Frameshift

Chapter 18

Nighttime. Two police officers, one black, one white. A blood-splattered sidewalk. A man named Chuck Hanratty dead, his body taken away by ambulance. Pierre chilled in the nighttime breeze, his shirt lying in a stiffening wad, soaked with blood.

“Look, it’s after midnight,” said the black cop to Molly, “and, frankly, your friend seems a bit out of it. Why don’t you let Officer Granatstein and me give you a lift? You can come by headquarters tomorrow to make a report.” He handed his card to her.

“Why,” said Pierre, slowly coming out of shock, “would a neo-Nazi want to attack me?”

The cop lifted his broad shoulders. “No big mystery. He was after your wallet and her purse.”

But Molly had read the man’s mind, and knew that this wasn’t a simple mugging — it was a deliberate, premeditated attempt on Pierre’s life. She gently grasped her husband’s hand and took him over to the police car.

Pierre and Molly lay in bed, Molly holding him tightly.

“Why,” said Pierre again, “would a neo-Nazi be after me?” He was still badly shaken. “Hell, why would anyone go to the trouble of trying to kill me? After all…” His voice trailed off, but Molly could read the already formulated English sentence: After all, I’ll probably be dead soon anyway.

Molly shook her head as much as her pillow would allow. “I don’t know why,” she said softly. “But he was after you. You in particular.”

“You’re sure?” asked Pierre, his voice betraying the faint hope that Molly was mistaken.

“As we passed him, Hanratty was thinking, About fucking time that frog showed up.”

Pierre stiffened slightly. “You can’t tell the cops that,” he said.

“Of course not.” She forced a small laugh. “They wouldn’t believe me anyway.” She paused. “But he’d been ordered to kill you, ordered by someone named Grozny — and he’d apparently already killed several other people for this Grozny, too.”

Pierre was still trying to digest it all. A man had died right in front of him. Yes, it had been self-defense, but one could nonetheless say that Pierre had indeed killed him. Pierre had come across the continent to the home of the free-love, antiwar movement, and he’d ended up with a human being’s blood spilling out onto his hands.

A knife slicing into the man’s body; Molly on his back, Pierre tripping him.

If only Hanratty had dropped the knife. If only…

Dead.

Dead.

He couldn’t shake the horror, couldn’t escape the pain.

Pierre would take the next day off work — something he had never done before except for his honeymoon.

“Maybe you should get some counseling,” Molly said. “Ingrid did a study of Desert Storm vets. She could recommend someone who handles post-traumatic stress.”

Pierre shook his head. They’d also tried to get him into counseling when he’d first discovered that he was at risk for Huntington’s. But counseling seemed a never-ending proposition. He didn’t have time for that.

“I’ll be all right,” he said, but the words sounded flat.

Molly nodded and continued to hold him tight.

Avi Meyer sat hunched over his metal government-issue desk at OSI headquarters in Washington. His window, the vertical blinds angled to block most of the sun, looked out over the gridlock of K Street. It was noon and already his chin felt rough as he supported it with his left hand.

Susan Tuttle, his assistant, came in. “Pasternak just faxed over a report — you might be interested.”

“What is it?”

“A neo-Nazi from San Francisco named Chuck Hanratty was killed two days ago.”

“How old was he?”

“Hanratty? Twenty-four—”

Avi waved an arm dismissively. “Not old enough to be a war criminal.

Except that it means there’s one less asshole in the world, why’d Pasternak think I’d care?”

“Hanratty was killed in a fight while trying to mug a French Canadian named Pierre Tardivel.”

Avi scowled. “Yes?”

“And this Tardivel worked at Lawrence Berkeley in the Human Genome Center there, so his boss is—”

Avi’s shaggy eyebrows lifted. “Burian Klimus.”

“Exactly.”

Avi stabbed the intercom button on his desk. “Pam?”

A woman’s voice. “Yes?”

“I need to get a flight to California…”

When Pierre had gone to Berkeley police headquarters to file his report, he’d asked the black man — Officer Munroe, his name turned out to be — for more information about Chuck Hanratty. Munroe really didn’t have much to add. Hanratty had lived, and was most frequently arrested, in San Francisco. After mulling it over for a day, Pierre decided to drive across the Oakland Bay Bridge and try his luck at SFPD headquarters.

It was raining. The bridge turned into the 101, and headquarters was just south of that at 850 Bryant, between Sixth and Seventh Streets.

Pierre furled up his umbrella, entered the building, and made his way down the short corridor that led to the desk sergeant, a burly white man with curly black hair atop a loaf-shaped head. He had a computer screen mounted at an angle beneath his desk, visible through a glass window on the desktop. He was reading something on it, but looked up when Pierre cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

Pierre wasn’t sure where to begin. “I was mugged a few nights ago.”

“Oh, yeah? You want to fill out a report?”

“No, no. I’ve already done that, over in Berkeley. I was just looking for more information. The guy who mugged me lived here, and, well, he died during the attempt. Fell on his own knife.”

“What’d you say your name was?”

“Tardivel. T-A-R-D-I-V-E-L.”

The sergeant typed on his keyboard. “Can I see some ID?”

Pierre opened his wallet and found his Quebec driver’s license. The sergeant looked at it, nodded, and turned back to his monitor. “Well, sir, I don’t know what kind of info you’re looking for. If he died in the attempt, it’s not like we’re still looking for suspects in the mugging.”

“I understand that,” said Pierre, nodding. “I was just interested in other cases this same guy was involved in.”

The sergeant eyed Pierre suspiciously. “Why?”

Pierre figured the truth was the simplest approach. “The officers over in Berkeley said Hanratty had been a member of a neo-Nazi group. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what such a person would have against me.”

“You Jewish?”

Pierre shook his head.

“But you are a foreigner. The skinheads aren’t keen on immigrants.”

“I suppose, but… well, I was wondering if I could see the file on him.”

The cop looked at Pierre for a time. “Hardly,” he said at last.

“But—”

“We’re not running a library here. Your case is closed. If your insurance company needs some paperwork to substantiate a claim, they can contact us or the Berkeley PD through normal channels. But otherwise, forget it.”

Pierre thought briefly about trying to push the point but realized it was hopeless. He laid a sarcastic ‘Merci beaucoup’ on the man and headed back to the lobby. It was still raining, so he stopped just inside the front doors to get his umbrella ready. As he was doing so, his eyes happened to glance over the building directory, made of little white plastic letters slid into a black board with slots in it, covered by glass.

Pierre’s eyebrows went up. He looked back. The sergeant had his head tilted down, reading. Pierre turned around, walked past him, and entered the elevator.

He got off on the third floor and found room 314. There was a sign on the door that said Forensics. Beneath it were two names in smaller letters:

H. Kawabata and J. Howells. He pushed the door open and stuck his head in. “Hello?”

A tall, fortyish Asian woman appeared from behind a room divider. She had frosted blond hair cut in a pageboy style, three rings on her right hand, a chain-link bracelet on her right wrist, a matching choker, and two small studs in her left ear. She wore a white lab coat, unbuttoned, over a pink pantsuit. Her lipstick matched the suit. “Can I help you?” she said in a rapid-fire voice.

Pierre didn’t like to make assumptions, but this one seemed a safe bet.

“Ms. Kawabata?” he said.

“That’s me.”

Pierre smiled and entered the room. “Forgive me. I was in the building on other business and I couldn’t resist stopping by. I know I should have made an appointment, but—”

The Asian woman’s voice hardened slightly. “All purchasing is done through the office on the fourth floor.”

Pierre shook his head. Maybe he needed to acquire better taste in sports jackets. “I’m not a salesman,” he said. “I’m a geneticist. I’m with the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Berkeley.”

She touched a hand to her lips. “Oh, I’m sorry! Come in, come in, Mr… ?”

“Tardivel. Dr. Pierre Tardivel.”

“I’m Helen,” said the woman, extending her hand. “I did my graduate work at UCB. Say, I hear you got that Nobel winner running things now, what’s his name…”

“Burian Klimus,” said Pierre.

Helen nodded. “The Klimus Technique, right — wonderful method; we’re starting to use it here. How is he to work for?”

Pierre decided to be honest. “He’s a bear. Fortunately, he’s spending a lot of time at the Institute of Human Origins these days; he’s gotten interested in Neanderthal DNA.”

Helen smiled. “I saw him on TV once — he looks old enough to have firsthand knowledge of that.”

Pierre laughed and looked around the room. Like just about every lab he’d ever been in, this one had some Far Side cartoons taped to the filing cabinets. “Nice equipment you’ve got here,” he said.

Helen looked at the centrifuges, microscopes, and other hardware, as if appraising them herself. “It does the trick. We don’t get to do nearly as much DNA work in-house as I’d like, but it’s quite exciting when I get to testify in court. We nailed a serial rapist last week. Doesn’t get much better than that.”

Pierre nodded. “I read about that case in the Chronicle.

Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“You know, I’m wondering if you can help me out. I— I was assaulted last week; that’s why I’m down here. I’m trying to find out why that particular person might have gone after me and, well…”

“And they told you to take a hike downstairs, right?”

Pierre smiled. “Exactly.”

“What do you want to know?”

“One of the officers who came to investigate said the guy who attacked me was a neo-Nazi, and he had a long record. I was wondering if there was any other info I could see about him.”

Helen frowned. “Are you really with the Human Genome Center?”

Pierre was about to reach for his wallet, but then decided against it.

Instead, he smiled. “Try me.”

Helen’s eyes twinkled. “Let’s see… What’s a riflip?”

“Restriction-fragment-length polymorphism,” said Pierre at once. “The variation from person to person in the sizes of DNA pieces snipped out by a specific restriction enzyme.”

Helen smiled. “I’d love a tour of your lab, Pierre.”

This time Pierre did pull out his wallet. He removed a business card — he’d gotten new ones the previous month, when the lab had changed its name from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — and handed it to her. “Anytime.”

She walked over to her desk and slipped the card into a little metal card box. She then moved over to her computer terminal. “What would you like to know?”

“The man who attacked me was named Chuck Hanratty. I’m still trying to figure out why he went after me in particular. It’s a bit unnerving, having somebody try to kill you.”

Helen tapped at the keyboard with two fingers. Her delicate eyebrows went up. “You offed him.”

“He fell on his own knife, actually. Does it really say I killed him?”

“No, no. Sorry. It says he was killed in a struggle with his intended victim. What do you want to know?”

“Anything at all. Anybody else he’d ever attacked, for instance.”

“I’ll print you out a copy of his rap sheet; just don’t ever tell anyone where you got it. And — that’s interesting. After he died, some of our people went over his rooming house. Guy lived in the Tenderloin — rough neighborhood. Anyway, among the things they found was a wallet containing credit cards belonging to a fellow named Bryan — that’s with a Y — Proctor. Cross-reference in the file says that Proctor was shot to death here in SF by an unknown intruder two days before the attack on you.

They found a gun at Hanratty’s place, too. Ballistics confirmed it was the murder weapon in the Proctor case.”

“Did this Proctor leave any family behind?”

Helen touched some more keys. “A wife.”

“Is there any way I could speak to her?”

Helen shrugged. “That’d be up to her.”

Chapter 19

“Pierre Tardivel?”

Pierre was bent over his lab countertop. He looked up. “Yes?”

A short man with a bulldog face and blue-gray stubble entered the room. “My name is Avi Meyer.” He snapped open an ID case, flashed a photo card. “I’m a federal agent, Department of Justice. I’d like to have a word with you.”

Pierre straightened up. “Ah — sure. Sure. Have a seat.” Pierre indicated a lab stool.

Avi continued to stand. “You’re not an American—”

“No, I’m—”

“From Canada, right?”

“Yes, I was born—”

“In Quebec.”

“Quebec, yes. Montreal. What’s this all—?”

“What brings you to the States?”

Pierre thought about saying “Air Canada,” but decided against it. “I’m on a postdoctoral fellowship.”

“You’re a geneticist?”

“Yes. Well, my Ph.D. is in molecular biology, but—”

“What is your association with the other geneticists here?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. They’re my colleagues; some are my friends—”

“Professor Sinclair — what’s your association with him?”

“With Toby? I like him well enough, but I hardly know him.”

“What about Donna Yamasaki?”

Pierre raised his eyebrows. “She’s nice, but her name—”

“Did you know her before coming to Berkeley?”

“Not at all.”

“You work under Burian Klimus.”

“Yes. I mean, there are several layers between him and me, but, sure, he’s the top person here.”

“When did you first meet him?”

“About three days after I started here.”

“You didn’t know him beforehand?”

“Well, his reputation, of course, but—”

“You’re not related to him, are you?”

“To Klimus? He’s Czech, isn’t he? No, I’m not—”

“Ukrainian, actually. You had no contact with him prior to coming to Berkeley?”

“None.”

“Do you belong to any of the same groups as any of the other geneticists here?”

“Most of us are in some of the same professional associations. Triple-A-S, stuff like that, but—”

“No. Outside your profession.”

“I don’t belong to any outside groups.”

“None?”

Pierre shook his head.

“You were attacked a short time ago.”

“Is that what this is about? Because—”

“Did you know—”

“—I gave the police a full report. It was self-defense.”

“—the man who attacked you?”

“Know him? Personally, you mean? No, I’d never seen him before in my life.”

“Then why did he attack you? You of all people?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“So you don’t think it was just a random attack?”

“The police certainly believe so, but…”

“But what?”

“Nothing, really. It just—”

“Do you have reason to think it wasn’t a random attack?”

“—seemed to me… what? No, no, not really. Just— no.”

“And you’d never seen the attacker around this lab before?”

“I’d never seen him anywhere before.”

“Never seen him with, say, Professor Klimus?”

“No.”

“Ever see him with Dr. Yamasaki? Dr. Sinclair?”

“No. Look, what’s this all about?”

“The man who attacked you belonged to a neo-Nazi organization.”

“The Millennial Reich, yes.”

“You know the group?” said Avi, eyes narrowing.

“No, no, no. But one of the police officers mentioned it.”

“You have any connection with the Millennial Reich?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“What are your politics, Mr. Tardivel?”

“NDP. What diff—”

“What the hell is ‘NDP’?”

“A Canadian democratic-socialist party. What possible difference—”

“Socialist? As in National Socialist?”

“No, no. The NDP is—”

“What do you feel about, say, immigration?”

“I am an immigrant. I came here less than a year ago.”

“Yes, and you’ve already killed an American citizen.”

“It was self-defense, damn it. Ask the police.”

“I’ve seen the report,” said Avi. “Why would a neo-Nazi want to attack you, Mr. Tardivel?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no connection to neo-Nazi organizations?”

“Certainly not.”

“There are a lot of anti-Semites among the Montreal French.”

Pierre sighed. “You’ve been reading too much Mordecai Richler; I’m not anti-Semitic.”

“What about the other geneticists here?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Do any of the geneticists here at Lawrence Berkeley — or down at the university — have connections that you know of to Nazi organizations?”

“Of course not. I mean, well—”

“Yes?”

“No, nothing.”

“Mr. Tardivel, your evasiveness is trying my patience. You’re not yet a citizen here; you wouldn’t want any special annotations in your immigration record. I could have you back in Canada faster than you can say Anne Murray.”

“Christ, I— look, the only guy who even comes close to being a Nazi is…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to get him in any trouble, but… well, Felix Sousa is a professor at UCB.”

“Sousa? Anyone else?”

“No. You know Sousa?”

Avi grimaced. “The whites-are-superior-to-blacks guy.”

Pierre nodded. “Tenured prof. Nothing they can do to shut him up. But if anybody’s a Nazi here, it’s him.”

Avi nodded. “All right, thank you. Don’t mention this conversation to anyone.”

“I still don’t know—”

But Avi Meyer was already out the door.

“Susan? It’s Avi. Yeah — yeah. What? Corrina, Corrina, with Whoopi Goldberg. Yeah, it was okay; better than the food anyway. Yes, I saw Tardivel this afternoon. He didn’t come out and say it, but I think he feels the attack was aimed right at him, which makes the connection even tighter. I’m going to spend tomorrow going over the files at the SFPD and the Alameda County sheriffs office on the Millennial Reich. No, I’m avoiding Klimus, at least for the time being. Don’t want to tip our hand…”

Chapter 20

“Since we’re going to have a baby,” said Molly, sitting on their living-room couch, “there’s something I want you to do.”

Pierre put down the remote control. “Oh?”

“I’ve never had anyone study my— my gift. But since we are going to have a child, I think maybe we should know some more about it. I don’t know if I want the child to be telepathic or not; part of me hopes it is, part of me hopes it isn’t. But if it does turn out to share my ability, I want to be able to warn him or her before it develops. I went through hell when it started happening to me when I turned thirteen — thought I was losing my mind.”

Pierre nodded. “I’ve certainly been curious about the science behind what you can do, but I didn’t want to pry.”

“And I love you for that. But we should know. There must be something different in my DNA. Can you find what it is?”

Pierre frowned. “It’s almost impossible to find the genetic cause of something with only one sample. If we knew of a large group of people who had your ability, we might be able to track down the gene responsible.

That’s how the Huntington’s gene was found, after all. They used blood samples from seventy-five families around the world that had Huntington’s sufferers. But with you being the world’s only known legitimate telepath, I don’t think there’s anything we can do in terms of looking for a gene.”

“Well,” said Molly, “if we can’t find it by working from the DNA up, what about reverse engineering? My guess is that there’s something chemically different in my brain — a neuro-transmitter, say, that no one else has, a chemical that perhaps allows me to use my brain’s neuronal wiring as a receiver. If we could isolate it and establish its amino-acid sequence, could you search my DNA for the code that specifies those amino acids?”

Pierre lifted his shoulders. “I suppose that might be possible, if it’s a protein-based neurotransmitter. But neither of us has the expertise to do that kind of work. We’d have to get someone else involved, to take the fluid samples and to separate out the neurotransmitters. And even then, it’s just a hunch that that’s the cause of your telepathy. Still,” he said, his voice taking on a faraway tone, “if we could identify the neurotransmitter, maybe someday they could synthesize it. Maybe all anyone needs to read minds is the right chemicals in the brain.”

But Molly was shaking her head. “I don’t mean to sound sexist,” she said, “but I’ve always suspected the only reason I’ve survived this long is because I’m a woman. I shudder to think what some testosterone-crazed male would do when he picked up offensive thoughts — probably kill everyone around him.” She brought her gaze back to meet Pierre’s. “No.

Maybe someday far in the future, humanity might be able to handle something like this. But not now; it’s not the right time.”

Pierre was setting up an electrophoresis gel when the phone in his lab rang for the third time that morning. He sighed, wheeled across the room on his chair, and picked up the handset. “Tardivel,” he snapped into the mouthpiece.

“Hi, Pierre. This is Jasmine Lucarelli, over in endocrinology.”

Pierre’s tone immediately warmed. “Oh, hi, Jasmine. Thanks so much for getting back to me.”

“Uh-huh. Listen — where did you say you got that fluid sample you sent over?”

Pierre hesitated slightly. “Ah, it was from a woman.”

“I’ve never quite seen anything like it. The specimen contained all the usual neurotransmitters — serotonin, acetylcholine, GABA, dopamine, and so on — but there was one protein in there I’d never seen before. Quite complex, too. I’m only assuming it’s a neurotransmitter because of its basic structure — choline is one of its chief constituents.”

“Have you worked out its full makeup?”

“Not personally,” said Dr. Lucarelli. “One of my grad students did it for me.”

“Can you send me a copy?”

“Sure. But I’d still like to know where this came from.”

Pierre exhaled. “It’s — it’s a prank, I think. A biochem student cobbled it together, trying to make a monkey out of his prof.”

“Shit,” said Lucarelli. “Kids today, eh?”

“Yeah. Anyway, thanks for looking at it. If you’d send me your notes on its chemical structure, I’d be grateful — I, ah, want to put a copy in the student’s file, in case he tries a stunt like this again.”

“Sure thing.”

“Thanks very much, Jasmine.”

“No problem.”

Pierre hung up the phone, his heart pounding.

Pierre had spent the last fourteen days studying the unusual neurotransmitter from Molly’s brain. Whether it was the key to her telepathy or just a by-product of it, he didn’t know. But the substance, despite its complexity, was just another protein, and like all proteins it was built up from amino acids. Pierre worked out the various sequences of DNA that could code for the creation of the most distinctive chain of aminos in the molecule. There were many possible combinations, because of codon synonyms, but he calculated them all. He then built up segments of RNA that would complement the various sequences of DNA he was searching for.

Pierre took a test tube full of Molly’s blood and used liquid nitrogen to freeze it to minus seventy degrees Celsius. That ruptured the cell membranes of the red corpuscles, but left the hardier white corpuscles intact. He then thawed the blood out, the ruptured reds dissolving into lightweight fragments.

Next, he spun the tube in a centrifuge at 1600 rpm. The millions of white corpuscles — the only large objects left in the blood sample now — were forced down to the end of the tube, forming a solid white pellet. He removed the pellet and soaked it for a couple of hours in a solution containing proteinase K, which digested the white corpuscles’ cell membranes and other proteins. He then introduced phenol and chloroform, which cleared away the protein debris in twenty minutes, then added ethanol, which over the next two hours precipitated out the delicate fibers of Molly’s purified DNA.

Pierre then worked on adding his special RNA segments to Molly’s DNA, and looked to see if they clamped on anywhere. It took over a hundred tries before he got lucky. It turned out that the sequence that coded for the production of the telepathy-related neurotransmitter was on the short arm of chromosome thirteen.

Pierre used his terminal to log on to GSDB — the Genome Sequence Database, which contained all the genetic sequences that had been mapped out by the hundreds of labs and universities worldwide working on decoding the human genome. He wanted to see what that part of chromosome thirteen looked like in normal people. Fortunately, the gene that occurred there had been sequenced in detail by the team at Leeds.

The normal value was CAT CAG GGT GTC CAT, but Molly’s specimen began TCA TCA GGG TGT CCA — completely different, which—

No.

No, not completely different. Just shifted one place to the right, one nucleotide — a T, in this case — having been accidentally added in the copying of Molly’s DNA.

A frameshift mutation. Add or remove one nucleotide, and every genetic word from that point on is altered. Molly’s TCA TCA GGG TGT

CCA coded for the amino acids serine, serine, glycine, cysteine, and proline, whereas the standard CAT CAG GGT GTC CAT coded for histidine, glutamine, glycine, valine, and arginine; both chains had glycine in the middle because GGG and GGT were synonyms.

Frameshifts usually garbled everything, turning the genetic code into gibberish. Many human embryos spontaneously abort very early on, before their mothers even know they’re pregnant; frameshifts were a likely reason for many of those failures. But this one—

A frameshift mutation that might cause telepathy.

Pierre sagged back in his chair, stunned.

Chapter 21

Although the ground had recently been broken for a dedicated genome facility to be built at LBNL, at the moment the Human Genome Center was shoehorned onto the third floor of building 74, which was part of the Life Sciences Division. Medical research was also done in this building, meaning they didn’t even have to go outside to find a small operating theater.

It was the Friday night of the Labor Day long weekend, the last holiday of the summer. Most everybody was out of town or at home enjoying the time off. Molly and Pierre met Burian Klimus, Dr. Gwendolyn Bacon, and her two assistants in Klimus’s office, and the six of them headed downstairs.

Pierre kept Klimus company outside as Molly lay on a table in the theater. Dr. Bacon — a gaunt, tanned woman of about fifty, with hair as white as snow — stood by as one of her assistants administered an intravenous sedative to Molly, and then Bacon herself inserted a long, hollow needle into Molly’s vagina. Monitoring her progress with ultrasound equipment, Bacon used suction to draw out sample material.

The hormones she’d been treating Molly with should have caused her to develop multiple oocytes to maturity this cycle, instead of the usual one.

The material was quickly transferred to a petri dish containing a growth medium, and Bacon’s other assistant checked it under a microscope to make sure it did indeed include eggs.

Finally, Molly got dressed, and Pierre and Klimus came into the theater.

“We got fifteen eggs,” Bacon said, with a slight Tennessee accent. “Good work, Molly!”

Molly nodded but then backed away from everyone in the room, rubbing her right temple a bit. Pierre recognized the signs: she clearly had a headache, and wanted to put some distance between herself and others to get some mental peace and quiet. The headache was no doubt brought about by the uncomfortable procedure and bright lights, and had probably been exacerbated by having had to listen to Dr. Bacon’s doubtlessly intense and clinical thoughts while performing the extraction.

“All right,” said Klimus from across the room. “Now, if you people will leave me alone, I’ll take care of… of the rest of the procedure.”

Pierre looked at the man. He seemed slightly… well, embarrassed was probably the right word. After all, the old guy was now about to whack off into a beaker. Pierre wondered for a moment what he was going to use to help him along. Playboy? Penthouse? Proceedings of the National Academy ? The semen could have been collected weeks before, but fresh sperm had a 90 percent chance of fertilizing the eggs, versus only 60 percent for the frozen variety.

“Don’t fertilize all the eggs,” said Dr. Bacon to Klimus. “Save half for later.” That was good advice. It was possible that Klimus’s sperm had low motility (not unusual in elderly men) and would fail to fertilize the eggs.

This way, if need be, some eggs would be in storage to try again later with a different donor, saving Molly from another round of needle aspiration.

Once Klimus’s sperm was added, the mixture would be placed in an incubator. Klimus would return tomorrow night at this time to check on what was happening: fertilization should take place pretty quickly in the dish, but it would be a day before it could be detected. He’d phone Pierre, Molly, and Dr. Bacon with the results, and assuming they did have fertilized eggs, they would all return the following night, Sunday evening, by which time the embryos would be at the four-cell stage, ready for implantation. Dr. Bacon would then insert four or five directly into Molly’s uterus through her cervical canal.

If none implanted, they’d try again later. If one or two did implant, a standard pregnancy test should reveal positive results in ten to fourteen days. If more than that implanted, well, Pierre had read about a procedure called “selective reduction” — another reason he hadn’t been keen on having his own sperm generate embryos for IVF. Selective reduction was done many weeks into the pregnancy by using ultrasound to target the most accessible fetuses, then injecting poison directly into their hearts.

“Well,” said Bacon, after scrubbing down and removing her gown, “I’m going home. Keep your fingers crossed.”

“Thank you so much,” said Molly, sitting on a chair across the room.

“Yes, thank you,” said Pierre. “We really appreciate it.”

“My pleasure,” said Bacon. She and her assistants left.

“You two should get going, as well,” said Klimus to Pierre and Molly.

“Go out to dinner; keep yourselves occupied. I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

The phone rang in Pierre and Molly’s living room at 8:52 the following evening. They looked at each other anxiously, not sure for half a second who should answer it.

Pierre nodded at Molly, and she dived for it, bringing the handset to her face. “Hello?” she said. “Yes? Really? Oh, that’s wonderful! That’s marvelous! Thank you, Burian. Thank you so much! Yes, yes, tomorrow.

We’ll be there at eight. Thanks a million! See you then.”

Pierre was already on his feet, his arms around his wife’s waist from behind. She put down the handset. “We’ve got seven fertilized eggs!” she said.

Pierre turned her around and kissed her passionately. Their tongues danced for a while, and his hands fondled her breasts. They collapsed back down on the couch, making wild, hot love, first licking and kissing each other, she taking him into her mouth, he lapping at her, and then, of course, the most important of all, driving his penis into her, pounding, pounding, as if to propel his own sperm through her blocked fallopian tubes, and at last exploding in orgasm, after which the two of them lay spent, cuddling together.

Pierre knew that for the rest of his life, he would think of that spectacular lovemaking session as the real moment his child had been conceived.

Craig Bullen came into the ultramodern office on the thirty-seventh floor of the Condor Health Insurance Tower in San Francisco. Sitting at his desk as he had every weekday for the past four decades was Abraham Danielson, the founder of the company. Bullen had mixed feelings about the old man. He was a crusty bastard, to be sure, but he had handpicked Bullen fifteen years ago, when Bullen had graduated from the Harvard Business School. “You’re the most rapacious kid I’ve seen in years,”

Danielson, who was old even back then, had said — and he’d meant it as a compliment. Danielson had brought Bullen up through the ranks, and now Bullen was CEO. Danielson still kept his hand in, though, and Bullen often turned to the old man for reality checks. But today Danielson’s ancient face was creased more than usual, a frown deepening his myriad wrinkles.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bullen.

Danielson gestured at the spreadsheet printout covering his desk.

“Projections for the next fiscal year,” he said in a gruff, dry voice. “We’ll still be doing fine in Oregon and Washington, but this new anti-genetic-discrimination law will be killing us here in Northern Cal. We got a raft of new policies this year from people we’d never have insured before, so that’s pushed the bottom line up a bit for the time being. But next year and in each subsequent year, many of those people will start showing overt symptoms, and begin filing claims.” He sighed, a rough, papery sound. “I thought that we were in the clear after Hillary Clinton fell flat on her face — the smug bitch — but if Oregon or Washington State adopt a California-style law, well, hell, we might as well close up shop and go home.”

Bullen shook his head slightly. He’d heard Danielson go on like this before, but it was getting worse as the years went by. “We’re lobbying like mad in Salem and Olympia,” Bullen said, trying to calm the old man. “And the HIAA is fighting hard in D.C. against any similar federal regulation.

The California law is an aberration, I’m sure.”

But Danielson shook his head. “Where’s that steely-eyed realism, Craig?

The days of profits in the health-insurance industry are numbered. Christ, if we could get the bottom line up enough, I’d sell my thirty-three percent and get the hell out.” Danielson sighed again, and looked up. “Was there something you wanted to see me about?”

“Yeah,” said Bullen, “and it’s apropos in a way, too. We got a letter from a geneticist at” — he consulted the sheet he was holding — “the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He objects to our clause that encourages terminating genetically flawed pregnancies.”

The old man gestured with a bony hand for the letter. Once he had it, he skimmed its text. “ ‘Bioethics,’ ” he said contemptuously. “And ‘the human side of the equation.’ ” He harrumphed. “At least he didn’t mention Brave New World.”

“Yes, he did. That’s what the bit about ‘Huxleyian nightmare’ refers to.”

“Tell him to go to hell,” said Danielson, passing the letter back to his protege. “Ivory-tower guy — doesn’t know the first thing about the real world.”

Pierre had had the copy of Chuck Hanratty’s rap sheet that Helen Kawabata had given him for eight weeks now. He’d been eager to talk to Bryan Proctor’s widow, but couldn’t bring himself to disturb her until a decent period had passed following her husband’s murder.

But now he regretted waiting — she seemed to have moved in the interim. He checked the address on the piece of fanfold paper again. No doubt about it: this dingy apartment building, a few blocks south of San Francisco’s Chinatown, was the place where Bryan Proctor had lived before Chuck Hanratty had shot him dead. But although there were twenty-one names on the buzzboard in the lobby, not one of them was Proctor. Pierre was about to give up and go home when he decided to try the superintendent. He pressed the button labeled super and waited.

“Yes?” said a female voice through a very staticky intercom.

“Hello. I’m looking for Mrs. Proctor.”

“Come on in. Suite one-oh-one.”

He heard a clunking going on inside the door, followed by an annoying buzz. It dawned on Pierre — of course! Bryan Proctor must have been the super; that’s why his buzzer wasn’t labeled by name.

He made his way through the lobby. It was a run-down building, with worn and stained carpeting. Suite — if it deserved that term — 101 was next to the single elevator. A large woman with one of those golf-ball chins fat people sometimes have was standing in the open doorway. She was wearing old jeans and a tattered white T-shirt. “Yes?” she said, by way of greeting. “The vacancy’s on the second floor. We need first and last months’ rent, plus references.”

Pierre had seen the sign for the two-bedroom apartment when he’d pulled up to the building. “I’m not here about the apartment. Forgive me for coming by without calling first, but you’ve got an unlisted number, and I… well, I don’t know where to begin. I’m terribly sorry about the loss of your husband.”

“Thank you,” she said guardedly, her eyes narrowing. “Did you know Bryan?”

“No, no, not at all.”

“Then if you’re trying to sell something, please leave me alone.”

Pierre shook his head in wonder; he must look like Willy Loman.

“No — no, it’s not that. It’s just that — well, see, I’m Pierre Tardivel.”

Her face was blank. “Yes?”

“I was the last person Chuck Hanratty attacked. I was there when he died.”

“You killed that bastard?”

“Umm, yes.”

She stood to one side. “Please, come in. Can I offer you a drink? Coffee?

Beer?”

She led the way into the living room. It had only two bookcases, one holding bowling trophies and the other mostly CDs. There was a paperback book splayed open facedown on the coffee table — a Harlequin romance. “A beer would be nice,” said Pierre.

“Have a seat on the couch and I’ll get it.” She disappeared for a few moments, and Pierre continued to look around. Copies of the National Enquirer and TV Guide sat atop a television set that looked about fifteen years old. There were no framed pictures, but there was a poster of the Grand Canyon held up with yellowing tape. There was no sign that the Proctors had any kids. Sympathy cards were lined up along the lid of an old record turntable.

Mrs. Proctor returned and handed Pierre a Budweiser can. He pulled the tab, took a swig, and winced. He’d never get used to this cow piss Americans called beer.

“It’s better this way,” said Mrs. Proctor, sitting in a chair. “Even if they’d caught Hanratty, he’d have been back on the streets in just a couple of years. My husband’s dead — but he wasn’t anyone important. They wouldn’t have given Hanratty the chair for that.”

Pierre said nothing for a time, then: “Hanratty attacked me — me in particular. It wasn’t just a random mugging.”

“Oh? The police told me—”

“No, he was after me. He, ah, he said so.”

Her piglike eyes went wide. “That a fact?”

“But I’d never met him before in my life. Heck, I’ve only been in California for a year now.”

“Color me surprised,” said the woman.

“Sorry?”

“You got one heck of an accent.”

“Oh, well, I’m from Montreal.”

“That up in Canada?”

“Yes.”

“One of our old tenants moved out, took a job in Vancouver. I wonder if you’d know him?”

Pierre smiled indulgently. “Ma’am, Canada is bigger than the United States. Vancouver’s a long way from where I lived.”

“Bigger than the States? Get out of here. States the biggest country on earth.”

Pierre rolled his eyes, but decided not to pursue the point. “Anyway,” he said, “since Hanratty went after me in particular, I was wondering if he also went specifically after your husband.”

“Can’t see why he would,” said the woman. “It was just a break-in, the police said. Guy didn’t expect my husband to be home. Probably figured, being super and all, that Bryan had a lot of power tools worth stealing. He did — but he kept them down in the boiler room, not here. Bryan apparently surprised the bastard, and he shot him.”

“I suppose. But what if he was after your husband, rather than his tools?”

“What on earth for?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m just wondering if he and I had anything in common. Hanratty was a member of a neo-Nazi group. It’s possible he didn’t like me because I’m a foreigner, for instance.”

“My Bryan was born right here in the good old U.S. of A. In Lincoln, Nebraska, to be exact.”

“What about his politics?”

“Republican — although sometimes he couldn’t bother getting off his duff to vote.”

“And his religion?”

“Presbyterian.”

“Did he go to university?”

“Bryan?” She laughed. “He’s an eighth-grade dropout.” She held up a hand. “Doesn’t mean he was stupid, mind you. He was a good man, and he could fix just about anything. But he didn’t have a lot of school.”

“And he was older than me, wasn’t he?”

“Depends. You as young as you look?”

“I’m thirty-three.”

“Well, my Bryan was forty-nine.” She grew a bit wistful at the mention of the age. “There’s nothing worse than dying young, is there?”

Pierre nodded. Nothing worse.

Pierre looked over the counter in the lab. Ever since he’d been a little boy, he’d hated cleaning up after himself. It just wasn’t nearly as much fun putting things away as it was taking them out. But it had to be done. He’d spread beakers and retort stands all across the countertop. And some of the labware had to be carefully washed; a molecular-biology lab was a perfect breeding ground for germs, after all.

He dismantled the retort stand and put it away in one of the cupboards.

He then picked up a beaker and took it over to the sink, rinsing it out under cold water, then placing it in a rack to dry. Next, he got his petri dishes and put them in a special bag for disposal. He returned to the table and reached out for a large flask, picked it up, and watched it fall from his trembling hand. Shards of glass went everywhere and the flask’s liquid contents made a yellowish splash across the tiled floor.

Pierre swore in French. Just tired, he told himself. Long day. Still a bit distracted from the meeting with Bryan Proctor’s widow. Need a good night’s sleep.

He went to get the broom and dustpan, and began sweeping up the broken glass.

Tired. Nothing more than that.

And yet—

God, would he have to go through this every time he dropped something? Every time he took a misstep? Every time he bumped into a wall?

Damn it — he — was — just — tired! Tired, that’s all.

Unless—

Unless it was fucking goddamn Huntington’s disease, at last rearing its monstrous head.

No. It was nothing.

Nothing.

He carried the dustpan over to the garbage pail and emptied it.

Tomorrow, everything would be fine.

Surely, it would be fine.

Chapter 22

Pierre and Molly stood in their bathroom early in the morning and looked at the test strip together. A blue plus sign blossomed into existence on its white surface.

“Oui?” said Pierre.

“Wow,” said Molly. “Wow.”

Pierre kissed his wife. “Congratulations.”

“We’re going to be parents,” said Molly dreamily.

Pierre stroked her hair. “I never thought this could happen. Not for me.”

“It’s going to be wonderful.”

“You’ll make a terrific mother.”

“And you’ll make a great daddy.”

Pierre smiled at the thought. “Do you want a boy or a girl?”

“You know, we probably could have asked Burian. He could have sorted his sperm, if we’d told him. There’s a difference between male-producing sperm and female-producing, isn’t there?” Pierre nodded. Molly paused, considering his question. “I don’t know. I suppose a girl, but that’s only because of my family life, I’m sure. My mother and sister and I were alone for a long time before Paul showed up. I’m not sure how I’d be with a little boy.”

“You’d do fine.”

“Do you have a preference?”

“Me? No, I guess not. I mean, I know that every man is supposed to want a son he can play catch with, but…” He trailed off, deciding not to complete the thought. “Maybe having a girl would be simpler,” he said.

Molly had missed, or was choosing to ignore, the undercurrent. “I really don’t care which it is,” she said at last, her voice still dreamy. “Just as long as it’s healthy.”

After a long day at the Human Genome Center, Joan Dawson was pleased to be approaching home. She was walking from the BART station; the walk was almost a mile, but she did it every night. At her age, she wasn’t up to any more-strenuous exercise, but she did spend all day at her secretarial desk, and diabetics had to be particular about their weight.

There was hardly anyone around; she lived in a quiet neighborhood.

When she and her husband had bought here in 1959, there had been lots of young families. The neighborhood had grown up with them, but although these had qualified as starter homes all those years ago, they were out of the reach of today’s young couples. Now this area was home mostly to elderly people — the lucky ones still husband and wife, but many of the others, like Joan, having lost their spouses over the years. Her Bud had passed on in 1987.

Joan came up the walk to the front of her house, opened the lid on the mailbox, scooped up the bills, smiled when she saw her copy of Ellery Queen’s had arrived, fumbled for her keys, and let herself in. She turned on the porch light, made her way up to her living room, and —

“Joan Dawson?”

Her heart practically shot out of her chest, it was beating so hard. She turned around. A young white man with a shaven head and tattoos of skulls on his forearms was looking at her with pale blue eyes.

Joan was still holding her purse. She thrust it at him. “Take it! Take it!

You can have my money.”

The man was wearing a black Megadeath T-shirt with a denim vest over it, jeans with artful slashes in them, and gray Adidas. He shook his head.

“It’s not your money I’m after.”

Joan started backing away, still holding the purse in front of her, but now as if it were a shield. “No,” she said. “No — there’s jewelry upstairs.

Lots of jewelry. You can have it all.”

The punk started walking toward her. “I don’t want your jewelry, either.”

Joan had backed into the glass-topped coffee table. She tumbled backward over it, and the glass cracked with a sound like a rifle going off.

She scrambled to her feet. Pain stabbed at her from her ankle; she’d wrenched it badly going down. “Please,” she said, whimpering now.

“Please, not that.”

The skinhead stopped approaching for a moment, a look of revulsion on his face. “Fuck, woman, don’t be disgusting. You’re old enough to be my grandmother.”

Joan felt a surge of hope fighting to the surface against all the terror.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She’d backed against the rough brick of the fireplace now.

The man pulled his vest open. He had a long single-edged hunting knife with a black handle in a sheath under his arm. He pulled out the weapon and amused himself for a second by sending a glint of light playing down Joan’s horrified face.

Joan fumbled for the fireplace poker, found it, raised it in front of her.

“Stay back!” she said. “What do you want?”

The man grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I want,” he said, “for you to be dead.”

Joan inhaled deeply, prelude to a scream, but before she could get it out, the man flipped the knife out of his hand, and it landed smack-dab in the middle of her chest, burying itself halfway to the hilt. She slumped to the tiled area just in front of the fireplace, her mouth still in the perfect O of the stillborn scream.

Pierre sat in front of his UNIX workstation. The monitor was on, but he wasn’t reading its display; rather, he was leafing through the Daily Californian, the UCB student newspaper. News about the campus football team; big debates about UCB’s elimination of racial quotas for students; a letter to the editor complaining about Felix Sousa.

Pierre’s mind wandered back to the last time he’d spoken to somebody about Sousa. He’d been talking to that strange bull-doglike fellow who had blustered into this very room over three months ago. Ari something. No, no — not Ari. Avi. Avi — Avi Meyer, that was it.

Pierre never had figured out what that had all been about. He closed the newspaper and turned to his computer, opening a window on the governmental telephone database CD-ROM, accessible through the LAN.

Avi Meyer had said he worked for the Department of Justice. The database didn’t contain individual agent listings, but Pierre did find a general-inquiry number in Washington. He highlighted the number, pressed the key for his telephone program, ticked the personal-call option in the dialogue box that popped up, and let his modem dial the call for him while he held his telephone handset to his ear.

“Justice,” said a female voice at the other end. All that was missing, thought Pierre, were Truth and the American Way.

“Hello,” he said. “Do you have someone there named Avi Meyer?”

Keyclicks. “Yes. He’s out of town right now, but I can put you through to his voice mail, or let you speak to a receptionist at OSI.”

“OSI?” said Pierre.

“The Office of Special Investigations,” said the voice.

“Oh, of course,” said Pierre. “Well, if you say he’s not in, I’ll just try again another time. Thanks.” He hung up, then clicked on his CompuServe icon and logged on to Magazine Database Plus, which had become one of Pierre’s favorite research tools since he’d discovered it a couple of months ago. It contained the full text of all the articles in over two hundred general-interest and specialty magazines — including such publications as

Science and Nature — going back as far as 1986. He typed in two search strings, “Special Investigations” and “OSI,” and selected whole-words-only, so that the latter wouldn’t result in a deluge of matches on “deposits” or “Bela Lugosi.”

The first hit was in an article from People magazine about Lee Majors.

In his 1970s TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, he’d worked for a fictitious government agency called the OSI. Pierre continued his search.

The second hit was right on target: an article in the New Republic from 1993. The highlighted sentence began: “Then there is the conduct of Demjanjuk’s major enemy in this country, the Office of Special Investigations, which set the wheels of injustice moving against him…”

Pierre read on, fascinated. The OSI was indeed part of the Department of Justice — a division founded in 1979, devoted to exposing Nazi war criminals and collaborators in the United States.

The case against this Demjanjuk fellow — a retired auto-worker from Cleveland, a simple man with just a fourth-grade education — had started out as the OSI’s first big success. Demjanjuk had been accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a guard at the Treblinka death camp. He’d been extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty in 1988, the second of two war-crimes trials ever held there. As in the first trial, that of Adolf Eichmann, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death.

But the OSI’s reputation was blackened when, on appeal, the Israeli supreme court overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk. In an inquest into the whole mess, U.S. federal judge Thomas Wiseman found that the OSI had failed to meet even “the bare minimum standards of professional conduct” in its proceedings against Demjanjuk, presuming him to be guilty and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

Pierre continued reading. The OSI had known that the real name of the man they’d wanted was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk. Now, yes, John Demjanjuk had listed his mother’s maiden name incorrectly as Marchenko on his application for refugee status, but he’d later claimed he’d simply forgotten her real name, and so had just filled in a common Ukrainian one.

Pierre skimmed other articles about the Demjanjuk affair, from Time, Maclean’s, the Economist, National Review, People, and elsewhere. He found part of Demjanjuk’s life story interesting because of the rocky marriage of his own parents, Elisabeth and Alain Tardivel. Demjanjuk had married a woman named Vera in a displaced-persons camp on September 1,1947. Nothing remarkable about that — except that when Vera and Demjanjuk had met, she was already married to another DP, Eugene Sakowski. Sakowski went to Belgium for three weeks, and, while he was gone, John Demjanjuk had taken up with Vera; when Sakowski returned, Vera divorced him and married John.

Pierre let his breath escape in a long sigh. Triangles were everywhere, it seemed. He wondered what his own life would have been like if his mother had ignored the church and divorced Alain Tardivel so that she could have married Pierre’s real father, Henry Spade. Things would have been so—

A sentence on the screen caught his eye: a description of Demjanjuk.

Magazine Database Plus contained text only — no photographs — but a picture nonetheless formed in Pierre’s mind: a Ukrainian, bald, sturdy, thick necked, with thin lips, almond eyes, and protruding ears.

Shit…

It couldn’t be.

It could not be.

The man had won a Nobel Prize, after all.

Yeah — and fucking Kurt Waldheim had ended up as United Nations secretary-general.

Bald, protruding ears. Ukrainian.

Demjanjuk had been identified based on those features. But Demjanjuk had not been Ivan the Terrible.

Meaning somebody else had been.

Someone the articles called Ivan Marchenko.

Somebody who might very well still be at large.

Burian Klimus was Ukrainian, and by his own recent statement had been bald since youth. He had large ears — not unusual for a man his age — but Pierre had never thought of them as protruding. Still, a little plastic surgery could have corrected that years ago.

And Avi Meyer was a Nazi hunter.

A Nazi hunter who had been sniffing around the Lawrence Berkeley Lab—

Meyer had asked about several geneticists, but he hadn’t really been interested in all of them. He’d consistently referred to Donna Yamashita as Donna Yamasaki, for instance — there’s no way he wouldn’t have known the correct name of someone he was actually investigating.

And, anyway, neither Yamashita nor Toby Sinclair — the other geneticist Meyer had asked about — was old enough to be a war criminal.

But Burian Klimus was.

Pierre shook his head.

God.

If he was right, if Meyer was right—

Then Molly was carrying within her the child of a monster.

Chapter 23

Pierre knew where to find any biology journal on campus, but he had no idea which of UCB’s libraries would have things like Time and National Review. He wanted to see the pictures of Demjanjuk, both as he appeared today and, more importantly, the old photos from which he’d been misidentified as Ivan. Joan Dawson seemed to know just about everything there was to know about the university; she’d doubtless know where he could find those magazines. Pierre left his lab and headed down to the HGC general office.

He stopped short on the threshold. Burian Klimus was in there, getting his mail out of the cubbyhole with his name on it just inside the door.

From the back, Pierre could see where Klimus’s ears joined his head.

There were white creases there. Were they scars? Or did every old person have creases like that?

“Good morning, sir,” said Pierre, coming into the office.

Klimus turned and looked at Pierre. The dark brown eyes, the thin lips — was this the face of evil? Could this be the man who had killed so many people?

“Tardivel,” Klimus said, by way of greeting.

Pierre found himself staring at the man. He shook his head slightly. “Is Joan in?”

“No.”

Pierre glanced at the clock above the door and frowned. Then a thought struck him. “By the way, sir, I ran into someone you might know a couple of months ago — a Mr. Meyer.”

“Jacob Meyer? That moneygrubbing little prick. He’s no friend of mine.”

Pierre was taken aback — that sure sounded like an anti-Semitic comment, precisely the kind a Nazi would make without thinking… unless, of course, this Jacob Meyer fellow really did happen to be a moneygrubbing little prick. “Uh, no, this fellow’s name was Avi Meyer.”

Klimus shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

Pierre blinked. “Guy about this high?” He held his hand at the height of his Adam’s apple. “Shaggy eyebrows? Looks like a bulldog?”

“No.”

Pierre frowned, then looked again at the clock. “Joan should have been in three hours ago.”

Klimus opened an envelope with his finger.

“Wouldn’t she have told you if she had an appointment?”

Klimus shrugged.

“She’s a diabetic. She lives alone.”

The old man was reading the letter he’d taken from the envelope. He made no reply.

“Do we have her number?” asked Pierre.

“Somewhere, I suppose,” said Klimus, “but I have no idea where.”

Pierre looked around for a phone book. He found one on the bottom shelf of a low-rise bookcase behind Joan’s desk and began flipping through it. “There’s no J. Dawson listed.”

“Maybe it is still under her late husband’s name,” said Klimus.

“Which was… ?”

Klimus waved the letter he was holding. “Bud, I think.”

“There’s no B. Dawson, either.”

Klimus’s old throat made a rough noise. “No one’s first name is really Bud.”

“A nickname, eh? What for?”

“William, usually.”

“There’s a W. P. Dawson on Delbert.”

Klimus made no reply. Pierre dialed the phone. An answering machine came on. “It’s a machine,” said Pierre, “but it’s Joan’s voice, and — Hello, Joan. This is Pierre Tardivel at LBNL. I’m just calling to see if you’re all right. It’s now almost one, and we’re just a bit worried about you. If you’re in, could you pick up the phone?” He waited for about thirty seconds, then hung up. Pierre chewed his lower lip. “Delbert. That’s not too far, is it?”

Klimus shook his head. “About five miles.” Pierre looked at the clock again. An elderly diabetic, living alone. If she was having an insulin reaction…

“I think I’m going to take a swing by her place.”

Klimus said nothing.

Pierre pulled up Joan’s driveway. Something amiss about the house, though: the porch light was still on, even though it was now well into the afternoon. He walked up to the front door. A morning paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, was still on the stoop. Pierre rang the doorbell and waited for a response, tapping his foot. Nothing. He tried again. Still no answer.

Pierre exhaled noisily, unsure what to do. He looked around. There were several large stones in the small flower bed in front of the house. He lifted each of them up, looking for a hidden key — but all he found was a large slate gray salamander, another thing about Berkeley he’d yet to get used to. He hefted the largest stone, thought about using it to break the frosted entryway window, but didn’t want to go to extremes…

He walked down the wide stretch of lawn between this house and the one adjacent to it, feeling enormously self-conscious. There was a picket fence, mostly covered with peeling white paint, between the front yard and the back. Part of the fence was a gate, and Pierre lifted the rusting catch, swung it open, and made his way into the backyard, most of which was given over to well-tended vegetable gardens. The rear part of the house had small windows and a sliding glass door overlooking the backyard.

Pierre moved up to the first window and pressed his face against the glass, boxing his eyes against the reflected sky with his hands. Nothing. Just a small wallpapered room with a TV and a corduroy-upholstered La-Z-Boy in it.

He tried the second window. The kitchen. Joan had every conceivable gadget: food processor, juicer, blenders, bread maker, two microwaves, and more.

He moved over to the glass door, moved his face up to it, and—

Jesus God—

Joan was on her side, facing him, eyes still open. A pool of dark crusted blood more than a meter in diameter had spilled out of her; its shape was irregular on the low-pile carpet, but had neatly filled the tiled area in front of the fireplace. Pierre felt his breakfast climbing his throat. He hurried back to his car, drove till he found a pay phone at a 7-Eleven, and dialed 9-1-1.

Pierre sat on Joan’s front stoop, arms supporting his chin, waiting. A

Berkeley police car pulled up at the curb. Pierre looked up, held a hand to his brow to shield his eyes, and squinted to make out the uniformed figures approaching against the glare of the afternoon sun: a beefy black man and a slim white woman.

“Mr. Tardivel, isn’t it?” said the black man, taking off a pair of sunglasses and putting them in the breast pocket of his jacket.

Pierre rose to his feet. “Officer—?”

“Munroe,” said the man. He nodded at his partner. “And Granatstein.”

“Of course,” said Pierre, nodding at each of them. “Hello.”

“Let’s see it,” said Munroe. Pierre led them down the path between this house and the adjacent one, through the gate, which he’d left open, and into the backyard. Munroe had his billy club out, in case he needed to use it to smash in a window, but when he got to the glass door, he saw the lock had been jimmied. “You haven’t been inside?” asked Munroe.

“No.”

Munroe entered and made a cursory examination of the body.

Granatstein, meanwhile, started looking around the yard for anything the assailant might have dropped during his escape. Munroe came back outside and took out a small notebook, bound with a wire spiral along its top. He flipped to a blank page. “What time did you arrive?”

“At thirteen-fifteen,” said Pierre. “I mean, at one-fifteen.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I look at my watch a lot.”

“And she was dead when you got here?”

“Of course—”

“You ever been out here before?”

“No.”

“Then what brought you here today?”

“She was late for work. I thought I’d check on her.”

“Why? What business is it of yours?”

“She’s a friend. And she’s a diabetic. I thought she might have been having an insulin reaction.”

“What were you doing around the back of the house?”

“Well, she didn’t answer the doorbell, so—”

“So you went snooping around?”

“Well, I—”

“The knife that did it is gone, but judging by the cut it made, it was very similar to the one that killed Chuck Hanratty.”

“Wait a minute—,” said Pierre.

“And you just happen to be at the scene of both killings.”

“Wait a goddamn minute—”

“I think you should come downtown with us, make another statement.”

“I didn’t do it. She was dead when I found her. Look at her; she’s been dead for hours.”

Munroe’s one long eyebrow knotted together in the middle. “How would you know that?”

“I’m a Ph.D. in molecular biology; I know how long it takes for blood to turn that dark.”

“All just coincidence, is that right?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“You say you worked together?”

“That’s right. At the Human Genome Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.”

“Someone tried to kill you, and now, four months later, someone does kill her. Is that it?”

“I guess.”

Munroe looked unconvinced. “You’ll have to hold tight until the coroner arrives; then we’ll head downtown.”

Pierre was sitting on a wooden chair in a small interrogation room at Berkeley police headquarters. The room smelled of sweat; Pierre could also smell Officer Munroe’s coffee. The lights overhead were fluorescents, and one of the tubes was strobing a bit, giving Pierre a headache.

The metal door had a small window in it. Pierre saw a flash of blond hair through it, then the door opened, and—

“Molly!”

“Pierre, I—”

“Hello, Mrs. Tardivel,” said Officer Munroe, moving between them.

“Thank you for coming down.” He nodded at the sergeant who had escorted Molly to the room.

It was a sign of how upset she was that Molly didn’t reflexively correct Munroe about her name. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Were you with your husband last night between five and seven?” The coroner’s initial analysis suggested that Joan Dawson’s death had occurred between those hours.

Molly was wearing an orange sweatshirt and blue jeans. “Yes,” she said.

“We’d gone out to dinner together.”

“Where?”

“Chez Panisse.”

Munroe’s eyebrow climbed his forehead at the mention of the expensive restaurant. “What was the occasion?”

“We’d just found out that we’re going to have a baby. Look, what’s—”

“And you were there from five o’clock on?”

“Yes. We had to go that early to get in without a reservation. Dozens of people saw us there.”

Munroe pursed his lips, thinking. “All right, all right. Let me make a phone call.” He stepped out of the room. Molly surged toward Pierre, hugging him. “What the hell’s going on?” she said.

“I went by Joan Dawson’s house this morning. She’d been murdered—”

“Murdered!” Molly’s eyes were wide.

Pierre nodded.

“Murdered…” repeated Molly, as if the word were as foreign as the occasional French phrases that passed Pierre’s lips. “And they suspect you? That’s crazy.”

“I know, but…” Pierre shrugged.

“What were you doing at Joan’s place, anyway?”

He told her the story.

“God, that’s horrible,” said Molly. “She was—”

Just then, Munroe reentered the room. “Okay,” he said. “Good thing you got that accent, Mr. Tardivel. Everybody at Chez Panisse remembered you. You’re free to go, but…”

Pierre made an exasperated sound. “But what? If I’m free—”

Munroe held up his beefy hand. “No, no. You’re cleared. But, well, I was going to say watch your back. Maybe it is all coincidence, but…”

Pierre nodded grimly. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Molly and Pierre left the station; Molly had taken a taxi over. They got into Pierre’s Toyota, which was stiflingly hot, having sat for two hours now in direct sunlight in the police parking lot. As they drove back to the university, Pierre asked her which of the campus’s libraries might have People or Time.

“Doe, probably — on the fourth floor. Why?”

“You’ll see.”

They headed there. Pierre refused to tell Molly what he was looking for, and he was careful to keep thinking in French, lest she pluck it from his mind. A librarian got the back issues Pierre wanted. He quickly leafed through them, nodded at what he found, then spread a copy of People out on a worktable and took some pieces of paper — flyers about the library’s overdue-fines policy — and used them to mask everything except a small photograph: a 1942 picture of John Demjanjuk.

“All right,” said Pierre, pointing at the table. “Go have a look at that photo and tell me if you recognize the person in it.”

Molly leaned in and stared at the photo. “I don’t—”

“It’s an old photo, from 1942. Is it anyone you know?”

“That’s a long time ago, and— oh, I see. Sure, it’s Burian Klimus, isn’t it?

Gee, he must have had his ears fixed.”

Pierre sighed. “Let’s go for a walk. There’s something we have to talk about.”

“Shouldn’t you go tell them at the lab about Joan’s murder?”

“Later. This can’t wait.”

“That photo wasn’t of Burian Klimus,” said Pierre as they walked out of Doe Library and headed south. It was a beautiful early autumn afternoon, the sun sliding down toward the horizon. “It’s of a man called John Demjanjuk.”

They passed by a group of students heading the other way. “That name’s vaguely familiar,” said Molly.

Pierre nodded. “He’s been in the news a fair bit over the years. The Israelis tried him for being Ivan the Terrible, the gas chamber operator at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.”

“Right, right. But he was innocent, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right. It was a case of mistaken identity. Someone else who looked a lot like Demjanjuk was the real Ivan the Terrible. And he’s still at large.”

“Oh,” said Molly. And then, “Oh.”

“Exactly: Burian Klimus looks like Demjanjuk — at least somewhat.”

“Still, that’s hardly reason enough to suspect him of being a war criminal.”

Pierre looked up. An airplane contrail had split the cloudless sky into two equal halves. “Remember I told you a federal agent came to see me after Chuck Hanratty attacked me? Well, I found out today that he’s with the part of the Department of Justice that’s devoted to tracking down Nazis.”

“I find it hard to believe that a man who won a Nobel Prize could be that evil.”

“Well, Klimus didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, after all. Anyway, the man who operated the gas chambers — Ivan Marchenko — he’d been a prisoner of war himself before volunteering for service to the Nazis. Who knows what he did before or after the war? Who knows what level of education he had?”

“But a Nobel laureate—”

“You know who William Shockley was?” asked Pierre.

“Umm, the inventeur of the transistor?”

Pierre smiled. “You’re cheating.”

Molly blushed a little.

“But, anyway, yeah, Shockley invented the transistor, and he won a Nobel Prize for that in 1956. He was also a raving, out-and-out racist. He claimed that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and that the only smart blacks were smart because they had some white blood in them. He advocated sterilization of the poor, as well as anyone with a below-average IQ. Believe me, I’ve read enough biographies of Nobel laureates to know that not all of them were good people.”

“But even if Burian is this Ivan Marchenko—”

“If he’s Marchenko, then, well—” He looked down at Molly’s stomach.

“Then the baby is Marchenko’s, too.”

“Oh, shit — I hadn’t even thought about that.” She lowered her eyes. “I keep thinking of it as your baby…”

Pierre smiled. “Me, too. But, well, if it is the child of Ivan the Terrible, then… then maybe we don’t want to continue with the pregnancy.”

They’d come to the plaza just inside Sather Gate. Pierre motioned for them to rest on one of the benches placed against the low retaining wall.

Molly sat down, and Pierre sat next to her, placing an arm over her shoulders.

She looked at him. “I know we’ve only known for sure that I’m pregnant for a day, but, well, I’ve felt pregnant ever since the implantation was done. And I’ve wanted this so long…”

Pierre stroked her arm. “We could try again. Go to a regular clinic.”

Molly closed her eyes. “It’s so much money. And we were so lucky to get an implantation on the first attempt this time.”

“But if it is Marchenko’s child…”

Molly looked around the plaza. People were walking in all directions.

Some pigeons were waddling by a few feet away from them. She turned back to Pierre. “You know I love you, Pierre, and I admire the work you do is a geneticist. And I know geneticists believe in ‘like father, like son.’ But, well, you know my speciality: behavioral psychology, just like good old B.

F. Skinner taught. I honestly believe it doesn’t matter who the biological parents are, so long as the child is brought up by a caring mother and a loving father.”

Pierre thought about this. They’d argued nature-versus-nurture once or twice before on their long evening walks, but he’d never expected it to be anything more than an academic debate. But now…

“You could find out for sure,” said Pierre. “You could read Klimus’s mind.”

Molly shrugged. “I’ll try, but you know I can’t dig into his mind. He has to be thinking — in English, in articulated thoughts — directly about the topic. That’s all I can read, remember. We can try to maneuver the conversation in such a way that his thoughts might turn to his Nazi past, but unless he actually formulates a sentence on that topic, I won’t be able to read it.” She took Pierre’s hand and placed it on her flat stomach. “But, regardless, even if he is a monster, the child in here is ours.”

It was late afternoon on the West Coast, and therefore early evening in Washington. Pierre struggled through the DOJ voice-mail system to get to the appropriate mailbox: “This is Agent Avi Meyer. I’m in Lexington, Kentucky, until Monday, October eighth, but am checking my voice mail frequently. Please leave a message at the tone.”

Beep!

“Mr. Meyer, this is Dr. Pierre Tardivel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — remember me? Look, one of our staff members was killed last night. I need to talk to you. Call me either here or at home. The number here is…”

Chapter 24

Joan Dawson’s funeral was held two days later in an Episcopalian church. Pierre and Molly both attended. While waiting for the service to begin, Pierre found himself fighting back tears; Joan had been so kind, so friendly, so helpful…

Burian Klimus arrived. It seemed wrong to take advantage of such a solemn occasion, but opportunities for Molly to actually see Klimus were few and far between. When the old man sat down in a pew at the back, Molly and Pierre got up and moved over to sit next to him, Molly right beside him.

“It’s such a shame,” said Molly, in a low voice.

Klimus nodded.

“Still,” said Molly, “what a lifetime to have lived through. Somebody said Joan had been born in 1929. I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been for a ten-year-old girl to see the world go to war.”

“It was no easier for a twenty-eight-year-old man,” said Klimus dryly.

“I’m sorry,” said Molly. “Where were you during the war?”

“The Ukraine, mostly.” And Poland.

“Spend any time in Poland?” said Molly. Klimus looked at her. “My, ah, father’s family was there.”

“Yes, for a short time.”

“There was a camp there — Treblinka.”

“There were several camps,” said Klimus.

“Terrible places,” said Molly. She tried a different tack. ‘“Burian’ — is that the Ukrainian equivalent of ‘John? Every language seems to have its own version of John: ’Jean‘ in French, ’Ivan‘ in Russian.”

“No, it’s not. In Ukrainian, ‘John’ is also ‘Ivan.’” He looked embarrassed for a moment. “‘Burian’ actually means ‘dwells near the weeds.’”

“Oh. Still, I love Ukrainian names. They’re so musical. Klimus, Marcynuk, Toronchuk, Mymryk… Marchenko.”

Ivan Marchenko, thought Klimus, the names falling together naturally in his mind. “Yes, I suppose they are,” he said.

“The war must have been terrible, and—”

“I don’t like to think of it,” Klimus said, “and — oh, excuse me. There’s Dean Cowles; I should really say hello.” Klimus rose and walked away from them.

As Pierre drove himself and Molly to the cemetery, he turned to look at his wife. “Well? Any luck?”

Molly shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. He certainly didn’t think anything along the lines of, Gee, my secret identity is Ivan the Terrible and I killed hundreds of thousands of people. Of course, that’s not surprising — most people who have done terrible things in their pasts have built up psychological defense mechanisms to keep the memories from coming to mind. Still, he does know the name ‘Ivan Marchenko’ — he put those two names together at once in his head.”

Pierre frowned. “Well, I’m seeing Avi Meyer this afternoon. Maybe he’ll have concrete answers about Klimus’s past.”

Avi Meyer flew directly to San Francisco from Kentucky, where he’d been investigating some octogenarian KKK members. He and Pierre had arranged to meet privately at Skates, on Berkeley’s Seawall Drive at the Marina. The restaurant jutted out over the Bay, supported by pillars that didn’t seem nearly strong enough to hold it up. Seagulls perched on the edge of its gently sloping roof, trying to hold on in a rising wind. It was midafternoon, with a leaden sky. They got a table by one of the huge windows, looking out across the water to San Francisco.

“All right, Agent Meyer,” said Pierre as soon as he sat down, “I know you’re some kind of Nazi hunter. I also know that I was attacked, and my friend Joan Dawson is dead. Tell me the connection — tell me why you are poking around LBNL.”

Avi sipped his coffee. He looked past the hanging plants and out the window. An aircraft carrier was moving along the Bay, heading for Alameda. “We routinely monitor university and corporate genetics labs.”

Pierre tilted his head. “What?”

“We also keep an eye on physics departments, political science, and several other areas.”

“What on earth for?”

“They’re natural places for Nazis to end up. I don’t need to tell you that there’s always been a whiff of controversy about genetics research.

Creating a master race, discrimination based on genetic makeup—”

“Oh, come on!”

“You yourself mentioned Felix Sousa—”

“He’s not part of HGC; he’s just a biochem prof at the university, and besides—”

“—and there’s Philippe Rushton, up in your native Canada, giving a whole new meaning to ‘Great White North’—”

“Rushton and Sousa are too young to be Nazis.”

“The universities are lousy with people hiding from one thing or another; in Canada, half your profs are Vietnam draft dodgers.”

“So’s your president, for Pete’s sake.”

Avi shrugged. “You ever see The Stranger ? Orson Welles film? It’s about a Nazi who takes a job as an American college professor. I can name over one hundred actual cases of the same thing.”

“Which is why you think Burian Klimus is Ivan Marchenko.”

Avi’s small mouth dropped open. “You’re good,” he said at last.

“I need to know if it’s true.”

“Why should you care? I’ve gone over your files from McGill and U of T—”

“You’ve what?”

“You weren’t a campus activist. Didn’t belong to any social-justice groups. Why should you care what Klimus might have done half a century ago? A French speaker from Montreal — why should someone like you care?”

“Damn it, I told you before I’m not an anti-Semite. Maybe there is a problem with that in Quebec, but I’m not part of it.” Pierre tried to calm himself. “Look, I’ve seen pictures of Demjanjuk. I know what he looked like as a young man, know he bore a resemblance to Klimus.”

A waitress appeared. “Sprite,” said Pierre. She nodded and left.

“Klimus looks even more like Marchenko than Demjanjuk did,” said Avi.

Pierre blinked. “You’ve got photos of Marchenko?” None of the Magazine Database Plus articles mentioned the existence of such things.

Avi nodded. “The Israelis have had Marchenko’s SS file since 1991.” He opened his briefcase, pulled out a manila envelope, and took two sheets from it. The first was a photostat of an old-looking form, with a small head-and-shoulders photograph attached to its upper-left corner. The second was a blowup of that photo. It showed a man of thirty, with a broad face (twisted here in a cruel frown), incipient baldness, and protruding ears.

Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “You can certainly see the resemblance to Demjanjuk.”

Avi frowned ruefully. “Tell me about it.”

Pierre looked at the photostats.

“So,” said Avi, tapping the enlarged photo, “is that Burian Klimus?”

Pierre exhaled. “The ears are different—”

“Klimus’s don’t protrude. But that’s an easy enough thing to have fixed.”

Pierre nodded, and looked at the blowup again. “Yeah. Yeah, it could be Klimus.”

“That’s what I thought when I saw Klimus’s picture in Time when he was named director of the Human Genome Center. If he is Marchenko, you have no idea what a monster that man was. He didn’t just gas people, he tortured them, raped them. He used to love to slice nipples off women’s breasts.”

Pierre winced at that. “But do you have any proof, besides his appearance, that Klimus might be Marchenko?”

“He’s a geneticist.”

Pierre’s tone was sharp. “That’s not a crime.”

“And he was born in the same Ukrainian town as Ivan Marchenko, and in the same year — 1911.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. And then there’s what happened to you. The attack on you was the first direct connection between the Nazi movement and the genetics work going on at Lawrence Berkeley.”

“But Chuck Hanratty was a neo-Nazi.”

“Sure. But a lot of neo-Nazi groups were started by real World War II

Nazis. Do you know the name of the leader of the Millennial Reich?”

“No.”

“In documents the SFPD has captured, he’s referred to by the code name Grozny.”

Pierre’s stomach fluttered. He’d been ordered to kill you, Molly had said, having read Chuck Hanratty’s mind as he died, by someone named Grozny.

“Grozny,” repeated Pierre. “What does that mean?”

“Ivan Grozny is Russian for Ivan the Terrible. It’s what the people at Treblinka called Ivan Marchenko.”

Pierre’s head was swimming. “But this is crazy. What could Klimus have against me?” The waitress appeared and deposited Pierre’s Sprite.

“That’s a very good question.”

“And what about Joan Dawson? What could Klimus have against her?”

Avi shook his head. “I have no idea. But if I were you, I’d watch my back.”

Pierre frowned and looked out at the roiling waters of the Bay. “You’re the second person to say that to me recently.” He took a sip of his drink.

“So what do we do now?”

“There’s nothing we can do, until some proof materializes. These cases don’t break overnight, after all; if Klimus is Marchenko, he’s eluded detection for fifty years now. But keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything you find to me.”

Chapter 25

Seven months later

“Thanks for letting me come,” said Pierre, keeping his hand steady by holding firmly on to the edge of a desk. Although he still felt as though he didn’t really belong here, Pierre could no longer deny the truth: he was clearly manifesting symptoms of Huntington’s disease. The support-group meeting was held in a high-school classroom in San Francisco’s Richmond district, halfway between the Presidio and Golden Gate Park.

Carl Berringer’s head jerked back and forth, and it was a few moments before he was able to reply. But when he did, his words were full of warmth. “We’re glad to have you. What’d you think of the speaker?”

Berringer was a white-haired man of about forty-five with pale skin and blue eyes. The guest speaker had spoken on coping with the juvenile form of Huntington’s.

“She was fine,” said Pierre, who had tuned out the talk and simply spent the meeting surreptitiously watching the others, most of whom were in much later stages of the disease. After all, besides his father, Henry Spade, Pierre had never really seen anyone else with advanced Huntington’s up close. He watched their pain, their suffering, the contorted faces, the inability to speak clearly, the torture of something as simple as trying to swallow, and the thought came to him that perhaps some of them would be better off dead. It was a horrible thing to think, he knew, but…

… but there, because there is no grace of God, go I. Pierre’s condition was getting steadily worse; he’d broken dozens of pieces of labware and drinking glasses by now. Still, only those who knew him well suspected anything serious was amiss. Just a tendency toward dancing hands, occasional facial tics, a slight slurring of speech…

“You work at LBL, don’t you?” asked Carl, his head still moving constantly.

Pierre nodded. “Actually, it’s LBNL now. They added the word ‘National’ to the lab’s name almost a year ago.”

“Well, we had a guy from your lab give a talk a couple of years ago. Big old bald guy. Can’t remember his name, but he won a Nobel Prize.”

Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “Not Burian Klimus?”

“That’s the guy. Boy, were we lucky to get him. All we can offer speakers is a Huntington’s Society coffee mug. But he had just been appointed to Lawrence Berkeley, and the university was sending him out to speaking engagements.” Carl’s hands had started moving, as if he were doing finger-flexing exercises. Pierre tried not to stare at him. “Anyway,” said Carl, “I’m glad you came. Hope you’ll become a regular. We can all use some support.”

Pierre nodded. He wasn’t sure he was any happier now that he’d finally relented and come here. It seemed an unnecessarily graphic reminder of what his future held. He looked around the room. Molly, hugely pregnant, was off in one corner sipping mineral water with a middle-aged white woman, apparently a caregiver. She was doubtless hearing what was in store for her.

The really bad cases weren’t even here; they would be bedridden at home or in a hospital. He looked around, counted eighteen people: seven obvious Huntington’s patients, seven more who were clearly their caregivers, and four whose status wasn’t easy to determine. They could have been recently diagnosed as having the Huntington’s gene, or they could have been caregivers for patients too ill to attend the meeting themselves. “Is this the normal turnout?” asked Pierre.

Berringer’s head was still jerking, and his right arm had started moving back and forth a bit, the way one’s arm does when walking. “These days, yes. We’ve lost five members in the last year.”

Pierre looked at the tiled floor. Huntington’s was terminal; that was the one unshakable reality. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“We’d expected some of them. Sally Banas, for instance. In fact, she’d held on longer than any of us had thought she would.” Berringer’s head movements were distracting; Pierre fought the irritation growing within him. “Another one was a suicide. Young man, only been to a couple of meetings. Recently diagnosed.” Berringer shook his head. “You know how it is.”

Pierre nodded. Only too well.

“But the other three…” Berringer had reached his left arm over to help steady his right. “World’s a crazy place, Pierre. Maybe it’s not so bad up in Canada, but down here…”

“What happened?”

“Well, they were all pretty new members — only recently manifesting the disease. They should have had years left. One of them — Peter Mansbridge — was shot. Two others were knifed to death, six months apart. Muggings, it seems.”

“God,” said Pierre. What had he done, coming to the States? He’d been assaulted, Joan Dawson had been murdered, and every time he turned around he heard about more violent crime.

Berringer tried to shake his head, but the gesture was obscured by the jerking motion. “I don’t ask for pity,” he said slowly, “but you’d think anyone who saw one of us moving the way we do would leave us in peace, instead of killing us for the few bucks we might have in our wallets.”

Chapter 26

At last, the long-awaited day came. Pierre drove Molly to Alta Bates Hospital on Colby Street. In the Toyota’s trunk, as there had been for the last two weeks, were Molly’s suitcase and a video camcorder — an unexpected gift from Burian Klimus, who had insisted to Pierre and Molly that videotaping the birth was all the rage now.

Alta Bates had beautiful delivery rooms, more like hotel suites than hospital facilities. Pierre had to admit that one thing missing from Canada’s government-run hospitals was any touch of luxury, but here — well, he was just thankful that Molly’s faculty-association health plan was covering the expenses…

Pierre sat on a softly padded chair, beaming at his wife and newborn daughter.

A middle-aged black nurse came in to check on them. “Have the two of you decided on a name yet?” she asked.

Molly looked at Pierre, making sure he was still happy with the choice.

Pierre nodded. “Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Helene.”

“One English name and one French,” said Pierre, smiling at the nurse.

“They’re both pretty names,” said the nurse.

“ ‘Amanda’ means ‘worthy of being loved,’ ” said Molly. There was a knock at the door, and then, a moment later, the door swung open. “May I come in?”

“Burian!” said Molly.

“Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre, a bit surprised. “How good of you to come.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said the old man, making his way across the room.

“I’ll leave you alone,” said the nurse, smiling and exiting.

“The birth went well?” asked Klimus. “No complications?”

“Everything was fine,” said Molly. “Exhausting, but fine.”

“You recorded it all on videotape?”

Pierre nodded.

“And the baby is normal?”

“Just fine.”

“A boy or a girl?” Klimus asked. Pierre felt his eyebrows lifting; that was usually the first question, not the fourth.

“A girl,” said Molly.

Klimus moved closer to see for himself. “Good head of hair,” he said, touching a gnarled hand to his own billiard-ball pate, but making no other comment about the child’s paternity. “How much does she weigh?”

“Seven pounds, twelve ounces,” said Molly.

“And her length?”

“Seventeen inches.”

He nodded. “Very good.”

Molly discreetly moved Amanda to her breast, mostly hidden by her hospital robe. Then she looked up. “I want to thank you, Burian. We both do. For everything you’ve done for us. We can’t begin to say how grateful we are.”

“Oui,”said Pierre, all his fears having dissipated. His daughter was an angel; how could she possibly have a devil’s genes? “Millefois merci.”

The old man nodded and looked away. “It was nothing.”

Je ne suis pas fou, thought Pierre, a month later. I’m not crazy. And yet the frameshift was gone. He’d wanted to do more studies of the DNA sequence that produced the strange neurotransmitter associated with Molly’s telepathy. He’d used a restriction enzyme to snip out the bit of chromosome thirteen that coded for its synthesis. So far, so good. Then, to provide himself with an unlimited supply of the genetic material, he set up PCR amplification of it — the polymerase chain reaction, which would keep duplicating that segment of DNA over and over again. Needing nothing more than a test tube containing the specimen, a thermocycler, and a few reagents, PCR could produce a hundred billion copies of a DNA molecule over the course of an afternoon.

And now he had billions of copies — except that, although the copies were all identical to each other, they weren’t the same as the original. The thymine base that had wormed its way into Molly’s genetic code, causing the frameshift, hadn’t been incorporated into the copies. At the key point, the snips of DNA produced through PCR all read CAT CAG GGT GTC

CAT. Just like Pierre’s own did; just like everybody’s did.

Could he have screwed up? Could he have misread the sequence of nucleotides in that original sample of Molly’s DNA he’d extracted from her blood all those months ago? He rummaged in his file drawer until he found his original autorad. No mistake: the thymine intruder was there.

He went through the long process of making another autorad from another piece of Molly’s actual original DNA. Yup, the thymine showed up there, too — the frameshift was present, shifting the normal CAT CAG GGT

GTC CAT into TCA TCA GGG TGT CCA.

PCR was a simple chemical procedure. It shouldn’t care if the thymine really belonged there or not. It should have just faithfully duplicated the string.

But it had not. It — or something in the DNA reproduction process — had corrected the string, putting it back the way it was supposed to be.

Pierre shook his head in wonder.

“Good morning, Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre coming into the HGC office to pick up his mail.

“Tardivel,” said Klimus. “How is the baby?”

“She’s fine, sir. Just fine.”

“Still have all that hair?”

“Oh, yes.” Pierre smiled. “In fact, she’s even got a hairy back — even I don’t have a hairy back. But the pediatrician says that’s not unusual, and it should disappear as her hormones become better balanced.”

“Is she a bright girl?”

“She seems to be.”

“Well-adjusted?”

“Actually, for someone just a month old she’s rather quiet, which is nice, in a way. At least we’re managing to get some sleep.”

“I’d like to come by the house this weekend. See the girl.”

It was a presumptuous request, thought Pierre. But then — dammit, he was the child’s biological father. Pierre felt his stomach knotting. He cursed himself for thinking anything this complex would end up not being a source of problems. Still, the man was Pierre’s boss, and Pierre’s fellowship was coming up for renewal.

“Um, sure,” said Pierre. He hoped Klimus would detect the lack of enthusiasm and decide not to pursue the matter. He took his mail from its cubbyhole.

“In fact,” said the old man, “perhaps I’ll come over for dinner Sunday night. At six? Make an evening of it.”

Pierre’s heart sank. He thought of something Einstein had once said:

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. “Sure,”

Pierre said again, resigning himself to it. “Sure thing.”

The old man nodded curtly, then went back to sorting through his mail.

Pierre stood still for a few moments, then, realizing he had been dismissed, took his own mail and headed on down the corridor to his lab.

Chapter 27

Burian Klimus sat in Molly and Pierre’s living room. Amanda didn’t seem to take to him at all, but, then again, he didn’t make any effort to hold her or baby-talk to her. That bothered Pierre. The old man had wanted to see the girl, after all. But instead of playing with her, he just kept asking questions about her nursing and sleeping habits, all the while — to Pierre’s astonishment — scrawling notes in Cyrillic in a pocket-size spiral-bound notebook.

Finally, it was time for dinner. Pierre and Molly had both agreed that although tonight was Pierre’s turn to cook, the evening would probably go better with something more elaborate than hot dogs or Kraft dinner.

Molly prepared chicken Kiev (Klimus was Ukrainian, after all), potatoes au gratin, and Brussels sprouts. Pierre opened a bottle of liebfraumilch to go with it, and the three adults made their way to the table, leaving Amanda — whom Molly had breast-fed earlier — contentedly napping in her bassinet.

Pierre tried all sorts of polite topics for conversation, but Klimus rose to none of them, so he finally decided to ask the old man what he was working on.

“Well,” said Klimus, after taking another sip of wine, “you know I’m spending a lot of time at the Institute of Human Origins.” The IHO was also in Berkeley; its director was Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous Australopithecus afarensis known as Lucy. “I’m hoping to make progress with Hapless Hannah’s DNA in resolving the out-of-Africa debate.”

“Great film,” said Molly lightly, really not wishing to see the conversation devolve into shoptalk. “Meryl Streep was excellent.”

Klimus raised an eyebrow. “I know Pierre knows about Hannah, Molly, but do you?”

She shook her head. He told her about his breakthrough with extracting intact DNA from the Israeli Neanderthal bones, then paused to fortify himself with another sip of wine. Pierre got up to open a second bottle.

“Well,” said Klimus, “there are two competing models for the origin of modern humans. One is called the out-of-Africa hypothesis; the other is the multiregional hypothesis. They both agree that Homo erectus started spreading out from Africa into Eurasia as much as one-point-eight million years ago — Java man, Peking man, Heidelberg man, those are all specimens of erectus.

“But the out-of-Africa hypothesis says that modern man, Homo sapiens — which may or may not include Neanderthals as a subgroup — evolved in east Africa, but didn’t expand out of there until a second migration from Africa just one or two hundred thousand years ago. The out-of-Africa proponents say that when this second wave caught up with various erectus groups in Asia and Europe, they defeated them, leaving Homo sapiens as the only extant species of humanity.”

He paused long enough to let Pierre pour him another glass of wine.

“The multiregional hypothesis is quite different. It says all those erectus populations went on evolving, and they each gave rise independently to modern man. That would explain why Homo sapiens seems to appear in the fossil record pretty much simultaneously across all of Eurasia.”

“But surely,” said Molly, intrigued despite herself, “if you have isolated populations, you’d end up with different species evolving in each area — like on the Galapagos Islands.” She rose to start clearing the dishes.

Klimus handed her his dinner plate. “The multiregionalists contend that there was a lot of inbreeding among the various populations, allowing them to evolve in tandem.”

“Inbreeding from France all the way to Indonesia?” said Molly, disappearing into the kitchen for a moment. “And I thought my sister got around.”

Pierre laughed, but when Molly returned she was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “This multiregional stuff seems more like an exercise in political correctness than good science — an attempt to avoid Felix Sousa’s which-race-came-first question and say, ‘Hey, we all evolved together at once.’ ”

Klimus nodded. “Ordinarily, I should agree with you, but there are excellent sequences of skulls going all the way from Homo erectus through Neanderthal man and into fully modern humans in Java and China. It does look like independent evolution toward Homo sapiens went on at least in those locations, and possibly elsewhere, too.”

“But that’s evolutionarily absurd,” said Molly. “Surely the classical model of evolution says that, through mutation, one individual in a population spontaneously gains a survival advantage, and then his or her offspring, because of that advantage, outcompete everyone else, eventually creating a new species.”

Pierre got up to help Molly serve dessert — a chocolate mousse she had made. “I’ve always had a problem with that method,” he said. “Think about it: it means that a few generations down the road, the entire population is descended from that one lucky mutant. You end up with a very small gene pool that way, and that tends to concentrate recessive genetic disorders.” He handed a glass bowl to Klimus, then sat down. “It’s like Queen Victoria, who carried the hemophilia gene. Her offspring inbred with the royal houses of Europe, devastating them. To suppose that whole populations are reduced to a single parent every time a major mutation-driven advantage occurs would make life extraordinarily precarious. If an accident didn’t kill off the lucky mutant, his or her offspring might die off anyway through genetic diseases.” He sampled the mousse, then nodded, impressed. “Now, if evolution could somehow occur simultaneously across widely dispersed populations, as the multiregionalists are suggesting, well, I suppose that would avoid that problem — but I can’t think of any mechanism that would allow that kind of evolution, although—”

Amanda started crying. Pierre immediately got back on his feet and hurried over to her, picking her up, holding her against his shoulder, and bouncing her up and down gently. “There, there, honey,” he cooed. “There, there.” He smiled at Klimus, back in the dining room. “Sorry about this,” he said.

“Not at all, not at all,” said Klimus. He pulled out his notebook and jotted something down.

Chapter 28

“Look at Mommy, sweetheart. Come on, look at Mommy. There’s a good girl. Now, Daddy’s got to prick your arm a little bit. It’ll hurt, but not too much, and it’ll only last a second. Okay, sweetheart? Here’s my finger. Give it a good squeeze. That’s right. Okay, here we go. No, no — don’t cry, honey.

Don’t cry. It’s over now. Everything’s going to be all right, baby…

Everything’s going to be just fine.”

Pierre checked a small sample of Amanda’s DNA. His daughter lacked the frameshift mutation on chromosome thirteen, and so presumably wouldn’t grow up to be a telepath. Molly seemed to have curiously mixed feelings about this, but Pierre had to admit he was relieved.

Pierre’s earlier work had shown that only one of Molly’s two chromosome thirteens had the telepathy frameshift, meaning Amanda had had only a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it from her mother (Amanda, of course, would have received one of Molly’s thirteens and one of Klimus’s thirteens). So there was really nothing remarkable about baby Amanda not having inherited her mother’s frameshifted gene, and yet—

And yet, during simple PCR amplification of Molly’s DNA, the frameshift had been corrected, so—

So was this a case of Amanda actually, by the luck of the draw, receiving the non-frameshifted chromosome thirteen from her mother, or—

Or did none of Molly’s eggs contain the frameshifted DNA?

Had it been somehow corrected there, too, just as it had in PCR replication?

Obviously, the frameshift couldn’t be corrected every time it appeared, or it would have been fixed when Molly herself was developing as an embryo thirty-odd years ago. But still, somehow, it was being corrected now. Pierre had to know whether the correction was present in Molly’s unfertilized eggs, or whether the correction was only made after the egg was fertilized and had started dividing.

Thanks to the pre-IVF hormone treatments, Molly had brought a large number of eggs to maturity in a single cycle. Gwendolyn Bacon had extracted fifteen from her for the IVF attempt, but she had told Klimus to only attempt to fertilize half of them, meaning seven or eight of Molly’s unfertilized eggs were presumably still here in building 74.

After phoning Molly to get her permission, Pierre left his own lab and walked down to the same small surgical theater in which Molly’s eggs had been extracted over a year ago. Pierre knew one of the techs there: the guy was a San Jose Sharks fan, and the two of them often argued hockey.

Pierre had no trouble getting him to find and hand over Molly’s eggs, seven of which were indeed still in cold storage.

Of course, it was possible that a random selection of seven eggs might all have the same maternal chromosome thirteen, but the odds were against it. The chances were as slim as a family having seven children and all of them being boys: 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50%, which was 0.078% — a minuscule likelihood.

And yet that apparently had happened. Not one of the eggs had the frameshift.

Unless—

Molly’s two chromosome thirteens differed from each other in other ways, of course. Pierre started testing other points on the chromosomes extracted from the eggs, and—

No. The eggs had not all gotten the same chromosome thirteen.

Four of them had received one of Molly’s chromosome thirteens — the one that, in Molly’s body, didn’t have the frameshift.

And three had received the other one of Molly’s thirteens — the one that, in Molly’s body, did have the frameshift.

And yet, incredibly, the frameshift had been corrected out of every one of the eggs…

A month later, Pierre and Molly drove to San Francisco International Airport. Pierre was about to meet his mother-in-law and sister-in-law for the first time. Amanda was going to be baptized the next day; although the Bonds weren’t Catholic, Molly’s mother had insisted on being on hand for this, at least.

“There they are!” said Molly, pointing through a sea of people, all struggling with their bags and luggage carts.

Pierre scanned the crowd. He’d seen pictures of Barbara and Jessica Bond before, but none of the faces leaped out at him. But now two women were waving at them from the back of the group, wide grins across their faces. They jostled their way through the little exit gate the crowd was funneling out of. Molly rushed over and hugged her mother and then, after a moment of sibling awkwardness, hugged her sister, too.

“Mom, Jess,” Molly said, “this is Pierre.”

There was another awkward moment; then Mrs. Bond moved in and hugged him. “It’s wonderful to meet you at long last,” she said, just the barest hint of a dig in her voice. She’d not been pleased when Molly had gotten married without even inviting her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” said Pierre.

“Hey,” said Jessica, a note of light teasing in her voice, perhaps trying to defuse the tension her mother’s remark had engendered. “You told us he was French-Canadian, but you didn’t say he had such a sexy accent.”

Molly giggled, something Pierre had never before heard her do. She and Jessica were suddenly teenagers again. “Go find your own immigrant,” she said, then turned to Pierre. “Honey, this is Jessica.”

Jessica held out her hand, the back of it facing up. “Enchantee,” she said.

Pierre adopted the role being requested of him. He bent low and kissed the back of her hand. “C’est moi, qui est enchante, mademoiselle.” She giggled. Jessica was a real knockout. Molly had mentioned that Jess had done modeling and he could see why. She was a taller, tartier version of her sister. Her makeup was expertly applied: black eyeliner, a dusting of blush, and pink lipstick. Molly was standing right beside him; Pierre felt momentarily anxious, but relaxed when he realized he was indeed musing about all this in French.

“I’m afraid our car is parked a fair distance away,” he said. The women’s bags weren’t very big. Even a few months ago, Pierre would have picked one up with each hand and simply carried them. But his condition was getting worse in small but noticeable daily increments, and he was now just as likely to drop them. Although his foot had been shaking somewhat, he’d hoped he’d been doing a credible job of making it look like toe tapping, as if he were some jittery type-A personality.

A few feet away, a big man was making a macho show of discarding the baggage cart his female companion had found and carrying a bulging Samsonite case himself. Pierre moved as fast as he could, seizing the cart and placing Jessica’s and Barbara’s bags on it. At the least, he could certainly push the cart for them. Indeed, it was probably better having it as a sort of discreet walker as they embarked on the long hike to the garage.

“How was the flight?” asked Pierre.

“It was a flight,” said Jessica. Pierre smiled, sensing a kindred spirit.

What more could one say about spending hours in a tin can?

“Where’s Amanda?” asked Barbara, her tone making clear that she was very much the new grandmother, eager to see her first grandchild.

“A neighbor is looking after her,” said Molly. “We thought all this” — she rolled her eyes, indicating the hubbub around them — “would be too much for her.”

“I would have loved to have been there for you,” said Barbara. Pierre allowed himself a slight sigh, lost on the background noise of the cavernous terminal. His mother-in-law wasn’t going to easily forgive Molly for cutting her out of so much of Molly’s life. Barbara and Jessica were only going to be here for four days, but it was clearly going to seem longer.

They passed through a pair of sliding glass doors into the late-afternoon sunshine. As soon as she was out of the terminal, Jessica fished a pack of Virginia Slims from her purse and lit one. Pierre jockeyed slightly so as not to be downwind from her. Suddenly she looked far less attractive.

Molly opened her mouth as if to reproach her sister, but in the end said nothing. Her mother clearly recognized the expression, though, and shrugged. “It’s no use,” she said. “I’ve told her a thousand times to quit.”

Jessica took a deep, defiant drag. They continued on toward the parking lot.

“Have either of you been to California before?” asked Pierre, the role of defuser now falling to him.

“Disney World when I was a kid,” said Jessica.

“Disneyland,” corrected Molly, sounding every bit the big sister. “Disney World is in Florida.”

“Well, whichever it was, I’m sure they still remember you throwing up all over the teacup ride,” snapped Jessica. She looked to Pierre with wide eyes, as if still stunned by it all. “How anyone could get motion sickness on the teacups is beyond me.”

Pierre spotted his car. “We’re over there,” he said, gesturing with his head as he steered the luggage cart.

Yes, he thought. A long stay indeed.

Pierre managed to carry the bags up the front steps. Molly looked on with compassion. They had worried about those steps when they bought the house, and watching him struggle with the bags gave her a clear foretaste of what was to come for him. The back door opened onto level ground; they knew eventually that it would end up as his principal entrance.

Once the bags were inside, Molly’s mother and sister plopped down, exhausted, in the living-room chairs.

“Nice place,” said Jessica, looking around.

Molly smiled. It was a nice place. Pierre’s taste in furnishings was abysmal (Molly shuddered every time she thought of that hideous green-and-orange couch he’d had), but she had a good eye for such things; she’d even taught a course on the psychology of aesthetics one year. They’d furnished the whole room in natural blond wood and green malachite accents.

“I’m going next door to get Amanda,” said Molly. “Pierre, maybe you can get Mom and Jess a drink.”

Pierre nodded and set about doing just that. Molly went through the front door and out into the twilight, enjoying being alone for a moment. It had been so much easier rebuilding her relationship with her mother and sister through letters and longdistance phone calls. But now that they were here, she had to face their thoughts again: her mother’s disapproval of the way Molly had left Minnesota, her dubiousness about her whirlwind romance and marriage to a foreigner, her thousand little criticisms of the way Molly dressed and the five extra pounds she hadn’t quite gotten rid of since the pregnancy.

And Jessica, too, with her infuriating vacuousness — not to mention her outrageous flirting with Pierre.

It had been a mistake having them come out here — of that, already, there could be no doubt. She would try to keep them out of her zone during the rest of their stay, try not to hear their thoughts, try to remember that they, as much as baby Amanda, were her flesh and blood.

She walked next door to the pink-stuccoed bungalow and rang the bell.

“Hi, Molly,” said Mrs. Bailey as the woman opened the screen door.

“Come to take your angel away?”

Molly smiled. Mrs. Bailey was a widow in her mid-sixties who seemed to have a bottomless appetite for baby-sitting Amanda. Her eyesight was poor, but she loved holding the baby and singing to her in an off-key but enthusiastic way. Molly stepped into the entryway, and Mrs. Bailey went over to Amanda, who had been napping on the couch. She picked her up and carried her over to Molly. Amanda blinked her large brown eyes at her mother and allowed herself to be passed from one woman to the other.

“Thanks so much, Mrs. Bailey,” said Molly.

“Anytime, my dear.”

Molly rocked Amanda in her arms as she carried her back to their house. She walked up the steps and let herself in the front door.

The arrival of the baby was enough to get Barbara and Jessica up off the couch. Pierre, although also wanting to see his daughter, apparently realized he’d have no luck competing against the three women for access.

He settled back in his chair, grinning.

“Oooh,” said Jessica, leaning in to look at the baby cradled in Molly’s arms. “What a little darling!”

Her mother leaned in, too. “She’s gorgeous!” She waved a finger in front of the baby’s eyes. Amanda cooed at all the attention.

Molly felt her heart pounding, felt anger rising within her. She pulled the baby away and moved across the room.

“What’s wrong?” asked her sister.

“Nothing,” said Molly, too sharply. She turned around, forced a smile.

“Nothing,” she said again, more softly. “Amanda was sleeping next door. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”

She moved toward the staircase and started up. She saw Pierre trying to catch her eye, but continued on.

Dog, Jessica had thought.

My God — what an ugly kid! her mother had thought.

Molly made it to the top floor and into the bedroom before she began to shake with anger. She sat on the edge of the bed, rocking her beautiful daughter back and forth in her arms.

Three months passed; it was now the middle of December.

Amanda, in a crib across the room, woke up a little after 3:00 a.m. and started crying. The sound awoke both Pierre and Molly. Molly went over to the padded chair by the window, and he watched quietly as she sat in the moonlight, breast-feeding his daughter. It was hard to imagine a more beautiful sight.

His left wrist started moving back and forth.

Molly put Amanda back down, kissed her forehead, and returned to their bed. Pierre could soon hear the regular sound of his wife’s breathing as she fell back to sleep. Pierre, though, was now wide awake. He tried to steady his left wrist by holding it with his right, but soon that one began to shake, too.

He thought back to the Huntington’s support-group meeting in San Francisco. All those people moving, shaking, dancing. All those people, like him. All those poor people…

We had a guy from your lab give a talk a couple of years ago. Big old bald guy. Can’t remember his name, but he won a Nobel Prize.

Burian Klimus had spoken to that group, and —

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.

Avi Meyer hadn’t proven it yet — indeed, might never be able to prove it, after half a century — but Klimus could very well be a Nazi.

Which meant he might very well be involved with the local neo-Nazi movement…

Neo-Nazis had certainly been responsible for the stabbing attempt on Pierre’s life and the shooting of Bryan Proctor, and, given the similarity of weapon, quite possibly for the murder of Joan Dawson.

Klimus had addressed the Huntington’s group, had likely met the three members of it who had been murdered.

Klimus worked day in and day out with Joan; surely he’d been aware of her incipient cataracts.

And Klimus knew that Pierre had some genetic disorder; Pierre himself had told him that in explaining why he and Molly wanted to use donated sperm.

Voluntary eugenics, Klimus had said to Pierre. I approve.

Could the old man have been trying to improve the gene pool? Weed out some Huntington’s sufferers, maybe a diabetic or two?

But no — no, that didn’t make sense.

Joan Dawson was way past menopause; although she had a grown daughter, she herself was incapable of making further contributions to the gene pool.

And Klimus knew that Pierre wasn’t going to breed.

But if not eugenics, then what?

An image came to his mind from out of the past, from the early 1980s: a drawing on the front page of Le Devoir.

Twelve dead babies.

Not eugenics.

Mercy — or, at least, someone’s version of it.

After all, the same thought had come to Pierre, too, unbidden, unwelcome, unfair, but there nonetheless: some of those with Huntington’s would be better off dead. And the same might be said for an old woman who lived alone and was about to lose her sight.

Pierre lay awake the rest of the night, shaking.

Chapter 29

Pierre took the elevator up to the third floor of San Francisco police headquarters and walked down to the forensics lab. He knocked on the door, then let himself in. “Hello, Helen.”

Helen Kawabata looked up from behind her desk. She was wearing a spruce green suit today, jade rings, and emerald ear studs. She’d also changed her hair since Pierre had last seen her: it was still frosted blond, but she’d traded the pageboy for a shorter, punkier look. “Oh, hi, Pierre,” she said, rapid-fire. “Long time no see. Listen, thanks for that tour of your facilities. I really enjoyed it.”

“You’re welcome,” said Pierre. Every now and then, he tried to respond to a “thank you” with a California “uh-huh,” but he had never felt comfortable with it. Still, his smile was a bit sheepish. “I’m afraid I have another favor to ask.”

Helen’s smile faded just enough to convey that she felt the books were now balanced: she’d done him one favor, and he’d repaid it with lunch and a tour of LBNL. She did not look entirely ready to help him again.

“I went to a Huntington’s support-group meeting several months ago, here in San Francisco. They told me three people who belonged to their group had died in the last two years.”

“Well,” said Helen gently, “it is a fatal condition.”

“They didn’t die from Huntington’s. They were murdered.”

“Oh.”

“Would the police have done any special investigations of that?”

“Three people belonging to a single group getting killed? Sure, we’d have checked that out.”

“I’m the fourth, in a way.”

“Because you went to one meeting? What were you doing, giving a talk on genetics?”

“I have Huntington’s, Helen.”

“Oh.” She looked away. “I’m sorry. I’d…”

“You’d noticed my hands shaking when I gave you the tour of my lab.”

She nodded. “I — I’d thought you’d had too much to drink at lunch.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”

Pierre shrugged. “Me, too.”

“So you think somebody has something against Huntington’s sufferers?”

“It could be that, or…”

“Or what?”

“Well, I know this sounds crazy, but the person could actually think they’re doing the Huntington’s sufferers a favor.”

Helen’s thin eyebrows rose. “What?”

“There was a famous case in Toronto in the early 1980s. It was everywhere in the Canadian media. You know the Hospital for Sick Children?”

“Sure.”

“In 1980 and ‘81, a dozen babies were murdered in the hospital’s cardiac ward. They were all given overdoses of digoxin. A nurse named Susan Nelles was charged in the case, but she was exonerated. The case was never solved, but the most popular theory is that someone on the hospital’s staff was killing the babies out of a misguided sense of mercy.

They all had congenital heart conditions, and one might have concluded they were going to lead short, agony-filled lives anyway, so someone put them out of their misery.”

“And you think that’s what’s happening to the people in your Huntington’s group?”

“It’s one possibility.”

“But the guy who tried to kill you — what’s his name… ?”

“Hanratty. Chuck Hanratty.”

“Right. Wasn’t Hanratty a neo-Nazi? Hardly the type known for humanitarian gestures — if you could even call something like this humanitarian.”

“No, but he was doing the job on orders from somebody else.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything about that in the report on the case.”

“I — I’m just speculating.”

“Mercy killings,” said Helen, trying the idea on for size. “It’s an interesting angle.”

“And, well, I don’t think it’s just Huntington’s sufferers. Joan Dawson — she was the secretary for the Human Genome Center — was murdered, too. The police said the same kind of knife that was used in the attack on me was also used in killing her. She was an elderly diabetic, and she was going blind.”

“So you think your angel of mercy is offing anyone who is suffering because of a genetic disorder?”

‘Maybe.“

“But how would this person find out? Who would know about you and — what’s her name? — Joan?”

“Someone we both worked with — and someone who had also spoken to the Huntington’s group.”

“And is there such a person?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I’d rather not say — not until I’m sure.”

“But—”

“How long do you keep tissue samples from autopsies?”

“Depends. Years, anyway. You know how court cases drag on. Why?”

“So you’d have samples from various unsolved murders committed in the last couple of years?”

“If an autopsy was ordered — we don’t always do one; they’re expensive.

And if the case is still unsolved. Sure, samples would still be around somewhere.”

“Can I get access to them?”

“Whatever for?”

“To see if some of them might have been misguided mercy killings, too.”

“Pierre, I don’t mean to be harsh, but, well…”

“What?”

“Well — Huntington’s. It does affect the mind, right? Are you sure you’re not just being paranoid?”

Pierre started to protest, but then just shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.

But you can help me find out. I only need tiny samples. Just enough to get a complete set of chromosomes.”

She thought for a moment. “You ask for the damnedest things, you know.”

“Please,” said Pierre.

“Well, tell you what: I can get you the ones we’ve got here. But I’m not going to go calling around to other labs; that would raise too many eyebrows.”

“Thank you,” said Pierre. “Thank you. Can you make sure that Bryan Proctor is included?”

“Who?”

“That superintendent who was murdered by Chuck Hanratty.”

“Oh, yeah.” Helen moved over to her computer, tapped some keys. “No can do,” she said after a moment. “Says here a tenant heard the gunshot that killed him. That fixed the time of death exactly, so we didn’t take any tissue samples.”

“Damn. Still, I’ll take anything else you can get for me.”

“All right — but you owe me big-time. How many samples do you need?”

“As many as I can possibly get.” He paused, wondering how much he should take Helen into his confidence. He didn’t want to say too much, but, dammit, he did need her help. “The person I have in mind is also under investigation by the Department of Justice for being a suspected Nazi war criminal, and—”

“No shit?”

“No — which explains the neo-Nazi connection. And, well, if he murdered thousands fifty years ago, he may very well have ordered a lot more than just the handful we know about murdered today.”

Helen thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do. But, look, it’s almost Christmas, and that’s our busiest time for crime, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to be patient.”

Pierre knew better than to push. “Thank you,” he said.

Helen nodded. “Uh-huh.”

Pierre hurried in the back door of the house. He’d given up fighting the steps to the front door a couple of weeks before. It was 5:35 p.m., and he went straight for the couch, scooping up the remote and turning on the TV. “Molly!” he shouted. “Come quickly!”

Molly appeared, holding baby Amanda, who, at eight months, had acquired even more rich brown hair. “What is it?”

“I heard just as I was leaving work that the piece on Felix Sousa is on

Hard Copy tonight. I thought I’d be home in time, but there was an accident on Cedar.”

A commercial for Chrysler minivans was coming to an end. The Hard Copy spinning typewriter ball flew out at them, making that annoying thunk-thunk ! as it did so; then the host, a pretty blonde named Terry Murphy, appeared. “Welcome back,” she said. “Are blacks inferior to whites? A new study says yes, and our Wendy Di Maio is on the story.

Wendy?”

Molly sat down next to Pierre on the couch, holding Amanda against her shoulder.

The image changed to some historical footage of the UCB courtyard behind Sather Gate, with longhaired flower children strolling by and a bare-chested hippie sitting under a tree, strumming a guitar.

“Thanks, Terry,” said a woman’s voice over the pictures. “In 1967, the University of California, Berkeley, was home to the hippie movement, a movement that preached making love not war, a movement that embraced the family of man.”

The image dissolved to modern videotape footage shot from the same angle. “Today, the hippies are gone. Meet the new face of UCB.”

Walking toward the camera was a trim, broad-shouldered white man of forty, wearing a black leather pilot’s jacket with the collar turned up and mirrored aviator sunglasses. Pierre snorted. “Christ, he’s even dressed like a storm trooper.”

The reporter’s voice-over said, “This is Professor Felix Sousa, a geneticist here. There’s no peace in the wake of his research — and no love for him on the part of many of the university’s staff and students, who are branding him a racist.”

The shot changed to Sousa in one of the chemistry labs in Latimer Hall, beakers and flasks spread out on the counter in front of him. Pierre snorted again; he’d never once actually seen Sousa in any lab. “I’ve spent years on this research, Miz Di Maio,” Sousa said. His voice was crisp and cultured, his enunciation meticulous. “It’s hard to reduce it to a few simple statements, but…”

The picture cut to the reporter, an attractive woman with a wide mouth and mounds of dark hair. She nodded encouragingly, urging Sousa to go on. The picture changed back to Sousa. “In simplest terms, my research demonstrates that the three races of humanity emerged at different times.

Blacks appeared as a racially distinct group some two hundred thousand years ago. Whites, on the other hand, first appeared one hundred and ten thousand years ago. And Orientals arrived on the scene forty-one thousand years ago. Well, is it any surprise that the oldest race is the most primitive in terms of brain development?” Sousa spread his hands, palms up, as if asking the audience to use its common sense. “On average, blacks have the smallest brains and the lowest IQs of any of the races. They’ve also got the highest crime rate and the most promiscuity. Orientals, on the other hand, are the brightest, the least prone to criminal activity, and the most restrained sexually. Whites fall right in the middle between the other two groups.”

The picture switched to footage of Sousa lecturing to a class. The students — all white — seemed rapt. “Sousa’s theories don’t stop there,” said the reporter’s voice over this. “He’s even suggesting that the old locker-room myths are true.”

They cut back to the interview tape. “Blacks do have bigger penises than whites, on average,” said Sousa. “And whites are better endowed genitally than Orientals. There’s an inverse relationship between genital size and intelligence.” A pause, and Sousa grinned, showing perfect teeth. “Of course,” he said, “there are always exceptions.”

Wendy Di Maio’s voice-over again: “Much of Sousa’s work echoes older, equally controversial studies, such as the research made public in 1989 by Philippe Rushton [still image of Rushton, a surprisingly handsome white man in his mid-forties], a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and the conclusions in the contentious 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve [slide of the book’s cover].”

An outside shot: Di Maio walking across the campus in the courtyard between Lewis and Hildebrand Halls. “Is it right that such obviously racist research is going on in our publicly funded institutions? We asked the university’s president.”

The camera panned up to what was presumably supposed to be the president’s window, but his office was actually clear across the campus from there. Then it switched to a close-up of the president in an opulent, wood-paneled room. His name and title were superimposed at the bottom of the screen. The elderly man spread his arms. “Professor Sousa has full tenure. That means he has full freedom to pursue any line of intellectual inquiry, without pressure from the administration…”

Molly and Pierre watched the rest of the report, and then Pierre clicked the off button. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “God, that pisses me off,” he said. “With all the quality work going on at the university, they pick crap like that to highlight. And you just know there are going to be people who think Sousa must be right…”

They ate dinner in silence — Stouffer’s lasagna done up in the microwave for them (it was Pierre the gourmet’s turn), and Gerber apple baby food for Amanda. At eight months, she had acquired a very healthy appetite.

Finally, after Molly had put Amanda to bed, they sat at the dining-room table, sipping coffee. Molly, growing concerned by Pierre’s quiet, said, “A penny for your thoughts.”

“I thought you could take them for free,” said Pierre, a little sharply. His expression showed that he immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Forgive me. I’m just angry.”

“About… ?”

“Well, Felix Sousa, of course — which got me to thinking about that paper he and Klimus did a few years ago for Science on reproductive technologies. Anyway, thinking about that paper got me thinking about Condor Health Insurance — you know, this business of financially coercing the abortion of imperfect fetuses.” He paused. “If I wasn’t already manifesting symptoms of Huntington’s, I’d cancel my policy in protest.”

Molly made a sympathetic face. “I’m sorry.”

“And that stupid letter Condor sent me — what patronizing crap, from some flack in the PR department. A complete brush-off.”

Molly took a sip of coffee. “Well, there’s one way to get a little more attention. Become a stockholder in Condor. Companies are usually more responsive to their stockholders’ complaints because they know that if they aren’t, the questions might be raised in person at their shareholders’ meetings. I took a course in ethics back at UM; that’s one of the things the prof said.”

“But I don’t want to support a company like that.”

“Well, you wouldn’t invest a lot.”

“You mean buy just one share?”

Molly laughed. “I can see you don’t play the markets much. Shares are normally bought and sold in multiples of a hundred.”

“Oh.”

“I take it you don’t have a broker, right?”

Pierre shook his head.

“You can call mine: Laurie Lee at Davis Adair. She’s great at explaining things.”

Pierre looked at her, startled. “You really think I should do this?”

“Sure. It’ll increase your clout.”

“What would a hundred shares cost?”

“That’s a good question,” said Molly. She headed down to the den, and Pierre followed her, holding carefully to the banister to help keep his balance on the short flight of stairs. Sitting on a desk was a Dell Pentium computer. Molly booted it up, logged on to CompuServe, scurried down a couple of layers of menus, and pointed to the screen. “Condor closed today at eleven and three-eights per share.”

“So a hundred shares would cost — what? — eleven hundred and… and…”

“Eleven hundred and thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents, plus commission.”

“That’s a fair piece of change,” said Pierre.

Molly nodded. “I suppose, but it’ll all be liquid. You should be able to recover almost all of it, if you decide to sell later on. In fact…” She tapped some more keys. “Look at that,” she said, pointing at the table that appeared on screen. “They’ve been climbing steadily. They were at just eight and seven-eighths this time last year.”

Pierre made an impressed face.

“So we might even end up making money when you eventually sell the stock. But, for the time being at least, Condor will have to take you seriously.”

Pierre nodded slowly, thinking it over. “Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s do it. How do I proceed?”

Molly reached for the phone. “First, we call my broker.”

Pierre pointed at the clock. “Surely she won’t be in this late.”

Molly smiled indulgently. “It may be eight p.m. here, but it’s noon in Tokyo. Laurie has a lot of clients who like to play the Nikkei. She could very well still be in.” Molly touched a speed-dial key. She was obviously very much into this; she had mentioned her investments in the past, but Pierre had never quite realized just how conversant she was with the field.

“Hello,” she said into the handset. “Laurie Lee, please.” A pause. “Hi, Laurie. It’s Molly Bond. Fine, thanks. No, not for me — for my husband. I told him you were the best in the business.” Laughter. “That’s right; anyway, can you take care of him, please? Thanks. His name is Pierre Tardivel; here he is.”

She held the handset out for Pierre. He hesitated for a moment, then brought it to his ear. “Hello, Ms. Lee.”

Her voice was high-pitched, but not grating. “Hello, Pierre. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I’d like to set up an account so that I can buy some stock.”

“Very good, very good. Let me just get a few personal details…”

She asked for information about his employer, and for his Social Security number (which Pierre had to consult his wallet to determine, having only recently received it).

“Okay,” said Laurie. “You’re all set. Was there anything you wanted me to buy for you now?”

Pierre swallowed. “Yes. A hundred shares of Condor Health Insurance, please.”

“They’re on the California Stock Exchange; I won’t be able to place the order until tomorrow. But as soon as the exchange opens, I’ll get you one hundred C-H-I Class B.” Pierre could hear keyclicks. “You know, that’s an excellent choice, Pierre. A very excellent choice. Not only has that stock been doing well on its own — it’s very close to its all-time high, which was set just two weeks ago — but it’s also done significantly better than its competition in the past year. I’ll send you confirmation of the purchase in the mail.”

Pierre thanked her and hung up, feeling quite the entrepreneur.

Three weeks later, Pierre was working in his lab. The phone rang. “Allo?”

“Hi, Pierre. It’s Helen Kawabata at the SFPD.”

“Helen, hi! I’d been wondering what had become of you.”

“Sony, but we’ve been swamped by that serial-killer case. Anyway, I’ve finally got together some tissue samples for you.”

“Thank you! How many did you get?”

“A hundred and seventeen—”

“That’s terrific!”

“Well, they’re not all from SF; my lab does forensics work on a contract basis for some of the surrounding communities, as well. And some of the samples are several years old.”

“But they’re all unsolved murders?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s great, Helen. Thanks so much! When can I come and get them?”

“Oh, whenever—”

“I’m on my way.”

Pierre picked up the samples, brought them back to LBNL, and turned them over to Shari Cohen and five other grad students; there were always plenty around. Through the polymerase chain reaction, the students would produce copies of each set of DNA, then test the material for thirty-five different major genetic disorders Pierre had specified.

That evening, as he was leaving building 74, Pierre passed Klimus in a corridor. He responded to Klimus’s curt “Good night” with a soft “Auf Wiedersehen,” but the old man didn’t seem to hear.

Chapter 30

While he waited for the grad students to report back on the samples Helen Kawabata had provided, Pierre mapped out all the cytosines in the portion of Molly’s DNA that contained the code for the telepathy neurotransmitter. He then crunched the numbers backward and forward, looking for a pattern. He’d wanted to crack the hypothesized code that cytosine methylation represented, and he could think of no more interesting stretch of DNA to work on than that part of Molly’s chromosome thirteen.

And at last he succeeded.

It was incredible. But if he could verify it, if he could prove it empirically—

It would change everything.

According to his model, cytosine-methylation states provided a checksum — a mathematical test for whether the string of DNA had been copied exactly. It tolerated errors in some parts of the DNA strand (although those errors tended to render the DNA garbled and useless, anyway), but in others — notably right around the telepathy frameshift — it would allow no errors, invoking some sort of enzymatic correction mechanism as soon as copying was initiated. The cytosine-methylation checksum served almost as a guardian. The code to synthesize the special neurotransmitter was there, all right, but it was deactivated, and almost any attempt to activate it was reversed the first time the DNA was copied.

Pierre stared out the lab window, contemplating it all.

If a frameshift in a protected region occurred by accident due to a random addition or loss of a base pair from the chromosome, the cytosine-methylation checksum saw to it that any future copies — including those used in eggs or sperm — were corrected, preventing the error in coding from being passed on to the next generation. Molly’s parents had not been telepaths, nor was her sister, nor would any of her children be.

Pierre understood what it meant, but was still shocked. The implications were staggering: a built-in mechanism existed to correct frameshifts, a built-in way of keeping certain fully functional bits of the genetic code from becoming active.

Somehow, the enzymatic regulator had failed to work during the development of Molly’s own body. Perhaps that had been due to some drug — prescription or illegal — Molly’s mother had been using while pregnant with Molly, or to some nutrient missing from Molly’s mother’s diet. There were so many variables, and it was so long ago, that it would likely be impossible to duplicate the biochemical conditions under which Molly had developed between her conception and birth. But whatever had happened then had allowed the expression of something that was — the anthropomorphic language kept springing to Pierre’s mind, despite his efforts to avoid it — that was designed to remain hidden.

A Saturday afternoon in June. The doorbell rang.

“Who could that be?” said Pierre to little Amanda, who was sitting in his lap. “Who could that be?” He made his voice high and soft, the exaggerated tones generations of parents have used when talking to their babies. Meanwhile, Molly got up and went to the door. She checked the peephole, then opened the door, revealing Ingrid and Sven Lagerkvist, and their little boy, Erik.

“Look who’s here!” said Pierre, still baby-talking to Amanda. “Why, look who’s here! It’s Erik. See, it’s Erik.”

Amanda smiled.

Sven was carrying a large wrapped gift. He kissed Molly on the cheek, handed the gift to her, and came into the living room.

Molly placed the package on the pine coffee table. She then came over to Pierre and took Amanda from him. Although Pierre loved holding his daughter in his arms while sitting in a chair, he’d given up walking and carrying her after almost dropping her a few weeks before.

Molly carried Amanda into the middle of the room and set her down on the carpet near the coffee table. Sven, holding Erik’s chubby little hand, led him across the living room to where Amanda was.

“Manda,” said Erik in his soft, slurred way. As was typical of those with Down’s syndrome, Erik’s tongue stuck partway out of his mouth when he wasn’t speaking.

Amanda smiled and made a small sound low in her throat.

Pierre leaned back in his chair. He hated that sound, that little thrumming. Each time Amanda made it, his heart skipped. Maybe this time — maybe at last…

Molly pointed at the brightly wrapped box and spoke to Amanda. “Look what Erik and Uncle Sven and Aunt Ingrid brought for you,” she said.

“Look! A present for the birthday girl.” She turned to the adult Lagerkvists. “Thanks so much, guys. We really appreciate you coming over.”

“Oh, it’s our pleasure,” said Ingrid. She was wearing her red hair loose about her shoulders. “Erik and Amanda always seem to have such a good time together.”

Pierre looked away. Erik was two; Amanda was one. Normally, they wouldn’t have made good playmates, but Erik’s Down’s syndrome had already held up his mental development enough that he really was at much the same stage as Amanda.

“Would either of you care for coffee?” asked Pierre, meticulously rising from his chair, then holding on to its back until he was completely steady.

“Love some,” said Sven.

“Please,” said Ingrid.

Pierre nodded. They’d gotten past the point, thank God, where Ingrid insisted on offering to help Pierre with every little thing. He could manage making coffee — although he would need someone else to carry the steaming cups back to the living room.

He poured ground coffee into the coffeemaker. Next to the machine sat the cake Molly had bought, a Flintstones birthday cake crowned with plastic figures of Fred and Wilma surrounding a baby Pebbles; Molly had said there had been a Barney/ Betty/Bamm Bamm version for little boys.

Red lettering on the white frosting said “Happy First Birthday, Amanda.”

Pierre resisted the urge to sneak a bit of the icing. He added water to the coffeemaker, then headed back into the living room.

The unopened gift had been set aside; they’d wait till after the cake for that. Erik and Amanda were now playing with two of Amanda’s favorite plush toys, a pink elephant and a blue rhinoceros.

Molly smiled up at Pierre as he came in. “They’re so cute together,” she said.

Pierre nodded and tried to return the smile. Erik was a well-behaved little boy; he seemed to be passing calmly through what for a normal child would have been the Terrible Twos. But, then, they knew exactly what was wrong with Erik. It was tearing Pierre up not knowing what was wrong with Amanda. After an entire year of life, she hadn’t said so much as “Mama” or “Dada.” There was no doubt that Amanda was a bright girl, and no doubt that she seemed to understand spoken language, but she wasn’t using it herself. It was both heart-wrenching and puzzling. Of course, many children didn’t speak until after their first birthday. But, well, Molly’s biological father was a certified genius and her mother was a Ph.D. in psychology; surely she should be on the fast end of the developmental cycle, and—

No, dammit. This was a party — hardly the occasion to be dwelling on such things. Pierre returned to the living room.

Ingrid, on the couch, gestured at Erik and Amanda. “The time goes by so quickly,” she said. “Before we know it, they’ll be grown.”

“We’re all getting older,” said Sven. He’d been cleaning his Ben Franklin glasses on the hem of his safari shirt. “Of course.” he said, replacing them on his nose, “I’ve felt old ever since the girls in Playboy started being younger than me.”

Pierre smiled. “What did it for me was Partridge Family reruns. When I first encountered that show in the mid-seventies, I thought Susan Dey was the hot one. But I saw a rerun recently, and she’s just a skinny kid.

Now I can’t take my eyes off Shirley Jones.”

Laughter.

“I knew that I was getting old,” said Molly, “when I found my first gray hair.”

Sven waved his arm dismissively. “Gray hair is nothing,” he said; there were more than a few in his massive beard. “Now, gray pubic hair…”

The doorbell rang again. Pierre went to open it this time. Burian Klimus stood on the stoop, his ever-present pocket notebook visible in his breast pocket.

“I hope I’m not too late,” said the old man.

Pierre smiled without warmth. He had hoped that his boss had been kidding about wanting to come over for the baby’s birthday. Klimus kept finding reasons to visit Molly and Pierre at home, kept looking at little Amanda, kept writing things in his notebook. Pierre wanted to tell him to go to hell, but he still wasn’t permanently assigned to LBNL. Sighing, he stood aside and let Klimus come in.

Everyone had gone home. The cake had been devoured, but the cardboard tray it had come on still sat on the dining-room table, a ring of frosting and crumbs on its upper surface. Empty wineglasses were perched on various pieces of furniture and on one of the stereo speakers.

They’d clean it up later; for now, Pierre just wanted to sit on the couch and relax, his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Little Amanda sat in Molly’s lap, and with her chubby left hand was holding on to one of her father’s fingers.

“You were a good girl today,” Pierre said in a high-pitched voice to Amanda. “Yes, you were.”

Amanda looked up at him with her big brown eyes.

“A very good girl,” said Pierre.

She smiled.

“Da-da,” said Pierre. “Say ‘Da-da.’ ”

Amanda’s smile faded.

“She’s thinking it,” said Molly. “I can hear the words. ‘Da-da, Da-da.’

She can articulate the thought.”

Pierre felt his eyes stinging. Amanda could think the thought, and Molly could hear the thought, but for Pierre from his daughter there was only silence.

Time passed.

Pierre had spent a long and mostly fruitless morning trying different computer models for coding schemes in his junk-DNA studies. He leaned back in his desk chair, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and arched his spine in a stretch. His can of Diet Pepsi was empty; he thought about going to the vending machine to get another.

The door opened, and Shari Cohen came in. “I’ve finally got the last of those reports, Pierre,” she said. “Sorry it took so long.”

Pierre waved her closer and had her place them on his desk. He thanked her, added the new reports to the pile of other genetic tests of murder victims that had been submitted earlier, squared all the pages off by tapping them on their four sides, then started going through them.

Nothing unusual on the first. Nada on the second. Zip on the third. Oh, here’s one — the Alzheimer’s gene. Bupkes on number five. Diddly on six.

Ah, a gene for breast cancer. And here’s a poor fellow who had both the Alzheimer’s gene and the neurofibromatosis gene. Three more with nothing. Then one with a gene for heart disease, and another with a predisposition to rectal cancer…

Pierre made notes on a pad of graph paper. When he’d gone through all 117 reports, he leaned back in his chair again, flabbergasted.

Twenty-two of the murder victims had major genetic disorders. That was — he rummaged on his cluttered desk for his calculator — just under 19 percent. Only 7 percent of the general population had the genetic disorders Pierre had asked the grad students to test for.

The samples Helen had provided had all been labeled, but Pierre didn’t recognize any of the 117 names, let alone the 22 of them who had had major genetic disorders. He’d hoped some of them would have been people he knew of from the UCB/LBNL community, or people he’d heard Klimus mention in passing.

And there was still the problem of Bryan Proctor. The only murder conclusively related to the attempt on Pierre’s life was Proctor’s; Chuck Hanratty had been involved in both. But there was no tissue sample from Proctor, and nothing Proctor’s wife had said to Pierre indicated that he’d had any genetic disorder. He’d have to find the time to visit Mrs. Proctor again, but—

Merde! It was already 14:00. Time to leave to pick up Molly. His stomach started churning. The murders could wait; this afternoon, they were going to find out what was wrong with Amanda.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Tardivel,” said Dr. Gainsley. He was a short man with a fringe of reddish gray hair around his bald head, and a completely gray mustache. “Thank you for coming in.”

Pierre shot a glance at his wife to see if she was going to correct the doctor by pointing out that it was Mr. Tardivel and Ms. Bond, but she didn’t say a word. Pierre could tell by her expression that the only thing on her mind was Amanda.

The doctor looked at each of them in turn, a grim expression on his face. “Frankly, I thought your pediatrician was just humoring you when she referred you to me; after all, lots of kids don’t speak until they’re eighteen months or more. But, well, have a look at this X ray.” He led them over to an illuminated wall panel with a single gray piece of film clipped to it. The picture showed the bottom half of a child’s skull, the jaw, and the neck. “This is Amanda,” he said. He tapped a small spot high up in the throat. “It’s hard to see the soft tissues, but can you see that little U-shaped bone? That’s called the hyoid. Unlike most bones in the body, it’s not attached directly to any other bone. Rather, the hyoid floats in the throat, serving as an anchor for the muscles that connect the jaw, the larynx, and the tongue. Well, in a normal child Amanda’s age, we’d expect to see that bone down around here.” He tapped the X ray farther down in the throat, in a line directly behind the middle of the lower jaw.

“And?” said Molly, her tone perplexed.

Gainsley motioned for them to take the two chairs in front of his wide glass-topped desk. “Let me see if I can explain this simply,” he said. “Mrs. Tardivel, did you breast-feed your daughter?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you must have noticed that she could suckle continuously without pausing to breathe.”

Molly nodded slightly. “Is that abnormal?”

“Not for newborns. In them, the path between the mouth and the throat curves very gently downward. This allows air drawn in by the nose to flow directly into the lungs, bypassing the mouth altogether, making it possible to breathe and eat at the same time.”

Molly nodded again.

“Well, as a baby begins to grow up, things change. The larynx migrates down the throat — and with it, the hyoid bone moves down, too. The path between the lips and the voice box becomes a right angle instead of a gentle curve. The downside of this is that a space opens up above the larynx where food can get caught, making it possible to choke to death.

The upside, though, is that the repositioning of the larynx allows for a much greater vocal range.”

Pierre and Molly looked briefly at each other, but said nothing.

“Well,” continued Gainsley, “the migration of the larynx is normally well under way by the first birthday and completed by the time the baby is eighteen months old. But Amanda’s larynx isn’t migrating at all; it’s still up high in her throat. Although she can make some sounds, a lot of other sounds will elude her, especially the vowels aw, ee, and oo — like in ‘hot,’

‘heat,’ and ‘hoot.’ She’s also going to have trouble with the guh and kuh sounds of G and K.”

“But her larynx will eventually descend, right?” asked Pierre. He had one testicle that hadn’t descended until he was five or six — no big deal, supposedly.

Gainsley shook his head. “I doubt it. In most other ways, Amanda is developing like a normal child. In fact, she’s even a bit on the large size for her age. But in this particular area, she seems completely arrested.”

“Can it be corrected surgically?” asked Pierre.

Gainsley pulled at his mustache. “You’re talking about massive restructuring of the throat. It would be extremely risky, and have only minimal chances of success. I would not advise it.”

Pierre reached over and took his wife’s hand. “What about — what about the other things?”

Gainsley nodded. “Well, lots of children are hairy — there’s more than one reason why we sometimes call our kids little monkeys. At puberty, her hormones will change, and she may lose most of it.”

“And — and her face?” said Pierre.

“I did the genetic test for Down’s syndrome. I didn’t think that was her problem, but the test is easy enough to do. She doesn’t have that. And her pituitary hormones and thyroid gland seem normal for a child her age.”

Gainsley looked at the space between the two of them. “Is there, ah, anything I should know?”

Pierre stole a glance at Molly, then made a tight little nod at the doctor.

“I’m not Amanda’s biological father; we used donated sperm.”

Gainsley nodded. “I’d thought as much. Do you know the ethnicity of the father?”

“Ukrainian,” said Pierre.

The doctor nodded again. “Lots of Eastern Europeans have stockier builds, heavier faces, and more body hair than do Western Europeans. So, as far as her appearance is concerned, you’re probably worrying about nothing. She clearly just takes after her biological father.”

Chapter 31

Pierre drove over to San Francisco, made his way to the dilapidated apartment building, and touched the button labeled super. A few moments later, a familiar female voice said, “Yes?”

“Mrs. Proctor? It’s Pierre Tardivel again. I’ve just got one more quick question, if you don’t mind.”

“You must get Columbo reruns up in Canada.”

Pierre winced, getting the joke. “I’m sorry, but if I could just—”

He was cut off by the sound of the door mechanism buzzing. He grabbed the handle and headed through the drab lobby to suite 101. An elderly Asian man was just getting off the small elevator next to the apartment. He eyed Pierre suspiciously, but went upon his way. Mrs. Proctor opened the door just as Pierre was about to knock.

“Thank you for seeing me again,” said Pierre.

“I was just teasing,” said the plump woman with the golf-ball chin.

She’d had her hair cut since the last time Pierre had been here. “Come in, come in.” She stepped aside and motioned Pierre into the living room. The old TV set was on, showing The Price Is Right.

“I just wanted to ask you a question about your husband,” Pierre said, taking a seat on the couch. “If you—”

“Jesus, man. Are you drunk?”

Pierre felt his face growing flush. “No. I have a neurological disorder, and—”

“Oh. Sorry.” She shrugged. “We get a lot of drunks around here. Bad neighborhood.”

Pierre took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. “I just have a quick question. This may sound funny, but did your husband have any sort of genetic disorder? You know — anything that his doctor ever said was inherited? High blood pressure, diabetes, anything like that?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Pierre pursed his lips, disappointed. Still… “Do you know what his parents died of? If either of them had died of heart disease, for instance, Bryan could have inherited those bad genes.”

She looked at Pierre. “That’s a thoughtless remark, young man.”

Pierre blinked, confused. “Sorry?”

“Bryan’s parents are both still alive. They live in Florida.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry they’re alive?”

“No, no, no. Sorry for my mistake.” Still — still — “Are they in good health? Either of them have Alzheimer’s?”

Mrs. Proctor laughed. “Bryan’s dad plays eighteen holes a day down there, and his mother is sharp as a tack. No, there’s nothing wrong with them.”

“How old are they?”

“Let’s see. Ted is… eighty-three or eighty-four. And Paula is two years younger.”

Pierre nodded. “Thank you. One final question: did you ever know a man named Burian Klimus?”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Ukrainian. He’s an old man, in his eighties, bald, built like a wrestler.”

“No, nobody like that.”

“He might have used a different name. Did you ever know an Ivan Marchenko?”

She shook her head.

“Or someone named Grozny? Ivan Grozny?”

“Sorry.”

Pierre nodded and got up off the couch. Maybe Bryan Proctor was a red herring — maybe Chuck Hanratty had just been after his tools or his money. After all, it sounded like the guy had had a fine genetic profile, and—

“Umm, could I use your bathroom before I go?”

She pointed down a short corridor, illuminated by a single bulb inside a frosted white sphere attached to the ceiling.

Pierre nodded and made his way slowly into the room, which had pale blue walls and dark green fixtures. He closed the door behind him, having to push a bit to get it to fit the frame; it had apparently warped from years of exposure to steaming showers. Feeling like an absolute heel, he opened the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet and looked inside. There! A man’s Gillette razor. He slipped it into his pocket, made a show of flushing the toilet and running the sink for a few moments, then headed out.

“Thank you very much,” said Pierre, wondering if he looked as embarrassed as he felt.

“Why were you asking all this?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “Just a crazy idea. Sorry.”

She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t be bothering you again.”

“No problem. I’ve been sleeping a lot easier since you — since that Hanratty guy died. You’re welcome here anytime.” She smiled. “ ‘Sides, I like Columbo.”

Pierre made his way out of the apartment building and headed for San Francisco police headquarters.

Molly had taken a two-year maternity leave from classroom teaching (the maximum the faculty-association agreement allowed without loss of seniority), but still went into the campus for a half day once a week to meet with the students for whom she was thesis adviser and to attend departmental meetings. Since Pierre was off in San Francisco, Mrs. Bailey was looking after Amanda.

After her last student appointment, Molly took advantage of the PC in her office to do some on-line research using Magazine Database Plus, the joys of which Pierre had introduced her to. She was about to log off when a thought occurred to her. She had tried to digest everything Dr. Gainsley had said, but she still didn’t understand it all. She typed in a query on the topic of “speech disorders,” but saw that there were over three hundred articles. She cleared that query, and thought. What was it that Gainsley had said? Something about the hyoid bone? Molly wasn’t even sure how to spell that word. Still, it was worth a try. She selected “Search for words in article text,” then tapped out HYOID. The screen immediately filled with citations for fourteen articles. She stared at the screen, reading and rereading three of the citations:

“Quoth the cavemen: nevermore” (laryngeal structures in human ancestors), Speech Dynamics, January-February 1997, v6 n2 p24(3).

Reference #A19429340. Text: Yes (1551 words); Abstract: Yes.

“Neanderthal neck bone sparks cross talk” (hyoid fossil may indicate capacity for speech), Science News, April 24, 1993, vl43 nl7 p262(l).

Reference #A13805017. Text: Yes (557 words); Abstract: Yes.

“Neanderthal language debate: tongues wag anew” (new reconstruction of La Chapelle Neanderthal skull), Science, April 3, 1992, v256 n5O53 p33(2). Reference #A12180871. Text: Yes (1273 words); Abstract: No.

She selected each of the articles in turn, and read them through.

There’d long been a debate among anthropologists over whether Neanderthals could speak, but it was difficult to resolve the issue since no soft tissues had been preserved. In the 1960s, linguist Philip Lieberman and anatomist Edmund Crelin had made a study of the most famous Neanderthal of all, the La Chapelle-aux-Saints specimen found in 1908.

Based on that specimen, they concluded that Neanderthals had a larynx high in their throats, with the air path curving gently down from the back of the mouth, meaning they would have lacked the vocal range of modern humans.

This view was challenged in 1989, when a Neanderthal skeleton dubbed Moshe was discovered near Israel’s Mount Carmel. For the first time ever, a Neanderthal hyoid bone had been found. Although somewhat larger than a modern human’s hyoid, the proportions were the same.

Unfortunately, Moshe’s skull was missing, making a complete reconstruction of his vocal tract — including the all-important positioning of the hyoid — impossible.

The Science article contained a quote from the University of Pennsylvania’s Alan Mann, who said that given the current contradictory evidence, he didn’t see “how a dispassionate observer could make a choice” between the pro-Neanderthal-speech and anti-Neanderthal-speech positions. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History agreed, saying most anthropologists were in “bystander mode,” awaiting some new evidence.

Molly’s whole body was shaking by the time she’d finished reading it all.

It looked horribly, incredibly, unthinkably as though Burian Klimus had found a way to bring just such new evidence to light.

“Hello, Helen.”

Helen Kawabata looked up. “Jesus, Pierre, we should really get you your own parking space.”

Pierre smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry, but—”

“But you’ve got one more favor to ask.”

“One of these days I’m going to stop by just to say hello.”

“Yeah, right. What is it this time?”

Pierre fished the razor out of his jacket pocket. “I got this from Mrs. Proctor. It’s Bryan Proctor’s razor, and I thought maybe you could see if a DNA sample could be lifted from it. I’m no expert at getting samples from dried blood specks or things like that.”

Helen walked over to a cupboard, pulled out a plastic specimen bag, came over to Pierre, and held it out with its mouth open. “Drop it in.”

Pierre did so.

“It’ll be a few days before I get a chance to look at it.”

“Thank you, Helen. You’re a peach.”

She laughed. “A peach? You need a more recent edition of Berlitz, Pierre. Nobody talks like that anymore.”

Molly, furious at what Klimus had possibly done, was on her way out of the campus, walking by North Gate Hall, when she first heard the argument. She looked around to see where the sounds were coming from.

About twenty yards away, she saw a couple of students, one male and one female, both twenty or so. The male had long brown hair gathered into a ponytail. His face was round and full and, just now, rather flushed. He was yelling at a petite woman with frosted blond hair. The woman was wearing stonewashed jeans and a yellow Simpsons sweatshirt. The man was wearing black jeans and a corduroy jacket, which was unzipped, showing a white T-shirt beneath. He was shouting at the woman in a language that Molly didn’t recognize. As he spoke, he drove home each point by thrusting a finger toward the woman’s face.

Molly slowed her walking a little. There was a never-ending problem with female students being harassed, and Molly wanted to ascertain if she should intervene.

But the woman seemed to be holding her own. She shouted back at the man in the same language. The woman’s body language was different from the man’s, but equally hostile: she held both hands out in front of her, fingers splayed, as if wanting to wrap them around his throat.

Molly only intended to watch long enough to satisfy herself that it wasn’t going to become violent, and that the woman was a willing participant in the exchange. A few other passersby had stopped to watch as well, although many more were continuing on after gawking for only a moment or two. The woman pulled a ring off her hand. It wasn’t a wedding or engagement ring; it came off the wrong finger. Still, it clearly had been a gift from the man. She threw it at him and stormed away. It bounced off his chest and went flying into the grass.

Molly turned to go, but as the man went to his knees, trying to find the ring, he shouted “Blyat!” at the departing woman. Molly froze. Her mind flashed back to that long-ago day in San Francisco: the old geezer tormenting the dying cat. The word she’d just heard was precisely what that horrible man had yelled at Molly then.

Molly took off after the woman, who was marching purposefully toward the doors of the nearest building, her head held defiantly high, ignoring the stares of onlookers. The man was still rooting in the grass for the ring.

Molly caught up with the woman just as she was pulling on one of the vertical tubular door handles, polished smooth by the hands of a thousand students each day.

“Are you okay?” asked Molly.

The woman looked at her, face still red with anger, but said nothing.

“I’m Molly Bond. I’m a professor in the psych department. I’m just wondering if you’re okay.”

The woman looked at her for a moment longer, then gestured rith her head toward the man. “Never better,” she said in an iccented voice.

“That your boyfriend?” asked Molly. As she looked, the man rose to his feet, holding the ring high. He glared across the distance at the two of them.

“Was,” said the student. “But I caught him cheating.”

“Are you an international student?”

“From Lithuania. Here to study computers.”

Molly nodded. That was the natural place for their conversation to end.

She knew she should just say, “Well, as long as you’re okay…” and head on her way. But she couldn’t resist; she had to know. She tried to make her tone light, offhand. “He called you ‘ blyat,’ ”said Molly. “Is that—” and she realized she was about to look like an ignoramus. Was there such a language as Lithuanian? Her Midwestern upbringing had left a few things to be desired. She finished her question, though: “Is that Lithuanian?”

“Nyet. It’s Russian.”

“What’s it mean?”

The woman looked at her. “It’s not a nice thing to say.”

“I’m sorry, but—” What the hell, why not just tell the truth? “Somebody called me that once. I’ve always wondered what it meant.”

“I don’t know the English,” said the student. “It has to do with the female sex part, you know?” She looked bitterly at the receding figure of the man she’d been arguing with. “Not that he’s ever going to see mine again.”

Molly looked back at the receding figure. “The jerk,” she said.

“Da,” said the student. She nodded curtly at Molly and continued on into the building.

Pierre accompanied Molly as she carried Amanda upstairs and put her in the crib at the foot of the king-size bed. They each leaned over in turn and kissed their daughter on the top of the head. Molly had been strangely subdued all evening — something was clearly on her mind.

Amanda looked at her father expectantly. Pierre smiled; he knew he wasn’t going to get off that easily. He picked up a copy of Put Me in the Zoo from the top of the dresser. Amanda shook her head. Pierre raised his eyebrows, but put the book back down. It had been her favorite five nights in a row. He’d yet to figure out what prompted his daughter to want a change, but since he now knew every word of that book by heart, he was quite ready to comply. He picked up a small square book called Little Miss Contrary, but Amanda shook her head again. Pierre tried a third time, picking up a Sesame Street book called Grover’s Big Day. Amanda smiled broadly. Pierre came over, sat on the foot of the bed, and began to read.

Molly, meanwhile, went back downstairs. Pierre got all the way through the book — about ten minutes’ worth of reading — before Amanda looked ready to fall asleep. He bent over again, kissed his daughter’s head once more, checked to make sure the baby monitor was still on, and slipped quietly out of the bedroom.

When he got down to the living room, Molly was sitting on the couch, one leg tucked up underneath her. She was holding a copy of the New Yorker, but didn’t seem to really be looking at it. A Shania Twain CD was playing softly in the background. Molly put down the magazine and looked at him. “Is Amanda asleep?” she said.

Pierre nodded. “I think so.”

Her tone was serious. “Good. I’ve been waiting for her to go down. We have to talk.”

Pierre came over to the couch and sat next to her. She looked at him briefly, then looked away. “Have I done something wrong?”

She faced him again. “No — no, not you.”

“Then what?”

Molly exhaled noisily. “I was worried about Amanda, so I did some research today.”

Pierre smiled encouragingly. “And?”

She looked away again. “It’s probably crazy, but…” She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “Some anthropologists contend that Neanderthal man had exactly the same throat structure as Dr. Gainsley said Amanda has.”

Pierre felt his eyebrows going up. “So?”

“So your boss, the famous Burian Klimus, has succeeded in extracting DNA from that Israeli Neanderthal specimen.”

“Hapless Hannah,” said Pierre. “But surely you don’t think—”

Molly looked at Pierre. “I love Amanda just as she is, but…”

“Tabernac,” said Pierre. “Tabernac.”

He could see it all in his mind. After Molly, Pierre, Dr. Bacon, and Bacon’s assistants had left the operating theater, Klimus hadn’t proceeded to masturbate into a cup. Instead, he’d maneuvered the first of Molly’s eggs onto the end of a glass pipette, holding it there by suction. Working carefully under a microscope, he’d then slit the egg open and, using a smaller pipette, had drawn out Molly’s own haploid set of twenty-three chromosomes, and replaced them with a diploid set of Hannah’s forty-six chromosomes. The end result: a fertilized egg containing solely Hannah’s DNA.

Of course, opening up the egg would have damaged the zona pellucida, a jellylike coating on its surface necessary for embryo implantation and development. But ever since Jerry Hall and Sandra Yee had shown in 1991 that a synthetic zona pellucida could be coated onto egg cells, human cloning had been theoretically possible. And just two years later, at an American Fertility Society meeting in Montreal, of all places, Hall and his colleagues announced they had actually done it, although the embryos they’d cloned weren’t taken beyond the earliest stage. Yes, the technology did exist. What Molly was suggesting was a real possibility. Klimus could have used the procedure to make several eggs containing copies of Hannah’s DNA, cultured them in vitro to the multicellular state, and then Dr. Bacon — presumably unaware of their pedigree — would have inserted the embryos into Molly, hoping that at least one of them would implant.

“If it’s true,” said Molly, looking up at Pierre, gaze flicking back and forth between his left eye and his right, “if it’s true, it wouldn’t change the way you feel about Amanda, would it?”

Pierre was quiet for a moment.

Molly’s voice took on an urgent tone. “Would it?”

“Well, no. No, I suppose not. It’s just that, well, I mean, I knew she wasn’t my child — biologically, that is. I knew she wasn’t part of me. But I’d always thought she was part of you. But if what you’re suggesting is true, then…” He let the words trail off.

The Shania Twain CD had stopped playing. Pierre got up, made his way slowly over to the stereo, ejected the disc, fumbled to get it back in its jewel case, and turned the power off. He was trying desperately to think. It was a crazy idea — crazy. Sure, Amanda had a speech disorder. So what?

Lots of kids dealt with things that were much more severe. He thought of little Erik Lagerkvist, who was infinitely worse off than Amanda. He put the CD back in the rack and made his way over to the couch. “I do love her,” he said as he sat down. He took his wife’s hand in his. “She’s our daughter.”

Molly nodded, relieved. But after a long moment she said, “Still, we need to know. It affects so much — her schooling, maybe even her susceptibility to disease.”

Pierre looked at the clock on the mantel. It was just after 9:00 p.m. “I’m going to the lab.”

“What for?”

“Most everyone will have gone home by now. I’m going to steal a sample of Hapless Hannah’s DNA.”

Chapter 32

Pierre used his card key to get into the Human Genome Center offices.

Hapless Hannah’s bones were normally kept at the Institute of Human Origins, and Pierre had no doubt that at least some copies of her DNA were kept there, too. The material was too precious to have it stored in only one facility.

There had to be an emergency set of keys somewhere. He went over to the desk that used to be Joan Dawson’s. The top drawer was unlocked. In it was a key ring with perhaps two dozen different keys on it. Pierre picked it up and headed down the corridor.

He looked at the keyhole in Klimus’s doorknob, but nothing gave away which key might fit it. He began trying keys one after another, and, in the process, vainly attempted to keep the jostling of the keys from making too much noise. Pierre felt nervous as hell, and—

“Can I help you?” said an accented voice.

Pierre’s heart did a flip-flop. He looked up. “Carlos!” he said, seeing the head janitor. “You startled me.”

“Sorry, Dr. Tardivel. I didn’t realize it was you. You need to get into Dr. Klimus’s office?”

“Umm, yes. Yes, I need a reference book he’s got.”

Carlos reached for his own key ring, which was attached to his belt by a device that let out cord if he pulled on it but wound it back in when he let go. He leaned over and unlocked the door. Then he stepped inside and flicked on the lights, the overhead panels sputtering a bit as they came to life; glare from them reflected off the sheets of glass covering the framed astronomical photos. Carlos motioned for Pierre to follow him in. Pierre made a show of going over to one of the floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases.

“See what you need?” asked Carlos.

“No — they’re not in alphabetical order. It’ll take me a while to find it.”

“Well, you go ahead and look. But be sure to lock up when you’re through. We’ve had some trouble lately with break-ins.”

“I will,” said Pierre. “Thanks.”

Carlos left. Pierre listened as the caretaker’s footfalls receded into the distance. He went over to the second door. It was locked. He tried all twenty keys; none of them opened it. He walked over to Klimus’s desk, opening the top drawer, hoping there’d be another set of keys in there.

Nothing. He closed the door and turned around. His arm moved unexpectedly, hitting the Mars globe on the credenza. For one horrible moment, Pierre thought he was going to knock it to the floor, but the red planet just spun on its axis a couple of times, then came to rest.

Pierre took out his wallet, fished out his Macy’s card, and tried to jiggle it into the gap between the door and the jamb, just as he’d seen on countless TV shows. Time passed. He was terrified that Carlos would return. But eventually he got the little bolt to slide aside. He opened the door, stepped in, and fumbled for the light switch.

There was a small refrigerator in there, sitting on what looked like a stand for a microwave oven. Taped to the fridge door was a laser-printed sign that said, “Biological specimens. Highly perishable. Do not turn off or unplug this unit.”

Pierre opened the refrigerator door. There were three wire shelves inside, each holding sealed glass containers. In the door of the fridge were cans of Dr Pepper. The glass containers were all labeled, and it took Pierre only a few minutes to find the one he wanted. A handwritten sticker on it said, simply, “Hannah.”

Pierre took the vial, closed the fridge door, turned off the light in the small room, turned off Klimus’s office light, and closed, but did not lock, the main door. He walked down to his own lab, used restriction enzymes to snip out some test fragments of the DNA, then set them up to undergo the polymerase chain reaction to make more duplicates. By the time he returned tomorrow, he’d have millions of copies of the test fragments.

He headed back to Klimus’s office, returned the sample container to the fridge, closed the door, locked up the office, and went home, adrenaline flowing.

The next day, as Pierre was coming down the corridor to his lab, he heard his phone ringing. He hurried along (at least it was hurrying for him; anybody else could have outpaced him by walking briskly), opened his lab, and scooped up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hey, Pierre. It’s Helen Kawabata.”

“Hi, Helen.”

“You’re in luck. There was actually a fair bit of DNA on Bryan Proctor’s razor. The blade was getting dull; he’d obviously been using it for a long time. Anyway, I’m going to be in court this morning, but you can come pick up the samples this afternoon if you like.”

“Thanks very much, Helen. I really appreciate it.”

“It’s the least a peach could do. Bye.”

Pierre turned to the work of PCR typing Amanda’s and Hannah’s DNA — not as complete as full genetic-profile DNA fingerprinting, but it would give results in two days instead of two weeks. When he had the process set up, he got in his car and drove over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, went to police headquarters, picked up the refrigerated samples of Bryan Proctor’s DNA, and drove straight back to LBNL. Shari Cohen happened to be coming down the corridor.

“Shari,” said Pierre, “would you have a chance to run that same battery of tests on one more sample for me, please?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks. Here it is. Oh, and can you also check to make sure there’s a Y chromosome present?” There was always a small chance that Mrs. Proctor used a man’s razor on her legs or armpits.

“Will do.”

“Thanks. Let me know as soon as you’ve got the results.”

That night, Pierre came home, kissed Molly and Amanda, and sat down on the couch to look at his mail. He was trying to keep his mind off Amanda’s DNA; he wouldn’t have results until the day after tomorrow.

Pierre’s copy of Maclean’s had shown up, with news that was now two weeks out of date from Canada; his Solaris had arrived, as well. He made a point of reading French magazines to keep himself still primarily thinking in that language. There was also his Visa bill, and—

Hey, something from Condor Health Insurance. A big manila envelope.

He opened it up. It was the company’s annual report, and a note announcing their next annual general meeting.

Molly sat down on the couch next to him. While Pierre read over the annual-meeting notice, she started flipping through the annual report. It was a thin perfect-bound book with a textured yellow-and-black cover, measuring the same size as a standard piece of typing paper. ‘“Condor is the Pacific Northwest’s leader in progressive health coverage,’” she said, reading from the first interior page. ‘“With foresight and a commitment to excellence, we provide peace of mind for one-point-seven million policy holders in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington State.’”

“Peace of mind my ass,” said Pierre. “There’s no peace of mind in telling a pregnant mother that she has to either abort her baby or lose her insurance, nor in telling a Huntington’s at-risk that he has to take a genetic test.” He held up the meeting notice. “Do you think I should go?”

“When is it?”

He peered at it. “Friday, October eighteenth. That’s — what? — three months from now.”

“Sure. Give them a piece of your mind.”

It was the first day of August. Pierre got into his lab early, ready to check over the DNA fingerprints for Hapless Hannah and Amanda Tardivel-Bond.

All he had to do was glance at the autorads, and—

Goddamn it. God fucking damn it.

Every marker was the same.

He found a chair and sat down in it before he fell down.

His daughter, his baby daughter, was a clone of a Neanderthal woman who had lived and died in the Middle East sixty-two thousand years ago.

It was all—

“Dr. Tardivel?”

Pierre looked up. It took a moment for his eyes to focus. He covered the autorads he’d been looking at with his hands. “Oh, hi, Shari.”

“I’ve finished testing that last DNA sample.”

Pierre’s head was still swimming. He almost said, “What DNA sample?”

Of course: the Bryan Proctor specimen, the one Helen Kawabata had recovered from his razor. “And?”

Shari Cohen shrugged. “Nothing. He — and it was a he — tested negative for every genetic disorder I tried.”

“Diabetes? Heart disease? Alzheimer’s? Huntington’s?”

“Clean as a whistle.”

Pierre sighed. “Thanks, Shari. I appreciate your help.”

“Is everything all right, Pierre?”

Pierre couldn’t meet her eyes. “Fine. Just fine.”

Shari looked at him for a moment more, then, with a little lifting of her shoulders, went over to one of the lab counters and began to work. Pierre leaned back in his chair. He was so sure that he was onto something — some vast conspiracy involving mercy killing of those who faced dark genetic futures. But Chuck Hanratty had killed Bryan Proctor, a man without any major genetic disorder. It made no sense.

Pierre glanced again at the autorads of Hannah’s and Amanda’s DNA, then got to his feet.

“I’m going home,” he said to Shari as he passed her.

“Are you sure everything’s okay?” asked Shari.

Pierre heard her, but didn’t trust himself to respond. He made his way out to the parking lot and found his car.

Chapter 33

Pierre came in the front door. Molly rushed over to greet him, little Amanda toddling behind.

“Well?” said Molly.

Pierre exhaled, unsure how to break the news. “She’s a clone,” he said simply.

Even though she’d been the one to originally suspect it, Molly’s eyes went wide. “That asshole,” she said.

Pierre nodded.

Amanda had made it over to where her daddy was standing. She looked at him with big brown eyes and stretched her arms up at him.

Pierre looked down.

Amanda.

Amanda Helene Tardivel-Bond.

Or…

Or Hapless Hannah, Mark II.

Her arms continued reaching up toward him. She looked confused about why he wasn’t picking her up.

No, damn it, thought Pierre. No. She is Amanda — is my daughter.

He reached down and lifted her off the ground. She put her arms around his neck and squirmed with delight. Pierre was supporting her now with one hand and tousling her brown hair with the other. “How you doin?” he said to her. “How’s Daddy’s little girl?”

Amanda smiled at him. He wanted to carry her over to the living-room couch, but that was risky. Instead he set her down, took her tiny hand in his, and together they managed the big walk over to it. He sat down and she clambered into his lap.

Molly came into the living room and took a seat in the easy chair opposite the couch. “So what do we do now?” she said.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if we should do anything—”

Molly’s eyes went wide again. “After what he did?”

Pierre raised a hand. “I know, I know. Don’t you think I feel the same way? God, I feel like he’s raped my wife — I want to wring his neck, kill him with my bare hands, but…”

“But what?”

“But there’s Amanda to think about.” He stroked his daughter’s head, smoothing out the hair he’d made disheveled earlier. “If we go after Klimus, the truth about her might come out.”

Molly considered this. “We have to get him out of our lives — I won’t have him coming over here, making her an object of study. Look, once he realizes we know the truth, he should back down. What he did was unethical—”

“Completely.”

“—so he risks losing everything if it’s exposed — his position at LBNL, his consulting contracts, everything.”

“But what if the truth about Amanda does come out?” asked Pierre.

“I don’t know. Couldn’t we leave here? Go to Canada, and change our names? You can still return to Canada, right?”

Pierre nodded.

“I know you wanted to stay here, but—”

Pierre shook his head. “That’s secondary. I’ll do anything for my daughter — anything at all.” He hugged Amanda to his chest, and she cooed with pleasure.

“Professor Klimus,” said Pierre, his voice sharp. He had intended to go in calm and reasonable, but the mere sight of the old man started his blood boiling.

Klimus looked up. His brown eyes flickered between Pierre and Molly.

He then tilted his bald head back down and turned the page in the journal that was spread open on his desk. “I’m very busy. If you want to see me, you must make an appointment with my secretary.”

Molly closed the door to the office.

“How could you?” said Pierre through clenched teeth.

Klimus reached for the phone on his desk. “I think I’ll call security.”

Pierre lunged forward, grabbed the handset from Klimus’s bony hand, and slammed it down on the cradle. “Don’t call anyone,” said Pierre, his voice quavering with fury. “I asked you how you could do it.”

“Do what?” said Klimus, now trying to feign innocence. He used his left hand to rub the one from which Pierre had wrenched the phone.

“Don’t play games,” said Pierre. “I got hold of a sample of Hapless Hannah’s DNA. It’s the same as Amanda’s.”

Klimus leaned forward. “Yes, it is. But, tell me — what made you suspect?”

“What the fuck difference does that make?”

“It’s the heart of the matter, no?” said Klimus, spreading his arms.

“Something made you realize that the infant specimen was not Homo sapiens sapiens. What gave it away?”

‘“Infant specimen,’” repeated Molly, shuddering. “Don’t call her that.”

“How could you tell she was not your daughter?” asked Klimus.

“Goddamn it!” said Pierre. “God—” He launched into a string of French profanity, unable to control himself. Then: “Damn you, damn you — you sit there asking us questions! I should break you in two, you pathetic old man!”

Klimus shrugged his broad shoulders. “Asking questions is what a scientist does.”

“Scientist?” sneered Pierre. “You’re not a scientist. You’re a monster.”

Klimus rose from his chair. “You snot-nosed kid — I am Burian Klimus.”

He said his own name as though uttering a prayer. “Don’t dare snap at me. I could see to it that you never work in any lab anywhere in the world again.”

Molly was red in the face and breathing in snorts. “Burian — we trusted you.”

“You wanted a baby. You have a baby. You wanted in vitro fertilization, normally an expensive process. You got that for free.”

Pierre’s fists were clenching and unclenching. “You bastard. You don’t feel any remorse over what you did.”

“What I did was wonderful,” said Klimus. “There hasn’t been a child like the infant specimen since the Stone Age.”

“Don’t call her ‘the infant specimen,’ damn it,” said Molly. “She’s my daughter.”

“Say that again,” said Klimus.

“Don’t try that — don’t you fucking dare to try that,” said Pierre. “Yes, we love Amanda — that has nothing to do with this.”

“It has everything to do with it,” said Klimus. “And it has to do with why you, Dr. Tardivel, shall now sit down and shut up.”

“I’m not going to shut up,” said Pierre. “I’m going to LBNL’s director, and to the police.”

“You shall do neither. You would have to explain the nature of your complaint — and that would mean revealing the nature of the child.” He turned to Molly. “Do you really want your daughter to be an object of great public attention, Ms. Bond?” Klimus’s expression was smug.

“You think that’s your ace in the hole, don’t you?” snapped Pierre.

“Well, you’re wrong. We’re prepared to tell the truth to anyone who can lock you up.”

“We’ll get you put in jail,” said Molly, “and then we’ll go to Canada and take new names — something I’m sure you know all about.”

Klimus didn’t blink. “I advise against such actions. If you have the best interests of the infant specimen—”

“I’ve had enough of you, you son of a bitch,” said Pierre. He reached for the phone, and pounded out the extension number for the office of LBNL’s director.

“That is your choice,” said Klimus with a shrug. “Of course, I should have thought you would want to avoid a custody battle—”

“Cust—” Molly’s eyes went wide. “You couldn’t do that.”

“The child is a clone, Dr. Bond. You may have brought the egg to term, but you aren’t the child’s biological mother; she is in fact not related to either of you by blood.”

“Hello?” said a male voice at the other end of the phone.

“Your choice, Tardivel,” said Klimus. “I am prepared to fight to the bitter end.”

Pierre glared at him, but replaced the handset on its cradle. “You could never win.”

“Couldn’t I? Amanda’s closest relative is Hapless Hannah — and Hannah’s remains are in the legal guardianship of the Institute of Human Origins, under an agreement with the government of Israel. Dr. Bond here is nothing but a surrogate — and the courts have traditionally conferred very few rights on such people.”

Molly turned to Pierre. “He can’t do that, can he? He can’t take Amanda away?”

“You bastard,” said Pierre to Klimus.

“Not me,” said Klimus, with a small shrug. “If anyone’s parentage is in question, it is Amanda.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Now, I believe I asked you how you knew the child was not yours. I expect an answer.” He reached for the phone. “Or perhaps I shall call the director. The sooner we start this legal battle, the sooner it will be resolved.”

Pierre yanked the phone away again.

“I see you now prefer this matter kept quiet,” said Klimus. “Very well; tell me how you discovered Amanda’s pedigree.”

Pierre’s face was flushed, and his fist was closing and opening in spasms. Molly said nothing.

“She is a very ugly child, you know,” said Klimus.

“Damn you — you are a monster,” said Molly. “She’s beautiful.”

Klimus didn’t seem to hear. He spoke in measured tones, looking at Molly, then Pierre. “Yes, we had Neanderthal DNA — but there were still many questions we couldn’t answer. Could Neanderthals talk, for instance.

There’s a huge debate over that in the anthropological community — you should hear Leakey and Johanson go on about it. Well, now we know. They could not speak aloud; they probably had their own very efficient sign language instead. We’ll want to see if Amanda picks up Ameslan faster than normal. Perhaps she’s hardwired in some way that we aren’t to communicate by signing.

“And the biggest question of all: are they the same species as us? That is, was Neanderthal man Homo sapiens neanderthalensis — just a subspecies, capable of producing fertile offspring with a modern human?

Or were they something else entirely — Homo neanderthalensis, a different species altogether, perhaps able to have a sterile child with a modern human, just as a horse and a donkey can produce a mule, but incapable of producing offspring that can breed. Well, as soon as Amanda enters puberty we’ll be able to find that out.”

“Fuck you,” said Molly.

Klimus nodded. “That would be one option.”

Molly lunged with her arms outstretched, ready to kill. Pierre moved in, grabbing his wife, holding her back. “Not now,” he said to her.

“We shall continue the charade that she is your child,” said Klimus, not in the least flustered. “But I shall visit her weekly and record details about her growth and intellectual abilities. When it comes time for me to publish that information, I will do so just as you would, Dr. Bond, in a psychological case study — referring to the infant specimen merely as ‘Child A.’ You will take no action against me; if you do, I will put on a custody fight that will make O. J. Simpson’s defense look like a public defender’s first case.” He swung on Pierre. “And you, Dr. Tardivel, will never speak to me in that tone of voice again. Now, do we have an understanding?”

Pierre, furious, said nothing.

Molly looked at her husband. “Don’t let him take her away from me.

When—”

She stopped short, but sometimes one could read minds without having the benefit of that special genetic quirk. When you’re gone, she’ll be all that I have left.

“All right,” said Pierre at last, through clenched teeth. “Come on, Molly.”

“But—”

“Come on.”

“I’ll be over this Saturday,” said Klimus. “Oh, and I shall bring equipment to take blood samples. You will not mind, I’m sure.”

“You fucking asshole,” said Molly.

“Sticks and stones,” said Klimus, with a shrug — “but I own Amanda’s bones.”

Molly rose. Her face was completely red.

“Come on,” said Pierre. He opened the door to Klimus’s office.

They exited the room. Pierre slammed the door behind them, took her hand, and continued down the corridor. They made it into Pierre’s lab; Shari was off somewhere else.

“Damn it,” said Molly, bursting into tears. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

She looked up at Pierre. “We have to find some way to get rid of him,” she said. “If there was ever a justified case of murder—”

“Don’t say that,” said Pierre.

“Why not? I know you’re thinking the same thing.”

“I wasn’t sure before,” said Pierre, “but now I am — this kind of experimentation is pure fucking Hitler. Klimus must be Marchenko.” He took his wife in his arms. “Don’t worry — he’s going to die, all right. But it won’t be us doing it. It will be the Israelis, hanging him for war crimes.”

Chapter 34

“Justice,” said the female voice at the other end of the phone.

“Avi Meyer, OSI,” said Pierre.

“I’m sorry, Agent Meyer is out of the office today. Would you—”

“His voice mail, then.”

“Transferring.”

“This is Agent Avi Meyer. I’m at a meeting in Quantico today, and won’t be back in the office until tomorrow. Please leave a message at the tone.”

Beep!

“Avi, call me as soon as you can. It’s Pierre Tardivel — the geneticist at Lawrence Berkeley. Call me right away. It’s important.” Pierre read out his number, then hung up.

“He’s out of town for the day,” said Pierre to Molly, who was sitting on a lab stool. “I’ll call him again Monday if he doesn’t call first.” He moved over to her and hugged her. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”

Molly’s eyes were still bloodshot. “I know,” she said, nodding slightly. “I know.” She looked at her watch. “Let’s go get Amanda from Mrs. Bailey. I want to hold my daughter.”

Pierre hugged her again.

Pierre’s conscience had been bothering him for days. It wasn’t as though he’d taken anything valuable. But, still, a man’s razor was a very personal item. It might have meant a lot to Bryan Proctor’s widow — an important way of remembering him. And, well, if things did get out of hand with Klimus, and they had to flee to Canada, Pierre didn’t want this continuing to prey on his mind. He wasn’t sure what pretext he’d use to explain his visit, but if he could get back into the apartment, he could return the razor to the medicine chest, maybe hiding it behind some other items so that its reappearance wouldn’t be obvious.

He pulled up to the dilapidated apartment building in San Francisco, walked into the entryway, and pushed the intercom button labeled super.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Proctor? It’s Pierre Tardivel.”

Silence for several seconds, then buzzing from the door. Pierre made his way slowly over to suite 101. Mrs. Proctor was waiting for him in the doorway, hands on hips. “You took my husband’s razor,” she said flatly.

Pierre felt his face grow flush. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

He pulled a small, clear plastic bag containing the razor out of his pocket.

“I’m — I’m a geneticist; I wanted a DNA sample.”

“What on earth for?”

“I thought maybe he had a genetic disorder that you didn’t know about.”

“And?”

“He didn’t. At least not a common, easily-tested-for one.”

“Which is precisely what I told you. What’s this all about, Mr. Tardivel?”

Pierre wanted to be a million kilometers away. “I’m sorry. It’s all crazy. I feel terrible.”

She kept staring at him, unblinking, golf-ball chin thrust out.

“I just had this crazy theory that maybe your husband’s death and the attempt on my life were linked. You know I’ve got a genetic disorder, and I though maybe he did, too.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No, he was in perfect health.”

The woman looked at Pierre, surprise on her face. “Well, I’d hardly say that. He was on a waiting list for a kidney transplant.”

Pierre felt his heart skip a beat. “What?”

“He had bum kidneys.”

Pierre was angry. “But I asked you if he had any inherited disorders—”

“He didn’t inherit this problem. It was a result of an injury. His kidneys were damaged in a car accident about ten years ago and had gotten steadily worse.”

“God,” said Pierre. “Jesus God.”

“Justice.”

“Avi Meyer, OSI, please.”

“Just a sec.”

“Meyer.”

“Avi, it’s Pierre Tardivel.”

“Hi, Pierre. Sorry not to get back to you yet. I was out of town. Say, any luck with your complaint against Condor Health?” Pierre had previously called Avi to find out whether the coercing of abortions was legal under federal law; it was.

“No,” said Pierre, “but that’s not why I’m calling. I’m phoning about Burian Klimus.”

“We don’t have anything new,” said Avi with a sigh.

“Maybe you don’t, but I do. You’re right about him. He’s Ivan Grozny.”

Avi’s voice was excited, but cautious. “What makes you say that?”

“You know the attempt on my life? The guy who tried to kill me was a neo-Nazi, right? Chuck Hanratty?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, Hanratty previously killed a guy named Bryan Proctor — and Proctor had bum kidneys.”

“So?”

“And Joan Dawson, a diabetic here at LBNL, was murdered, too, by a very similar knife to the one used in the attack on me; it wasn’t Hanratty who killed her, of course — he was dead by that point. But it could very well have been someone connected to Hanratty — meaning someone connected to the Millennial Reich.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And three Huntington’s disease sufferers were murdered recently in San Francisco — and Burian Klimus had met all three of them.”

“Really?”

“And I’ve checked tissue samples from a hundred and seventeen victims of unsolved murders here in the Bay Area — a vastly disproportionate number of them had bad genes.”

“So you think — shit, you think Klimus is doing what? Purging society of defectives?”

“Mein Kampf, chapter one, verse one,” said Pierre.

“You’re sure about all this?” said Avi.

“Positive.”

“You better be right,” said Avi.

“I am.”

“ ‘Cause if this is just some disgruntled-employee shit — if you’re just making trouble for your boss — then you’re making a huge mistake. OSI’s part of the Department of Justice, and you don’t fuck with Justice.”

Pierre’s tone was determined. “Klimus is Ivan the Terrible. I’m convinced of that.”

Chapter 35

Pierre loved his daughter — of that he had no doubts. But, well, he was a scientist, and he couldn’t help being intrigued by her special heritage. He knew that her DNA would differ from that of a modern human by far less than 1 percent. Hell, chimpanzee DNA deviated from modern human DNA by only 1.6 percent (chimps and humans having diverged some six million years ago). The differences between Amanda and other children who hadn’t bypassed the last sixty thousand years of human evolution were surely very subtle. Still, something — some tiny genetic change — had given the less-physically-robust modern humans some sort of advantage over the Neanderthals, leading to the disappearance of the latter. The attachment areas for Neanderthal pectoral muscles were twice the size of those in modern humans; they would have had Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique without working at it. Yet something tipped the balance in favor of Homo sapiens sapiens. Even while reviling Klimus’s outrageous experiment, Pierre could understand the fascination with studying Neanderthal DNA.

Using restriction enzymes to break up Amanda’s DNA into manageable fragments, he started looking for differences, and was surprised to find some unexpected ones. They weren’t in her protein-synthesizing DNA but rather in several long strands of junk DNA.

Intrigued, Pierre decided to visit the San Francisco Zoo. Surely he could cajole an array of primate tissue samples from the curator…

Pierre and Molly attended another meeting of the Bay Area Huntington’s Support Group in San Francisco; by this stage, he really did need the support.

The guest speaker was a loud PR woman from a company that made wheelchairs, walkers, and other aids for the mobility-impaired. Pierre hadn’t realized so many high-tech options were available.

After the meeting, he spoke again to white-haired Carl Berringer. “Good meeting,” said Pierre. “Interesting speaker.”

Carl’s whole upper body was shaking. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Umm, yes. Pierre Tardivel, from Montreal, originally. I came to a meeting about fifteen months ago.”

“Forgive me. My memory’s not what it used to be.”

Pierre nodded. He himself had not yet encountered many mental difficulties, but he knew they were a common part of Huntington’s.

“It’s a mixed blessing, a speaker like that,” said Berringer, nodding in the direction of the woman. She was talking with some people on the other side of the classroom. “For those of us who’ve got insurance, we think, Great — look at all those neat ideas. But a lot of our members don’t have any coverage, and couldn’t possibly afford any of those gadgets.”

Although the California law that went into effect two years earlier let anyone with the Huntington’s gene get insurance so long as they weren’t yet displaying overt symptoms, those already manifesting the disease were still generally uninsurable. “I tell you,” Carl said, “that system you’ve got up in Canada is the only thing that makes sense in the genetic age — universal coverage, with the population as a whole sharing the risks.”

He paused. “You got insurance?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky guy,” said Berringer. “I’m under my wife’s company plan now, but I had to quit my job to get that; it only covers dependent spouses.”

Pierre nodded grimly. “Sorry.”

“It probably wasn’t worth it,” said Carl. “She’s with Bay Area Health:

B-A-H. We call them ‘Bah, Humbug.’ They’ve got ridiculously low caps for catastrophic illness.” A pause. “Who are you with?”

“Condor.”

“Oh, yeah. They turned me down.”

“I actually own some Condor stock,” said Pierre. “I was thinking of going to their shareholders’ meeting this year, raise a bit of a stink about their policies. Is anybody else here with them?”

Berringer steadied himself by holding on to the brushed aluminum molding beneath the classroom greenboard. He looked around the room.

“Well, let’s see. Peter Mansbridge had been with them.”

That name had stuck in Pierre’s mind the first time Berringer had said it to him because by coincidence it was the same name as the anchor of

The National, CBC’s nightly newscast. “Peter Mansbridge?” Pierre said.

“Wasn’t he the fellow you said was shot to death?”

Berringer nodded. “Real shame that. Nicest guy you ever wanted to meet.”

“Anybody else?”

Berringer moved his left hand up to scratch the side of his head. His hand made the journey like a fluttering bird. “I used to know all this.” He shook his head sadly. “Time was, I had a memory sharp as a tack.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Pierre. “It’s not important.”

“No, no, let’s see…” He turned to face the room. “Excuse me!” he said loudly. “Excuse me!”

People turned to look at him; the caregivers in the group stopped moving.

“Excuse me, everybody. This fellow here, um—”

“Pierre.”

“—Pierre here is wondering if anyone else has insurance with Condor?”

Pierre was embarrassed that his simple question had been made into a big deal, but he smiled wanly.

“I do,” said a stunning black woman of about forty, holding up a manicured hand. She was standing next to a wheelchair; a black man was seated in it, his legs moving about constantly. “Of course, they won’t cover Burt.”

“Anybody else?” asked Carl.

A white fellow with Huntington’s raised his hand, his arm moving like a sapling’s trunk in a variable wind. “Wasn’t Cathy Jurima with them?” he said.

“That’s right,” another caregiver said. “She was an orphan — no family-history records. She got in years ago.”

“Who’s Cathy Jurima?” said Pierre.

Carl frowned. “Another of our members who was murdered.”

A crazy thought hit Pierre. “What about the other one who was killed?

Who was he insured by?”

Carl raised his voice again. “Anyone remember who covered — oh, what was his name now? Juan Kahlo?”

Heads shaking around the room — some in negation.

Carl shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Thanks, anyway,” said Pierre, trying to sound calm.

Pierre and Molly left the meeting. Pierre was quiet the whole trip home, thinking. Molly drove. They parked in their driveway, then walked next door to pick up Amanda from Mrs. Bailey. It was 10:40 p.m.; they begged off from the offered coffee and cake.

Amanda had been sleeping, but she woke up when her parents arrived.

Molly scooped up her daughter — it wasn’t safe for Pierre to carry her when they had to walk down the cement steps that led up to Mrs. Bailey’s front door. Molly hugged Amanda close, and as they walked back to their house, she said, “No, sweetheart, that’s all right… Did you, now? Did you really? I bet Mrs. Bailey was surprised at how good you are at drawing!”

Pierre’s heart pounded. He loved Amanda with all his soul, but he always felt like there was a wall between him and her, especially when Molly was carrying on what sounded like onesided conversations, detecting Amanda’s thoughts and replying to them.

The three of them came into their house, and Molly moved over to sit on the couch, Amanda perching herself in her mother’s lap.

“Would Joan Dawson have been under the same health plan as you?” asked Pierre.

Molly was stroking Amanda’s brown hair soothingly. “Not necessarily.

I’m on the faculty-association plan; she was support staff. Completely different union.”

“Remember Joan’s funeral?” said Pierre.

Amanda was apparently thinking something at her mother. “Just a second, dear,” said Molly to the girl. She then looked up at Pierre. “Sure, I remember the funeral.”

“We met Joan’s daughter there. Beth — remember?”

“Slim redhead? Yeah.”

“What was her husband’s name?”

“Umm — Christopher, wasn’t it?”

“Christopher, right. But what was his last name?”

“Good grief, I don’t have the foggiest—”

Pierre was insistent. “It was Irish — O’Connor, O’Brien, something like that.”

Molly frowned, thinking. “Christopher… Christopher… Christopher

O’Malley, that was it.”

“O’Malley, right!” He went into the dining room and got the phone book from a cupboard there.

“It’s too late to be calling anyone,” said Molly.

Pierre didn’t seem to hear her. He was already dialing. “Hello? Hello, is that Beth? Beth, I’m sorry to be calling so late. This is Pierre Tardivel; we met at your mother’s funeral, remember? I worked with her at LBNL.

That’s right. Listen, I need to know who provided your mother’s health insurance. No, no — that’s a life-insurance company; her health insurance.

Right, health. Are you sure? Are you positive? Okay, thanks. Thanks very much; sorry to disturb you. What? No, no, nothing like that. Nothing for you to worry about. Just, ah, just some paperwork back at the office.

Thanks. Bye.”

He put down the phone, his hand shaking.

“Well?” asked Molly.

“Condor,” said Pierre, as if it were a swear word.

“Christ,” said Molly.

“One more,” said Pierre, putting away the Berkeley phone book and pulling out the much thicker San Francisco one.

“Hello? Hello, Mrs. Proctor. It’s Pierre Tardivel. I’m really sorry about calling so late, but… yes, that’s right.” He did his best Peter Falk. ‘“Just one more little thing.’” Back to his normal voice. “I’m wondering if you can tell me who provided your husband Bryan’s health insurance. No, no, I don’t mind holding on.” He covered the mouthpiece and looked at Molly.

“She’s checking.”

Molly nodded. Amanda was now fast asleep in her arms.

“Yes, I’m still here. Really? Thanks. Thanks a million. And sorry to have disturbed you. Bye.”

“Well?” said Molly.

“Do the words ‘the Pacific Northwest’s leader in progressive health coverage’ mean anything to you?”

“Holy shit,” said Molly.

“Where’s that Condor annual report?”

“Down in the den, I think. In the magazine rack.”

Pierre left the dining room, hurried down the half flight of stairs — and tripped at the bottom, an unexpected movement of his left foot having caught him off guard. Molly appeared at the top of the stairs, holding Amanda, who, having been awoken by the crash, was now crying.

“Are you all right?” Molly called, her face contorted in fear.

Pierre used the banister to haul himself back to his feet. “Fine,” he said.

He continued on down the short corridor and emerged a moment later holding the annual report. He came up the stairs more carefully and sat down on the living-room couch. Amanda had stopped crying and was now looking around curiously.

Molly sat next to Pierre, who was rubbing his shin. He handed her the report. “Find that part you read aloud when we first got it — the part about how many policies Condor has.”

She folded back the yellow-and-black cover, flipped past the first couple of pages, then: “Here it is. ‘With foresight and a commitment to excellence, we provide peace of mind for one-point-seven million policy holders in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington State.’”

Pierre tasted bile at the back of his throat. “No wonder their stock is doing so well. What a great way to increase profitability: eliminate anyone who is going to make a major claim. Huntington’s sufferers, diabetics going blind, a superintendent about to have a kidney transplant…”

“Eliminate!”

“Eliminate — and for that, read ‘kill.’ ”

“That’s crazy, Pierre.”

“For me or you, maybe. But for a company that coerces abortions? A company that forces people to take genetic tests that might drive them to suicide?”

“But, look,” said Molly, trying to bring a note of reason back to the conversation, “Condor’s a big company. Think of how many people they’d have to get rid of to have any real effect on their bottom line.”

Pierre thought for a moment. “If they knocked off a thousand policy holders, each of whom were going to make claims averaging one hundred thousand dollars — the cost of a bypass operation, or a couple of years of at-home nursing — they’d increase their profits by one hundred million dollars.”

“But a thousand murders? That’s crazy, Pierre.”

“Is it? Spread them out over three states and several years, and no one would notice.”

“But how would they know who to go after? I mean, sure, they knew you were going to come down with Huntington’s because you told them, but they wouldn’t know in advance in most cases who was going to end up making a big claim.”

“They could get genetic reports from the policyholders’ doctors.”

Molly shook her head. “Not in this state. That’s part of the same law that prevents them from doing genetic discrimination: it’s illegal for an insurance company to request genetic data from a person’s doctor.”

Pierre got up and began pacing in a shaky fashion. “The only way to pull it off would be by doing their own genetic tests on all their policyholders, detecting in advance the ones who might file claims. After all, if you wait until the claims are filed before killing the person, someone would surely notice the connection.”

“But insurers don’t routinely take tissue samples. Lots of medical insurance is granted based on questionnaires, and if a checkup is required, it’s usually done by the family doctor. But, again, the law says the doctor can’t turn over genetic results to the insurer, at least here in California.”

“Then they must get tissue samples some other way — some clandestine way.‘’

“Oh, come on, Pierre. How could they possibly do that?”

“It would have to be during the initial interview with the customer — that’s the only time someone from the insurance company normally is physically close to the policyholder.”

“So what about your own interview? Did the salesperson touch you?”

“No. No, we didn’t even shake hands.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I don’t remember everyone I meet, but, well, I remember her.” He shrugged. “She was, ah, quite fetching.”

“Well, if she didn’t touch you, she couldn’t have taken a tissue sample.”

“Maybe,” said Pierre. “But there’s one way to find out for sure.”

“Hello, Ms. Jacobs. I’m Tiffany Feng from Condor Health.”

“Won’t you come in?” said Molly.

“Thank you — my, what a charming place you have.”

“Thanks. Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Well, then, please, have a seat.”

Tiffany sat down on the living-room couch and removed a few brochures from her attache case, then placed them on the pine coffee table, next to the blue-and-white transmitter for the baby monitor. Molly sat down next to her, putting Tiffany inside her zone. “Maybe you can tell me a bit about yourself, Ms. Jacobs,” said Tiffany.

“Please,” said Molly, “call me Karen.”

“Karen.”

“Well, I’m divorced. And I’m self-employed. I’ve got a preschooler.”

Molly gestured at the baby monitor. “But she’s with a neighbor right now.

Anyway, I got to thinking I should probably have some health insurance.”

“Well, you can’t go wrong with Condor,” said Tiffany. “Let me start by telling you about our Gold Plan. It’s our most comprehensive package…”

Molly listened intently to everything Tiffany said. All of Tiffany’s thoughts were benign: how much commission she’d get for landing the policy (Molly was surprised to learn that it was more than an entire year’s worth of premiums), the other appointments she had for the rest of the day, and so on.

When Tiffany’s spiel was over, Molly said, “Fine, I’ll take the Gold policy.”

“Oh, you won’t be sorry,” said Tiffany. “I just need you to fill out a form.” She took a legal-size sheet from her attache case and placed it on the table. She then opened her jacket, revealing an inside pocket with a row of pens clipped to it. She selected one and handed it to Molly. It was a retractable ballpoint. Molly pressed on the button with her thumb, the tip clicked out, and she began filling in the form.

Suddenly, there was the sound of a door opening upstairs.

Tiffany looked up, startled. “I thought we were alone.”

“Oh,” said Molly, “that’s just my husband.”

“Your husband — but I thought… Oh, my!”

Pierre was staggering down the stairs; for once, he didn’t mind the monster-movie sight he made as he did so. His left hand was holding on firmly to the banister, and in his right, which was swinging wildly, he held the receiver for the baby monitor. “Hello, Tiffany,” he said. Tiffany’s lipsticked mouth was open in shock. “Remember me?”

“You’re Pierre Trudeau!” said Tiffany, her eyes wide in recognition.

“Not quite,” said Pierre. “It’s Tardivel, actually.” He turned to his wife.

“Molly, I want to have a look at that pen.”

Tiffany tried to take the pen from Molly, but Molly jerked it away.

Pierre closed the distance, took the pen, sat down on an easy chair, unscrewed the barrel, and spilled the contents out on the coffee table.

There was a refill in there, with a spring wrapped around it. But the components of the button at the top of the pen were unusual. Pierre held the chrome-plated button up toward the window. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible spike projecting from its rounded top. He turned it toward his eye and squinted at it. It was hollow.

Pierre made an impressed face. “Nice piece of work,” he said, looking over at Tiffany. “When the customer presses down on the button with his thumb, a small core of skin cells is dug out. He wouldn’t feel a thing.”

Tiffany’s eyes were wide, and her voice was full of pleading. “Please, Mr. Tardivel, give me back the pen — I’m going to get in so much trouble!”

“I’ll say,” said Pierre grimly. “It’s against the law in this state to discriminate based on genetic tests — and I bet stealing cells from a body meets the legal definition of assault.”

“But we don’t discriminate!” said Tiffany. “The tissue samples are just for actuarial purposes.”

“What?” said Pierre, startled.

“Look — the new law, it’s crippling the insurance companies. We’re not allowed to get any genetic information from doctors unless it’s stripped of all other personal details about the individuals tested. How can we keep our actuarial tables current? We’ve got to have our own tissue database, do our own tests.”

“But you’re doing far more than that,” said Pierre. “You’re going after the policyholders—”

“What?” said Tiffany.

“The policyholders,” repeated Pierre. “If they’ve got bad genes, you—”

“We don’t keep any records relating the tissue samples to specific individuals. I told you, it’s just for actuarial studies — just for statistics.”

“But you—”

“No,” said Molly, still sitting next to Tiffany on the couch. “No, she really believes that.”

“It’s true,” said Tiffany emphatically.

“But then—” Pierre shut up. Maudit, she really didn’t know.

“Look,” said Tiffany, “please don’t say anything to anyone about that pen — it’ll cost me my job.”

“Do all the Condor salespeople use these pens?”

Tiffany shook her head. “No, no — only the top producers, like me. We get paid extra commissions for it, so—”

Pierre nodded grimly. “So no one ever leaves the company.” His voice was hard. “You want some advice? Quit your job. Quit today, right now, and start looking for work with another company — before everyone else from Condor is out there pounding the pavement with you.”

“Please,” said Tiffany, “my secretary doesn’t even know who I was seeing this morning. Just don’t tell them you got the pen from me, I beg you.”

Pierre looked at her for a time. “All right — if you don’t let anyone know we’ve got the pen, I won’t reveal where we got it. Deal?”

“Thank you!” said Tiffany. “Thank you!”

Pierre nodded, and pointed with a shaking arm at the front door. “Now get the hell out of my house.”

Tiffany rose, grabbed her attache case, and scurried out the door. Pierre leaned back in the chair and looked at Molly. They were both silent for a very long time. Finally, Molly said, “So what do we do now?”

Pierre looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Well, a conspiracy like this would have to be at the very highest level of the company, so we need to get in to see the president — what’s his name?”

Molly went and got the Condor annual report, and flipped pages in it until she found the officers’ listing. ‘“Craig D. Bullen, M.B.A. (Harvard), President and CEO.’”

“Okay, we get in to see this Craig Bullen, and—”

“How on earth do we do that?”

“They might not have cared about what I had to say about their coercing abortions, but they will damn sure pay attention to me as a geneticist.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll send him another letter on Human Genome Center stationery, telling him there’s been a breakthrough — something that will revolutionize actuarial science — and that I’m prepared to give him an advance look.

Hell, even salespeople like Tiffany know all about the HGP; you can bet the company’s president is following it closely and will jump at the chance to get ahead of his competitors.”

Molly nodded, impressed. “But even if he does agree to see you, what do we do next?”

Pierre smiled. “We put Wonder Woman to work.”

Chapter 36

Molly and Pierre drove up to the Condor Health Insurance Building in Pierre’s Toyota. The building was located on a well-treed thirty-acre lot on the outskirts of San Francisco, not far from the ocean. The tower in the center of it all was a Bauhaus monolith of glass and steel, stretching forty stories above the landscape. It was surrounded by parking lots on all four sides. The whole property was contained by a high chain-link fence.

They pulled up to the gatehouse, told the guard they had an appointment with Craig Bullen, and waited while he confirmed that by telephone. The barricade, painted with black and yellow chevrons, swung up, and they drove in, parked, and made their way to the front door.

The spacious lobby was done in brass and red marble. Two giant American flags stood on poles in the atrium, which also contained a pond with goldfish the length of Pierre’s forearm swimming in it. Another guard was sitting behind a wide marble desk. Pierre and Molly presented themselves there and received date-stamped visitors’ badges.

“The executive offices are on the thirty-seventh floor,” said the guard, pointing to a bank of elevators. The sign above the faux-marble door-skins said 31st to 40th Floors Only.

They entered the cab, which had mirrored walls and pot lights in the ceiling, and headed up. The Muzak was an instrumental version of the old Supremes song “Reflections.”

When they got off the elevator, a sign directed them to the president’s office. Pierre placed both his hands in his hip pockets to help control their shaking. As they came to the floor-to-ceiling glass doors, Pierre’s eyes went wide. Bullen’s brunette receptionist was gorgeous — Playboy Playmate of the Year gorgeous. She smiled, her teeth Liquid Paper white.

“Hello,” said Pierre. “Drs. Tardivel and Bond, to see Mr. Bullen.”

She lifted a telephone handset to her ear. Pierre thought briefly that this must be part of Silicone Valley. Molly, picking up the word “silicone,” whapped him lightly on the upper arm.

Having gotten the okay, she rose and, hips swaying atop black stiletto heels, escorted Pierre and Molly to the inner sanctum, opening the heavy wooden door and gesturing them inside.

A goodly hunk of Condor Health Insurance’s profits had clearly been spent on Craig Bullen’s office. It was twenty feet wide and forty feet long, paneled in rich reddish wood — California redwood, Pierre imagined — with intricate carvings of hunting dogs and deer along the frieze. Eight oil paintings of landscapes hung in the room, all doubtless originals. Pierre was astounded to see that the one closest to him, depicting the Scottish moors, was by John Constable, and, like every good Canadian, he immediately recognized the distinctive stylized work of Emily Carr next to it. Her painting included one of her trademark Haida totem poles.

Bullen rose from behind his wide mahogany desk and strode down the length of the room. He was a broad-shouldered, athletic man of about forty, with the lined, dark face of someone who often spent time lying on southern beaches. He had a squarish head, brown eyes, and a hairline that had receded, leaving behind a graying dust bunny at the top of his forehead. His designer suit was dark blue, and he wore intriguing inch-wide cuff links made of gold-plated watch innards.

“Dr. Tardivel,” he said in a deep voice as he extended a large hand.

“How good of you to come.”

“Thank you,” said Pierre, quickly taking the proffered hand and shaking vigorously enough to hide his own palsied movements.

Bullen’s grip was firm, perhaps overly so — an aggressive, macho display.

He turned to Molly, his eyebrows moving up for a conference with his dust bunny. “And this is?”

“My wife, Dr. Molly Bond,” said Pierre, returning his hands to his pockets. He stepped on his left foot with his right, trying to keep it from moving.

Bullen shook her hand as well. “You’re very beautiful,” he said, smiling right at her. “I hadn’t realized Dr. Tardivel was bringing anyone with him, but now that I see you, I’m delighted that he did.”

Molly blushed slightly. “Thank you.”

Bullen started walking. “Please, please, come in.”

A long conference table of polished wood filled part of the room; it had seating for fourteen. Bullen walked along its length to a giant antique Earth globe and tilted off the Northern Hemisphere, revealing a stock of liquor bottles within.

“Won’t you have a drink?” he said.

Pierre shook his head.

“No, thank you,” said Molly.

“Coffee? A soft drink, perhaps? Rosalee will be glad to get you anything you’d like.”

Pierre thought for half a second about asking for something, just to get another look at the spectacular secretary. He smiled ruefully to himself.

You can’t escape your genes. “No, thank you.”

“Very well,” said Bullen. He closed up the Earth and took a seat at the conference table. “Now, Dr. Tardivel, I understand you’ve had a breakthrough over at your lab.”

Pierre nodded and gestured for Molly to sit down. She took the padded leather seat next to Bullen, then moved the chair slightly, bringing him into her zone; her right knee was now practically touching his. Pierre walked around to the other side of the long table, using the backs of the chairs as supports. He removed his sports jacket — he was wearing a pale blue short-sleeved shirt beneath — and sat opposite both of them. “I think it’s safe to say,” said Pierre, “that what we’ve discovered will shock the entire insurance industry.”

Bullen nodded, fascinated. “Do go on, sir. I’m all ears.” A writing pad bound in calf leather was sitting on the table. Bullen drew it to him, opened it up, and took a gold-and-black fountain pen from his jacket pocket.

“What we’ve discovered,” said Pierre, “is, well, shall we say in the nature of a statistical anomaly.” He paused, looking significantly at Bullen.

The man nodded. “Statistics are the lifeblood of insurance, Dr. Tardivel.”

“Well said,” remarked Pierre, “for blood figures very heavily in all of this.” He looked over at Molly and raised his eyebrows a tiny amount, conveying the question of whether she was succeeding at reading Bullen’s mind. She nodded slightly. Pierre went on. “What we’ve discovered, Mr. Bullen, is that your company has a very low rate of major claims payments.”

A few vertical creases joined the horizontal ones on Bullen’s bronzed forehead as he drew his brows together. “We’ve been very lucky of late.”

“Isn’t it more than just luck, Mr. Bullen?”

Bullen was becoming visibly annoyed. “We strive for good management.

I don’t suppose you’ve read Milton Friedman, but—”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” said Pierre. He was pleased to see Bullen’s eyebrows go up — but Friedman had won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics. “I know he asked the question, ‘Do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible?’”

Bullen nodded. “And Friedman’s answer was, No, they do not.”

“But staying within the law is the key point, no? And that’s very hard to do.”

“I thought you had something to tell me about the Human Genome Project,” said Bullen, his face reddening. He placed the cap back on his pen.

Pierre’s heart was pounding so loudly he suspected Bullen and Molly could both hear it. He was suddenly confused. It had been happening more and more lately, but he’d been denying it to himself. That Huntington’s had already robbed him of much of his physical prowess he could accept, but that it also was bound to affect his mind was something he’d been refusing to deal with. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to remember what he was supposed to say next. “Mr. Bullen, I believe your company is illegally taking genetic samples from its policy applicants.”

Molly’s eyes went wide. As soon as the words were out, Pierre realized he’d said the precise thing they’d decided he would not say. All he’d intended to do was steer the conversation lightly around the issue, letting Molly listen to his thoughts. But now…

Bullen looked first at Pierre, then at Molly sitting next to him, then back at Pierre. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said slowly.

What to do? Try to backtrack? But the accusation was out, and Bullen was clearly on guard now. “I’ve seen the pens,” said Pierre.

Bullen shrugged. “There’s nothing illegal about them.”

To press on? Surely that was the only thing to do. “You’re collecting tissue samples without permission.”

Bullen leaned back in his chair and spread his arms. “Dr. Tardivel, that chair you’re sitting in is upholstered in leather, and today is a nice, hot summer’s day, even with the air-conditioning. Your forearm is probably sticking to the chair’s arm, no? When you lift up your arm, your skin will peel away from it, and you’ll leave many hundreds of skin cells behind on the chair. I could freely collect those. If you used my bathroom” — he gestured at an unmarked door set into the redwood paneling — “and left a bowel movement in the toilet bowl, there would be thousands upon thousands of sloughed-off epithelial cells from your intestines coating the feces, and I could collect those, too. If you shed a hair with attached follicle, or spit out some mouth wash in my sink, or blew your nose, or did any of hundreds of other things, I could collect samples of your DNA without you knowing it. My lawyers tell me there’s absolutely nothing illegal about picking up material people are dropping all the time anyway.”

“But you’re not just collecting cells,” said Pierre. “You’re using the information to determine which policyholders are likely to submit expensive claims.”

Bullen raised his hand, palms out. “Only in general terms, so we can plan responsibly. It lets my statisticians forecast the dollar value in claims payouts we’ll likely have to make to existing policyholders in the future — and that is to the policyholders’ benefit, actually. We were totally unprepared for all the claims related to AIDS, for instance; there was a while there in the late eighties when we thought we might have to file Chapter Eleven.”

“Chapter Eleven?”

“Bankruptcy, Dr. Tardivel. It doesn’t do a person much good to have a policy with a bankrupt insurer. This way, we’re able to responsibly plan for the claims we’ll have to pay.”

“I don’t think it’s that at all, Mr. Bullen. I think you’re doing it to avoid having to pay claims. I think you’re doing it to identify in advance and eliminate policyholders who will make substantial claims in the future.”

Molly shook her head slightly. Pierre knew he was going too far. Damn it, why couldn’t he think straight?

Bullen tipped his head to one side. “What?”

Pierre looked over at Molly, then back at Bullen. He took a deep breath, but it was too late now to stop. “Your company is killing people, isn’t it, Mr. Bullen? You arrange the murder of anyone you discover might make a big claim against you.”

“Dr. Tardivel — if you are a doctor — I think you should leave.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” said Pierre, wanting to resolve it once and for all.

“You killed Joan Dawson. You killed Bryan Proctor. You killed Peter Mansbridge. You killed Cathy Jurima. And you tried to have me killed, too — and probably would have tried again, except that that would have aroused too much suspicion.”

Bullen was on his feet now. “Rosalee!” he shouted. “Rosalee!”

The heavy door opened a bit, and the stunning brunette poked her head in. “Sir?”

“Call security! These people are crazy.” Bullen was moving quickly back toward his desk. “Get out, you two! Get out of here.” Rosalee was already on the phone. Bullen opened the top left drawer of his desk and pulled out a small revolver. “Get out!”

Pierre lifted his rump onto the table, slid across its wide, polished surface, got off on the other side, and quickly interposed himself between Molly and Bullen’s line of fire. “We’re leaving,” said Pierre. “We’re leaving.

Put that away.”

Rosalee reappeared. Her collagen-injected lips opened wide when she saw Bullen’s gun. “S-s-security is on its way,” she stammered.

Soon four burly guards in gray uniforms appeared. Two of them had large revolvers drawn.

“Eject these two from the premises,” snapped Bullen.

“Come along,” said one of the guards, gesturing with his gun.

Pierre started walking. Molly soon followed. The guards took them immediately to the elevator lobby. One of the cars was locked off on-service; they were hustled into that one. A guard turned a key in the control panel, and the elevator dropped rapidly down the thirty-seven stories to the ground, Pierre’s ears popping as it did so.

“Outside,” said the same guard who had spoken before.

Pierre and Molly hightailed it into the parking lot, two guards following them. They got into the Toyota, Molly driving, and sped out of the lot.

Pierre was shaking from head to toe, his chorea aggravated by the adrenaline coursing through his system.

“What happened in there?” said Molly.

“I — I got confused.”

“You said far more than you were supposed to.”

Pierre closed his eyes. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. It’s — damn, I hate this fucking disease.”

The road curved to the left. The tires squealed slightly as the car followed the bend.

“What about Bullen?” said Pierre at last.

Molly shook her head. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘Nothing’?”

“Bullen just kept thinking things like, ‘My God — he’s a lunatic,’ and ‘He’s out of his mind,’ and…”

“Yes?”

“And ‘Look at the way he’s shaking — he must be drunk.’”

“But nothing about the murders?”

She turned down another road. “Nothing.”

“No guilt? No sense of shock that he’d been caught?”

“No. Nothing like that. I tell you, Pierre, he honestly didn’t have a clue as to what you were talking about.”

“But I was so sure. All the evidence…”

They came to a traffic signal. Molly stopped the car. “Evidence that you’ve seen,” she said softly. She looked at him briefly, then dropped her eyes.

“No,” said Pierre sharply. “Dammit, no. What happened in there was a fluke. This isn’t a hallucination. I haven’t lost my mind.”

The light turned green. Molly pressed down on the accelerator.

They drove the rest of the way home in silence.

Chapter 37

Pierre, exhausted, came through the back door and immediately felt his spirits lifting. Their house wasn’t expensive, and their IKEA furnishings weren’t elaborate. But it was comfortable — the kind of life he never thought he’d have. A wife, a child, the smell of dinner cooking, toys scattered across the living-room floor, a fireplace.

Molly came into the living room, carrying Amanda. “Look who’s here!” she said to her daughter. “That’s right! It’s Daddy!… I don’t know. I’ll ask him.” Molly looked at her husband. “She wants to know if you liked the cookies we made for you.”

Pierre always brought a bagged lunch to work these days; it was easier to eat right in his lab than making his way down building 74’s long corridors to the snack bar. “They were delicious,” said Pierre. “Thank you.”

Amanda smiled.

Molly gave Pierre a kiss, Pierre sat down on the couch, and Molly transferred Amanda to his waiting arms. He lifted her above his head. She made little gurgling sounds of joy.

“How’s my girl?” he said to her. “How’s my little girl?”

Molly stepped briefly into the kitchen to stir the stew, then rejoined them. Pierre sat Amanda on his knee and bounced her up and down.

Sesame Street was on the TV, the sound turned off.

“Were you a good girl today?” asked Pierre. “You didn’t give Mommy any trouble, did you?”

Amanda was squirming with delight, as if the suggestion that she might be a troublemaker pleased her greatly.

“Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes,” said Molly.

Pierre smiled. “Thanks. Sorry I wasn’t home in time to make it. I know it’s my turn.”

“Oh, don’t worry, hon. I’m enjoying this time.”

She looked a bit wistful. Neither of them knew exactly what they would do with Amanda when Molly’s two-year leave was over. They couldn’t put a mute child in a normal day care, and they’d yet to find a special-needs one that seemed suitable. There was one nearby for deaf children, but none for those who could hear but couldn’t speak. Molly had talked about not going back to the university at all, but they both knew she couldn’t do that. She was on the path toward tenure, and would need to build a solid career for the time when Pierre was no longer with them.

Pierre picked up Amanda again and held her in front of him. He started making goofy faces at her, and she giggled wildly. But after a few moments, she started flapping her hands about, trying to say something.

Pierre put her down on his lap, so that she could move her hands freely.

Drink, she signed.

Pierre looked at her sternly, and signed, What do you say ?

Please, she signed. Drink, please.

Molly smiled. “I’ll get it. Apple juice?”

Amanda nodded. For a while, Amanda had resisted learning sign language; it had seemed a needless bother — until she came to understand that although her mother could hear what she was thinking, neither her father nor anyone else could.

Molly reappeared a few moments later with a small plastic glass half-filled with juice. Amanda took it with both hands and drained it in a couple of gulps. She handed the glass back to her mother.

“I’ve got to make the salad,” said Molly.

“Thanks,” said Pierre.

She smiled and went away. Pierre lifted Amanda off his lap and placed her on the couch next to him. He knew that sign language was, at best, a poor substitute for spoken language, and an even worse one for having thoughts read directly, but to be able to communicate with her meant the world to him. When they were signing, it was like that wall between them had disappeared. Pierre’s hands moved. What did you do today ?

Played, signed Amanda. Watched TV. Drew a picture.

What did you draw?

Amanda looked at him blankly.

What did you draw? Pierre signed again.

Amanda shrugged a little.

Pierre didn’t get as much practice as he’d like at signing. He figured he must be making a mistake, so he tried a different way of asking. You drew a picture of what ?

Amanda’s eyes were wide.

Pierre looked down at his hands… and saw that they were shaking. He hadn’t felt it at all. He gripped his right hand with his left, attempting to steady it. He tried to make the signs again, but they weren’t coming out properly. He couldn’t get his left palm to open correctly for “drew,” couldn’t get his right index finger to move smoothly across the fingers of his left hand for “what.”

Amanda’s brow was creasing. She could clearly see that Pierre was upset. Pierre tried again, but the gestures looked clawlike, unfriendly. He realized he was scaring his daughter, but, damn it, if he could only control his fingers he would—

Amanda began to cry.

“You know, hon, the Condor shareholders’ meeting is coming up next month,” said Molly that weekend. They were having steak, barbecued in their backyard. Molly had cut Pierre’s sirloin into manageable pieces; he had no trouble using knives on soft food, but had difficulty when consecutive slices in the same spot were required.

Pierre nodded. His hands moved constantly now, and his legs moved most of the time. “But they probably won’t let us in after what happened when we saw Craig Bullen.”

“They can’t legally bar you from attending. You’re a stockholder.”

“Still, it might be easier if we kept a low profile.”

“We could go in disguise,” said Molly.

“Disguise?” Pierre’s tone indicated his surprise.

“Sure. Nothing major, but — well, you could grow a beard. You’ve got four weeks after all, and…” She trailed off, but Pierre knew what she was thinking — that his jobs of shaving had been getting worse and worse as his hands had been shaking more and more. A beard would simplify his life anyway.

He nodded. “Okay, I’ll grow a beard. What about you?”

“No, I’d have to take testosterone pills for that.”

Pierre grinned. “I mean, what are you going to do about a disguise?”

“Well, I know Constance Brinkley over at the Center for Theater Arts pretty well. A lot of her acting students take psych courses. I’m sure she’d let me borrow a brown wig.”

Pierre considered. “Real undercover work, eh?”

Molly smiled. “Why not? That’s always been one of your strongest points…”

After a month of growth, Pierre’s beard turned out to be much more satisfactory than he’d imagined. Molly had brought home the wig the previous night. Pierre was startled by how different it made his wife look: her skin seemed almost porcelain white by comparison, and her cornflower eyes stood out piercingly. He’d talked her into wearing the wig to bed that night, and it inspired him to new levels of creativity. Molly gently teased him about being her six-foot vibrator.

The next day, Molly drove them to San Francisco; Pierre had quietly given up driving after an uncontrollable arm movement had almost sent them off Highway 1 into the Pacific.

As they approached the Condor Tower, Pierre caught sight of a small helicopter flying overhead. Although he couldn’t make out the markings on it, it was painted yellow and black, the Condor corporate colors. He shook his head as he watched it land on the roof of the forty-story building. More premiums well spent.

They parked the car and went inside.

Molly and Pierre got off the elevator in the basement of the Condor Tower. For the last few weeks, Pierre had been walking with the aid of a cane. There were long tables set up for shareholders to register, and he made his way slowly over to them, where he received a copy of the meeting agenda. Hundreds of people were milling about, drinking coffee or mineral water and snacking on canapes served by women in stylish uniforms.

Molly and Pierre entered the auditorium, which had about seven hundred seats. They found two chairs together near the middle, one of them on an aisle. Pierre took the aisle seat and held tightly to the handle of his cane, trying to control his shaking. Molly sat down, adjusted the position of her dark wig slightly, and read over the agenda.

On the stage, a line of nine white men and one white woman took seats behind a long mahogany table. Craig Bullen was in the middle. He was wearing a charcoal gray suit with a red carnation pinned to his lapel. He conferred with the men on either side of him, then rose to his feet and moved over to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the mike, “welcome to the Annual General Meeting of Condor Health Insurance. My name is Craig Bullen and I’m the president of the company.”

A few latecomers were still in the process of seating themselves, but everyone else broke into applause. Pierre resisted the urge to boo. The applause continued longer than mere manners would have required. The auditorium was three-quarters full. Many of the people were apparently individual stockholders, but Molly had pointed out several suited types who were probably representatives of mutual funds that had invested in the company.

Bullen was grinning from ear to ear. “Thank you,” he said as the applause finally died down. “Thank you very much. It has been a spectacular year, hasn’t it?”

More clapping.

“Our chief financial officer, Garrett Sims, will have a few words to say about that later, but for now, let me take you through our progress of the past year. We’ll start by introducing the auditors…”

All the usual reports were given, and three motions were brought to the floor — although it was clear that the board of directors had enough proxy votes to pass anything it wished. A few members of the audience asked questions. One young guy was all worked up about the fact that the annual report wasn’t printed on recycled paper. Pierre smiled. The spirit of California radicalism wasn’t dead.

Bullen returned to the podium. “Of course, the biggest impact on our cash flow has been Senator Patrick Johnston’s bill eleven forty-six, which became law on January first, three years ago. That bill has prevented us from denying policies to those who have genetic tests proving that they have serious disorders, so long as the disorder has not yet manifested itself. California insurance companies had lobbied hard in Sacramento to get that law defeated, and indeed had succeeded in getting Governor Wilson to veto it. But, as you may know, Senator Johnston kept reintroducing it, and Wilson finally signed it.” He looked out at the audience. “That’s the bad news. The good news is that we continue to lobby in Oregon and Washington State to make sure that no similar bills are introduced there. So far, the California law is still the only one of its kind in the nation — and we intend to keep it that way.”

The audience applauded. Pierre was fuming.

At the end of the formal presentations, Bullen — whose deep voice was now noticeably hoarse — asked if there was any new business. Pierre nudged Molly, who raised a hand on his behalf; he didn’t want people to see his arm waving wildly like some sixth-grade brownnose. Two other people were recognized first, and then Bullen pointed at Molly.

She rose briefly. “Actually,” she said loudly, “it’s my husband who wishes to speak.” Slowly, meticulously, Pierre got up, leaning on his cane.

He walked over to the microphone set up in the middle of the aisle. His feet were splayed as he moved, and his free arm — the one not holding the cane — was rising and falling at his side. There were gasps from a few people. Someone a few rows back said to his companion that the guy must be drunk. Molly turned around and gave him a withering stare.

Pierre at last reached the microphone stand. It was too low for him, but he knew he didn’t have the coordination to loosen the milled sleeve that would have let him raise one of the telescoping sections. Still, he grabbed the stand with his left hand to help steady its movements, and leaned hard on his cane with his right.

“Hello,” he said into the microphone. “I’m not just a stockholder; I’m also a geneticist.” Bullen sat up straight in his chair, perhaps recognizing Pierre’s accent. He motioned to someone offstage. “I heard Mr. Bullen tell you what an evil thing the California anti-genetic-discrimination law is.

But it’s not — it’s a wonderful thing. I come from Canada, where we believe that the right to health care is as inalienable as the right to free speech.

Senator Johnston’s law recognizes that none of us can control our genetic makeup.”

He paused to catch his breath — his diaphragm spasmed occasionally.

He noticed two security guards had appeared at the side of the theater; both had gun holsters. “I work on the Human Genome Project. We’re sequencing every bit of DNA that makes up a human being. We already know the location of the gene for Huntington’s disease — which is what I have — as well as the locations of the genes for some forms of Alzheimer’s and breast cancer and heart disease. But eventually we’ll know where every gene is, what every gene does. We may very well have that knowledge in the lifetime of many people in this room. Today, there’s only a handful of things we can test genetically for, but tomorrow, we’ll be able to tell who will become obese, who will develop high cholesterol, who will get colon cancer. Then, if it weren’t for laws like Senator Johnston’s, it could be you or your already-born children or grandchildren who would have the safety net pulled out from beneath them, all in the name of profit.” His natural instinct at this moment was to spread his arms imploringly, but he couldn’t do that without losing his balance. “We shouldn’t be fighting to keep other states from adopting laws like the one here in California. Rather, we should be helping them all adopt such principles. We should—”

Craig Bullen spoke firmly into his own microphone. “Insurance is a business, Dr. Tardivel.”

Pierre started at the use of his name. The cat was clearly out of the bag.

“Yes, but—”

“And these good people” — he spread his arms, and Pierre wondered for a moment if Bullen was mocking the gesture he’d been unable to make himself — “have rights, too. The right to see their hard-earned money work for them. The right to profit from the sweat of their brows. They invest their money here, in this company, to give themselves financial security — the security to retire comfortably, the security to weather uncertain times. You identified yourself as a geneticist, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But why don’t you also tell these good people that you’re also a policyholder? Why don’t you tell them that you applied for insurance on the day after Senator Johnston’s bill became law? Why don’t you tell them about the thousands of dollars in claims you’ve already submitted to this company, for everything from drugs to help contain your chorea, to the cost of that cane you’re holding? You are a burden, sir — a burden on every person in this room. Providing coverage for you represents state-imposed charity on our part.”

“But I’m—”

“And there is a place for charity, I certainly agree. Doubtless it would surprise you, Dr. Tardivel, to know that I personally, from my own pocket, donated ten thousand dollars last year to an AIDS hospice here in San Francisco. But our largesse must know reasonable bounds. Medical services cost money. Your vaunted Canadian socialized health-care system may well collapse as costs spiral ever upward.”

“That’s not—”

“Now please, sir, you’ve had your say. Please sit down.”

“But you’re trying to—”

A deep-voiced man shouted from the rear: “Sit down, Frenchie!”

“Go back home if you don’t like it here,” yelled a woman.

“Une minute!” said Pierre.

“Cancel your policy!” shouted another man. “Stop sucking us dry!”

“You people don’t understand,” said Pierre. “It’s—”

One fellow began to boo. He was soon joined by several more. Someone tossed a wadded-up copy of the agenda at Pierre. Bullen motioned with two crooked fingers at his security men, who started to move forward.

Pierre exhaled noisily and made his slow, painful way back to his seat.

Molly patted him on the arm as he sat down.

“You got a lot of nerve, buddy,” said a fellow with a comb-over in the row behind them, leaning forward.

Molly, who had been detecting some thoughts from this man and his wife throughout the evening, wheeled around and snapped, “And you’re having an affair with your secretary Rebecca.”

The man’s mouth dropped open and he began to splutter. His wife immediately laid into him.

Molly turned back to Pierre. “Let’s go, honey. There’s no point in staying any longer.”

Pierre nodded and began the slow process of getting to his feet again.

Bullen pressed on with the meeting. “My apologies for that unfortunate display. Now, ladies and gentlemen, as we do every year, we’ll close with a few words from the company’s founder, Mr. Abraham Danielson.”

Pierre was halfway out into the aisle now. Onstage, a completely bald octogenarian rose from the long mahogany table and began his own slow journey across the stage to the podium. Molly was gathering up her purse.

She looked up, and—

Oh my God!

That face — those cruel, dark eyes…

He’d been wearing a watch cap when she’d last seen him, his ears pressed flat against his head, his baldness concealed, but that was him, no doubt about it—

“Pierre, wait!” Her husband turned to look at her. Molly’s jaw was hanging open.

“I founded this company forty-eight years ago,” said Abraham Danielson, his reedy voice tinged by an Eastern European accent. “At that time—”

“It’s him,” said Molly in a low voice to Pierre, who was now lowering himself back into his seat. “It’s him — it’s the man I saw torturing the dying cat!”

“Are you sure?” whispered Pierre.

Molly nodded vigorously. “It’s him!”

Pierre squinted to see the guy better: thick necked, bald. Sure, all old geezers looked somewhat alike, but this guy bore more than a passing resemblance to Burian Klimus, although Klimus didn’t have flapping ears like that. In fact, who he really looked like was—

Jesus, he was the spitting image of John Demjanjuk.

“Holy God,” said Pierre. He sagged back in his chair, as if someone had knocked the wind out of him. “Holy God,” he said again. “Molly — it’s Ivan Marchenko!”

“But — but when I saw him that morning in San Francisco, he swore at me in Russian, not Ukrainian.”

“Lots of people speak Russian in the Ukraine,” said Pierre. He shook his head back and forth. It all made sense. What better job for an out-of-work Nazi than being an actuary? He’d spent the war years dividing people into good and bad classes — Aryan, Jew; master, slave — and now he’d found a way to continue doing that. And the murders, conducted by neo-Nazis led by a man they called Grozny. How many people needed to be eliminated to ensure Condor’s obscene profits? Whatever the figure, it was chump change compared to the number Marchenko had killed half a century before.

If only he had a camera — if only he could show Avi Meyer what this fucking goddamned son-of-a-bitch asshole looked like—

They got up to leave again, Pierre moving as fast as he possibly could.

They made it to the elevator lobby. Molly pressed the call button. As they waited, a large black man in a tweed jacket came out after them. “Wait!” he called. He had a big leather bag hanging from his shoulder.

Molly looked up at the row of illuminated digits above each of the four doors. The closest elevator was still eight floors away.

“Wait!” said the man again, jogging up to close the distance. “Dr. Tardivel, I want to have a word with you.”

Molly moved close to her husband. “He said everything he had to say back there.”

The black man shook his head. He was in his early forties, with a dusting of snow throughout his close-cropped hair. “I don’t think so. I think he’s got a hell of a lot more to say.” He looked directly at Pierre.

“Don’t you?”

Pierre’s legs were trying to walk out from underneath him. “Well…”

“What business is it of yours?” said Molly, cutting Pierre off. The elevator had arrived and the doors slid open.

The black man reached into his jacket. For a horrible moment, Pierre thought he was going for a gun. But all he pulled out was a slim, much-worn leather business-card case. He handed a card to Molly. “I’m Barnaby Lincoln,” he said. “I’m a business writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.”

“What do — ?” began Pierre.

“I’m covering the shareholders’ meeting. But there’s a better story in what you were saying.”

“They can’t see the future — can’t see where it’s all going,” said Pierre.

“Exactly,” said Lincoln. “I’ve been covering insurance stories for years; all these guys are out of control. There needs to be federal legislation preventing the use of genetic profiles in determining insurance eligibility everywhere.”

Pierre was intrigued. Ivan Marchenko had been free for fifty years now; a few minutes more wouldn’t matter. “D’accord,” said Pierre.

“Can we go somewhere for coffee?”

“All right,” said Pierre. “But before we do, I need you to do me a favor. I need a photo of Abraham Danielson.”

Lincoln frowned. “The old man doesn’t like having his picture taken. We don’t even have a file photo of him at the Chronicle.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Pierre. “Do you have a telephoto lens here?

Surely you could snap off a shot from the back of the room. I need a good, clean head-and-shoulders picture of him.”

“What for?”

Pierre was quiet for a moment. “I can’t tell you now, but if you take the photo, and get me some prints of it right away, I promise you’ll be the person I call first when” — he knew the appropriate metaphor in French, but had to rack his brain for a moment to come up with the English equivalent — “when the story breaks.”

Lincoln shrugged. “Wait here,” he said. He went back into the auditorium. As the door opened, Pierre recognized Craig Bullen’s voice coming over the speakers. So much the better: Abraham Danielson had clearly sat back down and would hardly be on guard against his picture being taken now. Lincoln returned a few minutes later. “Got it,” he said.

“Good,” said Pierre. “Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter 38

“Avi Meyer,” said a familiar Chicago-accented voice.

“Avi, it’s Pierre Tardivel at LBNL.” He hit the transmit button on his fax machine.

“Hey, Pierre. What’s new with Klimus?”

“Nothing, but—”

“We don’t have anything new, either. I’ve got an agent in Kiev, working on digging up records of his time in a displaced-persons camp, but—”

“No, no, no,” said Pierre. “Klimus isn’t Ivan Marchenko.”

“What?”

“I was wrong. He’s not Marchenko.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“Damn it, Pierre, we’ve spent months following this up on your insistence—”

“I’ve seen Marchenko. Face-to-face.”

“In Berkeley?”

“No, in San Francisco. And Molly saw him on a street wearing a trench coat.”

“What is this? The new version of Elvis sightings?” Avi breathed out loudly. His tone conveyed that he was regretting ever getting involved with an amateur sleuth. “Damn it, Pierre, who are you going to finger next?

Ross Perot? He’s got jug ears, after all. Or Patrick Stewart? There’s a suspicious-looking bald guy. Or the pope? Fucking guy’s got an Eastern European accent, and—”

“I’m serious, Avi. I’ve seen him. He’s using the name Abraham Danielson now. He was the founder of a company called Condor Health Insurance.”

Keyclicks in the background. “We’ve got no open file on a guy with that name, and — Condor? Aren’t those the people who have that abortion policy you don’t like? Goddamn it, Pierre, I told you not to fuck with Justice. I could have you jailed for this. First you sic us on your boss ‘cause he’s pissed you off somehow; now you try to get us to hound the guy whose company offends your delicate sensibilities—”

“No, I tell you I’ve got him this time.”

“Sure you have.”

“Really, damn it. This guy is a monster—”

“Because he encourages abortions.”

“Because he’s Ivan Grozny. Because he runs the Millennial Reich. And because he’s ordered the executions of thousands of people here in California.”

“Can you prove that? Can you prove one word of that? Because if you can’t—”

“Check your fax machine, Avi.”

“What? Oh… Just a sec.” Pierre could hear Avi setting down the handset and moving about the office. A moment later the phone was picked back up. “Where’d you get this picture?”

“A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle took it.”

“That’s — what was the name you said? — Abraham Danielson?”

“That’s him.”

“Shit, he does look like Marchenko.”

“Tell me about it,” said Pierre with satisfaction.

“I’ll have my assistant dig up his immigration papers; that could take a couple of weeks. But if this doesn’t pan out, Pierre—”

“I know, I know. Anne Murray time.”

Amanda still hadn’t said anything aloud, although, according to Molly, she could mentally articulate several hundred words — many more than she’d yet to learn in American Sign Language.

Saturday afternoon meant it was time for Klimus’s weekly visit. The old man arrived at 3:00 p.m. He brought no gift for Amanda — he never did — but, as usual, he did have a small notebook in his breast pocket. He sat back on the couch, making notes about Amanda’s behavior and her ability to communicate with her hands. Throughout it all, Molly had to keep Amanda far out of her zone: Amanda understood that unless she was close to her mother, her mother couldn’t hear her thoughts, but she didn’t yet understand that this ability was a secret, and so Molly simply kept her distance, hoping that nothing in Amanda’s behavior would give it away to Klimus.

After two hours of this, Klimus got up to leave, but Molly sat down next to him on the couch. “Please stay,” she said.

Klimus looked surprised. He’d grown accustomed to Molly and Pierre’s hostility.

“What for?” he asked.

“Just to talk,” said Molly, inching even closer to him.

“About what?”

“Oh, this and that. Stuff. We don’t really know each other that well, and, well, if you are going to be part of the family, I figured we should—”

“I’m a very busy man,” said Klimus.

But Pierre sat down as well, in a chair facing the couch. “We’ve got more coffee on. It won’t be a minute.”

Klimus exhaled and spread his arms. “Very well.”

Amanda toddled over to her mother and started to climb into her lap, but Molly blocked Amanda’s way. “Go over to your father,” she said.

Amanda looked at the distance, obviously thinking the lap at hand was just as good, but then seemed to shrug slightly, and made her way across to Pierre, who lifted her up into his lap.

“Tell us a bit about yourself,” said Molly.

“For instance?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What TV shows do you like?”

“The only one I watch is 60 Minutes. Everything else is garbage.”

Pierre’s eyebrows went up. 60 Minutes had been where the story about Ivan Marchenko first broke; no wonder Klimus had known the name.

“So,” said Klimus awkwardly. “How are your friends the Lagerkvists?”

“They’re fine,” said Molly. “Ingrid’s talking about going into private practice.”

“Ah,” said Klimus. “Would she stay in Berkeley?”

“If the Lagerkvists have any plans to move,” said Molly, “they’re keeping it a secret.” She paused for a beat. “Secrets are always interesting, aren’t they?” She looked right at the old man. “I mean, we’ve all got secrets. I do, Pierre does, even little Amanda does, I’m sure. What about you, Burian?

What’s your secret?”

What’s she on about ? thought Klimus.

“You know — something down deep, something hidden…”

She’s crazy if she thinks I’m going to talk about my private life.

“I don’t know what you expect me to say, Molly.”

“Oh, nothing really. I’m just rambling. Just wondering what makes a man like you tick. You know I’m a psychologist. You’ve got to forgive me for being intrigued by the mind of a genius.”

That’s more like it, though Klimus. A little respect.

“I mean,” said Molly, “normal people have all kinds of secrets — sexual things…”

Christ, I can’t remember the last time I had sex…

“Financial secrets — maybe a little cheating on the old income tax…”

No more than anyone else…

“Or secrets related to their jobs…”

Best damned job in the world, university professor. Travel, respect, decent money, power…

“Secrets related to your research…”

Not lately…

“To your earlier research…”

The prize should have been mine, anyway…

“To — to your Nobel Prize, maybe?”

Secrets Tottenham took to the grave…

Molly looked him directly in the eyes. “Who is Tottenham?”

Klimus’s parchment skin showed a little color. “Tottenham—”

“Yes, who is he?”

She.

“Or she?”

Christ, what is — “I don’t know anyone named—”

Amanda was playing with Pierre’s fingers. He spoke up.

“Tottenham — not Myra Tottenham?”

Molly looked at her husband. “You know that name?”

Pierre frowned, thinking. Where had he heard it before? “A biochemist at Stanford during the sixties. I read an old paper of hers recently on missense mutations.”

Molly’s eyes narrowed. She’d gone over Klimus’s bio in Who’s Who in preparation for today. “Weren’t you at Stanford in the sixties?” she said.

“Whatever happened to Myra Tottenham?”

“Oh, that Tottenham,” said Klimus. He shrugged. “She died in 1969, I think. Leukemia.” The frigid bitch.

Molly frowned. “Myra Tottenham. Pretty name. Did you work together?”

Tried to. “No.”

“It’s sad when somebody dies like that.”

Not for me. “People die all the time, Molly.” He rose to his feet. “Now, really, I must be going.”

“But the coffee—” said Pierre.

“No. No, I’m leaving now.” He made his way to the front door.

“Good-bye.”

Molly followed him to the door. Once he was gone she came back into the living room and clapped her hands together. Still in her father’s lap, Amanda turned to look at her, surprised by the sound. “Well?” said Pierre.

“I know I’ll never get you off hockey,” she said, “but fishing is my favorite sport.”

“How far is Stanford?” asked Pierre.

Molly shrugged. “Not far. Forty miles.”

Pierre kissed his daughter on the cheek and spoke to her in a soothing voice: “Soon you won’t have to see that mean old man anymore.”

Pierre couldn’t do the work himself; it required much too steady a hand. But LBNL did have a comprehensive machine shop: there was a wide variety of work done at Lawrence Berkeley, and custom-designed tools and parts had to be built all the time. Pierre had Shari sketch a design for him from his verbal description, and then he took the shuttle bus down to UCB, where he visited Stanley Hall, home of the university’s virus lab. He’d guessed right: that lab had the narrowest-gauge syringes he’d ever seen. He got several of them and headed back up to the machine shop.

The shop master, a mechanical engineer named Jesus DiMarco, looked over Pierre’s rough sketch and suggested three or four refinements, then went to write up the work order. LBNL was a government lab, and everything generated paperwork — although not nearly as much as a bureaucracy-crazy Canadian facility would have. “What do you call this gizmo?” asked DiMarco.

Pierre frowned, thinking. Then: “A joy-buzzer.”

DiMarco chuckled. “Pretty cute,” he said.

“Just call me koo,” said Pierre.

“What?”

“You know—” He whistled the James Bond theme.

DiMarco laughed. “You mean Q.” He looked up at the wall clock. “Come back anytime after three. It’ll be ready.”

“Newsroom,” said the male voice.

“Barnaby Lincoln,” said Pierre into the phone. “He’s a business reporter.”

“He’s out right now, and — oh, wait. Here he comes.” The voice shouted into the phone; Pierre hated people who didn’t cover the mouthpiece when shouting. “Barney! Call for you!” The phone was dropped on a hard surface.

A few moments later it was picked up.

“Lincoln,” said the voice.

“Barnaby, it’s Pierre Tardivel at LBNL.”

“Pierre! Good to hear from you. Have you given some thought to what we talked about?”

“I’m intrigued, yes. But that’s not why I’m calling. First, though, thanks for the pictures of Danielson. They were terrific.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” said Lincoln, deadpan.

“I need you to do one more thing for me, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you going to be interviewing Abraham Danielson soon?”

“Geez, I haven’t interviewed the old man for — hell, must be six years now.”

“Would he see you if you called?”

“I guess, sure.”

“Can you arrange that? Can you get in to see him? Even for five minutes?”

“Sure, but why?”

“Set it up. But come by my lab on the way. I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

Lincoln thought this over for a moment. “This better be a good story,” he said at last.

“Can you say ‘Pulitzer’?” said Pierre.

The receptionist escorted Barnaby Lincoln into Abraham Danielson’s office.

“Barney,” said Abraham, rising from his leather chair.

Lincoln surged forward, hand extended. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

Abraham looked at Lincoln’s outstretched hand. Lincoln left it extended. The old man finally took it. They shook firmly.

Pierre had been working in the den at home — it was awkward getting into LBNL these days, since Molly had to drive him. He decided to head up to the living room to replenish his Diet Pepsi. Coffee was too dangerous a way to get his morning caffeine; he overturned his drink at least once a week now, and didn’t want to scald himself. And regular Pepsi contained all that sugar — it would ruin his keyboard or computer if he spilled it in there. But aspartame wasn’t conductive; it might make a mess, but it wouldn’t wreck electronics if spilled on them… Of course Pierre made a fair bit of noise going up the stairs, but the dishwasher was going, producing enough racket to drown out the sound. As he entered the living room, he saw Molly sitting with Amanda on the couch. Molly was saying something to Amanda that Pierre couldn’t quite make out, and Amanda seemed to be concentrating very, very hard.

He watched them for a moment — and was pleased that, to some degree, at least, his jealousy of his wife’s closeness to their daughter had passed.

Yes, he still ached at not being able to communicate with her the way he’d like to, but he was coming to realize how important that special relationship between Molly and Amanda was. Amanda seemed totally comfortable with Molly’s ability to reach into her mind and hear her thoughts; it was almost a relief to the girl that she could communicate without effort with another human being. And Molly’s bond with her daughter went beyond even the normal closeness of mother and child; she could touch Amanda’s very mind.

Pierre still thought mostly in French, and he knew, given that he virtually always spoke English, that he was doing this on some subconscious level as a defense against having his thoughts read. But Amanda had accepted her mother’s ability from the beginning, and she erected no barriers between herself and Molly; they had a closeness that was transcendental — and Pierre was, at last, glad of it. His wife was no longer tortured by her gift; rather, she was now grateful for it. And Pierre knew that after he was gone, Molly and Amanda would need that special closeness to support each other, to go on and face whatever the future might bring them together, almost as one.

“Try again,” Molly, her back to Pierre, said to Amanda. “You can do it.”

Pierre stepped fully into the room. “What are you two conspiring about?” he said lightly.

Molly looked up, startled. “Nothing,” she said too quickly. “Nothing.”

She looked embarrassed. Amanda’s brown eyes went wide, the way they did when she’d been caught doing something bad.

“You look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” Pierre said to Molly, a bemused smile on his face. “What are—”

The phone rang.

Molly leaped to her feet. “I’ll get it,” she said, bounding into the kitchen.

A moment later, she called out, “Pierre! It’s for you.”

Pierre made his way ponderously into the kitchen. The noise from the dishwasher was irritating, but it would take him several minutes to hobble down to the den or up to the bedroom to use a different phone.

“Hello?” said Pierre after taking the handset from his wife.

“Pierre? It’s Avi.”

Molly headed back to the living room; Pierre could barely hear her as she went back to talking to Amanda in conspiratorial tones.

“We’ve dug up Abraham Danielson’s immigration records,” continued Avi. “You’re right that that’s not his real name. Nothing unusual about that, though; lots of immigrants changed their names when they came here after the war. According to his visa application, his real name is Avrom Danylchenko. Born 1911, the same year as Ivan Marchenko — but, then again, so was Klimus, so that’s hardly compelling evidence. He was living in Rijeka at the time he applied to come to the States.”

“Okay.”

“We can’t find anything prior to 1945 about Avrom Danylchenko.

Again, that doesn’t prove spit. Lots of records were lost during the war, and there’s tons of stuff from the old Soviet Union that no one has sifted through yet. Still, it is interesting that the last record we have of Ivan Marchenko is Nikolai Shelaiev’s statement that he saw him in Fiume in 1944, and the first record of Avrom Danylchenko is his visa application the following year in Rijeka.”

“How far is Rijeka from Fiume?”

“I wondered that myself — couldn’t find Fiume in my atlas at first. It turns out — get this — that Fiume and Rijeka are the same place. Fiume is the old Italian name for the city.”

“Jesus. So what happens now?”

“I’m going to show the photo to the remaining Treblinka survivors. I’m flying out to New Mexico tomorrow to see one of them, and I’m off to Israel after that.”

“Surely you could just fax the photo to the police there,” said Pierre.

“No, I want to be on hand. I want to see the witnesses at the moment they first look at the photo. We were fucked over on the Demjanjuk case because the identifications weren’t handled properly. Yoram Sheftel — that’s Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer — says in all his years in the business, he’s never once seen the Israeli police conduct a proper photo-spread ID. In the Demjanjuk case, they used a photo spread that had Demjanjuk’s photo mixed in with seven others. But some of the photos were bigger or clearer than the others, and most of them didn’t bear even a passing resemblance to the man the witnesses had described.

This time I’m going to supervise it all, every step of the way. There aren’t going to be any fuckups.” A pause. “Anyway, I’ve got to get going.”

“Wait — one more thing.”

“What are you, Columbo?”

Pierre was taken aback. At least it was an improvement over everyone assuming he was a salesman. “When you have somebody in custody, what kind of identification records do you keep?”

“How do you mean?” said Avi.

“I mean you must keep records, right? The whole idea behind Nazi hunting is proving identity. Surely if you have someone in custody, you must take pains to make sure you can identify the same person again years later if need be.”

“Sure. We take fingerprints, even some retinal scans—”

“Do you take tissue samples? For DNA fingerprinting?”

“That sort of routine testing is not legal.”

“That’s not a direct answer. Do you do it? It’s easy enough, after all. All you need is a few cells. Do you do it?”

“Off the record, yes.”

“Were you doing that as far back as the 1980s?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have a tissue sample from John Demjanjuk still on file?”

“I imagine so. Why?”

“Get it. Have it sent to my lab by FedEx.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. If I’m right — if I’m right, I can clear up the mystery of exactly what went wrong at the Ivan the Terrible trial in Jerusalem all those years ago.”

Chapter 39

The phone rang again the next day. This time Pierre was down in the den, and he got it there. “Hello?”

“Pierre, it’s Avi. I’m calling you from O’Hare. I saw Zalmon Chudzik this morning; he’s one of the Treblinka survivors who now lives in the States.”

“And?”

“And the poor bastard’s got Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Merde.”

“Exactly. But, you know — this may sound cruel — but in this one case, maybe it’s a blessing.”

“Huh?”

“His daughter says he’s forgotten everything about Treblinka. For the first time in over fifty years, he’s managing to sleep through the night.”

Pierre didn’t know how to reply. After a few moments, he said, “When do you leave for Israel?”

“About three hours.”

“I hope you have better luck there.”

Avi’s voice was weary. “Me, too. There were only fifty Treblinka survivors, and over thirty-five of them have passed on in the intervening years. There are only four left who hadn’t previously misidentified Demjanjuk as Ivan — and Chudzik was one of those four.”

“What happens to our case if we don’t get a positive ID?”

“It evaporates. Look at all the evidence they had against O. J.

Simpson — made no difference to the jury. Without eyewitnesses, we’re sunk. And I do mean eyewitnesses, plural. The Israelis aren’t going to pay attention unless we get at least two independent IDs.”

“Good Christ,” said Pierre softly.

“At this stage,” said Avi, “I’d even take his help.”

Avi Meyer had spent the last few days wrangling back and forth over jurisdictional issues with Izzy Tischler, a plainclothes detective with the Nazi Crimes Investigation Division of the Israeli State Police. They were now ready to attempt their first ID. Tischler, a tall, thin, red-haired fellow of forty, wore a yarmulke; Avi was wearing a large canvas hat, trying to ward off the brutal sun. They walked down the narrow street, beside buildings of yellow brick with narrow balconies, packed one right up against the next. Two Orthodox Jewish men walked down the lane, and an Arab headed up the other way. They didn’t look at each other as they passed.

“This is it,” said Tischler, checking the number on the house against an address he had written down on a Post-it note in his hand, folded in half so that the adhesive strip was covered over. The door was set back only a meter from the road. Weeds grew out of the cracks in the stone walk, but the beauty of the ceramic mezuzah on the doorpost caught Avi’s eye. He knocked. After about half a minute, a middle-aged woman appeared.

“Shalom,” said Avi. “My name is Avi Meyer, and this is Detective Tischler, of the Israeli State Police. Is Casimir Landowski home?”

“He’s upstairs. What’s this all about?”

“May we speak to him?”

“About what?”

“We just need him to identify some photos.”

The middle-aged woman looked from one man to the other. “You’ve found Ivan Grozny,” she said flatly.

Avi cringed. “It’s important that the identification not be prejudiced. Is Casimir Landowski your father?”

“Yes. My husband and I have looked after him since his wife died.”

“Your father can’t know in advance who we’re asking him to identify. If he knows, the defense lawyers will be able to get the identification ruled ineligible. Please, don’t say a word to him.”

“He won’t be able to help you.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s blind, that’s why not. Complications from diabetes.”

“Oh,” said Avi, his heart sinking. “I’m sorry.”

“Even if he could see,” said the woman, “I’m not sure I’d let you speak to him.”

“Why?”

“We watched the trial of John Demjanjuk on TV. What was that, ten or more years ago? He could see then — and he knew you had the wrong guy.

They’d shown him pictures of Demjanjuk, and he’d said it wasn’t Ivan.”

“I know. That’s why he’d have made a great witness this time.”

“But it tore him up, watching that trial. All that testimony about Treblinka. He’d never spoken about it — my whole life, he’d never said a word to me. But he sat there, transfixed, day in and day out, listening to the testimony. He knew some of those who were testifying. Hearing them recount the things that butcher did — murder and rape and torture. He thought if he never spoke about it, somehow he could separate it from his life, keep it isolated from everything else. To have to live through it all again, even from the comfort of his living room, almost killed him. To ask him to do that once more — such a thing I’d never do. He’s ninety-three; he’d never survive it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Avi. He looked at the woman, trying to size her up. It occurred to him that perhaps the man wasn’t really blind. Maybe she was just trying to shelter him. “I, ah, I’d like to speak to your father anyway, if I may. You know, just to shake his hand. I’ve come all the way from the United States.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said, in the same blunt tone she’d used before. But then she shrugged. “I’ll let you talk to him, but you can’t say a word about why you’re here. I won’t have you upsetting him.”

“I promise.”

“Come in, then.” She headed upstairs, Avi and Tischler following. The man was sitting in a chair in front of a television set. Avi thought he’d caught the woman in a lie, but it soon became apparent that he wasn’t watching the TV. Rather, he was just listening to it. A talk show in Hebrew was on. The interviewer, a young woman, was asking her guests about their first sexual experiences. The man was listening intently. In the corner of the room, a white cane leaned against a wall.

“Abba,” said the woman, “I’d like you to meet two people. They’re just passing through town. Old friends of mine.”

The man rose slowly, painfully, to his feet. As soon as he was standing, Avi saw his eyes. They were completely clouded over. “It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” said Avi, taking the man’s gnarled hand. “A great pleasure.”

“Your accent — you’re American?”

“Yes.”

“What brings you to Israel?” asked the man, his voice low.

“Just the sights,” said Avi. “You know — the history.”

“Oh, yes,” said the old man. “We’ve got lots of that.”

The phone in Pierre’s lab rang. He hobbled over to answer it. “Hello?”

“Pierre?”

“Hi, Avi. What’s the score?”

“Forces of good, zero. Forces of evil, two.”

“No IDs?”

“Not yet. The second guy is blind. Complications of diabetes, his daughter said.”

Pierre snorted.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s not funny, really. Just ironic. The first guy had Alzheimer’s and this one has diabetes. Those are both genetically related. As Danielson, Marchenko discriminates against people who have those same diseases, and now those diseases are saving him.”

“Yeah,” said Avi. “Well, let’s hope things go better. We’ve only got two shots left.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Right. Bye.”

Pierre went back to the light table, hunching over the two autorads. He kept at it for hours, but when he was done, he leaned back and nodded to himself in satisfaction. It was exactly what he’d expected.

When Avi got back to the States, Pierre would have one hell of a surprise for him.

Avi and Detective Tischler drove down to Jerusalem for their next attempt. All the buildings were made of stone — there was an ordinance that required it; at sunset, the light reflecting from the stone transformed Jerusalem into the fabled City of Gold. They found the ancient house they were looking for and knocked on the door. After a few moments a young man, perhaps thirteen years old, appeared, wearing a yarmulke and a

Melrose Place T-shirt. Avi shook his head slightly. He was always surprised at how pervasive American pop culture was no matter where he traveled.

“Yes?” said the boy in Hebrew.

Avi smiled. “Shalom,” he said. He knew his Hebrew was rough, but he’d told Tischler that he wanted to do all the talking. He couldn’t risk the Israeli police officer saying anything that might contaminate the identification. “My name is Avi Meyer. I’m looking for Shlomo Malamud.”

“He’s my zayde,” said the boy. But then his eyes immediately narrowed.

“What do you want?”

“Just to speak to him, just for a moment.”

“About what?”

Avi sighed. “I’m an American—”

“No shit,” said the boy, making it clear that this had been obvious from the first syllable Avi had uttered.

“—and this man is an Israeli police officer. Show him,” said Avi, turning to Tischler. Tischler pulled out his ID and held it up for the boy to see.

The boy shook his head. “My zayde is very old,” he said, “and almost never leaves the house. He hasn’t done anything.”

“We know that. We just need to talk to him for a moment.”

“Maybe you should come back when my father is home,” said the boy.

“When will that be?”

“Friday, for Shabbat. He’s on business right now, in Haifa.”

“What we want will only take a moment.” Through the doorway, Avi could see that an ancient man had appeared, oblivious of their presence, hunched over, shuffling toward the kitchen.

“Is that him?” asked Avi.

The boy didn’t have to look back. “He’s very old,” he said.

“Shlomo Malamud!” shouted Avi.

The man slowly turned around, a look of surprise on his deeply wrinkled, sun-battered face.

“Mar Malamud!” Avi shouted again. The man began to shuffle toward them.

“It’s all right,” said the boy, trying to stop his grandfather from coming nearer. “I’m taking care of everything.”

“Mar Malamud,” said Avi over the boy. “I’ve come a long way to ask you just one question, sir. I need you to look at some photographs and tell me if you recognize anyone.”

The man was moving slowly toward them, but the boy was still blocking the entrance with his body. “You’re wasting your time,” said the boy. “He’s blind.”

Avi felt his heart sinking. Not again! Damn it, why hadn’t he thought to check on this before leaving the States? How was he going to explain this one to his boss? “Yes, sir, that’s right, I spent three thousand dollars flying halfway across the world to show some pictures to a bunch of blind old men.”

The old fellow was still working his way down the corridor. “I — I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” Avi said, turning to go.

“What do you two want?” asked Malamud, his voice as dry as the desert.

“Nothing,” said Avi, and then, almost at once, thinking for a second that his Hebrew had failed him, “Did you say ‘you two?” Tischler hadn’t uttered a word since they’d arrived.

“Speak up, young man. I can hardly hear you.”

Avi wheeled on the teenager. “Is he blind, or isn’t he?”

“ ‘Course he is,” said the boy. “Well, legally blind.”

“Mr. Malamud, how much vision do you have left?”

“Not much.”

“If I show you a series of photographs, could you tell them apart?”

“Maybe.”

“Can we come in?”

The old man thought for a long time. “I guess,” he said at last.

The teenager, looking quite miffed at having had an end run done around him, reluctantly moved aside. Avi and Tischler followed Malamud as he moved at a snail’s pace down to the kitchen. He found a chair — whether he could actually see it, or simply knew where it would be, Avi couldn’t tell. After he’d sat down, he waved for Avi and Tischler to do the same. Avi opened up his briefcase and took out a small cassette recorder, thumbed it on, then placed it on the table near Malamud. He then took out the photo spread, unfolding it at its central masking-tape hinge and placing it in front of Malamud. The spread consisted of three rows of eight photos, twenty-four in all.

“These are modern pictures,” said Avi. “They all show men in their eighties or nineties. But we’re trying to identify someone you might have known in your youth — someone you would have known in the early 1940s.”

The old man looked up, his eyes full of hope. “You’ve found Saul?”

Avi looked at the teenager. “Who is Saul?”

“His brother,” said the boy. “He disappeared in the war. My grandfather was taken to Treblinka; Saul was taken to Chelm.”

“I’ve been looking for him ever since,” said Malamud. “And now you’ve found him!”

Avi knew this was ideal: if Malamud thought he was looking for someone else and still spotted Ivan Grozny, the identification would be very hard to discredit in court. But Avi couldn’t bear to use the man like that. “No,” he said. “No, I’m so sorry, but this has nothing to do with your brother.”

The man’s face visibly sank. “Then what?”

“If you can just look at these pictures…”

Malamud took a moment to compose himself, then fumbled for a pair of glasses in his breast pocket. They had enormously thick lenses. He balanced them on his large, pitted nose, and peered at the pictures for a few moments. “Still can’t see them very well,” he said.

Avi sighed. But then Malamud continued, “Ezra, go and get my lens.”

The boy, now somewhat intrigued by the proceedings, seemed reluctant to leave, but, after a moment’s hesitation, he disappeared into another room and then returned brandishing a magnifying glass worthy of Sherlock Holmes. The old man removed his glasses, held out his hand, let Ezra place the lens within it, and then bent over the photo spread again.

“No,” he said, looking at the first photo, and “No,” again, after peering at the second.

“Remember,” said Avi, knowing he should keep quiet, but unable to do so, “you’re looking for someone from fifty-odd years ago. Try to imagine them as young men.”

The man grunted, as if to say there was no need to remind him of that — he might be old, but he wasn’t stupid. He moved from face to face, his own eye only inches above the snapshots. “No. No. Not him, either.

No — oh, my! Oh, heaven — oh, heaven.” His finger was on the Danielson photo. “It’s him! After all these years, you’ve found him!”

Avi felt his pulse racing. “Who?” he said, trying to keep his voice under control. “Who is it?”

“That monster from Treblinka.” The man’s face had gone completely white and his hand was shaking so much it looked like he was going to drop the magnifying glass. Ezra reached over and took it gently from his grandfather.

“Who is he?” asked Avi. “What’s his name?”

“Ivan,” said the old man, practically spitting the word. “Ivan Grozny.”

“Are you sure?” said Avi. “Do you have any doubt?”

“Those eyes. That mouth. No — no doubt. It’s him, the very devil himself.”

Avi closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “If we draw up a statement to that effect, will you sign it?”

The old man turned to face Avi. “Where is he? Have you got him?”

“He’s in the United States.”

“You’ll bring him here? To stand trial?”

“Yes.”

The old man was silent for a long time, then: “Yes, I’ll sign a statement.

You’re afraid I’ll die before the trial, aren’t you? Afraid I won’t live to identify him in court?”

Avi said nothing.

“I’ll live,” said the old man simply. “You’ve given me something to live for.” He reached out, trying to find Avi’s hand. They connected, Avi feeling the rough, loose skin. As he reached out, Malamud’s sleeve rode up his forearm, revealing his serial-number tattoo. “Thank you,” said Malamud.

“Thank you for bringing him to justice.” He paused. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Meyer, sir. Agent Avi Meyer, of the United States Department of Justice.”

“I knew someone named Meyer, at Treblinka. Jubas Meyer. He was my partner in removing bodies.”

Avi felt his eyes stinging. “That was my father.”

“A good man, Jubas.”

“He died before I was born,” said Avi. “What — what was he like?”

“Sit down,” said Malamud, “and I’ll tell you.”

Avi looked at Tischler, his eyes asking for the Israeli cop’s indulgence.

“Go ahead,” said Tischler gently. “Family is important.”

Avi took a seat, his heart pounding.

Malamud told him stories about Jubas, and Avi listened, rapt. When the old man had recounted all he could remember, Avi shook his hand again. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so very much.”

Malamud shook his head, “No, son — thank you. Thank you for both of us, both me and your father. He’d be very proud of you today.”

Avi smiled, blinking away tears.

Pierre had done tests on various types of primate DNA collected from the zoo, determining not just the degree of genetic divergence but also specific ways in which key segments of their chromosome thirteens varied.

Pierre and Shari were now immersed in designing a computer simulation.

They integrated all the cytosine-methylation data they had, all the patterns they’d detected in the human and nonhuman introns, all the ideas they had about the significance of codon synonyms.

It was a massive project, with a huge database. The simulation was far too complex for them to run in any reasonable amount of time on their lab’s PC. But LBNL had a Cray supercomputer, a machine that could crunch all the numbers six ways from Sunday in the blink of an eye. Pierre had long ago put in a request for some CPU time on the Cray, and he’d slowly been moving up the queue. His time was scheduled for two weeks from now.

They’d need every minute of that time to get the simulation ready to run, but, assuming everything worked, they’d at last have the answers they’d been looking for.

“David Solomon?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Avi Meyer of the United States government. This is Detective Izzy Tischler of the Israeli police. We’d like to show you some pictures, and see if you recognize any of the people.”

Solomon had a face like a crumpled paper bag, tanned and coarsened from exposure to sun and wind. The only sharp part was his nose, a giant thing, curved and hooked like an eagle’s beak, and webbed over its entire surface by tiny exploded blood vessels. His irises were so dark brown that his pupils were all but lost against them, and the rest of his eyeballs were more yellow than white, shot through with veins.

“Why?” asked Solomon.

“I can tell you after you look at the pictures,” said Avi.

Solomon shrugged. “Okay.”

“May we come in?”

Another shrug. “Sure.” The old man shuffled into his living room and sat on the well-worn couch. There was no air-conditioning; the heat was oppressive. Tischler gingerly removed a vase from the coffee table and, finding nowhere else to set it down, simply held it in his hand. Avi placed his tape recorder on the table, then unfolded the photo spread, with its three rows of eight pictures. Solomon took off the pair of glasses he was wearing and replaced them with another pair from his breast pocket.

“These are people that—”

“Ivan Marchenko!” said the man at once.

Avi leaned forward anxiously. “Which one?”

“The middle row. The third one.”

Avi felt his stomach sink. The third picture in the middle row was indeed a bald-headed moonfaced man, but it was not Marchenko; rather, it was the caretaker at OSI headquarters in Washington. Avi knew that if he asked any leading questions — “Are you sure? Isn’t there somebody else who looks more like Ivan?” — the defense attorneys would get the evidence laughed out of court. Instead, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice, Avi simply said, “Thank you,” and reached over to close up the spread.

But Solomon was leaning forward. “I’d know that face anywhere,” he said. He reached over with a gnarled finger and tapped the sixth photo in the row of eight.

Avi felt adrenaline pounding. “But you said the third photo—”

“Sure. Third from the right.” The man looked at Avi. “That’s an American accent, isn’t it? Don’t you read Hebrew?”

Avi laughed out loud. “Not as much as I should, obviously.”

“Pierre, it’s Avi Meyer.”

“How’d it go?”

“I’ve got two positive IDs.”

“Terrific!”

“I’ll be flying back to Washington in a few days; I’ve still got some work to do with the Israeli police, helping them draft an extradition request.”

“No. Get a flight here. Fly into San Francisco. I’ve got something here you’ll want to see.”

Chapter 40

Pierre tried to ignore the way Avi Meyer was looking at him. It had been twenty-six months since they’d last seen each other face-to-face, and although Pierre had told Avi over the phone about his condition, Avi had not until today actually seen Pierre’s chorea.

Pierre slowly, carefully, laid two autoradiographs on the light table set into his lab’s countertop, and then, with dancing hands, tried to line them up side by side. He seated himself on a lab stool, then motioned for Avi to come over and look at the autorads. “All right,” said Pierre, “what do you see?”

Avi shrugged, not knowing what Pierre wanted him to say. “A bunch of black lines?”

“Right — almost like blurry versions of the bar codes you see on food boxes. But these bar codes” — he tapped one of the pieces of film with a trembling finger — “are DNA fingerprints of two different people.”

“Who?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. You see that the bar codes are quite different, right?”

Avi nodded his bulldog head.

“There’s a thick black line here,” said Pierre, pointing with a trembling finger again, “and there’s no corresponding black line at the same point on the other one, right?”

Avi nodded again.

“But some of the lines are the same, aren’t they? Here’s a thin line, and — look! — the other person has a thin line at exactly the same point.”

Avi sounded impatient. “So he does.”

“Now, have a good close look at the two fingerprints, and tell me by how much you think they overlap.”

“I don’t see what this—”

“Just do it, will you?”

Avi sighed in resignation and squinted his tiny eyes at the film. “I don’t know. Twenty or thirty percent.”

“About a quarter, in other words.”

“I guess.”

“A quarter. Now, you must know something about genetics — everybody does. How much DNA do you get from your parents?”

“All of it.”

Pierre grinned. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, what proportion comes from your mother and what proportion from your father?”

“Oh — it’s half and half, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. Of all the DNA that makes up a human being, precisely half comes from each parent. Now, tell me this: do you have a brother?”

“Yes,” said Avi.

“Okay, good. Now if you’ve got half of your mother’s DNA, so does your brother, right?”

“Sure.”

“But is it the same half?”

Avi ran a hand over the stubble on his face. “How do you mean?”

“Is the DNA you got from your mother the same or different from what your brother got?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess if I got a random selection of my mother’s genes, and Barry got a random selection, they’d overlap by — what? — fifty percent?”

“That’s right,” said Pierre, not nodding deliberately, but his head bobbing in a way that looked as though he was. “An average of fifty percent overlap. So, if I put DNA fingerprints for you and your brother side by side, what would you expect to see?”

“Umm — half of my bars at the same places as half of his bars?”

“Exactly! But what have we here?” He pointed to the two pieces of film on the illuminated panel.

“A twenty-five percent overlap.”

“So these two people are highly unlikely to be brothers, right?”

Avi nodded.

“But, still, they do seem to be related, don’t they?”

“I guess,” said Avi.

“Okay. Now there’s something I read when I first looked into this case that has stuck in my mind. On his application for refugee status, John Demjanjuk put his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko.”

“Yeah, but that was wrong. Her maiden name was Tabachuk.

Demjanjuk couldn’t remember it, he said, so he just put down a common Ukrainian name.”

“And that always struck me as strange. I know my mother’s maiden name, Menard — and her mother’s maiden name, Bergeron. How could someone not remember his own mother’s maiden name? After all, Demjanjuk filled out that form in the 1940s, while he was still in his twenties. It’s not like he was an old man with a failing memory.”

Avi shrugged. “Who knows? The point is he couldn’t remember it at the time.”

“Oh, I think he remembered very well — but rather that he didn’t understand the question.”

“What?”

“He didn’t understand the question. Tell me — what does the term ‘maiden name’ mean?”

Avi frowned, irritated. “The name a woman was born with.”

“Right. But suppose Demjanjuk — who, according to the articles I read, only had a fourth-grade education — suppose he thought it meant simply the name his mother had before she’d married his father.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Not necessarily. It’s only the same thing if his mother had never been married before.”

“But — oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

“You see? What was Demjanjuk’s mother’s first name?”

“Olga. She died in 1970.”

“If Olga had been born Olga Tabachuk, but had married a man named Marchenko and then later divorced him before marrying John Demjanjuk’s father—”

“—Nikolai Demjanjuk—”

“—then when asked his mother’s maiden name, and interpreting it as meaning his mother’s previous name, John Demjanjuk would have answered ‘Marchenko.’ And if Olga had had one son named Ivan in 1911 by this elder Marchenko, and another son named Ivan nine years later by Nikolai Demjanjuk, then—”

“Then Ivan Marchenko and Ivan Demjanjuk would be half brothers!” said Avi.

“Exactly! Half brothers, having about twenty-five percent of their DNA in common. In fact, it even makes sense that they’re both bald. The gene for male-pattern baldness is inherited from the mother; it resides on the X chromosome. And it explains why they look so much alike — why witness after witness mistook one for the other.”

“But wait — wait. That doesn’t work. Nikolai and Olga Tabachuk were married January twenty-fourth, 1910, and Ivan Marchenko was born after that — on March second, 1911. That means he would have been conceived in the summer of 1910 — after Olga had already ended up with the legal last name of Demjanjuk.”

Pierre frowned for a moment, but then, thinking briefly of his own mother and Henry Spade, he exclaimed, “A triangle!”

Avi looked at him. “What?”

“A triangle — don’t you see? Think about John Demjanjuk’s own marriage from 1947. I remember reading that he’d been fooling around with another man’s wife while that man was away.” Pierre paused. “You know, we sometimes sum up the geneticist’s creed as ‘like father, like son’ — but ‘like mother, like son’ is just as valid for many things. My wife the behaviorist doesn’t like to admit it, but particular kinds of infidelity do run in families. Let’s say Olga Tabachuk married the senior Marchenko, divorced him, and then married Nikolai Demjanjuk.”

Avi nodded. “Okay.”

“But Nikolai leaves their village and heads out to — what town was Demjanjuk born in?”

“Dub Macharenzi.”

“To Dub-whatever. He goes there, looking for work or something like that, saying he’ll send for his wife once he’s got a place. Well, while the cat’s away… Olga goes back to sleeping with her ex, Marchenko. She gets pregnant and gives birth to Marchenko’s child, a child they name Ivan.

But then Nikolai sends word for her to come join him in Dub-thingie. Olga abandons baby Ivan, leaving him with the elder Marchenko. In fact — well, here’s one my wife would like: Ivan Marchenko grew up to have a predilection for slicing off women’s nipples. Call that his revenge for having been abandoned by his mother.”

Avi was nodding slowly. “You know, it makes sense. If Olga really did abandon the baby Ivan Marchenko, and if her second husband, Nikolai Demjanjuk, never knew about that incident, when she finally had a son of her own by Nikolai, that could explain why she decided to name him Ivan, too — so that she could never give herself away by accidentally referring to her legitimate son by the bastard child’s name.” Avi looked down at the autorads. “So — so one of these was made from the tissue specimen I sent you that we’d taken from John Demjanjuk, right?”

Pierre nodded, and touched the one on the left. “This one, to be precise.”

“And the other one — not Abraham Danielson?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“How’d you manage to get a tissue sample from him? I thought you’d only seen him from a distance.”

“I had a little device built.” He slowly got up from his stool and, holding on to the rounded lip of the countertop for support, made his way over to a shelf and picked up a small object from it. He returned to where Avi was sitting and extended his shaking hand so that Avi could see what he was holding. It was impossible to get a good look at it the way Pierre’s arm kept moving; Avi reached in and plucked the small device from Pierre’s palm. It looked like a tiny beige thumbtack, with a very short, very narrow spike.

“I call it a joy buzzer,” said Pierre, sitting down again. “It sticks to the palm of your hand with a minuscule drop of cyanoacrylate glue, and when you shake hands with someone, it takes a sample of a few skin cells. The pressure of the handshake is enough to distract from the minute pricking sensation.” He held up a hand. “I can’t take full credit for it — I got the idea from a special pen Condor Health uses; it seemed poetic justice to employ a similar device. A fellow I know, a newspaper reporter — same one who took the photo I originally faxed you of Abraham Danielson — wore it going into a meeting with Danielson, and shook his hand in greeting.”

Avi nodded, impressed. “Can I have copies of these… these — what do you call them?”

“Autorads.”

“These autorads?”

“Sure. Why?”

“When we’re through, I want to send them to Demjanjuk’s lawyer in Cleveland. Maybe they’ll help him get his U.S. citizenship back.” He looked at Pierre, then shrugged a little. “It’s the least I can do.”

Pierre nodded. “So where do we stand?”

“We’ve got two eyewitness identifications, both positive. But, well, the witnesses are old, and one of them is legally blind. I wish we had more.

Still, this half brother stuff to some degree rehabilitates the positive identifications made during Demjanjuk’s denaturalization and his trial in Israel.”

“So have you got enough to move against Marchenko?”

Avi sighed. “I don’t know. Danielson wasn’t even suspected of being a Nazi. He’s done a great job of covering his tracks.”

“He’s doubtless been able to pay off people over the last few years — make any records he wants disappear.”

“More than likely.” Avi shook his head. “The Israelis are going to be very wary about taking him on, especially after what happened last time.”

“So what else would you need to make the case?”

Avi shrugged. “In the best of all possible worlds? A confession.”

Pierre frowned. Of course, Molly could confirm Danielson’s guilt easily enough, but there was no way Pierre wanted her to have to testify in court.

“I could meet with him while wired for sound.”

“What makes you think he’ll agree to see you?” The way Avi said “you” grated a little — it was almost as if Avi were saying, “What makes you think he’ll see someone in your condition?”

Pierre gritted his teeth. “We’ll find a way.”

“Even if he is willing to see you,” said Avi, spreading his arms, “what makes you think he’ll confess to you?”

“He doesn’t have to confess then and there. He just has to say something incriminating enough to justify you arresting him. Then you can interrogate him properly.”

“I suppose. It would take some paperwork.”

“Do it. Set it up.”

“I don’t know, Pierre. You’re a civilian, and—”

“I’m a volunteer. You want to see that bastard go free?”

Avi frowned, considering. “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s give it a try.”

Chapter 41

“Abraham Danielson’s office,” said a woman’s voice.

“May I speak to him, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Dr. Pierre Tardivel.”

“One moment.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Tardivel, Mr. Danielson is unable to take your call just now. Would you like to leave a message?”

“Tell him a woman from Poland named Maria Dudek suggested I call him. Give him the message now; I’ll hold on.”

“He’s really quite busy, sir, and—”

“Just give him the message. I’m sure he’ll want to take this call.”

“I really can’t—”

“Do it.”

There was quiet for a moment while the secretary mulled this over.

“Just a sec.”

A click as Pierre was put on hold. Three minutes went by.

Another click.

“Abraham Danielson speaking.”

“Hello, Ivan. Maria Dudek sends her regards.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Meet me in one hour at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.”

“I’m not going anywhere. You’re a crazy person—”

“You can talk to me, or I’ll start talking to other people. I understand the Department of Justice has a special office devoted to exposing war criminals.”

Silence for almost thirty seconds. Then: “If we’re going to talk,” said Danielson, “it will be here, on my turf.”

“But—”

“Take it or leave it.”

Pierre looked over at Avi Meyer, who was listening on an extension phone. Avi held up three fingers.

“I’ll be there at three o’clock,” said Pierre. “Make sure your gate guard knows to let me in.”

“Pierre Tardivel,” said Pierre. He was standing in front of the secretary’s desk in the founder’s outer office on the thirty-seventh floor of the forty-story Condor Building. “Here to see Abraham Danielson.”

The secretary was two decades older than Rosalee, the knockout who worked elsewhere on this floor for CEO Craig Bullen. She was clearly startled by Pierre’s dancing limbs and facial tics, but she quickly recovered her composure. “Have a seat, please. Mr. Danielson will be with you in a few moments.”

Pierre understood that he was being put in his place, that Abraham wanted the upper hand psychologically — you don’t sleep with a psychologist every night for three years without picking up a thing or two.

Still, his palms were sweaty. With the aid of his cane, Pierre made his way slowly over to the lobby couch. Several current magazines were on the glass-topped coffee table, including Forbes and Business Week; there was also a copy of the yellow-and-black Condor annual report.

Avi Meyer, four other OSI agents, and two officers from the San Francisco Police Department were parked a short distance away, outside the fence around the Condor property. All of them were crowded into a rented van, huddled over the listening equipment.

After a few minutes, the receptionist’s phone rang. She picked up the handset. “Yes, sir? Right away.” She put the phone down, then looked at Pierre. “Mr. Danielson will see you now.”

Pierre struggled to his feet and made his way slowly into the office. It was smaller than Craig Bullen’s — it had no conference table — but the furnishings were equally opulent, although Danielson’s tastes were ironically more modern than those of the much younger Bullen, running to black leather and chrome, with turquoise and pink accents.

“Mr. Tardivel,” said Abraham Danielson, with no warmth in his thin, accented voice. “Now, what’s all this nonsense?”

“I see you recognized the name Maria Dudek,” said Pierre, slowly taking a seat in front of Danielson’s desk.

“That name meant nothing to me.”

“Then why did you agree to see me?”

“You’re a stockholder; I recognize you from that shameful bit of grandstanding you did at our meeting. Still, I always make time for my stockholders.”

“I’ve been here once before,” said Pierre. “Oh, not to this room, but to this floor. I had a meeting a while ago with Craig Bullen. But I had the wrong person then — the puppet instead of the puppeteer.”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And it’s not just being Ivan Marchenko that I’ve got you on — not that that isn’t bad enough. I know you’re also the leader of the Millennial Reich. You’ve done more than just discriminate against people who have genetic disorders. You’re increasing your bottom line by killing off those who would otherwise represent expensive payouts for you, the single largest stockholder in this company.”

Danielson looked at Pierre, his expression blank. “You’re crazy,” he said at last.

Pierre said nothing. His hands danced.

Danielson spread his arms. “You suffer from Huntington’s chorea, isn’t that right? Huntington’s is a degenerative nervous disorder that has a profound effect on the faculties. Whatever you think you know is doubtless just a product of your disease.”

Pierre frowned. “Is it, now? I’ve been doing a lot of research, looking at unsolved murders in the last few years. A disproportionate number of those who died had genetic disorders, or were waiting for expensive medical treatments. And most of that subset were insured by Condor. And I know you routinely take secret skin-cell samples from new policyholders.

If someone you insured has bad DNA, or applies for an expensive treatment, you have them killed.”

“Come, come, Mr. Tardivel. What you’re proposing is monstrous, and I assure you I am not a monster.”

“No?” said Pierre. “What exactly did you do during World War II?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I was a minor Red Army soldier in the Ukraine.”

“Bullshit,” said Pierre. He let the word hang between them for several seconds. “Your real name is Ivan Marchenko. You were trained at Trawniki and then stationed at Treblinka.”

‘“Ivan Marchenko,’” said Danielson, pronouncing each syllable with care. “Again, that’s an unfamiliar name.”

“Is it, now? And I suppose you don’t know the name Ivan Grozny, either.”

“Ivan — Ivan the Terrible that would be, wouldn’t it? Wasn’t he the first czar of Russia?” Danielson’s face was composed.

“Ivan the Terrible was a gas-chamber operator at the Treblinka death camp in Poland where eight hundred and seventy thousand people were killed.”

“That has nothing to do with me.”

“There are eyewitnesses.”

“To events that took place half a century ago? Come now.”

“I can prove both charges against you — the insurance-related murders, and that you are Ivan. The question is, which one do you want to admit to? Do you fancy your chances are better here in a California court, or in Israel in a war-crimes trial?”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“Any good defense attorney could make mincemeat of someone with a brain disorder on the witness stand.”

Pierre shrugged. “Well, if my story doesn’t interest you, I’ll take it to the newspapers. I know Barnaby Lincoln at the Chronicle.” He started the slow process of getting out of his chair.

Danielson’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

Pierre lowered himself back down. “Ah, now that’s more like it. What I want, Ivan, is five million dollars — enough to look after my wife and daughter after my Huntington’s disease finally takes me.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“It will buy my silence.”

“If I’m the monster you believe I am, what makes you think you could possibly get away with blackmailing me? If I’ve killed as many people as you say, surely I’d not stop at killing you?” He paused and then looked directly at Pierre. “Or your wife and child.”

For once, Pierre was glad of his chorea; it masked the fact that he was trembling with fear. “I’ve taken precautions. The information is in the hands of people I trust, both here in the States and in Canada — people you will never find. If anything happens to me or my family, they have instructions to make it public.”

Danielson was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said, “I’m not a man who likes to be cornered.”

Pierre said nothing.

The old man was silent a while longer. Then, finally: “Give me a week to get it ready, and—”

Just then, the door to the office burst open. A husky uniformed security guard entered. Danielson rose to his feet. “What is it?”

“Forgive the interruption, sir, but we’ve detected a transmitter in this room.”

Danielson’s eyes narrowed. “Search him,” he snapped. And then, loudly, as if to make sure it was part of the official record, “I admitted nothing. I merely humored a mentally deficient person.”

The guard grabbed Pierre under the left shoulder, hoisted him from the chair, and began roughly patting down his clothes. In a matter of moments, he found the small radio microphone clipped to the inside of Pierre’s shirt. He tore it loose and held it up for Danielson to see.

Pierre tried to sound brave. “It doesn’t matter. There are seven assorted cops and government agents waiting outside the building to take you in for questioning, and we have two positive IDs of you from Treblinka survivors—”

Danielson thumped his fist on his desktop. At first Pierre thought it was a gesture of frustration, but a small section of the desktop popped up at an angle, revealing a hidden control console within. Danielson tapped a series of buttons, and suddenly a thin metal wall dropped down from the ceiling, slicing right in front of Pierre’s kneecaps. If his feet hadn’t just then been moving backward because of the chorea, they would have been sheared off.

The guard looked dumbfounded — either he hadn’t known about this secret wall or had never expected to see it actually in use. Pierre was agog, too — but Marchenko/Danielson was a multimillionaire fugitive who had been preparing for all eventualities for five decades. Doubtless there was a secret exit in the part of the office he was still in.

“Come along, pal,” said the guard, pocketing the microphone and again grabbing Pierre roughly by the arm. He propelled Pierre out of Danielson’s office, through the astonished secretary’s office, through the antechamber, and out into the elevator lobby. The man stabbed at the elevator call switch, but the little square of plastic didn’t light up. He tried again, then cursed. Marchenko must have shut off the elevators to slow down the OSI agents from getting up here. It would take them a while to climb thirty-seven floors, even if they could get into the building past Marchenko’s security people.

The beefy guard let go of Pierre, who, without his cane, which was still back in Marchenko’s office, promptly crumpled to the ground. The guard looked at him, a sneer of disgust across his face. “Christ, you’re a fucking crip, ain’t you?” he said. He looked at the closed elevator doors again, as if thinking, then back at Pierre. “Suppose you can’t do any harm if I leave you up here.” He headed around the corner. Pierre could hear a door opening and the sound of the big man’s feet slapping against stairs as he headed down, presumably to the lobby to join in defending the building’s entrance.

Pierre was all alone in the elevator lobby. He looked up, though, and could see Marchenko’s secretary through the glass doors of the antechamber and the outer office. She was looking at him, as if unsure what to do. He reached out a hand toward her. She got up, turned her back on him, and disappeared into the inner office. Pierre exhaled. He wished he could just lie there without moving, but his legs were dancing incessantly and his head was bobbing left and right.

The woman reappeared — and she was holding Pierre’s cane! She came out to him and helped him to his feet. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she said, “but no one should treat a person the way they’re treating you.”

Pierre took the cane and leaned on it. “Merci, ”he said.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened to Mr. Danielson?”

“Did you know about that emergency wall?”

She shook her head. “I was terrified when I heard it crash down. I thought we were having another quake.”

“There may be men with guns coming into the building,” said Pierre.

“You should get off this floor. Go down a few floors and find someplace to hide.”

She looked at him, overwhelmed by it all. “Are you going to be okay?”

He tried to shrug, but the gesture was lost amid the chorea. “This is as good as I get.” He flapped an arm toward the stairwell. “Go on, get yourself somewhere safe.”

She nodded and disappeared around the corner. Pierre wasn’t sure what to do next. He decided to hobble over to the secretary’s desk. He picked up the phone, but it, too, was dead.

Pierre tried to imagine the scene below, the agents and cops storming in the front door, badges flashing — surely they would have started in upon hearing that the microphone had been discovered. They’d be trying to make their way past guards who might well have drawn their pistols.

Pierre remembered what this building looked like more from when he’d last seen it, at the shareholders’ meeting, than from today. He’d been so nervous preparing for this confrontation that he hadn’t really looked at it as he’d driven in this time. A tall building, all glass and steel, with a helicopter landing on its roof…

Sweet Jesus — a helicopter. Marchenko wasn’t working his way down to the ground floor; he’d probably already gone up to the roof, three stories above.

Pierre hobbled around the corner. The door to the stairs was clearly marked, next to the men’s and women’s bathrooms. He pushed it open and felt cold air rushing over him. The interior of the stairwell was naked concrete, with steps painted flat gray. He began slowly, painfully, making his way up the first flight. Each flight covered a half floor — there would be at least six before he reached the roof.

His cane was unnecessary as he pulled himself up using the banister, but he didn’t dare let it go, and so it twirled, Charlie Chaplinesque, as he held it in his free palsied hand.

He could hear faint echoes of footfalls far, far below. Others were using the stairs to try to climb up. But thirty-seven flights — even for a young man, that was a lot of potential energy. He pulled himself higher and higher, turning around now as one flight of stairs gave way to the next. He hoped Avi would also figure out that Marchenko had gone up, not down.

Pierre continued his ascent. His lungs were pumping and his breath came in shuddering wheezes. His heart jumped at the sound of a gunshot from far, far below.

Pierre was rounding the thirty-ninth floor now — the number had been crudely stenciled in black paint on the back of the gray metal fire door.

For a brief moment he cursed his Canadian upbringing: it had never even occurred to him to ask Avi for a gun before going in.

Pierre grabbed the handrail and hauled himself up some more, but suddenly he tripped — his leg had moved left when he’d told it to go forward. His cane pushed out sideways, wedging between two of the vertical metal rods that supported the banister. Pierre fell backward, grabbing on to the cane for support. There was a cracking sound as that one point in the middle of the cane’s shaft took all of Pierre’s weight for a second, but then Pierre lost his grip and found himself tumbling down to the bottom of the current flight. His left elbow smashed into the concrete floor. The pain was excruciating. He reached his right hand over to touch the elbow, and it came away with freckles of blood on it. His cane had landed about two meters away. He crawled over to it and then fought to bring himself to his feet. He stood, unable to go on, waiting for his lungs to stop gulping in air. Finally, with an enormous effort, he started up the stairs again.

Up one half-flight, around the corner, then up another. He was now opposite the door labeled “40.” But — damn it, he wasn’t thinking straight — the heliport was on the roof, another two staircases above him.

And all his efforts were predicated on the assumption that there was an exit to the roof at the top. If not, he’d have to come back down to the fortieth floor and try to find the correct way up to the helipad.

He yanked himself up, step after agonizing step. The footfalls below sounded closer; the Justice agents had perhaps made it as high as the twentieth floor by now.

Finally Pierre reached the top. There was a door here, painted blue instead of gray, with the word ROOF stenciled on it. Pierre turned the knob, then pushed on it, and the door swung outward, revealing the wide concrete top of the Condor Health Insurance tower. After all that time in the dim stairwell, the late-afternoon sunlight, positioned directly in front of him, pierced his eyes. Pierre held on to the doorjamb for support. High winds whipped by him, their sound masking that of the door opening.

Marchenko was standing about twenty meters away, his back to Pierre, waiting by a small green-and-white metal shed that presumably held tools for helicopter maintenance. There was no helicopter in sight, but the rooftop near Marchenko was painted with a circular yellow landing target, and the old man was impatiently watching the skies.

The wind shrieked as it went down the stairwell. Pierre stepped out.

The rooftop was square, with a meter-high lip around its edges. Gulls were perched in a neat row along the southern lip. Nearby were two cement enclosures, presumably housing the elevator equipment. Three small and two large satellite dishes sat at one corner of the roof and a microwave relay jutted up from another. There was a rotating red light mounted on top of one of the elevator houses, and two searchlights, both off, on top of the other.

Marchenko hadn’t noticed Pierre’s arrival yet. The old man was holding a cellular phone at his side in his left hand — doubtless he’d used that to call for a chopper to come and get him.

Pierre tried to assess his chances. He was thirty-five, for God’s sake.

Marchenko was eighty-seven. There should be no contest. Pierre should be able to simply walk up to the old geezer and haul him back downstairs into the arms of justice.

But now — now, who could say? Pierre leaned on his cane. There was a good chance that Marchenko could kill him — especially if he was armed.

There was no indication that he had a gun, and, indeed, a lead pipe had been Ivan Grozny’s favorite weapon half a century ago. But even unarmed, Marchenko might well be able to take Pierre.

Maybe he didn’t have to do anything. He looked up, scanned the sky again. There was no sign of an approaching copter. Avi’s agents would be up here soon enough, and—

“You!” Marchenko had turned around and spotted Pierre. His shout startled the gulls into flight; their cries were faintly audible above the whipping wind. The old man started moving toward Pierre with a slow and ancient gait. Pierre realized he should move away from the open door leading to the stairwell. All it would take for Marchenko to defeat him would be a good, swift shove down the stairs.

Pierre hobbled to the north. Marchenko changed course and continued to close the distance. Pierre thought of the Pequod and Moby Dick, wallowing in high waves, each ponderously maneuvering around the other.

Marchenko continued to circle in.

He tasks me, thought Pierre, and I shall have him. With an Ahab-like gait, his cane substituting for the peg leg, Pierre moved forward as quickly as he could. He knew that retreating would be stupid. If he allowed himself to be backed up against the meter-high wall around the edge of the roof, Marchenko would have little trouble pushing him over the side to plummet forty stories to a splattering death. Pierre moved toward the center of the roof, wind whipping his hair, cutting through him with fingers of ice.

Marchenko’s broad face was contorted in fury — not just at him, Pierre guessed, but also at whomever he had called to come and get him. There was still no sign of an approaching chopper, although several jet contrails crisscrossed the sky, like lash marks on a prisoner’s back.

Just five meters separated them now. Marchenko’s bald head glistened with a sheen of sweat, looking, in the ruddy late-afternoon light, almost like a film of blood. The climb up the stairs had been hard on him, too; whatever secret exit he’d had from his office had apparently given him access to the stairwell rather than the elevator lobby.

Marchenko stretched his arms out, as if he expected Pierre to try to slip past him. Pierre wanted to lift his cane high enough to use it as a weapon — something he could only do, he realized, if he were backed up for support against the toolshed or elevator houses. He started crabbing sidewise, moving toward the closest of the concrete structures.

Marchenko narrowed the distance between them. He was still holding the phone in his left hand, but swung out with his right. His fist hit Pierre on the shoulder, but it wasn’t hard enough to really hurt. Marchenko apparently realized that; his right hand dug into his hip pocket and came out with a set of keys, which he proceeded to intertwine between his skeletal fingers — just as Pierre had done more than two years before when Marchenko’s henchman, Chuck Hanratty, had tried to kill him.

They were now about three meters from the elevator house. Pierre thought he heard another gunshot coming from the still-open door to the stairs. The OSI men were apparently being held at bay by security guards on one of the upper levels. Still, Avi would have doubtless called for reinforcements by now.

Pierre got his back against the elevator house’s wall. He lifted his cane high and smashed it down as hard as he could. He’d been aiming for the top of Marchenko’s head, but his arm had shaken coming down and the impact had been on Marchenko’s right shoulder instead. There was a loud cracking sound. Pierre hoped it was Marchenko’s scapula, but it turned out to be the cane. As Pierre pulled it back, he saw that it was partially broken in the middle, at the point that had taken the brunt of his weight during his earlier tumble down the stairs. Still, the impact had knocked the cellular phone from Marchenko’s gnarled hand. It hit the concrete and its black battery pack popped loose.

More gunshots in the background. Pierre looked beyond Marchenko and now saw a helicopter on the horizon, but it was impossible to tell if it was coming toward them. Marchenko started to back away. He was unaware of the copter, but apparently realized he was putting himself at a disadvantage by letting Pierre have both hands free.

“Come on, you piece of shit,” taunted Marchenko in his reedy, accented voice. “Come and get me, you fucking piece of shit.” He swiped his hand out, the keys glinting in the sunlight. “Come on, you—”

“Morceau de merde,” supplied Pierre, pushing off the elevator house’s wall with his left hand and leaning on his damaged cane, hoping it would continue to support him as long as he only put pressure straight down on it.

Marchenko was dancing backward now, baiting Pierre closer to — to the toolshed, it looked like, where the old man could probably find a better weapon than a set of keys. Pierre hoped Marchenko would trip as he walked backward. Pierre might not be able to club him into submission, but he still outweighed the geriatric by at least ten kilos. Just sitting on him might be enough to subdue him.

Marchenko looked behind him to make sure the way was clear, and saw the helicopter, now only a couple of kilometers away. Pierre stole a glance behind himself, too, but there was no sign of anyone emerging from the stairwell.

They continued creeping across the roof, wind slapping them like invisible hands. Finally, gathering all his strength, Pierre jumped forward.

It wasn’t much of a jump, but he did succeed in slamming into Marchenko’s chest, and the old man tumbled backward onto the hard concrete. Pierre straddled Marchenko. The hand with the keys lashed out, and Pierre felt them biting into his cheek. He arched his back and tried a roundhouse punch aimed at Marchenko’s face. It connected, and there was a cracking sound. Marchenko’s mouth opened to yowl in pain, and Pierre saw that his top teeth were all off-kilter — Pierre’s punch had knocked his upper denture loose.

Pierre tried to swing again, but this time he missed and the movement threw him off-balance, allowing Marchenko to push him off and struggle to his feet. Pierre could see that the back of Marchenko’s bald head was scraped raw from where it had hit the concrete.

Marchenko hobbled to the toolshed. It had a padlock on its door, but one of the now bloody keys in his hand unlocked it. Pierre, lying on his back, fought to catch his breath and struggled to bring his legs, which were dancing wildly, under control. Marchenko ducked into the shed and emerged a moment later holding a long black crowbar, presumably used to open crates shipped by helicopter. He came over to stand above Pierre.

“Before you die,” said Marchenko, as he raised the crowbar above his head, “I have to know. Are you a Jew?”

Pierre shook his head slightly.

Marchenko sounded sad. “Too bad. It would have made this perfect.”

He swung the crowbar down. Pierre rolled aside just in time, the crowbar’s splayed end taking a divot out of the roof.

The sound of the helicopter was now quite clear above the wind. Pierre glanced at it. It wasn’t the same yellow-and-black chopper he’d seen all those months ago. No, this seemed to be a private, civilian bird, all silver and white. Marchenko had probably called for one of his Millennial Reich cronies to come rescue him.

The old man swung the crowbar again. Pierre rolled to the right; the crowbar sparked against the concrete. Pierre rolled onto his back again, and, praying he could maintain a steady grip, lifted his cane high. But Marchenko parried with the crowbar, and the wooden stick split in two, one part pinwheeling high into the sky.

Marchenko brought the crowbar down in a gillooly on Pierre’s knees. He screamed as his left kneecap shattered. Marchenko lifted the crowbar again, this time trying to bring it down on Pierre’s head. Pierre squirmed on the ground. His arm reached out, undulating like a snake, and locked onto Marchenko’s ankle, yanking the old man down, the crowbar landing with a cracking of brittle ribs on Marchenko’s side.

Pierre looked up. The copter was now hovering over the scene, preparing to land, its rotor kicking up grit and debris on the rooftop. The man in the right seat, flying the helicopter — Christ, he was even wearing the same aviator’s jacket and mirrored shades as on Hard Copy. Felix Sousa. The fucking guy wasn’t just a Nazi in his thinking; he was an actual card-carrying member of Ivan Marchenko’s Millennial Reich.

The copter was descending now, the wind from its rotor slicing into them. Pierre hoped its downward force would keep Marchenko pinned to the ground, but the old man was soon scrabbling to his feet. The copter touched down.

Pierre glanced back. Another helicopter was approaching. It was hard to see anything in all this wind, but — way to go, Avi! The new copter was clearly marked SFPD — San Francisco Police Department.

Marchenko loomed over Pierre, clearly wanting to finish him off, but Sousa was gesturing frantically for him to hurry up and get aboard his copter; the police helicopter would be there within minutes. Marchenko’s round head split in a horrible, lopsided grin, his denture still askew, and he spit a contemptuous bloody gob onto Pierre’s face. He then hobbled, holding his cracked ribs, toward the copter, bending low to clear its rotor, which was still revolving counterclockwise at a reduced speed.

Suddenly Avi Meyer appeared at the top of the stairs. He was panting horribly and red as a beet after climbing forty stories. He reached into his jacket, pulled out a gun, and tried to shoot at Sousa’s copter. But Marchenko was already aboard, pulling the curving door shut, and the copter was lifting up off the roof.

The SFPD helicopter had closed the distance, though, and was now trying to force Marchenko and Sousa to land by flying directly above them, the downward wind sending grit flying everywhere. Sousa pulled his copter to the north, and it moved sideways a few meters above the rooftop, its body tilted to the side, its rotor barely clearing the lip around the edge of the roof. The police helicopter followed.

Pierre squinted, trying to watch but also trying to shield his eyes. Avi moved out of the stairwell entrance, and two of his men appeared behind him, also gulping for breath. One was holding his side and grimacing in agony. After a moment, Avi staggered to the south edge of the roof, as far from the noise of the helicopters as possible, and pulled out his cellular.

Pierre, meanwhile, picked up the crowbar and, using it as a short cane, keeping all weight off his destroyed left knee, hobbled over to the north edge, the pain almost unbearable, fighting nausea and dizziness with every step. When he got to the meter-high lip around the roof, he collapsed against it and brought both hands to his knee. He could hear the pounding of the helicopter blades, out of sight below him, next to the building.

“This is the police,” said a female voice from a bullhorn on the second copter; the voice was all but lost in the noise from the dueling rotors. “You are ordered to land.”

Pierre forced himself to his feet, using the lip to support himself. He almost blacked out from the pain; his body shook with agony and chorea.

Looking down was dizzying: forty stories of sheer glass, leading straight to the asphalt parking lot. Five SFPD squad cars were pulling up outside the building, sirens blaring. A few meters to Pierre’s right, and about ten meters below, was the silver copter with Marchenko and Sousa in it.

Marchenko could probably see directly into Craig Bullen’s office, with its redwood paneling and priceless paintings.

The cockpit was only a short distance away from the side of the tower.

The SFPD copter had moved alongside it now, as if trying to get a bead for a shoot-out. Pierre could clearly see the female pilot and her male companion, both uniformed, in the bubblelike cockpit. They seemed to be arguing with each other, and then the police copter started moving away, whichever one of them who felt flying this close to the building was dangerous having won the fight.

The rotor on Sousa’s copter was a circular blur below Pierre. The noise was deafening, but it would be only a matter of seconds before Sousa would head away from the building. He could make a beeline out into the Pacific, out over international waters, beyond the SFPD’s — or even the DOJ’s — jurisdiction, perhaps landing on a boat and sailing down to Mexico or beyond; surely there was more to Marchenko’s escape plan than just the helicopter.

Pierre hefted the crowbar, gauging its weight. It probably wouldn’t work — probably would just be deflected away. But he wasn’t about to stand by and do nothing —

Pierre closed his eyes, summoning all the control and all the strength he had left. And then he threw the crowbar as hard as he could, spinning it vertically end over end, down into the helicopter’s twirling blades, aiming for the outer edge of the rotor disk.

He was prepared to stagger back, in case the crowbar was sent flying up toward him.

It hit with a horrible clanging sound. The helicopter began vibrating, tipping toward the building, and—

—the blades touched glass, sending a shower of sparkling shards down toward the ground below—

—and then the blades began slicing through the metal frame of the curtain wall between two windows, dicing the metal into small fragments, sparks flying everywhere as each successive pass brought the blades into contact at a slightly different angle.

The copter was traveling forward now, and the rotor disk hit the wall between adjacent offices, the tips of the blades splintering the redwood paneling with a buzz-saw sound, then digging into the concrete firewall behind. The tips of the rotor were immediately ground off, and more and more of them sheared away with each revolution, the blades shortening, metal bits flying like confetti.

Then the jagged edge of the rotor dug into the concrete, sending powdery chunks of it airborne until, with a shriek of tortured metal, the rotor came to a dead halt.

The copter tipped forward again, the bird itself now rotating slowly clockwise, its tail rotor swinging into the side of the building, more windows shattering and office furniture splintering.

The copter’s turbines were screaming; smoke poured from the engine compartment and flames shot from the exhausts. The cockpit tipped forward, and the whole vehicle began to drop, story after story after story.

Pierre could see people far below scattering, trying to get out of its way.

Pierre heard footfalls, all but drowned out by the thunder of the police copter. Avi was running across the rooftop.

Sousa’s chopper continued to fall, almost as if in slow motion, its foreshortened blades now revolving lamely, providing a small amount of lift. It passed floor after floor, diminishing in apparent size, until—

Hitting the pavement like an egg, metal and glass splashing everywhere —

—and then, like a flower opening, flames expanding outward from the crash as the copter’s fuel exploded. Soon a pillar of black smoke rose up to the fortieth floor and beyond.

The SFPD copter circled around, surveying the scene, then descended for a landing in the far parking lot.

Pierre looked down at the inferno below, ringed by spectators, illuminated by low, red sunlight and roaring flames reflecting off the windows, and by revolving lights on the police cars. At long, long last, Ivan Grozny was dead.

Pierre staggered back a step, turned around, and collapsed in agony against the short wall around the roof’s edge.

“Are you okay?” asked Avi, leaning in to look at him after seeing his fill of the carnage below.

Pierre’s hands were on his shattered knee again. The pain was incredible, like daggers being jackhammered into his leg. Wincing, he shook his head.

Avi flipped open his cellular phone. “Meyer here. We need medics on the roof right away.”

Another OSI agent appeared from the stairwell — but this one wasn’t out of breath. He jogged over to Avi and Pierre. “We’ve got one of the elevators working again,” he said. “They were all locked off on the fortieth floor, but with the fireman’s key we were able to reactivate one of them once we pried its door open.”

“What happened?” asked Avi.

The agent glanced briefly at Pierre, then looked back at Avi. “It seems a crowbar was dropped from up here into the blades of the helicopter. It caused it to crash.”

Avi nodded and then waved the agent away. When they were alone, he leaned in to Pierre, holding Pierre’s shoulders with his arms. “Did you drop the crowbar?”

Pierre said nothing.

Avi exhaled. “Damn it, Pierre — we don’t cut corners in the OSI. Not anymore. Danielson hadn’t even been charged yet.”

Pierre shrugged slightly. ‘“Justice,”’ he said, his breath coming out raggedly as he quoted another Nobel laureate — at that precise moment, he couldn’t remember which one — ‘“is always delayed and finally done only by mistake.’” He took his right hand off his knee and held it up in the air.

Although they were sheltered from the wind here by the low wall, his arm moved back and forth as if blown by a breeze only it could feel. “Blame it,” said Pierre, “on my Huntington’s.”

Avi’s eyes narrowed and then he nodded, turned, and leaned back against the wall, exhausted not just by the climb but also by years of chasing Ivans and Adolphs and Heinrichs. He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, waiting for the medics to arrive.

Chapter 42

As soon as visiting hours began, Molly came into Pierre’s room at San Francisco General Hospital. Pierre looked up at her from the bed. The left side of his face was bandaged, and his legs were in traction.

“Hi, honey,” said Molly.

“Hi, sweetheart,” said Pierre. He gestured at all the equipment hooked up to him. “After you left yesterday, somebody said my total hospital bill is going to be in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars.” He managed a grin. “I’m sure glad Tiffany talked me into the Gold Plan.”

“I brought you a newspaper,” said Molly, pulling a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle out of the canvas bag she was carrying.

“Thanks, but I don’t feel much like reading.”

Molly said, “Then let me read it to you. There’s a front-page story by that man we met, Barnaby Lincoln.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Officials from the California State Insurance Board, escorted by eight state troopers, today seized control of Condor Health Insurance, Inc., of San Francisco, in the wake of startling revelations made last week. ”Condor is out of business, as of today,“ said Clark Finchurst, State Insurance Commissioner. ”The industry’s emergency fund, which was established to handle such things, will take care of current claims until Condor’s policies can be handed over in an orderly fashion to other insurers.“ ’ ”

“All right!” said Pierre.

“It says there’s going to be a full inquiry. Craig Bullen is cooperating with the authorities.”

“Good for him.”

“Oh, and I picked up that printout you wanted.” She took a two-inch-thick pile of fanfold computer paper out of her bag and placed it on the table beside his bed.

“Thanks,” said Pierre.

Molly sat down on the edge of the bed and took one of Pierre’s dancing hands in hers. “I love you,” she said.

“And I love you, too,” said Pierre, squeezing her hand. “I love you more than words can say.”

Pierre lay in his hospital bed that night. His six minutes of CPU time on LBNL’s Cray supercomputer had at last become available, and the simulation he and Shari had coded had finally been run. Pierre started wading through the 384 pages of printout.

When he was done, he operated the hand control that lowered the motorized back of his bed. He stared at the ceiling.

It made sense. It all fit.

The existence of codon synonyms did indeed allow additional information to be superimposed on the standard A, C, G, T genetic code.

Yes, AAA and AAG both made lysine, but the AAA form also coded a zero into what Shari had already dubbed, in a note jotted in the margin, “the gatekeeper function,” which governed the correction or invocation of frameshift mutations. Meanwhile, the AAG version coded a one.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were four valid codons that made proline: CCA, CCC, CCG, and CCT. For these, the final letter indicated a base-sixteen order of magnitude shift of the splicing cursor, which marked the position where a nucleotide would be added or deleted from the DNA, causing a frameshift. The CCT form moved the cursor sixteen nucleotides; the CCC form moved it 16, or 256 nucleotides; the 2

CCA form 16, or 4,096 nucleotides; and the CCG form moved it l6, or 3 4

65,536 nucleotides.

Other synonyms performed different jobs: GAA and GAG both made glutamine, but they also set the direction of the splicing cursor’s movement. GAG set it moving to the “left” (in the direction leading from the three-prime carbon to the five-prime carbon in each deoxyribose), and GAA set it moving to the “right” (the five-prime to three-prime direction).

Meanwhile, TTT, which made phenylalanine, coded for a nucleotide insertion, while its synonym TTC was the instruction for a nucleotide deletion. And the four codons that made threonine — ACA, ACC, ACG, and ACT — indicated by their final letter which nucleotide would be inserted at the splicing cursor.

The coding based on synonyms moved the cursor, but the timing of when frameshifts would be invoked was governed by certain of the seemingly endless stuttering sequences in the junk DNA. On the smaller scale of the individual, it had already been demonstrated that the number of CAG stutters set the age at which Huntington’s would first manifest itself, and, as Pierre had pointed out to Molly, the number of repeats does change from generation to generation in a phenomenon called “anticipation” — an ironically prophetic name given what Pierre and Shari’s model showed.

Indeed, the computer simulation suggested promising lines of research into manipulating genetic timers — research that ultimately might cure Huntington’s and related ailments. Certainly, no sudden breakthrough was likely, but, at a guess, inside a decade, controlling individual aberrant genetic timers might be possible. It had come full circle: by deliberately choosing not to pursue Huntington’s research, Pierre might have, in fact, made the discovery that would eventually lead to a cure for the disease.

If that had been all that his research suggested, he might have been pleased intellectually, but still profoundly sad, crushed by the cruel irony: after all, anything but an immediate cure would be too late to help Pierre Jacques Tardivel.

But Pierre didn’t feel sadness. On the contrary, he was elated, for the genetic timers pointed to something beyond his personal problems, beyond the problems — however real, however poignant — of the one in ten thousand people who had Huntington’s. The timers pointed to a truth, a fundamental revelation, that affected every one of the five billion human beings now alive, every one of the billions who had come before, and every one of all the untold trillions of humans yet to be born.

According to the simulation, the DNA timers, incrementing generation by generation through genetic anticipation, could go off across whole populations almost simultaneously. The multiregionalists were more right than they’d ever guessed: Pierre’s research proved that preprogrammed evolutionary steps could take place across vast groups of beings all at once.

A quote came to Pierre, from — of course — a Nobel laureate. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had written in his 1907 work Creative Evolution that “the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.” The junk DNA was a language, just as that article Shari had found had suggested: the language in which the master plan for life had been written by its designer. Pierre’s heart was pounding with excitement, and adrenaline was coursing through his system, but finally he drifted off to sleep, the printout still resting on his chest, dreaming of the hand of God.

Molly pushed the office door open and barged in. “Dr. Klimus, I—”

“Molly, I’m very busy—”

“Too busy to talk about Myra Tottenham?”

Klimus looked up. Somebody else was passing by in the corridor. “Close the door.”

Molly did so and sat down. “Shari Cohen and I have just spent a day at Stanford going through Myra’s papers; they’ve got stacks of them in their archives.”

Klimus managed a weak grin. “Universities love paper.”

“Indeed they do. Myra Tottenham was working on ways to speed up nucleotide sequencing when she died.”

“Was she?” said Klimus. “I really don’t know what this has to do—”

“It has everything to do with you, Burian. Her technique — involving specialized restriction enzymes — was years ahead of what others were doing.”

“What does a psychologist possibly know about DNA research?”

“Not much. But Shari tells me that what she was doing was close to what we now call the Klimus Technique — the very same technique for which you won the Nobel Prize. We looked through your old papers at Stanford, too. You were flailing about in completely the wrong direction, trying to use direct ion-charging of nucleotides as a sorting technique—”

“It would have worked—”

“Would have worked in a universe where free hydrogen didn’t bond to everything in sight. But here it was a blind alley — a blind alley you didn’t abandon until just after Myra Tottenham died.”

There was a long, long pause. Finally: “The Nobel committee is very reluctant to award prizes posthumously,” said Klimus, as if that justified everything.

Molly crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I want your notebooks on Amanda. And I want your word that you will never try to see her again.”

“Ms. Bond—”

“Amanda is my daughter — mine and Pierre’s. In every way that matters, that’s the whole and complete truth. You will never bother us again.”

“But—”

“No buts. Give me the notebooks now.”

“I — I need some time to get them all together.”

“Time to photocopy them, you mean. Not on your life. I’ll go with you wherever you want in order to get them, but I’m not letting you out of my sight until I’ve found and burned them all.”

Klimus sat still for several seconds, thinking. The only sound was the soft whir of an electric clock. “You are one hard bitch,” he said at last, opening his lower-left desk drawer and pulling out a dozen small spiral-bound notebooks.

“No, I’m not,” said Molly, gathering them up. “I’m simply my daughter’s mother.”

Four months had passed. As she walked slowly across the lab, Shari Cohen looked like she’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Pierre was sitting on a lab stool. “Pierre,” she said, “I — I don’t know how to tell you this, but your most recent test results are…” She looked away. “I’m sorry, Pierre, but they’re wrong.”

Pierre lifted a shaking arm. “Wrong?”

“You botched the fractionation. I’m afraid I’m going to have to redo it.”

Pierre nodded. “I’m sorry. I — I get confused sometimes.”

Shari nodded as well. Her upper lip was trembling. “I know.” She was quiet for a long, long time. Then: “Maybe it’s time, Pierre, for you—”

“No.” He said it as firmly as he could. He held his trembling hands out in front of him, as if to ward off her words. “No, don’t ask me to stop coming into the lab.” He exhaled in a long, shuddery sigh. “Maybe you’re right — maybe I can’t do the complex stuff anymore. But you have to let me help.”

“I can carry on our work,” Shari said. “I can finish our paper.” She smiled. Their paper would blow people’s socks off. “They’ll remember you,

Pierre — not just in the same breath as Crick and Watson, but as Darwin, too. He told us where we came from, and you’ve told us where we’re going.”

She paused, contemplating. Pierre’s most recent discovery — probably, it was sad to say, his final discovery — was the DNA sequence that apparently governed the lowering of the hyoid bone in the throat, a sequence that was shifted out in Hapless Hannah’s DNA, but shifted in within that of Homo sapiens sapiens. And he’d shown Shari a DNA sample with the telepathic frameshift shifted in, although she didn’t know to whom it belonged, and only half believed Pierre’s assertions about what it was for.

Pierre looked around the lab helplessly. “There must be something I can do. Wash beakers, sort files — something.”

Shari looked over at the garbage pail, where the broken glass from a flask Pierre had dropped earlier in the day was resting. “You’ve given so much time to the project,” she said. “But — well, I know you’re the one who is supposed to quote the Nobel laureates, but didn’t Woodrow Wilson say, ‘I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.’ You can borrow mine; I’ll carry on for both of us. It’s time for you to relax. Spend some time with your wife and daughter.”

Pierre felt his eyes stinging. He’d known this day would come, but this was too soon — much too soon.

There was an awkward moment between them, and Pierre was reminded of that afternoon three and a half years earlier when he’d ended up holding Shari as she cried over the breakup of her engagement. She perhaps recognized the similarity, too, for, with a small smile, she moved closer and lightly wrapped her arms around him, not squeezing tightly, not constricting his body’s rhythmic dance.

“You will be remembered, Pierre,” she said. “You know that. You’ll be remembered forever for what you discovered here.”

Pierre nodded, trying to take comfort in the words, but soon tears were rolling down his cheeks.

“Don’t cry,” said Shari softly. “Don’t cry.”

He looked up at her and shook his head. “I know we did good work here,” he said, “but…”

She brushed his hair off his forehead. “But what?”

“Bits and pieces,” he said. “I can understand bits and pieces of it. But the big picture — the nucleotides, the enzymes, the reactions, the gene sequences…” He reached up with a trembling hand and wiped his cheek.

“I don’t remember it all, and what I do remember, I don’t understand anymore.”

Shari stroked his shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You did the work. You made the discoveries. I can finish it up from here.”

Pierre looked up at her. “But what am I going to do now? I — I don’t know how to do anything except be a geneticist.”

Shari spoke softly. “There was another phone message for you from Barnaby Lincoln at the Chronicle. Why not give him a call?”

Chapter 43

Eighteen Months Later Pierre was busy these days. Barnaby Lincoln was right — lobbying was satisfying work. And who knew? Someday it might even bear fruit.

Meanwhile, Shari had finished up their jointly authored paper — “An intronic DNA mechanism for invoking frameshift mutations as a driving force in evolution” — and submitted it to Nature.

But today was a day off from worrying about what the journal’s referees were going to make of the paper, a day off from working the phones and dictating letters.

They couldn’t just go to the portrait studio at Sears; taking pictures of the Tardivel-Bond family was a little more complicated than that. Pierre had good moments and bad, and they had to wait more than an hour for him to have enough control to sit reasonably still. And Amanda — well, at three years of age, she was doing better dealing with other people, but it was still easier to keep her away from well-meaning but stupid adults who constantly said the wrong things, thinking that because she didn’t talk she also couldn’t hear.

Molly had helped Pierre put on his clothes, as she did every day now. At first she’d thought about having him dress up in a suit and tie, all formal and staid, but that wasn’t Pierre, and she wanted to remember him the way he really was. Instead, she helped him put on the red Montreal

Canadiens hockey jersey he was so fond of.

For her part, Molly did dress a little more fancily than she normally would, wearing a powder blue silk top and a stylish black skirt. She even put on some lipstick and eye shadow.

They’d borrowed the elaborate camera and tripod from the university.

Two chairs were set up in front of the fireplace, and Molly carefully framed the shot.

Amanda was in a lovely pink dress with small flowers on it. Molly had toyed with fighting the stereotype, but for today, at least, she wanted her daughter to look just like any other little girl. Sometimes such things did matter.

Finally, Pierre said, “I think… I’m ready.”

Molly smiled and helped him into one of the chairs. His right forearm was moving a little bit, but once he was settled in, Pierre moved his left hand over it, holding it steady. Molly sat down, smoothed out her clothes, and signed for Amanda to come and sit in her lap. She did so, enjoying flouncing across the room in her skirt.

Molly kissed her forehead, and Amanda grinned. In her left hand Molly held the remote control for the camera. She pointed a finger at the lens and told Amanda to look into it and smile.

Pierre lifted his left hand from his right arm and he, too, smiled when he saw that it was, at least for the moment, no longer flailing. He managed to slowly raise it up and drape it around his wife’s shoulders. Little Amanda reached up with her small hand and grasped three of her father’s fingers. Molly squeezed the remote, and first the preflash and then the real flash went off.

Amanda bounced in her mother’s lap, startled but excited by the bright lights. Molly waited for her to settle down a bit before trying another exposure and, while she did so, she reflected on what a truly remarkable family portrait they were making. It wasn’t just a woman and her husband and their child, a mother, father, and daughter all very much in love. It was also, in a very real sense, a portrait of the human race — of silence, of speech, and of telepathy, of past, present, and future, of where it had come from, where it is, and where it is going.

Molly’s telepathy, here, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, had been an accident — the result of a single nucleotide having squeezed its way into her DNA. But the genetic code to produce the telepathy neurotransmitter was there, hidden, frameshifted into something else, in the DNA of every man and woman on earth.

Molly’s words came back to her: “Maybe someday far in the future, humanity might be able to handle something like this. But not now; it’s not the right time.”

Not the right time.

Pierre’s discoveries had been astounding: it was all in there. Not just what we had been. Not just codes to make tails and scales and hard-shelled eggs. Not just our fishy and amphibious and reptilian past.

Not just the commands that played out the dance of ontogeny apparently recapitulating phylogeny during an embryo’s development. Not just leftovers and discards.

Not just junk.

Yes, the past was in there. But so was the future. So was the blueprint, the master plan, what we would become.

What was it she had said to Pierre, all those years ago? “God planned out all the broad strokes in advance — the general direction life would take, the general path for the universe — but, after setting everything in motion, he’s content to simply watch it all unfold, to let it grow and develop on its own, following the course he laid down.”

She squeezed the camera’s remote again. Illumination was everywhere.

Amanda looked up at her father and moved her hands. Why are we doing this ?

“We’re doing this,” said Pierre, “because we’re a family.” The words came out slowly but clearly.

Amanda’s large brown eyes looked up at him. Her face contorted. She’d been trying for ages, practicing in secret with her mother. They’d even been interrupted one morning when Pierre had come up to the living room without them being aware of his arrival, but she’d never yet managed it. Still, she knew that this was indeed a very special moment, and so she tried again with all her might.

The sound was raw, like the tearing of coarse paper, more aspirated breath than anything else. But it was also unmistakable, at least to someone who had longed to hear it. “I love you,” Amanda said, looking at her daddy. Pierre thought something in French, but then, smiling at his wife and hugging her close, reformulated the same thought in English.

Life, thought Pierre Tardivel, doesn’t get any better than this.