Runaway Heart

FOURTEEN

Susan found out that Herman hadn't returned to the hospital, because there was a message on her beeper from Dr. Shiller. She called the doctor on her cell phone after leaving Jack Wirta's office.

"He didn't show up," Shiller said angrily.

"Damn!" She made a U-turn, heading back to Fairfax and the Santa Monica Freeway.

"I feel like I'm always chasing an ambulance with this guy," Shiller said. "If he doesn't come back here, fine. That's it for me, Ms. Strockmire. I'm through. I can't help him."

"I understand," she said. "But, Doctor, at least let me find out why. I mean, maybe there's a good reason he didn't show up."

"I'm through trying to convince him. As far as I'm concerned, he should get another doctor."

"I'll get him there," she said. "I promise."

"Whatever."

It took her over forty minutes to get out to Malibu, because she took the Coast Highway and had forgotten how congested it could get in the late afternoon. She pulled the borrowed station wagon into the driveway of the huge French Provincial beach house and parked next to the Mercedes her father had been driving. That meant he was there. She let herself in through the side gate, punching the security code numbers and using her key, then walked past the Olympic-size pool to the large one-story guesthouse.

It was empty, but as she passed through the billiards room she saw her father through the window, sitting out on the sandy beach about thirty yards away, his back to her, staring at the ocean. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, looking very small and alone.

She slid open the glass doors and walked across the narrow brick patio and through the little white gate. She kicked off her shoes and trudged across the sand, finally settling down next to him. "You broke your promise."

"I know," he replied, but he seemed so sad and lost she didn't have it in her to beat him up over it.

"Dad, I talked to Dr. Shiller. He wants you there immediately."

"No he doesn't. He's washed his hands of me. Admit it."

"Dad, please."

"I'm right, aren't I?"

"He said he won't chase you around, and I don't blame him."

Herman nodded, then picked up his little laptop computer that was sitting open on the sand next to him and handed it to her. On the screen was Roland's e-mail.

She read it hurriedly, then looked up. "He got the corn file. They only did minimal testing. This would have been great if we hadn't been thrown out of court."

"Yep," Herman said, then pointed to one specific sentence in the e-mail. "He sent us an encrypted file from DARPA. I transferred it to a disk. It's inside."

"What is it?"

"Fifty or more pages of code. You read the e-mail. Roland wants us to take it to his friend, Zimmy. He told me about this guy. His name is Dr. Gino Zimbaldi, out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He uses JPL's computers to break code. It's like a hobby with him, so he does it on the sly after hours."

She sat still for a long time, not sure what to say. Then she handed the computer back. "Dad, you've got to go back to Cedars and get the operation."

"Honey, they won't release Roland's body. Worse still, the feds took his murder investigation away from the San Francisco police. They scooped up the whole case. They shipped what's left of Roland's corpse to Washington. I think it was feds who killed him, and now they're investigating a murder they committed themselves. Good luck solving that one, huh?"

"Dad, you have got to get this procedure done."

"Just give it a rest with the fucking doctors, okay? I'm trying to tell you something."

Susan was stunned. In thirty-plus years she only remembered one or two times that he had snapped at her like that.

"I've been sitting out here thinking about Roland. About him going up there trying to get this stuff for us and then getting murdered. Shredded. Pulled limb from limb."

"Dad, don't. Don't do this to yourself."

"I've been thinking about why. Why would they kill him like that? What did he get from Gen-A-Tec that was so dangerous he had to be murdered for it? And why so violently? I think the answer is sitting inside. I think it's in that fifty-page encryption. In fact, I know it is. That printout is waiting to tell us the secret that got Roland killed."

"Dad, you have to let go of this."

"I can't, sweetheart. I just can't."

"Are you afraid of the surgery? Is that it?"

He didn't answer. He was looking out at the late afternoon sun hanging in the L.A. smog, floating above the rolling Pacific like a big, orange Japanese lantern.

"Are you afraid to get the operation?" she asked again.

He seemed to think that over. "I confess I'm not the bravest guy on the planet," he answered softly. "Y'know all those tubes and drip bags and the smells in there… I just… I… Yeah, kinda… I guess."

"But, Dad, it's only going to take a day, then a week or two of rest and it's over."

I know… I know. But… I just… I just can't."

Now she knew she was being conned. He was bull-shitting her and she shook her head sadly. "You're a rat, you know that?"

"Why, because I'm scared of this operation? 'Cause I need a day or two to get myself up for it, get my mind in the right place?"

"You're not afraid of surgery. You just don't want to let go of this thing and take two weeks off. Not with Roland's e-mail in there, so you're trying to get me off your back."

"Honey, this could be much bigger than even I thought. DARPA… you saw that mentioned in his e-mail."

"Yes."

"I know about DARPA. A secret government think tank. They developed weapons and special projects. Very twenty-first century. I always suspected DARPA might be behind all of that stuff going on at Area Fifty-one."

"Dad, please don't start up with that. Not now."

"Honey, what do you suppose killed Roland? 'Cause, it was a what, not a who. A what. That's what Sergeant Cole said. A thousand pounds per square inch. Gimme a break, what could do that?"

"Some kind of monkey," she said. "A gorilla or a chimp."

"Not on your sweet life. Monkeys don't have the mental acuity to undertake a military mission… commit a complicated B and E, then a premeditated murder. They live in the here and now. They don't have memories, pasts, or futures. Trust me, they would make piss-poor assault weapons."

"What then?"

"Roland says that the fifty pages of code he sent us is something called the Ten-Eyck Chimera Project. Gen-A-Tec's research on it is being funded by DARPA. I couldn't find anything on a Ten-Eyck, but I looked up chimera in the dictionary, and you know what it says?"

"What?" She was beginning to get a feeling of hopelessness. She'd been on these scavenger hunts before.

"So, what is it?" she finally said dutifully, because he was waiting for her to ask.

"It's spelled C-H-I-M-E-R-A, but it's pronounced ki-mir-a. It's from the Greek: a fire-breathing she-monster having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail."

"That's ridiculous. You're saying DARPA's making one of those?"

"It's also an illusion of the mind."

"I like that better."

"Or," now he turned and looked right at her, "any life-form consisting of tissue of diverse genetic constitution." He was still staring at her after he finished the sentence, seeing her thoughts turn stormy, but still reading them like rain through a window. "Not corn or soybeans, not plants, but flesh and blood-tissue."

"Dad, just say it, will you?"

"They're making a hybrid animal. It's just the kind of thing those DARPA guys would try for."

"Why? Why would they? Why would anybody want to make a genetic monster? For what possible reason?"

He looked out to sea, reluctant to answer.

"I'm listening." she challenged.

"Honey, you know what's been happening in this country-you more than anyone. You've seen it. You've been with me fighting against the shallowing out of American values. In the new America the total doesn't have to equal the sum of its parts anymore. 'If it bleeds, it leads.' Don't debate, obfuscate. This country is suffering from the complete loss of a moral imperative in the face of profit and power."

"You're not answering my question. And stop with the rhyming polemics, Dad."

"The war in Kosovo is when it started. That war changed everything."

"And don't shift to history. Get to the point."

"No, listen. This is the point, because it's the basis of my theory."

She nodded, so he went on. " Clinton had a huge problem in Kosovo, and it became real clear to Milosevic that, despite the ethnic cleansing and mass murders, the American public didn't really give a shit. They weren't willing to lose even one GI over it. The same problem existed in Afghanistan and Iraq. If thousands of U.S. soldiers start dying, the American public will throw in the towel. The U.S. is the last remaining superpower, we have a responsibility to be world policemen, but as a nation we no longer have the stomach for it. It's okay to fight an air war, use smart weapons, push buttons where no one is hurt-everybody gets some popcorn and watches it on CNN. But what happens once our smart bombs have knocked out all the military targets?"

"I don't know." She was getting angry. "The war's over, I guess."

"No. You have to send in ground troops to mop up. You still have to put boots on the ground to wipe out pockets of resistance and hold the terrain. That's where the problem arises. This country won't sit still for losing any troops in a place like Kosovo or Iraq. We want our new fall fashions; we want to know who Britney Spears is dating. We've got appointment television and Tiger Woods. So, what do we do?"

"Dad…"

"We make disposable soldiers."

"We do?"

"Look, honey, the science already exists. Gene splitting began in the early 1980s. In the late nineties we were cloning sheep and pigs. Then we started splicing genes and crossbreeding animals like the beefalo. Four years ago a company named Celera made a DNA map of the entire human genome. Millions of genetic base pairs. Once you can isolate a gene, you can employ gene-splicing techniques to incorporate any genetic trait into any plant or animal on earth, just like they're doing with that damned genetically engineered corn. This is not far-fetched. It's not science fiction. It's today."

"And what do you suppose they're designing?"

"I think…" He stopped and looked out to sea, almost afraid to say it, so she said it for him.

"Aliens?" but she sort of hissed it, or sighed it.

"Honey, why not? What if Ten-Eyck stands for some kind of alien life form? You believe they have aliens on ice out at Area Fifty-one, don't you?"

"I'm not so sure about all that, Dad." She said it because she'd never been able to get completely behind that one, but it made her feel like a traitor to put the thought into words.

"Not sure? We've filed two lawsuits over it."

She finally just nodded.

But Herman was just getting started. "If there are dead aliens at Area Fifty-one, and if we harvested their DNA, what's to stop DARPA from doing some careful gene splicing, putting some of that alien DNA into the human zygote, upgrading the Homo sapiens, making a hybrid with selected alien powers mixed with our human dexterity and intelligence? The human-alien, this chimera, might have shadowy thoughts, or some genetic memory from outer space. It might have a strange appearance, but even that isn't necessary. The human zygote-the human egg-could be spliced to make the chimera look more physically acceptable to us. Then we raise it and train it to fight. Imagine disposable soldiers with ten times human strength. You could gene-splice them to be heat-resistant for desert warfare, or cold-resistant for places like Kosovo. Put 'em on the ground and let 'em do what we are no longer willing to have our own children do-fight and die. Chimeras have no parents. They are test-tube-grown and lab-incubated, so there is no one to grieve if they die in battle. They're the perfect conscription soldier. I'm telling you, honey, this is just the kind of shit those guys at DARPA come up with."

"Dad, I don't think…" She stopped, skeptical as she was, because her father was shaking his head sadly now. Then he slumped and looked down at the sand between his feet.

"I'm always alone," he said softly. "Always fighting everything by myself. I need someone to believe in me." He looked at her. "I need someone to be on my side."

"Daddy, I believe in you. God, how I believe in you. Don't you know that?"

"I can't let this go. I can't check into a hospital with this going on. Can't you see what's at stake here?"

It was then that she knew she had lost. "Yes, Daddy. I see." She was so afraid she was going to lose him, afraid that this fight would consume him.

They sat for a long time watching the waves blast the shore, then suck the Whitewater back up to build a new wave that slammed onto the sand again a few seconds later. The rhythmic motion of the ages.

"Did you find us a detective?" he asked, his voice tired.

"Yes. His name is Jack Wirta. He has good contacts on the San Francisco PD. But the feds took the case away from the locals, so he probably can't help us anymore."

"The local cops may have lost the case, but they have a duplicate file tucked away someplace. Cops are like that. Information is power. Believe me, there's a record of the investigation somewhere in their files. Mr. Wirta has to get them to show it to you."

"And what are you going to do?"

"I've gotta raise ten thousand dollars in three days."

"That's all?"

"This month's payment. She still wants the whole mil- ten a month for eight years."

"Oh, Daddy, I'm sorry."

"I'm also gonna go out to JPL-find out what's on those fifty pages of encryption," he said, changing the subject.

They sat quietly. After a while, she reached over and hugged him. He looked closer to defeat than she had ever seen him. "I'm on your side, Daddy."

"I know." But it broke her heart the way he said it.