“How did Sam and Ben get inside?”
“Here’s the good bit. I contacted the logistics company, who told me that the purchaser requested it to be shipped by road to Martinsburg before being put on a freight train to Minot!”
“Good God!” The Secretary said. “That’s them!”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have an undercover team of agents and SWAT converging at the railway yards at Minot. I’m about to board a flight to North Dakota to oversee the operation personally. We’re going to catch him this time.”
“You’d better. We both know what’s riding on this.”
“It will all work this time. One thing’s bothering me though.”
The Secretary said, “What?”
“They’re close to the Canadian border, so why stop there?” Devereaux gestured one finger to the steward and mouthed the words, just one more second! “It means that they’re heading somewhere specific. The question is what’s in Minot, North Dakota, that Sam and Ben need?”
“Not what. Who. And I know why, too.” The Secretary audibly exhaled. “This has just upped the ante.”
Devereaux raised his eyebrows. “Who?”
He felt a shiver of terror at her response.
“Aliana Wolfgang.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Aliana Wolfgang glanced out her window.
It had started to snow. Yesterday’s fog had become today’s powdery snowflakes, drifting down lazily in the still air. The weather forecasts were warning people about the blizzard of the year, if not the decade. Schools weren’t closed yet, but every single TV station, radio station, and schoolchild was predicting heavy snowfall — the sort of blizzard that brings a place like Minot to a standstill.
The temperature was twenty degrees Fahrenheit, cold but not too cold. You’d want to put your heavy coat on, that was for sure, but you didn’t need to put your light coat on underneath your heavy coat. Wind chill? Without any wind, there wasn’t any. No, the storm hadn’t arrived yet. They might still have another day of reprieve before it hit.
Aliana ignored the weather warnings.
Her mind was fixated on one of the greatest leads of her career in pharmaceutical research and development. It would be the greatest advancement in life expectancy, quality of life, and medicine in her lifetime. Commercially, it would make her company more valuable than gold. She smiled, revealing a set of white evenly spaced teeth.
It made her think of that song by Queen — Who Wants to Live Forever?
She’d heard the song plenty of times in her teens. Queen might have had some insight that she was missing, but the honest answer to the question was always going to be a resounding, everyone wants to live forever!
And her new research might pave the way to one day give it to them.
Her cell phone rang. She wanted to ignore it. Right now, she had no interest in talking to anyone. Her mind was fixed on both the scientific and ethical dilemma she’d been given.
She glanced at her smartphone. The name came up from her directory — Emma. They were at MIT together. While Aliana studied microbiology and biomedicine, Emma studied straight medicine. Two years ago, she inherited her father’s pharmaceutical company. They had often talked about what the two companies could do working together, with Aliana’s performing the research and development, while Emma’s produced and distributed the product.
Her heart skipped a beat. She pressed accept. “Emma!”
“Aliana,” replied Emma. “Did you get the sample I sent you?”
“Yes.”
There was a brief silence. “You want to tell me what you think of it?”
Aliana expelled a deep breath. She’d known Emma for most of her adult life. Still it amazed her that her friend had entrusted her with the blood sample. It was like mailing the winning lotto ticket to a friend to photocopy before you cash it in. “All right, it might be the breakthrough of the century. Where did you get it?”
“A prisoner having routine blood tests.”
“Does he know he has the genetic mutation?”
“Not a clue.”
“Christ!” Aliana swore. “Do you know how many laws we’re breaking?”
“Does it matter?” Emma’s voice was flat, her response anything but flippant. The potential rewards from their discovery had the chance to change the world and save lives. It was the very reason they had both gotten into their industries: to help people.
“You’re right, something like this, there are no risks too great to take the chance. It’s too valuable.”
Emma’s voice hardened. “So, can you reverse engineer the mutation?”
“I don’t know yet. Everything’s possible.”
In ten years, they might be able to prevent most types of cancer. That alone was worth whatever she sacrificed. In her research, she had known so many people who had only met her because they had fallen under the shadow of the terrible disease. And she had known so many of them who had since died…
Emma said, “We analyzed the DNA on one of the previous samples. There was definitely no sign of a breakdown along the telomeres.”
Carefully, Aliana said, “No sign?”
“None,” Emma replied. “Now, I’m not one of the world’s top DNA researchers. But even I know how unusual that is.”
It was. The shortening of the telomeres at the ends of DNA strands, not just in human beings but in almost every living species on the planet, was one of nature’s tradeoffs. The telomeres were, as far as they could currently ascertain, a bunch of meaningless junk at the ends of each strand of DNA as it weaved its way into a double helix.
Aliana thought about that in silence for a moment, because even those long sequences of meaningless junk had a purpose.
Every time a living being needed to reproduce its DNA in order to replace and rejuvenate the cells in its body, the bodily systems in charge of the reproduction “snipped” off a short section of that junk code.
Why?
As the telomeres became shorter and shorter, the valuable code of the DNA past the sections of telomeres became more and more exposed. Finally, the DNA became shortened enough that the cells weren’t able to reproduce, and therefore replace, damaged cells.
Aging.
The loss of the telomeres was a countdown to aging…and death.
But without the destruction of the telomeres came a second, even more serious issue: mutation. The earth was constantly being bombarded with solar radiation, despite the protection of the earth’s ozone layer. Life was always encountering something that damaged its cells on a molecular level. Chemicals, radiation, random chance…
Some of the mutations improved the gene pool; others ensured that it ended before it could reproduce.
Over a long enough period of time, though, DNA would be mutated into something undesirable.
Cancer.
By guaranteeing individual cells could only reproduce so long before they wiped themselves out, nature protected itself against most of the mutations that would lead to cancer — most of the time.
Cancer, however, fought back — by forcing cells to produce telomerase, an enzyme that added more telomeres right back on to the ends of the DNA. One of the most famous lines of cancer cells, that of Henrietta Lacks, or the HeLa line, was practically immortal, because of the way it aggressively produced telomerase.
So the fact that the prisoner’s cell sample wasn’t losing telomeres as it reproduced wasn’t exactly unique. Unless…
“In a healthy individual?” she asked.