Prophet of Bones

by Ted Kosmatka

  Paul stared at Charles. He didn’t know what to say.

  Finally he asked, “What about the new code?”

  “That’s the thing,” Charles said. “The reason I left.”

  “What?”

  “To me…” Charles continued. “It was a strange music. I don’t want to listen anymore.”

  He restacked the printed sheets and handed them back to Paul.

  “So what do I do?” Paul asked.

  “With the photos of the dig? I’d burn them and forget them.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “You have the code. You have the assays. The rest is just math.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t need the lab equipment. You can do the comparison anywhere with a computer powerful enough.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “No. I’ve said too much already.”

  “I can’t do this by myself.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  Paul looked at the birds scattered across the table. Despite what Charles had said, the drawings held their own beauty, distinct from the birds themselves. They were their own work of art.

  “Thank you for your time, Charles.”

  Paul stood. Charles walked him to the door.

  “One last thing before I go,” Paul said. “There was a list of names in your office. Museums and laboratories. What were you doing with that list?”

  “Following the money.”

  “To those places?”

  “Yes. Money has descent, just like any living thing. There are trophic levels.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Charles shook his head. “I’m done with that now. I don’t want to think about it anymore.” Charles shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  Paul could see that Charles was growing agitated. “Thank you,” he said. “So you’re sure that you’re not coming back?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then this is good-bye.”

  Paul stuck out his hand. Charles hesitated at first but shook it.

  “What are you going to do with yourself?”

  “I’m going to search for the recursive equation for human culture,” Charles answered. “And I’m going to draw.”

  “Good luck to you,” Paul said.

  He turned and walked down the steps. He got as far as the sidewalk before Charles stopped him, calling, “Wait, there is one thing.”

  Charles disappeared back inside, leaving the door open. There were a few moments of silence, and then the sound of ripping paper. Paul walked back up the steps.

  Charles returned and handed Paul one of the finch drawings. “On the back,” he said.

  Paul turned it over and saw a phone number and address.

  “It’s a computer guy,” Charles said. “He costs money, but he’s good at what he does.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “What you need.”

  “Thank you, Charles.” Paul shook his hand again and walked back to his car.

  29

  Morning began with coffee, thick and black. Then toast and three eggs. On the way to work, Paul drove through the steady, desultory rain of Baltimore.

  He found one of the third-floor secretaries at her desk.

  Be careful of Janus, Charles had said.

  “Where do the bones go when we’re done with them?”

  Ms. Bratton looked up from her computer monitor. The question had startled her out of her normal morning routine. “Several different facilities.”

  “Is there a way to get a list?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “There must be a master list.”

  “Perhaps you should ask your immediate superior.”

  “Thanks.”

  Paul swung by his office and pulled a random stack of papers from his filing cabinet. He took the elevator down to first-floor shipping. It was at the back of the building. Samples came in and went out, a steady turnover from and to all points of the globe. If the fifth floor was the company’s brain, shipping was its endocrine system.

  The head shipping guy’s name was Rob.

  Paul had seen him around but had never talked to him.

  Paul knocked on the door. The man looked up from his computer.

  “Can I help you?”

  Paul waved the stack of papers. “Yeah, I think there may have been a mix-up, and I just need to double-check.”

  “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “I have some samples that apparently never got to where they were supposed to go. Is there any way you can track them down?”

  “Sure.” The man tapped out a quick pattern on the keyboard. “You got tracking ID numbers?”

  Paul shuffled through the pages in his hand. “Somewhere…” He made a performance of scanning the papers, slowly sifting through the pile in his hands, until he was back at the beginning again. Eventually, Rob lost patience.

  “Where were they going?” he asked.

  “They were headed out for archiving. They came out of the fourth floor.”

  “Animal bones?”

  “No, human mostly.”

  “Oh,” Rob said. “That’s easy. Most human remains get sent to the Field Museum, in Chicago.”

  “Oh, right, I remember now,” Paul said. “That is where they were supposed to go.”

  “When did you ship them out?”

  “Two or three days ago.”

  “Well, that explains it,” Rob said, taking on a whole new demeanor. “They wouldn’t even have arrived yet. It takes four or five days to get there sometimes.”

  “Oh, sorry about that. I didn’t realize.”

  “If the samples still haven’t showed up in a week, then drop back by.”

  “Okay, thanks.” On a hunch, Paul asked Rob another question: “Do we have anything shipped from a place called Axiom?”

  “Axiom, Axiom.” Rob checked his screen.

  “A Florida address,” Paul said.

  “No, nothing shipped in from Axiom.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But we do ship things to Axiom.”

  “We do?”

  “In fact, we have a shipment going out now. Right in the next room.”

  “Thanks.”

  Paul entered the shipping room. Great stacks of crates and boxes were spread over the concrete floor. On a steel table in the back, he found a box labeled “Axiom.”

  He grabbed the X-Acto knife sitting on the table and cut the tape. The box opened, revealing a dozen neatly sliced bone samples wrapped in plastic.

  Paul reached in and took one out. He slipped it into his pocket and then taped the box shut again.

  Paul headed for the elevators. “Thanks,” he called out to Rob as he passed his office. “You were a big help.”

  30

  Paul pulled up to the curb and put his Matrix in park. He looked down at the address written on the back of the finch drawing, then back up at the old building. The numbers on the wall read 2213, in raised black letters. Paul glanced up and down the block. This wasn’t the greatest of neighborhoods but, for better or worse, he was in the right place.

  He climbed out and ascended the short riser of cement stairs. A car horn blared in the distance. From a window across the street wafted music, all bass.

  This part of Baltimore was all two- and three-flats. Architecture dating to the turn of. Bricked like brick was free back then.

  The place might have once been nice. Now graffiti marked the walls, drawn on top of old graffiti in layers like archaeological strata. They were a few city blocks from the water, on the wrong side of the bridge.

  It seemed an unlikely place to find a computer specialist. Even an illicit one who worked for cash under the table.

  Paul hit the buzzer twice before a voice came on: “Yeah?”

  “I’m the guy who called earlier.”

  “Who?”

  “We talked.”

  “That’s a little vague.”

&n
bsp; “Charles sent me.”

  A few seconds of silence. “That’s specific enough. Come on up. Third floor.”

  The door buzzed.

  Paul took the stairs two at a time.

  At the top and around the bend, a young face leaned out from a doorway.

  “In here,” the face said, then disappeared inside.

  Paul followed through the open doorway.

  “Close it behind you.” The voice came from somewhere in the living room.

  Paul closed the door and stepped farther into the apartment.

  The guy was pale with shaggy black hair and dark eyes. He was thin to the point of undernourishment, mid-thirties, good-looking, with a sharp profile and a narrow, boyish face. He sat on a ratty couch, a box of pizza sprawled open in front of him. He wore a black leather jacket, even though it had to be close to eighty degrees in the room.

  “Oh, and did you lock it?”

  “Uh, no,” Paul said.

  “Go ahead and lock it.”

  Paul went back and slid the bolt.

  “You never know around here. You want some pizza? Giordono’s.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Well, here, take a seat.” He gestured with a slice of pizza toward a chair next to the TV.

  Paul sank into the chair.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” the guy said. “But I’m starving. Absolutely starving. First chance I’ve had to eat all day. You don’t mind, do you? Giordono’s got the best pepperoni in town.” The words came in quick bursts, like machine-gun fire. He spoke twice as fast as a normal person.

  “No, it’s fine,” Paul said. “Eat away.”

  “I was at the doctor today for, like, three hours—psoriasis, the bane of my life—and they had me filling out these forms, because it was my first time there.” He took a bite of pizza, barely stopping for breath. “And you know those boxes you’re supposed to check, the ones that list you had this and you had that?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  “The paperwork when you first see a new doctor. There’s a clipboard, and a sheet of paper with a list of every disease in the world.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Well, there’s this spot where you’re supposed to list the causes of death for close relatives. You know, after all these boxes you have to tick off. Your grandfather died of x marks the box. All I could write was ‘Germans.’ They didn’t have a box for it.”

  “I suppose they wouldn’t.”

  “I mean, my parents are still alive, and as I’m filling it out, I’m thinking of my great-aunts and great-uncles and grandparents, all the ones who have actually died, and I’ve really got nothing to go on, you know?”

  Paul nodded.

  “I mean, that’s what family history is for. Your grandfather drops dead of a coronary at sixty, then you shouldn’t eat cheese, right?”

  “Sounds logical.”

  “But I don’t have anything like that. I mean, for all I know, I might come from a family of immortals. Our one Achilles’ heel: fucking Germans.”

  “Plausible.”

  “If I get hit by a car and killed in the street, you watch, it’ll be a German car. I’m Alan, by the way.”

  “Alan,” Paul said, “about the analysis.”

  “Right.” The computer guy held up a finger while he took a huge last bite of pizza. “The analysis,” he muffled.

  “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “It’s the apartment, right? A shit hole, I know. Doesn’t exactly give off the vibe I’m the kind of guy you’re looking for. I can understand that. People have expectations. But trust me, I’m the guy. I’m just a little short of apartment fundage right now. Besides, you’re just flushing money when you rent, so the shit holes are always the smart places to stay until you can afford to buy.” He paused, seeming to think about it. “Unless you get mugged or shot or something. That changes the cost-benefit analysis somewhat.”

  He cleared a space on the coffee table and plopped down an old, beat-up laptop, a Half-Life 3 sticker pasted across the lid.

  “Let’s see it,” he said.

  Paul handed him the flash drive.

  “This your only copy?”

  “No, I made a duplicate.”

  “Good man. Never give out your only copy.”

  The guy plugged the drive into his computer. “What have we here? Let’s see.” He took another bite of pizza while he waited for the system to load. “Two files?” he asked.

  “The first sample is the proband, the second is the reference.”

  “Doesn’t matter which is which,” Alan said. “The analysis will just provide a statistical correlation.”

  “You’ve worked with DNA before?”

  “A sequence is a sequence,” he said. “It’s just data. So who do these belong to?”

  “Better I don’t tell you.”

  “Ah, some paternity blackmail case. I hear you.”

  “Nothing like that. The reference sequence is human. I’m not sure what the other one is. That’s what I need you to tell me.”

  “I’m assuming the files are compressed.”

  “Yeah, is that a problem?”

  “No, it’s just a matter of finding the decompression algorithm.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “For biological systems, there are only six in common use. I’ll just plug them in to see which one works. So you just want a comparison?”

  “I need to know how divergent the two samples are. Are they the same species or different?”

  “Divergence will be easy enough to test for, but where the species line falls isn’t my area. After decompression, a simple comparison analysis will tell you the percentage difference. Will that work?”

  Paul nodded. “That’ll tell me what I need to know. If the samples are close enough, can you calculate time to most recent common ancestor?”

  “The percentage difference is all I can promise, but there might be existing programs I can run to get you the other result. I’ll have to do some research on it. This isn’t something I do every day, you see, but it shouldn’t be that complicated. The main problem will be the size of the data set being compared. Even with compression, these files are huge.”

  “That computer can handle it?”

  “What, this one? Shit, no. This is just my gaming rig. I have access to a computer at work that’ll have the balls for this, though.”

  “Work.”

  “Don’t sweat it. It’s at a private company, and I know how to delete project history. Nobody will know.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Ah, well, that depends. How long do you want it to take?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Then maybe a week.”

  Paul opened his wallet and pulled out five crisp hundred-dollar bills.

  The guy took the money. “Two days, maybe three.”

  “I need it faster.”

  Alan shook his head. “It’ll be two days no matter how many hundreds you’ve got in that wallet. It’ll take me a day to track down the right programs, then another day to run the analysis, double-check, and generate the report.”

  “Okay, then that will have to do.” Paul stood.

  “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  “I’ll see you in a few days,” Paul said and took the stairs back down to his car.

  31

  Paul was in the lab when they came for him.

  A security guard knocked on the door.

  “Paul Carlsson?”

  Paul looked up from his work. “Yeah.”

  “If you’ll come with me.” It was a guard Paul hadn’t ever seen before. And Paul had seen all the guards.

  “Why do you want him?” Janus asked. Janus was standing on the other side of the lab counter, mixing fixative.

  “We have some questions we need to ask,” the guard said.

  Paul looked at Janus. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Okay,�
� Janus said, though the look on his face said that he wasn’t particularly hopeful.

  Paul followed the security guard down the hall to the elevator. A thick finger stabbed the button for the sixth floor. This explained why he hadn’t seen the guard before. Paul had never been to the sixth floor. Except for the little round number in the elevator, he might not have known there was a sixth floor. What could be above heaven?

  The door dinged open and they stepped onto matte black tile. There was no grand, beautiful entrance here. No glass wall. This floor had no pretenses to keep up. At a steel door, the guard swiped a security pass and led Paul down a narrow hall. At the end of the hall was another door.

  “What’s this about?” Paul asked.

  “You’ll have to take it up with them.”

  The guard opened the door and motioned Paul inside.

  Three men sat at a table waiting for him. Two of them were strangers, but the third had a face he remembered well. A face etched in his memory. The guard closed the door and stood next to the wall.

  “Please sit,” the first man said.

  He was middle-aged and bland, wearing a suit that probably cost as much as Paul made in a month. The man next to him was older, round-faced, unsmiling. At the other end sat the face he remembered. The lawyer from the island.

  Paul pulled the chair out and took a seat.

  He felt an involuntary response to the lawyer’s presence. He resisted the urge to reach up and scratch at his eye patch. He made a point not to look at him and instead looked at the man sitting directly across from him. As if to prevent this, the lawyer spoke.

  “Hello, Paul.”

  “Hello.”

  “It’s nice to see you in circumstances better than when we last met.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Though, actually, when you think about it”—here the lawyer made a point to look at his two colleagues—“maybe these circumstances aren’t any better, after all.”

  The other two men didn’t so much as blink. They just stared across the table at Paul.

  “In fact,” the lawyer continued, “maybe it’s worse.”

  On the table was a large file. The lawyer opened it.