Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “At the Fort! Of course. Renfrew was learning that day. Calling sharks. It means they might have my cells too,” Chazz said grimly. “That’s what they were doing in the condo, disguised as the phone company… my comb, brush, any number of samples left around. It’s even easier to do with individual genotypes. Match any long random stretch. We’re on the list.”

  “This is incredible,” Takamura said. “It sounds like voodoo. How could it work?”

  “Think about the mole,” Chazz said. “He sits there waiting. He’s one of us, does what we do, but he’s burrowed in, waiting. Then something happens. A signal is given. He is activated.”

  “Activated?” Takamura asked politely.

  Chazz nodded. “Activated. He does a job, performs some function. Something uncharacteristic, something that doesn’t belong, that isn’t what he does when he’s one of us. He spies, he steals, he makes a phone call, he meets someone he doesn’t know in a park. Of course, the parks are usually in England. The English are better at this sort of thing.”

  “Ah,” Takamura said. “You’re joking. You have been reading fiction.”

  Again Chazz nodded. “This is not fiction, though, and we’re not talking about human beings. We’re talking about a nucleic-acid molecule. Ordinarily…” He leaned back and orated. “Ordinarily DNA is highly redundant. A long stretch would have many repetitions, start and stop signals, recognition sites and so on. Nature can be quite profligate with it; after all, it is a skinny little molecule and a lot can fit in a small space. Repetition pays off. Redundancy. Important for critters that don’t like to change much. We like to have human beings for children, not lizards or lambs.

  “But nature can be economical, too. The genetic code is made up of words. The words have three ‘letters,’ codons. Three bases to a codon. A series of exchanges go on; the message is read, translated, sent; proteins are made. Imagine you want to compress a message, pack it into a smaller space. You can overlap words. Start at a letter, read a word. Later, start at letter number two, and read a word. Change the frame, and it’s a different word. Very economical. Each pass through the message could work like that, if the encoder was very clever. It would then all depend on where you started reading what the message was. A viroid does this. It makes DNA that fits into the host’s DNA. A new gene, or series of genes, is there waiting. A mole, you see. An intruder. Waiting.”

  He paused. Behind him, out the window, the forest was splashed with light and dark. The patches moved like disease across the island’s skin.

  “The mole is a potential, waiting for a signal. If the signal comes, the gene produces a botulism protein or some kind of fast kuru. Something that interferes with nerve cells, produces the effects we saw. If the signal isn’t sent, no harm is done.”

  It was raining on the side of Wai’ale’ale, a dense gray cloud trailing veils of heavy rain behind it. The rain fell into sunlight. A rainbow sat in there, distant and small and pure.

  “Like us. Waiting,” Patria said softly.

  Chazz shifted in his chair. “What time did you tell him to be here?” he asked Takamura. It was the third time he’d asked.

  Takamura smiled. “Nine. He’ll be here, don’t worry.”

  “Okay, I won’t worry.” Chazz worried.

  “The victims didn’t wait. Renfrew, or someone else, got to them and they died. There was no signal sent.” Patria’s hands were folded in her lap, but her fine knuckles were yellowish in the fading twilight.

  “Two possibilities,” Chazz said. “One, they weren’t ready with the two-part procedure and wanted to test the second stage alone; or, two, they administered the mole and its signal at the same time. It doesn’t matter. It must be a two-step process. If it isn’t, we’ll have the end of the world. I don’t think these people are that stupid.”

  “Is it possible?” Patria asked. “Is it really possible to do something like this?”

  “Once someone has thought of it and is determined to try it, it’s possible. A lot of work, a considerable investment in resources, but possible. This is not a terrorist group tailoring an antibiotic-resistant typhus. That would be cheap to do, but in the end relatively easy to handle. This involved a lot of research. A lot. You would think someone in Congress or in some other oversight committee would have found it in the budget.”

  “The Valiant,” Patria suggested. “She was full of platinum. It would explain why they killed Wyman. He had the propeller in his garage. He was close to finding the wreck. This group had been removing the platinum, using it to fund the research. No concealed budget.”

  “I expect you’re right,” Takamura said. “But of course it’s against international law, every treaty, common decency. The Biological Weapons Convention expressly prohibits the use of recombinant DNA for biological warfare. Unfortunately, if I understand you correctly, it does not prohibit research for so-called ‘defensive purposes.’”

  Chazz nodded. “The problem is, it’s a damned sly idea. A potential. Infect the other side. Tell them about it and force capitulation. Perhaps a little demonstration; a minority group, perhaps. It would be like the atomic bomb. There was a debate whether to explode it over the ocean, just a demonstration of its power. They decided it was more effective to use it on people. That’s the way they think. Or publish enough of the data to convince their scientists it’s there. Tell them what to look for in the genotype. A lethal remote-controlled bomb that would kill only the enemy. Find a sequence of genes common to them all, or most of them, and have your viroid insert itself there. (And I’d bet now it’s Dewilliter’s spindle viroid that’s the backbone, the vector.) Then, if someone doesn’t have the recognition sequence, the viroid does not insert itself and disappears. You’ve got to admire them. It’s very clever. I hope it isn’t Ben Silver. He’s a good man, a good scientist. The best, in fact. That’s what makes him so likely for this. If anyone could do it, he could. Damn.”

  The rain had swept past, and the rainbow faded into the gloom. Chazz got up to turn on the lights, and the landscape disappeared into darkness.

  He sat down heavily again. “They were testing the god-damned thing. On Wyman, and Cameron, that junkie. On the kids. Testing it on human beings. It kills fast and very unpleasantly. The ritual mutilations were probably Renfrew’s embellishments. They were testing several ways of administering it. Aerosols, injections. Viral material would be absorbed quickly into the mucosa, the lungs. They could doctor cigarettes. The girl smoked. It could recognize a tissue, a cell type. Migrate there. They could make it sexually transmissible. They could do any damned thing. Not easy, but possible. They could make it any length, make it as specific or general as they wanted. It could be tailored for one individual or a nationality. That would be sloppy, of course. Trying to make it work only on Russians. Others might die. There would be casualties on our side. ‘Acceptable’ casualties, presumably. Christ.”

  In the silence that followed his outburst, there was a soft knock at the door.

  Takamura got up. “That’ll be him.”

  Chazz nodded. He said to Patria, “You know what you have to do?”

  “Of course,” she snapped, then softened. “Yes, I know. Don’t worry.”

  “Good.” Chazz stood as Shinawa Hiroshi, Shihan, master teacher, eighth-degree black belt in aikido, holder of advanced ranks in a number of other ancient arts from ninja-jutsu to flower arranging, entered the room. The older man smiled. “Are you ready to die?” he asked, and Chazz, palms together, bowed.

  “Let’s go,” Takamura said. He smiled. “We’ll go to their nest. After all, ‘Birds never divide worm until safe in nest.’”

  Chazz shook his head as he snapped off the lights. They all left together. Outside, the darkness was complete.

  62

  Dr. Benjamin Silver leaned back wearily and ran his fingers through his thin hair.

  He sighed, then slid a transparent sheet of film into the viewer. Horizontal smudges marched in lines from top to bottom. His computer screen read
them out, labeled them automatically, matched them with others in computer memory. A few seconds later a soft bell chimed and the words “match successful” appeared on the screen. Slavic genotyping was complete.

  He moved more swiftly then, changing to mask and paper hat, gloves and paper shoes. Through the glove boxes into the P5 room he went to work preparing the cultures. Beyond the glove boxes inside the manufacturing facility, he could see a space-suited figure working amid the industrial 400-liter fermentation tanks and the maze of stainless steel pipes, pressure gauges, valves, fittings, coolant feeders. Lambda phages were carrying the viroid sequences to E. coli, inserting them into the bacteria where they swiftly merged with host DNA. The processes were monitored and controlled by computer through microsensors performing continuous chemical analyses on random samplings of protein synthesis.

  Silver returned to the computer room. As the bacteria reproduced in the vats, their numbers ticking silently across the screens, he slept on a small cot near the door. An alarm awoke him when the first batch was nearly ready; he watched monitor screens attentively as the cultures reached peak concentration and went into the centrifuge. The paste was spun down and unwanted proteins removed by high-performance reverse-phase liquid chromatography, leaving a dense pack of viroid RNA ready for insertion into a viral aerosol, which on contact with the air would form rapidly dispersing droplets. This end result, prepared automatically by robot sequencers, contained the final vector, the spindle viroid backbone that would carry naked RNA viroid to the target hosts on the other side of the world.

  Ben didn’t hear the door behind him open, so intent was he on watching the screen. He jumped when the voice behind him said, “Quite a sight.”

  He turned. “Oh. Hello, Jim,” he said to the white-suited figure who entered. “It is quite a sight, yes.” Silver waved at the screen. “That’s the first Slavophilia off the line. Once it’s in place, we can hand the President a fait accompli. No more expensive nuclear missiles, Jim. We’ll hold the key to the end of the Soviet Union. World peace is a real possibility.”

  “You’ve recovered from your attack of the doubts? Good, Ben. It’s an extraordinary achievement, truly extraordinary. Almost unbelievable.” They watched as another robot arm placed the Styrofoam top on the package and spray-sealed the carton. The conveyer belt moved another box into place.

  “Perhaps,” Silver said. “Perhaps.”

  “What do you mean, Ben?”

  “I mean that it’s still unstable. It needs fine-tuning. It might not be as discriminate as it should be.”

  “It’s called Lolo slavophilia because it was designed to find the sequence which defines Slavic ethnic characteristics. Are you saying it might not do that, Ben?”

  “No,” Ben said slowly. “I’m saying it might do more than that. The local Russian vector worked, but there the vector was controlled. We tailored the bugs for specific targets. We applied it carefully. We had individual genotyping to work with, to assure the match. It won’t work that way in Moscow. Within hours it’ll be over a considerable part of the Soviet Union. Within weeks, it’ll be all over the world. It should be designed for full Slavic ancestry. That’s fifteen percent of the Soviet Union.”

  “A crucial fifteen percent, Ben. The ruling elite.”

  “I have Slavic blood, Jim. My grandparents were from Leningrad. We used my genotype to find the recognition site. I’m an American now. I don’t want Americans to die.”

  “Ben. Please. In six months, the vector will degrade. It won’t be viable any longer. Meantime, it’s been as carefully designed as we could make it for full Slavic genotypes. Don’t worry. By the time any of the viroid could blow back into this country, it’ll be harmless.”

  “I know. I just don’t like rushing it.” He turned to look at the monitor of the P5 lab. The LED over the airlock doors into the room indicated negative pressure, integrity preserved. Condition normal.

  There was a loading bay at the far end of NB1-212. In a short time Styrofoam containers would emerge from P5 into the loading bay, each container roughly a foot on a side containing a tiny vial of colorless fluid. The containers were sealed. A television monitor showed the assembly line where the first container was waiting. A robot arm moved out of view, returned holding the vial, placed it inside.

  The space-suited figure turned at the airlock and waved at the camera. Then it cycled through and vanished from view.

  “I brought you a sandwich,” Goode said. He put a plastic package down, and Silver smiled his thanks. Goode went on. “We’re not out of the woods. Koenig and that Jap are still out there. Dewilliter and Freeman are out of custody, but we can’t use them anymore.”

  “I know. That’s one reason I’m worried about the vector. Dewilliter did a lot of the work on it. He knew the structure.”

  “It was almost done, anyway, Ben. You finished.”

  Silver nodded. “You know,” he said. “When I was in the Soviet Union and I learned what they were up to, I didn’t believe it. If Dmitrov hadn’t given me that classified paper by mistake, we’d never have known. The only advantage we have in all of it is that the difficulties for them are far greater. This is the melting pot, after all. The genetic mix is too heterogeneous.”

  Jim Goode smiled. “It’s a great achievement, what we’ve done.”

  “I’m still worried. It’s unstable, but you’re right. It has to go as is. How’re the deployment plans going?”

  Commander Goode looked surprised. “Don’t worry, a nuclear sub is coming on a goodwill visit to the islands. Its orders will take it to the Aleutians. From there we have routine reconnaissance flights. It’s a simple aerosol. Meteorology has it doped out. Dispersal patterns, prevailing winds, current weather – that sort of thing. Of course they won’t know what it’s for, but it’ll fall all around the Moscow area. If it enters a non-Slavic host, it will dissolve harmlessly. If it finds the target, it’ll insinuate itself. A time bomb. From there they infect others. Computer simulation suggests the ten vials dispersed upwind of Moscow will have spread throughout most populated areas of the Soviet Union within six months. After that, if we release the trigger, their losses would be unacceptable. Sixty-seven percent, minimum. Technocrats, scientists, bureaucrats. Since they’ve done the same basic work, all we’d have to do is show them what we’ve done, and they’ll knuckle under. We could even let them save face, give them some of the credit for universal peace. We can afford it.”

  “The President does not care for the Soviet Union. Is he likely to let them save face?”

  Jim shrugged. “That’s his worry, of course. I’d recommend it. If we back them into too small a corner, they might do something desperate. First-strike or some such. Even the President wouldn’t want that. No, he may not like it, but he’ll let them have some credit. A diplomatic breakthrough. It’s a fail-safe plan, Ben. We should get the Nobel Prize. Too bad no one will ever know.”

  “Yes,” Ben Silver said. “Too bad.”

  “Well.” Jim stretched. “Big Fish will be here at 0400. We should have everything ready to load by then.” He gestured at the screen. The sixth package was just rolling out of sight. “After that, it’ll be five days. Then everything will be in place. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Silver repeated. He finished his sandwich and headed to the airlock, where he began to put on his pressure suit. He was thoughtful as he cycled through the airlock.

  63

  Patria Koenig feared violence, though she had confronted it often in the field. Primitive societies tended to ritualize their violence more than technological cultures. Bows and arrows, spears and stone knives were commonplace in her work. So were chants and spells, poisons and magic, innuendo and ostracism, violence physical and psychological, emotional and spiritual.

  The methodology of control was on her mind, the techniques of coercion and fear, dominance and submission. Who did what and how. Most violence, she thought, was bluff and threat. Killing someone was violent,
of course, but ultimately self-defeating. Dead people were slow to follow orders. Killing was useless as a method of control, except by example: the threat of the same violence to another.

  Chazz said that to attack is to reveal in yourself a weakness. Lift your arm to strike, and you leave exposed ribs, vulnerable belly. She hoped it was true.

  The bushes on either side of the path were heavy with blossoms. She paused to inhale the frangipani fragrance. Stars were thick in the sky, dripping as generously with light as the flowers were with scent. There was no moon tonight, not yet. There were no clouds, nor threat of rain.

  The front door was ajar, spilling light into the darkness.

  She looked around, but the dark night was still. Jupiter was high and bright. The larger universe moved on.

  She conceded submission was not a good response to violence. It bred contempt, resentment, anger, more violence. To be a victim meant, in part at least, attracting attack. Show muggers a film of people walking, and they will agree on which ones are the potential victims: the haphazard, the unwary, the distracted, the timid, the fearful. The easy marks.

  Bluff and counterbluff. Puff up the fur, inflate the throat, raise the hackles, be bigger, growl deeper, bark louder.

  She stood a moment, poised on the walk, steps slowed beside the frangipani. On the dimly-lit surface of the lawns she could see toads hopping clumsily, snapping mosquitoes from the air. She could hear their awkward plopping in the undergrowth.

  Her steps crunched on the gravel walk. A blare of radio music spilled from the doorway, faded away, shut off. She pushed the door open.

  “Dr. Silver?” she called urgently. “Hello. Anybody home?”

  Andrea Silver appeared from the rear of the house, brushing her gray hair with the back of her hand. She wore a large yellow-and-red plaid apron and carried a wooden spoon. “What is it?”