Rising Pressure, page 24
Laina dressed in dark jeans, black boots, and a hooded rain jacket to go over to the lab early on Sunday morning. After debating with herself, she had ultimately decided to wear her Lorraine disguise again in case one of the cameras caught her entering the building. She didn’t plan to look up towards any of the cameras and hoped the large hood would cover most of her face while also looking like normal attire for a possibly rainy day. Luckily, it was a relatively cool morning, so she wasn’t getting hot wearing the rain jacket. She hoped to be in and out of the building within ten minutes.
As she expected, all of the lights in the hallways were off when she stepped off the elevator. She kept Addison’s fob on her wrist for the time being, hoping that the bright yellow bracelet would remind her to slide the object under the office door before she left. She shuddered as she remembered having to deal with Eddie the previous afternoon. He was such a sleazebag. She had taken the hottest shower she could withstand after she got back to the apartment. If she hadn’t needed the fob so badly, she would have taken a chance at breaking his jaw with a punch to the face.
Laina walked quickly to the room with the deep freeze. She was trying to behave normally, so she turned the lights on instead of using a flashlight to look for the sample. She pulled the sleeve that held all of Anthony’s boxes and withdrew the one she had seen him using recently. Remembering his nearly useless labeling system, she cursed under her breath when she didn’t recognize the little symbols on any of the tiny tubes. She tried to remember what he’d told her he used to indicate that the sample held DNA for the sodium channel. Two parallel lines! She knew that her sample would be in a smaller tube with a small volume because he had already used what he’d taken from her twice and he hadn’t taken a noticeable amount in the first place. She pulled tube after tube, but none of them that were small were labeled with his channel symbol. He couldn’t have used all of it because I heard Addison tell him to keep it separate. Keep it separate. She closed the box and pulled the one below it. None of the tubes in that box were small nor were any of them labeled as the channel. She ground her teeth and looked in the next box. Her frustration grew as the number of boxes she looked through increased. Where was the damn sample?! She tried to calm herself down by slowing down her breathing, but she could feel herself starting to panic. If the sample was missing, that meant that they knew something was off about it.
Laina checked her watch. She had already been searching the freezer for fifteen minutes, much too long. She put the boxes back and closed the lid, formulating a new plan. Just as she was reaching out to press the call button for the elevator, she noticed the yellow bracelet and pulled her hand back. She moved quickly around the corner to Addison’s office and pulled the bracelet off of her wrist. Thankfully, the bottom edge of the door was not flush with the carpet inside the office. She pushed the bracelet into the office as far as she could with her thin fingers, then pulled out her driver’s license to give it a final nudge into the room. Satisfied that it would look like it had been mistakenly dropped on her way out of the office, Laina retreated back to the elevator. She needed to call Emmitt. She didn’t care that it was three o’clock in the morning in California. Things were getting out of hand at a rapid pace.
Laina grabbed her cell phone as she re-entered her apartment. She let the phone ring to his voicemail and hung up. She hit redial and willed him to answer. Now was not the time for beauty sleep, Emmitt! Wake up already! She hit redial a third time and he answered in a groggy voice on the second ring.
“Emmitt! We’ve got problems.” She said as she pulled off her wig.
“Laina? What time is it?”
“Emmitt! Pay attention. I went over to the lab this morning to get the sample back. I was worried that they would sequence it.”
“I told you not to worry about that. To not make a big deal out of it so that they wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. What are you doing? Doesn’t the building log your entry?”
“Don’t worry about that. I found a way around it. Now listen—”
“You found a way around it? Are you breaking and entering now? How is this staying incognito?”
“Would you shut up and listen already?!” She paused, daring him to challenge her again. “I went to get the sample back because I was worried that they would sequence it. Anthony was having tons of trouble with his experiments and they were trouble-shooting the cause. Sequencing a DNA construct is not out of bounds for them. I went early in the morning when no one else would be there, but I looked in all of his boxes. It’s not there.”
“Maybe he used everything that he took.”
“No. I heard her tell him to set it aside. He still has some. I don’t know what to do, Emmitt.”
“Have you checked your big brother spy system to see if she’s mentioned a mutation to anyone?”
“I haven’t seen anything that looks like she had it sequenced, but the fact that they have moved it is really bothering me. We need to do something, Emmitt!!”
“And what exactly do you suggest we do, Laina? Throw all of their samples out? Burn down their lab? Hire a muscle man to threaten them about being nosey?”
“Are you serious right now? A muscle man? What does that even mean? What do I do if they ask about it? Do I pretend not to know? Do I tell them to call you?”
“If they were going to ask you about it, they would have already asked you about it. I can’t believe you let someone get their hands on one of our constructs. You had one job, Laina.” Emmitt was getting more irritated by the second.
“One job? ONE job?! I had way more than one job, Emmitt. I had to drive all the way down here by myself, put up with this ogling grad student that couldn’t be lazier, and try to learn a completely new system in just a few weeks. Do not put this on me.”
“I can’t talk about this right now. I’m too angry. I need to think it over and figure out what should happen. Damnit, Laina. This was supposed to be easy.” He ended the call. Laina threw the cell phone at the couch and swallowed a scream. How was everything falling apart?
CHAPTER 77
Eleanor returned to the lab and heard the phone ringing. She quickly snatched up the receiver.
“Fischer lab.”
“Oh, Eleanor. Thank goodness you answered! I’m locked out downstairs. I couldn’t find my fob this morning. It wasn’t where I usually leave it in my console. Maybe Martin was fiddling with it or something. Could you come let me in from the catwalk?”
“Definitely, Dr. Fischer. I’ll be right down.” Eleanor grabbed her keys with her own fob and walked over to the elevator. Addison was waiting by the double doors to the catwalk when she got off. She swiped her fob at the door and pushed it open for her boss.
“Good morning!”
“Thank you so much, Eleanor. I can’t believe that I’ve lost my fob.”
“I’m sure it will turn up. Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”
“We really did. How was yours?”
“It was perfect. We had lots of family and fantastic food. Everyone brought their favorite dish. Even my brother Robert brought Jell-O, which I’m pretty sure is the only thing he knows how to make.” She laughed. “Gary told everyone about the clinical trial that he signed up for. He’s really looking forward to it starting, they emailed him last week to say that it’s going to start on December first!”
Addison nodded, remembering that she wanted to look up Gary’s mutation and compare it to the mutation they had discovered in Laina’s sample. She didn’t want to worry Eleanor about the trial until she knew more. Even if the mutations were identical, it didn’t necessarily mean that Emmitt’s lab was doing something wrong. It could be a coincidence. She realized that she had kind of zoned out of the conversation when the elevator dinged to indicate they had arrived on the eighth floor.
“…really hopeful that he’ll get the actual treatment and be able to have normal blood pressure. All of the background on the study sounds very promising.”
“That would be fantastic, Eleanor! Wait, did you say December first?”
“Yes, December first.” Eleanor looked at her funny, but then continued. “He did say that if the study is successful, that he will get the treatment for free after the trial ends. It’s usually two years, though, I think, unless the preliminary results are overwhelmingly good.”
“I think that’s how it works, but I’ve never been in a clinical trial before. Thank you again for letting me in. I guess I’ll have to put in a request for a new fob if I don’t find my old one today. So frustrating.”
“It’s not a problem at all. See you around.”
Eleanor entered the lab and Addison continued down the hallway to her office. She unlocked the door and pushed it open with a bit of a struggle. Something was caught under the edge of the door.
“Oh, it’s my fob!” She was thrilled to see it but couldn’t imagine how it had fallen off her wrist and gotten wedged under the door. She retrieved it from the floor and slid it back onto her wrist. One less thing to do today, she thought.
She set her things down and logged into her computer. She wanted to look up Gary’s mutation and compare it to the one they found. Eleanor had given her a printout that had all of his mutations listed. Addison grabbed the folder that she had put it in and sat down to look through it again. She ran her finger down the list of known mutations until she found the cardiac sodium channel: 655 A to G. That sounds familiar, she thought. She opened her sequencing app on her computer and found the file she had created from Laina’s sample. Same mutation.
Addison sighed. It seemed like too big of a coincidence to be just a coincidence. She had talked with Ryan about how to approach Emmitt with the news of the mutation. It felt awkward because she would have to confess that her lazy grad student had swiped one of his patented samples. On top of that, she was questioning her old classmate’s ethics if he knew about the mutation already. She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation and was glad it was too early to call the west coast for now. If he did know about the mutation, then she was also going to have to break the news to Eleanor that Gary did not want to participate in the clinical trial. She hadn’t realized that the trial was set to begin before the end of the week. If Emmitt was hiding one thing, he could be hiding more and that could be hazardous for those participating in a clinical study. She was about to grab her lunch to put into the refrigerator when someone knocked on her door.
“It’s open,” she called out. Anthony and Juan entered.
“Hi, Dr. Fish. We, uh, need to talk to you about something.”
“Okay, what’s up?” Addison asked, hoping no more catastrophes were coming.
“Can we sit down? This might take a few minutes.” Juan asked. Addison moved her bags that she had set down onto her chairs when she entered earlier.
“Here’s the deal. Several weeks ago, Juan was here late and noticed a guy leaving a note in Eleanor’s mailbox. He thought it was a little strange for someone to be doing that at the end of the day, so he looked at it.”
“It was a really strange note, written on a scrap of paper. It said not to trust the Strydent lab, but nothing else. I didn’t know who the guy was, so I couldn’t ask him about what he meant. I kind of let it go until Anthony told me about taking Laina’s sample and subsequently learning that it was mutated. It seemed really fishy when you considered the weird note.”
“Juan and I decided to figure out who the guy was and get him to talk to us about what he knew. I mean, Laina has been nice to us and everything, so we didn’t have any reason to think that she’d be trying to pull one over on the lab or something.”
“We knew that Dr. Strydent had been a student in Dr. Watt’s lab, so we started with his people. A lot of them had signed up to attend the postdoc and grad student Thanksgiving meal, so we figured that was our best chance of me seeing him again. Laina would be there too and we didn’t know if she would know him or not. We decided that one of us would be with her all the time so that she didn’t get suspicious of us eyeing the group.”
“Juan didn’t really want to miss his family’s Thanksgiving celebration, so we got to the meal early, hoping he would see the guy when he first arrived. As luck would have it, the note-writer did arrive early. He walked in at the same time as Juan and me. He didn’t realize who we were right away, so we were able to talk to him casually before asking him about the note. Laina didn’t get there until right when the meal started, which was convenient. We were able to talk to Trevor—that’s the guy’s name—and get his story before she even arrived.”
“Trevor used to work for a neighboring lab when Strydent was first starting his own lab in California. He and a classmate had both taken positions as lab techs at the university there. His friend started in the Strydent lab. He had hoped to get some experience before going to graduate school himself. He wanted to be more than just a lab tech for his boss, you know? He wanted to show him that he understood the work and could contribute to it. Just a few weeks into his position, he started getting curious about some of the things Strydent was asking him to do and asking him not to do. Strydent told him not to order any of the generic reagents; they used a lot of in-house things that actually cost more to maintain than it did to just order pre-made stuff.
“The lab does X-ray crystallography, right? Okay. Trevor’s friend started reading some background information on how the technique works, but also about protein-protein interactions. He knew a little bit from his undergrad degree, of course. Strydent had identified the binding regions on both the small protein and the channel. When the lab tech was looking at the make-up of the site on the channel and comparing it to the small protein, he was kind of surprised that they bound as well as Strydent had reported. Again, he wanted to be seen as involved and intelligent, not just a lackey. When he brought his questions to Strydent, the man got upset—almost angry even. Trevor said that Strydent didn’t say anything that was out of line or concerning but that his friend could see it in his eyes—Strydent was scared by the questions. About a week later, Strydent called him into his office with exciting news. He had recommended him for a graduate student program at a rather prestigious school on the west coast. He was already pre-accepted and started classes the next week. They had even found housing for him. Trevor said that his friend—Mike—felt like he was being put into some sort of reverse Witness Protection program.”
Addison listened to their story unfold and realized that her upcoming conversation with Emmitt was probably not going to go well. She contemplated going to Dr. Watt first before confronting Emmitt. Ultimately, she would have to report this to Dr. Watt, so she supposed the timing didn’t really matter.
“Oh goodness. Did Mike go to the graduate program?”
“He did. And he has been really successful. Initially, he was only slightly suspicious of the graduate school offer, but the longer he was away from that lab, the more he realized that Strydent was trying to get him away from his data.”
“It is all very strange. Thank you for telling me. I am going to have to confront Emmitt about this. I’m sorry for dragging our lab into this, even if we’re only on the periphery of it. I know it’s probably been unsettling for everyone. I had no idea that they were up to anything untoward or unethical. I’m going to be meeting with Dr. Watt, hopefully today. As long as we are up front and transparent about everything, I don’t think there will be any effect on the lab. I will keep you in the loop. I’m not sure if Laina is in yet today or not, but don’t mention this to her. I don’t want some sort of crisis on top of this already awkward situation.”
Juan and Anthony nodded and left her office. Addison looked at her watch. It was almost 6:30 a.m. in California. She grabbed her lunch and tried to decide if she should call Emmitt first or Dr. Watt. She couldn’t believe that what had started out as such a promising opportunity to collaborate was coming down in flames around her. As she rounded the corner, she almost bumped into Zenia.
“Oh, sorry about that. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” She apologized.
“Not a problem! Deep in thought again?”
“It’s a story too long to tell right now, but yes. Maybe one day I’ll feel like sharing.” She gave a half-hearted smile. Zenia nodded and continued on her way.
Addison took a deep breath before unlocking her office door. It felt like she was about to cross the point of no return. Even though she knew it was the right step, she still dreaded taking it. She unlocked the door and sat in her office chair. She would have liked to call Emmitt first, but knew that for her lab’s sake, she needed to speak with Dr. Watt before she told Emmitt anything. She picked up her office phone and called his office. Sheila answered immediately.
“Hi Sheila. It’s Addison Fischer. Is Dr. Watt available? It’s very important.”
“He does have a few minutes free right now. Should I connect you?”
“Actually, I’m coming to the office. I need to talk to him in person. I’ll be there momentarily. Thank you.” She hung up and grabbed her laptop on the way out the door. She wanted to be able to show Dr. Watt all of the evidence and not just talk in hypotheticals. She needed to stay in front of this before it brought her down too.
CHAPTER 78
Addison was impressed with how quickly Dr. Watt responded to her revelation. He immediately called someone he knew within the Apothecom company and requested that they put a hold on the work with the Strydent lab. He also recommended that they not respond to any requests from Emmitt until the impending investigation was completed.
“Thank you for taking this so seriously, Dr. Fischer. I’m equally shocked by all that was happening right under my nose for all of these years. I never would have pegged Emmitt as dishonest—yes, he was always pushing to be the best, the top student, all of that, but he worked hard. I wish I could go back in time and, I don’t know. I just feel partially responsible for not knowing about the mutation when it was first discovered.”
