Ark

by Charles McCarry

  “What happens to the women who built the ship?” I asked.

  “The best of them would go along, to maintain the ship,” Ng Fred said.

  “That should foster competition.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Do they know the truth about the flight?”

  “They know it will be a long flight—longer than a human life. Before liftoff they will know everything. We don’t lie to our people.”

  “How many will remain aboard?”

  “A hundred or so.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “They’ll go home,” Ng Fred said. “There’s no room for them.”

  “How do you replace workers as they die?”

  “That will be taken care of.”

  “How? Are you going to breed them to the flight crew?”

  “We’re going to let them make their own arrangements,” he said. “Polyandry is the likeliest outcome. Would you be affronted by that?”

  “Not in the least,” I replied.

  Like most of the women I knew, I had been practicing polyandry all my life without calling it by its proper name.

  We spent the night underground. The guest rooms were utilitarian: small, ship-shape, each with its own shower and toilet, computer, and refrigerator. A fact sheet in several languages was provided. The purified water for the scores of people who worked and lived here came from the mountainside spring and was continually recycled, as was the vast amount of urine produced by the workers. The refrigerator contained only juices and bottled springwater. The factory was a drug-, alcohol-, and tobacco-free zone. A fusion reactor, one of Henry’s smaller models, provided electrical power. The sheer efficiency of the whole installation calmed the mind and lifted the spirit. This surprised me. I had always despised the collective, and here I was, admiring with all my heart the only one I had ever seen close up.

  That night we dined with the workers in their cafeteria. Chinese songs played on the sound system—greatest post-Mao hits. After dinner, Ng Fred sang along in a jovial bass-baritone. I joined in with my quavering alto on the two or three songs I knew. Daeng and a tall, anorexic man in a chef’s toque came out to listen. The workers hesitated to join in.

  “Sing, sing!” boomed Ng Fred, waving his arms like a conductor.

  Daeng and the chef added their voices. Daeng sang counter-tenor beautifully in perfect Mandarin, no surprise, and the chef’s tenor wasn’t bad, either. Henry did not utter a sound, but regarded the four of us with guileless affection. Never in my life had I been happier, and while the music and the company had something to do with this, the factory was the real reason for my joy.

  Those pretty little women, hanging as if weightless from spiderwebs inside that sphere and doing their work in silence, had gladdened my heart. There really was going to be a ship, and if we had time on our side and a little luck, life really was going to go on.

  6

  HENRY AND NG FRED STAYED up all night, talking about technical matters. The next morning, Henry cut the trip short—a phone call from Amerigo, he said. Something urgent. Would I mind a stopover?

  Amerigo came aboard the Gulfstream in Milan. His face was grim. His charm was absent.

  He said, “This is serious, Henry. One of my people, a doctor who has worked with us from the beginning, has smuggled several embryos into the plant and placed them in the freezer with the enhanced embryos.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “He sold passage for the embryos to couples who want their DNA to survive the Event. Apparently they were rich couples. The price was five million euros per embryo. That included mixing the sperm and ovum in vitro.”

  “This fellow knows the truth?”

  “He deduced it,” Amerigo replied. “He’s greedy, but he’s not stupid.”

  Henry closed his eyes and tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. This was the equivalent of a loud, foot-long curse from an ordinary person.

  He said, “You have removed these bootlegged embryos, I assume.”

  “We don’t know which ones they are, Henry. Maybe the doctor doesn’t know himself. He labeled them in the same way as all the others and dropped them into the inventory in different slots on different dates. We don’t know exactly how many he smuggled in, and he won’t tell us. For all we know, it could be hundreds.”

  “Did you try checking out his bank deposits?”

  “Yes. Clementine’s moneyman couldn’t find any, apart from his salary. This guy is from Calabria. He could have given every member of his family a million or two in cash to hold for him. They’ll never tell anybody outside the camorra.”

  “Did he enhance the embryos first?”

  “No. I think sabotage was one of his motives.”

  “Explain.”

  “He knows that these specimens will pollute the experiment. If they survive and mate with enhanced individuals, they’ll produce a hybrid. It will mate with other individuals. That will introduce aberrant genes into the gene pool. It’s impossible to know what the effects might be over time. Certainly not what we intended. If you mate a nymph to a mortal, you might get Achilles. But not always.”

  “Why would he do this?”

  “For the money. Why else? Maybe he’s religious and thinks he’s protecting God’s work. Maybe he’s like a computer hacker and did it for the hell of it. But the obvious is usually the explanation. So it’s probably the money.”

  I said, “Wait a minute. ‘God’s work’? You really think that was his motive?”

  Amerigo said, “Why not? The world is full of religious people. Some of them are crazy. The question is, what do we do now?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Amerigo,” Henry said. “The sequence of preservation is as follows: All water is removed from the embryos to avoid the formation of ice crystals in their cells. Then they are placed in plastic containers and cooled until they are chilled enough to be stored in a tank filled with the vapor of liquid nitrogen, which freezes them to a temperature of minus 196 degrees Celsius.”

  “Correct.”

  “They cannot be thawed and refrozen?”

  “It’s considered unwise. Too much handling.”

  “How many survive storage?”

  “Sixty to eighty percent of our embryos should be viable at voyage’s end.”

  “So it’s possible that all the intruders would die en route.”

  “Or they could all survive. Either outcome is statistically unlikely, but not impossible.”

  “What are the stages of thawing?”

  “The embryos, still in their containers, are removed from the tank and warmed at room temperature, then placed in a water bath at a temperature of thirty-seven degrees Celsius. When completely thawed, the embryos are removed from the containers, and then incubated for two days to determine if they are alive.”

  “How do you know they’re alive?”

  “If the embryo was three weeks or older when it was frozen, it will have a beating heart even though it’s small enough to pass through the eye of a needle. If younger, there are other indications.”

  Surely Henry already knew the answers to the questions he was asking Amerigo. I couldn’t understand why he was asking, and from the look on Amerigo’s face and the cautious tone of his voice, neither could he. Henry moved in mysterious ways.

  “Can its DNA be decoded after thawing?” Henry asked.

  “Yes. But the problem of too much handling would arise again.”

  “But that aside, it’s possible to differentiate the intruder embryos from our embryos at the moment of thawing.”

  “Probably. Whether the crew will remember how to do it at the end of such a long flight is another matter. Maybe the crew will have forgotten the English language and can’t read the instructions.”

  “So if you forget all the maybes, where are we?”

  “The question remains,” Amerigo said. “Do we destroy the embryos or not?”

  Henry said, “I think we’ve got to start all ov
er again. Freeze a new batch.”

  “What about the embryos we’ve already got?” Amerigo asked.

  “Let them be,” Henry replied.

  Five

  1

  THE NEW YORK I CAME home to no longer knew all the answers. It was tentative, watchful, apprehensive. So was I. I sent a text message to Adam. He answered instantly. We arranged in ten words or less to meet at ten o’clock.

  “Where?” he queried.

  I was tired, I was thinking of something else, I wanted sex. Without thinking—or so I told myself a nanosecond later when I realized what I had done—I gave him the address of my new apartment.

  I had imagined Adam walking in, stopping in his tracks, and crying “Wow” when he saw the apartment for the first time. He did not disappoint me. As he stepped into the hallway, the door closed itself behind him. He looked up. The Hopper stared back at him. He actually leaped in his skin as if he had been startled by a loud noise. He stared back at the painting for what seemed a full minute, and then took in the other objects in the hall. Without so much as a look at me, he strode into the living room, and then, uninvited, into all the other rooms. He stopped in front of every picture, taking inventory. Adam knew pictures. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

  He said, “This is a Dante Gabriel Rossetti. What is this? Are you apartment-sitting or what?”

  I said, “I’m glad you like it.”

  He walked into my office, the last place I wanted him or anyone else to go. I had framed Clementine’s watercolor and hung it in this room. He walked up to it, nose almost touching the museum glass, and studied it for long moments.

  “This is an original O. Laster,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was a gift,” I said.

  “A gift,” he said tonelessly. “What about the rest of this stuff?”

  I said, “Cut it out, Adam.”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  He sounded like a husband accusing his wife of adultery. I said, “Here’s a simple answer. It’s none of your business.”

  Adam’s face was clenched. He looked like he would never smile again—at least not at me.

  He said, “Tell me the truth. Are you some zillionaire’s squeeze or what?”

  I said, “That does it. Out.”

  I pressed the remote. The door opened. Adam left, walking heavily on his heels as if he wanted to punch holes in the carpet. At the door, he stopped, turned around, and gave me what I thought was a good-bye look. There was no love or understanding in it. Sadness, deep and dark, enveloped me.

  I sobbed—just once, but from the bottom of my being, as if I loved this man. I didn’t, but I knew that something irreversible had happened. It had happened before with other men who didn’t like surprises, so I knew the signs, the look, the feeling. I thought I’d never see this man again.

  2

  I HAD HAD NO SERIOUS exercise in several days. This had a bad effect on my mood. I wanted to run, but lacked the pluck to go to Central Park. I used the treadmill, but it was like prison exercise, no substitute for the smell and sound and jostle and memories of the park.

  One afternoon the phone rang while I was on the treadmill. I saw who the caller was but answered anyway.

  “Clementine here,” said the husky voice. “I was wondering if you might be able to stop by my office. It’s not so very far from you. The chaps will lead you to it. Or we can come to you.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “A person Henry wants you to meet.”

  “When?”

  “Would five o’clock be convenient?”

  “I’ll be there. What is this person’s name?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” said Clementine. “Nice chap. American. Do be sure to take along the phone you’re using now, so the chaps can ring you up.”

  I wore jeans and running shoes to the meeting. As always, the doorman was holding his cell phone to his ear as I got off the elevator. He spoke a word into it and tucked it away. Almost immediately, my own phone rang.

  A slow male Southern voice said, “As you go outside, ma’am, please turn right, then right again on Fifty-seventh Street, then left on Seventh, then left on Fifty-fifth.” I did as I was told. After walking a block and a half on Fifty-fifth Street, a man beside me said, “Next building on the left, please, ma’am.” He went inside with me and rode up with me on the elevator. He then walked me to the door of an office and pressed a buzzer. The sign on the door read Grendel Associates, LLC.

  The bright-eyed sexagenarian waiting in Clementine’s office was no longer young, but not yet elderly. His hair was white and well cut, a bit of pink scalp peeking through. He wore a good suit and shirt and tie and lace-up shoes with a mirror shine. He stood up, spare and tall and not at all unhandsome.

  “May I introduce Mr. Elway Scott?” Clementine said. “He has a few questions about Mr. Mulligan.”

  I said, “He does? Who is he?”

  “I am an attorney at law, engaged by Mr. Henry Peel.”

  “If Henry wants me to talk to a lawyer,” I said, “what’s wrong with the lawyer I know?”

  Clementine said, “Melissa has recused herself owing to your friendship.”

  “Strange reason,” I said. “What’s this about?”

  “Your Mr. Mulligan,” Clementine said.

  Elway Scott handed me a business card—heavy stock, engraved, not embossed. He was a partner in a firm called Scott, Elway, and Starke.

  With a toothy smile, he said, “Shall we begin?”

  I made a gesture of indifference—why not?

  “A couple of weeks ago, a man named Francis P. Mulligan was delivered by Good Samaritans to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital on Park Avenue, near Central Park,” Elway Scott said in a drawling, old-money voice, speaking as smoothly as if he were reading the words off a teleprompter. “The Samaritans, who identified themselves as tourists from London who were stranded in New York by the earthquake, stated that they had discovered Mr. Mulligan, who was a stranger to them, in a state of unconsciousness in the park. Because Mulligan was such a large man, they borrowed a wheelchair to get him to the hospital. They had promised to return this item to the invalid who owned it, and who was waiting on a park bench for their return. Whereupon they disappeared.

  “The emergency room staff,” Scott added, “revived Mr. Mulligan, but not without difficulty. He had a large amount of a powerful antipsychotic drug in his system.

  “Some time later, Mr. Mulligan woke up with a roar, and though he was under restraint, somehow got to his feet, and with his hospital bed strapped to his back, slammed the doctor who was treating him against the wall, knocking him unconscious, and then, with two nurses in flight before him, charged down the ward, upsetting carts, overturning several dispensing machines, and in general terrifying patients and staff. When the police arrived, he was slamming the bed into the wall in an apparent attempt to free himself. Two police officers who attempted to subdue him were injured. They called for backup, and after more humane methods failed to do the job, the police fired Tasers into Mr. Mulligan’s body. Three Taser darts were necessary to subdue him.

  “The cops placed the unconscious Mulligan in a straitjacket and shackles and transported him to Bellevue Hospital, which was better equipped to deal with him. There, he was medicated and placed under heavy restraint.

  “When, after Mr. Mulligan had become somewhat calmer, two police detectives interviewed him,” Scott said. “He told them, in the presence of a staff psychologist, that he had been strolling in Central Park, minding his own business, when a woman wearing a floppy beret rose up out of the wheelchair in which she had been riding and pointed a large brown pistol at him. He had no doubt that she intended to shoot him. He had no idea why she was pointing a gun at him. He assumed she was a maniac. Fearing for his life, and seeing no way to flee through the heavy crowd without causing the woman to open fire and perhaps kill innocent persons by mistake, he ran toward her, intending to disarm her, or fa
iling that, heroically absorb the bullets that might otherwise have wounded or killed innocent bystanders.

  “At that moment, someone threw a net over him and injected him with a drug that rendered him unconscious.”

  Scott paused to drink a little more water.

  “Mr. Mulligan then stated that he had reason to believe that his assailants were in the pay of Mr. Henry Peel,” he said, “and that you, my dear, were responsible for the attack. You had, he stated, poisoned Mr. Peel’s mind against him by telling outrageous lies about him. This had resulted in the abrupt withdrawal of Mr. Peel’s support for his, Mr. Mulligan’s, extremely important dinosaur dig in Mongolia, and in his ignominious expulsion from China by friends of Mr. Peel’s in the Chinese secret police. He stated that you and Mr. Peel are intimate friends, and that he is going to sue Henry Peel for every penny he has and also file charges of assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder against you. And that, my dear young lady, is why I am here. To help you.”

  He and Clementine looked at me like a couple of bright-eyed old parrots hoping for a cracker.

  I said politely, “Help me in what way?”

  “With advice, with guidance,” he said. “It’s easy to put a foot wrong in this kind of situation.”

  “What kind of situation would that be, Mr. Scott?”

  “Surely you see the potential for embarrassment, or worse, for yourself and others.”

  “Surely you’re not suggesting,” I replied, “that the police or the hospital or anyone else could possibly have believed Mulligan’s story.”