The Lethal Helix Read online

  Praise for The Lethal Helix

  “A thrilling ride through the dark side of genetic engineering. Fascinating and well written . . . Donaldson knows the anatomy of a thriller.”

  —Michael Palmer

  Reviews for Don Donaldson’s other books

  “Donaldson combines an insider’s knowledge of modern technology with a real flair for making the reader’s skin crawl.”

  —Booklist

  “Sheer pulse-pounding reading excitement.”

  —Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson Mississippi)

  Other Don Donaldson Titles from Bell Bridge Books

  The Judas Virus

  The Memory Thief

  The Lethal Helix

  by

  Don Donaldson

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-394-8

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-365-8

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2001 by Don Donaldson

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book was originally published by Berkley under the title In the Blood in 2001

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

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  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Helix (manipulated) © Sebastian Kaulitzki | Dreamstime.com

  Trees/sky (manipulated) © Rcpphoto | Dreamstime.com

  :Ehlk:01:

  Prologue

  WHAT THE HELL is that?

  Chester Sorenson had grown up with cows and knew just about everything there was to know about them. But with all he knew and all he’d seen, he had no idea what this was on the floor. There was some ropy-looking stuff that reminded him of one thing, but nothing else about it fit.

  He moved around to get a look from a different position and began to think that what he believed was a single object, might in fact, be more than one. He wanted to see it flipped over, but didn’t want to touch it.

  “What have you got there, Chester?” a voice said from over his shoulder.

  Chester had been so interested in the object that he hadn’t heard his supervisor, Peter Dobbs, come up behind him.

  “Damned if I know,” Chester answered.

  Dobbs took a quick look, then said, “I can’t tell what it is either, but it doesn’t belong in here. You go on with your work. I’ll take care of it.”

  Before departing, Dobbs said something to the milker working the animals on the other side of the parlor and then practically pulled the guy from the room. Reluctantly, Chester left his discovery and returned to his duties, his mind still on that object.

  Dobbs sent the other milker to the main office to straighten out some problem with his time card. Dobbs then went to his desk and made a phone call.

  “No, he didn’t seem to know what it was,” he said. He listened carefully to the lengthy response, then said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  As Chester was fitting the pulsators to another animal, Dobbs returned with a black plastic bag and a wide aluminum dustpan. Producing a metallic screech that startled the cows, Dobbs scooped up the object and put it in the bag, leaving behind only a slimy spot on the tiles.

  A short while later, while Chester was cleaning things up between milking sessions, Dobbs approached him with a white envelope in his hand. “I need you to take this down to motor pool storage and give it to the guy who’s waiting there. He’s the contractor for some renovation work scheduled on that building, and this is the signed contract. So don’t lose it.”

  Though rankled at Dobbs’s suggestion that he was a moron, Chester didn’t let it show. “Why can’t he come up here and get it?”

  ”When you’re in charge, then you get to decide how things are done. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. So you won’t get too far behind here. Take your car.”

  Right, like I was planning to walk all the way down there, Chester thought as he headed for the exit.

  The dairy was situated on rolling land just inside the corporate limits of the little town of Midland, Wisconsin, about thirty-five miles from Madison. The motor pool storage building sat in a valley so that when you were there all you could see of the rest of the farm was the incinerator smokestack. As Chester pulled onto the asphalt apron in front of the building, he saw a car, but no driver. The big metal overhead door was open. Figuring that the contractor was inside, Chester parked and went to find him.

  Going inside, Chester edged past the four-wheel-drive truck with the big blade in front they used to keep the dairy roads free of snow. In the back, past an old hay baler, he saw a man wearing a bright clean pair of blue coveralls that made him look more like a newly minted garage mechanic than a contractor. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, butt against a workbench on which there was a galvanized washtub.

  “Good morning,” the man called out.

  Then Chester recognized him: a guy he’d seen around for a couple of years, mostly in the Lundstrom brothers’ café, where he was always in a shirt and tie. They’d exchanged enough “how are yous” for Chester to feel he knew him, but he’d never heard his name.

  “I didn’t know you were a contractor,” Chester said.

  “And I didn’t know you worked here,” the fellow said, grinning.

  “Fair enough,” Chester replied. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

  The man responded in kind.

  “Here’s the contract,” Chester said. “What are you gonna do with the place?”

  The man put the envelope in his pocket. “Move that wall over there out about thirty feet,” he said, gesturing behind the hay baler and a tractor on the other side. “Say, Chester, let me ask you something. You ever see anything like this?” He pointed into the galvanized tub.

  What, again? Chester thought. Two oddities in the same day? He eagerly walked up to the tub and looked in. But he saw only a foot and a half of clear water. He turned to the contractor. “It’s just water.”

  “No . . . I mean what’s swimming in it. You have to look closely.”

  Chester bent and stared into the water.

  Suddenly, there was pressure on the back of his head, forcing his face into the water. In his surprise, he inhaled, flooding his lungs.

  He struggled hard, but not for long. As he passed from this life into the next, he briefly saw himself on the farm he hoped to own someday, proudly driving a new bright green John Deere tractor.

  Back at the main complex, Peter Dobbs led the cow that had been closest to the strange object on the floor out of the barn. It followed him docilely, until about ten feet from their destination between two huge silage bunkers, the cow’s legs buckled and it went down. It then began to kick wildly. Mucus bubbled from its nose and mouth.

  Dobbs was bewilder
ed at what was happening, but it made what he had to do easier. Walking to the animal’s head, he lifted the .45 caliber pistol at his side and fired a shot into its brain.

  1

  “HERE’S THE CHART for room three.”

  Holly Fisher accepted the clipboard and scanned the existing data on Ralph Hanson, a fifty-three-year-old real estate agent, who had been referred by his regular physician following a nasty discovery during his annual physical. Satisfied with her grasp of the details, Holly opened the door of room three and went inside.

  Her patient got off the examining table and stood when he saw her.

  “Mr. Hanson, I’m Doctor Fisher.”

  Other than being about thirty pounds overweight, he didn’t look sick, which of course, he wouldn’t. She could see the fear in his eyes, and when she shook his hand, it was like gripping a moist sponge. At her request, he returned to the examining table.

  “What’s this about?” he prompted, one dangling foot beating out waltz time.

  “Part of your recent physical included a quantitative analysis of the various kinds of cells in your blood,” Holly said. “It was found that you have an unusually high number of the type known as lymphocytes.”

  “Which means what?” Hanson said.

  This was the point where she’d have to use the word, and his life would never be the same again. Even now, after having uttered it to so many patients that their faces were lost to her, it still set off an internal fire alarm. No surprise there, considering . . .

  “It means you have leukemia.”

  The blood drained from Hanson’s face and the bounce went out of his foot.

  Holly hastened to tell him the rest. “Chronic lymphocytic leukemia, to be precise,” she said. “The key word here is chronic. If you have to get leukemia, that’s the kind to get.”

  “It’s not . . . terminal then?” Hanson said.

  “I have a patient who was diagnosed eighteen years ago, and in all that time, she’s only had to treat it once, for a two-week period.”

  Hanson’s color brightened.

  “Your lymphocyte count is only about four times normal. That’s not terribly high. In all likelihood, this condition will not create any problems for a very long time. And when it does, we’ll treat it.”

  “And the treatments are effective?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long before I’d have to worry?”

  “Let’s put it this way. When your time comes, chances are slim that this will be the cause. But I do need to give you a short physical exam.”

  As the referring physician had noted, Holly found no enlarged lymph nodes, and though it was a bit difficult palpating Hanson’s spleen through his extra weight, it too felt normal in size. They talked for a few minutes after the exam, during which Holly told him to return in three months for another blood study.

  It was now nearly four o’clock, almost time for her to hit the gym for a workout. But first, she had to do a total white count and a differential on some preps that had come up from the lab just before she’d seen Mr. Hanson. Normally, she’d have let a med tech handle the counts, but this was a very special case.

  Returning to the office, she sat in front of her binocular microscope, where two Wright-stained blood smears and a sample of the same blood in a solution that dissolves red cells were waiting for her. She set about performing the total white count by drawing a small amount of the sample into a tiny tube fitted into the cap of the container holding the sample. She filled both chambers of a counting slide with blood from the tube, then put the slide on the scope. After a few adjustments, the white cells came into view, standing out like shiny ghosts against the vague debris of the dissolved red cells. She made the count quickly and plugged the result into a standard formula that yielded the good news; seventy-five hundred cells per cc, right smack in the middle of normal.

  She replaced the counting chamber with one of the blood smears. A couple turns of the coarse focus, then a tweak of the fine, brought the tiny embalmed blood components to sharpness, revealing a punctate landscape as familiar to her as the furnishings in her home. Technically, the slide was excellent; the erythrocytes nicely separated from each other and spread evenly over the slide, the white cell nuclei just the right shade of purple, the various granules specifically tinted orange or azure.

  She’d always enjoyed looking at blood smears, finding beauty even in the disturbed and immature shapes that spelled trouble for the patients they came from. But these cells were perfectly normal in appearance and in a few minutes, when she’d completed her diff count, she saw that the number of the various components were all within normal limits. This pleased her immensely because this blood was from a woman who, seven years earlier, while a student in medical school, had faced a death sentence from acute myelocytic leukemia . . . not the relatively benign disease Mr. Hanson had, but a fire-breathing dragon. And now, after treatment, she’d been in remission for more than six years. This continued evidence that the woman could look forward to a long life filled Holly with a joy that couldn’t be put into words, for the slide had been made from her own blood.

  To treat her, her doctors had taken a sample of her bone marrow and purged it of the outlaw stem cells causing her disease. They had then given her drugs to kill all the stem cells in her remaining marrow. The purged marrow was then injected back into her with hopes that those cells would begin producing only healthy progeny. And they had.

  But until today, Holly had not fully believed she was cured. She’d worried that the chemo they’d given her to kill the renegade stem cells in her body, or the method they’d used to clean up the marrow sample they’d re-injected, had missed one or two that had merely gone into hiding . . . that one day they’d mount a suicidal coup, and she’d be in the obituary column before she’d really lived. That fear was one of the reasons she’d decided on a specialty in hematology . . . to know the enemy. But now, with these good results, she suddenly felt free of all that. She was cured, really and truly.

  She picked up the phone, entered the number of Grant Ingram’s pager, then waited for him to call back, which he did barely two minutes later.

  “Hi, I need to talk to you. Can I come up?”

  “Sure,” Grant replied. “What’s the topic?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  As she passed the small room that housed the practice’s phlebotomist, or vampire, as Rena liked to call herself, Holly leaned in. “When you get a chance would you dispose of that blood sample in my office and clean my hemacytometer?”

  “Will do,” Rena said, keeping her attention on her patient’s arm, where she was searching for a vein. “You off to take out your aggressions on some gym equipment?”

  “Actually, I’m on my way to propose to Doctor Ingram.”

  This got Rena’s full attention and she looked at Holly, her face beaming. “A frontal attack. I love it.”

  Cured.

  Was there any more magical word in the world?

  In the years since her disease had gone into remission, Holly had tried to live a normal life. And for the most part, she had. For weeks at a time, she wouldn’t even think about the possibility that her leukemia might return. But even then, the specter was always there, lurking in the shadows at the edge of perception. Several times a month she’d see it clearly, often enough to remind her not to make any long-range plans or commitments.

  But that was in the past.

  Waiting for the elevator, she felt reborn; fresh and new, her life an uncluttered highway, stretching away to a distant horizon that held mysteries and wonders she longed to experience. So as the crowded elevator arrived and she stepped on, she began to hum a lullaby for the child she was now free to think about, caring not at all about the curious glances the other passengers were giving her.

  Two floors up, Holly found Grant i
n the hallway of his practice area scribbling in a chart.

  “Remember, somebody else may have to read that,” she quipped.

  He looked up, his brow furrowed. “I write legibly.”

  “It was a joke,” Holly whispered in his ear.

  “Oh.” He gave her a smile with no heart in it and motioned with his head. “Let’s go to my office.”

  In college Grant had been a champion swimmer, and his office was filled with the trophies he’d won. Now he was one of the city’s brightest young internists, and his blond hair still looked as though he’d just popped out of the pool and toweled it dry. He sat behind his desk, put his feet up, and cupped his hands behind his head.

  “I’m yours for the next five minutes.”

  “I just looked at my blood. Everything’s still fine,” Holly said.

  “That’s great, babe.”

  “For the first time I feel as though I can plan for the future . . . like I’m going to be around as long as anyone else.”

  “I never doubted that.”

  “I did. So when do you want to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Get married. Start a family.”

  Grant took his feet off the desk and rocked forward. “Slow down.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve been slowed down. I couldn’t even think of having a child when I didn’t know if I’d be around to raise it. But I’m sure now that I will.” Holly stared at Grant’s strained expression. “I don’t understand. I thought this was something you wanted too, and that you were just being considerate and supportive by not pressuring me to do something I felt so strongly was wrong.”

  “That’s not entirely correct,” Grant said. “I don’t recall ever saying I was ready for that responsibility. I’m only thirty-three years old, my practice is just beginning to take off, I’d like to travel . . .”

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” Holly said. “You only stayed with me because I was safe. As long as I was afraid my leukemia might return, you knew I wouldn’t pressure you for any kind of commitment. I was just a . . . vagina with no strings attached.”