The Blacklist

Chapter 453: Genetically Modified Triplets
August 8th was a new Monday, and Carrie's secret investigation had still not made any progress, but Reddington brought in a new case - a rather bizarre twin kidnapping case!

Elizabeth asked Alam to check the national missing children database and retrieved two recent cases. Within a day and a half, two eight-year-old girls were kidnapped in places more than 3000 kilometers apart. However, the two children looked exactly the same, which was really strange!
In the command hall of SER, Elizabeth pointed to the photos and related information on the big screen and said, "This is a recent case of missing children. The girl in the photo is Colleen Walker, who is over eight years old. She was taken away from a game hall in Minneapolis a day ago..."

Then, she motioned for Aram to play the next photo and information, "And just 37 hours before Colleen disappeared, another child named Nora Mitchell was lost in a park in Seattle...

"A girl disappeared in two places 3000 kilometers apart. They were originally unrelated, but if you look at their photos..."

Looking at Colleen and Nora on the big screen, everyone was very surprised because the two children looked exactly the same, even more than most twins!
Aram added: "According to birth records, Colleen Walker was born on March 2011, 3, in Minneapolis, to Mark and Heather, while Nora Mitchell was born the next day, 2 kilometres away, in Seattle, to Ben and Sarah."

Elizabeth nodded and continued, "The police in both places have questioned the two sets of parents and confirmed that in the eight years that the two children grew up, the two families had never met each other, let alone knew of each other's existence..."

At this moment, a voice suddenly interrupted: "Then find out if there was any intersection between the two families more than eight years ago. They don't necessarily know each other in person..." It turned out that it was Carrie who came downstairs to stroll around again and made a suggestion, and he ran away after saying it without further explanation.

Elizabeth listened to Kerry's advice this time and contacted the state bureaus in Washington and Minnesota to arrange video interviews with the two families...

In fact, the two couples were also surprised about the two children at this time, and the police stations in both places had tested the DNA of the two children and confirmed that the two children were identical twins. What was even more unacceptable to them was that neither of them was the biological parents of the children!

The CTU state bureaus in both places took the two couples to their bases. Elizabeth and Nawabi questioned them separately through remote video links and obtained an important clue - both couples had their children through in vitro fertilization, and in the same medical institution: the New Dawn Clinic outside of Minneapolis!
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Elizabeth personally led a team to Minneapolis and visited the New Dawn Clinic. The director of the clinic was willing to cooperate with the investigation and admitted that the Walkers and the Mitchells had undergone in vitro fertilization surgery at the clinic in 2010. However, the clinic equipped the two families with different medical teams at the time, which made it unlikely that mistakes would be made. So she was also confused about the current situation.

After Elizabeth asked about the clinic's operating procedures, she found out: If the problem occurred in the clinic, the only link that could go wrong was the last step before the embryo transplant. Only embryologist Miles Gordon had the opportunity to replace the embryo!

Brian's team took Miles to the local CTU state bureau. Before the formal interrogation, Aram and Nawabi who stayed in the tenement building found out that Miles was in debt and couldn't even pay off his student loans. But after working at the New Dawn Clinic for five months, he took out a loan to buy a house and a new car. Seeing these proofs, Miles could only admit that he had received money from strangers and secretly replaced three embryos before the operation. Later, all three children were born successfully, including Nora, Colleen, and Grace.

Time was running out, so Elizabeth immediately notified Carrie in New York and asked her to arrange for agents to find Grace. However, when Elise's team from SLR arrived at the school in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Grace Draxton, who was studying there, had been taken away by someone claiming to be from Child Protection Services!
As the problem escalated, Elizabeth felt that she was losing control and asked Carrie to direct the follow-up investigation.
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Under Carrie's auspices, Abby and Alam teamed up to conduct a quick comparative query of the FBI National Crime Database and the National Missing Children Database. The results showed that there have been many cases of child kidnapping or disappearance in the past eighteen months alone. The cases occurred in Miami, Chicago, Dallas and other places across the country!
What’s more serious is that after cross-comparison, it was confirmed that these missing children were triplets or twins, and were raised by different parents!

Moreover, Abby checked the DNA sequences of the three girls who had recently disappeared and found something abnormal. She suspected that someone had split a fertilized egg into three embryos and then modified the genes of two of them! For this reason, she believed that someone was doing some kind of illegal human experiment.

Carrie called Reddington and sent him photos taken from the Williamsport school surveillance, hoping that he could find the person who kidnapped the child as soon as possible.

Through underground channels, Reddington found out that the kidnapper was named Cotton, nicknamed "The Finder", who specialized in finding special things. He also received word that Cotton was looking for a lost work of art, the "Vaiśrava" tapestry, for a senator.

After some planning, Reddington used the photo of the "Vaiśravaṇa" tapestry to trap Cotton and had his interrogation expert Teddy interrogate him severely. The confession he obtained stated that the person who hired him to kidnap the children was a medical doctor named Guillermo Rizal.

Alam found out that Dr. Rizal was an important founder of the Human Atlas Project. At the age of 24, he had compiled a gene sequence determination program, which was adopted by major medical institutions, universities and laboratories around the world. He became very popular for a while!

Twelve years ago, the Global Gene Networks company founded by Rizal was successfully listed on the stock market, but he resigned from the company shortly afterwards and disappeared from the public eye!
Nawabi found out from the national residential database that Rizal owned a fairly large warehouse in Howard County, Maryland. And according to information reported by Reddington, Cotton, who was responsible for the kidnapping, was the one who handed over the children to Rizal on the highway in Howard County!
Kerry immediately ordered the field operations team to set off and rush to the warehouse! Elizabeth and others who had flown back from Minnesota were also rushing here...

(End of this chapter)