Chasing the Dime (30 page)

‘I thought it was about the science. The project.'

‘It is, Henry,' she said. ‘But they go hand in hand. The science is no good without the scientist. We want you to be dedicated and obsessed with the science and your projects. But not reckless with your life outside the lab.'

Pierce held her eyes for a long moment. He suddenly wondered if she knew the truth about what happened and about his obsessive investigation of Lilly Quinlan's disappearance.

Condon cleared his throat and cut in, trying to move the meeting forward.

‘Justine, Maurice, I am sure that Henry would be happy to cooperate with any kind of personal investigation you would like to conduct. I've known him for a long time and I've worked in the ET field for even longer. He is one of the most levelheaded and focused researchers I've ever come across. That is why I am here. I like the science, I like the project and I'm very comfortable with the man.'

Bechy broke away from Pierce to look at Condon and nod her approval.

‘We may take you up on that offer,' she said through a tight smile.

The exchange did little to erode the tension that had quickly enveloped the room. Pierce waited for somebody to say something but there was only silence.

‘Um, there's something I should probably tell you then,' he finally said. ‘Because you'll find out anyway.'

‘Then just tell us,' Bechy said. ‘And save us all the time.'

Pierce could almost feel Charlie Condon's muscles seize up under his thousand-dollar suit as he waited for the revelation he knew nothing about.

‘Well, the thing is ... I used to have a ponytail. Is that going to be a problem?'

At first the silence prevailed again but then Goddard's stone face cracked into a smile and then laughter came from his mouth. It was followed by Bechy's smile and then everybody was laughing, including Pierce, even though it hurt to do so. The tension was broken. Charlie balled a fist and knocked on the table in an apparent attempt to accentuate the mirth. The response far exceeded the humor in the comment.

‘Okay, then,' Condon said. ‘You people came to see a show. How about we go down to the lab and see the project that is going to win this comedian here a Nobel Prize?'

He put his hands on the front and back of Pierce's neck and acted as though he were strangling him. Pierce lost his smile and felt his face getting red. Not because of Condon's mock strangulation, but because of the quip about the Nobel. Pierce thought it was uncool to trivialize so serious an honor. Besides, he knew it would never happen. It would never be awarded to the operator of a private lab. The politics were against it.

‘One thing before we go downstairs,' Pierce said. ‘Jacob, did you bring the nondisclosure forms?'

‘Oh, yes, right here,' the lawyer said. ‘I almost forgot.'

He pulled his briefcase up from the floor and opened it on the table.

‘Is this really necessary?' Condon asked.

It was all part of the choreography. Pierce had insisted that Goddard and Bechy sign nondisclosure forms before entering the lab and viewing the presentation. Condon had disagreed, concerned that it might be insulting to an investor of Goddard's caliber. But Pierce didn't care and would not step back. His lab, his rules. So they settled on a plan in which it would appear to be an annoying routine.

‘It's lab policy,' Pierce said. ‘I don't think we should deviate. Justine was just talking about how important it is to avoid risks. If we don't — '

‘I think it is a perfectly good idea,' Goddard said, interrupting. ‘In fact, I would have been concerned if you had not taken such a step.'

Kaz slid two copies of the two-page document across the table to Goddard and Bechy. He took a pen out of his inside suit pocket, twisted it and placed it on the table in front of them.

‘It's a pretty standard form,' he said. ‘Basically, any and all proprietary processes, procedures and formulas in the lab are protected. Anything you see and hear during your visit must be held in strict confidence.'

Goddard didn't bother reading the document. He left that to Bechy, who took a good five minutes to read it twice. They watched in silence and at the end of her review she silently picked up the pen and signed it. She then gave the pen to Goddard, who signed the form in front of him.

Kaz collected the documents and put them in his briefcase. They all got up from the table then and headed toward the door. Pierce let the others go first. In the hallway as they approached the elevator, Jacob Kaz tapped him on the arm and they delayed for a moment behind the others.

‘Everything go okay with Janis?' Kaz whispered.

‘Who?'

‘Janis Langwiser. Did she call you?'

‘Oh. Yeah, she called. Everything's fine. Thank you, Jacob, for the introduction. She seems very capable.'

‘Anything else I can do?'

‘No. Everything is fine. Thank you.'

The lab elevator opened and they moved toward it.

‘Down the rabbit hole, eh, Henry?' Goddard said.

‘You got that right,' Pierce replied.

Pierce looked back and saw that Vernon had also held back in the hallway and had apparently been standing right behind Pierce and Kaz as they had spoken privately. This annoyed Pierce but he said nothing about it. Vernon was the last one into the elevator. He put his scramble card into the slot on the control panel and pushed the B button.

‘B is for basement,' Condon told the visitors once the door closed. ‘If we put L in there for lab, people might think it meant lobby.'

He laughed but no one joined him. It was a nice piece of worthless information he had imparted. But it told Pierce how nervous Condon was about the presentation. For some reason this made Henry smile ever so slightly, not enough to hurt. Condon might lack confidence in the presentation but Pierce certainly didn't. As the elevator descended he felt his energy diametrically rise. He felt his posture straighten and even his vision brighten. The lab was his domain. His stage. The outside world might be dark and in shambles. War and waste. A Hieronymus Bosch painting of chaos. Women selling their bodies to strangers who would take them and hide them, hurt and even kill them. But not in the lab. In the lab there was peace. There was order. And Pierce set that order. It was his world.

He had no doubts about the science or himself in the lab. He knew that in the next hour he would change Maurice Goddard's view of the world. And he would make him a believer. He would believe that his money was not going to be invested so much as it was going to be used to change the world. And he would give it gladly. He would take out his pen and say, Where do I sign, please tell me where to sign.

They stood in the lab in a tight semicircle in front of Pierce and Larraby. It was close quarters with the five visitors plus the usual lab crew trying to work. Introductions had already been made and the quick tour of the individual labs given. Now it was time for the show and Pierce was ready. He felt at ease. He never considered himself much of a public speaker but it was a lot easier to talk about the project in the comfort of the lab in which it was born than in a theater at an emerging-technologies symposium or on a college campus.

‘I think you are familiar with what has been the main emphasis of the lab work here for the last several years,' he said. ‘We talked about that on your first visit. Today we want to talk about a specific offshoot project. Proteus. It is something sort of new in the last year but it is certainly born of the other work. In this world all the research is inter-related, you could say. One idea leads to another. Sort of like dominoes banging into each other. It's a chain reaction. Proteus is part of that chain.'

He described his long-running fascination with the potential medical/biological applications of nanotechnology and his decision almost two years earlier to bring Brandon Larraby on board to be Amedeo's point man on the biological issues of this pursuit.

‘Every article you read in every magazine and science journal talks about the biological side of this. It's always the hot point topic. From the elimination of chemical imbalances to possible cures for blood-carried diseases. Well, Proteus does not actually do any of these things. Those things and that day are still a long way off. Not science fiction anymore but still in the distance. Instead, what Proteus is, is a delivery system. It is the battery pack that will allow those future designs and devices to work inside the body. What we have done here is create a formula that will allow cells in the bloodstream to produce the electric impulses that will drive those future inventions.'

‘It's really a chicken-and-egg question,' Larraby added. ‘What comes first? We decided that the energy source must come first. You build from the bottom up. You start with the engine and to it you add the devices, whatever they might be.'

He stopped and there was silence. This was always expected when a scientist attempted to build a word bridge to the non-scientist. Condon then jumped in, as he had been choreographed to do. He would be the bridge, the interpreter.

‘What you are saying is that this formula, this energy source, is the platform which all of this other research and invention will rely upon. Correct?'

‘Correct,' Pierce said. ‘Once this is established in the science journals and through symposiums and so forth, it will act to foster further research and invention. It will excite the research field. Scientists will now be more attracted to this field because this gateway problem has been solved. We are going to show the way. On Monday morning we will be seeking patent protection for this formula. We will publish our findings soon after. And we will then license it to those who are pursuing this branch of research.'

‘To the people who invent and build these bloodstream devices.'

It was Goddard and he had said it as a statement, not a question. It was a good sign. He was joining in. He was getting excited himself.

‘Exactly,' Pierce said. ‘If you can supply the power, you can do a lot of things. A car without an engine is going nowhere. Well, this is the engine. And it will take a researcher in this field anywhere he wants to go.'

‘For example,' Larraby said, ‘in this country alone, more than one million people rely on self-administered insulin injections to control diabetes. In fact, I am one of them. It is conceivable in the not too distant future that a cellular device could be built, programmed and placed in the bloodstream and that this device would measure insulin levels and manufacture and release that amount which is needed.'

‘Tell them about anthrax,' Condon said.

‘Anthrax,' Pierce said. ‘We all know from events of the last year how deadly a form of bacteria this is and how difficult it can be to detect when airborne. What this research field is heading toward is a day when, say, all postal employees or maybe members of our armed forces or maybe just all of us will have an implanted biochip that can detect and attack something like anthrax before it is allowed to cultivate and spread in the body.'

‘You see,' Larraby said, ‘the possibilities are limitless. As I said, the science will be there soon. But how do you power these devices in the body? That's been the bottleneck to the research. It's been a question that has been out there for a long time.'

‘And we think the answer is our recipe,' Pierce said. ‘Our formula.'

Silence again. He looked at Goddard and knew he had him. The saying is, don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes. Pierce could see the whites now. Goddard had probably been in the right place at the right time and gotten in on a lot of good things over the years. But nothing like this. Nothing that could make him money down the line — plenty of it — and also make him a hero. Make him feel good about taking that money.

‘Can we see the demonstration now?' Bechy asked.

‘Absolutely,' Pierce said. ‘We have it set up on the SEM.'

He led the group to what they called the imaging lab. It was a room about the size of a bedroom and contained a computerized microscope that was built to the dimensions of an office desk with a twenty-inch viewing monitor on top.

‘This is a scanning electron microscope,' Pierce said. ‘The experiments we deal with are too small to be seen with most microscopes. So what we do is set up a predetermined reaction with which we can test our project. We put the experiment in the SEM's vault and the results are magnified and viewed on the screen.'

He pointed to the boxlike structure located on a pedestal next to the monitor. He opened a door to the box and removed a tray on which a silicon wafer was displayed.

‘I'm not going to get into specifically naming the proteins we are using in the formula but in basic terms what we have on the wafer are human cells and to them we add a combination of certain proteins which bind with the cells. That binding process creates the energy conversion we are talking about. A release of energy that can be harnessed by the molecular devices we were talking about earlier. To test for this conversion, we place the whole experiment in a chemical solution that is sensitive to this electric impulse and responds to it by glowing. Emitting light.'

While Pierce put the experiment tray back in the vault and closed it, Larraby continued the explanation of the process.

‘The process converts electrical energy into a bio-molecule called ATP, which is the body's energy source. Once created, ATP reacts with leucine — the same molecule that makes fireflies glow. This is called a chemiluminescent process.'

Pierce thought Larraby was getting too technical. He didn't want to lose the audience. He gestured Larraby to the seat in front of the monitor and the immunologist sat down and began working the keyboard. The monitor's screen was black.