Prophet of Bones (23 page)

“I still don’t understand.”

They pushed through another set of doors and took a flight of stairs down to a lower level. Here there were no windows. They entered another room—this one bristling with activity. For a moment, Gavin’s mind couldn’t take it all in. Lab-coated techs moved through the room like bees in a busy meadow. Some carried clipboards. Others pushed carts. Gavin saw one who held a baby bottle. She was pretty and serious, but his eye snagged on the bottle, so incongruous in the setting. He watched as this technician crossed the room to where an incubator sat near a wall beneath a halo of light, surrounded by beeping machines and digital readouts. Within the incubator, he saw a shape. A small bundle.

The tech moved against the incubator, sliding the bottle and her arm through a small aperture in the side. Inside the glass enclosure of the incubator, a tiny hand reached up to hold the bottle.

“Not everything is meant for prying eyes.”

Gavin stared at the little hand curled around the bottle. He moved no closer. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“We never lie, here,” the old man said. “We just control the truth.”

When Gavin found his voice, he asked, “And get what in exchange?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

The old man gestured toward the incubator.

“We get freedom.”

“Freedom to do what?”

“To play God.”

24

Paul followed Janus down the hall, arms full of sample tray, being careful not to spill the gel.

It was Paul’s sixth week of training, and he’d finally been assigned to a project. “The Endangered Species Project” Janus had called it, saying the words slowly so that Paul would understand the gravity of the task. For some kinds of scientists, conservation was ideology. Save an animal, and it was like saving the world, one unit at a time. Paul envied men who felt this way. It had been a long time since he’d believed the world could be saved as easily as that.

Paul watched Janus run the samples. They were working with bald eagle DNA, testing the degree of heterozygosity of an inbred population in Colorado. They loaded the assays into the machine and hit the button.

“Pay attention to this,” Janus said. “This is the thing you watch for.”

Janus was tall. Almost as tall as Paul, so they were looking nearly eye to eye as they stood there in front of the machine. Janus seemed to have gotten used to the eye patch now, that earlier flash of pity now replaced by a nearly constant look of irritation.

“You put in a sample, and the machine spits out data. Then you plug the data into a program. The rule of thumb is, heterozygosity good, homozygosity bad.”

“Got it,” Paul said. As if he’d needed to be told.

“Too much homozygosity leads to a paucity of immunity haplotypes. Like cheetahs. All practically twins, a bottleneck within a bottleneck. These eagles might not be much better.”

Paul nodded. Despite appearances, the genes of men, he knew, like the genes of eagles, were less diverse than most species. A function of our creation, some said. Man, after all, had been made on the last day. Made in His perfect image.

Paul put the samples of eagle DNA in the tray and hit the button.

*   *   *

“I’m going to lunch,” Janus said.

“Go ahead,” Paul said, without looking up from his work. “I’ll finish up this batch.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’d rather get it done.”

“Okay.” Janus left.

When Janus was out the door, Paul continued to work. He waited two minutes, counting to one hundred and twenty in his head. After a hundred and twenty seconds, he figured that Janus had made it to the elevator. If he’d gotten that far, there was a good chance that he wouldn’t turn around and pop back into the lab for some reason. Paul put down his samples and rushed across the room to the forgotten drawer. He pulled out the old Tylenol bottle at the back.

He dumped the lozenge into his hand.

For a moment, his breath caught in his chest.

It had been a long time since he’d looked at the sample. For the last several weeks, he’d almost been able to pretend that none of it was happening, if he wanted to. But now, here it was.

Green and smooth to the touch. The lozenge was made of a special protein membrane, vacuum-sealed with a pocket in the middle. It was still hermetically sealed. Still protecting its secrets.

He inserted the applicator tip into the lozenge like a hypodermic needle and drew out a tiny sample of fluid.

The rest he knew by heart. Mass-production analysis, in two-million-letter sequences. But the key, he understood, wasn’t in the sequences; it lay in finding the places where the sequences were different. That’s where the software came in. He injected the sample into the agarose, adjusted the settings. He hit the button. The machine whirred to life.

From a genetic standpoint, most life on earth was quite similar. It was all just variation on a theme: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, repeated in a pattern and packaged in chromosomes. Even the sequences themselves didn’t differ a whole lot between species. Humans and chimps were identical across the vast majority of their sequences. But tiny differences could result in big changes in the organism. The entire human genome was more than three billion letters.

He went to the keyboard and typed the restriction codes.

The prompt flashed on the screen: Sample Type?

Paul typed five letters: Human. He wondered if it was true.

“Now we find out,” he whispered. Then he hit Enter.

Paul looked at the clock.

The read would take about fifteen minutes. Janus usually spent around twenty eating his lunch. It would be close.

Paul sat on his stool and waited to be found out or not.

Time dragged.

The machine hummed.

Paul stared at the machine as if watching it could hurry it.

Finally, an interminable time later, it beeped.

Paul checked his watch. Janus would be back any minute. He hit Print. He walked across the hall to retrieve the printout from the laser printer.

Gly – lle – Yal – Glu – Gln – Ala – Cys – Ser – Leu – Asp – Arg – Cys – Pro – Yal –Lys – Phe – Tyr – Thr – Leu – His – Lys - Asn - Gly - Met - Pro – Phe - Tyr - Ser - Cys – Yal - Leu - Glu –Yal - Asp - Gln -

Page after page of it, building into a thick stack. And this was only a small, representative sample—a compilation of hypervariant loci compressed into an amino acid chain. Hot spots, not the genome entire.

It might as well have been Morse code. Paul shoved the hard copy into his backpack and put the lozenge back into the Tylenol bottle. The lozenge contained enough sample for another analysis, if needed. He shoved the Tylenol bottle into his front pants pocket. Then he plugged his jump drive into the computer and saved the files to it. After that, he hit Delete. And it was like it had never happened.

Except for the jump drive.

Except for the printout.

Five minutes later, Janus returned. He came through the door and walked across to the lab bench.

He looked down over Paul’s shoulder.

“You didn’t get much done while I was gone,” Janus said.

“It’s slow work.”

*   *   *

That night, Paul sat in the darkness of his apartment, reading the code. He read it for hours, tracing the letters with his mind.

He wasn’t one of the gene freaks. He couldn’t read the amino acid sequence like prose. But the answer was there, in the code.

Paul went to his desk and opened the top drawer. He rummaged through the detritus of past projects, odds and ends, looking for something.

There.

He found it. The card was white with a single black magnetic strip running along the back. A Westing security card.

All the Westing cards looked the same. The size of credit cards, they were utterly featureless, meant to be carried in a wallet. Paul had broken this one the previous winter, a day near zero, and the cheap plastic had cracked in his pocket, a fault line splitting the magnetic strip, rendering the card useless. He’d gotten a replacement card the same day but had forgotten to turn his old card in.

Paul looked at the printout again: an impenetrable sequence, a language he couldn’t understand. What he needed was the Rosetta stone to tell him what it meant.

He knew just where to find one.

25

“I’m good at Ping-Pong,” Paul told him.

“Really?” said Makato in monotone.

“I’m the best player I know.”

“You don’t say.”

“It’s true,” Paul said. “My reflexes are catlike. I may be the best player in this state.”

“Good for you.”

“Perhaps the world.”

They sat at the lunch table, eyeing each other across their half-eaten meals. Paul had heard about Makato and Ping-Pong.

“I’ve played a little Ping-Pong in my day,” Makato mentioned.

“Really?”

“Just a little,” Makato said.

“Are you good?”

“Who, me? No, I wouldn’t say I’m
good.
No. Below average. Far below average.”

“Perhaps we should play.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be any competition.”

“Still, it would be fun,” Paul said.

“I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

“You won’t bore me. Maybe I could give you a few pointers.”

“It’s true I could use some instruction.”

“So you’ll play?” he asked.

Makato, who Paul knew well enough not to believe for a single nanosecond, said, “Sure.”

They met at the Omni Sports Center on Victoria Street after work the next night. The Ping-Pong tables were on the second floor. Paul wore a T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Makato arrived in a red track suit. Makato stretched before they started.

Paul knew he was in trouble from the very first serve.

They played for ninety minutes. Makato scored at will.

Paul discovered two things while he played Makato. First, that he could produce no volley that Makato could not return and, second, that Makato had the ability to make the ball dance in a way that Paul was certain defied all forms of physics other than quantum mechanics. Paul suspected the ball reverted to wave form during his various eye blinks when momentarily freed from the constraints of objective observation. In ninety minutes, Makato gave up seven points.

After Ping-Pong, they hit the steam room. Makato barely seemed to sweat. They sat on the hot wood while the steam opaqued the room around them. The steam worked its way into Paul’s skin. “You played well,” Makato told him.

“Hardly.”

“No, for an American, very good.”

After the steam room, they grabbed towels for the showers.

It was a simple thing to do. To lift Makato’s wallet.

He allowed himself to undress more slowly, and then Makato was naked, heading for the showers, and Paul opened his locker. They had the change room to themselves, so there were no witnesses to the theft. Paul pulled the wallet from Makato’s pants pocket. He noted the address on the driver’s license and then slid out the Westing security card. He put Makato’s card in his pocket and replaced it with the broken blank he’d retrieved from his drawer.

The cards were cheap plastic, and they often broke. It would not be a strange thing to open your wallet one day and find your card cracked and useless. It happened all the time. The guards would have your new card ready within an hour.

Makato would think nothing of it.

Paul closed the wallet and put it back in Makato’s pants. Then he hit the showers.

*   *   *

Later that night, MapQuest found the address.

Paul waited for three
A.M.
, then drove with the windows down. The air smelled like rain.

Thankfully, there were no dogs barking in Makato’s neighborhood, and very few streetlamps.

There were several different ways this could go. Paul knew from Google Maps that Makato’s house had a garage. If his car was inside the garage, this would be difficult. If the car was parked outside, it would be easier.

Paul parked two blocks from Makato’s address. He turned his engine off. The Matrix’s headlights stayed on for a full minute. Paul waited, hating this. Car manufacturers obviously didn’t have stealth in mind when they designed their vehicles. In the old days, a criminal could turn his headlights off immediately. Heck, Paul was old enough to remember cars that you could actually
driv
e without your headlights on. Now choice had been removed. Everything was automatic. Even the seat belts conspired against him. After a trip to the market, Paul usually had to buckle in his groceries just to get his car to stop beeping at him. Finally, the lights went off. Paul climbed out.

He moved silently up the street, walking quickly. He saw Makato’s house, and he saw Makato’s car parked in the driveway. A sensible Honda.

Paul moved through the dewy grass and pulled out his knife. He crouched against the back wheel of Makato’s car. He slid the blade between the treads and into the tough rubber—exactly where a piece of road debris might be expected to pierce the tire. It was more difficult than he’d expected. He felt the tire give, and the blade slid in.

A quick hiss of escaping air.

“Sorry, Makato,” he whispered. “I owe you a tire.”

26

The wind blew from the west. Paul slid the kayak into the water, moving a few feet offshore. He put one foot in the bottom, then crouched low and sat, kicking with his other foot. He used the paddle to leverage himself off the bank, heaving with his shoulder as mud scraped along the bottom, until silence, and just like that he was away. The Chesapeake rocked gently around him.

He paddled slowly, keeping a rhythm, easing the kayak into deeper water.

The kayak was eight feet long, light and nimble. At 235 pounds, Paul was at the upper end of its capacity.

The lights from the opposite shore made trails on the water. Paul had never kayaked at night. To do so wasn’t safe. To do so on a body of water like the Chesapeake, with its tides and freight traffic, was downright stupid.

He paddled. He put his back into it. His shoulders. Right-left-right-left-right, pushing the water behind him.

Out on the bay, the only sound was the dip of his paddles as they entered the waves. There was no way to silence them, but total silence wasn’t required for what he needed to do.