Dust to Dust

by James M. Thompson

Genres: Action & Adventure; Medical Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A MEDICAL MIRACLE The first subjects are lab rats. Injected with two experimental drugs by two different doctors, the rats begin to show signs of renewed youth, restored health, and remarkable vigor. Surprised by the results, neurologist Kat Williams and biochemist Burton Harris believe they have stumbled upon a major breakthrough in the science of aging. But there is only one way to know if their formula can truly reverse the aging process. Their next subject needs to be human . . . A LIVING NIGHTMARE His name is Jerome. A homeless, destitute alcoholic with no family, no history, and no hope to live, he is the ideal test subject for the next phase of the experiment. Like the lab rats, Jerome responds quickly and dramatically to the serum. But when Dr. Williams and Dr. Harris seek more funding for their study—from a paralyzed billionaire hoping to cure death itself—they make another chilling discovery about their “fountain of youth” drug. Everybody wants it. And some will kill for it . . .

Release date: April 25, 2017

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

Dr. Kaitlyn Williams, known to almost everyone as Kat, stared at her computer screen through bleary, bloodshot eyes. As she studied the chemical formulae that crawled across the screen like mating worms, she unconsciously rubbed at the back of her neck, which was beginning to go into spasms from her long hours in front of the computer. She had been working without a break for the past thirty-six hours and was finding it hard to concentrate, but she was determined to finish collating the serum formulae before she quit.

Finally, after another hour of manipulating the formulae on the computer, she had the relative concentrations of chemicals correct and was ready to proceed. Almost unconsciously, she muttered a brief prayer, “Let this be the one!”

She punched the PRINT button on the machine, and the computer printed out the amounts of each chemical to be added to the serum.

Kat took the printout and mixed the serum according to the specifications she had worked out. Holding the bottle of clear liquid up to the light, she whispered, “I need some magic here.” She thought for a moment, and then she wrote the name she had decided on for the serum on the bottle.

With a sigh of fatigue, she went over to the stack of wire cages and took the one labeled BLUE GROUP down and carried it to a table in the middle of the lab. There were twenty-four rats in the cage. Twelve of them had daubs of blue dye on their backs while the other twelve were unmarked.

One by one, she took the twelve blue-dyed rats out of the cage and injected them with five milliliters of clear liquid from the vial she had labeled NEURACTIVASE. When she was finished, she put the cage back on the shelf and stumbled wearily to her desk.

She sat there for a moment, elbows on the desk with her head in her hands. She was bone tired and desperately needed some sleep. With a supreme effort, she raised her head and looked at the clock on the wall. Eleven thirty-five. She glanced out the window to see if it was night or day, so exhausted she couldn’t remember if she’d been at work for twelve hours or twenty-four—darkness, unrelieved by stars or moon.

She realized she’d been working steadily for almost a day and a night. She frowned, thinking this was stupid. She was too tired to think straight and was bound to make a fatal mistake in her calculations at this rate.

She glanced to the side of her desk, where her Scottish terrier, Angus, was softly snoring in his bed. Trying to remember when she’d last taken him outside to do his business on the small patches of grass on the edge of the laboratory parking lot, she reached down and gently scratched his ears. His muzzle hair was almost totally white with advancing age, and she felt a momentary pang of guilt that lately she hadn’t been giving him much quality time, being so involved in her research.

He stirred and cut his dark brown eyes up at her, then moaned softly in pleasure at her touch. “Damn, big fellow,” she cooed. “I’ll try to do better . . . okay?”

He rolled over onto his back with his feet in the air, asking for a tummy rub, one of his favorite things to experience.

She complied and after a few moments spent rubbing his stomach, she reached into her left-hand desk drawer and took out a Greenie. “Here you go, Angus. This’ll make your teeth feel better.”

It almost broke her heart to see him try to stand up, weaving and struggling until he could get his feet under him, moaning softly with pain from his arthritic hips.

Once he got to his feet, he took the Greenie from her hand, being very careful to fold his lips over his teeth lest he accidentally bite her.

With the Greenie sticking out of the side of his mouth like a big green cigar, he circled three times and flopped back down on the pillow in his bed, chewing contentedly.

“Well,” Kat said, “I guess you don’t have to potty right now, big fellow.”

She took another moment trying to decide whether she had the energy to drive home, before she thought, What the hell? There’s nothing waiting for me there. She glanced at Angus, patted his head once again, and whispered, “Everything I love is here with me.” She laid her head on her crossed arms and was almost instantly asleep.

Kat started awake, the smell of coffee making her mouth water. She almost cried out loud at the pain in her neck and back as she tried to straighten from her position slumped over her desk.

“Hey, Doc, you okay?”

Kat slowly turned her head at the question and winced as the movement brought fresh pain. Kevin Paxton, her lab assistant, was watching her with a worried look on his face. He was tall, a shade over six feet, with a lean body and straw-blond hair in a crew cut. Even though he was only in his third year as a grad student at the University of Houston studying organic chemistry, he was thirty years old, due to spending some time in the military. Kat loved to tease him, telling him he looked about twenty years old.

Kat ran her hands over her face before answering, “Yeah, Kevin, I’m okay. What day is it, anyway?”

Kevin shook his head, frowning. “It’s Monday, Dr. Williams. Did you spend the whole weekend here, again?”

Kat motioned toward the Keurig coffeemaker on the bench in the corner. “Uh-huh. I guess the time just got away from me.”

Kevin walked to the coffeemaker and said over his shoulder, “You know that’s not good for your health, Dr. Williams.” He twirled the carousel containing the K-Cups of coffee and asked, “You want the regular Breakfast Blend or something more potent?”

She shook her head, still trying to come fully awake. “I think I’d better have the high-octane stuff, Kevin.”

He pulled out a K-Cup and said, “Folgers Lively Colombian it is, then,” and he proceeded to fill her custom cup with the dark, aromatic blend. When the coffeemaker hissed, signaling it was done, he took the coffee and moved to hand it to her with a handful of sugar packets.

Kat emptied four packets into her coffee and stirred it with her ballpoint pen. She took a deep drink. “Ah, breakfast.” She tried to smile but her lips stuck to her teeth, reminding her she needed to brush her teeth and wash her face.

Kevin pointed at the words printed on the cup:


“You need to heed those words, Doc, or the stress you’re putting on yourself is gonna kill you.”

Kat grinned and reread the slogan, smacking her lips at the heavenly taste of Kevin’s coffee. “Come on, Kev, quit being a mother hen and set the new batch of rats up to run the maze while I freshen up, then we’ll run ’em to get some control times recorded, right after I take Angus out for his morning call to duty.”

He held up both hands, palms out. “Don’t worry, I’ve already taken him and he was a very good boy, doing both one and two for me without any trouble at all.”

“Well, I’ll just get his breakfast.”

“Been there, done that. Look at him . . . he’s all set.”

She glanced over at his bed and saw Angus fast asleep and snoring peacefully, his full tummy pooching out. She turned and grinned at Kevin. “You’re too good to me, Kevin.”

Kevin shook his head and mumbled as he turned and walked off, “And you’re gonna be the death of me, Kat,” using her first name when he talked to himself, though he’d never quite dared to call her Kat to her face. In fact, he had a terrible crush on Kat and sometimes wished she’d look at him as less of an assistant and more as a man, a man who loved and adored her.

He went to the rats’ cages, hoping he’d managed to keep his adoration of her out of his expression. It wouldn’t do for her to realize what a crush he had on her . . . it might taint their working relationship. Hell, it might even get him fired, and then he wouldn’t be able to see her every day.

As he pulled the rats from their cages, his face burned as he pictured them together in a romantic setting. After all, she wasn’t that much older than him, he reasoned. He glanced over at her as she drank her coffee. Though she was in her early forties, she looked much younger. She was attractive, with a pretty, unlined face, long auburn hair usually worn in a twist while at work, and had hazel-green eyes and rosy cheeks . . . at least she did when she hadn’t been working for forty hours straight, Kevin thought.

Half an hour later, freshly scrubbed and feeling much more human after showering and brushing her teeth in the women’s locker room, Kat prepared to run both the rats she had injected with the NeurActivase and the uninjected, or control, rats through a maze. She needed to make sure that the formula had not impaired the performance of the injected rats, but she fully expected there to be no difference in the two groups’ maze times. After all, none of the chemicals she’d combined into her formula were in and of themselves dangerous or toxic to rats, so there should be no danger of the formula inhibiting the rats’ performance.

In fact, if anything, the formula should improve the rats’ ability to run the maze, if only slightly.

She sat at her desk and stared out the window at the early morning sunshine, drinking another cup of coffee and thinking while Kevin set up the experiment.

Almost three years had passed since she had begun working at the BioTech research facility. Her initial interest had been in the field of traumatic spinal injuries, damage to the central nervous system of such an extent that it left the patient completely paralyzed. The repair and regeneration of that tissue was not a new field of research, but little progress had been made in it.

The National Institutes of Health was funding her research with a series of grants, administered through BioTech. The enormous number of spinal and central nervous system injuries that occurred in the Vietnam and Middle East wars had finally convinced the government more needed to be done to find some way to rehabilitate these veterans. The government’s interest was not merely humanitarian. Disability payments and medical expenses on these permanently disabled vets were costing the treasury hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Kat became interested in the problem when, during her naval residency in neurosurgery, she had operated on several Iraqi War casualties and was unable to do more than just patch their wounds, unable to significantly alter their paralysis or significantly improve their rehabilitation from traumatic brain injuries. Her daily interaction with the young men—boys, really—and their families so affected her that she eventually became depressed and discouraged with the practice of neurosurgery. When her negative attitude began to affect her confidence and the quality of her surgical skills, she decided to quit neurosurgery when her tour of duty was up, in favor of the less-rewarding but also less emotionally traumatic field of research.

She knew that helping these young men and others like them would only come with advances in neurochemistry and not from more useless surgery.

BioTech was a seven-story building a few blocks from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Within its huge, horseshoe-shaped building, there were literally hundreds of laboratories and animal compounds, where everything from super-secret germ and chemical warfare experiments to testing of the latest experimental medical formulations were carried out.

The building was under the joint control of a syndicate of wealthy investors and Baylor professors who oversaw the research grants from the government. But the scientists working there were, for the most part, non-university employees hired specifically for the various and sundry experiments they worked on. It was not unusual for one scientist not to know, or even care, what was going on in the lab next to his.

With her usual thoroughness and eye for detail, Kat systematically pulled together every scintilla of information on the subject of traumatic spinal injuries and their treatment, both nationally and internationally. She found that very little cooperation existed in the field and there was work being duplicated in one area while being done at cross-purposes in others. She slowly collected her material and categorized it into the useless, the promising, and the highly experimental. With that as a foundation, she began to build an ambitious project using her own research as her stones and mortar.

For over a year she struggled along, attempting to find some sort of neuron “glue” that would cause the damaged nerve tissue to reconnect. The problem was that central nervous system cells, those of the brain and spinal cord, do not multiply after birth, and they do not regenerate or heal themselves after injury. She experimented with dozens of substances and enzymes and organic and inorganic chemicals in her serum, concentrating on those that had had some history of success.

She tried using the GM-1 Gangliosides to enhance the functional recovery of damaged or aging neurons and added Imuran to suppress the body’s formation of the antibodies that caused the destruction of injured neurons and thus inhibited the healing process.

She added calcium channel–blocking compounds to prevent the influx of calcium into the injured neurons, and she eventually added a thyrotropin-releasing hormone to enhance the body’s natural ability to heal and replace injured tissue. But her efforts to develop a serum that would act as a bonding agent for the damaged neurons were short-lived and ineffective. Then, in the past month, she ran across some little-known research suggesting the brain contained a reservoir of undeveloped mystery neuron cells, the cause of their existence and their purpose being unknown and unexplained.

Working from that thesis, she decided to experiment with adding fetal nervous system tissue of unborn rats to her serum. The undifferentiated fetal neural tissue would, she hoped, be forced to change into the host animal’s own neural tissue, replacing and repairing its own damaged nerves and brain cells and, hopefully, stimulating the undeveloped mystery neurons.

The shipment of fetal rat brains had arrived the previous week, and she had spent the last three days in a marathon work session to separate out the pure brain proteins from the fetal tissue in hopes that the tissue would contain some stimulatory protein or substance that would cause the dormant tissue in the adult rat brains to begin to grow and divide, or at least heal itself when injured.

If the new serum did not impair the rats’ performance, her next step was to cut the spinal cords of the test animals, leaving them paralyzed. She would then see if the serum caused the spinal cord injuries to heal and cure the paralysis.

Kat put on a heavy, bite-proof glove she used when handling rats and took one out of its cage. She placed it in the beginning chamber of the maze and let it smell a small square of Hershey’s chocolate. The rat’s whiskers twitched and it began to search for the source of the smell. It rose up on its hind legs and stretched to its full height, even tried to climb the walls of the chamber to get at the chocolate.

Once she had the rat’s full attention, Kat took the chocolate and put it in a small room at the end of the maze. She took out her stopwatch, glanced at Kevin to see if he was ready to record the time, and then simultaneously clicked the watch and opened the door to the rat’s chamber. The rat’s whiskers twitched again, and it headed out the door in search of the elusive chocolate. As quickly as it encountered a blind alley, the rat would backtrack and try another avenue and another until it found one that would bring it closer to the smell. Finally, at exactly nine minutes and fifty-four seconds, it ran into the room with the chocolate.

Kat decided to run all the control animals first, and at the conclusion, found the average times for the uninjected rats to be in the neighborhood often minutes, give or take twenty or thirty seconds.

Expecting the same results, since all the experimental rats were genetically identical, she placed the first of the injected rats in the maze. At first, the injected rat acted no different from the others that had gone before it. Then Kat noted something strange. The rat seemed to pause for just a second before choosing which alley to take, then it would invariably take the correct one. It was almost as if it was thinking about which alley went in the direction the chocolate smell was coming from, she thought, instead of just blindly trying each one it came to. Kevin clicked the stopwatch as the rat grabbed the chocolate. Kat frowned, sure she was mistaken about what she had seen, and thinking her fatigued eyes and hopeful mind were playing tricks on her.

“Hey, Dr. Williams. This one’s time was seven minutes and fifty seconds,” Kevin called, an excited look on his face.

Kat stared at him, eyebrows raised. “But that’s over twenty percent faster than the others.” She reached in and picked up the rat by its tail and held it up. “Look, Kevin, we have a rat Einstein.”

She took the rat by the scruff of its neck and examined it more closely. It certainly looked no different from the control rats, save for the blue mark on its back. Probably just a lucky run, she thought.

Kevin laughed as he wrote down the time. Neither he nor Kat laughed, however, when the next injected rat ran the maze only seconds slower than the first. Kevin and Kat stared at the clipboard, then at the watch, and Kat felt the first faint stirrings of excitement. Her heart rate accelerated, and suddenly her mouth was dry.

“Hurry, Kevin, get the next one.” She looked at her watch and noted it had been barely ten hours since the injection of the NeurActivase into the rats. “Jesus,” she whispered, “nothing could work that fast to produce such profound differences in intelligence.”

She tamped down her growing enthusiasm and warned herself to remain objective as she turned and took the third experimental rat from Kevin. With a mental crossing of her fingers, she placed it in the maze. After all the rats had run and the times had been averaged, Kat and Kevin sat in the lab, stunned.

Every injected rat ran the maze 20 percent faster than the noninjected control rats.

“Holy smoke, Doc, what do you think’s going on?”

Kat took a deep breath. “I don’t know, Kevin, I just don’t know.” Her mind was racing, questing for answers. At that second she had none. But, instinctively, she realized that the fewer people who knew about this, the better. And that included Kevin. For the time being, she had better keep whatever she’d discovered to herself.

Burton Ramsey, PhD, looked nervously over his shoulder as he handed the ticket agent at Aeromexico cash for his flight to Monterrey, Mexico. He knew ticket agents occasionally notified the DEA when customers paid for international flights with cash, but he didn’t want a record of the ticket to show up on his credit card.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he boarded the plane without a visit from any governmental agents. As soon as the flight was airborne, he ordered a double Chivas Regal from the stewardess and reflexively felt in his coat pocket for his cigarettes. As he began to pull one out of the pack, his eyes focused on the NO SMOKING sign above his seat. Shit, he thought. Even the foreign carriers are getting as prudish as the damn American airline companies are.

Frowning, he stuffed the cigarette pack back into his pocket and accepted his drink from the stewardess without even a thank-you. As he sipped, he began to make notes about what he needed to accomplish in Monterrey.

Dr. Humberto Garza and his lawyer, Felix Navarro, met Ramsey at the airport and took him directly to an empty building near the Monterrey General Hospital. The building had evidently once housed a laboratory, for there were long bar-topped cabinets, each with its own sink, arranged throughout a large central room. This room was flanked on either side with smaller, office-type rooms that still had a few scarred desks and wooden chairs that had been left by the previous occupants.

Ramsey thought he had never seen so many teeth in one face as Garza grinned. “Do you think this will be satisfactory, Señor Ramsey?”

Yeah, maybe for a high school biology project, thought Ramsey, but he forced a smile. “Certainly, Dr. Garza. As I told you over the phone, if you can supply me with the chemicals I’ll need, I feel I can finish my research project quite nicely in this building.”

The lawyer, Navarro, frowned slightly, and then he shrugged. “My client, Dr. Garza, hesitates to ask this, out of politeness, but I feel I would not be doing my duty to him if I did not ask a few questions about the research you plan to do here.”

Ramsey glanced from Garza to Navarro, his lips slowly curving up in a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. His voice became low and hard, his manner brusque. “I thought I made it clear in our negotiations that my research is completely secret—that is why I’m moving my lab from the States to here.”

Navarro felt a frisson of fear turn his bowels to water as he stared into Ramsey’s slowly reddening face. This americano was huge. Though he looked to be in his mid-forties, he stood ramrod-straight at six feet, two inches, was broad in the neck and shoulders, and had a rugged face that looked as if he could chew up and spit out anyone who angered him. Navarro quickly spread his hands in a placating manner, “Oh no, you misunderstand me, señor.” He looked at Garza, who suddenly wasn’t showing so many teeth. “We just need some . . . ah, assurance that whatever you are working on is . . . ah, within the law.”

Ramsey folded his arms and relaxed a little. “Oh, you mean you need to make sure I’m not making LSD or amphetamines, or something like that?”

Now both Garza and Navarro were smiling again, relieved that the rich americano hadn’t taken offense at the question. “Sí, señor. That is all that the law requires of us.”

Ramsey pulled a legal-size sheet of paper out of his coat and handed it to Garza. “Here, Dr. Garza, is a list of the chemicals and equipment that I’ll need. You’re welcome to show it to a competent chemist of your choice and have him tell you that none of those chemicals are used in the manufacture of any illicit drugs, or for anything even remotely considered illegal.”

While Garza was reading the list of chemicals, Ramsey took ten one-hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to Navarro, counting them out slowly while he stared at the lawyer. “I am a generous man, Navarro, but I won’t tolerate meddling in my affairs. Is that understood?” he growled, all friendliness gone from his tone.

Their eyes widened, and Ramsey thought the two men were going to dislocate their necks with their vigorous nodding as they spread the bills like a deck of cards, their eyes on the cash instead of Ramsey. “Sí, señor. There will be no questions asked, either about your research or your work permit, which will be available whenever you need it.”

Now Ramsey allowed himself a genuine smile as he stuck out his hand, “Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

On the flight back to Houston and BioTech, Ramsey sipped another Chivas as he once again went over the elaborate precautions he had taken to avoid leaving a paper trail the BioTech Oversight Committee could follow.

Finally, satisfied he had done all he could to avoid detection, he put out his reading light and leaned back to dream about the millions of dollars that would soon be his.

He arrived in Houston at eleven thirty at night. By the time he retrieved his car from the overnight parking garage and traversed the maze of intersecting freeways around the city to his apartment, it was well after one in the morning. He was exhausted by his one-day trip, but he figured it was worth it if it kept the bloodhounds off his trail.

If BioTech found out what he was about to do, it would not only cost him the millions of dollars he expected to make off his discovery, but it would also earn him fifteen to twenty years in prison.

Burton Ramsey, Ph.D. in biochemistry and paid researcher at BioTech, had begun working on a “blood scrubber” formula to hopefully reduce dependence on dialysis machines for patients with kidney failure. He’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Without knowing quite how he did it, Ramsey perfected a formula that cleansed the blood so completely it took out all of the free radicals and waste products that had caused much of the body’s aging. In short, he had a formula that stopped physical aging from progressing, and in some cases would even cause a mild rejuvenation of damaged or aged cells and body organs.

The fly in Ramsey’s ointment was that the serum did nothing to stop the aging of the central nervous system and brain, so that even though the body stayed youthful, the mind continued to age and ultimately decay. However, Ramsey was ever the pragmatist and figured half a loaf was better than none, and he knew that many aging millionaires would, too, and would pay practically any price to remain looking youthful well into their eighties.

Reality finally set in when he studied the contract he had signed with BioTech and realized he would get a measly 2 percent of the royalties for his serum—that is, if the government ever approved it for public use.

Ramsey, after much consideration, finally decided the government would probably mark the serum as top secret and keep it for the exclusive use of aging generals and influential politicians, a process that would put nothing in Ramsey’s pockets and do nothing for the very people he had vowed to help with his research.

Therefore, he had hit upon the simple expedient of faking his progress notes, destroying his records, and claiming failure of his project. He intended to move to Mexico and spend a year seeing if he could somehow make his serum work on nerves and brain tissue while he waited for BioTech to forget about him and his “failed” research. After that, whether he’d succeeded in improving his serum or not, he would announce to the world his discovery under his own name, and to hell with BioTech and the government that had paid for his work.

Of course, BioTech would be plenty suspicious, so he had to cover his ass—that explained all of the James Bond–style traveling and maneuvering. He thought to himself on the long ride back to Houston, it would all be worth it if he could show BioTech, and especially the medical doctors on the Progress Committee, he was a man to be reckoned with. In addition, if they really tried to push it, he could show the authorities his lab and his chemical requisitions and claim to have made his discovery after moving to Mexico and dare them and their platoons of hired guns and doctors to disprove it.

Burton Ramsey claimed to despise MDs for the plain and simple reason he had lusted to be one for as far back as his memory went. He had not been able to get that MD behind his name for one reason. And it had not been for lack of brains or intelligence or grades or skill or dedication. It had been because of money, or the lack thereof.

When he finished undergraduate school at a small state university in Texas with a dual degree in chemistry and biology, he took his Medical College Admissions Test, scoring well above the needed score, did his interviews, and was accepted at three prestigious medical schools. Unfortunately, he came along at a time when there was a glut of doctors, and scholarships and grants simply weren’t as available as in years past. What money there was seemed to be sucked up by minorities under affirmative-action guidelines, which caused him to be forever afterward suspicious of all ethnicities other than his own.

He tried every avenue he could think of to raise money. He had none, his family had none, and he had no friends or patrons who could advance him the enormous sums it would have taken to get through four years of medical school. He had worked his way through undergraduate school, but he knew he could never do that in medical school even though one dean of admissions had said he knew of students who did. But Burton knew his wasn’t the kind of brain that could do such a thing.

He was highly intelligent with an IQ just a little short of genius, but he wasn’t quick. He made straight As in college, but he did it by hard, unrelenting work. He was a plodder and he knew it. He knew students who didn’t have to study, didn’t have to take notes in class, and he admired them for their quick minds. But that was before he’d been denied the chance to become a physician.

What made the situation even more ironic was that Ramsey himself wasn’t motivated by money. He wasn’t seeking the MD degree because of the huge salaries or the lavish lifestyles that physicians enjoyed, but because he felt a true calling to help people and to do good things with his life. The seeds of his bitterness were sown by the cold eyes of the medical school interviewers who failed to recognize his idealism, and by the medical school accountants who awarded the few scholarships available to those less altruistically motivated than him.

In the end he simply continued his studies, getting first his master’s degree, then his Ph.D. in biochemistry while continuing to work at night to pay for his schooling. Because he had to work almost full-time, he had to take a light academic load and he was thirty-one years old before he finally received his Ph.D. and could go looking for the kind of job that would finally reward him for all his hard work.

He