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CH074

T
he self-proclaimed
environmental artist Mark Sanger, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica, looked up from his computer in astonishment as four men broke down the door and burst into his Berkeley apartment. The men were dressed head to foot in blue rubber hazmat suits, with big rubber helmets and big faceplates, rubber gloves, and boots, and they carried evil-looking rifles and big pistols.

He had hardly reacted to the shock when they were on him, grabbing him with their rubber hands and wrestling him away from the keyboard.

“Pigs! Fascists!” Sanger yelled, but suddenly it seemed like everybody was shouting and screaming in the room. “This is an outrage! Fascist pigs!” he shouted as they cuffed him, but he could see their faces behind the masks, and they were afraid. “Jesus, what do you think I’m doing here?” he said, and one of them answered, “We know what you’re doing, Mr. Sanger,” and spun him away.

“Hey! Hey!” They pulled him—roughly—down the steps from his apartment to the street. Sanger could only hope media would be waiting, cameras ready to film this outrage in broad daylight.

The press, however, was cordoned off across the street. They could hear Sanger as he shouted, and they were filming him, but their distance prevented the up-close, in-your-face confrontation he hoped for. In fact, Sanger suddenly realized how this scene must look through their lenses—policemen dressed in frightening hazmat suits escorting a
thirtyish bearded man in jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt, who struggled in their arms, cursing and shouting.

Sanger knew he must look like a madman. Like one of the Teds: Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, one of those guys. The cops would say that he had microbiology equipment in his apartment, that he had tools for genetic engineering, and he was making a plague, making a virus, making a disease—something horrible. A madman.

“Put me down,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I can walk. Let me walk.”

“All right, sir,” one of them said. They let him stand on his feet, and walk.

Sanger walked with as much dignity as he could muster, straightening his shoulders, shaking his long hair, as they led him to a waiting car. Of course it was an unmarked car. He should have expected that. Fucking FBI or CIA or whatever. Secret government organizations, the shadow government. Black helicopters. Unaccountable, the crypto Nazis among us.

Fuming, he wasn’t prepared to see Mrs. Malouf, the black lady who lived on the second floor of his building, standing outside with her two young kids. As he passed her, she leaned forward and started yelling at him. “You bastard! You risk my family! You risk my children’s lives! You Frankenstein! Frankenstein!”

Sanger was intensely aware of how that moment would play on the evening news. A black mother shouts at him, calls him Frankenstein. And the kids at her side were crying, frightened by everything that was happening around them.

Then the cops shoved Sanger into the unmarked car, with one rubber-gloved hand on his head, easing him into the backseat. And as the door slammed shut, he thought,
I am fucking screwed
.

Sitting in his jail cell,
watching the television in the hallway, trying to hear the commentary over the arguments of the other guys in the cell, trying to ignore the faint smell of vomit and the deep sense of despair that settled over him as he watched.

First there was footage of Sanger himself, hair long, dressed like a bum, walking between two guys in hazmat suits. He looked even worse than he had feared. The corporate flunky reading the news was mouthing all the buzzwords: Sanger was
unemployed
. He was an
uneducated
drifter. He was a
fanatic
and a
loner
who had
genetic engineering
materials in his
cramped, filthy apartment,
and he was considered
dangerous
because he fit the classic
bioterrorist profile.

Next, a bearded San Francisco lawyer from some environmental defense group said Sanger should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Sanger had caused irreparable harm to an endangered species, and had jeopardized the very existence of the species by his depredations.

Sanger frowned: what the hell was he talking about?

Next the TV showed a picture of a leatherback turtle and a map of Costa Rica. Now it seemed that authorities had been alerted to Sanger’s activities because he had visited Tortuguero, on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica, sometime before. And because he had made
serious threats to the environment
regarding leatherback turtles.

Sanger couldn’t follow this. He had never made any threats. He had wanted to help, that was all. And the fact was, once he got back to his apartment, he had been unable to carry out his plans. He bought stacks of genetics textbooks, but the whole thing was much too complicated. He opened the shortest of the texts and scanned some of the captions to graphics: “A plasmid harboring a normal LoxP has little chance of remaining integrated in a genome at a similar LoxP site since the Cre recombinase will eliminate the integrated DNA fragment…” “Lentiviral vectors injected into one-cell embryos or incubated with embryos from which zona pellucida was withdrawn were particularly…” “A more efficient way to replace a gene relies on the use of mutant ES cells devoid of the HPRT gene (hypoxanthine phosphoribosyl transferase). These cells cannot survive in the HAT medium, which contains hypoxanthine, aminopterine, and thymidine. The HPRT gene is introduced at the targeted site by a double homologous recombination…”

Sanger had stopped reading.

And now the TV screen showed turtles on the beach at night, glowing a weird purple color…and they thought that he had done that? The very idea was ridiculous. But a fascist state demanded blood for any transgression, real or imagined. Sanger could foresee himself thrown in jail for a crime he hadn’t committed—a crime that he didn’t even know
how
to commit.

CH075

S
till lost,
now driving through very hilly terrain, Stan Milgram squinted at the road sign emerging from the darkness ahead.
PALOMAR MOUNTAIN
37
MILES.
Where the hell was that? He had never realized California was so big. He had passed through a couple of towns a ways back, but at three in the morning everything was closed, including gas stations. And then he was once more in dark, empty countryside.

He should have brought a map.

Stan was exhausted, irritable, and he needed to pull over and sleep. But the damn bird would start shrieking as soon as he stopped the car.

Gerard had been silent for the last hour, but now, inexplicably, he began to make telephone dial tones. As if he were calling someone.

“Stop it, Gerard,” Stan said.

And the bird stopped. At least for a moment. Stan was able to drive in silence. But of course it didn’t last.

“I’m hungry,” Gerard said.

“You and me both.”

“You bring any chips?”

“The chips are gone.” They had eaten the last of them, back in the town of Earp. An hour ago? Two hours ago?

“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” Gerard said, humming.

“Don’t do it,” Stan warned.

“Nobody knows, ’cept Jesus…”

“Gerard…”

Silence.

It was like traveling with a child, Stan thought. The bird had all of the stubbornness and unexpectedness of a child. It was exhausting.

They passed train tracks, off to the right.

Gerard made chugging sounds, and a mournful whistle. “I ain’t seen the sunshine, since I don’t know when-nnn…”

Stan decided not to say anything. He gripped the wheel and drove through the night. Behind him, he could see a faint lightening of the sky. That meant he was driving west. And that was where he wanted to go. More or less.

And then in the tense silence, Gerard began again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, damen und herren, from what was once an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissues, may I now present a cultured, sophisticated, man about town! Hit it!”

“You’re pushing,” Stan said. “And I’m giving you a warning.”

“It’s my life—don’t you forget!” the bird sang, screaming at the top of its lungs. It seemed as if the whole car vibrated. Stan thought the windows might shatter.

He winced, gripped the wheel harder.

And then the screaming stopped.

“We’re so glad to see so many of you lovely people here tonight,” Gerard said, sounding like an announcer.

Stan shook his head. “Dear God.”

“Let’s be happy, happy happy, say the word now.

“Happy happy happy, try it somehow…”

“Stop,” Stan said.

Gerard went right on:

“Happy, happy, happy, happy, oh baby yes, happy, happy—”

“That’s it!” Stan yelled, pulling over to the side of the road. He got out of the car, slammed the driver’s door hard.

“You don’t scare me, buster,” Gerard said.

Stan swore and opened the back door.

Gerard was singing again: “I’ve got some news for you, and
you’ll soon find out it’s true, and you’ll have to eat your lunch all by yourself—”

“No problem,” Stan said, “because you are
out of here,
pal!” He grabbed the bird roughly—Gerard pecked at him viciously, but he didn’t care—and put Gerard down on the side of the road, in the dust.

“It looks as though you’re letting go, and if it’s real I don’t want to—”

“It’s real,” Stan snarled.

Gerard flapped his wings. “You can’t do this to me,” he said.

“Oh no? Watch me.” Stan walked back to the front of the car, opened the door.

“I want my perch,” Gerard said. “It’s the least you can—”

“Fuck your damn perch!”

“Don’t go away mad, it can’t be so bad, don’t go away…”

“Bye, bye, Gerard.” Stan slammed the door and shoved his foot down on the pedal, driving off fast, making sure he raised a big cloud of dust. He looked back, but couldn’t see the bird. He did, however, see all the bird shit in the backseat. Jeez, it would take days to clean all that up.

But now it was quiet.

Blessedly quiet.

Finally.

The adventures of Gerard were over.

Now that there was
silence in the car, his accumulated fatigue hit him. Stan began to doze off. He turned on the radio, rolled down the window, stuck his head out in the cold breeze. Nothing was helping. He realized he was going to fall asleep, and he had to pull off the road.

That bird had kept him awake. He felt a little bad, putting him out in the road that way. It was as good as killing him. A bird like that wouldn’t last long in the desert. Some rattler or coyote would make quick work of him. Had probably already done it. No reason to go back.

Stan pulled over to the side of the road, into a grove of pines. He turned the engine off and inhaled the scent of the trees. He fell instantly asleep.

Gerard walked
back and forth on the dusty ground for a while in the darkness. He wanted to get off the ground, and several times he tried jumping onto the scrubby sage bushes that surrounded him. But the sage didn’t support his weight, and he came crashing down again each time. Finally he half-hopped, half-flew into the air, coming down again on a juniper bush about three feet off the ground. Standing on that makeshift perch, he might have gone to sleep, except the temperature was extremely cold for a tropical bird. And he was kept awake by the yelping of a pack of animals in the desert.

The yelps were coming closer.

Gerard ruffled his feathers, a sign of unease. He looked in the direction of the sound. He saw several dark shapes moving through the desert brush. He caught the glint of green eyes.

He ruffled his feathers again.

And watched the pack come toward him.

CH076

T
he Robinson R44
helicopter descended in a cloud of dust, and Vasco Borden came out, crouched beneath the blades. He got into the waiting black Hummer. “Talk to me,” he said to Dolly, who was driving. She’d come down earlier, while Vasco went on that wild goose chase to Pebble Beach.

Dolly said, “She checked into the Best Western at seven-thirty tonight, went to Walston’s, where a security guy ID’d the car. She brushed him off with a story about an ex-husband, and he went for it.”

“When was that?”

“Little before eight. From there she went back to the motel, gave the kid at the desk a story about someone being in her room. While he was checking, she took his shotgun from under the counter and made off with it.”

“Did she?” Borden said. “The little lady has some balls.”

“Apparently she had tried to buy a gun in a drugstore, but ran into the ten-day wait.”

“And now?”

“We were tracking her cell phone, but she turned it off. Before that happened we got her heading east, toward Ortega Highway.”

“Into the desert,” Vasco said, nodding. “She’ll sleep in her car, and then continue on tomorrow morning.”

“We can download sat shots at eight a.m. That’s the fastest processing time.”

“She’ll be gone before eight in the morning,” Vasco said. He leaned
back in the Hummer. “She’ll go at dawn. So let’s see.” He paused, thinking. “All afternoon she’s been driving, and it’s basically south. The minute all this began, our lady went south.”

“You thinking Mexico?” Dolly said.

Vasco shook his head. “She doesn’t want to leave a record, and crossing the border will leave a record.”

“Maybe she’ll head east, try to cross at Brown Field or Calexico,” Dolly said.

“Maybe.” Vasco rubbed his beard thoughtfully. Too late, he felt the mascara coming off on his fingers. Damn, he had to remember that. “She’s scared. I think she’s heading for a place she thinks will give her help. Maybe meet her father down here. Or meet up with somebody she knows. An old boyfriend? School friend? Sorority sister? Former teacher? Former law partner? Something like that.”

“We’ve been checking all the net databases for the last two hours,” Dolly said. “And so far we’ve got nothing.”

“How about her old phone records?”

“No calls to San Diego area code.”

“How far back?”

“A year. That’s all that’s available without a special order.”

“So whoever this is, she hasn’t called ’em in a year.” Vasco sighed. “We’ll just have to wait for her.” He turned to Dolly. “Let’s go to that Best Western. I want to find out what kind of gun the little lady got. And we can get a couple of hours’ rest, before dawn. I’m sure we’ll get her by tomorrow. I got a feeling.” He tapped his chest. “And I’m never wrong.”

“Hon, you just got mascara on your nice shirt.”

“Ah hell.” He sighed.

“It’ll come out,” Dolly said. “I’ll get it out for you.”