Flypaper: A Novel

by Chris Angus

  Christ. One of the best discoveries of her life and she had to share it almost at once with this bureaucratic twit. Why did she seem destined always to be with Huang when something exciting and new turned up? She hadn’t seen him for an entire, blissful month since the cave-in. Maybe she needed to arrange a landslide every time he appeared on the scene—that might keep him away.

  He approached them slowly, an unusual, somber expression on his face. Then he saw the bodies and nearly fell over. “My good doctor! Whatever have you found?”

  “Samdup found them,” she replied. “It’s very exciting. But what on earth are you doing here and how did you find us?”

  “Your assistant pointed us in the right direction and we just kept going until we saw you. Easy enough in this open landscape to find the only two souls in a dozen square miles.” He stared at the bodies and knelt beside one of the large figures, reaching out a hand.

  “Please don’t touch them, Huang,” Kessler said, a bit petulantly. “We need to study everything about them before they’re disturbed in any way.”

  “Of course.” He stood. “But, Doctor, I’m afraid you’ll be unhappy to hear that you will not be doing the studying.”

  “What?”

  “Sad indeed, for I know your dedication, but . . . we are all the subjects of our governments, are we not?”

  “What the devil are you talking about, Huang?”

  “Why we have come for you. Your United States Embassy has asked for you to be flown out right away. Apparently a loss in your family back home. I offer my condolences, Doctor, and those of my country.”

  Kessler stared at him as though he had taken leave of his senses. She had no family. None at all since the death of her mother. There was no one anywhere closer to her than a friend or colleague.

  She started to say so, but then thought better of it. Something else was going on here. The embassy wanted her out. She’d been in foreign countries before when the political situation suddenly went bad. It hardly seemed likely anything could have happened to the Chinese government. But clearly the presence of Huang and the helicopter meant something.

  As she rose into the vast sky over the Asian steppe, Kessler stared down at the rapidly diminishing discovery that had so briefly been hers. Below, Samdup waved and then turned to begin the long trudge back to camp. There was no room on a Chinese military helicopter for a Tibetan.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The White House, Washington D.C.

  DUNCAN STOOD SELF-CONSCIOUSLY at the White House checkpoint and wondered yet again what on earth he was doing here. His ID was returned to him and an identity necklace placed over his head. A uniformed guard directed him down a corridor filled with offices and bustling young operatives eagerly doing the nation’s business.

  He was still in shock from the death of Professor Fitzhugh six months earlier. The professor had died on the operating table during the relatively simple procedure of installing a stent into one of his arteries. It was an extremely rare occurrence and had taken everyone by surprise. Fitzhugh’s wife had the body flown home to Wisconsin and the funeral held so quickly neither Duncan nor any of his staff were able to attend. Still, it wasn’t all bad. He was now the sole person in charge of the Carnoustie Woman site.

  He reached the end of the hall and found himself staring at a door with the name Gordon Page printed on it in gold letters.

  Page was President Herbert Klein’s science advisor and a close personal friend of the president’s from their days at Yale. Skull and Bones buddies, no less. An anthropologist ­specializing in circumpolar archaeology, his work had taken him across the northernmost regions of the world from Hudson Bay to the Bering Sea to the Novosibirskiye Ostrova archipelago in the ­Russian arctic. He’d come to the White House from his position as Director of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center.

  Page was precisely the sort of figure one expected to meet in the White House. He was tall and rapier-thin with dark hair graying at the temples. He moved like an athlete and had a degree of nervous energy that kept underlings hopping.

  “Mr. Melville, I’m glad to meet you.” Page rose from a desk piled with folders and came forward with his hand extended. “Sorry to pull you away from your work. Believe me, there was nothing I hated more than the government interrupting my studies.”

  “An honor to meet you, sir, though I confess I’m at a loss as to what I’m doing here.”

  “You and everyone else. We have something I think you will find interesting, to say the least.” Page glanced at his watch. “You’re the last to arrive. If you’ll come with me, we’ll join the others in one of the projection rooms.”

  As they started down the hall, Duncan’s eyes widened as he recognized President Klein coming toward them, talking animatedly to half a dozen young assistants who trailed after him dripping notebooks and briefing papers. If Page was everything one expected to see in a denizen of the White House, Klein was the complete antithesis. His rather rumpled appearance seemed to go with his stature. He was one of the shortest men ever to win the presidency, hardly more than five feet six inches tall. It had been the sheer force of his intellect that had allowed him to overcome that considerable handicap in the political arena. He was also the first Jewish president.

  Surrounded by his tall, slim, and uniformly wholesome young staff, the president looked like the short point man on an NBA team of seven-footers. He paused in front of his science advisor.

  “Gordon, we’ll have to move the meeting with the G-8 environmental ministers back a week. I’ve got my hands full with this latest mess in North Korea.”

  “I’ll make a note of it, sir. May I introduce Duncan Melville? He’s the last to arrive.” Page spoke as though Duncan’s presence here was well-known to the president.

  President Klein took his hand and Duncan felt the full force of his gaze. “Thank you for coming on short notice, Mr. ­Melville.” He hesitated, a grin flashing across his face. “My wife says I have to stop saying that. She says a presidential summons from a guy five-foot-six is always a short notice.”

  Everyone laughed politely and Duncan felt the sense of camaraderie that had infused the White House under the new president.

  “Anyway, I’m sure we can rely on your help . . . and discretion.” He added, “I’ll stop in toward the end of your presentation, Gordon.” And then he was gone, down the corridor, talking a mile a minute, aides poking furiously at their smartphones.

  Page led Duncan to an elevator and they rode down several levels to still another carpeted hall with offices and conference rooms. He entered one that turned out to be a small amphitheater with banked seating and a projection screen. “Find yourself a seat, Mr. Melville, and we’ll get started.”

  There were four other people in the room, two women and two men. As people will do when faced with a large room of empty seats, they’d sprinkled themselves about the third and fourth rows, optimum distance from the screen. Duncan took a seat two away from an attractive woman who nodded at him briefly.

  Page stood at a small lectern to one side of the screen. “I’m not sure how well you may know each other, if at all, so I’ll begin with introductions. The man I arrived with is Duncan Melville, in charge of a dig in Scotland that has uncovered a new bog body. Next to him is Leeanne Fitzhugh, also associated with the Scotland site.”

  Duncan started and turned to stare at the woman next to him. Malcolm Fitzhugh’s wife! He’d never met her before. He started to say something, to offer his condolences again, beyond the awkward letter he’d written to her, but Page was plowing ahead.

  “Seated to my far left is Dr. Alan Cooper, who’s recently been working in Kenya where he has made some exciting discoveries of ancient DNA that are . . . uh . . . raising quite a bit of international interest.”

  Duncan turned to look at Cooper. He saw a tall, slender man with a deep tan and the look of an academic, albeit one who probably spent more time under the hot African sun than in a classroom.

  A paper
Cooper had published in a mid-level archaeological journal had stirred up a hornet’s nest after being reviewed in a long article in National Geographic. Duncan remembered reading about the controversy. Cooper’s team had extracted the DNA of a 1.8-million-year-old hominid from stone tools excavated in the floor of a cave. At some point in the distant past, one of man’s oldest ancestors had crouched in that cave and nicked himself while cutting up an animal carcass. A drop of the hominid’s blood had oozed onto a rock. The DNA profile suggested something between a chimpanzee and a human, which suggested either Homo habilis, thought to be a direct human ancestor, or Paranthropus robustus, a flat-faced hominid. If confirmed, it would be the oldest DNA yet extracted.

  But the claims had been met with skepticism, many experts feeling the hot African climate would not permit the survival of DNA for anything more than 10,000 years.

  “For what it’s worth,” said Page, “I happen to think your paper was well vetted and on the mark.”

  “Thanks,” Alan said.

  “Last, but hardly least of the scientific crowd, is Dr. Marcia Kessler who has come to us—not terribly willingly, I’m afraid—from central Asia. I believe she needs little introduction.” Kessler was one of the world’s most famous, and colorful, archaeologists and was known, at least by reputation, to every scientist in the room.

  Marcia snorted and blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in Page’s direction. Duncan doubted whether the smoke-free restrictions of the White House had succeeded in producing any staffer willing to engage the cantankerous scientist over the issue. In her sandpaper voice, she croaked, “I hope for your sake, Gordon, you didn’t drag me halfway around the world to join the President’s Fitness Council.”

  “You would be a natural choice for the position, Marcia,” Page replied with a straight face. “However, I think you will find our discussion considerably more interesting than that, if you’ll bear with me.”

  A door opened near the top bank of seats and everyone turned to see a man in his sixties enter and sit quietly in the last row. His arrival was greeted with stunned silence, for they all recognized him: Paul Littlefield, head of one of America’s foremost software giants, a major supporter of the Klein administration, and a billionaire many times over. His support of the Jewish president had raised numerous eyebrows, since Littlefield was also known for his eccentric, creationist views. He wore dark pants, dress shoes, and a Hawaiian shirt.

  Without skipping a beat, Page continued. “Last, I would like to introduce Eric Logan.” He nodded at the man Duncan had picked out the moment he entered the room as the most out of place in this grouping. There was an air of barely suppressed energy about Mr. Logan. He was dressed casually in chinos and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, as though quite at home in the White House. “Mr. Logan is recently returned from China. His contribution to this meeting will soon be evident. I might add he is someone you will all come to rely upon in the weeks ahead.”

  This was the first indication of any kind that what was coming would mean a fairly lengthy interruption of all of their busy schedules. It seemed to focus everyone’s attention.

  “To begin, I want to say that the information you are about to hear is known to no one on Earth except the people in this room and the president, who will be joining us in a little while. It goes without saying not a word of this briefing will be shared by you with anyone.” He stared silently around the room for a moment, as if to emphasize the point.

  “You’ve all published, or submitted for peer review at least, preliminary reports on your various research endeavors. I’ve read all of these reports.”

  There were a couple of surprised murmurs. No one could imagine any reason why the president’s science advisor should take such an interest in their projects.

  Page’s gaze roamed the room, seeking silence. “Your DNA studies join a few others that have come to our attention in the past year as a result of one rather specific . . . anomaly.”

  Dr. Kessler put out her cigarette and sat up. “You’re certainly not going to suggest, Gordon, that the unusual phenomenon in the sequencing I reported on chromosome 18 might be real?”

  “What exactly was that phenomenon, Doctor? Had you ever encountered anything like it before?”

  “Well . . . it certainly wasn’t something I’d been looking for. Not related at all, really, to my work. But I happened to notice this unusual debris at the beginning of the sequence I was working on. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it does, if anything. I only reported it in passing as something I thought deserving of a look by another researcher.”

  “Why would you do that?” asked Page. “Background junk is common enough.”

  “I know. But . . . well . . . the act of sequencing seemed to cause the sequence to change, to alter subtly. Frankly, it was a perfect example of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that how you ask the question determines the answer you get. Each subsequent act of sequencing gave a different result, suggesting our measurements may somehow have disturbed the system. I’d never seen anything quite like it before, and I had to put it down to some lab error.”

  Duncan sat up. “You know,” he said slowly, “I saw something similar on the same chromosome.”

  “My God!” Alan reached down for his laptop. “I ran across that, too. There was all this junk, and when I went to sequence it, the order of the base pairs seemed to change. It was just so bizarre, I didn’t know what to make of it. The more I looked at it, the more I wondered if it did code for a protein. I began to speculate—pretty wildly I admit—that it might conceivably code for some sort of enabled prion.”

  “I believe you will find all of you encountered the same unusual phenomenon, as Dr. Kessler described it,” said Page.

  Kessler stared at him for a long moment. Then she reached for her own computer. “Alan, can you and Duncan each bring up the sequence you worked on?” She quickly typed in a series of commands and her screen filled with the unusual sequence. The scientists all huddled together staring at their screens.

  “Well . . . that’s sort of it,” said Alan. “I tried sequencing it three or four times and got three or four different results. I couldn’t get any good standard sequence from that area. It’s as if it’s changing as it’s being sequenced.”

  “But how could it possibly change just from the act of sequencing?” asked Duncan.

  Kessler shook her head. “I can’t answer that. Simply doing the sequencing shouldn’t have any effect. Unless, as Heisenberg suggests, the phenomenon is created by the way we sequence, that is, by how we ask the question—by something in our technique that affects the outcome. If that were the case, we might run the risk of turning it on biochemically, and if you did that . . .”

  “If you did that,” Alan interrupted, “you could be asking for trouble. Who knows what might happen? Suppose it proved to be contagious? We could release something for which humans have no immune protection.”

  Kessler turned to Duncan. “What was the date of your bog body?”

  “5200 B.C.”

  “The Tarim mummies date from one to two thousand B.C.” Kessler looked at Alan. “You’ve been working with hominid DNA, as I understand it, from more than a million years ago, is that right?”

  “Almost two million years,” Alan replied.

  “So this phenomenon, hunk of genetic material, background debris, junk—whatever you want to call it—has been around for at least two million years. The obvious question is, where did it come from?”

  “We should test to see if it shows up in the modern population,” said Alan.

  “Of course, that was our first inclination,” said Page. “The tests are preliminary, but it’s beginning to look as though it may appear in every living human on Earth.”

  “Impossible!” Kessler rose out of her seat.

  “This has got to be some mistake,” Alan said almost simultaneously.

  With a sigh, Page reiterated, “I assure you there’s no mistake. The same phenom
enon has been found in half a dozen ancient samples from around the world. We don’t know when it first appears. However, if it actually shows up in humans today, that certainly suggests it had to be introduced very early on—”

  “Unless it appeared somehow at an early bottleneck—a Mitochondrial Eve moment,” said Alan. “But I’m not sure that’s even possible. It would have to have appeared extraordinarily early to exist in everyone today.”

  “Excuse me,” said a voice high above them.

  Everyone turned and looked up at Paul Littlefield.

  “Sorry to interrupt such a fascinating discussion,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with this Mitochondrial Eve you just mentioned.”

  Alan cleared his throat. “Uh . . . Mitochondrial Eve refers to a theory that all humans alive on Earth today are related to a single common ancestor with respect to matrilineal descent.” He hesitated, uncertain how far to go. “We each have two parents, but we get our mitochondrial DNA from the ovum. That is, from our mothers. Our mothers got their mitochondrial DNA from their mothers and so on. While our nuclear DNA is a mish-mash of the DNA of our grandparents, our mitochondrial DNA is a near exact copy of the DNA of our maternal grandmother. Due to mutations, the match isn’t exact, and in fact the mutations in the mitochondrial DNA provide the molecular clock that allows us to determine how much time has elapsed since the ME—the Mitochondrial Eve—lived.”

  Alan stared up at Littlefield’s enigmatic face. The confusion was evident. “All right, let’s consider an extremely prolific woman living today. She has many daughters and decides to take them on a vacation to a remote site, say a Pacific island. During that week, a plague of mutated Ebola virus sweeps across Earth and drastically reduces the fecundity of all living women. The viral infection also changes the women’s genome so the daughters they give birth to will inherit this reduced fecundity. This means far more than the normal average of their fetuses will undergo miscarriage. Only this one woman and her daughters who were on the Pacific island are safe from the plague. Then assume the plague runs its course and disappears after their vacation. This woman and her daughters are now free to breed in a world where their reproductive potential far outstrips that of every other woman alive, and the daughters of those women. Soon, almost everyone on Earth will be related in some fashion to this one woman. When the last woman who was born to one of the matrilineal descendants of an infected woman dies, our non-infected Pacific island tourist takes on the title of the new Mitochondrial Eve.