Andrew Gross: Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 2: 15 Seconds, Killing Hour, The Blue Zone

Betsy, his assistant for over twenty years, stepped in carrying a chef’s salad on a plate along with a cloth napkin, Raab’s best defense against his proclivity for leaving grease stains on his Hermès ties. She rolled her eyes. “Raji, still …?”

Benjamin shrugged, drawing her eye to his notepad where he had already written down the outcome: $648.50 . He knew that his buyer was going to take it. Raj always did. They’d been doing this little dance for years. But did he always have to play out the drama so long?

“Okay, my friend.” The Indian buyer sighed at last in surrender. “We consider it a deal.”

“ Whew , Raj.” Raab exhaled in mock relief. “The Financial Times is outside waiting on the exclusive.”

The Indian laughed, too, and they closed out the deal: $648.50, just as he’d written down.

Betsy smiled—“He says that every time, doesn’t he?”—trading the handwritten contract for two glossy travel brochures that she placed next to his plate.

Raab tucked the napkin into the collar of his Thomas Pink striped shirt. “Fifteen years.”

All one had to do was step into Raab’s crowded office and it was impossible not to notice the walls and credenzas crammed with pictures of Sharon, his wife, and his children—Kate, the oldest, who had graduated from Brown; Emily, who was sixteen, and nationally ranked at squash; and Justin, two years younger—and all the fabulous family trips they’d taken over the years.

The villa in Tuscany. Kenya on safari. Skiing at Courchevel in the French Alps. Ben in his driver’s suit with Richard Petty at the Porsche rally school.

And that’s what he was doing over lunch, mapping out their next big trip—the best one yet. Machu Picchu. The Andes. Then on a fantastic walking tour of Patagonia. Their twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up. Patagonia had always been one of Sharon’s dreams.

“My next life”—Betsy grinned as she shut the office door—“I’m making sure I come back as one of your kids.”

“Next life,” Raab called after her, “I am, too.”

Suddenly a loud crash came from the outer office. At first Raab thought it was an explosion or a break-in. He thought about triggering the alarm. Sharp, unfamiliar voices were barking commands.

Betsy rushed back in, a look of panic on her face. A step behind, two men in suits and navy windbreakers pushed through the door.

“Benjamin Raab?”

“Yes …” He stood up and faced the tall, balding man who had addressed him, who seemed to be in charge. “You can’t just barge in here like this. What the hell’s going on …?”

“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”—the man tossed a folded document onto the desk—“is that we have a warrant from a federal judge for your arrest.”

“ Arrest …? ” Suddenly people in FBI jackets were everywhere. His staff was being rounded up and told to vacate. “What the hell for?”

“For money laundering, aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government,” the agent read off. “How’s that, Mr. Raab? The contents of this office are being impounded as material evidence in this case.”

“ What? ”

Before he could utter another word, the second agent, a young Hispanic, spun Raab around, forcing his arms roughly behind him, and slapped a set of handcuffs on his wrists, his whole office looking on.

“ This is crazy! ” Raab twisted, trying to look the agent in the face.

“Sure it is,” the Hispanic agent chortled. He lifted the travel brochures out of Raab’s hands. “Too bad.” He winked, tossing them back onto the desk. “Seemed like one helluva trip.”

“Check these babies out,” Kate Raab muttered, peering into the high-powered Siemens microscope.

Tina O’Hearn, her lab partner, leaned over the scope. “ Whoa! ”

In the gleaming luminescence of the high-resolution lens, two brightly magnified cells sharpened into view. One was the lymphocyte, the defective white blood cell with a ring of hairy particles protruding from its membrane. The other cell was thinner, squiggle-shaped, and had a large white dot in the center.

“That’s the Alpha-boy,” Kate said, slowly adjusting the magnification. “We call them Tristan and Isolde. Packer’s name for them.” She picked up a tiny metal probe off the counter. “Now check this out.…”

As Kate prodded, Tristan nudged its way toward the denser lymphocyte. The defective cell resisted, but the squiggle cell kept coming back, as if searching out a weakness in the lymphocyte’s membrane. As if attacking .

“Seems more like Nick and Jessica,” Tina giggled, bent over the lens.

“ Watch .”

As if on cue, the squiggle cell seemed to probe the hairy borders of the white blood cell, until in front of their eyes the attacking membrane seemed to penetrate the border of its prey and they merged into a single, larger cell with a white dot in the center.

Tina looked up. “ Ouch! ”

“Love hurts, huh? That’s a progenitive stem-cell line,” Kate explained, looking up from the scope. “The white one’s a lymphoblast—what Packer calls the ‘killer leukocyte.’ It’s the pathogenic agent of leukemia. Next week, we see what happens in a plasma solution similar to the bloodstream. I get to record the results.”

“You do this all day?” Tina scrunched up her face.

Kate chuckled. Welcome to life in the petri dish. “All year .”

For the past eight months, Kate had been working as a lab researcher for Dr. Grant Packer, up at Albert Einstein Medical College in the Bronx, whose work in cytogenetic leukemia was starting to make noise in medical circles. She’d won a fellowship out of Brown, where she and Tina had been lab partners her senior year.

Kate was always smart—just not “geeky” smart, she always maintained. She was twenty-three. She liked to have fun—hit the new restaurants, go to clubs. Since she’d been twelve, she could beat most guys down the hill on a snowboard. She had a boyfriend, Greg, who was a second-year resident at NYU Medical School. She just spent the majority of her day leaning over a microscope, recording data or transcribing it onto digital files, but she and Greg always joked—when they actually saw each other—that one lab rat in their relationship was enough. Still, Kate loved the work. Packer was starting to turn some heads, and Kate had to admit it was the coolest option she’d had for a while.

Besides, her real claim to distinction, she figured, was no doubt being the only person she knew who could recite Cleary’s Ten Stages of Cellular Development and had a tattoo of a double helix on her butt.

“ Leukoscopophy ,” Kate explained. “Pretty cool the first time you see it. Try watching it a thousand times. Now check out what happens.”

They leaned back over the double scope. There was only one cell left—larger, squiggle-shaped Tristan. The defective lymphoblast had virtually disappeared .

Tina whistled, impressed. “If that happens in a living model, there’s got to be a Nobel Prize in this.”

“In ten years, maybe. Personally, I was just hoping for a graduate dissertation.” Kate grinned.

At that moment her cell phone started to vibrate. She thought it might be Greg, who loved to e-mail her funny photos from rounds, but when she checked out the screen, she shook her head and flipped the phone back into her lab coat.

“If it’s not one thing it’s a mother …” she sighed.

Kate led Tina into the library, with about a thousand recorded iterations of the stem-cell line on digital film. “My life’s work!” She introduced her to Max, Packer’s baby, the cytogenetic scope worth over $2 million, which separated chromosomes in the cells and made the whole thing possible. “You’ll feel like you’re dating it before the month is through.”