the Third Twin

7

BERRINGTON SAT AT HIS DESK, BREATHING HARD.

He had a corner office, but otherwise his room was monastic: plastic tiled floor, white walls, utilitarian file cabinets, cheap bookshelves. Academics were not expected to have lavish offices. The screensaver on his computer showed a slowly revolving strand of DNA twisted in the famous double-helix shape. Over the desk were photographs of himself with Geraldo Rivera, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh. The window overlooked the gymnasium building, closed because of yesterday’s fire. Across the road, two boys were using the tennis court, despite the heat.

Berrington rubbed his eyes. “Damn, damn, damn,” he said with feeling.

He had persuaded Jeannie Ferrami to come here. Her paper on criminality had broken new ground by focusing on the components of the criminal personality. The question was crucial to the Genetico project. He wanted her to continue her work under his wing. He had induced Jones Falls to give her a job and had arranged for her research to be financed by a grant from Genetico.

With his help she could do great things, and the fact that she came from a poor background only made her achievement more impressive. Her first four weeks at Jones Falls had confirmed his judgment. She had hit the ground running and her project got under way fast. Most people liked her—although she could be abrasive: a ponytailed lab technician who thought he could get away with sloppy work had suffered a scorching rebuke on her second day.

Berrington himself was completely smitten. She was as stunning physically as she was intellectually. He was torn between a fatherly need to encourage and guide her, and a powerful urge to seduce her.

And now this!

When he had caught his breath he picked up the phone and called Preston Barck. Preston was his oldest friend: they had met at MIT in the sixties, when Berrington was doing his doctorate in psychology and Preston was an outstanding young embryologist. Both had been considered odd, in that era of flamboyant lifestyles, with their short haircuts and tweed suits. They soon discovered that they agreed about all sorts of things: modern jazz was a fraud, marijuana was the first step on the road to heroin, the only honest politician in America was Barry Goldwater. The friendship had proved more robust than either of their marriages. Berrington no longer thought about whether he liked Preston: Preston was just there, like Canada.

Right now Preston would be at Genetico’s headquarters, a cluster of neat low-rise buildings overlooking a golf course in Baltimore County, north of the city. Preston’s secretary said he was in a meeting, and Berrington told her to connect him anyway.

“Good morning, Berry—what’s up?”

“Who else is there?”

“I’m with Lee Ho, one of the senior accountants from Landsmann. We’re going over the final details of Genetico’s disclosure statement.”

“Get him the fuck out of there,”

Preston’s voice faded as he moved the phone away from his face. “I’m sorry, Lee, this is going to take a while. I’ll catch up with you later.” There was a pause, and he spoke into the mouthpiece again. Now his voice was peevish. “That was Michael Madigan’s right-hand man I just threw out. Madigan is the CEO of Landsmann, in case you’ve forgotten. If you’re still as keen on this takeover as you were last night, we’d better not—”

Berrington ran out of patience and interrupted him. “Steven Logan is here.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. “At Jones Falls?”

“Right here in the psychology building.”

Preston immediately forgot Lee Ho. “Jesus Christ, how come?”

“He’s a subject, he’s undergoing tests in the laboratory.” Preston’s voice went up an octave. “How the hell did that happen?”

“I don’t know. I ran into him five minutes ago. Imagine my surprise.”

“You just recognized him?”

“Of course I recognized him.”

“Why’s he being tested?”

“It’s part of our twins study.”

“Twins?” Preston yelled. “Twins? Who’s the other goddamn twin?”

“I don’t know yet. Look, something like this was sure to happen sooner or later.”

“But now of all times! We’ll have to pull out of the Landsmann deal.”

“Hell, no! I’m not going to let you use this as an excuse for going wobbly on the takeover, Preston.” Now Berrington wished he had not made this call. But he had needed to share his shock with someone. And Preston could be an astute strategic thinker. “We just have to find a way to control the situation.”

“Who brought Steve Logan into the university?”

“The new associate professor we just hired, Dr. Ferrami.”

“The guy who wrote that terrific paper on criminality?”

“Yes, except it’s a woman. A very attractive woman, as a matter of fact—”

“I don’t care if she’s Sharon fucking Stone—”

“I assume she recruited Steven to the project. She was with him when I met him. I’ll check.”

“That’s the key to it, Berry.” Preston was calming down now and focusing on the solution, not the problem. “Find out how he was recruited. Then we can begin to assess how much danger we’re in.”

“I’ll get her in here right away.”

“Call me right back, okay?”

“Sure.” Berrington hung up.

However, he did not call Jeannie immediately. Instead he sat and collected his thoughts.

On his desk was an old monochrome photograph of his father as a second lieutenant, resplendent in his white naval uniform and cap. Berrington had been six years old when the Wasp went down. Like every small boy in America, he had hated the Japs and played games in which he slaughtered them by the dozen in his imagination. And his daddy was an invincible hero, tall and handsome, brave and strong and all-conquering. He could still feel the overpowering rage that had gripped him when he had found out the Japs had killed Daddy. He had prayed to God to make the war go on long enough for him to grow up and join the navy himself and kill a million Japs in revenge.

He had never killed anyone. But he had never hired a Japanese employee or admitted a Japanese student to a school or offered a Japanese psychologist a job.

A lot of men, faced with a problem, asked themselves what their father would have done about it. Friends had told him this: It was a privilege he would never have. He had been too young to get to know his father. He had no idea what Lieutenant Jones would have done in a crisis. He had never really had a father, just a superhero.

He would question Jeannie Ferrami about her recruitment methods. Then, he decided, he would ask her to have dinner with him.

He called Jeannie’s internal number. She picked up right away. He lowered his voice and spoke in a tone that his ex-wife, Vivvie, used to call furry. “Jeannie, it’s Berry,” he said.

She was characteristically direct. “What the heck is going on?” she said.

“Could I talk to you for a minute, please?”

“Sure.”

“Would you mind stepping into my office?”

“I’ll be right there.” She hung up.

As he waited for her, he wondered idly how many women he had bedded. It would take too long to recall them one by one, but maybe he could approximate scientifically. It was more than one, more than ten certainly. Was it more than a hundred? That would be two point five per year since he was nineteen: he had certainly had more than that. A thousand? Twenty-five per year, a new woman every two weeks for forty years? No, he had not done that well. During the ten years he had been married to Vivvie Ellington he had probably had no more than fifteen or twenty adulterous liaisons in total. But he had made up for it afterward. Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand, then. But he was not going to take Jeannie to bed. He was going to find out how the hell she had come into contact with Steve Logan.

Jeannie knocked at the door and came in. She was wearing a white laboratory coat over her skirt and blouse. Berrington liked it when the young women wore those coats as dresses, with nothing else but their underwear. He found it sexy.

“Good of you to come by,” he said. He drew out a chair for her, then pulled his own chair around from behind his desk so there would not be a barrier between them.

His first task was to give Jeannie some plausible explanation for his behavior on meeting Steven Logan. She would not be easy to fool. He wished he had given it more thought instead of counting up his conquests.

He sat down and gave her his most disarming grin. “I want to apologize for my weird behavior,” he said. “I’ve been downloading some files from the University of Sydney, Australia.” He gestured at his desktop computer. “Just as you were about to introduce me to that young man, I realized I had left my computer on and forgotten to hang up the phone line. I just felt kind of foolish, that’s all, but I was pretty rude.”

The explanation was thin, but she seemed to accept it. “I’m relieved,” she said candidly. “I thought I had done something to offend you.”

So far, so good. “I was on my way to talk to you about your work,” he went on smoothly. “You’ve certainly got off to a flying start. You’ve only been here four weeks and your project is well under way. Congratulations.”

She nodded. “I had long talks with Herb and Frank over the summer, before I officially started,” she said. Herb Dickson was the department head and Frank Demidenko a full professor. “We figured out all the practicalities in advance.”

“Tell me a little more about it. Have any problems come up? Anything I can help with?”

“Recruitment is my biggest problem,” she said. “Because our subjects are volunteers, most of them are like Steve Logan, respectable middle-class Americans who believe that the good citizen has a duty to support scientific inquiry. Not many pimps and dope dealers come forward.”

“A point our liberal critics haven’t failed to make.”

“On the other hand, it’s not possible to find out about aggression and criminality by studying law-abiding Middle American families. So it was absolutely crucial to my project that I solved the recruitment problem.”

“And have you?”

“I think so. It occurred to me that medical information about millions of people is nowadays held on huge databases by insurance companies and government agencies. That includes the kind of data we use to determine whether twins are identical or fraternal: brain waves, electrocardiograms, and so on. If we could search for pairs of similar electrocardiograms, for example, it would be a way of identifying twins. And if the database was big enough, some of those pairs would have been raised apart. And here’s the kicker: Some of them might not even know they were twins.”

“It’s remarkable,” Berrington said. “Simple, but original and ingenious.” He meant it. Identical twins reared apart were very important to genetics research, and scientists went to great lengths to recruit them. Until now the main way to find them had been through publicity: they read magazine articles about twin studies and volunteered to take part. As Jeannie said, that process gave a sample that was predominantly respectable middle-class, which was a disadvantage in general and a crippling problem to the study of criminality.

But for him personally it was a catastrophe. He looked her in the eye and tried to hide his dismay. This was worse than he had feared. Only last night Preston Barck had said, “We all know this company has secrets.” Jim Proust had said no one could find them out. He had not reckoned with Jeannie Ferrami.

Berrington clutched at a straw. “Finding similar entries in a database is not as easy as it sounds.”

“True. Graphic images use up many megabytes of space. Searching such records is vastly more difficult than running a spellcheck on your doctoral thesis.”

“I believe it’s quite a problem in software design. So what did you do?”

“I wrote my own software.”

Berrington was surprised. “You did?”

“Sure. I took a master’s in computer science at Princeton, as you know. When I was at Minnesota, I worked with my professor on neural network-type software for pattern recognition.”

Could she be that smart? “How does it work?”

“It uses fuzzy logic to speed up pattern matching. The pairs we’re looking for are similar, but not absolutely identical. For example, x-rays of identical teeth, taken by different technicians on different machinery, are not exactly the same. But the human eye can see that they’re the same, and when the x-rays are scanned and digitized and stored electronically, a computer equipped with fuzzy logic can recognize them as a pair.”

“I imagine you’d need a computer the size of the Empire State Building.”

“I figured out a way to shorten the process of pattern matching by looking at a small portion of the digitized image. Think about it: to recognize a friend, you don’t need to scan his whole body—just his face. Automobile enthusiasts can identify most common cars from a photograph of one headlight. My sister can name any Madonna track after listening to about ten seconds of it.”

“That’s open to error.”

She shrugged. “By not scanning the entire image, you risk overlooking some matches. I figured out that you can radically shorten the search process with only a small margin of error. It’s a question of statistics and probabilities.”

All psychologists studied statistics, of course. “But how can the same program scan x-rays and electrocardiograms and fingerprints?”

“It recognizes electronic patterns. It doesn’t care what they represent.”

“And your program works?”

“It seems to. I got permission to try it out on a database of dental records held by a large medical insurance company. It produced several hundred pairs. But of course I’m only interested in twins who have been raised apart.”

“How do you pick them out?”

“I eliminated all the pairs with the same surname, and all the married women, since most of them have taken the husband’s name. The remainder are twins with no apparent reason for having different surnames.”

Ingenious, Berrington thought. He was torn between admiration of Jeannie and fear of what she could find out. “How many were left?”

“Three pairs—kind of a disappointment. I was hoping for more. In one case, one of the twins had changed his surname for religious reasons: he had become a Muslim and taken an Arab name. Another pair had disappeared without a trace. Fortunately, the third pair are just what I was looking for: Steven Logan is a law-abiding citizen and Dennis Pinker is a murderer.”

Berrington knew that. Late one evening, Dennis Pinker had cut the electric power to a movie theater in the middle of a Friday the 13th movie. In the ensuing panic he had molested several women. One girl had apparently tried to fight him off, and he had killed her.

So Jeannie had found Dennis. Christ, he thought, she’s dangerous. She could ruin everything: the takeover, Jim’s political career, Genetico, even Berrington’s academic reputation. Fear made him angry: how could everything he had ever worked for be threatened by his own protégée? But there was no way he could have known what would happen.

Her being here at Jones Falls was lucky, in that he had early warning of what she was up to. However, he saw no way out. If only her files could be destroyed in a fire, or she could be killed in a car wreck. But that was fantasy.

Might it be possible to undermine her faith in her software? “Did Steven Logan know he was adopted?” he said with hidden malice.

“No.” Jeannie’s brow wrinkled in a troubled frown. “We know that families often lie about adoption, but he thinks his mother would have told him the truth. But there may be another explanation. Suppose they were unable to adopt through the normal channels, for some reason, and they bought a baby. They might lie about that.”

“Or your system could be flawed,” Berrington suggested. “Just because two boys have identical teeth doesn’t guarantee they’re twins.”

“I don’t think my system is flawed,” Jeannie said briskly. “But I am worried about telling dozens of people that they might be adopted. I’m not even sure I have the right to invade their lives in that way. I’ve only just realized the magnitude of the problem.”

He looked at his watch. “I’m running out of time, but I’d love to discuss this some more. Are you free for dinner?” “Tonight?” “Yes.”

He saw her hesitate. They had had dinner together once before, at the International Congress of Twin Studies, where they had first met. Since she had been at JFU they had had drinks together once, in the bar of the Faculty Club on campus. One Saturday they had met by accident in a shopping street in Charles Village, and Berrington had shown her around the Baltimore Museum of Art. She was not in love with him, not by a long shot, but he knew she had enjoyed his company on those three occasions. Besides, he was her mentor: it was hard for her to refuse him.

“Sure,” she said.

“Shall we go to Hamptons, at the Harbor Court Hotel? I think it’s the best restaurant in Baltimore.” It was the swankiest, anyway.

“Fine,” she said, standing up.

“Then I’ll pick you up at eight?”

“Okay.”

As she turned away from him, Berrington was visited by a sudden vision of her naked back, smooth and muscular, and her flat ass and her long, long legs; and for a moment his throat went dry with desire. Then she shut the door.

Berrington shook his head to clear his mind of lascivious fantasy, then called Preston again. “It’s worse than we thought,” he said without preamble. “She’s written a computer program that searches medical databases and finds matched pairs. First time she tried it out, she found Steven and Dennis.”

“Shit.”

“We’ve got to tell Jim.”

“The three of us should get together and decide what the hell we’re going to do. How about tonight?”

“I’m taking Jeannie to dinner.”

“Do you think that may solve the problem?”

“It can’t hurt.”

“I still think we’ll have to pull out of the Landsmann deal in the end.”

“I don’t agree,” Berrington said. “She’s pretty bright, but one girl isn’t going to uncover the whole story in a week.”

However, as he hung up he wondered if he should be so sure.