When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [100]
Gillian wasn’t my friend.
She was my mortal enemy.
I knew exactly what was going to happen next.
This was to be an interrogation. It involved life or death.
Gillian wanted more information from me.Ishouldn’t give it to her.
“I do like you, Frannie.” Gillian began with one of her calculated, boldfaced lies. Who knows, maybe she even meant it. She was sitting on a high-backed black leather chair in the library-den upstairs. She stared deeply into my eyes.
I felt betrayed all over again. I wanted to scream at her, curse her out royally, but I held everything in. Well, almost everything.
“Was that before or after you had David murdered? And Frank McDonough,” I said.
A cold look swept into her dark brown eyes. Her face was flat and expressionless. It was as if I were meeting her for the first time. “And I would do it again. In this case, the end totally justified the means. Da Vinci and Copernicus had to break laws to make their discoveries, Frannie. Think everything through before you judge too harshly. Please, join me.” She pointed to a chair facing hers at a long mahogany table.
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to “join” Gillian in anything. I was feeling sick in the pit of my stomach. “Maybe this talk is good for your soul, but it doesn’t do much for mine. Please take me back downstairs. I don’t want to hear any more, Susan. Dr. Susan Parkhill?”
She frowned and tapped her fingers impatiently. “All right then, I need to hear things from you. Who have you spoken to? Make this easy for me, for yourself, and for those children you seem so fond of.”
“I haven’t told anyone,” I said in the calmest tone I could manage. “Now may I go back downstairs?”
Gillian’s eyes bore into my skull. “Who did you tell? Anyone other than your sister Carole?”
It was like a sucker punch to my stomach. I couldn’t speak.
“We haven’t found Carole and her girls yet. We will, though. I don’t need your help for that. Is there anyone else?”
I shook my head. God, how I hated her. There was a moment of silence between us as she studied me. My old friend.
“You don’t lie very well. That much I already know. So I suppose that I believe you, Frannie.”
The expression on her face changed; it actually softened. Gillian wanted to talk about herself. I recognized the self-satisfied look in her eyes.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” she said. “It’s astonishing. You’ll understand once you hear it. We turned all the expected research procedures over. Instead of inducing a minuscule amount of bird DNA into human zygotes, we induced a quite sizable amount of bird chromosome. We ‘melted’ the chromosomes of several birds and of our human patients, by heating them until they separated into their component strands of DNA. This may sound exotic, but it is an accepted technique.”
“You don’t have to talk down to me.”
She made a soft, tutting sound. “My husband’s breakthrough was to induce controlled genetic recombination between the strands. He actually directed what in Nature is a random process of swapping genes from strand to strand. He didn’t actually expect the cells to divide so readily, but they did. We were stunned when the sonogram showed that Max was viable. She started everything. She was the first breakthrough, however imperfect.”
Sonogram. I was right then. The children had been implanted in women’s uteruses… in uteruses of some kind, anyway.
Gillian continued. Her eyes were on my face, but she was staring right through me. “We worked through Dr. Brownhill’s in vitro fertilization clinics in Boulder and Denver. Couples trusted him, and he convinced them there was no precedent for his methods, which happened to be the truth. We’d harvest the woman’s egg, fertilize it with the husband’s sperm. Introduce a little DNA. Then we implanted the embryo into the woman’s uterus.”
“You had the permission of these women and their husbands, of course?”
“The mothers aren’t important,” Gillian said angrily. “We studied birds at first, because birds live a very long time for their size.”
I nodded. I’d already figured that much out. The Wandering Albatross