New Brunswick, New Jersey
THE PRODUCT WAS gone.
Meredith Morley pressed the “End” call icon on her iPhone and set it gently on the nightstand next to her bed. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then, she congratulated herself for showing such remarkable restraint. She had not screamed. She had not thrown her phone. She had not ordered anyone drawn and quartered.
Yet.
The report from Xavier Pope—her lead scientist and project director in Prague—was so absurd that it bordered on comic book fantasy. According to eyewitness accounts, Patient-65 escaped from his locked room, accessed the secure sample room, smashed the full complement of their most promising Adeno-associated virus vector serum, and stole a vial of weapons-grade Yersinia pestis. He then out-maneuvered a trained security staff of twelve by jumping down a four-story stairwell, breached containment by running out the fire escape door onto a city street, hailed a taxicab, and drove away. Meredith closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. What had been the most promising opportunity of her young and highly decorated career at Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals was now on the verge of becoming her own personal Chernobyl.
What vexed her most, however, was that Pope’s report had taken exactly eight hours and fourteen minutes too long to reach her. According to Pope, the security supervisor on duty had neglected to notify him of the episode until morning, foolishly believing he could “rectify the situation” on his own before shift turnover at eight o’clock in the morning. A weak mind begets a weak character. That was what her father had said to her when she was sixteen and tried to cover up a speeding ticket from an unsanctioned joyride in his Porsche. She had carried those words with her ever since; one could even argue the phrase had become her personal mantra. Pope assured her that he had fired the dolt on the spot, but that was little consolation. The damage was already done. Patient-65 had an eight-hour head start, and with every passing hour the cone of uncertainty surrounding his position was growing exponentially. Immediate action was imperative. She swung her legs off the side of the bed, slipped her nightshirt off, and walked naked into her bathroom. She turned on the cold water tap in the shower and stepped into the icy stream.
• • •
IT WAS ONLY five short months ago when a strange notice from one of the H1N1 vaccine trial administrators floated across her desk. As the Director of Research & Development for Vyrogen, Meredith was required to review and sign all anomaly reports. Since the H1N1 vaccine trial was technically classified as an R&D activity, she found herself regularly barraged with H1N1 administrative minutiae. Late one evening, while leafing through a stack of such reports, she came across a blood panel anomaly that made her gasp. A previously undocumented genetic aberration with groundbreaking implications had been detected in a study participant and tagged for further review. She moved swiftly; no one was going to snatch an opportunity like this away from her.
She directed three of her most loyal scientists to perform a preliminary assessment of the anomaly and ascertain what resources would be needed to go to the next level. The report was discouraging. The team advised her that outside expertise was needed, and only one man was on their list—Xavier Pope. Recruiting Pope away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been more difficult than she could have imagined. First, he demanded a copy of the lab data, a violation of Vyrogen policy. After much consternation, she reluctantly acquiesced. This was followed by a week of radio silence. Then, late on a Friday afternoon, he phoned her with additional demands: complete autonomy as project director, a 20 percent salary bump, and a new Audi company car. It chafed her to do it, but she agreed to his demands.
With Pope aboard, the project had wings, and initially things progressed steadily. However, Meredith wasn’t satisfied with a “normal” development cycle. Unlike Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in 1928 but was not able to mass-produce therapeutic antibiotics until seventeen years later in 1945, she had a more aggressive timetable in mind for achieving scientific immortality. She had given her team a target of nine months to decode the mutation, synthesize a gene therapy based on it, develop a delivery mechanism, perform preclinical toxicity analysis, and complete all essential bioanalytical testing. If they succeeded, she would be ready to start Phase 1 Clinical Development Trials within a year. To cement her personal commitment to the cause, she wire transferred ten thousand dollars directly from her personal bank account into the private accounts of each of her top five scientists, and promised a matching payment in nine months if the milestone was achieved.
Scientific accomplishment and monetary incentives alone proved to be insufficient levers to keep the team on pace with the schedule. Extraordinary measures were necessary. Moving the project offshore to the Czech Republic—away from prying corporate eyes and stifling procedural protocols—had been her first mandate. Patient-65’s compulsory participation was her second.
Nicknamed “The Calypso Directive” by Pope, the project mushroomed into a tremendous professional risk for everyone involved. The provenance of the nickname was not lost on her; she had Googled it. Calypso was the nymph who kidnapped Odysseus and held him prisoner on her secret island. Calypso needed Odysseus. She loved him, and in exchange for his love, she offered him the godly gift of immortality. Patient-65 was Meredith’s Odysseus. The laboratory in Prague, her secret island. While the babbling Hippocratic demurral from her staff tested her resolve daily, she was resolute in her conviction that the ends would justify the means. In true Homeric fashion, she would bestow on her patient-hero Calypso’s gift. Together, they would be gods—Morley and Foster—immortal in the annals of medical history.
With Patient-65 sequestered safely within the BSL-4 confines of her Chiarek Norse facility in Prague, Pope and the research team methodically dissected the assignment. The first step, decoding Patient-65’s genome, was purely a matter of computational power. This hurdle she could overcome with money and supercomputer-sourced processing time. The second step, however, synthesizing the mutation into an efficacious biopharmaceutical, was a nightmare. The crux of the problem was figuring out how to take the naturally occurring mutation in Patient-65’s immune system and program it safely into another human being’s DNA.
Meredith understood that gene therapy was a field of medical research rife with risk, complication, and uncertainty. Reprogramming a human’s genetic code, while perfectly logical in theory, had proven to be disastrously difficult in real life. Human gene therapy products were still not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the United States, making all gene therapy a purely experimental endeavor. Furthermore, patients who chose to undergo gene therapy faced daunting risks: toxic shock from severe immune response to the viral vector or transgene; inappropriate DNA insertion by the transgene causing mutation or cancer; and the potential for the vector virus to mutate, propagate, or exchange DNA with other viruses, thereby infecting the host. There was no silver bullet when it came to gene therapy, Pope had complained to her once over a neat glass of Dewar’s. Trial and error was the modus operandi of biopharmaceutical development. Their luck changed, however, when she learned of a groundbreaking gene therapy experiment at Boston University that used a bioengineered Adeno-associated virus as the vector.
Hijacking the research had been simple. The editor of the renowned science journal Immunology owed her a favor; she called it in. The term of her repayment was a copy of the pre-publication paper outlining the BU experiment. The work was the brainchild of an unknown researcher, a graduate student named August Jameson Archer. After Xavier Pope confirmed that Archer’s research was germane to their endeavor, Meredith obtained the raw data and project files from Archer’s lab. A thousand dollars cash, a willing BU coed infiltrator, and a USB “air card” modem was all it took to obtain everything she needed. The payoff was epic. Archer’s research pointed Pope and the project team in a direction they hadn’t considered, saving her millions in cash and months of precious pretrial development time. She was so confident that a production-ready formula was imminent that she had even begun drafting her presentation slides for the Annual Board of Directors’ meeting.
But when Patient-65 went running half-naked into the streets of Prague, her crystal ball exploded into a million tiny pieces.
• • •
SHE WRAPPED A towel around her head, shrugged on her favorite bathrobe and padded into her study. The cold shower had shocked her body awake and readied her for battle. She pressed the power button on her aluminum-encased MacBook Pro and felt a surge of adrenaline. Had she pursued a career practicing medicine, she would have been an ER doctor. In medicine, the word triage describes the process of systematically prioritizing actions to redress injuries as a function of both their severity and urgency. Successful triage requires equal parts judgment and action.
This was triage.
She had two bleeders demanding her attention: Retrieval and Damage Control. The former was a matter of urgency, the latter a matter of severity.
With Patient-65 on the run, Retrieval was going to be a problem. The longer her wayward genetic prodigy was missing, the harder it would become to find him. Swift, local intervention was the key. While Meredith preferred to clean up little messes like this on her own, desperate times . . . desperate measures. She sighed. Outside help was going to be necessary. Over the years she had come to realize that some jobs, especially the distasteful ones, were sometimes better to outsource. Every thorn has its rose, she mused. There would be no paperwork, no signatures or contracts that could be traced back to Vyrogen or to her. She would use an intermediary to make the necessary arrangements. Arm’s length separation. Plausible deniability. It was better that way. Safer. While she had never used the Zurn brothers before, as far as bounty hunters go, they came highly recommended and had reputation for pertinacity.
She made the call.
Damage Control she would handle herself. She began typing a list. Records would be moved, shredded, or scrubbed as necessary. Archival data would be copied, transferred, and then deleted from the Chiarek Norse servers. Equipment, materials, and staff would be relocated to an alternate facility outside the Czech Republic. This needed to happen fast. Within forty-eight hours, she decided. Loose lips had to be sealed. Payments would be made to ensure stories matched and memories were foggy. A cover story needed to be formulated and supporting press releases drafted. Her fingers danced on the keyboard at breakneck pace for over an hour. When her damage control plan was complete, she clicked “Save” and leaned back in her task chair.
She looked wistfully at the framed picture on her desk, the one depicting her father jokingly handing her the keys to his Porsche. Maybe someday she would be able to look back on this crisis and laugh, just as she and her father had done about the speeding ticket, twenty-three years ago. Probably not. One can only prepare for so many contingencies before something catches you off guard. There was no way she could have seen this coming, she told herself.
She did not want to do it, but this was triage. If the Zurns failed to capture Patient-65 within twenty-four hours, she would be forced to hedge her bets. She pressed the “Contacts” icon on her iPhone, touched the letter “N” on the sidebar, and scrolled through the list of surnames until she found his name. It had been two years since they had spoken. She was certain he would answer her call. The question was . . . would he help her?