The minute the receptionist stopped speaking, one of the granite panels opened, revealing an elevator. As he thanked her, Jason suddenly fancied that she was a lifelike robot. Smiling, he boarded the elevator and looked for the floor buttons. The door closed behind him. There was no floor-selector panel, but the elevator started upward.
When the doors reopened, Jason found himself in a doorless black foyer. He assumed the entire building was controlled from a central location, perhaps by the receptionist downstairs. To his left a granite panel slid open. Within the doorway stood a man with coarse features, impeccably dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, white shirt, and red paisley tie.
“Dr. Howard, I’m Leonard Dawen,” the man said, motioning Jason into the room. He didn’t offer to shake hands. His voice had the same commanding quality Jason remembered from the phone conversation. Compared to the tomblike austerity of the rest of the building, the conference room looked more like a wood-paneled library and seemed positively cozy until you looked at the fourth wall, which was glass. It looked out on what appeared to be a large ultramodern lab. There was another man in the room, an Oriental, wearing a white zippered jumpsuit. Dawen introduced the man as Mr. Hong, a Gene, Inc., engineer. After they were all seated around a small conference table, Dawen said, “I assume you have the lab book….”
Jason opened his briefcase and handed the ledger to Dawen, who handed it to Hong. The engineer began studying it page by page. A heavy silence ensued.
Jason looked back and forth between the two men. He’d expected things to be a bit more cordial. After all, he was doing them a favor.
He turned and peered through the glass wall. The floor of the room beyond was a story below. Much of the area was filled with stainless steel vats, reminding Jason of a visit he’d once made to a brewery. He guessed they were the incubators for the culture of the recombinant bacteria. There was a lot of other equipment and complicated piping. People in white jumpsuits with white hoods were moving about checking gauges, making adjustments.
Hong closed the lab book with a snap. “It seems complete,” he said.
“That’s a nice surprise,” Dr. Dawen said. Turning to Jason he said, “I hope you realize everything in this book is confidential.”
“Don’t worry,” Jason said, forcing a smile. “I didn’t understand much of it. What I’m interested in is Dr. Hayes. Just before he died he said he’d made a major discovery. I’m curious to know if what is described in those pages would be considered as such.”
Dawen and Hong exchanged glances. “It’s more of a commercial breakthrough,” Hong said. “There’s no new technology here.”
“That’s what I suspected. Hayes was so distraught I couldn’t tell if he was entirely rational. But, if he made a major breakthrough, I’d hate to have it lost to humanity.”
Dawen’s blunt features softened for the first time since Jason had arrived.
Jason continued, directing his attention to the engineer. “Any idea what Hayes could have been talking about?”
“Unfortunately, no. Hayes was always rather secretive.” Dawen folded his hands on the table and looked directly at Jason. “We were afraid you were going to extort us with this material — make us pay to get it back,” he said, touching the cover of the lab book. “You have to understand that Dr. Hayes had been giving us a rather difficult time.”
“What was Dr. Hayes’s role here?” Jason asked.
“We hired him to produce a recombinant strain of bacteria,” Dawen explained. “We wanted to produce a certain growth factor in commercial quantities.”
Jason guessed that was the Somatomedin.
“We agreed to pay him a flat fee for the project, as well as letting him use the Gene, Inc., facilities for his own research. We have some very unique equipment.”
“Any idea what his own research involved?” Jason asked.
Hong spoke up. “He spent most of his time isolating growth-factor proteins. Some of them exist in such minute quantities that the most sophisticated equipment is required to isolate them.”
“Would the isolation of one of these growth factors be considered a major scientific discovery?” Jason asked.
“I can’t see how,” Hong replied. “Even if they’ve never been isolated, we know their effects.”
Another dead end, Jason thought wearily.
“There’s just one thing I remember that might be significant,” Hong said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “About three months ago Hayes got very excited about some side effect. He said it was ironic.”
Jason straightened. There was that word again. “Any idea what caused his excitement?” he asked.
Hong shook his head. “No,” he said, “but after that we didn’t see him for a time. When we did see him, he said he’d been to the Coast. Then he set up an elaborate extraction process on some material he’d brought back with him. I don’t know if it worked, but then he abruptly switched to monoclonal antibody technology. At that point his excitement seemed to die.”
The words “monoclonal antibody” reminded Jason of the second lab book, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have brought it after all. Maybe Mr. Hong could have made more out of it than he had.
“Did Dr. Hayes leave any other research material here?” Jason asked.
“Nothing significant,” Leonard Dawen answered. “And we checked carefully, because he’d walked off with our lab book and the cultures. In fact, we were suing Dr. Hayes. We never anticipated he would try and contend he owned the strains that we’d hired him to produce.”
“Did you get your cultures back?” Jason asked.
“We did.”.
“Where did you find them?”
“Let’s say we looked in the right place,” Dawen said evasively. “But even though we have the strain, we still appreciate getting the protocol book back. On behalf of the company, I’d like to thank you. I hope we have helped you in some small way.”
“Perhaps,” Jason said vaguely. He had an idea he’d inadvertently found out who had searched Hayes’s lab and apartment. But why would the scientists from Gene, Inc., want to kill the animals? He wondered if the huge animals had been treated with Gene, Inc.’s, Somatomedin. “I appreciate your time,” he said to Dawen. “You have an impressive setup here.”
“Thank you. Things are going well. We plan to have recombinant strains of farm animals soon.”
“You mean like pigs and cows?”
“That’s right. Genetically we can produce leaner pigs, cows that produce more milk, and chickens that have more protein, just to give you a few examples.”
“Fascinating,” Jason said without enthusiasm. How far away could they be from genetically engineering people? He shivered again, seeing Hayes’s outsized rats and mice, especially those with supernumerary eyes.
Back in the car, Jason glanced at his watch. He still had an hour before the staff meeting being held to go over recent patient deaths, so he decided to visit Samuel Schwartz, Hayes’s attorney.
Starting the car, Jason backed out of the Gene, Inc., parking lot and worked his way over to Memorial Drive. He crossed the Charles River, stopping at Philip’s Drug Store on Charles Circle. Double-parking with his emergency light blinking, he ran into the store and looked up Schwartz’s address. Ten minutes later he was in the lawyer’s waiting room, flipping the pages of an outdated Newsweek.
Samuel Schwartz was an enormously obese man with a glistening bald head. He motioned Jason into his office as if he were directing traffic. Settling himself into his chair and adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses, he studied Jason, who had seated himself in front of the massive mahogany partner’s desk.
“So you are a friend of the late Alvin Hayes….”