by Mark Alpert
The other guard took hold of the wheelchair and pushed Raza into the corridor, heading in the opposite direction.
Grant watched them go. He started to feel better as the guards moved off. There was something seriously wrong with that kid. Disturbingly wrong.
But that’s why the boy was going to the Research Center. The scientists would do some tests on him, maybe extract a few tissue samples. One way or another, they’d figure it out.
NINE
Jenna woke up inside a tomb. She lay on the marble floor of a mausoleum in Green-Wood Cemetery, shivering in the darkness.
She wasn’t dead. But her body hurt so much, she almost wished she were. Her leg muscles were sore from her hips to her ankles. Her feet ached and throbbed.
She sat up, lifting her head from her makeshift pillow, which she’d made by folding and bunching up her sweatpants. To her left, a gap between the mausoleum’s iron doors let a slender shaft of sunlight into the bare room. Derek stood just inside the doors, his half-lit head turned toward the gap, looking outside, keeping watch. His hulking body stayed absolutely still, but his breath came in rasps. He sounded like Death itself, scraping its skeletal fingers against the tomb’s stone walls.
All in all, they’d run at least ten miles the night before. After leaving Bay Parkway, they headed north through Bensonhurst, zigzagging along the side streets to avoid the police patrols. Derek carried Jenna most of the way, at first because she was in shock over what he did to the New York Times reporter, and later because she was simply too exhausted to go on. By 5 a.m. they reached Borough Park, a quieter neighborhood with less flooding and fewer cops. But the sky was already brightening, so Derek started to look for a place to hide. Jenna assumed he’d break into an abandoned building, but instead he dashed for the cemetery and boosted her over its spiked fence.
He carried her for another mile across the sprawling graveyard, which was thick with trees and looping pathways and hundred-year-old monuments. Just before sunrise he climbed a hill that was studded with gravestones and topped by a building that looked like a miniature Roman temple. It was only twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, but it had an impressive granite portico at the front, with a pair of fluted columns flanking the doors. Derek set Jenna down on the grass and tugged one of the heavy doors, which slowly creaked open. Then he pulled her into the mausoleum and told her to get some rest.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept. Eight hours? Ten hours? But she could tell from the bright shaft of sunlight that the storm was over. She unfolded her sweatpants and pulled them up her sore legs, trying not to make a sound. She didn’t want Derek to notice her, didn’t want to deal with him at all. After a few seconds, though, he looked over his shoulder and pointed at the far wall of the mausoleum.
“There’s food and water if you want it.”
Then he turned back to the gap between the doors and resumed his watch.
Jenna would’ve preferred to refuse the offer, but she was too hungry. She rose unsteadily to her feet and stepped toward the wall at the back of the marble room. To her left and right were the final resting places of the family members who’d paid for this mausoleum. The stone coffins were stacked on top of one another, four of them on either side, each with a name and a pair of dates chiseled into it. The family’s last name was Higgins, and most of them had died a century ago. On the far wall was a stained-glass window with the words VIRTUE AND IMMORTALITY etched into the yellowish pane. On the floor at the base of the wall were two plastic jugs of water and a box of protein bars.
She picked up one of the jugs and took a long drink. Then she unwrapped a protein bar, devoured it, and grabbed another. This was more evidence of Derek’s meticulous planning. He’d come to this cemetery beforehand, maybe days ago, so he could break into this mausoleum and leave these supplies here. In addition to his superhuman fighting abilities, the guy was an excellent strategist. But he was also completely amoral. When Jenna had studied behavioral genetics at the Rockefeller University lab, she’d identified several genes that triggered compassion and empathetic behavior. In Derek’s case, it looked like all those genes had been turned off.
She thought of Keating again and remembered the sound of his skull shattering. Her stomach turned. She dropped the protein bar, unable to take another bite.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t just wait here until nightfall and then let Derek drag her across the city to the next stage of his meticulous plan, whatever that might be. At that very moment, Abbu and Raza were probably cowering in one of the FSU’s jails, huddled in a filthy cell block with hundreds of detainees and a staff of brutal guards trained to fear and hate Muslims. The thought of it made Jenna frantic—she needed to start looking for her father and brother right now. She wanted to shove Derek aside and bolt out of the mausoleum, charging through the gap between the heavy iron doors.
But that would never work. If she was serious about escaping, she had to come up with a better plan. She had to rely on her wits and try to outsmart him. Luckily, in a battle of wits, Jenna had a chance. Although her genes weren’t enhanced like Derek’s, she could be pretty damn sneaky when she put her mind to it.
She stepped toward him. “Who are you looking for? Mourners? You think some descendant of the Higgins family is going to come here to pay his respects?”
He shook his head but didn’t turn to look at her. “No mourners. After the big storm three months ago, Green-Wood closed its gates and stopped allowing visitors. But the cemetery isn’t empty.”
“What do you mean? Who else is here?”
He shrugged. “Gang kids, mostly. Sometimes they jump over the fence. You know, to get high and knock over the gravestones. And sometimes the cops chase them.”
“Well, this isn’t such a good place to hide then, is it?” She was trying to rattle him. “What if the cops come this way?”
“This is a good vantage point.” He pointed at the gap between the mausoleum’s doors. “If the cops show up, I’ll see them coming a long way off. Hear them, too.”
Jenna stepped closer and looked through the gap. In front of the Higgins mausoleum, the cemetery grounds sloped steeply downhill. There were several marble monuments scattered across the yellowing grass and a bronze statue of a Roman goddess holding her left hand in the air, but otherwise there was a clear view from the mausoleum to the cemetery’s entrance, about half a mile away. In fact, she could see all the way west to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and New York Harbor.
She took a step backward. Derek was right, this was a good place to hide. It was much better than holing up in an abandoned building where they could be surrounded and trapped. Jenna was impressed by Derek’s ingenuity, so impressed that she began to seriously question whether she could outsmart the guy. But even genetic engineering couldn’t make him perfect. There was a weakness in him somewhere, a chink in his armor. She just needed to keep probing.
“So how did you know about this place? You know anyone buried in this cemetery?”
He didn’t say anything at first. He just stood by the doors, looking outside, his lungs rattling in his chest. But after several seconds, he shook his head. “I grew up near here. In Flatbush.”
This was a surprise. She and Derek were fellow Brooklynites. Her neighborhood and his were less than five miles apart. She wondered for a second which high school he went to. Although it was hard to tell how old Derek was—the gene-altering drugs had ravaged his body too much—she guessed he was about thirty, the same age as her.
Then he did something even more surprising. He looked over his shoulder at her and, for the first time, Jenna saw him smile. “I used to come here to catch turtles. Snapping turtles.” He spoke with quiet awe, as if remembering a dream. “This cemetery has a pond that’s full of them. Big fucking things.”
He raised his hands and held them about two feet apart to show her how big the turtles were. Then his smile faded, and he turned away from her.
Jenna waited for him to say something else
, but he didn’t. He went back to peering through the gap between the doors. For a moment she felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. She’d just caught a glimpse of what Derek was like before the drugs and the genetic alterations, back when he was human. And she wanted to see it again.
“Do you still have family in Flatbush?” she asked.
He said nothing. He didn’t nod or shake his head. But Jenna got the feeling that the answer was no.
“Listen to me, Derek. We need to talk about what happened to you. Did they give you injections when you were in the army?”
Still nothing. Even the rattling noises in his chest subsided. Maybe he was holding his breath.
“You want me to cure you, right? Well, I can’t do a thing if you won’t talk to me.”
He finally turned around and looked at her. In the half-light, his face was a mottled wreck. Blood leaked from the corners of his eyes and trickled down his cheeks. “The doctors called the drug ‘Crisper.’ Like the drawer in your refrigerator where you put your lettuce. It made no sense at all.”
Jenna nodded. “CRISPR is an acronym. It stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.”
He let out a snort. “Really? That’s a fucking complicated name for it.”
“It’s a description of a special kind of genetic sequence. It was first discovered in the DNA of bacteria, actually.” Jenna paused, wondering how much to say. It was probably best to keep it short and sweet. “Some bacteria have evolved a molecular tool for altering their own genetic code, to help them fight off other infectious microbes. And scientists realized they could use the same tool to change the genes of all kinds of species. Including humans.”
“Jesus Christ. Palindromic Repeats.” He let out another snort, but it sounded more bitter than amused. “I guess that’s why they called it the Palindrome Project.”
“When did you get the injections?”
Derek turned slightly so he could keep one eye on Jenna and still watch over the cemetery grounds. “It started last April. We were in Afghanistan, at our base in Kandahar. A hundred soldiers from Third Battalion volunteered for it. Including me.”
“How many shots did they give you?”
“Dozens. In the legs, the arms, the chest.” He tapped his torso, the ridges of muscle under his T-shirt. Then he raised a hand to his head and patted the black stubble on his scalp. “But the worst were the injections in the head. The doctors took us to the field hospital at our base and drilled a bunch of holes into our skulls.”
Jenna nodded. The injections delivered viruses to Derek’s muscle and nerve cells. The microbes invaded his cells just like ordinary flu viruses—they broke through the cell membranes and released their genetic material inside. But these particular viruses carried the genetic instructions for producing the CRISPR molecular complex, which had been designed to modify human DNA. The CRISPR complex latched on to all the targeted genes and cut pieces of them from Derek’s chromosomes. The viruses also carried new, improved DNA sequences, which were inserted into the gaps.
“What happened afterward? When did you notice the effects?”
He let out a labored breath. “The first day was hell. It felt like my bones were cracking. Like all my insides were turning to mush. They hooked me up to an intravenous line and I lay on a cot all day and night. I was going in and out of consciousness, completely out of my mind.” He frowned and shook his head. “But after twenty-four hours, I started to get better. And a day after that, I was ready for action. I was jacked, you know? I was dying to go back to the front lines. A week later, our platoon got ambushed while I was leading a patrol through the Sulaiman Mountains, and boom I turned into a fucking assassin. I started running up and down the mountainside, picking off the jihadis. I killed a dozen of them in five minutes.”
Jenna wished she could take notes on this. Derek’s symptoms were very similar to what she’d observed in her animal experiments. Starting two years ago, she’d injected CRISPR into hundreds of rats, flooding them with gene-editing molecules that were designed to enhance their intelligence and muscular coordination. In all her experiments, the rats were near death for the first twenty-four hours, and then they recovered from their illness and showed phenomenal improvement in the maze-running and pattern-recognition tests. Apparently, it took a day for the viruses to fully infect the body and deliver CRISPR to all the brain and muscle cells.
“What about the other soldiers who got the injections? Were the effects the same for them?”
Derek cocked his head. He thought it over for a few seconds before answering. “Well, that’s the funny thing. Everyone’s experience was a little different. Some guys got an amazing boost to their memory. Others became unbelievably good marksmen.” He raised his hand and scratched the dead skin near the wound on his neck. His arm was trembling. “But the changes weren’t always good. After a few weeks some guys got sick again, even worse than the sickness at the beginning. Except this time it wasn’t just physical illness. A couple of my men went batshit. We had to put them in straitjackets and send them back home.”
Again, Jenna thought of her animal studies. After a month, half of her rats started behaving strangely. After two months, most of them were dead. She tried treating them with different types of CRISPR molecules, altering different combinations of their genes. But the results were always the same.
What’s more, she already knew that CRISPR was dangerous for humans too, because she’d tested the treatment—in secret—on her brother. She’d taken the risk because Raza’s disease was slowly killing him, and his doctor said he had less than two years left. She had a good reason to be hopeful about treating him with CRISPR: Raza had only one flawed gene that needed to be fixed, so Jenna assumed the process would be simpler and safer than her animal experiments, which manipulated the hundreds of genes involved in brain development and intelligence. But after a few months of improvement, Raza started having fits of panic and anger, wordless tantrums so violent he almost bit off his tongue. The attempt to repair his flawed DNA had apparently mangled several other genes in his brain cells, causing harmful changes in mental activity and behavior. Jenna stopped the treatment at once.
That’s why she’d objected to her lab’s experiments on human brain tissue. She told the lab director, Dr. Tung, that they needed to do a lot more basic research before they could jump ahead to developing CRISPR treatments for people. But Tung ignored her concerns, and six months later he kicked her out of the lab. And now one of the victims of those treatments stood trembling in front of her.
“I was scared. All the men under my command were falling apart, and I knew it would happen to me too. Every night at our barracks I’d check myself for symptoms. I’d lie in my bunk and wonder if I was going insane.” He looked down at the floor, folding his arms across his chest to stop them from shaking. “But after a few nights I stopped being scared and started getting angry. Because I realized that my real enemy wasn’t the Taliban or Al-Qaeda or any of the other goddamn jihadis. My enemy was the U.S. Army. It was the people who’d done this crazy fucking experiment on me.”
Jenna felt another twinge of sympathy for Derek. It’s not his fault. They turned him into a monster. But then she thought of Keating again, and the memory froze her. Yes, the CRISPR injections might have distorted Derek’s character. They might’ve altered his genes enough to maximize his aggressiveness and minimize his compassion. But could that excuse what he did?
She bit her lip. Stay focused. Keep asking questions.
“So what happened then? What did you do?”
He unfolded his arms and began rubbing his hands together. That didn’t stop the trembling either. “I knew the army would never let me go. Because I was their guinea pig now, and that’s all they cared about. They were gonna keep watching me and testing me until I was either dead or a whacked-out zombie. So I didn’t have a choice. There was only one way out.” He shrugged. “I had to pretend to kill myself.”
“Wait a second. You f
aked your own death?”
“It wasn’t that hard. In Afghanistan, there are lots of ways to get yourself killed. We were on a night raid in Zabul Province and I waited until our air-support team called in a strike on the village where the Taliban were. I ran into their compound just as the B-52 flew overhead, and I ran out of the village just before the bombs fell.” He pointed at the ugly lesion on his neck. “I got some shrapnel injuries, nothing too serious, but afterward I noticed they weren’t healing right. Then I started having breathing problems. The symptoms were weird, like the abnormal shit I’d seen in the other guys in my unit. And I knew it would get worse unless I did something about it.”
“So you came back to America?”
“Yeah, that was easy too. Anyone with half a brain could sneak across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then I went to Karachi and paid a few bribes to get on a cargo ship that was headed for New York. Your family’s from Karachi, right?”
Jenna paused before answering. She was so focused on Derek’s story that she hadn’t expected a question about herself. “How do you know that?”
“I know all about you. Once I got to New York, I did some digging. I knew Palindrome was a classified project, but I assumed the government would recruit the best scientists in the country, the big-time experts on DNA and all that stuff. So I went to the library and found a computer and got some of their names from the Web. Then I paid a visit to one of them and got him talking.”
Now Jenna was alarmed. There were plenty of people at the Rockefeller lab whom she disliked, but there were others whom she cared about. “Who did you talk to?”
Derek shook his head. “It’s probably better if I don’t tell you.”
“Why?” Dread churned inside her. “Did you bash his head in, like you did to the reporter?”
“He was the director of your lab. A jackass named Tung. And he deserved every damn thing I did to him.” Derek raised his voice, making it echo against the mausoleum’s walls. “Tung was just a useless bureaucrat. He admitted he didn’t even understand the research. But he knew everything about the scientists in his lab, and he said you were the best. He said you were a genius at this kind of work, a fucking DNA magician. And he told me where to find you.” He stared at her. His eyes were bloody slits. “So now we’re gonna go to your lab and you’re gonna work on a cure. You’re gonna make a drug that’ll reverse what those bastards did to me.”