Watchers (31 page)

A photographer’s strobe flashed once, twice, from farther back in the house. The hallway looked crowded, so Lem went around to the back by way of the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

Walt Gaines was standing in the breakfast area, in the dimness behind the last of the hooded kliegs. But even in those shadows, his anger and grief were visible. He had evidently been at home when he had gotten word about the murder of a deputy, for he was wearing tattered running shoes, wrinkled tan chinos, a brown- and red-checkered short-sleeve shirt. In spite of his great size, bull neck, muscular arms, and big hands, Walt’s clothes and slump-shouldered posture gave him the look of a forlorn little boy.

From the breakfast area, Lem could not see past the lab men and into the laundry room, where the body still lay. He said, “I’m sorry, Walt. I’m so sorry.”

“Name was Teel Porter. His dad Red Porter and I been friends twenty-five years. Red just retired from the department last year. How am I going to tell him? Jesus. I’ve got to do it myself, us being so close. Can’t pass the buck this time.”

Lem knew that Walt never passed the buck when one of his men was killed in the line of duty. He always personally visited the family, broke the bad news, and sat with them through the initial shock.

“Almost lost
two
men,” Walt said. “Other one’s badly shaken.”

“How was Teel . . . ?”

“Gutted like Dalberg. Decapitated.”

The Outsider, Lem thought. No doubt about it now.

Moths had gotten inside and were bashing against the lens of the klieg light behind which Lem and Walt stood.

His voice thickening with anger, Walt said, “Haven’t found . . . his head. How do I tell his dad that Teel’s
head
is missing?”

Lem had no answer.

Walt looked hard at him. “You can’t push me all the way out of it now. Not now that one of my men is dead.”

“Walt, my agency works in purposeful obscurity. Hell, even the number of agents on the payroll is classified information. But your department is subject to full press attention. And in order to know how to proceed in this case, your people would have to be told exactly what they’re looking for. That would mean revealing national defense secrets to a large group of deputies—”

“
Your
men all know what’s up,” Walt countered.

“Yes, but my men have signed secrecy oaths, undergone extensive security checks, and are trained to keep their mouths shut.”

“My men can keep a secret, too.”

“I’m sure they can,” Lem said carefully. “I’m sure they don’t talk outside the shop about ordinary cases. But this isn’t ordinary. No, this has to remain in our hands.”

Walt said, “My men can sign secrecy oaths.”

“We’d have to background-check everyone in your department, not just deputies but file clerks. It’d take weeks, months.”

Looking across the kitchen at the open door to the dining room, Walt noticed Cliff Soames and another NSA agent talking with two deputies in the next room. “You started taking over the minute you got here, didn’t you? Before you even talked to me about it?”

“Yeah. We’re making sure your people understand that they must not talk of anything they’ve seen here tonight, not even to their own wives. We’re citing the appropriate federal laws to every man, ’cause we want to be sure they understand the fines and prison terms.”

“Threatening me with jail again?” Walt asked, but there was no humor in his voice, as there had been when they’d spoken days ago in the garage of St. Joseph’s Hospital after seeing Tracy Keeshan.

Lem was depressed not only by the deputy’s death but by the wedge that this case was driving between him and Walt. “I don’t want anyone in jail. That’s why I want to be sure they grasp the consequences—”

Scowling, Walt said, “Come with me.”

Lem followed him outside, to a patrol car in front of the house.

They sat in the front seat, Walt behind the steering wheel, with the doors closed. “Roll up the windows, so we’ll have total privacy.”

Lem protested that they’d suffocate in this heat without ventilation. But even in the dim light, he saw the purity and volatility of Walt’s anger, and he realized his position was that of a man standing in gasoline while holding a burning candle. He rolled up his window.

“Okay,” Walt said. “We’re alone. Not NSA District Director and Sheriff. Just old friends. Buddies. So tell me all about it.”

“Walt, damn it, I can’t.”

“Tell me now, and I’ll stay off the case. I won’t interfere.”

“You’ll stay off the case anyway. You have to.”

“Damned if I do,” Walt said angrily. “I can walk right down the road to those jackals.” The car faced out of Bordeaux Ridge, toward the sawhorses where reporters waited, and Walt pointed at them through the dusty windshield. “I can tell them that Banodyne Laboratories was working on some defense project that got out of hand, tell them that someone or something strange escaped from those labs in spite of the security, and now it’s loose, killing people.”

“You do that,” Lem said, “you wouldn’t just wind up in jail. You’d lose your job, ruin your whole career.”

“I don’t think so. In court I’d claim I had to choose between breaching the national security and betraying the trust of the people who elected me to office in this county. I’d claim that, in a time of crisis like this, I had to put local public safety above the concerns of the Defense bureaucrats in Washington. I’m confident just about any jury would vindicate me. I’d stay out of jail, and in the next election I’d win by even more votes than I got the last time.”

“Shit,” Lem said because he knew Walt was correct.

“If you tell me about it now, if you convince me that your people are better able to handle the situation than mine, then I’ll step out of your way. But if you won’t tell me, I’ll blow it wide open.”

“I’d be breaking my oath. I’d be putting my neck in the noose.”

“No one’ll ever know you told me.”

“Yeah? Well then, Walt, for Christ’s sake, why put me in such an awkward position just to satisfy your curiosity?”

Walt looked stung. “It’s not as petty as that, damn you. It’s not just curiosity.”

“Then what is it?”

Leaning his head back against the seat, Lem closed his eyes and sighed. Walt had to know
why
he was required to forswear vengeance for the killing of one of his own men. His sense of duty and honor would not allow him to back off without at least that much. His was not exactly an unreasonable position.

“Do I go down there, talk to the reporters?” Walt asked quietly.

Lem opened his eyes, wiped a hand across his damp face. The interior of the car was uncomfortably warm, muggy. He wanted to roll down his window. But now and then men walked past on their way in or out of the house, and he really could not risk anyone overhearing what he was going to tell Walt. “You were right to focus on Banodyne. For a few years they’ve been doing defense-related research.”

“Biological warfare?” Walt asked. “Using recombinant DNA to make nasty new viruses?”

“Maybe that, too,” Lem said. “But germ warfare doesn’t have anything to do with this case, and I’m only going to tell you about the research that’s related to our problems here.”

The windows were fogging. Walt started the car. There was no air conditioning, and the fog on the windows continued to spread, but even the vague, moist, warm breeze from the vents was welcome.

Lem said, “They were working on several research programs under the heading of the Francis Project. Named for Saint Francis of Assisi.”

Blinking in surprise, Walt said, “They’d name a warfare-related project after a saint?”

“It’s apt,” Lem assured him. “Saint Francis could talk to birds and animals. And at Banodyne, Dr. Davis Weatherby was in charge of a project aimed at making human-animal communication possible.”

“Learning the language of porpoises—that sort of thing?”

“No. The idea was to apply the very latest knowledge in genetic engineering to the creation of animals with a much higher order of intelligence, animals capable of nearly human-level thought, animals with whom we might be able to communicate.”

Walt stared at him in openmouthed disbelief.

Lem said, “There’ve been several scientific teams working on very different experiments under the umbrella label of the Francis Project, all of which have been funded for at least five years. For one thing, there were Davis Weatherby’s dogs . . .”

Dr. Weatherby had been working with the sperm and ova of golden retrievers, which he had chosen because the dogs had been bred with ever greater refinement for more than a hundred years. For one thing, this refinement meant that, in the purest of the breed, all diseases and afflictions of an inheritable nature had been pretty much excised from the animal’s genetic code, which insured Weatherby of healthy and bright subjects for his experiments. Then, if the experimental pups were born with abnormalities of any kind, Weatherby could more easily distinguish those mutations of a natural type from those that were an unintended side effect of his own sly tampering with the animal’s genetic heritage, and he would be able to learn from his own mistakes.

Over the years, seeking solely to increase the intelligence of the breed without causing a change in its physical appearance, Davis Weatherby had fertilized hundreds of genetically altered retriever ova
in vitro,
then had transferred the fertile eggs to the wombs of bitches who served as surrogate mothers. The bitches carried the test-tube pups to full term, and Weatherby studied these young dogs for indications of increased intelligence.

“There were a hell of a lot of failures,” Lem said. “Grotesque physical mutations that had to be destroyed. Stillborn pups. Pups that looked normal but were
less
intelligent than usual. Weatherby was doing cross-species engineering, after all, so you can figure that some pretty horrible possibilities were realized.”

Walt stared at the windshield, now entirely opaqued. Then he frowned at Lem. “Cross-species? What do you mean?”

“Well, you see, he was isolating those genetic determinants of intelligence in species that were brighter than the retriever—”

“Like apes? They’d be brighter than dogs, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah. Apes . . . and human beings.”

“Jesus,” Walt said.

Lem adjusted a dashboard vent to direct the flow of tepid air into his face. “Weatherby was inserting that foreign genetic material into the retriever’s genetic code, simultaneously editing out the dog’s own genes that limited its intelligence to that of a dog.”

Walt rebelled. “That’s not possible! This genetic material, as you call it, surely it can’t be passed from one species to another.”

“It happens in nature all the time,” Lem said. “Genetic material is transferred from one species to another, and the carrier is usually a virus. Let’s say a virus thrives in rhesus monkeys. While in the monkey, it acquires genetic material from the monkey’s cells. These acquired monkey genes become a part of the virus itself. Later, upon infecting a human host, that virus has the capability of leaving the monkey’s genetic material in its human host. Consider the AIDS virus, for instance. It’s believed AIDS was a disease carried by certain monkeys and by human beings for decades, though neither species was susceptible to it; I mean, we were strictly carriers—we never got sick from what we carried. But then, somehow, something happened in monkeys, a negative genetic change that made them not only carriers but
victims
of the AIDS virus. Monkeys began to die of the disease. Then, when the virus passed to humans, it brought with it this new genetic material specifying susceptibility to AIDS, so before long human beings were also capable of contracting the disease. That’s how it works in nature. It’s done even more efficiently in the lab.”

As creeping condensation fogged the side windows, Walt said, “So Weatherby really succeeded in breeding a dog with human intelligence?”

“It was a long, slow process, but gradually he made advancements. And a little over a year ago, the miracle pup was born.”

“Thinks like a human being?”

“Not
like
a human being, but maybe
as well as
.”

“Yet it looks like an ordinary dog?”

“That was what the Pentagon wanted. Which made Weatherby’s job a lot harder, I guess. Apparently, brain size has at least a little bit to do with intelligence, and Weatherby might have made his breakthrough a lot sooner if he’d been able to develop a retriever with a larger brain. But a larger brain would have meant a reconfigured and much larger skull, so the dog would have looked damned unusual.”

All the windows were fogged over now. Neither Walt nor Lem tried to clear the misted glass. Unable to see out of the car, confined to its humid and claustrophobic interior, they seemed to be cut off from the real world, adrift in time and space, a condition that was oddly conducive to the consideration of the wondrous and outrageous acts of creation that genetic engineering made possible.

Walt said, “The Pentagon wanted a dog that looked like a dog but could think like a man?
Why?
”

“Imagine the possibilities for espionage,” Lem said. “In times of war, dogs would have no trouble getting deep into enemy territory, scouting installations and troop strength. Intelligent dogs, with whom we could somehow communicate, would then return and tell us what they had seen and what they’d overheard the enemy talking about.”

“
Tell
us? Are you saying dogs could be made to talk, like canine versions of Francis the Mule or Mr. Ed? Shit, Lem, be serious!”

Lem sympathized with his friend’s difficulty in absorbing these astounding possibilities. Modern science was advancing so rapidly, with so many revolutionary discoveries to be explored every year, that to laymen there was going to be increasingly less difference between the application of that science and magic. Few nonscientists had any appreciation for how different the world of the next twenty years was going to be from the world of the present, as different as the 1980s were from the 1780s. Change was occurring at an incomprehensible rate, and when you got a glimpse of what might be coming—as Walt just had—it was both inspiring and daunting, exhilarating and scary.