Forty-Eight X (31 page)

“Used means tested,” Krantz answered. “And if the owner is alive, I know it worked.”

Sulli Key dialed 7700 into the Gulfstream’s transponder, the code for an aircraft emergency. Then he radioed a “Mayday.” The plane descended rapidly toward the airstrip on Diego Garcia. The runway lights that had been off, came on. At five thousand feet, the plane slowed to 180 knots and an aft door opened. The plane shuddered from the rush of air whipping through the cabin. Everyone was strapped into their seats except Krantz, who wore a parachute and had Maggie strapped tight to his torso like a kangaroo mother with child. Lockstep, they stepped out into the darkness. The Gulfstream continued on its final approach to DG with Sulli at the controls. He beamed proudly as he landed the jet “right on the numbers.” They had not yet coasted to a stop when they were surrounded by emergency vehicles and a half-dozen Humvees with soldiers brandishing automatic weapons.

Maggie and Krantz descended safely, dropping in near a utility road at the south end of the island. He decided to make their way along the beach toward the major infrastructure in the middle of the island. It was second nature for a military man to avoid roads. He need not have worried. BIOT security staff were busy interrogating a celebrity and his guests and did not suspect they had other interlopers on the island. It took the air force mechanics only an hour to determine that nothing was seriously wrong with the Gulfstream. But it was decided that rather than chance sending an international movie star off in a plane that could crash, they would make a more detailed inspection of the plane in the morning. Sulli Key and company, however, would not see Diego Garcia in daylight. An hour after landing, they were guests aboard an Air Force C-130 en route to Cape Town.

At seven a.m. with the rush of folks going to work, Maggie and Krantz simply walked off the beach and into the largest building they saw. They were wearing army fatiques and seemed to fit right in. Maggie was astounded at the research facility. It surpassed any university or private facility she had ever seen. The equipment was all state of the art. And researchers, rather than sharing a quarter-million-dollar microscope, each had their own. She recognized a few faces from conferences she had attended in the past. These were the top scientists in their fields—microbiology, genetics, embryology, electronmicroscopy. They gave her curious looks for a moment but then paid her no attention. And then she saw two people she knew quite well—Sarah Zito, her father’s old assistant from Stanford, and Professor Joshua Jaymes from Princeton.

In the first hour after Sulli Key’s jet landed, Security on Diego Garcia was kept busy questioning the passengers of the “distressed” aircraft. Within the second hour, they were unceremoniously put aboard the C-130 and transported off the island.

While Security didn’t expect anyone to be able to get on or off BIOT without their notice, they also wanted to keep track of every person—every living creature—on the island. No one wanted to misplace a great scientist or a living experimental product. Surveillance was accomplished by a drone airplane that circled DG at sixty-five thousand feet. The Aerovironment Global Observer was a high-altitude long endurance, or HALE, unmanned air vehicle. The airplane, with a wingspan as long as a football field, stayed up for a week at a time and traded missions with a twin aircraft to maintain constant real time and infrared views over the island. A ground computer counted those infrared signatures every hour. The official count of persons and animals on the island was 5,678. When Security got around to checking the computer analysis of the infrared signature, it indicated a population of 5,680. There were two creatures on the island that were not suppposed to be there.

Dr. Jaymes greeted Maggie Wagner warmly and was cordial to her Middle Eastern-accented companion. After all, she was the daughter of his mentor. But he also realized something was quite awry.

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“We just dropped in,” Krantz replied curtly. “And we have a lot of questions.”

“Of course.” Jaymes turned to whisper something to a younger colleague. Two calls had to be made right away.

Krantz’s first question: “Is an Egyptian woman, Fala al-Shohada, being held here?”

“Yes, but she is not a prisoner. She has free run of the island.”

It was at that moment that four armed security guards entered. They pointed automatic weapons at the couple.

“Are you armed?” the lieutenant in charge asked.

“We’re not,” Krantz was quick to reply and raise his hands. Security quickly patted him down looking for weapons.

“We went to a lot of trouble to get here,” Maggie countered and was less cooperative, pushing away the security guard who intended to search her.

“You’ve broken the law by coming here. This is a military installation.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

Maggie turned to Professor Jaymes. “I don’t believe my father was a murderer or a suicide.”

“We think he was murdered,” Krantz said, entering the verbal fray, “and I bet you know why.”

“I deserve an answer,” Maggie was yelling now, her voice cracking. “I deserve an answer.”

“Yes, you do.” The voice at the door was familiar. When Maggie turned, she was looking into the eyes of her father. Julius Wagner was still balding with that wild shock of hair at the back of his head—but he looked thinner, tanner, and more at ease than she had ever seen him in her life. He was wearing cargo shorts and a floral Hawaiian print shirt.

“Dad?”

“Flesh and blood.” Wagner embraced his daughter.

He could feel her trembling with emotion. “It’s all right,” he said, caressing his little girl’s hair. “It’s all right,” he said again, nodding toward Security for them to leave.

The lieutenant hesitated, but Dr. Wagner added a caveat. “Where are they going?”

“You’re not dead,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Honey, I do regret the charade. But it had to be done.”

“They found your body,” Maggie said, bewildered. “Shot and burnt.”

“I myself still have unanswered questions. I did check into that motel with a woman, just so that everyone could identify that I was there. I was told that the intelligence services of nine countries spent months looking for look-alike murder victims to fake my death. But I know I work for the military, and I do not bemuse myself of the fact that they can be vicious in their tactics.”

To change the topic, Wagner turned to Colonel Krantz. “You must be the private detective my daughter hired. You are very good.”

“I am and I’m not. My name is Joshua Krantz. I did help your daughter, but I had other motives. I have come looking for the woman your people abducted—Fala al-Shohada. Where is she?”

“Oh, you’re the Israeli spy.”

“I am not a spy. I am an archaeologist, formerly of Israeli intelligence.”

“Do the Israelis know about Lemuria?” Dr. Wagner queried.

“I think they know enough,” Krantz conceded. “And Fala?”

“She’s well,” Dr. Wagner replied. “And you can see her. But tell me, would the moon have been far enough away to keep this a secret? No matter. Maggie, come. Everyone, come. We’ll sit down and talk, and I’ll tell you about my little miracles.”

Dr. Wagner’s office was on the top floor of the six-story research center. Other than from atop the airfield’s control tower, his office had the best view on the island. A picture window overlooked a grove of palms, and beyond it McGraw’s tent encampment and the sea. The old man sat at his desk in a leather swivel chair feeding a newborn chimpanzee from a baby bottle like a doting grandfather.

“This is my latest miracle. Every day a dozen more are born. And every day we refine our capabilities at breeding. By manipulating their genetic core, we have freed them of many common diseases, fine-tuned their senses so that they have better night vision and improved hearing. With alterations in hearing, they have developed some human speech capabilities and with that, more temporal lobe brain activity.”

“You isolated and inserted the genes that create alpha-tectorin,” Maggie said, eyeing Krantz with an “I told you so” gaze.

“Exactly.” Dr. Wagner beamed like a proud father, pleased with his daughter who had chosen to follow in his footsteps. “And they have the capability of sensory substitution.”

Now Maggie was surprised. “Your animals have synesthesia?”

“Most, but not all. We haven’t been able to consistently merge the senses in every animal.”

“What’s synesthesia?” Krantz asked.

“They can see what they hear. Taste what they touch,” Julius Wagner clarified.

“What?”

“I’ll explain it to you later,” Maggie said, anxious to hear more about her father’s work.

“And we have enhanced all their own best attributes—more muscle strength per pound than natural-born chimps and far more than humans, a more sensitive olfactory sense, adaptable to greater temperature variations.”

Dr. Wagner smiled, pleased with himself. He held up his infant chimp, letting it grasp tightly and dangle from his index fingers.

“We once calculated that the chimpanzee was 98.4 percent genetically identical to us. This animal is more than 99 percent identical—”

“And why,” Maggie interrupted, “did all this require you to ruin your good name and put me through hell?”

“There are good reasons I didn’t tell you about my leaving. The Lemuria Project was named for a mythological place. When the plan was first brought to me, it seemed just as much a fantasy. But then a general, Maximillian Shell, convinced me it could be made to happen. The military decided they needed a new weapon for a world gone mad after 9/11. We all know that the American public has no tolerance for casualties seen up close on the nightly news. And yet we must still overcome the never-ending needle pricks of terrorists and the genocidal and suicidal beliefs of barbaric warlords and rogue nations. Maggie, they offered me unlimited funding and an unrestricted, unfettered research environment for whomever I could recruit. The knowledge we’ve gained here will benefit humanity immeasurably. We can cure AIDS, regenerate organs, splice neurons together to reverse the effects of strokes and let a paraplegic walk—”

“But that’s not what they hired you for?” Joshua Krantz interrupted.

“No,” her father conceded. “No.”

“What did they hire you for, Dad?”

“My job was to give them a division—ten thousand troops; in this case ten thousand non-human soldiers—chimpanzees especially bred and trained to fight America’s wars. Genetic research has always been about saving and bettering lives, Princess. I couldn’t say no. And to succeed, it all had to be kept secret.”

Maggie was unconvinced. “There are other ways to end wars besides making other creatures die for our insanity.”

“You always spoke your own mind, insisted on taking your own path. I knew you would not have approved, and that is why I didn’t let you in on it.”

“You shouldn’t have put me through this hell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If you told me, I would have understood.”

“Would you? I was chosen to bring this project to fruition. In the last year, I realized I couldn’t playact as a department head at Stanford and successfully direct the greatest scientific endeavor of my generation by commuting halfway around the world every week. And I couldn’t just disappear. People would ask questions. If they faked my murder, there would have been investigations. If it was a simple car accident, there would have still been reporters searching into my most recent work and questioning my most recent comings and goings. Just as you did. So, they conjured up my strange and shameful death. The lurid became more interesting than the truth, and I was quickly forgotten. Had I told you all about Lemuria, you may have wanted to come along or visit and that would have aroused more suspicion. Or, you would have vocally disapproved. And not even government threats would have kept you quiet. My God—and I didn’t have anything to do with it—but they drugged you, tried to take compromising pictures of you, and you still didn’t give up. And, Maggie, I really didn’t think you cared that much about me anymore.”

“Well, you didn’t win your Nobel Prize for affection. But you’re my father. I do love you.”

“There’s one other thing. You’ll find out eventually, and you would have disapproved of that, too, but—”

“What?”

“Well, the human DNA that I used to splice into chimp DNA came from many sources. Much of it came from the stored sperm cells of the greatest men of the last fifty years. It also came from my most elegant creation,” Julius Wagner said.

Tears welled up in his eyes as the director of the Lemuria Project set the infant chimp onto Maggie’s lap and handed her the baby’s bottle. She was uncomfortable for a moment but then took to cradling the infant and feeding it. Julius Wagner smiled like a—grandfather.

“I used your DNA, cord blood I saved when you were born.”

Maggie eyed the baby chimp more closely. “So what are you saying, Dad? We’re like sisters?”

Krantz instantly perceived the relationship differently. “More like mother and daughter.”