Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  “Sorry. Of course.”

  But they didn’t talk about anything. They just watched the night, listened to the bits of conversation drifting in from the kitchen.

  Out in the darkness, the slap of a closing door. Dylan emerged from the greenhouse, Turtle at his side. Jake watched closely as the boy crossed the distance to the house. “How are the tomatoes doing?” Maggie asked as he stepped up on the porch.

  “Almost ready. I think I can pick them pretty soon.”

  She pulled him close, kissed him on the forehead. “Good. Now go get ready for bed.”

  Dylan turned to face Jake. He held out a hand. “Good night.”

  The two shook formally. Dylan ducked his head and disappeared inside. Maggie watched her son go, took a breath, and looked gratefully at Jake before glancing away, suddenly embarrassed.

  Jake smiled. “A question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The spreading-of-the-breaths thing. How long does it take for the gas molecules all around the world to mix? How long until a breath makes it to, say, China?”

  “Ten years. It takes about a decade for the air on the planet to get stirred completely.” She looked down at the deck, put her arms around herself. “So right now, Liam’s last breath is still mostly right here. Right around us.”

  Jake nodded. “But less so with each day.”

  They were silent after that, watching the darkness. Jake glanced over, catching her in profile, the slight subtle motion of her hair in the breeze. When someone died, all the relationships surrounding that person were shaken, had to be rebuilt in new ways to help fill the void. That’s what grief helped you do.

  He wanted contact, to feel the warmth of her. He leaned toward her, and their shoulders touched. She kept looking at the woods, but he felt her body relax. On the railing, he placed his hand over hers, let it rest there. “You know,” he said, “it’s not just Dylan.”

  “I know. But listen—”

  Jake’s cell went off in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said.

  She pulled her hand in. “It’s fine. Go ahead. Take it.”

  He fished it out, and his pulse jumped a notch. “It’s Becraft,” he said to Maggie. He accepted the call. “Yes?”

  “Professor Sterling? We need you to come down. Right away. It’s about the missing MicroCrawlers.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “Some of them, yes. The Onondaga medical examiner’s office just called.” Becraft paused. “Look. I’d prefer it if you came down.”

  Jake looked to Maggie. “Tell me where you found them.”

  “We just got Liam Connor’s autopsy report. They found four in his stomach.”

  17

  LAWRENCE DUNNE MADE HIS PLAY. CHOOSING ONE OF THE small black stones from the wooden bowl, he placed it with a sharp click onto the Go board. He tried to project authority, but it was a desperation move.

  His opponent bit her lower lip, studying the pattern of stones arrayed in a gridlike pattern on the board. They were alone in a Motel 6, the yellow walls adorned with paintings of ducks and dogs. She was naked, sitting cross-legged on the bed. He sat across from her, as naked as she.

  She clicked her piece down, smooth and white.

  “Shit,” Dunne said.

  Her wide smile lit up the generic room. “You’re mine.” She dove for him, knocking him backward onto the bed, scattering the stones.

  Dunne wrestled her onto her back, enjoying the view. He allowed himself two indulgences, games he enjoyed whether he won or lost. The first was Go, the second this woman. Her name was Audrey Candor, née Pister. They’d met at Yale ten years ago, when she was an undergraduate student sitting in on his course on game theory and geopolitics. She was from Long Island, her father a Wall Street financier and her mother a minor movie star in the eighties. Audrey was married to the son of a rich diplomat from France, but Dunne and she had kept up their trysts over the years. She was smart, devilish, and unbelievably gorgeous. Dunne wasn’t an unattractive guy—he had a rakish charm—but she was in another category altogether.

  He bent over her, staring down at smooth white skin and coal-black eyes. She wore a pale red lipstick, the kind he liked. Picking one of his black stones off the mattress, he balanced it on her nipple. She giggled.

  “Run away with me,” he said. “We’ll crash a plane into a small Pacific island, live off fruit and berries. I’ll rig snares to trap wild boar.”

  She laughed. “You’d better crash into an island with a Whole Foods.”

  “You underestimate me. I can be a beast.”

  “Show, don’t tell,” she ordered, pulling him down.

  An unwelcome knock on the door.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Dunne? You don’t seem to be answering your cell. There’s a call from your assistant.”

  “Get lost,” he said. His ringer had been very purposefully turned off. “I’ll be free in twenty.”

  “Sir? He said Lancer absolutely needs to talk to you.”

  “Holy Christ,” Dunne said, thoughts of the deserted Pacific isle long forgotten.

  OUT FRONT A BLACK LIMO IDLED, TWO SECRET SERVICE AGENTS at the ready. Three minutes later, Dunne was on the vehicle’s secure line with the President of the United States.

  “Lawrence?”

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “You need to get to Manhattan. Now.”

  DUNNE WAS EDGY AS HE RODE IN THE SPEEDING LIMO, THE police escort’s horns blaring as they headed for Reagan National Airport. The President had sounded rattled, his trademark confidence shaken. The two men knew each other well. When the POTUS had started his improbable run at the White House, Dunne had been one of his earliest supporters and his primary foreign-policy adviser on Asian affairs. When he’d won in a landslide that surprised even his dedicated supporters, the President had rewarded Dunne with the position of deputy national security adviser. He’d offered Dunne the national security adviser job, but Dunne preferred to stay out of the media spotlight, where he could focus on policy rather than polish.

  Now Dunne was on the phone with the deputy director of the FBI, William Carlisle, who described the situation with the Times Square victim: “Twenty-three years old, Japanese. Recently had his middle right finger chopped off, the wound crudely cauterized. He was incoherent, raving, clearly under the influence of a hallucinogenic, as yet unidentified.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  Carlisle sounded as though he was reading. “Undergrad at Columbia, art major. Specializes in sculpture, small pieces made from bits of wire. Originally from Tokyo. Nothing else in his background is unusual. Father is a low-level diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Ottawa, mother a poet. A team’s interviewing them now. So far nothing remarkable about him, save one thing. You ready? The kid’s name is Hitoshi Kitano.”

  For a second, Dunne thought he hadn’t heard right. He thought of the eighty-five-year-old man with the same name rotting in jail. “Hitoshi Kitano? You gotta be kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  He still couldn’t believe it. For reasons unknown to Carlisle, Dunne had hoped the name Hitoshi Kitano would be forever relegated to the roll at Hazelton prison. He cleared his throat. “Any relation?”

  “None. Nothing that we can find. There’s no connection. It’s either coincidence or—”

  “Or it’s a goddamn message.”

  18

  JAKE UNLOCKED THE DOOR TO HIS APARTMENT AND STEPPED into the darkness. He stood in the entryway for a moment, listening. The steam pipes of the old building clanked. The compressor on his refrigerator turned on with a click and a hum. Everything was just as it always was. Except that it wasn’t.

  The autopsy report was clear: Liam Connor had been tortured. His tongue had been glued to the bottom of his mouth. Fibers consistent with a straitjacket were on his shirt. And they’d found four MicroCrawlers in his stomach, along with thousands of tiny rips to the tissues, a lot of internal bleeding. The pathologist said that Liam w
ould probably have died from the internal bleeding, had he not jumped.

  This was now a whole other kind of nightmare. The FBI was taking over, the search for the woman on the bridge going national. They were even going to put out an APB on the nine Crawlers still unaccounted for. Finding them was no longer the job of a couple of graduate students and campus police but of the entire law-enforcement apparatus of the country. The FBI was worried that the Crawlers might be a part of a larger plan, might be used as a vector for a biological attack. Becraft had also talked to the man at Fort Detrick, General Arvenick. He said they’d be sending more people in the morning.

  He and Maggie had barely talked on the drive back from the police. She was too upset. She was crying most of the time. “Who would do that?” she’d kept saying. “Torture a sweet old man?”

  It killed Jake to see her so upset. He could barely stand it.

  Rivendell had been dark when they’d pulled up the long gravel driveway. Jake had walked her to the door. “Maggie, I’m going to stay here tonight.”

  “No. I’ll be all right. I need some time alone. To think about what I’m going to say to Dylan.”

  “I can sleep out here in the car. Keep watch.”

  She forced a smile. “Jake. Thank you. You’ve done a great deal already. There’s a police car at the head of the road. I’ll be all right. Go home.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to—”

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Go home. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  JAKE TURNED ON THE TV, WENT TO CNN TO SEE IF THEY’D picked up on any of this yet. He found nothing but a weather report—it was snowing farther north.

  He went to the bedroom, flicking on lights as he went. He pulled the sheet of paper from his pocket, the one Liam had left for him. “Jake, Please watch after them. —Liam.”

  Jake could see it now, in hindsight. Liam had been gently pushing Jake and Dylan together since at least the summer. He would bring Dylan over to Jake’s labs, leave the two of them alone together. He was setting Jake up to step in.

  “Please watch after them.” What the hell does that mean? Look after them? Protect them? From what? Did he know someone was after him? And if so, why didn’t he tell someone?

  Jake went to his closet and pulled out something he hadn’t touched in a couple of years. His soldier’s pack. He dragged it out. It left a trail of sand. You could never get the sand out of things. It was everywhere.

  What Jake hated most was its mutability. You dig a foxhole, the walls would cave in. The wind comes up, the sand comes in, pulling down and down on you. Jake had read a book once, two years after the war, that had caught it right. The Woman in the Dunes, by the Japanese author Kōbō Abe. Jake had dreams of the sand walls coming down, burying him. You dig and dig, and every day the sand is still there. That’s what Jake felt like. Like he was being buried.

  A crazy idea was forming, taking slow shape in Jake’s mind. He kept thinking about what Liam had told him, the superweapon the Japanese had developed. The sinking of the ship in the Pacific, all those soldiers killed. It was conceivable that all this—Liam’s death, the stolen Crawlers—was connected to the secrets that Liam had told him, his stories about the Uzumaki. Liam had sworn Jake to secrecy, said it was still classified, one of the last great secrets of that long-ago war. At the time, Jake had thought that Liam was just an old man unburdening himself. But was there more to it? Did the woman torture Liam to find out what he knew?

  MAGGIE COULDN’T SLEEP, EVEN THOUGH THE HOUSE WAS pin-drop quiet. It had taken her an hour before she settled down enough to even think straight. She kept being assaulted by images of her grandfather in pain. Her grandfather writhing in agony. Her grandfather screaming…

  Why had she sent Jake away? The feelings he aroused disturbed her, kept her off-balance. He was great with Dylan, but still she was nervous around him. She needed to keep her distance. She hoped she’d be strong enough.

  She tried to calm herself, tried to think it through. On the table before her was the folder Mel Lorince had left. Beside it were the directions to the letterbox. And next to that the disk with the glowing, pulsing fungus shapes: the mushroom, the arrowhead, and the Crawler.

  He hadn’t committed suicide, she knew that for sure now. He had jumped, but it was to get away from the woman. At least that made sense. Horrifying as it was, at least that made sense. But what about the letterbox, the glowing fungi—what were they about? It couldn’t be a coincidence that he had left this trail for them to follow right before he died. They must have missed something. Liam had left something else behind for them to find.

  But what? She went back through the materials in the envelope that Liam’s lawyer had left. Nothing unusual besides the note about the letterbox. Then what? Logic, Ms. Connor. Think it through. If Liam had left them something else, reason said it would have been something at the end of the trail they’d already followed.

  The end of the trail was the piece of wood with the glowing fungi.

  She held the piece of wood up to the light. Her grandfather had drilled holes in the side of the piece and inserted three glass lyophil straws, each containing cultures of the fungus in case the stuff on the outside died. That was odd, now that she thought about it. Why was he so interested in making sure she had a living batch of the fungus?

  The three symbols glowed, pulsing. She studied them closely, looking for watermarks, secret writing, she didn’t know what. He must have worked very hard to get them to turn on and off like that. It was a biological feedback loop, she knew. Express the green fluorescent protein pathway from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish, then have that expression induce the creation of a suppressor that would turn it off. Similar for the red and yellow fungi, using different proteins. Liam had played these games before. He was a master at genetic modification.

  She stared at the green arrowhead. Her son’s letterboxing symbol. It pulsed, one long, one short. The pattern was irregular. Something must have gone wrong in Liam’s genetic circuit.

  No. Not irregular. A pattern.

  A repeating pattern.

  A memory came to her, when she was a little girl. She and Liam played a game called telegraph. They tapped out messages using Morse code. She’d played the same game with Dylan, teaching him to spell out his name.

  The red. A long pulse, then two shorter.

  The green one. A long pulse, then short.

  The yellow. A short pulse, followed by a longer one.

  Oh my God.

  The Morse code symbols were all letters in Dylan’s name—was that it? Then the series of dots and dashes became clear to her:

  — • • = D

  — • = N

  • — = A

  She picked up Liam’s fungus disk. DNA. The idea hit her like a lightning bolt. She grabbed the instructions:

  The hollow hides a footpath, follow it you must,

  to the settler’s creek that dances across the land held in trust.

  The first letter of each line throughout the entire message was an A, C, or T. Written altogether, they spelled out: TTATATATCT. The last letters were all G’s and T’s: TTGGTTTTGG.

  The first and last letters spelled out two short genetic sequences.

  Primers. They were primers. The beginning and end of a genetic string.

  She stared at the glowing fungi, her skin electric. She was as certain as she’d ever been of anything. Liam had hidden his message inside the fungus. He had written it into its genome.

  JAKE WOKE ON THE COUCH, FULLY DRESSED, HIS CELL RINGING. His sleep had been black, devoid of dreams. He fished the phone from the coffee table. It was six-thirty a.m. He didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was 202—Washington, D.C.

  “Yes?”

  A woman’s voice was on the line. “Professor Sterling? Can you hold? The deputy national security adviser will be with you in a moment.” Then she was off the line.

  Lawrence Dunne?

  Dunne was a foreign-policy wunderkin
d, one of the few to predict both the spectacular fall of the Soviet Union and the equally spectacular rise of China. Jake had met Dunne once, at a Defense Science Board reception, before Dunne was promoted to deputy national security adviser. Dunne knew how to work a room, had struck Jake as fiercely intelligent, but that didn’t mean Jake liked him. He didn’t. Jake’s general experience was that those on the civilian side of the national security establishment were dangerously untempered, playing games with knives when they had never been cut. Dunne was no exception.

  “Professor Sterling?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Lawrence Dunne. I’ve a lot on my plate right now, so I’m going to get right to it. You worked closely with Liam Connor, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ever mention a man named Hitoshi Kitano?”

  “The billionaire? No. Why?”

  Silence. “We need you to come in. To Fort Detrick. Right away.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve no time for explanations right now. One of our staff will call and arrange transport.”

  “All right. But what is this—”

  “Professor Sterling. I must go, but I personally wanted to stress something to you. At this point, any conversation you may have had with Liam Connor is classified information and should only be discussed with someone in an official capacity. Do you understand?”

  Jake heard a knocking at his door.

  He started toward it, phone still to his ear.

  “No, I’m not entirely sure that I do. Why do you—”