Knockout Mouse Page 14

  I peered closely at the blur of metal, rubber, and glass. There it was. That maroon. The same color I’d seen at the office shop where Jenny I had copied the diary. The car was not in a parking space, but moving down a row. That’s what had startled Sheila, not Gregory. Dugan had hired Pratt after all, and had hired him before anything happened to Sheila.

  I rewound and squinted. I couldn’t make out who was inside, nor any other details. Just the blur of maroon.

  Then Sheila, and the leather bag. I thought hard about it, replaying the moment when Sheila had arrived at Jenny’s. Her smooth and certain denial of having been in the parking lot. The way she’d unwrapped the scarf with both hands. The small bag on her shoulder. The linen jacket I’d hung in the closet. The tomatoes. But no large brown leather pouch. I was sure of that. Sheila showed no signs of having endured a struggle, so she must have succeeded in delivering it wherever she’d been going.

  A string of possibilities filed through my mind. Maybe Sheila had stolen LifeScience intellectual property, as Dugan claimed, and I’d caught her in the process. If that was the case, the PIs were tracking her for legitimate reasons.

  Or Sheila had taken something from the lab, and her success in delivering it had enraged Dugan and Pratt. Possibly so much so that they came after her following the dinner party. Or before, but whatever toxin they’d given her hadn’t yet taken effect by the time she arrived. Maybe they’d even gotten their hands on the bag, and Sheila was seeking refuge at the party. But she’d looked calm enough when she arrived that I had to dismiss the latter two possibilities.

  It was equally possible that the bag was Sheila’s own property. That would mean there was still a tangle to unwind, a knot of people and factors I hadn’t yet found.

  Such as Karen. She was the missing piece. More and more counted on meeting her tomorrow. If only I felt better about what I had to do to get that meeting.

  I got to work transferring the DAT tapes I’d pilfered from Rita earlier in the day. I had to run several samples before I got the levels right.

  While the tapes were transferring, I tried Jenny once more, and once more got her machine. A sudden pit of panic gaped in my stomach. She should have been back by now.

  I dialed her cell number. As it rang and rang, the pit deepened. Then suddenly there was Jenny’s voice. I asked if she was all right. Yes, she was out with some friends. Restaurant din clattered in the background.

  “I got worried about you.”

  “That’s sweet.” Her voice was back to its perky self. “But I’m fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I have to stay here and—” I started to say. But the connection was lost. “Transfer some tapes.”

  I put down the phone and stared at the floor. A congealed piece of pizza sat on my plate. It tasted a lot like I felt.

  20

  It was ten minutes after twelve on Friday when I careened into the BioVerge parking lot. Knowing Gregory, he’d chewed his cell phone to bits trying to find me: our meeting was set for noon. He’d have to chew a little longer. I dashed into the Kumar building to return, surreptitiously, the DAT originals to Rita’s sound bag, praying no one had noticed their absence. Fortunately Rita was busy and only had time to give me a quick nod.

  I ran across the lot to BioVerge. Sure enough, there was Gregory, pacing in the lobby. I caught a flash of relief on his face before he set it sternly.

  “Dude, I thought you were going to leave me hanging.”

  “Would I do that to you, Gregory?” His eyes fixed on the same plastic bag I’d been carrying yesterday. I kept a tight grip and scanned the lobby. “Where’s Karen?”

  He held out his hand. “At her station. Rikki will take you.” The receptionist, a girl with three pigtails, looked up.

  “I think you should introduce me to Karen,” I insisted.

  Gregory pointed toward a conference room. “I’ve got two execs and a lawyer waiting for me. The lawyer is on the clock.”

  This was plausible. I handed over the bag. Inside were two DAT cassettes and a videotape. Gregory bared those big dental rows again and clenched a fist. “Justice will prevail, buddy.”

  He was gone before I could answer. Rikki regarded me, removed her headset, and motioned for me to follow. She wore a pleated skirt, tights, and boots. She took the stairs two at a time, turned left on the second floor, and entered a large space divided into a maze of cubicles. Rounding the corner, she stopped abruptly at one.

  “Oh! Karen’s not here?”

  I went in and scanned the papers on the desk. An interoffice envelope had Karen’s name on the bottom. This seemed to be her station. Rikki peeked in the next cubicle over. “Lian’s gone, too?” In fact, the whole space was strangely quiet.

  “I’ll wait here for Karen,” I said. When Rikki hesitated, I added, “Gregory will be upset if no one’s at the front desk.”

  “I’ll go and, like, page Karen?”

  I plopped down in Karen’s chair. Maybe she’d just gone to the bathroom or something. But I got a sick feeling in my stomach when I saw that her computer was off. I conducted a quick search of her stuff. A hairbrush in her drawer yielded dark strands about eight inches long. Judging from the height of her desk chair, she was half a foot shorter than me. A picture of two parent-age figures tacked to a small bulletin board showed a woman with sharp brown eyes and a thin, intelligent mouth. A completed crossword puzzle had been tossed on top of a row of binders.

  The phone buzzed. I stared at the blinking light, then picked up the receiver and waited. “Hello?” an uncertain voice asked.

  “It’s Bill, Rikki. Go ahead.”

  “Oh! Well, someone said Karen was in a conference?”

  Before I could ask where, a harsh voice near Rikki demanded who she was talking to. “Uh, you better come down?” she said.

  The voice sounded like Gregory’s. I slammed down the phone. He’d double-crossed me. I went into the main corridor. Two employees gave me a curious look. Gregory was not going to leave me to my own devices up here, I was sure of that. I turned right, away from the central stairway, and went in search of an exit. As I reached the end of the corridor, a voice yelled at me, “Hey! Stop!”

  I tried an unmarked door. To my relief, it gave onto a concrete stairway. I plunged down the stairs. They ended in a stale vestibule on the first floor. To my right was a door that would take me back inside. In front of me was a door labelled, EMERGENCY EXIT. ALARM WILL SOUND.

  This counted as an emergency. As I reached for the door, I had the bizarre precognition of hearing the fire alarm go off before I touched it. But the head-splitting bell was real enough. It propelled me out the door.

  In front of me was a small walk, landscaped with grass and low bushes, and beyond them a strip of parking spaces. The main lot was around the corner of the building. I sprinted down the walk.

  As I turned the corner, the first thing that caught my eye was a woman running for her car. At the same instant, I saw Gregory near the building entrance, speaking frantically into his cell phone. The woman was about five foot six, with straight brown hair that fell to her neck. She had to be Karen.

  I followed Gregory’s line of sight and my blood ran cold. A maroon sedan was speeding into the lot. Karen reached a white Honda and dug for her keys in her bag. The sedan screeched around the corner. I raced across the asphalt, entirely underestimating the car’s speed. The next thing I heard was the shriek of tires. The sedan was in a skid and coming right at me. At least Pratt, or his partner, had been nice enough to hit the brakes.

  I dove out of the way and rolled into a gap between two cars, still one space over from Karen. Propelling myself under the car, I scraped along the pavement. Tires squealed behind me. I popped out on the other side and knocked on Karen’s passenger window. She gaped at me, terrified, from behind the wheel.

  “I’m a friend of Sheila’s!” I shouted over the scream of the fire alarm. The maroon car had blocked Karen’s exit. I motioned for her to get out. “come with
me!”

  Either I had an honest face or she made a quick calculation between the lesser of two evils. Karen sprang from her car. We dashed in parallel rows away from the sedan. “Sheila was a friend of mine,” I repeated, yelling across the space between us. “I’ve got a Scout over here.”

  We slowed in the lane between parked cars. The fire bell ceased abruptly, leaving us in a gaping silence. Karen kept her distance, eyeing the line of trees at the end of the lot and the boulevard beyond it.

  A car door slammed. The head of Pratt’s partner bobbed among the glittering cartops.

  “They’ll catch you if you run,” I warned. “They were hired by Dugan at LifeScience.”

  That did the trick. Without saying a word, she joined me, angling across the lot. The maroon car peeled out, coming our way. The Scout was a few spaces over, in the last row of the lot. Karen and I met at the passenger door. I jerked the keys from my pocket, sorted frantically, and fumbled the right one into the lock.

  Karen climbed in. Pratt’s partner was hurrying across the last bit of pavement as fast as his stomach could shake. There was no time for me to get to the driver’s side. I pivoted and stood inside of the passenger door, pulling it most of the way closed. My posture relaxed, as if I was going to surrender to the fact the man had caught me. I gauged his approach: six feet, four, two…

  I swung the door out as hard as I could. Twenty pounds of steel hit him square in the stomach and sent him sprawling to the ground. He gasped for breath. I caught the door on its way back and dove into the jeep over Karen’s lap, into the driver’s seat. She slammed the door shut and hit the lock. Again I fumbled with the keys, trying to will the tiny tip into its slot in the ignition.

  By now the maroon car had arrived. It blocked my rear exit. I heard the partner gasp something to Pratt. The next moment Pratt was at my window, pounding on the glass.

  “Open up!” he commanded. “Open up!”

  I turned the key. The engine cranked, and cranked, and cranked. Please don’t be ornery, I pleaded.

  “I’ve got mace,” Karen said.

  It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice was clear, pragmatic, and perfectly calm. I stared at her. She gave a little nod. Her hand was in her bag and had already closed around the canister.

  “I’m going to roll down the window and duck,” I said.

  She nodded again. I held my arms up in surrender to Pratt. He’d just cocked his elbow to smash in the window. “I’m opening!” I shouted.

  I rolled the window down fast, inhaled, and ducked away. Karen leaned across me and gave Pratt a quick shot. He screamed and staggered against the car next to me. I rolled the window back up.

  I pressed the gas pedal to the floor and cranked the ignition again. At last the engine roared to life. Over my shoulder, I saw that the partner had regained his breath and was getting into the maroon car behind us. I didn’t intend to wait to find out if he was going for a weapon.

  Only one direction was open. In front of me was a high curb and a tree, about ten feet tall, newly planted on the grass embankment between the parking lot and the boulevard below. I gunned the engine and pushed the tires, in first gear, up to the curb. More gas, and they jumped it. Sad to say, the little tree wasn’t much of a match for the Scout. It cracked and went down. When my rear tires hit the curb, the jolt shot both Karen and me up out of our seats.

  The Scout skidded down the grass slope. I held on to the wheel, pumped the brakes, and wrestled the jeep to the right to avoid the cars parked along the street below. Now I found myself driving down a narrow sidewalk, one wheel still angled up on the grass bank. Luckily, this was not the kind of place where people actually walked.

  As soon as I found a break in the row of parked cars, I bounced down between them. When traffic was clear, I swerved onto the boulevard. I knew the maroon car would be coming out of the lot to head us off. I crossed two lanes and hit the median at an angle, jerking the left wheel up to help it over the curb. Again we were thrown into the air and pitched from side to side as the other three tires dealt with the median. Something scraped horribly on the curb as I came down into the opposite lane.

  “Ouch,” I said, but still managed a smile to myself.

  The Scout had come through. I accelerated and we headed away from BioVerge.

  “Who are you?” Karen asked in that same steady, purposeful voice.

  I looked over at her. My smile disappeared. She still had the mace in her hand, and it was pointed at me.

  21

  “Sheila tore the pages out of her diary because she was afraid. At least, that’s my theory.”

  Karen Harper paused to lift a cup of coffee to her lips. She sat across from me at a small tottery table in a cafe in downtown Santa Clara. Her blue-jeaned legs were crossed. Her finger curled around the handle. The cup was perfectly steady.

  I sat facing the door of the cafe, just to be on guard. Chances were, though, that Pratt had not been able to track us through ten miles of surface streets.

  “Afraid of Neil Dugan?” I asked.

  “Yes. Afraid of what would happen if anyone found out what she was up to.”

  “So, Karen, what was she up to?”

  Karen took another sip. She had those sharp brown eyes I’d seen in the photograph at her desk. Her lips compressed in a thoughtful line. I’d told her enough about Sheila, and what had happened since her death, to convince her to keep sitting with me. I’d also hinted she might get a look at the journal.

  “Sheila and I went to graduate school together. We understood each other’s style. Some of the people in mo bio are really wound up, very secretive about their work. They view every gain you make as a loss for them. I think it’s a carryover from physics. You know, in the early part of the twentieth century, a lot of physicists got into the field. Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book called What Is Life? They’d gotten matter down to its basic building blocks; now they set out to do the same for life. The stakes were high. Lots of Nobel prizes. Sheila and I preferred the old, more cooperative approach. When she found some peculiar results in her program, she came to me.”

  “The MC124 program. The monoclonal antibody that Frederick McKinnon designed to fight cancer.”

  “Designed in a manner of speaking.” Karen’s lips curled for a moment, and then her face returned to its default expression. There was something appraising and yet plain about it, unsettling yet reassuring. Most people revealed more in their faces—softness or hardness, wariness or openness. Karen simply seemed aware. Ready.

  “McKinnon does deserve credit,” she went on. “He conceived the program, he directed the research. Sheila was loyal to him. She thought he was brilliant, and I’d guess the feeling was mutual. He was the one who’d spotted her at Stanford. But according to Sheila, it was really Doug Englehart who made the big steps in identifying the monoclonal.”

  “And he’s not getting credit?”

  “Not what he deserves. That’s the way it works in this business. The senior scientist takes primary authorship. Our advisor, Harry Salzmann, was different. He put us in alphabetical order. The work inspired him more than the glory. Don’t get me wrong, the work inspires the others, too. But they live for the glory.”

  “And McKinnon’s got plenty of that coming. Not to mention good old cash.”

  “If MC124 works. It did well in vitro and in animal tests, but you never know what will ultimately show up in the clinical trials.”

  “And that’s what got Sheila worried?”

  Karen nodded slowly. “I’d say so. But for the time being she was worried about a mouse. One little knockout mouse. Dead.”

  “Knockout mouse?”

  “A mouse with certain genes knocked out. It’s often done to determine the gene’s function. Recently it was found that a mouse lacking a gene for brain development will also keep hair longer. Whole lines of knockout mice have been created for testing purposes. RAG1 mice are immunodeficient in a way that allows tumors to grow quickly. In nude mi
ce, the tumors can be seen growing under the skin. You can knock in genes, too. Human immune genes might be knocked into a mouse to get it to produce a more humanized antibody.”

  “So a knockout mouse got knocked out in Sheila’s lab…”

  “This mouse was in the trial population for MC124. Anything could have killed it. It happens all the time, you know. Organisms die. You look for the pattern. McKinnon and Englehart assumed this mouse was merely an anomaly. But Sheila thought there was something special about it. Its eyes were a little farther apart than the others. She was sure it came from a different, more humanized population than the other trial mice. If that was true, it didn’t belong in the test group. It may have been mixed in by accident. On the other hand, the humanized mice have a certain marking on their feet, which this one lacked.”

  “If MC124 is fatal to human immune systems, that sounds like a problem. Did they test it on more humanized mice?”

  “I assume they will. But McKinnon and Englehart are just as sure as they can be that it’s safe. Sheila still wanted to look very closely at this particular mouse.”

  “And then she got transferred out of the group.”

  “Yeah. McKinnon told her she was wasting her time. Actually, it was Sheila who asked to be transferred. She never did tell me why.”

  “That’s weird. Wasn’t she excited about the program?”

  “Very. It was good work. I was envious.”

  “What does MC124 do, exactly? What’s a monoclonal antibody?”

  “MAbs, we call them. You know what an antibody is, right? It’s a type of protein that responds to an antigen—an invader—in your body by going around and tagging it for destruction. Most antibodies have a single antigen they bind to. Their molecular receptors fit each other like a lock and key. One antigen, one antibody. So you can design a MAb to hunt out and bind with certain parts of cancer cells instead of with the usual pathogens like bacteria or a virus.”