ONE WEEK LATER …
Karen arrived at Ellen’s office in the East Wing of the White House at the scheduled time of half past seven in the morning. She was dressed sharply in a blue suit. In a few hours she’d be facing the cameras, part of a team of people who would be giving a press conference to discuss the shocking events that had taken place inside Hal Hewitt’s office at the Greater Washington Fertility Center.
Day and night, reporters continued to scavenge for information, attempting to piece together some kind of story using what few facts they had, spreading disinformation with the speed of a mouse click.
Karen winced in pain as she took a seat in the empty chair placed in front of Ellen’s cherrywood desk. The bullet Hewitt fired had bruised her ribs badly, but otherwise she’d escaped serious injury. A few inches lower and the projectile would have bypassed her bulletproof vest and could easily have severed her spinal cord. Karen was well aware of her good fortune. Her gaze settled on a manila envelope on the desk in front of her.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
“Bump in salary, promotion to senior management, everything we discussed,” replied Ellen. “I told Russell that I wanted to give you the news personally.”
A lump sprang into Karen’s throat, making it difficult to swallow. Finally, after so many setbacks, she’d get a chance to put into practice many of the reform ideas she and her father had spent years championing.
“Ellen … I’m—” Karen paused. Not one to normally be at a loss for words, she was suddenly unsure exactly what to say. “I’m sorry” hardly seemed adequate. What Hal had done to her, to Geoffrey, to so many others, was unconscionable.
“You don’t have to say anything, Karen. You of all people understand how hard I fought to have Cam, and I’ll never, ever stop fighting for him, no matter what that monster did to our family.”
Ellen picked a piece of paper off her desk and flipped it over. “I found Hal’s e-mail to me,” she said. “He sent it ten years ago, but I had it in my archives. He wrote to tell me that he was now on the board of the TPI and he could get Cam in right away, no waiting list. I didn’t need much convincing.”
Karen sighed with disgust. “Guessing he sent similar letters to the parents of the other children,” she said.
“Yes, he did,” said Ellen, anger rising in her voice. “From what the FBI could piece together, Hal Hewitt got close to Yoshi and worked his way onto the board so he could steer all his offspring to the institute from the shadows, then he carefully observed their progression.
“Five families took him up on his offer. Those that couldn’t afford tuition were told they could get scholarships, when in reality it was Hewitt secretly paying their bill. Three families declined his offer entirely. One of those families had relocated to Ohio. They’re all dead. Home invasion. No arrests ever made. The other two have children younger than Cam. They haven’t presented with symptoms yet.”
“Have they been notified?” Karen could hardly imagine how difficult that news would be to receive.
“It’s in process,” said Ellen. “Should we go over the press statement? I wanted to get your reaction before I present it to Geoffrey and his senior staff and cabinet members. Some of this might not make it to the final press statement, but the public is clamoring for answers and we have to give them something. I’m not sure how much I’m comfortable sharing, or what to even say. Either way, I’ll need you with me to answer any questions pertaining to the assault.”
“Sounds good.”
The only thing the public knew for certain was that Dr. Hal Hewitt had illegally fathered Cam Hilliard, along with other children, and that the first lady had confronted him after learning the devastating news. The story leaked to the press was that Karen shot Hewitt, who had brandished a weapon of his own. Everyone agreed that America did not need to know that Hewitt had threatened the first lady with a gun seized from the Secret Service.
As for figuring out Hewitt’s various crimes, he had left behind a substantial digital trail, which had allowed the FBI and other investigative agencies to piece together his methods and motives. It took three minutes for Ellen to dispense with background information, including the development of Cam’s strange symptoms, Lee’s involvement, links to other TPI students, concerns over the ProNeural nootropics, and Gleason and Yoshi’s fraud scheme.
Ellen began reading the press statement:
In every case, the murders and assaults, including the attempt on my son’s life, were the result of one man’s horrifically misguided deeds. Dr. Hal Hewitt’s sick and twisted vision for the future began with the struggles of his son, Liam Hewitt.
Liam was a gifted artist who had fallen victim to drug abuse. From analysis of Dr. Hewitt’s digital archives, we now know that he confronted his son about his drug problem. Liam insisted that drugs were essential to his creative process and would not stop taking them. Dr. Hewitt became obsessed with saving Liam and set off on his destructive path to discover if it was possible to unlock a person’s creative potential without any reliance on drugs of any kind.
Ellen paused and took a drink of water.
“It sounds great so far,” Karen said, encouraging.
Dr. Hewitt’s work as a fertility specialist made him uniquely qualified to shape the formation of human life. He spent years perfecting his protocol and developed a rudimentary form of gene editing in sperm that predated today’s modern CRISPR-Cas systems for targeted genome editing.
Using his technique, Dr. Hewitt could snip out a piece of any organism’s DNA cheaply, quickly, and precisely—like a film editor altering frames of a movie. We can only speculate that Dr. Hewitt did not share his breakthrough research with the broader scientific community because he wanted to further his selfish and misguided ambitions without interference.
Dr. Hewitt believed he had correctly identified the genes that control our neuroplasticity, which is how the brain learns and retains information. In one of the papers the FBI recovered during this ongoing investigation, Dr. Hewitt referred to his procedure as, and I quote, “putting the brain’s ability to form new neural connections on steroids.”
What Dr. Hewitt strived for was a genetically modified child capable of quickly mastering skills requiring tremendous creativity. Music. Art. Chess. Mathematics. Any endeavor combining creative thought and cognitive ability.
In his prodigious writings, Dr. Hewitt expressed a desire to maximize people’s potential, to help usher in a new golden age. He imagined a planet full of artists and brilliant abstract thinkers who could solve humanity’s greatest challenges, and believed wrongly that the sacrifices of a few would be worth such a result.
Dr. Hewitt used his sperm without the knowledge or consent of any of the parents who had entrusted him with their fertility treatment, as a way of presumably reducing the variables of his horrific experiment. From the data analyzed so far, it appears Dr. Hewitt’s procedure did augment to some capacity the brain’s natural neuroplasticity and enabled a type of genius that far surpassed what was obtainable without genetic enhancement.
To put his theory into practice, Dr. Hewitt required a vehicle to expose each child to different skills to master. It was his hope an innate interest would take root, and because of the genetic enhancement, Dr. Hewitt theorized these children would develop tremendous skills quickly. He believed rapid skill acquisition would subsequently foster an interest in obtaining true mastery. For this reason, the TPI became an essential component of Dr. Hewitt’s plan.
It is our strong belief that Dr. Hewitt was well aware of the risks involved and he intentionally limited his manipulations to a handful of test subjects so that he could monitor them most carefully. He made a vow, which he had put into writing, to see each child through to adulthood before he went public with his discovery.
However, when these children reached a certain age of maturity, they experienced symptoms of a systemic genetic disease unlike anything known to medicine. The symptoms that presented in these young people—organ enlargement, seizures, among others—were unequivocally the result of Dr. Hewitt’s nightmarish eugenics procedure.
We believe Dr. Hewitt became worried that doctors would eventually discover the genetic anomaly and trace it back to him. However an autopsy, if performed, would show evidence of a new type of genetic disease, but would not offer any links back to his fertility clinic. It is the opinion of the FBI, and other investigative authorities, that Dr. Hewitt commissioned the murder of all affected young people, and in some cases their families as well, to hide his many crimes and protect his research.
It is the strong belief of the FBI that the people responsible for the attempted murder of my son were part of this elaborate scheme and that Dr. Fredrick Gleason, Cam’s personal physician, played no part in the attempt on my son’s life.
Ellen put the paper down.
“Is that all?”
“No, there are a few paragraphs about what this has done to my family, to the others. I just can’t read it right now.”
Karen reached across the desk and briefly took hold of Ellen’s hand. “Are you sure you can go through with this?”
“I have to,” said Ellen.
“How did he get to Duffy?” The question had been bothering Karen for some time.
“Mark Mueller—he was the man Lee killed at the farm, nickname Mauser—was a drug dealer who sold narcotics to an employee at the NSA. That employee went looking through various computers at the people closest to Cam, to learn their secrets.”
“And found Duffy’s.”
“Right. That employee has since been arrested and has been cooperating, as I understand it.”
“What about Mauser and his crew?”
“The FBI is still piecing that together,” said Ellen. “They believe Mauser was Liam Hewitt’s drug dealer. Hewitt may have hired Mauser as some sort of nanny to keep his son supplied, monitor his intake, keep him safe, and in exchange for their protection services, Hewitt fed them OxyContin to sell, which he siphoned from his clinic’s pharmacy by replacing real narcotics with counterfeit pills he bought online. He even had a code name; called himself Rainmaker. When the children started having medical issues, Hewitt threatened to cut off Mauser’s supply unless they cooperated.”
“Cooperated by killing those kids.”
“I guess in Hewitt’s mind his son Liam wasn’t like the others. Liam could still live as an addict, but the other kids were going to die, no matter what anyone did to try and save them.”
“And now?”
“And now…” Ellen’s eyes grew misty. “Now they’re still going to die, Karen, and I can’t stop it. I can’t save my son. Lee can’t. Nobody can.”