The Blue Zone

CHAPTER TWO

“Check these babies out,” Kate Raab muttered, peering into the high-powered Siemens microscope.

Tina O’Hearn, her lab partner, leaned over the scope. “Whoa!”

In the gleaming luminescence of the high-resolution lens, two brightly magnified cells sharpened into view. One was the lymphocyte, the defective white blood cell with a ring of hairy particles protruding from its membrane. The other cell was thinner, squiggle-shaped, and had a large white dot in the center.

“That’s the Alpha-boy,” Kate said, slowly adjusting the magnification. “We call them Tristan and Isolde. Packer’s name for them.” She picked up a tiny metal probe off the counter. “Now check this out…”

As Kate prodded, Tristan nudged its way toward the denser lymphocyte. The defective cell resisted, but the squiggle cell kept coming back, as if searching out a weakness in the lymphocyte’s membrane. As if attacking.

“Seems more like Nick and Jessica,” Tina giggled, bent over the lens.

“Watch.”

As if on cue, the squiggle cell seemed to probe the hairy borders of the white blood cell, until in front of their eyes the attacking membrane seemed to penetrate the border of its prey and they merged into a single, larger cell with a white dot in the center.

Tina looked up. “Ouch!”

“Love hurts, huh? That’s a progenitive stem-cell line,” Kate explained, looking up from the scope. “The white one’s a lymphoblast-what Packer calls the ‘killer leukocyte.’ It’s the pathogenic agent of leukemia. Next week, we see what happens in a plasma solution similar to the bloodstream. I get to record the results.”

“You do this all day?” Tina scrunched up her face.

Kate chuckled. Welcome to life in the petri dish. “All year.”

For the past eight months, Kate had been working as a lab researcher for Dr. Grant Packer, up at Albert Einstein Medical College in the Bronx, whose work in cytogenetic leukemia was starting to make noise in medical circles. She’d won a fellowship out of Brown, where she and Tina had been lab partners her senior year.

Kate was always smart-just not “geeky” smart, she always maintained. She was twenty-three. She liked to have fun-hit the new restaurants, go to clubs. Since she’d been twelve, she could beat most guys down the hill on a snowboard. She had a boyfriend, Greg, who was a second-year resident at NYU Medical School. She just spent the majority of her day leaning over a microscope, recording data or transcribing it onto digital files, but she and Greg always joked-when they actually saw each other-that one lab rat in their relationship was enough. Still, Kate loved the work. Packer was starting to turn some heads, and Kate had to admit it was the coolest option she’d had for a while.

Besides, her real claim to distinction, she figured, was no doubt being the only person she knew who could recite Cleary’s Ten Stages of Cellular Development and had a tattoo of a double helix on her butt.

“Leukoscopophy,” Kate explained. “Pretty cool the first time you see it. Try watching it a thousand times. Now check out what happens.”

They leaned back over the double scope. There was only one cell left-larger, squiggle-shaped Tristan. The defective lymphoblast had virtually disappeared.

Tina whistled, impressed. “If that happens in a living model, there’s got to be a Nobel Prize in this.”

“In ten years, maybe. Personally, I was just hoping for a graduate dissertation.” Kate grinned.

At that moment her cell phone started to vibrate. She thought it might be Greg, who loved to e-mail her funny photos from rounds, but when she checked out the screen, she shook her head and flipped the phone back into her lab coat.

“If it’s not one thing it’s a mother…” she sighed.

Kate led Tina into the library, with about a thousand recorded iterations of the stem-cell line on digital film. “My life’s work!” She introduced her to Max, Packer’s baby, the cytogenetic scope worth over $2 million, which separated chromosomes in the cells and made the whole thing possible. “You’ll feel like you’re dating it before the month is through.”

Tina looked it over with a shrug of mock approval. “I’ve done worse.”

That was when Kate’s cell phone sounded again. She flipped it out. Her mom again. This time there was a text message coming in. KATE, SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. CALL HOME QUICK!

Kate stared. She’d never gotten a message like that before. She didn’t like the sound of those words. Her mind flashed through the possibilities-and all of them were bad.

“Tina, sorry, but I gotta call home.”

“No sweat. I’ll just start the small talk rolling with Max.”

With a jitter of nerves, Kate punched in the speed dial of her parents’ home in Larchmont. Her mom picked up on the first ring. Kate could hear the alarm in her voice.

“Kate, it’s your father…”

Something bad had happened. A tremor of dread flashed through her. Her dad had never been sick. He was in perfect shape. He could probably take Em at squash on a good day.

“What’s happened, Mom? Is he okay?”

“I don’t know… His secretary just called in. Your father’s been arrested, Kate. He’s been arrested by the FBI!”