Halfway down page five. That’s too much to be coincidental. So the string of A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s in between the START and STOP sequences must contain some kind of coded message!
Excited, she went back to the flash-drive file.
How to decode the message?
She looked at the coded file again. This key must make the binary code compatible with the genetic code—some kind of conversion factor. Her eyes bored into the screen, focusing on the binary digits:
0000-AA-0001-CA-0010-GA-1000-AG
1111-AT 0011-CC 0110-TT 0100-AC
0111-CG 1010-CT 0101-GC 1001-TG
1110-GT 1011-TC 0010-GA 1100-GG
The dashes seemed to be relating the four-digit binary strings with the two-digit nucleic acid strings. Kristen knew that binary code could somehow represent the entire alphanumeric system, but she couldn’t remember exactly how. She considered waking her snoring brother, but decided instead to look it up on her own.
She went to Internet search engine Google and typed in “binary code alphabet.” Clicking on the first result she saw yielded:
A 01000001
B 01000010
C 01000011
D 01000100
E 01000101
F 01000110
G 01000111
H 01001000
I 01001001
J 01001010
K 01001011
...
The code continued through the letter Z, and also included numbers. She straightened up in her chair, awakened by a realization:
Eight digits! It takes eight binary digits to equal one alphabet letter. But the key code only uses four binary digits at a time.
She looked once again at the first line of the encryption key:
0000-AA 0100-AC 0010-GA 1101-TA 1000-AG
Then she took a notebook and pencil from her backpack. On the laptop she positioned the windows so that she could see the bacteria’s sequenced DNA and the flash-drive’s encryption key at the same time. She scribbled the first two letters (nucleic acids) of the sequenced DNA found within the START and STOP strings in her pad:
AC
Then she found that two-letter pair, AC, in the key file. She wrote down the binary digits it was paired with:
0100
She repeated the process for the next two letters in the sequenced DNA: AG. In the encryption code, AG was paired with... she squinted as she searched for the digits on the screen...1000. Kristen wrote this binary string down next to the previous one, to get an eight digit string:
01001000
Then she went back to the binary code from the Internet. The eight digit binary string “01001000” corresponds to the letter...
H
Encouraged, Kristen repeated the process for the next several characters. She worked rapidly, scanning the codes and quickly writing down the corresponding letter before moving on to the next two base pairs. After over an hour of decoding, Kristen realized that she was starting to repeat the same sequences over and over again.
She wrote the deciphered characters, including the binary code for the space character, together on one line. She wrote very quickly, jotting the characters down without considering their meaning until she had finished. When at last she actually read the results of her laborious translation, she screamed out loud.
“Oh God, no!”
…CGGA23TTTG...
6:57 P.M.
“Everything okay?”
The unexpected voice at the door made Kristen jump. She looked up from the laptop to see Tara Shores standing in the doorway, eyes scanning the inside of the house.
“I—I don't know,” Kristen stammered, turning back to the laptop. Tara walked over to the table, noticing Lance passed out on the couch on her way across the room.
“Where's Dave?” she asked. She was dealing with three people, so she would keep track of all three of their whereabouts. This kind of situational awareness was second nature to Tara.
“In his room, sleeping.” Tara did not want to offend Kristen by checking the room. She would need her confidence to learn more, and what's more, she could hear snoring emanate from the other side of the bedroom door.
“Okay. What's the problem?”
Kristen indicated her screen and looked down in horror at the message she had translated from within the genes of the marine bacteria she’d collected:
HELP ME W Archer 0601 Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601 Wailua R KIDNAPPED...
Her father’s name, William Archer, encoded in the DNA of an entire bacterial population. She couldn’t believe it. But there it was. She explained to Tara how she'd decoded the message using the decryption key found on the flash drive.
Tara stared at the crowded array of characters displayed on the screen. She knew that for the time being, she had no choice but to take Kristen's word as to their meaning. A primal sense of, not quite fear, but awareness, mindfulness, washed through Tara's nervous system. For her, the symbols on the screen represented only one thing. This was a crime somehow involving science.
It was a situation she'd encountered before, and had barely lived to tell about it. Tara herself, although a highly trained and specialized observer, was not a scientist. She would have to rely on what Kristen explained to her until it could be verified by FBI scientific consultants. And that made her uneasy, for it represented a certain lack of control over the case.
“And so,” Kristen was saying as Tara snapped back to the present, “someone—probably my father—devised a method that essentially turns the DNA of living cells into a data storage medium. And a secure one, at that,” she added, nodding toward the code on the screen she'd just had to crack.
“Amazing, that someone thought to arrange the genetic letters in that way,” Tara said.
Kristen nodded. “And not just thought of it,” she said, “but actually did it. They inserted the message into a population of live organisms, making it a part of them. When they reproduce, they are copying the message, replicating it. Information storage is, after all, the natural function of DNA. They just altered what information is stored.”
Tara considered this for a moment, then said, “Who would know how to do something like that?”
Kristen answered without hesitation. “My father. It had to be him.”
Tara regarded her coolly. She knew that Kristen wanted to believe more than anything that her father might still be alive. But was grief clouding her judgment?
“Okay, but think for a second about who else—besides your father—might be able to work with this kind of biotechnology. Can you give me a ballpark estimate of how many labs around the world are capable of performing this kind of work?”
Kristen remained silent as she considered this. After several seconds she shrugged. “Probably a couple dozen labs around the world could do it, were they so inclined, but only my Dad would do it.”
“Why do you say that?” Tara discreetly thumbed her digital voice recorder in her pants pocket. A habit, when faced with conversations on complex topics. She might need to have someone else verify facts. But she believed Kristen was telling the truth.
“The technology inherently lends itself to commercial applications. In fact, my father told me several years ago he was working on a new biotechnology called 'molecular watermarking'. Have you heard of this?”
Tara shook her head. As if.
“In theory, a corporation that invents a designer organism could protect its patent over that organism by encoding their copyright information as a message right into the organism's junk DNA. So say they invented a bug that rapidly digested oil that could be used in cleaning up oil spills—they insert their company name and patent office number right into the bug's genes, and then they have a surefire way of identifying their product, should someone attempt to use it without permission.”
Tara raised an eyebrow. “Has that actually been done before?”
“Not to my knowledge, with the watermark thing, no. But an American team as far bac
k as 2002 was successful in encoding the lyrics to “It's a Small World” into a culture of bacterial cells, just to prove the technological concept. And I know my father was interested in the message coding technology, and everyone knows that he's been working with gene sequencing and genetically modified organisms.”
Tara moved on, saying, “If your father wanted to leave some kind of message for someone to find, why did he put the weight in the box so it would sink to the bottom of the ocean? If he could throw it overboard, wouldn’t he want it to float so that someone might find it?”
“I have no idea. But somehow the guy who hired Dave—and whoever killed him—knew it was there. I can say that the potential applications of the technology make it extremely lucrative.”
When Tara said nothing further, Kristen turned back to her laptop and considered the rest of the message, pondering its meaning with Tara. They weren’t sure what “Wailua R” meant. A Hawaiian word, maybe a town. But, 0601.
“Not sure what the numbers mean,” Kristen admitted. “Organic chemistry notation, maybe? Carbon chain positioning on a lattice structure?”
Tara frowned. “I think it's a date. June 1.”
They both stared at the screen. 0601.
Tara confirmed the date on her watch. If the numbers did, in fact, represent a date, then only two weeks ago Kristen's father had issued a desperate plea for help. But why so cryptically? Was that the only way? There were only a handful of people on the planet capable of not only deciphering the message, but of even being able to realize that a message was there, Tara knew.
But Kristen's Dad knew his daughter would come looking for him.
Kristen's eyes brightened as she reflected on the numbers in a new light. “Good thinking!”
Tara sighed. “Try not to act so surprised.” The general public saw FBI agents as the brighter members of law enforcement, Tara was aware, but to PhD level scientists and other high echelon professionals, she was still just a dumb cop who carried a gun to protect the tax-paying public from dangerous thugs.
“No, I didn't mean to insinuate—” Kristen began, but Tara waved her off. “It's okay, I'm just kidding. Forget it.” It amazed her how scientists were so brilliant, albeit in such a narrow, highly focused area of expertise. Kristen had understood there was a coded message in the DNA of a bacterial cell, but she didn't recognize a simple date format when she saw it, because she was locked in to a kind of tunnel vision.
If the numbers really did represent a date, Tara reminded herself. It was just a guess. She decided to move on.
“So that's the entire message?” Tara asked.
Kristen nodded. Then she eyed the DNA sequence again, now being able to recognize the string of letters as the message she had decoded. “Well, that's the content, but in actuality the message repeats that same thing over and over.”
She had written down only one line of it, because it was obvious that it repeated hundreds of times. The impact of what the entire message was, were it to be fully transcribed and written out, hit them hard as they mentally pictured the results:
HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED HELP ME W Archer 0601Wailua R KIDNAPPED
It would run for several pages. He’d just copied the same strand over and over and inserted it into the genome, Kristen realized. It gave her the chills.
Help me, help me, help me...being churned out by a population of living organisms as if they were factory workers producing goods on an assembly line.
An entire population with a message.
Her father’s single-celled couriers.
It occurred to Kristen that one hundred—possibly even one thousand—years from now, the population of bacteria in the waters of Oahu would likely still carry this message.
Tara huddled closer to the computer screen. She wondered what she was getting into as she looked down again at the message’s opening: HELP ME!
Part III: Sequence of clues
…TTCC24TTTC...
7:44 P.M.
Lance and Dave, up from their naps, joined Tara and Kristen at Dave’s kitchen table where they pored over a map of the Hawaiian Islands. Kristen had filled them in on the coded message. Now they considered the meaning of “Wailua R.”
“I don’t think there’s anything called that on Oahu,” Dave said, squinting at the map. He said he thought it might be on the island of Kauai.
They all looked at Oahu’s neighbor island on the map.
“Yep, here it is,” Kristen said, pointing to a dot on that isle’s east shore.
“Not just a town,” Lance said, tilting his head to take in the map with his one functioning eye. The other one was still swollen shut.
“Yeah, it’s a beach, a bay, a valley...” Dave said.
“And a river!” Kristen finished triumphantly.
“Wailua R,” Dave said, grasping her meaning.
“Looks like a pretty big river,” Lance said. He traced the blue line on the map as it wound its way through the contour lines. “Goes way up into the mountains, looks like,” he said.
“Through the rain forest,” Dave said.
“The Wailua River wasn’t part of the Tropic Sequence’s scheduled itinerary,” Kristen said, navigating to a web page on her laptop. “Let’s take a look.”
She brought up a satellite image of the Wailua River mouth. It depicted a great plume of brown water being ejected into the ocean. A pier ran out from a beach adjacent to the river’s opening, and several boats could be seen on Wailua Bay. Other images showed the lengthy river snaking its way into rugged, jungle-covered mountains.
“So why do you think your Dad wanted somebody to know about the Wailua River?” Tara asked.
Lance shrugged, saying nothing.
“I don’t know,” Kristen said, pulling up the Hawaiian Airlines web site, “but I think a little river boat trip might help to answer that question.”
Lance chewed his thumbnail while he watched his sister start to book airline tickets.
“Hey wait a minute,” he said, tapping Kristen on the shoulder.
“What is it?” she said while continuing to type.
“I just realized that I won't be able to fly.”
Kristen froze for a second, hand poised over the keyboard, before turning around in her chair to face Lance.
“Why not?”
“My wallet was stolen, remember? I've got no ID. Can't fly without ID.”
Silence ensued as the four of them digested this. Tara considered requesting FBI air support, but decided against it. Her case was not yet strong enough to warrant such a requisition. They'd tell her to fly commercial. But it was Kristen who had the solution.
“Then we'll go by private air charter,” she said, getting back to her laptop. “At least we'll get there faster.”
“That's awful pricey, isn't it?” Lance said. “I won’t be able to pay that.”
“I'm not expecting you to pay, Lance. I've paid for this entire trip so far, remember? I'll pay for this, too.”
Lance turned red, furious at his sister's mentioning their finances in front of others. He got up and went to the living room couch and laid down.
“What are you doing?” Kristen asked.
“Going back to sleep. Just tell me where to go when the time comes. That's what you like doing anyway, isn't it?”
Dave and Tara exchanged glances that expressed how awkward it was to be caught in the middle of the siblings' clash.
“Have it your way
, Lance. I hate to burst your bubble, but I didn't bring you here to drink all night and lay around all day.” She dialed her cell-phone.
Tara, wanting to diffuse the tension, told Kristen “I'll pay you for my share of the charter, a quarter of the total cost.”
“My tax money at work,” Kristen said before introducing herself on the phone to the air charter company.
…ACAA25CGGA...
Wailua River, Kauai
9:02 A.M., Tuesday June 16
The water transitioned from blue to brown as their Avon inflatable boat crossed into the plume of effluent discharged from the river. Dave was at the wheel in front of the boat’s low-profile console, happy to continue his employment streak with Kristen as a local water guide. Kristen and Lance sat on the craft’s pontoons, facing each other while Tara occupied the front-facing seat forward of the console. They’d caught the first flight of the morning from Honolulu International to Kauai’s much smaller Lihue Airport. There they rented a car and drove it to the town of Wailua where they rented the boat. Kristen watched as the verdant landscape rushing past them gave way to a broad inlet.
The mouth of the Wailua.
Dave eased back on the throttle as he banked the Avon toward the river. A gaggle of small craft, including a large group of touring kayakers, were littered about the entrance to Hawaii’s only navigable inland waterway. Two old metal bridges spanned the river mouth, each bearing one lane of traffic in opposite directions. The Avon bucked choppy swells as it approached the river mouth.
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