“What, you think he was murdered?” he asked.
De Vaca did not reply.
“How far from Mount Dragon was the Hummer?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because I saw Nye return with his horse after the dust storm. He’d probably been out searching for Teece.” He told her the story of what he’d seen in the stables two evenings before.
De Vaca listened intently. “You think he’d be out searching in a dust storm? Returning from burying the body, more likely. He and that asshole, Mike Marr.”
Carson scoffed. “That’s ludicrous. Nye may be a son of a bitch, but he’s not a murderer.”
“Marr is a murderer.”
“Marr? He’s as dumb as a lump of busted sod. He doesn’t have the brains to commit murder.”
“Yeah? Mike Marr was an intelligence officer in Vietnam. A tunnel rat. He worked in the Iron Triangle, probing all those hundreds of miles of secret tunnels, looking for Viet-cong and their weapons caches and frying anybody they found down there. That’s where he got his limp. He was down a hole, following a sniper. He triggered a booby trap and the tunnel collapsed on his legs.”
“How do you know this?”
“He told me.”
Carson laughed. “So you’re friends, are you? Was this before or after he planted the butt of his shotgun in your gut?”
De Vaca frowned. “I told you, the scumbag tried to pick me up when I first got here. He cornered me in the gym and told me his life story, trying to impress me with what a bad dude he was. When that didn’t work, he grabbed my ass. He thought I was just some kind of easy Hispana whore.”
“He did? What happened?”
“I told him he was asking for a swift kick in the huevos.”
Carson laughed again. “Guess it took that slap at the picnic to cool his ardor. Anyway, why would he or anybody else want to murder an OSHA inspector? That’s insane. Mount Dragon would be shut down in an instant.”
“Not if it looked like an accident,” De Vaca returned. “The storm provided a perfect opportunity. Why did Nye take a horse out into the storm, anyway? And why haven’t we been told about Teece’s disappearance? Maybe Teece found out something that he wasn’t supposed to know.”
“Like what? For all we know, you could have misinterpreted what you heard. After all—”
“—I heard it, all right. Were you born yesterday, cabrón? There are billions at stake here. You think this is about saving lives, but it isn’t. It’s about money. And if that money is jeopardized ...” She looked at him, eyes blazing.
“But why kill Teece? We had a terrible accident on Level-5, but the virus didn’t escape. Only one person died. There’s been no cover-up. Just the opposite.”
“ ‘Only one person died,’ ” de Vaca echoed. “You ought to hear yourself. Look, something else is going on around here. I don’t know what it is, but people are acting strange. Haven’t you noticed? I think the pressure is driving people over the edge. If Scopes is so interested in saving lives, why this impossible timetable? We’re working with the most dangerous virus ever created. One misstep, and adiós muchachos. Already, people’s lives have been ruined by this project. Burt, Vanderwagon, Fillson the zookeeper, Czerny the guard. Not to mention Brandon-Smith. How many more lives?”
“Susana, you obviously don’t belong in this industry,” Carson replied wearily. “All great advances in human progress have been accompanied by pain and suffering. We’re going to save millions of lives, remember?” Even as he spoke the words, they sounded hollow and clichéd in his ears.
“Oh, it all sounds noble enough. But is this really an advance? What gives us the right to alter the human genome? The longer I’m here, the more I see of what goes on, the more I believe what we’re doing is fundamentally wrong. Nobody has the right to remake the human race.”
“You’re not talking like a scientist. We’re not remaking the human race, we’re curing people of the flu.”
De Vaca was digging a trench in the cinders with short, angry movements of her heel. “We’re altering human germ cells. We’ve crossed the line.”
“We’re getting rid of one small defect in our genetic code.”
“Defect. What the hell is a defect exactly, Carson? Is having the gene for male pattern baldness a defect? Is being short a defect? Being the wrong skin color? Having kinky hair? What about being a little too shy? After we eradicate the flu, what comes next? Do you really think science is going to refrain from making people smarter, longer-lived, taller, handsomer, nicer? Particularly when there’s billions of dollars to be made?”
“Obviously, it would be a highly regulated situation,” Carson said.
“Regulation! And who is going to decide what’s better? You? Me? The government? Brent Scopes? No big deal, let’s just get rid of the unattractive genes, the ones nobody wants. Genes for fatness and ugliness and obnoxiousness. Genes that code for unpleasant personality traits. Take off your blinders for a moment, and tell me what this means for the integrity of the human race.”
“We’re a long way from being able to do all that,” Carson muttered.
“Bullshit. We’re doing it right now, with X-FLU. The mapping of the human genome is almost complete. The changes may start small, but they’ll grow. The difference in DNA between humans and chimps is less than two percent, and look at the vast difference. It won’t take big changes in the genome to remake the human race into something that we’d never even recognize.”
Carson was silent. It was the same argument he had heard countless times before. Only now—despite his best efforts to resist—it was starting to make sense. Perhaps he was just tired, and didn’t have the energy to spar with de Vaca. Or perhaps it was the look on Teece’s face when he’d said, What I’ve got to do can’t wait.
They sat silently in the shadow of the volcanic rock, looking down toward the beautiful cluster of white buildings that were Mount Dragon, trembling and insubstantial in the rising heat. Even as he fought against it, Carson could feel something crumbling inside him. It was the same feeling he’d had when, as a teenager, he had watched from a flatbed truck while the ranch was being auctioned off piece by piece. He had always believed, more firmly than he believed anything else, that the best hopes for mankind’s future lay in science. And now, for whatever reason, that belief was threatening to dissolve in the heat waves rising from the desert floor.
He cleared his throat and shook his head, as if to dislodge the train of thought. “If your mind is made up, what do you plan to do about it?”
“Get the hell out of here and let people know what’s going on.”
Carson shook his head. “What’s going on is one-hundred-percent legal, FDA-regulated genetic research. You can’t stop it.”
“I can if somebody was murdered. Something’s not right here. Teece found out what it was.”
Carson looked at her as she sat with her back against the rock, her arms wrapped around her knees, the wind whipping her raven hair away from her forehead. Fuck it, he thought. Here goes.
“I’m not sure what Teece knew,” he said slowly. “But I know what he was looking for.”
De Vaca’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Teece thinks Franklin Burt was keeping a private notebook. That’s what he told me the night he left. He also said that Vanderwagon and Burt had elevated levels of dopamine and serotonin in their bloodstreams. So did Brandon-Smith, to a lesser extent.”
De Vaca was silent.
“He thought that this journal of Hurt’s could shed light on whatever might be causing these symptoms,” Carson added. “Teece was going to look for it when he got back.”
De Vaca stood up. “So. Are you going to help me?”
“Help you what?”
“Find Burt’s notebook. Learn the secret of Mount Dragon.”
Charles Levine had taken to arriving at Greenough Hall very early, locking his office door, and leaving instructions for Ray that he was taking no c
alls and seeing no visitors. He had temporarily passed on his course load to two junior instructors, and he’d canceled his planned lecture schedule for the coming months. Those had been the last pieces of advice from Toni Wheeler before she resigned as the foundation’s public-relations adviser. For once, Levine had decided to follow her suggestions. The internal pressure from the college trustees was growing, and the telephone messages left for him by the dean of faculty were becoming increasingly strident. Levine sensed danger, and—against his nature—had decided to lay low for a while.
So he was surprised to find a man waiting patiently in front of his locked office door at seven o’clock in the morning. Instinctively, Levine held out his hand, but the man only looked back at him.
“What can I do for you?” Levine said, unlocking the door and showing him in. The man sat down stiffly, gripping his briefcase across his lap. He had bushy gray hair and high cheekbones, and looked about seventy.
“My name is Jacob Perlstein,” he said. “I am a historian with the Holocaust Research Foundation in Washington.”
“Ah, yes. I know your work well. Your reputation is without peer.” Perlstein was known around the world for the unflagging zeal with which he brought to light old records from Nazi death camps and the Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe. Levine settled into his chair, puzzled by the man’s hostile air.
“I will come to the point,” the man said, his black eyes peering at Levine through contracted eyebrows.
Levine nodded.
“You have claimed that your Jewish father saved Jewish lives in Poland. He was caught by the Nazis and murdered by Mengele at Auschwitz.”
Levine did not like the wording of the question, but he said nothing.
“Murdered through medical experimentation. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” said Levine.
“And how do you know this?” the man asked.
“Excuse me, Mr. Perlstein, but I’m not sure I appreciate the tone of your questions.”
Perlstein continued to stare at him. “The question is simple enough. I would like you to tell me how you know this.”
Levine strove to conceal his irritation. He had told this story in countless interviews and at innumerable fund-raisers. Surely Perlstein had heard it before. “Because I did the research myself. I knew my father had died at Auschwitz, but that was all. My mother died when I was very young. I had to know what happened to him. So I spent almost four months in East Germany and Poland, combing Nazi files. It was a dangerous time, and I was doing dangerous work. When I found out—well, you can imagine how I felt. It changed my view of science, of medicine. It gave me deeply ambivalent feelings about genetic engineering, which in turn—”
“The files on your father,” the man interrupted brusquely. “Where did you find them?”
“In Leipzig, where all such files are kept. Surely you already know this.”
“And your mother, pregnant, escaped, and brought you to America. You took her name, Levine, rather than your father’s name, Berg.”
“That’s correct.”
“A touching story,” said Perlstein. “Odd that Berg is not a commonly Jewish name.”
Levine sat up. “I don’t like the tone of your voice, Mr. Perlstein. I must ask you to say whatever it is you’ve come to say, and leave.”
The man opened his briefcase and took out a folder, which he laid distastefully on the edge of Levine’s desk. “Please examine these documents.” He pushed the folder toward Levine with the edge of his fingers.
Opening the folder, Levine found a thin sheaf of photocopied documents. He recognized them immediately: the faded gothic typeface, the stamped swastikas, brought back memories of those horrible weeks behind the Iron Curtain, sifting through boxes of paper in damp archives, when only an overwhelming desire to know the truth had kept him going.
The first document was a color reproduction of a Nazi ID. card, identifying one Heinrich Berg as an Obersturmführer in the Schutzstaffel—the German SS—stationed at the concentration camp of Ravensbrueck. The photograph still appeared to be in excellent shape, the family resemblance extraordinary.
He pawed through the rest of the papers quickly, in growing disbelief. There were camp documents, prison rosters, a report from the army company that liberated Ravensbrueck, a letter from a survivor bearing an Israeli postmark, and a sworn affidavit. The documents showed that a young woman from Poland named Miyrna Levine had been sent to Ravensbrueck for “processing.” While there, she had come into contact with Berg, become his mistress, and later been transferred to Auschwitz. There she had survived the war by informing on resistance movements within the camp.
Levine looked at Perlstein. The man was staring back, the eyes dry and accusatory.
“How dare you peddle these lies,” Levine hissed when he had at last found his voice.
Perlstein’s breath rasped inward. “So, you continue to deny. I expected as much. How dare you peddle your lies! Your father was an SS officer and your mother a traitor who sent hundreds to their deaths. You are not personally guilty of your parents’ sins. But the lie you are living compounds their evil, and makes a mockery of the work you do. You claim to be searching for truth for everyone else, yet the truth doesn’t apply to you. You—who allowed your father’s name to be carved among the righteous at Yad Vashem: Heinrich Berg, an SS officer! It is an insult to the true martyrs. And this insult shall be made known.” The man’s hands trembled as they clutched the leather case.
Levine struggled to remain calm. “These documents are forgeries, and you are a fool to believe them. The East German communists were famous for faking—”
“Since this was brought to my attention several days ago, the originals have been examined by three independent experts in Nazi documents. They are absolutely genuine. There can be no mistake.”
Suddenly, Levine was on his feet. “Get out!” he screamed. “You’re just a tool for the revisionists. Get out, and take this filth with you!” He stepped forward, raising one arm threateningly above his head.
The elderly man tried to snatch the folder, ducking in alarm, and the contents spilled onto the floor. Ignoring them, he retreated to the outer office, then out into the corridor beyond. Levine slammed his office door and leaned against it, the pulse hammering in his head. It was an outrageous, vicious lie, and he would clear it up quickly ... he had certified copies of the real documents, thank God ... he would simply hire an expert to debunk the forgeries. The slander against his murdered father was like a stab through the heart, but this was not the first time he had been foully attacked and it would not be the last—
His eye fell on the folder, its documents and their filthy lies lying scattered across the floor, and a sudden, terrible thought struck him.
He rushed to a locked filing cabinet, jammed in a key, and reached for a folder marked, simply, “Berg.”
The folder was empty.
“Scopes,” he whispered.
The next day, with a tone of infinite regret, the Boston Globe carried the story on the front page of its second section.
Muriel Page, a volunteer for the Salvation Army store on Pearl Street, watched the young man with the slept-on hair pawing through a rack of sport coats. It was the second time he had come in that week, and Muriel couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He didn’t look like a self-medicator—he was clean and alert—no doubt just a young man down on his luck. He had a boyish, slightly awkward face that reminded her of her own grown son, married now and living in California. Except this young man was so thin. He certainly wasn’t eating right.
The young man flipped through the rack at high speed, glancing at the jackets as they went by.
He stopped suddenly and pulled one out, sliding it on over his black T-shirt as he walked toward a nearby mirror. Muriel, watching out of the corner of her eye, had to admire the man’s taste. It was a very nice jacket, with narrow lapels and little overlapping triangles and squares in red and yellow floating on a field of black. Proba
bly dated from the early fifties. Very stylish, but not something—she thought a little mournfully— that most young men today would like. Clothes had been so much classier when she was a young lady.
The young man turned around, examined himself from various angles, and grinned. He came walking toward the counter, and Muriel knew she had a sale.
She removed the tag. “Five dollars,” she said with a cheerful smile.
The young man’s face fell behind the black glasses. “Oh,” he said. “I was hoping ...”
Muriel hesitated for just an instant. The five dollars probably represented several meals to him, and he looked hungry. She leaned forward and spoke conspiratorially. “I’ll let you have it for three, if you won’t tell anyone.” She fingered the sleeve. “That’s real wool, too.”
The man brightened, smoothing his unruly cowlick with a self-conscious hand. “Very kind of you,” he said, fishing in his pocket and removing three crumpled bills.
“It’s a lovely jacket,” Muriel said. “When I was a young lady, a man wearing a jacket like that... well!” She winked. The young man stared back at her, and instantly she felt silly. Briskly, she wrote out a receipt and handed it to him. “I hope you enjoy it,” she said.
“I will.”
She leaned forward again. “You know, just across the street we have a very nice place where you can get a bite of hot food. It’s free and there are no strings attached.”
The man looked suspicious. “No religious harangues?”
“None at all. We don’t believe in forcing religion on people. Just a hot, nourishing meal. All we require is that you be sober and drug-free.”
“Really?” he asked. “I thought the Salvation Army was a religious group of some kind.”
“We are. But a hungry person isn’t likely to be thinking about spiritual salvation, just his next meal. Feed the body and you free the soul.”
The man thanked her and exited. Taking a covert peek out the window, she was gratified to see him head directly for the soup kitchen, take a tray at the door, and get in line, striking up a conversation with the man in front of him.
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