the Third Twin (1996)

by Ken Follett

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Shall we go to Hamptons, at the Harbor Court Hotel? I think it’s the best restaurant in Baltimore.” It was the swankiest, anyway.

  “Fine,” she said, standing up.

  “Then I’ll pick you up at eight?”

  “Okay.”

  As she turned away from him, Berrington was visited by a sudden vision of her naked back, smooth and muscular, and her flat ass and her long, long legs; and for a moment his throat went dry with desire. Then she shut the door.

  Berrington shook his head to clear his mind of lascivious fantasy, then called Preston again. “It’s worse than we thought,” he said without preamble. “She’s written a computer program that searches medical databases and finds matched pairs. First time she tried it out, she found Steven and Dennis.”

  “Shit.”

  “We’ve got to tell Jim.”

  “The three of us should get together and decide what the hell we’re going to do. How about tonight?”

  “I’m taking Jeannie to dinner.”

  “Do you think that may solve the problem?”

  “It can’t hurt.”

  “I still think we’ll have to pull out of the Landsmann deal in the end.”

  “I don’t agree,” Berrington said. “She’s pretty bright, but one girl isn’t going to uncover the whole story in a week.”

  However, as he hung up he wondered if he should be so sure.

  8

  THE STUDENTS IN THE HUMAN BIOLOGY LECTURE THEATER were restive. Their concentration was poor and they fidgeted. Jeannie knew why. She, too, felt unnerved. It was the fire and the rape. Their cozy academic world had been destabilized. Everyone’s attention kept wandering as their minds went back again and again to what had happened.

  “Observed variations in the intelligence of human beings can be explained by three factors,” Jeannie said. “One: different genes. Two: a different environment. Three: measurement error.” She paused. They all wrote in their notebooks.

  She had noticed this effect. Any time she offered a numbered list, they would all write it down. If she had simply said, “Different genes, different environments, and experimental error,” most of them would have written nothing. Since she had first observed this syndrome, she included as many numbered lists as possible in her lectures.

  She was a good teacher—somewhat to her surprise. In general, she felt her people skills were poor. She was impatient, and she could be abrasive, as she had been this morning with Sergeant Delaware. But she was a good communicator, clear and precise, and she enjoyed explaining things. There was nothing better than the kick of seeing enlightenment dawn in a student’s face.

  “We can express this as an equation,” she said, and she turned around and wrote on the board with a stick of chalk:

  Vt=Vg+Ve+Vm

  “Vt being the total variance, Vg the genetic component, Ve the environmental, and Vm the measurement error.” They all wrote down the equation. “The same may be applied to any measurable difference between human beings, from their height and weight to their tendency to believe in God. Can anyone here find fault with this?” No one spoke, so she gave them a clue. “The sum may be greater than the parts. But why?”

  One of the young men spoke up. It was usually the men; the women were irritatingly shy. “Because genes and the environment act upon one another to multiply effects?”

  “Exactly. Your genes steer you toward certain environmental experiences and away from others. Babies with different temperaments elicit different treatment from their parents. Active toddlers have different experiences than sedentary ones, even in the same house. Daredevil adolescents take more drugs than choirboys in the same town. We must add to the right-hand side of the equation the term Cge, meaning gene-environment covariation.” She wrote it on the board then looked at the Swiss Army watch on her wrist. It was five to four. “Any questions?”

  For a change it was a woman who spoke up. She was Donna-Marie Dickson, a nurse who had gone back to school in her thirties, bright but shy. She said: “What about the Osmonds?”

  The class laughed, and the woman blushed. Jeannie said gently: “Explain what you mean, Donna-Marie. Some of the class may be too young to remember the Osmonds.”

  “They were a pop group in the seventies, all brothers and sisters. The Osmond family are all musical. But they don’t have the same genes, they’re not twins. It seems to have been the family environment that made them all musicians. Same with the Jackson Five.” The others, who were mostly younger, laughed again, and the woman smiled bashfully and added: “I’m giving away my age here.”

  “Ms. Dickson makes an important point, and I’m surprised no one else thought of it,” Jeannie said. She was not surprised at all, but Donna-Marie needed to have her confidence boosted. “Charismatic and dedicated parents may make all their children conform to a certain ideal, regardless of their genes, just as abusive parents may turn out a whole family of schizophrenics. But these are extreme cases. A malnourished child will be short in stature, even if its parents and grandparents are all tall. An overfed child will be fat even if it has thin ancestors. Nevertheless, every new study tends to show, more conclusively than the last, that it is predominantly the genetic inheritance, rather than the environment or style of upbringing, that determines the nature of the child.” She paused. “If there are no more questions, please read Bouchard et al. in Science, 12 October 1990, before next Monday.” Jeannie picked up her papers.

  They began packing up their books. She hung around for a few moments, to create an opportunity for students too timid to ask questions in open class to approach her privately. Introverts often became great scientists.

  It was Donna-Marie who came up to the front. She had a round face and fair curly hair. Jeannie thought she must have been a good nurse, calm and efficient. “I’m so sorry about poor Lisa,” Donna-Marie said. “What a terrible thing to happen.”

  “And the police made it worse,” Jeannie said. “The cop who drove her to the hospital was a real asshole, frankly.”

  “That’s too bad. But maybe they’ll catch the guy who did it. They’re passing out flyers with his picture all over the campus.”

  “Good!” The picture Donna-Marie was talking about must have been produced by Mish Delaware’s computer program. “When I left her this morning she was working on the picture with a detective.”

  “How’s she feeling?’

  “Still numb … but jumpy, too.”

  Donna-Marie nodded. “They go through phases, I’ve seen it before. The first phase is denial. They say: ‘I just want to put it all behind me and get on with my life.’ But it’s never that easy.”

  “She should talk to you. Knowing what to expect might help her.”

  “Any time,” Donna-Marie said.

  Jeannie walked across the campus toward Nut House. It was still hot. She found herself looking around watchfully, like a nervous cowboy in a western movie, expecting someone to come around the corner of the freshmen’s residence and attack her. Until now the campus of Jones Falls had seemed like an oasis of old-fashioned tranquillity in the desert of a modern American city. Indeed, JFU was like a small town, with its shops and banks, sports fields and parking meters, bars and restaurants, offices and homes. It had a population of five thousand, of whom half lived on campus. But it had been turned into a dangerous landscape. That guy has no right to do this, Jeannie thought bitterly; to make me feel afraid in my own place of work. Maybe a crime always had this effect, causing the solid ground to seem unsteady beneath your feet.

  As she entered her office she started thinking about Berrington Jones. He was an attractive man, very attentive to women. Whenever she had spent time with him she had enjoyed herself. She was also indebted to him, for he had given her this job.

  On the other hand, he was a bit oily. She suspected that his attitude to women might be manipulative. He always made her think of the joke about a man who says to a woman: “Tell me all about yours
elf. What’s your opinion of, for example, me?”

  In some ways he did not seem like an academic. But Jeannie had observed that the real go-getters of the university world noticeably lacked the vague, helpless air of the stereotype absentminded professor. Berrington looked and acted like a powerful man. He had not done great scientific work for some years, but that was normal: brilliant original discoveries, such as the double helix, were usually made by people under thirty-five. As scientists got older they used their experience and instincts to help and direct younger, fresher minds. Berrington did that well, with his three professorships and his role as conduit for Genetico’s research money. He was not as respected as he might have been, however, because other scientists disliked his involvement in politics. Jeannie herself thought his science was good and his politics were crap.

  At first she had readily believed Berrington’s story about downloading files from Australia, but on reflection she was not so sure. When Berry had looked at Steven Logan he had seen a ghost, not a phone bill.

  Many families had parenthood secrets. A married woman might have a lover, and only she would know who was the real father of her child. A young girl might have a baby and give it to her mother, pretending to be an older sister, the whole family conspiring to keep the secret. Children were adopted by neighbors, relatives, and friends who concealed the truth. Lorraine Logan might not be the type to make a dark secret of a straightforward adoption, but she could have a dozen other reasons for lying to Steven about his origins. But how was Berrington involved? Could he be Steven’s real father? The thought made Jeannie smile. Berry was handsome, but he was at least six inches shorter than Steven. Although anything was possible, that particular explanation seemed unlikely.

  It bothered her to have a mystery. In every other respect, Steven Logan represented a triumph for her. He was a decent law-abiding citizen with an identical twin brother who was a violent criminal. Steve vindicated her computer search program and confirmed her theory of criminality. Of course, she would need another hundred pairs of twins like Steven and Dennis before she could talk about proof. All the same, she could not have had a better start to her program of research.

  Tomorrow she would see Dennis. If he turned out to be a dark-haired dwarf, she would know something had gone badly wrong. But if she were right, he would be Steven Logan’s double.

  She had been shaken by the revelation that Steve Logan had no idea he might be adopted. She was going to have to work out some procedure for dealing with this phenomenon. In the future she could contact the parents, and check how much they had told, before approaching the twins. It would slow her work, but it had to be done: she could not be the one to reveal family secrets.

  That problem was soluble, but she could not lose the sense of anxiety caused by Berrington’s skeptical questions and Steven Logan’s incredulity, and she began to think anxiously of the next stage of her project. She was hoping to use her software to scan the FBI’s fingerprint file.

  It was the perfect source for her. Many of the twenty-two million people on file had been suspected or convicted of crimes. If her program worked, it should yield hundreds of twins including several raised-apart pairs. It could mean a quantum leap forward in her research. But first she had to get the Bureau’s permission.

  Her best friend at school had been Ghita Sumra, a math wizard of Asian-Indian descent who now had a top job managing information technology for the FBI. She worked in Washington, D.C., but lived here in Baltimore. Ghita had already agreed to ask her employers to cooperate with Jeannie. She had promised a decision by the end of this week, but now Jeannie wanted to hurry her. She dialed her number.

  Ghita had been born in Washington, but her voice still held a hint of the Indian subcontinent in its softness of tone and roundness of vowels. “Hey, Jeannie, how was your weekend?” she said.

  “Awful,” Jeannie told her. “My mom finally flipped and I had to put her in a home.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What did she do?”

  “She forgot it was the middle of the night, got up, forgot to get dressed, went out to buy a carton of milk, and forgot where she lived.”

  “What happened?”

  “The police found her. Fortunately she had a check from me in her purse, and they were able to track me down.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  That was a female question. The men—Jack Budgen, Berrington Jones—had asked what she was going to do. It took a woman to ask how she felt. “Bad,” she said. “If I have to take care of my mother, who’s going to take care of me? You know?”

  “What kind of place is she in?”

  “Cheap. It’s all her insurance will cover. I have to get her out of there, as soon as I can find the money to pay for something better.” She heard a pregnant silence at the other end of the line and realized that Ghita thought she was being asked for money. “I’m going to do some private tutoring on the weekends,” she added hastily. “Did you talk to your boss about my proposal yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  Jeannie held her breath.

  “Everyone here is real interested in your software,” Ghita said.

  That was neither a yes nor a no. “You don’t have computer scanning systems?”

  “We do, but your search engine is faster by far than anything we’ve got. They’re talking about licensing the program from you.”

  “Wow. Maybe I won’t need to do private tuition on the weekends after all.”

  Ghita laughed. “Before you open the champagne, let’s make sure the program actually works.”

  “How soon can we do that?”

  “We’ll run it at night, for minimal interference with normal use of the database. I’ll have to wait for a quiet night. It should happen within a week, two at most.”

  “No faster?”

  “Is there a rush?”

  There was, but Jeannie was reluctant to tell Ghita of her worries. “I’m just impatient,” she said.

  “I’ll get it done as soon as possible, don’t worry. Can you upload the program to me by modem?”

  “Sure. But don’t you think I need to be there when you run it?”

  “No, I don’t, Jeannie,” Ghita said with a smile in her voice.

  “Of course, you know more about this kind of stuff than I do.”

  “Here’s where to send it.” Ghita read out an E-mail address and Jeannie wrote it down. “I’ll send you the results the same way.”

  “Thanks. Hey, Ghita?”

  “What?”

  “Am I going to need a tax shelter?”

  “Get out of here.” Ghita laughed and hung up.

  Jeannie clicked her mouse on America Online and accessed the Internet. As her search program was uploading to the FBI, there was a knock at her door and Steven Logan came in.

  She looked at him appraisingly. He had been given disturbing news, and it showed in his face; but he was young and resilient, and the shock had not brought him down. He was psychologically very stable. If he had been a criminal type—as his brother, Dennis, presumably was—he would have picked a fight with someone by now. “How are you doing?” she asked him.

  He closed the door behind him with his heel. “All finished,” he said. “I’ve undergone all the tests and completed each examination and filled out every questionnaire that can be devised by the ingenuity of humankind.”

  “Then you’re free to go home.”

  “I was thinking of staying in Baltimore for the evening. As a matter of fact, I wondered if you’d care to have dinner with me.”

  She was taken by surprise. “What for?” she said ungraciously.

  The question threw him. “Well, uh … for one thing, I’d sure like to know more about your research.”

  “Oh. Well, unfortunately I have a dinner engagement already.”

  He looked very disappointed. “Do you think I’m too young?”

  “For what?”

  “To take you out”

 
Then it struck her. “I didn’t know you were asking me for a date,” she said.

  He was embarrassed. “You’re kind of slow to catch on.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was being slow. He had come on to her yesterday, on the tennis court. But she had spent all day thinking of him as a subject for study. However, now that she thought about it, he was too young to take her out. He was twenty-two, a student; she was seven years older; it was a big gap.

  He said: “How old is your date?”

  “Fifty-nine or sixty, something like that.”

  “Wow. You like old men.”

  Jeannie felt bad about turning him down. She owed him something, she thought, after what she had put him through. Her computer made a doorbell sound to tell her that the program had finished uploading. “I’m through here for the day,” she said. “Would you like to have a drink in the Faculty Club?”

  He brightened immediately. “Sure, I’d love to. Am I dressed okay?”

  He was wearing khakis and a blue linen shirt. “You’ll be better dressed than most of the professors there,” she said, smiling. She exited and turned her computer off.

  “I called my mom,” Steven said. “Told her about your theory.”

  “Was she mad?”

  “She laughed. Said I wasn’t adopted, nor did I have a twin brother who was put up for adoption.”

  “Strange.” It was a relief to Jeannie that the Logan family was taking all this so calmly. On the other hand, their laid-back skepticism made her worry that perhaps Steven and Dennis were not twins after all.

  “You know …” She hesitated. She had said enough shocking things to him today. But she plunged on. “There is another possible way you and Dennis could be twins.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Babies switched at the hospital.”

  He was very quick. This morning she had noticed more than once how fast he worked things out. “That’s right,” she said. “Mother number one has identical twin boys, mothers two and three each have a boy. The twins are given to mothers two and three, and their babies are given to mother number one. As the children grow up, mother number one concludes that she has fraternal twins who bear one another remarkably little resemblance.”