by Neil Mcmahon
“Isn’t it true, sir, that REGIS is a tool to deny rights—”
“Would you address the rumor that REGIS is a racist stereotype—”
“There is no truth to any such vicious slurs,” Bouldin said loudly. The clamor continued. He looked down onto the crowd with a coldness that bordered on contempt. Then, abruptly, he raised his hand in dismissal and stepped back from the podium.
The press conference was over.
The announcer cut back in. “For commentary, we have with us Dr. Joseph Krauzer, a geneticist from Stanford Medical Center.” The screen switched to a bearlike, balding man of about sixty.
“Dr. Krauzer, let’s start with a couple of issues that Mr. Bouldin declined to address. Proponents of the REGIS program are saying it’s a huge step forward in early diagnosis of disease, and prevention of hereditary defects. But as we’ve heard, critics charge that REGIS will be used to discriminate against people who already have defective genes, to deny them health insurance, employment, and perhaps even more. What’s your position?”
Krauzer’s voice was authoritative, his words measured. “The moral implications are enormous. But I’d like to set them aside and concentrate on a practical issue. Quite simply, does REGIS work? In theory, it stands to be an extremely valuable tool. But it’s going to take a lot of time to refine, and it may never prove out.”
“So you think that marketing REGIS at this point is premature?”
“Very much so,” Krauzer said. “Since it’s not a drug or medical product, there’s been no FDA supervision or other regulation. No actual testing has been done except rudimentary work with laboratory animals. Most of REGIS’s claims are based on computerized projections, and there’s simply no way to estimate how accurate those are.”
“But that’s not going to stop its widespread sale and use?”
“It certainly doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing,” Krauzer said dryly.
The television screen cut back to the anchored dragon-prowed boat. “The ship you’re watching, the—” the announcer hesitated over the pronunciation “—Mjollnir, is an authentic replica of an actual Viking longboat. Tomorrow evening, it will sail for Belvedere, carrying Aesir executives and top stockholders to a gala celebration to launch REGIS—and a billion-dollar IPO.”
It did seem like the health professionals and other critics were like a Greek chorus in the background, Monks thought: commenting, voicing protests and even outrage, but powerless to change events.
He started for the shower. The phone rang.
Monks picked it up and said, “Hello.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” a woman said. He recognized Martine Rostanov’s voice. She sounded tense and brittle.
“Not at all. I just watched the press conference.”
“That’s where I’m calling from,” she said. “I’ve been trying to make up my mind whether to do this.”
“Do what?”
There was a longish silence. Ten seconds. Twenty.
Then she said, “I lied to you. It was Lex Rittenour last night.”
“I’d be lying if I said I was surprised.”
“Can we get past that?”
“Get past it to where?”
“I told you to be careful about trusting me,” she said. “But if I tell you this—I have to trust you.”
He hesitated. Sudden trust could be a heavy weight, especially when it only worked one-way.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Lex disappeared last night. That’s what Tygard came to my house to tell me.”
“Disappeared how?” Monks said.
“He ran away. They’d taken him to Ken Bouldin’s house. Put him to bed, trying to get him ready for the press conference. When they checked in on him later, he was gone.”
Monks grappled with the concept of a junked out, billionaire computer expert “running away.”
“Tygard wanted to know if I’d heard from Lex,” she said. “But I’m afraid that really—he might have been killed.”
Monks realized that his body had turned and he was staring at the refrigerator, and what it contained. The Precious Blood of Saint Lex, Patron of Corporate Megabucks.
“Do you have a reason for thinking that?” he said.
“He was getting in the way. There was someone else before him who got in the way. Who turned up dead.”
“Why aren’t you taking this to the police?”
“If I do that, it puts me there too,” she said. “In the way.”
Over the years, Monks had started looking back at his life as a series of choices. It was something like quantum theory in nuclear physics. Most of those choices were tiny inconsequential decisions, routine, barely conscious, that occurred during every infinitesimal subinstant of time blending into the next. And yet, they added up like a weight gain, until they tipped the scales into larger choices. These might lead in turn to a moment of life-changing significance.
Then there were the ones that were somewhere in between, where you stepped from one pathway to another.
“Take down this address,” he said. “I’ll meet you there in an hour.”
8
The windows of Stover Larrabee’s third-story office looked out on the east end of Howard Street. Past the Embarcadero, a collage of gray concrete piers and the derricks of tankers rose against the fog-bound sky and steely waters of the Bay. Gentrification had landed around Larrabee, but had not yet found him. The weathered warehouses with broken windows reminded Monks of his own boyhood on Chicago’s south side.
The office floor was scarred old hardwood, sagging in places from the weight of bearing walls. The doors had transoms and the ceiling was ten feet high, made of pressed lead and probably backed by asbestos, an environmentalist’s nightmare. Larrabee lived in adjoining rooms, which was illegal, zoning-wise, but nobody troubled him. His presence put a damper on crime, and the building’s management was glad to have him.
Larrabee was leaning against a wall, arms folded, a burly man in his forties with a thick mustache and roosterlike shock of dark hair. He was a former SFPD cop, now chief investigator for a doctor-owned malpractice insurance group that Monks also worked for, as consultant and expert witness. It was how he and Larrabee had come to be friends and sometime partners.
“Dr. Rostanov, you don’t know specifically how to interpret that document?” Larrabee said. “Or who the people are?”
“No. It’s all in codes, and I don’t have a key.” Martine was sitting in a chair, typing on her notebook computer. Her hands looked thin and bloodless. So did her face.
Monks sat beside her, watching the screen. It showed only columns of numbers.
“Then, if you’ll excuse my asking,” Larrabee said, “how’d you figure out what it means?”
Her fingers stopped moving and her shoulders sagged.
“I helped set up the format,” she said.
She looked at Monks, apologetic, a little teary-eyed. The well of information that she had not been forthcoming about was getting deeper.
“Certain genes have been singled out,” Martine said, her finger reaching to the computer screen to underscore a number highlighted in bold type. “I think they’re sex-linked. Passed on through the X and Y chromosomes.”
Monks watched the screen, scrolling slowly. The document was divided into segments of several pages. Each segment began with an identification number and a date, then was followed by columns of multidigit numbers. There was no printed information, nothing but the complex numerical codes.
What they represented, according to Martine, were REGIS gene scans, over one hundred of them, which had been performed on real human beings. The columns of numbers represented the genes, for each person, that REGIS had identified as potentially troublesome.
“Look here,” she said. Her finger touched an identification number, 103. “The one just means female, a woman. The zero three is her personal number.”
Martine scrolled on several more pages, to another se
gment’s beginning. “And here,” she said. This number was two zero six. “A man, number six.”
The screen moved on farther this time, to a segment beginning with a much longer identification number: 103206-201. “It’s a combination of those two base numbers, with a suffix,” she said. “Two for a male. The zero one—I think it means firstborn. In other words, those two parents, one zero three and two zero six, had a baby boy, their first child.”
Monks said incredulously, “These are pedigrees?”
“As near as I can tell, there were fourteen women and nine men. Not monogamous couples—more like random mating. All together, they had one hundred thirty-seven pregnancies, in about four years.”
Larrabee ran his hand over his hair, a gesture that signaled unusual agitation. “That’s impossible,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“I said pregnancies. Not children.”
Monks was starting to get a queasy feeling.
“I’m sorry to be dense, Doctor, but I don’t know zilch about science,” Larrabee said. “Spell it out, please.”
Her shoulders moved in a sort of shrug, a gesture of being overwhelmed. “It’s like a reverse eugenics program. Breeding different combinations of parents who carried disease-linked genes and tracking how the genes were passed on.
“That’s why some of the pregnancies are only a few months apart.”
Monks pushed his chair back and walked to a window.
What it meant was that most, if not all, of the fetuses had been aborted. But the pregnancies were not accidental.
It was just the opposite. The fetuses had been bred so that their genomes could be scanned, and the hereditary aspects tracked. Then they had been discarded, with a high turnover to maximize efficiency.
The results would be a gold mine of information. Instead of the gargantuan task that legitimate researchers faced, of trying to track inherited genes through a vast population of parents, here a very few genomes could be manipulated in known combinations, the genes charted easily—and quickly. Monks tried to imagine the mind that had designed the research. A mind that had no concern for human life, or was able to justify using life casually, in the name of science.
Monks said, “Tell us how you helped set this up.”
“Not this,” Martine said. “My god, please don’t think that. I just worked on a theoretical model. I never dreamed somebody would use it like this.”
She looked away from them, hands folded tensely, shoulders trembling a little. Monks felt pity for her, but that was not quite the right word. It was as if her intense unhappiness had spilled over into him. He wanted to touch her, to try to soothe her. But he was worried, too worried that once again she was not telling him everything.
She was silent for another half minute, breathing deeply. Then she began to speak. “A man named Walker Ostrand was sent to talk to me by the personnel office, about five years ago. He was a physician, he’d been in the military. Aesir hired him for translating theoretical aspects of REGIS into actual medical applications. I’d been working on that all along. I gave him what I had.”
“This setup?” Monks said, touching the computer screen.
She nodded. “A very rough prototype. It was just a way of correlating the genes that REGIS identified, with actual diseases. Of course, there were other people working on the same thing, and I gave it to them too. It was never meant to be used. It was just a tool, a basic step. Much more sophisticated programs have been developed by now.
“After that, I forgot about Ostrand. I didn’t see him for years. He was a subcontractor, like a lot of the others, so he wasn’t around the offices. Then one night a few months ago he showed up at my house. He was drunk, in a vicious mood. I was scared. There was something scary about him anyway. A coldness, a vacuum.”
“I don’t have any trouble believing that,” Larrabee muttered.
“He was in a disagreement with somebody at Aesir,” she said. “He wouldn’t say who. He felt he was being cheated out of a lot of money—but he had information that could destroy people, and if he didn’t get the money, he would.
“Then he started into this slimy innuendo that I was in it with him somehow. That my model had been used for something highly unethical. And I had better help him—or I was going to be destroyed too. I finally got him to leave, with some vague promises that I’d do what I could. It shook me, but I put it down to his being drunk.
“Two days later, that computer disk came in the mail. Plain envelope, no note, no return address. I spent the next day trying to figure it out. I don’t think I’d have known what it was if he hadn’t come by earlier. When it started to sink in, I couldn’t believe it. I tried to call him. That’s when I found out he was dead. He’d fallen into a swimming pool with just a few inches of water in it. Knocked himself unconscious and drowned.”
“Was there any flap about the death?” Larrabee asked. “Suspicion, investigation?”
“No, it was ruled accidental. I think he drank a lot.”
But the coincidence of the death with the threat of blackmail was hard to ignore.
“Any idea who he was dealing with at Aesir?”
Martine shook her head. “I fished around in the company computer records,” she said. “Ostrand just showed up as a subcontractor, doing data analysis. No specifics, not a hint about who hired him. I even drove to his office address, in an industrial park in south San Francisco. It was already rerented. The manager said somebody came and cleaned it out right after he died.”
It was a good bet that the “somebody” had covered tracks in other ways.
“Did Lex Rittenour know about this research?”
“Yes. I showed it to him.”
“You did?” Larrabee said. “You knew him that well?”
“All my life. Our families were friends. I’m four years older, I grew up taking care of him. Never really stopped. We had a bond, we were both geeks. He was a genius. I had this.” She touched the brace on her leg.
“When did you show it to him, Doctor?”
“Five days ago.”
“How did he react?”
“He was devastated. He’d been wavering about REGIS anyway: that it wasn’t ready yet, the IPO was premature. This pushed him to a decision. The press conference that was scheduled for today? He was going to get up there and publicly withdraw his support for REGIS. Knock the pins out from under the IPO.”
Larrabee said, “Jesus wept.” He paced, passing his hand over his hair.
You could fill a big graveyard with people who had been killed for less.
“Did he tell anybody else he was going to do that?” Larrabee said.
“He didn’t plan to,” she said. “He was going to drop the bomb, then take off, go someplace obscure for a while. But then he started doing drugs again. I don’t know what he might have said or done since.”
“Again?”
“I’ve gotten him off it twice. But when the pressure starts building, he goes back.”
So: The man who was arguably the world’s greatest software genius—like a Mozart, orchestrating the infinitely complex symphony of the human genome—was an addict. It was precedented; there had been a number of famous visionary narcotics users.
And other unfinished masterpieces which might or might not ever be successfully performed.
“Dr. Rostanov, I can see why you didn’t tell anybody else about the research,” Larrabee said. “But why’d you tell Lex?”
“I couldn’t just not do anything. But I was scared. If I went public, they could hush it all up and get rid of me. Aesir’s got tentacles everywhere: police, government, an incredible information system. I convinced myself that Lex was too important to get rid of. So I let him take the risk. God, I used to baby-sit him.” She rocked forward, hands rising to cover her face.
This time, Monks stepped behind her and lightly put his fingers on her shoulders. Larrabee’s eyebrows rose.
“I was up most of last night,” she said into her hands. “Hoping he’d
show.”
Larrabee said, “The smartest thing you could do, Doctor? Flush that disk down the toilet, now. I’ll help you cut it up. Then you go someplace obscure for a while. Come back with amnesia.”
She sat without moving, as if she had not heard. Monks was touched again by the sense of her deep aloneness.
“I hated lying to you,” she finally said, turning to Monks. “But I did it. I hate being a coward, but I am. But I can’t let this go now, not with Lex gone. I have to do something. Please, help me decide what.”
Monks waited. This sort of thing was Larrabee’s side of the street.
“If this research could be verified, it would blow up like a hydrogen bomb,” Larrabee said. “But right now, Doctor, all you’ve got is a bunch of numbers that only you can interpret. It might even be a fraud, something Ostrand cooked up to try to gouge money. If you come forward, but you’re not able to prove anything solid—” Larrabee shrugged. “You’ve attracted very undesirable attention.”
The kind of attention, Monks thought, that might have gotten at least one man killed.
“You could try leaking it to the media anonymously,” Larrabee said.
“Like Deep Throat?” she said.
Larrabee smiled. “Yeah.”
She looked intrigued. “I could use anew self-image.”
“But I doubt the anonymity would hold up for long,” Larrabee said. “You’re too connected.”
Everybody moved a little, physically; absorbing what had happened, thinking about what came next.
“Let’s look at ways to get to whoever it is at Aesir,” Larrabee said. “Who are the women who were having the abortions? If we had names to put to those numbers—then I’d feel confident about going public.”
She shook her head again, this time wearily. “I’m sorry to be so helpless, but I have no idea. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Monks had been considering possibilities for the research group—hospitals, schools, the military, prisons—but none seemed to fit. It had to be relatively stable; the same women and men had to have been available for a period of years. It was probably in the San Francisco area. Had the women known what was happening? Were they paid for silence? Was it forced? A religious group, perhaps, a cult or sect?
