Redheads (13 page)

She sat in the van and looked out the window. This didn’t look like a place for a serial killer. Behind Honolulu were green mountains topped with clouds. A rainbow arched towards the ocean behind the volcanic crater she recognized as Diamond Head. But he’d been here. She saw the rain in the mountains and thought of Chris driving with the police to the scene of his wife’s slaughter. Nowhere near the ocean was safe. The map in their short-lived headquarters proved that. From the overpass where the van sat in traffic, she could see an oil tanker waiting at anchor west of the airport runway. He had to be coming on a ship. If he could swim like Aaron thought, he could easily make it ashore from a tanker a mile or two out. There’d be no record of him even entering most of the countries. She wondered what to do with the idea. He might not have any records, but the ship would.

“Here on vacation?” asked the cab driver.

“Yeah.”

“Meeting your boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“What hotel?”

“The Hyatt?” she said. There had to be a Hyatt in Waikiki.

“Hyatt hotel, okay. Traffic is bad.”

She wondered what he would look like. Middle aged, probably, if he’d been killing since the seventies. Built like an athlete. But he couldn’t possibly look like an ordinary man. There would be something that marked him and set him apart. No one could do what he did and simply blend into the crowd. She was sure there’d be some kind of ugliness about him.

“Boyfriend already at the Hyatt?”

“Yeah,” she said. She was getting sick of this conversation. She rested her hand on the suitcase next to her. Her Sig Sauer was packed in a locked travel case inside her checked bag. She hadn’t brought any ammunition—it was illegal to pack it.

“On the way, can you stop somewhere I can pick up a box of .45 ACP?”

The cab driver looked around. “Ma’am?”

“.45 ACP. You know, bullets?”

She paid for an ocean-view suite in the Diamond Head tower of the Waikiki Hyatt. She ignored the waterfalls and tropical birds in the open-air lobby and went directly to the elevators. She left her suitcase unopened by the door, and then went out onto the lanai with her laptop.

A little before sunset, her phone rang. It was Chris.

“You find a hotel?”

“The Hyatt, in Waikiki.”

“Want some dinner?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll call you from the lobby in about an hour.”

They walked across Kalakaua Boulevard and through the lobby of the old Moana Surfrider hotel. A banyan tree with three separate trunks spread across the patio behind the hotel and gave shade almost all the way to the beach. They took a table under the boughs at the edge of the beach. Diamond Head was to her left across the turquoise water.

“Can you explain how this works?” Chris asked.

She nodded and put down the menu.

“The program’s simple. It’s called a stack buffer overflow exploit, and it takes advantage of weaknesses in the target computer to upload executable code into the stack buffers.”

Chris looked at her as if she’d just spoken in Chinese, but before she could explain more, he asked a question.

“How do you get it on the target computer?”

“I’m going to start my way at the bottom and work up. Each FBI field office has a special agent in charge, the SAC. The SAC’s the person with the highest level of authority within the FBI intranet system, short of a deputy director. You figure an FBI agent will be more cautious than an ordinary person. So the idea isn’t to try to infect her computer first, but to start somewhere else and work my way towards her through the computers of people she trusts.”

“Why pick Honolulu?”

“Mike was able to get some good stuff about the Honolulu SAC.”

The waiter came back and brought their drinks. She looked at the banyan tree that spread out above them. Roots starting in its branches hung down in the air over their heads. Someday they would reach the ground and would grow into new trunks.

“What’d he find?”

“Her name’s Helen Barton. She’s only been in Honolulu three years, so she wasn’t in charge of the field office when Cheryl was killed. Her son, Scott, is in the Army and was deployed to Afghanistan ten months ago. Mike ran his background and learned he’s engaged to a girl in San Diego named Brenda Johannson.”

“How’d he find that out?”

“Facebook. Anyway, my plan is to start with the girl. All I’ve got to do is get her to click on a link in an email. That’ll upload my program into her Outlook’s call stack. The program will let me send a second email that looks like it came from her computer.”

She took another drink from her glass of beer. The waiter came back and they ordered appetizers.

“How will you get her to click on a link? Most people just delete emails with hyperlinks from people they don’t know.”

“Thanks to Facebook, I know who her friends are. So I made up a Gmail account in the name of one of her friends. The link’s part of a wedding invitation. If she clicks it, I’ve got her. If she doesn’t, I’ll wait a day and try something else.”

“You already started?”

She nodded. “I just need to find an unsecured wireless network.”

“What about here?”

“Not here. See at the outdoor bar, over the cash register?” Julissa pointed over Chris’s left shoulder.

Chris turned his head and looked. There was a security camera over the cash register and their table would be in the background of its view.

“There were some others in the lobby, and we might be covered by one or two I didn’t see. If the FBI traced my email to this wireless network, which they could do, they’d check the video cameras. They’d know the exact date and time the email was sent. They’d see me sitting with a laptop out. Half my projects since grad school were funded by the NSA. I’ve had a security clearance since I was twenty-three. They’d know who I am.”

“What’s your plan?”

“When we leave here I’ll take a walk, with my laptop in my purse. I programmed it to look for an unsecured network, log on, then send mail. If there’s a security camera wherever I link up, it’ll just see me walking past.”

“Want me to come?”

“Sure.”

An hour and a half later, in her hotel room, Julissa opened her laptop. She and Chris had walked along the beach, past the zoo and the aquarium, and then into a neighborhood of mansions that clung to the slopes of Diamond Head. To return, they cut back across the soccer fields of Kapiolani Park and zigzagged through the side streets of Waikiki between Kuhio and Ala Wai, walking past dozens of high-rise condominiums. When they said good night at the corner of her hotel, he’d put his hand on her shoulder briefly. That had felt good. She wanted to invite him up for a drink in her room but she didn’t know what he would say. So she said nothing, and leaned her head down to press her cheek against the back of his hand on her shoulder. They made plans to meet the next day at noon and she rode up the elevator alone.

Julissa sat on the end of her bed and logged into her new Gmail account. The message was sent.

The only thing left to do was wait.

Chapter Fifteen

Dr. Chevalier was alone in the lab again. As a child, reading French-language copies of National Geographic at his parents’ winter home in Papeete, he often wondered what it would feel like to discover a new species. He’d never imagined his emotions over the last seven hours.

Self-doubt. Disbelief.

Fear.

He’d compared the DNA to primer snippets of genes from birds, fish, reptiles, insects, crustaceans, and corals. There were random links but nothing substantial. His emotional thermostat ticked into fear when he searched mammalian genes. This wasn’t just a new species. It was like nothing he’d ever seen.

Now he sat at his computer and began typing an email to Chris Wilcox and his friends. The telephone on his desk rang and his hands were shaking when he answered it.

“This is Chevalier.”

“I hope it’s not too late. You said call anytime.” The voice had a soft-spoken Midwestern twang.

“Dr. Corliss.
 
How are you?
 
You found something?” Chevalier said.

“The sample was small. The test consumes the sample, so it’d be impossible to reproduce the test unless you have any more of it.”

“But did you find anything?” Chevalier asked again.

“Based on the ratio of strontium 87 to strontium 86 in the sample, and the fact the water content was clearly glacial in origin,” Corliss said, “I’d say your subject has been drinking a lot of water from one of five countries.”

“You can’t be more specific?” Chevalier asked.

“No. The sample was too small to say with any certainty.”

“What are the countries?”

“Finland, Sweden, Norway, Scotland and Iceland. All countries with existing or recent glaciers and similar strontium deposits. If I had more to work from, I could probably narrow it down to within a few hundred miles, but this is the best I can do,” Corliss said.

“How can you tell the water’s glacial?”

“It’s too low in the heavier isotope of oxygen, O-18. Meaning it evaporated during a climactically cooler period.”

“Such as an ice age.”

“Yes.”

“Write it up.”

“I’ll have it tonight.”

“And send a list of your expenses. I’ll cut your check.”

Chevalier hung up and went to the globe in the corner of his office, spinning it.

Finland, Sweden, Norway, Scotland or Iceland.

A cold-weather creature.

He went to his desk and continued writing the report to his clients. He wanted to fulfill his obligation and get this project off his desk and out of his mind. This was too dangerous. And even if he could prove everything he believed, what could he expect? His respectable clients would stay away and his business would collapse while tabloid reporters trampled a path to his door in search of any information on whatever it was. He didn’t even want to start speculating on where it came from or why it existed. He just wanted to lay out the facts for Chris Wilcox and call the job done. He’d even decided to give back half the deposit money.

To: Wilcox, Chris

CC: Clayborn, Julissa; Nakamura, Mike; Westfield, Aaron

Date: July 16, 2010 4:58:20 a.m. (EST)

RE: Intelligene Report (!)

Ladies and Gentlemen:

This email and the attached documents will be my report on the nuclear DNA from unknown tissue found on the piece of evidence which Mr. Wilcox provided to me on July 14. I haven’t completed the sequencing of the DNA, but consider this my final report. By separate letter to the escrow company, I’ll return of half the deposit and the remaining funds.

I want no further involvement.

The sample contained tissues belonging to a human female and to a male. The male cells were suspended in saliva and appeared to be stratified squamous keratinized epithelial cells, consistent with the cellular tissue of the hard palate and gums. From that, I conclude the saliva belongs to the male. On the other hand, the female tissue was muscular tissue and fat cells, possibly taken from the breast area.

My instructions were to complete an analysis of any cellular tissue belonging to a male. The male cells had fifty-eight chromosomes. By comparison, a human being has forty-six chromosomes. There is no known genetic disorder which would result in twelve extra chromosomes, and there is simply no way that the organism which produced these cells could be considered “human”.

I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much to go on.

Eighty-five percent of the organism’s genome is consistent with a mammal. Sixty percent of the mammalian DNA is in common with human DNA. The other forty percent of the mammalian DNA has no direct association with any primate or other species I could find.

This creature has genes I’ve never seen, so I can’t speculate on what they do. And it lacks genes normal organisms possess. For example: it has no telomeres, which are the genetic structures commonly associated with aging. Does that mean that it never grows old? I don’t know.

It might look like a man. I found genetic markers I’d normally associate with light-colored skin. It probably had red hair, although it may not anymore, because I found a gene associated in humans with male-pattern baldness. Whether this gene would be active in this creature is, again, anyone’s guess. Unless its diet or other circumstances have resulted in a different outcome, it might be quite tall—over six feet. It has a muscular build and may be extremely strong. As an aside, and this may relate to either its diet or its hygiene (or both), its saliva is swarming with bacteria. I haven’t identified the various strains, but as a safe guess, anyone bitten by this thing would be looking at a fatal infection.

The genetic information for its brain is unlike anything I’ve seen. Is it intelligent? Almost certainly. Is it more intelligent than us? I can’t even guess. A genetic laboratory equipped for comparative zoology or evolution may be better at answering these questions.