Knockout Mouse Page 13

  “Oh… well, never mind,” he stammered. “But I think it can be easily—uh, easily treated.”

  He looked at his watch and I looked at mine. Seven-fifteen. Wes’s cell phone chirped. His secretary was punctual. After a few uh-huhs into the phone, he gulped down his beer. “Something’s come up. Sorry, I’ve got to go. Good seeing you, Marion.”

  Marion stood to protest. I stood with her. “What is this?” she demanded. “You set me up!”

  I blocked her way out. “Stay just a minute, Marion. Let’s talk about Sheila.”

  Marion sank slowly into the chair. Her eyes burned holes into Wes’s receding back, then turned on me. “You’re a couple of creeps.”

  My face remained innocent and blank. The waitress set a perfect brimming amber cone of Manhattan before me. I lifted it in Marion’s direction and savored a spine-shivering sip. She looked into her own drink, then picked the umbrella out and twirled it. “You still have a copy of the diary, don’t you?”

  I was impressed with her ability to shift gears. “I know what’s in it,” I allowed, “and I’m willing to share. But first, I want to know why you ganged up with Fay against Jenny and me.”

  Marion gave a naughty-girl tilt of the head. A strand of hair fell across her face. “Don’t take it personally. It was just something I needed to do. George Harros was in a position to shed light.”

  I held her eyes. They’d gone opaque again, reflecting neither hostility nor sympathy. She was all about her own agenda. “I’m glad to hear you use the past tense. As you know, there’s a lot more to it than Harros thinks. You know that Dugan is in deep, and he’s got Harros snookered.”

  “I had to keep Dugan off my own ass, Bill.”

  “Maybe so, but you’ve used us as decoys long enough. Jenny’s about to have a nervous breakdown.” This did bring a flicker of concern. “Let’s just talk. We’re both trying to figure out what killed Sheila, right?”

  Marion tilted her head in a qualified yes.

  “I count five ways Sheila could have died,” I went on.

  “Only five?”

  “Feel free to add to the list. One, Jenny had the shellfish antigen in her kitchen. Unless she’s totally mistaken, this isn’t it. Two, Sheila ingested the antigen on her own before or after Jenny’s. This is highly unlikely. She was very careful. Three, someone brought the antigen to the meal in a deliberate attempt to poison her. Four, someone injected the antigen or forced it on her outside of Jenny’s apartment, before or after dinner. She had puncture marks in her arm. And five, the cause of death is something other than the antigen. Factor X. Probably from the lab at LifeScience.”

  Amusement played on Marion’s lips. “You’re so charmingly naive about causation. You think we can pin it on one little smoking-gun protein.”

  “So you’re saying it’s number five. Factor X.”

  “No. Bill, I don’t know what killed her. Honestly, I don’t. I’m trying to make you see that there could be a multiplicity of factors. Cellular interactions so complex we’ll never disentangle them.”

  “Don’t pull the scientist stuff on me, Marion. If I need to learn something new, I will.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m saying we really may never unravel it. It’s the nature of the new world we’re creating. We’re rearranging the alphabet of life.”

  “Well, isn’t biotech just a more precise way to do what farmers have been doing for millennia? Animal breeding, grain hybrids. They’re pretty much the cornerstone of civilization, right?”

  “Sure. But we’re transferring genes between kingdoms now, not just species. For each little step we take, there’s a logical purpose. Put them together, though, and they add up to something bigger than any of us can grasp. People only latch on to the immediate dangers. The Institute of Science and Technology is funding research into mass-produced, high-throughput, high-value cloned chickens for the poultry industry. Animal welfare people worry that the chickens will suffer. Sure, that’s an issue, but it’s miles from the real point. The leap we’re taking is epochal. It’s metaphysical.”

  “Metaphysical?”

  “On the scale of Prometheus stealing fire from Olympus. In the old days, doctors were like mechanics repairing a vehicle. Now we’re becoming more like co-creators of the vehicle. Look at the other realms we’ve conquered. Once upon a time, the heavens belonged only to birds and gods. Now we zoom through them drinking cocktails. Then, when we divided the atom, which was thought to be the irreducible unit of the universe, we gave ourselves the button to apocalypse. Over and over, we usurp the powers of nature, or the gods, or whatever name you want to use. The question, of course, is whether we have the wisdom of the gods.”

  “From what I remember of Greek mythology, the gods had more power than wisdom.”

  “You two have got to need another drink,” the waitress said from over my right shoulder. The lines around her eyes said she knew more about the whims of the gods than the two of us put together.

  “Rum and bitters,” Marion said. “Over, with a twist.”

  I tapped my glass for another Manhattan. “How’d you get into biotech anyway, Marion?”

  “I started in botany, way back when. Silly thing, I loved flowers, their role in evolution. ‘The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world.’ But I slowly found out that if you really wanted to know why a plant survived a drought or resisted a pest, you had to go into the lab.”

  “So you switched to molecular biology.”

  “I’d thought mo bio was all about yeast colonies and fruit flies. When I saw what it could tell me about petals, I was hooked. Fifty years ago, most people thought proteins were what we now call genes. Now we can manipulate them to assemble our own bestiary.”

  “Didn’t someone plug a firefly gene into a rabbit, so that the rabbit glowed in the dark?”

  “Mere epiphenomena. We can go much deeper now. We can engineer male fruit flies to spend their whole day doing mating dances with each other in a big conga line. If you alter a gene called disheveled, a normally neat mouse turns into a slob. Humans share 80 percent of our genome with fruit flies, 90 percent with mice, and 98 percent with chimps. That means we’ll be able to engineer human behavior, too. Stephen Hawking and others say we have no choice, or we’ll be left behind by our machines.”

  The cocktails arrived. We touched glasses. I took a long sip and said, “We’ve got the power to engineer ourselves into obsolescence.”

  Marion swallowed some rum. “Accelerated evolution into cyborgs or transgenic superhumans,” she said. “The ones left behind will be curiosities. Like Ishi, the last Yahi Indian.”

  “But people later realized he had a lot of knowledge we’ve lost. I wonder if the preterite humans will be valued and consulted for their appreciation of, say, a Tarkovsky film.”

  “If they’re lucky. They may have no survival value. The direction we’re going, survival will be measured by efficiency and shareholder value. We’ll still have entertainment, but it will come in the form of adrenaline jolts. Religion will be packaged as pharmacologically managed inner peace.”

  “They’re both guaranteed box office. But I’m not so sure it’s going to happen, Marion. I mean, look around.” A silver-haired man in a crimson cravat was playing liar’s dice with the bartender. Two women with their white hair done up in cochlear curls were chatting over martinis. “The dot-commers used to flock to this place. Now it’s retro’d back to the days before retro. You never know when the future’s going to go bust.”

  “Markets may rise and fall, but the underlying technology takes root. The Internet certainly has. The groundwork is being laid in bioengineering right now. Real estate in the genome is being staked out the same way it was on the Web.”

  I let some more of the Manhattan warm my throat. “Okay, so biotech is where it’s happening, and you want to influence its direction. What exactly do you do at LifeScience?”

  “I’m in the agri department. Bioremediation. Engineering crops t
hat help the environment instead of depleting it. For example, a guy in Davis has a tomato that can grow in salty soils and alleviate soil salinity at the same time. That’s potentially revolutionary.”

  “What about MC124?”

  “Another department altogether. I don’t know a whole lot about it, to tell you the truth.”

  “How about helping me find out, then? Let’s say some mysterious combination of microbes from the lab killed Sheila. Okay, maybe we can’t get all the details, but at least we can find out where it came from.”

  Marion tapped the side of her glass. Her nails were short and unlacquered. The right thumb had been chewed. “Sheila’s death is kind of beside the point. I’m sorry for it, but she is, after all, dead. The question is, can we make it count for something?”

  I regarded Marion’s pale Nordic face. She was Dutch, Wes had said. At this particular moment she seemed bloodless as a stone. Maybe she was already part of the future. “Don’t you think her family deserves to know what killed her? Don’t you think Sheila herself deserves it? She was on to something at LifeScience.”

  “She was into something, Bill. She may have stolen some company secrets, or sold inside information, I’m not sure. I’d let it go, if I were you. Whatever you find will only muddy her name. Is that what you want?”

  “What is it that you want, Marion?”

  She shook the ice in her glass. “Something bigger, Bill. Something necessary. It’s not personal to Sheila or you or Jenny.”

  “And you expect me to let you see the diary based on this?”

  “What were you talking about so intensely with Sheila that night at Jenny’s?”

  “Nothing sinister, Marion. Just life. Allergies. Genetics. Not her work, but general stuff. That’s all.”

  Marion folded her arms and regarded me. “Well, I could be wrong. Maybe I should trust you. I just don’t know.”

  I folded my arms back at her. “Why am I even talking to you?”

  “You tell me. You’re not the only one with the diary.”

  “Yeah. There’s Dugan.” This got a good wince from her. She leaned forward. I went ahead and told her about the interrogation this afternoon. Actually, I wasn’t certain that Dugan had read the journal, but I was willing to bet Harros would let him. “It’s them or us,” I said. “Who are you going to let take control?”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry, Bill. It’s just too risky for me to tell you more.”

  “I know that Frederick McKinnon is feuding with Dugan. I know that he’s planning to start human trials soon. I know that MC124 will be very big for LifeScience if it pans out.” The idea was to make her feel that she’d be adding only a small scrap of information to a large pile.

  “Good for you.” Marion loosened the scarf and re-draped it on her shoulders. I could see the down on her arms. She looked more human now. Her voice was softer. “You’ll understand one day.”

  I ate my second cherry, red dye and all, and signalled the waitress for the check. Marion opened her wallet, but I stopped her. “So where’s Jenny?” she asked.

  I wasn’t quite fast enough. “Um—”

  “She was never coming to begin with. You really are a creep, aren’t you?”

  Marion stood and put her arm into a long cable-knit sweater. I couldn’t resist a little smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting this way.”

  The corners of her mouth folded down, which I took to be an effort not to smile back. She took a couple of steps, then turned. “Does Wes really have some kind of—should I see a doctor?”

  I wondered if she had strong feelings for him. I hoped not. I wasn’t sure he could handle her.

  “Nah,” I said. “He just wanted to see you.”

  19

  “So what did she say about me?”

  Wes handed me a beer. We were at a party in a loft in the South of Market area of San Francisco. Much of the neighborhood was landfill, an area of mixed industry that slowly became more of a skid row after the 1906 quake. In the eighties artists started moving in and it became known as SOMA, then in the nineties, with the rise of digital media, Multimedia Gulch. Magazines like Wired and The Industry Standard had started here. Many had ended here, too.

  People in flared hip huggers and platform shoes clustered near outposts of bean bags and neobrutalist sofas. This was more the city Web crowd, what remained of it, than the Silicon Valley chip crowd. The latter tended to be true geeks, or else suburbanites in polo shirts who felt cool because they worked in high tech. The dot-commers were the ones with the sideburns and soul patches, nose posts and Buddy Holly glasses, the weekends on E and techno.

  This party hosted the hip middle between the original idealists—the ones who were deep online before the run-up and had remained so after it evaporated—and the legions of well-scrubbed graduates who’d roved the city in packs in the late nineties, sucking up real estate and bar stools.

  Wes reclined in a hammock hung between two pillars of iron. A sculpted car crash, painted remains of mangled metal, was affixed to the concrete wall above. I kept out from under it.

  “Marion didn’t really mention you,” I replied. “Except she did want to make sure you didn’t have any diseases.”

  Wes shook his head slowly. “The bonds of friendship run deep here, Damen. You owe me.”

  “And here I am, drinking beer with you, as promised.” I gave him a toast. “Thanks again. I’ll definitely cast you in the next script.”

  “Just as long as you rewrite my scene with Marion.”

  “Is it over between you two?”

  Wes had himself a long gulp of beer, then scanned the room. “I don’t know. Her arms were too long. I felt like I was being grabbed by a tree.” He was a connoisseur of faults, particularly if he sensed a woman was losing interest. “You find out what you needed?”

  “I’m starting to think that whatever killed Sheila came out of LifeScience Molecules.”

  “Like maybe Sheila brewed up something that came back to bite her?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, Marion says it will make Sheila look very bad.”

  “Maybe you should just drop this thing, Bill.”

  “You and Marion agree on that. But I can’t, not as long as Dugan and the Harroses are still all over Jenny. And me.” I put my beer down. “I need to call her. Can I use your phone?”

  Wes handed me his cell. I got only Jenny’s machine. Either she’d gone out or she was refusing to pick up.

  I sipped my beer, and suddenly realized it was the last thing I wanted right now. “Wes,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I got to go.”

  “No way. A belly dancer is coming out.”

  “Sorry, no bangles for me tonight. I got tapes I gotta view.” I clapped Wes on the shoulder. “Thanks again. You’re an excellent guy.”

  Wes shook his head. “I can’t believe it. Leaving just when the fun is about to start. You’re obsessed, Billy.”

  I stumbled into the dark warehouse streets. As I had been doing since Sunday, I approached the Scout warily. The only activity came from a couple of street people down the block, having a smoke beside a shopping cart. Maybe Dugan thought he was in control enough now not to bother with me. Either that or the PIs were still following me and I was too tired to realize it.

  » » » » »

  At home, I went straight to the answering machine. Gregory had called, of course, to remind me about our meeting tomorrow. Rita had checked in to ask how I was doing. A couple of other people I was supposed to see this week had called to ask where the hell I was. But no message from Jenny.

  I found a couple pieces of stale pizza from last weekend in my refrigerator, popped them in the microwave, and took the soggy results down the hall to my video player. I put in the tape I had retrieved today, rewound it, and settled back.

  There was Gregory in the parking lot, mugging for the camera and talking about buying an island in the Caribbean. What made him say something like that when his company was so desperate? The same bravado, I s
uppose, that got BioVerge funded in the first place. The bravado that had fueled the Internet binge, driven by youngsters like Gregory who hadn’t been around long enough to know their conjurings were only vapor, and by investors who’d been around long enough to know better than to be bewitched by the vapor. The two got together to produce dreams of a new alchemy, one that transmuted money into silicon and back into exponentially multiplied money via arcane coding rites known only to the young magicians of bits.

  I hit myself on the side of the head, trying to knock my own personal bitters and about five ounces of Manhattan out of my ear. As the camera shifted away from the grid of Gregory’s teeth, I tracked the image in slow motion. The block geometry of the BioVerge building loomed in the distance. The foreground was a blur of parked cars—black tires, reflective windshields, chunks of color. Then sudden, reflexive focus on a small figure emerging from behind a black Range Rover. Sheila was eerily resurrected.

  The pause button gave me a still of the dark ringletted hair, the startled brown eyes, mouth caught in an O of worry. She was up to something. You could see the tension in her body, the tightening of muscles, one hand rising to ward off the camera’s intruding eye. Her right shoulder was weighed down by the large brown leather bag, something like what a mail carrier might use.

  I tracked ahead in slow motion. As her left hand rose, the other arm pulled the bag protectively close. The eyes narrowed. She was trying to gauge us. Her gaze shifted right of the camera to where Gregory and Ron stood. I hit PAUSE, then scrolled ahead frame by frame. She must have seen Gregory’s grin and realized he didn’t recognize her. Her mouth relaxed into a frown, one of displeasure more than fear. Her eyes stayed on him for a moment, as if to be sure, and then scanned back to the left. Then came a moment when they changed again. I hadn’t noticed it in real time. Sheila’s gaze caught on something. Her lips drew back in alarm. She turned and disappeared quickly behind the Range Rover.

  On the soundtrack, Gregory chortled and made his comment about her. Then the tape went blue.

  I rewound past Sheila to Gregory’s teeth, stopped, and scrolled forward again. Nothing in the background—the BioVerge building—was noteworthy. Nor did I see anything special in the parking lot middle ground—until after Sheila had moved away and I’d swung the camera to my right.