Fire Of Heaven Book I Blood of Heaven Page 6

  “Hi.” He grinned.

  Katherine swallowed back her surprise. “Hi.”

  “You’re all dressed up.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Suddenly the lights came on. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought Eric told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “My new software.”

  “Software.” She sounded like a parrot repeating every phrase, but she was still trying to get her bearings.

  “Yeah.” He motioned to his computer. “I’m having a dickens of a time with some new software. I thought maybe we could work on it for a while.” He flashed what was supposed to be a sexy grin while raising a six-pack of Budweiser in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “Then maybe work on some of our own moves.”

  “Moves?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Katherine stood a moment, then she reached for the door —

  “Hey, wait a min —”

  — and shut it, clicking the dead bolt back into place.

  “Daddy, Freddy won’t share his apple with me.”

  O’Brien looked up from his picnic lunch — a dripping peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, partially baked Tollhouse cookies, chocolate milk, and Snickers bars. The lunch had been packed by Julie, his seven-year-old. Julie was partial to sweets.

  Both Julie and Sarah, her twelve-year-old sister, had been playing on the gym set with Freddy while O’Brien and his wife sat on a blanket spread across the newly laid sod. Granted, no one would catch a tan in the artificial environment, but it sure cut down on the flies and ants.

  “Daddy.” Julie stood with her little hands on her little hips. It was a pose she had learned early from her mother. “Make him share with me.”

  “Sweetheart.” Beth threw a concerned look to O’Brien while addressing her daughter. “I don’t think you and Freddy should be sharing food. There’s no telling what type of germs he may be carrying.”

  “Mom —”

  “I’m sorry.” She reached into the Tupperware and pulled out a carrot stick. “Here, chew on this for a while.”

  Julie took the carrot with an overly dramatic sigh, then trudged back to her sister and the baboon. The three were playing a game of tag. Of course Freddy didn’t completely understand the rules, but it was obvious that he loved chasing and being chased. He also loved the hugs and cuddles that followed each capture.

  O’Brien turned to his wife. “Actually, it’s the other way around,” he explained. “In this environment, Freddy’s the one with the fewer germs.”

  Beth said nothing as she watched their raven-haired beauties play. O’Brien knew she still had some trepidation about Freddy, but that was small potatoes compared to the resentment she harbored. Through the years, their marriage had often hit rocky ground. You don’t raise a multimillion-dollar company from nothing without a little stress and a few thousand hours of overtime. Then, just as things were beginning to settle down and the marital stress was starting to mend, along came this new project and, of course, Freddy. Suddenly everything went into hyper speed, with every problem needing to be solved yesterday, and O’Brien’s family having to take the farthest seat in the back. The recent eat-and-dash routine at Thanksgiving was the perfect example — an example O’Brien still found himself paying for.

  “They’ll be okay,” he said, rubbing the back of his hand against her arm.

  She nodded and tossed her black, shoulder-length hair to the side. It was obvious where the girls inherited their beauty. She had classical Italian features, a strong profile, dark eyes, full lips, and a figure to match. She was also a great mom and wife. Despite their fights over his time spent away, O’Brien knew he needed her as much as the girls did. In fact, if he hadn’t had her there, reminding him of home and family, his work would literally and quite completely consume him. She was his tent peg, a reminder of what was really important. That was the purpose of the picnic. If Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain this Saturday afternoon, then Beth would bring the mountain to him.

  For as long as O’Brien could remember, science had been his passion. As a kid, he’d wanted to know how everything worked. Now, as a genetic engineer, he wanted to make everything work better. So far, he and his peers were doing just that. Slowly, of course, but step-by-step, discovery after discovery, they were making progress. Gene therapy had already been used in treating over three hundred people, beating cystic fibrosis, ADA deficiency, hypercholesterolemia, as well as certain forms of anemia. Meanwhile, everyone was hot on the trail of ways to use it to cure breast cancer, sickle-cell anemia, melanoma, attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, and the list went on. The opportunities were mind-boggling. By current estimates, there are four thousand human diseases caused by malfunctioning genes. That’s four thousand opportunities to make the world a better place. Four thousand ways of not only increasing the quality of life, but in many cases actually saving life.

  Granted, social problems resulting from improved genetic science were rising almost as quickly as the cures — like employers refusing to hire individuals if they didn’t like what showed up on their genetic screening, or health insurance companies dropping clients because genetic tests indicated a high risk. O’Brien still shuddered at the HMO group who’d told an expectant mother of a cystic fibrosis child that they would pay for an abortion — but not for treatments if she chose to give birth.

  Still, these were problems to be worked out in the courts, not the laboratory. O’Brien had neither the time nor the interest to deal with people’s greed or prejudice — unless, of course, he could find a gene for that, too.

  “So what do you think?”

  O’Brien turned back to Beth, who waited patiently for an answer. She’d obviously been having another of their conversations without him. His mind raced. What had they been talking about? He was clueless, and she knew it.

  “About getting away this winter,” she repeated. “Maybe Mazatlán.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think that would be good.”

  “If I could clear it with the schools, maybe we could stay a few weeks.”

  “Well,” he stalled, somehow suspecting that this was a test. “I mean, we don’t have to decide that just yet, do we?”

  Beth sighed and looked away. It had been a test, and he’d just flunked.

  Trying to regain lost ground, he continued, “Actually, you’re right. A few weeks might do us all some good.”

  “Fine,” she said flatly, without looking back at him. “I’ll get the information.”

  “Great,” he said, sounding a little too enthusiastic. “And we can look it over and decide as a family.”

  Nice try, but still no response.

  He gave it another shot. “But you’re right, a few weeks would be really good for us.” He stared at the back of her head, unable to tell if he’d made any progress. “Real good.”

  Before she could respond, his beeper went off. He had been careful to switch it to vibrate instead of beep, knowing how Beth hated the sound. He stole a peek at his belt: 3798. That was Wolff, one of Murkoski’s assistants. The man never called unless it was important. And since Murkoski was still in Lincoln …

  “Listen, I, uh —”

  “You need to answer that,” Beth said, without turning.

  He looked at her, surprised. How did she do that? “I shouldn’t be long,” he said, rising to his feet.

  “It’s okay, I understand.”

  “No, really, I won’t —”

  “I said I understand. And I appreciate your letting us have this time.”

  He wasn’t sure whether she was serious or sarcastic. After fourteen years of marriage, she still had her mysteries. In any case, he bent down and kissed the top of her head. “Thanks.” Then, turning to the kids, he shouted, “What does a guy have to do to get a good-bye kiss around here?”

  The children ran toward him, shouting “Daddy! Daddy!” and began protesting his leaving. Even Freddy showed some disappointment as he loped up to him
, wrapped his arms around one leg, and indicated that he’d be happy to pick off a few lice if O’Brien stayed.

  “Sorry, fella,” O’Brien chuckled, “duty calls.” After another round of hugs and kisses, he left the room. His heart was heavy, but only for a moment. Back in the hall, the thousand-and-one migraine makers of running Genodyne Inc. quickly returned.

  How he envied people like Wolff. People completely immersed in research. No worries about funding, no P and L statements, no keeping an antagonistic board of directors satisfied, or disgruntled employees happy, or impossible FDA compliances met — all this while trying to remember why he had started the company in the first place. It was more than one man could handle, and too many things were slipping through the cracks. That’s why he’d brought Murkoski on board for the new project. And that’s also why he was always having to play catch-up with the kid. He didn’t like it much — particularly when it appeared that Murkoski was keeping him out of the loop.

  That seemed to be happening more and more lately. Despite O’Brien’s efforts to stay informed, Murkoski seemed to be gradually building a wall around the project, slowly turning it into a company within a company. More than once O’Brien had wanted to slow things down, but the pressure they were receiving from the government, coupled with the potential for incredible financial reward, and Murkoski’s own brazen ego, made it difficult to find the brakes.

  He’d thought they’d hit a barrier when Coleman had made his impossible demand to be removed from death row. And yet, in just a few short days, Murkoski had secured permission. “If that’s what it takes to do it,” Murkoski had said of his government contacts, “then that’s what they’ll do. This project is too important to balk at details.”

  O’Brien shook his head as he moved down the hall. Was there nothing the kid couldn’t pull off? He was amazing. But just as amazing was how the project had become so complicated. When you get right down to it, gene therapy is anything but complicated. In fact, in its basic form, it’s so simple a child can grasp it. Both Sarah and Julie thoroughly understood the concept.

  Every living cell contains DNA, that spiral ladder magazines are so fond of drawing. Inside this DNA are genes that we inherit from our parents. These genes tell us whether we’re going to be turtles or people, short or tall, die from breast cancer, or live to be a hundred. You’d think such important messengers would be impossibly complex. They’re not.

  In fact, it all comes down to just four building blocks, four basic chemicals: guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine, better known as G, A, T, and C. These are the rungs that hold the strands of the famous spiraling DNA ladder together. That’s it, just four chemicals. But it is the way these four chemicals are combined that creates the fifty to one hundred thousand different genes found in the DNA in every human cell.

  Genodyne’s job is relatively simple. Discover the gene or combinations of genes that creates a specific characteristic (one gene can contain a group of hundreds or even thousands of these chemical rungs), find which rung it begins at and which rung it ends at, snip out that characteristic at the appropriate rungs with chemical scissors called restriction enzymes, and replace the old section with the new one. Don’t like brown hair? Find those genes, snip them out, and replace them with the genes for blonde hair.

  But having one cell in your body that says “I’m a blonde-haired person” when millions of other hair-producing cells are saying, “No way, we’re brown,” is a losing battle. The trick is to find some way to tell all the cells that influence hair color to change from manufacturing brown hair to blonde. That’s where a virus like the one injected into Freddy and Coleman comes in. Since viruses love to multiply by infecting other cells, why not inject the new genes into a virus, and turn the virus loose in the bloodstream to infect the appropriate cells, changing their brown-haired genes into blonde-haired ones.

  That’s gene therapy in a nutshell. Of course, there are thousands of minor problems, which explains Genodyne’s staff of four hundred fifty and counting. Just to find the right gene is a near-impossible task. That’s why there are programs like the Human Genome Project discovering new genes every week in the hope of having all 100,000 mapped and labeled by the year 2005.

  Once the genes have been discovered, snipped out, and replaced, there’s still the problem of making sure they’ll really do what they promise they’ll do. That’s where Wolff’s mice come in. Since the DNA rungs in all animals are made up of the same four chemicals, G, A, T, and C, the mouse doesn’t know from where it’s receiving these snippets of DNA — it could come from anything from humans to insects. (One of O’Brien’s favorite stories was the grad student who isolated the genes for making fireflies glow and inserted them into a mouse to see if the mouse would glow. It did. Well, sort of.)

  Once the genes from the precious ancient blood sample had been identified and reproduced, they were inserted into the eggs of Wolff’s mice. They could have been inserted into the blood of adult mice, but since the gestation period for mice is only twenty days, it’s simpler and cleaner to change the creatures before they’re even conceived. These genetically altered eggs were then replanted back inside the mouse, where they were fertilized and eventually birthed.

  Still, the new generation of mice infected with genes from the ancient blood didn’t necessarily show any change of appearance or behavior. Much of genetic research is guesswork, hit and miss, looking for the right combination of genes. So they had repeated the process, again and again, generation after generation, until they were finally able to isolate and identify the “GOD gene.” Murkoski had come up with the name — a hangover, he said, from his Catholic school days. By gene standards, it wasn’t terribly long, only one thousand and fifty-eight ladder rungs. But when inserted into the mice, the results were astounding. They no longer scrambled for food, but shared it. In fact, the purest strain (the DNA Freddy and Coleman shared) seemed to actually make the mice more concerned about the welfare of their fellow mice than about themselves.

  Incredible. But to O’Brien, no more amazing than the fact that the key to the difference in every animal — from flies to mice to baboons to man — is controlled by the combination of those same four chemicals, G, A, T, C. The concept never ceased to amaze him. And, more and more often, as he made entries into his personal lab notebook, he found himself referring to the “Genius” behind it all — spelled not with a small g, but with a capital.

  O’Brien entered the research wing by shoving his billfold against the five-by-five-inch black box. The magnetic ID card in the wallet buzzed the door. He then entered his six-digit PIN. The door unlocked and he stepped inside to the bottom floor of an impressive, six-story arboretum. Balconies of each of the other floors looked down on him from all sides. Thirty-foot palm trees and assorted flora and fauna stretched toward the frosted skylights. Of course, his board of directors had told him that this was a waste of square footage, but O’Brien, who had spent more than his fair share of time cooped up in a lab, had insisted. Any scientist working in the dozens of labs along the halls that opened up onto the balconies would relish the fresh air and glimpse of nature that the arboretum provided.

  He walked past a small trickling waterfall and shoved his billfold against another box, reentering his PIN. The door to the Transgenetic Mice Area clicked open. He moved down the hall and entered a small room where paper gowns and booties were folded neatly on stainless-steel shelves. He unfolded the gown, slipped it over his shirt and jeans, and buttoned it. Next came the paper booties. These were a little trickier. There was a line painted across the floor, dividing the room into two sections. The first half was for street shoes, the second half was for paper booties. One had to balance on one foot on the street-shoe side while slipping the paper bootie over the other foot. When the paper bootie was in place, the papered foot would come down on the bootie side of the floor, and the whole process could begin again with the other foot.

  Once O’Brien had suited up, he stepped onto a sticky floor
mat to pick up any dirt or organism that may have contaminated his paper booties while he was putting them on. He then opened the other door and entered a hallway.

  He crossed to one of the four metal doors with square viewing portholes in their center and rapped on the glass.

  Wolff, an athletic, red-haired surfer type in his late twenties, looked up from dozens of racks. These held the clear Lucite boxes that housed the individual mice. But these were no ordinary mice. They were pampered beyond belief. Not only was the whole gown-and-bootie process for their benefit, but so were the special temperature and humidity controls, the filtered air, the low-fat food, and the vast array of other amenities you would only provide mice that, after months and months of genetic alteration and breeding, cost thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce.

  Wolff crossed to the door and opened it. O’Brien felt the gentle breeze against his face as the positively pressured room blew any contaminants he may have brought in back outside into the hallway.

  “What’s up?” O’Brien asked.

  Wolff looked grave as he silently escorted O’Brien over to the racks near the far wall. Unlike the other racks, these held larger Lucite boxes containing groups of four to eight mice, housed together to see how they would behave in a community environment.

  “This is our last generation,” Wolff said, “the same strain we have in your guy back at Lincoln.”

  “And…”

  Wolff stooped down to the third shelf. “They were fine this morning, but when I checked them after lunch — well, see for yourself.” He pulled out the Lucite container, and O’Brien bent down for a better look.

  Five mice were huddled together at one end, some eating, others cleaning and sleeping. They looked and behaved perfectly normal. It was the sixth mouse, at the other end of the box, that made O’Brien catch his breath. The mouse that lay all by itself, perfectly motionless. The mouse whose body had been shredded apart and partially devoured.