“How do you get it on the target computer?”
“I’m going to start my way at the bottom and work up. Each FBI field office has a special agent in charge, the SAC. The SAC’s the person with the highest level of authority within the FBI intranet system, short of a deputy director. You figure an FBI agent will be more cautious than an ordinary person. So the idea isn’t to try to infect her computer first, but to start somewhere else and work my way towards her through the computers of people she trusts.”
“Why pick Honolulu?”
“Mike was able to get some good stuff about the Honolulu SAC.”
The waiter came back and brought their drinks. She looked at the banyan tree that spread out above them. Roots starting in its branches hung down in the air over their heads. Someday they would reach the ground and would grow into new trunks.
“What’d he find?”
“Her name’s Helen Barton. She’s only been in Honolulu three years, so she wasn’t in charge of the field office when Cheryl was killed. Her son, Scott, is in the Army and was deployed to Afghanistan ten months ago. Mike ran his background and learned he’s engaged to a girl in San Diego named Brenda Johannson.”
“How’d he find that out?”
“Facebook. Anyway, my plan is to start with the girl. All I’ve got to do is get her to click on a link in an email. That’ll upload my program into her Outlook’s call stack. The program will let me send a second email that looks like it came from her computer.”
She took another drink from her glass of beer. The waiter came back and they ordered appetizers.
“How will you get her to click on a link? Most people just delete emails with hyperlinks from people they don’t know.”
“Thanks to Facebook, I know who her friends are. So I made up a Gmail account in the name of one of her friends. The link’s part of a wedding invitation. If she clicks it, I’ve got her. If she doesn’t, I’ll wait a day and try something else.”
“You already started?”
She nodded. “I just need to find an unsecured wireless network.”
“What about here?”
“Not here. See at the outdoor bar, over the cash register?” Julissa pointed over Chris’s left shoulder.
Chris turned his head and looked. There was a security camera over the cash register and their table would be in the background of its view.
“There were some others in the lobby, and we might be covered by one or two I didn’t see. If the FBI traced my email to this wireless network, which they could do, they’d check the video cameras. They’d know the exact date and time the email was sent. They’d see me sitting with a laptop out. Half my projects since grad school were funded by the NSA. I’ve had a security clearance since I was twenty-three. They’d know who I am.”
“What’s your plan?”
“When we leave here I’ll take a walk, with my laptop in my purse. I programmed it to look for an unsecured network, log on, then send mail. If there’s a security camera wherever I link up, it’ll just see me walking past.”
“Want me to come?”
“Sure.”
An hour and a half later, in her hotel room, Julissa opened her laptop. She and Chris had walked along the beach, past the zoo and the aquarium, and then into a neighborhood of mansions that clung to the slopes of Diamond Head. To return, they cut back across the soccer fields of Kapiolani Park and zigzagged through the side streets of Waikiki between Kuhio and Ala Wai, walking past dozens of high-rise condominiums. When they said good night at the corner of her hotel, he’d put his hand on her shoulder briefly. That had felt good. She wanted to invite him up for a drink in her room but she didn’t know what he would say. So she said nothing, and leaned her head down to press her cheek against the back of his hand on her shoulder. They made plans to meet the next day at noon and she rode up the elevator alone.
Julissa sat on the end of her bed and logged into her new Gmail account. The message was sent.
The only thing left to do was wait.
Chapter Fifteen
Dr. Chevalier was alone in the lab again. As a child, reading French-language copies of National Geographic at his parents’ winter home in Papeete, he often wondered what it would feel like to discover a new species. He’d never imagined his emotions over the last seven hours.
Self-doubt. Disbelief.
Fear.
He’d compared the DNA to primer snippets of genes from birds, fish, reptiles, insects, crustaceans, and corals. There were random links but nothing substantial. His emotional thermostat ticked into fear when he searched mammalian genes. This wasn’t just a new species. It was like nothing he’d ever seen.
Now he sat at his computer and began typing an email to Chris Wilcox and his friends. The telephone on his desk rang and his hands were shaking when he answered it.
“This is Chevalier.”
“I hope it’s not too late. You said call anytime.” The voice had a soft-spoken Midwestern twang.
“Dr. Corliss. How are you? You found something?” Chevalier said.
“The sample was small. The test consumes the sample, so it’d be impossible to reproduce the test unless you have any more of it.”
“But did you find anything?” Chevalier asked again.
“Based on the ratio of strontium 87 to strontium 86 in the sample, and the fact the water content was clearly glacial in origin,” Corliss said, “I’d say your subject has been drinking a lot of water from one of five countries.”
“You can’t be more specific?” Chevalier asked.
“No. The sample was too small to say with any certainty.”
“What are the countries?”
“Finland, Sweden, Norway, Scotland and Iceland. All countries with existing or recent glaciers and similar strontium deposits. If I had more to work from, I could probably narrow it down to within a few hundred miles, but this is the best I can do,” Corliss said.
“How can you tell the water’s glacial?”
“It’s too low in the heavier isotope of oxygen, O-18. Meaning it evaporated during a climactically cooler period.”
“Such as an ice age.”
“Yes.”
“Write it up.”
“I’ll have it tonight.”
“And send a list of your expenses. I’ll cut your check.”
Chevalier hung up and went to the globe in the corner of his office, spinning it.
Finland, Sweden, Norway, Scotland or Iceland.
A cold-weather creature.
He went to his desk and continued writing the report to his clients. He wanted to fulfill his obligation and get this project off his desk and out of his mind. This was too dangerous. And even if he could prove everything he believed, what could he expect? His respectable clients would stay away and his business would collapse while tabloid reporters trampled a path to his door in search of any information on whatever it was. He didn’t even want to start speculating on where it came from or why it existed. He just wanted to lay out the facts for Chris Wilcox and call the job done. He’d even decided to give back half the deposit money.
To: Wilcox, Chris
CC: Clayborn, Julissa; Nakamura, Mike; Westfield, Aaron
Date: July 16, 2010 4:58:20 a.m. (EST)
RE: Intelligene Report (!)
Ladies and Gentlemen:
This email and the attached documents will be my report on the nuclear DNA from unknown tissue found on the piece of evidence which Mr. Wilcox provided to me on July 14. I haven’t completed the sequencing of the DNA, but consider this my final report. By separate letter to the escrow company, I’ll return of half the deposit and the remaining funds.
I want no further involvement.
The sample contained tissues belonging to a human female and to a male. The male cells were suspended in saliva and appeared to be stratified squamous keratinized epithelial cells, consistent with the cellular tissue of the hard palate and gums. From that, I conclude the saliva belongs to the male. On the o
ther hand, the female tissue was muscular tissue and fat cells, possibly taken from the breast area.
My instructions were to complete an analysis of any cellular tissue belonging to a male. The male cells had fifty-eight chromosomes. By comparison, a human being has forty-six chromosomes. There is no known genetic disorder which would result in twelve extra chromosomes, and there is simply no way that the organism which produced these cells could be considered “human”.
I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much to go on.
Eighty-five percent of the organism’s genome is consistent with a mammal. Sixty percent of the mammalian DNA is in common with human DNA. The other forty percent of the mammalian DNA has no direct association with any primate or other species I could find.
This creature has genes I’ve never seen, so I can’t speculate on what they do. And it lacks genes normal organisms possess. For example: it has no telomeres, which are the genetic structures commonly associated with aging. Does that mean that it never grows old? I don’t know.
It might look like a man. I found genetic markers I’d normally associate with light-colored skin. It probably had red hair, although it may not anymore, because I found a gene associated in humans with male-pattern baldness. Whether this gene would be active in this creature is, again, anyone’s guess. Unless its diet or other circumstances have resulted in a different outcome, it might be quite tall—over six feet. It has a muscular build and may be extremely strong. As an aside, and this may relate to either its diet or its hygiene (or both), its saliva is swarming with bacteria. I haven’t identified the various strains, but as a safe guess, anyone bitten by this thing would be looking at a fatal infection.
The genetic information for its brain is unlike anything I’ve seen. Is it intelligent? Almost certainly. Is it more intelligent than us? I can’t even guess. A genetic laboratory equipped for comparative zoology or evolution may be better at answering these questions.
The isotope hydrologist I contacted at Harvard got some results from a saliva sample I gave him. His report is attached, and it’s as specific as he could get.
If you were sitting here, you’d probably ask me what I thought this thing is. Or you’d want to know where it came from. I don’t have the answers you want. But I can give you a few guesses. I think I can safely say it’s not from outer space. Its DNA is similar enough to other organisms that it probably evolved naturally. The only other possibility is that it was engineered, but I wouldn’t put much money on that: genetics has gone pretty far in the last ten years, but not that far. So if you asked for my gut feeling, I’d say this: it’s a natural product of evolution, something that branched off from everything else long ago.
It’s an old planet. We don’t really know everything that’s out there.
Why would a predator so finely tuned for killing not be more successful as a species? Why aren’t there more of them? Who knows—there are a lot of reasons for a species to die out besides not being adapted to hunt and kill prey. Maybe this species is so violent that whenever two of them are in the same room, instead of mating, they kill each other. Maybe there are a couple hundred of them and they’re just hard to spot. Maybe they look just like us. If I’m right that its lack of telomeres means it doesn’t age, that would explain why this one is still around, even though its species as a whole has declined.
I believe nothing good could come from this knowledge, besides what you four propose to do. If this creature has done what you say, it needs to be tracked down and wiped out. It doesn’t need to be researched, or understood, or, God forbid, bred. If it has cells and DNA, if it eats to stay alive, then it can be killed.
Regards,
Dr. Gerard Chevalier, M.D., Ph.D.
Chevalier didn’t believe he was doing the right thing, but he knew he was doing the smart thing. The smart thing was to close the lid on this box as fast as he could, give it back to Chris Wilcox, and forget it as quickly as possible. Within two years, with enough work on other projects, he was sure he could forget this. He would come to doubt all of his conclusions and would believe that this had been some kind of strange hoax.
He hit the Send button and in a moment, the email was gone.
The sun was coming up as he walked across the lobby and used his access card to sign out and open the front door. A green light was blinking on the console of lights behind the security station. He assumed this meant the system was properly functioning.
Chapter Sixteen
Chris woke at dawn and went in his bare feet across the back lawn to the dock. He stepped into the dinghy, used a hand pump to bail the rain water from the night before, and then rowed to his boat. Sailfish was a sixty-two-foot Hallberg-Rassy, three years old when he and Cheryl bought her at Nawiliwili Harbor on Kauai and sailed her to Oahu. Now she was nine years old but in better-than-new condition. He rarely sailed her, but he kept her maintained. She was too beautiful to rot on her mooring, and Cheryl had loved her. Not a single bad thing had ever happened to either of them aboard the Sailfish. They had sailed each weekend, had crossed the Kaiwi channel to Molokai in every kind of weather, had made love in Sailfish’s spacious center cockpit while sailing on autopilot under a full moon with the cloud-shadowed volcanoes of the Big Island ten miles ahead of their bow. Every time they stepped aboard, they had the same conversation and went through the same calculations: how much longer do we have to work before we can sell everything but the boat and follow the wind for the rest of our lives? They had a map of the world on the bedroom wall and they penciled in routes and highlighted places they wanted to see in the first five years. When Cheryl was killed they had six years of work left on their plan. They might have been packing to leave this week. Instead, Cheryl was dead, Chris had more money than he could ever use, and Sailfish lay idle on her mooring in Kaneohe Bay, collecting barnacles that he scrubbed off every two weeks with a stiff brush.
He climbed aboard, tied off the dinghy, and opened the bronze combination lock on the companionway hatch. Once inside, he checked the volt meter to be sure the solar panels were still charging the battery bank; he checked the bilge for water; and he powered up the laptop computer at the navigation station. Then he went into the galley to make a cup of coffee. With that brewed, he climbed the companionway ladder and went back into the cockpit where he sat under the bimini cover. It was only 6:01 a.m. but Julissa would be up—she’d only been in Honolulu for one night and couldn’t have adjusted to the time yet. He took a sip of his coffee and dialed her number on his cell. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Not at all. I’m walking on the beach.”
“Any news?”
“She took the bait and clicked the link.”
“The program installed?”
“Yeah, but that’s enough about that for now,” she said. And then, more gently, “I’ll give you the details when we meet up. Not over the phone.”
“Okay.”
“You checked your email this morning?”
“No. Why?”
“There’s an email from the scientist you hired. Chevalier. Either he’s completely insane and just stole half your deposit, or…”
Chris waited for her to finish, but she didn’t.
“Or what?” he finally said.
“Maybe you ought to read the email. Read it and come see me—room 1708 You checked this guy out before you hired him, right?”
“And Mike did a full background. He’s completely legit and so’s his company.”
“Jesus,” Julissa said. “I was afraid of that.”
Thirty minutes later Chris had printed the two hundred pages of attachments to Chevalier’s email, locked the boat, rowed ashore and fetched a pair of flip-flops from his back porch. He took the Pali Highway over the mountains, got stuck in traffic near the tunnel and remembered that for everyone else this was just a normal workday. He risked getting a ticket by picking up his phone and calling Chevalier’s cell number. No answer. Chevali
er said he wanted no more involvement, but Chris didn’t think very much of that. The man had shaken his hand and agreed to do a job; he’d already been paid fifty thousand dollars and apparently planned to keep half.
He was going to make himself available for questions.
Chris dialed the number again and left a message when the voicemail finally picked up. On the other side of the tunnel the traffic cleared and moved quickly all the way out of the mountains. When he got off of the highway, he followed Kalakaua Avenue into Waikiki.
He left his car with the Hyatt’s valet and rode the elevator to Julissa’s floor, carrying the printout of Chevalier’s report. Julissa opened the door as soon as he knocked. She was wearing a tank top and denim shorts, and her hair was still wet from the shower.
“Come in. I just finished making coffee.”
He stepped into her room and followed her to the counter next to the TV. He’d forgotten what it was like to be in a room with a beautiful woman who’d just stepped from the shower. It came at him from every angle: the smell of her hair, the steam in the air, the sheen of moisture on her throat. And he knew with a certainty what it would feel like to hold her close, with nothing between them, his hands plunged deep into her red hair. He studied the bedspread, embarrassed, his left thumb touching the base of his third finger, seeking the reassurance of a ring he hadn’t worn in years. Her laptop was open on the bed and he could see she’d been surfing the Internet, reading about genetics.
She poured two cups of coffee from the little pot and handed him one. If she’d sensed anything that had just gone through his mind, she didn’t show it. The door to the lanai was open and the curtains were blowing inward on the light morning wind. Without speaking they moved outside. Chris put the printed report on the glass patio table.
“You get through the attachments?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Make any sense to you?”
“Some. But keep in mind I’ve got no background in biology. Anything more confusing than high school is over my head. And just because the attachments make sense doesn’t mean Chevalier didn’t make it all up. Lots of bullshit makes sense.”
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