Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (15 page)

“So, how’re things?” I feebly asked the table in general.

“Good, great,” they mumbled.

A waitress appeared and saved me. “Something from the bar?”

“No, thanks. I can’t stay.” She wandered off. “In fact, I’m late as it is. Good to see you all.” I gathered up my stuff and gave a weak wave, like the Queen Mother.

They waved back and looked relieved.

Outside the restaurant as I was trying to get my bearings and looking for a cab, someone pulled on my jacket from behind. I turned around.

“Late for what?” Ben Tucker asked me.

“Pardon?”

“You said you had to leave because you were late. Late for what?”

“Nothing,” I admitted. “I just felt totally out of place. And besides, I was making everyone else uncomfortable.”

“Go on. No way,” he teased. “We’re used to drinking with the CEO.”

“You invited me. Were you trying to set me up?” I think I was flirting with him a little bit.

“No. I was just hoping to get your attention.” Now he was flirting with me. “Can I buy you a coffee?” He pointed to the Starbucks across the street.

“Sure.”

Ben insisted that I get a table while he ordered. I watched in amazement as he maneuvered his wheelchair through the maze of tables with one hand and served me my coffee with a flourish. He zipped back to the counter to fetch his and arrived back with a grin. I stared at him the whole time and he knew it.

“Skiing accident.”

“Pardon?”

“You’re wondering how I ended up in this chair. Aren’t you?”

“I’m wondering lots of things. And yeah, that was one of them.”

“What else do you want to know?”

“Do you still ski?”

“Yep. And play basketball and floor hockey.”

All of which would explain his incredibly fit-looking upper body. I wouldn’t mind getting a look at his forearms under his nicely tailored suit jacket.

We chatted about mundane things, his family, where he went to school, where he lived in the city. Chit chat. The conversation finally got around to the one thing we had in common. Phoenix Technologies.

“How long have you been at Phoenix?” I asked him.

“Going on four years. I was with the company in Arizona and moved out here to New York two years ago.”

He had started as a programmer and worked his way up to project team leader in research and development. He loved it. In fact, if it was at all possible, his face became even more animated and handsome as he talked about his baby. The San Carlos project. I just sat back and watched and listened, mesmerized by his enthusiasm and his obvious passion for his job. It was a one-sided conversation, Ben talking, me listening.

“So when her project was cancelled and funding withdrawn,” he was saying, “I got some of her team members on the San Carlos project.”

My ears had perked up.

“Whose project?” I asked.

“Nat’s. Weren’t you listening?”

I blushed a little. “Sorry. I had heard about that project being cancelled. What’s Natalie working on now?”

“Who knows? As usual, it’s totally top secret. Very few get into her inner circle. And since the demise of Mr. Connaught, that inner circle is even fewer.” He grinned at me knowingly.

I gave him my best dumb blonde look, pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Oh come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“About Nat and Mr. Connaught. Everyone knew.”

That’s not what Carrie had told me.

“Knew what?” I persisted. “I’ve been holed up in my office. And I’m not exactly best friends with Nat. What are you talking about?”

He looked at me for a few moments, probably trying to decide if he had said too much.

“I’ve probably said too much.” I had read his mind. “Nat and Mr. Connaught were an item. He was your ex-husband, wasn’t he?”

I nodded.

“You seem more his type than Nat. None of us could figure out the attraction. Nat’s nickname is the Ice Queen.”

I smiled. I had already given her that moniker myself.

chapter twenty

“She strikes me as very focused. Someone who takes her work very seriously,” I said.

“Her work is her life. That’s one of the reasons we all found it so surprising when she and Mr. Connaught started seeing each other.”

It seemed obvious that most people knew about the affair, despite what Carrie told me. I wanted to question Ben about Tommy and Nat, but I needed to do it discreetly. I was in the executive offices now, not the secretarial pool and although I was sure the upper echelons of corporations had their fair share of gossip, I wasn’t sure if executives kept their juicy morsels among themselves.

“What could possibly have been the attraction?” I pondered out loud. “I can’t picture those two together. Tommy was so loose and easy going. Natalie Scott strikes me as someone so uptight you could bowl with her shit.”

Did I just say that out loud? I looked over at Ben and he was trying very hard not to laugh.

“She’s that, I’ll agree,” Ben said. “They worked very closely on that project of hers. Mr. Connaught used to get right in there with his shirt sleeves rolled up. We all worked long hours and he was often there with us, programming, throwing out ideas. Part of the team. I suppose all those long hours spent together just led to the two of them hitting it off.” He shrugged his shoulders and sipped his coffee. “Go figure.”

“Yeah, go figure,” I agreed. “What was the project all about?”

“Well, it’s still top secret. I could tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you.” He leaned across the table and pointed his finger at me, like he was shooting a pistol. “Bang bang.”

“Very funny. Just tell me what the project was about,” I insisted in an exasperated tone.

“Well, I guess now that you’re the CEO, I can spill my guts. This secret’s been such a burden to carry around,” he said very seriously. He hung his head.

My heart raced a little. Maybe this was the break I was looking for. Some solid information. I looked around me to see who our table neighbours were, and realized we were the only ones left in Starbucks.

“So spill your guts,” I urged him in a near whisper. He lifted his head and he had a huge, shit-eating grin plastered across his face.

“Gotcha!” he exclaimed.

“Ha ha,” I deadpanned. Ben was turning out to be just a
little
juvenile. I was suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue and decided to pack it in for the evening.

“Thanks for the coffee. I just realized how tired I am.”

Ben grabbed my hand and pulled on it.

“Come on Kate. Sit down. Joke’s over. Okay?”

I sat down reluctantly.

“Just tell me about the project, will you? I’ve enjoyed our joking, but now I’m tired. If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll get the info somewhere else.”

“Okay, okay. It was a subcontract for a bio-medical engineering company. We were developing an interface device for one of their projects. The company is called Global Devices. Global ended up losing too much money before they could get their product to market, so they just closed it down. It was as simple as that.”

“What was their product?”

“An artificial kidney.”

“An artificial kidney? You’re kidding me again. I’ve read about artificial hearts, and there’s one company up in Canada that were leading the way in that area, but artificial kidneys. Wow. Very Star Wars.” A low wattage light bulb was turning on in my head.

Ben shook his head. “Nope. I’m deadly serious. There are dozens of bio-medical companies out there in the race to develop artificial organs. A couple of companies have introduced artificial hearts and others are close to animal trials on other organs. If someone can come up with a plastic heart, why not a kidney? There are more people on waiting lists for kidney transplants than heart transplants.”

“But what about dialysis? Isn’t that, in a sense, an artificial kidney?”

“Sure it is. But in this day and age, the medical engineers think we can do better for kidney patients. If you’re a patient on dialysis, you are literally tied to the dialysis machine. Most patients have dialysis three times a week, and most of them have to go to a hospital or a clinic to receive the treatment,” he explained. “Global Devices was developing a kidney that could be implanted
into
the human body.”

The Van Buren Health Centre was world renowned for research and transplants. Tommy was murdered behind the Van Buren Health Centre. The light bulb in my head was functioning now but only giving off about forty watts.

“Explain to me how computers are used for this sort of thing.”

Ben was in his element now and eager to teach me. “Well, because the organ is artificial, the brain and central nervous system obviously can’t give the organ any signals on how to work. The organ recipient has to be hooked up to a computer, outside the body, that gives the artificial organ, in this case the kidney, the signals it needs to operate properly. These computer units are about the size of a cell phone and can be clipped on to the person’s belt. It sends signals to the artificial kidney through radio waves, so there are no wire hook ups. Amazing, right?”

“Amazing,” I agreed, “but a little scary. Artificial hearts, artificial kidneys. What’s next? An artificial brain?”

He laughed. “Probably not impossible, but highly improbable. Today that is. Who knows where we’ll be in fifty years with computers?”

“Well, I don’t know if I want to live long enough to see an artificial human brain. Sounds like something out of a cheap movie.” I shuddered at the thought. “So how far along were we in the software development before the plug got pulled?”

Ben shrugged. “The project was almost done. Remember, Phoenix was doing just a portion.”

“Which portion?”

“The remote signaling. We were developing software to enable the computer outside the body to give the remote signals to the chips embedded with the artificial organ.”

“So the company just ran out of money? Totally? Did they go tits up?” I grimaced inwardly as I said that. I made a mental note to start cleaning up my gutterisms, as my mother called them. I have to start acting more ladylike, more CEO-like.

“No, they’re still around. They just ran out of funding for the development of the artificial kidney.”

I was a little puzzled. “So Phoenix Technologies just gets cut out of the contract?”

“It’s part of the research and development world. Happens all the time. No big deal. “

“And this was Nat Scott’s pet project,” I stated. “How did she react when the contract was cancelled?”

“She blew a gasket. I heard she was throwing things around her office. Mr. Connaught was in there calming her down. She left the building and didn’t come back for a week. Word was she was on a holiday. Yeah, right,” he said.

Oh, the girl has a temper. “How long ago did all this happen?” I asked.

“About a month or six weeks ago, I think,” Ben said. “When Nat came back from her vacation,” he mimed finger quotes when he said vacation, “she and Mr. Connaught were no longer a couple.”

No doubt, I thought. The Tommy I knew would
never
put up with temper tantrums or hissy fits.

chapter twenty-one

Ben’s short lesson on artificial kidneys had me intrigued and wondering if somehow the work Phoenix had been doing with Global Devices was tied to Tommy’s murder.

I spent the better part of the next day finding out as much as I could about artificial organs. The internet was a great help and I was amazed to find out that not only were hearts and kidneys viable organs to implant in the body, but researchers were developing artificial livers, lungs, stomachs, pancreases and urinary bladders.

My research led me to a biography about the man the medical community had christened the “father of the artificial organ”.
Dr. Willem Kolff was born in Holland and is credited with inventing the first artificial kidney during the Second World War using sausage casings and orange juice cans. He and his colleague Dr. Robert Jarvik are credited as the inventors of the first artificial heart that was implanted in a human.

Dr. Kolff’s early invention using the sausage casings, orange juice cans and a washing machine, led to the modern dialysis machine. In his first experiment in 1938, Dr. Kolff filled sausage casings with blood, then somehow expelled the air in the casings, added some urea (a kidney waste product), and agitated the contraption in a tub of salt water. Within minutes all the urea had moved into the salt water. The next device consisted of one hundred and forty-five feet of sausage casing wrapped around a wooden drum immersed in a salt solution. The patient’s blood was drawn from the wrist artery and fed directly into the casings. The drum was constantly rotating, removing the impurities from the blood. Okay, so far so good, I was understanding the basics.

And then the story got really good. Dr. Kolff used a design copied from the water pump coupling found in Ford motor engines to get the blood safely back into the patient. Voila! The concept for dialysis was born.

Unfortunately, the first fifteen patients placed on the machine died. By 1945 Kolff had made several more modifications to the machine and was using blood thinners to prevent coagulation of the blood. The first person to survive after being on the machine was a woman, in a coma from kidney failure. The machine worked its wonders and when the patient came out of the coma, her first words were “I’m going to divorce my husband”! She lived another seven years after receiving the treatment.

Dr. Kolff sent a prototype of his machine to doctors in New York City in 1947 and eventually the machine was improved to such a level that it was used regularly by people whose kidneys had failed. Today in the United Stated, tens of thousands of people undergo dialysis treatment three times a week. Many of them are waiting for a kidney transplant. Dr. Kolff moved to the U.S. in the fifties and went on to invent membrane oxygenators for bypass surgery, which eventually became the artificial heart, and worked on artificial eyes, ears and limbs.

I called Ben Tucker and asked him how much he new about the artificial kidney project. He told me that I knew as much as he did because he had pretty much told me everything the other night at Starbucks. I didn’t press him. Carrie told me that the artificial kidney project had been code named the Arapaho Project and she gave me a list of the people who had worked on it. Nat Scott was the project leader (in addition to her role as Vice President of Research and Development) and there were fifteen employees listed as team members. Tommy’s paper file was not very thick and contained very little information. When I asked if Tommy kept files on his computer at the office Carrie said she wasn’t sure. We turned on his desk computer and after putting in the password (which Carrie knew) we surfed around a little and discovered nothing. Apparently Tommy used his office computer for email only and there was nothing else stored or filed on it.