From Filth & Mud (5 page)

Jacob smiled courteously, rose from his chair, and exchanged a polite handshake as they walked toward the conference room door.

“There is no expiration period to our offer, Jacob. If you’d like to stick around for a bit, you can talk to Beth, our human resources representative. She can give you a package with salary and benefits information. You can also watch some quick tutorial videos our recruiting department put together. It’s pretty good stuff. Real classy. High production values.” Mr. Tepper’s nervousness was back. Jacob deduced that it came from standing. He wasn’t very good on his feet, his knees wobbled from being locked out, his breath was cut short from the clenching of his glutes and sucking in of his soft midsection, his torso visibly strained against his spine’s hunching tendency.

November 2013:

              Dr. Emmanuel “Manny” Monte-Alban recalled the moment he realized that he was alone in the universe. It was the morning of November 11, 2011, almost two years ago to the day. It was the day of his most wonderful achievement, but it was also the dawning of his greatest fear. As he had stood in front of the display, staring at his creation, he took stock of his life’s work. A horrifying thought overcame him. He was God. Not even Lucifer himself had done what he had done. Until that day, God had been the only creator. Until now, humanity had only attempted to understand His universe. Now he had rewritten it. If he was God, then how would he control his creation? Eden had not survived. How was he to manage?

He had yet to answer that question two years later. It was 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, which gave him three hours before Catholic Mass. He didn’t leave much room for anything else. Today he stared at the display with bleary, sleepless eyes. His current iteration of Lilith, well her hundreds of offspring that he’d named Lilicytes, appeared in ghostly contrast on the electron-microscope’s display. The initial experiments had produced wonderful, if not concerning, results. They had exposed a single Lilicyte to a bacterium to see if it could successfully infect it. The Lilicyte did so with ease. This was expected, since Manny had dedicated several years to the development of her unique, biosynthetic, protein coat. He had designed it to have the ability to create specific protein “keys” which would attach to specific receptors of the target cell’s membrane.

The process was difficult because God was an ingenious architect. Cells are generally good at dealing with infecting agents because of the protection offered by their membranes, which have unique chemical receptor sites that act as locks to the membrane door. Creating a protein coat for an infectious agent to target one specific type of cell membrane was relatively straightforward. It required finding the right key for the right lock. Creating a pan-infectious protein coat was exponentially more difficult, bordering on impossible. Creating a pan-infectious protein coat that would only express the specific protein key needed to access the receptors it encountered, at the specific time it encountered them, and only then, that was impossible… At least it had been for God, and billions of years of evolution, trial, and error since Creation had not yielded the desired result, but Manny had managed to figure it out.

His first step was to borrow from God’s blueprint and work with the most contagious virus known to medicine: measles. A single infected host of the virus can infect 12 to 18 additional people. For comparison, a host with influenza, can infect 2 to 3, HIV/AIDS 2 to 5, smallpox 5 to 7, pertussis 12 to 17, and the most panic-inducing, killer of them all, Ebola, 1.5 to 2.5.

His mentor, Dr. LaPierre, had hesitated when he’d first posited the idea of using measles. LaPierre was hesitant of combining any biological design with their synthetic design. He’d been on the forefront of oncological research, specifically tumorigenesis, for more than thirty years. LaPierre had been a pioneer of pharmacological cancer treatments, and as such, he remained skeptical of other methods, let alone one so novel as the one Manny had proposed. But Manny persisted and convinced LaPierre that his idea of hijacking the measles virus to act as a conduit to deliver targeted cancer treatment directly to tumors was hypothetically possible.

Manny had always had an affinity for problem solving, a skill he’d learned on the farms his parents had worked as day laborers picking produce in California’s Central Valley. As a young boy, he would accompany them to the fields to help them pick. After a while, he began tinkering with some of the old equipment that lay unused in fallow fields. He became consumed by their inner workings and attempted to fix a few with some success. Soon he was given the unofficial title of field mechanic and paid under the table for his services. The experience taught him to search for the source of the problem by starting with the key mechanism.

Manny’s idea was to use cancer cells as the tool of their own destruction. Cancer cells release certain proteins called cytokines and growth factors into the surrounding area when they begin to form. These cytokines and growth factors create a fertile environment for the cancer to grow unregulated. They also help to create an immune suppressed environment, so that the host body’s immune system is unable to detect or attack the cancer cell. The cancer cells simultaneously release other specific growth factors that poison surrounding cells, turning them into zombies. These newly animated zombie cells begin to produce cytokines that favor the cancer cell’s tumorigenesis. Once enough of the surrounding environment becomes hospitable, the cancer cells are free to grow into uncontrollable tumors and metastasize.

It was in this process that Manny saw the Achilles heel. He would use the very cytokines and growth factors against the cancer. He devoured volume upon volume of oncology research and found that each cancer cell expresses specific release sites for the cytokines and growth factors. If he could repurpose the measles virus’ protein coat to mirror these sites, Lilith would be able to bind directly to the cancer cell and attack it without causing collateral damage upon healthy cells. Manny quickly went on the hunt to uncover the genetic mechanism for the expression of these binding sites within the DNA of the cancer cell, or oncogenes. With the help of LaPierre and a team of lab assistants, he was able to identify several sections of various oncogenes that appeared as the primary candidates for coding the specific binding sites. The sections of genetic code, however, included multiple gene expressions for the same binding site, akin to having a combination lock with scores of possible, number sequences but only one being the correct sequence.

After several months of harrowing work using the latest CRISPR gene-splicing techniques, Manny was able to identify and extract the correct series of oncogene DNA segments that coded for the specific binding sites. He then spliced these segments into the measles DNA architecture. What resulted, much to LaPierre’s surprise, was what Manny had predicted: a virulent transport mechanism capable of identifying, binding to, and destroying cancer cells that they named, Lilith. The real problems were soon to come.

Jacob was resurrecting. He’d made the phone call six months ago. Since then, he’d spent most of his time shuttling between D.C., New York, and occasionally, Boston. Sarah was happy to have him out of the house, more for him, than her. She enjoyed having a husband who put on a suit every morning. He did that for her. Dress-casual was the standard dress code for XPS contractors; suits were assignment dependent. The clients wanted to feel protected, but did not want to project paranoia, so fatigues and combat boots were out of the question. The clients were people who valued their privacy above all. They were mostly old-money types, shipping, energy, industrials, and some Wall-Streeters. They were people who’d rather not be identified in this new era where the rich were so reviled. They enjoyed their time away from their businesses, spending weeks at a time gardening in the northwest corner of Connecticut, sipping sweet tea on estates in the Shenandoah Valley, or riding horses on ranches in Montana. They desired the calming sternness of men who spoke clearly, men who were good-looking with non-distinct features, clean-cut, shaven of course, and whose courteousness rang of years of military service. Jacob was the mold. This was not lost on his employer, or the clients, and he quickly became a desired contractor.

John had advised him that the clients were the driving force for assignments. If they liked you, they demanded you. If they could not have you for that assignment they paid more, and your schedule was immediately shuffled to fit their needs. Once you became a highly sought-after contractor, your services were billed at a higher rate. XPS staff always ensured that their best contractors were in high demand and that their schedules were always overbooked. Clients wanted whom they wanted, and they would not be caught dead arriving at a meeting of industry titans only to find that their preferred escort had accompanied a competitor or worse yet, a
friend
! They paid XPS’ ransom price to avoid embarrassment.

Jacob tolerated the business meetings, dinners, fundraisers, and galas. He understood his clients innately, fading into the background when he was not needed. The older, female clients―the
Miss Daisies
as the contractors called them―took well to him. They appreciated his charm and his company. Though the babysitting paid well, it was infuriatingly mundane, and so many of the contractors found alternative means of entertainment.

The others often battled to score the jobs escorting the
Kittens.
The
Kittens
were the forty and fifty-something socialites and were by far the most dangerous clients. They rather enjoyed toying with their escorts. These were women of power, status, and wealth, in the waning twilight of their virile years, who had been abandoned by their otherwise occupied or long-dead husbands. What were they to do now when suddenly surrounded by young, strong, good-looking, testosterone-engorged men who would surely savage them if given a chance? To the delight of both parties, the
Kittens
were eager to grant them their opportunities. Jacob enjoyed the salacious stories, but he would demur at the tempting offers.

The truth was that for all of the pomp, his services were superfluous. The vast majority of the clients were never in any danger. The sad reality was that no one was out to get them because no one cared.

“Most people go about their lives too worried about their jobs, families, etc. to give a crap about any of the clients. Honestly most of us do too,” Jacob told a tired-looking John.

“Look, I know, but this is the job. We make decent money protecting these people from threats real or imagined.”

“Babysitting!”

“Sure, babysitting, whatever. All I’m saying is that it’s a little too early for you to start bitching about the job that’s all. These people have a real need. There’s a real need out there for people to feel safe, secure, like they are being watched over. They want to feel like nothing bad will happen to them. So they hire us.” John’s baggy eyes creased into the wrinkles of his growing grin.

He continued, “XPS fills that need. Sure we might coax it a little bit by sending out our monthly security reports and by the little bells and whistles we add to our details, but the clients actually get a kick out of that. It plays into their overinflated sense of self-importance. Look, man, it helps our bottom line, and everybody wins.”

“So we keep playing cloak-and-dagger, huh? Look, I’m not saying I don’t appreciate it, getting out of the house and making some money. Lord knows Sarah wants to keep it that way, but I’m a little bored.”

John assured him that this was a good thing. He could otherwise work in the Special Services Division, which was an entirely different scenario. More stress, longer hours, and the coffee sucked. A benefit was that the jobs paid a lot more money.

“What if I took on a few special service jobs just to change things up?” John had the juice within the company to make it happen.

“Look, I’m not promising you anything…”

“Thanks, John. I know you will.”

“But don’t complain when you’ve got plans with your family and then you’ve got to cancel because these jobs come up suddenly. There is no two-week heads-up like personnel side.” John smiled into his grin. Jacob knew he’d get an assignment.

“I’ll wait for the call. Thanks again, John.”

“You’ll regret it.” John’s phone buzzed; an incoming email from XPS operations. He sighed and excused himself, truncating the conversation before it devolved into the usual debauchery of banter about Gate Two at Kadena Air Base.

“Don’t forget to ask,” Jacob shouted, as his friend hurried through the door of the cafe with his phone to his ear. John returned an indecent salute as he exited.

Jacob’s phone buzzed a few minutes later with details of his latest assignment. There was just enough time to get a coffee to go. Jacob had about twenty minutes to get to 300 East 75
th
Street where he would be picked up by a company car, near the Fairmont. Upper-Eastsiders demanded an escort in fine attire, so he’d kept his suit on this morning. This would be the last assignment for the week, a business brunch, followed by a meeting at an area law firm where the client was discussing a merger of her business. He was already thinking about the JFK flight home. He’d arrive well past the boys’ bedtime, but they would be waiting for him as usual.

They hated when he was gone on the long jobs, but they couldn’t wait to hear his stories. He would spice them up a bit for them. Nathan and Luke didn’t seem to mind his absence as much when his stories were cool. They also liked when he brought them stuff from wherever he’d been. New York pizza was the best. Sometimes he thought that they waited more for the pizza than him. Who could blame them though? The pizza was good even if it was cold by the time they dug in.