by Jamie Metzl
“You don’t have to do that,” I say, moving behind her and placing my hands on her shoulders.
“It’s okay,” she says softly.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess,” I whisper into her ear.
She turns to face me. “I made my own choice.”
“Because I asked?”
“Probably,” she says reflectively. “Mostly. I see death all the time at work, but there’s something significant about deciding one person is important, for whatever reason. Sometimes one baby dying at the NICU hits hard. I don’t always know even why one death reaches me more than others.”
I hold her to me.
“Sometimes we just pick one thing to care about, one person, because that’s all we can do,” she continues, her message to me clear. “That’s our statement to the universe that our lives don’t just amount to birth and death statistics even though in the big picture they might.”
Toni’s words reach me. Maybe we each have to just mark off a corner of the universe to call our own, to care for, to project meaning into. Maybe nothing is our destiny except for what we randomly declare to be so.
“Thank you for being here, with me,” I say softly.
She reaches for the washcloth to dry her hands and looks me in the eye.
I feel us reconnecting.
Then she smushes the wet washcloth in my face.
I don’t move.
She puts the washcloth on the counter and wipes my face with her palm. Her smiling face grows serious. “I’m here, baby.”
48
I’m a strange brew of delirious and groggy when I meet Maurice at the I-435 Hilton at 5:45 a.m. Even at this early hour Maurice looks solid and starched.
He preps me one last time then sits in his car as I go in. I chug myself a quick mug from the lobby coffee pot. It tastes like dirt.
I take the elevator to the fifteenth floor then pause a moment in front of room 1527. My heart pounds.
Bam. Bam. Bam. I’m normally not such an aggressive knocker. I count to five, as Maurice and I have practiced.
Bam. Bam. Bam. I hear rustling. One, two, three, four, five.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
“Hold on.” Gillespie’s words are forceful and angry.
A few moments later the door opens partly and Gillespie reaches his head, turtle-like, into the opening. His hair is messy, his white bathrobe uneven.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Gillespie’s words only technically constitute a question.
“We need to talk,” I say calmly.
“How did you find me?”
“I don’t have time for this,” I say. “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t serious.”
Gillespie stares at me, trying, it seems, to assess if I am. “I’ll meet you in the coffee shop in twenty minutes.”
This is one of the responses I’d prepared for.
“No,” I say. “I need to talk with you now.”
“Fuck yourself,” Gillespie says. “Twenty minutes.”
The door pushes shut.
So much for seizing the momentum.
I amble back to the elevator, feeling like I’ve failed my first test, then slide into a booth in the coffee shop and wait.
The Gillespie who sits across from me is very different from the mess of raw emotion I’d encountered twenty minutes before. This Gillespie is back in suit and tie, his eyes awakened. He is back, in other words, in control.
“So,” he says, his eyes bearing down on mine, “I’ll ask you again. What the fuck are you doing here?”
I stare back for a moment before speaking. “Yesterday morning I told you about the text message I received.”
“And I told you to back off. What about ‘fuck off’ don’t you understand?”
“I got another text. This one said that MaryLee Stock was impregnated at a fertility clinic called Bright Horizons. Have you heard of it?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m sensing a lot of hostility from you. Are you sure you should be taking caffeine?”
Gillespie’s nostrils flare. Something about harassing him is starting to give me pleasure. “It said she was impregnated at Bright Horizons with a mutated embryo, and it said that Bright Horizons is owned by a front company that belongs to the United States Department of National Competitiveness. I’m just feeling torn. I’m trying to drop this case, but I keep getting these messages and I want to do everything I can to help your investigation.”
Gillespie looks like he’s going to kill me.
“And it said there’s a woman at Bright Horizons named Jessica Crandell who is involved in this who has a lot of information about what’s going on.”
Gillespie is on the verge of boiling over. He stares through me with venomous eyes. “Are you done?”
I nod slightly.
“You can cut the bullshit about the text messages,” he hisses. “I know what you’re doing. I know you don’t give a shit about what happens to the Kansas City Star.”
“Not that much.”
Gillespie shakes his head. “But I’d imagine you care about what might happen to you. I think you know, or you should know, that once you’ve started covering a story, the News Protection Act applies to you, even if you no longer work for the same organization. You are personally, criminally liable. Everything you’re telling me now can and probably will be used against you in a court of law. It’s not a regular court. It’s a FISA court. Do you know what that is?”
I don’t respond.
“Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It’s where we try people connected to state secrets. It’s not a good place to be. Do you know how long it will take me to get a warrant for your arrest?”
“State secrets?” I ask.
“Fuck off.” He stares at me, awaiting my answer.
My position is weakening, but I’m not going to indulge him with an answer.
“I can arrest you now. I can get retrospective FISA approval in an hour. You know why I’m not doing that?”
“Why?”
“Because I think you have no idea what the hell you’re doing, what you’re interfering with.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“I know you think you’re being clever, but I’m actually going to tell you. Do you know why?”
I’m afraid to ask. “Why?”
“For two reasons. First, because you have uncovered some useful information for us.”
The words surprise me. Who have I compromised?
“You’re a smart guy, Azadian,” Gillespie continues, “but we’re both smart. I can have you locked up right now, but believe it or not, I respect you enough to think that once I tell you what’s actually going on here you’ll realize you’re barking up the wrong tree and back the fuck off. Or you’ll be smart enough to recognize how painful this will be for you and the people around you if you keep going. I can haul you in, but even I understand it’s never possible to completely muzzle someone.”
He looks me straight in the eye and then adds calmly, “No matter how much I would want to do so.”
The words send a chill through my body.
“Do you want to know the second reason?”
My internal radar says no.
“I’m telling you so I’ll know that if anything on this leaks, you’re the one responsible. It’s like swallowing dye before an MRI. If this gets out, I’ll know that my first reason didn’t pan out and I’ll have the Star shut down and”—his eyes lock on mine—“I’ll have you shut down. Am I clear?”
My swallow reflex betrays me.
“Good,” he says. “You’re right about MaryLee Stock,” he adds after a pause to let his words sink in. “That’s why I’m here. You already know that.”
“I do.”
“You’re right about the extra chromosome. When someone is born naturally with an extra chromosome, it’s a mutation. When someone is conceived that way through IVFGS at a fertility clinic, it’s a crime.”
I’m trying to f
igure out where he is going with this.
“You’re right that Bright Horizons was involved. That’s why we’ve been tracking them. That’s why we are shutting them down. I met with Jessica Crandell about this yesterday.”
I stare at him blankly.
“You’re wrong about the US government owning Bright Horizons. We’ve been tracking them for months. They’re owned by a front company in the Cayman Islands. We’ve been trying to hack into their computer network but haven’t succeeded, which is why we’ve had to do things the old-fashioned way.”
“Which is?”
“Watching. Which is why I know where you were last Saturday, Dikran. May I call you Dikran?”
May I call you asshole? I want to say.
“So you should be grateful we’ve let you enjoy your weekend away with your girlfriend. We wanted to see what you were up to.”
Now I’m the one seething.
“We lost you for a while, but then you came back on the grid. Which leads us back to the same three questions.”
“Which are?”
“Who owns Bright Horizons, why was MaryLee Stock killed, and why was Chinese intelligence monitoring this so closely?”
“Chinese intelligence?”
“Don’t be that surprised. Your little friend was the one who alerted us that she’d slipped away.”
“She?”
“The Chinese girl, the pharmacy student, Min Zhao.”
“And you think—?” I stammer.
“I think they knew something about Bright Horizons. Do I think the Chinese girl killed MaryLee Stock? Could be.”
“Why would they do that?” I ask. Looking over Gillespie’s shoulder, I notice Collins at a corner table. I have no idea how long he’s been there, which is all the more unsettling. His unflinching, hawkish glare locked on me with an eerie intensity I can feel acutely from fifty feet away.
“I’ll ask you a question,” Gillespie says.
I shift my eyes and nod apprehensively.
He lifts his mug and takes a long, slow sip before placing it back on the table. “Have you ever heard of Yao Ming?”
49
I don’t even know how to begin responding to the question.
“The old basketball player?” I stammer.
Gillespie just looks at me.
My mouth begins to form a question, but I’m not quite sure what to ask.
“Where do you think Yao Ming came from?” Gillespie asks. The words shoot from his mouth like bullets from an automatic.
“Um, China.”
“Yao Ming was bred,” Gillespie declares.
I’m not sure where he’s heading, or what it possibly has to do with the murder of MaryLee Stock. I hold my gaze.
“In the nineteen seventies China decided they wanted to compete in international sports like basketball. They sent scouts around the country looking for people with the right physical attributes. Kids with incredible coordination for diving, strength for weight lifting, speed for running—”
“And height,” I say, trying to stay on my game by cutting short his pedantry.
“Yao Ming’s parents were each recruited by the government.” Gillespie scowls. “His dad was the star center for the men’s team. The mom was the same for the women. The lead sports official decided to put them together to breed the next superstar for the state. He was born into the national basketball academy. His training started when he was a little kid.”
“And you’re telling me this because . . .”
Gillespie doesn’t listen, only launches into another annoying rhetorical question. “Do you know how many gold medals China won three years ago in the 2020 Olympics?”
“In Tokyo?”
“Yes.”
“A lot. They kicked our asses.”
“The answer is sixty-two,” Gillespie says without inflection. “How many did they win in the eighty-eight Olympics?”
“How many?” My tone conveys how sick I’m getting of this what-am-I-thinking game.
“Five. Twelve years later they won twenty-eight in the 2000 games. Eight years after, fifty-one in Beijing.”
“And?” I say, hardly hiding my annoyance at being given a sports trivia lesson.
“The point is that China is getting stronger and stronger. Why?”
I don’t respond. If he wants to tell me, let him.
“Because they’ve been finding the kids with all the right physical characteristics, taking them away from their families, and putting them in sports schools around the country where they spend all their time training. Most of the kids don’t make it, but in a country of over a billion people they can find the superstars.”
“So what does this have to do with MaryLee Stock?”
Gillespie ignores me and marches on. “Have you ever heard of a Sweeney mouse?”
The pedantry is getting to me. “No.”
Gillespie shakes his head slightly as if to suggest I’m a hopeless idiot. “It’s a genetically altered mouse, actually a bunch of mice, created at the University of Pennsylvania. Sweeney mice all have a forty-seventh chromosome. Some of them have genes that make them stronger, some of them smarter, and down the line.”
Gillespie’s words suddenly became a lot more interesting. I sit up in my chair.
“The logical thing would be to explore whether the technology could apply to humans,” Gillespie says, “but we can’t.”
“Politics?” I say, starting to imagine options for where he might be going.
“Yes. Political battles here, but not in China.”
Gillespie pauses for dramatic effect. “I’m guessing you also haven’t heard of the mouse called Wu.”
I don’t answer.
Gillespie gives the same you’re-an-idiot head shake. “It’s named after a Yale University professor named Wu Tian who moved back to China sixteen years ago. He started a lab in Shanghai financed by the Chinese government doing genetic research on knockout mice on a scale never been done before.”
“What’s that?”
“A mouse with a special moth gene that can be used to turn off one gene at a time, and a jellyfish gene that lights up to show which offspring carries the mutation.”
I’m amazed a federal marshal knows this much about genetics.
“I don’t expect you to understand this, but they isolated thousands of genes that governed specific traits and began to figure out what small changes to the mouse genome actually meant, then they started experimenting with different combinations of simultaneous genetic manipulations to see what patterns would emerge.”
I nod cautiously, mindful of how completely I’m being pulled into Gillespie’s story.
“Next, they built an automated factory to genetically alter and test tens of thousands of mice a day and integrated that data with the data they were stealing from the genome sequencing and synthetic biology labs around the world. The Chinese government put tens of billions of dollars toward becoming the world leader in applied genomics with a very specific goal.”
The pieces begin to come together in my mind. “And because the mouse genome and the human genome are essentially the same—”
Gillespie cuts me off. “They have essentially the same sets of genes, just organized in a different order, but yes, the three pieces come together. Yao Ming tells us that the Chinese are perfectly comfortable using selective breeding to advance the goals of the state. They are a country run by engineers. For them, the genome is just another system to be rigged. The sports schools tell us that China will take these kids away from their families to train them for their one purpose in life. But the big part of the puzzle is what we’ve begun to learn about China’s plans to use the kind of genetic enhancements applied to the Sweeney and Wu mice to create new human champions of the Chinese state.”
“Athletes?”
Gillespie’s look says you’re dumber than I thought. “Scientists, inventors, business leaders, engineers, mathematicians, computer experts, musicians. Anything where China is c
ompeting with the rest of the world, anything to give them a competitive advantage.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Let’s just say we do.”
“And we is?” I ask.
“You already know the answer to that question, Dikran. The US Department of National Competitiveness. That’s our job.”
Stop calling me fucking Dikran. “So why not just go public?”
“Because we don’t have all the information. Because we probably won’t be able to stop them. That’s why we’ve been monitoring them.”
“Them?”
“The Tianjin Genomics Institute, the Ministry of State Security, a unit of military intelligence called 8341. We don’t know what they can do. We only know what they want to do. They started a massive cognitive genomics program a decade ago to try to map the genetic footprint of genius, run by a quirky genius named Zhao Bo Wu. They’ve got all the systems in place, the genomics institute, the elite schools for all sorts of things based on the sports school model. Right now they’re funneling their best and brightest kids into those schools, and the results are impressive. First Yao Ming, then He Shiwen who demolished her own world records in the swimming pool in Tokyo, now the pianist Ying Lang. I guarantee you that the kids in their science schools will be winning Nobel Prizes for decades, even without genetic enhancement. If they’re making as much progress on genetic enhancement as we think they are, then all bets are off once those kids enter the system. If it works, there might be no way for us to compete down the line.”
“But you don’t know whether there’s a Chinese Sweeney yet?”
Gillespie drives his index finger into the table. “That is the point. We know they’re making huge progress. We know they’ve isolated key genetic patterns that make up different types of intelligence in mice and are putting huge resources into figuring out how these patterns can apply in humans. We know they are collecting or stealing the full genomic readings of tens of thousands of the smartest people in the world and comparing their genomes with those of normal people to try and figure out the genetic recipe for intelligence. We know they and others have found specific genes that correlate to thicker gray matter in the brain and the functioning of the cerebral cortex. I’m sure the letters KL-VS, NR2B, and NPTN don’t mean much to you, but they’re all genes linked to heightened intelligence the Chinese are focusing on. We know the Chinese are setting up systems designed to breed and educate kids with superhuman capabilities. Do we have someone reporting daily from the secret Chinese military intelligence unit overseeing this all? No.”
