Kathy gave the slightest hint of a frown. “You think waiting on tables and singing at bars is awesome? Come on, I didn’t exactly just fall off a turnip truck. You’re a doctor at a big pharmaceutical company.”
Juan smiled. “I guess that’s maybe how others see me, but on the inside, I’m still that kid born in the slums of East LA I had an infinitely higher chance of dealing drugs or working at some dead-end job than becoming a doctor. I’m lucky that I had a very strong-willed mother who pushed me to be better than that.”
At that moment a waiter walked by with a large bowl full of shaved ice and fruit, with sparklers stuck into it. Some bare-chested Polynesian waiters appeared out of nowhere and began singing “Happy Birthday” to an older lady at the table next to them.
Kathy smiled at the woman’s surprised reaction. It was the first time Juan had seen her smile; it lit up her entire face. She was breathtakingly beautiful, and he suddenly felt more awkward than he’d ever felt before.
Don’t hit on this girl. It’s wrong. Besides, you don’t stand a chance.
While the men sang, Juan noticed Kathy had a couple of circular pink scars peeking out from the neckline of her shirt. There was another on the back of her left hand, and one on the back of her right wrist.
His mind raced back to medical school and the classes he’d taken on immunology. For some reason, the scars reminded him of what he’d read about regarding smallpox vaccinations. They reminded him of the round, oftentimes pink scars that had once been common indications of a recent smallpox vaccination.
But smallpox had been eradicated in the late seventies.
Just as he was going to ask about the scars, a waiter arrived with their food.
The waiter laid a gorgeously arranged plate in front of Kathy and said, “For the lady, the teriyaki wagyu beef served with roasted mushrooms, asparagus, grilled pineapple, garlic confit, and sprinkled with sesame seeds.”
The waiter placed a steaming dish in front of Juan. “And for the gentleman, the twenty-ounce cowboy Delmonico ribeye, marinated and hung over oak coals, medium rare, served with wasabi horseradish and mashed potatoes.”
Juan’s mouth watered as he took in the succulent aroma coming off of his plate.
When the waiter left, Juan smiled at Kathy. “Don’t take this wrong, but I’m glad to see you’re not a vegan.”
Kathy snorted as she plunged her fork into a cube-like piece of meat on her plate. “Not hardly. I think my father would have disowned me. And besides, I’m slightly anemic, so I’m supposed to eat some red meat.”
Juan cut a piece from his steak and marveled at the pink juicy morsel at the end of his fork. “Well, as a physician, I wholly endorse your choice of treatment for the anemia. I think you’ll have a promising future in medicine.”
For the first time since they’d met, Kathy graced him with a smile.
###
Juan leaned back in his chair, patted his flat stomach and groaned. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten this much.”
Kathy took a final sip of soda. “My roommate said that this place has a big trail with views of the Potomac. It’s supposed to be all lit up with torches at night so it’s just like being in Hawaii. You interested in walking some of this food off?”
Juan tried to keep the excitement from his voice. “Absolutely.” He’d figured his time with Kathy was at its end, and he would have taken any excuse to prolong the evening.
Kathy led the way outside.
Juan was amazed at how successfully the riverside location had been transformed into what looked like a tropical paradise. The sounds of crickets and birds surrounded them as they strolled along palm tree-lined paths dotted with the occasional torch. He looked for the speakers he knew must be piping in those sounds, but they’d done a good job of hiding them.
“This place is amazing,” he said.
Kathy breathed in deeply and nodded. For a second, Juan thought he saw a pained expression flash across her face.
“So…” she said. “Maybe you could tell me more about what you’re doing now in your research?”
“I’d love to. Frankly, I’m kind of excited by it.” Juan motioned toward a well-lit alcove with a bench hewn from a log. “Let’s sit and enjoy the breeze.”
Kathy sat in the middle of the six-foot-wide bench, and as Juan sat, she twisted in place so she faced him.
He drank in the image of this beautiful girl and felt nervous once more.
“Before I say anything,” he said, “I just have to ask you to keep this to yourself. We haven’t yet announced the details of some of my work and—”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”
Juan nodded. “Well, it started with me trying to figure out how multiple copies of a certain gene showed up in modern-day elephants…”
###
To Juan’s surprise, Kathy seemed sincerely fascinated as he explained everything he’d been working on. She even asked very probing questions. This woman was as smart as she was beautiful.
“So,” Kathy asked, “the pattern you found, it really was accurate for other animals?”
“Yup. I was kind of shocked, myself. It took a lot of tweaking because some of my data had come from partially damaged DNA samples, but in the end, it was like I’d found a key to a puzzle. The same basic pattern appeared across species.”
Kathy hesitated, then asked: “Do you believe in God?”
Juan’s eyes opened wider as the unexpected question registered, and he paused, giving the question serious consideration. “I do. In fact, I grew up Catholic, though I’d be lying if I said I’d been in church recently. Not since my mom died.”
“Well, have you ever thought that you might have found a pattern that God had put into all animals? How else can the universality of this pattern be explained?”
“Oh,” Juan exclaimed, not having expected the conversation to go in that direction. “I usually don’t allow myself to assign motivation into things, or delve into subjects that I can’t prove. And God’s one of those unknowable things. And I’m not saying you couldn’t be right, just that… well, there are things we can believe, and there are things we can study.”
Kathy nodded. “I have another question. What about environmental influences? How can you determine centuries of evolution when evolution is often driven by external factors? Wasn’t that what Darwin’s observations were all about?”
“That’s a great question. I suppose I think of it like this: all of our lives, whether it’s humanity or the rest of the animal kingdom, we’re connected by genetics. That being said, it stands to reason that the inherent way that DNA evolves can take certain paths. For instance, my algorithm wouldn’t know if a path becomes a dead end due to environmental situations.
“Imagine the dinosaurs. If I had DNA samples, sure, I could try and predict what they’d be like nowadays, but my algorithm wouldn’t know about the asteroids—or ice ages, or any other global catastrophes. So the algorithm plots an evolutionary path in a vacuum, if you will. And in that sense, it’s a purer path than what we see in the real world.
“Really, I see the pattern like a cipher. An evolutionary puzzle that just needed someone to come along and see that it was there. Without being too modest… I think maybe that’s what I’ve done.”
“Darwin’s cipher?” Kathy said, smiling.
“Yes—I suppose so.” Juan returned her smile.
Silence settled over them, and Kathy stood. “Well, it’s getting late, and I really need to get to bed.” She rolled her eyes. “I made the mistake of signing up for an eight a.m. class.”
Juan chuckled. “I think all freshmen make that mistake once in their student career. But only once! Come on, I’ll drive you home.”
###
As Kathy walked from Juan’s car to her dorm, she forced herself not to look back. This was the first time she’d been out with anyone since Brad, and she couldn’t help bu
t feel guilty about it. Every time she felt herself having a good time with Juan, her mind would flash back to Brad, and the guilt would wash over her yet again.
Maybe it was just too soon.
And yet… Juan was so nice. He was older, sure, but not too much older. Younger than Brad. And he didn’t talk to her like he was older, or like he was a teacher and she was his student. He put them both on the same level. Just two people talking.
And… he was interested. He never made a move of any kind, but she could tell.
As she walked under one of the streetlights just outside the dorm entrance, she glanced at the business card he’d given her. It had his personal cell number on the back. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t want her to call him.
Of course, she wouldn’t. She had way too much emotional baggage at the moment. And he lived in a totally different state.
She carefully slid his business card into her purse and two people suddenly stepped out of the shadows near the dorm entrance. Kathy barely held back a scream of surprise.
“Katherine O’Reilly?”
Kathy froze mid-step and stared wide-eyed as the man brandished a badge with a printed ID held at arm’s length. He and his companion were both wearing business attire, which stuck out like a sore thumb on a school campus.
“Excuse me, but are you Katherine O’Reilly?” he repeated.
Kathy nodded, though she readied herself just in case she had to sprint to the dorm’s entrance.
“Ma’am, I’m Special Agent Carrington with the FBI.” The man motioned to his right. “This is Special Agent Ragheb. I believe you were involved in an incident about four months ago that we’d like to ask you some questions about.”
Chapter Ten
Nate walked into Jeff’s office, but his supervisor was on the phone. Jeff mouthed “One minute” and motioned for him to sit.
As Nate settled into the leather chair, waiting for Jeff to finish, he looked around the room. His eyes were drawn to a US Army poster from Jeff’s old division. The motto “Do what has to be done” was emblazoned on it in red letters.
Jeff, Nate knew, had spent twenty years in the Army’s equivalent of the Criminal Investigation Division. Having spent nearly a decade in the Army himself, Nate understood the pride Jeff had for his brothers in arms. It was probably why the two of them got along as well as they did. They had a mutual respect and understanding. Similar roots.
Jeff finished his phone call and hung up. “Thanks for coming in, Nate. I’ve got some bad news to share with you, and figured it would be better to do it face to face.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You shouldn’t. I’ll start with my attempt to get surveillance established on German intelligence. In short, it was denied by the FISA court.”
“What? I thought the FISA court was pretty much a rubber stamp for these kinds of things.”
Jeff shrugged. “Evidently, a request from a CID assistant director doesn’t always have the pull you’d think it does with the FISA judges. Requesting surveillance of a foreign government can be a tricky thing. They have immunity, and there’s a bit of cat and mouse that some of the intelligence folks play. We claim professional courtesy and promise not to spy on each other, but we do it anyway. And this time, we got blocked.
“I also reached out to my CIA contacts—official and unofficial. I even went through the front door. Nothing. If what happened on that island is a CIA op, nobody’s talking. Sorry, Nate.” The sixty-something-year-old man jabbed his index finger in Nate’s direction and asked, “So how about on your end? Have you tracked down that witness from the island yet?”
Nate swallowed the disappointment he felt over the lack of cooperation from both the FISA court and the CIA. His mind flashed back to the redheaded coed he’d interviewed only three days ago. “Yup, I found her and you won’t get an expense report, because it just so happens that she’s local now. Katherine O’Reilly is enrolled in Georgetown University, and she was particularly helpful.”
“Oh? How helpful?”
“Well, let’s just say that the poor girl and her boyfriend were definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagine doing a Gilligan’s Island and getting yourself stranded somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but instead of coconuts and paradise, you’ve got killer birds coming at you from every direction, all of them trying to get a piece of your ass. It’s a miracle she got off that island at all.”
Jeff frowned. “And you believe her?”
“One hundred percent. She showed me some of the scars.” Nate shook his head as he recalled her pushing up the sleeves of her sweatshirt. The puckered quarter-sized pink scars ran all up and down her pale arms. “It’s not like I had her on a polygraph, but Jeff, I’ve done this for nearly two decades, and I’m telling you, she believed every word of what she told me. I’d stake everything on that.”
“I’m not doubting you, just asking. You said there was a boyfriend there too? It would help if we had a corroborating statement.”
Nate shook his head. “Officially, Brad Harper is MIA. He’s been missing ever since the incident four months ago. Presumed lost at sea. But Miss O’Reilly was pretty heated about that AgriMed company. She believes wholeheartedly that they let him die somewhere on that island and then covered it up.”
“Then why didn’t she go to the cops?”
“Because some corporate guy from AgriMed flew out there and got her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. In exchange for her silence, they paid her off to the tune of six figures.”
Jeff stood and began pacing the otherwise empty conference room. “Now we know they’ve got something to hide. Did she give you a name for the corporate guy?”
“Yes. Dr. Harry Winslow. I looked him up—he’s some kind of vice president and director of research at AgriMed.”
“A VP?” Jeff frowned. “Seems odd that a multinational would send a VP out to the middle of nowhere to pay hush money to some girl who saw their dirty little secrets.”
“Alleged dirty secrets,” Nate said. “Remember, AgriMed claims the military had already torched the island by the time they arrived. And we only know about any of this because of them.” Nate drummed his fingers on the table as his mind raced. “I doubt they would have called us in if they were doing something squirrely over there.”
“Maybe… I sure wish we had some information on what was going on on that island.”
With a smile, Nate withdrew a sheet of paper from his suit jacket and placed it on the desk—a summary document of all the paperwork that the woman had turned over to him. “You mean like a bunch of classified documents that Miss O’Reilly smuggled off that God-forsaken island, including names, descriptions, and all sorts of things that I’ll need subject-matter experts to make sense of.”
“You’re shitting me!” Jeff grabbed the sheet and looked at it. “How the hell did she manage… never mind. DARPA? As in our DARPA?”
“Yup.” That had jumped out at Nate too. If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was involved, things were getting even more curious. “They were represented by a Dr. Ian Wexler. He’s a program manager at the Biological Technologies Office in DARPA. He’s also a medical doctor who used to work at the CIA, doing lord knows what.”
Jeff ran his finger down the page. “And who’s this? Dr. Reinhardt from… Bundesnachrichtendienst?”
“I’m impressed you managed to spit that word out on the first try. Hans Reinhardt might be associated with German intelligence, but I’m not certain on that yet. It’ll take a while to be sure—in part because much of it’s in German, in part because it’s some pretty technical mumbo-jumbo. But they’re using some kind of evolution algorithm, and they’re applying it in experiments on animals. In particular, they were messing around with finches.” Nate grinned. “Jeff, this is a smoking gun if there ever was one.”
Jeff didn’t return Nate’s smile. In fact, his expression was grave. “Nate, what thi
s is is some serious shit. I’m going to go to the top with this. No more of this pussyfooting around. These people have at least one MIA to answer for and a whole lot of messed-up shit going on. Plus, somehow our military is involved, maybe the CIA, German intelligence… it makes no sense.”
Feeling antsy about the next steps, Nate nodded at the sheet of paper in Binghamton’s hand and asked, “Do you want me to get translators and the lab guys looking at the document? It’s got classified markings all over it.”
“File a copy of this in evidence and give me one as well.” Jeff laid the single sheet of paper back down on the table and pointed at some of the classified markings. This ‘COSMIC’ marker is a NATO Top Secret classification. As to the ‘SI-G DRWN’ markings, we’ll have to look into this. I have no idea what this ‘DRWN’ compartment is and who controls it, but we’re definitely not read-in on that. I’ll reach out to our special access officers and see what I can learn.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nate was about to ask another question, but Jeff held up his hand and gazed off into the distance.
“Nate, I need you to track down this Winslow guy. Ask him about this stuff—”
“But Jeff, isn’t that violating the classified—”
“I didn’t tell you to read him this shit, just go with what the girl told you. I’m sure she told you all about this document before she handed it over, right?” Jeff nodded in an exaggerated manner.
Nate smiled. “As a matter of fact she did.”
“Good. And Nate…” Jeff leaned forward. “Watch your six, you got me?”
“Yes, sir.”
###
Juan wrinkled his nose as he glanced at the day-old pizza sitting beside his computer. It had been a few weeks since he’d gone to the supermarket, and there was no other food in the house. Throwing caution to the wind, he picked it up and took a bite.
He returned his attention to his computer screen and made some minor adjustments to what he’d now dubbed the Darwin Algorithm. He and his assistants had been hard at work eliminating the genes that hadn’t contributed to producing Hercules’s fantastic results. It was tedious work, and the knockout assay had been progressing at a slower pace than he’d like, but he couldn’t afford mistakes if he was going to try to get permission for entering human trials.
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