Mutant (20 page)

Wednesday, May 24, 5:00 P.M.

“Mother of God,” Sullivan muttered once she unpacked the samples Racine had taken from the grounds of Agriterre Incorporated. They’d arrived from France in a large Styrofoam cooler by late afternoon the next day, just as he’d promised. Except when she’d laid them out in front of her, they covered the entire length of a twenty-foot workbench.

He’d followed her instructions precisely, providing her with individual packets of soil, roots, and, depending on the type of vegetation at a particular spot, blades of grass or stems and leaves. And they were all taken at varying intervals along or distances from the side of the building, also as she’d requested. But unlike her own clandestine visit to Agrenomics, his official unrestricted access to Agriterre had proffered over twelve hundred individual specimens to be tested.

“We’ll start with the ones from closest to the building,” Sullivan declared, speaking over her shoulder to Azrhan Doumani and the four technicians whom he’d selected to work on the project with them. “Any vectors present will consistently be found in the highest concentration there. The rest we’ll have to store for the moment. I’m afraid we’re facing a late night, so if anyone’s expecting you, better call home.”

They quickly sorted out who would do what, and began the routine that by now had become familiar. Some emptied small amounts of each sample into mortar vessels, giving them all a shot of liquid nitrogen. The white vapors flowed over their gloved hands as they proceeded to grind the frozen material with a pestle until it became a fine mash. Others subjected the subsequent powders to the chemical wash and spin in a centrifuge that separated out the chromosomes from the rest of the debris, leaving them floating on the surface like sludge on a bath. Doumani and Sullivan took on the task of si-phoning off these supernatants and giving their DNA contents the cut-and-paste treatment with an arsenal of restriction enzymes, ones designed to fragment the entire range of DNA vectors that had shown up in the worldwide study, not just those specific to the cauliflower mosaic virus. It meant additional work, since they would now be testing each specimen nearly a dozen times.

Within an hour they were plating the first fifty of these solutions onto thin strips of electrophoretic gels, readying them for the journey through a special electrical field that would spread out the subsequent bits of DNA strands according to size and molecular weight, a process that would take until morning. And they’d only dealt with five sets of cuttings out of the entire shipment.

“Eleven hundred and ninety-five to go,” she cracked to Doumani, flashing him a big grin as she switched on the electrophoresis equipment, a freestanding machine only slightly bigger than a photocopier that would hopefully unravel Pierre Gaston’s secret.

Her assistant simply gave her a wan smile and went on preparing a gel for the next specimen.

Odd, she thought, I’d have expected him to be as pumped up with excitement as I am. “Are you all right, Azrhan?”

“Of course, Dr. Sullivan, just tired is all,” he answered quickly, evading her gaze.

She didn’t believe him. He’d been acting distracted by something ever since her return from Honolulu, and “just tired is all” didn’t half explain the extent that puffy crescents of loose skin had been building under his eyes lately. She’d already spoken to him once about it—a few days ago when he’d botched a key step while helping one of her doctorate students with a research project. But she’d received only some vague explanation about his having family problems, along with multiple apologies and assurances it wouldn’t happen again. Better not, she thought, what with the load they had ahead of them. But the fatigued look of him left her worried.

Into the night they worked, repeating the steps for each packet. By eleven-thirty they’d exhausted their capacity to do electrophoresis, having filled their other five machines, and had barely made a dint in what remained to be done. “Do you think we could beg, borrow, or steal some more of these units?” Sullivan asked Doumani, tapping the beige surface of the one nearest her. “It’s obvious we’ll be doing little else than separating out DNA over the next few weeks.”

“I’ll phone around to other labs,” he replied, looking at his watch and yawning, “as soon as they’re open.”

“Then everyone else home for a sleep,” she ordered the technicians. “From now on we’ll work in shifts to optimize the use of the equipment we do have. I’m afraid I’ll need two of you back here in seven hours when the results from the first batch should be ready; evenings we’ll make from four till midnight. Work it out amongst yourselves about who does what. Azrhan, I think one of us should be here at all times to supervise and keep an eye on the equipment that’s running, so we’ll each pull a twelve-hour duty. Do you want days or nights?”

“Days would be better, because of my fiancée—”

“Fine!” she cut in, not exactly thrilled with leaving him alone, whatever shift he chose.

Once they’d all left the lab she returned to her office and unfolded the bed concealed in the couch. She wanted to be awake at seven, unwilling to have those all-important first results checked by Azrhan on his own, not in the state of mind he seemed to be in. She’d also have to brief her regular staff when they arrived about what regular projects they would suspend in order to make room for the Rodez work. But as exhausted as she felt, she couldn’t sleep. Rain peppered the tall glass panes that stretched above where she lay, and over the city lightning branched into molten roots as if trying to sink itself into the nearby buildings. Booms of encouragement followed each attempt, and during the intervals, every sound in the big old lab, from the clanking of pipes to the thumps and bumps of what she couldn’t identify, further assured she wouldn’t sleep. Instead she tossed and turned, thinking about the bizarre note Pierre Gaston had left for her, and whenever she closed her eyes, the ghostly image of Hacket’s face staring at her seconds before he’d had his neck snapped hovered in the darkness.

Did the samples in the next room hold a secret about the bird flu outbreak in Taiwan and Oahu? And did that secret relate to the man who had tried to murder Richard Steele? From a lineup of computer-generated likenesses showing acne-scarred men, she’d picked the composite of the man whose face she’d seen at Agrenomics without the slightest hesitation. Detective McKnight seemed to take her a little more seriously after that.

Restless, she kept getting up to check the electrophoresis equipment in the lab, impatient for the results despite knowing that nothing could hurry the fully automated process. The half dozen machines simply sat there, silent but for an occasional soft click, their operating lights and digital timers glowing red and green in the dark. The fact she couldn’t see anything external to mark their internal progress only heightened her frustration.

Finally, as dawn penciled a gray line across the horizon, she drifted off, and dreamed of being chased through fields of tall grass by hooded men in black who kept shouting at her in a harsh and alien language.

Over the next few days and nights they settled into the second stage of their monotonous task—harvesting suspected vectors from the pink areas of electrophoretic gels, giving them a wash with GENE CLEAN, then using the appropriate primers to link up with and replicate the specific excerpts of these fragments by which they could be identified. This step, which took but an hour in the PCR machine, often generated so many distinct pieces of DNA that it took a few days’ worth of electrophoresis to sort them all out.

But identify them they did, and the more data they gathered, the more depressed Sullivan became. Everything they discovered simply replicated the findings of the world study as far as the vectors were concerned. Over and over they kept turning up DNA sequences from the same dozen or so carriers, the cauliflower mosaic virus being the most frequent. Also prevalent were a variety of commonly used transposons, promoters, and enhancers meant to help integrate, replicate, and express whatever gene the vector carried once it arrived in its new host. It all seemed so ordinary she kept wondering, What could it be that Pierre Gaston had intended me to unmask?

They worked into the Memorial Day weekend, still appearing to get nowhere. The only bright spot in the tedium occurred when Richard Steele dropped over, albeit on crutches. He’d done the reading she’d given him, but wanted more. She offered him unlimited use of her onsite library, and felt pleased when, the following week, he started coming in regularly at the end of each day, soon only with the help of a cane, to talk over anything he hadn’t understood.

“Your passion for genetics is infectious,” he said during one of their sessions together. “You must be a great teacher.”

“It’s the power of the gene that’s the fascination,” she told him without hesitation, delighted by his compliment and eager to share her enthusiasm for the work she loved. “I don’t see how anyone can look on DNA and not experience the same awe that, say, Einstein and Bohr felt for the atom. Certainly the potential to manipulate that power for good or evil is just as great.”

An hour later McKnight phoned and quickly put an end to their pleasant interlude by delivering more discouraging news. “Agrenomics, it turns out, hires its own security guards individually,” said the detective. “They claimed to have fired the man with the acne weeks ago— Fred Smith is the name on his employee record. ‘Bad attitude,’ they gave as the reason. They’d originally hired him, they said, because he offered the services of his trained watchdogs as part of the deal, yet everyone else felt too scared of the animals to have them around. The personnel office gave us where he lived, and guess what? The guy moved leaving no forwarding address. In fact, apart from a driver’s license and birth certificate, there’s no record of the man. ‘Fred Smith’ is probably an alias.”

“What about Sydney Aimes?” she asked.

“I thought he’d blow a gasket, he got so mad when I paid him a visit in his offices. As soon as I mentioned that his comment to Dr. Steele could be taken as a threat, he summoned a half dozen lawyers into the room. After that, he wouldn’t tell me the way to the can without whispering with them for five minutes. But apart from infuriating the guy, I got nothing.”

By the end of the second week she’d grown convinced that whatever Pierre Gaston had wanted her to find that was
even deadlier
, it didn’t have anything to do with the makeup of vectors, which is what they’d been testing for all this time. It must be one of the genetic packages that they transport, she reasoned, referring to the gene or genes intended for a leap across the species barrier and insertion into a new organism.

If that was the case, she might as well try and find a particular grain of sand on a beach as guess which primers would fingerprint it for her. The possibilities of what it could be were that endless. And genetic mapping, the only process that can sequence the nucleic acids of a completely unknown strand of DNA, was out of the question. It involved costly, highly specialized equipment found at such a limited number of research centers and constantly in such high demand she’d not get access to one anytime soon, if ever. After all, she was on a fishing expedition, chasing she knew not what, the only evidence that it even existed being a five-month-old message from a dead man. Hardly the stuff to put on an application for a turn with a sequencer. Besides, even if she did have the means to map a gene, which sample would she start with? She didn’t know which vectors among the thousands they’d isolated contained the thing she was after.

She nevertheless dug out the gels showing the fragments of cauliflower mosaic virus and the other carrier microbes they’d already replicated and separated out into “fingerprint” patterns. Slipping them one by one through her microscope, she saw near the bottom of each a horizontal smudge of DNA. These were the intact chromosomes of the carrier along which the primers had lined up to set off the replication process. More lengthy, and therefore heavier than their parts, the strands had hardly budged during their exposure to the electrical field. Buried within them, she knew, would also be the genes that the vector had been assigned to carry. “The DNA I want is in there,” she muttered. “There must be a way to tease it out.” Yet as she stared through the microscope at this line on a gel, it taunted her, like a horizon she would never reach.

She sat struggling with the problem, scarcely noticing that most of her staff and Doumani had gone home. Getting nowhere, she eventually took another tack. Maybe Inspector Racine can help me, she thought. If he raided Agriterre and put the place under a microscope as he’d planned, he’ll likely have already seized their records. And if I can get a look at their scientific files, perhaps I’ll learn from them what sorts of genes they were transposing. At the same time I can ask him if he’s any more leads on who killed Pierre Gaston. After all, knowing that might shed some light on who attacked me in Hawaii, or the identity of the man who tried to kill Steele.

Would it be too late to call him now? Glancing at her watch she saw 7:15. Given the time difference, that made it 1:15 A.M. in France. She whipped off her request by e-mail instead.

Logging off the Internet, she went back to scrutinizing the gels they’d run so far. Twenty minutes later she remembered a promise to call Greg Stanton at seven o’clock. “Damn!” she muttered, reaching for the phone. Ever since their meeting ten days ago, he’d continued to insist on regular updates. Yet each time they spoke about the Rodez samples she seemed to raise more questions than provide answers, and she hadn’t much better news for him regarding the specimens taken from Hacket’s farm.

As she dialed, she flipped open the notes she’d scribbled during her many conversations with the Honolulu lab. The samples they’d analyzed so far had contained no evidence of DNA vectors whatsoever, and the last time she spoke with them, they informed her that their own research had started cutting into the electrophoresis time they could spare her.