Robin Cook - Seizure

“I have a vitally important request of my own,” Ashley said. “I think we should exchange special email addresses and use the Internet for all our communications, which should be generic and short. The next time we talk directly should be at the Wingate Clinic on New Providence Island. I am committed that this affair be a closely guarded secret, and the less direct contact we have, the better. Is that acceptable?”

“By all means,” Daniel agreed.

“As for expense money,” Ashley said, “I will advise you by email of a confidential account at an offshore bank in Nassau, set up by one of my political action committees, from which you will be able to withdraw funds. I will, of course, expect an accounting in the future. Is that acceptable?”

“As long as there’s enough money,” Daniel said. “One of the major expenses will be to obtain the necessary human egg cells.”

“I reiterate,” Ashley said, “there will be more than adequate funds available. Rest assured!”

A few minutes later, after a final long-winded farewell from Ashley, Daniel leaned forward and disconnected the speakerphone. He lifted the phone back onto the end table. Then he swung around to face Stephanie. “I had to laugh when he called the head of the Wingate Clinic a blowhard. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”

“You were right about him putting a lot of thought into this affair. I was shocked when he said he’d made travel reservations a month ago. There’s no doubt in my mind he had the Wingate Clinic investigated.”

“Are you feeling better about being involved in curing him?”

“To a degree,” Stephanie admitted. “Especially since he says he’ll have no compunction signing a release that we write. At least I’ll have the feeling he’s considered the experimental nature of what we will be doing and the attendant risks. I wasn’t at all sure of that before.”

Daniel slid across the couch, put his arms around Stephanie, and hugged her against his body. He could feel her heart beating in her chest. Pushing himself back enough to look into her face, he stared into the dark depths of her eyes. “Now that we have seemingly gotten things under control in the political/business/research arena, how about starting out where we left off last night?”

Stephanie returned Daniel’s stare. “Is that a proposition?”

“Indeed, it is.”

“Is your autonomic nervous system going to cooperate?”

“A lot better than it did last night, I can assure you.”

Daniel got to his feet and helped Stephanie to hers.

“We forgot the do-not-disturb sign,” Stephanie said, as Daniel eagerly pulled her toward the bedroom.

“Let’s live dangerously,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

2:35 P.M., Friday, February 22, 2002

By the time Stephanie had awakened early that morning, she was caught up in the details of the Butler project. Her negative intuition about treating the senator’s Parkinson’s disease had not changed, but there was too much to do to obsess about such feelings. Even before she had showered, she used her laptop to fire off a series of emails to the senator about the handling of his biopsy.

First, she wanted the biopsy as soon as possible that morning. Second, she wanted to be absolutely certain it was a full-thickness skin, because she would need cells from deep in the dermis. And third, she wanted the sample merely to be placed in a flask of tissue culture fluid and not frozen or even iced. She was confident the tissue would be fine at room temperature until she got back to the laboratory in Cambridge, where she would deal with it appropriately. Her goal was to create a culture of the senator’s fibroblasts, the nuclei of which she would ultimately be using to create the cells to treat him. She had always had better luck with fresh rather than frozen cells when she was doing HTSR followed by nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning, as some people insisted on calling the process.

To Stephanie’s surprise and despite the early hour, the senator emailed her back almost immediately, indicating that not only was he an early riser but that he was as committed to the project as he had suggested the previous evening. In his message, he assured her he had already put in a call to his doctor and that when the doctor called back he would communicate her requests and insist they be followed.

Daniel was ebullient from the moment he’d thrown back the covers. He too was at his laptop, emailing before doing anything else. Dressed only in a hotel terry-cloth robe, he typed out a message to the West Coast venture capital group that had expressed interest in investing in CURE but had been reluctant to release any funds until there’d been a resolution of Senator Butler’s bill. Daniel wanted to let them know that the bill was destined to languish permanently in the subcommittee and was no longer a threat. Daniel would have liked to explain how he knew this bit of news, but he knew he couldn’t. Daniel had not expected a message back from the prospective investors for several hours, since it was only four in the morning on the West Coast when his message went out on the World Wide Web. Nonetheless, he was confident in their response.

As a splurge, they had ordered breakfast in the room. At Daniel’s insistence, it included mimosas. Jokingly, he told Stephanie that she’d better get accustomed to such living, because it would become the order of the day once CURE went public. “I’ve had enough of academic poverty,” he’d declared. “We are going to be on the A list, and we are going to act the part!”

At nine-fifteen, both had been surprised by a call from the concierge’s desk saying that a courier had dropped off a package from a Dr. Claire Schneider labeled URGENT. They were asked if they wanted it sent directly to the room, and they had responded in the affirmative. As they assumed, the package contained Butler’s skin biopsy, and they were duly impressed with Butler’s efficiency. Its arrival was several hours earlier than they had hoped to see it.

With the biopsy in hand, they had been able to catch the ten-thirty shuttle flight to Boston, getting them into Logan Airport just after noon. Following an even more hair-raising taxi experience than those in Washington, as far as Daniel was concerned, with a driver from Pakistan in a rattletrap vehicle, they were dumped off at Daniel’s condominium apartment on Appleton Street. A change of clothes and a quick lunch followed by a short ride in Daniel’s Ford Focus brought them to CURE’s current digs in East Cambridge on Athenaeum Street. They entered through the front door. The company occupied the ground-floor suite immediately to the right of the entrance.

When Daniel had first founded CURE, it had occupied most of the first floor of the renovated, nineteenth-century brick office building. But as the money crunch deepened, space was first to go. Currently, it was one-tenth of its original size, with only a single laboratory, two small offices, and a reception area. Second to go were the nonessential personnel. The employees included Daniel and Stephanie, who’d not drawn salaries for four months, another senior scientist by the name of Peter Conway, operator-cum-receptionist/secretary Vicky McGowan, and three laboratory technicians soon to be reduced to two or maybe even one. Daniel had not yet decided. What Daniel had not changed was the board of directors, the scientific advisory board, and the ethics board, all of whom Daniel intended to leave in the dark about the Butler affair.

“It’s only two-thirty-five,” Stephanie announced, after closing the door behind them. “I’d say that’s good timing, considering we woke up in Washington, D.C.”

Daniel merely grunted. His attention was directed at Vicky, who was handing him a bundle of telephone messages, a few of which needed explanation. In particular, the venture capital people from the West Coast had called instead of returning Daniel’s email. According to Vicky, they were hardly satisfied with the information they’d gotten and were demanding more.