed to the jury to cut him some slack.
“Now, Mr. Burnet, I imagine it has been taxing for you to go over the emotionally draining experiences of the last few years. I appreciate your telling the jury your experiences, and I won’t keep you long. I believe you told the jury that you were very frightened, as anyone would naturally be. By the way, how much weight had you lost, when you first came to Dr. Gross?”
Alex thought, Uh-oh. She knew where this was going. They were going to emphasize the dramatic nature of the cure. She glanced at the attorney sitting beside her, who was clearly trying to think of a strategy. She leaned over and whispered, “Stop it.”
The attorney shook his head, confused.
Her father was saying, “I don’t know how much I lost. About forty or fifty pounds.”
“So your clothes didn’t fit well?”
“Not at all.”
“And what was your energy like at that time? Could you climb a flight of stairs?”
“No. I’d go two or three steps, and I’d have to stop.”
“From exhaustion?”
Alex nudged the attorney at her side, whispered, “Asked and answered.” The attorney immediately stood up.
“Objection. Your Honor, Mr. Burnet has already stated he was diagnosed with a terminal condition.”
“Yes,” Rodriguez said, “and he has said he was frightened. But I think the jury should know just how desperate his condition really was.”
“I’ll allow it.”
“Thank you. Now then, Mr. Burnet. You had lost a quarter of your body weight, you were so weak you couldn’t climb more than a couple of stairs, and you had a deadly serious form of leukemia. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Alex gritted her teeth. She wanted desperately to stop this line of questioning, which was clearly prejudicial, and irrelevant to the question of whether her father’s doctor had acted improperly after curing him. But the judge had decided to allow it to continue, and there was nothing she could do. And it wasn’t egregious enough to provide grounds for appeal.
“And for help in your time of need,” Rodriguez said, “you came to the best physician on the West Coast to treat this disease?”
“Yes.”
“And he treated you.”
“Yes.”
“And he cured you. This expert and caring doctor cured you.”
“Objection! Your Honor, Dr. Gross is a physician, not a saint.”
“Sustained.”
“All right,” Rodriguez said. “Let me put it this way: Mr. Burnet, how long has it been since you were diagnosed with leukemia?”
“Six years.”
“Is it not true that a five-year survival in cancer is considered a cure?”
“Objection, calls for expert conclusion.”
“Sustained.”
“Your Honor,” Rodriguez said, turning to the judge, “I don’t know why this is so difficult for Mr. Burnet’s attorneys. I am merely trying to establish that Dr. Gross did, in fact, cure the plaintiff of a deadly cancer.”
“And I,” the judge replied, “don’t know why it is so difficult for the defense to ask that question plainly, without objectionable phrasing.”
“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you. Mr. Burnet, do you consider yourself cured of leukemia?”
“Yes.”
“You are completely healthy at this time?”
“Yes.”
“Who in your opinion cured you?”
“Dr. Gross.”
“Thank you. Now, I believe you told the court that when Dr. Gross asked you to return for further testing, you thought that meant you were still ill.”
“Yes.”
“Did Dr. Gross ever tell you that you still had leukemia?”
“No.”
“Did anyone in his office, or did any of his staff, ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Then,” Rodriguez said, “if I understand your testimony, at no time did you have any specific information that you were still ill?”
“Correct.”
“All right. Now let’s turn to your treatment. You received surgery and chemotherapy. Do you know if you were given the standard treatment for T-cell leukemia?”
“No, my treatment was not standard.”
“It was new?”
“Yes.”
“Were you the first patient to receive this treatment protocol?”
“Yes. I was.”
“Dr. Gross told you that?”
“Yes.”
“And did he tell you how this new treatment protocol was developed?”
“He said it was part of a research program.”
“And you agreed to participate in this research program?”
“Yes.”
“Along with other patients with the disease?”
“I believe there were others, yes.”
“And the research protocol worked in your case?”
“Yes.”
“You were cured.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. Now, Mr. Burnet, you are aware that in medical research, new drugs to help fight disease are often derived from, or tested on, patient tissues?”
“Yes.”
“You knew your tissues would be used in that fashion?”
“Yes, but not for commercial—”
“I’m sorry, just answer yes or no. When you agreed to allow your tissues to be used for research, did you know they might be used to derive or test new drugs?”
“Yes.”
“And if a new drug was found, did you expect the drug to be made available to other patients?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sign an authorization for that to happen?”
A long pause. Then: “Yes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Burnet. I have no further questions.”
“How do you think it went?” her father asked as they left the courthouse. Closing arguments were the following day. They walked toward the parking lot in the hazy sunshine of downtown Los Angeles.
“Hard to say,” Alex said. “They confused the facts very successfully. We know there’s no new drug that emerged from this program, but I doubt the jury understands what really happened. We’ll bring in more expert witnesses to explain that UCLA just made a cell line from your tissues and used it to manufacture a cytokine, the way it is manufactured naturally inside your body. There’s no ‘new drug’ here, but that’ll probably be lost on the jury. And there’s also the fact that Rodriguez is explicitly shaping this case to look exactly like the Moore case, a couple of decades back. Moore was a case very much like yours. Tissues were taken under false pretenses and sold. UCLA won that one easily, though they shouldn’t have.”
“So, counselor, how does our case stand?”
She smiled at her father, threw her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Truth? It’s uphill,” she said.
CH003
Barry Sindler, divorce lawyer to the stars, shifted in his chair. He was trying to pay attention to the client seated across the desk from him, but he was having trouble. The client was a nerd named Diehl who ran some biotech company. The guy talked abstractly, no emotion, practically no expression on his face, even though he was telling how his wife was screwing around on him. Diehl must have been a terrible husband. But Barry wasn’t sure how much money there was in this case. It seemed the wife had all the money.
Diehl droned on. How his first suspicions arose when he called her from Las Vegas. How he discovered the charge slips for the hotel that she went to every Wednesday. How he waited in the lobby and caught her checking in with a local tennis pro. Same old California story. Barry had heard it a hundred times. Didn’t these people know they were walking clichés? Outraged husband catches wife with the tennis pro. They wouldn’t even use that one on Desperate Housewives.
Barry gave up trying to listen. He had too much on his mind this morning. He had lost the Kirkorivich case, and it was all over town. Just because DNA tests had shown that it wasn’t the billionaire’s baby. And then the court wouldn’t award him his fees, even though he had cut them to a measly $1.4 mil. The judge gave him a quarter of that. Every damn lawyer in town was gloating, because they all had it in for Barry Sindler. He had heard that L.A. Magazine was doing a big story on the case, sure to be unfavorable to Barry. Not that he gave a crap about that. The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to a divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. And Barry Sindler was without a doubt the most ruthless, unscrupulous, publicity-hungry, self-aggrandizing, stop-at-nothing son-of-a-bitch divorce lawyer in Southern California. And proud of it!
No, Barry didn’t worry about any of those things. He didn’t even worry about the house he was building in Montana for Denise and her two rotten kids. He didn’t worry about the renovations on their house in Holmby Hills, even though the kitchen alone was costing $500K, and Denise kept changing the plans. Denise was a serial renovator. It was a disease.
No, no, no. Barry Sindler worried about just one thing—the lease. He had one whole floor in an office building on Wilshire and Doheny, twenty-three attorneys in his office, none of them worth a shit, but seeing all of them at their desks impressed the clients. And they could do the minor stuff, like take depositions and file delaying motions—stuff Barry didn’t want to be bothered with. Barry knew that litigation was a war of attrition, especially in custody cases. The goal was to run the costs as high as you could and stretch the proceedings out as long as you could, because that way Barry earned the largest possible fees, and the spouse eventually got tired of the endless delays, the new filings, and of course the spiraling costs. Even the richest of them eventually got tired.
By and large, husbands were sensible. They wanted to get on with their lives, buy a new house, move in with the new girlfriend, get a nice blow job. They wanted custody issues settled. But the wives usually wanted revenge—so Barry kept things from being settled, year after year, until the husbands caved. Millionaires, billionaires, celebrity assholes—it didn’t matter. They all caved in the end. People said it wasn’t a good strategy for the kids. Well, screw the kids. If the clients cared anything about the kids, they wouldn’t get divorced in the first place. They’d stay married and miserable like everybody else, because—
The nerd had said something that jogged him back to attention.
“I’m sorry,” Barry Sindler said. “Run that by me again, Mr. Diehl. What did you just say?”
“I said, ‘I want my wife tested.’”
“I can assure you, these proceedings will test her to the limit. And of course we’ll put a detective on her, see how much she drinks, whether she does drugs, stays out all night, has lesbian affairs, all that. Standard procedure.”
“No, no,” Diehl said. “I want her tested genetically.”
“For what?”
“For everything,” he said.
“Ah,” Barry said, nodding wisely. What the hell was the guy talking about? Genetic testing? In a custody case? He glanced down at the papers in front of him, and the business card. RICHARD “RICK” DIEHL, PH.D. Barry frowned unhappily. Only assholes put a nickname on the card. The card said he was CEO of BioGen Research Inc., some company out in Westview Village.
“For example,” Diehl said, “I’ll bet my wife has a genetic predisposition to bipolar illness. She certainly acts erratic. She might have the Alzheimer’s gene. If she does, psychological tests could show early signs of Alzheimer’s.”
“Good, very good.” Barry Sindler was nodding vigorously now. This was making him happy. Fresh, new disputed areas. Sindler loved disputed areas. Administer the psychological test. Did the test show early Alzheimer’s or not? Who the fuck could say for sure? Wonderful, wonderful—whatever the test results, they would be disputed. More days in court, more expert witnesses to interview, battles of the doctorates, dragging on for days. Days in court were especially lucrative.
And best of all, Barry realized that this genetic testing could become standard procedure for all custody cases. Sindler was breaking new ground here. He’d get publicity for this! He leaned forward eagerly. “Go on, Mr. Diehl…”
“Test her for the diabetes gene, breast cancer from the BRCA genes, and all the rest. And,” Diehl continued, “my wife might also have the gene for Huntington’s disease, which causes fatal nerve degeneration. Her grandfather had Huntington’s, so it’s in her family. Both her parents are still young, and the disease only shows up when you’re older. So my wife could be carrying the gene and that would mean a death sentence from Huntington’s.”
“Umm, yes,” Barry Sindler said, nodding. “That could render her unfit to be the primary caregiver to the children.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m surprised she hasn’t been tested already.”
“She doesn’t want to know,” Diehl said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance she may have the gene. If she does, she’ll eventually develop the disease and die writhing in dementia. But she’s twenty-eight. The disease might not appear for another twenty years. So if she knew about it now…it could ruin the rest of her life.”
“But it could also relieve her, if she didn’t have the gene.”
“Too big a risk. She won’t test.”
“Any other tests you can think of?”
“Hell yes,” Diehl said. “That’s just the beginning. I want her tested with all the current panels. There are twelve hundred gene tests now.”
Twelve hundred! Sindler licked his lips at the prospect. Excellent! Why had he never heard of this before? He cleared his throat. “But you realize that if you do this, she will demand you be tested, as well.”
“No problem,” Diehl said.
“You’ve already been tested?”
“No. I just know how to fake the lab results.”
Barry Sindler sat back in his chair.
Perfect.
CH004
Beneath the high canopy of trees, the jungle floor was dark and silent. No breeze stirred the giant ferns at shoulder height. Hagar wiped sweat from his forehead, glanced back at the others, and pushed on. The expedition moved deep into the jungles of central Sumatra. No one spoke, which was the way Hagar liked it.
The river was just ahead. A dugout canoe on the near bank, a rope stretched across the river at shoulder height. They crossed in two groups, Hagar standing up in the dugout, pulling them across on the rope, then going back for the others. It was silent except for the cry of a distant hornbill.
They continued on the opposite bank. The jungle trail grew narrower, and muddy in spots. The team didn’t like that; they made a lot of noise trying to scramble around the wet patches. Finally, one said, “How much farther is it?”
It was that kid. The whiny American teenager with spots on his face. He was looking to his mother, a largish matron in a broad straw hat.
“Are we almost there?” the kid whined.
Hagar put his finger to his lips. “Quiet!”
“My feet hurt.”
The other tourists were standing around, a cluster of bright-colored clothing. Staring at the kid.
“Look,” Hagar whispered, “if you make noise, you won’t see them.”
“I don’t see them anyhow.” The kid pouted, but he fell into line as the group moved on. Today they were mostly Americans. Hagar didn’t like Americans, but they weren’t the worst. The worst, he had to admit, were the—
“There!”
“Look there!”
The tourists were pointing ahead, excited, chattering. About fifty yards up the trail and off to the right, a juvenile male orangutan stood upright in the branches that swayed gently with his weight. Magnificent creature, reddish fur, roughly forty pounds, distinctive white streak in the fur above his ear. Hagar had not seen him in weeks.
Hagar gestured for the others to be quiet, and moved up the trail. The tourists were close behind him now, stumbling, banging into one another in their excitement.
“Ssssh!” he hissed.
“What’s the big deal?” one said. “I thought this was a sanctuary.”
“Ssssh!”
“But they’re protected here—”
“Ssssh!”
Hagar needed it quiet. He reached into his shirt pocket and pressed the Record button. He unclipped his lapel mike and held it in his hand.
They were now about thirty yards from the orang. They passed a sign along the trail that said BUKUT ALAM ORANGUTAN SANCTUARY. This was where orphaned orangs were nursed to health, and reintroduced into the wild. There was a veterinary facility, a research station, a team of researchers.
“If it’s a sanctuary, I don’t understand why—”
“George, you heard what he said. Be quiet.”
Twenty yards, now.
“Look, another one! Two! There!”
They were pointing off to the left. High in the canopy, a one-year-old, crashing through branches with an older juvenile. Swinging gracefully. Hagar didn’t care. He was focused on the first animal.
The white-streaked orang did not move away. Now he was hanging by one hand, swinging in the air, head cocked to one side as he looked at them. The younger animals in the canopy were gone. White-streak stayed where he was, and stared.
Ten yards. Hagar held his microphone out in front of him. The tourists were pulling out their cameras. The orang stared directly at Hagar and made an odd sound, like a cough. “Dwaas.”
Hagar repeated the sound back. “Dwaas.”
The orang stared at him. The curved lips moved. A sequence of guttural grunts: “Ooh stomm dwaas, varlaat leanme.”
One of the tourists said, “Is he making those sounds?”
“Yes,” Hagar said.
“Is he…talking?”
“Apes can’t talk,” another tourist said. “Orangs are silent. It says so in the book.”
Several snapped flash pictures of the hanging ape. The juvenile male showed no surprise. But the lips moved: “Geen lichten dwaas.”
“Does he have a cold?” a woman asked nervously. “Sounds like he’s coughing?”
“He’s not coughing,” another voice said.
Hagar glanced over his shoulder. A heavyset man at the back, a man who had struggled to keep up, red-faced and puffing, now held a tape recorder in his hand, pointing it toward the orang. He had a determined look on his face. He said to Hagar, “Is this some kind of trick you play?”
“No,” Hagar said.
The man pointed to the orang. “That’s Dutch,” he said. “Sumatra used to be a Dutch colony. That’s Dutch.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Hagar said.
“I would. The animal said, ‘Stupid, leave me alone.’ And then it said, ‘No lights.’ When the camera flashes went off.”
“I don’t know what those sounds were,” Hagar said.
“But you were recording them.”
“Just out of curiosity—”
“You had your microphone out long before the sounds began. You knew that animal would speak.”
“Orangs can’t speak,” Hagar said.
“That one can.”
They all stared at the orangutan, still swinging from one arm. It scratched itself with the free arm. It was silent.
The heavyset man said loudly, “Geen lichten.”
The ape just stared, blinked slowly.
“Geen lichten!”
The orang gave no sign of comprehension. After a moment, he swung to a nearby branch, and began to climb into the air, moving easily, arm on arm.
“Geen lichten!”
The ape kept climbing. The woman in the big straw hat said, “I think it was just coughing or something.”
“Hey,” the heavyset man yelled. “M’sieu! Comment ça va?”
The ape continued up through the branches, swinging in an easy rhythm with its long arms. It did not look down.
“I thought maybe it speaks French,” the man said. He shrugged. “Guess not.”
A light rain began to drip from the canopy. The other tourists put their cameras away. One shrugged on a light, transparent raincoat. Hagar wiped the sweat from his forehead. Up ahead, three young orangs were scampering around a tray of papayas on the ground. The tourists turned their attention to them.
From high in the canopy came a growling sound: “Espèce de con.” The phrase came to them clearly, surprisingly distinct in the still air.
The heavyset man spun around. “What?”
Everyone turned to look upward.
“That was a swear word,” the teenager said. “In French. I know it was a swear word. In French.”
“Hush,” his mother said.
The group stared up at the canopy, searching the dense mass of dark leaves. They could not see the ape up there.
The heavyset man yelled, “Qu’est-ce que tu dis?”
There was no answer. Just the crash of an animal moving through branches, and the distant cry of a hornbill.
CHEEKY CHIMP CHEWS OFF TOURISTS
(News of the World)
AFFE SPRICHT IM DSCHUNGEL, FLÜCHE GEORGE BUSH
(Der Spiegel)
ORANG PARLE FRANÇAIS?!!
(Paris Match, beneath a picture of Jacques Derrida)
MUSLIM MONKEY BERATES WESTERNERS
(Weekly Standard)
MONKEY MOUTHS OFF, WITNESSES AGAPE
(National Enquirer)
TALKING CHIMPANZEE REPORTED IN JAVA
(New York Times, subsequent correction printed)
POLYGLOT PRIMATES SIGHTED IN SUMATRA
(Los Angeles Times)
“And, finally, a group of tourists in Indonesia swear they were abused by an orangutan in the jungles of Borneo. According to the tourists, the ape swore at them in Dutch and French, which means it was probably a lot smarter than they were. But no recordings of the cursing chimp have turned up, leading us to conclude that if you believe this story, we have a job for you in the current administration. Plenty of talking apes there!”
(Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC News, no correction)
CH005
Get this,” Charlie Huggins said, looking at the television in the kitchen of his house in San Diego. The sound was turned off, but he was reading the crawl beneath. “It says, ‘Talking Ape Cited in Sumatra.’”
“You mean it got a speeding ticket?” his wife said, glancing at the screen. She was making breakfast.
“No,” Huggins said. “They must mean the ape was ‘sighted.’ With an ‘s.’”
“The ape was sighted? Meaning the ape could see?” His wife was a high school English teacher. She liked these jokes.
“No, honey. The story says…some people in Sumatra encountered an ape in the jungle that talked.”
“I thought apes can’t talk,” his wife said.
“Well, that’s what the story says.”
“So it has to be a lie.”
“You think? Uh, now…Britney Spears is not getting divorced. I’m relieved. She may be pregnant again. From the pictures it looks like it. And Posh Spice wore a nice green dress to a gala. And Sting says he can have sex for eight hours without stopping.”
“Scrambled or over easy?” his wife said.
“Tantric, apparently.”
“I mean your eggs.”
“Scrambled.”
“Call the kids, will you?” she said. “Everything’s almost ready.”
“Okay.” Charlie got up from the table and headed for the stairs. When he got to the living room, the phone rang. It was the lab.
In the laboratories of Radial Genomics Inc., in the eucalyptus groves of the University of California at San Diego, Henry Kendall drummed his fingers on the countertop while he waited for Charlie to pick up. The phone rang three times. Where the fuck was he? Finally, Charlie’s voice: “Hello?”
“Charlie,” Henry said. “Did you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“The ape in Sumatra, for Christ’s sake.”
“That has to be bullshit,” Charlie said.
“Why?”
“Come on, Henry. You know it’s bullshit.”
“They said the ape spoke Dutch.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“It might have been Uttenbroek’s team,” Kendall said.
“Nah. The ape was big, two or three years old.”
“So? Uttenbroek could have done it a few years ago. His team’s advanced enough. Besides, those guys from Utrecht are all liars.”
Charlie Huggins sighed. “It’s illegal in the Netherlands to do that research.”
“Right. Which is why they would go to Sumatra to do it.”
“Henry, the technology’s much too difficult. We’re years away from making a transgenic ape. You know that.”
“I don’t know that. You hear what Utrecht announced yesterday? They harvested bull stem cells and cultured them in mouse testicles. I would say that is difficult. I would say that is fucking cutting edge.”
“Especially for the bulls.”
“I don’t see anything funny here.”
“Can’t you imagine the poor mice, dragging around giant purple bulls’ balls?”
“Still not laughing…”
“Henry,” Charlie said. “Are you telling me you see one report on television about a talking ape, and you actually believe it?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Henry.” Charlie sounded exasperated. “It’s television. This story’s right up there with the two-headed snake. Pull yourself together.”
“The two-headed snake was real.”
“I have to get the kids to school. I’ll talk to you later.” And Charlie hung up.
Fucker. His wife always took the kids to school.
He’s avoiding me.
Henry Kendall walked around the lab, stared out the window, paced some more. He took a deep breath. Of course he knew Charlie was right. It had to be a fake story.
But…what if it wasn’t?
It was true that Henry Kendall had a tendency to be high-strung; his hands sometimes shook when he spoke, especially when he was excited. And he was a bit of a klutz, always stumbling, banging into things at the lab. He had a nervous stomach. He was a worrier.
But what Henry couldn’t tell Charlie was that the real reason he was worried now had to do with a conversation that had taken place a week ago. It seemed meaningless at the time.
Now it took on a more ominous quality.
Some ditsy secretary from the National Institutes of Health had called the lab and asked for Dr. Kendall. When he answered the phone, she said, “Are you Dr. Henry A. Kendall?”
“Yes…”
“Is it correct that you came to the NIH on a six-month sabbatical four years ago?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Was that from May until October?”
“I think it was. What’s this about?”
“And did you conduct part of your research at the primate facility in Maryland?”
“Yes.”
“And is it correct that when you came to the NIH in May of that year, you underwent the usual testing for communicable diseases, because you were going to do primate research?”
“Yes,” Henry said. They had done a battery of tests, everything from HIV to hepatitis to flu. They’d drawn a lot of blood. “May I ask what this is about?”
“I am just filling out some additional paperwork,” she said, “for Dr. Bellarmino.”
Henry felt a chill.
Rob Bellarmino was the head of the genetics section of NIH. He hadn’t been there four years before, when Henry was there, but he was in charge of things now. And he was no particular friend of either Henry or Charlie.
“Is there some problem?” Henry asked. He had the distinct feeling there was.
“No, no,” she said. “We’ve just misplaced some of our paperwork, and Dr. Bellarmino is a stickler about records. While you were at the primate facility, did you do any research involving a female chimpanzee named Mary? Her lab number was F-402.”
“You know, I don’t remember,” Henry said. “It’s a long time back. I worked with several chimps. I don’t recall specifically.”
“She was pregnant during that summer.”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.”
“That was the summer we had an outbreak of encephalitis, and they had to quarantine most of the chimps. Is that right?”
“Yes, I remember the quarantine. They sent chimps all around the country to different facilities.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kendall. Oh—while I have you on the phone, can I verify your address? We have 348 Marbury Madison Drive, La Jolla?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Thanks for your time, Dr. Kendall.”
That was the entire conversation. All Henry really thought, at the time, was that Bellarmino was a tricky son of a bitch; you never knew what he was up to.
But now…with this primate in Sumatra…
Henry shook his head.
Charlie Huggins could argue all he wanted, but it was a fact that scientists had already made a transgenic monkey. They’d done it years ago. There were all kinds of transgenic mammals these days—dogs, cats, everything. It was not out of the question that the talking orang was a transgenic animal.
Henry’s work at NIH had been concerned with the genetic basis of autism. He’d gone to the primate facility because he wanted to know which genes accounted for the differences in communication abilities between humans and apes. And he had done some work with chimp embryos. It didn’t lead anywhere. In fact, he had hardly gotten started before the encephalitis outbreak halted his research. He ended up back at Bethesda and working in a lab for the duration of his sabbatical.
That was all he knew.
At least, all he knew for sure.
HUMANS AND CHIMPS INTERBRED UNTIL RECENTLY
Species Split Did Not End Sex, Researchers Find a Controversial Result from Genetics
Researchers at Harvard and MIT have concluded that the split between humans and chimpanzees occurred more recently than previously thought. Gene investigators had long known that apes and human beings both derived from a common ancestor, who walked the earth some 18 million years ago. Gibbons split off first, 16 million years ago. Orangutans split about 12 million years ago. Gorillas split 10 million years ago. Chimpanzees and human beings were the last to split, about 9 million years ago.
However, after decoding the human genome in 2001, geneticists discovered that human beings and chimps differed in only 1.5% of their genes—about 500 genes in all. This was far fewer than expected. By 2003, scientists had begun to catalog precisely which genes differed between the species. It is now clear that many structural proteins, including hemoglobin and cytochrome c proteins, are identical in chimps and humans. Human and chimp blood are identical. If the species split 9 million years ago, why are they still so alike?
Harvard geneticists believe humans and chimpanzees continued to interbreed long after the species split. Such interbreeding, or hybridization, puts evolutionary pressure on the X chromosome, causing it to change more rapidly than normal. The researchers found that the newest genes on the human genome appear on the X chromosome.
From this, researchers argue that ancestral humans continued to breed with chimps until 5.4 million years ago, when the split became permanent. This new view stands in sharp contrast to the consensus view that once speciation occurs, hybridization is “a negligible influence.” But according to Dr. David Reich of Harvard, the fact that hybridization has rarely been seen in other species “may simply be due to the fact that we have not been looking for it.”
The Harvard researchers caution that interbreeding of humans and chimpanzees is not possible in the present day. They point out that press reports of hybrid “humanzees” have invariably proven false.
CH006
BioGen Research Inc. was housed in a titanium-skinned cube in an industrial park outside Westview Village in Southern California. Majestically situated above the traffic on the 101 Freeway, the cube had been the idea of BioGen’s president, Rick Diehl, who insisted on calling it a hexahedron. The cube looked impressive and high-tech while revealing absolutely nothing about what went on inside—which is exactly how Diehl wanted it.
In addition, BioGen maintained forty thousand square feet of nondescript shed space in an industrial park two miles away. It was there that the animal storage facilities were located, along with the more dangerous labs. Josh Winkler, an up-and-coming young researcher, picked up rubber gloves and a surgical mask from a shelf by the door to the animal quarters. His assistant, Tom Weller, was reading a news clipping taped to the wall.
“Let’s go, Tom,” Josh said.
“Diehl must be crapping in his pants,” Weller said, pointing to the article. “Have you read this?”
Josh turned to look. It was an article from the Wall Street Journal:
SCIENTISTS ISOLATE “MASTER” GENE
A Genetic Basis for Controlling Other People?
TOULOUSE, FRANCE—A team of French biologists have isolated the gene that drives certain people to attempt to control others. Geneticists at the Biochemical Institute of Toulouse University, headed by Dr. Michel Narcejac-Boileau, announced the discovery at a press conference today. “The gene,” Dr. Narcejac-Boileau said, “is associated with social dominance and strong control over other people. We have isolated it in sports leaders, CEOs, and heads of state. We believe the gene is found in all dictators throughout history.”
Dr. Narcejac-Boileau explained that while the strong form of the gene produced dictators, the milder heterozygous form produced a “moderate, quasi-totalitarian urge” to tell other people how to run their lives, generally for their own good or for their own safety.
“Significantly, on psychological testing, individuals with the mild form will express the view that other people need their insights, and are unable to manage their own lives without their guidance. This form of the gene exists among politicians, policy advocates, religious fundamentalists, and celebrities. The belief complex is manifested by a strong feeling of certainty, coupled with a powerful sense of entitlement—and a carefully nurtured sense of resentment toward those who don’t listen to them.”
At the same time, he urged caution in interpreting the results. “Many people who are driven to control others merely want everybody to be the same as they are. They can’t tolerate difference.”
This explained the team’s paradoxical finding that individuals with the mild form of the gene were also the most tolerant of authoritarian environments with strict and invasive social rules. “Our study shows that the gene produces not only a bossy person, but also a person willing to be bossed. They have a distinct attraction to totalitarian states.” He noted that these people are especially responsive to fashions of all kinds, and suppress opinions and preferences not shared by their group.
Josh said, “‘Especially responsive to fashions’…Is this a joke?”
“No, they’re serious. It’s marketing,” Tom Weller said. “Today everything is marketing. Read the rest.”
Although the French team stopped short of claiming that the mild form of the master gene represented a genetic disease—an “addiction to belonging,” as Narcejac-Boileau phrased it—they nevertheless suggested that evolutionary pressures were moving the human race toward ever-greater conformity.
“Unbelievable,” Josh said. “These guys in Toulouse hold a press conference and the whole world runs their story about the ‘master gene’? Have they published in a journal anywhere?”
“Nope, they just held a press conference. No publication, and no mention of publication.”
“What’s next, the slave gene? Looks like crap to me,” Josh said. He glanced at his watch.
“You mean, we hope it’s crap.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. We hope it’s crap. Because it gets in the way of what BioGen’s announcing, that’s for sure.”
“You think Diehl will delay the announcement?” Tom Weller asked.
“Maybe. But Diehl doesn’t like waiting. And he’s been nervous ever since he got back from Vegas.”
Josh tugged on his rubber gloves, put on safety goggles and his paper face-mask, then picked up the six-inch-long compressed-air cylinder, and screwed on the vial of retrovirus. The whole apparatus was the size of a cigar tube. Next, he fitted a tiny plastic cone on top of that, pushing it in place with his thumb. “Grab your PDA.”
And they pushed through the swinging door, into the animal quarters.
The strong, slightly sweet odor of the rats was a familiar smell. There were five or six hundred rats here, all neatly labeled in cages stacked six feet high, on both sides of an aisle that ran down the center of the room.
“What’re we dosing today?” Tom Weller said.
Josh read off a string of numbers. Tom checked his PDA listing of numerical locations. They walked down the aisle until they found the cages with that day’s numbers. Five rats in five cages. The animals were white, plump, moving normally. “They look okay. This is the second dose?”
“Right.”
“Okay, boys,” Josh said. “Let’s be nice for Daddy.” He opened the first cage, and quickly grabbed the rat inside. He held the animal by the body, forefingers expertly gripping the neck, and quickly fitted the small plastic cone over the rat’s snout. The animal’s breath clouded the cone. A brief hiss as the virus was released; Josh held the mask in place for ten seconds, while the rat inhaled. Then he released the animal back into the cage.
“One down.”
Tom Weller tapped his stylus on the PDA, then moved to the next cage.
The retrovirus had been bioengineered to carry a gene known as ACMPD3N7, one of the family of genes controlling aminocarboxymuconate paraldehyde decarboxylase. Within BioGen they called it the maturity gene. When activated, ACMPD3N7 seemed to modify responses of the amygdala and cingulate gyrus in the brain. The result was an acceleration of maturational behavior—at least in rats. Infant female rats, for example, would show precursors of maternal behavior, such as rolling feces in their cages, far earlier than usual. And BioGen had preliminary evidence for the maturational gene action in rhesus monkeys, as well.
Interest in the gene centered on a potential link to neurodegenerative disease. One school of thought argued that neurodegenerative illnesses were a result of disruptions of maturational pathways in the brain.
If that were true—if ACMPD3N7 were involved in, say, Alzheimer’s disease, or another form of senility—then the commercial value of the gene would be enormous.
Josh had moved on to the next cage and was holding the mask over the second rat when his cell phone went off. He gestured for Tom to pull it from his shirt pocket.
Weller looked at the screen. “It’s your mother,” he said.
“Ah hell,” Josh said. “Take over for a minute, would you?”
“Joshua, what are you doing?”
“I’m working, Mom.”
“Well, can you stop?”
“Not really—”
“Because we have an emergency.”
Josh sighed. “What did he do this time, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but he’s in jail, downtown.”
“Well, let Charles get him out.” Charles Silverberg was the family lawyer.
“Charles is getting him out right now,” his mother said. “But Adam has to appear in court. Somebody has to drive him home after the hearing.”
“I can’t. I’m at work.”
“He’s your brother, Josh.”
“He’s also thirty years old,” Josh said. This had been going on for years. His brother Adam was an investment banker who had been in and out of rehab a dozen times. “Can’t he take a taxi?”
“I don’t think that’s wise, under the circumstances.”
Josh sighed. “What’d he do, Mom?”
“Apparently he bought cocaine from a woman who worked for the DEA.”
“Again?”
“Joshua. Are you going to go downtown and pick him up or not?”
Long sigh. “Yes, Mom. I’ll go.”
“Now? Will you go now?”
“Yes, Mom. I’ll go now.”
He flipped the phone shut and turned to Weller. “What do you say we finish this in a couple of hours?”
“No problem,” Tom said. “I have some notes to write up back in the office, anyway.”
Joshua turned, stripping off his gloves as he left the room. He stuck his cylinder, goggles, and paper mask into the pocket of his lab coat, unclipped his radiation tag, and hurried to his car.
Driving downtown, he glanced at the cylinder protruding from the lab coat, which he had tossed onto the passenger seat. To stay within the protocol, Josh had to return to the lab and expose the remaining rats before five p.m. That kind of schedule and the need to keep to it seemed to represent everything that separated Josh from his older brother.
Once, Adam had had everything—looks, popularity, athletic prowess. His high school days at the elite Westfield School had consisted of one triumph after another—editor of the newspaper, soccer team captain, president of the debating team, National Merit Scholar. Josh, in contrast, had been a nerd. He was chubby, short, ungainly. He walked with a kind of waddle; he couldn’t help it. The orthopedic shoes his mother insisted he wear did not help. Girls disdained him. He heard them giggle as he passed them in the hallways. High school was torture for Josh. He did not do well. Adam went to Yale. Josh barely got into Emerson State.
How times had changed.
A year ago, Adam had been fired from his job at Deutsche Bank. His drug troubles were endless. Meanwhile, Josh had started at BioGen as a lowly assistant, but had quickly moved up as the company began to recognize his hard work and his inventive approach. Josh had stock in the company, and if any of the current projects, including the maturity gene, proved out commercially, then he would be rich.
And Adam…
Josh pulled up in front of the courthouse. Adam was sitting on the steps, staring fixedly at the ground. His ratty suit was streaked with grime and he had a day’s growth of beard. Charles Silverberg was standing over him, talking on his cell phone.
Josh honked the horn. Charles waved, and headed off. Adam trudged over and got in the car.
“Thanks, bro.” He slammed the door shut. “Appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
Josh pulled into traffic, glancing at his watch. He had enough time to take Adam back to their mother’s house and get back to the lab by five.
“Did I interrupt something?” Adam asked.
That was the annoying thing about his brother. He liked to mess up everyone else’s life, too. He seemed to take pleasure in it.
“Yes, actually. You did.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry? If you were sorry, you’d stop doing this shit.”
“Hey, man,” Adam said. “How the fuck was I supposed to know? It was entrapment, man. Even Charles said so. The bitch entrapped me. Charles said he would get me off easy.”
“There wouldn’t be any entrapment,” Josh said, “if you weren’t using.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself! Don’t lecture me.”
Josh said nothing. Why did he even bring it up? After all these years, he knew nothing he said mattered. Nothing made a difference. There was a long silence as he drove.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said.
“You’re not sorry.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Adam said. “You’re right.” He hung his head. He sighed theatrically. “I fucked up again.”
The repentant Adam.
Josh had seen it dozens of times before. The belligerent Adam, the repentant Adam, the logical Adam, the denying Adam. Meanwhile his brother always tested positive. Every time.
An orange light came on on the dashboard. Gas was low. He saw a station up ahead. “I need gas.”
“Good. I got to take a leak.”
“You stay in the car.”
“I got to take a leak, man.”
“Stay in the fucking car.” Josh pulled up alongside the pump and got out. “Stay where I can fucking see you.”
“I don’t want to pee in your car, man…”
“You better not.”
“But—”
“Just hold it, Adam!”
Josh put a credit card in the slot and started pumping gas. He glanced at his brother through the rear windshield, then looked back at the spinning numbers. Gas was so damn expensive now. He probably should buy a car that was cheaper to run.
He finished and got back in the car. He glanced at Adam. His brother had a funny look on his face. There was a faint odor in the car.
“Adam?”
“What.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
He started the engine. That smell…Something silver caught his eye. He looked at the floor between his brother’s feet and saw the silver cylinder. He leaned over, picked up the cylinder. It was light in his hand.
“Adam…”
“I didn’t do anything!”
Josh shook the cylinder. It was empty.
“I thought it was nitrous or something,” his brother said.
“You asshole.”
“Why? It didn’t do anything.”
“It’s for a rat, Adam. You just inhaled virus for a rat.”
Adam slumped back. “Is that bad?”
“It ain’t good.”
By the time Josh pulled up in front of his mother’s house in Beverly Hills, he had thought it through and concluded that there was no danger to Adam. The retrovirus was a mouse-infective strain, and while it might also infect human beings, the dose had been calculated for an animal weighing eight hundred grams. His brother weighed a hundred times as much. The genetic exposure was subclinical.
“So, I’m okay?” Adam said.
“Yeah.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry about that,” Adam said, getting out of the car. “But thanks for picking me up. See you, bro.”
“I’ll wait until you get inside,” Josh said. He watched as his brother walked up the drive and knocked on the door. His mother opened it. Adam stepped inside, and she shut the door.
She never even looked at Josh.
He started the engine and drove away.
CH007
At noon, Alex Burnet left her office in her Century City law firm and went home. She didn’t have far to go; she lived in an apartment on Roxbury Park with her eight-year-old son, Jamie. Jamie had a cold and had stayed home from school. Her father was looking after him for her.
She found her dad in the kitchen, making macaroni and cheese. It was the only thing Jamie would eat these days. “How is he?” she said.
“Fever’s down. Still got a runny nose and a cough.”
“Is he hungry?”
“He wasn’t earlier. But he asked for macaroni.”
“That’s a good sign,” she said. “Should I take over?”
Her father shook his head. “I’ve got it handled. You didn’t have to come home, you know.”
“I know.” She paused. “The judge issued his ruling, Dad.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“And?”
“We lost.”
Her father continued to stir. “We lost everything?”
“Yes,” she said. “We lost on every point. You have no rights to your own tissue. He ruled them ‘material waste’ that you allowed the university to dispose of for you. The court says you have no rights to any of your tissue once it has left your body. The university can do what it wants with it.”
“But they brought me back—”
“He said a reasonable person would have realized the tissues were being collected for commercial use. Therefore you tacitly accepted it.”
“But they told me I was sick.”
“He rejected all our arguments, Dad.”
“They lied to me.”
“I know, but according to the judge, good social policy promotes medical research. Granting you rights now would have a chilling effect on future research. That’s the thinking behind the ruling—the common good.”
“This wasn’t about the common good. It was about getting rich,” her father said. “Jesus, three billion dollars…”
“I know, Dad. Universities want money. And basically, this judge held what California judges have held for the last twenty-five years, ever since the Moore decision in 1980. Just like your case, the court found that Moore’s tissues were waste materials to which he had no right. And they haven’t revisited that question in more than two decades.”
“So what happens now?”
“We appeal,” she said. “I don’t think we have good grounds, but we have to do it before we can go to the California Supreme Court.”
“And when will that be?”
“A year from now.”
“Do we have a chance?” her father said.
“Absolutely not,” Albert Rodriguez said, turning in his chair toward her father. Rodriguez and the other UCLA attorneys had come to Alex’s law offices in the aftermath of the judge’s ruling. “You have no chance on further appeal, Mr. Burnet.”
“I’m surprised,” Alex said, “that you’re so confident about how the California Supreme Court will rule.”
“Oh, we have no idea how they will rule,” Rodriguez said. “I simply mean that you will lose this case no matter what the court holds.”
“How is that?” Alex said.
“UCLA is a state university. The Board of Regents is prepared, on behalf of the state of California, to take your father’s cells by right of eminent domain.”
She blinked: “What?”
“Should the Supreme Court rule that your father’s cells are his property—which we think is unlikely—the state will take ownership of his property by eminent domain.”
Eminent domain referred to the right of the state to take private property without the owner’s consent. It was almost always invoked for public uses. “But eminent domain is intended for schools or highways…”
“The state can do it in this case,” Rodriguez said. “And it will.”
Her father stared at them, thunderstruck. “Are you joking?”
“No, Mr. Burnet. It’s a legitimate taking, and the state will exercise its right.”
Alex said, “Then what is the purpose of this meeting?”
“We thought it appropriate to inform you of the situation, in case you wanted to drop further litigation.”
“You’re suggesting we end litigation?” she said.
“I would advise it,” Rodriguez said to her, “if this were my client.”
“Ending litigation saves the state considerable expense.”
“It saves everyone expense,” Rodriguez said.
“So what are you proposing as a settlement, for us to drop the case?”
“Nothing whatever, Ms. Burnet. I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. This is not a negotiation. We’re simply here to explain our position, so that you can make an informed decision in your best interest.”
Her father cleared his throat. “You’re telling us that you’re taking my cells, no matter what. You’ve sold them for three billion dollars, no matter what. And you’re keeping all of that money, no matter what.”
“Bluntly put,” Rodriguez said, “but not inaccurate.”
The meeting ended. Rodriguez and his team thanked them for their time, said their good-byes, and left the room. Alex nodded to her father and then followed the other attorneys outside. Through the glass, Frank Burnet watched as they talked further.
“Those fuckers,” he said. “What kind of world do we live in?”
“My sentiments exactly,” said a voice from behind him. Burnet turned.
A young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses was sitting in the far corner of the conference room. Burnet remembered him; he had come in during the meeting, bringing coffee and mugs, which he had put on the sideboard. Then he had sat down in the corner for the rest of the meeting. Burnet had assumed he was a junior member of the firm, but now the young man was speaking with confidence.
“Let’s face it, Mr. Burnet,” he said, “you’ve been screwed. It turns out your cells are very rare and valuable. They’re efficient manufacturers of cytokines, chemicals that fight cancer. That’s the real reason you survived your disease. As a matter of fact, your cells churn out cytokines more efficiently than any commercial process. That’s why those cells are worth so much money. The UCLA doctors didn’t create anything or invent anything. They didn’t genetically modify anything. They just took your cells, grew them in a dish, and sold the dish to BioGen. And you, my friend, were screwed.”
“Who are you?” Burnet said.
“And you have no hope of justice,” the young man continued, “because the courts are totally incompetent. The courts don’t realize how fast things are changing. They don’t understand we are already in a new world. They don’t get the new issues. And because they are technically illiterate, they don’t understand what procedures are done—or in this case, not done. Your cells were stolen and sold. Plain and simple. And the court decided that was just fine.”
Burnet gave a long sigh.
“But,” the man continued, “thieves can still get their comeuppance.”
“How’s that?”
“Because UCLA did nothing to change your cells, another company could take those same cells, make minor genetic modifications, and sell them as a new product.”
“But BioGen already has my cells.”
“True. But cell lines are fragile. Things happen to them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cultures are vulnerable to fungus, bacterial infection, contamination, mutation. All kinds of things can go wrong.”
“BioGen must take precautions…”
“Of course. But sometimes the precautions are inadequate,” the man said.
“Who are you?” Burnet said again. He was looking around, through the glass walls of the conference room, at the larger office outside. He saw people walking back and forth. He wondered where his daughter had gone.
“I’m nobody,” the young man said. “You never met me.”
“You have a business card?”
The man shook his head. “I’m not here, Mr. Burnet.”
Burnet frowned. “And my daughter—”
“Has no idea. Never met her. This is between us.”
“But you’re talking about illegal activity.”
“I’m not talking at all, because you and I have never met,” the man said. “But let’s consider how this might work.”
“Okay…”
“You can’t legally sell your cells at this point, because the court has ruled you no longer own them—BioGen does. But your cells could be obtained from other places. Over the course of your life, you’ve given blood many times in many places. You went to Vietnam forty years ago. The army took your blood. You had knee surgery twenty years ago in San Diego. The hospital took your blood, and kept your cartilage. You’ve consulted various doctors over the years. They ran blood tests. The labs kept the blood. So your blood can be found, no problem. And it can be acquired from publicly available databases—if, for example, another company wanted to use your cells.”
“And what about BioGen?”
The young man shrugged. “Biotechnology is a difficult business. Contaminations happen every day. If something goes wrong in their labs, that’s not your problem, is it?”
“But how could—”
“I have no idea. So many things can happen.”
There was a short silence. “And why should I do this?” Burnet said.
“You’ll get a hundred million dollars.”
“For what?”
“Punch biopsies of six organ systems.”
“I thought you could get my blood elsewhere.”
“In theory. If it came to litigation, that would be claimed. But, in practice, any company would want fresh cells.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“No problem. Think it over, Mr. Burnet.” The young man stood, pushed his glasses up his nose. “You may have been screwed. But there’s no reason to bend over for it.”
From Beaumont College Alumni News
STEM CELL DEBATE RAGES
Effective Treatments “Decades Away” Prof. McKeown Shocks Audience
By Max Thaler
Speaking to a packed audience in Beaumont Hall, famed biology professor Kevin McKeown shocked listeners by calling stem cell research “a cruel fraud.”
“What you have been told is nothing more than a myth,” he said, “intended to ensure funding for researchers, at the expense of false hopes for the seriously ill. So let’s get to the truth.”
Stem cells, he explained, are cells that have the ability to turn themselves into other kinds of cells. There are two kinds of stem cells. Adult stem cells are found throughout the body. They are found in muscle, brain, and liver tissue, and so on. Adult stem cells can generate new cells, but only of the tissue in which they are found. They are important because the human body replaces all its cells every seven years.
Research involving adult stem cells is for the most part not controversial. But there is another kind of stem cell, the embryonic stem cell, that is highly controversial. It is found in umbilical cord blood, or derived from young embryos. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can develop into any kind of tissue. But the research is controversial because it involves the use of human embryos, which many people feel, for religious and other reasons, have the rights of human beings. This is an old debate not likely to be resolved soon.
SCIENTISTS SEE A BAN ON RESEARCH
The current American administration has said that embryonic stem cells can be taken from existing research lines, but not from new embryos. Scientists regard existing lines as inadequate, and thus view the ruling a de facto ban on research. That’s why they are going to private centers to carry out their research, without federal grants.
But in the end, the real problem isn’t simply a lack of stem cells. It’s the fact that in order to produce therapeutic effects, scientists need each person to have his or her own pluripotent stem cells. This would allow us to regrow an organ, or to repair damage from injury or disease, or to undo paralysis. This represents the great dream. No one is able to perform these therapeutic miracles now. No one even has an inkling how it might be done. But it requires the cells.
Now, for newborns, you can collect umbilical cord blood and freeze it, and people are doing that with their newborns. But what about adults? Where will we get pluripotent stem cells?
That’s the big question.
TOWARD THE THERAPEUTIC DREAM
All we adults have left is adult stem cells, which can make only one kind of tissue. But what if there were a way to convert adult stem cells back into embryonic stem cells? Such a procedure would enable every adult to have a ready source of his or her own embryonic stem cells. That would make the therapeutic dream possible.
Well, it turns out that you can reverse adult stem cells, but only if you insert them into an egg. Something within the egg unwinds the differentiation and converts the adult stem cell back into an embryonic stem cell. This is good news, but it is vastly more difficult to do with human cells. And if the method could be made to work in human beings, it would require an enormous supply of human egg cells. That makes the procedure controversial again.
So scientists are looking for other ways to make adult cells pluripotent. It is a worldwide effort. A researcher in Shanghai has been injecting human stem cells into chicken eggs, with mixed results—while others cluck in disapproval. It’s not clear now whether such procedures will work.
It’s equally unclear whether the stem cell dream—transplants without rejection, spinal cord injuries repaired, and so on—will come true. Advocates have made dishonest claims, and media speculation has been fantastical for years. People with serious illnesses have been led to believe a cure is just around the corner. Sadly, this is not true. Working therapeutic approaches lie many years in the future, perhaps decades. Many thoughtful scientists have said, in private, that we won’t know whether stem cell therapy will work until 2050. They point out that it took forty years from the time Watson and Crick decoded the gene until human gene therapy began.
A SCANDAL SHOCKS THE WORLD
It was in the context of feverish hope and hype that Korean biochemist Hwang Woo-Suk announced in 2004 that he had successfully created a human embryonic stem cell from an adult cell by somatic nuclear transfer—injection into a human egg. Hwang was a famous workaholic, spending eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, in the lab. Hwang’s exciting report was published in March 2005 in Science magazine. Researchers from around the world flocked to Korea. Human stem cell treatment seemed suddenly on the verge of reality. Hwang was a hero in Korea, and appointed to head a new World Stem Cell Hub, financed by the Korean government.
But in November 2005, an American collaborator in Pittsburgh announced that he was ending his association with Hwang. And then one of Hwang’s co-workers revealed that Hwang had obtained eggs illegally, from women who worked in his lab.
By December 2005, Seoul National University announced that Hwang’s cell lines were a fabrication, as were his papers in Science. Science retracted the papers. Hwang now faces criminal charges. There the matter stands.
PERILS OF “MEDIA HYPE”
“What lessons can be drawn from this?” asked Professor McKeown. “First, in a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims. For years the media have touted stem cell research as the coming miracle. So when somebody announced that the miracle had arrived, he was believed. Does that imply there is a danger in media hype? You bet. Because not only does it raise cruel hopes among the ill, it affects scientists, too. They start to believe the miracle is around the corner—even though they should know better.
“What can we do about media hype? It would stop in a week, if scientific institutions wanted that. They don’t. They love the hype. They know it brings grants. So that won’t change. Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins promote hype just as much as Exxon or Ford. So do individual researchers at those institutions. And increasingly, researchers and universities are all commercially motivated, just like corporations. So whenever you hear a scientist claim that his statements have been exaggerated, or taken out of context, just ask him if he has written a letter of protest to the editor. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he hasn’t.
“Next lesson: Peer review. All of Hwang’s papers in Science were peer-reviewed. If we ever needed evidence that peer review is an empty ritual, this episode provides it. Hwang made extraordinary claims. He did not provide extraordinary evidence. Many studies have shown that peer review does not improve the quality of scientific papers. Scientists themselves know it doesn’t work. Yet the public still regards it as a sign of quality, and says, ‘This paper was peer-reviewed,’ or ‘This paper was not peer-reviewed,’ as if that meant something. It doesn’t.
“Next, the journals themselves. Where was the firm hand of the editor of Science? Remember that the journal Science is a big enterprise—115 people work on that magazine. Yet gross fraud, including photographs altered with Adobe Photoshop, were not detected. And Photoshop is widely known as a major tool of scientific fraud. Yet the magazine had no way to detect it.
“Not that Science is unique in being fooled. Fraudulent research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, where authors withheld critical information about Vioxx heart attacks; in the Lancet, where a report about drugs and oral cancer was entirely fabricated—in that one, 250 people in the patient database had the same birth date! That might have been a clue. Medical fraud is more than a scandal, it’s a public health threat. Yet it continues.”
THE COST OF FRAUD
“The cost of such fraud is enormous,” McKeown said, “estimated at thirty billion dollars annually, probably three times that. Fraud in science is not rare, and it’s not limited to fringe players. The most respected researchers and institutions have been caught with faked data. Even Francis Collins, the head of NIH’s Human Genome Project, was listed as co-author on five faked papers that had to be withdrawn.
“The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special—at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do—lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change.”
CH008
In the BioGen animal lab, Tom Weller was going down the line of cages with Josh Winkler, who was dispensing doses of gene-laced virus to the rats. It was their daily routine. Tom’s cell phone rang.
Josh gave him a look. Josh was his senior. Josh could take calls at work, but Tom couldn’t. Weller stripped off one rubber glove and pulled the phone from his pocket.
“Hello?”
“Tom.”
It was his mother. “Hi, Mom. I’m at work now.”
Josh gave him another look.
“Can I call you back?”
“Your dad had a car accident last night,” she said. “And…he died.”
“What?” He felt suddenly dizzy. Tom leaned against the rat cages, took a shallow breath. Now Josh was giving him a concerned look. “What happened?”
“His car hit an overpass around midnight,” his mother said. “They took him to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, but he died early this morning.”
“Oh God. Are you at home?” Tom said. “You want me to come over? Does Rachel know?”
“I just got off the phone.”
“Okay, I’ll come over,” he said.
“Tom, I hate to ask you this,” she said, “but…”
“You want me to tell Lisa?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to reach her.” Lisa was the black sheep of the family. The youngest child, just turned twenty. Lisa hadn’t talked to her mother in years. “Do you know where she is these days, Tom?”
“I think so,” he said. “She called a few weeks ago.”
“To ask for money?”
“No, just to give me her address. She’s in Torrance.”
“I can’t reach her,” his mother said.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Tell her the funeral is Thursday, if she wants to come.”
“I’ll tell her.”
He flipped the phone shut and turned to Josh. Josh was looking concerned and sympathetic. “What was it?”
“My father died.”
“I’m really sorry…”
“Car crash, last night. I need to go tell my sister.”
“You have to leave now?”
“I’ll stop by the office on my way out and send Sandy in.”
“Sandy can’t do this. He doesn’t know the routine—”
“Josh,” he said, “I have to go.”
Traffic was heavy on the 405. It took almost an hour before he found himself in front of a ratty apartment building on South Acre in Torrance, pushing the buzzer for apartment 38. The building stood close to the freeway; the roar of traffic was constant.
He knew Lisa worked nights, but it was now ten o’clock in the morning. She might be awake. Sure enough, the buzzer sounded, and he opened the door. The lobby smelled strongly of cat piss. The elevator didn’t work, so he took the stairs to the third floor, stepping around plastic sacks of garbage. A dog had broken one sack open, and the contents spilled down a couple of steps.
He stopped in front of apartment 38, pushed the doorbell. “Just a fucking minute,” his sister called. He waited. Eventually, she opened the door.
She was wearing a bathrobe. Her short black hair was pulled back. She looked upset. “The bitch called,” she said.
“Mom?”
“She woke me up, the bitch.” She turned, went back into the apartment. He followed her. “I thought you were the liquor delivery.”
The apartment was a mess. Lisa padded into the kitchen, and poked around the pans and dishes stacked in the sink, found a coffee cup. She rinsed it out. “You want coffee?”
He shook his head. “Shit, Lise,” he said. “This place is a pigsty.”
“I work nights, you know that.”
She had never cared about her surroundings. Even as a child, her room was always a mess. She just didn’t seem to notice. Now Tom looked through the greasy drapes of the kitchen window at the traffic crawling past on the 405. “So. How’s work going?”
“It’s House of Pancakes. How do you think it’s going? Same every fucking night.”
“What did Mom say?”
“She wanted to know if I was coming to the funeral.”
“What’d you say?”
“I told her to fuck off. Why should I go? He wasn’t my father.”
Tom sighed. This was a long-standing argument within the family. Lisa believed she was not John Weller’s daughter. “You don’t think so, either,” she said to Tom.
“Yeah, I do.”
“You just say whatever Mom wants you to say.” She fished out a cigarette butt from a heaping ashtray, and bent over the stove to light it from the burner. “Was he drunk when he crashed?”
“I don’t know.”
“I bet he was shitfaced. Or on those steroids he used, for his bodybuilding.”
Tom’s father had been a bodybuilder. He took it up later in life, and even competed in amateur contests. “Dad didn’t use steroids.”
“Oh sure, Tom. I used to look in his bathroom. He had needles.”
“Okay, so you didn’t like him.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “He wasn’t my father. I don’t care about any of it.”
“Mom always said that he was your father, that you were just saying it, because you didn’t like him.”
“Well, guess what? We can settle it, once and for all.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, a paternity test.”
“Lisa,” he said. “Don’t start this.”
“I’m not starting. I’m finishing.”
“Don’t. Promise me you won’t do this. Come on. Dad’s dead, Mom’s upset, promise me.”
“You are a chickenshit pussy, you know that?” That was when he saw she was near tears.
He put his arms around her, and she began to cry. He just held her, feeling her body shake. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
After her brother had gone, she heated a cup of coffee in the microwave, then sat down at the kitchenette table by the phone. She dialed Information. She got the number for the hospital. A moment later, she heard the receptionist say, “Long Beach Memorial.”
“I want to talk to the morgue,” she said.
“I’m sorry. The morgue is at the County Coroner’s Office. Would you like that number?”
“Someone in my family just died at your hospital. Where would his body be now?”
“One moment please, I will connect you to pathology.”
Four days later, her mother called back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, going down to the hospital and asking for blood from your father.”
“He’s not my father.”
“Lisa. Don’t you ever get tired of this game?”
“No, and he’s not my father, because the genetic tests came back negative. It says right here”—she reached for the printed sheet—“that there is less than one chance in 2.9 million that John J. Weller is my father.”
“What genetic test?”
“I had a genetic test done.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“No, Mom. You’re the one who’s full of shit. John Weller’s not my father, and the test proves it. I always knew it.”
“We’ll see about that,” her mother said, and hung up.
About half an hour after that, her brother, Tom, called. “Hey, Lise.” Real casual, laid-back.
“Just got a call from Mom.”
“Yeah?”
“She said something about a test?”
“Yeah. I did a test, Tommy. And guess what?”
“I heard. Who did this test, Lise?”
“A lab here in Long Beach.”
“What’s it called?”
“BioRad Testing.”
“Uh-huh,” her brother said. “You know, these labs that advertise on the Internet aren’t very reliable. You know that, don’t you?”
“They guaranteed it.”
“Mom’s all upset.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“You know she’ll do her own test now? And there’s going to be lawsuits? Because you’re accusing her of infidelity.”
“Gee, Tommy, I don’t really give a damn. You know that?”
“Lise, I think this is causing a lot of needless trouble around Dad’s death.”
“Your dad,” she said. “Not mine.”
CH009
Kevin McCormick, chief administrator of Long Beach Memorial, looked up at the chubby figure coming into his office, and said, “How the hell did this happen?” He pushed a sheaf of papers across his desk.
Marty Roberts, the chief of pathology, glanced quickly through the document. “I have no idea,” he said.
“The wife of the deceased, Mr. John J. Weller, is suing us for unauthorized release of tissue to the daughter.”
“What’s the legal situation?” Marty Roberts said.
“Unclear,” McCormick said. “Legal says the daughter is a family member and has a clear right to be given tissues to test for diseases that may affect her. Problem is, she did a paternity test and it came back negative. So she’s not his daughter. Arguably that makes our release of tissues unauthorized.”
“We couldn’t have known that at the time—”
“Of course not. But we’re talking about the law. The only important question is, can the family sue? The answer is yes, they have grounds to bring a suit, and they are.”
“Where’s the body now?” Marty said.
“Buried. Eight days ago.”
“I see.” Marty flipped through the pages. “And they are asking for…”
“Besides unspecified damages, they’re asking for blood and tissue samples to conduct further testing,” McCormick said. “Do we have blood or tissue samples from the deceased?”
“I’d have to check,” Marty said. “But I’d presume that we do, yes.”
“We do?”
“Sure. We keep a lot of tissue these days, Kevin. I mean, everybody that comes into the hospital, we collect as much as we possibly can legally…”
“That’s the wrong answer,” McCormick said, glowering.
“Okay. What’s the right answer?”
“That we don’t have any tissues from this guy.”
“But they’ll know that we do. At the very least, we did a tox screen on the guy because of the accident, so we have his blood—”
“That sample was lost.”
“Okay. It was lost. But what good does that do? They can always dig up the body and get all the tissues they want.”
“Correct.”
“So?”
“So let them do that. That’s Legal’s advice. Exhumation takes time, permits, and money. We’re guessing they won’t have the time or the money—and this thing will go away.”
“Okay,” Marty said. “And I am here because?”
“Because I need you to go back to pathology and confirm for me that, unfortunately, we have no more samples from the deceased, and that everything not given to the daughter has been lost or misplaced.”
“Got it.”
“Call me within the hour,” McCormick said, and turned away.
Marty Roberts entered the basement pathology lab. His diener, Raza Rashad, a handsome, dark-eyed man of twenty-seven, was scrubbing the stainless steel tables for the next post. If truth be told, Raza really ran the path lab. Marty felt himself burdened by a heavy administrative load, managing the senior pathologists, the residents, the medical student rotations, and all the rest. He’d come to rely on Raza, who was highly intelligent and ambitious.
“Hey, Raza. You remember that forty-six-year-old white guy with crush injuries, a week back? Drove himself into an overpass?”
“Yeah. I remember. Heller, or Weller.”
“The daughter asked for blood?”
“Yeah. We gave her blood.”
“Well, she ran a paternity test, and it came back negative. Guy was not her father.”
Raza stared blankly. “That right?”
“Yeah. Now the mother’s all upset. Wants more tissues. What’ve we got?”
“I’d have to check. Probably the usual. All major organs.”
Marty said, “Any chance that material got misplaced? So we couldn’t find it?”
Raza nodded slowly, staring at Marty. “Maybe so. Always possible it could be mislabeled. Then it would be hard to find.”
“Might take months?”
“Or years. Maybe never.”
“That’d be a shame,” Marty said. “Now, what about the blood from the tox screen?”
Raza frowned. “Lab keeps that. We wouldn’t have access to their storage facility.”
“So they still have that blood sample?”
“Yeah. They do.”
“And we have no access?”
Raza smiled. “It might take me a couple of days.”
“Okay. Do it.”
Marty Roberts went to the phone and dialed the administrator’s office. When McCormick came on the line, he said, “I have some bad news, Kevin. Unfortunately, all the tissues have been lost or misplaced.”
“Sorry to hear that,” McCormick said, and hung up.
“Marty,” Raza said, coming into the office, “is there a problem with this Weller guy?”
“No,” Marty said. “Not anymore. And I told you before—don’t call me Marty. My name is Dr. Roberts.”
CH010
At the Radial Genomics lab in La Jolla, Charlie Huggins twisted his flat-panel screen around to show Henry Kendall the headline: TALKING APE CLAIMED FRAUD. “What’d I tell you?” Charlie said. “A week later, and we learn the story’s a fake.”
“Okay, okay. I was wrong,” Henry said. “I admit it, I was worried about nothing.”
“Very worried…”
“It’s in the past. Can we talk about something important?”
“What’s that?”
“The novelty-seeking gene. Our grant application was denied.” He began typing at the keyboard. “Once again, we’ve been screwed—by your personal favorite, the Pope of Dopamine, Dr. Robert A. Bellarmino of the NIH.”
For the last ten years, brain studies had increasingly focused on a neurochemical called dopamine. Levels of dopamine seemed to be important in maintaining health as well as in diseases such as Parkinsonism and schizophrenia. From work in Charlie Huggins’s lab, it appeared that dopamine receptors in the brain were controlled by the gene D4DR, among others. Charlie’s lab stood at the forefront of this research, until a rival scientist named Robert Bellarmino from the National Institutes of Health began referring to D4DR as the “novelty gene,” the gene that supposedly controlled the urge to take risks, seek new sex partners, or engage in thrill-seeking behavior.
As Bellarmino explained it, the fact that dopamine levels were higher in men than women was the reason for the greater recklessness of men, and their attraction to everything from mountain climbing to infidelity.
Bellarmino was an evangelical Christian and a leading researcher at the NIH. Politically skilled, he was the very model of an up-to-date scientist, neatly blending a modest scientific talent with true media savvy. His laboratory was the first to hire its own publicity firm, and as a result, his ideas invariably got plenty of press coverage. (Which in turn attracted the brightest and most ambitious postdocs, who did brilliant work for him, thus adding to his prestige.)
In the case of D4DR, Bellarmino was able to tailor his comments to the beliefs of his audience, either speaking enthusiastically about the new gene to progressive groups, or disparaging it to conservatives. He was colorful, future-oriented, and uninhibited in his predictions. He went so far as to suggest that there might one day be a vaccine to prevent infidelity.
The absurdity of such comments so annoyed Charlie and Henry that six months before, they had applied for a grant to test the prevalence of the “novelty gene.”
Their proposal was simplicity itself. They would send research teams to amusement parks to draw blood samples from individuals who rode roller coasters time and again during the day. In theory these “repeat coasters” would be more likely to carry the gene.
The only problem with applying to the NSF was that their proposal would be read by anonymous reviewers. And one of the reviewers was likely to be Robert Bellarmino. And Bellarmino had a reputation for what was politely termed “appropriation.”
“Anyway,” Henry said, “the NSF turned us down. The reviewers didn’t think our idea was worthy. One said it was too ‘jokey.’”
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said. “What does this have to do with Robbin’ Rob?”
“Remember where we proposed to conduct our study?”
“Of course,” Charlie said. “At two of the biggest amusement parks in the world, in two different countries. Sandusky in the U.S., and Blackpool in England.”
“Well, guess who’s out of town?” Henry said.
He hit his e-mail button.
From: Rob Bellarmino, NIH
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: Travel
I will be out of the office for the next two weeks. If you need immediate assistance please contact my office by phone…
“I called his office, and guess what? Bellarmino is going to Sandusky, Ohio—and then to Blackpool, England.”
“That bastard,” Charlie said. “If you’re going to steal somebody else’s research proposal, you should at least have the courtesy to change it a little.”
“Bellarmino obviously doesn’t care if we know he stole it,” Henry said. “Doesn’t that piss you off? What do you say we go for it? Put him up for ethical violations?”
“I’d like nothing better,” Charlie said, “but, no. If we formally charge misconduct, it means a lot of time and a lot of paperwork. Our grants could dry up. And in the end, the complaint goes nowhere. Rob’s a major player at NIH. He’s got huge research facilities and he dispenses millions in grants. He holds prayer breakfasts with congressmen. He’s a scientist who believes in God. They love him on the Hill. He’d never be charged with misconduct. Even if we caught him buggering a lab assistant, he wouldn’t be charged.”
“So we just let him do it?”
“It’s not a perfect world,” Charlie said. “We have plenty to do. Walk away.”
CH011
Barry Sindler was bored. The woman before him yammered on. She was an obvious type—the rich-bitch Eastern broad who wore pants, Katharine Hepburn with an attitude, a trust fund, a nasal Newport accent. But despite her aristocratic airs, the best she could manage was to hump the tennis pro, just like every L.A. fake-tit dimwit in this town.
But she was perfectly suited to the dumb-ass attorney by her side—that Ivy League jackoff Bob Wilson, wearing a pinstripe suit and a button-down shirt with a rep tie and those stupid lace-up wingtips with the little perforations in the toes. No wonder everyone called him Whitey Wilson. Wilson never tired of reminding everyone he was a Harvard-trained lawyer—as if anybody gave a shit. Certainly Barry Sindler didn’t. Because he knew Wilson was a gentleman. Which really meant he was chickenshit. He wouldn’t go for the throat.
And Sindler always went for the throat.
The woman, Karen Diehl, was still talking. Jesus, these rich bitches could talk. Sindler didn’t interrupt her because he didn’t want Whitey to state on the record that Sindler was badgering the woman. Wilson had said that four times already. So, fine. Let the bitch talk. Let her tell in full, exhausting, incredibly stupefyingly boring detail why her husband was a lousy father and a total shit heel. Because the truth was, she was the one who’d had the affair.
Not that that could ever come out in court. California had no-fault divorce, which meant there were no specific grounds for divorce, just “irreconcilable differences.” But a woman’s infidelity always colored the proceedings. Because in skilled hands—Barry’s hands—that fact could easily be turned into the insinuation that this woman had more important priorities than her darling children. She was a neglectful parent, an unreliable custodian, a selfish woman who sought her own pleasure while she left the kids all day with the Spanish-speaking maid.
And she was good-looking at twenty-eight, he thought. That worked against her, too. Indeed, Barry Sindler could see his central theme shaping up quite nicely. And Whitey Wilson looked a bit anxious. He probably knew where Sindler would take this.
Or maybe Whitey was troubled by the fact that Sindler was attending the depo at all. Because ordinarily Barry Sindler didn’t conduct spousal depos. He left those to the jerkoff peons in his office, while he spent his days downtown, racking up expensive courtroom hours.
Finally, the woman stopped to catch her breath. Sindler moved in. “Mrs. Diehl, I would like to hold this line of questioning and go on to another issue. We are formally requesting that you undergo a full battery of genetic tests at a reputable facility, preferably UCLA, and—”
The woman sat bolt upright. Her face colored swiftly. “No!”
“Let’s not be hasty,” Whitey said, putting his hand on his client’s arm. She angrily pushed him away.
“No! Absolutely not! I refuse!”
How wonderful. How unexpected and wonderful.
“In anticipation of your possible refusal,” Sindler continued, “we have drafted a request that the court order these tests”—he passed a document to Whitey—“and we fully expect the judge to agree.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Whitey said, thumbing through the pages. “Genetic testing in a custody case…”
By now Mrs. Diehl was full-bore hysterical. “No! No! I will not! It’s his idea, isn’t it? That prick! How dare he! That sneaking son of a bitch!”
Whitey was looking at his client with a puzzled expression. “Mrs. Diehl,” he said, “I think it’s best if we discuss this in private—”
“No! No discussion! No test! That’s it! No!”
“In that case,” Sindler said, with a little shrug, “we have no choice but to go to the judge…”
“Fuck you! Fuck him! Fuck all of you! No fucking test!”
And she stood up, grabbed her purse, and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
There was a moment of silence. Sindler said, “Let the record show that at three forty-five p.m. the witness left the room, thus ending the deposition.”
He began to put his papers into his briefcase.
Whitey Wilson said, “I’ve never heard of this, Barry. What’s genetic testing got to do with child custody?”
“That’s what the tests are intended to find out,” Sindler said. “This is a new procedure, but I think you’ll find it’s the coming thing.” He snapped his briefcase shut, shook Whitey’s limp hand, and left the office.
CH012
Josh Winkler closed the door to his office and started toward the cafeteria when his phone rang. It was his mother. She was being pleasant, always a danger sign. “Josh, dear, I want you to tell me, what have you done to your brother?”
“What do you mean, done to him? I haven’t done anything. I haven’t seen him in two weeks, since I picked him up from jail.”
“Adam had his arraignment today,” she said. “And Charles was there, representing him.”
“Uh-huh…” Waiting for the other shoe to drop. “And?”
“Adam came to court on time, in a clean shirt and tie, clean suit, hair cut, even his shoes polished. He pleaded guilty, asked to be put in a drug program, said he had not used in two weeks, said he had gotten a job—”
“What?”
“Yes, he’s got a job, apparently as a limo driver for his old company. Been working there steadily for the last two weeks. Charles says he’s gained weight—”
“I don’t believe this,” Josh said.
“I know,” she said. “Charles didn’t either, but he swears it’s all true. Adam’s like a new man. He’s acquired a newfound maturity. It’s like he suddenly grew up. It’s a miracle, don’t you think? Joshua? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” he said, after a pause.
“Isn’t it a miracle?”
“Yes, Mom. A miracle.”
“I called Adam. He has a cell phone now, and he answered right away. And he says you did something to help him. What did you do?”
“Nothing, Mom. We just had a talk.”
“He said you gave him some genetic thing. An inhaler.”
Oh Jesus, he thought. There are rules against this kind of thing. Serious rules. Human experimentation without formal application, meetings of the approvals board, following the federal guidelines. Josh would be fired in an instant. “No, Mom, I think he must be misremembering. He was pretty whacked out at the time.”
“He said there was a spray.”
“No, Mom.”
“He inhaled some mouse spray.”
“No, Mom.”
“He said he did.”
“No, Mom.”
“Well, don’t be so defensive,” she said. “I thought you would be pleased. I mean, you’re always looking for new drugs, Joshua. Big commercial applications. I mean, what if this spray gets people off drugs? What if it breaks their addiction?”
Joshua was shaking his head. “Mom, really, nothing happened.”
“Okay, fine, you don’t want to tell me the truth, I get it. Was it something experimental? Is that what your spray is?”
“Mom—”
“Because the thing is, Josh, I told Lois Graham about it because her Eric dropped out of USC. He’s on crack or smack or—”
“Mom—”
“And she wants to try this spray on him.”
Oh Jesus. “Mom, you can’t talk about this.”
“And Helen Stern, her daughter is on sleeping pills; she crashed her car; they’re talking about putting her baby in foster care. And Helen wants—”
“Mom, please! You can’t talk about it anymore!”
“Are you crazy? I have to talk about it,” she said. “You gave me my son back. It’s a miracle. Don’t you realize, Joshua? You have performed a miracle. The whole world is going to talk about what you have done—whether you like it or not.”
He was beginning to sweat, to feel dizzy, but suddenly his vision became clear and calm. The whole world is going to talk about it.
Of course, that was true. If you could get people off drugs? It would be the most valuable pharmaceutical in the last decade. Everybody would want it. And what if it did more? Could it cure obsessive-compulsive disorders? Could it cure attention-deficit disorders? The maturity gene had behavioral effects. They already knew that. Adam sniffing that aerosol was a gift from God.
And his next thought was: What’s the state of the patent application on ACMPD3N7?
He decided to skip lunch and head back to the office.
“Mom?”
“Yes, Josh.”
“I need your help.”
“Of course, dear. Anything.”
“I need you to do something for me and not to talk about it to anyone, ever.”
“Well, that’s difficult—”
“Yes or no, Mom.”
“Well, all right, dear.”
“You said that Lois Graham’s son is on smack, and dropped out of college?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he now?”
“Apparently,” she said, “he’s downtown in some godawful flophouse off campus—”
“Do you know where?”
“No, but Lois went to see him. She told me it was squalid. It’s on East Thirty-eighth, some old frame house with faded blue shutters. Eight or nine addicts are there sleeping on the floor, but I can call Lois and ask her—”
“No,” he said quickly. “Don’t do anything, Mom.”
“But you said you needed my help—”
“That’s for later, Mom. For now, everything is fine. I’ll call you in a day or so.”
He scribbled on a pad:
Eric Graham
E 38th Street
Frame hse blue shutters
He reached for his car keys.
Rachel Allen, who worked in the dispensary, said, “You still haven’t signed back in one oxygen canister from two weeks ago, Josh. Or the virus vial that was with it.” The company measured remaining virus in returned vials, as a way of keeping a rough track of dosages to the rats.
“Yes,” he said, “I know, uh, I keep forgetting.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my car.”
“In your car? Josh, that’s a contagious retrovirus.”
“Yeah, for mice.”
“Even so. It must remain in a negative-pressure laboratory environment at all times.” Rachel was a stickler for the rules. Nobody really paid attention to her.
“I know, Rach,” he said, “but I had a family emergency. I had to get my brother”—he dropped his voice—“out of jail.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
He hesitated. “Armed robbery.”
“Really.”
“Liquor store. Mom is crushed. Anyway, I’ll bring the canister back to you. Meanwhile, can I have one more?”
“We only sign out one at a time.”
“I need one more now. Please? I’m under a lot of pressure.”
Light rain was falling. The streets were slick with oil and shimmered in rainbow patterns. Beneath low, angry clouds, he drove down East Thirty-eighth Street. It was an old section of town, bypassed by modern rebuilding farther north. Here houses built in the 1920s and 1930s were still standing. Josh drove past several wood-frame houses, in various states of disrepair. One had a blue door. None had blue shutters.
He ended up in the warehouse district, the street lined with loading docks. He turned around and headed back. He drove as slowly as he could, and finally he saw the house. It was not actually on Thirty-eighth but on the corner of Thirty-eighth and Alameda, tucked back behind high weeds and ratty bushes. An old mattress streaked with rust lay on the sidewalk in front of the house. There was a truck tire on the front lawn. A battered VW bus was pulled up to the curb.
Josh parked across the street. He watched the house. And waited.
CH013
The coffin rose into sunlight. It looked the same as it had when buried a week earlier, except for the clumps of dirt that dropped from the underside.
“This is all so undignified,” Emily Weller said. She stood stiffly at the graveside, accompanied by her son, Tom, and her daughter Rachel. Of course, Lisa was not there. She was the cause of all this, but she could not be bothered to see what she had done to her poor father.
The coffin swung slowly in the air as the graveside workers guided it to the far side of the pit under the direction of the hospital pathologist, a nervous little man named Marty Roberts. He should be nervous, Emily thought, if he was the one who had given the blood to Lisa without anybody’s permission.
“What happens now?” Emily said, turning to her son. Tom was twenty-six, dressed in a sharp suit and tie. He had a master’s degree in microbiology and worked for a big biotech company in Los Angeles. Tom had turned out good, as had her daughter Rachel. Rachel was a senior at USC, studying business administration. “Will they take Jack’s blood here?”
“Oh, they’ll take more than blood,” Tom said.
Emily said, “What do you mean?”
“You see,” Tom said, “for a genetic test like this, where there is a dispute, they ordinarily take tissues from several organ systems.”
“I didn’t realize,” Emily said, frowning. She felt her heart pounding, thumping in her chest. She hated that feeling. Soon there was a squeezing feeling in her throat. It was painful. She bit her lip.
“You all right, Mom?”
“I should have taken my anxiety pills.”
Rachel said, “Will this take long?”
“No,” Tom said, “it should be only a few minutes. The pathologist will open the casket, to confirm the identity of the body. Then he’ll take it back to the hospital to remove the tissues for genetic analysis. He’ll return the body for reburial tomorrow or the next day.”
“Tomorrow or the next day?” Emily said. She sniffled, wiped her eyes. “You mean we have to come back here? We have to bury Jack again? This is all so…so…”
“I know, Mom.” He patted her arm. “I’m sorry. But there is no other way. You see, they have to check for something called a chimera—”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said, waving her hand. “I won’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, Mom.” He put his arm around her shoulder.
In ancient mythology, chimeras were monsters composed of different animal parts. The original Chimera had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. Some chimeras were part human, like the Egyptian Sphinx, with the body of a lion, the wings of a bird, and the head of a woman.
But true human chimeras—meaning people with two sets of DNA—had been discovered only recently. A woman needing a kidney transplant had tested her own children as possible donors, only to discover that they did not share her DNA. She was told the children weren’t hers, and was asked to prove she had actually given birth to them. A lawsuit ensued. After considerable study, doctors realized that her body contained two different strands of DNA. In her ovaries, they found eggs with two kinds of DNA. The skin cells of her abdomen had her children’s DNA. The skin of her shoulders did not. She was a mosaic. In every organ of her body.
It turned out that the woman had originally been one of a pair of fraternal twins, but early in development, her sister’s embryo had fused with hers. So she was now literally herself and her own twin.
More than fifty chimeras had since been reported. Scientists now suspected that chimerism was not as rare as they had once thought. Certainly, whenever there was a difficult question of paternity, chimerism had to be considered. It was possible that Lisa’s father might be a chimera. But to determine that, they would need tissues from every organ of his body, and preferably from several different places on each organ.
That was why Dr. Roberts was required to take so many tissue samples, and why it would have to be done at the hospital, not at the grave site.
Dr. Roberts raised the lid and turned to the family on the opposite side of the grave. “Would one of you make the identification, please?”
“I will,” Tom said. He walked around the grave and looked into the coffin. His father appeared surprisingly unchanged, except the skin was much grayer, a dark gray now, and the limbs seemed to have shrunk, to have lost mass, especially the legs inside the trousers.
In a formal voice, the pathologist said, “Is this your father, John J. Weller?”
“Yes. He is, yes.”
“All right. Thank you.”
Tom said, “Dr. Roberts, I know you have your procedures, but…if there is any way you can take the tissues here…so my mother doesn’t have to go through another day and another burial…”
“I’m sorry,” Marty Roberts said. “My actions are governed by state law. We’re required to take the body to the hospital for examination.”
“If you could…just this once…bend…”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could.”
Tom nodded and walked back to his mother and sister.
His mother said, “What was all that about?”
“Just asking a question.”
Tom looked back and saw that Dr. Roberts was now bent over, his body half inside the casket. Abruptly the pathologist rose up. He walked over to speak in Tom’s ear, so no one else could hear. “Mr. Weller, perhaps we should spare your family’s feelings. If we can keep this between us…”
“Of course. Then you’ll…?”
“Yes, we’ll do everything here. It should take only a few moments. Let me get my kit.” He hurried off to a nearby SUV.
Emily bit her lip. “What’s he doing?”
“I asked him to do all the tests here, Mom.”
“And he said yes? Thank you, dear,” she said, and kissed her son. “Will he do all the tests that he would do at the hospital?”
“No, but it should be enough to answer your questions.”
Twenty minutes later, the tissue samples had been taken and placed in a series of glass tubes. The tubes were placed in slots in a metal refrigeration case. The casket was returned to the grave, disappearing into shadow.
“Come on,” Emily Weller said to her children, “let’s get out of here. I need a damn drink.”
As they drove away, she said to Tom, “I’m sorry you had to do that. Was Jack’s poor body very decayed, dear?”
“No,” Tom said. “Not much, no.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Emily said. “That’s very good.”
CH014
Marty Roberts was sweating by the time he got back to Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Because of what he had done at the cemetery, he could lose his license, no problem. One of those gravediggers could pick up the phone and call the county. The county could wonder why Marty had broken protocol, especially with a lawsuit pending. When you take tissues in the field, you risk contamination. Everybody knew that. So the county might start wondering why Marty Roberts would risk that. And before long, they might be wondering…
Shit. Shit, shit, shit!
He pulled into the emergency parking, next to the ambulances, and hurried down the basement hallway to Pathology. It was lunchtime; almost nobody was there. The rows of stainless steel tables stood empty.
Raza was washing up.
“You dumb fuck,” Marty said, “are you trying to get us both in jail?”
Raza turned slowly. “What is the problem?” he said quietly.
“The problem,” Marty said, “is that I told you, take the bones only on the cremations. Not the burials. The cremations. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”
“Yeah, well. That’s what I do,” Raza said.
“No, that’s not what you do. Because I just came from an exhumation, and you know what I saw when I dug the guy up? Very fucking skinny legs, Raza. Very skinny arms. In a burial.”
“No,” Raza said, “that’s not what I do.”
“Well, somebody took the bones.”
Raza headed to the office. “What’s the name of this guy?”
“Weller.”
“What, that guy again? He’s the guy we lost the tissues for, right?”
“Right. So the family exhumed him. Because he was buried.”
Raza leaned over the desk, keyed in the patient name. He stared at the screen. “Oh yeah. You’re right. It was a burial. But I didn’t do that one.”
Marty said, “You didn’t do that one? Who the fuck did?”
Raza shrugged. “My brother came in, that’s all. I had an appointment that night.”
“Your brother? What brother? Nobody else is supposed to be—”
“Don’t sweat it, Marty,” Raza said. “My brother comes in from time to time. He knows what to do. He works at Hilldale Mortuary.”
Marty wiped sweat from his forehead. “Jesus. How long has this been going on?”
“Maybe a year.”
“A year!”
“Only at night, Marty. Late night only. He wears my lab coat, looks like me…We look the same.”
“Wait a minute,” Marty said. “Who gave that girl the blood sample? That girl Lisa Weller.”
“Okay,” Raza said. “So sometimes he makes mistakes.”
“And sometimes he works afternoons?”
“Only Sundays, Marty. If I have appointments, is all.”
Marty gripped the edge of the desk to steady himself. He leaned over and breathed deeply. “Some fucking guy who doesn’t even work for the hospital gave unauthorized blood to a woman because she asked for it? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not some fucking guy. My brother.”
“Jesus.”
“He said she was cute.”
“That explains everything.”
“Come on, Marty,” Raza said, in a soothing tone. “I’m sorry about the Weller guy, I really am, but anybody could have made the switch. Fucking cemetery could have dug him up and taken the long bones. Gravediggers working as independent contractors could have done it. You know it happens all over. They got those guys in Phoenix. And the ones in Minnesota. And now Brooklyn.”
“And they’re all in jail now, Raza.”
“Okay,” Raza said. “That’s true. The thing is, I told my brother to do it.”
“You did…”
“Yeah. That particular night, the Weller body came in, we had a stat call for bone, and the Weller guy typed right. So do we fill the order or what? Because you know those bone guys can take their business elsewhere. To them, now means now. Supply or die.”
Marty sighed. “Yeah, when they call stat, you should fill it.”
“Okay, then.”
Marty slid into the chair and began typing at the keyboard himself. “However,” he said, “if you extracted those long bones eight days ago, I don’t see any payment transfer to me.”
“Don’t worry. It’s coming.”
“The check is in the mail?”
“Hey, I forgot. You’ll get your taste.”
“Make sure of it,” Marty said. He turned to go. “And keep your fucking brother out of the hospital from now on. You understand me?”
“Sure, Marty. Sure.”
Marty Roberts went outside to move his car from the emergency space. He backed out and drove to the Doctors Only section of the parking garage. Then he sat in his car for a long time. Thinking about Raza.
You’ll get your taste.
It seemed that Raza was starting to believe that this was his program, and that Marty Roberts worked for him. Raza was handing out the payments. Raza was deciding who should come in to help. Raza was not behaving like an employee; he was starting to behave like he was in charge, and that was dangerous for all sorts of reasons.
Marty had to do something about it.
And he had to do it soon.
Or losing his medical license would be the least of his problems.
CH015
At sunset, the titanium cube that housed BioGen Research shimmered with a blinding red glare, and bathed the adjacent parking lot in a dark orange color. As president Rick Diehl stepped out of the building, he paused to put on his sunglasses, then walked toward his brand-new silver Porsche Carrera SC. He loved this car, which he had bought the week before in celebration of his impending divorce—
“Fuck!”
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
His parking spot was empty. The car was gone.
That bitch!
He didn’t know how she had done it, but he was sure she had taken his car. Probably got her boyfriend to arrange it. After all, the new boyfriend was a car dealer. Moving up from a tennis pro. Bitch!
He stomped back inside. Bradley Gordon, his chief of security, stood in the lobby’s waiting area, leaning over the counter, talking to Lisa, the receptionist. Lisa was cute. That was why Rick had hired her.
“Goddamn it, Brad,” Rick Diehl said. “We need to review security tapes of the parking lot.”
Brad turned. “Why? What is it?”
“Somebody stole my Porsche.”
“No shit,” Brad said. “When did that happen?”
And Rick thought, Wrong guy for this job. It wasn’t the first time he had thought it.
“Let’s check the security tapes, Brad.”
“Yeah, sure, of course,” Brad said. He winked at Lisa, and then headed back through the keycard-swipe door, into a secure area. Rick followed, fuming.
At one of the two desks in the little glass-walled security office, a kid was minutely examining the palm of his left hand. He ignored the bank of monitors before him.
“Jason,” Brad said, in a warning tone, “Mr. Diehl is here.”
“Oh shit.” The kid snapped upright in the chair. “Sorry. Got a rash. I didn’t know if—”
“Mr. Diehl wants to review the security cameras. Which cameras are they exactly, Mr. Diehl?”
Oh Jesus. Rick said, “The parking lot cameras.”
“The parking lot, right. Jason, let’s start forty-eight hours back, and—”
“I drove the car to work this morning,” Diehl said.
“Right, what time was that?”
“I got here at seven.”
“Right. Jason, let’s go back to seven this morning.”
The kid shifted in his chair. “Uh, Mr. Gordon, the parking lot cameras are out.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Brad turned to Rick. “The parking lot cameras are out.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. We think there’s a cable problem.”
“How long have they been out?”
“Well—”
“Two months,” the kid said.
“Two months!”
Brad said, “We had to order parts.”
“What parts?”
“From Germany.”
“What parts?”
“I’d have to look it up.”
The kid said, “We can still use the roof cameras.”
“Well, then show me the roof cameras,” Diehl said.
“Right. Jason, bring up the roof cameras.”
It took them fifteen minutes to rewind the digital storage and begin to run it forward. Rick watched his Porsche pull in. He watched himself get out and enter the building. What happened next surprised him. Within two minutes, another car pulled up, two men jumped out, broke into his car quickly, and drove it away.
“They were waiting for you,” Brad said. “Or following you.”
“Looks like it,” Rick said. “Call the police, report it, and tell Lisa I want her to drive me home.”
Brad blinked at that.
The problem, Rick reflected, as Lisa drove him home, was that Brad Gordon was an idiot, but Rick couldn’t fire him. Brad Gordon, surf bum, ski bum, travel bum, recovering alky and college dropout, was the nephew of Jack Watson, a principal investor in BioGen. Jack Watson had always looked after Brad, had always seen that he had a job. And Brad invariably got into trouble. It was even rumored that Brad had been fucking the wife of the vice president of GeneSystems up in Palo Alto—for which he was duly fired—but not without a big stink from his uncle, who saw no reason why Brad should be let go. “It’s the vice president’s own fault,” Watson famously said.
But now: No security cameras in the parking lot. For two months. It made Rick wonder what else was wrong with security at BioGen.
He glanced over at Lisa, who drove serenely. Rick had hired her to be the receptionist soon after he discovered his wife’s affair. Lisa had a beautiful profile; she could have been a model. Whoever had refined her nose and chin was a genius. And she had a lovely body, with a narrow waist and perfectly enhanced breasts. She was twenty, on her summer break from Crestview State, and she radiated healthy, all-American sexiness. Everyone in the company had the hots for her.
So it was surprising that whenever they made love, Lisa just lay there. After a few minutes she seemed to notice his frustration and would begin to move mechanically, and make little panting sounds, as if she had been told that was what people did in bed. Sometimes, when Rick was worried and preoccupied, she would talk to him, “Oh baby, yes, baby, do it, baby,” as if that was supposed to move things along. But it was only too obvious that she was unmoved.
Rick had done a little research and discovered a syndrome called anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Anhedonics exhibited a flat affect, which certainly described Lisa in bed. Interestingly, anhedonia appeared to have a genetic component. It seemed to involve the limbic system of the brain. So there might be a gene for the condition. Rick intended to do a full panel on Lisa one of these days. Just to check.
Meanwhile, the nights he spent with her might have made him insecure, if it were not for Greta, the Austrian postdoc in the microbiology lab. Greta was chunky and had glasses and short, mannish hair, but she fucked like a mink, leaving them both gasping for breath and covered in sweat. Greta was a screamer and a writher and a howler. He felt great afterward.
The car pulled up at his new condo. Rick checked for his keys in his pocket. Lisa said matter-of-factly, “You want me to come up?”
She had beautiful blue eyes, with long lashes. Beautiful lush lips.
He thought, what the hell. “Sure,” he said. “Come on up.”
He called his lawyer, Barry Sindler, to report that his wife had stolen his car.
“You think so?” Sindler said. He sounded doubtful.
“Yeah, I do. She hired some guys. I have it on security tape.”
“You have her on tape?”
“No, the guys. But she’s behind it.”
“I’m not so sure,” Sindler said. “Usually women trash a husband’s car, not steal it.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Okay, I’ll check into it. But right now, there are a few things I want to go over with you. About the litigation.”
Across the room, Lisa was stepping out of her clothes. She folded each item of clothing and placed it on the back of the chair. She was wearing a pink bra and pink briefs that skimmed her pubic bone. No lace, just stretchy fabric that molded smoothly to her smooth body. She reached behind her back to release the bra.
“I’ll have to call you back,” Rick said.
BLONDES BECOMING EXTINCT
Endangered Species To “Die Out in 200 Years”
According to the BBC, “a study by experts in Germany suggests people with blonde hair are an endangered species and will become extinct by 2202.” Researchers predicted that the last truly natural blonde would be born in Finland, a country that boasts the highest proportion of blondes. But the scientists say too few people now carry the gene for blondes to last much longer. The researchers hinted that so-called bottle blondes “may be to blame for the demise of their natural rivals.”
Not every scientist agrees with the prediction of impending extinction. But a study by the World Health Organization does indicate that natural blondes are likely to become extinct within the next two centuries.
More recently, the probability of extinction was reviewed by The Times of London, in light of new data about the evolution of the MC1R gene for blondeness.
CH016
The jungle was completely silent. Not a buzzing cicada, not a hornbill cry, nor a distant chattering monkey. Utterly silent—and no wonder, Hagar thought. He shook his head as he looked at the ten camera crews from around the world now clustered in little groups on the jungle floor, protecting their lenses from the dripping moisture as they peered upward into the trees overhead. He had told them to be silent, and indeed nobody was actually talking. The French crew smoked cigarettes. Although the German crew maintained silence, the cameraman kept snapping his fingers imperiously as he gestured to his assistant to do this and that. The Japanese crew from NHK was quiet, but beside them, the CNN crew out of Singapore whispered and murmured and changed lenses, clanking metal boxes. The British Sky TV crew from Hong Kong had come inappropriately dressed. They now had their running shoes off and were plucking leeches from between their toes, swearing as they did so.
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Michael Crichton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Number One international bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Congo and Sphere blends fact and fiction to create a near-future where genetic engineering opens up a whole new world of terrifying, page-turning possibilities…