Necessary Evil (17 page)

Keep in mind that whoever you take will have to have a serious accident."

"What if they come up here on their own looking for their buddy?"

"Tell them that Kier doesn't want people walking around because it will interfere with tracking survivors. Tell them we need to find him only because we've lost radio contact and need to get him another radio. Explain that the government is using armed soldiers to keep everybody out of this area to allow Kier to do his job unhindered. Then, if you have to, that's when you offer to take one as a guide and representative.

"Doyle, you'll stay here. Brennan, you will then lead one of three groups up the mountain. He'll go the route we consider most likely after interviewing the Tiloks. We'll put two other groups up on different ridges in the next most-likely areas. Everybody will look for tracks. In some of those snowfields any idiot can see tracks.

''I'm going to head out by myself on the heels of Brennan's group. No one is to know this. Absolutely no one. Tell the men I've returned to Johnson City. Brennan and I will talk on a scrambled channel. Doyle will stay here at the command post with the other men."

"You're going to hunt Kier while Kier hunts Brennan's group," Doyle said.

"Precisely. You'll have a chance to test your defensive skills against one of the best," Tillman told Brennan.

"How many men will I have?" Brennan asked.

"Ten starting from the cabin," Tillman said. "You may have to split up, because there is more than one ridge. But when you find him, if you find him, we'll bring them all together and bring in the other two groups."

"If the men don't know you're out there, they may confuse you with him."

"I'll worry about that. You and I will talk. I'll know where the men are at all times. If we have to tell the men someone else is out there, we'll just tell them it's a hired tracker, working alone."

Kier approached the hut, proud of the food he had managed to gather in such a short time. She had slept through the early morning and into the afternoon. He had taken fairly lengthy naps, and as soon as they ate he intended to sleep several more hours.

Concerned that he would startle her from a deep sleep by slipping into the hut, he pulled the plug and whispered: "It's okay."

"You found a phone booth?"

"You have a cozy house with food. Technology is overrated."

"Did you say food?"

"Turn over on your belly and sniff straight ahead."

''Gosh, I didn't know starvation could do that to your nose."

"Up here you don't take the simple things of life for granted."

"What kind of food?" He heard the eagerness in her voice.

Kier crawled under the covers, settling in beside her. ''Today the mountain offers up rabbit and bread." He reached back to the entrance to retrieve some tinfoil packages.

"I'm hungry," she said, once again breathing in the smell of the freshly cooked food. "Unbelievable that a scent can be so glorious."

"Breakfast in bed."

He pulled in the plug and turned the interior dark until he snapped on a light.

"Where did you get bread?"

"Reach out your hand."

Her fingers touched something that felt like a cake of oatmeal.

"What? Do I just . . . hhmmm. . . Well, it's not terrible." She chewed the cake.

To Kier it tasted slightly bitter, bland, with maybe just a hint of sweet. The subsequent bites he knew would be a little better as their appetites grew.

"You've got to tell me how you did this."

"In the night, I boiled the inner bark of a sugar pine. I got up a couple hours ago, pounded the boiled strips into a mash, and then pressed them into cakes before putting them in the fire. Using tinfoil from the canvas bag was cheating, but faster than trying to bake in hollowed-out stones. Here, now try this."

The rabbit was juicy, warm, and tender from slow cooking.

"God, food never tasted this good." She took a second mouthful, this time a huge hunk. "I see where you got your reputation. We've been here a night and most of a day, and you have created a house with dinner. Really, your prowess at survival is remarkable. If only you were a little more. . . maybe conventional is the word I'm looking for."

"You wish I thought like a white man from New York."

"I wish you were at my mercy instead of me at yours."

"Would you be nice?"

"I'd be horrible." She gave him a wicked smile. "And I'd wish for a phone, a bathtub, central heating, and paintings on the wall. But one of us decided to run around the mountains and the other of us had little choice but to follow. Still, I would like to thank you for the food. That and this book are the only things I can think of to be thankful for at the moment."

"Because of that book we know a lot more than he wants us to."

''We know the guy who wrote the diary figured Tillman was out to kill them and we know they're all pretty damn dead. From what you've been saying it sounds like he's got some incredible technology."

"I think he can predict the effect of genetic mutations. And I think he can create them."

"What are you talking about?"

"They have a giant computer program they call the God Model. Tillman can plan a specific change to your DNA and predict its effect. Like his scientists could maybe grow you a new scalp and turn you into a redhead."

"My hairdresser can do that."

''Or more to the point they could use a computer to randomly generate potential mutations in a gene related to your pancreas, predict the effects of all the various mutations, and then choose one whose effect would be positive for adult onset diabetes."

"I'm beginning to get the picture. But why haven't we heard about this 'God Model'?"

"There's a reason. We just have to discover it."

"If he's manipulating Tilok genes, they might hang him for that."

"Not if they never find out," he said.

"Yeah. The troubling part is that the proof may be incinerated. He's got everything except us and Volume Five. And he doesn't have Volume Six. Have you come up with any ideas about who left those tracks by the plane?'' She hunkered down under the covers and got a little closer to him for warmth.

"It appeared to be a lost man unaccustomed to the forest. But I'm not completely sure."

"What do you mean?"

''He moved away from the plane up a small rise before going downhill again. Most lost and confused people just go downhill right away. They take the path of least resistance without thinking. So it doesn't quite fit. If I'd had time to follow, maybe I could have figured it out. Tracks talk even when their makers don't want them to."

"Doesn't seem like anybody would have walked away from that crash."

"Doesn't seem like a lost city type would be hanging around in a blizzard." Kier reached under the clothes pile, and pulled out the heavy binder. "For the moment we better read what we've got."

As Kier read, he tried to organize in his mind the big picture concerning the research of Tillman's laboratories. He understood that the government's genome project would only map DNA structure. The real trick was understanding how slight changes in the order of the nucleic acids of the DNA would ultimately affect the proteins formed by the body.

He could see that what they dubbed the God Model was a very sophisticated computer program that was able to anticipate how a change in DNA would affect the amino acids that were expressed in a cell and then create impressive three-D projections of the protein molecules that would unfold in the body. Kier was also intrigued by Tillman's extensive work with viruses. For years scientists had attempted, sometimes successfully, usually not, to use viruses to transport altered genes into an organism. This could serve either the purpose of repairing a damaged gene or replacing a gene defective since birth. Viruses were simply little strands of DNA wrapped in a coating that allowed them to enter cells easily. Once inside the cell, the injected DNA could become inserted into the cell's host DNA, carrying along any nucleic acid chains that had been added to the virus.

One of the many difficulties with this approach was the problem of deactivating the carrier virus, known as a retroviral vector, in such a way that potentially infectious viruses could not be reformed in the body.

He stopped reading when Jessie stirred.

"So what have you figured out?" she asked.

He saw that her blanket had loosened, partially exposing her breasts in the soft light. In response to his gaze, she pulled the blanket tight around her.

Then she said, ''My theory is that they wanted to discover the gene for stubbornness and came to the Tilok. The logic is inescapable. Either that, or they wanted great hunters with large dicks."

He thought she wanted to smile, but it never came. "Tell me what
you've
figured out," she said.

Kier began by going over all the basics of human genetics, then plunged into the more exotic work of Tillman's labs.

"It's not surprising that if you can crack DNA sequences and manipulate their structures, you have a massive shortcut to disease control. All the labs ended up with a major emphasis on genetic research. They built viruses to deliver repaired genes to treat humans. Scientists often use viruses as biological delivery wagons, but neutralize them so they are supposedly harmless. I'm reading here about how they used an altered African virus that way. It was some kind of a rare virus that they liked because it could invade so many cells and was harmless."

"Okay. I got that. You might take such a virus—"

"They call it 'RA-4T'."

"Okay, RA-4T or whatever, change the sequence of its nucleic acids—that's the same as its DNA, right?"

"Yup," he said. "You'd do that to make sure it didn't replicate. Usually they take out so much genetic material from the original virus that the chances of it activating into a serious and complex virus is miniscule. Only I think there might have been a hitch in this case. They call the vector RA-4TV, and apparently they purposely removed some DNA from it to deactivate it. There is a lot of technical material in here about that."

"For all your whole-earth philosophy, Kier the doctor is steeped in science. You know this is telling me a lot more about you than it is about viruses. I can picture you in a college lab explaining things. There's another side to you, Kier."

"Never mind about me. The fact is, I think they cloned people."

"I knew it! Carbon copies of grown people, right?"

"Yes. Listen to this."

" 'We introduced a diploid nucleus from a cell of HO 121249533561289 into a fertilized egg from which the nucleus had been removed and introduced it into the uterus on the first day of what we had determined to be a very regular twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle.'

"Supposedly these are monkeys. But they have a thirty-seven-day menstrual cycle. At least chimps do. Humans have a twenty-eight-day cycle. When they identified the monkeys by I.D. number, they would begin with 'MA' for macaque. I think 'HO' is Homo sapien. I think it was a revealing slip of the pen. They're so into their research they occasionally drop the fig leaf."

"Why are they cloning people?"

''Believe me, I'm trying to figure it out. But you can't speed-read this stuff.

"There's another reason I think they're cloning people. In another section is a summary of the experimental vaccine and the AVCD-4 antivirus for another viral disease. I'm not sure what it was. But I'm suspicious that it was RA-4TVM, which I believe is a mutation of the vector virus. Which is a puzzle because it was supposed to be a harmless vector for delivering genes and there would be no reason to develop a vaccine and antivirus to attack it. It says here:

" 'HO 1212 and HO 0814 infants who did not receive the vaccine had a spike in plasma antigenemia two weeks after injection with RA-4TVM. After four weeks, high levels of the virus were present in T-4 cells, with only 1,000 to 10,000 PBMCs needed to recover culture. The nonvaccinated infants then received the vaccine and antivirus, with the result that after sixty days we could not recover any of the challenge virus from ten to the sixth PBMCs, in HO 1212 clones. To achieve the same result in HO 0814 clones took 150 days.' "

"Just tell me what it means," she said.

''Well, I think it means that they took cloned humans and used them to test a remedy for this RA-4TVM. Anyway, it worked. When they injected these infants with RA-4TVM, they were all cured by the combination of the vaccine and the antivirus. But one set of clones had much better genetic immunity and was cured much more quickly. Another reason I think it was humans is because when they are experimenting on monkeys they use SRA-4TV, or SRA-4TVM, which, I think, is a version of RA-4TV that infects primates. Here the reference is to RA-4TVM."

"I'll take your word for it." Even though they had talked about it, seeing it in print obviously shocked her. "God. That seems really far-fetched. You're telling me they cloned babies and then gave them some disease and then cured them?''

"I'm just suggesting. I didn't say it happened."

"If they cloned babies and thereafter infected them with a disease, that would explain why they so desperately want these volumes back."