As Daniel’s fear abated during the passing days, his anger at the event waxed, and a significant amount of the anger was redirected toward Stephanie. Although she had apologized and had been sincerely sympathetic initially, Daniel fumed at her lingering doubt about her family’s role in the event. She hadn’t said as much directly, but Daniel had gotten that sense from indirect comments. With such a screwed-up family and lack of judgment in dealing with them, Daniel couldn’t help but question whether Stephanie would be too much of a liability over the long haul.
Stephanie’s self-righteousness was also a problem. Even though she’d promised not to make waves with the Wingate people, she was constantly doing so with inappropriate comments about their supposed stem-cell therapy and even inappropriate questioning of the young, pregnant Bahamian women who worked at the clinic, which was an extremely sensitive issue with Paul Saunders. On top of that, she was embarrassingly dismissive of Spencer Wingate. Daniel recognized that the man was being progressively forward in expressing his social interest in Stephanie, a fact that might have been influenced by Daniel’s passivity in the face of Spencer’s comments, yet there were less rude ways for her to handle the situation than she was choosing. It irked Daniel to no end that Stephanie just couldn’t seem to understand that her behavior was potentially jeopardizing everything. If she and Daniel got kicked out, all bets were off.
Daniel sighed as he watched Stephanie work. Although he felt conflicted over her long-term contribution, there was no question that she was needed in the short term. There were only eleven days left before Ashley Butler’s arrival on the island, and in that time, they had to develop the dopamine-producing neurons from the senator’s fibroblasts to treat the man. They were making progress with the HTSR and the nuclear transfer already done, but there was a long way to go. Stephanie’s expertise with cellular manipulation was sorely needed, and there just wasn’t time to replace her.
Stephanie could feel Daniel’s eyes on her back. She recognized that her sense of guilt and her confusion about the implications of her family’s role in his being attacked made her acutely sensitive, yet he was not acting like himself. She could only guess what it must have been like getting beaten up, but she had expected him to recover more quickly. Instead, he was still acting distant from her in many subtle ways, and although they continued to sleep in the same bed, there had been no intimacy whatsoever. Such behavior raised an old concern of hers that Daniel was either incapable or unmotivated to offer the kind of emotional support she felt she needed, particularly in periods of stress, no matter what the cause or whose fault it was.
Stephanie had followed Daniel’s suggestions to the letter, so that couldn’t be the explanation for his behavior. Despite an aching urge to call and confront her brother, she didn’t. And on the relatively frequent conversations she had with her mother, she made it a point to stress that she and Daniel were in Nassau to work, and they were working very hard, which was certainly true. To back it up, she said they had not gone to the beach to swim even once, which was also true. In addition, on multiple occasions she had emphasized that they would be finished soon and would come home about March twenty-fifth to a financially stable company. She had studiously avoided bringing up the subject of her brother with her mother, although on a call the previous day, she had finally yielded to temptation. “Has Tony asked about me?” she had asked in as casual a voice as she could manage.
“Of course, dear,” Thea had said. “Your brother worries about you and asks about you all the time.”
“What exact words does he use?”
“I don’t remember the exact words. He misses you. He just wants to know when you are coming home.”
“And what do you say in return?”
“I tell him just what you tell me. Why? Should I say something different?”
“Of course not,” Stephanie had remarked. “Assure him we’ll be home in less than two weeks, and I can’t wait to see him. And tell him our work is going extremely well.”
In many respects, Stephanie was thankful about how busy she and Daniel were. It reduced her opportunity to anguish over emotional issues as well as lessened her chance to question the appropriateness of treating Butler. Her misgivings about the affair had increased, thanks to the assault on Daniel and her need to turn a blind eye to the depravity of the Wingate principals. Paul Saunders was by far the worst. She felt he was conscienceless, devoid of even rudimentary ethics, and dumb. The compiled results of the Wingate stem-cell therapy program, which he had touted, were a bad joke. They were merely a collection of descriptions of individual cases and their subjective outcomes. There was not one iota of scientific method involved, and the most disturbing part was that Paul didn’t seem to realize it or care.
Spencer Wingate was another story, but he was more annoying than scary like the mad pretend-scientist Paul. Still, Stephanie would not have liked to be caught unaccompanied in Spencer’s house, as his persistent invitations proposed. The problem was that his lechery was bolstered by an ego that could not fathom his overtures being rejected. At first, Stephanie had tried to be reasonably polite with her regrets, but eventually she had to be blunt with her refusals, especially after it seemed Daniel was indifferent. Some of Spencer’s more blatantly randy invitations had come in Daniel’s company, with no response from him.
As if the personalities and behavior of these maverick infertility doctors wasn’t enough to make Stephanie question the propriety of working at the clinic, there was the issue of the origin of the human oocytes. She tried to make discreet inquiries but was rebuffed by everyone except the lab technician, Mare. Even Mare was hardly forthcoming, but at least she said the gametes came from the egg room run by Cindy Drexler, located in the basement. When Stephanie asked for clarification about what the egg room was, Mare clammed up and told her to ask Megan Finnigan, the lab supervisor. Unfortunately Megan had already echoed Paul by saying the egg source was a trade secret. When Stephanie approached Cindy Drexler, she was politely told that all egg inquiries had to be directed to Dr. Saunders.
Switching tactics, Stephanie had tried talking to several of the young women who worked in the cafeteria. They were friendly and outgoing until Stephanie tried to turn the conversation around to their marital status, at which point they became shy and evasive. When Stephanie then tried to talk about their pregnancies, they became withdrawn and reticent, which only fanned Stephanie’s curiosity. As far as Stephanie was concerned, one didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess what was going on, and despite Daniel’s edict to the contrary, she intended to prove it to herself. Her idea was that, armed with such information, she would anonymously inform the Bahamian authorities after she, Daniel, and Butler had long since departed.
What Stephanie needed to do was get into the egg room. Unfortunately, she had not had an opportunity, as busy as she and Daniel had been, although over the next few hours, that was going to change. The current egg she was fusing with one of Butler’s HTSR-altered fibroblasts had been a replacement for one of the original ten eggs that Paul Saunders had supplied. The replaced egg had failed to divide after nuclear transfer. Honoring their warranty, Paul had provided an eleventh egg. The other original nine eggs were dividing fine after receiving their new nuclei. Some were now at the five-day point and beginning to form blastocysts.
The plan that Stephanie and Daniel had devised was to create ten separate stem-cell lines, each comprising cellular clones of Ashley Butler. All ten would contribute cells to be differentiated into dopamine-producing nerve cells. The tenfold redundancy was to serve as a safety net, since only one of the cell lines would ultimately be used to treat the senator.
Perhaps later that afternoon, or more likely in the morning, Stephanie would begin the process of harvesting the multipotential stem cells from the forming blastocysts, but until then she would have some free time. The only problem would be getting away from Daniel but staying within the safety of the Wingate Clinic, and thanks to his emotional detachment
from her, she didn’t think that would be an insurmountable problem, although outside the clinic, he refused to let her out of his sight.
“How did the fusion go?” Daniel called out from where he was sitting.
“Looks good,” Stephanie said, peering at the construct under the lens of a microscope. The oocyte now had a new nucleus with a full complement of chromosomes. Following a process that no one yet understood, the egg would now begin mysteriously reprogramming the nucleus from its duties as the controller of an adult skin cell back to a primordial state. Within hours, the construct would mimic a recently fertilized egg. To initiate the conversion, Stephanie carefully transferred the artificially altered oocyte into the first of several activation mediums.
“Are you as hungry as I am?” Daniel called out.
“Probably,” Stephanie responded. She glanced at her watch. It was no wonder. It was almost twelve. The last time she’d had anything to eat was at six that morning, and it was only a continental breakfast of toast and coffee. “We can head over to the cafeteria once I get this egg into an incubator. It’s got only another four minutes in this medium.”
“Sounds good,” Daniel said. He slid off his stool and disappeared into their office to get out of his lab coat.
As Stephanie prepared the next activation medium for the reconstructed egg, she tried to think of some excuse to return by herself to the lab during their lunch. It would be a good time for a bit of sleuthing, since most everyone ate lunch between twelve and one, including the egg room technician, Cindy Drexler. Lunch hour was a major socialization time for the clinic staff. Stephanie’s first thought was to blame her need to return on the activation process of the eleventh egg, but she quickly discarded the idea; Daniel would be suspicious. He knew that once the egg was in the second activation medium, it was to sit undisturbed in the incubator for six hours.
Stephanie needed some other excuse and seemed to be coming up blank until she thought of her cell phone. Particularly after Daniel’s beating, she’d been compulsive about keeping it on her person, and Daniel knew it. There were several reasons for her compulsiveness, not least of which was that she’d told her mother to use the cell number rather than the hotel’s. But having just talked with her mother that morning and hence being assured of no imminent emergency with her health status, Stephanie wasn’t concerned about missing a call over the next half hour. After glancing back toward their tiny office to be certain Daniel wasn’t watching, Stephanie pulled the tiny Motorola phone from her pocket, switched it off, and placed it on the reagent shelf over the lab bench.
Satisfied with her plan, Stephanie returned her attention to the activation process. In another thirty seconds, it would be time to move the egg from the first medium to the next.
“What do you say?” Daniel questioned, as he reappeared without his lab coat. “Are you ready?”
“Give me another couple of minutes. I’m about to transfer the egg and put it into the incubator, and then we can be on our way.”
“Sounds good,” Daniel responded. While he waited, he stepped over to the incubator and looked in at the other containers, a few of which had been in there for five days. “Some of these might be ready to harvest stem cells this afternoon.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Stephanie responded. Gingerly, she carried the newly suspended reconstructed egg over to the incubator to join the others.
Kurt Hermann let his feet fall to the floor in an uncharacteristically sudden, uncontrolled movement. They had been perched on the countertop in the video room. At the same time, he sat bolt upright, causing the desk chair to roll backward a short distance. Regaining the serenity developed over many years of martial arts training, he scooted himself forward in a slow, deliberate fashion to get closer to the screen he’d been watching for the last hour. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It had happened so quickly, but it appeared as if Stephanie D’Agostino had just taken the cell phone Kurt had been trying to get his hands on over the previous week and a half out of her pocket and had deliberately placed it behind some reagent bottles on the shelf over the laboratory bench. It was like she was hiding it.
With the button on top of the joystick that was currently connected to operate the minicam he was watching, Kurt zoomed in. Using the joystick itself, he kept the camera directed at what he hoped was the phone. It was! Its black, molded plastic tip was just visible as it protruded from behind a bottle of hydrochloric acid.
Confused at this unexpected but promising development, Kurt zoomed back out, only to realize that Stephanie had disappeared from the camera’s angle. Using the joystick again, Kurt panned the room and quickly found both Stephanie and Daniel in front of one of the incubators. Increasing the gain on the volume control, he strained to listen in case she mentioned the phone, but she didn’t. They were continuing their talk about going to lunch, and within minutes they left the laboratory.
Kurt’s eyes rose to the screen just above the one he’d been watching. He saw the couple emerge from building number one and start across the central courtyard, toward building number three.
During the construction of the clinic, Paul Saunders had given his head of security carte blanche to make it secure, in hopes of avoiding a catastrophe similar to what had happened to the clinic in Massachusetts, when a couple whistle-blowers had penetrated the clinic’s database. Because they managed to gain unauthorized access to the computer server room and avoid apprehension after their trespass, Kurt had made sure the entire new complex was bugged with audio and video. Both the cameras and the microphones were the latest stealth technology, integrated by computer and completely unobstrusive. Unbeknownst to Paul, Kurt had had them included in the restrooms, the guest apartments, and most of the staff living quarters, where they were concealed in various and sundry electrical fixtures. Everything could be viewed from the monitors in the video room off Kurt’s office, and in the evenings, Kurt found watching some of them entertaining, even when security wasn’t necessarily an issue. Of course, Kurt could make an argument to the contrary, for it was important in an organization like the Wingate Clinic to know who was sleeping with whom.
Kurt continued observing Daniel and Stephanie until they entered building number three, although his eyes were mostly on Stephanie. Over the last week and a half, he’d become addicted to watching her, despite the ambivalence she evoked. He was both attracted and repulsed by her innate sensuality. As with women in general, he appreciated her beauty yet at the same time he recognized her Eve-like qualities. Kurt had watched her make and receive calls in the laboratory, and although he could frequently hear her side of the conversation, he was unable to hear the caller. Consequently, he’d not been able to provide Paul Saunders with the name of the patient as Kurt had promised, and Kurt liked to keep his promises.
Kurt’s attitude toward women had been set in stone by his ultimate betrayer, his mother. She and he had had an intimate relationship fostered by long absences of his undemonstrative strict disciplinarian father who had demanded perfection from both wife and son but who only acknowledged failure. His father had preceded Kurt into the Army’s Special Forces, and like Kurt, who had ultimately followed in his footsteps, he had been a trained covert-operations killer. But when Kurt was thirteen, his father had been killed in a classified operation in Cambodia during the final weeks of the Vietnam War. His mother’s reaction was like a lovebird released from a cage. Ignoring Kurt’s emotional confusion of grief and relief, she indulged a flurry of affairs, the intimacies of which Kurt had to endure audibly through the thin drywall of their army-base house. Within months, Kurt’s mother consummated her frantic dating by marrying a prissy insurance salesman whom Kurt despised. Kurt felt that all women, particularly the attractive ones, were like the mythologized mother of his youth, plotting to lure him in by seduction, sap him of his strength, and then abandon him.
As soon as Daniel and Stephanie had disappeared inside building number three, Kurt’s eyes moved automatically to monitor twelve and
waited for them to appear in the cafeteria. When they joined the line at the steam table, Kurt got to his feet and walked out into his office. From the back of his desk chair, he took his lightweight, black silk jacket and slipped it on over his black T-shirt. He wore the jacket to conceal the holstered pistol he always carried in the small of his back. He pushed the sleeves up above his elbows. From the corner of his desk, he picked up the box containing the tiny cell phone bug he’d been eager to implant in Stephanie’s phone as well as its monitoring device. He also grabbed his jeweler’s tool kit, which included a delicate soldering iron and a binocular watchmaker’s loupe.
Moving catlike, he emerged from a basement door in building two with the equipment and tools in hand and headed for building one. Within minutes, he was at the lab bench assigned to Daniel and Stephanie. After a quick glance in all directions to be certain he was alone in the laboratory, he retrieved the phone, put on the loupe, and set to work.
In less than five minutes, the bug was in place and tested. Kurt was in the process of replacing the phone’s plastic cover when he heard the distant door to the lab bang open. Expecting to see one of the lab personnel or possibly Paul Saunders, he bent over and looked beneath the reagent shelf back toward the entrance some eighty feet away. To his utter surprise, it was Stephanie who’d arrived and was approaching with a quick, determined step.