Vitals

by Greg Bear

  “Rob had the other half of the secret. That’s what Lissa said. If I get that list, I could finish the work. I would know everything Golokhov knows. Maybe more.”

  “I’m sure,” Ben said with a sigh. I was incurable—he had finally realized that—so he was giving up the moral tone.

  This angered me. “Don’t you see it could be important? Rob asked, didn’t he?”

  Ben nodded. “It was the most important thing in the world to him,” he said, his voice seeming to come from outside the car.

  “They’ve tried to kill us, they’ve murdered innocent civilians, just to stop us from knowing.” I held off for a second, face hot, before adding, “And my brother.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said

  We were five minutes down the road when Ben resumed.

  “We were dropped off near Times Square, soaking wet. In an alley. Stuart stuffed a pistol into my hand, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked genuinely disgusted at what they had to do. Then he and Norton went to the end of the alley to wait. I honest to God tried to aim the gun at them, but I couldn’t. I was focused on Rob.”

  I felt my breath take a hitch. “You shot him,” I said, hoping he would end his story now.

  “It wasn’t that simple,” Ben said. “First, I had to get mad. So I punched him, right there in the alley. I broke his nose, I think. There was this awful voice in my head, it kept telling me ‘Go for the snot locker. That’ll get him angry and that will make you angry.’ His face was covered with blood. But Rob danced and sang a song about which genes he’d work on next, which proteins he would block. He said we’d all live forever.”

  “Shit,” I said, and covered my ears.

  “Goddamn it, listen to me!” Ben shrieked over the back of the seat, pounding it with his fist. “Listen to me and, Jesus, give me some sort of absolution! Your brother came to me, he dragged me into this! You two stirred up the hornets, and they all used me!”

  We were both crying. I reached out and tried to touch his arm. He flicked my hand aside.

  “Then something changed. The flag went down and Rob got frightened. He wasn’t reacting the same way I was. He didn’t want to kill me, he wanted to talk. But I wasn’t having any of it. He backed off and said he knew something. He told me to pass on something to his brother. He wanted me to tell you what he knew, if I survived. He said, ‘Tell Hal I know why it works on you and not on me.’ Then he rattled off some names, didn’t make sense. Peace keeper or peace maker or something was the first.”

  “Piecework?”

  “That’s it. Then . . . Revolver or regulator.”

  “Regulus?”

  Ben nodded. “I told him to shut up. He found a chunk of wood from a crate. He was pitiful. I had the gun but he was waving that stick of wood. The last word was chopper. I remember that, because he was chopping at me with the wood. He wanted to get away, but I blocked the alley. He kept shouting that if I just remembered who I was and what we were doing, we could get out of here. ‘There’s so much life, there’s so much more to see,’ he said. But I couldn’t stop.”

  Piecework, regulus, chopper. I was familiar with two of them. Piecework was a common bacterial gene that regulated the creation of adhesins. Toothpaste companies were interested in it because it stopped Streptococcus and Actinomyces from binding in the human mouth and reduced plaque on teeth. Regulus was a human nuclear gene that coordinated mitochondrial functions. Mess with regulus in the wrong way and you could end up with Parkinson’s. That’s why I had avoided it, though it was a clear candidate for my work. Our work. Chopper wasn’t a gene. I couldn’t immediately place where I had heard the name.

  I dropped my face into my hands.

  “Rob couldn’t take it anymore,” Ben said. “He made a run at me, and I shot him. Then I threw away the pistol and ran out of the alley. Stuart and Norton were gone. I was all alone on the street. It was four in the morning.”

  Ben spoke this last quickly, his cheeks shining.

  We pulled into a service station. I leaned out of the door, thought about vomiting, decided it wasn’t strictly necessary, and stood beside the car. “I have to go,” I said, for the sixth or seventh time. The elixir was still having a strong effect.

  Banning bought gas. I got the key from the young man behind the counter, went to the rest room, and leaned over the dirty sink. Despite the nausea, I couldn’t bring up anything.

  I had just listened to a man confess to shooting my twin, my shadow. My essential shadow. And I did not know how to react, whether to hate or pity. I was angry, not at Ben Bridger, but at Rob and myself. We had screwed it up so badly. We could have beaten the world. Or saved it. Instead, I had stolen his girls, then bits and pieces of his dignity. Rob had done things to me, in return. So many little disputes I should have been willing to concede. His science, that I didn’t steal, because by then we had kept secrets and stayed away from each other.

  We could have done it together. We would have had the Long Haul in our hot little hands right now. We really would have, I kept telling myself, staring into the scratched and filthy mirror.

  I was my twin, right down to the suicidal arrogance.

  The elixir’s diarrhea came and went. I spent ten minutes on the toilet, totally absorbed in misery.

  Back in the car, Ben was drinking a Royal Crown. I climbed gingerly into the backseat. He blew his nose into a blue windshield wipe and avoided looking at me.

  Banning sipped coffee from an orange 76 mug and studied another fold in the map.

  “You probably haven’t been following the news,” Ben said.

  “No.” I felt my stomach turn, tried to stop my voice from shaking.

  “The director of the CIA just resigned. He’s under suspicion of downloading classified files, but that’s just a cover. There’s more going on, much more. Cracks in the Silk network in Washington. A little war. Anyway, something did the trick,” Ben said. “Some agents reported back to their bosses—maybe the two that were in Anthrax Central, assigned to help Stuart and Norton. The bosses discovered something pretty special, a little late. They discovered they had done enough kowtowing and cringing. ‘It’s a new millennium, gentlemen,’” Ben pontificated, swinging out his right arm and waving it at the night air. “ ‘Time to clear the slate and set things right. Time to get a new compass.’ Maybe Rob’s death wasn’t in vain.

  “Some cops found me an hour later outside the alley. I was pretty strung out. The next day, three agents I had never seen before sprung me from Rikers and took me in from the cold. Put me in hiding, gave me a physical and detox, then debriefed me about everything since Rob first showed up at my house. I thought at first they were just going to kill me after they’d got what they wanted. But no. There were two agencies, a cover agency either tagged into treason or defending its mistakes, and a special investigation team with almost no support and no money.

  “I accompanied a group of them back to San Jose and we opened up Rob’s secret office. They assigned their own lab guys to look over Banning’s papers and what Rob had put together. They inventoried all his cultures and chemistries.”

  “Before Lissa took me there,” I said.

  “Yeah. They modified the elixir based on Rob’s work. By the time they had their act together, and set out to find you, it was a couple of weeks after Rob’s funeral in Florida. You had gone underground. Banning got to you first, but he was acting on his own, as usual.”

  “Sometimes that’s best,” Banning said.

  “We’re in a small operation, so far, deliberately—they don’t know who might be tagged, and who might not, and they want it to look to Silk like we’re still rogues. The operation may not even be officially sanctioned. I think they’re still making some tough discoveries and decisions back in Washington.”

  “What about the body in the freezer?” I asked.

  “There was a dust-up in San Francisco. We almost got shot—and caught two runners. One was killed, the other got away.”

  “A man in gray?” I thou
ght of the man who had argued with Lissa in front of the strip motel.

  “Yeah. The Agency did a quick autopsy of the dead fellow, took samples to see what Silk might be doing to control runners. Then they hauled the body in a refrigerated truck down to San Jose. Left him in Rob’s freezer in case Silk decided to come looking. It was convenient, and there was an element of payback. A little psychological warfare.”

  Lissa had certainly been surprised. “They put a sentry out in the used-car lot, in case I showed up,” I said. “The skinny guy in a herringbone suit. The one Lissa shot.”

  “We don’t know who that was,” Ben said. “Maybe just a good citizen, hoping to arrest a bomber.”

  Fucking amateur. “I doubt that,” I said. “Something went wrong—some lack of coordination at the top. The bomb scared Lissa. Maybe she took it out on one of their own. Maybe a taggee . . . maybe an inept runner.” Or maybe—the thought came and went—we didn’t understand anything yet.

  Ben shrugged. “They make mistakes. That’s something in our favor. Our team started tracking you after Mrs. Callas illegally logged on to NCIC2000.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The FBI’s on-line database of criminal activity in the United States. It’s available only to law enforcement. A real hacker’s target.”

  “Callas refused to have anything to do with us,” I said.

  “Smart woman,” Ben said. “We caught up with you after they spotted Lissa Cousins’s car east of LA.”

  We rolled out on the road again.

  “Those three names,” I said. “Let’s make sure. They were piecework, regulus, and chopper?”

  “I think so,” Ben said.

  “They could be important,” I warned.

  “The first could have been peacekeeper or peacemaker,” Ben said.

  “There are no such genes.”

  “They’re names for genes?”

  “Two of them are genes,” I confirmed. Chopper was coming back to me. Not a gene, but a glycoprotein often created during phage infection. It was part of a bacterial ID system.

  “Make you live forever?”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t what Rob was telling us. They’re part of the complex of pathways that allow bacteria to coordinate their activities on our skin and in our gut. Pumping in antisense RNA with a shuttle vector could block the gene products. Phage-infected bacteria, without chopper, could get picked out as ‘foreigners’ and targeted by other bacteria. Rob must have worked them into his treatment early on, but not into yours. That made the difference in your tagged behavior. He came out from under faster.”

  “Piecework, chopper, regulus,” Banning said. “It is nice to be among fellow crazies, to have some acknowledgment of my efforts, and to finally, after all these years, have a government job.”

  “Sure,” Ben said. “Drive.”

  “I hope, gentlemen, that when this is over, one of you will lend me a pistol. I would like to kill these idiot voices once and for all.”

  “Gladly,” Ben said.

  Banning’s lips started working. He couldn’t help it. “My first love was a beautiful young Jewess, you know,” he confessed, eyes darting.

  “Just shut up,” Ben said wearily.

  Banning was quiet the rest of the way.

  Our rendezvous point was a small civilian airport in the desert. A group of ten or so earnest-looking men in suits waited inside a big tin hangar. They seemed surprised to see us.

  “You did it,” said a pleasant-looking fellow a little older than me and wearing jeans and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He introduced himself as an FBI agent named Condon. “Good to see you. Our other outside expert didn’t get through. We’re to accompany you to New York. Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Near where they shot my brother,” I said.

  “Sorry about that,” Condon said, and ran his hands through his sandy hair.

  “Don’t apologize to me,” I said tightly. “Apologize to Ben. You’re the bastards who did this.”

  It wasn’t a fair assessment, but no one tried to set me straight. Three doctors came out of the back of an unmarked van and checked us over, then gave us some injections. I made one last visit to the bathroom, and, when I came out, I felt as empty as I’ve ever been in my life.

  Ben and I and three others climbed into an Air Force Learjet, and a few minutes later we took off into a clear morning sky.

  They left Banning with the car. He waved at us from beside the hangar. Rudy Banning, whether he wanted to be or not, was a survivor.

  Once we were at altitude, the oldest of the three agents unbelted and walked forward, hunched over in the low cabin. He had a square, tanned face topped with a thatch of graying brown hair, black eyes, and well-formed Levantine lips. He clamped his hand on the blue fabric of my seat back to steady himself while he spoke.

  “My name is David Breaker,” he said. “We want to thank you for all you’re doing.” I heard his stomach grumble. “Ben might have described our operation.”

  “A little,” I said.

  “I’ve been put in charge of this part of the effort. We’re taking you to New York. To Manhattan. As you can see, I don’t feel good, and it isn’t because of airsickness. We’re pretty ashamed, but we’re doing all we can to make up for it, including a little intestinal penance.”

  “Fine,” I said tonelessly. I still did not know whom to believe, whom to be nice to, and certainly not whom I would trust with my life.

  “I, personally, did not know about Silk until a month ago. But that’s neither here nor there, and after the death of your brother, with the collusion of a portion of the Agency, I just wanted to . . .”

  “Apologize,” I said, feeling another brutal cut of anger. “The hell with it.”

  “You need to know some things about this operation. One, it is not sanctioned by the President. The President tests positive as a recent taggee. We’ve disengaged two of the people we think are running him, but there could easily be backups. Some of my colleagues are monitoring all the President’s phone calls. I don’t know what more we can do, practically or constitutionally, at this point. So we’re ultimately on our own, illegal as it may be. First we need to weed out the center of Silk activity in North America. That effort requires your help, Dr. Cousins. This afternoon, if all goes well, we’re putting an armed team, everyone we can muster, Army, CIA, NSA, FBI, maybe twenty people, into the Jenner Building in New York. You know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Ben told me,” I said. “Anthrax Central.”

  “That was its cover for years. We hope to have it under our control by the time our plane lands. You’ll go in with a security team. We want to give you a chance to evaluate their facilities. Think of it as a kind of dress rehearsal for the big show in Florida.”

  “Lemuria?”

  Breaker nodded.

  “I can help you right now, possibly,” I said. I looked at Ben, sitting across the aisle from me, partially hidden by Breaker. Ben leaned forward and our eyes made contact. For no good reason whatsoever, I trusted the very man who had pulled the trigger on Rob.

  Rob would have appreciated that. It would have amused him greatly.

  “How?” Breaker asked.

  “Tell your scientists to antisense piecework, that’s piece with an i-e, regulus, and chopper. It was my brother’s last message to me.”

  “Antisense?”

  “They’ll know what I mean. Add them to the list in your elixir. Immunize all of us again, if there’s time.”

  Breaker seemed doubtful. “If there’s time,” he said. An agent seated behind us shifted an assault rifle to one side and recorded the names on a paper notepad. I spelled them all several times to make sure.

  Breaker plugged a small DVD player into a screen mounted in the seat back. “This is from a security camera in the cafeteria at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC,” he said. “Two weeks ago.” A title card came up: “TAPS HOOVER July 29.”
/>   The segment, shot from a security camera at a high angle, showed two skinny boys and two matronly women working in the kitchen and food line. All wore aprons and plastic snoods. They worked a number of serving stations, cleaning up and replacing food.

  One by one, they used little plastic bottles to spray a salad bar, steam tables, and, finally, racks of Jell-O cups, puddings, and other desserts. Men and women filling their trays paid no attention. Just part of the routine.

  Then, more segments with titles like “TAPS CIA ARL VA July 30,” “TAPS FBI ACDY Aug 2.”

  “It’s the beginning, or the resumption, of a general massive assault on our institutions, conducted by perhaps fifty Silk runners,” Breaker said. “They’re aware of our activity, apparently are frightened by it, and are taking measures to counter it.”

  Sound recordings followed, several phone calls from outside the FBI headquarters to offices within.

  “The callers claim to be relatives,” Breaker said. “Often dead relatives. They read through lists of numbers and ask them to be repeated. Nearly everyone repeats the numbers. Afterward, the agents remember only receiving blank phone calls.”

  “I’m familiar with the routine,” I said.

  “You can see the size of our problem,” Breaker said.

  “It’s huge,” I agreed. “I think you’ve waited too long.”

  Breaker lifted his eyebrow. “Possibly.”

  “Any word on Garvey and Crenshaw?” Ben asked.

  “None,” Breaker said. “We won’t take any action against collusive agents until we have the situation well in hand. And until we know whether or not they were tagged.”

  “Give me a crack at them. I’ll take action,” Ben said in a low rumble.

  “You are not essential to this operation, Mr. Bridger,” Breaker warned. “I will remove you if necessary.”

  “Is there any food on board?” I asked, feeling particularly contrary.

  “None,” Breaker said. “There’s hot coffee. Very hot.”

  This army, I saw, would not be running on its stomach. The stomach and everything south could no longer be trusted.