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  Heading straight up Capitol Hill over pot holes and cracks in the pavement from years of erosion due to the rain, took only minutes. School let out at 3:30, but Jason would need to be there to intercept Lily before going to her after-school program. On Mondays, Lily got pulled out of class for reading. Today she was supposed to be in a separate classroom with two other children using a special program to help with reading comprehension in a more personalized way.

  Jason went to Lily’s room to get her for speech therapy. The door was open so he stuck his head in to try to see her without disturbing the class. There were only four children sitting in front of the computer with one middle-aged woman sitting at a table behind them. Lily, however, was not there.

  Jason carefully walked into the classroom to make sure that Lily was not there. Once confirming his suspicion he looked to the teacher. “Ma’am, I thought Lily Roy was supposed to be in your room today.”

  The woman furrowed her eyebrows before responding, “I don’t know what to tell you, sir. She isn’t here today. Check with the front office.”

  Jason slowed his breathing before turning to leave the classroom. The front office was right around the corner and down the hall. Jason walked by Lily’s home classroom before heading to the front. “Is Lily in here?”

  There was a young substitute sitting in front of the classroom who answered Jason, “Sorry sir, but Lily who?”

  By now Jason was beginning to tremble. He knew she was probably fine, but where could she be? He spoke to the woman in as even a voice as he could muster. “Lily Roy. She usually has reading now, but she was not with the reading specialist.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Roy. There was a note left for me that she was to leave for another class. She said she knew where she was supposed to go so I let her walk by herself. You should check at the front office.”

  Jason turned back to the hallway with visions of someone in a van with no windows driving through the parking lot. Why wasn’t she in her reading room today? Jason walked back to the front office. A very cheerful woman with short bobbed hair and a round face greeted Jason. “Mr. Roy, we’ve been waiting for you.”

  Jason could feel his heart come to a halt. “What do you mean? Where is Lily?”

  “Dad, I’m over here.”

  Jason hadn’t realized how upset he had become until he felt the muscles in his shoulders relax. “Lily, we have speech, sweetheart.”

  “Daddy, I know, silly. There is supposed to be some assembly soon so they wanted me to meet you in the office. I brought home the letter yesterday.”

  As usual, Lily knows what’s going on. I need to remember that she is more capable than people give her credit for.

  She ran over and gave him a big hug like she hadn’t seen him in months. Big brown eyes, and long straight blond hair that came down to her shoulders, her smile lit up the room even though she had a few missing teeth. Lily had a style all her own. Jason tried to keep her “look” reasonable, but as always, she was unique: purple skirt, blue shirt, and red polka dot socks that went up past her knees.

  “Did you bring Eleanor?”

  “Yes, sweetie, Eleanor is waiting for you.”

  They escaped the school just before the bell and made the quick walk back to the parking lot and Eleanor.

  “Daddy, I’m ten now. I want to ride up front with you.”

  “Sorry, I know you’re a big girl but it’s still not safe for you to sit up front. The safest place is the backseat.”

  “Geez, Dad, okay.”

  Jason walked around the car so he could open the door for Lily to get into the backseat. She climbed under his arm to sit and gave Jason her best pout. He couldn’t resist, a smile cracked his face. With her arms crossed and her face crunched she said, “no smile, not funny.

  “All right little girl, buckle up. We’re off to speech.”

  11

  ANN ARBOR—2014

  Nate turned off of Huron Parkway onto Plymouth. It was a beautiful spring day in Michigan with flowers everywhere he looked. Before Nate and Debbie decided to move to Ann Arbor from Seattle, they told each other they were looking forward to four distinct seasons. It was still hard to believe that a blind date set up by Jason years ago had led to his life with Debbie. The reality was they could do without winter. Month on end of cold overcast weather was often depressing especially when there wasn’t even a decent ski resort close by for all of the snow; at least when they were in Seattle it was easy to go skiing. Now that they were in Michigan, it was a day’s drive or flight to do any skiing.

  Nate had worried about this meeting all week. The entrance to Gibson Labs was on his left where two guards sat behind windows in a building made of brown brick. It looked like every security shelter he had ever seen. The front was lined with a standard parking gate and a guard shack in the middle. About twenty feet behind the regular gate was a ten-foot motorized steel gate that could block the road in seconds, but Nate had never seen it close.

  The administration building was on his left. It was a three-story building built in the shape of a football, with the outside walls made entirely of glass. It was interesting, but not exactly art. He couldn’t decide if the building was actually someone’s planned idea to do something novel, or if the architect just got so sick of making square buildings that it was some type of mini rebellion. Nate parked in the employee lot across the street and walked in with the rest of the lemmings headed for another day in the grind.

  The pressure to produce results over the last year since he had moved here from Seattle had been immense. Nate had grown up in Seattle, gone to the University of Washington, and worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center since finishing his post-graduate work. It was his work at the “Hutch” with T cell immunity and cancer treatments that had gotten Nate this offer from Gibson Labs. His work with the Hutch had been changing the world of cancer care one patient at a time. Now with more money for research, he was hoping to prevent cancer on a widespread basis.

  At the Hutch they had learned to hype up someone’s own T cells to help fight blood cancers like leukemia with a person’s own defensive mechanisms. They had been extremely successful by taking a cancer patient’s blood, removing the T cells, then ramping up that person’s T cells and putting them back into that same cancer patient. Those now super T cells would attack the cancer, ridding the patient of the destructive cells without the risk of chemotherapy or the complications of bone marrow transplants since they were using the person’s own cells. The problem was that it was on a person-by-person basis, and could only be done after someone had contracted a blood cancer.

  Now Nate had more resources, but also more pressure. Gibson Labs had been instrumental in developing a vaccine to HIV that had virtually eliminated the disease and allowed Gibson to become an international financial and political force. After the release of the Hutch’s treatment strategy, executives had realized immediately the possibility of developing a vaccine to cancer, or at least certain types of cancer. Who wouldn’t want to prevent themselves or their family from getting cancer? What insurance company wouldn’t pay for an immunization that would prevent billions in cancer treatment costs? In theory, that is. Nate knew all too well that a good idea was worth nothing if you couldn’t make it a reality. The people at Gibson wanted results, not theories. Today Dr. Gibson wanted a personal talk from Nate; his research was moving forward but not at the pace they wanted. Apparently, standing in front of the upper management was supposed to stimulate Nate’s research, or make them decide he was on the cutting block. The truth was, Nate wasn’t exactly sure why on earth they wanted to hear from him. Debbie knew how stressed he was today so he had promised to call her when all was said and done.

  The security in the administration building was much more subtle than the iron gates at the entrance. Facial recognition software and card readers that found your magnetic code without you even having to take it out of your pocket made the flow of people seem much less secure than it actually was. The
conference room where Nate was heading was on the third floor. The term conference room didn’t quite capture it. It was more of an auditorium with a centralized podium and stadium seating which encircled the speaker who was at the far end of the U-shaped layout. The room was clearly big enough to hold a few hundred, but there were barely twenty people sitting around the podium. Everyone but Nate was wearing a suit. Nate had spent too much time in Seattle shopping at REI, and his idea of dress-up was pants and any shirt with buttons.

  The podium was situated under the vaulted ceiling and tinted skylights that gave it an almost cathedral look.

  “Dr. Amsler, glad you could join us this morning. Everyone is excited about hearing what you have for us.”

  “Happy to do it, Dr. Gibson. Where would you like me?”

  “Well, as we all came just to hear you, I think you can start at the podium.”

  Nate moved to the podium, feeling like the only thing missing from this lynching was the rope and the tree. Fortunately, he was prepared and knew that his project was too important to give up on it this early. On the dash of the podium was a touch screen linked to the internal computer server. Nate had prepared a presentation with a slideshow for today and was now pulling it up for his audience. The windows automatically dimmed as an enormous LCD screen lowered next to Nate.

  “Thanks for coming today. I must confess I haven’t had a chance to personally meet most of you, but I’m excited at the opportunity to talk with you today. As you know, since the mapping of our genome was announced nearly twenty years ago, there has been a huge leap in our understanding and use of genes. I was recruited here two years ago to help further our understanding of the genome as it applies to cancer treatment. For years the pharmaceutical companies developed drugs that killed cells that were reproducing in a particular way to try to rid us of cancer. They were partially successful at treating cancer but also at the cost of destruction to normal cells. The drugs became better and better while the companies became richer and richer. Alas, there was never the silver bullet everyone had hoped for.”

  Nate could feel that his audience was listening. He was also relieved to find someone had remembered to leave a bottle of water he had requested; he reached under the podium to get a drink before continuing.

  “Then came gene therapy, or immunotherapy. The first real iteration of this was bone marrow transplants. Unfortunately, although it often worked, it was very difficult sometimes to find a match and complications that could occur. The next iteration was T cell re-implantation, where scientists removed a cancer patient’s T cells then boosted their function. The super T cells were then re-infused to help fight the cancer. This was highly successful and prevented many complications as these were the patient’s own T cells.”

  A hand went up from the back of the room. Jason couldn’t see who it was, but at the thought of the interruption he could feel the palms of his hands begin to sweat.

  “Dr. Roy, we are here to hear your work. This is common knowledge. Please don’t patronize us.”

  Jason mustered his courage. “I’m sorry, I am not sure who I am addressing.”

  “Dr. Huxley. I am vice president of immunogenetics.”

  Jason had never met him but knew that his reputation was not to be trifled with. By report, he enjoyed embarrassing people in public on his own little ego trips. Jason also knew that today Dr. Huxley was one of the smaller fish so he couldn’t afford to get bogged down by him.

  “You are absolutely correct. Most of the people in this room do know this as common knowledge. Unfortunately for those of you who do know this stuff I have to catch everyone else up so please bear with me. I mean no disrespect, but I think this is the only way to get us all on the same page. I will be as brief as possible.”

  Dr. Gibson interceded while staring down Dr. Huxley, “Please proceed, Dr. Amsler.”

  Nate turned his attention back to the slides. “Spurred by the success of T cell re-implantation, researches began trials with stem cells in an effort to grow T cells that could be used by any cancer patient without the need for harvesting their own cells or worrying about immune reactions such as graft versus host disease. This has only been partially successful mainly because of the availability of stem cells for wide production. Although stem cell research has been accepted, its routine use in the treatment of disease conditions is highly regulated.”

  In an attempt to hold everyone’s attention, Nate had several brightly covered slides with pictures of T cells interspersed with pictures of famous locations around the world.

  Before beginning again, Nate looked around the room. It was dark but not so dark he couldn’t make out their faces. No one was looking at their phones or doing anything other than looking squarely at him. He knew the room was completely temperature-controlled but his body was playing tricks on him as he felt his face getting more flushed.

  “And now we come to where we are today. We now know how to turn stem cells into T cells that will attack tumor cells, and we have isolated the receptors to several forms of cancer. We also know how to insert genes into the DNA of people to help treat several disease conditions.”

  Nate turned to a slide of several diseases currently being treated with gene therapy. At the top of the list was severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID).

  Nate suspected Congress and other politicians would like slides like this when explaining things to their constituents. Giving information to people who were supposed to be “in the know” without patronizing them was a skill Nate continued to work on as Dr. Huxley had so kindly pointed out.

  Dr. Gibson looked up to Nate with a bit of a sneer. Nate had known that he was currently embroiled in negotiations with Congress regulatory committees on genetics. He was hoping to lighten up his mood a little with something he could use. Gibson’s sneer wasn’t angry, yet it wasn’t happy either. Nate decided to move on.

  “Gene therapy was first used to help treat patients by using a retrovirus. As you know, a retrovirus stores its genome as RNA, which it converts to DNA to insert into the cell it’s infected. We used the retrovirus to insert a gene into these patients. Fortunately it worked. Unfortunately, this was in our infancy, and the insertion point was so off that it turned on an oncogene, or cancer-causing gene, and gave most of these patients cancer. Which is why I am here. Our goal is to develop an inoculation to prevent cancer by inserting a gene that stimulates T cells to fight specific forms of cancer. Eventually we can create preventive treatments for the most common or deadly cancers starting with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The first phase of my research here is to develop a viral vector to pass the gene with enough specificity or accuracy to be safely used.”

  Dr. Gibson stood from his seat. “This is a very nice story, Dr. Amsler. What do you have for us today? You have been here for two years now and have nothing new to show us?”

  “Well, I am very glad you asked me that, Dr. Gibson. We were waiting until we had enough data, but we have been conducting some testing with a mutated retrovirus that we will be using as a vector to implant our gene. It is very early, but I think we will have enough data to apply to the FDA for phase one human trials starting next quarter.”

  A small gentleman stood up to ask a question. He had a receding hairline and a batch of hair on his chin that he must have felt made him look cool. His name was Henry Geller and he was always at Dr. Gibson’s side. “It sounds like you have made progress, Dr. Amsler, but I want to make it clear to everyone. The only thing worse than no data is wrong data. We’ve been very patient with you. If things aren’t as they seem, we will have no tolerance. I believe we’ve been more than generous with you. Our company cannot afford failure. We have had experiences in the past where we’ve dealt with people who’ve avoided failure by telling us what they think we want to hear. We do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. However, if what you say is true, we stand to change the world.”

  Nate stood unsure of what to do next. He thought things had gone well, but the audience was di
fficult to read. It seemed clear that Henry Geller was threatening him. The science community had its share of battles and difficult personalities but Nate had never been threatened. Deep breaths, deep breaths. Nate tried to calm the tremor in his hands. Before he could muster the nerve to say something Gibson spoke.

  “That will be all, Dr. Amsler.”

  Nate logged off from the podium computer and turned to walk out of the auditorium the same way he entered.

  As he walked back to his office, Nate knew he was still angry. But what did he mean by repeating the mistakes of the past? Nate’s office was a couple of buildings over so there was no point in moving the car. With his mind racing, he left the building and quickly walked over to his lab. He wasn’t sure he could control his emotions if he called Debbie so he sent her a text; he knew she was worried about him.

  “Hey sweetheart, I survived the meeting, love ya lots, talk when I get home.:)”

  Nate looked at the text as he hit send. He was a terrible liar, but he didn’t have the heart to tell Debbie the truth, or at least the complete truth. Something was going on, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to leave it alone. What on earth is Gibson up to?

  Dr. Gibson was almost spitting he was so angry. “What on earth were you thinking, Henry? We need him. Is this twenty questions? ‘We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past’: why would you say that to him?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Henry. “Nate Amsler just seems to be a conceited scientist who doesn’t understand the gravity of what we are doing here. I think we needed to remind him that this isn’t a charitable foundation that will fund his research just because it’s interesting.”

  Dr. Gibson looked at the floor thoughtfully before looking up. “I don’t disagree, but we cannot afford to have him digging in our previous projects and contaminating his perception of what the goal is. On a related topic, what’s going on with Dr. Jason Roy in Seattle? His project could undermine ours.”