Mutant

by Peter Clement

  She’d clucked at his cynical take on human nature, then railed at how he shouldn’t have to be doing the police’s job in any case. “It’s despicable how they refused to press the issue that someone at Agrenomics might have set the pizza-faced man onto you,” she declared, brimming with indignantion. “No?”

  “That’s how I read it,” he’d assured her.

  “So why don’t the police see things the way we do?”

  “Because we haven’t the slightest idea who in the place would go after me, or why. Because nothing links them with Rodez or Hawaii. Because the only evidence you can show that Agrenomics is behaving suspiciously is how they came out pristine clean in your tests. Is it any wonder McKnight won’t act?”

  Those eyes of hers had flared so luminously at him that for a second he feared he’d been far too blunt. But the blaze died, and a few seconds later, she mumbled, “I guess you’re right.”

  “So it’s time we learned everything we can about the place. While I’m talking to people there about Pizza Face, I’ll try and poke a stick beneath that squeaky clean surface and stir up the bottom a little. There’s got to be somebody who’s willing to tell us what’s going on.”

  But no one obliged. Even though Steele had driven by an inviting-looking roadside café and bar not five miles back, an hour passed and not a soul came out of the laboratory premises to go eat. “Must all be a lunch bucket crowd,” he muttered, wondering what he should do next. The idea of sneaking up on the place seemed fruitless, the area being so open. Besides, what good would it do him? As much as he’d like to see inside, scaling the fences around the greenhouses looked impossible, and the solitary guard would certainly spot him if he tried to gain access to the main building. Maybe I can intercept people when they go home? he wondered, glancing at his watch. But that wouldn’t be for another three and a half hours.

  He found himself looking at the railway spur again. Retrieving his binoculars he brought it into focus, and followed its roadbed through the fields with his eye. Trees and shrubs lined it most of the way, and it passed close in front of the greenhouses. I might get a glimpse inside them from there, he reasoned, and if I approach using the tracks, I don’t think anyone would spot me.

  His left leg hurt as he walked the ties between the rails, yet he made good progress. It had been seventeen days since the attack on him, and a week since he removed his own stitches. His only difficulty occurred when he pushed off with the ball of his foot and worked his calf muscles. Despite the tears and missing strands, the filaments were mending, but the scarring foreshortened their range of movement.

  The sun blasted the stone ballast with the full heat of the afternoon, and the dark treated wood beneath his feet released such a pungent perfume of creosote that it radiated all the way to the back of his nose to tickle his throat. His exertion left him breathing with his mouth open, and he unbuttoned his shirt, letting it trail out behind him while the breeze evaporated his sweat and cooled his torso. He took some pride in having lost the paunch he’d been developing over the winter; cutting back on drinking and keeping busy had started to take effect for the better. Around him the cicadas buzzed, their sound mingling with the continuous whisper of the bushes and young trees lining the tracks. The noise, he hoped, would cover the occasional crunch of his footsteps.

  He’d driven a little under a mile past the front entrance of Agrenomics before he parked once more on the side of the road. Slipping his binoculars around his neck, Steele walked several hundred yards through a field to reach the spur. From that point, atop a little hillock, he could see where the line joined the main track about another mile farther west. Several miles beyond that, there seemed to be a railyard where strings of freight cars sat on dozens of sidings. Using his binoculars, he made out a small diesel engine poking its way through the various switches and tracks, coupling onto a string of boxcars, then shunting them farther down the line. He could also make out a man wearing jeans and a hard hat who dangled off a ladder at the end of the rear car, waving instructions to whoever sat at the throttle in the engine’s cab. Around them stretched endless green fields of month-old spring crops made lush by all the rain they’d had. A sleepier scene he couldn’t imagine.

  Maybe I should visit those men when I’m through here, he thought, continuing to trudge along toward Agrenomics and eyeing the shiny tracks that indicated regular use. Perhaps I’ll learn what they haul out of the place and where it goes.

  The greenhouses loomed ahead on his left. As he drew closer, he kept an eye on the back end of the lab building through the foliage on his right. To his relief he saw that it had no windows.

  Staying low, he veered toward the near corner of the razor wire fence and ducked behind a complex of massive pipes and flexible hoses. Satisfying himself that he remained out of sight, he took a closer look at what he’d hidden in. It seemed to be a device for pumping something into railway cars, and he could make out a similar structure located on the main grounds near the wall where the spur ended. His curiosity about what they shipped grew.

  He proceeded to stride briskly along the length of fence leading farther into the fields. It stretched about three hundred yards, and he kept a sharp eye out for security cameras, planning to mimic somebody out bird-watching if he saw a sign of surveillance. Even when he failed to spot any peering lenses, he put on a show of periodically gazing into the sky through his binoculars, just in case.

  Finally he reached the far end of the barricade, where he stepped around the corner while still keeping an eye out for overhead video equipment. He knelt to massage his calf, the uneven ground and his fast pace having aggravated it, then surreptitiously tried scraping away enough dirt to slip under the bottom strands of the chain links. His fingers hit a strip of concrete buried in the soil. “Christ!” he muttered, realizing that the only way through would be with a pair of wire cutters. He next attempted to see into the nearest greenhouse, but while its peaked roof had clear glass, the panes on the sides had enough of a reflective surface that they prevented the identification of much of what was inside. All he could make out were tables of endless troughs containing scattered stalks of something that looked about six feet high, but the rest seemed to have been already harvested.

  Disappointed, he turned and started back the way he’d come. He got halfway along the fence toward the tracks when all at once he thought he heard voices.

  “Shit!” he said, glancing around him ready to do some fast talking.

  But he saw no one.

  Yet the voices continued, muffled so he couldn’t make out the words, the way a conversation sounds when the people speaking are in the next room. It must be coming from inside one of the greenhouses, he thought, straining to see any sign of movement behind the glass nearest him. But all he saw were silhouettes similar to those same scraggy stalks that he’d seen minutes earlier.

  The voices continued. Somebody even laughed. “What the hell?” he muttered, looking around and feeling the bewilderment of a rational man who’s suddenly beginning to consider he may actually be encountering a ghost. Either that, or he got more sun than he realized, he thought, determined to figure it out.

  The voices still continued. Not so much behind, beside, or in front of him, as from below.

  He studied the ground beneath his feet. It seemed like ordinary dirt. He scuffed it with the toe of his shoe. More ordinary dirt. He then swept his eyes to right and left, and spotted a rectangular metal cover coated with dust just inside the fence by where he stood. Kneeling down, he heard the voices grow louder. They were definitely coming from wherever that cover led.

  Five Hours Later

  The trilling of her cellular phone seemed to go on forever. Trying to rouse herself, she fumbled around on the floor in the direction of the sound and, upon opening her eyes, couldn’t remember for a few seconds why she’d been asleep in her office. Retrieving the receiver, she glanced at her watch. “Bloody hell!” she muttered, seeing 7:50 P.M. and all at once recalling what she’d
intended to do. “Only a half-hour snooze, and I’ll be as right as rain” she promised her technicians two hours ago, unable to keep her eyes open. The night shifts were wreaking havoc with her sleep despite afternoon naps at home and Lisa’s tiptoeing around after school so as not to disturb her. “I want to get at the latest batch of gels,” she added, “so be sure to wake me.” They obviously hadn’t.

  “Kathleen? It’s Dr. Julie Carr. Sorry to disturb you, but have I got news! It’s stranger than anything you could imagine.”

  “Julie, from Hawaii?” she answered, struggling to sit up. Outside her window to the west of the Twin Towers she saw a slash of orange across a dark horizon marking the end of the day.

  “That’s right,” the virologist replied. “It’s not even two here yet, and we just finished running confirmation studies on what we found in your samples from Hacket’s farm.”

  “Really?” she answered, still a little groggy. “But why are you involved? And only a few weeks ago the chief technician told me my stuff had gotten bumped—”

  “That was before the mistake, and it changed everything. Let me start at the beginning.”

  “Mistake?”

  “First of all, we found evidence of genetic vectors in the kernels of corn farmer Hacket had been using to feed the chickens,” said Julie, barging ahead. “The carrier portions were mostly made of cauliflower mosaic virus, but we picked out a few other types employing all the primers you and Patton included in your world study.”

  “My God! So I was right—”

  “We also found small fragments of bird flu H5N1 DNA in the hen droppings, this time using the restriction enzymes and primers for the virus that I got from the CDC in Atlanta.”

  Sullivan’s brain snapped to full alert. “So we’ve got a case for my theory—the vectors and the H5N1 virus were in close proximity inside the chickens’ GI tract. Julie, that’s enough to publish. It gives my theory that the vectors made the H5N1 jump the species barrier much more credibility. Sydney Aimes, eat your heart out!” The flush of vindication sent her spirits soaring despite the grim prognosis that her discovery might hold for humankind. It was a macabre kind of ecstasy, she knew, a glow of accomplishment peculiar to doctors and scientists when they unearth a suspected truth even when the news is bad, but she relished it just the same.

  “Hold it, gal. You ain’t heard nothing yet. I haven’t explained what happened after the mistake.”

  “What mistake?”

  “As you know, the people in the lab here were processing your stuff whenever they had time, and that meant the most junior personnel often ended up doing the work. A technician confused the primers, and added the one intended to demonstrate H5N1, the bird flu virus in the hen droppings, to the PCR machine while it was processing kernels of corn for vectors containing CaMV.”

  “She what?”

  “I know, it sounds silly, but that’s what happened.”

  “So? She should simply have thrown the subsequent mix away and repeated the PCR—”

  “That’s just it. She didn’t realize she’d made the error, and another technician ran the resulting fragments of DNA through an electrophoresis gel.”

  “Wait a minute. What fragments of DNA? There shouldn’t have been any replication of any DNA if she used the wrong primer.”

  “But there were fragments. Big long chains of them— all of it H5N1 DNA. That’s where our bird flu came from.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The H5N1 was in the corn, Kathleen! Brought there by a CaMV vector. Someone modified the corn with DNA from bird flu.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “I couldn’t believe it, either.”

  “But how did it get there? I can’t even imagine any way that someone could insert H5N1 into corn by accident.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like you, I couldn’t conceive of how this had occurred. But when I looked at all these fragments of H5N1 and compared them to gels of the virus that the CDC sent me, I noticed that they didn’t add up to an intact specimen. At first I thought pieces might have been missing because of natural deterioration, but as the results from more kernels came in, I saw that the same fragments of DNA were absent each time. And when I gave these strands a proper viral coat and placed them in a culture media, they didn’t replicate. That’s when I realized what we were dealing with.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Sure you do. Someone systematically removed those pieces of the DNA that let the virus replicate, Kathleen. They attenuated it, the same way we remove part of a virus to prevent replication when we want to make a regular vaccine, and still leave it intact enough that the surface proteins will stimulate an antibody reaction in the recipient. Except in this case, they made the modification on the level of the DNA itself.”

  “Are you saying what I think you are?”

  “The corn’s a genetic vaccine, Kathleen. A poorly made, highly dangerous genetic vaccine. Those birds on Kailua didn’t test positive for H5N1 surface protein and antibodies because they were sick. They tested positive because, unknown to us, they’d all been vaccinated against the infection through their feed. They’d incorporated the attenuated DNA into their own genes, manufactured their own supply of the virus’s protein coat, and mounted an immune response to it. If we’d done a lot of confirmatory procedures on the birds, we would maybe have picked up on it, but we had a dead kid on our hands and rushed to judgment. What can I say? Those chickens were still bloody dangerous—pooping out a vaccine loaded with long strands of near-intact H5N1 virus, all turbocharged with enhancers, promoters, and transposons. It’s no wonder a recombinant event between it and human influenza occurred, once little Tommy Arness inoculated his nose with the stuff. Hell, if we hadn’t killed the birds off, anyone else with the flu who handled them might also have incubated the hybrid, and we would have had a real epidemic on our hands.”

  “My God!” Sullivan murmured.

  “The shit’s really hit the fan over here,” Julie continued. “We’ve informed the Department of Public Health, they’ve notified the police, and since we all know that there’s only one outfit on the island sophisticated enough to be dealing in genetic vaccines, Biofeed has already received an official visit from the law. The subsequent denials that they’ve ever traded in that kind of product are flying out of the CEO’s office so loud you can likely hear them even in New York. Not surprisingly, a wall of company lawyers has formed around their records department, but the cops declared all documents in the place relevant to a possible case of negligent homicide—the death of the Arness boy—and word is they’ll access them by morning. Those same detectives are also reevaluating the murder at the Hacket farm and the attack on you in the context of someone trying to keep the cause of the child’s death from being found out. But I suppose you had your suspicions about that all along.”

  “More so recently,” Sullivan replied, her mind already racing too far ahead to bother explaining about Rodez, Agrenomics, and Pizza Face. “Julie, can you courier me the restriction enzymes and primers for H5N1 you used?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Let’s just say that I may soon come up with a surprise of my own.”

  After hanging up, she could barely contain her excitement. She especially wanted to tell Greg Stanton, at last having specific evidence that tied bird flu to the murders in Rodez and Oahu. When she reached him at home, she could hear the sounds of a party in the background. He nevertheless listened patiently, and when she finished, he said, “Well done, but I’ll need Dr. Carr’s reports in writing—to address the board about them. And when will you be running the tests for bird flu on the Rodez specimens?”

  “I won’t receive the reagents until Monday morning when the courier gets them here. Expect the first results by midnight.”

  “Great. And what are you going to do in the meantime?”

  “I’ll be in the lab, trying to finish the current tests and pre
paring the samples we’ll need once those primers arrive.”

  “Just don’t go making any preliminary announcements,” he ordered, and rang off.

  Despite his warning, she thought, why not call Sydney Aimes and let him in on the good news? Picturing the spectacle of the man at the conference, his bald head and thick neck tumescent with rage, she began to imagine his reaction with relish. The big prick will look like an erection on legs.

  But her sense of triumph over him quickly died. From the dark recesses where instinct and inarticulate fears lurked ever ready to infest her dreams, there escaped a remarkably lucid warning. As clearly as if someone had uttered a whisper inside her ear, she heard: He’s also going to become exceedingly more dangerous.

  Better let Stanton handle him, she decided.

  Instead she dialed Steve Patton’s number. Telling him tonight’s news would not only be a refreshing change from having nothing new to say for the last few weeks, it would give them something to focus on. These days their relationship seemed to have once more recovered to a stage where they could discuss work without being too awkward about it, and she wanted to nurture that progress. That’s why she promised herself to be very discreet as she savored the sweet taste of payback for his “I told you so” attitude in Honolulu.

  His phone rang a few times longer than it usually took him to pick up, and when he did, she recognized a telltale throatiness that once would have been enough to send her into a fit of despair. But now, even as she caught his barely concealed breathlessness and an occasional grunt in the background, she actually experienced a sense of relief from knowing he was with another woman. Somehow it made her feel off the hook. For a second she even toyed with the idea of hanging up without saying a word and calling him tomorrow, when he said, “Kathleen?” and all the noise of having sex ceased immediately.