kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) (11 page)

“That’s what I thought at first, too. But you can think of sequencing—literally determining the sequence of the four letters—as decoding the living information system.”

“Decoding DNA,” Lance said.

“Right. Deciphering the information it contains.”

“But you said you don’t think the file is a sequencing algorithm?”

They reached the street their hotel was on and turned the corner, green mountains now visible in the distance.

“Quite the opposite, actually.”

Lance gave her a sidelong glance. “Not sure I follow you,” he said. “The opposite of decoding is encoding.”

“Bingo,” Kristen said, walking up their hotel driveway.

“DNA encoding?”

They entered the lobby and walked to the elevator. Kristen pushed the button for their floor. Around them people were talking about the
luau
they went to last night, or how fantastic the weather was.

“I’m pretty sure it’s a DNA encryption scheme,” Kristen said.

They got into the elevator.

“You’re saying it’s a way of encrypting DNA?” Lance asked, confused.

They reached their floor and exited the elevator, their fellow passengers giving them questioning looks.

“I’m saying it’s a way of encrypting data
within
DNA. Of using DNA not only to store information, but to do so in a secure fashion. Lance, I think that file we found today represents the cipher needed to decipher the DNA messages.”

“You mean biological information?” They walked down the hallway toward their room.

“No, Lance. I mean any information. Anything that can be encoded by one’s and zero’s. Did you know that a group of researchers in the pacific northwest once encoded the lyrics to the song “It's a Small World” into the DNA of a bacterial population?”

“I had no idea.”

“They did, and when the bacteria replicated, guess what?”

“The lyrics were still encoded in the new generation?”

“Exactly! And do you know who first made me aware of this research?”

“No.”

“Our father, Lance. Over five years ago.”

“So what’s the point of it?”

Kristen paused with her key in the lock, looking at Lance.

“The point is that it’s possible to essentially turn bacteria into data storage devices. That you can introduce messages into the DNA of living cells, like bacteria, and as they replicate, that
data
will be transferred from generation to generation—preserved for as long as the population survives.”

Lance’s good eye widened as he comprehended his sister’s explanation. “And so that flash-drive file does what?”

“It’s essentially a decryption key. It tells how to decipher what’s been encoded into the DNA.”

“And that’s what you think is on your laptop now?” Lance asked, incredulous. “A DNA encryption scheme worth killing over?”

“I guess so,” Kristen said pushing the door open. “It
is
a very forward-looking technology. Definitely something Dad would be involved in. I thought it was still in the early prototype stages, but it seems—”

Kristen cut herself off mid-sentence as her brain registered what her eyes were showing her.

Their room had been torn apart.

…ACGC
20
TTTA...

10:50 A.M.

Kristen and Lance walked down the hall to their room again, this time accompanied by the hotel manager and a small phalanx of security guards. Not wanting to enter the room for fear that whoever had trashed it could still be inside, they had requested assistance at the front desk.

The security guards went in first while the rest of them waited in the hall in a nervous huddle.

“Pardon me, sir,” the manager said, looking at Lance. “Your eye—you were in a fight? Here, in the hotel?”

Lance shook his head and told him the same mugging story he’d given Kristen and Dave earlier.

One of the security guards came back out.

“Nobody there,” he declared, reinserting a baton—the most serious weapon at his disposal—back into its holster.

The rest of them entered.

The room had been savagely turned inside out. Their clothes lay all over the beds and floor, some of the more elaborate articles having undergone a methodical shredding. Lance’s bags, too, had been emptied and not merely shredded, Kristen thought as she looked on in disbelief, but more like
deconstructed
. Liners had been separated, seams peeled back, surfaces sliced through with architectural precision. The contents were mostly inconsequential clothing and routine travel items and had clearly been rifled through.

“I’m terribly sorry. I pray you left your valuables in the hotel safe deposit box as we recommend?” the manager asked, nervously rubbing his hands together.

Kristen tugged at her backpack. “Fortunately, I had most of my important things out with me.”

“You have both of your room keys?” the manager inquired.

Kristen dug hers from her backpack. Lance pulled his from a pocket. A security guard indicated the sliding glass door leading out to the
lanai
.

“Glass cutter,” he said, pointing at the door. The group went closer. Indeed, there was a neat circular hole near the inside lock where the glass had been cut.

Realizing he would not be able to place even partial blame for the break-in on his guests, the manager became apologetic.

“I’ll see to it you are moved to a different room immediately. We are happy to provide you with a complimentary suite for the remainder of your stay.”

“What is going on, Lance? How could those guys in the boat possibly have found out where we’re staying—we’ve been here less than a day,” Kristen said as they stepped from the hotel lobby into the dazzling sunshine outside.

“Good question. Answer: who cares? Maybe we should go back home and let Agent Shores handle things. Meanwhile. let’s go make the police report in person, like the manager suggested.”

Kristen’s phone rang before she could reply. She answered. Dave’s voice sailed from the earpiece.

“Kristen, I just returned the boat. You guys okay?”

“Yes, we’re okay.” She relayed to him the ransacking of their room. She could hear Dave quickly relay the news to Tara.

“Jesus. Okay, listen. Agent Shores says she needs to stop by her office but she still wants to talk with you and Lance. How about I pick you up in my truck and we’ll go to my place to check out what’s on the laptop? All my roommates have laptops, I can probably find a cord that’ll work. Agent Shores will meet us there.”

11:33 A.M.

Kristen and Lance squeezed into the front seat of Dave’s pickup truck, Kristen sitting between the two men. A miniature
hula
girl bobbed and weaved atop the dash. Heading away from the beach as he drove them out of the gridlock of Waikiki and toward the mountains, Dave told them how Agent Shores took the flash-drive to be examined by FBI computer forensics experts. He asked Kristen what she thought the contents of the flash-drive file were. As she explained her DNA encryption theory, the road began to slope upward.

“This is Manoa,” Dave said, indicating a residential neighborhood on their left and a sprawling green lawn on the right. “That’s the University of Hawaii campus, there,” he said, pointing at grassy grounds punctuated by majestic palm trees. “If we kept driving up this road, in a few minutes we’d get to the beginning of the rain forest.”

But he turned off the road and slowed down as he entered a student neighborhood, pedestrians and young adults zipping about on scooters, bicycles and skateboards. He turned into the driveway of a compact one-story house and parked the truck.

The three of them got out and Dave led the way inside to an empty living room. It was all secondhand furniture, electronics and empty beer cans.

“Okay, make yourselves at home, guys. Roommates are either on campus for classes or out working.”

Kristen’s eyes lighted on a clutch of laptops charging on a coffee table. Dave followed her gaze. “Let’s try it,” he said.

Lance wandered past them into the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator. “Mind if I grab one of these beers?” he asked.

“Hair of the dog, eh? Go for it,” Dave said, bending down to examine the power adapters, looking for a match with Kristen’s laptop.

Kristen shook her head. “Really, Lance, don’t you think you had enough last night?”

Lance cracked a can of cheap light beer and looked at his sister. “I’ve been here less than one day and already I’ve been beaten up, shot at, had my wallet stolen and all my stuff destroyed. I need a frickin’ beer.” He proceeded to guzzle his beverage.

Kristen cast him a disapproving glance before handing Dave her laptop. He tried one of the cords, which didn’t fit, before finding a match with the second. “Yeah!” Kristen exclaimed as her machine tasted power once again.

She opened the screen. The mysterious file was still displayed there.

“That does look like something that has to do with DNA and some kind of computer program,” Dave said, squinting at the screen. “Could this be what Johnson was looking for?”

“What else could it be?” Kristen answered. “We didn’t find anything else down there, right?”

Dave nodded in agreement, eyes still on the densely packed characters. “Maybe there’s some info in the file properties, like a name or something,” he suggested.

Kristen raised an eyebrow. “Good idea. Let me check.” She brought up the file’s properties, hoping they might contain some clue as to the document’s origins.

But the properties section was blank.

They heard Lance crack another beer in the kitchen. Dave still appeared doubtful. “I still don’t see how this stuff is worth anything,” he said, tilting his head at the open laptop.

Kristen sighed, shaking her head at the sheaf of papers she had brought that told everything about what had happened to her father...right up to the moment where he disappeared. The activity of the last day began to weigh on her. Sleep was starting to sound good. She lifted her backpack from the floor to put the papers back in, and something fell from it onto the floor.

The collection bottle.

With the excitement of finding the flash-drive, she’d forgotten all about the sample she’d taken during their decompression stop.

She stared at the gray cylinder now laying beneath the laptop.

“Oh, hey, did you get a water sample?” Dave asked, seeing the collection bottle. He was glad to have something to focus on other than the cryptic characters on the screen. He’d been paid good money to take her diving; he wanted her to have something to show for it besides the questionable file.

“Kristen?”

The scientist had not answered him. She stared at the sample bottle, utterly transfixed. He watched her eyes flicker from the bottle to the laptop and back.

“What’s the matter?” Dave prompted.

Kristen picked up the cylinder. She ran a finger along the lid, suddenly interested in the integrity of the seal. She hefted the sampling tool, its weight telling her it contained seawater.

“Dave, can you tell me something?”

“Sure,” he said, perplexed.

“At the university, is there a bioinformatics lab—somewhere that does DNA sequencing?”

…TTCA
21
TTTG...

University of Hawaii campus

12:41 P.M.

While Dave kept Lance company drinking beers in the house, Kristen struck out in search of a laboratory that could perform DNA sequencing on the marine bacteria present within her sampling bottle. She had a DNA encryption key...where was its lock? Her father had been cataloguing marine bacterial DNA when he went missing. At the very least, she’d be carrying on some of his work, she thought.

At a young looking twenty-eight, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and carrying a backpack, Kristen was easily mistaken for a student as she consulted the campus map Dave had given her. The water sloshing around in the bottle she carried in the pack reminded her, however, that she had more pressing concerns than the typical collegiate responsibilities that once plagued her during her own student days.

She squinted into the sun at the name of a building. A young man removed his iPod earpieces to ask her if she was looking for something. She gave him the name of a hall, and he pointed the way.

She walked through an open archway to a bank of elevators, calling one and riding it to the fourth floor. She exited and walked down an open air hall, checking door numbers as she went. Finding the one that matched what she had on the map, she entered and walked up to a counter occupied by administrative staff. A sign on the wall behind them read,
Institute for Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics
.

“Student issues are handled by the departmental office, next door,” an Asian woman said, pointing with a pencil without looking up from her computer screen.

Kristen took being mistaken for a student as a compliment. She smiled and said, “Excuse me, my name is Doctor Kristen Archer. I’m a professor of marine microbiology at Cal State University. I’m here to see about having some DNA sequencing work done.”

The secretary looked up, surprised, but recovered quickly. Professors had no dress code, after all.

“Certainly. Have you placed an order already?”

Kristen said that she had not.

“You’ll need to fill out these forms,” she said, handing Kristen a thick stack of papers. Flipping through them, Kristen saw that some were release forms, requiring the person submitting the sample to be sequenced to affirm that the material was not a biological agent on a restricted list, such as microbes that could be weaponized.

Kristen had resigned herself to filling out the extensive paperwork when an elderly Japanese-American man stepped out of a rear office. He wore light slacks and a Hawaiian shirt with muted colors, typical business wear in the islands.

“Did I hear you say you were Kristen Archer? As in William Archer’s daughter, and respected scientist in her own right?” He smiled broadly at Kristen, who returned the smile.