Camouflage

—43—

They decided to set a trap for the alien.

“Rae wanted to get to the artifact, but was playing it cool. She asked me about getting around the security protocols so she could actually be in the same room with it; touch it.” Russell was doodling while he talked, drawing precise geometrical figures. He and Jack and Jan were outside Jack’s suite at Aggie Grey’s, talking quietly on the balcony. Jack had belatedly realized the spooks could have had his room bugged. It was less likely with the wrought-iron patio furniture, exposed to the elements.

“You told her you could arrange it?” Jan said.

“Put her off. I said security’d probably be relaxed soon, if the artifact stayed calm.”

“Leading her on,” Jack said.

“Maybe so. But I had no reason to think it was anything other than normal curiosity. Who wouldn’t want to go take a look at the thing?”

“Especially someone who’d come all this way to take a low- paying job, out of curiosity about it,” Jan said. “We tested her enthusiasm, remember, by having her pay her own way out for the interview.”

“Which we can do again, for the trap,” Jack said. “But maybe we should be more subtle.”

Russell nodded. “Whatever Rae is, she knows human nature well. She’s either going to be very careful or direct. She might just phone us and set up a meeting, one where she can control the conditions.”

“I wonder how old she is,” Jack said.

“Thirty-some.”

“Try thirty thousand. She can’t be killed—at least not by a point-blank shotgun blast, or by drowning—and she can masquerade as another person down to the fingerprints and retinas. Who was she before Rae Archer? Before that? She might go all the way back through human history and prehistory.

“She might have come to this planet even before humans evolved. Wandering around as a saber-toothed tiger. As a dinosaur before that.”

“No,” Jan said, “I don’t think she’s an alien at all. Just a different kind of human. They probably evolved alongside us and learned to keep their nature secret—or somewhat secret. There are legends about shape-changers and immortals.”

Jack rubbed his beard. “If so, there can’t be many of them. They’d just take over.”

“Maybe they have,” Russ said. “We ought to check every world leader for DNA.” He and Jan laughed nervously.

“The CIA is probably having this same conversation,” Jack said.

In fact, by the time Jack said this, every employee of the CIA had donated a few cheek cells to the agency, as had employees of NSA and Homeland Security. A “suggestion” had come down from the White House that all of the country’s leaders be tested.

Laboratories that did DNA testing were initially overwhelmed, but then their usual work was not just testing for the presence of DNA, but rather analyzing a sample to link it to a particular microorganism or person. This called for time-consuming processes like electrophoresis or mass spectrometry. But of course in those cases they already knew that a sample contained DNA; the question was pinning down its origin.

It turned out that a DNA/no DNA test was a lot simpler. You took the buccal swab and swirled it around in a test tube containing a solution that turns acid in the presence of even a microgram of DNA, then added a drop of phenol red. If it turned yellow, voila, the scraping was from a human cheek, or at least it came from something that had DNA of some description. It couldn’t discriminate between onion DNA and human, but in this case it didn’t matter. Samples of the “flesh” and “blood” in the arm that resided in a freezer in the Apia police station had been sent all over the world for analysis. The samples had the right proportions of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, and nitrogen to have come from the amino acids that make up human (or animal) protein, but their chemistry was not human. It was not even organic chemistry.

The thing it came from had not been alive, in the sense that a human is alive.

The tests proved that every member of the American intelligence community was human, at least in a nominal sense, and so were all prominent politicians, including the president, which surprised a few people.