at company-wide annual meetings, and on the Internet. He had a TED Talk which had been widely circulated throughout BioMed, on the limitless horizons of bioengineering.
“We are still in the dark ages of medicine …” was how he’d opened his speech. After which he’d gone on to point out that things like organ donation with its immune system problems and Draconian chemotherapy protocols for cancer patients were going to be akin to the leeches, tubercular sleeping porches, and lack of sterilization of the past. Fifty years from now, he maintained, replacement parts for the human body were going to be grown in labs, cancer was going to be battled at the molecular level by the immune system, and aging was going to be a matter of choice rather than inevitability.
Sarah could see some of what he was saying. What she hadn’t liked about him was his messianic affect, like he was a self-proclaimed pied piper with all the answers, leading a drop-footed, dumber populace to the promise land of science of which only he was aware.
Then again, the man was worth how much? Having billions could make a megalomaniac out of anybody.
Given that McCaid had been head of the IDD lab, he had to know about this research. And by extrapolation, if McCaid reported directly to Kraiten, then the CEO had to know about this research.
In fact, a strong conclusion could be made that both men had promoted it, one by doing the work and the other by providing the funding and facilities.
Unless she was missing something. But how else could you explain it? Kraiten either had unethical experimentation being conducted in his lab by a rogue researcher with unlimited access to restricted-use MRI machines, PET and CAT scans, and X-rays as well as a blood laboratory and a fucking patient … or Kraiten was paying for the research to occur and keeping a lid on everything.
Even if it meant killing the scientists who were doing the work.
And God … what happened to the patient? Was he even alive anymore? The files were all two years old.
Sarah brought the laptop back into place and reviewed the directory one more time. She knew what she was looking for, knew that the hunt was stupid and fruitless. Knew that she was bound to be disappointed.
And she was.
Nothing from Gerry. No directions as to what to do with all this. No recounting of why he’d lifted all of this data.
Most importantly, no indication of what his role was in the protocol.
The Gerry she knew would never have endangered the life of a patient in the pursuit of scientific knowledge or advancement. He believed in the sanctity of life and had a commitment to the alleviation of suffering. Both were the reasons he’d gotten into medicine.
But this was his Infectious Disease division. And he obviously had not gone to the authorities with any of this—otherwise, all of BioMed would have been shut down.
On that note, the FBI was asking questions about the deaths, not the work.
Or maybe they were probing the corporation and she just didn’t know the depth of what had triggered their investigation.
“What happened to the patient?” she said aloud while she rubbed her aching eyes.
As she closed her lids and leaned back again, from out of nowhere, a memory of her hanging up the phone in her teenage bedroom came to mind, and she saw everything so clearly: the messy floral bedspread she’d been sitting on and her Smashing Pumpkins posters across the walls and the blue jeans draped on the back of her desk chair.
Bobby something or another. She couldn’t remember what his last name had been and didn’t that seem odd, given the momentous bomb he’d dropped on her.
Total devastation: He’d told her he was taking someone else to senior prom forty-eight hours before the dance. And not just anyone, either. He was escorting her good friend, Sara, a.k.a., No-“h”, because Sarah had been with the “h”. Talk about your sniper invites. Bobby had been relatively new to school, having arrived the year before as a junior when his dad took a job with the metro government. Sara and Sarah, on the other hand, had known each other since kindergarten.
That phone conversation had been quick, the kind of thing that he’d rushed through because he felt bad, but his mind was made up.
It wasn’t like Sarah didn’t get it. No-“h” was a knockout, or had been ever since her body had gotten its curves on the summer before. She