Prescription: Makeover (9 page)

She pulled away, eyes dark with an unreadable emotion. “I know there aren’t any guarantees. And, no, I’m not backing out. And in the future please call me Eleanor. It helps me stay in character.”

“Of course.” He dropped her arm and stepped away. “I get that. Going undercover…” He trailed off, realizing there was really nothing left to say. She’d made her choice and they would both have to live with it. “Never mind. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

He expected her to snap his head off. Instead she nodded. “I will. And I hate to admit it, but I’m glad you’ll be there. I’ll feel safer knowing that you’re backing me up.”

You shouldn’t,
he wanted to say.
I could time it wrong again. I could get you killed.
Instead he gestured toward the door. “Let’s roll. We don’t want you to be late for your meeting.”

Located just outside the midsize city of Springfield, Massachusetts, the Markham Institute of Biomedical Research was high-tech dressed up to resemble the brick and ivy of the Five Colleges farther north. As Ike pulled into the parking lot, she picked out a pair of security cameras high up in a maple tree by the entrance, providing redundancy for the guard shack, where a uniformed security guard stepped out and motioned for her to buzz down the window of her nondescript SUV.

The guard was in his early forties, with a hanging gut and sideburns that nearly hit his chin. He was carrying a clipboard and wearing a scowl, but when he ducked down to see into the car, his expression brightened. “Good evening, ma’am.”

“Good evening,” Ike said. “I have an appointment with Dr. Lukas Kupfer.”

She kept her smile in place as the guard checked his clipboard, though she seethed inwardly at the knowledge that he probably would have asked for three forms of ID if she’d been dressed in her normal clothes.

The guard passed the clipboard over, along with a pen. “Sign in, please.” When she’d handed the items back, he pointed across the parking lot, where two huge brick-faced buildings intersected, forming a small alcove around a pair of glass-and-brass doors. “Go through the door, take the elevator to the fifth floor and hit the buzzer inside the lobby. Doc Kupfer will let you in.”

She nodded her thanks and drove across the parking lot, choosing a relatively secluded spot in the back corner. As she drove, she remained acutely aware that she wasn’t alone in the SUV.

Directly behind her seat, a polymer screen closed off the back of the vehicle. On it, a three-dimensional holographic projection made it look as if there was nothing but seats and normal car clutter in the back of the SUV. Behind the screen, though, William sat in a small command center wearing a pair of headphones and a scowl.

She didn’t have to see the expression to know it was there; he’d been surly since they’d left New York City, long before they’d switched drivers and he’d moved to the back. They hadn’t spoken during the drive because there really wasn’t much to talk about. The air, though, had vibrated with the things they hadn’t said.

“It’s showtime.” She turned off the SUV and dropped the keys into her girlie Eleanor purse. “Wish me luck.”

She expected a snide rejoinder, but he said only, “Good luck.” His voice sounded both from behind her in the vehicle and inside her head, courtesy of a small transmitter that was tucked deep into her ear and hidden beneath her long hair.

His restraint should have soothed her. Instead, as she climbed out of the SUV and shut the door, then crossed the parking lot toward the building the guard had indicated, nerves pulled her chest tight, making it hard to breathe.

She paused at the double doors, suddenly unable to believe she was really going undercover in a dress and heels. She didn’t have her gun, didn’t have Tom, Dick and Harry or any of her usual equipment. She had a camera clipped to her bra — which was pink, for God’s sake — and nothing to work with besides her wits.

“You going to stand there all day?” William’s transmitted question was dry as dust, but she knew he was really asking,
Are you going to be okay?
She felt a momentary flare of emotion at his concern, then cursed herself for wishful thinking. In all likelihood he’d really meant,
Move your flower-covered butt.

“I’m fine,” she said and pushed open one of two glass doors that were embossed with researchers’ names in gold paint. “I’m going in.”

“I’ve got a visual from the camera,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Don’t give me a running commentary or you’ll look like an idiot.”

She found his sarcasm perversely comforting as she entered the building, stifling the urge to say things like
I’m on the elevator
and
I’m buzzing to get let in now.
As she stood in the chrome-and-glass waiting area just outside the elevator on the fifth floor, though, she couldn’t help feeling as if William were standing just behind her, smoothing out the jitter of nerves that gathered in her stomach. Figuring what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt either of them, she allowed herself to take comfort in the image as a hazy figure appeared on the other side of the frosted glass. There was a buzzing noise and the door popped free of its lock and pushed inward.

The man who held open the door was about her height, shy of six feet by an inch or two, but rang in at about twice her mass. He wasn’t fat, more like heavy all over, with large arms and powerful-looking legs beneath a gray suit, white shirt and conservative navy tie. As in his photographs, Lukas Kupfer’s face seemed caught somewhere between laughter and sadness as he held out his hand. “Miss Roth, welcome. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She shook. “The pleasure is mine, Dr. Kupfer. Thank you so much for allowing me to visit your lab on such short notice.”

“Anything to help out the good folk at Boston General.” He grinned, the expression taking at least five years off his looks. “That’s the joy of working in academia rather than industry — we get to share the fun stuff.”

He ushered her through the door and into a lobby that was done in muted grays and beiges. It held two cluttered reception desks facing away from a wall of filing cabinets, printers and copy machines. Both desks were empty since it was after quitting time, but their surfaces gave the impression of ordered chaos. Two of the walls were hung with colorful prints — fluorescent-labeled cells on one side and schematic pictures of DNA molecules on the other. The remaining wall space was taken up by doorways: four leading to offices; one to what looked like a break room; and an airlock-type doorway in the far wall offering access to the lab area.

Kupfer waved her across the lobby. “Come on into my office. I want to give you a couple of reprints for background info, and then we can head into the lab and have a look around.”

His office was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were uniformly stuffed to the brim with journals, along with enough books to fill a small library, their titles ranging from
The Clinicogenetic Characteristics of the Muscular Dystrophies
and a thin volume entitled
A Boy Like Me — DMD Explained,
to what looked like just about every
Far Side
compendium ever published. The stacked journals, papers and books leaned against one another with apparent disregard for the laws of gravity, looking as though they might avalanche at any moment onto the desk that sat in the center of the small room, facing the single window. The desk surface was nearly dominated by a good size desktop computer and an industrial-looking printer, along with a Mason jar full of what looked like Super Balls and a beat-up-looking stuffed dog.

Kupfer crossed to one of the bookcases and started flipping through a stack of papers, no doubt looking for the journal articles he’d mentioned. Ike wandered to the other side of the small room, where a few more personal items rested on a relatively neat shelf. She could’ve told him not to bother with the reprints, that she’d already studied everything he’d ever written, plus a handful of the most recent papers published by each of his competitors. Instead she scanned the shelf, looking for insight into Kupfer, a hint of whether he was Odin’s coconspirator or his next victim.

She focused on a trifold frame that held three photographs, all of the same subjects — a handsome blond woman and a young, brown-haired boy with stick-thin limbs and a devilish glint in his eyes. She touched the frame. “This was your son?”

It seemed safe to use the past tense without giving away her background research. Any Google search would pull up the story of how Kupfer had first started studying Duchenne muscular dystrophy because he’d had an affected son who’d died.

“His name was Matthew.” Kupfer crossed the room and stood beside her so they were both looking at the photographs of a laughing mother and child. “He was only ten when the disease took him.”

“Too young,” Ike said, trying hard not to let the boy in the photo blur to the memory of another challenged child, one with downward-turned eyes and her father’s chin.

“I think he’d be proud of what I’ve accomplished here,” Kupfer said simply. Then he handed her a thick stack of reprinted journal articles and waved her to the door. “It’s getting late and you’ll want to settle in at your hotel. I’ll give you a quick tour of the lab so you can orient yourself and then tomorrow morning I’ll introduce you to my head tech, Sandy Boylen. She’ll help you run your tests.”

It took Ike a half second to remember the blood samples Zach Cage had FedExed her from Boston General. That was ostensibly the reason she was there — to use Kupfer’s highly optimized fluorescent hybridization techniques to identify the genetic defects in three BoGen patients who had all the symptoms of the Duchenne but had so far screened negative for the known DMD mutations.

She nodded. “That’d be great.”

Beyond the heavy-duty negatively pressurized door, Kupfer’s lab consisted of five interconnecting rooms along one side of the building, plus a hallway leading to several smaller individual rooms that could be sealed and pressurized as needed, to protect the purity of the samples and experiments. As Ike followed the scientist from room to room, she inhaled the mingled scents of solvents, tissue culture media and floor wax that seemed to pervade just about every academic biotech lab she’d ever entered.

Kupfer led her through a long room. “We process the patients’ blood samples in here, isolating the white blood cells and either immortalizing them in long-term culture or extracting DNA for amplification and sequencing. All of the procedures are performed under the hoods, to reduce the chance of cross-contamination.” He gestured to a series of glass-enclosed boxes along one wall, where panels could be pulled down to just above a tech’s gloved arms, allowing a gentle vacuum to suck up any fumes or debris. Lab benches were set along the other wall, some holding basic microbiological equipment, others piled with the bits and pieces of a working lab.

“See if you can get him talking about the press conference,” William’s voice said suddenly in her ear, startling her.

Ike hid the flinch and inwardly berated herself for needing the reminder.
Focus,
she told herself, feeling the press of the small transmitter in her ear and the scrape of the wire beneath her bra.
You’re supposed to be investigating.

“Tell me a bit about what you’re doing in here,” she requested, knowing that most scientists would talk endlessly about their work given the slightest provocation.

Sure enough, that was all the encouragement he needed to give her a mini lecture on DMD. As he talked, he led her into the next room, which was full of cell culture equipment, along with several large incubators. The air was warmer and smelled faintly yeasty with an overtone of sweetness from the liquid media used to feed the growing cells. Kupfer’s voice gained volume and enthusiasm as he talked about how the cells of DMD patients couldn’t make a protein called dystrophin on their own. “So I’ve spent the past decade developing a genetic vector based on the flu bug,” he said. “Except instead of making people sick, the virus enters the patient’s body and tricks his cells into producing the dystrophin protein from DNA sequences contained within the virus.”

“Fascinating,” Ike said and meant it.

He glanced at her. “You’ve heard about the press conference on Friday?”

She lifted one shoulder and flashed him a smile. “Rumor has it you’re about to put a couple of your competitors at a serious disadvantage.”

That was a shot in the dark, but when one lab broke a big development, it was usually bad news for competing labs that might have been a few months, sometimes even only weeks or days away from publishing the same discovery.

Kupfer shook his head. “Oh, no. I’m giving them an advantage. That’s why I’m going with a press conference rather than waiting for journal publication. I want everyone to be able to repeat my work and use it in their own studies as soon as possible.”

That got Ike’s attention. “You’re not licensing it?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Free access.”

“Dare I ask what you’ve found?” she asked, suddenly certain this was bigger than just DMD, which would explain why The Nine were interested.

“I’ve finally found the missing piece that’s prevented DMD gene therapy from working as well as we’d like.”

“A new viral vector?” Ike guessed, based on his last few papers.

“No. An adjunct.” Kupfer’s face lit with excitement and he waved his hands as he spoke. “We got the virus optimized a few years ago, but the efficiency just wasn’t good enough. Some cells in each culture would produce the protein, but others wouldn’t, which meant we couldn’t predict or control its effect on patients. So we started looking for a helper molecule that would improve the efficiency of the viral infection and protein production.”

“And you found it?”

“Yes.” He beamed. “Even better, it’s not specific to just the dystrophin gene. Our preliminary results suggest that it should enhance the transcription and function of just about any foreign gene loaded into an adenoviral vector.”

And there it was, Ike realized, sucking in a breath. The reason Odin was after Kupfer’s work. Not because of the muscular dystrophy cure but because researchers had been searching for a functional gene therapy adjunct for…well, for as long as the term
gene therapy
had been around.