Double Helix

by Sigmund Brouwer

  War had not been crisp uniforms and the glamour of ribbons. It had been filth and fear and a dry mouth no matter how many swigs from the canteen. It had been cargo flights of air conditioners and TVs and fresh beef for the generals; beds of grass, and beans and frankfurters for the grunts. It had been a fight against an army supplied with rice and fish heads by bike and wheelbarrow. It had been a place where the most dangerous opponent was an eight-year-old with a soft drink in one hand and a grenade in the other.

  It had also been shame.

  Del didn’t want to let his mind go there, but along with the softening of his body, he’d lost the need and ability to empty his mind for hours at a time.

  Waiting again as if war had returned brought his mind back to the one memory he wished he didn’t carry, to the photographs he cursed.

  Lt. William Calley’s slaughter at My Lai of more than a hundred women, old men, and children hadn’t been the only war atrocity carried out by an American platoon. Del knew Calley’s claim that he was being singled out for the commonplace was too close to the truth.

  In Del’s case, he had missed most of the first of it, taking a half-hour to cover their advance by planting pressure-detonated explosives in the middle of a cart-track road and camouflaging them as the rest of the platoon surged through tiny fields of sweet potatoes into the village ahead. By the time he’d caught up, most of the screams had ended.

  The village was hardly more than ten conical huts with banana-leaf roofs in a beaten clearing. There were scattered grass mats, old soot-blackened aluminum pots, spilled rice, a couple of yellowed photographs of a woman and child in straw hats. The trash of poor peasants,

  Del took those details in mechanically as his eyes were riveted on the five of them hanging upside down from a pole hastily suspended between two supporting trees. Three papasans, a small boy, and an old man. Two soldiers stood nearby, focusing a camera on the bodies.

  Del didn’t see his CO move up beside him.

  “You got that look on your face, Dog-breath.” The man’s cheeks were hollowed by fatigue and camouflage paint.

  “Sir?”

  “The look like you ain’t one of us.”

  “Us sir?”

  “Us. You’ve been in this platoon a week; it’s time you joined. You got your choice. Bayonet those bodies. Or go in the hut where a few of the boys have themselves a woman.”

  Del was shaking his head, confused. The CO pulled an automatic pistol and pointed it at Del’s head.

  “I don’t want to shoot you. You’re a good soldier and the platoon can use good soldiers. But don’t fool yourself. I pull this trigger, and you’re just another dog tag in an envelope headed stateside.” The CO grinned, his hollow cheeks pulling tight. “See, all the rest of us, we’re a unit. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors. Black-market contraband. Brisk trade in pharmaceuticals. War’s making some nice things possible for us. All of us. We can’t afford to have someone we don’t trust. And you get our trust by posing for some pictures. So what’s it going to be? Dead bodies, or a live woman? Surely you ain’t as dumb as you are big.”

  Del chose to attack the bodies on the pole. Never could he rid himself of the vision of the men’s dangling bodies, an albatross hanging around him as surely as if they had been tied to his own neck instead that green sapling pole in the steaming jungle.

  If he got Ellis, Del could free himself of the damning photographs that he’d discovered later were only part of a collection that the CO had been building to use for blackmail after Nam. But the CO had been killed sitting in a latrine, hit by an incoming VC rocket. And all the photos had somehow disappeared, until the spook with the puckered skull had dropped them into Del’s lap.

  He cursed the photos again. If only Slater Ellis would return to his mountain-resort house. That was the first step to reclaiming his freedom.

  Del had been waiting beneath the tree since eight o’clock the evening before. He’d rented a car for this – afraid his own vehicles might have electronic tracers and wanting to be certain spooksville wouldn’t know he’d made the move here – and hidden the rental well on a dirt track some hundred yards down the road.

  Out of police uniform and wearing noiseless soft hunting clothes, he’d eased along the trees that shadowed Slater’s driveway to this rise. He would watch the house from here, unseen, as long as it took to decide when to hit, then hit hard. That would give him the night and as much of tomorrow as he needed to break the guy.

  Except the house had been empty.

  Del had wanted badly to go inside, check around, learn more about Ellis, see if he’d packed and run. But that was too risky. If Ellis returned, not alone, it wouldn’t be a perfect grab. Anyway, Del had taken the next day off, anticipating a long, difficult interrogation. He’d told only Louise his destination, and he’d told her it might take all night. So he could afford to wait. If Slater didn’t return by noon, then Del would cheek the house and from there begin tracking Slater’s flight. If Slater did return, it would make the night beneath the spruce branches more than worthwhile.

  Just past dawn, Del had slowly rolled away from the tree, and, lying on his side, had emptied his bladder before rolling back to cover beneath the tree. This was a combat situation, and he was going to play it that way. War brought down the unwary and the lazy, and Del refused to get sloppy in his vigilance.

  The sun was hot now, and Del had been motionless for nearly four hours, long enough to add pressure to his bladder again. He was thirsty – hadn’t planned on a full night here – and tired of the crawly sensation of needles from the low spruce boughs against the back of his neck. Twice he had let a spider crawl across his face. Once a squirrel had darted across his feet. Yet Del was too stubborn to deviate from what he’d learned in Nam. He would not move.

  As his bladder reached the aching point again, the noise of an approaching vehicle rewarded his sore muscles and determination.

  But it didn’t sound like a 4 x 4 to Del. Nor like the beat-up station wagon of the idiot who had shown up the day before at exactly the wrong time. Instead, it was a much softer engine noise – a late-model American make.

  When the vehicle broke into view below him, Del saw he’d guessed right. What caught his breath was the person who stepped out: the freak with the scarred face and puckered head.

  Del closed his eyes. There was only one reason he’d told Louise his destination. And he’d desperately hoped she wouldn’t fail his test. Now the snake of betrayal coiling through his guts told him she had.

  ***

  Van Klees drove to the square, flat industrial building at the north end of town. At the security gate he nodded at the guard, then proceeded to the back of the building and parked in the stall reserved for Jack Tansworth.

  Nothing about the building rated a second glance. It was set well back from the street. Except at the rear, where the paved lot was large enough to accommodate thirty vehicles, large maple trees shaded and hid most of the building. Its unassuming appearance had helped Van Klees to choose this location.

  As he walked to the rear entrance, Van Klees took in the lines of the building with an indulgent smile, a habit of his on every approach to the TechnoGen corporate headquarters. He freely admitted his weakness of allowing himself this satisfaction in TechnoGen. After all, as with the New York real estate corporation belonging to his John Hammond identity, TechnoGen was merely the means to an end. Just a cog in the conglomerate that only Van Klees and Zwaan – now that Darby Stephens was dead – knew and understood to be the support base for the Institute.

  Van Klees always forgave his weakness of satisfaction, however, by reminding himself that TechnoGen alone would be the life’s work of a lesser person. And he took pride in knowing the same lesser person would still be hailed as a genius by the business world, should a company like TechnoGen ever allow some of its activities to reach a higher profile.

  Yes, this was a public company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, a move that had put ten million
dollars into Van Klees’s slush fund. TechnoGen was designed to withstand any scrutiny – from the Internal Revenue Service or any other government agency. But, legal as the company’s activities were, Van Klees would never permit the least amount of media profile. Not with the source of its revenue base: fetal parts.

  Van Klees had fifteen specialists on the road every day. Each one traveled a weekly regional route to local abortion clinics to scavenge for the remains of aborted fetuses. Just about any fetal part was valuable – from brain slivers to organ pieces, to a whole heart. These “specialists” paid the abortion clinics a service fee for the inconvenience caused by their searches; fetal-tissue users in turn paid TechnoGen a handling fee. Thus, based on service charges only, no government organization would be able to claim TechnoGen actually bought or sold human body parts.

  In short, one of TechnoGen’s roles was as tissue broker. With scientists and researchers proclaiming fetal transplantation as one of the most exciting areas of human biotechnology, business was booming. One tremendous advantage of human fetal parts was the legal simplicity. Fetal tissue wasn’t taken from anything the supreme court recognized as human; scientists and researchers never had to worry about lawsuits. Almost as significant, fetal body parts grow far more easily than the biological materials of mature humans.

  Van Klees often felt smug at how well he had recognized TechnoGen as not only a perfect tie-in to the Institute but also as a business opportunity. There were maybe a half-dozen other fetal harvesters in the country, certainly no more than a dozen. He had conceived – and he often smiled at that pun – and formed a thriving company in a virtual monopoly position. TechnoGen’s service-charge revenue in the area of fetal parts had recently broken the five-million-dollar-a-year mark, with a net prost hovering at 30 percent.

  Van Klees had not been slow to see another opportunity, directly linked to his supply source. Upon reading research papers on the subject, he’d immediately begun a smaller division to copy other researchers’ success of creating humanized mice. The process was simple. The TechnoGen lab technicians took the thymus, liver, and lymph nodes from human fetuses, then implanted a piece of each organ under the kidneys of young mice. Within a few days, the blood vessels of the mice would begin to penetrate the human subparts, and these fetal organs would begin to grow, eventually producing human immune system cells within the mouse. These mice were ideal for experiments; injected with human leukemia-causing viruses or the human AIDS virus, they could be used to screen antiviral compounds for effectiveness. Each human mouse was worth Five thousand dollars in resale but cost barely a hundred dollars to raise; TechnoGen produced generation after generation for sale to pharmaceutical companies, who in turn knew a billion-dollar pot at the end of the rainbow belonged to the first to find a cure for any one of dozens of diseases.

  TechnoGen’s same division was also experimenting with other injections. If mice could produce human immune cells, why not graft other fetal parts – human lungs, or intestines, pancreas, pituitary glands, skin or brain cells – into mice? After all, TechnoGen could pick and choose the best part samples from the hundreds of aborted fetuses it scavenged each week.

  Because of this, Van Klees and TechnoGen had lately – with success – been putting pressure on physicians for better quality fetal parts. Van Klees knew better than to hope for the ideal – copying Swedish researchers who had harvested tissue from a live fetus in the mother’s womb before it had been aborted. So he settled for second best. TechnoGen advertised – discretely, of course – and paid higher fees to doctors who used the dilation-and-evacuation technique on fetuses in the second trimester of pregnancy. At that age, the fetuses were large enough and distinctly formed enough to provide excellent organ parts. Van Klees was forced to pay the higher rates because squeamish doctors preferred other methods of abortion, which killed the fetus before labor. The extra payment was worth it, however, since dilation-and-evacuation sucked the fetus out of the anesthetized mother, and the TechnoGen specialists were often able to harvest the fetus still alive in the operating room.

  If harvesting the unborn and implanting their parts into experimental animals were all that TechnoGen did, it would still be a remarkable company, Van Klees repeatedly noted.

  But always, and from the beginning, there was the shadow behind it: the Institute.

  ***

  Van Klees carried a bulky briefcase into the reception area of TechnoGen. Nothing about him or his unwrinkled clothing hinted that since dawn he’d flown from Sante Fe to Albuquerque and then to D.C., then later from D.C. to Pittsburgh.

  A smiling redheaded secretary welcomed him.

  “Mr. Tansworth, how nice to see you.”

  Van Klees forced a warm smile on his face. So tedious, the predictability of women like this, believing he would respond to the wrigglings of mere flesh, as if his mind would permit bodily functions to overrule and risk the larger visions he carried. These women only wanted to leech from him, hoping with intimacy to gain some of his greatness.

  “Good afternoon, Tammy,” Van Klees said. “I see you’ve done something new with your hair. It looks terrific.”

  She beamed.

  Van Klees moved on. Loyalty took so little to acquire.

  He stopped several steps later, paused and turned, the act of someone remembering something casual.

  “Oh, Tammy,” he called. “Did the shipments of eggs arrived as scheduled?”

  “Yes sir,” she said.

  Van Klees knew she was admiring the broadness of his shoulders. He wanted to snarl at her.

  “Wonderful,” he said with a return smile. “And a courier picked them up again to redirect the shipment?”

  “Yes, Mr. Tansworth.”

  He maintained his smile. The eggs would be awaiting him at the Institute the next day. Let the taxpayers complain, Van Klees thought, but the military can be extremely efficient transporters when motivated.

  Five minutes later, Van Klees sat relaxed in the heavy leather chair opposite the desk of TechnoGen’s director.

  “Keith, you’ll find the notes to be in excellent order.” Van Klees did that as frequently as possible, calling people by their first names. Salesmanship.

  Keith Edison looked up from the open briefcase on his desk. “Why would these be different from any of the others?”

  No reason at all. Not a year’s worth of Institute research neatly condensed into a stack of laser-printed reports.

  “Read through them before you pass them on to the researchers,” Van Klees said. “I’m sure you’ll find some commercial application.”

  Van Klees gave a leering grin. “And I’m sure you’ll find some use for the year-end bonus when those commercial applications add to our bottom line.”

  Keith Edison leered back. A short, wide man, his face was almost puce. He liked his food, he liked his booze, he liked his private airplane, and he liked the yacht he flew to every weekend in Atlantic City. He was the perfect director for TechnoGen because he asked very few questions as long as his yearly bonus remained intact.

  “Year in, year out, boss,” he said, “you wait until the end of the university school year and plunk down these genetic miracles ten years ahead of the rest of the pack. Tough life, huh, going from campus to campus?”

  “There are a few creature comforts,” Van Klees allowed. He kept his grin at a leer. The button to push with Edison was women. Let him think you chased them as much as he did.

  “Long-legged twenty-year-olds. Nice of you to sacrifice for TechnoGen.”

  “We all have our roles to play.” Van Klees gave a theatrical sigh. “I’ll endure mine.”

  Keith nodded and smiled dreamily.

  “By the way,” Van Klees said. “Any updates on the demethylase enzyme?”

  “It’s costing us a ton of money.”

  Van Klees leaned forward. “Then make more.”

  Keith held up his hands in mock self-defense. “Don’t kill me, boss man. You’ll break the hearts of all my g
irlfriends.”

  Van Klees resumed his relaxed position. Inside, he fumed. Partly at Edison’s irreverence, and partly at how he himself had slipped, betrayed too strong an interest.

  “Until I get your girlfriends’ phone numbers, I guess you’re safe.” Van Klees hated common banter, but if that’s what it took, he’d do it. “I couldn’t let you die without knowing where you kept your treasure.”

  “Then I’ll keep my little black book out of sight,” Edison said. “As for the demethylase, we did get one of the frogs slightly beyond the end of the tadpole stage. But that was it. And we can’t seem to isolate what blocked the rest of the development.”

  Van Klees nodded. “Stay with it, all right?”

  Edison shrugged. “Your company, boss man.”

  Boss man. So vulgar. Van Klees wondered if it would be worth more to lose Edison’s services in exchange for the satisfaction of seeing him reduced to begging hamburger by Zwaan.

  He stood up and shook Edison’s hand.

  “You’re a good man, Keith. Keep it going. And get me a copy of your latest work on the tadpoles.”

  “Sure.” Edison was standing too. “If it finally works, I think I’ll clone myself. Just imagine. Then I could handle a dozen more broads.”

  Van Klees smiled. “Yes, Keith. Just imagine.”

  Chapter 10

  Thursday, May 25

  She nearly said, Hello, John,” when she picked up the phone because she half hoped it was Hammond returning her call from wherever he might be in the country. She didn’t expect any other callers anyway, not during her cloistered retreat here.