Rupture Read online

  “Quick,” she said. “Hide.”

  Eli held up his hands in disbelief and pretended to look for a place in the closet-sized room. “Hide?”

  “Hello, is this the Branch lab?” The voice was coming closer.

  Glass pipettes, the size of drumsticks, were stacked in a rack inside the cell culture hood. Vera had armed herself with one in each hand and acquired a ninja-like pose.

  “Deny it like hell, Dr. B. We ain’t going down.”

  Eli wanted to wring her neck.

  “Put those down and stay behind me.”

  They stepped into the main lab, Vera crouched behind Eli like a schoolgirl. He saw that the pipettes were still clutched in her fists.

  Eli tried to prepare an alibi.Should I deny any knowledge of the stolen equipment or just blame the whole thing on this nutcase from the start? He suffered from great inexperience when lying about stolen property.

  The best dressed scientist Eli had ever seen extended his hand with an expensive click of gold cuff links. “Hello, I’m Harvey Stone.” His black suit looked tailor-made.

  Eli gripped his hand firmly. “Dr. Stone.” Eli decided on a wait-and-see approach.

  But Vera stepped from behind Eli and wedged herself between the two men facing Harvey Stone.

  “I’m the alfalfa and the omega,” she said in a ninja-death pose, pipettes pointed at his eyes.

  Stone glanced at Eli, bewildered.

  How easy it would be to blame a lab full of stolen equipment on this crazy loon.

  Stone stepped back to a more comfortable distance, but Vera met his move with a forward lunge.

  “Methodist Eskimo bitches did it.”

  Stone pointed to the hall and said to Eli, “I think I’ll come back at another time.” He reached over Vera’s head to display a business card between two fingers.

  Vera watched his arm move above her, a snarling dog ready to bite. Eli took the card, and Stone exited to the hallway. Vera looked around at Eli with a victorious grin. “Baptist Jew Whore Daddy. Think?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Eli said, and he quickly read the card. “Please. Just shut up.”

  HARVEY STONE

  CEO

  REGENCY BIOTECH INTERNATIONAL

  ONE RBI DRIVE

  SAND DOLLAR REEF

  731-325-2104

  This guy isn’t a scientist from down the hall. He’s CEO of one of the leading biotech companies in the world. He came to find me?

  “Get your smelly rags out of here,” Vera yelled, loud enough to travel down the hall.

  Eli stared at Vera. She was quickly losing her charm, if she ever had any. “Hush, will you? Hush.”

  Eli sprinted into the hallway, Vera yelling behind him, “Rich Bitch Ink, Rich Bitch Ink.”

  Harvey Stone was waiting for the elevator at the end of the hall, arms folded across his chest.

  “Mr. Stone,” Eli called to him. “Wait just a minute.”

  The elevator arrived and Stone disappeared into it. Eli stuck his hand in the crack of the doors as they were closing.

  Harvey Stone had his back flat against the wall.

  “I’m very sorry, sir.”

  “I thought surgeons always protected their paws,” Stone said, holding his hands as though scrubbed for surgery.

  “I usually stop elevators with my head,” Eli said, “but right now it’s up my ass.”

  Slowly, the stern expression on Stone’s face melted into a gentle smile. “I want you to come see me,” he said and pointed to the card in Eli’s hand that was braced against a nervous door. “Call that number and a limo will pick you up.”

  The elevator beeped in revolt and Eli released the doors to Stone’s final words.

  “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SAND DOLLAR REEF

  HOME OF REGENCY BIOTECH INTERNATIONAL

  TUESDAY, 4:00 P.M.

  Alexander Zaboyan pushed back from the edge of his desk and reclined deeply in a black leather chair. He tapped a pen against the armrest, methodically sliding down the shaft with each tap before flipping it to the other end. The vice president of RBI had been sitting like this for almost an hour, replaying his conversation with Harvey Stone.

  These events were just confirmation of what he had expected all along. After building one of the most successful biomedical device companies in the world, he felt now that he’d been suckered into this merger. For the first few months, the merger seemed successful, causing wide exposure in the press, a prominent cover article in Forbes, and resulting in a sharp rise in the price of the company’s stock. All it would take was one crafty reporter to link the deaths to RBI for everything to go to hell.

  During visits from New York before his company’s relocation, Zaboyan had been shown only the best of Memphis. Except for passing through the Atlanta airport on his way to other destinations, he never had a reason to visit the South. Before the merger, he couldn’t imagine a reason that might take him there.

  Bunch of rednecks in pickup trucks shooting helpless ducks and anything else that moved.

  But it was becoming clear to him now. He had been carted around in an air-conditioned limousine down select streets to penthouse receptions with views too high to expose the decay. And the RBI compound itself was a like a city, with a restaurant, salon, even a post office. Every convenience needed that would prevent the 237 employees from having to leave the premises except for their trip home at the end of the day.

  He rotated his chair to a floor-to-ceiling window with a panoramic view of the Mississippi River and looked upstream at a rusty barge loaded with pyramids of barrels.

  Moonshine, most likely.

  He smiled at the thought.

  The AortaFix is my baby. Stone doesn’t care about it. He just wants the profit to fuel his stem cell therapy. And he’ll drop the device in a second if the media picks up a problem.

  The majestic river view spiraled when he looked down, just beyond the six-foot barrier wall that surrounded the RBI complex. Kudzu and poison oak entangled every scrubby willow in a thick web.

  Two deaths is nothing. I’ll sweep them both under the rug.

  Zaboyan pictured the skyline view from his beloved office in New York, a billion lights above the East River. He shook his head.

  I have moved to hell.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NORTH RESEARCH BUILDING

  4:14 P.M.

  “It was the Episcopalians, you know.”

  “What?” Eli asked. He was trying to get his mind around Harvey Stone’s surprise visit.

  Vera smoothed the front of her dress with both hands and stopped at her pubic bone. She patted it twice.

  “They kidnapped me in the basement and tortured me with holy water.”

  Eli told Vera to take the rest of the day off. The last thing he needed was one of her ludicrous stories.

  She banged her empty cart through the door and kept talking ninety miles an hour using explicit terms about the Episcopalians who had kidnapped her in the church basement and tortured her with holy water, a drip-drip-drip on her private parts. Eli sent her down the hall and locked both the lab door and his office.

  He pinned Stone’s business card to the corkboard above his desk. It was the only thing on the board and he sat staring at it.

  A limo will pick me up? Yeah, right. I’m barely hanging on to my job here and they’re going to escort me for a chat?

  He focused on the address. RBI Drive.

  RBI?

  Where had he heard those initials recently? Eli tried to bring his thoughts into focus through a sleep-deprived haze.

  Runs Batted In?

  No. Too obvious.

  Then it came to him.

  Kanter.

  It was Kanter, the anesthesiologist, who called out “RBI” during Gaston’s operation. RBI was the manufacturer of Gaston’s device. A failed device was one thing. It happened rarely. Failure of even the best-made device was possible. But a fatal device was a di
saster.

  He knew that a major biotech firm had relocated to Memphis recently. His father had kept him in touch, during his years in Nashville, with the Memphis health care and business scene, sending clippings from the city’s newspaper,The Commercial Appeal. He knew that the move had been ensnarled in controversy when the company decided to build on an obscure island in the middle of the river. He glanced again at the card.

  SAND DOLLAR REEF

  The computer on his desk was a mid-nineties model. The screen saver was the logo for the Memphis River Kings with a shot of a player slamming the puck. Eli looked closely at the jersey, a majestic crown-topped M, gold outlined in black. He remembered this version from the hockey team’s ’95 season.

  Eli selected the early version of Netscape and typed in Regency Biotech International. After a full minute, the first ten hits appeared, including the company’s home page. But another site grabbed his attention first. It was a headline from The Commercial Appeal.

  RBI STUNS CITY OFFICIALS:

  To Build Multimillion Dollar Complex on Sand Dollar Reef

  He scanned the story. When GlobeVac International and Regent Biotech announced the merger and plans to relocate to the Mid-South from Washington, D.C., and New York City, officials in Memphis all but donated large tracts of land to house the biotech giant, a move that would propel a city once established on bolls of cotton into a frontrunner of biotech power. CEO Harvey Stone announced that he would move his company to Memphis and the business community assumed that other pharmaceutical-based companies would follow. They envisioned a booming industry that would make the city competitive with other giants such as Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

  But after RBI executives visited the city’s prime real estate sites, the whole Mid-South and anyone who followed the biotech industry were shocked to learn that the new complex would rise on a no-man’s-island between the lines of Arkansas and Tennessee, unclaimed by either state.

  Then the company denied the city administration’s plan to advertise RBI’s choice of Memphis over other sites such as Seattle, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. The mayor was stunned when the advertising campaign, one that would have boosted the River City’s commerce and invigorated tourism along Beale Street, fell through with a bang. The final blow occurred when the privately funded bridge to the island was built not from the Tennessee shoreline but from a peninsula of land protruding from Arkansas, so that employees would choose to live in West Memphis, Arkansas, effectively shutting the company off from downtown Memphis.

  Eli closed the Web site and clicked on the company’s home page. While the outmoded computer searched, he glanced at the clock. He could hear no one in the hallway or the building. With the relaxed schedule of summer, most of the personnel in the neighboring labs would have left by now.

  The Web page displayed the letters RBI in bold silver, each rotating in a random, chaotic manner before realigning to form the trademark. After a couple of seconds, the letters began their dizzying rotation again. Eli clicked on the screen with no effect until the letters realigned once more. Eventually, a double click took him to the next page, which displayed three options:

  • Vaccine Development

  • Biomedical Devices

  • Stem Cell Technology

  He knew RBI was a leader in vaccines, and that the recent merger had incorporated an established medical device company. But it was the third item that attracted his attention. As a scientist, Eli understood the rationale of embryonic stem cell therapy. A no-brainer, as they say. With a bit of finesse, and the addition of human growth factors, these earliest embryonic cells could be coaxed to differentiate into a specific tissue.

  Insulin producing cells for the diabetic.

  Dopamine secreting cells to control the ravages of Parkinson’s disease.

  Spinal nerve cells for the paralyzed.

  How could a country with the most advanced health care in the world not take full advantage of this resource?

  Eli knew, however, that embryonic stem cell therapy was much more complicated than had been portrayed to the general public. What could be accomplished in a test tube was often vastly different than actual therapy in a human patient. The promise of gene therapy, followed by the disappointing results, had shown how the hype of medical breakthrough is much different than reality of cure. It would take years, a generation at best, for embryonic stem cell therapy to come to fruition, if it worked at all.

  Eli thought of his mother, dead from cancer. His grandfather, devastated by Parkinson’s before he died. And Henry, his own brother, a mental invalid from his neurologic condition. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate these dreaded diseases?

  But an issue that at first seemed so clear in Eli’s mind quickly turned gray.

  Is the sacrifice of human embryos the answer to the shortcomings of doctors and the medical profession? Allowing one potential life to save another? But then Eli remembered. These human embryos will be discarded anyway, the unintended surplus of our well-intended technology for infertile couples. What could be the harm? Unused, prediscarded embryos could furnish the much needed embryonic cells for research that could advance the field of embryonic stem cells into therapeutic reality.

  But how many embryos would ultimately be needed for this miraculous healing? An experiment in a culture dish was one thing, the escalating demand and sheer magnitude of cells needed for human therapeutics was entirely different.

  There was always one point on this issue that Eli could not get his head around. That point was Henry, his brother. Would defective embryos be specifically chosen for this purpose, the bad cells discarded, the normal embryonic cells harvested for therapy? If that had been the case years ago, Eli would have been an only child. He thought about that—no fights in high school for defending his brother, the retard. And now, he would not be responsible for the expensive bills that paid for Henry’s care.

  Considering these arguments, Eli wondered why he didn’t use his position as a surgeon-scientist to advocate for embryonic stem cell research. But this same scientific acumen warned him this was not the path the profession of medicine should take.

  Or maybe his scientific acumen had nothing to do with it.

  Maybe it was simply his brother, with his kindergarten IQ, and his developmentally delayed, precious life.

  Eli returned to the menu page of RBI’s Web site and clicked on Biomedical Devices. No controversy here, he thought. The page was further divided to give the history of New York-based Regent Biotech before the merger and applauded the company’s success as an innovator in the industry.

  Eli scanned a series of pages until CAURRENT PRODUCTS appeared. He skipped past Pacemakers and Robotics to the category that interested him most,Endovascular. He clicked on the subcategory Aortic, but after a few seconds of delay the following message appeared:

  We’re sorry.

  This page is unavailable.

  Current updates being installed.

  The same rotating emblem appeared and began to bounce from side to side and from the corners of the screen. Irritated and fatigued with a lengthy search that had taken him nowhere, Eli closed the Web page and shut down the antiquated computer.

  He walked from his laboratory to the hospital and hit the fourth floor button on the elevator. The pediatric intensive care unit brought a flood of memories to Eli from his days as a third-year resident on pediatric surgery.

  Stat call for a chest tube in a three-year-old. Perforated intestine from necrotizing enterocolitis in a premature infant no bigger than a squirrel.

  He shuddered at the mental image.

  Eli entered the unit and showed his badge to the clerk. She pointed to a soap dispenser on the wall.

  “Scrub those hands, doctor.”

  Eli squirted a glob of alcohol-based gel in his hand and rubbed it in, acrid fumes from the evaporating gel filling his nose.

  “I’m seeing Margaret Daily.”

  The clerk glanced at a clipboard on her desk. “Bed
seven. Mom’s in there now.”

  The rooms were arranged in a circle around a central nurse’s desk and the doctor’s workstation. Eli passed a group of pediatricians on their daily afternoon rounds outside room four. As he approached, they stopped their discussion and eyed his name badge. Surgeons ambling about in the pedi ICU either brought a sense of relief or great consternation. There was no in between.

  Margaret’s nurse was standing in the doorway.

  “How is she?” Eli asked.

  “She’s not scheduled for any surgery, I can tell you that.”

  Eli put up both hands in surrender. “I know that, I’m just a friend.”

  The nurse smiled. “She’s much better now. Might even go home in the morning.” Then she held out a finger and made like a hook. “But she’s scared enough already, doesn’t need any more doctors.”

  Eli understood. He took off his white coat and dropped it over her hook.

  Meg was sitting in a chair pulled close to Margaret’s bed. The girl held a gift store teddy bear and was bouncing it on her stomach.

  “How we doing?”

  Eli could see the relief in Meg’s eyes when she saw him. She started in with some formal introduction.

  “Sweetheart, I want you to meet Dr. —”

  But Eli came up beside the bed, took the bear, and used it to kiss Margaret on the nose.

  “My name’s Eli. What’s his?”

  Margaret grabbed the bear, hugged it close to her chest, and stared at Eli while she thought about it. “His name’s Fuzzy.”

  Eli leaned over and opened his eyes wide.

  “How fuzzy was he?”

  Margaret giggled and kissed Eli’s nose with the bear.

  Eli turned to Meg. She was covering a smile with her hand.

  “Glad things are better,” he said.