Zimmy cleared his throat. "I may have the answer to
that."
They turned in unison to look at him. "I know when the CIA
debriefs they often use a lie detector to determine the veracity of the
answers. I don't think you can administer a polygraph to someone who has a
heart condition. The lie detector uses heart rate and skin electrical
conductivity to measure a response. If Herm's heart was out of rhythm I don't
think they could have gotten an accurate result."
Herman leaned forward. "Maybe my heart had to be fixed so
they could find out if I was telling the truth."
"We need to get to a hospital and see what they really did."
Susan sounded worried.
Miro pointed to the sandwich tray. "Try the little deviled
ham ones—they have caviar."
"Thanks," Jack said as he took one, then continued.
"Next are the fifty pages of encryption Zimmy decoded."
All eyes turned to Dr. Zimbaldi. "It was just a bunch of
genetic base pairs. A slice of a gene map of some kind. I checked it against
the Celera map of the human body that I keep in my research computer. But it
wasn't human, wasn't anything I could determine, so I e-mailed a copy to your
computer, Herm, and then I ran my copy over to a friend in Santa Monica, Dr.
Carolyn Adjemenian. Her field is genetics."
"Can you get her on the phone?" Herman asked.
"We can't use our cell if it's being tracked by
satellite," Susan reminded them.
"You can use the phone in here," Miro offered. He handed
the phone to Zimmy. "But what on earth is going on? This sounds
juicy."
"Herm thinks we may have been invaded by aliens," Jack
offered glumly.
Miro nodded. "We don't have many down here, but I know a lot
of illegal aliens have been moving into Pico Rivera."
Nobody cleared up the misunderstanding. Zimmy got Dr. Adjemenian
on the office phone, then explained who Herman was and handed over the
receiver.
Herman spoke quietly, cupping the receiver so that Miro couldn't
hear. Finally, he hung up and looked over at them. "She wants to see us.
She won't tell me what it is over the phone, except to say it's like nothing
she's ever seen." Herman seemed jazzed.
Jack was just about to open the door
when he heard something next door.
"Shhh." He put his ear to the wall. Somebody was moving
around his office. He heard drawers opening and whispered, "Somebody's in
there again."
"It's that bunch of drug addicts from down the hall,"
Miro said angrily, then started to storm out to protect Jack's stuff. Jack made
a grab for him and stopped him just in time.
"Wait a minute. Hold it," Jack whispered urgently.
They waited for almost ten minutes until they heard the office
door close and footsteps retreating down the hall.
Jack slipped outside and silently followed two men who were just
disappearing down the stairs. He went to the end of the corridor and looked out
the window. From that spot he could see the street below. After a few seconds,
he saw the two men walk out of the building, climb into the back of a brown
Econoline van and pull the door closed. They were both in their mid-twenties,
with crewcuts, jump boots, jeans, and windbreakers.
The van didn't leave. While Jack watched, the door opened again
and the two men got back out. They looked up at the building and scratched
their heads. One of them gave the other a
beats me
shrug, then they
headed back inside the building.
Jack returned to the Lipstick Lounge and waited until the door to
his office opened and the men were again walking around inside. He put his ear
to the wall and faintly heard the two men arguing. The sentences sounded
garbled, like cartoon fish talking, but Jack could make out what was being
said.
"He ain't here," one of the voices insisted.
"He's gotta be," the other answered.
"Go tell that to Valdez, why don't ya?"
"You're right. . . this is stupid. The equipment must be
screwed up. Let's go."
And they left for the second time.
Jack followed them out as they headed back into the stairwell,
then watched from the window until they appeared on the street. Then they both
climbed back into the van and closed the door.
Jack returned to the Lipstick Lounge and reported. "They're
parked out there waiting. We gotta find a way to sneak out of here and slide
past 'em."
"You could wear some of these," Miro said, pulling some
dresses off the rolling rack. "We've got wigs in those boxes, some
triple-wide pumps."
"Not even during Gay Pride Week," Jack said. He was
trying to be enlightened, but he wasn't going out on the street wearing plastic
pumps and a ball gown.
"The wigs are a good idea," Susan said, and began opening
boxes, pulling out a few. She chose a long black one for herself, then gave
Herman a blond bob. Zimmy tried on a gray shag. Jack got the strawberry
pageboy.
"Oh, Jack, that's
so you,"
Miro gushed.
When Jack looked in the mirror he saw Wynonna Judd on steroids.
They took off their jackets to further change their appearance,
and Susan borrowed a blue plastic raincoat.
Jack led them down the staircase and out the front, hugging the
building, using a crowd of laughing men coming out of The Sports Connection as
a screen. Miraculously, they made it to the Nissan Sentra.
Jack snatched off his wig. "Let's get the hell out of
here."
They pulled past the Econoline van, and as Jack was looking out
the back window one of the CDF troopers got out and looked up the street after
them. It was almost as if he knew they had just driven away.
D
r. Carolyn Adjemenian was a tall woman
in her mid-thirties with a pockmarked, narrow face and a spectacular body. Her
muscles were etched on tight skin like lines on an anatomy chart. She had
blondish hair, grayish eyes, and wore her reading glasses up on her head like a
geek tiara.
"Come in," she said after Zimmy did the introductions.
The house was a two-bedroom duplex in Santa Monica. Neat lawn, white shutters,
a carport.
She led the three of them to her computer room in the guest
bedroom. As they were walking down the hall, Herman caught a glimpse of the
master. She had turned it into a full gym: free weights, a pull-down lat bar,
stacks of heavy plates and pulleys. He wondered where she slept— maybe on the
flat bench.
"Sit down," she said as if she were ordering sprinters
onto their marks. She sat in front of her computer, booted up, and found a Web
site called
basic alignment search tool:
BLAST
"We use this Web site in genetics research to identify any
unknown DNA sequence," she said. "It has the gene maps for all plant
and animal species that scientists have catalogued to date."
While she waited for it to load she turned toward Herman.
"Zimmy gave me your decoded encryption. As you
may or may not
know, DNA is made up of thousands of base-pair genes. There are only four
different kinds of proteins that make up a gene. Each protein has its own designated
letter: A, C, G, or T. The combination and sequence of these base pairs
determine our genetic makeup." She reached behind her and grabbed the
printout of what Roland had died for. It contained pages and pages of the same
four letters in varying chains and sequences.
ACACACACCAG
TGTACCACA TTGATCAG TTCAAGTA
CCAAGGTAT
GGATTCAGTCC ACCATGGATTA TTAGAACCTA
CCTTAGC
ACCAACCAAG ACACACAGTATA TATCCG
"When I first saw it I knew it had to be a DNA sequence for
some animal or plant, so I fed it into the BLAST program to compare this
sequence of yours with all the gene maps of species already stored in its
databank. It gives you a percentage of homology."
"It does what?" Herman asked.
"It takes your DNA sample and matches it to all others, then
tells you what percentage one is to the other." She turned back to her
computer and clicked on two icons. "For example, if you put in a chimp and
ask BLAST to match its DNA to the gene map of
Homo sapiens,
this is what
you'll get." The BLAST program displayed a percentage: "98.4
percent homology.
She pointed to the
percentage printed on the screen. "That's how close human DNA is to a
chimpanzee's. A chimp is closer to a human genetically than the African
elephant is to the Indian elephant. It's hard to believe, but chimps are closer
to humans than they are to their ape cousins, like bonobos, or gorillas, or
orangutans. So, despite outward appearances, the chimpanzee's closest relative
is
not
any ape species, but us. Some geneticists believe humans are
nothing more than a third more developed species of chimpanzee. You with
me?"
"Yes," all four of them said at once.
"What comes up on a typical BLAST search is a list
from the most
homolistic to the least," Dr. Adjemenian continued. "Then if you want
to narrow it you can set your search to focus on particular irregularities
between species. Those irregularities can also be determined by percentile. A
single gene can be a gene-to-gene perfect match between two species, or it can
differ by a percentage. Okay?"
"Okay." This time only Herman answered. "We are
usually trying to determine the identity of the animal in question,"
Carolyn went on. "If we recover a DNA sample and we want to know what
animal left it, we might run a BLAST search comparing it to a human. If we find
that it is 98.4 percent human we know it's a chimp. If it's only 96.4 percent
we know it's an orangutan. Still with me?"
"Yeah, I guess," Herman said.
"So. . . once I got my basic DNA comparison, I set BLAST to
asterisk any gene in this map that doesn't match on the over forty thousand
genes in this particular base-pair string. I ran a BLAST search on your sample,
but it doesn't correspond to
any
exact species we have here on earth . .
. at least not as far as I can determine."
She looked at them and let this sink in. "It's close, very
close. But this genome does not represent any species now in existence."
Jack rubbed his eyes. He hated this more than he hated gang
violence or checks bouncing. More than just hating it, he was also terrified of
it. Jack didn't mind facing off some murderous asshole like Matasareanu outside
a bank in North Hollywood, because at least Emil wore pants and pissed standing
up. But aliens? Space monsters? No way. That was not in his emotional zip code.
"Are you saying that this animal, whatever it is, is from
somewhere else?" Herman said, creeping up on his next thought like an
Apache in the dark. "Are you saying that it's perhaps from some other
world . . . like . . . well. . . like from outer space?" He'd finally said
it.
Jack shuddered, but Carolyn Adjemenian shook her head, sending her
geek tiara flying. She got up and retrieved
her glasses. "For God's sake, no!" she laughed.
Herman actually slumped, but Jack was sure as hell relieved.
"No, no," she went on. "It's definitely from this
planet, but it's not a pure breed. It's some kind of mixture of species, and
since separate species can't interbreed, that means this animal has more than
likely been engineered."
That remark hung over them like ripe fruit.
"Basically, it is very close to a chimpanzee, but with some
interesting upgrades."
"Upgrades?" Herman leaned in, looking at the gene map on
her computer screen, studying it intently.