“Yes.”

“Did you sign an authorization for that to happen?”

A long pause. Then: “Yes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Burnet. I have no further questions.”

“How do you think it went?” her father asked as they left the courthouse. Closing arguments were the following day. They walked toward the parking lot in the hazy sunshine of downtown Los Angeles.

“Hard to say,” Alex said. “They confused the facts very successfully. We know there’s no new drug that emerged from this program, but I doubt the jury understands what really happened. We’ll bring in more expert witnesses to explain that UCLA just made a cell line from your tissues and used it to manufacture a cytokine, the way it is manufactured naturally inside your body. There’s no ‘new drug’ here, but that’ll probably be lost on the jury. And there’s also the fact that Rodriguez is explicitly shaping this case to look exactly like the Moore case, a couple of decades back. Moore was a case very much like yours. Tissues were taken under false pretenses and sold. UCLA won that one easily, though they shouldn’t have.”

“So, counselor, how does our case stand?”

She smiled at her father, threw her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Truth? It’s uphill,” she said.

CHAPTER 003

Barry Sindler,divorce lawyer to the stars, shifted in his chair. He was trying to pay attention to the client seated across the desk from him, but he was having trouble. The client was a nerd named Diehl who ran some biotech company. The guy talked abstractly, no emotion, practically no expression on his face, even though he was telling how his wife was screwing around on him. Diehl must have been a terrible husband. But Barry wasn’t sure how much money there was in this case. It seemed the wife had all the money.

Diehl droned on. How his first suspicions arose when he called her from Las Vegas. How he discovered the charge slips for the hotel that she went to every Wednesday. How he waited in the lobby and caught her checking in with a local tennis pro. Same old California story. Barry had heard it a hundred times. Didn’t these people know they were walking clich?s? Outraged husband catches wife with the tennis pro. They wouldn’t even use that one on Desperate Housewives.