The List - A Thriller

by Konrath, J. A.

  “I don’t know what the hell you just said.” Roy got off the sofa. He gave Tom a look of intent, patting the Foxhound in the pocket. Off to check the rest of the place out. “Anyone want some water?”

  “Kitchen is through there. How about you two? Am I going too fast?”

  Tom ventured a guess. “You were scraping out fertilized eggs and adding your own genes?”

  “Exactly. But it didn’t work. We couldn’t get the enucleated egg and the donor cell to fuse. We tried the Sendai virus, electrofusion—nothing worked. Then, as a control, I tried it with a non fertilized ova. It fused into a zygote like magic.”

  “So all you did was put a human cell in an empty egg and it grew?” Bert seemed surprised.

  “Well, my boy, you make twenty years of research sound simple. Actually, it was much more difficult than that. You had to actually put the donor cells in the gap-zero phase by starving them. You see, cells go through phases—”

  “Doctor.” Tom held up his hand. “You might as well be speaking Martian. We believe you when you say it was hard work.”

  “Darn tootin’. And we finally did it—grew an embryo in agar and transplanted it into the uterus of a woman, who successfully gave birth to a healthy baby. We did it many times, in fact. You can imagine how excited we were. But again, it had to be kept quiet, and again, it wasn’t enough. Our next miracle was to bring dead cells back to life. Which, of course, is impossible.”

  “It can’t be impossible.” Bert leaned back and crossed his legs. “Because here we are.”

  “Oh, but it is impossible. Once tissue is dead, it’s dead. Frankenstein’s monster will forever remain in the realm of fiction. My team did enough work on that to settle the debate forever.”

  “So how…?”

  “Are you sure no one would like some coffee? You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to tell this, after so long. I don’t even have access to my notes. There won’t be any memoirs, any posthumous Nobel Prize. He took everything.”

  “Who did?”

  “We’ll get to that in a moment. Anyhoo, once we proved that regenerating dead tissue was impossible, we did the next best thing. We copied it.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow. “You cloned it?”

  “No, you can’t clone dead tissue. The cell has to be alive, in the dormant G-zero phase, before we can take out the DNA. In a dead cell, the DNA won’t replicate. It’s a shell, a corpse. But since all DNA is simply building blocks made up of protein, all we had to do is reconstruct a dead person’s genetic code. Rebuild it out of raw material, so to speak, in the exact same way as the original.”

  Roy came back with a glass of water. He shook his head at Tom and sat down carefully on his donut.

  Tom puzzled over Harold’s latest words but couldn’t get them to ring true. Even with today’s technology, it was impossible to build a strand of DNA from the ground up. There was just no way.

  “Doctor, I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

  Bert shrugged. “I got lost right after he mentioned the twigs.”

  Tom continued. “Maybe I can believe you doing all of these reproductive experiments years ahead of the scientific community, and I can even believe that you cloned a person from a live cell. But human DNA wasn’t even completely mapped until a few years ago, and that took a decade, using the biggest super computers. I read the article in Time. Even then, it was only mapped—that’s just the general picture. To get an exact replica, it needs to be sequenced, and that’s still a long way off.”

  “You’re right. We didn’t have the technology back then to sequence the entire human genome. Let alone the genomes of the ten people that we cloned. There are over 50,000 genes in a human being, made up of billions of base pairs. We never could have sorted them all out and put them in the right order.”

  Tom leaned forward, arms on his knees. “So how did you do it?”

  Harold’s face lit up. “We took a picture. A very special picture. And from the picture we made a living cell.”

  “Please explain.”

  “In 1953, Watson and Crick used X-ray crystallography to discover the structure of a DNA molecule. They bounced radiation off of DNA and formed an image on photographic film, coming up with the double helix configuration. How much do you know about DNA?”

  Tom thought back to high school biology, over twelve years ago.

  “It’s made up of four bases. They match up with each other in special orders. When the DNA replicates, it unzips, and then free floating proteins match up with each side of the zipper and make a carbon copy.”

  “Excellent. The four nucleotide bases are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. When they stack up in specific combinations they make genes—sections of DNA that code for protein. Genes make up chromosomes, and chromosomes make up that double spiral staircase we call DNA.”

  “I remember this.” Roy nodded. “The bases are A, T, C, and G. G always teams with C, and A always teams with T.”

  “Exactly! That was what made it work. We fooled the DNA into copying itself.”

  “You lost me again.”

  “Never even had me.” Bert frowned. “I’ve been counting the antlers in that lamp.”

  “It was actually very simple.” Harold sat on the coffee table and faced them. “We built a special camera. Its lens was an electron microscope—still not powerful enough for us to actually see every base nucleotide, but we didn’t need to. Only the film did. Then we harvested some dead cells from each donor and took pictures of the nucleus—that’s the center part of the cell where all the DNA is bundled up.”

  “So far, so good.”

  “Now, you all know how film works? It makes a negative, an opposite of the picture that is going to be developed. We used a film stock that was seeded with base nucleotides.”

  Tom smiled. “I think I get it.”

  “Hello!” Bert raised his hand. “Can you explain, for the benefit of the stupid people?”

  “We took a picture of the DNA using film that had A, C, G, and T in it. Now, there are four forces in the universe; gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. Many scientists believe they are all simply different applications of one, universal force. Is the force that keeps the earth revolving around the sun the same force that holds atoms together? Or makes adenine always want to pair with guanine?”

  “I’m going to go back to counting antlers.”

  “Stick with me, Bert. After taking a picture of the nuclear DNA with seeded film, we ran an electromagnetic current through the negative. It worked. When a free floating adenine saw the negative picture of a thymine, it tried to attach itself. It couldn’t, of course, because that wasn’t a real thymine molecule—it was only a picture. But it did line up correctly, along with all of the other molecules. We made half of the zipper. Then we scraped the negative, added more bases, and the other half of the zipper formed. The DNA rebuilt itself in the correct order.”

  Bert nodded. “I get it. It’s like you took a picture of a skunk, and another skunk thought it was real and tried to mate.”

  This comparison temporarily stymied the doctor.

  “Well, I guess, sort of. The base pairs lined up to the negative as if it were real. When we finished, we had a batch of fresh DNA. We inserted this into an enucleated liver cell, cultured them, put them in gap-zero, then removed the nucleus again and transferred it to an egg. From the egg it went to the mother, and nine months later, tada! Clones!”

  “And the twig?”

  “Get off the twig, Bert.” Tom turned to Harold. “So I’m not an actual clone of Jefferson. I’m more like a copy?”

  “Genetically, you’re identical. You have an exact DNA match. But your body was never part of his, no. In fact, there are quite a few subtle differences. For example, the enucleated liver cells that we cultured your DNA in—they were mine. They were just empty shells, but still my genetic material. The same with the donor eggs from the mother—again they were scraped out, but the cell membrane was still from another hum
an being.”

  “So I’m part Einstein, part you, and part Mexican woman?”

  Harold shook his head. “No, Bert. You’re all Einstein.”

  This brought a snort from Roy.

  “But I wasn’t grown from Einstein?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who else was cloned?”

  “I did ten of you, all born within a few days of each other. The first was Abraham Lincoln. Then Robert E. Lee, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison. Those are the Lucky Seven.”

  “Why these seven?”

  “Phillip thought they represented the greatest figures in history. He believed they would have the greatest potential to benefit mankind. Or, more specifically, the US Government.”

  “Phillip?”

  “We’ll get to him shortly.”

  “Wasn’t Joan of Arc burned at the stake?”

  “The one place in the body that DNA never seems to dissipate, even after thousands of years, is in the teeth. From what I understand, Phillip had located her scorched jawbone, secreted away from the pyre by a zealot and locked up in some French monastery for years.”

  “You said there were ten.”

  “Ah yes. The others. Keep in mind, this was more than just a scientific breakthrough. It was a behavioral experiment as well. Just because we made a copy of Lincoln didn’t mean he’d actually grow up to be Lincoln, with all of the traits we imbue Lincoln with. What makes a person who they are is much more complicated than their genetics. There are many factors—parents, environment, chance, socioeconomic conditions, illness, accidents—influences that we could only imagine. But we didn’t know that, back then. And every good experiment needs some control subjects…”

  “So you chose Jack the Ripper and Attila the Hun?”

  “Jack was my fault. I’d always been a Ripperphile, and was convinced the killer was that fish porter, Joseph Barnett. So we got a DNA sample and cloned him. I believe I was proven right. At age eleven he stabbed his adoptive parents to death.”

  Roy returned Tom’s told you so look with a blank stare.

  Harold went on. “Phillip chose the other two. Ancient leaders, known for their cruelty. Attila and Vlad.”

  “Vlad?”

  “Vlad Tepes Dracula. Vlad the Impaler. Ruled Wallachia in the fifteenth century, tortured over a hundred thousand people to death. He’d spear them on long stakes—horrible man. His clone seemed to inherit the same sadistic streak. Set the family dog on fire when he was only six.”

  “Explain to us again why you’d clone the biggest psychos in world history and think it was a good idea?”

  “The logic was sound at the time. If personality was inherited, then the Lucky Seven would grow up and be brilliant, and the Unholy Three would grow up as monsters. Of course, we only got it half right.”

  “The monster half.” Tom frowned.

  “Not to say that you didn’t turn out fine,” Harold quickly added. “We’ve watched you for years. That none of you rose to the greatness of your parental genotypes doesn’t mean our experiment failed. But ultimately, our major success was with them. Perhaps the will to destroy is more easily transferable than the will to create. Monsters, all three of them.”

  “So this was just one big social experiment?” Bert sounded disappointed. “We weren’t created to control the world or anything?”

  “Phillip had planned to reveal you to the world, at some point. But after watching you progress, there didn’t seem to be any reason. Robert didn’t become a great General. Neither Abe nor Tom have attempted to hold office. Bert, neither you nor the clone of Edison have made any grand discoveries or inventions. It was decided to never tell you. But yet, you figured it out.”

  “How could you have been at Rush-Presbyterian in Chicago if we were all born in Mexico?”

  “I was a member of the staff, but have never actually been to the place. Phillip set it up, through his connections. It allowed us to fake all the birth certificates, make you US citizens. Phillip found suitable parents through his Army connections—the idea was to match the newborns up with fathers who were comparable to the clone.”

  “You keep bringing up this Phillip as the guy who set this whole thing up.” Tom stared hard at the doctor. “Are you ready to tell us who he is?”

  “He was, still is, one of the most powerful men in the world. Phillip Stang.”

  “Phillip Stang? The Phillip Stang?”

  “Who’s Phillip Stang?” Bert asked.

  “A Democratic congressman from Illinois. His picture was all over the media last year, when he became Speaker of the House.”

  “I remember now!” Bert’s face twisted in fear. “When I met with Jessup a few days ago, he thought he was being followed. He told me it started the month before, right after talking to some politician.”

  “It was Phillip Stang?”

  “I didn’t get the name. But what if it was Stang? He’s one of the richest, most powerful men in the world. What if he’s the one that wants us dead?”

  Tom winced. This wasn’t a pleasant development.

  “I think this is a case of overreacting.” Harold had finished his coffee but brought the empty cup to his lips just the same. “I’ve known Phillip Stang for years. Besides, you’ve got the wrong one. The Phillip that started the project with me is retired. His son, same name, is Speaker. Fine lad, too. Now there’s someone with political aspirations.”

  It wasn’t an intentional barb, but it stung just the same. Tom rose above it.

  “We’ll need some addresses. Anything you have on any of the clones. They have to be warned.”

  “Of course. But you have to be careful. You both seem to have adjusted well to the truth about your births, but it could be potentially traumatic to the psyche to suddenly find out you’re someone else.

  No kidding, Tom thought.

  “We’d also like to talk with the elder Phillip Stang. Can you set that up?”

  “Yes. Haven’t spoken to him in a while. Last I heard, his health was failing again. Chronic kidney problems. He’s got a home in Illinois, by Springfield.”

  “How about the others?”

  “Not a problem. I know Abe is in Nebraska. He sells used cars, I believe. Joan went to Hollywood and is a hot shot producer. I saw one of her movies a few years ago, something loud with aliens in it. William is a writer. This thrilled us at first. He got great grades in college. Unfortunately, he wound up in advertising. I have their last names written down someplace, a few addresses.”

  “How about the other three?”

  “Oh dear. No idea. They managed to disappear. Jack was involved in the CIA for a while. His specialty was wet work, I believe they called it. He killed people for Uncle Sam. Vlad—we named him Victor—he escaped from police custody after murdering some young women in a particularly horrible way. Fled to South America. I’ve heard rumors that he worked as a freelance interrogator for various governments. And Arthur, Attila—in and out of prisons his whole life. Probably killed his parents. No idea where he might be.”

  “Do you know how they found out about everything?”

  “The only thing I can think of is they must have been told. All three are above average intelligence, but I wouldn’t say they had the savvy to dig up their pasts. Of course, that doesn’t leave many people left. Even though I had a research team, none of my assistants knew exactly what we were doing. You were watched by various government employees while growing up, but they were never given details why. The only two people who knew everything about the experiments are myself and Phil, and even I didn’t know everything.”

  “Did you tell them?”

  “Tell them? My boy, if I saw any of them I’d run away as fast as my little old legs could carry me. I’m going for more coffee. Anyone care to join me?”

  They declined. Harold plodded off into the kitchen.

  “It’s got to be Stang.” Bert nodded smartly. “There’s no one else left.”


  “All the high-tech listening devices point to a government operation.” Tom agreed. “But what would the motive be? Why would he devote his entire life to this project, and then want to wipe it out?”

  “Could Jack and Attila be working on their own?”

  “I hope so. Because if Phillip Stang is involved, I won’t be needing my donut anymore.”

  “Why?”

  Roy frowned. “Because if we’re being hunted by that cat, we can all kiss our asses good-bye.”

  “It tastes like beef.”

  Roy wiped some ketchup off of his mustache and took another bite of the ostrich burger.