Shadow of Eden (32 page)

“Well, since I have to drag you from the trash you’re reading and inform you, here’s what happened. For some reason I’ve been sued for sexual abuse, called up by the medical board to answer allegations of malpractice, had advertisements placed in the paper alleging malpractice, and had faked pictures sent to my wife supposedly showing me in bed with another woman.”

“Was she beautiful? That’s always the tip off that they’re fake. Nobody has affairs with beautiful women.”

“And someone tried to run me off the road to kill me—”

“Bad driving.”

Steve tried to stare through the magazine. “—who followed me and shot at me.” Steve finished sure that would provoke a reaction.

“Bullet? Too dangerous. Not interested.”

Valenti raised the magazine back up.

“But somebody’s behind all this. I need to find out who and why.”

Valenti lowered the magazine showing his eyeballs again.

“Can’t you figure it out?” he said, as if he were lecturing a child. “You poked someone’s wife. Her husband found out about it and is very mad. He filed the complaints and placed the advertisements. He’s so mad, he’s gone to chasing you and couldn’t push you off the road, so he takes a potshot at you. You want me to come in to make it look like you’ve been wronged and to help make up with your wife, who I suspect left you and took the children with her. No thanks. Go see your priest and ask for forgiveness.” The magazine went back up.

Steve opened his mouth to protest when he looked at the magazine cover, actually seeing it for the first time. It was a
People
magazine headlining the “World’s Richest Bachelors.” The cover photo featured Vicktor Morloch, Chairman of Trident Pharmaceuticals. Under his name, it listed his personal worth at eight billion dollars. Steve stared at it for a moment and then leaned over the desk to snatch it from Valenti’s grasp, a thought forming in his mind.

“Hey!”

Steve paced as he stared at the cover, trying to pull it all together. It had all started after his call to Trident. Morloch was worth billions all on the basis of Eden, Trident’s only drug . . . and in a rush, all the pieces tumbled into place.

That’s it. It’s got to be.
His realization at once illuminated and terrified him. He sat back down in the chair in front of Valenti’s desk. “Oh my God. I’ve made one of the richest men in the world a personal enemy.”

Valenti, arms folded across his chest, wore a puzzled look. “What on earth are you talking about?”

Steve sat motionless in the brown vinyl covered chair, critically evaluating his own conclusion. This was totally foreign to him. Was he even rational? So many things had happened so fast. Could it really be that Vicktor Morloch would even notice him at all, much less send hired killers to eliminate him? Had his overwrought brain invented an enormous conspiracy? Steve couldn’t tell for sure. He needed a reality check, a sane person to talk him out of his psychotic notion.

He eyed Valenti, still waiting expectantly for his magazine, although he did have a curious expression. Steve tossed it back and Valenti caught it against his chest. “Well, must have been a good article,” Valenti quipped. “Keep it. I’ll get another one.”

Steve looked at the bemused PI. Why was he treating a prospective client in so cavalier a manner? Whatever Harmon saw in him wasn’t at all apparent but . . . “Thanks, but I’d rather tell you a story instead. Care to make a short trip?”

Valenti stuck out his bottom lip as if in thought. “Well, I’m a very busy man . . .”

“Of course you are.” Steve appraised Valenti’s double chin and sizeable gut. “I’ll buy lunch . . .”

Valenti squinted at Steve for a long moment. “OK, deal.”

Chapter 68

“P
roteins 101,” Amos Sheridan began.

Steve and Valenti sat in Amos’s hopelessly cluttered office, a striking contrast to his pin-neat laboratory. The animated Sheridan loved teaching and waved his arms as he explained the science to Valenti. Even on short notice, he was happy to talk about his research.

“Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids.” Holding up a set of plastic snap beads in a clear bag, he reached inside and pulled out a fistful, popping a series of them together as he talked.

“You eat protein in the form of a chicken leg or a hamburger. The stomach breaks it down into its constituent amino acids, like these beads, and absorbs them into the bloodstream. The cells take up the amino acids and re-assemble them into the proteins it needs. Voila.” He held up the strand of beads.

“Well, just remember, I flunked high school chemistry,” Valenti warned. “Go too fast and my brain hurts.”

“Don’t go to sleep and you’ll pass.” Sheridan’s eyes twinkled. “Now, proteins, once made, fold up into a three dimensional shape that makes them work. If they do not fold up in the right configuration, they do not work. Uhh—” He looked around his desk and seized a paperclip. “Like this.” He showed it to Valenti. “It holds papers together by virtue of its shape. If it is mis-folded . . .” He mangled the paperclip into a twisted piece of wire, “. . . it can’t hold papers together. It is a defective protein.”

“Proteins are found everywhere in the cell, as enzymes and as parts of the cell membrane. If a critical protein does not fold up right, it doesn’t work right and you get something like muscular dystrophy or sickle cell anemia. Okay so far?”

“Okay. So I need to eat protein to live and they need to fold up right.”

“Good enough,” Steve replied. “Now, change gears for a moment. Bacteria and viruses cause most infectious diseases. But there are newly identified infectious diseases caused by a mis-folded protein. It’s called a prion.”

“A prion.” Valenti rolled it around in his mouth. “So?”

Sheridan cut in, “A prion is a mis-folded evil twin of a normal protein that all of us have in our bodies, including our brains. It has the same amino acids in the same order—it’s the same protein, really, but it folds up differently. In its normal state, it’s called the prion precursor protein.”

“Evil twin,” Valenti said, “The scientific term?”

Steve ignored him. “We don’t actually know what this precursor protein does in our bodies, but we know it’s almost everywhere in the body. Now, here’s the juicy part. When the bad protein, the prion, touches its normal precursor counterpart, the normal protein re-folds into a prion. Then the new prion touches and transforms more precursor proteins, which converts even more. Like a nuclear chain reaction, prions trigger sequential conversions until there are few normal ones left.”

“So if it touches another one like it,” Valenti said, “it corrupts it into a bad character. Catholics into Baptists.” He grinned. “Or like . . . a vampire protein.”

“That’s it!” Sheridan exclaimed. “Vampire proteins. Only there’s no wooden stake.”

“Huh? You lost me.”

“The prions are really, really bad. They kill nerves and brains.”

“Well, how come I’ve never heard of them?”

“Ever hear of mad cow disease?” Steve asked.

“Sure. You mean that’s caused by these vampire prions? Don’t you get it by eating bad beef?”

“Or people,” Sheridan grinned. “Prions were first discovered in cannibalistic New Guinea tribes, killing thousands of them. It spread because they ate infected dead people, particularly their brains.”

Valenti paled a bit. “Well, of course. That’s why I don’t eat dead people.”

Sheridan continued, “All known human versions, except one, are caused by transmission of the actual prion into the next victim, like a virus or bacteria. It acts like an infectious disease, so if you get infected growth hormone or had brain surgery with contaminated instruments you can get it. Until now, that is.”

“This is gonna get worse, I can just feel it.” Valenti absently picked up a red plastic reagent squeeze bottle and started toying with it until Sheridan gently pulled it out of his hands.

“I wouldn’t. Pure potassium chloride. Eats your skin right off.”

Valenti recoiled, “Friends shouldn’t let friends play with that stuff.”

“Now follow me.” Sheridan went to a large refrigerator-like insulated cabinet and opened its door. He pulled out a flat glass tissue culture block and placed it under a binocular microscope. “This is a healthy nerve cell culture. Look.”

Valenti looked into the microscope. “It’s full of cells or something all jumbled up like rush hour at the amoeba convention.”

“Right. Those are nerve cells, nice, plump and healthy.” He put that plate back and after donning gloves, pulled another out of a second insulated cabinet. Placing it under the microscope he motioned Valenti to look. “Now, this one started out like the last one, but has been overrun by prions.”

Valenti looked through the microscope. “It’s like a ghost town.”

“Right, now look again, only this time I’m using a black light to show up the fluorescent labeled prions.” Sheridan picked up a small black plastic box with a bluish light bulb exposed on one side. He plugged it in and aimed the light at the plate.

Valenti stared down the microscope. “Prions? Holy Jesus. There must be millions.”

“But here’s the point.” Sheridan leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “We never put a single prion into the nerve culture. All the prions, you see, came from the normal precursor proteins that all cells have.”

“How’d you do that?”

Steve answered. “Something science has never seen before. We introduced a catalyst. A short chain of amino acids called a poly-peptide.”

“A catalyst?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “a catalyst that hundreds of millions of people are taking every day. In fact, it’s the most widely prescribed drug in the world.”

“Huh? A drug?” Then he caught on. “Eden? Eden? Oh, my sainted aunt.” He muttered something under his breath that Steve couldn’t hear.

“What?” Steve asked.

“The apple—the apple of the garden of Eden.”

“Of course,” Steve understood immediately. “Paradise lost.”

Valenti motioned to the cell culture. “And Eden did all this?”

“Yep, and Eden is the sole reason Mr. Vicktor Morloch, Chairman and principal stockholder of Trident and magazine cover playboy is worth over eight billion dollars.”

“Hells bells, I’d kill to protect eight really big ones. Well, maybe not. But tell me, are people really dying from this?”

“Follow me,” Steve beckoned with a motion of his head. “I’ve one other place to take you.”

“Why do I feel like I’m following the Ghost of Christmas Future?”

Chapter 69

S
hirley’s glass ICU door was tightly closed to mute her screams. Edith and Shirley’s nurse each held one of Shirley’s hands and spoke in calming voices, trying to settle her down, their faces reflecting their strain and fatigue.

Valenti followed Steve into the nurses’ station where Steve put a copy of Shirley’s most recent MRI scan up on the X-ray view box.

“Here’s Shirley’s brain. See the white streaks starting here . . .” he traced the abnormal pathways with his finger, “ . . . and radiating here and here.”

“Looks bad,” Valenti said.

“It goes in your nose. That’s how it enters the brain.”

“That’s right, it’s a nose spray, isn’t it?”

“It’s normally absorbed through the nasal membranes into the blood, but the small nerve endings that pick up smells also absorb a little bit of Eden. They then transport it back into the rest of the brain.” Steve smiled slyly. “Ever get a whiff of that perfume a long lost flame used to wear?”

“Who says she’s long lost?” Valenti shrugged. “Well, sure, I remember.”

“Did you instantly remember her and picture exactly where you were? Wasn’t it vivid, like it just happened?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it. Every time I smell this one perfume, Chloe, Valerie, from high school, pops into my head. That’s funny. I never thought about it before.”

“The sense of smell is very old in our evolutionary development. It was so important to survival that it went directly to the memory and emotional centers of the brain. It’s literally the most direct and strongest path from the outside world to our memory—and our emotions. Chloe’s smell travels down a broadband connection to your memories and feelings for Valerie. The strong emotional events associated with smell, like a perfume, are forever linked. The fragrance pulls your memories right back.”