Genesis Code

by Jamie Metzl

  Maurice’s argument makes sense; it’s his technique that concerns me. I’m not sure what they teach at the police academy, but there’s got to be something more sophisticated than this.

  “Seven a.m., Clyde Manor, apartment 802. You’ll get your people there?”

  “I will,” I say softly, not sure how I’ll get everyone together with all of my fears of compromised vehicles and devices.

  As I begin to get out of his car, Maurice reaches over and pulls me back. “One more thing,” he says with a mischievous half grin I’ve seen once before, “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He reaches inside the left pocket of his blazer and peels off a four-inch piece of masking tape. Specs of dust are affixed to the sticky side.

  “What’s that?”

  He points to an almost imperceptible golden line across the tape as he speaks. “A strand of Cobalt Becker’s hair.”

  I want to hug Maurice Henderson. Instead, I look him in the eye and smile. “You’re a good man, Maurice,” I say. “How long will it take?”

  “I can know by tomorrow morning if it’s a genetic match. I’ll see you then.”

  I drive over to pick up Toni from the back entrance of the hospital.

  “You look awful,” she says, getting into the car. “What’s going on?”

  I ask her about her day and am somehow surprised it was uneventful. Then I tell her about mine. With each word, I feel I’m simultaneously drawing her in and casting her overboard. I wish I had a better plan, but I explain the rough outline of the one we have.

  We drive to her friend’s house and pick up her mother’s car.

  Driving back to Toni’s place, I feel sullen. I’ve been in constant motion since the day MaryLee Stock died, but now that I pause for a moment all of my doubts seem to catch up with me. Have I gone too far with Toni, exposed her to harm, risked too much?

  “I’ll see you in the morning, baby,” I say, walking over to my car.

  “Come in?” she says.

  I pull her to me, a different embrace than early this morning, and hope it doesn’t betray my existential exhaustion and growing unease. Right now I need to be in my own home, sleep in my own bed, refuel my private tank. I feel guilty. “Clyde Manor, room 802. Seven o’clock?”

  “Aye aye, sir,” she says, trying to lighten the mood.

  I smile.

  I instruct my Haier kitchenette from my u.D to toast a sesame bagel and cook a veggie burger as I drive home. It’s hot and ready when I take it from the cooker, but the freezerator screen senses I’m approaching and flashes the words in bold it wants to shout at me but can’t since I’ve disabled its voice. “Hey, moron,” it probably wants to say, “your milk is now fifteen days past expiration and you’re going to be praying to the porcelain god if you even think about eating these salmonella-ridden eggs.” Instead, the words flash in bold across the screen. ALERT: MILK FIFTEEN DAYS PAST EXPIRY. EGGS FORTY-ONE DAYS PAST EXPIRY. DO NOT CONSUME.

  ”Xie xie,” I say, carrying my veggie burger up the steps. I devour it in six bites then collapse into bed without washing up. The thought that strangers have been wandering through my house only vaguely registers. The place seems no more messy than it already was.

  My u.D alarm vibrates me awake from a fitful sleep at six fifteen. Waking in my own bed, I feel, for a moment, safe. Then the illusion fades.

  The others are there when I arrive at Clyde Manor. The apartment belongs to Maurice’s neighbor, a temporarily unoccupied rental unit. Maurice is already going through the paces.

  Toni looks at me, shakes her head slightly from side to side, then winks.

  Maurice turns his head my way and nods slightly. I can’t say I’m surprised, but my heart skips a beat nonetheless when he takes me aside to give me the news from the genetic test of Becker’s hair.

  Joseph focuses in rapt attention.

  “The first element of surveillance is to know whom you are following,” Maurice says without an ounce if irony. “The second key principle is, don’t get caught. Don’t be obvious, don’t make jarring moves. Third, coordinate. A one-man surveillance is far less likely to succeed than one with two or three people. Fourth, never take your eyes off the target. Fifth, if the target sees you three times, you are burnt, out of it.”

  Maurice traces different techniques on sheets of white paper he’s taped to the wall.

  “Can’t we just put a GPS tracker on the guy’s car?” Jerry asks.

  “Anyone sophisticated would do a scan,” Maurice responds.

  “Gillespie has met Rich and me, and he probably knows who you are,” Toni says.

  “Yes,” Maurice responds.

  “So that leaves Jerry and Joseph.”

  “That’s our team,” Maurice says. “The rest of us are support.”

  I look around the room. The plan makes me uneasy.

  After forty-five minutes of training, I take out my phone and call the number on Gillespie’s card. He answers after two rings.

  “Mr. Gillespie, this is Rich Azadian. We need to talk.”

  “Where?”

  “Why don’t you come back to my place?”

  Toni makes a face at me. You really can’t help yourself, can you?

  I raise my eyebrows and smile.

  Forty-five minutes later, the familiar black GMC pulls in front of my house.

  “Welcome back,” I say, inviting him and his colleague in the door.

  Gillespie’s dead eyes don’t respond to the attempted humor. He gruffly introduces his colleague, Marshal Collins. Short and wiry, with close-cropped hair, Collins’s forehead juts over a face that looks more like an eagle’s beak. His hawkish eyes dart around the room as if hunting for prey.

  “What do you want to say?” Gillespie pushes his words at me.

  “I’ve been thinking about our meeting yesterday,” I say with a false innocence.

  “Thinking?” Gillespie repeats suspiciously.

  “Thinking. Not looking into the story, of course.”

  He glares at me as I continue.

  “But I received a very strange message on my u.D from an unknown address and I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Let me see it,” Gillespie says.

  “I need to ask you something first.”

  “What?” Gillespie fumes.

  “I feel like I’m in a strange position. I wrote the initial story and, I admit, kept going when I shouldn’t have. Now that the NPA letter has been delivered to the Star, I’ve been suspended and stopped investigating.”

  Gillespie glares at me. Collins paces menacingly around the room, suspiciously eying every corner of it.

  “But now,” I continue, “I’ve received this anonymous text and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to pass it to anyone or create the impression I’m investigating and put my colleagues at risk. But I know you’re looking into this, and I also don’t want to interfere with your work. So what’s the right thing to do?”

  “Show me,” Gillespie orders.

  I lift my wrist to show him the text on my u.D.

  He pulls it hostilely off my arm.

  “The part about the extra chromosome really struck me. I know it’s none of my business, but do you think that could be true?” I ask, pretending sheepishness.

  Collins strides over and stands behind Gillespie, reading the text. The negative energy running through both of them could power the house for months.

  “Let me put it to you this way,” Gillespie hisses, looking straight through me. “You just stay away from all of this. Do you hear me?” His last sentence is pure threat.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stares at me for a few seconds more than feels comfortable, hands me my u.D without breaking his stare, then walks out the door.

  Collins scans the room one last time before glaring at me with a crooked, pitying half smile. “We’re so sorry to bother you, Mr. Azadian.” His voice is higher pitched than I’d imagined, his accent betraying a hint of country. But his
hawkish eyes are flinty and unflinching. “Have a nice day.” The menacingly polite words seem the closing lines of Gillespie’s threat. They send a chill down my spine.

  Collins holds his intense glare for what feels like an uncomfortable eternity but must only be a few moments, smiles coldly, then turns and strides out the door.

  46

  “Target turning left on Southwest Trafficway, over,” I hear Joseph say.

  “I have visual,” Jerry responds. “Taking lead. Drop back, over.”

  Listening to the chatter on the radios Maurice has provided, my mind wanders into the surreal labyrinth of overlapping codes surrounding me.

  Borges writes of humanity searching endlessly for a lost catalogue of catalogues that will provide a map of all knowledge that we, the imperfect librarians, are destined to never find. If the human genome is the library of Babel, I wonder if we’ll ever be able to understand the catalogue well enough to reorder our nucleotides with even the slightest level of responsibility.

  The second code is almost as central to our lives. For some, the history of FORTRAN, Basic, Java, HTML, and Netsperanto has become a modern creation myth, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, like Moses coming down from Sinai. Most everything in our lives has a computer chip embedded somewhere in it, regulated by an endless number of computer programs. If a person had to count the number of lines of computer code that in some way touch him or her on a daily basis, how high would that number be? Trillions?

  With all of these lines of code around us, it’s incredible we can even define what we mean by a virus, that we have so much faith in the orderly running of things that something violating that structure can earn itself a special name. Can anything rationally be called a weed in such a vast and diversified forest? We live in a world defined by uniformity but still identify ourselves by our mutations.

  “Entering 435 East. Backing off, over.” The stakeout chatter continues on the base station.

  “Got him. Tracking target, over.”

  I drive to Broadway Café and put two quarters in the pay phone.

  “Martina Hernandez’s office,” Justina Morris says after two rings.

  I freeze.

  “Miss Hernandez, please,” I say in a ridiculous low voice. I was never meant for this kind of subterfuge.

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Tell her it’s Mr. Borges.”

  “Hold the line a moment.”

  “What the fuck, Azadian?” I hear a moment later. “Why are you calling me?”

  “We need to talk. I need you to meet me at the Penn Valley Park Indian statue at noon.”

  “Listen, Az—”

  “I need you to trust me. Meet me.” I hang up.

  A few minutes before noon, buzzed from my triple espresso, I’m back looking at the Indian statue and waiting for Martina. This poor soul, naked but for his loin cloth in the autumn chill. Astride his horse, his hand shields his eyes from the sun as he surveys the crumbling bridges and rotting houses in the valley below. Stuck forever imagining what it would be like to move forward but never quite getting there, surveilling the evidence of his own failure, he feels depressingly familiar.

  At twelve fifteen Martina screeches to a halt beside me. Annoyance defines her face. She rolls down her passenger window reluctantly as I approach.

  “Get in,” she orders. “Do you know how much you are putting at risk by calling me, by asking me to come here?”

  “I do.”

  “So what the fuck?”

  “There’s a lot happening. Big things.”

  “Listen to me Azadian. I know that for whatever fucked up reason you don’t want to drop this. But there’s a lot more than you at risk here. I’m not going fight this battle and lose the war.”

  “This battle is a war, Martina,” I say.

  “Maybe for you it is, but what do you think it means that the Kansas City Star exists? It’s not just that all the people who work there get dental. It’s that we’re the only ones around with the resources to hold people accountable for their actions. Who else is keeping the City Council, the mayor honest? Every government in the world, every company, is paying a small army of people to blog and tweet and cloud about how great they are. Every citizen feels empowered, and because everyone has a voice no one does. This town would be a hell of a lot worse if it weren’t for what we do.”

  “And if you have to throw a dead woman, maybe two, maybe more overboard to keep it that way, then that’s a price you’ve got to pay?” I spit out.

  “Goddam right it is. What would you rather have us do, the opposite?”

  “Accountability?”

  “Is an aggregate fucking term,” Martina fires back.

  “I can take this story somewhere else, you know.”

  Marina pulls her head back. “And get them shut down, too? You know what the fucking law says, and until you got the story nailed down, air tight, any news organization would be insane to publish it, suicidal. The story would be dead in minutes. They’d be shut down and you’d be in jail.”

  “I can get there, Martina.”

  “Are you there now?” she says fiercely.

  “No,” I say softly, “I’m not.”

  I can see Martina preparing to charge in for the kill. Then she stops herself. Her lips purse. “Tell me what you mean,” she says, after a pause, “but then don’t call me, don’t call the Star, don’t represent to the rest of the world that you’re connected to us in any way.”

  I collect my thoughts.

  “Talk,” she orders.

  “MaryLee Stock was murdered by a fatal dose of potassium cyanide. She was pregnant when she died. The police know that but didn’t release the information. Cobalt Becker was the genetic father.”

  “Stop there. Can you prove it?”

  I can almost see the political calculations in her head as she processes what this could mean to Senator King’s campaign.

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “She’d been impregnated through an IVFGS clinic in KC owned by the US Department of National Competitiveness.”

  Martina’s eyes widen. “How concrete is all of this?” she says quietly, her manner changed completely.

  “Most of it,” I say. “Some of the evidence is circumstantial, and I don’t have the whole story nailed down.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Trying to confirm.”

  She taps her right fist with her left open palm for about fifteen seconds. She fixes her sharp eyes on me. “I’m not going to bring anyone else in on this until you tell me that you’ve got all of this 100 percent. They’d kill it, kill you, kill the Star.”

  I nod.

  “Even then,” she continues, “they may kill it just the same, but at least we’ll be able to have the debate. Right now we wouldn’t get that far.”

  “We need to find a way to communicate.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I think they’re tracking me. I called you from a pay phone. There’s one at the Lukoil station at Fourteenth and Main. I can call you there every day at three o’clock.”

  She tilts her head slightly to the right and shakes it slowly from side to side as if to say she can’t believe she’s letting herself be drawn into this. “I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks, Martina,” I say to try to seal the deal before she changes her mind.

  “Ahora vea por esos hijos de puta!”

  My Spanish is not great, but I know enough to understand. Now let’s get those bastards.

  47

  “I do,” I respond to Maurice as the image flashes across the wall screen, “that’s Jessica Crandell.”

  The room goes silent.

  The combined photos that Jerry and Joseph have taken over the course of the day hadn’t, until this moment, told much of a story. Gillespie stopping for coffee, Gillespie driving to the downtown federal building and staying put most of the day, Collins leaving at four. Then this photo of Gillespie with Jessica
Crandell.

  “So if the US government owns Bright Horizons, then what?” Maurice asks.

  “Someone knows a lot more than they are telling us. The chances of this being somehow connected to the murder become pretty overwhelming,” I say.

  “And now that we have more information, it’s time to go on the offensive.”

  Maurice outlines his plan. I can’t say I’m convinced. He says it beats sitting around, that we need to catch him off guard and push our momentum. We map out our plan of attack before we head out of Clyde Manor one at a time.

  I pause a moment beside her car in the parking lot before scribbling a note I leave under her windshield wiper. Come over?

  I race home, not entirely certain what she’ll do. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and spray the place with Lysol just in case.

  “It smells like the hospital in here,” she announces, pushing through the door. My face and teeth are clean, the house does not smell as bad as it did a few minutes ago. Looks are another matter.

  “And you did all this for me?”

  My house has more of an accumulated feel. Shelves that once must have held art objects and perfectly organized decorative tomes under the old occupants now strain under the weight of disheveled old books, pots where a few plants once lived, unused cookware, garbage sculptures, and out-of-date electrical equipment. The Scooba 8600 home bot I purchased two years ago had promised to hover around my house cleaning the floors with the dedication of a sorcerer’s apprentice. Trapped between a chair and an empty flowerpot four months ago and unable to make it back to the charging station, the dusty hubcap has become just another part of the problem it was initially recruited to fix.

  “I’ve been a little preoccupied,” I say sheepishly.

  “That’s for sure,” she says, moving into the kitchen. The freezerator must sense its opportunity for some TLC. It flashes its milk and eggs warning.

  Toni shakes her head as she empties the milk carton in the sink, then tosses it and the offending eggs into the garbage bin.

  Really, Rich? she says with her eyes as she starts to transfer dishes from the sink to the dishwasher.

  I try to stop myself from feeling alarmed at her kind gestures.