Payback. Don Pendleton

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      “What’s up?” Grimaldi asked, leaning over to try to get a look at the LCD screen.

      “Hal wants to see us right away.”

      “What do you know?” the pilot said as he put the sound suppressor back into his pocket. “Saved by the bell.”

      Pima County, Arizona

      IN THE STERILE environment of the state-of-the-art laboratory in the GDF Laboratory, Dr. Ellen Campbell leaned intently over her microscope as she placed the second slide tray under the lens.

      “You look tired, my dear,” Dr. Allan Lawrence said as he entered and stopped by her table. His long gray hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and his light blue eyes focused on her in their customary, probing fashion. “Haven’t you been sleeping well?”

      She smiled as warmly as she could manage. “I’ve got a lot on my mind lately.”

      Lawrence made a tsking sound and moved across the lab to the nude, muscular man on the steel table. Trang was the latest and most successful candidate in Dr. Lawrence’s GEM program. So many failures, so few successes...and yet John Lassiter had been one of those successes. If you could call him that. When she’d gone to Dr. Lawrence weeks ago with the somewhat puzzling results from her latest tests, he’d pooh-poohed her findings, patting her arm like a condescending favorite uncle. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he’d said. “Typical fluctuations well within the parameters.”

      Only now she knew they weren’t.

      Campbell went back to studying the slide showing the breakdown of the cells she’d taken from Lassiter’s blood sample of the previous night, or more accurately, early that morning. The correction did little to alter what was grimly obvious: inflammatory myopathies leading to oncosis. She switched to another slide. Same effect, only in a more advanced stage of pyknosis. Something was causing them to break down at a progressive rate. The nuclei were dissolving into the cytoplasm. Karyorrhexis. She straightened and looked across the lab as Lawrence, her mentor and surrogate father figure, injected a syringeful of the AAV-IGF-X5 into Trang’s arm.

      Lawrence had wooed her from her research studies at Johns Hopkins by promising her a chance to make a real difference. That had been seven years ago, and he’d fulfilled his promise in spades. Not only did he take her under his wing and give her total access to the fantastic, governmentally financed research projects that he’d already begun, but he welcomed her input as an equal partner.

      Back then she was thrilled, but intimidated. Deep down she knew she could never be Lawrence’s equal. His peer, maybe, but she soon discovered his work, his outlook, was too cutting edge. He was unafraid to take risks, boldly cut swaths through regulations and restrictions, forging a new frontier in genetic enhancement, but ultimately, at the expense of the test subject’s safety.

      “We’re this close to curing major diseases like M.S., Alzheimer’s, cancer,” Lawrence had said. “We’ll take the bold step—administration of dystrophin—to the next level.”

      It had sounded wonderful, and his promise to give a new hope to so many made her look the other way as he explained the necessity of going from experimentation on mice and guinea pigs to human volunteers. She’d balked, until he’d reassured her once again.

      “All the advancements, all the great leaders in medical science—Pasteur, Currie, Fleming—all saw the necessity of putting their theories to the ultimate test. The human test.”

      Her reticence lingered, however, until he assured her that nothing could go wrong. “That’s why I need you in the program,” he said. “As a safeguard. You could be a distaff Daedalus to my impulsive Icarus.”

      She was flattered by his allusion to Greek mythology, giving her, by implication, the more dominant role. He’d sounded so idealistic, so brilliant, how could anything possibly go wrong? And that was, she reflected, how she first got involved in the supersecret governmentally funded research called the Genetically Enhanced Male—GEM—project. What she’d originally thought would be a quest to eradicate disease soon was transformed into the quest for a super soldier. Human volunteers were no problem. Most experienced violent side effects and were quickly dropped from the program, faceless young men who came and went. Then she met John Lassiter, and everything changed.

      Now, instead of the allusion to Daedalus, she likened her experience more to Pandora.

      She watched as Trang grimaced slightly when Lawrence depressed the plunger, and wondered if the risks of what they were doing had been fully explained to him. She thought about the slides. She thought about John. All these ramifications, albeit unexpected and sudden, certainly hadn’t been explained to him.

      “Doctor,” Campbell said, “I need to talk to you.”

      Lawrence glanced at her briefly, then turned back to Trang. He was Asian, but the enhancements had begun to give his face a more brutish cast. The high cheekbones had begun to expand, as had his mandible.

      John’s face hadn’t shown the same degree of distortion, she thought. That had to mean that Lawrence was using a higher dosage. She had to tell him about her new findings immediately.

      “Doctor, I really do need to talk to you,” she repeated.