"Honey," he said, "you know we don't have a choice here.
You know we have to go now. This is really important. If I ask for a
continuance with the federal docket so congested we'll never get back in front
of a judge before the monarch migration."
"I know, Daddy. It's just. . ." She wanted to say how
frustrated he made her sometimes, how her own heart was aching right along with
his, and how desperately she needed him to be alive and there for her.
"It's just—I don't want to lose you." He turned, pulled his half
glasses off his nose, and looked at her.
"Understandable. Why would anybody want to lose something as
beautiful as this?" he spread his hands out to include his fat, hairy
body. "I'm just too big and sexy to lose."
"You know what I mean, dummy." She smiled at him.
"Honey, I'll make you a promise, okay?"
"Yeah, sure," she said, knowing what was coming because he'd
made this "I'll take care of myself promise a hundred times before, and it
was always just to shut her up.
"I'll tell you what. . . if I start to feel even slightly wrong
I'll get the continuance and I'll check back in here quick as a bunny."
"You mean, like you did this morning, when you had a pulse rate of
a hundred and eighty while you were trying to hold onto our three wussy clients
instead of getting your big, sexy ass over here?"
"Well, maybe this morning was bad judgment on my
part. . . pretty
foolish, okay? I'm admitting that. I'll cop to it, but from now on I'm gonna be
a good patient, okay? Gonna win the Patient-of-the-Year Award."
"Okay." She squeezed his hand again and sighed. There was a
light knock on the door, and a surprisingly attractive forty-eight-year-old
woman with salt-and-pepper hair stuck her head in.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Doctor Deborah DeVere." Her
anxious eyes immediately taking in all of the bedside equipment beeping and flashing
like a NASA launch computer.
"Come in, Doctor. Pull up a chair. Can we get you a bypass, a heart
transplant, or a manicure?" Herman said, smiling at her. She smiled back
and Herman liked her on sight. Over the phone she had sounded knowledgeable and
angry at the government's callous disregard for the monarch. Now, looking at
her, he was sure she was his kind of witness: a doctor who worked hard to save
threatened life-forms, did cutting-edge research science, and had a pretty fine
ass on her to boot.
She strode into the room displaying runner's legs. Susan rose to shake
her hand. "I'm Susan Strockmire, Herman's daughter. We spoke."
"I assumed," she smiled. "Nice to meet you." Dr.
DeVere pulled up a chair and sat, but a frown crept across her handsome face,
spreading like a dark shadow. "Are you really okay? This looks
serious."
"I always do this before court," Herman grinned and put down
his legal pad. "You'd be surprised how a little electro-cardioversion and
an EKG can calm you before a trial."
"Seriously, Mr. Strockmire, are you okay to go into court?"
"I have my doctor's approval. Right, baby?" He looked over at
Susan, who smiled and nodded, then turned her gaze back to the window so she
wouldn't give away her true feelings.
They spent the next half hour prepping Dr. Deborah DeVere, although she
was already up to speed on the issues.
She was going
to be a dynamite witness. She even suggested some good secondary questions to
ask that would allow her to interject some overpowering scientific facts,
including how genetically engineered bio-foods that produce their own
pesticides not only affect the butterfly, but also damage the caterpillar
before its metamorphosis.
At 10:30 the nurses cleared the hospital room and Dr. DeVere, who had
become Dedee, got up to leave. She shook Herman's hand and smiled at him.
"See you in court, Dedee," Herman said. "I'll be the one
wearing the backless nightgown and the EKG clips."
"I can hardly wait for that one, Herm," she said with a wink,
then left.
There could definitely be something going on here,
Herman thought
as he watched her go.
Susan gathered up her laptop and printer and started packing her stuff
away. "Dad, what are you going to do about getting another client?"
she asked. "You said, don't worry about it, but I can't help but worry.
Judge King is going to demand we represent someone. In order to get a jury
trial we had to add a suit for damages to the injunctive relief. We need a
plaintiff who's been damaged."
"We're in luck. We've just been hired by the Danaus Plexippus
Foundation," he said.
"And what on earth is the Danaus Plexippus Foundation?" She
was smiling at him now. That was just like him to have something up his sleeve.
"It happens to be Latin for 'butterfly.' It's a DBA operating in
Michigan, and they've gone all over the country spending money on saving the
monarch. I had it on standby, just in case. By the way, you're the
secretary-treasurer, and you are looking at the president and founding
partner."
"A sham foundation?" she said, arching her brow at him.
"Honey, it's the best we've got. It's going to pass muster. We'll
just amend the plaintiff list with this motion before court tomorrow." He
ripped a page from his yellow pad and handed it to her. She scanned it. It was
in his
curlycue,
hard-to-decipher script. Only Susan and Leona Mae Johnson, his secretary back
in D.C., had ever successfully translated an entire page. She folded it and put
it into her purse.
"Dad, if Judge King finds out. . ."
"How is Judge King gonna find out? Three people know about it. You,
me, and Leona Mae, and unless you guys blow me in, we're cool."
She nodded, then turned off his bed lamp. "I love you, Daddy."
"I love you, too, sweetheart. I count on you more than you
know."
Then she leaned down and kissed him, holding her father close to her,
almost afraid to let go. His heart was beating with hers as she pressed against
his chest, strangely in rhythm, his electronically beeping from the bedside
monitor while hers was frightened about the future.
She closed her eyes as she hugged him.
Beep. . . beep. . . beep. Thump. . . thump. . . thump.
His was the heart of a lion.
T
he phone rang, pulling Roland up with a
start.
Where was he? His one-bedroom apartment in D.C. ? His cot at the
Institute for Planetary Justice?
Then he landed back in time and place. He
was in San Fran, asleep in the rectal monstrosity. It was the middle of the
night and he was ready to do battle with the Gen-A-Tec cyber-shit who kavorked
him that afternoon. He fumbled the phone off the hook. "Your wakeup
call," the operator said.
"Bitchin'." Roland hung up, got out of bed, and went into the
bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face, then returned to his
computer and turned it on. He looked down at his weapon of choice while it
booted up. With this little twenty-four-ounce spaceship he could fly anywhere
in the universe, visit secure sites, soar above it all—a bird of prey searching
for rabbits in the system.
Once his laptop was up he grabbed a Coke out of the minibar and went to
work. He logged into the Gen-A-Tec mainframe using the stolen security codes
that his line-sniffer had lifted from Jack Sasson's log-on. In seconds he was
accepted and welcomed into the real Gen-A-Tec computer system.
"Eat my shorts," Roland said to his screen as he got in.
The rest was cake.
He found the real
reshcorn
file
and downloaded it, scanning as it copied to the zip disk. Everything Herman
wanted was in there: the almost total lack of testing Gen-A-Tec had done; the
callous disregard for collateral damage that the genetically enhanced corn
might wreak with its
self-generated pesticides. He pulled up
the EPA and FDA reports. Those agencies had really done a piss-poor job of
vetting this Frankenfood. The whole program had been fast-tracked by the
Department of Agriculture, probably because of Gen-A-Tec's strong-arm lobbying
tactics.
Roland downloaded the file on human testing, which consisted of not one
single test, but just a bunch of scientific opinion. Then he went on a search
to find out what the fuck DARPA had to do with this private-sector lab. He
started back in e-mail and screened the executive boxes. Several e-mails
cropped up with DARPA in them. He read them all and finally saw the same
fragment of the message he had seen in the shadow system:
We should put in
a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.
Below the message were listed the Gen-A-Tec projects that DARPA was
interested in. There were two.
One was
[dna enhanced gene
splicing].
That could include the Frankenfood,
Roland thought,
the
corn, soybeans, all the other stuff.
The second program was something
called
[the ten-eyck chimera project].
This was the first mention of the Ten-Eyck Chimera Project he had seen
in all of the browsing he had done in the Gen-A-Tec system, so he went all the
way to the root directory and gerped for the text string on
ten-eyck chimera.
This took him a
while, but the search came back:
NO RESULTS
The only mention was in the e-mails he already had. He looked for the
table of file systems and found it. There were two related files:
/dev/hda8/chimera
/dev/hda9/chimera
So there was a
Chimera
file.
He had no idea what the hell
it was, but Roland was getting jazzed. He was on the case. He issued a
mount-a-command to load up every related file in the system. Then he asked for
a complete list of file directories. What he got back looked like gibberish.
"What the fuck is this?" he wondered aloud.
Inside the Gen-A-Tec building an alarm
went off and Lincoln Fellows walked over to his computer and saw that a window
had popped up, warning:
TEN-EYCK CHIMERA
ACCESSED BY SASSON. MONITOR?
Line was about to allow it when he
decided, just to be safe, to check the sign-in logbook. It was after 2
a.m.
and, although some Gen-A-Tec
employees worked screwy hours, this seemed worth investigating. The Chimera file
was restricted to A-list in-building use. For Sasson to legally access the file
he would have to be in his office down the hall, and it was a little strange
for the CFO to be working here at this hour.
Line checked the logbook. Dr. Sasson had gone home at five and had not
signed back into the building. Link resented it when corporate cheese thought
they could just walk in at strange hours and ignore his security system. He was
the one who would get reamed if there was a breach. So Lincoln Fellows left the
control room and walked down the hall to the corporate offices on Mahogany Row.
Sasson's office was empty and dark.
The guy was downloading secure files from his home computer. . . a
complete breach of security!
Link stormed back to his control room and snatched up the phone.
While Lincoln was waking up Jack Sasson,
Roland was downloading the corn file. He went back to the systems directory to
prowl around, and found another strange encryption:
>@dA»p&AE01.
This one was shorter, so Roland thought
he could break it with the encryption programs in his toolkit. He downloaded it
for later.
Then, as the
reshcorn
files
completed downloading, Roland went back to the problem of penetrating the
Ten-Eyck Chimera file.