Double Helix

by Sigmund Brouwer

  But what was this?

  He refocused on the next petri dish.

  Even a blind dog can find a bone.

  Normal development to the sixty-four-cell stage Van Klees guesstimated.

  Encouraging. Yes, very encouraging.

  Give it two more days – about when he should try to implant it – and he might have something here.

  He’d have to implant an original embryo too. There was no sense letting one grow without the other to have as a comparison.

  Fortunately, Zwaan would be back by then.

  Elated by his possible success, Van Klees found the motivation to return to the telephone and the humdrum administration calls that always took too much time away from the laboratory.

  He first collected his messages from all areas. Aside from the university, most were ordinary business calls. There was one message, however, that brought Van Klees to full attention.

  He cursed under his breath. Hadn’t Zwaan taken care of all potential problems in that area?

  Good thing, then, he himself had taken the extra effort to cultivate a safeguard.

  Van Klees punched in the numbers. The phone was answered in two rings.

  “Hello, Paige,” Josef Van Klees said. “This is John Hammond. I just called into New York and got your message. I’m glad to be hearing from you so soon after our supper together. Is this a business call, or pleasure?”

  ***

  Coming up with the excuse for his phone call was a lot easier for Slater than it had been for him to come up with the taped material for it.

  “UCLA main reception,” a bored male voice said.

  Slater checked his watch. Eight forty Pacific time. With luck, he’d catch one of the professors before classes started.

  “Good morning,” Slater said. “Could you transfer me to the language department?”

  “Romance languages? Mideast? Far East? Slavic? Can you be more specific?”

  “Um...” Slater didn’t have any idea. That’s why he was calling. “Romance, That’s French, Italian, right?”

  “If you say so.” The connection ended.

  Ten rings later, someone else picked up the phone.

  “Romance.” The woman’s voice sounded anything but.

  “I’m wondering if I could speak to one of the professors in your department.”

  “Which one?”

  “Whoever is available, if you don’t mind.”

  “Regarding?”

  Slater hadn’t realized he’d need his story so soon. “Regarding a possible journalistic piece for the L.A. Times Sunday Magazine.”

  This connection ended as abruptly as the first had. Stupid, Slater thought, throwing in the word possible, just to keep the statement from being an outright lie. Like, after everything else, whether he told a meaningless lie mattered!

  Slater listened to silence on the telephone as he waited. He was grateful for silence – except for the murmur of his television – outside his study as well. It meant the kids weren’t fighting their situation.

  “George Franklin here.”

  “Hello, Professor Franklin. I hope it won’t be inconvenient to ask one minute’s worth of questions.”

  “No, not really. I do leave for class in about ten minutes. This is for the Times?”

  “It depends on how the article works out,” Slater said. “This might be too weird even for L.A.”

  “Really?” Franklin’s voice grew interested.

  “I’ve been working with some kids who might be from the inner city. As you can imagine, it’s been hairy.”

  “Are you kidding?” Franklin said. “I wouldn’t drive into East L.A. in a Sherman tank.”

  “Exactly.” Slater looked at the microrecorder in his palm. “Anyway, the short of it is that I managed to get some conversation on tape, except I have no idea what’s being said.”

  “The kids were Hispanic, of course.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Slater found himself irritated at the racist overtones of the man’s assumption. He took a breath. “How about I try a clip of it over the phone?”

  “Sure.”

  Slater moved the recorder to the mouthpiece of the telephone and pressed play. The excited babble he’d captured early this morning transmitted clearly.

  “Was it too loud?" Slater asked as he resumed the conversation.

  “No...” Franklin hesitated. “It sounded strange, but familiar. Play it again.”

  Slater did.

  “And again,” Franklin asked moments later.

  Slater complied.

  “Real interesting,” Franklin finally said. “If I’m right, you shouldn’t feel bad for not having a clue. And like you said, something weird is happening there.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think it’s Latin,” Franklin told him. “But call over to Austad. Ben Austad. He’s sharing an office in the Greek department. Let him listen.”

  “Great,” Slater said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “No problem,” Franklin said. “And it’s an ‘i.’ ”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “For your article. F-r-a-n-k-1-i-n. Not ‘e-n.’”

  Before making another call to UCLA, Slater went back to the living room to check on the kids.

  At his approach, they stopped their whispering and graced him with ferocious glares.

  “Hey boys,” he said, “how’s the party? Comfy? Need more snacks? All you need to do is holler.”

  If they understood his wry humor, they did a good job of concealing it.

  Slater grinned, walked behind the couch and leaned over it to gently pull their wrists into sight, allowing him to inspect the knots on their ropes.

  He’d made a difficult decision the night before. These boys seemed wild. They’d attacked him, robbed his truck. They’d scavenged the neighborhood. They’d tried trapping him in his own garage.

  It seemed to Slater he had few choices. He could let the kids go. Except he was more than a little intrigued at the situation, somewhat concerned about the kids, and happy to have a problem to preoccupy him, so he wasn’t about to cast them into the woods again.

  He could call the cops, turn the kids over to them. But aside from putting him in a spotlight of publicity – a bad enough problem – there was something strange about this. The way the cop had suddenly changed his attitude when Slater phoned about the kid. The lack of media coverage you’d expect with missing triplets. The weird language. And the tattoos on their heads. No, Slater wasn’t in a hurry to bring in cops.

  He’d keep the kids as he tried to puzzle this through. Short of building a prison, that meant tying them up to keep them from doing damage to him or the house. Slater had opted to bind their hands behind their backs. He’d given them as much freedom as he dared by hobbling each one separately, a short piece of rope attaching left ankle to right ankle.

  The ropes tested one. They were still securely bound.

  “Latin, huh?” Slater asked.

  Malevolent stares.

  Slater grinned. “Caveat emptor, boys.” It was nearly the extent of his Latin. Senseless, of course, in this situation, but he gave them the translation anyway. “Let the buyer beware. Caveat emptor.”

  They blinked. Comprehension?

  “How’s this?” Slater discovered he was enjoying, after his long solitude, having company, no matter how sullen. “Carpe diem,” he shot at them.

  Now puzzlement. They even exchanged glances, the first time they had allowed him to see any reaction.

  Slater grinned again. He could imagine their thoughts. Why is this guy telling us to seize the day?

  “I saved my best for last, guys, Ready?”

  Slater gave them a drum roll, determined to break down their walls with unrelenting good humor.

  “Cogito ergo sum,” he announced proudly.

  He walked back to the study. “I think, therefore I am.” Let the little cusses ponder that.

  ***

  “Dr. Austad, I’m callin
g on the advice of George Franklin, He suggested you might be interested in some consulting work.”

  “That was kind of him,” a measured voice replied. “Specialists in Latin rarely have the opportunity.”

  Slater never believed much in trusting first impressions. Yet this man’s voice was relaxed, almost contemplative. Slater decided against the journalistic approach he’d found useful with Franklin and, on an impulsive hunch, asked a question he hadn’t planned on.

  “Dr. Austad, do you like mysteries?”

  “Life is a mystery, if you choose to enjoy it that way.”

  Again, unperturbed calm. Austad could have answered so many ways. Annoyance. Flippancy. Nervous laughter. Instead, this was a man whose waters seemed to run deep.

  Slater felt safer. He also realized the anonymity of the telephone still protected him. He plunged ahead.

  “Well, sir,” Slater said, “Would you find it strange to hear about runaway triplets who speak only Latin?”

  The telephone transmitted five seconds of silence from the campus across the six-hundred-odd miles to New Mexico.

  When Ben Austad spoke next, his voice had lost none of its calm. “Runaway triplets who speak only Latin,” he repeated. “I don’t wish to be rude, but are you from Hollywood?”

  ***

  Despite his impatience, Del forced himself to move slowly on this one. He couldn’t risk assigning anyone else to the questions. It didn’t even matter now that Louise hadn’t yet delivered her promised list of hospital personnel.

  Slater Ellis.

  In his hospital report, the guy had listed himself as a resident of Montana. So why didn’t the Montana DMV have any record of him? No driver’s license. No speeding tickets. If Ellis lived in Montana, he got around on horseback when he was there.

  Which wasn’t often.

  Because Slater Ellis lived in New Mexico.

  After Montana had checked negative, Del had done the obvious. He ran Slater Ellis through New Mexico DMV. Sure enough – Del had discovered yesterday afternoon – Ellis had a state driver’s license. Not only that, Ellis had moved three times within the state over the last four years.

  Nothing made sense about the moves either. The guy hadn’t been ducking bill collectors. That would have showed up on the credit report now hidden in the lower-left-hand drawer of Del’s desk.

  Thing was, the guy lived on a poverty-level income. Or if he did make more, it was on a cash-only basis. Del knew that for a fact. He’d called an ex-army buddy who had a low-level position in the FBI – the call had been made from a pay phone because Del often wondered if spooksville had tapped his office phone – and that buddy had called someone in the IRS, who’d called someone two levels up and gotten income information and social security printouts on Slater Ellis, which Del had copied down by hand two hours later from the same phone on his return call to the ex-army FBI man.

  What Del expected was that someone at Slater’s level of income would have plenty of bills. The credit check – arranged by a local bank manager who liked to fish with Del – showed not only zero debts but also zero loans. The guy hadn’t had a chance to miss any payments because he simply didn’t borrow money. Yet a cross-check on vehicle plates showed Slater drove a late-model 4 x 4. Like he’d paid cash?

  When Del had finally noticed something about all the incoming information, much began to fall into place. Nothing – nowhere – was more than four years old. The guy didn’t exist before he’d applied for his driver’s license in Albuquerque.

  Put that alongside the FBI fingerprint report that showed the prints from the pay phone at the hospital belonged to some guy who’d been on the run for four years after being charged with attempted murder.

  Four years on the run. Four years on the new ID for Slater Ellis. And they were rock-solid papers, too, the kind of stuff you paid big bucks for on the black market. A birth certificate that matched some baby who’d died around the same time the guy was born. Social security that wouldn’t raise any flags on the computer. Clean driver’s license. Call it ten grand for all the new papers.

  Four years on the run. Four years on the new ID Convenient. Pretty safe bet Slater Ellis was connected with spooksville. And there was one way to confirm Del’s guess – straight from the horse’s mouth, even if it meant strapping the horse into a chair and pulling teeth from his mouth with pliers.

  Slater Ellis. Del didn’t care who he’d been before. Del knew Slater lived nearby. If Slater Ellis had a telephone or utility account, he was within Del’s grasp.

  ***

  Barely away from the airport and onto Gibson Boulevard, the quiet dude with the bad face reached over and snapped the radio volume control to instant silence.

  “What you doing, man?” Wally Williams said. “That’s ZZ Top!”

  This was his truck, Wally thought, and once onto the interstate they had seventy-five miles to go from Albuquerque to Sante Fe, probably another hour more to Los Alamos. He needed tunes.

  Wally reached for the radio and blared the volume again. Outside the cab of the truck, he took flack from plenty of people, His old lady, the car-payment nag down at the bank, a Hitler boss man. But inside the cab, Wally Williams was king. Put him in the groove of the highway, and the road was his. Took a special breed to drive these semis, and, long hair or not, he was as cowboy as any of the breed.

  The dude reached for the radio again, and Wally would have slapped his hand away, but some old bag in a big domestic car hit the brakes for a yellow light when any idiot would have cruised through, and Wally had to fight the truck to a shuddering stop.

  ZZ Top died with a click.

  Seconds later, with the cab of the truck shaking to the rhythm of a diesel motor idling not quite in tune, Wally looked down at the radio.

  “Are you crazy, dude?” Wally screamed.

  The dude with the bad face handed Wally the volume control knob, which he’d snapped from the radio.

  “Wake me from my sleep,” he said, his first words since meeting Wally at the truck, “and next I rip off your earring.”

  Whoaaa, dude, Wally thought, bad vocals.

  Regardless of his thoughts, Wally Williams understood serious intimidation. He said nothing during the entire three-hour drive to a military compound outside Los Alamos.

  The silence nearly killed Wally. He kept having to deal with the thoughts bouncing around his head, and that was a real bummer.

  As soon as he had unloaded the wooden crates by forklift and set them on a dock outside the one-story building, he was gone, glad to be king in his own cab again, vowing to blow his brains on the stash of major weed waiting for him at the trailer park.

  ***

  Zwaan watched the truck clear the security gates and pull away. There was always a risk some trucker might ask one question too many, and it helped to hire someone whose brains had been fried by chemicals. It didn’t make the trip any easier, though, when all the sleep Zwaan had caught in the last two days had been naps in transit.

  He drew a deep breath and forced energy into himself.

  Ahead of him were the considerable complications of emptying the coffins, introducing the surviving refugees to their new world, and testing them for AIDS – one of the disadvantages of taking specimens from a part of the world with such a high concentration of the virus.

  After all the administration, Zwaan still couldn’t afford to sleep. Not until he’d spoken to Del Silverton. Then to Del’s wife.

  For it wouldn’t do to have the mice playing in his absence.

  ***

  The phone rang at 11:40.

  Seated in front of his computer, Slater snatched the phone from its cradle before the first ring ended. “Good morning, Dr. Austad.”

  “I apologize for the delay,” Ben Austad began. “Two students stopped me in the hallway.”

  “You’re the one doing me the favor. Let me call you right back so we’re talking on my dime.”

  “It’s the university’s dime,” Austad said. “I
consider this research.”

  “Well,” Slater told him, “I’m as interested in the results as you are.” Understatement, Slater added to himself. The two hours waiting for the call had not been productive. The boys had done nothing except stare at him. He in return had been online at his computer, Jogged in as a guest user on the off chance some hacker was tracking him, going over his hidden money markets, but concentrating little on the numbers, glancing back occasionally at the burning stares from his houseguests.

  They had communicated aloud once. Briefly. Then simultaneously released the contents of their bladders on the couch. This action had only underscored Slater’s frustration. Without a common language – or lacking that, some degree of trust – he would make zero progress. The sheer logistics of keeping the boys would force him to either let them loose or turn them in to the authorities.

  This phone call, however, might change his choices.

  “I’ll put us on speaker now. Any questions before we begin?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Austad said. “You did a more than adequate job of explaining the situation earlier.”

  “All right then,” Slater replied. “Here goes.”

  He punched the button on the phone and set the receiver in its cradle.

  “Dr. Austad?”

  “I’m still here.”

  Austad’s voice held the trace of echo that always made hands-free telephone calls annoying. Yet it was loud enough and clear enough.

  The boys on the couch tilted their heads at the unfamiliar voice.

  “You’ve got their attention, Dr. Austad. In fact, you might find it amusing. A new and strange voice in the room and they have no idea how it’s reaching them.”

  “Hard to believe they don’t even understand telephones.”

  Slater opened his mouth to reply, but Austad had continued.

  “Salutatio,” Austad was saying. In Latin, he told them his name was Ben Austad.

  Slater could have dropped a hornet’s nest among them and seen less reaction. They kicked their legs as if bucking loose from the hobbles and shot startled glances at each other.

  “You’ve got their attention, Doctor,” Slater said softly. “Keep going.”

  In a slow, strong voice, he asked them to introduce themselves.