“That’s interesting. Mine did, too,” he said slowly. “A friend of hers who lived in New Orleans told her about a doctor who was supposed to be very good, and she traveled to Louisiana to see him.”
They stared at each other. “To New Orleans?”
“I don’t know. Do you think that could be it?”
“It’s something unusual,” he conceded.
“What clinic?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would your father know the name of the place?”
A man named Harold Goddard could have given them the answer—if he’d been so inclined.
But he wasn’t the kind of man who did things simply because they were in the best interests of others. His moves were always careful and calculated. He was cautious when it came to his own welfare, yet the quest for knowledge was a powerful motivator. Not just knowledge for its own sake. He wanted information he could use to his advantage.
This afternoon he was waiting for a report from New Orleans regarding a scenario that he’d set in motion a couple of months ago.
He turned from the window and walked to his desk, where he scrolled through the messages in his e-mail. Unfortunately, there was nothing he hadn’t known a few hours ago.
With a sigh he got up and left the office, heading for his home gym which was equipped with a treadmill, a recumbent bike and a universal weight machine. This afternoon he stepped onto the treadmill and slowly raised the speed to three miles per hour.
He was in his sixties, and he hated to exercise, but he knew that it was supposed to keep your body fit and your mind sharp, so he made himself do it.
He was retired now, but he kept up his interest in the projects that he’d handled for the Howell Institute, working under the direction of a man named Bill Wellington, who’d operated with funds hidden in a variety of government budget entries. Wellington had been interested in advancing America through the application of science. Everything from new ways to fertilize crops to schemes for improving the human race.
Some of the experiments were well thought out, others bordered on lunatic fringe. And all of them had been shut down years ago. Or at least Goddard had thought so—until a few months ago when the news from Houma, Louisiana, had been filled with reports of an explosion in a private research laboratory. The local fire marshal had ruled that the explosion was due to a gas leak, but Goddard had sent his own team down to investigate, and he suspected there might be another explanation—because the clinic had been owned by a Dr. Douglas Solomon. He’d been one of Wellington’s fair-haired boys, until his experiments had failed to pan out.
Solomon had operated a fertility clinic in Houma, Louisiana, where he’d been highly successful in using in vitro fertilizationtechniques. It was what he’d tried with the embryos that had not been a roaring success. Solomon’s experiments had been designed to produce children with super intelligence, but when his testing of the subjects had not shown they had higher IQs than would be expected in a normal Bell curve, the Howell Institute had terminated the funding.
Now the children had reached adulthood, and there might be something important the doctor and Wellington had both missed—as demonstrated by the mysterious explosion in Houma.
Goddard had partial records from the Solomon Clinic, and he’d followed up on some of the children. A number of them had disappeared. Others had died under mysterious circumstances—often together in bedrooms around the country.
But had Solomon unwittingly created men and women with something special that had previously been latent—until they made contact with each other?
Because he wanted to know the answer to that question, he’d decided to try an experiment. After scrolling through the list of names, he’d found two that looked like they were perfect for his purposes. Stephanie Swift and Craig Branson.
He’d engineered a scenario that had propelled them together. Now he was waiting to find out the effects. But he couldn’t afford to leave them on the loose for long. And what he did when he captured them was still up for consideration. He’d like to know what they could do together, but it might also be important to examine their brain tissues.
Stephanie looked down at her hands. “I don’t know if my dad knows the name of the clinic, and I don’t know if he’d tell meif he knew. He wasn’t too friendly when I went over there this afternoon.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe he’s feeling guilty about my agreeing to marry John to pay his gambling debts—and he’s showing it by acting angry with me.”
“That doesn’t make perfect sense.”
She sighed. “And I did accuse him of gambling again, which didn’t go over too well.”
“Yeah, right.”
“How did you get along with your parents?” she asked.
“They knew I was devastated by Sam’s death. They tried to make it up to me. I let them think they were succeeding.”
“But it didn’t really work?”
