With Patient-65 sequestered safely within the BSL-4 confines of her Chiarek Norse facility in Prague, Pope and the research team methodically dissected the assignment. The first step, decoding Patient-65’s genome, was purely a matter of computational power. This hurdle she could overcome with money and supercomputer-sourced processing time. The second step, however, synthesizing the mutation into an efficacious biopharmaceutical, was a nightmare. The crux of the problem was figuring out how to take the naturally occurring mutation in Patient-65’s immune system and program it safely into another human being’s DNA.
Meredith understood that gene therapy was a field of medical research rife with risk, complication, and uncertainty. Reprogramming a human’s genetic code, while perfectly logical in theory, had proven to be disastrously difficult in real life. Human gene therapy products were still not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the United States, making all gene therapy a purely experimental endeavor. Furthermore, patients who chose to undergo gene therapy faced daunting risks: toxic shock from severe immune response to the viral vector or transgene; inappropriate DNA insertion by the transgene causing mutation or cancer; and the potential for the vector virus to mutate, propagate, or exchange DNA with other viruses, thereby infecting the host. There was no silver bullet when it came to gene therapy, Pope had complained to her once over a neat glass of Dewar’s. Trial and error was the modus operandi of biopharmaceutical development. Their luck changed, however, when she learned of a groundbreaking gene therapy experiment at Boston University that used a bioengineered Adeno-associated virus as the vector.
Hijacking the research had been simple. The editor of the renowned science journal Immunology owed her a favor; she called it in. The term of her repayment was a copy of the pre-publication paper outlining the BU experiment. The work was the brainchild of an unknown researcher, a graduate student named August Jameson Archer. After Xavier Pope confirmed that Archer’s research was germane to their endeavor, Meredith obtained the raw data and project files from Archer’s lab. A thousand dollars cash, a willing BU coed infiltrator, and a USB “air card” modem was all it took to obtain everything she needed. The payoff was epic. Archer’s research pointed Pope and the project team in a direction they hadn’t considered, saving her millions in cash and months of precious pretrial development time. She was so confident that a production-ready formula was imminent that she had even begun drafting her presentation slides for the Annual Board of Directors’ meeting.
But when Patient-65 went running half-naked into the streets of Prague, her crystal ball exploded into a million tiny pieces.
She wrapped a towel around her head, shrugged on her favorite bathrobe and padded into her study. The cold shower had shocked her body awake and readied her for battle. She pressed the power button on her aluminum-encased MacBook Pro and felt a surge of adrenaline. Had she pursued a career practicing medicine, she would have been an ER doctor. In medicine, the word triage describes the process of systematically prioritizing actions to redress injuries as a function of both their severity and urgency. Successful triage requires equal parts judgment and action.
This was triage.
She had two bleeders demanding her attention: Retrieval and Damage Control. The former was a matter of urgency, the latter a matter of severity.
With Patient-65 on the run, Retrieval was going to be a problem. The longer her wayward genetic prodigy was missing, the harder it would become to find him. Swift, local intervention was the key. While Meredith preferred to clean up little messes like this on her own, desperate times… desperate measures. She sighed. Outside help was going to be necessary. Over the years she had come to realize that some jobs, especially the distasteful ones, were sometimes better to outsource. Every thorn has its rose, she mused. There would be no paperwork, no signatures or contracts that could be traced back to Vyrogen or to her. She would use an intermediary to make the necessary arrangements. Arm’s length separation. Plausible deniability. It was better that way. Safer. While she had never used the Zurn brothers before, as far as bounty hunters go, they came highly recommended and had reputation for pertinacity.
She made the call.
Damage Control she would handle herself. She began typing a list. Records would be moved, shredded, or scrubbed as necessary. Archival data would be copied, transferred, and then deleted from the Chiarek Norse servers. Equipment, materials, and staff would be relocated to an alternate facility outside the Czech Republic. This needed to happen fast. Within forty-eight hours, she decided. Loose lips had to be sealed. Payments would be made to ensure stories matched and memories were foggy. A cover story needed to be formulated and supporting press releases drafted. Her fingers danced on the keyboard at breakneck pace for over an hour. When her damage control plan was complete, she clicked “Save” and leaned back in her task chair.
She looked wistfully at the framed picture on her desk, the one depicting her father jokingly handing her the keys to his Porsche. Maybe someday she would be able to look back on this crisis and laugh, just as she and her father had done about the speeding ticket, twenty-three years ago. Probably not. One can only prepare for so many contingencies before something catches you off guard. There was no way she could have seen this coming, she told herself.
She did not want to do it, but this was triage. If the Zurns failed to capture Patient-65 within twenty-four hours, she would be forced to hedge her bets. She pressed the “Contacts” icon on her iPhone, touched the letter “N” on the sidebar, and scrolled through the list of surnames until she found his name. It had been two years since they had spoken. She was certain he would answer her call. The question was… would he help her?
Chapter Three
August Jameson Archer rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrists, not his fingers, just in case his fingertips were contaminated with the chemical dye he was presently applying to a new batch of samples. Phosphorescent green sclera could be a cool Halloween trick, as long as someone else was the test subject. To observers, his eye-rubbing technique was an oddity, but for AJ Archer the behavior had become so rote — because of his incessantly itchy eyes — that he adhered to the practice even when outside the laboratory. The samples he was preparing today were not related to the core focus of his dissertation, but he had a hunch he wanted to follow. This hunch, like most of his hunches, had come to him while eating. This was a ramen noodle mixed with canned tuna hunch, which if past experience held true, most likely would be a miserable dead end. Yet, he was of the strong opinion that any hunch pertaining to science, no matter how ludicrous, must be investigated.
Technically, his dissertation was complete. It was only April, but his PhD was in the bag. The next two months were what his faculty advisor called the tail end of the roller coaster ride. The hills, the loops, the corkscrews were now just nauseating memories; the train was coasting into the station. This was not the case for all his peers, however, especially those whose research had not yielded publishable results. For the unlucky ones, the graduate student express was in a free fall, plummeting into the abyss below with no sign of pulling up. He shuddered. Thank God it hadn’t happened to him, for it easily could have. Such is the way with scientific research. His advisor, Tim McNamara, had warned him at the beginning of the program five years ago: Nature does not yield her secrets easily. Don’t be surprised if you hit more than one roadblock in your quest for answers.