The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  “Just about nothing.”

  “You’re kidding—weren’t you following up on the data I left for you?”

  “Yes. I followed up on everything you found.”

  “So …”

  “So there’s nothing there. No patent holder. And I can’t find Patient Zero anywhere.”

  Janie was quiet for a moment, then said, “That doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t exist. Or that we’re not going to find out who he is. Or who did this.”

  “No. It doesn’t. But unfortunately what it does mean is that we probably won’t be able to work a fix, at least not quickly. We need the original gene segment.”

  “We can build one from scratch. From nucleotides and other little snippets of material.”

  “That’ll take months. I don’t think we have that much time.”

  While Janie watched, Kristina unwrapped a mint and popped it into her mouth. She tucked the wrapper into her pocket. “It’s very frustrating, to come this far and then hit the wall like this.”

  “Can we get this segment from somewhere else? We know from your reconstruction what it’s supposed to be, so we just need to find it. Someone out there is bound to have it.”

  “Yes, one of the hundred sixty million people in the United States. Maybe we should just call each one of them and ask.”

  It was a wall, but there were ways they could climb over it. Janie leaned closer and whispered, “Look, when I take my little walk inside Big Dattie I can do a thorough search for it.”

  Kristina seemed surprised. “Walk inside Big Dattie? When?”

  “Soon,” Janie said. “I sent you a message about it before I left.”

  “I don’t—think so.”

  Janie considered Kristina’s denial, and found herself feeling disturbed by it. But she was sympathetic too, for the girl was clearly having difficulties of some kind. She felt a great need to choose her next words carefully, to be firm yet gentle with the young woman. “Yes,” she said after a moment of recollection, “I did. It was one of the last things I did before I went to Iceland. And when you came to pick up V.M. that night you said the money wouldn’t be a problem. You ate a mint then too. I can remember the wrapper crinkling.”

  As Kristina whitened, Janie said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” came the too-quick answer.

  “The money won’t be a problem, will it? Because if it is—”

  “No. It won’t.” She pressed her palm against her forehead. “I’m sorry. I forgot. I’ve got so much going on in my head right now that I forget things sometimes.”

  “Kristina,” Janie said softly, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about something. I’ve noticed—”

  Kristina almost seemed to rise up off the bench. “There’s nothing wrong with my memory.”

  So, Janie thought, I was right. And maybe Tom’s suggestion that Janie examine Kristina was a good one.

  She patted the girl lightly on the arm and said, “Relax. I was just going to say that I’ve noticed you seem to be under stress. And when we have a lot of stress in our lives, our memories can be affected. So let me take this opportunity to personally welcome you to the People Who Forget Things Club, of which I am a charter member, especially this week.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kristina said quietly. “It seems like an awful lot all of a sudden, this project.”

  “It is an awful lot. It’s very consuming, and it’s probably just going to seem bigger as we get deeper into it. So let’s just do a little bit at a time, and eventually it will all unfold. We’ll just search for this segment we need instead of what I’d originally planned to do. We’ll find it.”

  The young girl was rattled, uncertain. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because it has to be out there somewhere. It has to. And eventually, you and I will corner the little sucker.”

  A pleasant early evening breeze came up, and it blew Kristina’s loose hair around her head like a feathery halo, though she herself didn’t seem to notice it. She seemed lost and distant, sad in an undefinable way. Janie reached up with one hand, almost without thinking, and brushed a wayward strand out of Kristina’s eyes. “I’m staying with my lawyer until I get settled someplace else,” she said gently. “He knows a little bit about what’s going on.”

  She expected a reaction, but got none, and she began to feel a little worried. “He said he doesn’t mind if we meet at his place.”

  “That’s good.”

  Janie wondered what she was thinking about. When the silence had gone on for too long, she added, “There was something else I wanted to tell you—I talked to that hacker again this afternoon. He said we could hook up anytime I’m ready. I want to do it as soon as possible, tonight even, if I can. So I should get the gene sequence from you right away.”

  “All right. I’ll mail it to you as soon as I—as soon as possible.” She stood up, nodded, and walked away.

  The hacker assured her the bar would be a safe place to meet.

  “No one will be looking over your shoulder,” he said. “They are all much more interested in other things, eh?”

  She looked around at the crowd of young, hungry-looking people. The hormone-thick air was warm and almost oppressive.

  “I suppose so,” she admitted. “So—how are you going to do this?”

  “This is not something I should be telling you. A gentilhomme must have his secrets, I think.”

  He was playing up his French accent, using it to good effect. But Janie didn’t let his dark European looks and facile ways influence her. “Of course you should be telling me. I’m paying you, aren’t I? I want to know what I’m going to get nailed for if I get nailed.”

  “You will not be ‘nailed,’ ” he said with a wink, “at least not in that way.” He reached into his carrying case and pulled out a corneal scanner, the now defunct technology that had once been the only way to enter Big Dattie. “You are going to put one of your lovely blue eyes in front of this device, and it will let you enter. But it will not leave behind a record of who you are.”

  Janie was shocked—this was ancient history. She looked around nervously to see if anyone noticed her surprise. But as the hacker had predicted, no one was paying them any mind. Still, she wanted to say, Give me back my five grand, you faker, and then maybe I won’t yank those plastic teeth out of your smarmy mouth and shove them up—

  But she was here, the money had changed hands already, and maybe, just maybe, this dinosaur technology could open the gate. She decided to wait and see what happened next.

  The French hacker attached the scanner by a cord to the back of his computer, then slipped a disk into one of the side slots. He tapped the keyboard a few times and touched the screen, then touched it again, and after a brief pause touched it one more time. Then with a triumphant smile, he said, “Voilà! Step right up, mademoiselle!”

  Very quietly, Janie said, “This can’t possibly work. They took out all the corneal programming two years ago. Along with all the records of everyone’s corneas.”

  “Ah,” the Frenchman said with a grin, “but I have just reintroduced the program. I snuck it in; the database thinks it is just another data entry.”

  “You couldn’t get your hands on that corneal program.”

  “You are right, of course. I am far too unsavory a character for anyone even to sell it to me. However,” he said, still smiling, “I did not need to get my hands on it. You see, I was the one who originally wrote it.”

  A few minutes later, as promised, she was in. The hacker looked at his watch. “You have thirty minutes,” he reminded her. “Bon voyage.”

  This time it felt like a wonderland. But Janie didn’t allow herself to wander aimlessly—that would have been too much of a luxury. She entered the coding for the gene segment Kristina had mailed to her and told Big Dattie to find it. It would be a long search through millions of files, and Janie prayed it would yield something.

  Fifteen precious minutes went by. She tapped her foot nervously
and bit her nails nearly down to the quick as lines of code scrolled by in an unreadable blur on the screen before her. At the sixteen-minute mark a message came up on the screen.

  SIX MATCHES FOUND

  If they could get a tissue sample from one of the matches, they could isolate the required gene, replicate the hell out of it, and replace the altered gene in the afflicted boys. Even if they never managed to find out who’d been responsible for this travesty, they would still be able to correct it. Her heart began to race with the tantalizing thought that success in at least one part of their quest was so close at hand.

  Display, she ordered.

  Six names and six addresses came up on the screen. After each one of the entries was a big red boldface D.

  Deceased.

  She stared at the screen in disbelief. Her heart sank. She looked quickly through the vitae of the group: two adult men, one infant boy, three teenage boys. How could they all be dead?

  Stupid question, horrifying answer: half of the population died. These people all happened to be in that half. It was not a statistical impossibility.

  But it was deflating and discouraging. Janie wanted to cry. But in an establishment like the one she was in, that would be a signal to the closest loser to come over and attempt a consolation. So she squeezed her eyes closed until the tears resorbed, and got on with it.

  Could one of these boys be dug up, if, by some cosmic grace, he’d been buried, not cremated? Maybe, but it was a real long shot. The wild and woolly DR SAM had loved the open invitation so often issued by young boys with their dirty hands and runny noses, and had eaten them up with gusto, from the inside out, liver first, then kidneys, then the diaphragm.…

  But maybe one of them had died from some other cause, some less ghastly problem that didn’t require cremation. There might be a body, somewhere, from which she could take the single cell she needed. But when she took a quick look in the files of each of the positives, she only confirmed what she already suspected—that the cause of death in all six, including the boys, had been massive, drug-resistant staph infection. There would be no body after all.

  She tried a few things that might yield a donor, but all her attempts proved futile. All she could do in the time remaining was to search for the information she’d originally wanted, the inquiries she’d set aside in favor of the fruitless search she’d just made.

  One by one, she entered the names of the fifteen orthopedists she’d gotten from the AMA. Then she asked the database to give her a list of gene alteration projects, past and present, that might have anything to do with bone tissue. Several came up, including two from the foundation.

  She moved all these files into the holding area, then reached into her purse and pulled out a data storage disk. She tried to put it into the slot.

  But the Frenchman’s programming disk was still in there. Well, well … she thought to herself. Another member of the People Who Forget Things Club.

  But this was a big item to forget, and a surprising notion slipped into her head. She astonished herself even further by acting on it. Apparently the computer god was looking over her shoulder, because by some miraculous accident the corneal program disk was not write-protected, and she was able to copy the data files directly onto it. When the disk finally stopped spinning, Janie removed it, shielding it from view with her hand as she did. She slipped in the blank one she’d brought with her, but left it partly exposed, and tucked the purloined disk back into her purse.

  Her time was almost up. There was one more thing to do.

  Find: Kristina Warger, she commanded.

  Big Dattie was checking itself. Good, she thought, there won’t be too many matches. That’ll make it easier.

  But to her astonished disappointment, there were no matches at all. Alternate suggestions were displayed—in this case, people who had similar names: Elena Warger, Frederick Warger, Harold Warger, Matilda Warger … and so on down the alphabet. But no Kristina. Deeply confused, she closed the program. And when the Frenchman came back a minute before the sign-off time, he smelled heavily of Scotch.

  As she slipped off the stool, she said, “All done. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” She put out her hand, expecting him to shake it. Instead he pulled it to his face and kissed it dramatically. Janie froze and cringed, knowing that the plastic teeth were only a few millimeters from her skin. But she let him do it, for she did not wish to upset him in any way.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” he said. He glanced over at the computer, and seemed satisfied by what he saw. “Au revoir, mademoiselle. Perhaps we shall meet again.”

  “A bientôt, monsieur,” she said. “Perhaps we shall.” She smiled as warmly as she could, and got out.

  It was the closest thing to a normal family setting that Janie had experienced in years. There were so many blended families now, where one parent with surviving children found another with whom to join forces, and a new unit was formed, sometimes more out of necessity than desire. Janie recalled all the self-help books with advice on how to structure new families born out of divorce; they were popular in the late nineties, at a time when many of her and her husband’s friends were calling it quits and starting over again. Those books didn’t have much validity now, when the primary issue was grief, not anger.

  Tom was in the kitchen cooking, while Janie and Kristina worked on the computer doing something that felt oddly like homework. He had graciously allowed them to usurp his entire home office for the purposes of their work, but Janie didn’t get the sense that he felt in any way intruded upon. He seemed almost eager for them to be there. She was surprised by how smoothly he and Kristina made each other’s acquaintance; with herself and the girl, it had been a bit more rocky. But Tom seemed to understand Kristina really well. He’d had the benefit of Janie’s prior comments, but that advance work wasn’t adequate to explain their almost instant rapport. They seemed, quite simply, to have a sense of each other.

  They were looking through the information for the orthopedists, trying to narrow it down to one or two likely choices, but they were getting nowhere fast. When they’d been at it for an hour, Kristina sat back in her chair and rubbed her forehead. “No Patient Zero, no orthopedist, no gene match.”

  “There must be somewhere else we can look for that match,” Janie said. “We have to give this more thought. I know we’re missing something terribly important. We have to go over what we know about these boys until something jumps out at us.”

  “They’re mostly from New York. They’re all the same age. They all went to this one particular camp.”

  “They’re all of European Jewish ancestry.”

  “If there was something, anything we had from one of the matches that we could use to gather just a couple of cells,” Kristina said, “a baby tooth or a snippet of hair, or sweat or a nail clipping, anything with a trace of DNA on it … God, what it’s going to be like explaining this to their relatives, if there are any left—”

  “Wait a minute,” Janie said. “Say that again. In fewer words.”

  “We need something with a trace of DNA from one of them.”

  “Or from someone else with the right gene.” She sat back in her chair, a slightly perplexed look on her face. “Oh, my God,” she said quietly. “I don’t believe what I’m thinking.”

  She pulled out her phone and punched in the code for the Hebrew Book Depository.

  25

  Elizabeth called her husband’s manservant to her chamber early in the morning, and banished her own maids to the anteroom for the duration of his visit. It was an unusual invitation, for one who attended exclusively to a gentleman was seldom able to enter the realm of a lady, with its more feminine accoutrements and trimmings. And while he was honored to be summoned and intrigued by his surroundings, he could not imagine the nature of the countess’s business with him.

  “I shall be brief,” she said, “lest idle tongues wag about the seemliness of a wife enclosing herself in her chambre with the ser
vant of her husband … I have had a word of warning about Prince Lionel’s health from de Chauliac, through my own physician, Dr. Hernandez.”

  When the valet showed grave concern, she said, “Oh, he is not in any immediate danger. But these two very wise and learned men have examined my husband many times, and they agree that if his gout is to be contained, and if he is to avoid the further buildup of the foul humor that caused so much agony to his poor dear toe, then certain steps must be taken.”

  “Name them, madame. I shall see to their implementation immediately.”

  “Good. I knew I could count on your assistance. And your discretion. This difficulty with his health has deeply strained the cordiality of our marital union, and only his continued improvement will repair it. In any case, the first and most important thing is that he is to take more air. On this point they were quite vehement. To that end I have arranged for the groom to bring around his favorite horse, shortly before noon today. He shall bring one for you as well. You are to see that he has a good ride along the river, and that he stays out for at least two or three hours. I too am to take more air, but not of such great duration, say, perhaps an hour or only slightly more. So I shall go separately to a garden with one of my ladies, under escort, of course.”

  “Madame, he will surely object to your vulnerability.”

  “I will not be vulnerable. And he may not object. He is under his doctor’s strictest orders, as am I. Now, I will give him this news myself, but I thought to tell you first so that you would not be surprised if he summoned you for the ride. The best hours of the day are the ones just after noon, according to our physicians. He must take a good fill of them. And make sure that one of his stoutest knights rides along with you, so there will be no chance of violence. It happens far too often these days in Paris.”