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She settled into her chair and watched him drive. The darkness outside the windows was peaceful, and she knew it was balmy because of the weather report. She wished she could tell Mark to take a detour and head to the beach. One of the things she missed the most about the outside world was the beach.
Jenna fought off the deep feeling of sadness that weighed her down as she wondered if she’d ever be able to be on the beach again.
But that was something she could deal with later, after she was home and had had a full night’s sleep in her own bed. After they had stopped whatever Joaquin was planning.
Before long, Mark was pulling into the parking lot of a small coffee shop, the lights bright in the early morning. He parked and looked at her, and she could tell he was just as tired as she was. “What do you want?”
“To drink, I’ll take something with chai,” she said, not wanting the harsh, pure abrasiveness of coffee at the moment. “Food…I’m not sure. What do they serve?”
“Apparently they’re known for their chicken fingers. I know that sounds nuts, but that’s what everyone was talking about in line. Some sort of crispy breading. I think I’m going to try them.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“You got it.” He took a moment and put his hands on both armrests, leaning over her and kissing her gently. “I’ll be right back.”
The door opened and closed, and she let her head fall back against the chair and stared at the ceiling. After so many days feeling like she was constantly in a state of movement and urgency, it felt weird to be standing still. Like the odd sensation when you’d been on a boat too long and suddenly came back to dry land. It took a while to get used to stillness.
So for right now, she’d just be happy about her upcoming chicken fingers. Not just chicken fingers,crispychicken fingers.
Crispy fingers.
Jenna’s smile faded as Emily’s words from yesterday came back to her. God, how had she not realized before what the woman was talking about.
Jenna rushed over to her computer system and brought up the recording of the interview. It didn’t take long to find the section she was looking for.
“Do you remember anything at all they were arguing about?”
“No. It was stuff I didn’t understand. Something about the deadline for the sale and me being crispy and ink on my fingers. But I didn’t have any ink on my fingers. I checked.”
Notinkfingers…zincfingers. As in, zinc finger nucleases. ZFNs were a type of DNA-binding proteins.
And Jenna was willing to bet the scientists talking around Emily had said CRISPR, notcrispy. CRISPR/Cas9…the most important technology in the world when it came to gene editing—a way of finding a specific piece of DNA inside a cell.
Those two factors were the very basics of the subjectification research Jenna had developed while she was in captivity. Emily would have no frame of reference for those terms, so her brain had turned them into something else.
Jenna watched the footage again, this time paying more attention to the rest of their conversation and when Emily freaked out over seeing Joaquin. Except this time, Jenna didn’t focus on the fact that Joaquin had shot someone in from of Emily.
She focused on thewhy.
If the doctors couldn’t do their job by the deadline, Joaquin would find someone who could.
Deadlines.
Scientists.
Countdowns.
Sale.
It all came together for Jenna in a moment, and once the pieces fell into place, it all made perfect sense.
Joaquin was planning to sell the subjectification technology. That was what the countdown was to. That was why he’d had the robots ping off government servers—to get the word out about what he had for sale and to demonstrate what it could do at the same time.
But evidently, he’d run into some sort of problem if he was killing scientists just a day ago. He didn’t have the capacity to make the compound universal yet.
Jenna grinned. There weren’t many people in the world who had the expertise to do that. She was one of them, but she sure as hell wouldn’t be helping him.
She needed to get this info to Ian. They didn’t need to waste their time narrowing down potential terrorist attack locations in Vegas. They all needed to figure out the meeting place.
