The Black Silent (13 page)

that if we make more plankton, we could have a big problem. I don't get that part."

"Are you sure Ben was familiar with this plankton-feeding idea?"

"For sure. He and his friend Lattimer Gibbons argued about the effectiveness of the idea all the time."

"He seems to be leading us somewhere. Where do you think?" Sam asked.

"Three possibilities: Lattimer Gibbons's place, Ben's office, or his beach house on Lopez."

Sam nodded and signaled for her to continue.

"Ben was part of a joint invertebrate project with the University of Washington lab. The committee he was on published a series of articles that used the subtitle: 'The Ocean Breathes for the Earth.' So I'd look for his copies of those articles. He used to have them all in a bunch of binders in his office. We can't get back in there."

"Maybe we can, maybe we can't. Tell me more about Lattimer," Sam said. "The few times I met him, he seemed odd. Anxious maybe, sort of fussy, but thoroughly devoted to Ben. Ben has always been patient."

"You know what I know. He's a retired engineer. He and Ben used to argue about fertilizing the ocean. I don't know if you were around for any of those arguments.

Lattimer loved the idea and used to torture Ben with articles from other scientists who were touting it."

"Could Lattimer have the binders? Or copies?"

"Yeah," she said, "he definitely could have some of it. Maybe some copies. He could have a lot of things."

"And the same for Ben's old family beach house on Lopez?"

"There's deep-ocean stuff there, but that's actually related to the plankton because they die and rain down on the bottom."

"So back to the sigh and everybody dies," he said.

"I'm not following that part. At least not in relation to the plankton thing. But maybe Ben figured something out about that."

"Lattimer strikes me as the type that might hide things for Ben," he said.

"Yeah. And since his association with Ben is totally informal, I don't think anyone would think to look there. I could definitely see Ben hiding his
real
research with Lattimer. You know that nonconformist streak of his."

"Or hiding with Lattimer himself," Sam said. "Let's go see Mr. Gibbons."

Haley moved back toward the scooter, but Sam wasn't following her. Instead, he opened the trunk of the Corvette and removed and opened a small suitcase full of makeup.

Haley raised her eyebrows at the sight.

"This is pretty much what's left of my old life."

"I wish you'd tell me about your old life."

Inside the case was foundation makeup, skin-whitening cream, blush, prosthetic plastic, spirit gum, fake hair, and a host of other fillers and toners that you'd find on a typical movie set. Sam began placing the items on the hood of the Vette.

Next he removed a heavy lockbox. It contained documents that he rifled through carefully. He found a car registration form that said
Frederick Raimes
and pulled out the corresponding license plates.

"I really don't get this bit with the license plates," Haley said.

"It's okay. All legal."

It took him a minute or two to change the plates.

"I'm going to call for a tow truck," he said.

"Why?" Haley asked.

Sam took out his cell phone and dialed 411.

"State of Washington. San Juan Towing, on San Juan Island, please."

The operator rang him through.

"Hi," Sam told the mechanic. "My name is Fred Raimes. I'm a Triple A member. I was here visiting and I need to get my car back to Anacortes. What would you charge to take my car on the eight p.m. ferry tonight?"

"Is it broke down?"

"Yes. Blown head gasket."

"You could have it fixed on the island."

"Yeah, but I'm a mechanic and I want to get it home."

A pause. "Uh, it comes out to be about two hundred fifty bucks, including the cost of the ferry."

"Great." Sam read him the number off the AAA card in the name of Fred Raimes.

They confirmed a time and place, and Sam hung up.

"Frick's gonna be disappointed," Haley said. "You said you were Robert Chase."

Sam put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. "Now you're catching on."

"It's none of my business, but is Raimes the name you used in your life away from the islands?"

"Sometimes. Now I go only by Sam Wintripp. I was born Samuel H. Browning."

"The name we knew," Haley said.

"You know about Helen's ancestry?"

"Helen and your father were originally descended from the Scottish Highlanders,"

Haley said. "Originally they were named Broun. Then their ancestors emigrated to England and changed it to Browning, right?"

"Right."

She stopped. He could tell she wanted to ask more, but there was a quiet reserve about her—a stubborn resolve. Sam nodded. He was pretty certain he knew what was really on her mind. The summer of 1994 still hung in the air between them. Instinctively, though, he felt now was not the time to break open the old scab and try to clean out the underneath.

"I took the name Wintripp when I discovered that Mother was alive and not what my father claimed—a dead mestizo woman with a bad history."

"I'm sorry about that. Everyone in the family was told the same story about your mother. Maybe that's why I identified with you. God knows my mother had her own problems." She was quiet again. "You would show up now and then, to visit, like an apparition out of the mist, saying nothing about yourself or your life. You were in the

'export business'? Give me a break. Even now," she said, "today, I wonder who you
were
back then, I mean as a person. Around 1992 they said you went into the computer business and then as a person with a life, you mostly disappeared." There was a hint of frustration in her voice and he knew she was getting nearer the source of her feelings.

Sam began shaving his beard away with a portable electric razor, using a mirror to watch his progress. There were things he had to work out in himself and they needed more time to talk if he were ever to bring up the past.

"People who knew me, and there weren't many of those, called me Sam back then. No last name."

"When did you find out that your mother was a Tilok Indian?" Haley asked.

"When I was twenty-one."

"I think I was eleven when you told us. Your father hid it from you then, as long as he lived?"

"Yes. He was a shrill, bigoted, stubborn, macho Englishman—or actually Scotsman, if you will —emphasis on the macho. He was dead for a year when you came to live with Ben and Helen in '81. When I found my mother's family in '83, the Tiloks, I was given a new name: Kalok. Kids called me Kai and I liked it better. Anyway, fast-forward to nearly a year ago. After some tough circumstances—all these injuries and some worse things— I chose a new path in life. I decided, though, that Kai was too unusual for most folks and I was used to Sam; so outside the Tiloks, I'm still Sam."

"We've always known you as Sam. Who picked Sam?"

"Actually, my mother, before they told her I died. She liked Samuel Clemens. That's the story, or as much of it as I can tell you right now." He looked away from his small mirror and into her eyes. "I'm trusting you to tell no one."

She nodded, perhaps slightly happier now.

"Were you a spy?"

Sam thought for a moment.

"I was chasing the worst form of sophisticated criminals and terrorists, and there were plenty of them to chase. For now, that's all I can tell you."

She seemed, reluctantly, to accept this and went back to reading Ben's documents while Sam finished shaving. Sam liked to face things fair and square, but his relationship with Haley was not like most things.

"I'm always amazed at how fast you read," he said, glancing at her while he began applying makeup.

"Uh-huh," she said, oblivious now to everything but what was in front of her. The intense look of concentration heightened his curiosity.

When she was done, she put down the papers and looked up. She took a long look at his disguise-in-progress and gave him a thumbs-up. "Ready to hear about the papers?"

"You bet." Sam continued working while he listened.

"The papers from the whale are in Ben's miserable shorthand, which I can barely read. I think he's making four peptide hormones with different protein expressions, using genetically altered bacteria at least for three of them. But I can't tell more than that.

They're working notes—notes he wouldn't even type up."

After a few minutes she spoke again. "This is pretty interesting."

"What?"

"Ben started with about two hundred eighty genes of the twenty-five thousand or so found in humans and other higher mammals."

"Okay. . ."

"To get down to six genes or so," Haley said, "is a major step. He clearly was onto something, but I can't see what that something was. Nothing here tells me that he was on the verge of solving the problem of aging."

"Could six genes really solve a problem like aging?" Sam asked. "To get youth retention would be tough, like you said."

"Exactly. Aging is a diffuse process. It's brain, it's body . . . it's widespread. How are you supposed to fix that with six genes? Add to this that when your body's cells divide to replenish themselves, they have a built-in clock. . .Well, you read
Nature,
you know about telomeres. You're stuck with old cells when you get old."

"You still don't believe in this discovery, do you?" Sam asked.

"Do I really believe that Ben has something that will allow people to live decades longer or hundreds of years? I haven't changed my mind. That would be hard to swallow."

Sam had finished with the skin whitener and had gone on to the foundation. "You're a good teacher. Keep going, but hurry." He now applied the foundation makeup in layers of slightly different colors to give the mottled appearance of real skin. Because of time constraints he had opted for only a small bit of prosthetic plastic, so he had to do some contouring with nothing more than heavy makeup.

"Oh, my God," Haley said.

"What?"

"Listen to this." She read aloud:

"Microbial life in the deep seafloor is widespread, to depths of at least eight hundred
meters

into the bottom sediments. Samples indicate that methanogenesis occurs at the deepest
sediment layers where carbon dioxide and hydrogen are converted to methane. The
depth

limit of anaerobic life in deep-sea sediments is not known. Most striking we have
discovered

that methane-producing Archaea divide every few thousand years, maybe one hundred
thousand years. Their life span, if we could call it that, is unparalleled, indicating a
DNA

stability unknown in terrestrial life. Notably we have discovered a gene isolate in one
species

of methanogenic Archaea that differs by twenty-four percent from its nearest relative.

"Then he goes on," and Haley continued to read:

"Popular magazines have picked up on the longevity of Arcs and put it in much more
poetic

terms describing them as living in time with the slowest rhythms of the earth or as
living in

'geologic time’. Interesting that the basic truth is not obscure.

"He actually mentions
Discover
magazine instead of a science journal. There's a little tongue in cheek there."

Sam was silent a moment. "Archaea, it says?"

"Ben wrote his own comment on the article.
'Archaea
are the longest-lived life-forms on the earth. And they are closer to humans, DNA-wise, than are bacteria. The truth is under our nose in popular magazines and in numerous more serious journal articles.

'"They live in geologic time,'" she quoted again. "That would mean these microbes are thousands and thousands of years old. At least. Geologic time implies
millions
of years old."

Sam could see Haley's mind was spinning. She was determined not to be overly dramatic, but she knew better than anyone that Ben Anderson always chose his words carefully.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

"I think I get the concept of what Ben was doing, if not the details."

"Tell me."

"If a gene releases a protein that, say, translates to a pep-tide hormone that performs a vital function, and we can duplicate the protein or its function in medication, then maybe we affect aging. But how do you use a gene from a deep-sea microbe to help a human being?"

Sam shrugged.

"Here. We need to give you a wig, make you blonde, and put some age on you," Sam said.

Haley was still concentrating on her discovery.

"The answer is you don't use the gene. But Ben seems to be replicating gene functions with organic molecule products. In Ben's case he's allowing bacteria infused with the gene of interest to make the organic molecules that become the medicine. Yet he's still talking about a microbe and you would think its gene would not produce human-compatible proteins."

"So," Sam said, "to know what Ben's doing, we'd have to know something about how certain of the microbe's genes function?"

"To understand it, we would. I suspect what he is doing is letting genes express their products, which would be proteins and then using them as medicine with the caveat that the proteins may ultimately be broken down into pro-hormones, hormones, enzymes, or the like." She explained how that worked.

Then Haley referred back to the notes while Sam splotched her face. "He calls these microbes 'Archaea.' He does have these two hundred eighty other genes he was studying.

So maybe he found homologous genes in microbes, animals, and humans."

Sam nodded. His makeup job looked nearly completed. Hers had a ways to go. "It would be astonishing if we could use ancient microbes to lengthen our life spans." He applied a finishing touch. "People might kill for that."

"I just realized something else that makes sense," Haley said, trying to work on her makeup and talk at the same time. "Archaea microbes live in the bottom of the sea, down where the ocean cleanses itself. How about that?"