The petite, black-haired volunteer laughed aloud. "He's not quite my type, being barely into the double digits of age. Besides," she added, smiling devilishly, "there are laws against that sort of thing."
"Well, be that as it may, you're about to meet him." Connie held her noteputer up to the dataport on the desk terminal, downloaded Joshua's chart into the handheld device, then gestured for Francesca to follow her down the hall. "You aren't squeamish about blood, are you?"
"Only my own." Francesca smiled, then blushed. "As long as I'm not going to be drawing it out of him."
The other woman waved that concern away. "The Intelligence Secretariat has poked, prodded, and probed me just about every way they can just so I can have the right to poke, prod, and probe Joshua. I've been pulling so much blood out of him over the last six months that he calls me Nurse Dracula, and I can't blame him. He's really a dear little boy."
Francesca followed the older woman down the hall, past the elevators and lobby, and around the corner to the area of the pediatric ward that had private rooms. Two huge men with rifles stood on either side of the hallway. Before anyone could enter what had to be Joshua's room, they had to go through a small barrier that led past a metal detector. One guard waved them toward the metal detector with his rifle while the other moved slightly away and prepared to shoot if anything untoward began to happen.
Connie handed the noteputer to the guard near the detector, then walked through the magscanning unit. The guard examined the noteputer, then returned it to her. Francesca he blocked with one hand held up. "Is she cleared?"
Connie nodded. "Call it in. I got notice at the start of my shift that she'd passed a screening three days ago.
The guard used a radio to connect with his superiors. He read Francesca's ID number aloud from her volunteer badge, then nodded. "She's not doing anything medical with him, right?"
"Right. Just helping clean up after me."
The guard silently waved Francesca through and she passed without setting anything off. The guard checked their nametags again, tapped something into his own noteputer, then knocked on the door to Joshua's room. Two deadbolts drew back with a click and then the heavy, bombproof door opened slowly.
Aside from the armed guard opening the door, Joshua was the only other occupant of the room. His bed was set with the head against the left wall, and on it sat a bald boy staring intently at the holovision monitor set near the ceiling in the far corner of the room. Francesca saw that the set was playing an old holovid—one of the Immortal Warrior series— but she couldn't identify the mud-covered star nor clearly make out who he was fighting this time. The series was little more than a live-action cartoon, but Joshua was, predictably, engrossed in it.
"Good evening, Joshua."
The boy's head came around quickly and the bright smile he wore eroded at the edges. "Nurse Dracula, the sun hasn't even gone down yet."
"I'm wearing sunblock eighty-eight."
"Foiled again!" the hollow-chested boy announced and bared his left arm. "Be careful. Last time I had bruises."
"Yes you did, but they cleared up faster than before, which is very good." Connie unlocked a small cabinet and drew from it some cotton balls, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a vacutube blood-sampling device. These she placed on a small tray that she set on Joshua's bedside table.
Joshua peered around Connie at Francesca. "Hello. I'm Joshua Marik."
Francesca bowed her head. "I'm pleased to meet you, Duke Joshua. I'm Francesca Jenkins, but you can call me Fran. I'm helping Nurse Dracula."
"She'll be straightening up your room and changing your bed linen while I give you your bath." Connie raised an eyebrow at her young charge. "Perhaps I should bathe you first, then take your blood—or do you promise there'll be no splashing around this time?"
Joshua said nothing, but looked up at Connie with huge, sad, puppy-dog eyes.
With a wink at Francesca, the nurse took up a cotton ball, pressed it against the top of the alcohol bottle several times, then liberally swabbed the crook of Joshua's left elbow. Discarding the cotton ball in the basket, she took up the vacutube assembly and pressed it against the boy's arm. Adjusting the constricting strap around his upper arm gave her a nice choice of veins.
The vacutube system worked simply. A needle ran through a stopper and collar assembly to end up protruding from the back. Connie took a test tube containing a vacuum and inserted it into the stopper assembly. The back part of the needle pierced the thin membrane, keeping the vacuum in, then Connie pushed the needle into Joshua's arm. The vacuum sucked the blood up into the test tube.
When the first tube was almost full, Connie depressed a button on the stopper, shutting off the blood flow. Twisting the test tube free, she set it on the bedside table. The membrane over the top resealed itself, preventing spillage. Connie plugged a second tube into the collar, released the button, and drew a second tube of blood.
Joshua looked up at her, concern on her face. "How many today?"
"Just two." Connie glanced over at Francesca. "I'll run these down to the lab if you think you can handle the swab and bandage detail."
Francesca nodded. "Got it." She crossed to the small table and picked up two cotton balls. One she soaked in alcohol while keeping the other pressed against the palm of her right hand with two fingers. Holding the wet ball up between the thumb and index ringer of her right hand, and displaying a bandage in her left, she nodded to indicate her readiness to Connie.
The nurse pulled the whole vacutube assembly from Joshua's arm and Francesca stepped in. Using her body to shield her movements from view, she deftly switched cotton balls, pressing the dry one to the wound. She held it there for three seconds, being sure not to exert enough pressure to close off the blood flow. When Connie turned toward the door, Francesca took the opportunity to switch cotton balls. With her left thumb she kept the alcohol-soaked ball on the needle-hole while her right hand sank into the pocket of her smock.
She reached through the rip she'd made in the seam and stuffed the bloody cotton ball into the top of her stocking, making certain it was secure against the flesh of her thigh. Drawing her right hand out again, she dabbed at the wound with the wet cotton ball, then tossed it into the basket. Applying the bandage to the hole in the boy's arm, she gave him a big smile.
"There, all done," she told him, and it was only half a lie.
* * *
Four hours later Francesca Jenkins left the New Avalon Institute of Science Medical Center, ten days into her mission for Marik intelligence and a mere seventy-two hours from completing it. The Intelligence Secretariat had investigated and cleared her for volunteer duty at the NAIS and for contact with Joshua Marik because of her exemplary record.
Except for a trio of four-month periods, the twenty-six-year-old, computer graphics supervisor had lived her whole life on New Avalon. During that time she had collected a half-dozen parking tickets and one tax audit.
Because she had been born on New Avalon, of an Avalonite and his war-bride from Castor, Francesca had started out in life as a low security risk. When she was fourteen, her parents divorced, and her mother went back to her maiden name of Jenkins. Francesca's name was also legally changed. Mother and daughter clung tightly to each other, Francesca being an only child and her mother far from home and family in the distant Free Worlds League.
In the meantime, Francesca's father had become obsessed with gaining custody of his daughter, going so far as trying to abduct her on two occasions. Both attempts failed, and Francesca's mother got a restraining order to keep her ex-husband away from them both. On her sixteenth birthday, Francesca came home from school to find her mother lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood and her father sitting slumped over at the table, dead from a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Orphaned, she was taken in by her father's sister. Though her new family was kind and treated Francesca very well, they believed her mother was somehow responsible for the whole tragedy.
The fact that Francesca decided to keep the Jenkins name did not help matters.
The next summer the maternal grandparents she had never met sent her tickets to visit them on Castor. Francesca jumped at the chance even though the round trip would take three months and only give her a month with her grandparents. Once on Castor she met Stefan and Adrianne Jirik—-the name her mother had changed to Jenkins in an attempt to fit in better on New Avalon—and was welcomed into the Jirik family fold.
The Jiriks, she was told, had a grand tradition of service to the League. In that one month Francesca was given a history and family roots and a tradition on which to base her self-image and self-esteem. After hearing all this she told her grandparents she wanted to remain with them instead of returning to her aunt and uncle, but they cautioned her against such rash action. They reminded her that New Avalon was a world of great learning, and that the Jirik family valued education highly. They also knew that her aunt had been good to her. To return that kindness with ingratitude would, they said, be dishonorable.
Reluctantly the girl agreed to return to New Avalon.
On the two subsequent visits to Castor the Jiriks completed Francesca's subversion into an agent for the Free Worlds League. On Castor they addressed her as Frantiska, the version of her name more commonly found in the League. They taught her simple but nearly unbreakable ciphers, how to create and work dead-drops, how to employ a cut-out, and even how to maintain and shoot a variety of pistols. They assured her that as a mole on New Avalon she would never be asked to harm anyone, only gather information in areas where the Federated Commonwealth was strong and the League weak. They strongly intimated that this meant only industrial espionage, again promising their granddaughter that she would never be asked to do anything truly dangerous.
Ten days ago the fateful message had arrived in a piece of electronic mail at her office. On her lunch hour she went to a dead-drop she'd established—a small envelope fastened to the underside of a kneeler in the first confessional in St. Andrew's Church—and from it retrieved a computer disk. She did not know who put it there, but that didn't bother her. Not knowing was the purpose of a dead-drop; it was part of the game and she was determined to play it as well as she could.
At home the computer had easily decoded the message, which outlined a simple task: obtain a sample of Joshua Marik's blood without attracting attention, conduct a genetic typing on it, and report if it matched the datafile on the disk.
Francesca immediately began to research her problem. In refreshing her memory of basic biology, she discovered that the amount of blood needed to obtain a gene match was relatively small. A discarded bandage or other similar item would never be noticed, whereas a purloined vial of blood would surely attract attention.
That meant she had to get close to Joshua. It was not long before she thought of volunteering at the hospital to gain admittance to his floor and his room. She started talking to friends about how her life felt incomplete, that something was missing despite her success at work. She hinted at a desire to get pregnant and raise a child on her own. Deflecting her from that course of action, her friends suggested she volunteer to work with children at the hospital. As though simply following her friend's advice, she made a call to the hospital.
The two Intelligence Secretariat agents who'd investigated her also spoke with her friends. They reported trying to help Francesca by suggesting volunteer work with children, which made her cover even more viable. Within forty-eight hours Francesca had clearance for contact with Joshua if her duties so required.
Three days after that, she had her blood sample.
* * *
There were plenty of private labs that could do a full genotyping of the sort commonly used in a paternity/ maternity suit, but they were costly and time-consuming. They would also create a paper trail that Francesca definitely did not want. Instead she went to an educational supply house with the story that she was tutoring a neighbor child in the sciences and needed a genetic experiment kit intended for secondary school use. She paid in cash.
The basic tools for genetic manipulation had been around for centuries, but their availability had not resulted in the explosion of genetically altered lifeforms many bioethicists had railed against a millennium before. It was one thing to identify a string of nucleotide base pairs and yet another to swap known genes one for the other. Even that was still worlds away from being able to play God and make life up from scratch. As one of the kit's booklets noted, the science of genetics was at the point where it could recognize the shapes of jigsaw puzzle pieces, and could even switch some pieces from one puzzle into another. It was another thing to combine twenty million puzzles into one cohesive picture while drawing pieces from yet other puzzles. It was a feat no one had yet accomplished.
At home she took the cotton swab and soaked it in a test tube into which she poured some distilled water. After squeezing it out, she had three ccs of pinkish liquid. Into this she dumped three ccs of the kit's DNA amplifier solution. Following the diagrams in the instruction book, she placed the test tube in her oven and programmed it to heat and cool the solution over the next thirty hours.
The amplifier was a chemical solution rich in the nucleotides needed to recreate bits and pieces of the DNA double-helix. It also included some special chemical strings designed to isolate specific genetic sequences. For identification purposes the chemical concentrated on two chromosome pairs: X, Y, and the pair number 1. The X and Y sequences would allow matching by sex while the number 1 pair samples would provide a contrast of contributions from each parent on a chromosome both contributed. By the end of the thirtieth hourly cycle, a million copies of the particularly selected sequences had been manufactured.
After the DNA content of the sample had been enhanced, Francesca drew off one cubic centimeter of fluid into each of five test tubes. She poured the last cc of fluid in the original test tube into a plastic bag and tucked it back in her freezer in case she needed to repeat her tests or her controllers wanted her to pass the material on. Simply by repeating the step with the DNA amplifier solution she could create as many samples as needed.
Into each of the five test tubes she added a single drop of each of the five different cutter/trimmer solutions provided in the kit. These droplets contained chemical cutters that looked for a specifically repeated pattern of nucleotide pairs within the duplicated samples. Because all DNA is made up of only four nucleotides: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, and because they only bond adenine to thymine and cytosine to guanine, a fair amount of sequence repetition is common. The cutters looked for specific sequences, about sixty base pairs long, and snipped them out of the duplicated chains.
In the five hours the chemicals took to prepare the samples, Francesca boiled up the banding gel and poured it into the shallow pan that looked like an electric pancake griddle. The gel cooled and hardened into a translucent film over a black background. It reminded her of ice on the roadways during particularly bad Avalon City winters.
She put one drop from a marking dye bottle into each test tube, thoroughly mixed it in, then used a pipette to draw a drop from the first tube. She sunk the pipette's end into the gel at a spot about ten centimeters from the top of the sheet and deposited the droplet there. Using individual pipettes for the other solutions, she repeated the procedure until she had five drops in the gel. She placed the cover on the incubator, plugged it in, turned it on, and left it to do its work for two hours.
While she waited, Francesca washed out all her experimental glassware, then boiled it, and finally crushed it before sweeping it into a bag. In her fireplace she burned the box and instructions—save the last two pages, which gave procedures for completing the experiment—stirred the ashes and swept them up for later disposal. The plastic chemical vials were emptied down the sink, then washed and melted down. The melting, which she did in her fireplace, did not work terribly well and she ended up scraping plastic from the bricks after the mess had cooled enough.
&nbs
p; Two hours later the incubator shut itself off. It had not been cooking the solution in the gel, but had been separating it. Electric current ran through the gel from left to right. In two hours it drew the clumps of sequences along from the starting point toward the other side of the gel. The larger the separate segments in the clumps, the further away from the starting point they moved in the electrical field.
The marking dye had stained the segments so they would fluoresce. Francesca removed the cover of the incubator and subjected the gel to a strong light for five minutes. She placed the overlay grid on the gel, then turned out all the lights. Once her eyes had adjusted, she saw glowing lines at certain points in the grid matrix and she faithfully recorded the grid coordinates: X, 3, 25; Y, 12, 24; 1.1, 2, 9, 20, 31; 1.2, 4, 15, 37, 43; 1.3, 7, 16, 30, 42.
Returning to her computer, she pulled up the record for the match sample and compared the two of them side by side:
Chromosome Joshua Match Sample
X 3, 25 2, 18
Y 12, 24 15, 45
1.1 2, 9, 20, 31 3, 7 23, 39
1.2 4, 15, 37, 43 12, 17, 31, 33
1.3 7, 16, 30, 42 2, 14, 19, 37
Francesca smiled. Though she was only twenty-six and had led a normal life on New Avalon—save for being recruited as a spy by her grandparents—she had not led a sheltered one. All the while she cooked the solutions and tended them and stained them and incubated them, she had been thinking about why her superiors in the Free Worlds League might want someone to do a genetic match on Joshua. About the time the plastics started dripping all over the bricks in her fireplace, she hit upon the reason: with the recent death of Sophina Marik, someone must have come forward and claimed to be Joshua's real father. Wanting to prevent the media having a field day with a trumped-up scandal, the Captain-General would need some way to refute this foul claim. Thus had she been chosen to collect a blood sample and conduct this simple test.