The Third Twin - Ken Follett [84]
“Is that your excuse?”
“I don’t need excuses—”
“Perhaps not, but wouldn’t you do better to find a case of invasion of privacy that someone really cares about? Wouldn’t that make an even better story for the newspaper?”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Jeannie sighed. She had done her best. Gritting her teeth, she tried to end the conversation on a friendly note. “Well, good luck with it.”
“I appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Ferrami.”
“Good-bye.” Jeannie hung up and said: “You bitch.”
Ted handed her a mug of coffee. “I gather they’ve announced that your program is canceled.”
“I can’t understand it. Berrington said we’d talk about what to do.”
Ted lowered his voice. “You don’t know Berry as well as I do. Take it from me, he’s a snake. I wouldn’t trust him out of my sight.”
“Perhaps it was a mistake,” Jeannie said, clutching at straws. “Maybe Dr. Obell’s secretary sent the release out in error.”
“Possibly,” Ted said. “But my money’s on the snake theory.”
“Do you think I should call the Times and say my phone was answered by an impostor?”
He laughed. “I think you should go along to Berry’s office and ask him if he meant for the release to go out before he talked to you.”
“Good idea.” She swallowed her coffee and stood up.
He went to the door. “Good luck. I’m rooting for you.”
“Thanks.” She thought of kissing his cheek and decided not to.
She walked along the corridor and up a flight of stairs to Berrington’s office. His door was locked. She went to the office of the secretary who worked for all the professors. “Hi, Julie, where’s Berry?”
“He left for the day, but he asked me to fix an appointment for you tomorrow.”
Damn. The bastard was avoiding her. Ted’s theory was right. “What time tomorrow?”
“Nine-thirty?”
“I’ll be here.”
She went down to her floor and stepped into the lab. Lisa was at the bench, checking the concentration of Steven’s and Dennis’s DNA that she had in the test tubes. She had mixed two microliters of each sample with two milliliters of fluorescent dye. The dye glowed in contact with DNA, and the quantity of DNA was shown by how much it glowed, measured by a DNA fluorometer, with a dial giving the result in nanograms of DNA per microliter of sample.
“How are you?” Jeannie asked.
“I’m fine.”
Jeannie looked hard at Lisa’s face. She was still in denial, that was obvious. Her expression was impassive as she concentrated on her work, but the strain showed underneath. “Did you talk to your mother yet?” Lisa’s parents lived in Pittsburgh.
“I don’t want to worry her.”
“It’s what she’s there for. Call her.”
“Maybe tonight.”
Jeannie told the story of the New York Times reporter while Lisa worked. She mixed the DNA samples with an enzyme called a restriction endonuclease. These enzymes destroyed foreign DNA that might get into the body. They did so by cutting the long molecule of DNA into thousands of shorter fragments. What made them so useful to genetic engineers was that an endonuclease always cut the DNA at the same specific point. So the fragments from two blood samples could be compared. If they matched, the blood came from the same individual or from identical twins. If the fragments were different, they must come from different individuals.
It was like cutting an inch of tape from a cassette of an opera. Take a fragment cut five minutes from the start of two different tapes: if the music on both pieces of tape is a duet that goes “Se a caso madama,” they both come from The Marriage of Figaro. To guard against the possibility that two completely different operas might have the same sequence of notes at just that point, it was necessary to compare several fragments, not just one.
The process of fragmentation took several hours and could not be hurried: if the DNA was not completely fragmented, the test would not work.
Lisa was shocked by the story Jeannie told, but she was not quite as sympathetic as Jeannie expected. Perhaps that was because she had suffered a devastating trauma just three days earlier, and Jeannie’s crisis seemed minor by comparison. “If