My heart leaped toward the little girl. Tears came to my eyes again. I would never be able to explain to anyone what I felt at this moment.
“She’s Wendy. This is Frannie.” Max made polite, almost formal introductions.
Then Wendy spoke in a soft, squeaky voice. “You should see my twin!”
She pointed to her brother, Peter, who was a nearly perfect copy of his sister, another masterpiece.
An older boy, close to Max’s age, hung back. His hair was fine ash blond and it hung all around his face and down to his shoulders. His frame was lean, his bones fine and long.
It occurred to me that although these children had wings in common, their lineage was different. What could that mean? It meant something important, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I reached out to the boy, but he hissed when I touched his arm. Of course the boy was afraid of me. How could he trust anyone? How could any of the children trust us?
Only with assurances from Max did this little boy named Icarus allow me to approach him.
“I would never hurt you,” I told him.
“Heard that one before,” he said. “That’s how they all talk. Liars!”
Icarus pushed his blond hair away from his face, and I saw then that his irises were an opaque bluish-gray. I looked at Max and she told me what I already knew.
“Icarus is blind,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m kind of a mistake,” said the boy. “We all are.”
Chapter 81
KIT HAD LEFT Frannie and Max with the smaller children. There was so much that he needed to know about this place. He entered an executive office. Some kind of higher-up worked here. A bold sign in Helvetica type caught his eye: Assume nothing. Question everything.
“I’m already there,” he whispered under his breath.
Kit continued to be afraid for the children, and for Frannie. The fear was growing exponentially inside him. He felt that he’d been given responsibility for another family, to make sure they got through this safely. He took the responsibility seriously, and it scared him more than anything else could.
He surveyed the office. There were no photographs, no mementos on any of the table surfaces. Nothing personal was left out in plain sight.
Whose office was it? It had to be somebody important in the scheme of things. The room was about twenty feet square with a picture window opening out onto the lab. The floors were covered with plush, silver-gray carpet. The desk was old blond oak. There was a corkboard on the wall above it.
The papers on the corkboard mesmerized him. He stared at an amazing collection of pen-and-ink drawings of what looked to be theoretical improvements on human parts and organs. Whoever had done the drawings was a very good artist, he was thinking. He shuddered. A cold chill raced up his spine. Whoever did these line drawings—wants to be God.
He took down a manila envelope. Inside the packet were drawings of eyes of different shapes with cross-section illustrations, both lateral and transverse.
Da Vinci would have been proud of this artwork, Kit thought.
There was a complex sequence of drawings of a human leg. The leg was shown in various positions, some requiring a flexibility that seemed impossible to Kit. There was a tight line drawing of an arm, the fingers outstretched. Over the arm was a transparency upon which a new arm had been sketched.
A new arm? Abetter human arm? Is that what I’m looking at?
The new drawing showed longer muscles, and more streamlined digits. It certainly looked like an improvement on the current model. He hated to admit it, but it was actually quite thrilling.
It seemed as if some kind of extremely talented corporate body-part designer were sketching the new models for the coming season.
He was so immersed in studying the drawings that he almost missed the bunch of little keys hanging from a metal pushpin. They’d been right in front of him all the time. He grabbed them, and the corkboard almost came off the wall. The keys were labeled in small, meticulous print.
The first key was to the desk drawer. Kit pulled it so hard, it fell out of the desk, its contents spilling all over the floor.
He bent and rifled through the litter: paper clips and coins and stamps and pens—the usual universal desk debris. There was a Swiss Army knife amid the clutter. He pocketed it. It could come in handy.
The next key opened a long gray metal cabinet beside the corkboard. Inside the dark recess were quart bottles, tightly sealed from the look of them.
He took down the first, labeled “AGE1,” and held it up to the light.
Floating in dark fluid were a dozen embryos no larger than marbles.
Kit thought he might lose it. Right there in somebody’s fancy office. He turned away and blew out hard. He finally calmed down a little. He looked back at the embryos.
Human, he thought. Little dead babies kept in a closet? God damn them!
He forced himself to study the embryonic heads, minuscule fingers and toes sloshing in the liquid. Silent and dead. His stomach was sloshing around pretty good, too.
Kit reached into the cabinet again and took out another large jar. He held it carefully in both hands. This one was marked “AGE2.” It contained another embryo collection much the same as the first. AGE3 and AGE4 were identical to the first jars.
The entire cabinet was filled to capacity with jars of embryos so similar that he couldn’t really differentiate between them.
He took up the third key and slipped it into the lock of a file cabinet standing to the left of the desk. The lock clicked. Kit slid open the top drawer.
Inside was an alphabetical arrangement of files: mundane interoffice memorandums, drafts of an untitled manuscript of some sort.
The middle drawer contained medical magazines dating back to the eighties and clippings from Der Spiegel, a German magazine, a clipping from the Times of London.
In the back of the bottom drawer, he found notebooks filled with formulas and data in scientific techese. It was frustratingly incomprehensible, but looked important. He decided to take a few of the smaller notebooks with him.
As he leafed through the papers, Kit felt a cold prickling at his back. It was too quiet in here, too quiet in general. Why had the lab suddenly been deserted? Abandoned? Why had the bird-children been left behind?
The embryos in the bottles looked long dead. Some of the drawings were flyspecked. Each manuscript was annotated, so marked up and crossed off, it looked as if the author had started, stopped, started again, then finally given up.
And how did all of this link up with Max and the four other children? The ones they’d found lying in their own waste, starving in the cages down the hall? The ones who were probably being put to sleep.
Kit heard a noise behind him and turned. It was only Frannie. He wanted to tell her everything, all at once.
“Come look at this amazing stuff. Tell me what you think.”
Chapter 82
THEIR ARROGANCE is absolutely astonishing. Like nothing I could begin to imagine,” I said angrily. My eyes were greedily taking in the elaborate line drawings on the walls.
Kit was emptying out a carton of documents onto the floor. He lifted up sheaves of paper to show me what he’d found.
“This box is filled with pictures and diagrams of wings. All kinds of wings. They were designing in here. Do you believe this?”
“More like redesigning,” I said, as I leafed through a fistful of the well-wrought line drawings. “Whoever made these drawings is definitely playing God, Kit.”
“It’s the group from Boston and Cambridge, the outlaws from MIT. They make their own rules. They always have. Anthony Peyser believes he’s above the rest of us and above the law as well. Look at these.”
He showed Frannie a half dozen memos to staff. At the bottom of each page was a handwritten A.P.…. Anthony Peyser.
I had been racking my brain trying to think if anyone I knew in the area might be Dr. Peyser. No one came to mind, and I had met most of the medical
doctors and scientists in the area. David knew them all. Where could Peyser be hiding himself? Could this have been his office? Was he the mystery designer?
Kit sat in a desk chair in front of a computer. He was punching letters on the keyboard and a directory of contents had scrolled up.
“I’ve been calling up a few files at random. I haven’t been asked for a password once. The front door is wide open. Why? The keys to the files are hanging on the bulletin board and… Why?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t get it either. Not yet.”
My eyes fell on a pile of the notebooks he’d spilled onto the floor. Whoever had made the notes had a brilliant way with a fine-line pen. The drawings were made with a high degree of medical accuracy, but there was art to them as well. Had Dr. Anthony Peyser actually worked in this room? I suspected that he had. A.P. had been here.
I picked up a drawing from the pile before me. It showed a little boy, an infant, with a heart growing outside its chest cavity, a huge heart. I studied it carefully. It illustrated why tissue engineering was so problematic. No one knew how to reliably stop the cellular growth once the process had begun.
But even if that major problem had been solved, it was a hell of a leap from growing organs on lab animals to growing wings on a human child. And with Max it wasn’t just that she had wings. Her entire cardiopulmonary system was avian, and that led me to conclude that she’d been created out of whole cloth.
My mind was churning at about a million miles an hour. I felt I could go stark raving mad at the blink of an eye. The whole world was being turned upside down. Someone had challenged everything we had learned to believe in and accept.
Assume nothing. Question everything. That’s what this was about, wasn’t it? To evolve life, as man chose to evolve it.
I was considering outrageous possibilities I hadn’t dared to imagine before. One winged child could have been a biological accident, but now that I’d seen the other four, I had to accept that there had been a definite intent to create a new kind of being. And, by God or despite Him, someone had actually done it. Someone had succeeded at playing God here.
What had they created?
Chapter 83
KIT CONTINUED TO WORK furiously at the desktop. Like many of the younger agents in the Bureau, he was good at it. He liked computers most of the time, and was comfortable around them. He brought up Netscape, then opened it. In the location field, he typed—about:global.
Up came all the sites the previous user of the desktop had visited in the past few months. Kit quickly scanned the list. He’d been doing similar detective work on the case before he left Boston.
He honed in on www.ncbi.nbm.n.h.gov. It was Genebank, the government-run repository for all known genetic sequences.
He looked for key words in red, indicating a previous user had clicked on them. There were several. He went to “taxonomy.” Under “Taxonomy browser,” he clicked “tree.” Then he typed in “aves” in the search field.
Apodidae (swifts), Laridae (gulls), Columbidae (doves), and Hirundinidae (swallows) had all been searched.
The plot thickened.
Kit closed the site and returned to the list about:global. Next, he went into the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory site. He futzed around with a few entries, then tried DSHL publications—Genome Research.
He went into the September 1997 issue, where he became puzzled again. The previous user had called up a paper on Double-Muscle Belgian Blue and Piedmontese Cattle.
Cattle? He stopped typing and thought about the curious entry.
“Frannie. Come here for a second,” Kit said without looking away from the screen.
He showed her what he’d been doing, then the last article he found. “What’s all this stuff about cattle somebody from here was checking out? You understand it?”
“Some,” Frannie said. She read the rest of the article, then reread key parts of it. She thought about what she had just absorbed. “Son of a—” she finally said. “I think I understand. I’ll give you a wild theory, anyway.”
Kit nodded and listened.
“The article is about a mutated cow gene. The study actually began twelve years ago. Somebody produced double muscling in the chest of these cows. So here’s a theory. Kit, I think this is how they could have made Max’s chest muscles large enough to support wings and also carry her weight. This is part of how they made her.”
Chapter 84
WE SEARCHED THE COMPUTER files for a few more minutes, but found nothing else of interest. So Kit and I continued our tour of the School. The arrogance and amorality of the scientists working here affronted everything I believed in. I wanted to find one of “them” and strangle the person with my bare hands.
I looked at the foreboding metal sign on the locked door before us: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. So of course, Kit kicked it off its hinges. “Authorization accepted,” he said.
We were instantly bombarded with alarms blaring in the room and out in the halls. We walked inside. The rank smell of human waste washed over us like a fetid cloud. The dark of the room was broken by neon-colored tracers flat-lining across unseen video monitors.
I found the light switch and flicked on the overhead lights.
I have been exposed to some really bad things in my years of working with animals: abuse, neglect, occasional cruelty. But I’d never been confronted with anything as horrifying as this. Nothing even came close.
We were inside some kind of pediatric intensive-care ward. It was filled with shiny new life-support equipment, but also a dozen or so small cribs. All the equipment was new and expensive.
I shook my head slowly back and forth. This couldn’t be real. I held back tears, but it was hard. I looked at Kit. He had turned pale.
Inside the cribs lay dead and dying children. Everywhere I looked, I saw failure of pulmonary, cardiac, and renal systems. The screeching electronic noise was meant to alert medical personnel of trouble, which was pretty much total. Empty IV bags, stalled ventilators and dialysis machines. Vomit and excrement coated the tiny patients.
I finally screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming. Kit reached out and held me. I took long, steadying breaths, until I regained control of myself.
“We have to do something for them,” I whispered. “We can’t leave them to die like this. I can’t do that.”
“I know, I know,” he whispered back. “We’ll do what we can, Frannie.”
The room was painted pale yellow, with a border of whimsical cartoon animals running along the top of the walls. The cartoons made it worse—much worse. A flannel board next to a refrigerator held crayoned pictures, and yellow-on-white happy faces were stuck up at random on the walls. The happy faces killed me. Just killed me. I steeled myself to peer down into the closest crib. Inside, a naked female infant about several months old squirmed and waved her small, perfect hands in the air. The tiny baby had no face, no features at all.
A feeding tube was inserted into her small stomach, but the attached bag was empty. I put my hand gently on the top of her head. The green line of the heart-rate monitor beat faster.
She was aware of me.
“Hello, baby,” I whispered. “Hello, sweet little girl.”
I threw open the fridge, then the cabinet doors. I shoved aside bandages and tubes and syringes, but there was no food anywhere.
In mounting despair, I hurried to the next crib. The baby boy inside was already dead and decomposing. He had a head the size of a volleyball and the musculature of a child of four or five.
“You poor, poor thing.”
I pulled the plug from the monitor, ripped out the catheter in the little one’s head. I covered his face with a blanket.
The third crib held another dead child, a year-old babe with a body shape as ordinary as any little kid on the block—except that his skin was separated in irregular tears. The skin hadn’t grown at the same rate as the child.
The child’s eyelids were inverted, and the sightless, bulging eyes stared up a
t me. I couldn’t ever begin to imagine the pain he had endured before his death, possibly from sepsis. The fourth crib held year-old twins conjoined at the waist. One had died, and because they shared many organs, the other would be dead soon, too.
I gently put my hand on the living child’s cool cheek and the eyes fluttered open.
“Hi, baby. Hi there.”
There was nothing I could do for the living twin, nothing anyone could do without medical supplies. I was sobbing now as I went from crib to crib.
A dialysis tube had once been hooked up but was now dangling alongside the crib of a small being with simian features. The child was undernourished, dehydrated, comatose.
Everywhere I looked were deformed, impossible children. If I was right, the most incredible tragedy was that these children had been grown from ordinary human zygotes. They could have been perfectly normal, but they’d been mutated. Human experiments had been performed in this room again and again.
Kit was going from crib to crib, yanking out electrical cords and tubes. It was the only thing we could do.
Suddenly Max was in the lab beside us. I was afraid for her. I wanted to protect Max from this, but it was too late. Her eyes were sad, but knowing. “They put the babies to sleep,” she whispered. “They do it with the rejects, the losers. They do it all the time. Now you know.”
They! Whoever they were—I hated them fiercely. My fists were clenched tight at my sides.
“We should get out of here right now,” Kit said. “They have to come back at least one more time. They can’t leave all this to be found.”
I looked at Kit. “Or any witnesses.”
Chapter 85
MAX, the other children, Kit, and I hurried through the towering fir woods as if we were playing a bizarre game of tag or hide-and-seek. We were “it.” “They” would be after us soon. We were witnesses to horrible crimes that included murder.
Ironically, the mountains and woods looked so damn pretty. The light was softly dappled. Bluejays and phoebes twittered away. Leaves rustled and fluttered in a lightly pine-scented breeze. But it was as scary as an unexpected trip into Hades. We knew the horrible truth—at least a part of it.
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