kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller)

by Chesler, Rick

  “So?”

  “Genetics. Those letters represent the amino acids that comprise DNA.”

  “Oh.”

  “But there’s more. Strings of one’s and zero’s, too.”

  “Like binary code?” Lance’s inert form straightened somewhat.

  Kristen saw that she had awakened her brother’s interest in computers. To her, his talent for programming was a source of both pride and frustration. Though she would never tell him, she was disappointed that he had not managed to develop this interest into a more respectable career. Hawking generic software packages over the phone was enough for him to be able to tell people he worked “in software,” but she knew that he had landed far short of his true potential.

  “Yes, exactly,” Kristen said, turning the laptop his way. “Here take a look.”

  The screen went black just as Lance moved closer.

  “Crap. Battery’s d—” Kristen started.

  The boat suddenly slowed, the howl of its engine subsiding to a hum. They could hear Tara repeating a message to the radio transmitter: “FBI, stop your vessel...” Dave thrust his head into the cabin.

  “We’re coming up on the dock in front of the Rainbow Hilton. Get ready to jump. C’mon,” he said, waving them outside.

  Kristen snapped her laptop shut. She didn’t yet know exactly what the file’s contents meant, but she was certain of one thing: It was exactly the kind of thing that Dr. William Archer would be working with. DNA and computers.

  She grabbed her backpack and slipped the machine in it before following Dave outside, Lance close behind.

  As she cautiously crawled out on deck, Kristen recalled something her father had said many years ago.

  Binary is the code that tells computers what to do. DNA is the code that tells living cells what to do. They’re both used to store algorithms—ordered sets of instructions—one for machines, and one for life. Different media, but they can be made to work together. That’s what I’m working on.

  The true meaning of the strange file they had salvaged from the bottom of the sea hit Kristen just as she exposed herself to the light of day.

  “I know what it is!” Kristen yelled to Dave, Lance and Tara. All three were preoccupied with their immediate surroundings outside the boat.

  Dave was pulling the boat up to a long concrete pier extending from Waikiki Beach in front of the Hilton. Hundreds of beachgoers swam in the water and basked on the beach nearby, a typical vacation scene.

  The RIB floated about fifty yards behind them. Tara was speaking rapidly into her cell-phone while eyeing the black vessel.

  “Dave, that file—it’s from my Dad! And I know what it is,” Kristen said.

  She could tell that Dave was indisposed as their boat glided up to the private pier. Already they could see a hotel worker trotting out to inform them that they were not permitted to land here.

  The RIB motored further out, watching to see if their quarry would be turned away. They knew that if the woman aboard had been lying about being FBI, that they would be turned away at the private pier.

  Dave spoke next. “Kristen, Lance: jump off. Get on the pier. I’ll head back out.”

  Lance leapt from the boat, but because his depth perception was off from having one eye swollen shut, he misjudged the distance and slammed the side of his head into the concrete pier. He got an arm over the edge of the dock, though, and managed to pull himself up.

  Kristen hesitated, looking first at the RIB and then into Dave’s eyes.

  “Go!” he implored.

  The hotel guy was shouting at him to move the boat, waving them off. Tara turned away from the RIB long enough to flash the employee her badge. “FBI, official business.”

  Kristen tore her gaze from Dave’s and jumped onto the pier. The hotel employee now stepped aside, blathering into a walkie-talkie. Kristen took Lance’s hand and the two of them ran down the pier to the beach.

  As Tara used her cell-phone to relay the details of the boat chase to Field Office personnel, Dave slowly and casually took the boat out toward the reef. The deep water channel that had been cut through the coral would take him past the idling RIB. Should he confront them?

  But the gunmen had seen Tara present her badge and be allowed to land. It wouldn’t be long before a marine law enforcement unit of some kind was dispatched to assist her. As Dave made his way through the coral channel back out to sea, he and Tara watched as the RIB accelerated toward the horizon, a fat rooster-tail spraying in its wake. Within seconds the boat was no longer visible to them.

  Dave aimed the boat for the Ala Moana Harbor while Tara finished making a cell-phone report on the RIB. When she hung up, Dave asked if she wanted to stay out on the water.

  “No, return to the harbor, please,” Tara said, hoping she didn't sound too eager to get back to dry land. She had come a long way toward overcoming her fear of water, but she knew that it was still there, lurking deep inside. The gunfight had actually kept her mind from it, she recognized.

  “Okay, just let me know if there's anything else you need.”

  “That boat had a dragonfish painted on the side. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Dave appeared puzzled. “A dragonfish? You mean, an arowana? Sort of like a carp with really big scales? Tapered tail?”

  Tara was reminded that she was speaking to a marine biologist. “I don’t know what an arowana is, but yes, it’s like a carp, big scales and eyes, this one was red in color.”

  “I’ve been to a Chinese restaurant here that has fish tanks with arowanas in them—they’re white, though—but other than that, it doesn’t have any special significance to me, no.”

  “Okay. There is one more thing.”

  “What's that?”

  Tara reached over and plucked the flash drive from Dave's neck. “This is now the property of FBI Computer Forensics.”

  They watched the black boat disappear into the horizon. They didn’t get the flash-drive, Tara thought.

  Behind the boat’s wheel, Dave was also swimming in his thoughts. He flashed upon Johnson’s mutilated neck seeping blood on the ocean bottom. Did Johnson know about the flash-drive? Dave recalled being told to “bring up anything you can find that’s not obvious trash.”

  Then he hit on Kristen saying something while he was busy pulling the boat up to the pier. He hadn’t had time to really listen to it then, but he had heard it. The file belonged to her father, and something else...Dave squinted out to sea, where he could no longer see the RIB…She said she knows what it is.

  Whatever the file meant, Dave had no doubt that he, Kristen and Lance faced serious harm were those men to find out that they had duplicated it. He was glad to be rid of the drive, he thought, as he watched Tara drop it into a plastic evidence bag.

  Dave put the boat in gear and headed toward the harbor.

  …TTAC18TTGC...

  10:15 A.M., Waikiki

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have copied that drive, Kristen,” Lance said.

  “Too late now. Look around. You see anyone following us?” Kristen asked, digging through her backpack. They stood in the middle of the sidewalk on Kalakaua Avenue, where they had run to from the pier. Lance swiveled his head, trying to pick out any suspicious characters from among the throngs of scantily clad surfers and international tourists.

  “No, but it’s not like it would be hard for someone to blend in with this crowd. Maybe we should stop in at a restaurant or something before we go back to our room. We wouldn’t want anyone to know where we’re staying.”

  “No. I need to get back to the room,” Kristen said, pulling her cell-phone from the pack.

  “What for?”

  “Find my laptop cord.”

  “Oh, Christ. Whatever’s on there will still be there later. What’s the hurry?”

  “I need to do some research online.”

  “Research? We almost got killed and you want to surf the web? Did you hear what I just said? They could still be following us. What i
f they know you copied that drive?”

  “How would they know that?” Kristen asked, flipping her phone open and tapping her finger on the keypad.

  “I don’t know. How did they know we were out there in the first place? Who are you calling?”

  “Dave. See how he’s doing with Agent Shores. He gave me his cell number on the boat. I guess those thugs in the black boat knew we were out there because we were diving on the same site where Dave was yesterday.”

  “He could be in on things with those guys, for all we know.”

  Kristen glared at her brother as she put the phone to her ear. “You feeling okay, Lance? You’re not thinking straight. Dave was getting shot at too, remember? He got shot. His finger!”

  “Yeah, well he sure is attracting a lot of violence, isn’t he? That Johnson guy dies out there with him, and now this...”

  “Let the FBI agent worry about that, Lance. You're far from a detective.” Kristen pointed to the phone. “Went to voice-mail,” she said. She spoke a brief message into the phone, leaving Dave her number.

  “He found the flash-drive for me,” Kristen said, turning to her brother and flipping the phone shut.

  “Yeah, for a thousand bucks. It’s probably worthless. You don’t even know what it is.”

  “I doubt it’s worthless, considering the trouble someone—possibly our father—went through to hide it. And you’re wrong. I do know what it is.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s walk, and I’ll tell you.”

  Reluctantly, Lance dragged his feet across the pavement after his sister toward their hotel room.

  Part II: A coded message...revealed

  …GACA19GAAA...

  “You remember when Dad used to talk about how there were two kinds of information systems,” Kristen said to Lance as they walked toward their hotel. “The ones with computers, and—”

  “—and the one with nature. Genes.”

  “Yes! ‘Nature’s information system,’ as he put it.”

  “And in high school, when I was into computers and you were into biology...”

  “He said he had one kid for each system,” Kristen said, smiling.

  “Except I haven’t really turned out to be much of a computer whiz,” Lance said, frowning. “You’re the one he’s proud of.”

  “He’s proud of you, too Lance. And at least you’ve had a social life.”

  Lance touched his swollen eye and winced. “So what does this have to do with what came from the flash-drive?”

  They passed in front of the Duke Kamehameha statue, the former champion surfer immortalized in bronze, hands outstretched and draped with leis. A web-cam mounted on a light pole opposite the statue attracted vacationers who stopped to wave at distant friends and relatives, and the siblings had to sidestep through clutches of people posing for the lens.

  “In computers, binary code—the ones and zeroes—is what actually communicates directly with the computer, right?” Kristen led off as soon as they had passed through the sidewalk’s bottleneck.

  “Right, binary is as ‘close to the machine’ as you can get,” Lance said.

  “So instead of working with binary...”

  “We use programming languages, like Assembly, or C++ or Visual Basic, which are like easier-to-understand proxies for communicating with the machine. Something like Assembly, which is less of an intuitive, natural-language type of programming environment, is known as a ‘low level’ language, and the ones like Basic, that have recognizable English word commands—those are your high-level languages. So binary is your lowest possible level.”

  “And the DNA that codes for a living cell’s entire potential—the molecular symbols A,C,G, and T are like the ones and zeroes for computers. The precise order of those four characters, which represent unique molecules, are the algorithm that is executed within all living things.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah, I can see that. But that file—I know it had the DNA letters and the binary code, but I still don’t get what it is. It could be a lot of things. A gene sequencing algorithm, maybe?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, too. But you can think of sequencing—literally determining the sequence of the four letters—as decoding the living information system.”

  “Decoding DNA,” Lance said.

  “Right. Deciphering the information it contains.”

  “But you said you don’t think the file is a sequencing algorithm?”

  They reached the street their hotel was on and turned the corner, green mountains now visible in the distance.

  “Quite the opposite, actually.”

  Lance gave her a sidelong glance. “Not sure I follow you,” he said. “The opposite of decoding is encoding.”

  “Bingo,” Kristen said, walking up their hotel driveway.

  “DNA encoding?”

  They entered the lobby and walked to the elevator. Kristen pushed the button for their floor. Around them people were talking about the luau they went to last night, or how fantastic the weather was.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a DNA encryption scheme,” Kristen said.

  They got into the elevator.

  “You’re saying it’s a way of encrypting DNA?” Lance asked, confused.

  They reached their floor and exited the elevator, their fellow passengers giving them questioning looks.

  “I’m saying it’s a way of encrypting data within DNA. Of using DNA not only to store information, but to do so in a secure fashion. Lance, I think that file we found today represents the cipher needed to decipher the DNA messages.”

  “You mean biological information?” They walked down the hallway toward their room.

  “No, Lance. I mean any information. Anything that can be encoded by one’s and zero’s. Did you know that a group of researchers in the pacific northwest once encoded the lyrics to the song “It's a Small World” into the DNA of a bacterial population?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “They did, and when the bacteria replicated, guess what?”

  “The lyrics were still encoded in the new generation?”

  “Exactly! And do you know who first made me aware of this research?”

  “No.”

  “Our father, Lance. Over five years ago.”

  “So what’s the point of it?”

  Kristen paused with her key in the lock, looking at Lance.

  “The point is that it’s possible to essentially turn bacteria into data storage devices. That you can introduce messages into the DNA of living cells, like bacteria, and as they replicate, that data will be transferred from generation to generation—preserved for as long as the population survives.”

  Lance’s good eye widened as he comprehended his sister’s explanation. “And so that flash-drive file does what?”

  “It’s essentially a decryption key. It tells how to decipher what’s been encoded into the DNA.”

  “And that’s what you think is on your laptop now?” Lance asked, incredulous. “A DNA encryption scheme worth killing over?”

  “I guess so,” Kristen said pushing the door open. “It is a very forward-looking technology. Definitely something Dad would be involved in. I thought it was still in the early prototype stages, but it seems—”

  Kristen cut herself off mid-sentence as her brain registered what her eyes were showing her.

  Their room had been torn apart.

  …ACGC20TTTA...

  10:50 A.M.

  Kristen and Lance walked down the hall to their room again, this time accompanied by the hotel manager and a small phalanx of security guards. Not wanting to enter the room for fear that whoever had trashed it could still be inside, they had requested assistance at the front desk.

  The security guards went in first while the rest of them waited in the hall in a nervous huddle.

  “Pardon me, sir,” the manager said, looking at Lance. “Your eye—you wer
e in a fight? Here, in the hotel?”

  Lance shook his head and told him the same mugging story he’d given Kristen and Dave earlier.

  One of the security guards came back out.

  “Nobody there,” he declared, reinserting a baton—the most serious weapon at his disposal—back into its holster.

  The rest of them entered.

  The room had been savagely turned inside out. Their clothes lay all over the beds and floor, some of the more elaborate articles having undergone a methodical shredding. Lance’s bags, too, had been emptied and not merely shredded, Kristen thought as she looked on in disbelief, but more like deconstructed. Liners had been separated, seams peeled back, surfaces sliced through with architectural precision. The contents were mostly inconsequential clothing and routine travel items and had clearly been rifled through.

  “I’m terribly sorry. I pray you left your valuables in the hotel safe deposit box as we recommend?” the manager asked, nervously rubbing his hands together.

  Kristen tugged at her backpack. “Fortunately, I had most of my important things out with me.”

  “You have both of your room keys?” the manager inquired.

  Kristen dug hers from her backpack. Lance pulled his from a pocket. A security guard indicated the sliding glass door leading out to the lanai.

  “Glass cutter,” he said, pointing at the door. The group went closer. Indeed, there was a neat circular hole near the inside lock where the glass had been cut.

  Realizing he would not be able to place even partial blame for the break-in on his guests, the manager became apologetic.

  “I’ll see to it you are moved to a different room immediately. We are happy to provide you with a complimentary suite for the remainder of your stay.”

  “What is going on, Lance? How could those guys in the boat possibly have found out where we’re staying—we’ve been here less than a day,” Kristen said as they stepped from the hotel lobby into the dazzling sunshine outside.

  “Good question. Answer: who cares? Maybe we should go back home and let Agent Shores handle things. Meanwhile. let’s go make the police report in person, like the manager suggested.”