NH3

by Stanley Salmons

  “Okay, what’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that it louses up the genomic DNA as well. Then all the little bits of genomic DNA reform and contaminate the plasmid DNA. We can’t work with a prep like that – we won’t know where the hell we are. If we’re less aggressive we can get pure plasmid DNA but the yield’s shitty.”

  “Have you brought Pieter and Ulrich in on it? They’re the experts on cyanobacteria.”

  “Yeah, we talked about it but they never did anything like this either.” He sighed. “What we need is much bigger samples.”

  She closed her eyes. “Matt, you don’t seem to appreciate what’s involved. In total there are massive amounts of this stuff around but it’s still distributed thinly. To get decent samples like these you’ve got to go to places where it’s highly concentrated. Those places are dangerous. Terry and I collected the samples you’re using in the Sargasso Sea. We took respirator masks and even so we were nearly caught out. One of the crew was quite badly affected. Can’t you grow some on in the lab?”

  “Pieter and Ulrich are still trying but it’s hard to find the optimum conditions. You know the problem; what works out there in the environment doesn’t work in the lab and vice versa.”

  Maggie recalled her failure to grow on single organisms. If the experts were having problems maybe it wasn’t so surprising. On the other hand…

  “I grew some up on a nutrient gel. That worked fine.”

  He shook his head. “We need to do it in solution to get reasonable quantities.”

  She sighed. “It’s a pity we lost those river samples. I got those going in a day or so and I didn’t have a problem…” She made a decision. “Matt, you don’t have enough? Take the rest of the samples. Pool them.”

  He looked at her. “We haven’t totally nailed down the procedure yet. If we screw up, you’ve lost the lot.”

  “We’ll just have to take the chance.”

  “What about Sergei?”

  “Sergei’s got one flask. He doesn’t need large quantities. He’ll manage.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. It’s your call.”

  At the door, she turned. “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  She smiled. “You will try not to screw up, won’t you?”

  He gave her a mock salute. “We’ll do our best, ma’am.”

  “Hey, Terry, come and look at this.”

  Phil Drummond was the youngest member of the climate team, a PhD from Princeton. Terry went over and looked where he was pointing. The 32-inch screen in front of him displayed a satellite view of the South China Sea and the adjacent Asian land mass. There was a large spiral of cloud just off the coast.

  “Category 4 tropical cyclone,” Phil said. “I watched it forming up yesterday. It was a Category 3 then, but it’s intensifying all the time. Could even make a 5.”

  “Where’s it going?”

  “Westward. It’s going to make landfall in South Vietnam.”

  “There are a lot of towns and villages up and down that coast.”

  Phil looked at him and nodded. “It’s a biggie. It’ll cause a lot of damage.”

  One evening after the other staff had left the Institute for the day, Maggie and Terry walked back to the students’ residence. In the basement area of the building there were three machines that took coins and delivered snacks, soft drinks, or hot beverages. The hot chocolate was excessively sweet but it seemed to be the best of what was on offer. They took the steaming polystyrene cups up to Terry’s room and sank into the armchairs in the small sitting/study area.

  Maggie took a sip of the chocolate and swallowed. “Why does it all have to be so damned hard?” she sighed. “It looked like it was going to be straightforward.”

  Terry gave her a tired smile. “Research never is. Even Nobel Prize winners don’t go in a straight line. Medawar said if he had back all the time he’d spent going up blind alleys he’d have a third of his research life over again.” He frowned. “Or was it two-thirds?”

  She shook her head. “Back in England I accepted it as part of the puzzle, part of the challenge. You backtracked, you found a different way, or you gave up that approach altogether. But this is different. We’re up against a deadline, and we can’t afford detours. We’ve wasted a lot of time.”

  “Because of the sequencing?”

  “Yes, everyone’s held up, waiting for it. Well, everyone except Sergei. He’s getting on, quietly screening his phages against the organisms. He keeps himself to himself but at least his lot seem to be making progress.”

  “Is it resolved now?”

  She sighed again. “Yes, thank God. I think they’ll be able to start sequencing properly next week. It’s a good thing we took a good batch of samples at Bermuda, though. We nearly had to go back for more.” She sipped the chocolate again. “What’s happening to the atmospheric levels?”

  “You’re not going to like this.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve just finished analysing the data from the second sampling flight.” He paused. “The average is sixty-one per cent of the threshold level.”

  She sat up.

  “You’re not serious! Sixty-one per cent? Already?”

  “Yes. And it’s rising rapidly.”

  Maggie frowned. “My God. Is this just a local accumulation?”

  “No, that’s the whole point of taking the average at a number of sites and altitudes. There’ll be some variation but we’ve allowed for it.”

  “But at that rate we’ll be across the threshold in weeks not months!”

  “It’s beginning to look that way.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “I thought you said we had six months.”

  “To start with that’s what it looked like, based on the trends Chris and I extracted from the NSF and NOAA data. But a lot has happened out there since. I think the weather’s to blame: hurricanes in the Atlantic, cyclones in Asia – I’ve had reports of water spouts in the South China Sea. Those systems carry the stuff up thousands of feet and transport it far and wide. It’s self-reinforcing: the organisms generate ammonia; that injects energy into the atmosphere, and the high winds spread the organisms even further. The result is, the levels are going up much faster than predicted.”

  “Is Chris aware of this?”

  “I’m sure he is. Chris and Noel Harrison have to monitor the levels as well; we courier the reports to them every week.”

  She straightened up and her lips tightened. “There’s time yet. We can still win.”

  They were washed up in their hundreds all along the coast of the Baja Peninsula in California: Pacific white-sided dolphins, beaked whales – both adults and calves, sperm whales and orcas. Local residents and wild life experts hurried to the beaches in the hope of rescuing at least some of them. They found not a single one alive.

  CHAPTER 34

  A few days later Terry was working in his office when he received a message from Silvia Mussini asking if he and Maggie could come to her lab urgently. He picked up Maggie and they headed straight there.

  Silvia got up from the bench when she saw them come in, stripped off her latex gloves, and had a quick word with Sara Tennant. Then she led them into her office and gestured to the chairs before sitting down herself. Silvia was one of the people Maggie had said she most wanted on the team, based on the superb reputation she’d established at the University of Padua and more recently at the University of California, Berkeley. Terry had had little contact with her until now but her message had been clear: she wanted him to be in on this.

  She shook back her thick, dark hair, and the sunlight from the window illuminated her fine features. She turned to them. Her expression was warm and friendly and there was a lively intelligence in those dark eyes.

  “I have something to show you,” she said.

  She placed a sheet of paper on the desk and turned it towards them. “This is part of the sequence for the plasmid. Matt and his team thought I would like to look at i
t while they are working on the rest.”

  She ran a fingernail along some letters, which she’d underlined. “You recognise this sequence.”

  Terry stared at it, but it meant nothing to him. He looked at Maggie. Her jaw had gone slack.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s the gene for GFP, Terry. Green Fluorescent Protein. It’s a reporter gene.”

  “Okay, but what the hell is a reporter gene?”

  “Terry,” Silvia said. “Molecular biologists don’t just pop genes into cells. It is not so simple. If we are lucky we succeed in maybe one cell in a thousand. So we have to find out which cells actually received the gene. We do that by attaching it to another gene – a special gene that makes something easy to recognize: a reporter. For example, the reporter gene may make a compound that fluoresces. Then if a cell fluoresces it means the reporter is present. If the reporter is present then so is the gene we’re interested in.” She stood up quickly. “Come with me.”

  Silvia led the way to the microscope room. Once inside she switched on the power supplies and they waited while she selected a slide and placed it on the stage of a fluorescence microscope.

  “Close the door and turn off the light,” she instructed and Terry complied, pulling the door to and tugging the cord suspended from the ceiling. The small room was plunged into total darkness. As his eyes accommodated he became aware of a blue glow from the light source, the angular dark outline of the microscope, and Silvia sitting in front of it, making adjustments. She stood up.

  “This is one of your ocean samples. The excitation wavelength is 395 nm.”

  They took turns to peer into the eyepieces.

  “We can have the light on again now.”

  Terry found the cord and blinked as the room was flooded with light again.

  He said, “Every one of those organisms was glowing bright green.”

  “Yes.” Silvia bent forward to switch off the microscope.

  “So every one of them contained this reporter sequence?”

  “Correct. And if an organism contains a reporter sequence it does not get there by accident.” She turned to face them.

  Terry stared at her, comprehension finally dawning on him.

  The small room had gone so quiet he could feel the pressure on his ears.

  She nodded. “Yes, Terry. This was not a spontaneous mutation at all. The plasmid is an artificial DNA construct.”

  He looked at Maggie and saw the shock on his own face reflected in hers. Her mouth moved, the words almost inaudible:

  “Someone wanted these organisms to produce ammonia. They did this on purpose. This thing is man made.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Shall we go?” Silvia said brightly.

  They followed her back and paused in the corridor outside her lab.

  Terry’s mind was racing. “Silvia, we need time to take this on board. We’ll come back to you, okay?”

  “Of course. It was a surprise for me too.”

  Maggie laid a hand on her arm. “Great work, Silvia.”

  They took the stairs down to Terry’s office and he closed the door behind them. Terry waved her to a chair and sat down, his elbows on the desk and his fingertips plunged into his hair. For several minutes they said nothing. He looked up at her.

  “What do you make of this?”

  “You know, it’s actually starting to make sense. Originally we thought the mutation arose in the Sargasso Sea. That didn’t seem hugely surprising – you might expect something of the sort to happen in a rich soup like that. Then you got the NASA data and we found out it actually started on the Eastern seaboard. That’s been sitting in the back of my mind ever since. I kept thinking: why there of all places?” She opened her hands. “Now we know. But, for God’s sake, who made it, and why?”

  Terry’s eyes widened and he started to breathe fast. His voice was taut with excitement. “Maggie, somebody made it.”

  “I know somebody made it. That’s what we just said.”

  “No, you’re not getting it. Somebody made it! Don’t you see? Whoever it was could tell us what’s in the plasmid and how it works.”

  He leapt to his feet. “We need to take this to Washington right away. I was due to fly up there for a status meeting in a couple of days, but I’ll get us on the first flight in the morning. This is huge Maggie. This could be the short cut we need.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Tricia Lawton came into Chris Walmesley’s office carrying a tray, and the room filled with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. She left the tray on the desk with a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

  A few minutes later Chris came through the door and settled behind his desk. “Ah, good. Coffee.”

  He poured two cups and gave one to Maggie and one to Terry. Then he poured one for himself and took a sip.

  “So, what’s new? Please tell me it’s good news.”

  “Sort of, Chris,” Maggie said. “We have a partial sequence for the plasmid. It tells us this wasn’t a spontaneous mutation at all. The organism that caused the problem was man-made.”

  Chris slammed his coffee cup down. “What the hell?! Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. The plasmid contains a well-known artificial sequence. There’s no doubt about it. It was genetic modification.”

  “I can’t believe someone would do such a thing deliberately!”

  “Our thoughts exactly,” said Terry. “There’s more. You remember when we tracked back before and saw the problem originated here in the States? Stands to the reason that whoever designed it, they did it here, Chris. In the USA.”

  “Jesus. You’re right of course.” Walmesley seemed to be in shock.

  “The real issue now,” continued Terry, “is we have no idea who did it, or why, and whether it got out by accident, or whether it was released on purpose. But there is an upside. Maggie?”

  “You know the situation, Chris,” said Maggie. “We’re running out of time – fast. If we could find out who synthesized the plasmid, he could tell us what was in it and how it worked. It would drastically cut the time we need to reach a solution.”

  Chris nodded once and was immediately down to business. “Right. What do we need to do?”

  “Well, seeing as it was made here in the States, can’t we get the FBI onto it?”

  They waited. Walmesley thought for a moment. “The Director of the FBI is Joseph Englehardt, and he reports to Bob Cabot. I could work through Bob, get someone assigned.”

  “SomeONE,” exclaimed Maggie. “Chris, the world’s on the brink of disaster. We should be recruiting every agent in the country.”

  “The president would never go for it, Maggie. There’s no way we could keep an operation like that a secret. In any case until you actually had some leads to follow you couldn’t use that much manpower. But all that’s not really the problem.”

  Maggie looked at him. “Well what is?”

  “An agent or agents would have the investigative skills but it’s not enough in this case. They’d need direct access to specialist knowledge and expertise.” He nodded towards them. “The sort of specialist knowledge and expertise really only you two could provide.”

  Terry blinked. “You’re not suggesting we work with the FBI?”

  “That’s exactly what I am suggesting.”

  Maggie turned to him. “Why not, Terry, if it would speed things up?”

  “Why not? It could be bloody dangerous, that’s why.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  “Well think about it. How did it appear on the other side of the world? It could have been the work of an extremist organization, a highly sophisticated one. We might be up against some pretty nasty people.”

  Walmesley said, “Terrorists usually claim responsibility for attacks. So far as I know, no one’s claimed responsibility for this one. Could be an accidental release.”

  “All right, even if it was think about the damage and loss of life it’s caused already. We’re talking a
bout millions of dollars in law suits. Billions, probably. Whoever did this might kill at the drop of a hat if it kept them from being discovered.”

  Maggie flushed. “All that matters is that the ammonia’s on the verge of crossing the threshold level. If we don’t come up with a solution soon that countdown is going to start and tens of thousands of people are going to lose their lives. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t like to have that on my conscience when I could have avoided it by taking a small risk myself.”

  “Okay, Okay,” said Terry holding up his hands. He sighed. “All right, Chris, looks like we’re in.”

  CHAPTER 36

  The next morning they waited together in Terry’s room. He jerked when the telephone rang but picked it up quickly.

  “Good morning, sir. Reception. Your tour is here.”

  Terry opened his mouth to say “We didn’t order a tour,” then thought better of it. He picked up his brief case and they went down to the lobby.

  A man was waiting for them. He was tall and strongly built. His grey suit needed pressing and although he wore a shirt and tie the top button of his collar was unfastened, as if he couldn’t bear the restriction. His hair was short, a little less extreme than the haircuts Terry had seen on US Marines, but not by much. He greeted them by name and took them out to a blue sedan. There was no FBI shield on the door and Terry couldn’t see one on the windscreen. He hesitated but the man pointedly held the rear door open for them and they got in. He shut the door and got into the driver’s seat. He looked over his shoulder.

  “Name’s Sam Milner, FBI,” he said showing them his badge. “And in the future, if a guy you’ve never met ushers you into an unmarked car, best to ask him who he is before you get in.”

  Then he held out a hand, palm up. Terry looked blankly at it.

  “Brief case. Routine security.”

  Reluctantly Terry handed over the brief case and Milner looked inside, inspecting the lap top, the NASA disks and a few printouts of data and graphs. He handed it back, threw the automatic into drive and moved off.