by Tom Clancy
“Oh, that’s your ex-husband over there in the corner, isn’t it?” the senator asked, surprised at the change in her face when he said it.
“Yes.” The voice neutral, showing no emotion, as she turned to face in another direction. Having spotted him, she needed to do no more. Both knew the rules. No closer than thirty feet, no lengthy eye contact, and certainly no words.
“I had the chance to put money into Horizon Corporation two years ago. I’ve kicked myself quite a few times since.”
“Yes, John has made quite a pile for himself.”
And well after their divorce, so she didn’t get a nickel out of it. Probably not a good topic for conversation, the senator thought at once. He was new at the job, and not the best at politic conversation.
“Yes, he’s done well, twisting science the way he has.”
“You don’t approve?”
“Restructuring DNA in plants and animals—no. Nature has evolved without our assistance for two billion years at least. I doubt that it needs help from us.”
“ ‘There are some things man is not meant to know’?” the senator asked with a chuckle. His professional background was in contracting, in gouging holes in the ground and erecting something that nature didn’t want there, though his sensitivity on environmental issues, Dr. Brightling thought, had itself evolved from his love of Washington and his desire to remain here in a position of power. It was called Potomac Fever, a disease easily caught and less easily cured.
“The problem, Senator Hawking, is that nature is both complex and subtle. When we change things, we cannot easily predict the ramifications of the changes. It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences, something with which the Congress is familiar, isn’t it?”
“You mean—”
“I mean that the reason we have a federal law about environmental impact statements is that it’s far easier to mess things up than it is to get them right. In the case of recombinant DNA, we can more easily change the genetic code than we can evaluate the effects those changes will cause a century from now. That sort of power is one that should be used with the greatest possible care. Not everyone seems to grasp that simple fact.”
Which point was difficult to argue with, the senator had to concede gracefully. Brightling would be making that case before his committee in another week. Had that been the thing that had broken up the marriage of John and Carol Brightling? How very sad. With that observation, the senator made his excuses and headed off to join his wife.
“There’s nothing new in that point of view.” John Brightling’s doctorate in molecular biology came from the University of Virginia, along with his M.D. “It started with a guy named Ned Ludd a few centuries ago. He was afraid that the Industrial Revolution would put an end to the cottage-industry economy in England. And he was right. That economic model was wrecked. But what replaced it was better for the consumer, and that’s why we call it progress!” Not surprisingly, John Brightling, a billionaire heading for number two, was holding court before a small crowd of admirers.
“But the complexity—” One of the audience started to object.
“Happens every day—every second, in fact. And so do the things we’re trying to conquer. Cancer, for example. No, madam, are you willing to put an end to our work if it means no cure for breast cancer? That disease strikes five percent of the human population worldwide. Cancer is a genetic disease. The key to curing it is in the human genome. And my company is going to find that key! Aging is the same thing. Salk’s team at La Jolla found the kill-me gene more than fifteen years ago. If we can find a way to turn it off, then human immortality can be real. Madam, does the idea of living forever in a body of twenty-five years’ maturity appeal to you?”
“But what about overcrowding?” The congress-woman’s objection was somewhat quieter than her first. It was too vast a thought, too surprisingly posed, to allow an immediate objection.
“One thing at a time. The invention of DDT killed off huge quantities of disease-bearing insects, and that increased populations all over the world, didn’t it? Okay, we are a little more crowded now, but who wants to bring the anopheles mosquito back? Is malaria a reasonable method of population control? Nobody here wants to bring war back, right? We used to use that, too, to control populations. We got over it, didn’t we? Hell, controlling populations is no big deal. It’s called birth control, and the advanced countries have already learned how to do it, and the backward countries can, too, if they have a good reason for doing so. It might take a generation or so,” John Brightling mused, “but is there anyone here who would not want to be twenty-five again—with all the things we’ve learned along the way, of course. It damned well appeals to me!” he went on with a warm smile. With sky-high salaries and promises of stock options, his company had assembled an incredible team of talent to look at that particular gene. The profits that would accrue from its control could hardly be estimated, and the U.S. patent was good for seventeen years! Human immortality, the new Holy Grail for the medical community—and for the first time, it was something for serious investigation, not a topic of pulp science-fiction stories.
“You think you can do it?” another congresswoman—this one from San Francisco—asked. Women of all sorts found themselves drawn to this man. Money, power, good looks, and good manners made it inevitable.
John Brightling smiled broadly. “Ask me in five years. We know the gene. We need to learn how to turn it off. There’s a whole lot of basic science in there we have to uncover, and along the way we hope to discover a lot of very useful things. It’s like setting off with Magellan. We aren’t sure what we’re going to find, but we know it’ll all be interesting.” No one pointed out that Magellan hadn’t made it home from that particular trip.
“And profitable?” a new senator from Wyoming asked.
“That’s how our society works, isn’t it? We pay people for doing useful work. Is this area useful enough?”
“If you bring it off, I suppose it is.” This senator was himself a physician, a family practitioner who knew the basics but was well over his head on the deep-scientific side. The concept, the objective of Horizon Corporation, was well beyond breathtaking, but he would not bet against them. They’d done too well developing cancer drugs and synthetic antibiotics, and were the leading private company in the Human Genome Project, a global effort to decode the basics of human life. Himself a genius, John Brightling had found it easy to attract others like himself to his company. He had more charisma than a hundred politicians, and unlike the latter, the senator had to admit to himself, he really had something to back up the showmanship. It had once been called “the right stuff” for pilots. With his movie-star looks, ready smile, superb listening ability, and dazzlingly analytical mind, Dr. John Brightling had the knack. He could make anyone near him feel interesting—and the bastard could teach, could apply his lessons to everyone nearby. Simple ones for the unschooled and highly sophisticated ones for the specialists in his field, at the top of which he reigned supreme. Oh, he had a few peers. Pat Reily at Harvard-Mass General. Aaron Bernstein at Johns Hopkins. Jacques Elisé at Pasteur. Maybe Paul Ging at U.C. Berkeley. But that was it. What a fine clinician Brightling might have made, the senator-M.D. thought, but, no, he was too good to be wasted on people with the latest version of the flu.
About the only thing in which he’d failed was his marriage. Well, Carol Brightling was also pretty smart, but more political than scientific, and perhaps her ego, capacious as everyone in this city knew it to be, had quailed before the greater intellectual gifts of her husband. Only room in town for one of us, the doctor from Wyoming thought, with an inner smile. That happened often enough in real life, not just on old movies. And Brightling, John, seemed to be doing better in that respect than Brightling, Carol. At the former’s elbow was a very pretty redhead drinking in his every word, while the latter had come alone, and would be leaving alone for her apartment in Georgetown. Well, the senator-M.D. thought, that’s life.
/> Immortality. Damn, all the pronghorns he might take, the doctor from Cody thought on, heading over to his wife. Dinner was about to start. The chicken had finished the vulcanization process.
The Valium helped. It wasn’t actually Valium, Killgore knew. That drug had become something of a generic name for mild sedatives, and this one had been developed by SmithKline, with a different trade name, with the added benefit that it made a good mix with alcohol. For street people who were often as contentious and territorial as junkyard dogs, this group of ten was remarkably sedate. The large quantities of good booze helped. The high-end bourbons seemed the most popular libations, drunk from cheap glasses with ice, along with various mixers for those who didn’t care to drink it neat. Most didn’t, to Killgore’s surprise.
The physicals had gone well. They were all healthy-sick people, outwardly fairly vigorous, but inwardly all with physical problems ranging from diabetes to liver failure. One was definitely suffering from prostate cancer—his PSA was off the top of the chart—but that wouldn’t matter in this particular test, would it? Another was HIV+, but not yet symptomatic, and so that didn’t matter either. He’d probably gotten it from drug use, but strangely, liquor seemed all he needed to keep himself regulated here. How interesting.
Killgore didn’t have to be here, and it troubled his conscience to look at them so much, but they were his lab rats, and he was supposed to keep an eye on them, and so he did, behind the mirror, while he did his paperwork and listened to Bach on his portable CD player. Three were—claimed to be—Vietnam veterans. So they’d killed their share of Asians—“gooks” was the word they’d used in the interview—before coming apart and ending up as street drunks. Well, homeless people was the current term society used for them, somewhat more dignified than bums, the term Killgore vaguely remembered his mother using. Not the best example of humanity he’d ever seen. Yet the Project had managed to change them quite a bit. All bathed regularly now and dressed in clean clothes and watched TV. Some even read books from time to time—Killgore had thought that providing a library, while cheap, was an outrageously foolish waste of time and money. But always they drank, and the drinking relegated each of the ten to perhaps six hours of full consciousness per day. And the Valium calmed them further, limiting any altercations that his security staff would have to break up. Two of them were always on duty in the next room over, also watching the group of ten. Microphones buried in the ceiling allowed them to listen in to the disjointed conversations. One of the group was something of an authority on baseball and talked about Mantle and Maris all the time to whoever would listen. Enough of them talked about sex that Killgore wondered if he should send the snatch team back out to get some female “homeless” subjects for the experiment—he would tell Barb Archer that. After all, they needed to know if gender had an effect on the experiment. She’d have to buy into that one, wouldn’t she? And there’d be none of the sisterly solidarity with them. There couldn’t be, even from the feminazi who joined him in running this experiment. Her ideology was too pure for that. Killgore turned when there came a knock at the door.
“Hey, doc.” It was Benny, one of the security guys.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Falling asleep,” Benjamin Farmer replied. “The kids are playing pretty nice.”
“Yeah, they sure are.” It was so easy. Most had to be prodded a little to leave the room and go out to the courtyard for an hour of walking around every afternoon. But they had to be kept fit—which was to say, to simulate the amount of exercise they got on a normal day in Manhattan, staggering from one dreary corner to another.
“Damn, doc, I never knew anybody could put it away the way these guys do! I mean, I had to bring in a whole case of Grand-Dad today, and there’s only two bottles left.”
“That their favorite?” Killgore asked. He hadn’t paid much attention to that.
“Seems to be, sir. I’m a Jack Daniel’s man myself—but with me, maybe two a night, say, for Monday Night Football, if it’s a good game. I don’t drink water the way the kids drink hard booze.” A chuckle from the ex-Marine who ran the night security shift. A good man, Farmer. He did a lot of things with injured animals at the company’s rural shelter. He was also the one who’d taken to calling the test subjects the kids. It had caught on with the security staff and from them to the others. Killgore chuckled. You had to call them something, and lab rats just wasn’t respectful enough. After all, they were human beings, after a fashion, all the more valuable for their place in this test. He turned to see one of them—#6—pour himself another drink, wander back to his bed, and lie down to watch some TV before he passed out. He wondered what the poor bastard would dream about. Some did, and talked loudly in their sleep. Something to interest a psychiatrist, perhaps, or someone doing sleep studies. They all snored, to the point that when all were asleep it sounded like an old steam-powered railroad yard in there.
Choo-choo, Killgore thought, looking back down at his last bit of paperwork. Ten more minutes, and he could head home. Too late to put his kids to bed. Too bad. Well, in due course they would awaken to a new day and a new world, and wouldn’t that be some present to give them, however heavy and nasty the price for it might be. Hmph, the physician thought, I could use a drink myself.
“The future has never been so bright as this,” John Brightling told his audience, his demeanor even more charismatic after two glasses of a select California Chardonnay. “The bio-sciences are pushing back frontiers we didn’t even know existed fifteen years ago. A hundred years of basic research are coming to bloom even as we speak. We’re building on the work of Pasteur, Ehrlich, Salk, Sabin, and so many others. We see so far today because we stand on the shoulders of giants.
“Well,” John Brightling went on, “it’s been a long climb, but the top of the mountain is in sight, and we will get there in the next few years.”
“He’s smooth,” Liz Murray observed to her husband.
“Very,” FBI Director Dan Murray whispered back. “Smart, too. Jimmy Hicks says he’s the top guy in the world.”
“What’s he running for?”
“God, from what he said earlier.”
“Needs to grow a beard then.”
Director Murray nearly choked at that, then he was saved by the vibrating of his cellular phone. He discreetly left his seat to walk into the building’s large marble foyer. On flipping his phone open, it took fifteen seconds for the encryption system to synchronize with the base station calling him—which told him that it was FBI Headquarters.
“Murray.”
“Director, this is Gordon Sinclair in the Watch Center. So far the Swiss have struck out on ID-ing the other two. Prints are on their way to the BKA so they can take a look.” But if they hadn’t been printed somewhere along the line, that, too, would be a dry hole, and it would take a while to identify Model’s two pals.
“No additional casualties on the takedown?”
“No, sir, all four bad guys down for the count. All hostages safe and evacuated. They should all be back home now. Oh, Tim Noonan deployed on this operation, electronics weenie for one of the go-teams.”
“So, Rainbow works, eh?”
“It did this time, Director,” Sinclair judged.
“Make sure they send us the write-up on how the operation went down.”
“Yes, sir. I already e-mailed them about that.” Less than thirty people in the Bureau knew about Rainbow, though quite a few would be making guesses. Especially those HRT members who’d taken note of the fact that Tim Noonan, a third-generation agent, had dropped off the face of the earth. “How’s dinner going?”
“I prefer Wendy’s. More of the basic food groups. Anything else?”
“The OC case in New Orleans is close to going down, Billy Betz says. Three or four more days. Aside from that, nothing important happening.”
“Thanks, Gordy.” Murray thumbed the END button on his phone and pocketed it, then returned to the dining room after a look and a wav
e at two members of his protective detail. Thirty seconds later, he slid back into his seat, with a muted thump from his holstered Smith & Wesson automatic against the wood.
“Anything important?” Liz asked.
A shake of the head. “Routine.”
The affair broke up less than forty minutes after Brightling finished his speech and collected his award plaque. He held court yet again, albeit with a smaller group of fans this time, while drifting toward the door, outside of which waited his car. It was only five minutes to the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House. He had a corner suite on the top floor, and the hotel staff had thoughtfully left him a bottle of the house white in an ice bucket next to the bed, for his companion had come along. It was sad, Dr. John Brightling thought, removing the cork. He’d miss things like this, really miss them. But he had made the decision long before—not knowing when he’d started off that it could possibly work. Now he thought that it would, and the things he’d miss were ultimately of far less value than the things he’d get. And for the moment, he thought, looking at Jessica’s pale skin and stunning figure, he’d get something else that was pretty nice.
It was different for Dr. Carol Brightling. Despite her White House job, she drove her own car without even a bodyguard to her apartment off Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, her only companion there a calico cat named Jiggs, who, at least, came to the door to meet her, rubbing his body along her panty-hosed leg the moment the door was closed, and purring to show his pleasure at her arrival. He followed her into the bedroom, watching her change in the way of cats, interested and detached at the same time, and knowing what came next. Dressed only in a short robe, Carol Brightling walked into the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and got a treat, which she bent down to feed to Jiggs from her hand. Then she got herself a glass of ice water from the refrigerator door, and drank it down with two aspirin. It had all been her idea. She knew that all too well. But after so many years, it was still as hard as it had been at first. She’d given up so much more. She’d gotten the job she’d craved—somewhat to her surprise, as things had turned out, but she had the office in the right building, and now played a role in making policy on the issues that were important to her. Important policy on important topics. But was it worth it?