Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (16 page)

Lyle settled back.

Ironwood’s smoke screen couldn’t last forever. Eventually, someone would make a mistake.

Someone always did.

“Because evolution proceeds by
chance
,” David insisted. “That’s why.” Before Ironwood could interrupt him again, he held his phone close and continued in one breath. “So it
is
impossible that the
billions
—no, make that
trillions
—of
chance
occurrences that led to the evolution of humans on Earth happened in
exactly
the same way on
another
planet.”

David inhaled deeply and sat back in the rickety office chair he’d drawn up to his makeshift desk. The walls of his new lab were soot-stained red brick with heavy wooden beams. The not-so-clean floor was splotched and cracked slab concrete. The hanging light fixtures on the twelve-foot ceilings were antique fluorescents, buzzing and flickering, washing everything below in sickly green.

He was a half hour and a world away from Ironwood’s luxury casino resort in Atlantic City: close enough to be convenient, far enough away not to cost real money.
Bargains for billionaires,
David thought. Being cheap was either how Ironwood got rich or how he stayed that way.

“Two things wrong with that argument, Dave.”

“Only two?” David tried to hide his frustration. Ironwood’s incessant calls were making it hard to work at all. Still, he’d kept his word and paid for the equipment David had requested.

“First up, you’re assuming that biology itself is blind. But you have to admit it’s equally possible that it follows rules like every other science—universal rules. I mean, stars form wherever enough hydrogen clumps together, right? And that’s no matter where or when. Why is that? Because those are the rules for how hydrogen behaves. So why can’t that be true about life? What if the rules of biology make it so only RNA and DNA can carry genetic information?”

David winced and held the small phone away from his ear. Ironwood’s voice blared from the speaker.

“What if only carbon-based life can get smart?”

David knew this conversation wouldn’t end until Ironwood ended it. “So what’s the second thing wrong with my argument?”

“Well, it just could be that Earth’s some kind of alien farm, and we’re the cattle.”

David was glad he wasn’t having this conversation by video, so Ironwood couldn’t see him roll his eyes. “We’ve been seeded here, you mean.”

“Seeded. Engineered. Hell, we could be a galactic art project for all I know. But the fact remains: If aliens
created
life on this planet, it stands to reason they used their own biology to do it. Which means,”
Ironwood triumphantly concluded,
“their DNA
can
interact with ours.”

David wanted to pound his phone on the worktable. Instead, unable to let the argument go, he made a counterargument. “The only thing wrong with that hypothesis is that there’s absolutely no proof of it.”

“You mean, there didn’t
used
to be proof—until you found it.”

David’s jaw clenched. “I have to get to work.”

“ ’Course you do. Got to know where they landed, and when.”

“There’s going to be another explanation.”

“Good man—spoken like a scientist. Doubt everything till you get the data that prove the hypothesis.”

David mouthed a silent scream. “
If
the data exist.”

“They exist, all right. Just ask the government.”
Ironwood barreled on.
“Work hard, Dave. You’ve got my money. I want your results.”

Then, mercifully—dead air.

David snapped his phone shut. What was it with people who didn’t know the difference between facts and supposition? And what was it with his own inability to simply walk away from an unproductive argument?

His father had been easygoing, as much as David could remember. His mother, definitely so. Wherever his streak of stubbornness had come from, like his genetic peculiarities, it didn’t seem to be from his parents. Overall, they had simply been accepting of life. When his father had died in the car crash at age thirty-two, David remembered his mother’s grief was short-lived.
We go on,
she said. Nine years later, at the age of fourteen, David had recalled those words as he stared at his thirty-six-year-old mother in her open casket, taken in turn by cancer.

We go on.
In his case, into foster care, finding freedom only when he went to college, a year ahead of his peers. Early on, he’d realized that everything died. It was the way of things. His mother had been right.
We go on.
He had.

Until eight months ago, when he’d discovered that his death was no longer an abstract future decades away.

Since then he’d experienced anger and frustration, especially when, late at night, he lay alone with his thoughts, imagining each breath, each heartbeat, was marking a countdown to the end of everything if he couldn’t solve his problem. No fear, though. He couldn’t remember ever feeling that. Just urgency and impatience.

His nightly phone call over, David rolled his chair across the concrete floor to another makeshift table. This one held fifteen unopened boxes of various reagent kits for use with the genetic analysis system still boxed up beneath the table. The DNA sequencer and its dedicated computer controller—about the size of a medium office photocopying machine—was for processing the DNA samples he’d told Ironwood he’d start to collect for him.

Now that he was able to work full-time, not in stolen evenings at the army lab, and now that he had the funds to buy openly from all genetic databases available, David anticipated the more rapid discovery of more clusters. To Ironwood, that meant more outposts. To David, it meant more chances to find others like him, and, most importantly, who among them had beat the odds—of all the cases he’d uncovered, none had yet. So finding more clusters meant more chances to find and turn off the genetic trigger that could kill him before he reached the beginning of the lethal interval, twenty-six years, six months.

Less than three months left.

Reason enough to get back to work now, resume his own investigation into his own genetic code.

To that end, he’d set up his own mini supercomputer. Already, the dedicated computing power of the three networked Apple Pro towers exceeded what he’d been able to access using his own account in the armed forces lab. The new screens, too, were larger and brighter and easier on the eyes than his old ones. He’d confirmed that on a few twenty-four-hour marathons. Everything else about his new lab, though, was decidedly low-tech.

His five worktables were nothing more than sheets of plywood on raw wood sawhorses. On the table with the screens, keyboards, and various drives, a gray and black rat’s nest of wires and cables cascaded over the back and down to his computers and their battery backup. In another corner, deep in shadows, were four other tables laden with unopened boxes of lab supplies, junk food, and several cases of Red Bull. The cot and a sleeping bag were for the rare nights when the Red Bull stopped working.

He’d definitely reached that point now but doubted he’d be sleeping anytime soon. Ironwood’s late-night phone calls and sheer obstinacy were partly responsible for his insomnia. More to blame was the new genome display on the large computer monitor on his makeshift desk—his complete genetic pattern this time, not just that of his mitochondria.

The genome on his screen told the story: The reality of his mtDNA results could not be denied. Fully 8 percent of his own DNA was nonhuman.

As he paged through graph after graph of his genome, David chewed at his lip, thoughtful. At the army lab, when he’d discovered that the
peculiarities of his genetic structure were shared by a handful of other people, those individuals had had no other obvious relationship with him or with each other. The only exception to that lack of connection had been a few whose families clustered together geographically.

Those clusters had convinced David that the death sentence coded in his genes was a rare, recessive trait that his mother and father had carried, but on only one chromosome each. Both characteristics combined explained why his parents had lived past twenty-seven, and why the trait had persisted in the human population for so long without being identified as a medical threat.

It had been some of his searches online for more information about those regions that had drawn Merrit’s and then Ironwood’s interest to him. When they’d offered to buy his data, he’d scrubbed the army files and sold the first three data clusters. By that time, he’d already realized he’d either make a discovery worth something even to the army—it wasn’t every day someone found nonhuman DNA in humans—or, with luck, he’d be dead before anyone could prosecute him. In any case, without the money, he’d be unable to do anything in time to save himself.

While Ironwood wanted to believe the origins of those three clusters with nonhuman DNA were alien, to David it was a given they were not. So far, however, he’d been unable to come up with a plausible, testable, alternate hypothesis.

So he’d decided to look next not just in the genetic profiles of other people but in those of other species, because Nature hoarded good ideas: If a particular sequence of amino acids accomplished something well in one life form, then the chances were strong the sequence would be conserved and passed on to other generations and, eventually, to other species.

Just this morning, he’d set his computers to comparing his own genes with those in twenty-eight other species. Following established protocols, he’d included seventeen specific mammals, plus a platypus, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish. He wouldn’t know if he had a negative result until after his computers compared all the sequences, and that could easily take three days. A positive result, though, was a different matter. That could occur at any time, even with the first comparison.

David stifled a yawn and stretched. Time to call it a night. He instructed his computer to text his phone whenever, and if ever, it found a positive match.

He locked the metal exterior door and separate iron grate of his lab, then stepped out into the cloyingly humid August air. The evening’s earlier rain had brought no relief, and it felt like more was on the way.

His black Jeep was one of three vehicles in the small parking lot edged
on three sides by the converted warehouse. Another was a vintage Toyota truck that hadn’t budged since he’d moved in. The battered pickup looked to be dark green under its thick coat of grime and dust. Two cinder blocks propped up the chassis where a rear tire was missing. The third vehicle, an old maroon Ford Crown Victoria, had initially captured his attention because it was the same model he’d seen Army CID agents drive on their visits to the lab. There was no apparent schedule to its presence here; sometimes it was parked in space number 27, and sometimes not. Reassuringly, though, he’d never noticed it anywhere else he drove in the area. Not at the local fast-food outlets, nor at the nearby Holiday Inn where Ironwood had parked him at a discount corporate rate until his few possessions from Maryland could be shifted to a local apartment.

David headed for his Jeep, pleased to hear only distant planes from the airport about a mile away, and the closer, faint electrical buzz of the lot’s single light pole—a light pole that only held a light. Unlike the lab in Maryland, there were no surveillance cameras here.

He flicked the Jeep’s windshield wipers on once to clear the last of the evening’s rain, then drove out of the lot and onto the street, pausing briefly to check both ways. There was no traffic this time of night, only a cable van parked across the street. David made a mental bet it’d be on blocks when he returned tomorrow. This wasn’t a district for leaving vehicles unattended.

He turned left, heading for the 24/7 McDonald’s nearest his lodging. A shake and two Big Macs sounded about right—that stupefying combination should stun him into dreamless sleep. It was not as if he had to worry about what cholesterol would do to him at fifty.

He switched on his radio and kept pressing
SEARCH
until a talk radio station came on. He really didn’t care what they were arguing about—any conversation was a better background noise than music, especially when he was working out problems. Someday he’d remember to get the kit that would let him plug his iPod into the Jeep’s radio. Then he could play his collection of environmental sounds: recordings of the background noise of actual places, buildings, outdoor settings. He enjoyed visualizing the layout of the place where each recording had been made. He’d always been able to “read” the echoes and reverberations. The exercise was calming.

For now, though, he settled for talk radio, and he drove on while simultaneously following the political discussion on the air, trying to remember where he’d seen an Apple Store in Atlantic City for the iPod kit, and mulling over genes.

What he didn’t do was realize that tonight, like every night for the past three weeks, he was still under surveillance.

This time, not just by the air force.

The screen in the cable van tracked David Weir’s real-time position via a GPS beacon. Roz Marano had planted it.

“He’s not going back to the hotel,” Chang said.

“McDonald’s,” Lyle suggested. “There’s one on Rupert.” Weir ate like a horse.

Chang nodded and entered the departure in his log.

On another monitor, Lyle caught the flare of headlights in the converted warehouse’s parking lot. Too much of a coincidence for his liking. “The Crown Vic’s starting up. Run the tape back.”

Chang brought up a different video display of the car now approaching the exit to the lot. Then, as that camera’s image continued live on the first screen, he made time run backward on the second.

Lyle watched both screens until the Crown Victoria was out of range of the van’s cameras, heading in the same direction as Weir’s Jeep. On the playback screen, the Jeep backed into the lot, its headlights switched off, and Weir walked backward to his lab, unlocked the grate and door, then stepped back inside.