“We’re not going to be able to publish this affair,” Stephanie said.
“I know! It’s just fun to think about it being a harbinger of things to come. The next step will be a controlled experiment, and we’ll certainly be able to publish that. At that point, CURE will be in the limelight, and our funding miseries will be long gone.”
“I wish I could share your enthusiasm.”
“I think you will, once things start falling into place. Even though timing wasn’t mentioned tonight, I’m going to assume the senator would be eager to do it sooner rather than later. That means we should start with the preliminaries tomorrow when we get back to Boston. I’ll look into making the arrangements with the Wingate Clinic and lining up the neurosurgeon. How about you take on the Shroud of Turin portion.”
“That should at least be interesting,” Stephanie said, trying to generate some eagerness about the thought of treating Butler, despite what her intuition was telling her. “I’ll be curious to find out why the church still considers it a relic after it was proved to be a fake.”
“The senator obviously thinks it’s real.”
“As I recall, the carbon dating was confirmed by three independent labs. It would be hard for that to be debunked.”
“Well, let’s see what you find out,” Daniel said. “In the meantime, we better start planning some serious travel.”
“You mean Nassau?”
“Nassau and probably Turin, Italy, depending on what you find out.”
“Where are we going to get the money for such travel?”
“From Ashley Butler.”
Stephanie’s eyebrows lifted. “Maybe this escapade isn’t going to be so bad after all.”
“So, are you with me on this?” Daniel questioned.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“That’s not very positive.”
“It’s the best I can do at the moment. But I imagine I’ll come around as things progress, like you suggested.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Daniel announced. He got up from the couch and gave Stephanie’s shoulder a squeeze in the process. “I’m going to have another Scotch. Let me fill your glass.”
Daniel poured the additional drinks, then sat back down. After glancing at his watch, he put Butler’s business card down in front of him and lifted the phone onto the coffee table. “Let’s tell the senator the news. I’m sure he’ll be irritatingly smug, but to borrow his phrase, Such is life.” Daniel used the speakerphone button to get a dial tone. The call went through and was picked up quickly. Ashley Butler’s baritone Southern drawl inundated the room.
“Senator,” Daniel called out, interrupting Ashley’s verbose hello. “I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s late and I just wanted to let you know that I have decided to take you up on your offer.”
“Well, glory be!” Ashley intoned. “And so soon! I was afraid you were going to let this simple decision spoil your slumber and that you would not be calling until the morning. Well, I am pleased as punch! Can I assume Dr. D’Agostino has agreed to participate as well?”
“I have agreed,” Stephanie said, trying to sound positive.
“Excellent, excellent!” Ashley echoed. “Not that I am surprised, since this affair is to all our benefit. But I most sincerely do believe that being of the same mind and having unanimity of purpose is key to success, and we most certainly want success in this endeavor.”
“We assume you would like to do this straightaway,” Daniel said.
“Most assuredly, my dear friends. Most assuredly. I’m on borrowed time in terms of concealing my infirmity,” Ashley explained. “There is no time to lose. Conveniently for our purposes, a Senate recess is coming up. It commences about a month from now on March twenty-second and runs through April eighth. Normally I head home to politick, but instead it is the period of time I have had my heart set upon for my treatment. Is a month an adequate amount of time for you scientists to formulate the appropriate curative cells?”
Daniel glanced at Stephanie and spoke to her softly, just above a whisper: “That’s quicker than I thought he’d have in mind. What do you think? Could we do it?”
“It’s a long shot,” Stephanie whispered with a shrug. “First, we’d need a few days to culture his fibroblasts. Then, assuming a successful nuclear transfer creating a viable pre-embryo, we’d need five or six days for the blastocyst to form. After that, we’d need a couple of weeks of culturing on feeder cells after harvesting the stem cells.”
“Is there a problem?” Ashley questioned. “I cannot for the life of me hear what you good folks are discussing.”
“Just a second, Senator!” Daniel said into the speakerphone. “I’m talking with Dr. D’Agostino about timing. She would be doing most of the actual hands-on work.”
“Then we’d have to get them to differentiate into the proper nerve cells,” Stephanie added. “That will take another couple of weeks, or maybe a little less. The mouse cells were fine after only ten days.”
“So what would you guess, if all goes well?” Daniel asked. “Would a month work?”
“It’s theoretically possible,” Stephanie said. “It could be done, but we’d have to start almost immediately with the cellular work, like tomorrow! The problem with that idea is that we’d have to have human oocytes available, and we don’t.”
“Oh, jeez!” Daniel mumbled. He bit his lower lip and furrowed his brow. “I’m so accustomed to working with a surfeit of cow eggs that I forgot about the supply problem with human eggs.”
“It’s a major stumbling block,” Stephanie admitted. “Even in the best of circumstances where we already had a egg donor waiting in the wings, we’d need a month or so to stimulate her and retrieve them.”
“Well, perhaps our maverick infertility friends can help us in this regard as well. As a functioning infertility center, they’d surely have a few extra eggs available. Considering their unethical reputation, I bet with the right inducement we could talk them into providing us with what we will need.”
“It’s possible, I suppose, but then we’d be even more beholden to them. The more they do for us, the less easy it will be to wash our hands and leave like you so blithely suggested a moment ago.”
“But we don’t have a lot of choice. The alternative is giving up on CURE, HTSR, and all our blood, sweat, and tears.”
“It has to be your call. But for the record, it makes me feel uncomfortable to be obligated to the Wingate people in any form, knowing their history.”
Daniel nodded a few times as he mulled over the issues, sighed, and then turned back to the speakerphone. “Senator, there’s a chance we can have some treatment cells in a month. But I have to warn you that it’s going to require effort and a bit of luck, and we have to start immediately. You’ll have to be cooperative.”
“I will be as cooperative as a baby lamb. I’ve already started the process a month ago by making plans to arrive in Nassau on the twenty-third of March and to stay on the island for as much of the recess period as needed. I have even made a reservation for you. That’s how confident I was about your participation. It is important to have done this early, because it is high season in the Bahamas at this time of the year. We’ll be staying at the Atlantis resort, where I had the pleasure of staying last year with this plan in mind. It is a hotel complex sizable enough to provide adequate anonymity of coming and going without raising suspicions. They also have a casino, and as you might imagine, I do enjoy gambling when I am fortunate enough to have a few extra dollars in my pocket.”
Daniel exchanged glances with Stephanie. On the one hand, he was glad Ashley had made early reservations to help the project, but on the other hand, he was irritated at having been taken for granted.
“Will you be registered under your own name?” Stephanie questioned.
“Indeed I will,” Ashley said. “But I will be using an assumed name for my trip to the Wingate Clinic.”
“What about this clinic?” Daniel demanded. “I trust t
hat you have looked into it as carefully as you have looked into my past.”
“Your trust is well placed. I think you will find the clinic well suited for our purposes, although the personnel less so. The purported head of the clinic is Dr. Spencer Wingate, who is something of a blowhard, although apparently well qualified in the field of infertility. He seems more interested in being an island socialite and looks forward to flying off to the continent to drum up business in the courts of Europe. The man in secondary command is Dr. Paul Saunders, and he runs the show on a day-to-day basis. He is a more complicated individual who sees himself as a world-class researcher despite his lack of appropriate training beyond clinical infertility. I’m confident both individuals will be accommodating if you merely appeal to their individual vanities. For them to have the prospect of working with someone with your credentials and stature is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“You flatter me, Senator.”
Stephanie smiled at Daniel’s sarcasm.
“Only because it is well deserved,” Ashley said. “Besides, one should have faith in one’s doctor.”
“It would be my guess that doctors Wingate and Saunders will be more interested in money than my resume,” Daniel said.
“It is my thought that they will be interested in your resume to gain stature and to help them make money,” Ashley commented. “But their venal nature and their lack of research training is not a concern of ours, other than to be aware of it and to take advantage of it. It is their facility and equipment we are interested in.”
“I hope you realize that doing this procedure under these circumstances is not going to be cheap by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Nor would I want it to be cheap,” Ashley responded. “I want the expensive, high-quality, first-class version. Rest assured, I have access to more than sufficient funds to cover any expenses that impinge upon my political career. But I will expect your personal services to be pro bono. We are, after all, exchanging favors.”
“Agreed,” Daniel said. “But prior to rendering any services, Dr. D’Agostino and I will require you to sign a special release that we will draw up. This release will spell out the exact way that this affair originated as well as all the attendant risks involved, including the fact that we have never done the procedure on a human being.”
“As long as I can be assured of the confidentiality of this release, I will have no qualms about signing it. I can understand you would want it for your protection. I am absolutely certain I would want the very same thing if I were in your position, so there should be no problem whatsoever, provided it does not include anything unreasonable or inappropriate.”
“I can assure you it will be reasonable,” Daniel said. “Next, I’d like to encourage you to use your resources as you suggested to find out about access to the Shroud of Turin so we can get a sample.”
“I have already instructed Ms. Manning to initiate the appropriate meetings with the various prelates with whom I have had a working relationship. I will assume it will happen in the next few days. How big a sample would be required?”
“It can be extremely small,” Daniel said. “Merely a few fibers would be adequate, but it would have to be fibers coming from a section of the shroud containing a bloodstain.”
Ashley laughed. “Even an ignorant, nonscientist like myself would assume as much. The fact that you need only a small sample should help immeasurably. As I mentioned last night, I know there were such samples taken and then called back by the church.”
“We’d need them as soon as possible,” Daniel added.
“I understand completely the need for expeditiousness,” Ashley responded. “Is there anything else you require of me?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said. “We will need you to have a punch biopsy of your skin tomorrow morning. If there is a chance we can produce the curative cells in a month, we’ll need to take your biopsy back with us tomorrow when we return to Boston. Your private physician can arrange having the biopsy with a dermatologist, who can have a courier bring it over to us at the hotel. It will serve as a source of fibroblasts that we will grow in tissue culture.”
“I will see to it first thing in the morning.”
“I believe that is all for now,” Daniel said. He looked at Stephanie, and she nodded in agreement.
“I have a vitally important request of my own,” Ashley said. “I think we should exchange special email addresses and use the Internet for all our communications, which should be generic and short. The next time we talk directly should be at the Wingate Clinic on New Providence Island. I am committed that this affair be a closely guarded secret, and the less direct contact we have, the better. Is that acceptable?”
“By all means,” Daniel agreed.
“As for expense money,” Ashley said, “I will advise you by email of a confidential account at an offshore bank in Nassau, set up by one of my political action committees, from which you will be able to withdraw funds. I will, of course, expect an accounting in the future. Is that acceptable?”
“As long as there’s enough money,” Daniel said. “One of the major expenses will be to obtain the necessary human egg cells.”
“I reiterate,” Ashley said, “there will be more than adequate funds available. Rest assured!”
A few minutes later, after a final long-winded farewell from Ashley, Daniel leaned forward and disconnected the speakerphone. He lifted the phone back onto the end table. Then he swung around to face Stephanie. “I had to laugh when he called the head of the Wingate Clinic a blowhard. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”
“You were right about him putting a lot of thought into this affair. I was shocked when he said he’d made travel reservations a month ago. There’s no doubt in my mind he had the Wingate Clinic investigated.”
“Are you feeling better about being involved in curing him?”
“To a degree,” Stephanie admitted. “Especially since he says he’ll have no compunction signing a release that we write. At least I’ll have the feeling he’s considered the experimental nature of what we will be doing and the attendant risks. I wasn’t at all sure of that before.”
Daniel slid across the couch, put his arms around Stephanie, and hugged her against his body. He could feel her heart beating in her chest. Pushing himself back enough to look into her face, he stared into the dark depths of her eyes. “Now that we have seemingly gotten things under control in the political/business/research arena, how about starting out where we left off last night?”
Stephanie returned Daniel’s stare. “Is that a proposition?”
“Indeed, it is.”
“Is your autonomic nervous system going to cooperate?”
“A lot better than it did last night, I can assure you.”
Daniel got to his feet and helped Stephanie to hers.
“We forgot the do-not-disturb sign,” Stephanie said, as Daniel eagerly pulled her toward the bedroom.
“Let’s live dangerously,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
six
2:35 P.M., Friday, February 22, 2002
By the time Stephanie had awakened early that morning, she was caught up in the details of the Butler project. Her negative intuition about treating the senator’s Parkinson’s disease had not changed, but there was too much to do to obsess about such feelings. Even before she had showered, she used her laptop to fire off a series of emails to the senator about the handling of his biopsy.
First, she wanted the biopsy as soon as possible that morning. Second, she wanted to be absolutely certain it was a full-thickness skin, because she would need cells from deep in the dermis. And third, she wanted the sample merely to be placed in a flask of tissue culture fluid and not frozen or even iced. She was confident the tissue would be fine at room temperature until she got back to the laboratory in Cambridge, where she would deal with it appropriately. Her goal was to create a culture of the senator’s fibroblasts, the nuclei of which she would ultimately be
using to create the cells to treat him. She had always had better luck with fresh rather than frozen cells when she was doing HTSR followed by nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning, as some people insisted on calling the process.
To Stephanie’s surprise and despite the early hour, the senator emailed her back almost immediately, indicating that not only was he an early riser but that he was as committed to the project as he had suggested the previous evening. In his message, he assured her he had already put in a call to his doctor and that when the doctor called back he would communicate her requests and insist they be followed.
Daniel was ebullient from the moment he’d thrown back the covers. He too was at his laptop, emailing before doing anything else. Dressed only in a hotel terry-cloth robe, he typed out a message to the West Coast venture capital group that had expressed interest in investing in CURE but had been reluctant to release any funds until there’d been a resolution of Senator Butler’s bill. Daniel wanted to let them know that the bill was destined to languish permanently in the subcommittee and was no longer a threat. Daniel would have liked to explain how he knew this bit of news, but he knew he couldn’t. Daniel had not expected a message back from the prospective investors for several hours, since it was only four in the morning on the West Coast when his message went out on the World Wide Web. Nonetheless, he was confident in their response.
As a splurge, they had ordered breakfast in the room. At Daniel’s insistence, it included mimosas. Jokingly, he told Stephanie that she’d better get accustomed to such living, because it would become the order of the day once CURE went public. “I’ve had enough of academic poverty,” he’d declared. “We are going to be on the A list, and we are going to act the part!”
At nine-fifteen, both had been surprised by a call from the concierge’s desk saying that a courier had dropped off a package from a Dr. Claire Schneider labeled URGENT. They were asked if they wanted it sent directly to the room, and they had responded in the affirmative. As they assumed, the package contained Butler’s skin biopsy, and they were duly impressed with Butler’s efficiency. Its arrival was several hours earlier than they had hoped to see it.