by Jon McGoran
“He did.” She shrugged. “And from what I gathered, when the bees swarmed, it was totally unexpected. Not only were they surprised the bees could swarm, but they seemed to do it surprisingly quickly, unexpectedly. In a way it’s a big deal, but it’s not the kind of thing you murder people over.”
The room was quiet when I said, “They’re aggressive.” Everybody looked at me. “I know the guy I was fighting with at the lab was covered with the pheromone, but he wasn’t just stung to death, he was annihilated … I didn’t want to lay it on too thick, but it was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re right,” Annalisa said. “Even their reaction when I was there. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Do bees get more aggressive when they swarm?” Jimmy asked.
Annalisa shook her head. “Just the opposite. When a hive swarms, the old queen takes a portion of the colony and they split off, to go start a new hive. Before they go, they gorge themselves on honey, and that makes them docile. Sometimes they’re so bloated they’re physically unable to sting.”
“Wait,” I said, “so the old queen leaves the hive?”
Annalisa nodded.
“So does that mean there’s a new queen in the old hive?”
She nodded again. “Usually, yeah.”
“And the queen lays all the eggs. So it’s like, a new generation, right?” I thought for a second. “Could the aggressiveness be a recessive trait? Something that doesn’t show up in the first generation?”
Annalisa didn’t react at first. After a few seconds, she said, “Hmm. Actually, it could.”
“So maybe when they faked the data, they weren’t just hiding the fact that the hive was swarming, they were hiding what came after it. The aggressiveness.”
“That would make sense,” she said.
“But they couldn’t hope to release those bees, knowing they’re going to turn aggressive,” Nola said. “Not because it’s morally reprehensible, but because they’d never get away with it.”
“Sumner might think he could,” Annalisa said. “They’re licensing the bees, not selling them. If Bee-Plus technicians are working them, I’m sure they are getting rid of any new queens. And with the flightless queens, any that got by shouldn’t be able to fly away. I think Sumner is still working on a fix,” Annalisa said quietly. “He sent the faked data to Stoma, but he was still working on the Bee-Plus bees. Maybe he’s hoping to fix it before a wider release.”
“That’s a hell of a risk he’s willing to take,” Nola said.
“And that might be something worth killing to hide,” Jimmy added.
“Unless it really wasn’t murder,” I said. “Or at least not first degree. Maybe it was a cover-up to hide the cause of an accidental death.” They all looked over at me, and I paused, hoping someone else would finish the thought so I wouldn’t have to. No one did. “I wonder if the cause of death for Claudia and Lynne was a bee attack. That would explain why they had to dispose of the bodies.”
Annalisa gasped and put her hand over her mouth. “Poor Lynne.”
Jimmy put his arm around her, and she leaned against him.
Nola put her hand on my knee. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
67
Nola ran a bath and helped me out of my clothes, revealing the scratches and cuts and bruises from the glass and thorns and cliffs. Dried blood streaked my limbs. As steam rose from the tub, Nola cupped my cheek, her eyes teary.
“I’m okay,” I said with a smile.
She responded with a kiss, a strong, hungry, desperate kiss. The kind of kiss that makes you take a step back to steady yourself. The kind of kiss that sends a shiver through your body, that makes certain parts of your body try to convince the other parts that maybe they’re not as tired as they seem.
Nola noticed the effect she’d had on me with a raised eyebrow and a very soft touch. Suddenly, a bath wasn’t the first thing on my mind. I put my hands on her ribs and kissed her back, my hands sliding up, squeezing and caressing, eliciting a soft sound from deep in her throat. She broke away, her face flushed, and pointed at the tub.
I submerged myself completely, washing my hair, then I lay back and closed my eyes as Nola washed the rest of me. She lingered on the dirtiest parts. When she was done, my body was clean and my thoughts were most certainly not.
She wrapped me in a towel, running her hands all over me. “Jimmy said we could have the bedroom,” she said, leading me to it. The bath had soothed and relaxed me, and I was more than half asleep. But not completely asleep. Part of me was wide awake.
I flopped onto the bed and she straddled me.
“I think Jimmy has the hots for Annalisa,” she said, looking down at me. “Then again, I thought you did, too.”
“I have the hots for you,” I mumbled.
“So I see,” she said, reaching down and making me groan.
I let her do the driving, and she seemed to know where she was going. It was gentle and sweet, in part because I wasn’t capable of anything else, in part because that was what we needed. When we were done, she rolled off me and we held each other tight.
“I missed you,” she said, running her fingers lightly across my chest.
I reached over and brushed the hair away from her face. “I missed you, too,” I said, realizing as I said it how intensely it was true.
She leaned over for a long, slow kiss. Then I fell asleep.
* * *
The sun was up when I awoke. Everyone was downstairs, sitting around the dining room table. Moose was there, too. He came over and wrapped me in an awkward hug.
“They told me what happened,” he said, not letting go.
“Okay,” I said, arms at my sides, hugged into place. “Could use some oxygen.”
After a couple more seconds he let go and stood back. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Any word from Benjy?”
“Nothing.”
Nola came over with a cup of coffee, and I sat at the table. She pulled a chair up next to mine and held my hand, running her fingers through mine.
They had gotten Moose up to speed and now they were all talking it out, trying to figure out what was going on. I took a gulp of coffee, trying to follow along and hoping the caffeine would help.
“This morning, Annalisa decrypted a few e-mails from the server,” Nola explained. “There are repeated references to a ‘new site’ at ‘TFS,’ whatever that is, and talk about moving the next phase up. Something is supposed to be coming to a head in the next couple of days.”
“So, ‘TFS,’” Jimmy said, turning to me. “I thought maybe they were referring to Katama somehow, but that doesn’t make sense. Any ideas?”
I looked at Moose, and he shook his head. I did, too.
Moose and Annalisa took over the conversation, talking about gene vectors, transposons, and genomic sequences. Something about the whole thing had been bothering me, though, and as the caffeine did its thing, it came to me.
“The Bee-Plus bees were brought in because the bees on the island started dying, right?” I said. “Wouldn’t that mean the mites were acting up before the Bee-Plus bees even got here? And wouldn’t that mean it couldn’t have jumped from the bees to the mites?”
Moose and Annalisa were quiet for a moment, Nola and Jimmy looking back and forth between them.
Moose looked down and said, “Shit.”
Nola looked at him “What?”
“He’s right,” Moose replied. Then he looked up Annalisa.
She nodded. “Unless they brought the Bee-Plus bees before they had permission.”
“Do you have any samples of the mites from before last week?” I asked. “And is there any way to test them?”
Annalisa was shaking her head, but Moose said, “Benjy has some.” She turned to look at him. “In his shack. He has samples going back to the end of last summer. You have access to a thermal cycler, right?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
&nbs
p; “A machine that does polymerase chain reactions,” she said. “It amplifies a DNA sample so you can sequence it. There’s one at my lab, if it’s still there. And a gel electrophoresis unit, too. But I don’t dare go back. And it would take hours to run the test,” Annalisa said.
“How big are they?” Moose asked.
She stared at him for a moment, thinking. “They’re not that big. What are you thinking, bring them back here?”
He shrugged. “Or somewhere else, but yeah.”
She looked frightened at the thought, but she nodded her head. “That might actually work.”
68
Jimmy drove to the lab. We slowed down at the front entrance to Johnny Blue’s farm. The gate was seriously banged up and spattered with garbage. We kept going, curving around to the left, and slowed to a stop in the middle of the road. To the left was the back entrance to Johnny Blue’s property. The two Stoma lab units were gone. So was Pug-face’s body, but I could still picture it.
I tapped Jimmy on the arm and pointed. “The labs are gone.”
He nodded and we pulled into the other driveway. We both let out a breath when we saw Annalisa’s lab still there.
As we got out of the car, I looked around carefully for any sign of bees.
Annalisa had sat us down and coached us on what to do if we saw them: no loud noises, no sudden moves, no hesitating, just get back to the car. Even covered with bees, just get back into the car.
Jimmy was reading my face. “Bad way to go, huh?”
I nodded. “Worst I’ve seen so far.”
“Guess we better be careful, then.”
“Careful and fast. If they already moved the two units across the road, they’ll be coming back for this one soon enough.”
We approached the lab with our guns out. I swiped Annalisa’s ID through the slot, pushed open the door, and we stepped inside.
Annalisa had shown us pictures of the two units online, and they were right there when we walked in. I grabbed one and Jimmy grabbed the other and we carried them out to Jimmy’s truck. We went back and took the mini fridge from under the bench, which held all the reagents, and a small two-drawer cabinet full of tubes, pipettes, and other supplies. As we brought them outside, we could hear a helicopter approaching and we quickly placed everything in the back of the truck and got out of there before it showed up.
We dropped off the equipment back at the safe house, and Annalisa immediately started setting it up. Nola gave me a kiss and a squeeze, then started helping her.
I traded Jimmy in for Moose before heading out to Benjy’s shack to get the mite samples. As we drove away, I felt better knowing Jimmy was there with Nola and Annalisa. No offense, Moose.
Benjy’s shack was an actual shack, a tiny wooden structure on the edge of a small industrial site in Tisbury. Inside it was a desktop computer on a plywood workstation, with a chair in front of it. Next to that were a plastic porch chair and what looked like a trash-picked coffee table, both strewn with papers and printouts. Moose opened a metal cabinet in the corner, and started poking around one of the shelves. It was crowded with tiny glass jars labeled with white stickers.
While he was rummaging around, I stood in the middle of the floor, trying to keep out of the way. There were papers lying everywhere, but next to the computer, right on top, were two dated the day before Benjy disappeared. One was a printout of a half page of numbers. Across the bottom were large handwritten characters from a red felt-tipped pen: “225 Hz,” circled and underlined. The paper next to it was a printed map of the island. There were pencil lines all over it, but a half-dozen were traced in red felt tip, all converging at a point on the edge of the forest, just west of the airport.
“Bingo,” Moose said, pulling out one glass jar, then another, then two more. “August and October of last year, April and May of this year.”
“What are these?” I asked.
Moose glanced at them. Then he did a double take. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
He took them out of my hand, studying them more closely. “The numbers are wrong.” He looked from the papers to the computer. “So, are we camping out at that house now? Is that, like, our control center?”
“Yeah. I don’t think Jimmy’s too happy about it.”
Moose thought for a second. Then he handed me back the papers and started pulling plugs out of the back of the computer. “Give me a hand with this.”
* * *
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jimmy said as we walked in with Benjy’s computer. He was sitting with Annalisa at the dining room table, now covered with the server and the lab equipment. “What is this, the goddamned control center?”
Annalisa looked up at him, a wry and almost intimate look on her face. He seemed to sense it, looking back at her and slumping his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “All right, whatever.” He slid some of the beakers out of the way to make room.
“What did you find?” Annalisa asked.
We put everything on the table, and Moose started unpacking the box. “We got the mite samples we need,” he said, sliding the glass jars toward her. “We also found some information that could be important, but I’m going to have to get on Benjy’s computer and check it out.”
Moose got to work on the computer, and Annalisa started pulverizing the mites with the back of a fork, mixing them with different solutions. At one point she was using the salad spinner as centrifuge. Nola and I got out of their way, but Jimmy stayed right where he was, sitting close by Annalisa’s side. I looked back as we walked out of the room, and a tiny wistful pang passed through me, but I put my arm around Nola and she pulled me in tight.
Nola and I found enough canned ingredients in the cupboard to make a passable chili, and we worked quietly but comfortably together in the kitchen. By the time the chili was ready, Annalisa had finished preparing the samples and she and Jimmy were sitting close together, staring at the thermal cycler.
Moose pushed himself away from the computer. “I’m onto something here,” he said, rubbing his face. He paused and looked with a sudden intensity at the chili I’d set next to him, then shoveled in a few quick spoonfuls.
“Okay,” he said around the third spoonful. “So, we’ve been tracking the bees on the island since Benjy started this project last year, counting the number of bees with these LIDAR units, then mapping out where the colonies are. The LIDAR picks up all the movement around them—a massive amount of data. Then we filter it. We’re looking for honeybees, so we filter the data for two hundred hertz, the frequency of honeybee wings. You filter the data, you look at which direction the honeybees are flying, and you plot the line. You do it from a few different locations, and where the lines intersect, is where there’s a hive. Then we would go visit it and add it to our census map.”
Jimmy’s forehead looked like there was an aneurysm behind it. I wondered if that was how I looked when Moose first explained it to me.
“So a few weeks ago,” Moose said, “the number of bees flying around starts dropping, then the bees stopped showing up altogether.” He sat back and took a deep breath. “Apparently, a few days ago, Benjy started filtering for different frequency signatures. And at two hundred and twenty-five hertz, he got hits. Lots of them. When I plug those numbers in, I get the same result.”
“Could the calibration have been off?” Annalisa asked. “Could it have actually been two hundred, and just registering as two-twenty-five?”
“It’s possible. And I’m going to check the LIDAR units to make sure. But it’s also true that maybe what he was getting hits from weren’t regular honeybees.”
“You mean Bee-Plus bees?” Nola asked.
“Or maybe more accurately Bee-Plus-plus, right?” he said with a bitter laugh. “Because if they’re swarming, that means another generation is involved. Stoma said the queens are supposed to be flightless, to prevent that from happening, but they could be wrong. Imagine that: a genetic modification not doing
what it’s supposed to, right?” he said sarcastically. “Makes you wonder what else they’re wrong about. Or lying about. Either way, if these aren’t regular bees, it wouldn’t be a total shock that they had a different signature.”
The table fell quiet as that sunk in.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“We need to check the LIDAR units, that’s for sure,” Moose said as he picked up the map we’d found at Benjy’s. “But first we need to go check and see if this info is right, because if it is,” he said, poking it with his finger, “there should be a feral hive right here.”
69
The lines on Benjy’s map converged on a small wooded area fifty yards inside the state forest. Nola looked worried when we left. I kept it light, asked her if she wanted us to bring her some honey, but I was worried, too.
Moose had the coordinates on his phone, and we parked on the side of the road and sat there for a moment.
As he opened the door, I said, “Shouldn’t we have beekeeper suits or whatever?”
“Yeah,” he said with a grim smile. “We should.”
Then he got out.
I did, too, thinking that if he’d seen what I’d seen, he wouldn’t be so glib. Annalisa had assured me that the alarm pheromone would have long since worn off, and maybe the patchouli had, too, but I swore I could still smell them both, and it was giving me the heebie jeebies.
The forest was buzzing with flies and gnats as we walked as quietly as we could into the woods. The buzzing grew louder, making my hair stand up. When I looked at Moose, I could tell he heard it, too.
That’s when I caught the smell. At first so faint that, if I hadn’t known what it was, I wouldn’t have even noticed. Then Moose smelled it, too, a furrow creasing his brow.
His face was screwed up at the stench, and he was opening his mouth to speak when I pointed out a deer lying at the base of a large pine tree twenty yards away, its stomach grotesquely bloated.
Moose saw it and looked back at me. I held up a finger, for him to wait, but when I walked over to it, he followed. The smell was intense. Maggots squirmed around the animal’s eyes, nose, and mouth. It was peppered with dead bees and stingers.
