kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) (26 page)

Until he tried to leave, that is.

The door was locked from the outside. The only porthole was covered with black paint. He was a prisoner; a captive with an assignment: create the GREENBACK carbon dioxide scrubber system, along with supporting documentation which would allow the genetically modified organisms to be recreated elsewhere—the lab notes, microscopy images, even video of his procedures.

William Archer tried not to think about how serious these men were—the great lengths they’d gone to in duplicating his custom (and very expensive) shipboard lab, intercepting his yacht (how did they know exactly where and when to be?), murdering his crew, keeping him hidden on a different ship. Dr. Archer had no doubt people would be looking for him, not the least of which would be the kidnap and ransom consultants on retainer at Alacra Genomics, but he wondered how anyone would be able to do anything.

When he was captured—on that chaotic day he could no longer think about without becoming nauseous—he had told the biopirates that a full month was required to create the sought-after microbes. In retrospect, Archer now realized, security had at first been lax. He had been treated almost as an honored guest, albeit one who was not permitted to leave the ship. His requests for contacting the outside world were politely denied by telling him that he would have the opportunity “soon.” His abductors had been satisfied with his thirty-day timeframe and left him to his own devices, not even locking him inside the lab. Archer had taken advantage of that small degree of freedom by using a flash-drive he had been lucky enough to have on his person at the time of capture. The drive contained his DNA encryption scheme. The sole computer in the lab was dedicated for the purpose of controlling machinery and had no connections of any kind, not even ports in which to plug an external storage device like a flash drive, which meant that creating a real message—a typed letter—was impossible. But Archer knew that there was one person in this world who would know what the drive’s single file was: his daughter.

So he had encoded his S.O.S. message into a population of marine microbes and then had his captors deploy the sample in the ocean off Waikiki Beach under the guise of a GREENBACK trial. This part of his plan had gone off without a hitch. It appeared as though Archer was working away in the lab on GREENBACK, when in fact he was transferring his coded message into the junk DNA of marine bacterial cells.

The second part of the plan required that he toss the flash drive overboard. He was lucky enough to find a rugged, watertight plastic box that would float. He placed the flash drive inside and stepped onto the deck just outside his lab. Knowing they were not far off Waikiki, Archer decided that there was a high probability of the box being found. He wished he could have typed a real message, but at least he had something. He had gone missing in this area, and a strange file floating on the ocean…he could only hope that Kristen would hear about it and make the connection.

When he thought no one was looking, Archer had thrown the box overboard. He watched for a moment as it drifted away on the waves, floating like a cork. Pleased with himself, he had retreated to his lab. Fifteen minutes later, one of his kidnappers paid him a visit. In his hand he had held the watertight box. He opened it in front of Archer and took out the flash drive.

“What is on it?” he had asked simply. Archer knew that the man would have checked it on a laptop, but that the file had made no sense to him. Archer told him that the file was part of the original GREENBACK gene sequence work. An early blueprint.

The man surprised him by asking if it would be worth anything to biotechnology companies. Archer said that he was sure it would be considered valuable. He had thought it strange that the man would ask these kinds of questions alone. The kidnapper had then left his lab without saying anything further. It was the last Archer would see of him.

Thirty-five days later a group of kidnappers had burst inside the room, tasers drawn, asking him why he wasn’t yet done with the GREENBACK cell line. “Let me guess. You are unfamiliar with the laboratory,” one of them had joked, eliciting a round of guffaws from his cohorts.

Archer chuckled good naturedly along with them. “In all seriousness, I don’t know why, but the cells died just before the RG16T gene mutated for CO
₂
uptake. I’ve had this problem before.”

“Then you should know how to fix it,” one of them said.

“I’m working on it.”

And then one of them had walked to a Bunsen burner and lit it, adjusting the flame higher until it burned bright orange. The man had nodded and two of his associates had grabbed Dr. Archer by each arm. He had resisted, his sandaled feet leaving scuff marks on the floor as his captors forcibly dragged him to the burner. They had held his left wrist over the flame as they counted to seven.

“The next time we have to ask why you have not delivered what we requested, the flame will be held to your body for fifteen seconds, and it won’t be your arm—it will be one of your eyes.”

The accomplished scientist had slumped immediately to the floor when the torturers had released their grip on him, clutching his arm in agony, not even realizing he was sobbing in response to a pain that had been unfathomable to him before this day.

“I’d put some ice on that or something,” one of his captors said as they left the lab. “I assume you haven’t forgotten where you keep your first aid kit.”

Thirty days had passed—thirty more long days filled with terrifying uncertainty—during which he slept in a cot in a corner of the lab, listening to the hum of centrifuges working through the night. Funny thing was, he had always kept a cot in his lab at Alacra, so that he could take catnaps during all-night binges of scientific experimentation. But now the cot was his cell bed.

And here they were coming back. William Archer sat calmly on a bench in front of a microscope as he listened to a key sliding into the door lock. He glanced at the deep scar on his wrist before returning his attention to the microscope. He peered into it with one eye as his captors entered the lab, closing the door swiftly behind them so as to offer him as little view as possible of what lay outside “his” lab.

“Progress report,” one of the men demanded.

As usual, the voice was eerily machine-like because all of his captors wore masks with integrated voice modulators, synthesizing a robotic monotone. But what frightened Dr. Archer even more than the masks was the prospect that one time, they might take the masks off, for the day they came to him unmasked would be the day he died, he knew. They wore the masks only so long as they intended to release the scientist.

During his previous month in captivity, Archer had plenty of time to wonder how his release would even be possible. Once they had GREENBACK, what did they have to gain by releasing him? His people at home would no doubt be alert for a ransom call, but he doubted that a simple ransom was the motive for this secretive and highly skilled group.

He made a conscious effort to show no interest whatsoever in identifying his kidnappers. No peering intently at their masks, trying to see through the tinted faceplates, no asking even remotely personal questions, no trying to catch their skin color between the full body coveralls they wore and the yellow rubber gloves. None of that. His K&R training had taught him to let the hostage-takers be as relaxed as possible around him. Let them become accustomed to a docile, compliant captive; cooperative, but not friendly—alert, but not overtly watchful.

But one of the three men was already headed for the Bunsen burner again. And once more, they all carried the tasers. Further proof that they intended to exert complete control over him without resorting to lethal force. But after he gave them what they wanted...

“Gentlemen,” Archer said, inwardly cringing at the use of the word directed at such barbarians, “if you are serious about obtaining GREENBACK, you will have to be a bit more patient. It is not that I’m not working—I am. But just because you place an artificial time constraint on my science does not mean that it will pan out.”

Archer indicated his microscope. “The results of my latest generation are here. It is going to take several more amplification runs. Maybe another week. There is nothing I can do about this timeline.”

“You have documentation for this,” the one by the burner said. A statement, not a question; as if Archer would never be foolish enough not to have documented what he had done.

“Of course,” Archer said. “You remember when I released my last experimental population into the ocean.”

“Yes.”

“And then I retrieved the sample—actually you were kind enough to do it for me—”

“You do not need to refresh our memories, doctor. I remind you that you only require one eye to look through your microscope.” The captor at the burner activated the flame, dialing it up, playing with it. That caused the hairs to stand up on Archer’s neck.

“Very well. That population did not exhibit sufficient CO
₂
uptake. So I will need to release a new population.”

“When?”

“Today. Right now—the sooner the better.”

Archer turned to a Nansen bottle—the same type Kristen had used to collect seawater samples—and held it up. “I will need to release the population in this sample, and then retrieve water and air samples from this same area in seven days. At that time I will examine the cells to verify that their metabolic pathways have been suitably modified for atmospheric CO
₂
uptake.”

The captor who had been standing in front of the burner approached Archer, standing arm’s length from him. Moving slowly, he reached out and took the Nansen bottle, his breath coming in machine-like rasps through the voice modulator.

“If this procedure is effective,” the captor said, “I trust you will be able to duplicate it.”

“Absolutely. In fact, there’s nothing I want more. As wonderful as these accommodations are, I’m not exactly looking to prolong my stay here.”

There came only the labored, mechanical breathing of the voice modulator.

“During the next week, you have work to do, correct? You will not simply wait for the results of this trial, but will pursue viable alternatives, create action plans for statistically probable outcomes, yes?”

In spite of the situation, Archer could not stop himself from laughing. “You know, if this job doesn’t work out for you, you might make a good manager somewhere. May have to rethink your incentives program though, it leaves something to be—”

The captor rammed the Nansen bottle into Archer’s stomach. From his sitting position on a lab stool, he doubled over with the impact to the point that he fell off the stool onto the floor. He lay there in a crumpled heap as the three kidnappers filed out of the lab, their mechanical rasping the only sound, until one of them spoke just before the door slammed behind them.

“Seven days.”

…TTTG
49
TTCG...

William Archer lay on the floor of his shipboard prison lab. He had recovered from the blow delivered to him, but still he did not get up. Nor had he lost his will to survive. The physical conditions to which he had been confined for the last three months were tolerable, even though in all that time he had not once seen the sun. It reminded him of his early post-doc days, when he lived in the lab by choice. He could no doubt exist in this manner indefinitely. He was fed well. But troublesome thoughts plagued his brain, ideas which would not dissipate.

Archer had stalled his kidnappers as long as he could. This he knew as surely as he could read the labels on the bottom cabinets which were nearly at eye level with his awkward position on the floor
. Erlenmeyer flasks
...
Beakers, 250 mL...

For three months he had led his captors to believe he was perfecting GREENBACK, right here in the very lab they had so painstakingly created for him to toil in. But each “sample” he had them release to the ocean contained a coded S.O.S. message, and had nothing to do with GREENBACK, not that he didn’t know how to make it. He could give them what they wanted. Archer knew damn well how to make GREENBACK in this lab. In fact, he needed only forty-eight hours to do it. But would they kill him as soon as he handed it over? He wasn’t sure.

One thing he was certain of was that the kidnappers’ patience would soon wear thin. With each passing day they risked detection by authorities. Even if they believed him—that he just hadn’t yet been able to get GREENBACK to work despite his best efforts—they could decide to cut their losses...

Archer thought back to a K&R seminar he had attended at an upscale Los Angeles hotel where an ex-police hostage negotiator had made it clear that as a hostage, you do not want to outlive your perceived usefulness to your kidnappers.

To inform your kidnappers that you are worth much less than what they had anticipated, or that you cannot produce what they expected of you, was to sign your own death warrant.

“If this situation is unavoidable,” Archer remembered the K&R guy saying, “you will have no choice but to levy an escape attempt, regardless of your state of readiness. This is where your ongoing observations of your captive environment will come into play...”

Archer’s eyes flicked back to a cabinet label:
Caustic Reagents!

He was of course sitting in the middle of a full service scientific lab, which meant that it was stocked with various chemical reagents. Some of these chemicals, in the hands of a highly trained professional, could be combined and directed in lethal ways.

Archer pulled himself up from the floor by the stool, eyes suddenly alight with a devilish array of chemically driven escape possibilities. Some of these resulted in his surviving while his kidnappers did not. Others killed them all.

He might be able to combine acids into a highly explosive concoction and blow up the ship, for example. He could start a fire. He could create a caustic cloud of acid vapors that would envelope his captors as they entered the lab—even their voice modulator masks might not protect them from that, and he did have a respirator for himself. A chemistry lab could be a very dangerous place indeed...