kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller)

by Chesler, Rick

  “It's not the fall that kills you,” a rookie agent had joked in response to Tara’s recounting of the event, “it's the whole hitting the ground part.”

  “Shut your mouth, Chavez, or I'll assign you to the city cleanup crew and you can personally scrub the blood off the street.” I'd like to see him joke about it after he let the guy drop. More death. Follows me everywhere.

  Tara had lost both of her parents to a car accident as a young girl. Their car had plunged into a Florida canal one evening during heavy rains. Her father had been able to push Tara to safety, but could not free himself and Tara’s mother in time. The accident had also given Tara a severe case of hydrophobia. She had finally managed to control her fear of water sufficiently to be an effective agent in and around the ocean, but the move to the islands had brought some of her old fears to the surface.

  It also didn’t help that Tara found it a bit lonely in Hawaii—not overwhelmingly so, but she had discovered living so far from the mainland on a small, oceanic island where she had no acquaintances outside of work to be isolating. She had been seeing an FBI diver back home, as she thought of L.A., but it wasn’t a serious enough relationship to survive the long distance her transfer demanded. She maintained contact with her friends on the mainland via the Internet, but it was not the same. How lucky she was to live in Hawaii, they exclaimed, but she found it difficult to convey that it was much different than being here on vacation. Then there was the local culture, a hodgepodge of Asian and Pacific island countries where no single race constituted a majority. Almost like living in a foreign land, Tara thought.

  With a sigh, Tara averted her glance from the calendar, whose pages had patiently ticked off another year off her life, to the stack of case files on her desk. She picked up a folder festooned with Post-it notes, the most prominent of which read: “6/16 PENDING.”

  Frowning, Tara uncapped a marker and drew a line through PENDING. She picked up a rubber stamp which would print the word INDETERMINATE, but paused, holding the stamp over the folder.

  In FBI speak, “indeterminate” was the designation for cases that were unsolved. This case was the most interesting Tara had come across since relocating to the islands, and yet it was set to go officially unsolved in two more days. As ice-cold as the case had become, she was not expecting any breakthroughs.

  Tara flipped open the case folder even though she knew there was nothing in it she had not already seen. She was glad to have something to take her mind off the Asian man. A missing person case where the individual was both wealthy and well known, if not exactly famous. Furthermore, the missing subject was to be declared legally dead in two more days, official cause of death: “Unknown, presumed lost at sea.” She and a small platoon of agents under her command had been working on this case over the past three months, yet nothing had come of it. Tara spread the contents of the folder over her desk, reflecting on the case. Three months earlier, Dr. William Archer, a highly successful biotechnology researcher and businessman, had gone missing aboard his mega-yacht. More specifically, Tara noted with distaste, the entire yacht and crew had simply vanished as if it had been plucked from the ocean by an invisible hand. Perhaps it had sunk, but the weather and sea conditions were calm around the time of the disappearance, so why not a single radio call, emergency beacon or some kind of S.O.S.? Coast Guard searches had turned up nothing. Harbor master alerts had been issued in case the yacht should turn up with a new name and paint job in a marina somewhere, but these too had produced nothing.

  The case had landed in FBI jurisdiction because Dr. Archer’s business partners had suspected a kidnapping, and because Archer was an international businessman with technology that posed potential security risks to the United States, including weaponization of microbes, though that was not known to be the main focus of his work.

  Operating under heightened security, with industrial espionage always a concern, Archer had purportedly engineered an aerial microbe—a microscopic organism that lives in the atmosphere, drifting with the freezing winds miles above the ground—that traps greenhouse gases through metabolic processes. This designer organism was being heralded by many in the environmental science community as “the global warming bug,” because it could potentially reverse the build-up of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere; the answer to global warming. It also went by a more media friendly product name of GREENBACK, an acronym for Global warming Reversal by Environmental ENgineering of Bacteria for Atmospheric Carbon reuptaKe. The marketing slogan ran, “Bring the green back with GREENBACK!”

  Business sources had reported that Archer’s company, Alacra, was ready to file for patent on the CO2-absorbing cells. While the potential dollar amount of Archer’s pending intellectual property was a matter of cocktail party discussion in biotechnology circles, it was rumored that he’d been offered a billion dollars for the rights to the technology by an international biotechnology consortium, a proposition which Archer had steadfastly refused. GREENBACK, the billion-dollar bug—if it even existed—would remain Archer’s crown jewel.

  Special Agent Shores had personally conducted interviews of the subject’s family, friends, and many of his colleagues. Depending on whom one talked to, Dr. William Archer was either a hard-working genomics profiteer—skillfully and legally running a company of talented bioinformatics and legal experts to successfully navigate the United States patent system—or a power-hungry bio-pirate, ruthlessly exploiting international natural resources for immense personal gain.

  Yet no evidence had been uncovered to support foul play. Investigations had shown that there had been no unusual activity on his personal financial accounts. It aroused Tara’s interest, however, that Dr. Archer had not been unaware of potential danger to himself.

  In the weeks prior to going public with its GREENBACK technology, Archer’s corporate team had quietly contracted an elite private security outfit to provide what was known as “kidnap and ransom” training. Intended to provide high net worth, “risk-prone” clients with the knowledge and tools needed to protect themselves from potential abduction threats, the training not only included weapons and hand-to-hand combat instruction from ex-SEALs, Rangers and other celebrated forces, but also covered psychological tactics to survive such an ordeal. Finally, it formulated strategies for ransom payment—how or if a transfer of funds would take place, who was to be notified, and other contingencies.

  Yet a ransom demand had never come.

  Meanwhile, Tara thought as the phone on her desk rang yet again, there were other cases to attend to. While she spoke to a field agent about a wanted illegal drug manufacturer, Tara set down the stamp without having used it. She gathered the papers on the missing yacht and put them back into the folder, the word “indeterminate” grating on her mind like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  … CGAC6TTTG...

  Off Waikiki

  June 14, 2011, 10:08 A.M.

  Dave ripped his mask off and gasped for breath as his head broke the surface. He had pulled two full breaths from the emergency gas canister. That was all. The first had allowed him to escape the boots, while the second let him make the vertical swim. Barely.

  Now a new panic gripped him.

  Johnson had not died by accident. Dave treaded water in circles, looking for his support boat. He squinted in the tropical sunlight, blinding after an hour walking the ocean floor.

  He was about a mile offshore, and it occurred to him that whoever had dispatched his boss probably hadn’t counted on him surfacing alive. Were they to see him now, he would be at their mercy.

  Or perhaps they hadn’t known there was a diver down at all, Dave hoped. There had been no dive flag as was customary to mark a diver’s position to boat traffic. Johnson had said flags were only for scuba divers, that they weren’t necessary when using commercial dive gear.

  The closest vessel to him was a sailboat heading in the opposite direction, about two hundred yards away and growing smaller, toward the rougher waters surrounding the famous Di
amond Head inactive volcano. Its sails bulged with the steady trade winds. A smattering of powerboats could be seen in the distance, all of them closer to shore than he was, and all of them larger than his departed support boat, the Honu.

  Dave wasn’t worried about swimming to shore if no boat picked him up. He knew he could do that. He just hoped no one would try to deliberately run him down.

  Fixing his eye on the distant blotch of pink that was the century-old Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Dave began a slow but confident crawl stroke toward the island.

  … TTAT7TTGT …

  “Mai tai, please,” Lance requested of a passing flight attendant.

  “One minute, sir,” the harried woman responded. It was Lance’s third such request since they’d taken off an hour and a half ago for the five-and-a-half hour flight to Honolulu.

  The attendant handed Lance and his sister each a piece of paper, explaining that it was the airline’s “Halfway Contest,” in which the passenger who correctly guesses the exact time that the plane is geographically half way to Honolulu wins a prize. The captain’s voice came over the intercom, giving them the information needed to calculate the answer, including air speed and headwind velocity. Lance scribbled a random guesstimate on his form and put it down. Around them, a few passengers could be heard contemplating the solution and asking each other for calculators and pencils.

  “Hey, can I use your laptop to play solitaire?” Lance asked his sister. Kristen gave him an irritated glance before writing something on her form and handing it to the flight attendant who had arrived back with Lance’s drink.

  “Okay, I want to read the magazine article again. But don’t use all the batteries, I might need it.”

  She removed her laptop from her backpack and relinquished the computer to her brother. Then she took out the current issue of a well-known national news magazine, switched on the light over her seat, and settled back to read.

  The title of the cover story was “What Happened to the Gene Hunter?”

  The cover pulled at Kristen’s heartstrings. It was a composite of her father in several of his most recognizable likenesses—Dr. William Archer wearing a white lab coat, clear safety glasses perched atop his bald dome while he peered into a microscope…a much younger Professor Archer standing at a podium directing a laser pointer onto a densely covered chalkboard depicting biochemical reactions…and—the most recent shot, representing his current life phase—the wealthy scientific entrepreneur at the helm of his sailing yacht-cum-floating research laboratory, the R/V Tropic Sequence.

  Much of the article was devoted to the life accomplishments of the renowned scientist. Archer’s PhD was in genetics, from Stanford, where he met his wife who tragically died of cancer shortly after the birth of their two children. Following her demise he threw himself into his work. His early efforts had concentrated on decoding the genome of several bacterial species, which involved identifying all of the genes that comprise a bacterial cell’s genetic makeup, and creating a so-called ‘map’ of them.

  His first profitable venture, while still in his late twenties, had involved the splicing of genes responsible for big cat coat patterns into the genome of the common housecat in such a way that they would be expressed as intended. The results were normal housecats that looked superficially like tigers, leopards or lions. A big cat specialist would note that the bone structures were different from those of true big cats, that it was only the appearance of the fur that was shared—they were not true dwarf or pygmy big cats, but just housecats that looked like miniature tigers. But the gimmick was wildly successful on the pet trade, and as the owner of the patent, Dr. William Archer had made his first million.

  He decided, however, that working with mammals was not the direction in which he should continue. Not only because of the animal rights groups that plagued his actions, but mostly because it took too long to see the results of his gene manipulation. Sometimes it took years (making it all the more impressive he’d been able to accomplish what he had at such a young age)—due to the long inter-generational period for mammals.

  With microbes, he could see several generations multiply over the course of just a few hours. It was like a photographer waiting a few days to get his film back versus the advent of digitally shooting pictures and reviewing them instantly. If something didn’t come out right, he could re-take the picture and see it again right away. View results, refine, repeat… Also, the applications of genetically modified microbes tended to be more useful to society than producing trendy, designer animals for the upscale pet market.

  There had been some grumbling by Dr. Archer’s university about ownership of rights to any patents developed while in the school’s employ. Ultimately, however, Archer had been able to convince a judge, through expensive legal representation costing nearly as much as the technology itself, that his moonlighting venture into feline genetics was sufficiently removed from the theoretical gene sequencing research he did for the university to qualify him as sole owner. The experience had so soured him on academic life, however, that Archer had quit his university post soon thereafter in order to pursue private enterprise full-time.

  The result was Alacra Genomics, so named for a play on the word alacrity, meaning with speed or readiness. Dr. Archer had wanted to proceed with sequencing genes as quickly as possible, employing the use of Cray supercomputers and streamlined operations in order to sequence many organisms faster than governments could. Archer quickly attracted well-heeled investors with his ability to distill knowledge of microbial genetics into practical scientific and industrial applications. He set to work elucidating the functions of the myriad genes he had sequenced earlier, selling the knowledge to pharmaceuticals and biotech companies who all but threw money at Archer’s gene maps. Alacra applied for and received scores of lucrative patents—some ethically questionable—along the way.

  But it was Archer’s most recent work on the GREENBACK designer organism which showed the most promise, the article pointed out.

  Archer recognized that there were many potential buyers for his microbial application, some of which might be willing to pay to keep the bugs out of the atmosphere, such as the fledgling “sustainable energy” industry, for whom the threat of global warming was a boon for business.

  In order to control work done with genes, Archer reasoned, it made sense to discover the most genes possible. The more genes one can isolate and identify, the more raw material one would have to work with. It was a “sequence first and ask questions later” approach, Archer had once said at an Alacra press conference.

  For it was true that no one—not even Archer—had a clue as to the functions of all these thousands of genes being sequenced. But whatever they were, Archer owned them, so if they turned out to do something important, well then he would essentially own that important thing, whatever it was. So even though millions of genes may turn out to be mere “junk” sequences—stretches of DNA that coded for nothing useful—it was the one-in-a-million gene that did code for some useful function that made Archer rich. A numbers game, a sort of biotechnology mega-lottery—the more genes he collected, the better his chances that some of them would someday turn out to be worth something.

  This line of reasoning had led Dr. Archer to his most ambitious scientific undertaking, the voyage of the R/V Tropic Sequence. The fact that seawater held millions of bacterial cells per liter had not escaped Archer, and he wanted to know what was in those genes—what was the average genetic diversity—the number of different genes—in different parts of the ocean?

  Kristen Archer frowned as she looked at the pull-out color map with the R/V Tropic Sequence’s completed itinerary represented as a solid red line, and its intended path as a dotted red line. Her father’s boat had set out from Los Angeles three months ago with a crew of six, including Dr. Archer himself. It was a skeletal crew for a ninety foot yacht on such a long voyage, but the vessel had “automatic everything,” as Archer put it, and his crew were highly skilled and experienced s
ailors as well as world-class scientists.

  The solid line ran from L.A. straight down to Tahiti. From there it meandered around the French Polynesian islands until it made its way west to the Cook Islands, where there was weeks’ worth of further wandering, and then over to Tonga and Fiji where they stayed for several more weeks. Then the ship had continued north to the Solomon group and the Marshalls. From there it had found its way east to the Line Islands, including a stay on legendary Palymra Atoll, and then to waters surrounding Johnston Atoll, before coming in to port at Honolulu, Hawaii.

  There on the island of O’ahu, it was well-documented that Archer had resupplied and made minor repairs before continuing his journey four days later. His intentions were to work his way up the archipelago to the waters of lush Kauai, then to the ‘Forbidden Isle’ of privately owned Ni’ihau, and from there to follow along the atolls, shoals and seamounts that made up the pristine, uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the farthest of which—Kure Atoll—was 1,100 miles from the urban center of Honolulu. After that he was to have headed across the Pacific again to Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia before eventually ending up in Sydney, Australia for another major re-supply stop.

  Kristen traced her unpainted, unmanicured fingernail along the dotted line as it snaked its way through the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. She watched as it passed over the island of Midway, where the famous World War II battle was fought. If the Tropic Sequence had still been on course, that was where it should be right now, Kristen thought.

  The trouble was that it wasn’t. The Coast Guard attention had so far revealed only the magnificent desolation of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands—a rugged seascape of barely submerged undersea mountains and gorgeous tropical lagoons, entirely uninhabited by humans except for a small government research station on Midway Island which had reported nothing out of the ordinary.