Under Fire (Love Over Duty #1)(23)

"Hey, Louisa, your presentation was awesome. Nice to finally meet you," Cabe said.

Louisa looked up briefly, but quickly returned to what she was doing, which appeared to be reorganizing the books that were left on the shelves into alphabetical order. Cabe glanced over in his direction, a what-the-hell-is-she-doing? look on his face. Six smiled and shook his head slightly.

"Louisa was just telling me that she was having some problems. You want to continue, Lou?"

She finished the shelves and made her way over to the window and started to untangle the cords for the blinds, which were full of knots. "My medical research focuses specifically on finding a drug to combat the involuntary movements of Huntington's disease," she said, threading a cord back on itself. "It used to be called Huntington's chorea because chorea is the Greek word for dancing, but that was a really limiting title because there is way more to the disease than those abnormal jerky movements. Some trials work, some trials don't. We just developed a treatment that we were really confident was going to work, but it ended up paralyzing the rats we tested it on. What was doubly frightening was the way it mutated. We hadn't gotten around to doing the full postmortem on both the experiment and the rats, so we held on to the sample we'd created. When I saw you out on the trail last week, I was waiting for an answer from my lab partner because I couldn't find one of the samples. Then on Friday, I went straight to the lab to check the files to confirm what the chemical makeup of the missing sample was, because any way you looked at it, that sample was dangerous and could quite possibly be used to do harm. My handwritten notes and my electronic files are all gone." 

The hairs on the back of Six's neck stood on end. He usually had a pretty good radar for detecting bullshit stories, and his gut was telling him that Louisa was telling the truth.

"So, report it to the police," Cabe said. "Feels like a civilian thing rather than the kind of thing we do."

"Technically you're right. It would become an FBI issue. But  …  gah. See, I can't even explain it to you. It's a feeling. My lab partner and my boss, who happens to be my lab partner's grandfather, are just acting  …  strange  …  cagey."

"So your fear is what?" Cabe asked.

"What we'd created had all the makings of a chemical weapon," Louisa said, finally looking up at them as her hands kept busy.

"Is that possible?' Six asked.

Louisa dropped the cord, and he noticed there were no knots left in it. "Do you know the history of chemotherapy?"

Six looked over at Cabe, and they both shook their heads.

"It came from two doctors at Yale University looking at the medical records of soldiers who had died from mustard gas poisoning in the Great War. They were trying to find an antidote for the weaponized poisonous gas because World War II was on its way, but instead they noticed that many of those who'd died had had a very low number of immune cells. So they figured that if mustard gas could kill good cells, it could probably kill cancerous ones too. It's a bit more complicated than that, obviously, but that was pretty much the start of chemotherapy as a cancer treatment. In short, it's not uncommon for many of these cures to walk a very fine line between medicinal brilliance and poison."

Talking science calmed her. It probably wasn't a conscious thing, but he noticed the way her voice lost its uncertainty as she spoke. "I had no idea," Six said. The whole time they'd been in his office, he'd remained perched on the desk while she continued to roam around and move things. It might drive many people nuts, but he found it quite endearing.

"Most people don't realize the connection, but that's what makes the sample so dangerous. It's not uncommon for there to be occurrences of espionage between one lab and another. Or for someone to get the smart idea to steal a sample and attempt to either sell it to another lab or blackmail the lab it came from to deliver it back to them. Neither of those things ever work, because everybody assumes the sample is compromised. But it's just weird how Ivan and Vasilii are acting."

"Ivan Popov?" Six asked, becoming more and more intrigued by her problem, especially now that it involved somebody he knew and didn't particularly like.

"So, why did you come to Six?" Cabe interrupted before Louisa could answer.

"I can't decide whether going to the police is the right thing. Will I get fired if I go around my boss to the police to ask them directly for an update? Is there a way for me to figure this out a little more before I make a career-ending decision to push Vasilii and Ivan? I don't know."

She looked straight at him, a rarity. "I just thought you might be able to give me some advice."