Mutant

by Peter Clement

  He didn’t answer, issuing a long sigh instead. At the sound she envisioned him deflating like a stuck balloon and she knew what she’d said had hit home. Yet all at once she felt too hurt, rejected, and above all angry to care whether he realized what he’d done or not.

  “I’m a man dragging a lot of baggage,” he finally acknowledged, his voice steeped in what sounded a little too close to self-pity for her liking. “You don’t need all my crap in your life.”

  “Damn you, Richard Steele, I certainly don’t need you feelin’ sorry for yourself. You’re scared, pure and simple. There’s a cure for that these days. It’s called backbone. As to what else I do or don’t require, it’ll be me and me alone that’ll do the decidin’, one way or t’other!” She slammed the phone down.

  By Wednesday evening Racine hit pay dirt.

  “As you suspected, Dr. Sullivan, the files at Agriterre pointed to both Taiwan and Oahu,” he told her, his voice triumphant even after traveling a horizontal journey of about three thousand miles. “In 1997, Dr. François Dancereau, the CEO, planned to take advantage of a bird flu outbreak in Asia and ordered the production of an oral vaccine against the virus. Pierre Gaston, the late geneticist, obliged. A tidy profit of sixteen million francs resulted, and ultimately the first boat shipment of the altered meal corn headed across the ocean, ordered by the Taiwan branch of Biofeed International, Agriterre’s parent company. Six months later, however, Dancereau starts receiving correspondence from Biofeed executives in Taiwan saying that all the local farmers claim the feed is making the bird flu outbreak worse. Dancereau writes back, admitting it’s possible, and suggests they pawn off the unused feed as regular corn in some area of the world where there is no problem with bird flu. Within two weeks he’d resold the lot to the Biofeed office in Hawaii.”

  “Did Dancereau or anyone else ever clue in to the fact that the vaccine could be dangerous to humans? That it had a role in the Taiwanese child getting bird flu?”

  “According to their records, no one ever even considered the possibility. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that since they were just dealing with poultry, they didn’t have to be careful.”

  The arrogance took her breath away. “Who is François Dancereau, anyway? His name sounds familiar.”

  “He’s one of the virologists responsible for the AIDS-TAINTED blood scandal in our country during the mid-eighties—the kind of man you Americans call ‘a real sweetheart.’ He escaped prosecution only by informing on his colleagues. According to some internal memoranda we found, Agriterre put him in charge of its genetic engineering program precisely because they figured his willingness to cut corners would maximize profit.”

  The stark photo images of an air lock, decontamination showers, and moon suits that Steele had shown her a few days earlier flashed to mind. They remained rife with their own insinuations about what crazy manipulations someone willing to “cut corners” might be attempting closer to home. After hanging up, she shivered, once more trying to keep her imaginings in check but without much success.

  As to thoughts of Steele himself and the rift between them, they persisted tenacious as a toothache and just as intrusive on her concentration. Boy, I sure can pick them, can’t I, she lamented, furious that once more she’d let a man get hold of her peace of mind.

  By Friday, a Detective Billy Ho of the Honolulu police department had the upper echelons of Biofeed, Hawaii, diving for cover.

  “Racine’s stuff made them the official prime suspect in the Hacket murder and the attempt on you,” he told her over the phone, “so we were into their offices like a bad smell. Everybody there claims they don’t know who okayed the purchase of the mutated corn, and they sure deny they ever participated in a cover-up. But one thing we found of interest is the bill of sale for a brand-new pickup truck in October 1999. The vehicle’s serial number is the same as Hacket’s.”

  He assured her that they wouldn’t quit until they got at the truth. But it could take weeks before they finished questioning everybody and even longer to go through all the records.

  By Monday the story had made front-page news in both France and the United States.

  VACCIN GÉNÉTIQUE MORTEL screamed the Paris papers.

  LETHAL GENETIC VACCINE LINKED TO BIRD FLU announced the New York journals.

  BIOFEED: NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE? questioned the Honolulu press.

  But so far no police in either country had found a single piece of correspondence, trace of e-mail, or record of a telephone call showing a link to Agrenomics.

  “I can’t touch them,” McKnight told her, shaking his head sadly.

  Tuesday, June 20, 7:00 A.M. The Dean’s Office

  “But we’ve got to get back in there, Greg,” said Steele, gathering up his photos.

  “I don’t even want to know you’ve already been. Jesus, Richard, what you’ve done, that’s breaking and entering.”

  “Christ, for two years now you’ve been telling me to get up off my ass and become involved in life again. Hell, you’re also the one who gave me the I’m-scared-for-my-kids speech. Well, now I’m scared for all our kids.”

  “Your job’s hanging by a thread as it is, my friend, and Aimes has gone berserk with all the recent headlines. Because Dr. Sullivan here has seemingly slipped beyond his grasp by vindicating herself to the board, he more than ever wants to make an example out of someone, and for the moment, you’re still the lucky guy.”

  “Why?” interjected Sullivan. “Destroying Dr. Steele’s career isn’t going to make the vaccine story go away.” She spoke his name with a cold formality, and out of the corner of her eye saw him wince. Eat your heart out, bucko, she thought, still hurting from his rejection.

  “It’s called damage control,” said Stanton. “If Richard gets a very public shellacking for ‘unfounded speculation,’ everyone else will be very careful to limit what they say about the issue, sticking only to proven dangers, namely the vaccine in question, and won’t generalize their criticisms beyond the two specific companies involved. That way, Aimes figures, he can confine the damage to Biofeed and Agriterre, thereby protecting all his other clients from getting tarred by the same brush.”

  “Aimes told you this?” she asked.

  “Of course not. But any fool can see that’s what he’s up to.” Stanton pointed directly at Steele. “So don’t even think of going after Agrenomics without hard evidence of wrongdoing, Richard, if you have the slightest interest in getting your old job back.”

  “You don’t think these pictures I just showed you are proof that they’re doing something dangerous?” Steele challenged, leaning forward in his chair.

  Stanton gave a derisive snort. “You can’t tell for certain that there’s anything illegal going on from these snaps. How do you know they’re not just being more careful with genetic vectors than even Dr. Sullivan advocates as necessary?”

  Her eyes shot toward the heavens.

  Steele groaned.

  “Give me a friggin’ break, Greg!” she said.

  “Kathleen, you’ve got to understand something. You’re off the hook with Aimes for the moment, and your stock is back up at the university, but hey, don’t push it. You start saying things without proof again, and Aimes will be back on you with all his considerable financial clout in an instant. Make no mistake, you’re still the worst enemy of all the companies he represents, and they’ll be gunning for you.”

  She started back from him. “Does gunning include firebombs and hired thugs in black vans?”

  “What?” His face skewered into a frown, and he seemed to need a few beats to understand what she meant. “Aimes is an asshole, but you can’t seriously think he’d resort to those kinds of tactics. Why that’s precisely the kind of careless talk that’ll give him the excuse he needs to slap you with a slander charge—”

  “Speaking of careless talk, Greg,” she interrupted, “did you tell anyone about Julie Carr’s finding the vaccine after we spoke on Friday night?”

  His cheeks
flushed scarlet. “Kathleen! Of course I didn’t. How dare you even suggest that I’d be so careless with confidential material—?”

  “How dare I? I dare because I don’t like nearly being killed or having my lab burnt down.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “Can you hear yourself, Greg? All you seem concerned about, now that my name can once more bring in the endowment money it always has, is that I stay a good little girl and keep my ‘stock’ up.”

  “Dr. Sullivan! I protest . . .”

  “Don’t you get it? I couldn’t give a leprechaun’s ass about how many contributors I lure in. Finding out what the sons of bitches who are after Richard and me are up to is my priority. I don’t care who I offend in the process, whether it’s Agrenomics, Sydney Aimes, or you!”

  “But you’ve solved that mystery. Those men were trying to keep you from finding out about the vaccine. Let the police track down who’s responsible, whether they’re at Agrenomics or anywhere else.”

  She looked at him in amazement. Against the windows behind him a thick mist the color of watery milk lapped at the panes, obscuring even the nearest buildings. The sight of it made her feel slightly nauseated, reminding her of a chalky medicine her mother used to give her as a child.

  “Either you are incredibly stupid, Greg Stanton, or you must think I am,” she told him. “Is keeping me in line your latest way to make sure the biotech industry doesn’t threaten to pull any more of their funding? And in the meantime, the medical school profits from both of us.”

  Before he could reply, she got to her feet, turned on her heel, and strode out the door.

  Christ, I need a coffee, she thought, stepping off the elevator in the foyer. She reached the street and jaywalked toward an espresso outlet opposite the undergraduate building. Down at ground level the mist had thinned to a cool gray emulsion that actually felt soothing to her face. But it did little to temper her anger at Stanton for his trying to get her to back off. The nerve of the man, blatantly playing both sides of the street like that, all because a thug like Aimes can coordinate his clients into using their money as blackmail!

  She arrived at the café, ordered a coffee, and took a table where she’d see Steele when he came out. As the cream she added hit the steaming surface of her cup, raising it to the brim and sending white tendrils coiling into the dark fluid, she wondered just how much further the good dean might go to secure his precious endowments. She stirred the marbled swirl of black and brown, nudging the notion a little further. For instance, if Aimes and his clients were up to a little corporate blackmail, why wouldn’t they be willing to engage in a bit of bribery as well. Hell, maybe that’s what Stanton’s dog and pony show just now was all about. Those sons of bitches might actually have offered to increase their funding as long as he made me behave, and the good dean might have accepted.

  No, that’s nuts. Surely he wouldn’t be that sleazy, she told herself, adding a third spoonful of sugar to what had become café au lait. But still furious at him and unable to stop thinking the worst of his tactics, she wondered if his insistence about regular updates on every single detail of her work had been a way of keeping tabs on her. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered, mulling the possibility over while taking sips of the syrupy liquid. Her empty stomach seized on the hot drink with a hungry abandon, sending out growling noises so loud she feared the people at the next table would hear. Within minutes the warm buzz of caffeine and glucose began suffusing her brain, but instead of alleviating her foul mood, all that fuel kicked out a hypothesis darker than anything she’d surmised so far.

  What if he’s keeping track of my progress not just in a general way, but to stop me before I get too close to whatever I’m not supposed to find? After all, I’d just told him that I’d be testing for the vaccine vectors, and a few hours later those goons arrived. Her breathing slowed. Could he have deliberately brought the attackers down on the lab, or knowingly fed the information to whoever did? Was there an endowment so large it could have enticed him to go that far?

  Try as she might, she couldn’t totally dismiss the idea, and in the fertile ground of her uncertainty, the suspicion took hold. “We’re idiots,” she muttered, the realization creeping over her that she and Steele may have just confided their knowledge of the secret pathogen lab to the wrong man.

  Feeling increasingly rattled, she glanced at her watch. Come on, Richard, what’s taking so long? We’ve got to talk.

  And not only about what happened upstairs. Apart from a few terse exchanges of information, they hadn’t spoken together since their fight a week ago. She’d come today determined to corner him after the meeting and to clear the air, at least to the point where they could work together without it being so tense between them. If talking will do any good, she thought. He may be as smart as me intellectually, but when it comes to personal insight, he seems about as perceptive as a tree stump.

  A quarter of an hour later she finally saw Steele exit the building. “What kept you?” she asked, after running across the street to meet him.

  “He was telling me what an asshole I was.”

  “That took fifteen minutes?”

  “It was a let-me-count-the-ways kind of thing.”

  At least Stanton got that part right, she thought, and started to suggest Steele join her back at the coffee shop, when her cellular rang.

  “Kathleen!” said Steve Patton as soon as she answered. “How’d your meeting with the dean go?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “That bad? Well, this will perk you up. Drop everything you’re doing, and get over to my office.”

  “What?” She instantly felt wary. He’d been calling her practically every day, offering moral support and listening patiently while she vented her frustration about being unable to find any leads that officially implicated Agrenomics. She’d actually appreciated the shoulder to cry on, but always at the edge of her mind lurked the worry that he might take it in his head to try and get back together with her. His presumptive summons had her backstepping like a drum majorette in reverse. “Look, Steve, I appreciate the offer, but I can’t right now—”

  “I won’t tell you anything over the phone, except to say I’ve not only found a way to get you into Agrenomics, but you’ll have unfettered access to that secret lab as well. Bring Steele along if he’s still with you.” And he hung up.

  Chapter 18

  “A retired watchman working weekends at Agrenomics?” said Kathleen. “Isn’t that a little convenient, Steve?”

  “Convenient?” He gestured skyward with a sweep of his arm that would have brought the house down in Carnegie Hall. “Hell, it’s like manna from heaven. He came to us out of the blue, Kathleen, and offered his services. As long as I’ve been in this business, it never ceases to amaze me how often someone will have a crisis of conscience, step forward, and hand you what’s needed. Why, six months ago, who’d have predicted all those scientists would have come up with the worldwide vector studies from their own places of work, all in response to a suggestion you made in an article on the Internet. But they did.” As he spoke, Patton strode back and forth in front of a massive set of floor-to-ceiling windows occupying three sides of the room. It offered a panoramic view from south Manhattan of just about every important landmark in New York, starting with the Hudson River and TriBeCa in the foreground.

  Steele knew it was as prestigious an address as could be gotten in the city these days. Looking around at the tasteful interiors—mahogany paneling, plush carpets on hardwood floors, and all the magnificent antique furniture—he wondered how many trees had died to furnish the eighteenth-floor offices. He also noticed that without exception, Patton’s numerous assistants and secretaries were all female, attractive, and young. For “an over-the-hill environmentalist who never outgrew the sixties,” he’d done all right for the Blue Planet Society, as well as himself.

  Steele made yet another observation, this one not without satisfaction. It was how guarded Kathleen seemed towa
rd the man. She certainly didn’t share his flamboyant enthusiasm. “I still think it’s a little too pat,” she said. “How do we know he’s not linked up with Pizza Face or those thugs that descended on my lab?”

  “You’re absolutely right to suspect a trap, given all that’s happened. Except we checked this guy out. He got to us through his niece who does volunteer work for one of our chapters. He’s a local out of White Plains who got bored in his early retirement and took the weekend job with Agrenomics when they first opened. His niece, of course, was always onto him about the dangers of GMOs, so he started to read. All the recent headlines about the vaccine pushed him to come forward.”

  “It all could be a front,” she said. “He still could be in cahoots with those others.”

  “There was no evidence of it when our people looked into his background and questioned the man. He was quite forthright about having seen the guy with the acne scars about the place, but said he never had anything to do with him. Remember, he’s a watchman, not part of that armed guard group they’ve got out there during the nighttime. This guy wanders the halls and checks that no one left a tap running or a beaker boiling. He doesn’t even carry a gun.”

  “I still don’t like it—”

  “What’s the plan?” interrupted Steele. “And specifically, how does he intend to get me into the underground lab?”

  Patton looked over at him and stopped pacing, a slightly surprised expression on his face as if he’d forgotten Steele was in the room. The light from outside reflected off the surface of his wire-rimmed glasses, making them appear like huge round eyes. Taken with his gray curls, the environmentalist’s appearance resembled some kind of tufted owl. “You’ll go?” he said.

  Steele nodded.

  A broad smile broke out where there should have been a beak. “Why, that’s excellent, Richard.”

  Kathleen said nothing.

  “Well, ‘the plan’ is to take advantage of the upcoming Fourth of July weekend,” he began, remaining at a standstill in front of his window. “As you both know, Agrenomics, for whatever reasons, has cut back its operations. During the week, there’s only a skeleton staff at best, but because the Fourth is a Tuesday this year, and Monday is also a holiday, even those few who are there want to take advantage of the four-day weekend. So when the regular watchmen and guards said they wanted that time off, too, our man ‘volunteered’ to work extra shifts, supposedly in exchange for them giving him a break next Thanksgiving. As a result, he’s managed to make himself sole guardian of the place during the late afternoon and evening of the big day itself, July fourth.”