The Messiah Code (8 page)

He glanced around Holly's room. On one wall a
Jurassic Park
3
poster vied with a life-size picture of The Internet Troopers. A soccer ball sat on the middle shelf above the desk, next to a large photo of Olivia laughing in the garden. He quickly shifted his gaze to the collection of CD-ROM computer games and GI Joe action figures. He smiled inwardly when he considered how there wasn't one doll, cute Peanuts poster, or doe-eyed Disney character in sight. From when she was tiny it had been obvious that Holly wasn't a Barbie doll kind of girl. So much for genetics, he thought.

Suddenly he imagined this room empty. The fear came so quickly and unannounced that he needed a second to compose himself. He took a deep breath and reassured himself that the CAT and PET brain scans they had taken together had shown no sign of Holly's tumor yet. Again he told himself that there
was
enough time to find her a cure. He would find the time.

"Dad?"

He turned to Holly, who was studying his feet. "Yes?"

"You ready for work already?"

"Of course. Why?"

"Your socks don't match."

He looked down and saw she was right. He was wearing

one blue and one brown sock. "They're not meant to match," he said. "They're a special pair."

Holly just raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, right."

Tom stood up and kissed her on the cheek. "No really, Hol. I can prove it."

Holly narrowed her eyes. "How?"

He couldn't resist a grin as he moved to the door. "Because I've got another pair just like them."

He heard her groan, "Daaad," but Tom managed to get out the door before the pillow reached him.

B
y six-thirty Tom was driving through the gates of the GENIUS campus, his discreet police tail not far behind. He normally liked to be at his desk before six-fifteen, but seeing Holly awake had been a welcome break in his routine.

He drove the Mercedes into the underground parking garage and noticed it was virtually empty. He smiled when he saw the lone bright green BMW convertible parked in the first available spot. He had a running joke with Jazz to see who could be in earliest and whoever won invariably took the prime spot to prove the point. Occasionally Jack Nichols would get in at some stupid time and park his car there, just to tell them he could be up with the best of them, but most days it was between them. Usually he won. But not today.

He got out of the car and walked to the stairs that led to the atrium. Before the shooting he would have run up them, but now he only walked. He refused to take the elevator out of principle.

It was quiet save for the hollow click-clack of his heels on marble. To his left, through tinted glass walls he could see Jasmine wandering around the main computer room. Leading to her from the atrium was a door of black opaque glass marked: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECTION--AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY. The IT Section, along with the central atrium and the Hospital Suite, occupied the ground floor of the GENIUS pyramid.

He returned her wave and walked to the middle of the atrium. Here, reaching up to the apex of the pyramid, was

a thirty-foot-tall multicolored hologram of the DNA spiral, rotating on a circular holo-pad. As he often did, Tom disobeyed the sign beside it and stepped directly into the three-dimensional image. He looked up through the spiral staircase rotating around him and marveled at the multi-colored rungs of nitrogen bases. Standing inside the double helix that carried the code of all life never failed to inspire him. This to him was the real information superhighway, along whose route most secrets that mattered could be unraveled. Shaking his head in fresh wonder, he stepped off the holo-pad and headed for the Hospital Suite to the west of the atrium.

Pushing open the door, he found himself in the small, cheerfully decorated waiting room with its adjoining rest rooms. Ahead were a pair of swinging doors that led to the experimental gene therapy ward and the fully equipped operating room beyond. Approved by the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the ward had ten beds. Fully funded by GENIUS, it was staffed with four doctors and ten nurses, one for each bed. Two of the doctors were on paid sabbatical from the NIH. Both of them were charged with ensuring the cross-fertilization of ideas and best practice--plus of course checking that GENIUS obtained the necessary Federal Drug Administration and NIH approvals for all experimental treatments on their human guinea pigs. He valued the NIH doctors' presence and hid nothing from them. Well, almost nothing. He hadn't shown them the IGOR DNA database yet. He was sure that despite his motives, the National Institutes of Health wouldn't approve of that.

Tom opened the door and smiled at the sunny room that greeted him: yellow walls, curtains of cornflower blue, houseplants, pine beds in semiprivate cubicles. All added to the impression that this wasn't a ward at all, but a large bedroom. However, that wasn't what made the place so special, and Tom so proud.

The ward was unusual because patients could qualify for a bed here only if they met one stringent criterion: They had to have less than three months to live. People came here when chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and all other treat

ments had failed. This was literally their last resort. It was where they came to have their genes reprogrammed.

Tom had initiated the ward to ensure that his scientists in the labs upstairs saw the direct application of their work, and never forgot that medical research was meaningless if it didn't help save human lives. Many of the terminally ill patients still died, but a significant few had missed their stop and kept on living. Back in early 1999 the first accredited cystic fibrosis cure through gene therapy had happened in this room. As had the first recorded successful gene therapy trial for Huntington's chorea a year later. This modest ward had seen more than fifty people's lives saved in the last nine years. Plus countless more throughout the world as a result of what was tested here.

Only six beds were being used at the moment. Five of the patients were asleep but he wasn't surprised to see that Hank Polanski was sitting up talking to the head nurse, Beth Lawrence. Today was a big day for the twenty-three-year-old farmer from North Carolina. The FDA had finally approved their new treatment and this morning Hank Polanski was to be injected with the HIV retrovirus that caused AIDS.

The patients were mainly treated by the other doctors, simply because of his laboratory commitments. But Tom still couldn't help regarding each and every one of them as his own personal responsibility.

Nurse Lawrence, a tall prim-looking woman with a surprisingly open smile, was busy fitting an intravenous drip into Hank's arm. When she looked up she greeted Tom warmly. "Good morning, Dr. Carter."

"Morning, Beth. Morning, Hank. How are you feeling today?"

Hank turned his pale face to him and gave a defiant grin. "I'm still here, Doc." When he spoke he did so with a breathless wheeze.

"You ready for the treatment?"

Hank nodded nervously. He was a volunteer for the experimental gene therapy, but Tom knew he had no choice. Hank had lung cancer and would die without radical treatment. This involved inserting genes into Hank's tumor

cells, genes that would tell the immune system to kill the tumor. Cancer cells are cells that have rebelled against their strict genetic orders, and are growing out of control. To put down this revolt Tom had to make sure he killed
all
, or virtually all, of the tumor cells. To do that he needed a vehicle to get the killer genes into the rebel cells without harming the good ones. That was where the HIV retrovirus came in.

Retroviruses could enter a body cell, incorporating their own genetic instructions into the cell's healthy DNA. Like cruise missiles, retroviruses could be reprogrammed in the laboratory, their harmful code turned off and good genes inserted. By neutering the genes in the HIV retrovirus that attacked the human immune system, and putting in special therapeutic genes, the killer that caused AIDS could be tamed to cure lung cancer. Tom and his team had proved they'd made the retrovirus harmless. It had been successfully loaded with genes to target and kill cancerous lung cells. All that remained was to test the genetically engineered retrovirus in a human.

"What are the risks again?" asked Hank, trying not to look frightened.

Tom put his hand on Hank's shoulder and rested it there. As always he was careful to be completely honest.

"One risk is that the retrovirus goes AWOL and invades a healthy cell, and then inserts the genes into the wrong part of your genetic sequence."

"What would that do?"

"It could give the healthy cells cancer too. But the odds of that happening are very, very small."

"Could I catch AIDS?"

"No, we've tested the retroviral vehicle--or vector as we call it--over the last three years, and we've proved that it's harmless. That's why the FDA sanctioned it. Frankly, Hank, the only real risk to you is that it might not work." He felt the bony shoulder shrug beneath his hand.

"So I ain't got zip to lose, then?" asked Hank.

Tom paused for a second and looked into Hank's eyes. He remembered him first coming here three weeks ago, the once fit outdoorsman already so weak he could barely walk. "I ain't good at being sick," he'd explained then. "So kill me or cure me. But just get me the hell outta here." The man had been willing to try anything as long as he could get out of his bed and the hospital.

"Let me be completely straight with you, Hank," said Tom. "The chances of this treatment failing are high--perhaps eightyfive percent. But the odds of it making you worse are minimal. And the chances of you surviving without it are zero. So you have a choice. One, you do nothing and let the disease take its course. Or, two, you do this and have a fifteen percent chance of being cured."

Hank frowned as if thinking, then wheezed, "Fifteen percent?"

Tom kept his face impassive. "At best."

Hank smiled, a big grin that lit up his thin face and made him look almost well. "I've had worse odds."

Tom returned his smile. "So have I. I've seen people with far less chance than that walk out of here. So don't give up on me just yet." It would take many weeks, months, even years before the results were conclusive. But Tom didn't care how long it took, if he could only keep death's greedy hands off this young man for a while longer. He turned to the nurse, who was hanging a drip bag on the stand by the bed. In the bag was the first batch of red retroviral serum that had been cloned in the upstairs lab.

He said, "Right, Beth. We'll wait for Hank's mother to arrive. She said she'd be here at seven. Then could you get one of the NIH doctors to check what we're doing? I suggest Karl Lambert. When you've done that, come and get me and we'll start the first intravenous drip. Okay?"

When Beth nodded, Tom could see the excitement in her eyes. He felt quietly confident about curing Hank. He only wished he felt as confident about the infinitely more complex cancer threatening his daughter. Bob and Nora had said they'd be ready to check the retrovirus they'd developed to combat glioblastoma multiforme at nine o'clock. He checked his watch; only two more hours to go.

A
cross the ground floor of the pyramid Jasmine Washington was spending the first half hour checking around her domain. Soon, the keenest of her staff would start arriving, and she liked to have some time alone with her machines.

She walked through the Experimental Genescope facility. This facility was similar to the one upstairs, where Holly's genome had been read. Except here there were only four Genescopes, and all were upgraded experimental models. The two on the right were holo-models equipped with the prototype Gene Genie software. Jasmine was confident they would be up and running within the next few days.

Again she felt the conflicting emotions stir within her. Four days ago she and Larry had taken Holly to the classic Disney animation movie
The Lion King
, and as always they had laughed and teased each other, but Jasmine had been unable to stop thinking about DAN's verdict. She was proud of the Genescope's ability to predict disease, especially when it could be prevented or cured. But if all the invention could do was predict misery without offering any solace, then it didn't seem so very clever.

She sighed and walked through the Genescope facility, passing the main IT office suite on her right, with its silent workstations and terminals. She opened the chrome and glass door in front to reveal a large dazzling chamber. This room was the heart of her IT department, and the information heart of GENIUS worldwide.

It was in this cool, all-white space, referred to simply as the White Room, that Jasmine liked to walk and think. Kept at a constant fifty-five degrees, it contained four enormous boxes that hummed away in the center. Two of the four large boxes housed Big Mother, the large protein-based ultracomputer that was linked to all the Genescopes in existence. This mother brain knew at any one time what scans were being conducted by its "brood," anywhere around the world. And it was Big Mother that allowed the existence of the database that resided in the other two boxes: the Individual Genome Ordered Repository--IGOR.

The ethical guidelines on gene scanning were rigorous. Genomes could be tested only if patients were accompanied by their doctor, or had professional counseling. Strict matching checks were used to ensure that an individual couldn't have his genome scanned without his knowledge. The other major guideline was that all scans should be kept strictly confidential. The life and health insurance companies had frequently tried to challenge this, claiming that if an individual discovered that he had an imminent incurable disease that individual could take out extremely high insurance coverage at standard premiums. The law, however, was adamant that the privacy of the individual was paramount. And this was why Jazz and Carter were so keen to keep the database secret. IGOR was strictly illegal.