Enhancement (Black Market DNA Book 1) Read online

  CHAPTER NINE

  A wrenching headache muddled Chris’s thoughts. The sun filtering in through his windows burned his retinas. A hot shower hardly made a dent in the throbbing pain that filled his skull like a persistent jackhammer.

  Sure, more cures for cancer existed now than ever before, but there wasn’t a pill to treat a hangover. Or maybe there was, and it had been released while he had wasted away in prison. Screw prison.

  As he forced down a breakfast of oatmeal, he watched Baltimore 7’s morning cast on the holoscreen. The newscasters spoke in practiced voices rich with obnoxious cheeriness. They reported the incoming threat of a cold front. Chris reported a heavy hangover and turned the projection off.

  He put his oatmeal bowl down on the coffee table and stared hard at the sketchbooks he had left lying open. A gull soared over an abandoned beach, its wings spread in the wind. A ship sailed up the ominous roll of a rogue wave in a squall. A couple danced in a packed bar from another century where the smoke of cigarettes filled the air. That image evoked mixed memories of time spent with Veronica and, now, Tracy. Sprawled across the coffee table were all the little worlds he had drawn in blacks and whites, varying shades of gray. But one world remained closed.

  Chris picked up Vincent’s journal and debated opening it again. He couldn’t do it. Not now.

  He slid the journal into the leather shoulder bag propped against the couch. Though it remained empty, he took the bag as if he had something to carry. Papers, lab reports, contraband. Not anymore. He would work on delivering genetic drugs for ass cancer patients, and all he lugged around was a dead cellmate’s journal that he superstitiously feared opening.

  When he’d gone into prison, he’d thought it would harden him. What the hell had happened? Why did opening a former cellie’s glorified diary scare him?

  ***

  “Good morning, doc.” Tracy’s voice rang out high against Chris’s eardrums.

  He rubbed his temples. “What the hell did you do to me last night?”

  Tracy laughed. “Sorry, didn’t know you drank like a little girl.” She pulled up a seat next to him and laid her head in her hands, her elbows propped on his desk. “That was fun, but I don’t have time to nurse you back to health. We need to get moving.”

  He waved a hand in acknowledgment but kept his eyes closed. “Fine.”

  “That kind of means now. We’re supposed to finish this delivery system in a month. Claire’s orders.”

  “Claire?”

  “VP of research. Man, they hired you on the spot, and you don’t even know who you’re working for? Maybe you know something I don’t.”

  “Right, right. Sorry, I know that. I’m just a bit...hungover. I don’t know how the hell you do it.”

  Tracy stood up and slapped his back. “Some people are just born with natural greatness.”

  He met her triumphant expression and stared hard.

  “Tell you what: you read up on APC today. You’re going to need to know what the hell you’re dealing with before you design a delivery system for it, anyway.” She shrugged. “It’s my gift to you. Also, lab happy hour is every Thursday. That means tonight.”

  “I don’t think I’m up for it.”

  Tracy grinned. “You don’t have a choice. You want to be a part of our group, you have to go.”

  Before Chris could protest, Tracy retreated to the lab.

  ***

  Chris waded through the research papers outlining the role of APC in tumor suppression and how familial adenomatous polyposis led to colon cancer. It took him several times to read over the terms before they sank in as he trudged through the haze that had settled in his head. With the help of a constant supply of coffee, his thoughts clicked into place. The more he dug into the papers, the more he figured his old tricks would suit the genetic treatment well. Designing a genetic modification delivery vector out of DNA-based materials would be simple enough.

  Simple enough if he could access all his old vector materials and lab notebooks. All of that now lay stowed away in a maximum-security evidence facility, never to see the light of day, much less make its debut as a scientific publication or patent.

  God, he had been stupid. He could have patented the technology. It would have required more time, more financial investment, but its application would have been useful in a variety of genetic enhancement or replacement treatments, such as the one he dealt with now.

  Now the only person that might even read about his past inventions would be a bored officer reviewing old case files with a burnt coffee in hand from a crappy street-corner autoserve window.

  He recalled tidbits of his designs, but they weren’t sufficient by themselves. For his first real assignment at Respondent, he wanted to develop a delivery vector that outshone Randy’s expectations. He could prove to his boss and himself that he deserved his position at the company. As an added benefit, it might further endear him to Tracy. Couldn’t complain about that.

  He took out his comm card and projected a blank page onto his desk. Writing and doodling on the blank page, he conveyed his thoughts as they came, racking his pained brain for the answers to the riddle Tracy had provided him. Flashing back to his days before prison, he strained to remember what the exact vector he had used for his muscle enhancements. He tried to recall the inert DNA strands that made up the bulk material, preventing the immune system from recognizing the vector as an invasive foreign body and thus expelling it, rendering it useless. That sequence and the material made from it had been his bread and butter, and now he couldn’t remember how the hell he had ever made toast.

  Frustrated, he flicked his comm card across his desk and massaged his temples. The pain flared in his head, and he resisted the urge to pound the desk. That wouldn’t make a great impression for his second day on the job.

  He leaned his forehead on his arm, allowing him a perfect vantage point into the leather shoulder bag near his feet. With the worn brown cover, Vincent’s journal stared out. Was it Vincent’s writing in the journal that had been the reason his cellmate had died in the riots? Or was it just bad luck?

  His sides itched. Though the healing skin patches from the prison infirmary had fallen off just days before he started at Respondent, he could feel their uncomfortable, ghostly presence. It felt as if the wounds were scabbed and healing again.

  He gave up on solving the problem with the APC corrective gene delivery system and searched for archived news on the Fulton Prison riots. Several stories showed up in the results. Most seemed lackluster in excitement and detailed the location, time, and outcome of the riot: seven dead, seventeen wounded.

  But the articles listed no names. One mentioned that the riot had started when several unnamed inmates had been spontaneously attacked, but the journalist offered no purported causes for the random attacks. No news stream had reported any external connections or justifications for the stabbings, except for one source that ventured the attacks were gang related. Sure, skinheads occupied a couple cells, and enough imprisoned street gang members ran around to cause problems at Fulton, but gang violence wasn’t the cancer that so often afflicted other prison systems. Besides, if the gangs had been responsible for the riots, he wanted to know how he had become involved.

  Further investigations provided no more leads on possible gang involvement, so he set his sights on Vincent. Maybe he had had an external connection to these groups and had become a target like Chris. Chris needed to figure out if his cellmate’s history held the key to finding out who had wanted them dead and why. He snapped his fingers as he struggled to recall Vincent’s last name. When he’d first shaken his cellmate’s hand, when he’d first introduced himself, hadn’t Vincent given him a last name? It started with a K. Ko——? Ka——?

  “Head still pounding?”

  Chris jumped and dropped the comm card. He closed out of the open sites. “Uh, yeah. Still got a bit of a headache.”

  Tracy offered a sympathetic smile and put her hand on his shoulder. “I
must have messed you up. Why don’t I make it up to you with lunch?”

  Vincent’s last name, just beginning to materialize, dissipated back into the recesses of Chris’s mind. His thoughts swirled to Tracy’s hand still on his shoulder, and he returned her smile. Sharing a meal with her would be recompense enough for a meager headache. “Yeah, sure, fine.”

  “Promise that it’ll help.”

  He figured he needed more help than Tracy could provide.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chris scrounged up the energy to make it through the lab’s happy hour at Cowboys and Poets. Happy hour extended into a dinner filled with greasy cheeseburgers and overly salted fries. After their meal, Paul claimed he had research papers to review at home and Kristina said that she needed to meet up with her brother, who lived in nearby Glen Burnie, to go over his resume.

  “It looks like it’s clear who the real men are around here,” Randy said.

  Seated beside him and across from Chris, Tracy elbowed Randy in the side. “Come on. I’m still here.”

  “My point still stands.” Randy laughed and held his hands on his protruding stomach. “But you know what? Tonight, I’ll give you my man card. I’m going to check out, too.”

  As the other three departed, Tracy and Chris sat alone at a table full of empty plates and glasses. Chris had managed to drink his share from the pitchers of lager that Randy had provided for the table, but he couldn’t quite muster up the same confidence he had felt the previous night with Tracy. “You want to go dancing?”

  “What happened to the little boy complaining about a hangover?” Tracy laughed. “Last night was fun, but I’m not feeling it right now.”

  “That’s fine. You headed home, then?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” She smiled. “It’s still early, though. You want to come over for a drink? It smells a lot better in my apartment than it does here.”

  When they arrived at her place, she retrieved a bottle of pinot noir from a wine cooler. She poured a glass for each of them and handed one to Chris. Tracy held hers up in toast. “To the newbie.”

  Chris clinked his glass against hers but couldn’t help remembering when Kurt had called him a newbie. At least this time, he worked a real job. And for all he cared, she could call him whatever she wanted. He took a swig. “You have any music?”

  “Of course.” Tracy tapped on her comm card, and the apartment filled with the steady beat of synthesized instruments.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure about this.”

  Tracy drew her head back. “What’s wrong with my music?”

  “It’s a little hard to dance to, but we can make it work.”

  “God, you’re persistent, aren’t you?”

  Chris took her hand and pulled her into the center of her living room as they swayed to the rhythm, each of them balancing a glass in one hand. As he drained the final drops of pinot, his face warmed and he felt an uninhibited contentment brought on by the mix of alcohol and his present company. His thoughts turned from Tracy and he wondered what Veronica would think of him now. So many times, she had filled him up on wine and begged him to live a little, to stop acting so rigid. He lived now.

  As they swayed, he leaned in toward Tracy. She smiled before she met him halfway. They ceased dancing and Tracy set her glass on the nearby table. She threw both hands around his neck and pulled Chris tighter against her.

  The music followed them into the bedroom as Tracy unbuttoned Chris’s shirt between kisses and grins. She pushed him onto her bed and dimmed the lights with her comm card. Tossing it away, she crawled over him and pushed his wrists up toward the headboard as her lips met his. The lingering pinot noir possessed an almost sweet edge on Tracy’s lips and tongue. Chris closed his eyes.

  When Tracy had sprawled out across her bed asleep, her naked skin glowing in the wintry moonlight, Chris didn’t want to disturb her when he felt the pressing need for a glass of water. He tiptoed into the kitchen, crashed against her countertop, and searched through the cupboards. His hands knocked into a stack of plates on one of the shelves. The plates teetered, but he caught them before they came crashing down. He peeked back into the bedroom to see that Tracy lay sound asleep, still stretched out across the bed, the moonlight her only cover. Smiling to himself in drunken reverie, he wondered how they would fare together, wondered if they could last or if this was just a one-night stand. He found it hard to believe that she would ever accept him for who he was and what he had been, but he couldn’t help hoping that she would.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Almost two months into his job at Respondent, Chris had not heard anything from the businessman. He clung to a distant hope that maybe the stranger no longer needed him. Maybe he was free from his indentured servitude and could keep working as a researcher just like the rest of the scientists and engineers at Respondent. He’d already begun to blend in with them. He joined in on their Thursday happy hours, bantering at lunch over Congress’s ineffectiveness just down the road in DC, and going on coffee runs to the QuickFix autoserve window down the block. He had even developed a working delivery system for correcting the defective APC genes. Animal trials would begin in mere weeks.

  Tracy sat on the edge of his desk, her familiar smirk almost reaching her high cheekbones. “Ready for lunch, doc?”

  “Sure thing, sunshine.” Chris displayed an equally mischievous grin.

  “Stop calling me that.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “Or what? You going to dump me?”

  “Something like that.”

  ***

  When they settled into a beaten-up booth at Silver Linings Diner, the spot where Tracy had first taken Chris to recover from a painful hangover, her face drew up in a grave expression. “I want you to tell me something and I want you to be honest: Why were you in prison?”

  His heartbeat quickened and his cheeks flushed. A mix of embarrassment, shame, and shock surged through him. He struggled through potential answers. Maybe he shouldn’t tell her everything—maybe he just did something stupid, like drove his car manually while drunk. Except he didn’t have a car. What about stealing something? No petty thievery. She was far too smart to believe that.

  “I just want you to be honest.” She repeated the word with a look meant to endear herself to him, as if she knew what he was thinking.

  “I screwed up.”

  “No shit,” she said. “But how did you screw up?”

  He felt like he might be able to tell her but wanted to bide a bit more time. “Can you at least tell me how you found out?”

  “I did a little stalking on the net.” She shrugged. “Wanted to make sure you weren’t a killer or sex offender, or something, you know. I mean, you weren’t—you aren’t.” She corrected herself. “But I saw you spent time in prison.”

  “Then you saw what I did.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’ve got this weird feeling like it’d be better if you told me. Straight to my face.”

  He smiled. “Thanks, I guess.” He scratched his head and let out a slow exhale. “You promise you aren’t going to go around telling everyone?”

  “Are you kidding?” Tracy raised an eyebrow and leaned across the table. “I won’t. But if they go looking for it, they’re going to find it.”

  “True.”

  “Just tell me.”

  Over a Philly cheesesteak sandwich, Chris explained how he’d been snubbed for several promotions from his role as an entry-level research engineer at Ingenomics. He had been eschewed for less-qualified engineers who’d worked their way up the career ladder through dogged brown-nosing. He consistently produced delivery vectors with higher levels of transfection efficiency, yet his superiors hardly seemed to notice his scientific talent. When he had decided that waiting on a raise wouldn’t satisfy him, he marketed his own illegal genetic enhancements through a distributor. He had earned enough from his initial batches fabricated in Ingenomics’s labs after hours to build a cramped but adequate setup in his condo to manufacture the delivery s
ystems he used for the genes he made while on the clock at work.

  “You sold genies on the street?”

  He nodded, scowling at the use of “genies” to describe his illicit work. Enhancers, or the people that used black-market enhancements, often referred to the genetic delivery systems as “genies” for short. The word evoked both a short-form name for the enhancements and the enhancers’ desire to alter their bodies with one wish. “I can’t excuse my, well, inexcusable actions.” He shook his head. “Never again. I was stupid and arrogant, and I don’t even know what happened to the people that used my enhancements.”

  Tracy’s expression dropped. “Did anyone die?”

  Chris shuddered at her words, and his stomach dropped. The thought that he may have killed someone stabbed at his heart, and his mouth went dry as he fought for words. “I have no idea.” He swallowed hard. This wasn’t the first time he’d faced that question, but he never liked to dwell on it for too long. “I’d like to think I was good enough to prevent something like that. I mean, the enhancements I sold were similar to a couple FDA–approved treatments, so it’s highly unlikely. But, all the same, I’ll never know for sure.” Guilt swelled in his chest like an aneurysm fit to burst. “I understand if you want to end this thing between us. If you want me to leave Respondent, I will.”

  “Randy knew about all this when he hired you?”

  He hesitated, reminded of the dealings between Randy and the mysterious benefactor that he knew nothing about. When he had accepted the job offer, the strange man had assured him that Randy knew about Chris’s past but would keep the matter confidential. “Yes, he knew.”

  Her expression relaxed. Reaching across the table for his hand, Tracy shook her head. “No, Chris. I would never ask you to do that. I couldn’t. We’ve all screwed up at one point or another. I wanted you to be honest, and you were. Thanks.”

  Chris opened his mouth, ready to tell her about how he had actually gotten the job at Respondent. Honesty. That’s all she wanted.