Reliquary

= 35 =

“WHERE ARE THE others?” Margo asked as D’Agosta entered the small Anthropology conference room.

“They’re not coming,” D’Agosta said, hiking up his trouser legs and sitting down. “Scheduling.” Then he caught Margo’s glance, and gave his head a disgusted shake. “Ah, what the hell. If you want to know the truth, they’re not interested. That guy Waxie, who you saw at Brambell’s presentation? He’s in charge of the case now. And he believes he’s already got his man.”

“What do you mean, already got his man?” Margo asked.

“Some nut they found in the park. He’s a murderer, all right, but he’s not the killer we’re looking for. At least, Pendergast doesn’t think so.”

“And Pendergast?”

“He’s on a little business trip.” D’Agosta smiled, as if at some private joke. “So whatcha got?”

“I’ll start at the beginning.” Margo took a deep breath. “It’s ten years ago, okay? There’s an expedition to the Amazon Basin. It’s headed by a Museum scientist named Julian Whittlesey. There are personality conflicts, and the team splits up. For various reasons, nobody makes it back alive. But several boxes of relics are shipped to the Museum. One of them includes a hideous figurine, packed in some fibrous material.”

D’Agosta nodded. So far, it was ancient history.

“What they didn’t know was that the figurine was a representation of a savage, indigenous creature. And that the packing material was a local plant essential to the diet of this creature. Soon after, the creature’s home environment is destroyed in the local government’s search for mineral deposits. So this monster—this Mbwun—follows the only remaining fibers. All the way from the Amazon Basin, to Belem, to New York City. It survives in the Museum basement, eating feral animals and consuming this plant, to which it seems addicted.”

D’Agosta nodded again.

“Well,” said Margo, “I don’t buy it. I used to, but I don’t anymore.”

D’Agosta raised an eyebrow. “What about it don’t you buy, exactly?”

“Think about it, Lieutenant. How could a wild animal—even an extremely intelligent one—make its way from the Amazon Basin to New York City in search of a few cases full of fibers? That’s a hell of a long way from its habitat.”

“You’re not telling me anything we didn’t already know when that beast was destroyed. There was no other interpretation then, and I sure can’t see any other one now. Mbwun was here. I felt the thing breathe on me, for Chrissakes. If it didn’t come from the Amazon, then where?”

“Good question.” said Margo. “What if Mbwun was originally from New York and was simply coming home?”

There was a brief silence. “Coming home?” D’Agosta said, mystified.

“Yes. What if Mbwun was not an animal at all, but a human being? What if he was Whittlesey?”

This time, the silence was much longer. D’Agosta looked at Margo. Great shape or no, she must be near dead from exhaustion, working nonstop on those corpses. And Brambell getting murdered like that, and then her discovering that one of the corpses she’d been picking over belonged to a former coworker. A coworker she already felt guilty about having dropped out of touch with… How could he have been so stupid, so selfish, bringing her in on a job like this, knowing how much the original Museum murders had upset her? “Listen,” he began. “Dr. Green, I think you’d better—”

Margo held up her hand. “I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But it’s not, I swear it’s not. My lab assistant is working on several more tests as we speak, just to verify my findings. So let me finish. Mbwun had an astonishingly high percentage of human DNA. We had one of the claws sequenced, remember? We found intact strings of perfect human DNA, many thousands of base pairs long. That’s no evolutionary aberration. Also, Pendergast found some items of Whittlesey’s in the creature’s lair, remember? And don’t forget that the creature killed everyone it came in contact with except one person: Ian Cuthbert. Why? Cuthbert had once been a close friend of Whittlesey’s. And then, Whittlesey’s body was never found…”

D’Agosta’s jaw set. This was insane. Pushing the chair back, he began to rise.

“Let me finish,” Margo said quietly.

D’Agosta returned her level gaze. Something about the look in her eyes made him sit down again.

“Lieutenant,” she continued, “I know how this sounds. But you must listen. We made a terrible mistake. I’m as much to blame as anybody else. We never put the final pieces of the puzzle together. But somebody did. Greg Kawakita did.”

She placed an 8” x 10” blowup of a microscopic image on the table. “This plant contains a reovirus.”

“We already knew that.”

“But what we overlooked is that these reoviruses have a unique ability: they can inject foreign DNA into the host cell. And they produce a drug. I ran some additional tests on the fibers this evening, after I made this discovery. They carry genetic material—reptilian DNA—which is inserted into the human host when the plant is eaten. And that DNA, in turn, initiates a physical transformation. Somehow—I don’t know how or why—Whittlesey must have ingested the plant while on the expedition. He underwent a morphological change. He became Mbwun. Once the change was complete, he needed a steady diet of the drug in the plants. And when the local supply was destroyed, Whittlesey knew that more could be found in the Museum. He knew, because he’d sent them the plants here, as packing fibers in the crates. So he returned to the crates. It was only when he was cut off from the supply of fibers that he began killing human beings. See, the hypothalamus of the human brain contains a hormone similar to the plants—”

“Wait. You’re saying that eating this plant turns you into some kind of monster?” D’Agosta asked incredulously.

Margo nodded. “And now I know what Greg had to do with this. He figured everything out, then dropped out of sight to pursue some plan of his own.” She unrolled a large diagram on the conference table. “Here’s a map of his laboratory, or as much of it as I could reconstruct. This list in the corner inventories all the equipment I could identify. Even at wholesale prices, it all must have cost in excess of eight hundred thousand dollars.”

Despite himself, D’Agosta whistled. “Drug money.”

“That’s exactly right, Lieutenant. The only purpose of such a lab would be some very sophisticated production-level genetic engineering. I emphasize the word production.”

“Late last year, there were rumors about a new drug on the street,” D’Agosta said, “called glaze. Very rare, very expensive, with an amazing rush. Haven’t heard much about it recently, though.”

Margo placed a finger on the diagram. “There are three stages to genetic engineering. The first is to map the DNA of an organism. That’s what these machines along the north wall did. Combined, they made up a massive sequencing operation. This first one controls the polymerase chain reaction, which replicates the DNA so it can be sequenced. This one sequences the DNA. Then this machine, here, was a Cambridge Systems NAD-1. We have one downstairs. It’s a highly specialized supercomputer that uses gallium arsenide CPUs and vector processing to analyze sequencing results. Then here, along the south wall, were the melted remains of a series of aquaria. Kawakita was growing the Mbwun plant in large quantities to supply raw material for this operation. And here was an Ap-Gel viral production facility for incubating and culturing viruses.”

There was a deathly silence. D’Agosta mopped his brow and felt around in his pocket for the reassuring shape of his cigar. Despite himself, he was starting to believe.

“Kawakita was using this equipment to remove genes from the plant virus.” Margo placed some more pictures on the table. “These are SEM micrographs. They show that he was removing the reptilian genes. Why? Because he was obviously trying to negate the physical effects of the drug.”

“What does Frock think of all this?”

As he asked the question, D’Agosta thought he saw a momentary flush move across Margo’s features. “I haven’t had the chance to tell him yet. But I know he’ll be skeptical. He’s still wedded to his fractal evolution theory. This may sound crazy, Lieutenant, but the fact is there are many substances in nature—hormones, for instance—that cause startling transformations like this. It’s not as bizarre or unusual as it sounds. There’s a hormone called BSTH which turns a caterpillar into a butterfly. There’s another called resotropin-x. When a tadpole gets a dose of that, it turns into a frog in a matter of days. That’s what’s happening here, I’m sure of it. Only now, we’re talking about changing a human being.”

She paused. “There’s something else.”

“Isn’t this enough?”

Margo dug into her carryall and pulled out some small scraps of burned paper, sandwiched between pieces of clear plastic. “I found what looked like Kawakita’s lab journal among the ashes. These were the only sheets with any legible writing on them.” She brought out more photographs. “I had the scraps enlarged. This first one is from the middle of the notebook. It’s some kind of a list.”

D’Agosta peered at the photograph. He could make out a few scribbled words along the left edge of the badly burned page: wysoccan, dung-loving blue foot. Then, nearer the bottom: green cloud, gunpowder, lotus heart.

“Mean anything to you?” D’Agosta asked, scribbling the words into his notebook.

“Just the gunpowder,” Margo replied. “Although something tells me I ought to recognize more of it.” She handed him another photograph. “There’s another one that seems to be fragments of code for his extrapolation program. Then there’s a longer one.” D’Agosta scanned the offered fragment.

…can’t live with the knowledge of what I’ve… How could I, while concentrating on… ignore the mental effects that… but the other one grows more eager by the day. I need the time to…

“Sounds like he was getting a conscience, there toward the end,” D’Agosta said, handing back the card. “But what was it, exactly, that he did?”

“I’m getting to that,” Margo replied. “Notice he talks here about the mental effects of glaze as something he hadn’t considered. And did you catch that reference to ‘the other one’? I still haven’t figured that part out.” She reached for another card. “Then there’s this. I think it came from the last page of the journal. As you can see, besides a lot of numbers and calculations, there are only three completely legible words, with a period between them: ‘irreversible. Thyoxin might …’ ”

D’Agosta looked at her questioningly.

“I looked it up. Thyoxin is an experimental herbicide, highly potent, for removing algae from lakes. If Greg was growing this plant, what would he want with thyoxin? Or with vitamin D, which he was also apparently synthesizing? There’s still a lot I haven’t figured out.”

“I’ll mention it to Pendergast, just in case he has any ideas.” D’Agosta stared at the photographs a moment, then pushed them aside. “So tell me, Dr. Green,” he went on, “I’m not quite there yet. Just what exactly was Kawakita trying to do with all this apparatus of his?”

“He was probably trying to tame the drug by subtracting the reptilian genes from the Mbwun plant virus.”

“Tame?”

“I think he was trying to create a drug that didn’t cause the grotesque physical changes. To make the user more alert, stronger, faster, able to see better in the dark. You know, the kind of hypersensory abilities Mbwun had. But without the side effects.”

Margo began rolling up the diagram. “I’d need to test tissue samples from Kawakita’s corpse to be sure. But I think we’ll find traces of the Mbwun drug, substantially altered. And I think that the drug itself will be found to have some kind of narcotic side effect.”

“You mean Kawakita was taking it himself?”

“I’m certain of it. But he must have screwed up in some way. He must not have refined it or purified it properly. And the deformation that we saw in his skeleton was the result.”

D’Agosta wiped his brow again. God, he needed that cigar. “Just a minute,” he said. “Kawakita was a smart guy. He wouldn’t just take a dangerous drug for the hell of it, to see what would happen. No way.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. And perhaps that’s where the guilt comes in. See, he wouldn’t have taken the drug himself right away. He would have tested it first.”

“Oh,” D’Agosta said. There was a long silence, and then he added, “Oh, shit.”