But what if, just this once, he had been wrong?
He spit a torn cuticle out the window’s narrow slit.
What if she was just a very ill lady with some sinful ideas?
No embryos had ever gone missing. There was no evidence of a lab anywhere. Could she have been going to the East Village regularly before to see a doctor, as she had told Trent? Dopp had been so sure that was another one of her lies. But could there have been a little-known specialist who practiced there?
No. The tip of doubt was the first crack of faith; it was the Devil beckoning to him; it was the weakening of his divine link. At all costs, he could not ignore his intuition about that woman. It could not be wrong. His connection to God could not be slipping after fifty-seven solid years.
He spit another hangnail out the window and then rested his left hand on his gun, secure in its holster around his belt. The barrel was smooth and reassuring. He was still in control, still the director of the DEP: the noblest of all government agencies, despite any questions about its necessity.
If only Windra would call again, even to prod him. But Dopp had heard nothing from the senator since Monday, and the budget talks had begun by now. Dopp checked the news on his laptop like a fiend, but there was nothing noteworthy yet about their progress. The talks were behind closed doors, so he—and the news—could not follow them. Could Windra have stopped calling because he had written off the DEP as a lost cause?
Dopp would prove him wrong yet.
“I will,” he pledged aloud to no one.
But his boldness sounded forced, even to him. He turned to his laptop and navigated to the website of an online Bible. Reading some of his favorite passages in Colossians and Revelations would at least keep his self-doubt at bay.
* * *
The five stacks of papers on Trent’s desk should have overwhelmed him: they were printouts, separated by borough, of the daily electronic reports sent in by all the fertility clinics in the city. Yesterday’s reports. He was supposed to be reviewing each one and checking it against past records, then sending a summary to Dopp, who was continuing to assign random inspections from his car.
But with an understaffed office consumed by apprehension, Trent could tell that the department’s efficiency was sliding. So he wasn’t too worried that his own productivity was about the same level as Dianne’s, his notoriously lazy colleague who had been the first person Dopp fired this week. Trent’s own employment status meant nothing to him. Not today. Not with one day left before the transfer.
Arianna was counting on him, one last time: it was a huge moment of truth. He hated to think of it that way, but the phrase sneaked into his mind like the slogan of a pressure-mounting campaign. How the hell was he going to distract Dopp for forty-five minutes? He sighed, blowing off the top report in one of the stacks on his desk. He could hardly imagine luring Dopp away from her for even forty-five seconds.
What could possibly take up his attention for that long?
Trent knew that his wife was heavily pregnant. How that could work to Trent’s advantage, though, was unclear. Unless Trent could somehow suspend communication between the two, and then tell Dopp to rush to Long Island for an emergency delivery …
No, impossible. Besides, even Dopp’s seven-year-old son had a cell phone, and was fond of calling his father during business hours to report the most mundane details, like the fact that Joanie had forgotten to cut off his sandwich crust. So there was no way that the boy would fail to communicate with his father if his mother went into labor.
What else might draw Dopp away? Trent scrunched up his eyes, summoning an image of his exacting boss. What might scare him enough to drop everything and run to another site? A fire in the department’s headquarters? Too dangerous. A break-in at his own home? Possibly. Trent did have a gun, courtesy of the department, and knew where his boss lived. But the timing would be risky—what if the family wasn’t even home? Not to mention that it was a heinous stunt to perpetrate on his wife and kids. But was Dopp’s stakeout of Arianna any less vicious, any less undeserved?
It might work, though Trent was uncomfortable with the idea. There had to be a lure that was both surefire and nonviolent. Preferably not involving others. He tried rephrasing the question in his head: What did Dopp want?
And then he gave a start, and reached for his phone to call Arianna on her private cell. It was so obvious, and so simple—Dopp was desperate to find the secret place he had suspected and hunted for all along.
* * *
Friday. The day finally arrived, and more quickly than Sam had expected. It was early evening when he looked up from his microscope for the last time, feeling immensely proud. The cells had differentiated into perfect oligodendrocytes, all containing Arianna’s unique DNA, and they had proliferated in the petri dish. There was no logical reason for her body to reject them.
Sam had outdone himself: out of the four batches of stem cells he extracted, all had differentiated into the correct cells, proving that his hit-upon combination was no fluke. But he needed only one batch for the transfer, so the other three would remain behind, lost testaments to his breakthrough.
He had flawlessly—if obsessively—executed the whole procedure, checking on the cells every hour instead of every two, for the past forty-four hours. Fatigue had come and gone, a momentary phase, as nervous excitement took hold. The only sign of his marathon of insomnia was droopiness in his eyelids, but he hardly noticed
