Calypso Directive (2 page)

The fall was terrifying, idiotic. As flights of stairs rushed past, thoughts of impending injury flooded his mind: His shoulder would be dislocated, ripped from the socket most likely. His neck would probably snap. He had not imagined it happening this way. With half a second to spare, he reached up and grabbed the sheet above him, as if trying to climb away from the fall. He drew his arms together, slightly bent at the elbows, in preparation.

The force of the deceleration hit him like a Freightliner. The section of sheet that was wrapped around his chest absorbed most of the energy, compressing his ribs and driving the air out of his lungs. His abdominal muscles tore. The tendons in his shoulders burned like individual strands of fire. He could taste fresh blood in his mouth. Still, the fitted sheets had held, and the eight slipknot shock absorbers had performed exactly as intended, popping like firecrackers and averting multiple fractures and dislocations from the one g-force fall.

Suspended in midair, dangling four feet above the concrete floor, he gasped for air. He unraveled himself from the sheet-rope and dropped to the ground in a heap. Footsteps echoed in the stairwell as his pursuers renewed their chase from three flights above. He smiled despite the pain. The jump had won him a substantial lead, and in a chase where seconds would determine success or failure, he needed each and every one.

He looked up at the sign on the door in front of him. GROUND LEVEL—CORRIDOR E. His injured stomach muscles screamed in protest as he pushed open the heavy metal door. Before it slammed shut, he could hear the footsteps growing louder.

Corridor E was silent and empty. Thirty yards away, freedom beckoned. He could just make out the words “Emergency Exit—Alarm Will Sound” stenciled in large white letters across the red fire escape door at the end of the corridor. His legs responded grudgingly to yet another call for action, and he managed to move toward the exit in a gait feebly resembling a run. He spied a jacket, draped over an open door, in a row of employee lockers along the wall of the corridor. He snagged it midstride, gambling it might fit.

As he closed the gap, panic began to well up inside him. The emergency exit was the only element of his plan he had been unable to test. The truth was that he didn't know what would happen when he tried to go through that door. It might be locked; that wouldn't surprise him in this place. It could lead to another corridor or to a lobby full of security personnel. It could even be bricked over on the other side.

In any case, he had no choice. There was no turning back now.

He barreled into the red door.

It opened so easily that he lost his balance and went tumbling to the concrete. After two awkward somersaults, he came to an abrupt stop on his hands and knees, staring down into a puddle of cold, muddy water. Behind him, the Emergency Exit alarm shrieked, announcing his arrival like a royal trumpeter, and then fell abruptly silent as the door slammed shut. He struggled to his feet. He was standing in the middle of a deserted sidewalk along an unfamiliar city street. His pupils were still adjusting to the darkness of night, and he could not make out the street signs or recognize which avenue he was on. A stiff, cold breeze sent a crumpled paper advert, with strange Cyrillic words, tumbling over his foot. Bewildered, he surveyed his surroundings as he shrugged on the jacket, covering his bare torso.

In all the months of planning, he had never considered what he would do after he was out. His escape fantasies had always ended at the red door.

His heart pounded; they would be on top of him in seconds.

He started running.

Any direction would do.

As he pushed his battered body onward, the illuminated rooflamp of a taxicab caught his attention. It was bright, yellow, and beautiful. The taxi was stopped at a red traffic light at the nearest intersection, some twenty meters away.

Panic erupted inside him. If the light changed to green before he could close the gap . . .

The emergency exit alarm shrieked anew behind him. They were coming.

He hurtled himself toward the cab.

Ten meters to go. Still red.

A car, traveling on the cross street, braked to a stop. The light would change any second.

Three meters.

It flashed to green.

“Wait,” he yelled.

In a final adrenaline-charged burst, he flung himself against the side of the taxi, just as it started to pull away. The cab jerked to a stop, and he fell onto the street next to the curb. From his knees, he opened the rear door, and hauled himself into the passenger compartment of the beat-up sedan.

The cab driver turned to greet his new fare. The jovial smile he wore melted immediately to a frown at the sight of the beggarly-looking man huffing in his back seat.

“Drive. Anywhere. Please, just go!” Patient-65 said as he slammed the car door closed.

He looked frantically over his shoulder. Yellow-suits were pouring out of the emergency exit like angry bees from a rattled hive, and still the cab was not moving.

“Please. Help me. They're coming.”

The cab driver looked into the other man's pleading eyes and saw fear. But that was not what moved his foot to the accelerator. In Patient-65's eyes he saw decency; he saw goodness. It didn't matter that he would sacrifice a fare. It didn't matter that he would probably lose his driving permit—again. All that mattered was a kindred spirit needed saving, and he was the only one in the world who could do it.

“We go! I save you,” the cabbie exclaimed as the turbo diesel engine launched the sedan into motion.

With only one hand on the wheel, the cab driver whipped the taxi through a squealing right turn onto the cross street. After slamming the shifter into third gear, he turned up the radio—almost as if to add a soundtrack to their getaway. He shouted unintelligible expletives as he swerved around a slower-moving car. As they sped away, Patient-65 turned for a final glance out the rear window. He watched the angry yellow-suits until they had completely faded from view.

For ten minutes, the cab driver piloted his sedan at a lunatic pace, racing down avenues, squealing around corners, and narrowly avoiding collisions with oncoming traffic. When they eventually reached the outskirts of the city, Patient-65 came to a startling realization. The skyline before him was not one he recognized. Nor could he recall passing any of the landmarks he knew so well.

It couldn't be. It wasn't possible.

He was not in New York.

In between lurches, he reached forward and patted the driver on the shoulder.

“You can slow down now.”

Without a word, the cabbie swerved to the right and brought the sedan to a screeching halt alongside the curb. He gave the parking brake a yank, put the manual transmission in neutral, and turned around. After a moment's study, he noticed his passenger was battered, his lips crusted with dried blood.

“You are hurt! I take you to doctor, yes?”

Patient-65 looked away and out the window.

“No, no. I'm okay,” he said. “No hospitals, please.”

The cabbie was silent, lost in speculation about the curious American sitting in the backseat of his cab.

Patient-65 looked back at him. “Where are we?” he said, gesturing to the world outside.

The cabbie laughed loudly and then threw his chest out like a prizefighter. “Praha, of course. The greatest city in all of Europe.”

Speechless, Patient-65 stared at the smiling middle-aged Czech.

Feeling the need to say something, the cabbie added, “You are safe now, yes? Then you tell me now—where you want to go?”

Raising his eyebrows, the cabbie waited for direction from the most unusual tourist he had ever serviced. But Patient-65, Will Foster, had no instructions.

Only questions.

What the hell am I doing in Prague?

New Brunswick, New Jersey

T
HE PRODUCT WAS
gone.

Meredith Morley pressed the “End” call icon on her iPhone and set it gently on the nightstand next to her bed. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then, she congratulated herself for showing such remarkable restraint. She had not screamed. She had not thrown her phone. She had not ordered anyone drawn and quartered.

Yet.

The report from Xavier Pope—her lead scientist and project director in Prague—was so absurd that it bordered on comic book fantasy. According to eyewitness accounts, Patient-65 escaped from his locked room, accessed the secure sample room, smashed the full complement of their most promising Adeno-associated virus vector serum, and stole a vial of weapons-grade
Yersinia pestis.
He then out-maneuvered a trained security staff of twelve by jumping down a four-story stairwell, breached containment by running out the fire escape door onto a city street, hailed a taxicab, and drove away. Meredith closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. What had been the most promising opportunity of her young and highly decorated career at Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals was now on the verge of becoming her own personal Chernobyl.

What vexed her most, however, was that Pope's report had taken exactly eight hours and fourteen minutes too long to reach her. According to Pope, the security supervisor on duty had neglected to notify him of the episode until morning, foolishly believing he could “rectify the situation” on his own before shift turnover at eight o'clock in the morning.
A weak mind begets a weak character
. That was what her father had said to her when she was sixteen and tried to cover up a speeding ticket from an unsanctioned joyride in his Porsche. She had carried those words with her ever since; one could even argue the phrase had become her personal mantra. Pope assured her that he had fired the dolt on the spot, but that was little consolation. The damage was already done. Patient-65 had an eight-hour head start, and with every passing hour the cone of uncertainty surrounding his position was growing exponentially. Immediate action was imperative. She swung her legs off the side of the bed, slipped her nightshirt off, and walked naked into her bathroom. She turned on the cold water tap in the shower and stepped into the icy stream.

•      •      •

IT WAS ONLY
five short months ago when a strange notice from one of the H1N1 vaccine trial administrators floated across her desk. As the Director of Research & Development for Vyrogen, Meredith was required to review and sign all anomaly reports. Since the H1N1 vaccine trial was technically classified as an R&D activity, she found herself regularly barraged with H1N1 administrative minutiae. Late one evening, while leafing through a stack of such reports, she came across a blood panel anomaly that made her gasp. A previously undocumented genetic aberration with groundbreaking implications had been detected in a study participant and tagged for further review. She moved swiftly; no one was going to snatch an opportunity like this away from her.

She directed three of her most loyal scientists to perform a preliminary assessment of the anomaly and ascertain what resources would be needed to go to the next level. The report was discouraging. The team advised her that outside expertise was needed, and only one man was on their list—Xavier Pope. Recruiting Pope away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been more difficult than she could have imagined. First, he demanded a copy of the lab data, a violation of Vyrogen policy. After much consternation, she reluctantly acquiesced. This was followed by a week of radio silence. Then, late on a Friday afternoon, he phoned her with additional demands: complete autonomy as project director, a 20 percent salary bump, and a new Audi company car. It chafed her to do it, but she agreed to his demands.

With Pope aboard, the project had wings, and initially things progressed steadily. However, Meredith wasn't satisfied with a “normal” development cycle. Unlike Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in 1928 but was not able to mass-produce therapeutic antibiotics until seventeen years later in 1945, she had a more aggressive timetable in mind for achieving scientific immortality. She had given her team a target of nine months to decode the mutation, synthesize a gene therapy based on it, develop a delivery mechanism, perform preclinical toxicity analysis, and complete all essential bioanalytical testing. If they succeeded, she would be ready to start Phase 1 Clinical Development Trials within a year. To cement her personal commitment to the cause, she wire transferred ten thousand dollars directly from her personal bank account into the private accounts of each of her top five scientists, and promised a matching payment in nine months if the milestone was achieved.

Scientific accomplishment and monetary incentives alone proved to be insufficient levers to keep the team on pace with the schedule. Extraordinary measures were necessary. Moving the project offshore to the Czech Republic—away from prying corporate eyes and stifling procedural protocols—had been her first mandate. Patient-65's compulsory participation was her second.

Nicknamed “The Calypso Directive” by Pope, the project mushroomed into a tremendous professional risk for everyone involved. The provenance of the nickname was not lost on her; she had Googled it. Calypso was the nymph who kidnapped Odysseus and held him prisoner on her secret island. Calypso needed Odysseus. She loved him, and in exchange for his love, she offered him the godly gift of immortality. Patient-65 was Meredith's Odysseus. The laboratory in Prague, her secret island. While the babbling Hippocratic demurral from her staff tested her resolve daily, she was resolute in her conviction that the ends would justify the means. In true Homeric fashion, she would bestow on her patient-hero Calypso's gift. Together, they would be gods—Morley and Foster—immortal in the annals of medical history.