hostage taker’s name is Sean Murphy. He’s a medical student working at the clinic. He’s with a nurse named Janet Reardon. We don’t know if she’s an accomplice or a hostage.”
“What do you mean by ‘some kind of bomb’?” Hector asked.
“He mixed up a big flask of nitroglycerin,” Anderson said. “It’s standing in ice on a desk in the room with the hostages. Once it freezes, slamming the door can set it off. At least, that’s what Dr. Mason said.”
“You’ve talked with the hostages?” Hector asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Anderson said. “Dr. Mason told me he and his wife are in a glass office along with the nitro. They’re terrified, but so far they’re unharmed and they have a phone. He says he can see the perp. But the girl is gone. He doesn’t know where she went.”
“What’s Murphy doing?” Hector asked. “Has he made any demands yet?”
“No demands yet,” Anderson said. “Apparently he’s real busy doing some kind of experiment.”
“What do you mean experiment?” Hector asked.
“No clue,” Anderson said. “I’m just repeating what Dr. Mason said. Apparently Murphy had been disgruntled because he’d been denied permission to work on a particular project. Maybe he’s working on that. At any rate, he’s armed. Dr. Mason said he waved the gun in front of them when he broke into their home.”
“What kind of gun?”
“Sounds like a .38 detective special, from Dr. Mason’s description,” Anderson said.
“Make sure the building is secure,” Hector said. “I want no one going in or out. Got it?”
“Got it,” Anderson said.
After telling Anderson that he’d be out on site in a few minutes, Hector made three calls. First he called the hostage negotiating team and spoke with the supervisor, Ronald Hunt. Next he called the shift SWAT team commander, George Loring. Finally he called Phil Darell, the bomb squad supervisor. Hector told all three to assemble their respective teams and to rendezvous at the Forbes Cancer Center ASAP.
Hector heaved his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame out of the desk chair. He was a stocky man who’d been all muscle during his twenties. During his early thirties, a lot of that muscle had turned to fat. Using his stubby, shovel-like hands, he attached to his belt the police paraphernalia he’d removed to sit at his desk. He was in the process of slipping into his Kevlar vest when the phone rang again. It was the chief, Mark Witman.
“I understand there’s a hostage situation,” Chief Witman said.
“Yes, sir,” Hector stammered. “I was just called. We’re mobilizing the necessary personnel.”
“You feel comfortable handling this?” Chief Witman said.
“Yes, sir,” Hector answered.
“You sure you don’t want a captain running the show?” Chief Witman asked.
“I believe there’ll be no problem, sir,” Hector said.
“Okay,” Chief Witman said. “But I must tell you I have already had a call from the mayor. This is a politically sensitive situation.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” Hector said.
“I want this handled by the book,” Chief Witman said.
“Yes, sir,” Hector said.
SEAN ATTACKED his work with determination. Knowing that his time was limited, he tried to work efficiently, planning each step in advance. The first thing he did was slip up to the sixth floor to check on the automatic peptide analyzer that he’d set up on Saturday to sequence the amino acids. He thought there was a good chance his run had been disturbed since Deborah Levy had appeared to read him the riot act just after he’d started it. But the machine hadn’t been touched, and his sample was still inside. He tore off the readout from the printer.
The next thing Sean did was carry two thermal cyclers down from the sixth floor to the fifth. They were going to be his workhorses for the afternoon. It was in the thermal cyclers that the polymerase chain reactions were carried out.
After a quick check on the Masons, who seemed to be spending most of their time arguing over whose fault it was that they’d been taken hostage, Sean got down to real work.
First he went over the readout from the peptide analyzer. The results were dramatic. The amino acid sequences of the antigen binding sites of Helen Cabot’s medicine and Louis Martin’s medicine were identical. The immunoglobulins were the same, meaning all the medulloblastoma patients were being treated, at least initially, with the same antibody. This information was consistent with Sean’s theory, so it fanned his excitement.
Next, Sean got out Helen’s brain and the syringe containing her cerebrospinal fluid from the refrigerator. He took another general sample of tumor from the brain, then returned the organ to the refrigerator. After cutting it into small pieces, Sean put the tumor sample in a flask with the appropriate enzymes to create a cell suspension of the cancer cells. He put the flask in the incubator.
While the enzymes worked on the tumor sample, Sean began loading some of the ninety-six wells of the first thermal cycler with aliquots of Helen’s cerebrospinal fluid. To each well of cerebrospinal fluid he added an enzyme called a reverse transcriptase to change any viral RNA to DNA. Then he put the paired primers for St. Louis encephalitis virus into the same well. Finally, he added the reagents to sustain the polymerase chain reaction. These reagents included a heat stable enzyme called Taq.
Turning back to the cell suspension of Helen’s cancer, Sean used a detergent designated NP-40 to open the cells and their nuclear membranes. Then, by painstaking separation techniques, he isolated the cellular nucleoproteins from the rest of the cellular debris. In a final step he separated the DNA from the RNA.
He loaded samples of the DNA into the remaining wells of the first thermal cycler. Into these same wells Sean carefully added the paired primers for oncogenes, a separate pair for each well. Finally he dosed each well with an appropriate amount of reagents for the polymerase chain reaction.
With the first thermal cycler fully loaded, Sean turned it on.
Turning to the second thermal cycler, Sean added samples of Helen’s tumor cell RNA to each well. In the second run he was planning to look for messenger RNA made from oncogenes. To do this he had to add aliquots of reverse transcriptions to each well, the same enzyme that he’d added to the samples of cerebrospinal fluid. While he was in the tedious process of adding the oncogene primer pairs, a pair in each well, the phone rang.
At first Sean ignored the phone, assuming that Dr. Mason would answer it. When Mason failed to do so, the continuous ringing began to grate on Sean’s nerves. Putting down the pipette he was using, Sean walked over to the glass-enclosed office. Mrs. Mason was sitting glumly in an office chair pushed into the corner. She’d apparently cried herself out and was just sniffling into a tissue. Dr. Mason was nervously watching the flask in the ice bath, concerned that the ringing phone might disturb it.
Sean pushed open the door. “Would you mind answering the phone?” Sean said irritably. “Whoever it is, be sure to tell them that the nitroglycerin is just on the verge of freezing.”
Sean gave the door a shove. As it clunked into its jamb, Sean could see Dr. Mason wince, but the doctor obediently picked up the receiver. Sean turned back to his lab bench and his pipetting. He’d only loaded a single well when his concentration was again broken.
“It’s a Lieutenant Hector Salazar from the Miami Police Department,” Dr. Mason called. “He’d like to talk with you.”
Sean looked over at the office. Dr. Mason had the door propped open with his foot. He was holding the phone in one hand, the receiver in the other. The cord snaked back into the office.
“Tell him that there will be no problems if they wait for a couple more hours,” Sean said.
Dr. Mason spoke into the phone for a few moments, then called out: “He insists on talking with you.”
Sean rolled his eyes. He put his pipette back down on the lab bench, stepped over to the wall extension, and pushed the blinking button.
“I’m very busy right now,” he said without preamble.
“Take it easy,” Hector said soothingly. “I know you’re upset, but everything is going to work out fine. There’s someone here who’d like to have a word with you. His name is Sergeant Hunt. We want to be reasonable about all this. I’m sure you do too.”
Sean tried to protest that he didn’t have time for conversation when Sergeant Hunt’s gruff voice came over the line.
“Now I want you to stay calm,” Sergeant Hunt said.
“That’s a little difficult,” Sean said. “I’ve got a lot to do in a short time.”
