Mount Dragon

“When you get back?” Carson echoed.

Teece nodded. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Radium Springs to file my preliminary report. Communication links to the outside world are practically nonexistent here. Besides, I need to consult with my colleagues. That’s why I’ve spoken to you. You are the person closest to Hurt’s work. I’ll be needing your full cooperation in the days to come. Somehow, I think Burt is the key to all this. We need to make a decision soon.”

“What decision is that?”

“On whether or not to allow this project to continue.”

Carson was silent. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine Scopes allowing the project to be terminated. Teece was getting up, wrapping his towel tighter.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Carson said.

“Advise what?”

“Leaving tomorrow. There’s a big dust storm coming up.”

“I didn’t hear anything about it on the radio,” Teece frowned.

“They don’t broadcast the weather for the Jornada del Muerto desert on the radio, Mr. Teece. Didn’t you notice the peculiar orange pall in the southern sky when we came out of the Fever Tank this evening? I’ve seen that before and it means trouble.”

“Dr. Singer’s lending me a Hummer. Those things are built like articulated lorries.”

For the first time, Carson thought he saw a look of uncertainty in Teece’s face. He shrugged. “I’m not going to stop you. But if I were you, I’d wait.”

Teece shook his head. “What I’ve got to do can’t wait.”

The front had gathered its energy in the Gulf of Mexico, then moved northwestward, striking the Mexican coastline of Tamaulipas State. Once over land, the front was forced to rise above the Sierra Madre Oriental, where the moist air of the higher altitudes condensed in great thunderheads over the mountains. Vast quantities of rain fell as the front moved westward. By the time it descended on the Chihuahua desert, all moisture had been wrung from it. The front veered northward, moving laterally through the basin and range provinces of northern Mexico. At six o’clock in the morning it entered the Jornada del Muerto desert.

The front was now bone dry. No clouds or rain marked its arrival. All that remained of the Gulf storm was an enormous energy differential between the hundred-degree air mass over the desert and the sixty-five-degree air mass of the front.

All this energy manifested itself in wind.

As it moved into the Jornada, the front became visible as a mile-high wall of orange dust. It bore down across the land with the speed of an express train, carrying shredded tumble-weeds, clay, dry silt, and powdered salt picked up from playas to the south. At a height of four feet above the ground, the wind also included twigs, coarse sand, pieces of dry cactus, and bark stripped from trees. At a height of six inches, the wind was full of cutting shards of gravel, small stones, and pieces of wood.

Such desert storms, though rare enough to occur only once every few years, had the power to sandblast a car windshield opaque, strip the paint off a curved surface, blow roofs off trailer homes, and run horses into barbed-wire fences.

The storm reached the middle Jornada desert and Mount Dragon at seven o’clock in the morning, fifty minutes after Gilbert Teece, senior OSHA investigator, had driven off in a Hummer with his fat briefcase, heading for Radium Springs.

Scopes sat at his pianoforte, fingers motionless on the black rosewood keys. He appeared to be in deep thought. Lying beside the hand-shaped lid prop was a tabloid newspaper, torn and mangled, as if angry hands had crumpled it, then smoothed it again. The paper was open to an article entitled “Harvard Doc Accuses Gene Firm of Horror Accident.”

Suddenly, Scopes stood up, walked into the circle of light, and flounced down on the couch. He pulled the keyboard onto his lap and typed a brief series of instructions, initiating a vidéoconférence call. Before him, the enormous screen winked into focus. A swirl of computer code ran up along one edge, then gave way to the huge, grainy image of a man’s face. His thick neck lapped over a collar at least two sizes too tight. He was staring into the camera with the bare-toothed grimace of a man unused to smiling.

“Guten tag,” said Scopes in halting German.

“Perhaps you would be more comfortable speaking in English, Mr. Scopes?” the man on the screen asked, tilting his head ingratiatingly.

“Nein,” Scopes continued in bad German. “I want to practice the German. Speak slowly and clearly. Repeat twice.”

“Very good,” the man said.

“Twice.”

“Sehr gut, sehr gut,” the man said.

“Now, Herr Saltzmann, our friend tells me you have clear access to the old Nazi files at Leipzig.”

“Das ist richtig. Das ist richtig.”

“This is where the Lodz Ghetto files currently reside, is it not?”

“Ja. Ja.”

“Excellent. I have a small problem, an—how does one say it?—an archival problem. The kind of problem you specialize in. I pay very well, Herr Saltzmann. One hundred thousand Deutschmarks.“

The smile broadened.

Scopes continued to talk in pidgin German, outlining his problem. The man on the screen listened intently, the smile slowly fading from his face.

Later, when the screen was blank once again, a soft chime, almost inaudible, sounded from one of the devices on the end table.

Scopes, who was still sitting on the decrepit sofa, keyboard in lap, leaned toward the end table and pressed a button. “Yes?”

“Your lunch is ready.”

“Very well.”

Spencer Fairley entered, the foam slippers on his feet in ludicrous contrast to the somber gray suit. He made no noise as he crossed the carpet and set a pizza and a can of Coca-Cola on the far end table.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” Fairley asked.

“Did you read the Herald this morning?”

Fairley shook his head. “I’m a Globe reader,” he said.

“Of course you are,” said Scopes. “You should try the Herald once in a while. It’s much more lively than the Globe.”

“No, thank you,” said Fairley.

“It’s over there,” Scopes said, pointing to the pianoforte.

Fairley went over and returned, holding the rumpled tabloid. “Unpleasant piece of journalism,” he said, scanning the page.

Scopes grinned. “Nah. It’s perfect. The crazy son of a bitch has put the knife to his own throat. All I need to do is give his arm a little nudge.”

He pulled a rumpled computer printout from his shirt pocket. “Here’s my charity list for the week. It’s short, only one item: a million to the Holocaust Memorial Fund.”

Fairley looked up. “Levine’s organization?”

“Of course. I want it done publicly, but in a quiet, dignified way.”

“May I ask ...?” Fairley raised an eyebrow.

“... Why?” Scopes finished the sentence. “Because, Spencer, you old Brahmin, it’s a worthy cause. And between you and me, they’re shortly going to lose their most effective fundraiser.”

Fairley nodded.

“Besides, if you thought about it, you would realize there are also strategic reasons to free Levine’s pet charity from excessive dependence on him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Fairley, look, my jacket has a hole in the elbow. Would you like to go shopping with me again?”

A look of extreme distaste passed quickly across Fairley’s face, then disappeared again. “No, thank you, sir,” he said firmly.

Scopes waited until the door hissed shut. Then he laid the keyboard aside and lifted a slice of pizza from the box. It was almost cold, exactly the way he liked it. His eyes closed in enjoyment as his teeth met in the gooey interior of the pizza crust.

“Auf wiedersehen, Charles,” he mumbled.

Carson emerged from the administration building at five o’clock and stopped in amazement. All around him, the buildings of Mount Dragon stood in the dim aftermath of the dust storm, dark shapes emerging from an orange pall. The landscape was deathly still. Carson breathed in gingerly, testing the air. It was arid, like brick dust, and strangely cold. As he stepped forward, his boot sank an inch into powdery dirt.

He’d gone to work very early that morning, before sunup, eager to get the analysis of X-FLU II out of the way. He worked diligently, almost forgetting the windstorm raging above che silent underground fastness of the Fever Tank. De Vaca arrived an hour later. She had beaten the storm, too, but just barely; her muttered curses, and the dirt-streaked face that scowled back at him through the visor, attested to that.

This must be what the surface of the moon looks like, he thought as he stood outside the administration building. Or the end of the world. He had seen plenty of storms on the ranch, but nothing like this. Dust lay everywhere, coating the white buildings, glazing the windows. Small drifts of sand had accumulated in long fins behind every post and vertical rise. It was an eerie, twilit, monochromatic world.

Carson started toward the residency compound, unable to see more than fifty feet ahead in the thick air. Then, hesitating a moment, he turned and headed instead for the horse corral. He wondered how Roscoe had fared. In a bad storm, he had known horses to go crazy in their stalls, sometimes breaking a leg.

The horses were safe, covered with dust and looking irritated but otherwise unhurt. Roscoe nickered a greeting and Carson stroked his neck, wishing he had brought a carrot or a sugar cube. He looked the animal over quickly, then stood back with relief.

A sound from outside the paddocks, muffled and deadened by the dust, reached his ears. Glancing up, he saw a shadow looming out of the pall of dust. Good God, he thought, there’s something alive out there, something very large. The shadow vanished, then reappeared. Carson heard the rattle of the perimeter gate. It was coming in.

He stared through the open door of the barn as the ghostly figure of a man on horseback materialized out of the dust. The man’s head hung low on his shoulders, and the horse shuffled on trembling legs, exhausted to the point of collapse.

It was Nye.

Carson withdrew into the dim spaces of the barn and ducked into an empty stall. The last thing he wanted was another unpleasant encounter.

He heard the gate swing shut, then the sound of boots slowly crossing the sawdust floor of the barn. Squatting down, Carson peered through a knothole in the frame of the stall.

The security director was saturated, head to toe, in dun-colored dust. Only his black eyes and crusted mouth broke through the monotony of the powdery coat.

Nye stopped in front of the tack area and slowly untied his rifle boot and saddlebags, hanging them on a rack. He uncinched the saddle, jerked it off the horse, and set it on a carrier, slinging the saddle blankets on top. Every movement raised small mushroom clouds of gray dust.

Nye led the horse toward its stall, out of Carson’s view. Carson could hear him brushing the horse down, murmuring soothing words. He heard the snip of a bale being cut, the thump of hay thrown into the stall and a hose filling the water bucket. In a few moments, Nye reappeared. Turning his back to Carson, he pulled out a heavy tack box from one corner of the barn and unlocked it. Then, moving to his saddle bags, he unbuckled one side and extracted what looked like two squares of clear stiff plastic, sandwiching a ragged—and completely unauthorized—piece of paper. Placing them on the floor of the tack area, Nye removed what looked like a wax pencil from the saddlebags, bent over the paper, and began making notations on the covering plastic. Carson pressed his eye to the crack, straining for a better view. The piece of paper looked old and well worn, and he could see a large, handwritten phrase across its upper border: Al despertar la hora el áquila del sol se levanta en una aguja del fuego, “At dawn the eagle of the sun stands on a needle of fire.” Beyond that he could make out nothing.

Suddenly, Nye sat up, alert. He looked around, craning his neck as if searching for the source of some noise. Carson shrank into the shadows at the back of the stall. He heard a shuffling sound, the click of a lock, the heavy clumping of feet. He peered out again to see the security director leave the barn, a gray apparition vanishing into the mist.

After a few moments, Carson got up and, eyeing the tack box curiously for a moment, moved over to the stall that held Muerto, Nye’s horse. It stood spraddle-legged, a string of brown saliva hanging from its mouth. He reached down and felt the tendons. Some heat, but no serious inflammation. The corona was hot but the hooves were still good, and the horse’s eye was clear. Whatever Nye had been doing, he had pushed the animal almost to its limit, maybe even as much as a hundred miles in the last twelve hours. The animal was still sound; there was no permanent damage and the horse would be back in form in a day or two. Nye had known when to quit. And he had a magnificent horse. A zero branded into its right jaw and a freeze brand high on its neck indicated it was registered with both the American Paint Horse Association and the American Quarter Horse Association. He patted its flank admiringly.

“You’re one expensive piece of horseflesh,” he said.

Carson left the stall and moved to the barn entrance, peering out into the dust that hung like smoke in the oppressive air. Nye was long gone. Closing the barn door quietly, Carson headed quickly for his room, trying to make sense of a man who would risk his life in a savage dust storm. Or a security director who would risk his job carrying around a piece of paper topped by a meaningless Spanish phrase at a place where paper was forbidden.

Carson passed through the canteen and out onto the balcony, the weathered banjo case knocking against his knees. The night was dark, and the moon obscured by clouds, but he knew that the figure sitting motionless by the balcony railing was Singer.

Since their first conversation on the balcony, Carson had often noticed Singer sitting out, enjoying the evening, fingering chords and runs on his battered guitar. Invariably, Singer had smiled and waved, or called out a cheerful greeting. But Singer seemed to change after the death of Brandon-Smith. He became quieter, more withdrawn. The arrival of Teece, and Vanderwagon’s sudden fit in the dining room, seemed only to deepen Singer’s mood. He still sat on the canteen balcony in the evenings, but now his head drooped in the desert silence, the guitar lying silent by his side.

During the first few weeks, Carson had often joined the director on the balcony for an evening chat. But as time went on and the pressure increased, Carson had found there was always more on-line research to be done, more lab notes to be recorded in the quiet solitude of his room after working hours. This evening, however, he was determined to find the time. He liked Singer, and didn’t like to see him brooding, no doubt blaming himself unnecessarily for the recent troubles. Perhaps he could draw the man out of himself for a bit. Besides, the talk with Teece had left Carson with nagging doubts about his own work. He knew that Singer, with his unswerving faith in the virtues of science, would be the perfect tonic.

“Who’s there?” Singer asked sharply. The moon passed out of the clouds, temporarily throwing the balcony into pale relief. Singer caught sight of Carson. “Oh,” he said, relaxing. “Hello, Guy.”

“Evening.” Carson took a seat next to the director. Although the balcony had been swept clean of its mantle of dust, fresh clouds of the stuff rose dimly into view as he settled his weight into the chair. “Beautiful night,” he said, after a pause.

“Did you see the sunset?” Singer asked quietly.

“Incredible.” As if to make up for the fury of the dust storm, the desert sunset that evening had been a spectacular display of color against the smoky haze.

Without speaking further, Carson leaned over, unsnapped the case, and pulled out his Gibson five-string. Singer watched, a spark of interest kindling in his tired eyes.

“Is that an RB-3?” he asked.

Carson nodded. “Forty-hole tone ring. 1932 or thereabouts.”

“It’s a beauty,” Singer said, squinting appraisingly in the moonlight. “My God. Is that the original calfskin head?”

“That’s right.” Carson drummed the dirty head lightly with the tips of his fingers. “They don’t like desert conditions, and this one’s always going flat. Some day I’ll break down and buy a plastic one. Here, take a look.” He handed the instrument to Singer.

The director turned it over in his hands. “Mahogany neck and resonator. Original Presto tailpiece, too. The flange is pot-metal, I suppose?”

“Yes. It’s warping a little.”

Singer handed it back. “A real museum piece. How’d you come by it?”

“A ranch hand who worked for my grandfather. He had to leave our place in a hurry one day. This is one of the things he left behind. It sat for decades on top of a bookcase, collecting dust. Until I went to college, got the bluegrass bug.”

As they spoke, Singer seemed to lose some of his funk. “Let’s hear how it sounds,” he said, reaching over and picking up his old Martin. He strummed it thoughtfully, tuned a string or two, then swung into the unmistakable bass line of “Salt Creek.” Carson listened, nodding his head in time to the music as he vamped background chords. It had been months since he’d picked up the instrument, and his chops weren’t what they had been at Harvard, but gradually his fingers limbered up and he tried some rolls. Then suddenly Singer was playing backup and Carson found himself taking a solo break, smiling almost with relief when he found that his pull-offs still sounded crisp and his single-string work was clean.

They finished with a shave-and-a-haircut tag and Singer launched immediately into “Clinch Mountain Backstep.” Carson swung into the tune behind him, impressed by the director’s virtuosity. Singer, meanwhile, seemed wholly engrossed, playing with the abandon of a man suddenly freed of a terrific burden.

Carson followed Singer through the strong, ancient changes of “Rocky Top,” “Mountain Dew,” and “Little Maggie,” feeling more and more comfortable and at last allowing himself an up-the-neck break that brought a smile and a nod from the director. Singer moved into an elaborate ending tag, and they closed with a thunderous G chord. As the echoes died, Carson thought he heard the faint, brief sound of clapping from the direction of the residency compound.

“Thank you, Guy,” Singer said, putting aside the guitar and wiping his hands together with satisfaction. “We should have done this a long time ago. You’re an excellent musician.”

“I’m not in your league,” Carson said. “But thanks all the same.”

A silence fell as the two men stared out into the night. Singer stood up and moved into the canteen to fix himself a drink. A disheveled-looking man walked by the balcony, counting imaginary numbers on his fingers and muttering loudly in what sounded like anguished Russian. That must be Pavel, Carson thought, the one de Vaca told me about. The man disappeared around a walkway corner into the night. A moment later, Singer returned from inside. His tread was slower now, and Carson sensed that whatever mantle of responsibility had temporarily been lifted was quickly settling again.

“So how’ve you been keeping, Guy?” Singer said, settling back into the chair. “We haven’t really spoken for ages.”

“I suppose Teece’s visit kept you busy,” Carson said. The moon had once again vanished behind thickening clouds, and he sensed, rather than saw, the director stiffen at the investigator’s name.

“What a nuisance that turned out to be,” Singer said. He sipped his drink while Carson waited. “Can’t say I think much of Mr. Teece. One of those people who act like they know everything, but won’t reveal any of it to you. He seems to get a lot of his information by setting people against each other. Know what I mean?”

“I didn’t speak with him for very long. He didn’t seem too pleased with the work we’re doing,” Carson said, choosing his words carefully.

Singer sighed. “You can’t expect everyone to understand, let alone appreciate, what we’re trying to do here, Guy. That’s especially true of bureaucrats and regulators. I’ve met people like Teece before. More often than not, they’re failed scientists. You can’t discount the jealousy factor in people like that.” He took a swallow. “Well, he’ll have to give us his report sooner or later.”

“Probably sooner,” Carson replied, instantly sorry that he’d spoken. He felt Singer’s eyes on him in the dark.

“Yes. He left here in an awful hurry. Insisted on taking one of the Hummers and driving himself to Radium Springs.” Singer took another swallow. “You seem to be the last one he spoke to.”

“He said he wanted to save those closest to X-FLU for last.”

“Hmm.” Singer finished his drink and placed the glass heavily on the floor. He looked back again at Carson. “Well, he’ll have heard about Levine by now. That won’t make things any easier for us. He’ll be back with a fresh set of questions, I’ll bet money on it.”

Carson felt a cold wave pass through him. “Levine?” he asked as casually as possible.

Singer was still looking at him. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard, the rumor mill is full of it. Charles Levine, head of the Foundation for Genetic Policy. He said some pretty damaging things about us on national television a few days ago. GeneDyne stock is down significantly.”

“It is?”

“Dropped another five and a half points today. The company has lost almost half a billion dollars in shareholders’ equity. I needn’t tell you what that does to our stock holdings.”

Carson felt numb. He was not worried about the small amount of GeneDyne stock in his portfolio; he was worried about something entirely different. “What else did Levine say?”

Singer shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s all lies, anyway, all shitty lies. The problem is, people eat up that sort of stuff. They’re just looking for something else to use against us, something to hold us back.”

Carson licked his lips. He’d never heard Singer swear before. He wasn’t very good at it. “So what’s going to happen?” A look of satisfaction surfaced briefly on Singer’s features. “Brent will deal with it,” he said. “That’s just the kind of game he likes.”

The helicopter approached Mount Dragon from the east, across the restricted airspace of the White Sands Missile Range, unmonitored by civilian air-traffic control. It was after midnight, the moon had disappeared, and the desert floor was an endless carpet of black. The helicopter’s blades were of a noise-baffled military design, and the engine was equipped with pink-noise generators to minimize the aircraft’s sound signature. The running lights and tail beacon were off, the pilot using downward-pointing radar to search for its target.

The target was a small transmitter, placed in the center of a reflective sheet of Mylar held down by a circle of stones. Next to the transmitter sat a Hummer, its engine and headlights off.

The helicopter eased down near the Mylar, the rotor wash tearing and shredding the material into confetti. As the runners settled on the desert floor, the dark figure of a man stepped out of the Hummer and ran toward the helicopter’s hatch, an oddly shaped metal suitcase imprinted with the GeneDyne logo in one hand. The hatch opened, and a pair of hands reached out for the case. As soon as the hatch was secured, the helicopter lifted off, banked, and disappeared again into the blackness. The Hummer drove away, its shielded lights following the two tire tracks that had brought it. A single shred of Mylar, borne aloft in an updraft, curled and drifted away. Within moments, a bottomless silence had once again settled on the desert.

That Sunday, the sun rose to a flawless sky. At Mount Dragon, the Fever Tank was closed as usual for decontamination, and until the obligatory evening emergency drill, the science staff would be left to their own devices.

As his coffee brewed, Carson looked out his window at the black cone of Mount Dragon, just becoming visible in the predawn light. Usually, he spent his Sundays like the rest of the staff: isolated in his room, laptop for company, catching up on background work. But today, he would climb Mount Dragon. He’d been promising himself he’d do just that since first arriving at the site. Besides, the balcony session with Singer had whetted his appetite to play again, and he knew the sharp nasal sounds of the banjo strings echoing through the quiet residency compound would incite half a dozen irate e-mail messages through the lab net.

Dumping the coffee and grounds into a thermos, he slung his banjo over his shoulder and headed to the cafeteria to pick up some sandwiches. The kitchen staff, usually almost unbearably chipper, were morose and silent. They couldn’t still be upset about what had happened to Vanderwagon. Must be the early hour, Carson thought. Everyone seemed to be in a bad mood these days.

Checking out with the perimeter guard, he set off down the dirt road that wound northeastward toward Mount Dragon. Reaching the base, he began the climb toward the summit, leaving the road in favor of a steep, narrow trail. The instrument felt heavy on his back, and the cinders slid under his feet as he climbed. Half an hour of hard work brought him to the top.

It was a classic cinder cone, its center scooped out by the ancient eruption. A few mesquite bushes grew along the rim. On the far side, Carson could see a cluster of microwave and radio towers, and a small white shed surrounded by a chain-link fence.

He turned around, breathing hard, ready to enjoy the view he’d worked hard for. The desert floor, at the precise instant of dawn, was like a pool of light, shimmering and swirling as if there were no surface at all, but merely a play of light and color. As the sun climbed fully over the horizon and flung a sheet of golden light across the ground, each solitary mesquite and creosotebush attached itself to shadows that ran endlessly toward the horizon. Carson could see the edge of light race across the desert, from east to west, etching the hills in light and the washes in darkness, until it rushed away over the curve of the earth, leaving a blanket of light in its wake.

Several miles away, he could see the wrecked outline of the old Anasazi pueblo—he now knew it was called Kin Klizhini—throwing shadows like black slashes across the dusty plain. Still farther away, the desert floor became black and mottled: the Malpaís lava flow.

He chose a comfortable spot behind a large block of tufa. Putting the banjo beside him, he stretched out and shut his eyes, enjoying the delicious solitude.

“Shit,” came a familiar voice several minutes later.

Startled, Carson looked up and saw de Vaca standing over him, hands on her hips.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

Carson grabbed the handle of his banjo case. His day was already ruined. “What does it look like?” he asked.

“You’re in my spot,” she said. “I always come up here on Sundays.”

Without another word, Carson heaved himself to his feet and started to walk away. This was one day he was going to avoid an argument with his lab assistant. He’d take Roscoe out a good ten miles, do his playing out there.

He halted when he saw the expression on her face.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

Carson looked at her. His instincts told him not to strike up a conversation, not to ask, just to get the hell out of there.

“You look a little upset,” he said.

“Why should I trust you?” de Vaca asked abruptly.

“Trust me about what?”

“You’re one of them,” she said. “A company man.” Beneath the accusatory tones, Carson sensed genuine fright.

“What is it?” he asked.

De Vaca remained silent for a long time. “Teece disappeared,” she said at last.

Carson relaxed. “Of course he did. I talked to him the night before last. He was taking a Hummer to Radium Springs. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

She shook her head angrily. “You don’t understand. After the storm, his Hummer was found out in the desert. Empty.”

Shit. Not Teece. “He must have gotten lost in the sandstorm.”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

He turned toward her sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

De Vaca wouldn’t look at him. “I overheard Nye. He was talking to Singer, saying that Teece was still missing. They were arguing.”

Carson was silent. Nye ... A vision came into his head: a vision of a man emerging from the sandstorm, encased in dust, his horse nearly dead from exhaustion.

“What, you think he was murdered?” he asked.

De Vaca did not reply.

“How far from Mount Dragon was the Hummer?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because I saw Nye return with his horse after the dust storm. He’d probably been out searching for Teece.” He told her the story of what he’d seen in the stables two evenings before.

De Vaca listened intently. “You think he’d be out searching in a dust storm? Returning from burying the body, more likely. He and that asshole, Mike Marr.”

Carson scoffed. “That’s ludicrous. Nye may be a son of a bitch, but he’s not a murderer.”

“Marr is a murderer.”

“Marr? He’s as dumb as a lump of busted sod. He doesn’t have the brains to commit murder.”

“Yeah? Mike Marr was an intelligence officer in Vietnam. A tunnel rat. He worked in the Iron Triangle, probing all those hundreds of miles of secret tunnels, looking for Viet-cong and their weapons caches and frying anybody they found down there. That’s where he got his limp. He was down a hole, following a sniper. He triggered a booby trap and the tunnel collapsed on his legs.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told me.”

Carson laughed. “So you’re friends, are you? Was this before or after he planted the butt of his shotgun in your gut?”

De Vaca frowned. “I told you, the scumbag tried to pick me up when I first got here. He cornered me in the gym and told me his life story, trying to impress me with what a bad dude he was. When that didn’t work, he grabbed my ass. He thought I was just some kind of easy Hispana whore.”

“He did? What happened?”

“I told him he was asking for a swift kick in the huevos.”

Carson laughed again. “Guess it took that slap at the picnic to cool his ardor. Anyway, why would he or anybody else want to murder an OSHA inspector? That’s insane. Mount Dragon would be shut down in an instant.”

“Not if it looked like an accident,” De Vaca returned. “The storm provided a perfect opportunity. Why did Nye take a horse out into the storm, anyway? And why haven’t we been told about Teece’s disappearance? Maybe Teece found out something that he wasn’t supposed to know.”

“Like what? For all we know, you could have misinterpreted what you heard. After all—”

“—I heard it, all right. Were you born yesterday, cabrón? There are billions at stake here. You think this is about saving lives, but it isn’t. It’s about money. And if that money is jeopardized ...” She looked at him, eyes blazing.

“But why kill Teece? We had a terrible accident on Level-5, but the virus didn’t escape. Only one person died. There’s been no cover-up. Just the opposite.”

“ ‘Only one person died,’ ” de Vaca echoed. “You ought to hear yourself. Look, something else is going on around here. I don’t know what it is, but people are acting strange. Haven’t you noticed? I think the pressure is driving people over the edge. If Scopes is so interested in saving lives, why this impossible timetable? We’re working with the most dangerous virus ever created. One misstep, and adiós muchachos. Already, people’s lives have been ruined by this project. Burt, Vanderwagon, Fillson the zookeeper, Czerny the guard. Not to mention Brandon-Smith. How many more lives?”

“Susana, you obviously don’t belong in this industry,” Carson replied wearily. “All great advances in human progress have been accompanied by pain and suffering. We’re going to save millions of lives, remember?” Even as he spoke the words, they sounded hollow and clichéd in his ears.

“Oh, it all sounds noble enough. But is this really an advance? What gives us the right to alter the human genome? The longer I’m here, the more I see of what goes on, the more I believe what we’re doing is fundamentally wrong. Nobody has the right to remake the human race.”

“You’re not talking like a scientist. We’re not remaking the human race, we’re curing people of the flu.”

De Vaca was digging a trench in the cinders with short, angry movements of her heel. “We’re altering human germ cells. We’ve crossed the line.”

“We’re getting rid of one small defect in our genetic code.”

“Defect. What the hell is a defect exactly, Carson? Is having the gene for male pattern baldness a defect? Is being short a defect? Being the wrong skin color? Having kinky hair? What about being a little too shy? After we eradicate the flu, what comes next? Do you really think science is going to refrain from making people smarter, longer-lived, taller, handsomer, nicer? Particularly when there’s billions of dollars to be made?”

“Obviously, it would be a highly regulated situation,” Carson said.

“Regulation! And who is going to decide what’s better? You? Me? The government? Brent Scopes? No big deal, let’s just get rid of the unattractive genes, the ones nobody wants. Genes for fatness and ugliness and obnoxiousness. Genes that code for unpleasant personality traits. Take off your blinders for a moment, and tell me what this means for the integrity of the human race.”

“We’re a long way from being able to do all that,” Carson muttered.

“Bullshit. We’re doing it right now, with X-FLU. The mapping of the human genome is almost complete. The changes may start small, but they’ll grow. The difference in DNA between humans and chimps is less than two percent, and look at the vast difference. It won’t take big changes in the genome to remake the human race into something that we’d never even recognize.”

Carson was silent. It was the same argument he had heard countless times before. Only now—despite his best efforts to resist—it was starting to make sense. Perhaps he was just tired, and didn’t have the energy to spar with de Vaca. Or perhaps it was the look on Teece’s face when he’d said, What I’ve got to do can’t wait.

They sat silently in the shadow of the volcanic rock, looking down toward the beautiful cluster of white buildings that were Mount Dragon, trembling and insubstantial in the rising heat. Even as he fought against it, Carson could feel something crumbling inside him. It was the same feeling he’d had when, as a teenager, he had watched from a flatbed truck while the ranch was being auctioned off piece by piece. He had always believed, more firmly than he believed anything else, that the best hopes for mankind’s future lay in science. And now, for whatever reason, that belief was threatening to dissolve in the heat waves rising from the desert floor.

He cleared his throat and shook his head, as if to dislodge the train of thought. “If your mind is made up, what do you plan to do about it?”

“Get the hell out of here and let people know what’s going on.”

Carson shook his head. “What’s going on is one-hundred-percent legal, FDA-regulated genetic research. You can’t stop it.”

“I can if somebody was murdered. Something’s not right here. Teece found out what it was.”

Carson looked at her as she sat with her back against the rock, her arms wrapped around her knees, the wind whipping her raven hair away from her forehead. Fuck it, he thought. Here goes.

“I’m not sure what Teece knew,” he said slowly. “But I know what he was looking for.”

De Vaca’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Teece thinks Franklin Burt was keeping a private notebook. That’s what he told me the night he left. He also said that Vanderwagon and Burt had elevated levels of dopamine and serotonin in their bloodstreams. So did Brandon-Smith, to a lesser extent.”

De Vaca was silent.

“He thought that this journal of Hurt’s could shed light on whatever might be causing these symptoms,” Carson added. “Teece was going to look for it when he got back.”

De Vaca stood up. “So. Are you going to help me?”

“Help you what?”

“Find Burt’s notebook. Learn the secret of Mount Dragon.”

Charles Levine had taken to arriving at Greenough Hall very early, locking his office door, and leaving instructions for Ray that he was taking no calls and seeing no visitors. He had temporarily passed on his course load to two junior instructors, and he’d canceled his planned lecture schedule for the coming months. Those had been the last pieces of advice from Toni Wheeler before she resigned as the foundation’s public-relations adviser. For once, Levine had decided to follow her suggestions. The internal pressure from the college trustees was growing, and the telephone messages left for him by the dean of faculty were becoming increasingly strident. Levine sensed danger, and—against his nature—had decided to lay low for a while.

So he was surprised to find a man waiting patiently in front of his locked office door at seven o’clock in the morning. Instinctively, Levine held out his hand, but the man only looked back at him.

“What can I do for you?” Levine said, unlocking the door and showing him in. The man sat down stiffly, gripping his briefcase across his lap. He had bushy gray hair and high cheekbones, and looked about seventy.

“My name is Jacob Perlstein,” he said. “I am a historian with the Holocaust Research Foundation in Washington.”

“Ah, yes. I know your work well. Your reputation is without peer.” Perlstein was known around the world for the unflagging zeal with which he brought to light old records from Nazi death camps and the Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe. Levine settled into his chair, puzzled by the man’s hostile air.

“I will come to the point,” the man said, his black eyes peering at Levine through contracted eyebrows.

Levine nodded.

“You have claimed that your Jewish father saved Jewish lives in Poland. He was caught by the Nazis and murdered by Mengele at Auschwitz.”

Levine did not like the wording of the question, but he said nothing.

“Murdered through medical experimentation. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” said Levine.

“And how do you know this?” the man asked.

“Excuse me, Mr. Perlstein, but I’m not sure I appreciate the tone of your questions.”

Perlstein continued to stare at him. “The question is simple enough. I would like you to tell me how you know this.”

Levine strove to conceal his irritation. He had told this story in countless interviews and at innumerable fund-raisers. Surely Perlstein had heard it before. “Because I did the research myself. I knew my father had died at Auschwitz, but that was all. My mother died when I was very young. I had to know what happened to him. So I spent almost four months in East Germany and Poland, combing Nazi files. It was a dangerous time, and I was doing dangerous work. When I found out—well, you can imagine how I felt. It changed my view of science, of medicine. It gave me deeply ambivalent feelings about genetic engineering, which in turn—”

“The files on your father,” the man interrupted brusquely. “Where did you find them?”

“In Leipzig, where all such files are kept. Surely you already know this.”

“And your mother, pregnant, escaped, and brought you to America. You took her name, Levine, rather than your father’s name, Berg.”

“That’s correct.”

“A touching story,” said Perlstein. “Odd that Berg is not a commonly Jewish name.”

Levine sat up. “I don’t like the tone of your voice, Mr. Perlstein. I must ask you to say whatever it is you’ve come to say, and leave.”

The man opened his briefcase and took out a folder, which he laid distastefully on the edge of Levine’s desk. “Please examine these documents.” He pushed the folder toward Levine with the edge of his fingers.

Opening the folder, Levine found a thin sheaf of photocopied documents. He recognized them immediately: the faded gothic typeface, the stamped swastikas, brought back memories of those horrible weeks behind the Iron Curtain, sifting through boxes of paper in damp archives, when only an overwhelming desire to know the truth had kept him going.

The first document was a color reproduction of a Nazi ID. card, identifying one Heinrich Berg as an Obersturmführer in the Schutzstaffel—the German SS—stationed at the concentration camp of Ravensbrueck. The photograph still appeared to be in excellent shape, the family resemblance extraordinary.

He pawed through the rest of the papers quickly, in growing disbelief. There were camp documents, prison rosters, a report from the army company that liberated Ravensbrueck, a letter from a survivor bearing an Israeli postmark, and a sworn affidavit. The documents showed that a young woman from Poland named Miyrna Levine had been sent to Ravensbrueck for “processing.” While there, she had come into contact with Berg, become his mistress, and later been transferred to Auschwitz. There she had survived the war by informing on resistance movements within the camp.

Levine looked at Perlstein. The man was staring back, the eyes dry and accusatory.

“How dare you peddle these lies,” Levine hissed when he had at last found his voice.

Perlstein’s breath rasped inward. “So, you continue to deny. I expected as much. How dare you peddle your lies! Your father was an SS officer and your mother a traitor who sent hundreds to their deaths. You are not personally guilty of your parents’ sins. But the lie you are living compounds their evil, and makes a mockery of the work you do. You claim to be searching for truth for everyone else, yet the truth doesn’t apply to you. You—who allowed your father’s name to be carved among the righteous at Yad Vashem: Heinrich Berg, an SS officer! It is an insult to the true martyrs. And this insult shall be made known.” The man’s hands trembled as they clutched the leather case.

Levine struggled to remain calm. “These documents are forgeries, and you are a fool to believe them. The East German communists were famous for faking—”

“Since this was brought to my attention several days ago, the originals have been examined by three independent experts in Nazi documents. They are absolutely genuine. There can be no mistake.”

Suddenly, Levine was on his feet. “Get out!” he screamed. “You’re just a tool for the revisionists. Get out, and take this filth with you!” He stepped forward, raising one arm threateningly above his head.

The elderly man tried to snatch the folder, ducking in alarm, and the contents spilled onto the floor. Ignoring them, he retreated to the outer office, then out into the corridor beyond. Levine slammed his office door and leaned against it, the pulse hammering in his head. It was an outrageous, vicious lie, and he would clear it up quickly ... he had certified copies of the real documents, thank God ... he would simply hire an expert to debunk the forgeries. The slander against his murdered father was like a stab through the heart, but this was not the first time he had been foully attacked and it would not be the last—

His eye fell on the folder, its documents and their filthy lies lying scattered across the floor, and a sudden, terrible thought struck him.

He rushed to a locked filing cabinet, jammed in a key, and reached for a folder marked, simply, “Berg.”

The folder was empty.

“Scopes,” he whispered.

The next day, with a tone of infinite regret, the Boston Globe carried the story on the front page of its second section.

Muriel Page, a volunteer for the Salvation Army store on Pearl Street, watched the young man with the slept-on hair pawing through a rack of sport coats. It was the second time he had come in that week, and Muriel couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He didn’t look like a self-medicator—he was clean and alert—no doubt just a young man down on his luck. He had a boyish, slightly awkward face that reminded her of her own grown son, married now and living in California. Except this young man was so thin. He certainly wasn’t eating right.

The young man flipped through the rack at high speed, glancing at the jackets as they went by.

He stopped suddenly and pulled one out, sliding it on over his black T-shirt as he walked toward a nearby mirror. Muriel, watching out of the corner of her eye, had to admire the man’s taste. It was a very nice jacket, with narrow lapels and little overlapping triangles and squares in red and yellow floating on a field of black. Probably dated from the early fifties. Very stylish, but not something—she thought a little mournfully— that most young men today would like. Clothes had been so much classier when she was a young lady.

The young man turned around, examined himself from various angles, and grinned. He came walking toward the counter, and Muriel knew she had a sale.

She removed the tag. “Five dollars,” she said with a cheerful smile.

The young man’s face fell behind the black glasses. “Oh,” he said. “I was hoping ...”

Muriel hesitated for just an instant. The five dollars probably represented several meals to him, and he looked hungry. She leaned forward and spoke conspiratorially. “I’ll let you have it for three, if you won’t tell anyone.” She fingered the sleeve. “That’s real wool, too.”

The man brightened, smoothing his unruly cowlick with a self-conscious hand. “Very kind of you,” he said, fishing in his pocket and removing three crumpled bills.

“It’s a lovely jacket,” Muriel said. “When I was a young lady, a man wearing a jacket like that... well!” She winked. The young man stared back at her, and instantly she felt silly. Briskly, she wrote out a receipt and handed it to him. “I hope you enjoy it,” she said.

“I will.”

She leaned forward again. “You know, just across the street we have a very nice place where you can get a bite of hot food. It’s free and there are no strings attached.”

The man looked suspicious. “No religious harangues?”

“None at all. We don’t believe in forcing religion on people. Just a hot, nourishing meal. All we require is that you be sober and drug-free.”

“Really?” he asked. “I thought the Salvation Army was a religious group of some kind.”

“We are. But a hungry person isn’t likely to be thinking about spiritual salvation, just his next meal. Feed the body and you free the soul.”

The man thanked her and exited. Taking a covert peek out the window, she was gratified to see him head directly for the soup kitchen, take a tray at the door, and get in line, striking up a conversation with the man in front of him.

Muriel felt a tear well up in her eye. That absentminded, slightly lost expression was so much like her son’s. She hoped that whatever had gone wrong in his life would straighten itself out before too long.

The following morning, the Pearl Street Salvation Army store and soup kitchen received an anonymous donation in the amount of a quarter of a million dollars, and no one was more surprised than Muriel Page when she was told it was in honor of her work.

Carson and de Vaca walked silently down the trail and back to the Mount Dragon complex. Outside the covered walkway leading to the residency compound, they stopped.

“So?” de Vaca prompted, breaking the silence.

“So what?”

“You still haven’t told me if you’re going to help me find the notebook,” she said in a fierce whisper.

“Susana, I’ve got work to do. So do you, for that matter. That notebook, if it exists, isn’t going anywhere. Let me think about this a while. OK?”

De Vaca looked at him for a moment. Then she turned without a word and walked into the compound.

Carson watched her walk away. Then, with a sigh, he climbed the staircase to the second floor, stepping through the doorway into the cool, dark corridor beyond. Maybe Teece had been right about Burt’s secret notebook. And maybe de Vaca was right about Nye. In which case, what Teece thought didn’t matter as much anymore. But what concerned Carson most was that horrible moment on top of Mount Dragon, when he’d suddenly felt the strength of his convictions turn soft. Since his father died and the last ranch had failed, Carson’s love of science—his faith in the good it could accomplish—had meant everything to him. Now, if ...

But he wouldn’t think about it any more today. Maybe tomorrow, he’d have the strength to face it again.

Back in his room, Carson stared at the drab white walls for a minute, summoning the energy to switch on his laptop and begin sorting through the X-FLU II test data. His eye fell upon the battered banjo case.

Hell with it, he thought. He’d play a little; without picks, to keep the noise down. Just five minutes, maybe ten. Get his mind off all this. Then he’d get to work.

As he lifted the five-string from the case, his eye fell on a folded piece of paper lying on the yellowing felt beneath. Frowning, he picked it up and unfolded it on his knee.

Dear Guy,

I’ve always hated this infernal instrument. For once, how-ever, I hope you practice with regularity. You’ve apparently already left for the morning, and I can’t delay my departure any further. This seems the best—indeed, only—way to contact you.

As you know, I’ll be gone for a couple of days. Since we spoke, I have tried without success to learn where Burt might have hidden his notebook. You know the Mount Dragon complex, you know the surrounding area, and—most importantly—you know Burt’s work. It’s quite possible that, perhaps inadvertently, Burt left behind a clue to the whereabouts of the notebook. Would you please look through Burt’s electronic notes and see if you can find such a clue?

Do not, however, try to find the notebook yourself. Let me do that when I return from my journey. Meanwhile, please don’t mention this to anyone.

Had I felt there was more time, I would not have burdened you with this. I have a feeling you are someone I can trust. I hope I am not mistaken.

Yours,

Gil Teece

Carson reread the hastily scrawled note. Teece must have come looking for him the morning of the dust storm and, not finding him, left the message in the one place Carson would be most likely to find it. When he’d opened the case on the canteen balcony, the night had been dark and he hadn’t seen the note. He felt a momentary anxious stab as he thought about how easily the paper could have fallen unnoticed to the floor of the balcony, to be discovered later by Singer. Or maybe Nye.

He angrily shook aside the thought. Another couple of days and I’ll be as paranoid as de Vaca. Or even Burt. Shoving the note into his back pocket, he punched de Vaca’s extension on the residency intercom.

“So this is where you live, Carson? It figures they’d give you one of the better views. All I see from my room is the back end of the incinerator.”

De Vaca moved away from the window. “They say the way a person decorates their own space is a good barometer of personality,” she went on, scanning the bare walls. “Figures.”

She leaned over his shoulder while he booted up his residency laptop.

“About a month before he left Mount Dragon, Burt’s entries began to grow shorter,” Carson said as he logged in. “If Teece is right, that’s the time he started keeping the illegal journal. If there are any clues as to its whereabouts in Burt’s on-line notes, that’s where I figure we should start looking.”

He began paging through the log. As the formulas, lists, and data scrolled by, Carson was reminded irresistibly of the first time he had read the journal, a lifetime ago, on his first workday in the Fever Tank. His heart sank as he skimmed yet again the failed experiments, the recordings of hopes that were alternately lifted, then shattered. It all felt uncomfortably close to home.

As he scrolled on, the scientific notes were increasingly leavened by conversations with Scopes, personal entries, even dreams.

May 20

I dreamt lost night that I was wandering, lost, in the desert. I walked toward the mountains, and it grew darker and darker. Then a great light appeared, like a second dawn, and a vast mushroom cloud rose from behind the mountain range. I knew I was witnessing the Trinity explosion. I saw the wave of overpressure bearing down on me, and then I woke up.

“Damn,” Carson said, “if he confides stuff like this to his on-line notes, why would he bother keeping a secret diary?”

“Keep going,” urged de Vaca.

He continued scanning.

June 2

When I shook out my shoes this morning, a little scorpion fell out and landed on the floor all in a tizzy. I felt sorry for him and brought him outside. ...

“Keep going, keep going,” de Vaca repeated impatiently.

Carson continued scrolling. Poetry began appearing among the data tables and technical notes. Finally, as Burt’s madness emerged, the log degenerated into a confusing welter of images, nightmares, and meaningless phrases. Then there was the last horrifying conversation with Scopes; a burst of apocalyptic mania; and the end-of-file marker was reached.

They sat back and looked at each other.

“There’s nothing here,” Carson said.

“We’re not thinking like Burt,” de Vaca said. “If you were Burt, and you wanted to plant a clue in the record, how would you do it?”

Carson shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would. Teece was right: subconscious or conscious, it’s human nature. First, you’d have to assume that Scopes was going to read everything. Right?”

“Right.”

“So what would Scopes be least likely to read in here?”

There was a silence.

“The poetry,” they both said at once.

They scrolled back to the point in the journal where the poems first appeared, then paged slowly forward. Most, but not all, were on scientific subjects: the structure of DNA, quarks and gluons, the Big Bang and string theory.

“You notice that these poems start around the same time the journal entries get shorter?” Carson asked.

“No one’s ever written poetry quite like this before,” de Vaca replied. “In its own way, it’s beautiful.” She read aloud:

There is a shadow on this glass plate.

A long exposure in the emission range

Of alpha hydrogen

Yields satisfactory results.

M82 was once ten billion stars,

Now it has returned to the slow lazy dust of creation.

Is this the mighty work

Of the same God who fires the Sun?

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“Messier 82 is a very strange galaxy in Virgo. The whole galaxy blew up, annihilating ten billion stars.”

“Interesting,” said de Vaca. “But I don’t think it’s what we’re looking for.”

They scrolled on.

Block house in the sheeted sun

The ravens rise as you approach,

They circle and float, crying at the trespass,

Waiting for emptiness to return.

The Great Kiva

Is half-filled with sand,

But the sipapu

Lies open.

It empties its silent cry into the fourth world.

When you leave

The ravens settle back,

Croaking with satisfaction.

“Beautiful,” said de Vaca. “And somehow familiar. I wonder what this black house is?”

Carson suddenly sat up. “Kin Klizhini,” he said. “It’s Apache for ‘Black House.’ He’s writing about the ruin just south of here.”

“You know Apache?” de Vaca asked, looking at him curiously.

“Most of our ranch hands were Apache,” Carson said. “I picked up some stuff from them when I was a kid.”

There was a silence while they read the poem again.

“Hell,” said Carson. “I don’t see anything here.”

“Wait.” De Vaca held up her hand. “The Great Kiva was the underground religious chamber of the Anasazi Indians. The center of the kiva contained a hole, called the sipapu, that connected this world with the spirit world below. They called that world the Fourth World. We live in the Fifth World.”

“I know that,” Carson said. “But I still don’t see any clues here.”

“Read the poem again. If the kiva was filled with sand, how could the sipapu be open?”

Carson looked at her. “You’re right.”

She looked at Carson and grinned. “At last, cabrón, you learn to speak the truth.”

They decided to take the horses, in order to be back in time for the evening emergency drill. The sun had passed the meridian and the day was at its hottest.

Carson watched de Vaca throw a saddle on the rat-tailed Appaloosa. “I guess you’ve ridden before,” he said.

“Damn right,” de Vaca replied, buckling the flank cinch and looping a canteen over the horn. “You think Anglos have a monopoly? When I was a kid, I had a horse named Barbarian. He was a Spanish Barb, the horse of the Conquest.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Carson said.

“They’re the best desert horse you can find. Small, stout, and tough. My father got some from an old Spanish herd on the Romero Ranch, Those horses had never interbred with Anglo horses. Old Romero said he and his ancestors always shot any damn gringo stallions that came sniffing around their mares.” She laughed and swung herself into the saddle. Carson liked the way she sat a horse: balanced and easy.

He mounted Roscoe and they rode to the perimeter gate, punched in the access code, then reined toward Kin Klizhini. The ancient ruin reared up on the horizon about two miles away: two walls poking up from the desert floor, surrounded by mounds of rubble.

De Vaca tilted her head back, gave her hair a shake. “In spite of everything that’s happened, I never get tired of the beauty of this place,” she said as they rode.

Carson nodded. “When I was sixteen,” he said, “I spent a summer on a ranch at the northern end of the Jornada, called the Diamond Bar.”

“Really? Is the desert up there like it is down here?”

“Similar. As you move northward, the Fra Cristóbal Mountains come around in an arc. The rain shadow from the mountains falls across there and it gets a little greener.”

“What were you, a ranch hand?”

“Yeah, after my dad lost the ranch I cowboyed around for the summer before going to college. That Diamond Bar was a big ranch, about four hundred sections between the San Pascual Mountains and the Sierra Oscura. The real desert started at the southern edge of the ranch, at a place called Lava Gate. There’s a huge lava flow that runs almost to the foot of the Fra Cristóbal Mountains. Between the lava flow and the mountains is a narrow gap, maybe a hundred yards across. The old Spanish trail used to go through there.” He laughed. “Lava Gate was like the gates of hell. You didn’t want to go south from there, you might never come back. And now here I am, right in the middle of it.”

“My ancestors came up that trail with Oñate in 1598,” said de Vaca.

“Up the Spanish trail?” Carson asked. “They crossed the Jornada?”

De Vaca nodded, squinting against the sun.

“How did they find water?”

“There’s that doubting look on your face again, cabrón. My grandfather told me they waited until dusk at the last water, and then drove their stock all night, stopping at about four in the morning to graze. Farther on, their Apache guide brought them to a spring called the Ojo del Águila. Eagle Spring. Its location is now lost. At least, that’s what my grandfather said.”

There was a question Carson had been curious about for some time, but had been afraid to ask. “Where, exactly, did you get the name Cabeza de Vaca?”

De Vaca looked at him truculently. “Where’d you get the name Carson?”

“You have to admit, ‘Head of Cow’ is a little odd for a name.”

“So is ‘Son of Car’ ”

“Forgive me for asking,” Carson said, mentally reprimanding himself for not knowing better.

“If you knew your Spanish history,” de Vaca said, “you’d know about the name. In 1212, a soldier in the Spanish army marked a pass with a cow skull, and led a Spanish army to victory over the Moors. That soldier was given a royal title and the right to use the name ‘Cabeza de Vaca’.”

“Fascinating,” Carson yawned. And probably apocryphal, he thought.

“Alonso Cabeza de Vaca was one of the first European settlers in America in 1598. We come from one of the most ancient and important European families in America. Not that I pay any attention to that kind of thing.”

But Carson could see from the proud look on her face that she paid a great deal of attention to that kind of thing.

They rode for a while, saying nothing, enjoying the heat of the day and the gentle roll of the horses. De Vaca rode slightly ahead, her lower body moving with the horse, her torso relaxed and quiet, left hand on the reins and right hooked in her belt loop. As they approached the ruin, she stopped, waiting for him to catch up.

He drew alongside and she looked at him, an amused gleam in her violet eyes.

“Last one there is a pendejo,” she said suddenly, leaning forward and spurring her horse.

By the time Carson could recover and urge Roscoe forward, she was three lengths ahead, the horse going at a dead run, its head down, ears flattened, hooves throwing gravel back into Carson’s face. He urged Roscoe on with urgent, light heel jabs.

Carson edged up on her and the two horses raced alongside, leaping the low mesquite bushes, the wind roaring in their ears.- The ruin loomed closer, the great stone walls etched against the blue sky. Carson knew he had the better mount, yet he watched in disbelief as de Vaca leaned close to her horse’s ear, urging him forward in a low but electric voice. Carson jabbed and shouted in vain. They flashed between the two ruined walls, de Vaca now half a length ahead, her hair whipping like a black flame behind her. Ahead of them, Carson saw a low wall rise suddenly out of the brown sands. A group of ravens burst upward with a raucous crying as they both took the wall at a leap and were suddenly past the ruin. They slowed to a lope, then a trot, turning the horses back, cooling them off.

Carson looked over at de Vaca. Her face was flushed, and her hair wild. A fleck of foam from the sweaty horse lay across her thigh. She grinned. “Not bad,” she said. “You almost caught me.”

Carson flicked his reins. “You cheated,” he said, hearing the peevishness in his own voice. “You got the jump on me.”

“You have the better horse,” she said.

“You’re lighter.”

She smirked. “Face it, cabrón, you lost.”

Carson smiled grimly. “I’ll catch you next time.”

“Nobody catches me.”

Reaching the ruin, they dismounted, tying their horses to a rock. “The Great Kiva was usually in the very center of the pueblo, or else far outside its borders,” de Vaca said. “Let’s hope it hasn’t collapsed completely.”

The ravens circled far overhead, their distant cries hanging in the dry air.

Carson looked around curiously. The walls were formed from stones of shaped lava, cemented together with adobe. Walls and room blocks rose on three sides of the U-shaped ruin, the fourth side opening onto a central plaza. Potsherds and pieces of flint littered the ground beneath their feet. Much of it was covered by sand.

They walked into the plaza, long overgrown with yucca and mesquite. De Vaca knelt down by a large fire-ant hill. The ants had fled inside to escape the noonday heat, and she carefully smoothed the gravel with her ringers, examining it closely.

“What are you doing?” Carson asked.

Instead of answering, de Vaca picked something off the mound and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Take a look,” she said.

She placed something in his palm, and he squinted at it: a perfect little turquoise bead, with a hole no wider than a human hair drilled through its center.

“They polished their turquoises using blades of grass,” she said. “No one is really sure how they got the holes so small and perfect, without the use of metal. Perhaps by twirling a tiny sliver of bone against the turquoise for hours.” She stood up. “Come on, let’s find that kiva.”

They moved to the center of the plaza. “There’s nothing here,” Carson said.

“We’ll separate and search beyond the perimeter,” de Vaca replied. “I’ll take the northern semicircle, you take the southern.”

Carson moved out beyond the edge of the ruin, tracing a widening arc, scanning the desert as he did so. The huge storm and drying winds had erased any signs of footprints; it was impossible to tell whether Burt had been there or not. Centuries before, the subterranean kiva would have had a roof flush with the desert floor, with only a smoke hole on the surface revealing its presence. While it was likely the roof had collapsed long ago, there was a chance that it had remained intact and was now completely concealed by the shifting sands.

Carson found the kiva about one hundred yards to the southwest. The roof had collapsed, and the kiva was now nothing but a circular depression in the desert, thirty feet across and perhaps seven feet deep. Its walls were of shaped rock, from which projected a few stubs of ancient roof timbers. De Vaca came running at his call, and together they stood at its edge. Near the bottom, Carson could make out places where the walls were still plastered in adobe mud and red paint. At the base, the wind had piled up a crescent of sand, completely burying the floor.

“So where’s this sipapu?” Carson asked.

“It was always in the exact center of the kiva,” said de Vaca. “Here, help me down.” She scrambled down the side, paced off the center, then knelt, digging in the sand with her fingers. Carson dropped down and began to help. Six inches into the sand, their hands scraped against flat rock. De Vaca brushed the sand away excitedly, moving the stone aside.

There, in the sipapu hole, sat a large plastic specimen jar, its GeneDyne label still intact. Inside the jar was a small book with dented corners, bound in a stained, olive-colored canvas.

“Madre de Dios,” de Vaca whispered. She lifted the jar out of the sipapu, pried open the lid, and pulled out the journal, opening it as Carson looked on.

The first page was headed May 18. Below the date, the page was covered in dense, precise handwriting, so tiny that two lines were written in each ruled space.

Carson watched as de Vaca flipped through the pages incredulously. “We can’t bring this back to Mount Dragon,” he said.

“I know. So let’s get started.”

She turned to the beginning.

May 18

Dearest Amiko,

I write to you from the ruins of a sacred Anasazi kiva, not far from my laboratory.

When we were packing my things, that last morning before I flew to Albuquerque, I stuck this old journal into the pocket of my jacket, on impulse. I’d always planned to use it for bird sightings. But I think now I’ve found a better use for it.

I miss you so terribly. The people here are friendly, for the most part. Some, like the director, John Singer, I think I can even count as friends. But we are associates before we are friends here, all pushing toward one common goal. There is pressure upon us; tremendous pressure to move ahead, to succeed. I feel myself drawing inward under such pressure. The endless desolation of this awful desert magnifies my loneliness. It is as if we have stepped off the edge of the world.

Paper and pencil are forbidden here. Brent wants to keep track of everything we do. Sometimes, I believe he even wants to keep track of what we think. I’ll use this small journal as my lifeline to you. There are things I want to tell you, in good time. Things that will never appear in the on-line records at GeneDyne. Brent is, in many ways, still a boy, with boyish ideas; and one of those ideas is that he can control what others do and think.

I hope you will not worry when I tell you such things. But I forget; when you read this, it will be with me by your side. And these will be but memories. Perhaps the passage of time will allow me to laugh at myself and my petty complaints. Or feel pride at what we have accomplished here.

It’s a long walk out to this kiva, and you know how poor a rider I am. But I think it does me good, to spend this time with you. The journal will be safe here, under the sand. Nobody leaves the facility except the security director, and he seems to have his own strange desert business to attend to.

I will come again, soon.

May 25

My darling wife,

It is a terribly hot day. I keep forgetting how much water one needs in this frightful desert. I will have to bring two canteens next time.

It is no wonder, in this waterless landscape, that the entire religion of the Anasazi was directed at the control of nature. Here, in the kiva, is where the rain priests called on the Thunderbird to bring the rain.

Oh, male divinity!

With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us,

With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head, come to us soaring,

With these I wish the foam floating on the flowing water over the roots of the great corn,

Happily abundant dark clouds I desire,

Happily abundant dark mists I desire,

Happily may fair blue corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you.

This was how they prayed. It is a very ancient desire, this thirst for knowledge and power, this hunger to control the secrets of nature, to bring the rain.

But the rain did not come. Just as it does not come today.

What would they think if they could see us now, laboring day after day, in our warrens beneath the earth, working not only to control nature, but to shape it to our will?

I can write no more today. The problem I’ve been given is demanding all my time and energy. It’s hard to escape it, even here. But I will return soon, my love.

June 4

Dearest Amiko,

Please forgive my long absence from this place. Our schedule in the laboratory has been fiendish. Were it not for the requisite decontaminations, I believe Brent would have us working round the clock.

Brent. How much have I told you about him?

It’s strange. I never knew that I could feel such profound respect for a man, and yet dislike him at the same time. I suppose I might even hate him. Even when he’s not actually pushing me to work faster, I can still see his face, frowning, because the results are not as he would like. I hear him whispering in my ear: Just five more minutes. Just one more test series.

Brent is probably the most complex person I’ve ever met. Brilliant, silly, immature, cool, ruthless. He has an enormous internal storehouse of witty aphorisms which he brings forth for any occasion, quoting them with great delight. He gives away millions while arguing bitterly over hundreds. He can be suffocatingly kind to one person and unbearably cruel to the next. His knowledge of music is extraordinary. He owns Beethoven’s last and finest piano, the one that supposedly prompted him to write his final three sonatas. I can only guess at the price.

I’ll never forget the first time I spoke to him. It was when I was still working in GeneDyne Manchester, shortly after my breakthrough with GEF, the filtration system. Our preliminary results were excellent, and everyone was excited. The system promised to cut production time in half. The team in the transfection lab were beside themselves. They told me they were going to nominate me for president.

That’s when the call came from Brent Scopes. I assumed it was congratulatory; perhaps another bonus. But instead, he asked me to come to Boston, on the next plane. I had to drop everything, he said, to assume leadership of a critical GeneDyne project. He didn’t even allow me to finish the final tests on GEF; I had to leave that to my staff at Manchester.

You remember my trip to Boston. I’m sure I must have seemed evasive on my return, and for that I am sorry. Brent has a way of pulling you in behind his banner, of electrifying you with his own enthusiasm. But there seems no reason not to tell you about it now. It will be in all the newspapers in a matter of months, anyway.

My task—putting it simply—was to synthesize artificial blood. To use the vast resources of GeneDyne to genetically engineer human blood. The preparatory work had already been done, Brent said. But he wanted someone with my background, and my expertise, to see it through. My work on the GEF filtration process made me the perfect choice.

It was a noble idea, I admit, and Brent’s delivery was superb. Never again would hospitals suffer from blood shortages and emergencies, he said. No longer would people have to fear contaminated transfusions. No longer would people with rare blood types die for lack of a match. GeneDyne’s artificial blood would be free of contamination, would match all types, and would be available in limitless quantities.

And so I left Manchester—I left you, our home, everything I hold dear—and came to this desolate place. To pursue a dream of Brent Scopes, and, with any luck, make the world a better place. The dream lives. But its cost is very high.

June 12

Dearest Amiko,

I have decided to use this journal to continue the story I began in my last entry. Perhaps that was my purpose all along. All I can tell you is that, after leaving this kiva on my last visit, I felt a tremendous sense of release. So I will continue, for my own sake if not for posterity.

I remember one morning, perhaps four months ago. I was holding a flask of blood. It was the blood of a human being, yet it had been manufactured by a form of life as far removed from human as possible: streptococcus, the bacterium that lives in the soil, among other places. I had spliced the human hemoglobin gene into strep and forced it to produce human hemoglobin. Vast quantities of human hemoglobin.

Why use streptococcus? Because we know more about strep than about almost any other form of life on the planet. We have mapped its entire genome. We know how to snip apart its DNA, tuck in a gene, and sew everything back together.

You will forgive me if I simplify the process. Using cells taken from the lining of a human cheek (my own), I removed a single gene located on the fourth chromosome, 16s rDNA, locus D3401. I multiplied it a millionfold, inserted the copies into the strep bacteria, and grew them in large vats filled with a protein solution. Despite how it sounds, my dear, this part wasn’t difficult. It has been done many times before with other genes, including the gene for human insulin.

We made this bacterium—this extremely primitive form of life—ever so slightly human. Each bacterium carried a tiny, invisible piece of a human being inside it. This human piece, in essence, took over the functions of the bacterium and forced it to do one thing: produce human hemoglobin.

And that, to me, is the magic—the irreducible truth of genetics, the promise that will never grow stale.

But this is also where the difficult work really began.

Perhaps I should explain. The hemoglobin molecule consists of a protein group, called a globin, with four heme groups riding shotgun on it. It collects oxygen in the lungs, exchanges this oxygen with carbon dioxide in the tissues, and then dumps carbon dioxide into the lungs to be exhaled.

A very clever, very complicated molecule.

Unfortunately, hemoglobin by itself is deadly poisonous. If you injected naked hemoglobin into a human being, it would probably be fatal. The hemoglobin needs to be enclosed in something. Normally, this would be a red blood cell.

We therefore had to design something that would seal up the hemoglobin, make it safe. A microscopic sack, if you will. But something that would “breathe,” that would allow oxygen and carbon dioxide to pass through.

Our solution was to create these little “sacks” out of pieces of membrane from ruptured cells. I used a special enzyme called lyase.

Then came the final problem: to purify the hemoglobin. This may sound like the simplest problem of all.

It was not.

We grew the bacteria in huge vats. As the amount of hemoglobin produced by the bacteria built up, it poisoned the vat. Everything died. We were left with a soup of crap: molecules of hemoglobin mixed with dead and dying bacteria; bits of DNA and RNA; chromosomal fragments; rogue bacteria.

The trick was to purify this soup—to separate the healthy hemoglobin from all the junk—so that we would end up with pure human hemoglobin and nothing else. And it had to be extremely pure. Getting a blood transfusion is not like taking a tiny pill. Many pints of this substance might go inside a human being. Even the slightest impurities, multiplied by those quantities, could cause unpredictable side effects.

It was around this time that we got word of what was going on back in Boston. The marketing people were already studying—in great secrecy—how to market our genetically engineered blood. They assembled focus groups of ordinary citizens. They discovered that most people are terrified of getting a blood transfusion because they fear contamination: from hepatitis, from AIDS, from other diseases. People wanted to be reassured that the blood they were receiving was pure and safe.

So our unfinished product was dubbed PurBlood. And the decree came down from corporate headquarters: henceforth, in all papers, journals, notes, and conversations, the product would be called PurBlood. Anyone calling it by its trade name, Hemocyl, would be disciplined. In particular, the marketing decree stated, any use of the word “genetic engineering” or “artificial” was verboten. The public did not like the idea of genetically engineered anything. They didn’t like genetically engineered tomatoes, they didn’t like genetically engineered milk, and they really hated the phrase “genetically engineered artificial human blood.” I guess I can’t blame them, really. The thought of having such a substance pumped into something as inviolate as one’s own veins has to be disturbing to a layman.

My love, the sun is growing low in the sky, and I must leave. But I will return tomorrow. I’ll tell Brent I need a day off. It’s not a lie. If you only knew how pouring out my soul to you on these pages has lifted a great weight from my shoulders.

June 13

Dearest Amiko,

I come now to the most difficult part of my story. The part, in fact, that I was not sure until now I could bring myself to tell you. I may yet burn these pages, if my resolve weakens. But it is a secret I can no longer keep within myself.

... So I began the purification process. We fermented the solution to free the hemoglobin from its bacterial prison. We centrifuged it to clear out the refuse. We forced it through ceramic micron filters. We fractionated it. To no avail.

You see, hemoglobin is extremely delicate. You cannot heat it; you cannot use overly strong chemicals; you cannot sterilize or distill it. Each time I attempted to purify the hemoglobin, I ended up destroying it. The molecule lost its delicate structure: it “denatured.” It became useless.

A more delicate purification process was required. And so Brent suggested we try my own GEF filtration process.

I realized immediately that he was right. There was no reason not to. It must have been misplaced modesty on my part that kept it from occurring to me before.

The process I’d been working on in Manchester was a type of modified gel electrophoresis, an electric potential that drew precisely the correct molecular weight molecule through a set of gel filters.

Setting up the process took time, however—time during which Brent grew increasingly impatient. At last, I was able to purify six pints of PurBlood using the gel process.

The GEF process was successful beyond my wildest hopes. Using four of the six pints as samples, I was able to prove the mixture was pure down to sixteen parts per million. Thus, out of one million hemoglobin molecules, there were no more than sixteen foreign particles. And probably less.

This may sound pure. And it is pure enough for most drugs. But, in this case, it was not. The FDA had decided, with typical capriciousness, that 100 parts per billion would be safe. Sixteen parts per million was not. The number 16—it will haunt me forever. In scientific terms, a purity of 1.6 X 10^-7.

Please don’t misunderstand. I believed—and I still believe—that PurBlood is much purer than that. I just couldn’t prove it. The difference is crucial. But to me, the distinction was unfair and artificial.

There was one test for purity—the ultimate test—that I had not performed, because it was discouraged under FDA regulations. I secretly performed that test. Please forgive me, my love—one night, in the low-security lab, I opened a vein in my arm and bled out a pint. Then I replaced it with a transfusion of PurBlood.

It was rash, perhaps. But PurBlood passed with flying colors. Nothing happened to me, and all medical tests proved it was safe. Naturally, I couldn’t report the results of that test, but it satisfied me that PurBlood was pure.

So I did something else. I infinitesimally diluted my last pint of PurBlood with distilled water, two hundred to one, and ran the array of tests that automatically calculated and recorded purity. The result was, of course, a purity of 80 parts per billion. Well within the FDA safety range.

That was all I had to do. I did not make a report, I did not change figures or falsify data. When Scopes downloaded the test results that night, he knew what they meant. The next day he congratulated me. He was beside himself.

The question I now ask myself—the question you may ask me—is why did I do it?

It wasn’t for the money. I have never really cared that much about money. You know that, my darling Amiko. Money is more trouble than it’s worth.

It wasn’t for fame, which is a terrific nuisance.

It wasn’t to save lives, although I have rationalized that this was the reason.

I think perhaps it was pure, naked desire. A desire to solve this last problem, to take that final step to completion. It is the same desire that led Einstein to suggest the terrible power of the atom in a letter to Roosevelt; it is the same desire that led Oppenheimer to build the bomb and test it not thirty miles from here; it is the same desire that led the Anasazi priests to meet in this stone chamber and exhort the Thunderbird to send the rain. It was the desire to conquer nature.

But—and this is what haunts me, what has driven me to commit this all to paper—the success of PurBlood does not alter the fact that I cheated.

I am only too well aware of this. Especially now ... now that PurBlood has gone on to large-scale production, and I am banging my head against another, even more insoluble problem.

Anyway, dearest one, I hope you can find it in your heart to understand. Once I am free of this place, I will make it my life’s resolve never to be apart from you again.

And perhaps that will be sooner than you think. I’m beginning to suspect certain people here of— but more on that some other time. I had best end this for today.

You will never know what being able to speak this secret has done for me.

June 30

It took me a long time to get here today. I had to take a special route, a secret route. The woman who cleans my room has been looking at me strangely, and I don’t want her following me. She’ll talk to Brent about it, just as my lab assistant and the network administrator have done.

It’s because I’ve discovered the key. And now I must be ceaselessly vigilant.

You can tell them by the way they leave things on their desks. Their messiness gives them away. And they are polluted with germs. Billions of bacteria and viruses hiding in every crevice of their bodies. I wish I could speak of it to Brent, but I must continue as if nothing had happened, as if all were normal.

I don’t think I had better come here again.

Carson was silent. The sun settled toward the horizon, its shape ballooning in the layers of air. The old stone walls of the ruin smelled of dust and heat, mingled with the faint scent of corruption. One of the horses whinnied with impatience, and the other answered.

At the sound of the horses, de Vaca started. Then she quickly stuffed the journal in the container, placed it into the sipapu, covered the hole with the flat rock, and smoothed the warm concealing sand over the spot.

She straightened up, brushing off her jeans. “We’d better get back,” she said. “There’ll be questions if we miss the emergency drill.”

They climbed out of the ruined kiva, mounted their horses, and reined slowly in the direction of Mount Dragon.

“Burt, of all people,” de Vaca muttered as they rode. “Faking his data.”

Carson was silent, lost in thought.

“And then using himself as guinea pig,” de Vaca went on.

Carson roused himself, startled by a sudden realization. “I guess that’s what he meant by ‘poor alpha,’ ” he said.

“What?”

“Teece told me that Burt has been raving about ‘poor alpha, poor alpha.’ I guess he meant himself, as the alpha test subject.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t call him a guinea pig, though. Making himself the alpha was very much in character. A man like Burt wouldn’t deliberately risk thousands of lives on unproven blood. He was under incredible time pressure to prove its safety. So he tested it on himself. It’s not unheard of. It isn’t exactly illegal to do something like that, either.” He looked at de Vaca. “You have to admire the guy for putting his life on the line. And he had the last laugh. He proved the blood was safe.”

Carson fell silent. Something was teasing the back of his mind; something that had surfaced as they read the journal. Now it remained just out of the reach of consciousness, like a forgotten dream.

“Sounds like he’s still having the last laugh. In a nuthouse somewhere.”

Carson frowned. “That’s a pretty callous remark, even for you.”

“Maybe so,” de Vaca replied. Then she paused. “I guess it’s just that everyone talks about Burt like he was larger than life. This is the guy who invented GeneDyne’s filtration process, synthesized PurBlood. Now we find he faked his data.”

There it was again. Suddenly, Carson realized what it was in the journal that had raised an unconscious flag. “Susana, what do you know about GEF?”

She looked back at him, puzzled.

“The filtration process Burt invented when he was working at Manchester,” Carson went on. You just mentioned it. We’ve always simply assumed the filtration process works on X-FLU. What if it doesn’t?”

De Vaca’s look of puzzlement turned to scorn. “We’ve tested X-FLU again and again to make sure that the strain coming out of the filter is absolutely pure.”

“Pure, yes. But is it the same strain that went in?”

“How could the filtration process change the strain? It makes no sense.”

“Think about how GEF works,” Carson replied- “You set up an electrical field that draws the heavy protein molecules through a gel filter, right? The field is set precisely to the molecular weight of the molecule you want. All the other molecules are trapped in the gel, while what you want emerges from the other end of the filter.”

“So?”

“What if the weak electrical field, or the gel itself, causes subtle changes in the protein structure? What if what comes out is different from what went in? The molecular weight would be the same, but the structure would be subtly altered. A straightforward chemical test wouldn’t catch it. All it takes is the tiniest change in the surface protein of a virus particle to create a new strain.”

“No way,” said de Vaca. “GEF is a patented, tested process. They’ve already used it to synthesize other products. If there was anything wrong, it would’ve shown up a long time ago.”

Carson reined in Roscoe and stood motionless. “Have any of the tests for purity we’ve done looked at that possibility? That specific possibility?”

De Vaca was silent.

“Susana, it’s the only thing we haven’t tried.”

She look at him for a long moment.

“All right,” she said at last. “Let’s check it out.”

The Dark Harbor Institute was a large, rambling Victorian house perched on a remote headland above the Atlantic. The institute counted one hundred and twenty honorary members on its rolls, although at any given time only a dozen or so were actually in residence. The responsibility of the people who came to the institute was to do only one thing: to think. The requirements for membership were equally simple: genius.

Members of the institute were very fond of the rambling Victorian mansion, which 120 years of Maine storms had left without a single right angle. They especially liked the anonymity, since even the institute’s closest neighbors—mostly summer visitors—did not have the vaguest idea of who those bespectacled men and women were who came and went so unpredictably.

Edwin Bannister, associate managing editor of the Boston Globe, checked out of his inn and directed the placing of his bags into the back of his Range Rover, his head still throbbing from the effects of the bad bordeaux he’d been served at the previous evening’s dinner. Tipping the porter, he walked around the Rover, eyeing as he did so the little town of Dark Harbor, with its fishing boats and church steeple and salt air. Very quaint. Too damn quaint. He preferred Boston, and the smoke-filled atmosphere of the Black Key Tavern.

He slid behind the wheel and consulted the hand-drawn map that had been faxed to him at the newspaper. Five miles to the institute. Despite the assurances, a part of him still doubted whether or not his host would really be there.

Bannister accelerated through a yellow light and swung onto County Road 24. The car lurched over one pothole, then another, as it left the tiny town behind. The narrow road headed due east to the sea, then ran along a series of high bluffs over the Atlantic. He rolled down the window. From below, he could hear the distant thunder of the surf, the crying of gulls, the dolorous clang of a bell buoy.

The road ran into a stand of spruce, then emerged at a high meadow covered with blueberry bushes. A log fence ran across the meadow, its rustic length interrupted by a wooden gate and shingled guardhouse. Bannister stopped at the gate and powered down his window.

“Bannister. With the Globe,” he said, not bothering to look at the guard.

“Yes sir.” The gate hummed open, and Bannister noted with amusement that the rustic logs of the gate were backed with bars of black steel. No car bombers crashing this party, he thought.

The mansion’s oak-paneled foyer seemed empty, and Bannister walked through to the lounge. A fire blazed in an enormous hearth, and a long series of casement windows looked out over the sea, sparkling in the morning light. The faint sound of music could be heard in the background.

At first, Bannister thought he was alone. Then, in a far corner, he spotted a man in a leather armchair, drinking coffee and reading a paper. The man was wearing white gloves. The newspaper rustled between them as its pages were turned.

The man looked up. “Edwin!” he said, smiling. “Thank you for coming.”

Bannister immediately recognized the unkempt hair, the freckles, the boyish looks, the retro sports jacket over black T-shirt. So he had come, after all.

“Good to see you, Brent,” Bannister said, taking the proffered armchair. He automatically glanced around for a waiter.

“Coffee?” Scopes asked. He had not offered to shake hands.

“Yes, please.”

“We help ourselves here,” Scopes said. “It’s over by the bookcase.”

Bannister hauled himself to his feet again, returning with a cup that promised to be less than satisfactory.

They sat in silence for a moment, and it dawned on Bannister that Scopes was listening to the music. He sipped his coffee and found it surprisingly good.

The piece ended. Scopes sighed with satisfaction, folded the newspaper carefully, and placed it next to an open briefcase beside his chair. He removed his ink-stained reading gloves and placed them on top of the paper.

“Bach’s Musical Offering,” he said. “Are you familiar with it?”

“Somewhat,” said Bannister, hoping that Scopes wouldn’t ask a question that would reveal the lie. Bannister knew next to nothing about music.

“One of the canons of the Offering is entitled ‘Quaerendo Invenietis.’ ‘By seeking, you will discover.’ It was Bach’s puzzle, asking the listener to see if he could tell what intricate canonical code was used to create the music.”

Bannister nodded.

“I often think of this as a metaphor for genetics. You see the finished organism—such as a human being—and you wonder what intricate genetic code was used to create such a marvelous thing. And then you wonder, of course: If you were to change a tiny piece of this intricate code, how would that translate into flesh and blood? just as changing a single note in a canon can sometimes end up transforming the entire melody.”

Bannister reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a tape recorder, and showed it to Scopes, who nodded his approval. Turning on the device, Bannister settled back in his chair, his hands folded.

“Edwin, my company is in a bit of a predicament.”

“How so?” Bannister already knew this was going to be good. Anything that brought Scopes out of his aerie had to be good.

“You know about the attacks Charles Levine has been making against GeneDyne. I hoped that people would recognize him for what he is, but that’s been slow to happen. By hiding under the skirts of Harvard University, he acquired a credibility I wouldn’t have thought possible.” Scopes shook his head. “I’ve known Dr. Levine for over twenty years. I was once a close friend of his, in fact. It pains me a great deal to see what has happened to him. I mean, all those claims about his father, and then it turns out he was an SS officer. Now, I don’t begrudge a man for protecting the memory of his father, but did he have to lionize him with such an offensive story? It just shows that this man holds truth secondary to achieving his own ends. It shows that one must scrutinize every word he utters. The press hasn’t really done that. Except for the Globe, thanks to you.”

“We never publish anything without verifying the facts.”

“I know, and I appreciate that. And I’m sure the people of Boston appreciate it, given that GeneDyne is one of the state’s larger employers.”

Bannister inclined his head.

“In any case, Edwin, I can’t sit still and take these scurrilous attacks any longer. But I need your help.”

“Brent, you know I can’t help you,” Bannister said.

“Of course, of course,” Brent waved his hand dismissively. “Here’s the situation. Obviously, we’re working on a secret project at Mount Dragon. It isn’t secret because of any particular danger factor, but because we face tremendous competition. We’re in a winner-take-all business. You know how it works. The first company to patent a drug makes billions, while the rest eat their R-and-D investments.”

Bannister nodded again.

“Edwin, I want to assure you—as someone whose judgment I respect—that nothing uncommonly dangerous is going on at Mount Dragon. You have my word on that. We have the only Level-5 facility in existence, and our safety record is the best of any pharmaceutical company in the world. Those are facts of record. But don’t take my word for it.”

He slid a file out of his briefcase and placed it before Bannister.

“This folder contains the entire safety record of GeneDyne. Normally, this information is proprietary. I want you to have it for your story. Just remember: It didn’t come from me.”

Bannister looked at the file without touching it. “Thanks, Brent. You know, however, that I can’t just take your word for it that you aren’t working on dangerous viruses. Dr. Levine’s charges—”

Scopes chuckled. “I know. The doomsday virus.” He leaned forward. “And that’s the primary reason I’ve asked you here. Would you care to know just what this terrible, inconceivably deadly, virus is? The one that Dr. Levine says may end the world?”

Bannister nodded, the many years of professionalism successfully concealing his eagerness.

Scopes was looking at him, grinning mischievously. “Edwin, this is off the record, of course.”

“I would prefer—” Bannister began.

Scopes reached over and turned off the tape recorder. “There is a Japanese corporation working on a very similar line of research. On this particular type of germ-line research, they’re actually ahead of us. If they realize its ramifications before we do, then we’re dead. Winner take all, Edwin. We’re talking about a fifteen-billion-dollar annual market here. I’d hate to see the Japanese increase their trade deficit with us, and have to close down GeneDyne Boston, all because Edwin Bannister at the Globe revealed what virus we were working with.”

“I see your point,” Bannister said, swallowing hard. Sometimes it was necessary to work off the record.

“Good. It’s called influenza.”

“What is?” Bannister said.

Scopes’s grin widened. “We’re working with the flu virus. And that is the only virus we are working with at Mount Dragon. That is Levine’s so-called doomsday virus.”

Scopes sat back with a look of triumph.

Bannister felt the sudden, desperate emptiness of a lead story disappearing beneath his fingers. “That’s it? Just flu viruses?”

“That’s right. You have my solemn promise. I want you to be able to write with a clear conscience that GeneDyne is not working with dangerous viruses.”

“But why the flu?”

Scopes looked surprised. “Isn’t it obvious? Countless dollars in productivity are lost every year because of flu. We are working on a cure for the flu. Not like these flu shots that you have to take every year, and that don’t work half the time. I’m talking about a permanent, onetime cure.”

“My God,” said Bannister.

“Just think what that will do to our stock price if we succeed. Those who own GeneDyne stock are going to become rich. Especially considering how cheap the stock has become recently, thanks to our friend Levine. Not rich tomorrow, but in a few months, when we announce the discovery and go into phased FDA testing.” Scopes smiled, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “And we’re going to succeed.” Then he reached over and switched on the tape recorder.

Bannister said nothing. He was trying to imagine just how large a number fifteen billion was.

“We are taking vigorous action against Dr. Levine and his libelous statements,” Scopes continued. “You’ve done an excellent job so far in reporting our lawsuits against Dr. Levine and Harvard. I have news on that front. Harvard has revoked the university charter for Levine’s foundation. They’ve been keeping the revocation under wraps, but it’s about to be made public. I thought you might be interested. We will be dropping our lawsuit against Harvard, of course.”

“I see,” said Bannister, thinking quickly. There might be a way to salvage this, after all.

“The Faculty Committee on Tenure is reviewing Dr. Levine’s contract. There is a clause in all university contracts allowing tenure to be revoked in cases of ‘moral turpitude.’ ” Scopes laughed softly. “Sounds like something out of the Victorian Age. But it’s cooked Levine’s goose, I can tell you.”

“I see.”

“We’re not yet sure how he did it, but certain grains of truth in his otherwise false allegations prove he used illegal, not to mention unethical, methods to gain confidential information from GeneDyne.” Scopes slid another folder toward Bannister. “You’ll find the details in here. I’m sure you will find out more in your own fashion. Obviously, my name must not appear in connection with any of this. I’m only telling you this because you’re the one reporter whose ethics I most respect, and I want to help you write a balanced, fair article. Let the other newspapers write down everything Levine says without fact-checking. I know the Globe will be more careful.”

“We always check our facts,” said Bannister.

Scopes nodded. “I’m counting on you to set the record straight.”

Bannister stiffened slightly. “Brent, all you can count on is a story that presents a strictly objective, accurate rendition of the facts.”

“Exactly,” Scopes said. “That is why I’m going to be totally honest with you. There is one charge Levine made that is partially true.”

“And that is—?”

“There was a death at Mount Dragon recently. We were keeping the matter quiet until the family could be notified, but Levine somehow found out about it.” Scopes paused, his face growing serious at the memory. “One of our best scientists was killed in an industrial accident. As you’ll see in the first folder I gave you, certain safety procedures were not followed. We immediately notified the necessary authorities, who dispatched inspectors to Mount Dragon. It’s a formality, of course, and the lab remains open.”

Scopes paused. “I knew the woman well. She was—how shall I say it?—an original. Dedicated to her work. In certain ways, perhaps a bit difficult. But undeniably brilliant. You know, it’s very difficult to be a brilliant woman in science, even today. She had a rough time of it until she got to GeneDyne. I lost a friend as well as a scientist.” He looked briefly at Bannister, then dropped his eyes. “The CEO is ultimately responsible. This is something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.”

Bannister watched him, genuinely moved. “How did she—?” he began,

“She died of a head injury,” Scopes said. Then he looked at his watch. “Damn! I’m running late. Anything else you’d care to ask, Edwin?”

Bannister picked up his tape recorder. “Not at the moment—”

“Good. I hope you’ll excuse me. Call me if you have any questions.”

Bannister watched the thin, slight figure of Scopes walk out of the room, toes pointing toward the walls, lugging the briefcase that seemed three sizes too large for him. An amazing fellow. Worth an amazing amount of money.

As Bannister wound his way back along the Atlantic headlands, he kept returning to that fifteen-billion-dollar figure, and what such an announcement would do to the value of GeneDyne stock. He wondered what GeneDyne was trading at right now. Come to think of it, he’d have to check that out. It wouldn’t hurt to put in a call to his broker and stick his money in something a little more exciting than tax-free munis.

Carson glanced up, peering through his visor at the oversized clock on the lab wall. The amber LED display read 10:45 P.M.

An hour earlier, the Fever Tank had been full of frenzied sound, as the shriek of the alert siren sounded the drill and the suited bodies tramped down the low corridors. Now the lab was once again deserted and almost preternaturally quiet, the only audible sound the whisper of air in Carson’s bluesuit and the faint hum of the negative-airflow system. The chimpanzees, disturbed by the drill, had finally ceased their hooting and screaming and had fallen into troubled sleep. Outside his own brightly lit lab, the corridor glowed a subdued red, and the cramped spaces of the Fever Tank were full of shadows.

Because the Fever Tank was decontaminated each week-night and again over the weekend, Carson had rarely been inside this late. Although the red nocturnal illumination was creepy and a little disorienting, he preferred it to what had come just before. The full-scale stage-one alert drills—which had begun to supplant the less severe stage-two and stage-three drills since Brandon-Smith’s death—were grim affairs. Nye was now personally supervising the drills, directing events from the security substation on the bottom level of the Fever Tank, and his brusque tones had rung irritatingly through Carson’s headset.

The one advantage of the frequent drills was that Carson had become more adept at moving around the Fever Tank in his bluesuit. He found that he could maneuver quickly through the corridors and around the labs, avoiding protrusions deftly, hooking and unhooking his air hoses to his suit instinctively, like breathing.

He looked away from the clock toward de Vaca, who was staring skeptically back at him.

“Just how do you plan to test this theory of yours?” came her voice over the private channel.

Instead of taking the time to answer, Carson turned to the small lab freezer, dialed its combination, and removed two small test tubes containing X-FLU samples. The tops of the test tubes were covered with thick rubber seals. The virus existed as a small white crystalline film at the bottom of each tube, If I handle this stuff a million times, he thought, I’ll never get used to the fact that it’s potentially more lethal to the human race than the largest hydrogen bomb. He placed both tubes inside the bioprophylaxis table and sealed it carefully, waiting for the samples to reach room temperature.

“First,” he said, “we’re going to split open the virus and get rid of the genetic material.”

Moving to a silver cabinet on the far wall of the lab, he removed some reagents and two sealed bottles labeled DEOXYRIBASE.

“Give me a number-four Soloway, please,” he said to de Vaca.

Since hypodermics were considered too dangerous for anything other than animal inoculation in the Fever Tank, other devices for transferring materials had to be used. The Soloway Displacer, named after its inventor, used blunt-ended plastic vacuum-needles to siphon liquid from one container to another.

Carson waited for de Vaca to place the instrument inside the bioprophylaxis table. Then, moving his gloves through the rubber openings in the front end of the table, he inserted one nozzle of the Soloway device into a reagent and the other through the rubber seal in one of the two test tubes. A cloudy liquid squirted into the tube. Gingerly, Carson swirled the tube in one gloved hand. The liquid became clear.

“We just killed a trillion viruses,” Carson said. “Now to undress them. Take off their protein coats.”

Using the device, Carson added a few drops of a blue liquid through the rubber seal, then removed .5 cc’s of the resulting solution, injecting it into the deoxyribase container. He waited while the enzyme broke up the viral RNA, first into its base pairs, then into nucleic acids.

“Now, to get rid of the nucleic acids.” He tested the precise acidity of the solution, then performed a remote-assist titration with a high-pH chemical. Then he drained off the solution, centrifuged out the precipitate, and transferred the pure, unfiltered X-FLU molecules that remained to a small flask.

“Let’s see what this little old molecule looks like,” he said.

“X-ray diffraction?”

“You got it.”

Carson carefully placed the X-FLU flask into a yellow bio-box and sealed it. Then, holding the box carefully in front of him, he removed his air hose and followed de Vaca down the corridor toward the central hub of the Fever Tank, ducking at last through a hatchway into a deserted lab. A single red light glowed from the ceiling. Already small, the compartment was cramped by the eight-foot stainless-steel column that dominated the center of the room. Next to the column was an instrument housing that contained a-computer workstation. There were no knobs, switches or dials on the column; the diffraction machine was controlled entirely by computer.

“Warm it up,” Carson said. “I’ll prepare the specimen.”

De Vaca sat down at the workstation and began typing. There was a click and a soft, low hum that gradually increased in pitch until it disappeared into inaudibility, followed by the hiss of air being evacuated from the interior of the column. De Vaca typed in additional commands, tuning the diffraction beam to the correct wavelength. In a few moments, the terminal beeped its readiness.

“Open the mount, please,” Carson said.

De Vaca typed a command, and a titanium-alloy stage mount slid out of the base of the column. It contained a small removable well.

Using a micropipette, Carson removed a single drop of the protein solution and placed it in the well. The stage mount slid shut with a hiss.

“Chill.”

There was a loud drumming noise as the machine froze the drop of solution, lowering its temperature toward absolute zero.

“Vacuum.”

Carson waited impatiently as the air was removed from the specimen chamber. The resulting vacuum would force all water molecules from the solution. As it did so, a faint electromagnetic field would allow the protein molecules to settle into a lowest-energy configuration. What remained would be a microscopic film of pure protein molecules, spaced with mathematical regularity on the titanium plate, held steady at two degrees above absolute zero.

“We’re green,” de Vaca said.

“Then let’s go.”

What happened next always seemed like magic to Carson. The huge machine began to generate X-rays, shooting them at the speed of light down the vacuum inside the column. When the high-energy X- rays struck the protein molecules, they would be diffracted by the crystal lattice structures. The scattered beams would be digitally recorded with an array of CCD chips and sent, as an image, to the computer screen.

Carson watched as a blurred image appeared on the screen, bands of dark and light. “Focus, please,” he said.

Using an optical mouse, de Vaca manipulated a series of diffraction gratings inside the column, which tuned and focused the X-rays onto the specimen at the bottom. Slowly, the blurred image came into focus: a complicated series of dark and light circles, reminding Carson of the surface of a pond stippled with rain.

“Great,” he said softly. “Easy does it.”

The X-ray diffraction machine took just the right touch, Carson knew, and de Vaca had that touch.

“That’s as sharp as it gets,” she said. “Ready for film and data feed.”

“I want sixteen angles, please,” Carson said.

De Vaca typed in the commands, and the CCD chips captured the diffraction pattern from sixteen separate angles.

“Series complete,” she said.

“Let’s feed this into the central computer.”

The machine’s computer began loading the diffraction data into the GeneDyne net, where it was sent across a dedicated land line at 110,000 bits per second to the GeneDyne supercomputer in Boston. All Mount Dragon jobs had high priority, and the supercomputer immediately began translating the X-ray diffraction pattern into a three-dimensional model of the X-FLU molecule. For over a minute, those working late in the GeneDyne home office noticed a perceptible slowdown while several trillion floating-point operations were performed and fed back to Mount Dragon, where the image was reassembled on the diffraction machine’s workstation.

An image appeared on the workstation screen: a breathtakingly complex cluster of vibrantly colored spheres, glowing in rainbows of rich purples, reds, oranges, and yellows: the protein molecule that made up the viral coat of X-FLU.

“There it is,” Carson said, peering at the image over de Vaca’s shoulder.

“The cause of such terrible suffering and death,” came de Vaca’s voice in his headset. “And look how beautiful it is.”

Carson continued gazing at the image for a moment, mesmerized. Then he straightened up. “Let’s purify the second test tube with the GEF filtration process. It’s almost decontam time, we have to vacate the Tank for an hour or two anyway. Then we’ll come back, take another look at it, and see if the molecule has changed.”

“Lots of luck,” de Vaca grumbled. “But I’m too tired to object. Let’s go.”

By the time the second filtered X-FLU molecule crystallized on the computer screen, dawn was breaking over the desert floor fifty feet above their heads. Once again Carson marveled at the beauty of the molecule: how surreal it was, and how deadly.

“Let’s compare the two molecules side by side,” he said.

De Vaca split the screen into two windows and called up the image of the unaltered X-FLU molecule from the computer’s memory, displaying it side by side with the filtered molecule.

“They look the same to me,” she said.

“Rotate them both ninety degrees along the X axis.”

“No difference,” de Vaca said.

“Ninety degrees along the Y axis.”

They watched as the images rotated on the computer screen. Suddenly, the silence turned electric.

“Madre de Dios,” breathed de Vaca.

“Look how one of the tertiary folds of the filtered molecule has uncoiled!” said Carson excitedly. “The weak sulfur bonds along the entire side have become unstuck.”

“Same molecule, same chemical composition, different shape,” said de Vaca. “You were right.”

“What’s that?” Carson asked, looking at her with a grin.

“Okay, cabrón. You win this one.”

“And it’s the shape of a protein molecule that makes all the difference.” Carson stepped away from the diffraction machine. “Now we know why X-FLU keeps mutating back to its deadly form. The last thing we always do before the in vivo test is to purify the solution using the GEF process. And it’s the GEF process itself that causes the mutation.”

“Burt’s original filtration technique was to blame,” de Vaca answered. “He was doomed from the beginning.”

Carson nodded. “Yet nobody, least of all Burt, thought the process itself could be flawed. It’s been used before without any problems. And here we’ve been banging our heads against the wrong door all this time. The gene splicing, everything else, was fine to begin with. It’s like sifting through the wreckage of a plane crash to determine the cause of an accident, when in reality the problem was faulty directions from the control tower.”

He leaned wearily against a cabinet. The full significance of the discovery began to sink in, like a flame in his gut. “Hot damn, Susana,” he breathed. “After all this time, we’ve solved it at last! All we need to do is change the filtration process. It may take some time to correct, but we know the real culprit now. X-FLU is as good as manufactured.” He could almost picture the expression on Scopes’s face.

De Vaca was silent.

“You agree, don’t you?” Carson prompted.

“Yes,” said de Vaca.

“So what’s the problem? Why the long face?”

She looked at him for a long moment. “We know the flaw in the filtration process causes mutations in the X-FLU protein coat. What I want to know is, what the hell does it do to PurBlood?”

Carson stared back at her, not comprehending. “Susana, who cares?”

“What do you mean, who cares?” de Vaca said, flaring up. “PurBlood could be dangerous as hell!”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Carson replied. “We don’t know that the filtration flaw would affect anything other than the X-FLU molecule. And besides, the kind of purity necessary for X-FLU doesn’t necessarily apply to hemoglobin.”

“Easy for you to say, cabrón. You’re not putting the stuff into your veins.”

Carson fought to keep his temper. This woman was attempting to spoil the greatest triumph of his life. “Susana, think a moment. Burt tested it on himself, and he survived. It’s been in phased FDA testing now for months. If anybody had become sick, we’d have heard of it. Teece would have known. And, believe me, the FDA would have yanked it.”

“Nobody getting sick? So tell me, where’s Burt now? In a fucking hospital, that’s where he is!”

“His nervous breakdown came months after he tested himself with PurBlood.”

“There still might be a connection. Maybe it breaks down in the body, or something.” She looked at him defiantly. “I want to know what the GEF process does to PurBlood.”

Carson sighed deeply. “Look. It’s seven-thirty in the morning. We’ve just made one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of GeneDyne. And I’m dead on my feet. I’m going to report this to Singer. Then I’m going to take a shower, and get some well-deserved rest.”

“Go ahead and get your gold star,” de Vaca snapped. “I’m going to stay here and finish what we started.”

She switched off the machine, disconnected the air hose from her suit valve with an angry yank, then turned and marched out of the compartment. As he watched her go, Carson heard other voices on the intercom, people announcing their arrival in the lab. The workday was beginning. He wearily pushed himself away from the cabinet. God, he was tired. De Vaca could tinker with PurBlood as much as she liked. He was going to spread the good news.

Carson stepped outside, breathing in the cool morning air with relish. He was tired, but elated. While there might be other snags ahead, he knew that this, at long last, was the home stretch.

Ducking back into the administration building, he bounded up the stairs and headed for Singer’s corner office. At the far end of the main hall, he could see the director’s door standing open, the light reflecting brilliantly off the white surfaces.

As he entered the office, Carson saw Singer sitting near the kiva fireplace. Another man stood before Singer, his back to Carson; a man with a ponytail, wearing a safari hat.

Singer looked up. “Ah, Guy. Mr. Nye and I were just about to have a private meeting.”

Carson stepped forward. “John, there’s something you’ll be—”

Nye swiveled toward him, then waved his hand impatiently, cutting him off.

Singer leaned over the coffee table, adjusting a magazine. “Guy, another time, please.”

“Dr. Singer, it’s extremely important.”

Singer looked up again, staring at him, a puzzled expression on his face. Carson was shocked at how bloodshot his eyes were, and at the faint cast of yellow in the whites. Singer didn’t appear to have heard. Carson watched as the director plucked a malachite egg from the coffee table and began turning it over and over in his hands.

Nye glowered at Carson, arms crossed, a dark expression on his face. “Well?” he said. “What’s so bloody important, then?”

Carson watched as Singer replaced the egg on the coffee table, adjusting its position carefully. Then the director’s hands slowly passed over each item on the table, unconsciously adjusting them, lining and squaring them up.

“Carson?” Nye spoke again, more sharply.

The director looked up at Carson as if he had forgotten he was there. His eyes were watering.

In an instant, other images forced their way into Carson’s consciousness. Brandon-Smith’s mannerism of rubbing her hands along her thighs time and again. The way the knick-knacks on her desk were so carefully arranged. The way Vanderwagon had carefully polished and lined up the tableware at dinner that night, just before putting out his own eye.

His eye. That was another thing: They all had bloodshot eyes.

Suddenly, everything became perfectly, terribly clear.

“It can wait,” Carson said, backing out the door.

Nye watched him closely as he left. Then, without a word, he stepped forward and shut the door.

In the darkness of his suite at the institute, Scopes washed his hands meticulously. Then he paced restlessly, awaiting the helicopter that would return him to Boston. His front room boasted a spectacular view of the stormy Atlantic, but the heavy curtains were closed.

Abruptly, Scopes paused in his pacing. Then he moved quickly toward his PowerBook, plugging its thin cable into a wall jack. He knew the institute had a dedicated link into Flashnet, and from there, with his access key, he could enter the GeneDyne network.

There was something that had been tugging at the back of his mind for days; something his discussion with the Globe reporter had at last made clear. It had been obvious from the start, given the quality of Levine’s data on Brandon-Smith and X-FLU, that the information had come from within GeneDyne, rather than from sources in the FDA or OSHA. But what had escaped Scopes’s attention was the timing of Levine’s information.

Levine had known details about X-FLU that even the nosy bastard Teece, the investigator, couldn’t have learned until arriving at Mount Dragon. Levine had aired his dirt on the Sammy Sanchez show while Teece was still nosing around in New Mexico. And there were no standard long-distance lines out of Mount Dragon. Scopes knew that the only communications out of Mount Dragon were across the GeneDyne net. He knew it, because he had seen to it himself.

That meant Levine must not only have obtained his information from a source within GeneDyne—he must have obtained it from a source within Mount Dragon. And that meant Levine had gained unprecedented access to GeneDyne cyberspace.

Once inside the GeneDyne net, Scopes worked silently and intently. Within minutes, he was within a region that he and he alone had access to. Here, his finger was on the pulse of the entire organization: terabytes of data covering every word of every project, e-mail, program file, and on-line chat generated by GeneDyne employees over the last twenty-four hours. With the click of a few more keys, Scopes moved through his personal region of the network to a dedicated server containing a single massive application, which he had called, whimsically, Cypherspace.

Slowly, a strange landscape materialized on his small computer screen. It was like no landscape on earth, and too complex and symmetrical to have been conceived solely by a human mind. This was the virtual landscape of GeneDyne cyberspace. The Cypherspace application used direct links into the GeneDyne operating system to transform datastreams, memory contents, and all active processes into shapes, surfaces, shadows, and sounds. A strange sighing sound, like sustained musical notes, vibrated from the laptop’s speaker. To a layman such a landscape would appear surreal and bizarre, but to Scopes, who loved to wander through this strange junglescape late at night, it was as familiar as the backyard of his childhood.

Scopes wandered through the landscape, looking, listening, watching. For a moment, he was tempted to go to a special place in this landscape—a secret among secrets—but he realized there was no time.

Suddenly Scopes sat up and breathed out. In the landscape, there was something that was not right. It was a thread, invisible of itself, manifest only by what it obscured. As Scopes crossed the invisible thread, the strange music dropped to silence. It was a tunnel of nothing, an absence of data, a black hole in cyberspace. Scopes knew what it must be: a hidden data channel, visible only because it had been hidden a little too well. Whoever had programmed this back channel was transcendentally clever. It couldn’t have been Levine. Levine was brilliant, but Scopes knew that Levine’s computer abilities had always been his weakest suit.

Levine had help.

Accessing his bag of digital tricks, Scopes selected a transparent relay, readying it for insertion in the channel. Then, slowly, with infinite care, he began to follow the thread, twisting and turning in its mazy path, losing it, picking it up again, working methodically back toward its hidden target.

Carson found de Vaca at work in Lab C. She had a small flask of PurBlood, still smoking from the deep freeze, sitting on the bioprophylaxis table.

“You’ve been gone for eight hours,” came her voice over the private channel. “What, did they fly you to Boston for your awards ceremony?”

Carson moved toward his stool and sat down numbly. “I was in the library archives,” he replied.

De Vaca swiveled her computer screen toward him. “Take a look at this.”

Carson sat still for a long moment. Finally, he turned toward the screen. More than anything, he did not want to know what de Vaca might have discovered.

On her screen were two images of phospholipid capsules, side by side. One was smooth and perfect. The other was ragged, full of ugly holes and tears where molecules had obviously been displaced from their normal order.

“The first image shows an unfiltered PurBlood ‘cell.’ This second image shows what happens to PurBlood after it passes through the GEF filtration.” The excitement in de Vaca’s voice was clear even through the speaker in Carson’s headset. Mistaking his silence for disbelief, she continued. “Listen. You remember how PurBlood is made. Once the hemoglobin has been encapsulated, it has to be purified of all manufacturing by-products and any toxins produced by the bacteria. So they used Burt’s GEF filtration on the hemoglobin to—”

De Vaca stopped, looking at Carson. He had positioned himself between her and the lab’s video camera, blocking its view. He was moving his gloved hands downward in a suppressing motion. Through the visor, she could see him shaking his head and silently mouthing the word stop.

De Vaca frowned. “What’s up?” she asked. “Been chewing peyote buttons, cabrón?”

Carson brusquely motioned her to wait. Then he looked around the lab as if searching for something. Suddenly he reached for a cabinet, pulled out a large vial of disinfectant powder, and sprinkled a light dusting of it on the glass surface of the bioprophylaxis table. Shielding his actions from the camera, he formed letters in the white dust with a gloved finger:

Don’t use intercom.

De Vaca stared at the words for a moment. Then, extending a gloved finger, she formed a large question mark in the powder.

Tell me the rest HERE, Carson wrote.

De Vaca paused, looking narrowly at Carson. Then she wrote out the message: PurBlood contaminated by GEF filtration. Burt used himself as alpha tester. That’s what’s wrong with him.

Carson quickly smoothed out the message and sprinkled a little more disinfectant on the surface. He quickly wrote: THINK. If Burt was alpha tester, who were the beta testers?

He saw a look of fear spread slowly across her face. She was mouthing words but he could not hear them.

He wrote: Library. Half hour. After waiting for her to nod agreement, he erased the tracings with a sweep of his glove.

The Mount Dragon library was an oasis of rusticity in a high-tech desert: its yellow, gingham-checked curtains, rough-hewn roof beams, and coarse floorboards were designed to resemble an oversized Western lodge. The intent of the designers had been to provide relief from the sterile white corridors of the rest of the facility. However, given the moratorium on paper products at Mount Dragon, the library contained mostly electronic resources, and in any case few members of the overworked Mount Dragon staff had time to enjoy its solitude. Carson himself had only been in the library twice before: once when poking around the facility during his initial explorations, and again just a few hours before, immediately after leaving Singer and Nye to themselves.

As he closed the heavy door behind him, he was glad to see that de Vaca was the library’s only occupant. She was sitting in a white Adirondack chair, dozing despite herself, long black hair fallen carelessly across her face. She looked up at his approach.

“Long day,” she said. “And long night.” She looked at him speculatively. “They’re going to wonder why we left the Fever Tank early,” she added in a lower tone.

“They would have wondered a lot more if I’d let you keep running your mouth,” Carson muttered back.

“Hell, and I thought I was paranoid. You really think somebody listens to all those monitor tapes, cabrón?”

Carson gave a short shake of the head. “We can’t take that chance.”

De Vaca stiffened slightly. “Don’t pull a Vanderwagon on me, Carson. Now, what’s this about beta testers for PurBlood?”

“I’ll show you.” He motioned her over to a data terminal in a far corner of the library. Pulling up two chairs, he put the terminal’s keyboard on his lap, entering his employee ID at the waiting prompt.

“What research have you done on PurBlood since you got here?” he asked, turning to her.

De Vaca shrugged. “Not much. The later lab reports of Burt’s. Why?”

Carson nodded. “Exactly. The same kind of materials I examined: sample runs, lab notes Burt made while he was transferring his attention to X-FLU. The only reason we were interested in PurBlood at all was because Burt had worked on it prior to getting involved with our own project, X-FLU.”

He punched keys. “I did see Singer this morning. But I didn’t really speak with him. I came here instead. I remembered what you’d said about PurBlood, and I wanted to learn a little more about its development. Look what I found.”

He gestured at the screen: