Rupture Page 11

  Eli didn’t feel reassured.

  The guard remained silent and motioned for Eli to remove his shoes, then led him through what appeared to be a metal detector, like at an airport. Eli’s shoes were examined and given back to him.

  Through the window, Eli could see his driver who leaned against the limo, smoking as usual. With the guard’s hand firmly against his back, Eli was shoved toward a table and told, by way of a grunt, to sit in the chair. Eli wondered if he spoke English, or even spoke at all.

  Before him on the table sat a black box the size of a small microwave oven. From the box, a view piece projected forward, much like the View-Master toy used by children to see Disney characters. Again, with a nudge to his back, Eli was made to bend forward until his face met the plastic piece. He wasn’t feeling much like an invited quest.

  A completely dark field was suddenly illuminated by beams of light that passed over both eyes in a flash. Another grunt indicated that he was finished with this part of the examination.

  When Eli stood, his vision was blurry and bright, as though his pupils had been dilated. As he rubbed his eyes with balled fists, Eli felt the guard’s hands squeeze his armpits and slide down his waist and across his crotch.

  “Hey,” Eli yelled and pushed the man’s arm away. But the guard was already down to feeling Eli’s knees and patting his ankles. Eli stepped back and felt dizzy. The guard grunted a little louder and longer and pointed to the door. This time, his mouth was open, and Eli noticed the man’s unusually large tongue, swollen in a thick peninsula of muscle.

  RBI may be a top biotech company. But they need a lesson or two in public relations.

  The driver helped Eli into the limo. “They call him Tongue,” he said. “He looks scary, but he’s fairly harmless.” Then with a low whisper, “He ain’t all there.”

  They pulled away from the guardhouse, and as the glass divider was closing, the driver’s cheery voice said, “Now, doctor, you’re ready for the tour.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  RBI COMPLEX SAND DOLLAR REEF

  8:02 A.M.

  Regency Biotech International stood alone like a concrete fortress on a desolate island. Four massive antebellum-style columns created a magnificent entrance, with oversized magnolia trees planted in a semicircle. Rising four stories, square concrete sections with small, sparsely spaced windows fanned out on either side of the entry. Eli realized the company’s intention with façade. Visitors would be so impressed by the charming Old-South entrance that they wouldn’t notice the concentration camp bunkers.

  The limo pulled a hard turn along the circular drive, which surrounded a waterfall that splashed over the three-letter logo carved deep in a piece of granite. The driver escorted Eli to the impressive front entry.

  “Have a good visit, Dr. Branch.” He tipped his cap and retreated in a brisk escape to the limo.

  Eli stood before double glass doors that appeared twenty feet tall. Humidity rolling off the river saturated the air like the inside of a greenhouse. Reaching to his back pocket but not finding a handkerchief, he wiped beads of sweat from his forehead and slung them to the ground.

  He reached for the handle and briefly caught his reflection in the glass. His black suit was at least fourteen years old. He had bought it at James Davis, a top-notch Memphis clothier, for the specific purpose of medical school interviews during his final year at Ole Miss. With a little care and scarce use, the suit had held up well. But the jacket was tight across his shoulders now and the pants hem showed a little too much sock.

  As he tugged at the knot of his blue-and-red-striped Rebel tie, his focus converged through the glass on the face of a young woman sitting behind the reception desk. She was smiling, probably having enjoyed watching him primp. The doors opened toward him with a mechanical hum and a blast of cool air.

  “Dr. Branch?” The receptionist stood to greet him.

  Sleeveless black spandex clung to her like skin and erupted in a tight collar around her neck.

  “I’m Lisa.”

  Eli took her hand in a professional manner and gazed into brilliant, fake-blue eyes. He was certain to keep his vision well above the nice-to-meet-you nipples that tested the integrity of him and her blouse.

  “Did you get the message about Mr. Stone?”

  Eli acted interested in the vaulted ceiling and a chandelier that reflected squares of light on the wall like a disco ball.

  “He should be arriving any moment now,” Lisa said, tapping her watchless wrist.

  Large ceiling fans circulated the cool air, and drops of sweat fixed themselves to Eli’s hairline as if frozen. “That’s fine,” he said, looking around the foyer. “Is there a restroom?”

  “Sure, follow me.”

  Lisa stepped from behind the desk and led him into a narrow corridor. Her pink chiffon skirt bounced and jiggled as if suspended on springs.

  “Here you go.”

  Eli opened the door and released the breath he had been unaware of holding. The room smelled of cologne. Approaching a thick marble lavatory, he grabbed a wad of paper towels, held them under a gold-plated faucet, and applied them to his face.

  The voice behind him erupted like the crank of a chainsaw.

  “Sticky out there, ain’t it?”

  Eli swung around to find an old man sitting on a stool, white towel folded across his arm. The man hopped off his perch, limped toward Eli, and presented the towel.

  “Thank you, sir,” Eli said, still rattled.Attendants in the bathroom of fancy restaurants are one thing, but at a corporation?

  “Staying a while, are you?”

  Eli noticed the gentle sweep of a security camera at the corner of the ceiling. “No, just visiting,” he said.

  The man ripped into a series of gnawing laughs. “Just visiting? Humph. My son, nobody just visits this place.” His eyes darted toward the foyer. “Why would you ever want to leave?”

  The man smiled, sparkling white teeth forming a brilliant centerpiece within his black face. His eyes continued to jerk and dart in a twisting glare as though in the dawn of a seizure.

  “Okay, Prine, that’s enough,” Lisa yelled just outside the door.

  He winked at Eli. “She’s my little girl. Yes sirree.”

  When Eli approached the urinal, the bathroom attendant began to hum “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” He used the towel to whip-pop the air for the cymbal parts. With this commotion and Lisa listening from the hallway, Eli couldn’t start a stream, even with two cups of coffee in him. He turned to leave.

  “Hold on there, son.” Prine took a squirt bottle of cologne from the counter and delivered a halo of mist around Eli’s head. “It’s her favorite.”

  As Eli entered the hallway, his eyes were not only dilated but also stinging from the cologne. Lisa was waiting with a twig of blonde hair twisted around a finger and pulled toward her mouth. “Come,” she said, dangling her hand in front of her. “We have just enough time to visit one of the laboratories before Mr. Stone arrives.”

  RBI was divided into three sections, each with a presidential name: East Wing, West Wing, and the Oval Terrace. The East Wing housed all the research laboratories, and the West Wing contained the business and administrative offices. At least this is what Lisa told him as they headed toward the East Wing. She walked fast and Eli followed close behind her. Despite his blurry vision, he tried to focus on the facility instead of a posterior view of chiffon.

  Eli asked about the Oval Terrace. Lisa shrugged, pinching her spandex top even tighter. “I don’t know,” she said. “You need a special code to go back there.”

  Lisa inserted a card into a reader on the wall and they entered the East Wing. The doors swung forward and Eli had to step back to avoid being hit. Before them stretched a long, sterile corridor bright with fluorescent lights. All the doors along the hall were closed. As he passed each one, Eli looked through narrow-paned windows reinforced with steel mesh. The laboratories looked pristine, glassware arranged neatly on bench to
ps as if for a movie set. Not once did he see a person in a lab.

  At the end of the hall, Lisa peeked through a pane of glass and said, “Good, she’s here.”

  To enter the lab, she inserted her card and removed it quickly. She allowed Eli to enter first. The room looked the same as the other labs except it was somewhat smaller, and the glassware and equipment appeared to be in use rather than for show. By now his blurry vision had cleared.

  “She” was sitting at a desk with her back to him, one leg tucked beneath her, a position that hiked her shirt up in the back to reveal a perfect line of vertebral bulges, which carried his vision down to the edge of a black pair of tight, nylon slacks. Just visible above a dipping waist-line were two purple lace straps that hung off scrumptious hips and disappeared below. Either the woman didn’t know he was there or she was putting on a good show. Eli turned to his tour hostess, but Lisa was gone.

  When Eli turned back, the woman was moving, tilting to one side to release her captive leg, pants stretched tight, just enough tension on the purple thong straps to indent her skin.

  It was one of those moments again, like the first time he watched Meg Daily at the microscope. But now Meg seemed indistinct, his memory lacking detail. The moment drew longer, then too long. Eli cleared his throat and said, “You have a very nice . . . laboratory.” Eli could see now that she was writing and her pen continued to move as though finishing a sentence. Then she pushed back the chair and stood, nearly six feet tall with shoulder-length straight blonde hair. The bottom half of her navel was showing, a crest surrounded by a sea of tanned flesh. She spoke with a foreign accent, Scandinavian. He would further define it to be Swedish after her voice swirled down and vaulted off twin Alpine peaks.

  “Hello, Dr. Branch.”

  The way she said his name, and the dragging out of the l’s in hello, made Eli imagine her tongue curled and fluttering along the roof of her mouth.

  “My name is Tsarina,” she said and extended her hand.

  Her eyes were sharp, aqua blue, and indented like a cat’s. She held her mouth open just enough for Eli to see the tip of her tongue pressed playfully against her teeth.

  “It’s so very nice to meet you,” Eli said. He noticed a firm grip and an engorged vein that ran the length of her forearm.

  She stood in silence and seemed comfortable with it.

  Eli’s mind raced. What’s next? Stand here and talk about protein chemistry?

  “Let me show you what I’m working on,” she said, eventually.

  Yeah, show me.

  He followed her to the desk. A blueprint-sized scroll of paper held an algorithm sketched in longhand. At the top right-hand corner was the RBI logo and a bold, computer-generated title in the center:

  DIVISION OF STEM CELL TECHNOLOGY

  Tsarina reached for a gold-plated pen that had rolled to the edge of the desk. When she touched it, however, the pen fell to the floor and rolled under the table.

  She knelt on both knees reaching to get the pen, shirt practically up to her neck, the purple straps pulled taut in a magnificent V, a formation of geese in search of warmth.

  “Well, I see you found us.”

  Eli turned to Harvey Stone standing in the doorway. He was dressed in an elegant blended, dark blue suit.

  “Sorry I’m late. Had a patch of fog over the Potomac that held us back.” He extended his hand to Eli and they shook.

  Tsarina was back at the desk straightening her papers.

  “I hope you’ve had a chance to see what we’re made of,” Stone said, with pride.

  Eli nodded. “And then some.”

  “I was about to show him our plans for the Stem Cell Division,” Tsarina said.

  Stone put his hand on her shoulder. “We want to be the world’s leader in stem cell therapy,” he said. “And we’re fortunate to have a world-renowned scientist, Dr. Anatolia, leading the effort.”

  Tsarina smiled. “Thank you, Harvey.”

  “I’ll take Dr. Branch to my office.” When he turned away, he let his hand caress her shoulder. “Swing by later and show me the latest from the stem cell meeting in St. Martin.”

  Eli caught Stone’s wink at the end of his invitation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  NORTH RESEARCH BUILDING

  EARLY THURSDAY MORNING

  MID-SOUTH MEDICAL CENTER

  The cleaning woman found the body at 7:15 A.M. as she was emptying the trash from the laboratory of Eli Branch, M.D. She answered a battery of questions from the police in broken English while she crossed herself and snatched at her rosary beads. Juanita Huerta, age forty-three, had worked in the building for seven years, cleaning the hospital labs, at minimum wage, to support her family of five. She answered these questions for a full hour after she had unlocked the door to the doctor’s incubator room. It was an hour of complete hysteria.

  With difficulty, the police managed to piece together the sequence of events. When she entered the lab, Juanita emptied the trash receptacles and checked an empty can in Eli’s office. The final part of her routine was the incubator room, for which she had a key. Her main job was to remove the thick red plastic bags marked BIOHAZARD . She would gather the bags in a knot at the top, with various pipettes and culture dishes leaking pink liquid media inside.

  The door to the incubator room was always closed, a requirement of Infection Control, which conducted semiannual inspections to ensure that specifications were maintained to code. Inside, laminar flow under negative pressure prevented bacteria and viral particles from entering the building’s general air circulation.

  The two large cell culture hoods glowed fluorescent green from ultraviolet rays that reflected off the surface of stainless steel. A sliding glass frame could be lowered to shield the face and allow only the arms of laboratory personnel to enter the sterilized chamber, like hands selecting vegetables under the glass at a salad bar. Juanita knew not to touch the switches and buttons that controlled this specialized environment. She needed to touch only one light switch, go in quickly, grab the biohazard containers, and leave.

  At 7:15 this morning, when she turned on the fluorescent lights, she entered as usual and bent over to collect the bags. That’s when she noticed that the incubator door was ajar. Then she saw the pool of coagulated blood on the floor.

  The body was stuffed into the culture chamber with the head twisted inward and an arm pinned under the sliding glass. Blood was smeared across the inside glass, grotesquely painted with frantic fingertips before it seeped under the glass and dripped on the floor. Legs were folded back over the head, causing the dress to collect around a pantyless waist.

  Juanita did not scream. She dropped the bags of laboratory waste, culture dishes spilling across the floor. She stared at the mangled body, her hands shaking violently, and she crossed herself over and over. Then she fled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  RBI

  9:00 A.M.

  “Have a seat, Dr. Branch.”

  Eli entered the office of RBI’s CEO. Twice this week he had been asked to sit in a hot seat. The first time, in his chairman’s office, he was all but fired. This time had to be better.

  Mallard ducks were mounted on each of the dark-paneled walls. A ten-point buck projected above Stone’s desk. Eli expected to find elk, or even a prize kill from an African safari, but all the game were local.

  “You’re a busy man,” Stone began. “I’m busy too, so let’s get straight to the point, shall we?”

  “I’m all ears,” Eli replied. After the security guard ordeal, he decided to remain quiet and offer information only if it proved to his benefit.

  To begin his pitch, Stone leaned forward in his chair, arms on his desk and fingers interlaced.

  “We lost our chief medical officer a few days ago. Bernard Lankford. He was visiting our new stem cell clinic in the Caribbean. Heart attack. Tragic.”

  Eli nodded.

  “He was a good man. Devoted husband. He and his wife, Fran, had a brand new g
randchild, their first. Never saw her. Now I hear the child is very sick. What a terrible time this has been for Fran.”

  Eli nodded again.

  Stone continued. “Bernie had been with me for almost twenty years. We were poised to lead the world in stem cell therapy.”

  Eli remained silent. He was bursting with a single question.So what do you want from me?

  Before Eli could ask it, Stone told him. “We want you to be our new chief medical officer.”

  Eli clenched the muscles in his jaw. But he felt a smile trying to burst free.

  “I’m a surgeon,” he answered. “Blood-and-guts stuff. You know that, don’t you?”

  Without looking at any notes, Stone recited Eli’s credentials. University of Mississippi, the comparative anatomy fellowship abroad, Alpha Omega Alpha in medical school, Vanderbilt surgical training.

  Eli felt like someone being introduced as a frequent public speaker.

  “And I talked with your mentor at Vandy, Dr. Dezillion. She said you had one of the most brilliant and intuitive scientific minds she had ever seen.”

  Eli basked in this compliment. Dr. Dezillion was an international leader in the field and known to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize.

  “The board of directors has met. We reviewed several outstanding candidates. A unanimous decision says you’re our man.”

  Eli’s mind filled with the possibilities. Flights to New York in the company’s Lear. No more Fisher. No crazy lab technician. Tsarina!

  And the salary had to be better than his job in academia.

  Had to be.

  Stone continued the sell. “We need to boost the image of our company, both locally and abroad. You would bring a fresh perspective to RBI, a young, successful surgeon well known in the community.”

  Eli thought of many meanings of the word successful. His job in the Department of Surgery was in jeopardy. His lab was full of stolen equipment. Almost every penny he earned went to caring for his brother.