by Randy Dutton
“I’m leaving my office now. Be there in 30 minutes. Love you!” he said in a rush.
“I love you, too. I’ll call the doctor.”
I’ll just relax with some music while Pete drives in.
Walking to the entertainment system, she turned on a Fiddlehead Celtic CD Pete had bought her last summer. Easing herself onto the recliner sofa, Anna leaned back, closed her eyes, and with the background music, and reminisced about their honeymoon.
“Anna, I’m home!” Pete’s booming voice broke her reverie as he rushed to her side. “How’re you doing, Babe?”
Anna’s were eyes closed and her expression calm. “I’m fine, Honey. Contractions are five minutes apart. I’ve just been thinking about last summer, when it was just you and me.”
He grabbed her overnight bag. “Those were great times, weren’t they?! Except for that whole Russian thing...”
He took her hand. “Come on, Dear. Let’s get you to the hospital. I never told you, but my mom was in labor with me for only two hours. We Heywards move fast.... We should hurry.”
“Congratulations, Son!” Irma said over the phone three hours later. “Give me the details.”
“Thanks, Mom. Well, Connor looks great! Came in at eight pounds. Anna claims it wasn’t that bad..... No complications. She said her endorphins must have kicked in during labor.... I think it was her meditation.”
“I dunno. Sure it wasn’t that fighting she does? A woman who hits dummies with her legs and fists has got to have a mighty tolerable pain threshold.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“How’re her spirits?”
“She’s doing good...not depressed at all.”
“How can you tell?”
“She said she wouldn’t mind having another.”
“Some women are like that. It’s why Paula’s age is so close to yours.... You sound happy, Son.”
“Of course! I’m ecstatic! I really want a larger family.”
Chapter 85
April 3, 1800 hours
Heyward House
Pete cradled their blanketed son in his large arms. Next to him, Anna clutched her husband’s upper arm for support as they stepped into their brightly lit house. Immediately, they were greeted by country music and the aroma of pot roast. She glanced up at her grinning husband.
Their dogs sat just inside, their wagging tails sweeping wide arcs. Losing control, the dogs barked excitedly and milled around their feet.
Anna snapped her fingers and pointed. On command, the canines trotted back to their designated rug and laid down, their tails thumping the floor.
“Surprise!” cried Mac as she and Irma stepped out from the kitchen.
Anna smiled at Pete. “You do keep secrets from me!” She turned to her in-laws. “Hi, Mom...Mac. When did you arrive?”
“Coupla hours ago,” Mac said. “Thought we’d help with Connor,”
“Welcome home, Dear,” Irma said affectionately as she gave Anna a big hug. “We’re so glad you didn’t have any problems.... The next ones are easier.” Irma winked at Pete.
Anna arched her brow at Pete.
He, in turn, glanced upward feigning innocence.
Irma reached out and insisted, “May I hold my grandson?”
With the child nestled in her arms she mused, “Son, he looks just like you as a baby.” Irma went into cooing mode.
Mac swept in and gave Anna a big hug. “Congratulations, Anna! He looks magnificent. You made it seem so easy. Kinda makes me want to move up my wedding date from November.”
“Delivery wasn’t too bad...and it was short!” Anna said. “Pregnancy, as a whole, has its perks when you have a supportive husband who pampers you and cooks anything you ask.” She batted her eyes at Pete.
“Yes, I’ve learned to cook French cuisine.” Pete pointed to the long shelf of cookbooks. He walked over and kissed Anna’s cheek. “Oh, but she’s so worth it.”
Mac outstretched her arms to Irma. “My turn!”
“I’m really glad you came! It’s a treat having family around,” Anna said.
The small group settled around the dining table. Anna picked up her wine glass and sipped the apple cider, mostly savoring the small talk about babies and early years of child rearing.
After a while, Mac switched topics. “Pete, what does the university have you doing now?”
“Like so many other institutions, we’re studying the Scourge.”
“Is that what they’re calling it now?” Mac’s brow furrowed. “Sounds ominous.”
Irma frowned. “Lord, have mercy. I’ve never known this moss could take over so completely. It’s bad in Dallas...gets into everything. But it’s a real mess out here. Must be difficult keeping it out of the house.” She started passing plates of food.
“Scourge isn’t its official designation, but a minority of us do think it’s ominous. The government hasn’t yet made that determination. They keep trying to put a good spin on it.”
“We might as well call them the Snath Snafi,” Anna said in a subdued voice. “And yes, the fibers float in the air and settle on everything.”
“Snafi?” Mac asked.
Anna smiled. “Sorry, private joke. It’s snafu made plural.”
Mac’s eyes furrowed. “Snafu?”
Pete chimed in, “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.”
Irma gave a disapproving look.
“Come on, Mom, it’s the clean version of an old Army phrase.”
“Hope you don’t go teaching my grandson any of those colorful military expressions!”
Mac grinned at Pete being reprimanded. “Have you discovered anything?”
“Actually, yes. We found the phytoplankton can’t tolerate fresh water for long.”
“Well that’s promising...isn’t it?” Irma asked.
“Yes, Mom.” Pete laughed. “It’s a good thing. We’re doing genetic testing using Long Fragment Read – LFR – Technology and found an interesting commonality.”
Mac’s brow lifted. “What’s that?”
“The genetic code of the Scourge found in the wild all have about the same telomere length, adjusted for environmental conditions.”
“What’s a telomere?” Mac prompted.
Pete explained. “It’s a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome that protects the end from deteriorating, or from fusing to a neighboring chromosome—”
Anna cleared her throat.
Pete realized his sister and mother were staring. “Okay,” he restarted. “Think of it as an aglet, a shoe lace tip. It protects the lace from unraveling.”
His mother nodded.
With a smile, he continued. “Every time the cell divides, it loses a piece of the end. It’s not actually copied by the DNA, but rather added by an enzyme called”—he looked at his mom and hesitated—“telomerase reverse transcriptase.”
Irma shrugged.
Pete added, “It’s the telomerase that is supposed to rebuild the length of the...shoelace tip.”
“So how does that help?” Mac asked.
“Well, there’s a difference between what we expect in the wild and our initial samples, which are much longer.”
Irma leaned forward. “What’s the implication, Son?”
“There’s a possibility the telomerase protein has a deficiency that inhibits the rebuilding of the full telomere length. Some studies have shown that shortened telomeres cause a species to be more susceptible to illness or environmental stress. Once the telomeres are gone, the DNA unravels and starts losing the coding that gives it super power. Then the epidemic ends.”
“That’s great!” Anna’s eyes widened with hope.
“Maybe.... If the cells don’t go immortal on us.”
“Immortal?” Irma asked.
“Cells replicate without limitation, like cancer cells...when the cells find a way around the programmed self-destruction,” he explained.
“If these critters don’t go...immor
tal...how long until they die out?” Irma asked.
“Well that depends on several factors – temperature, macronutrient availability, CO2 levels, and the presence of nitrogen, iron, and phosphorus. In the cold Antarctic water, phytoplankton reproduces once every two days. In warm waters along the US East Coast, they replicate four times faster, so every 12 hours. Where there’s no sunlight or nutrients, it may not propagate at all, but stay latent.”
“So there’s hope?”
“Yes, Mom. We’re also hoping there’s a suicide gene built into the DNA.”
“A what?” Irma’s face scrunched.
“Genetic coding causing the cell to self-destruct under some conditions, either environmental or longevity.”
“Have you found anything that eats the phytoplankton or the Fuzz?” Mac asked.
“We’re still looking, but we haven’t had much success. Typically, zooplankton eats phytoplankton, but it’s not happening much yet.”
“What happens when phytoplankton die?”
“Usually bacteria consume the remains and return CO2 to the air. That isn’t happening either, because the phytoplankton seems to have been engineered to decompose near the surface and release the nutrients that would have made them food for others. And those nutrients feed the proliferation of more phytoplankton. In other words, the dead ones are just hollow carbon shells by the time they might be seen as food. The carbon drops to the ocean bottom and is ignored.”
His eyes shifted to Anna as he said, “He was a genius, I’ll give him that.”
“Who?” Irma asked.
He looked at his mother. “Dr. Sven Johansson. The Snath Genetics president who led the design team.”
“Do they know for sure it came from Snath?” Mac asked.
“Yes. The DNA of the phytoplankton remnants in the delivery containers scattered across the globe matches the DNA now found in the wild.”
“Didn’t he hire companies to sterilize the containers?” Anna asked.
“Yes. They did a good job inside the cylinders, but neglected the control valves and the framing underneath where the water was released.”
“Where’s the scoundrel?” Irma growled.
“Sven disappeared, right after the releasing these species into the wild. He also took or destroyed everything relating to the project.”
“Anyone know where he went?” Mac asked. “I, uh, saw your office map.”
“No one can find him. His project manager and wife disappeared as well,” Anna said.
“Where does someone like that come from?” Irma asked with disgust. She noticed Pete’s eyebrow flicker at Anna. “Anna dear, did you know this Johansson fella?”
Anna looked down, and nodded sheepishly. “Yes, Irma, I knew him...quite well, in fact.”
Pete leaned forward, eager for snippets of information she hadn’t yet revealed to him.
“You were Snath’s executive recruiter, weren’t you?” Irma leaned forward.
“Uh huh,” Anna responded hesitantly. She wasn’t sure how much Irma had figured out about her over the previous months.
“Did you hire the man?”
Anna nodded. Her lips were pursed as she prepared alternative stories for whatever came next.
“It’s all right, Dear. Men are enigmas.”
Anna held her amusement. “Well you’re right about that...Mom. Sven was a genius, with a penchant for exploring new concepts, cutting corners, and getting results. I’ve no doubt he could have gotten a Nobel if he had had ethics.” She looked into Pete’s narrowed eyes and smiled. “He also was pompous, flippant, spoiled, and a womanizer. And he wasn’t my type.”
Pete leaned back and grinned.
Irma brow knitted upon realizing a sensitive topic had just been broached.
“You hired him?” Mac was more excited now as a few family secrets were slipping out.
Anna sipped her cider, then elaborated. “For about a year, I researched him before I made the offer. For several days I even worked as a temp in a company where he was employed...before he was fired.” Her smile became more cunning. “I looked like a dowdy secretary, with stained, buck teeth; coarse, dull, black hair in a bun; thick, black rimmed glasses; shapeless, rather ugly outfits; and a couple moles on my face. Oh, and I augmented my body shape to a size 12.”
Pete grimaced.
Her smile widened as she elaborated. “I never got a second look from any of the men, and the women just wrinkled their noses.”
Irma brow furrowed. “Dear, that seems a bit much to recruit someone.”
“Well, when you’re homely, you don’t draw attention and you get much more access. Everyone assumes you live for work because you can’t possibly have a social life. I was a great secretary, so they kept asking for me to come back and fill in at various positions – personnel, research, finance, and administration.”
“What name did you use?” Mac asked, loving that her sister-in-law lived the life of a spy.
She grinned. “Cornelia McToosh—”
“Ouch!” Pete blurted out. “So when were the moles removed?”
A dinner roll struck him as a reward.
“Any idea what he’s doing now?” Mac asked, chuckling at the image of food bouncing off her older brother’s forehead, especially in front of their mother.
To the bemusement of everyone but Irma, Talos immediately trotted over and snatched the errant roll.
“No. I’m sure he knew he had crossed the line even before he released the phytoplankton,” Anna continued. “Swanson told him not to continue with it.”
“Why?” Mac asked.
“He worried the phytoplankton would proliferate beyond control. But, then, even Swanson didn’t realize it could go this far. He just feared losing money and power.”
“And Sven?”
“Sven really did fear CO2 would wreak the climate, and he believed, like many others, that mankind was a virus on the Earth. I’ve no doubt he thought he was saving the Earth from humanity.”
“Is he hiding, or might something else have happened?” Mac asked.
Anna shrugged. “I truly don’t know. Every lead’s been a dead end.”
Pete’s eyes drifted to the ceiling and his fingers started tapping the table.
“What is it, Honey?” Anna asked.
Pete refocused on his wife, and leaned forward. “You know, as smart as you say this guy was, I was just thinking of something called the thrifty telomere hypothesis. It’s pretty theoretical.”
“What’s that?” She leaned in.
“It says long telomeres increase energy expenditure. Therefore, when the environment requires energy economy, shorter telomeres would be an energy conservation mechanism. This might be a long shot, but what happens if the phytoplankton’s suddenly exposed to limited CO2?”
“As when the phytoplankton consumes most of the dissolved CO2?”
“Exactly. Did he design the phytoplankton to shed telomeres to be more efficient in low CO2 levels, so they will die off quicker as we hit some threshold? That might be something to test.”
Anna clasped her fingers and leaned toward him. “Sven always needed to be in control. I’ve got to think he designed in something that would control his own creations. We’ll just have to find out what it is.”
He leaned in closer “And how do we do that?”
“I need to continue my search for him,” Anna said thoughtfully.
“Or find his research notes.... He had to put them somewhere.”
“They’d be with him.... That creates another worry.” Anna’s brow furrowed. “If he’s built in a failsafe, what would prevent him from unleashing the same plague a second time?”
“Nothing, if he has the original phytoplankton in cold storage. It could be unleashed over and over.”
“So he would need a secure facility...probably near the ocean.... I’ve been looking at this wrong,” she said. “He’s not hiding...he’s probably working.”
With a stern voice, Irma cut in. “Excuse
me, Pete...Anna. What are you two conspiring?!”
Pete leaned back. “Mom, we’re just speculating how to solve a mystery.”
“That’s not what it sounds like to me.” Her tone was agitated. “You sound like that detective couple in Hart to Hart. Out solving crimes, always getting into trouble. Risking their lives. I seem to recall something about keeping a low profile! Or am I the only one here not going senile?”
Anna happily interjected, “Self-made millionaire husband, his journalist wife, and a trusty sidekick. Always happy, great fashions. Ran five seasons ages ago.... Oh I loved that show, Irma!”
“I’ll bet you did, Dear.” Irma groaned with exasperation.
MacKenzie’s eyes lit up. “Can I be the trusty sidekick?!”
Chapter 86
April 4, 1800 hours
Ocean Shores
Duke popped open another Budweiser. With some effort, he sat in the dining area of the one bedroom beach rental. “Come here, Kyler!” His partner dashed up and jumped onto his own chair.
Duke lifted his hand to the dog. “Give me five!”
The dog tapped his hand with a paw.
“You’re the dog!”
The dog cocked his head.
“That woman you sniffed on the beach? You tried telling me that you recognized the scent from the farmhouse, but I didn’t get it. She may be the one!”
Duke gulped half the beer and put down the can.
“Remember, Mary? That nice nurse I brought home one night last November? Well, she remembered our fugitive’s face on the poster I had on the wall. Get this...our alleged target just delivered a baby three days ago! And Mary saw her face.”
He lifted the can and took another gulp.
“I just returned from Mary’s house and showed her several more photos. She swears it’s the same woman. And...we’ve got a n-a-m-e!”
He turned on his computer. “Let’s see what happens when we do a background on Anna Catherine Heyward.”
Half an hour later, Duke had two pages of notes but wasn’t nearly as ebullient. “I’d swear the woman didn’t exist before last year. I can’t find a single reference showing a maiden name. Is she in witness protection? That could explain the bounty.”