by M. G. Harris
Many authors were now publishing information straight onto the Web, not waiting for the slow process of print publication. Maybe some geneticists somewhere in the world were discussing something similar?
Marie-Carmen determined to search thoroughly, leaving no stone unturned. One hour later, she was satisfied that she had exhausted all possibilities.
The BELTRAN sequence – in its entirety as a DNA sequence or as its amino acid translation – appeared nowhere on the Web.
What about a sub-section? What if some scientists had discovered a smaller section but not the entire sequence?
Marie-Carmen’s knowledge of molecular biology had reached a limit. For all she knew, a match with a smaller section would be irrelevant – a mere coincidence with no biological impact. Even so, the whole sequence of what Jackson had called the ‘open-reading frame’ – the part which made a product – was only 45 DNA bases long. That was short enough to try a few sections, just for fun.
Marie-Carmen took the first fifteen bases, and searched for them. Nothing. She took the middle section, then the last section; still nothing.
She glanced outside; the sky was beginning to darken. By now, however, she was gripped; she had to get a result, one way or another.
Opening a Visual Basic application, she wrote a short computer program which would submit the entire 45 letter sequence to the search engines, in a series of pieces, starting with nine letters and increasing by three letters at a time.
GCAGGUUAC
GCAGGUUACCUA
GCAGGUUACCUAAUC and so on.
Then the starting position would shift, starting at the second letter in the sequence:
CAGGUUACC
CAGGUUACCUAA
CAGGUUACCUAAUCC and so on, until the entire sequence of 45 letters had been sectioned.
Being on the cutting edge of her specialization – ancient Mayan writing – had required Marie-Carmen, years ago, to learn some simple programming. It had been a challenge, but one which had served her well. To Marie-Carmen, deciphering puzzles and codes was almost a compulsion – once she had begun, she simply had to make some progress before she would allow herself a break.
Satisfied that her scrappily-written program would at least cover a large number of the huge range of possible sequences, she coded into the evening. It was dark before the program was finished. The day’s sun had been entirely wasted.
“If I get this done tonight,” she promised herself, “I can go to the nightclub”.
By the time her program was ready to run, she was exhausted and parched. She strolled to the cold drinks machine in the corridor, returned with sodas and a bucket of ice. The computer screen displayed a number of search results. She poured herself a tall, ice-filled glass of Mountain Dew, and began to examine the list.
This was exactly the distraction she needed, Marie-Carmen reflected. How easy it would be to fret over her cousin’s murder and the insane stories that her brother had told her were now appearing in the press. It really was beginning to look as though Jackson was a suspect in PJ’s murder. The injustice of it made Marie-Carmen seethe, but she reminded herself that the police didn’t know what had happened to Jackson since he’d left the airport.
She and Jackson simply had to track down the identity of Hans Runig or any of his hired killers. Or at the very least, they had to find a witness to Jackson’s story about being attacked in Tepoztlan.
Otherwise it would be Jackson’s word against that of the police. In most justice systems, including Mexico’s, that wouldn’t count for much. Even though Jackson was out of Mexico for now, if the Mexican authorities put a case together, there was a good chance he’d be extradited right back.
Marie-Carmen decided to avoid thinking about this. She had to concentrate on cracking the puzzle that her cousin had left for Jackson to solve. Somewhere in that DNA, there was a message.
When she thought of Jackson, Marie-Carmen found herself experiencing an unexpected sensation of guilt. She’d allowed things to get pretty intense. Now she thought about it, she’d made all the running. It was possible that Jackson might read more into the development than she’d intended. But he’d been almost impossible to resist. Unusually vulnerable and kind of pathetic; obviously desperate to please her but without any clear strategy. Desire had oozed out of Jackson from the minute she’d picked him up in her car. The more he’d tried to conceal it, the more attractive he’d become.
Jackson couldn’t have been more different from the men she usually dated, who were confident to the point of arrogance, typical machos. Not that Jackson wasn’t manly; she’d sneaked a peek at some of his snow sports photos on the Web and decided that he looked pretty hot on skis. But when it came to dealing with women, he was either relatively inexperienced, just plain shy – or maybe scared. He wasn’t too young to have had his heart broken, either. Maybe that was the problem? Marie-Carmen wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her own insecurities hadn’t taken long to surface when he had teased her about why she wasn’t married. What if there was a similar misery tucked away somewhere in Jackson’s past?
Marie-Carmen forced herself to stop daydreaming about what would probably turn out to be just a one-night-stand. The more work she could do on the mysterious BELTRAN sequence, the more information she’d be able to send Jackson, in case he did wind up being arrested for PJ’s murder.
After a while this turned to disappointment. She clicked on website after website only to find a partial match to the BELTRAN sequence appear in a totally irrelevant, non-biological context. Finally, one of these caught her eye; an article entitled: Ancient Sumerian Biologists: Did the Sumerians know about the genetic code?
The bad news was that the article was on a website whose domain name made Marie-Carmen’s hopes slide:
www.archaeologyconspiracies.com
Chaldexx
Jackson studied his watch. He surveyed the myriad faces around him. Which one looked as though they might be meeting a stranded geneticist? He’d been at the meeting place for five minutes. With what he’d just experienced in his online communication with Hans Runig, five minutes had already stretched into an eternity.
He itched with a desire to leave, to vanish into the anonymity of the crowd, take a Metro train deep into the center of the city and once and for all place himself beyond the reach of Runig’s people. Paranoia, he decided, is not a state of mind but rather, a physical sensation; a crawling of the flesh where the focused gaze of the object of fear fires sensors in the hairs of the arms, of the back of the neck.
“Jackson Bennett?”
He’d strayed into a reverie; the clipped tones of an African-American man in his late twenties awoke him with a snap.
“Alex Douglass – meeting you for Chaldexx Biopharmaceuticals? If you’re ready to leave, we’d like to take off as soon as possible.”
Jackson eyed Douglass with suspicion. Dressed in a dark blue suit and pale blue tie, Douglass looked every inch the corporate executive. Jackson didn’t move.
“You got any I.D., ‘Alex Douglass’?”
Douglass raised an eyebrow as he took a wallet from his jacket pocket, flipped it open to display his Chaldexx security I.D. card. The name and photo were a match. Jackson nodded.
Douglass regarded him with a bemused grin. “You seem a little jumpy.”
Jackson decided to come clean. “I kind of might be in a bit of trouble with Mexican Customs. I brought some samples in VIP a couple of days ago.”
“You went vial-in-pocket!” Douglass chuckled. “So what? Who hasn’t?”
“Well, I have my reasons for thinking they might, on this occasion, be a little mad at me.” Jackson decided that he wouldn’t mention the news reports that the police were after him. A little Customs ‘misunderstanding’, however, was understandable. Indeed, Douglass seemed to think he was already too worried.
“Who gets caught doing vial-in-pocket? Look, just let me worry about this.”
Jackson shrugged. “OK. Lead the way.”
Jackson’s name didn’t seem to have triggered any watch-list. Maybe Customs weren’t bothered with the possibility of him leaving the country? Maybe it was because his passport wasn’t yet the newer, digital kind. Or maybe the rules were different in this part of the airport? Looking around, Jackson noticed a tangible air of privilege. Just beyond the desk the departure lounge was populated with handful of urbane, sleekly-dressed men and women, awaiting their private jets. A few sipped sparkling wine from fluted glasses.
“See?” Douglass turned to Jackson with a broad grin. “No problem.”
“OK so maybe I am a little paranoid. But seriously, how did you do that?”
Douglass took him down some stairs, before answering.
“Let’s just say that in this part of the airport we pay a little extra for treatment that’s fast and hassle-free.”
Jackson followed Douglass out of the terminal and onto the tarmac where fifty yards distant, stood a ten-seater Gates Learjet. They climbed aboard. Minutes later, the jet began to taxi towards the runway.
The jet had been furnished to an appreciable level of comfort. Seats were thickly upholstered; there was a soft, brown leather-covered couch. After the take-off Douglass unbuckled and took a seat on the couch. He opened a small cupboard set into the table in front of the couch, removed two glass tumblers and an ice bucket.
“What are you drinking?”
Jackson clicked open his safety belt. “J&B with a little ginger ale. Isn’t this plane kind of small to be going all the way to Switzerland?”
Douglass grinned. “We’re going via Miami. You’re booked on a Swiss Air flight which leaves in around four and a half hours, gets you into Geneva for tonight.”
“Uh huh.” Jackson paused briefly. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, maybe I should have taken a commercial flight from Mexico City?” It seemed only reasonable to acknowledge the extra effort being made by Chaldexx to help him.
“Melissa . . . Professor DiCanio, is keen to meet with you as early as possible. The flights from Mexico City were full until the day after tomorrow.”
“We in a hurry, Alex?”
Douglass clinked his glass to Jackson’s. “Oh yeah, Melissa’s one driven lady; she’s always in a hurry.”
Jackson could imagine; he’d come across the type before, running from meeting to meeting, always too important to arrive on time, always taking ‘urgent’ calls on their cell phones. As much as he usually hated this behavior, in a woman he found it somehow appealing.
“How long have you worked at Chaldexx?”
“I helped set up the US office. We’re based out of Boston. It’s mostly business development, investor relations and such-like. All the research goes on in Switzerland.”
“You flew in from Chetumal, right? So what’s the interest there?”
Douglass hesitated. Jackson felt certain that he saw the executive’s jaw tighten. “Oh, we have some interests in biodiversity. There’s a nature reserve in Quintana Roo state.”
“You have a base there, or what?”
Douglass’s smile couldn’t have been more glacial. “Something like that. So tell me, Jackson, how’d a guy like you get the attention of Melissa DiCanio?”
Jackson considered. “I met her a few years ago, visited some labs in Baylor. I was looking to take up a PhD position there, but it didn’t pan out. Didn’t really want to move away from San Francisco.”
Douglass nodded. “SF is a cool city. Anyway, Melissa moved to England around then.”
“Yeah. All the same, you know what? Melissa had some influence on my work, even if I didn’t end up going to her lab.”
“How so?”
“I’d almost forgotten,” Jackson mused. “But actually, a conversation with Melissa led me to start working on joust. We were talking about the role of transposons in evolution, wondering whether or not there could be transposons from two completely different species; say, a fly and a human, but which would have significantly the same DNA sequence, and even a similar function. Just dreaming, really, the way you get to doing sometimes. Melissa said that it would be a really interesting project, and I guess I agreed, was intrigued, and I followed it up.”
Douglass smirked. “You must have made an impression.”
Jackson burst out laughing. “Hey man, don’t hold back. I may not have quite put the finishing touches on my thesis, but that’s only because I’ve been kind of busy with joust.”
“You don’t want to stop to write up, I get that. You’ll never find a job if you don’t get the doctorate.”
Jackson swallowed the last of his whiskey. His boss often made the same point. Yet still he couldn’t bring himself to stop the experiments and get on with writing.
Douglass leaned over with the bottle of J&B and refilled his glass. “Jackson, why not relax, make yourself at home? You’re booked first class on the Swiss Air flight, so pal, you’ve got some sixteen hours of luxury coming to you.”
Jackson sipped his whisky. He sank deep into the couch and closed his eyes. For the first time in three days, he felt safe.
The following morning a driver met him in the lobby of Interlaken’s Hotel Victoria-Jungfrau. Jackson had risen early to enjoy a sauna and then dressed in the new shirt and trousers that Marie-Carmen had picked out for him, as well as his suede jacket. He felt nervous and curiously eager to make a good impression in this second meeting with DiCanio. With PJ out of the picture, Jackson was now pretty much the world expert on the biology of jumping-genes like joust and phoenix. It was a fairly arcane area of biology. He couldn’t help but wonder why a drug company like Chaldexx would be remotely interested in their work.
The car drove through crisp, mountain air towards the lakeside headquarters of Chaldexx BioPharmaceuticals. The five-story building was starkly presented glass and smooth concrete, the water-facing side clad in pristine, blond pinewood. The main staircase was on the outside, floor-to-ceiling glass providing spectacular views of the deep blue-green Lake Brienz.
The driver stopped the car, then ran over to open Jackson’s door. He escorted Jackson to the entrance, where Jackson was met by a man in his twenties dressed in jeans and a sports jacket.
“Hi, you must be Jackson Bennett! I’m Andrew Browning. It’s really good to meet you.”
The British man shook his hand with enthusiasm.
“Melissa’s just finishing off a presentation to some guys from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.”
The young man continued energetically, leading Jackson through the marble-floored lobby, grabbing a visitor badge at the reception desk, and then on into a wide corridor.
“She asked me to get you anything you want from the staff restaurant, and then to give you the tour. She told me to be sure to tell you that she’s really sorry that she couldn’t do the tour herself, but, you know how it is.”
Jackson was acutely aware already that he had absolutely no idea how it was to be a top biotechnology executive, with a private jet at his beck and call, a crowd of highly educated young people eager to do your bidding and a diary crammed with dates with the commercial world’s most influential ‘movers and shakers’. He didn’t buy that Melissa was ‘really sorry’ at all – people in her position didn’t give ‘the tour’ to people like him. In fact, he was faintly surprised that Browning had been told to say that she was. Yet, the vigorous young British man seemed absolutely sincere.
“Melissa wants us to make you as comfortable as possible. Frankly, we were completely taken aback by the news about Pedro Juan Beltran. It’s unthinkable. Do you know if the police have any leads yet, on who killed him? Or why?”
“You knew PJ?” asked Ja
ckson.
“I met him a couple of times here over the past few months. He’d been involved in collaboration with us. Melissa goes way back with PJ’s boss. They were all hoping to get a thing going between Chaldexx and Temixco. Melissa loves Mexico; I think she misses being in Texas and being able to nip across there whenever she likes. Her mum lives in Mexico – San Miguel de Allende, you know. Retired. An artist. Got a fabulous house, by all accounts. Melissa’s seen her right since things started to take off for us here.”
Andrew continued, merrily chattering on about DiCanio and her achievements at Chaldexx. Jackson was simply flabbergasted. It wasn’t so much unusual for a highly-placed executive to inspire such apparent devotion in an underling, as unheard of. He remembered DiCanio as a somewhat attractive if awkward and rather formal woman. She hadn’t exactly exuded charm. Could it be that the trappings of power and success had changed all that? Or maybe she’d been sent on some particularly effective leadership training? He found it hard to imagine DiCanio worshipping at the feet of one of the world’s more eclectic management gurus, but you never could tell. Money and influence changed people; that much he’d seen at first hand.
But was that all? Listening to the Chaldexx man, Jackson felt a vague sense of displacement, as though a gear was being turned inside his brain. Whatever he’d expected from the meeting, it wasn’t this. He sensed he was being drawn into territory that was both foreign and entirely irresistible.
archaeologyconspiracies.com
Marie-Carmen picked up the phone and ordered a salad niçoise from room service. Waiting for the delivery, she plugged her iPod nano into the room’s stereo system, selected a playlist of tropical dance music. She smiled at the memory of Jackson trying to ingratiate himself with her by claiming to enjoy reggaeton. It was always possible that he actually did, she told herself, but that would be unusual, for a white, Anglo, North-American guy like Jackson. Much more likely that he was trying to impress her. And quite cool, if so, that he hadn’t gone for something more typically Mexican, like norteños or Luis Miguel.