Sins of the Father (22 page)

“May I ask a question?” McCoy said. Something had been bothering him since he’d left Bangkok.

“You’re wondering why we had her get the DNA from Peter rather than doing it ourselves,” Jones said.

“I… Yes.” The man was infuriating—he’d hate to play chess against him. Jones always seemed to be three steps ahead of everyone else. Annoyed, McCoy trudged on anyway.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to grab one of his Thai bargirls in Bangkok? His DNA would have been all over her.”

“Wheels within wheels. On the one hand, it’s akin to eagles stealing fish from falcons after all the work’s been done for them. But more importantly, we need skills only Doctor Lachaux possesses—need her to do certain things in a certain order. Using her to get the DNA from Peter steers her in the proper direction—she’s even more invested now. She’ll go where we need her to go, when we need her to go there.

“She’s dancing to our tune, and when the time is right, she’ll be our big finale.”

“Understood,” McCoy said, though he didn’t really believe it. There were games going on here to which he wasn’t privy, and much as it irked him, it was probably best he not know. “Where am I off to now?”

“New York,” Jones said. “There are some people I need you to make contact with.”

* * *

Peter hurried Julia inside, eased her to the couch, and then went to the window to scan the street. Whoever had attacked her was gone. He didn’t think they’d be back, either. What was there left for them to take? So he turned back toward Julia.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “A little dizzy.” She touched one finger to a lump forming on her head and winced.

“And sore.”

“I’ll get you some ice,” he said, and he stepped toward the kitchen. He called back over his shoulder. “What happened? You were leaving, weren’t you?”

“No, I was… Dammit. Yes, I was leaving.”

“Why?” he said from the kitchen. He smoothed out the piece of paper he had found by the car’s tire when he grabbed the contents of her purse. It was a map, printed out, showing the route to a place called Reiden Lake. It took him a second to dredge the name up out of his memory before he had it. His family had a cabin there when he was a kid. He had a flash of memory of the lake, of cold, of his father.

He pushed it aside. Grabbing a dishtowel, he then went to the freezer and scooped out some ice. He dropped it onto the towel, folding it into an impromptu ice pack.

Peter could feel this score starting to slip out of his grip. He still needed the money to pay Big Eddie, and he was damned if he was going to see it disappear. He needed to pull things back on track. The best route was honesty. Or at least the appearance of it.

He returned to the living room, and she looked up.

“Peter, I like you,” she said. “Obviously. But…”

“But you don’t entirely trust me.” He placed the ice on the goose egg forming on her scalp. “Hold this here.”

“Thanks,” she said. She put her hand on his to hold the ice in place. He let it linger there a little too long. “This isn’t just my life’s work, Peter. It’s my cure. It’s important that this goes to the people who are afflicted, but I’ve got a personal stake in this, too. These seizures, they take everything from a person. You don’t know what that’s like.”

“No, I don’t know what that’s like,” he responded. “But I
do
understand you not trusting me.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “I come out of nowhere, your stolen work in my hands, and offer to sell it to you.

For all you know, I could have been the one who stole it. Last night’s fiasco could have been an elaborate ruse.”

“No,” she said, turning away from him. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I’ve seen stranger cons.”

“Well, if it helps,” she said, turning back, “I trust you now. Whoever stole it before has it again. And I’m afraid of what they’re going to do with it.”

“Can you describe the people who took it?”

“I think one of them was a driver from last night—the blond man. And the other one…” She paused. “It was the Englishman. The one who supplied me with the smallpox samples.”

A thought occurred to Peter. Considering how much traveling he did, seeing an Englishman abroad was hardly surprising. Still, an Englishman in Bangkok? The one with the vial? It couldn’t be the same guy, of course. The man in Bangkok was dead. Had to be. But there was a connection between the two.

“What if we tackle this from a different direction?” he suggested. “This is an epilepsy drug, right? Experimental.

Chances are he’s going to want to sell it. It’s bound to be worth a lot of money to the right people.”

“What are you suggesting?” she asked.

“I know a guy who knows a guy…” he began.

“And what if the Englishman’s not selling it?” she said, cutting him off. “What if he’s going to use it to hurt people?”

“This guy I know, he might still be able to help. He’s got his ear to the ground for all sorts of things.”

She looked at him, silently, and he wondered what she was thinking.

“I can’t think of a better idea,” Julia said finally.

“Okay, what do you need from me?”

* * *

Peter looked over the email to make sure it had all of the details it needed. He didn’t want to put too much into it, but it needed to include enough to be useful.

Once he was satisfied with it, he ran it through an encryption algorithm and sent it to the digital equivalent of a dead drop. It was encrypted with a public key system that only the recipient—Bernard Stokes—would be able to read. And if by chance anyone was able to crack the encryption, all they would find was a recipe for apple pie, and not a very good apple pie at that. The real message was encoded through a null cipher he and Bernard had agreed upon years ago, where every fifth letter in the email was a letter from the real message.

Bernard Stokes was a good man to know if you were very wealthy, and very sick. He dealt in gray-market drugs. Nothing so prosaic as opium or cocaine. Need an experimental drug for your stage IV pancreatic cancer? Trying to stave off HIV and your cocktail’s gone bad? Then Stokes was your man.

Peter had long ago stopped trying to justify Stokes’s occupation. At one point he had rationalized that the man was doing a service, getting medications to people who needed them. But the more he dealt with Stokes, the more it became apparent that he specialized in the diseases of the rich.

“Well, that’s that,” Peter said. “Now we wait.”

“You can’t just call him?” Julia said.

“He’s not like your average street dealer. The mail I sent will go to a secure server somewhere, and let him know it’s there. If we’re lucky, he reads it. If we’re luckier, he answers me.”

“All that security, and he’s just going to call you?”

Peter laughed. “No. I told him we’re somewhere near Hartford. He’ll encode the address of a nearby phone booth into his response, and a number to call him. He’ll have taken steps to secure both lines.”

“Do you really think someone will be listening in?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t, but he does. He’s not doing all this for our benefit. He’s got a lot to lose if he gets caught. This may take some time. But if he does have any information for us, we might have to move fast. You said that if this thing gets into someone without epilepsy, it’s bad. Is there a vaccine for it? Or an antiviral if someone gets infected?”

“I’ve been working on that,” she said, “but it hasn’t been my highest priority. I’ve got some inactivated samples of the virus to work with, back at the lab, and I’ve had some computer models running. The virus has a regulatory protein and there’s some indication that introducing a new amino acid might fold that protein into…” She stopped, and studied his face. “I’m sorry, am I getting too technical? I do that sometimes.”

“No, that’s fine. I’m following. Mostly. Proteins are developed from chains of amino acids into 3D forms, right? And the form it takes changes its function?”

“Right,” she said. “Different acids lead to different structures. Folded one way, the protein does its job. Folded another, it can have disastrous effects on an organism, like causing cystic fibrosis, or creating amyloid plaques in the brain leading to Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.”

“Mad cow disease.”

“Right. Some viruses have proteins that make up a protective coating.”

“That’s the capsid, right?” Peter said, dredging up long-forgotten biology lessons. He was a little surprised that he could remember it. He hadn’t had to think about any of this stuff for years.

“Yes,” she replied, “But this one also has a protein it uses to regulate function. The last models I ran suggested that introducing a new amino acid into the mix would cause a mis-fold of the protein, essentially rendering the virus inert and unable to function properly. Introduced into an infected host, the virus with the mis-fold should transfer the new protein to the rest, and halt the process.”

Peter thought about that for a second.

“Infect the infection.”

“Basically, yes.”

“How far did you get?”

“I left a model running on the computers in the lab before I came to meet you.” She looked at her watch. “It takes a long time for the calculations to run as it goes through different fold permutations, but if it’s not finished now, it should be soon.”

Peter checked his email.

“Nothing from Stokes yet. Not surprising. It could be hours before he gets back to us.”
If he gets back to us at all.
“Why don’t we check on the progress of the model? You said it’s in your lab?”

“Yes,” Julia said, her face creasing into a frown. “But what if the Englishman’s there?”

“I don’t think he will be. They had a chance to grab you earlier, and they didn’t take it. You don’t have any live virus at the lab, right? Just dead samples? I think they probably have what they wanted. Still, I can go in on my own and check it out. You can stay here.”

“No,” she said. “You won’t know what you’re looking for. We’ll go together.” She took Peter’s hands in her own. They were cold, shaking.

“We’ll be okay,” he said. “I promise.”

“That’s it?” Peter said, parking the car.

The Center for Seizure Disorder Research looked a lot more impressive on its website. Forced perspective in the marketing photos had taken a small, generic office building in an industrial park in Hartford, with its stucco walls and dark glass front door and windows, and made it look as though it were part of something larger. Instead of the sprawling complex the photos implied, it was a single-story building that couldn’t hold more than a few offices and a moderately sized lab.

His sense of anticlimax must have come across in his tone. He caught Julia frowning at him.

“It may not look like much, “she said, “but there’s more science going on in that building than in most universities in the country.”

“Not saying there isn’t,” he said. “Better than a lot of places I’ve seen.” Better than Walter’s lab, that was for sure. All he had was a dingy set of rooms at Harvard. At least this place wasn’t stuck in a basement.

“You’ve seen a lot of labs?”

“Enough,” he said, getting out of the car and heading toward the building. “Come on. Let’s see what we can—”

Peter paused near the front door, putting a hand out to stop Julia from going further. She had her keys in her hand and froze when she saw it.

The glass door had been shattered.

Only a handful of cars were scattered through the lot, and theirs was the only one parked near the building. Peter didn’t think anyone was still here, but he couldn’t rule it out.

He wished he had a gun. He’d searched through Westerson’s house, looking for something that might come in handy, but all he could find was a small can of pepper spray. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He pulled it out of his pocket and edged slowly toward the door.

“This the alarm panel?” Peter asked, pointing to a small metal box. The front of it was torn off and the wires had been stripped, alligator-clipped together to short it out. Julia nodded, eyes wide with fear. She held her keys in a tight fist, Peter noted, making an impromptu weapon.