Fortifying himself as best he could, Victor made the call and waited for Robert to be located. While Victor waited he thought about his own experiments and realized that they now held very little interest for him. After all, VJ had solved most of the questions involved. It was humbling for Victor to be so far behind his ten-year-old son. But the good side was what they would be able to accomplish together. That was thrilling indeed.
“Dr. Frank!” Robert said suddenly into the phone, waking Victor from his musings. “I’m glad I found you. I’ve pretty well sequenced the DNA fragment in the two tumors, and I wanted to make sure you wanted me to go ahead and reproduce the sequence with recombinant techniques. It will take me some time to do, but it is the only way we’ll be able to ascertain exactly what it codes for.”
“Do you have any idea what it codes for?” Victor asked hesitantly.
“Oh, yeah,” Robert said. “It’s undoubtedly some kind of unique polypeptide growth factor.”
“So it’s not some kind of retro virus,” Victor said with a ray of hope, thinking that a retro virus could have been an infectious particle artificially disseminated.
“Nope, it’s certainly not a retro virus,” Robert said. “In fact, it’s some kind of artificially fabricated gene.” Then with a laugh he added, “I’d have to call it a Chimera gene. Within the sequence is an internal promoter that I’ve used myself on a number of occasions—one taken from the SV40 simian virus. But the rest of the gene had to come from some other microorganism, either a bacterium or a virus.”
There was a pause.
“Are you still there, Dr. Frank?” Robert asked, thinking the connection had broken.
“You’re sure about all this?” Victor asked, his voice wavering. The implications were becoming all too clear.
“Absolutely,” Robert said. “I was surprised myself. I’ve never heard of such a thing. My first guess was that these people picked up some kind of DNA vector and it got into their bloodstreams. That seemed so strange that I gave it a lot more thought. The only possible mechanism that I could come up with involves red-blood-cell bags filled with this infective gene. As soon as the Kupffer cells in the liver picked them up, the infective particles inserted themselves into the cell’s genome. The new genes then turned proto-oncogenes into oncogenes, and bingo: liver cancer. But there’s only one problem with this scenario. You know what it is?”
“No, what?”
“There’s only one way that RBC membrane bags could get into somebody’s bloodstream,” Robert said, oblivious to the effect all this was having on Victor. “They would have to be injected. I know that—”
Robert never had a chance to finish his sentence. Victor had hung up.
The mounting evidence was incontrovertible. There was no denying it: David and Janice had died of liver cancer caused by a piece of foreign DNA inserting itself into their chromosomes. And on top of that, there was the instructor from Pendleton Marsha had told him about. All these people were intimately related to VJ. And VJ was a scientific genius with an ultramodern, sophisticated laboratory at his disposal.
Colleen poked her head in. “I was waiting for you to get off the phone,” she said brightly. “Your wife is here. Can I send her in?”
Victor nodded. Suddenly he felt extremely tired.
Marsha came into the room and closed the door forcibly. The wind rustled the papers on Victor’s desk. She walked directly over to Victor and leaned forward over his blotter, looking him directly in the eye.
“I know you would rather not do anything,” she said. “I know you don’t want to upset VJ, and I know you are excited about his accomplishments, but you are going to have to face the reality that the boy is not playing by the rules. Let me tell you about my latest discovery. VJ is involved with a group of Colombians who are supposedly opening a furniture import business in Mattapan. I met these men and let me tell you, they don’t look like furniture merchants to me.”
Marsha stopped abruptly. Victor wasn’t reacting. “Victor?” Marsha said questioningly. His eyes had a dazed, unfocused look.
“Marsha, sit down,” Victor said, shaking his head with sad, slow deliberation. He cradled his head in his hands and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his neck, and straightened up. Marsha sat down, studying her husband intently. Her pulse began to race.
“I’ve just learned something worse,” Victor said. “A few days ago I got samples of David’s and Janice’s tumors. Robert has been working on them. He just called to tell me that their cancers had been artificially induced. A foreign cancer-causing gene was put into their bloodstreams.”
Marsha cried out, bringing her hands to her mouth in dismay. Even though she had begun to suspect as much, the confirmation was as horrifying as if she’d been given the news cold. Coming from Victor, who’d fought her tooth and nail when it came to hear fears and apprehensions, made it all the more damning. She bit her lower lip while she quivered with a combination of anger, sadness, and fear. “It had to be VJ!” she whispered.
Victor slammed his palm on top of his desk, sending papers flying. “We don’t know that for sure!” he shouted.
“All these people knew VJ intimately,” Marsha said, echoing Victor’s own thoughts. “And he wanted them out of the way.”
Victor shook his head in grim resignation. How much blame lay at his door, and how much lay at VJ’s? He was the one who’d ensured the boy’s brilliance. But did he stop for one second to think what might go hand in hand with that genius? If David and Janice and that teacher had died by VJ’s hand, Victor wasn’t sure he could live with his conscience.
Marsha began hesitantly, but her conviction made her strong. “I think we have to know exactly what VJ is doing in the rest of that lab of his.”
Victor let his arms fall limply to his side and stared out the window. He looked at the clock tower, knowing that VJ was working there right now. He turned to Marsha and said, “Let’s go find out.”
14. Monday Afternoon
Marsha had to run to keep up with Victor as he made his way toward the river. The two soon left the renovated part of the complex behind. In broad daylight the abandoned buildings did not look quite so sinister.
Entering the building, Victor went straight to the trapdoor, bent down, and rapped sharply on the floor several times.
In a minute or two the trapdoor came up. A man in a Chimera security uniform eyed Victor and Marsha warily, then motioned for them to descend.
Victor went first. By the time Marsha was down the stairs, Victor had rounded the paddle wheel and was heading toward the intimidating metal door barring the entrance to the unexplored portion of VJ’s lab. For Marsha, the lab itself was as forbidding as it had been the last time she’d been there. She knew that the fruits of scientific research could be put to good or evil use, but something about the eerie basement quarters gave Marsha the feeling that the research conducted here was for a darker purpose.
“Hey!” yelled one of the guards, seeing Victor approach the restricted door. He jumped up and sprinted across the room diagonally, and grabbed Victor by the arm. He pulled him around roughly. “Nobody’s allowed in there,” he snarled in his strong Spanish accent.
To Marsha’s surprise, Victor put his hand squarely on the man’s face and pushed him back. The gesture took the man by surprise, and he fell to one knee, but he maintained a hold on Victor’s jacket sleeve. With a forcible yank, Victor shook free of the man’s grasp and reached around to the door.