Seizure

eighteen

11:30 A.M., Monday, March 11, 2002

Occasionally, Daniel had to give credit where credit was due. There was no doubt in his mind that Stephanie was far better at cellular manipulation than he, and that reality was underlined by what he was presently watching through the eyepieces of a double-headed dissecting stereomicroscope. He and Stephanie had placed the instrument on the corner of their lab bench at the Wingate Clinic to allow Daniel to watch while Stephanie worked. Stephanie was about to begin the process of nuclear transfer, otherwise known as therapeutic cloning, by extracting the nucleus of a mature oocyte whose DNA had been stained with a fluorescent dye. She already had the human egg cell fixated by suction with a blunt-tipped holding pipette.

“You make this look so easy,” Daniel remarked.

“It is,” Stephanie responded, as she guided a second pipette into the microscopic field with a micromanipulator. In contrast to the holding pipette, this pipette’s hollow end was as sharp as the finest needle, and the pipette itself was only twenty-five-millionths of a meter in diameter.

“Maybe it’s easy for you, but it’s not for me.”

“The trick is not to rush things. Everything has to be slow and even, and not jerky.”

True to her word, the sharp pipette moved smoothly yet decisively toward the fixated oocyte to push against the cell’s outer layer without penetrating it.

“This is the part I invariably screw up,” Daniel said. “Half the time, I go clear through the cell and out the other side.”

“Maybe because you are too eager, and therefore, a bit heavy-handed,” Stephanie suggested. “Once the cell is adequately indented, it just takes a slight tap with the index finger on the top of the micromanipulator.”

“You don’t use the micromanipulator itself to do the puncture?”

“Never.”

Stephanie carried out the maneuver with her index finger, and within the microscopic field, the pipette was seen to enter cleanly the cytoplasm of the hapless egg cell.

“Well, you live and learn,” Daniel said. “It proves I’m just a rank amateur in this arena.”

Stephanie pulled away from her eyepieces to glance at Daniel. It wasn’t like him to be self-deprecating. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. This is busywork, which you’ve always had skilled technicians to do. I learned how to do it when I was a graduate-student grunt.”

“I suppose,” Daniel said without looking up.

Stephanie shrugged and directed her eyes back into the microscope. “Now I use the micromanipulator to approach the fluorescing DNA,” she said. The tip of the pipette approached its target, and when Stephanie applied a tiny amount of suction, the DNA disappeared up into the pipette’s lumen as if the pipette were a miniature vacuum cleaner.

“I’m not good at this part either,” Daniel said. “I think I suck up too much cytoplasm.”

“It’s important to get just the DNA,” Stephanie said.

“Every time I watch this technique, I’m even more amazed that it works,” Daniel commented. “My mental image of the submicroscopic internal structure of a living cell is akin to a miniature glass house. How can it be that we can tear out the nucleus by its roots, essentially throw in another nucleus from an adult differentiated cell, and have the whole thing work? It boggles the imagination.”

“Not only work, but cause the adult nucleus we toss in to become young again.”

“That too,” Daniel agreed. “I tell you, the process of nuclear transfer truly defies belief.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Stephanie said. “For me, the improbability of it working is evidence of God’s involvement in the process, which rattles my agnosticism even more than what we learned about the Shroud of Turin.” While she spoke, she guided a third pipette into the microscopic field. This pipette had within its lumen a single fibroblast cell from Ashley Butler’s fibroblast culture: a cell whose ancestral nucleus Daniel had painstakingly manipulated, first with HTSR, to replace those genes responsible for the senator’s Parkinson’s disease with those derived from the shroud’s blood, and second, with an added gene at Stephanie’s suggestion for a special surface antigen. This fibroblast’s nuclear DNA was going to replace the DNA Stephanie had removed from the egg cell.

As Daniel watched Stephanie’s artful manipulations, he marveled at what he and she had been able to accomplish in the week and a half since his assault by the thug from Boston. Luckily, his physical injuries had healed and were for the most part a mere memory, save for some residual tenderness along his right cheekbone and the now yellow-and-green remainder of his resolving shiner. Unfortunately, Daniel still struggled with the psychological damage. Burned into the retina of his mind and appearing in recurrent nightmares was an image looming over him of the hulking attacker’s huge head, small ears, and bulbous features. Most disturbing was the man’s crooked smile and cruel, beady eyes. Even after eleven days, Daniel still suffered repetitive nightmares of that awful face and the feeling of utter defenseless vulnerability it engendered.

In the daytime, Daniel had fared considerably better than during sleep. As he and Stephanie had discussed immediately after the episode, they had made it a point to stay together practically like Siamese twins and not leave the hotel grounds, except to go to the Wingate Clinic. As it turned out, such a plan was hardly an imposition, since they had spent sunup to after sundown in the laboratory each and every day. There, Megan Finnigan was most helpful, providing them with a small office in addition to their own laboratory bench. Having room to spread out their paperwork and flow sheets was a godsend and a boon to their efficiency. Even Paul Saunders had helped by acting true to his word and producing ten fresh human oocytes twelve hours after they had been requested.

At first, there had been a convenient division of labor between Daniel and Stephanie. Her job initially was to work with the fibroblast culture sent by Peter. She got it thawed and growing with only minor glitches. Concurrently, Daniel attacked the buffered solution containing the shroud sample. After a single pass through the PCR machine to magnify the DNA present in the fluid, Daniel determined the contained DNA was primate and probably human, although decidedly fragmented, as he had expected.

Following a purification trick using microscopic glass beads, Daniel ran the isolated shroud DNA fragments through the PCR several more times before utilizing his dopaminergic gene probes. He was immediately successful, but with only parts of the required genes, a situation that required sequencing the gaps. After several sixteen-hour days, Daniel succeeded in attaching the appropriate fragments with nucleotide ligases to form the genes. At that point, he was ready for Ashley Butler’s fibroblasts, which by then Stephanie conveniently had available.

HTSR was the next step, and it went practically without a hitch. Having developed the procedure, Daniel was intimately aware of its subtleties and pitfalls, but under his sure hand, the enzymes and viral vectors worked perfectly, and he soon had a number of the fibroblasts ready. The only problem had been Paul Saunders, who had insisted on shadowing Daniel’s every move and frequently got in the way. Paul unabashedly admitted that he planned to add the technique to the Wingate’s stem-cell therapy regimen, with the idea of charging the patients significantly more. Daniel doggedly tried to ignore him and bit his tongue to keep from ordering the quack out of his own laboratory, but it was difficult.

Once the HTSR had been completed, Daniel thought they were ready to do the nuclear transfer, but Stephanie had surprised him with the suggestion that they also transfect the HTSR-altered cell with an ecdysone construct, meaning several combined genes, capable of creating a unique nonhuman surface antigen on the ultimate treatment cells. Stephanie had argued that if there was ever a need or an interest to visualize the treatment cells within Butler’s brain after the implant, it could be done with ease, since the treatment cells would have an antigen that none of Butler’s other trillion cells had. Daniel had been impressed with the idea and had agreed to the additional step, especially after Stephanie told him she’d had the foresight to ask Peter to send the construct and its viral vector down from their Cambridge laboratory along with the Butler tissue culture. Daniel and Stephanie had used the same technique when they’d successfully treated the mice afflicted by Parkinson’s, and it had been a valuable addition to the protocol.

“I always use the micromanipulator for this step,” Stephanie said, pulling Daniel back from his musings. The pipette containing Butler’s altered fibroblast pierced the oocyte’s envelope without piercing the underlying cell membrane.

“I have trouble with this part too,” Daniel admitted. He watched as Stephanie injected the relatively tiny fibroblast into the space between the egg’s cell membrane and its comparatively thick outer covering. The pipette then disappeared from view.

“The trick is to approach the oocyte’s envelope tangentially,” Stephanie said. “Otherwise, you can inadvertently enter the cell.”

“That makes sense.”

“Well, I’d say that looks just dandy,” Stephanie said, after viewing her handiwork. The appropriately granular enucleated egg cell and the comparatively tiny fibroblast were locked in an intimate embrace within the oocyte’s envelope. “Time for the fusion process and then the activation.”

Stephanie pulled away from the microscope’s eyepieces and extracted the petri dish from beneath the microscope’s objective. Slipping off her stool, she walked over to the fusion chamber, where she would subject the paired cells to a brief shock of electricity to fuse them.

Daniel watched her go. Along with the recurrent nightmares subsequent to his beating by the Castiglianos’ henchman, Daniel struggled with other psychological sequelae from the experience. During the first few days, he had experienced continuous anxiety and fear that the man would reappear, despite what Daniel had reassuringly told Stephanie immediately after the event. It was also despite what the hotel did after Daniel had informed the administration of what had happened. To his credit, the hotel manager had voluntarily stationed a security person within Daniel and Stephanie’s building for a week. Every night, the man had accompanied Daniel and Stephanie back to their room after they’d finished their dinner in the hotel’s Courtyard Terrace restaurant, and the intimidatingly large individual had remained on guard in the hall until Daniel and Stephanie departed for the Wingate Clinic in the morning.

As Daniel’s fear abated during the passing days, his anger at the event waxed, and a significant amount of the anger was redirected toward Stephanie. Although she had apologized and had been sincerely sympathetic initially, Daniel fumed at her lingering doubt about her family’s role in the event. She hadn’t said as much directly, but Daniel had gotten that sense from indirect comments. With such a screwed-up family and lack of judgment in dealing with them, Daniel couldn’t help but question whether Stephanie would be too much of a liability over the long haul.

Stephanie’s self-righteousness was also a problem. Even though she’d promised not to make waves with the Wingate people, she was constantly doing so with inappropriate comments about their supposed stem-cell therapy and even inappropriate questioning of the young, pregnant Bahamian women who worked at the clinic, which was an extremely sensitive issue with Paul Saunders. On top of that, she was embarrassingly dismissive of Spencer Wingate. Daniel recognized that the man was being progressively forward in expressing his social interest in Stephanie, a fact that might have been influenced by Daniel’s passivity in the face of Spencer’s comments, yet there were less rude ways for her to handle the situation than she was choosing. It irked Daniel to no end that Stephanie just couldn’t seem to understand that her behavior was potentially jeopardizing everything. If she and Daniel got kicked out, all bets were off.

Daniel sighed as he watched Stephanie work. Although he felt conflicted over her long-term contribution, there was no question that she was needed in the short term. There were only eleven days left before Ashley Butler’s arrival on the island, and in that time, they had to develop the dopamine-producing neurons from the senator’s fibroblasts to treat the man. They were making progress with the HTSR and the nuclear transfer already done, but there was a long way to go. Stephanie’s expertise with cellular manipulation was sorely needed, and there just wasn’t time to replace her.

Stephanie could feel Daniel’s eyes on her back. She recognized that her sense of guilt and her confusion about the implications of her family’s role in his being attacked made her acutely sensitive, yet he was not acting like himself. She could only guess what it must have been like getting beaten up, but she had expected him to recover more quickly. Instead, he was still acting distant from her in many subtle ways, and although they continued to sleep in the same bed, there had been no intimacy whatsoever. Such behavior raised an old concern of hers that Daniel was either incapable or unmotivated to offer the kind of emotional support she felt she needed, particularly in periods of stress, no matter what the cause or whose fault it was.

Stephanie had followed Daniel’s suggestions to the letter, so that couldn’t be the explanation for his behavior. Despite an aching urge to call and confront her brother, she didn’t. And on the relatively frequent conversations she had with her mother, she made it a point to stress that she and Daniel were in Nassau to work, and they were working very hard, which was certainly true. To back it up, she said they had not gone to the beach to swim even once, which was also true. In addition, on multiple occasions she had emphasized that they would be finished soon and would come home about March twenty-fifth to a financially stable company. She had studiously avoided bringing up the subject of her brother with her mother, although on a call the previous day, she had finally yielded to temptation. “Has Tony asked about me?” she had asked in as casual a voice as she could manage.

“Of course, dear,” Thea had said. “Your brother worries about you and asks about you all the time.”

“What exact words does he use?”

“I don’t remember the exact words. He misses you. He just wants to know when you are coming home.”

“And what do you say in return?”

“I tell him just what you tell me. Why? Should I say something different?”

“Of course not,” Stephanie had remarked. “Assure him we’ll be home in less than two weeks, and I can’t wait to see him. And tell him our work is going extremely well.”

In many respects, Stephanie was thankful about how busy she and Daniel were. It reduced her opportunity to anguish over emotional issues as well as lessened her chance to question the appropriateness of treating Butler. Her misgivings about the affair had increased, thanks to the assault on Daniel and her need to turn a blind eye to the depravity of the Wingate principals. Paul Saunders was by far the worst. She felt he was conscienceless, devoid of even rudimentary ethics, and dumb. The compiled results of the Wingate stem-cell therapy program, which he had touted, were a bad joke. They were merely a collection of descriptions of individual cases and their subjective outcomes. There was not one iota of scientific method involved, and the most disturbing part was that Paul didn’t seem to realize it or care.

Spencer Wingate was another story, but he was more annoying than scary like the mad pretend-scientist Paul. Still, Stephanie would not have liked to be caught unaccompanied in Spencer’s house, as his persistent invitations proposed. The problem was that his lechery was bolstered by an ego that could not fathom his overtures being rejected. At first, Stephanie had tried to be reasonably polite with her regrets, but eventually she had to be blunt with her refusals, especially after it seemed Daniel was indifferent. Some of Spencer’s more blatantly randy invitations had come in Daniel’s company, with no response from him.

As if the personalities and behavior of these maverick infertility doctors wasn’t enough to make Stephanie question the propriety of working at the clinic, there was the issue of the origin of the human oocytes. She tried to make discreet inquiries but was rebuffed by everyone except the lab technician, Mare. Even Mare was hardly forthcoming, but at least she said the gametes came from the egg room run by Cindy Drexler, located in the basement. When Stephanie asked for clarification about what the egg room was, Mare clammed up and told her to ask Megan Finnigan, the lab supervisor. Unfortunately Megan had already echoed Paul by saying the egg source was a trade secret. When Stephanie approached Cindy Drexler, she was politely told that all egg inquiries had to be directed to Dr. Saunders.

Switching tactics, Stephanie had tried talking to several of the young women who worked in the cafeteria. They were friendly and outgoing until Stephanie tried to turn the conversation around to their marital status, at which point they became shy and evasive. When Stephanie then tried to talk about their pregnancies, they became withdrawn and reticent, which only fanned Stephanie’s curiosity. As far as Stephanie was concerned, one didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess what was going on, and despite Daniel’s edict to the contrary, she intended to prove it to herself. Her idea was that, armed with such information, she would anonymously inform the Bahamian authorities after she, Daniel, and Butler had long since departed.

What Stephanie needed to do was get into the egg room. Unfortunately, she had not had an opportunity, as busy as she and Daniel had been, although over the next few hours, that was going to change. The current egg she was fusing with one of Butler’s HTSR-altered fibroblasts had been a replacement for one of the original ten eggs that Paul Saunders had supplied. The replaced egg had failed to divide after nuclear transfer. Honoring their warranty, Paul had provided an eleventh egg. The other original nine eggs were dividing fine after receiving their new nuclei. Some were now at the five-day point and beginning to form blastocysts.

The plan that Stephanie and Daniel had devised was to create ten separate stem-cell lines, each comprising cellular clones of Ashley Butler. All ten would contribute cells to be differentiated into dopamine-producing nerve cells. The tenfold redundancy was to serve as a safety net, since only one of the cell lines would ultimately be used to treat the senator.

Perhaps later that afternoon, or more likely in the morning, Stephanie would begin the process of harvesting the multipotential stem cells from the forming blastocysts, but until then she would have some free time. The only problem would be getting away from Daniel but staying within the safety of the Wingate Clinic, and thanks to his emotional detachment from her, she didn’t think that would be an insurmountable problem, although outside the clinic, he refused to let her out of his sight.

“How did the fusion go?” Daniel called out from where he was sitting.

“Looks good,” Stephanie said, peering at the construct under the lens of a microscope. The oocyte now had a new nucleus with a full complement of chromosomes. Following a process that no one yet understood, the egg would now begin mysteriously reprogramming the nucleus from its duties as the controller of an adult skin cell back to a primordial state. Within hours, the construct would mimic a recently fertilized egg. To initiate the conversion, Stephanie carefully transferred the artificially altered oocyte into the first of several activation mediums.

“Are you as hungry as I am?” Daniel called out.

“Probably,” Stephanie responded. She glanced at her watch. It was no wonder. It was almost twelve. The last time she’d had anything to eat was at six that morning, and it was only a continental breakfast of toast and coffee. “We can head over to the cafeteria once I get this egg into an incubator. It’s got only another four minutes in this medium.”

“Sounds good,” Daniel said. He slid off his stool and disappeared into their office to get out of his lab coat.

As Stephanie prepared the next activation medium for the reconstructed egg, she tried to think of some excuse to return by herself to the lab during their lunch. It would be a good time for a bit of sleuthing, since most everyone ate lunch between twelve and one, including the egg room technician, Cindy Drexler. Lunch hour was a major socialization time for the clinic staff. Stephanie’s first thought was to blame her need to return on the activation process of the eleventh egg, but she quickly discarded the idea; Daniel would be suspicious. He knew that once the egg was in the second activation medium, it was to sit undisturbed in the incubator for six hours.

Stephanie needed some other excuse and seemed to be coming up blank until she thought of her cell phone. Particularly after Daniel’s beating, she’d been compulsive about keeping it on her person, and Daniel knew it. There were several reasons for her compulsiveness, not least of which was that she’d told her mother to use the cell number rather than the hotel’s. But having just talked with her mother that morning and hence being assured of no imminent emergency with her health status, Stephanie wasn’t concerned about missing a call over the next half hour. After glancing back toward their tiny office to be certain Daniel wasn’t watching, Stephanie pulled the tiny Motorola phone from her pocket, switched it off, and placed it on the reagent shelf over the lab bench.

Satisfied with her plan, Stephanie returned her attention to the activation process. In another thirty seconds, it would be time to move the egg from the first medium to the next.

“What do you say?” Daniel questioned, as he reappeared without his lab coat. “Are you ready?”

“Give me another couple of minutes. I’m about to transfer the egg and put it into the incubator, and then we can be on our way.”

“Sounds good,” Daniel responded. While he waited, he stepped over to the incubator and looked in at the other containers, a few of which had been in there for five days. “Some of these might be ready to harvest stem cells this afternoon.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Stephanie responded. Gingerly, she carried the newly suspended reconstructed egg over to the incubator to join the others.

Kurt Hermann let his feet fall to the floor in an uncharacteristically sudden, uncontrolled movement. They had been perched on the countertop in the video room. At the same time, he sat bolt upright, causing the desk chair to roll backward a short distance. Regaining the serenity developed over many years of martial arts training, he scooted himself forward in a slow, deliberate fashion to get closer to the screen he’d been watching for the last hour. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It had happened so quickly, but it appeared as if Stephanie D’Agostino had just taken the cell phone Kurt had been trying to get his hands on over the previous week and a half out of her pocket and had deliberately placed it behind some reagent bottles on the shelf over the laboratory bench. It was like she was hiding it.

With the button on top of the joystick that was currently connected to operate the minicam he was watching, Kurt zoomed in. Using the joystick itself, he kept the camera directed at what he hoped was the phone. It was! Its black, molded plastic tip was just visible as it protruded from behind a bottle of hydrochloric acid.

Confused at this unexpected but promising development, Kurt zoomed back out, only to realize that Stephanie had disappeared from the camera’s angle. Using the joystick again, Kurt panned the room and quickly found both Stephanie and Daniel in front of one of the incubators. Increasing the gain on the volume control, he strained to listen in case she mentioned the phone, but she didn’t. They were continuing their talk about going to lunch, and within minutes they left the laboratory.

Kurt’s eyes rose to the screen just above the one he’d been watching. He saw the couple emerge from building number one and start across the central courtyard, toward building number three.

During the construction of the clinic, Paul Saunders had given his head of security carte blanche to make it secure, in hopes of avoiding a catastrophe similar to what had happened to the clinic in Massachusetts, when a couple whistle-blowers had penetrated the clinic’s database. Because they managed to gain unauthorized access to the computer server room and avoid apprehension after their trespass, Kurt had made sure the entire new complex was bugged with audio and video. Both the cameras and the microphones were the latest stealth technology, integrated by computer and completely unobstrusive. Unbeknownst to Paul, Kurt had had them included in the restrooms, the guest apartments, and most of the staff living quarters, where they were concealed in various and sundry electrical fixtures. Everything could be viewed from the monitors in the video room off Kurt’s office, and in the evenings, Kurt found watching some of them entertaining, even when security wasn’t necessarily an issue. Of course, Kurt could make an argument to the contrary, for it was important in an organization like the Wingate Clinic to know who was sleeping with whom.

Kurt continued observing Daniel and Stephanie until they entered building number three, although his eyes were mostly on Stephanie. Over the last week and a half, he’d become addicted to watching her, despite the ambivalence she evoked. He was both attracted and repulsed by her innate sensuality. As with women in general, he appreciated her beauty yet at the same time he recognized her Eve-like qualities. Kurt had watched her make and receive calls in the laboratory, and although he could frequently hear her side of the conversation, he was unable to hear the caller. Consequently, he’d not been able to provide Paul Saunders with the name of the patient as Kurt had promised, and Kurt liked to keep his promises.

Kurt’s attitude toward women had been set in stone by his ultimate betrayer, his mother. She and he had had an intimate relationship fostered by long absences of his undemonstrative strict disciplinarian father who had demanded perfection from both wife and son but who only acknowledged failure. His father had preceded Kurt into the Army’s Special Forces, and like Kurt, who had ultimately followed in his footsteps, he had been a trained covert-operations killer. But when Kurt was thirteen, his father had been killed in a classified operation in Cambodia during the final weeks of the Vietnam War. His mother’s reaction was like a lovebird released from a cage. Ignoring Kurt’s emotional confusion of grief and relief, she indulged a flurry of affairs, the intimacies of which Kurt had to endure audibly through the thin drywall of their army-base house. Within months, Kurt’s mother consummated her frantic dating by marrying a prissy insurance salesman whom Kurt despised. Kurt felt that all women, particularly the attractive ones, were like the mythologized mother of his youth, plotting to lure him in by seduction, sap him of his strength, and then abandon him.

As soon as Daniel and Stephanie had disappeared inside building number three, Kurt’s eyes moved automatically to monitor twelve and waited for them to appear in the cafeteria. When they joined the line at the steam table, Kurt got to his feet and walked out into his office. From the back of his desk chair, he took his lightweight, black silk jacket and slipped it on over his black T-shirt. He wore the jacket to conceal the holstered pistol he always carried in the small of his back. He pushed the sleeves up above his elbows. From the corner of his desk, he picked up the box containing the tiny cell phone bug he’d been eager to implant in Stephanie’s phone as well as its monitoring device. He also grabbed his jeweler’s tool kit, which included a delicate soldering iron and a binocular watchmaker’s loupe.

Moving catlike, he emerged from a basement door in building two with the equipment and tools in hand and headed for building one. Within minutes, he was at the lab bench assigned to Daniel and Stephanie. After a quick glance in all directions to be certain he was alone in the laboratory, he retrieved the phone, put on the loupe, and set to work.

In less than five minutes, the bug was in place and tested. Kurt was in the process of replacing the phone’s plastic cover when he heard the distant door to the lab bang open. Expecting to see one of the lab personnel or possibly Paul Saunders, he bent over and looked beneath the reagent shelf back toward the entrance some eighty feet away. To his utter surprise, it was Stephanie who’d arrived and was approaching with a quick, determined step.

For a brief, panic-filled second, Kurt debated what to do. But his training prevailed, and he quickly regained his customary composure. He finished with the phone by snapping its cover into place, then slipped it back to its original position behind the hydrochloric acid bottle. Then he lent his attention to the jeweler’s tools, the monitoring device, and the loupe. As silently as possible, he got them into a drawer and pushed it closed with his hip. Stephanie D’Agostino was now a mere twenty feet away and closing in rapidly. Backing away, Kurt intended to keep the lab bench and its overhead shelving between him and the researcher. It was not much cover, and she would surely see him, but there were no other options.

In truth, Tony was mostly pissed that he had to forsake a nice lunch, which was one of the high points of his day, while he made yet another visit to the freaking Castigliano brothers’ crummy plumbing supply store. The rotten-egg smell of the salt marsh didn’t help matters either, although with the temperature in the twenties, it was less of a problem than it had been on his last visit a week and a half earlier. At least it was easier visiting the stinkhole in the middle of the day rather than at night, since he didn’t have to worry about tripping over any of the crap littered around the front of the place. The good part was that he had reason to believe this would be the last visit, at least concerning the problem with CURE.

Tony went through the entrance door and headed for the rear office. Gaetano looked up from dealing with a couple customers at the front counter and nodded a greeting. Tony ignored him. If Gaetano had done his job right, Tony would not be walking at that moment between dusty plumbing-supply shelves, with the smell of rotten eggs lingering in his nose. Instead, he’d be sitting at his favorite table at his Blue Grotto restaurant on Hanover Street, sipping a glass of ’97 Chianti while trying to decide which pasta to have. When underlings screwed up, it irked him to death, since it never failed to mess up his life. As he’d grown older, he’d become a progressively firmer believer in the old saying, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Tony opened the door to the rear office, stepped in, and pulled the door shut with a bang. Lou and Sal were at their respective desks, eating pizza. A fleeting shiver of nausea went down Tony’s spine. He hated the smell of anchovies, especially combined with the residual aroma of rotten eggs.

“You people have a problem,” Tony announced, pressing his lips together in a wry expression of disgust and bobbing his head like one of the dog figures some folks put in the rear windows of their cars. But to ensure that he wasn’t implying any disrespect to the twins, he approached each of them for a quick, slapping handshake before retreating to the couch and plopping down. He unbuttoned his coat but left it on. He only intended to stay for a couple minutes. There was nothing complicated about what he had to say.

“What’s wrong?” Lou asked through a mouthful of pizza.

“Gaetano screwed up. Whatever the hell he did down in Nassau had no effect at all. Zero!”

“You’re joking.”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” Tony wrinkled his forehead and spread his hands widely.

“You’re telling us that the professor and your sister didn’t come back?”

“It’s more than that,” Tony said scornfully. “Not only didn’t they come back, Gaetano’s shenanigans, whatever they were, didn’t even warrant a single word from my sister to my mother, and they talk almost every day.”

“Wait a second!” Sal questioned. “You’re saying that your sister didn’t say they had a little problem or anything like her boyfriend got hurt? Anything at all?”

“Absolutely nothing! Zilch! All I hear is everything’s going honky-dory in paradise.”

“That doesn’t jibe with what Gaetano said,” Lou said, “which I find hard to believe, since he usually overdoes the physical stuff.”

“Well, in this instance, he surely didn’t overdo anything,” Tony said. “The lovebirds are still down there, frolicking in the sun and insisting, according to my mother, that they are going to stay the three weeks or month or whatever they’d originally planned. Meanwhile, my accountant says nothing’s changed with their company’s downward spiral. He insists in a month they will be broke, so goodbye to our two hundred K.”

Sal and Lou exchanged glances of disbelief, confusion, and escalating irritation.

“What did Gaetano say he did?” Tony asked. “Slap the professor’s wrists and tell him he was being bad? Or did he not even go to Nassau and say he did?” Tony crossed his arms and legs and sat back.

“Something’s screwy in all this!” Lou declared. “None of it adds up.” He put his slice of anchovy-and-Italian-sausage pizza down, ran his tongue around the inside of his lips to loosen the debris on his teeth, swallowed, and leaned forward to press a button protruding on the surface of his desk. A muffled buzz sounded through the door connecting the office to the store proper.

“Gaetano went to Nassau!” Sal said. “We know that for damn sure.”

Tony nodded, a grimace of disbelief on his face.

He knew he was pushing the twins’ buttons, since they liked to believe they ran a tight ship. The idea was to inflame their passions, and it worked. By the time Gaetano poked his head through the door, the twins were ready to take it off.

“Get the hell in here and shut the door,” Sal snapped.

“I got customers out at the counter,” Gaetano complained. He motioned over his shoulder.

“I don’t care if you have the President of the United States out there, you moron,” Sal yelled. “Get your ass in here!” To make his point, Sal pulled out the center drawer of his desk, grabbed a snub-nosed thirty-eight revolver, and tossed it onto his blotter.

Gaetano’s broad brow knotted as he did as he was told. He’d seen the gun on a number of occasions and wasn’t worried because getting it out was one of Sal’s quirks. At the same time, he knew Sal was pissed about something, and Lou didn’t look much happier. Gaetano eyed the sofa but, with Tony occupying the middle, he decided to remain standing. “What’s up?” he asked.

“We want to know exactly what the hell you did down in Nassau!” Sal barked.

“I told you,” Gaetano said. “I did exactly what you asked me to do. I even managed to do it in one day, which was a ball-breaker, to be honest.”

“Well, maybe you should have stayed an extra day,” Sal said contemptuously. “Apparently, the professor didn’t get the message we intended.”

“What exactly did you tell the dirtbag?” Lou demanded with equal venom.

“To get his ass back here and fix his company,” Gaetano said. “Hell, it wasn’t complicated. It’s not like I could have gotten it mixed up or something.”

“Did you push him around?” Sal questioned.

“I did a lot more than push him around. I clocked him with a good one to start, which turned him into a rag doll such that I had to pick him up off the floor. I might have broken his nose, but I don’t know for sure. I know I gave him a black eye. Then I walloped him the hell out of his chair at the end, after our little talk.”

“What about a warning?” Sal questioned. “Did you tell him you’d be back if he didn’t get his ass back here to Boston and get his company back on track?”

“Yeah! I said I’d hurt him bad if I had to come back, and there’s no doubt he got the message.”

Both Sal and Lou looked at Tony. They shrugged in unison.

“Gaetano doesn’t lie about this kind of thing,” Sal said. Lou nodded in agreement.

“Well, then it’s just another instance of this professor flipping us off,” Tony said. “He certainly didn’t take Gaetano seriously, and he obviously doesn’t give a damn about our two hundred K.”

For a few minutes, silence reigned in the room. The four men eyed one another. It was obvious everybody was thinking the same thing. Tony was waiting for someone else to bring it up, and Sal finally obliged: “It’s like he’s asking for it. I mean, we already decided if he didn’t straighten up, we’d whack him and let Tony’s sister take the reins.”

“Gaetano,” Lou said. “It looks like you’re going back to the Bahamas.”

“When?” Gaetano asked. “Don’t forget, I’m supposed to push around that deadbeat eye doctor from Newton tomorrow night.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Lou said. He looked at his watch. “It’s only twelve-thirty. You can go this afternoon via Miami, get rid of the professor, and be back tomorrow.”

Gaetano rolled his eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Lou demanded mockingly. “You got other things to do?”

“Sometimes it’s not that easy to whack somebody,” Gaetano said. “Hell, I got to find the guy first.”

Lou looked at Tony. “Do you know where your sister and her boyfriend are staying these days?”

“Yeah, they’re in the same hotel,” Tony said, with a dismissive laugh. “That’s how serious they took Gaetano’s lame message.”

“I’m telling you,” Gaetano insisted. “It wasn’t lame. I clocked the guy good several times.”

“How do you know they’re at the same hotel?” Lou asked.

“From my mother,” Tony said. “She’s been mostly calling my sister’s cell phone, but she told me she’d also tried the hotel once when she couldn’t get through on the cell. The lovebirds are not only at the same hotel, but they’re still in the same room.”

“Well, there you go,” Lou said to Gaetano.

“Can I do the hit at the hotel?” Gaetano asked. “That will make it a hell of a lot easier.”

Lou looked at Sal. Sal looked at Tony.

“No reason why not,” Tony said with a shrug. “I mean, as long as my sister’s not involved, and as long as it’s done quietly, without a scene.”

“That goes without saying,” Gaetano remarked. He was warming to the idea. Heading all the way down to Nassau for an overnight might involve a lot of traveling, and it would be hardly a vacation in the sun, but it could be fun. “What about a gun? It’s got to have a silencer.”

“I’m sure our Colombian friends in Miami can arrange that,” Lou said. “With as much of their junk as we push for them up here in New England, they owe us.”

“How will I get it?” Gaetano asked.

“I imagine somebody will come to you when you land in Nassau,” Lou said. “I’ll work on it. As soon as you know the number of the flight you’re going to take over to the island, let me know.”

“What if there is a problem, and I don’t get a gun?” Gaetano questioned. “If you want me back here for tomorrow night, everything has to go smoothly.”

“If you arrive and no one approaches you, give me a call,” Lou said.

“Okay,” Gaetano said agreeably. “I’d better get my ass in gear.”