The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  THE METHUSELAH GENE

  by Jonathan Lowe

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 Jonathan Lowe

  Copy-edited by Erin Bailey – Cover Design by David Dodd

  Background image courtesy of: http://a-rien.deviantart.com/

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  1

  I felt my stomach growl. The early June sun hadn’t visibly appeared, but was already spreading orange marmalade and butter onto the crusty horizon. Then, three miles from downtown Alexandria, in the middle of a field where a dairy farm had once been, the Tactar Pharmaceuticals plant suddenly loomed above the hill beyond the city. The three story glass and steel structure appeared dark, except for a few lights on the second floor. Its silhouette was haloed by a streak of distant clouds that caught the doomed colors of morning.

  I parked in my usual spot, and surveyed the other cars already there. Half a dozen in the half light, not counting two plant security vehicles. Ominously, there were three police cruisers, flashers off since this was a private lot off a private road. Getting out, I looked up to tally the office lights in the administration section of the building . . .

  My own office, Jeffers’ office, and two others. So Winsdon had not been summoned—yet. Jeffers was keeping this low key, whatever it was.

  I took the elevator, utilizing my security badge. After emitting a ping, the elevator’s stainless steel doors whispered open on the second floor. Treading along the hallway like a burglar might, I felt my heartbeat quicken in my temples. Then, with unusual trepidation, I approached the open door of my own office, and stuck my head inside to see Jeffers waiting for me just outside the entrance to the lab. The V.P. wore a blue pullover sports shirt, and sneakers, as though late for an early round of golf at his country club. Two uniformed officers stood at the shattered window behind him, where a plainclothes detective took a fingerprint sample.

  “Sir?” I said.

  Jeffers whirled. Staring directly at me, as if at a recalcitrant son returning to the scene of some embarrassing indiscretion, he addressed the officers behind him. “He’s here,” was all Jeffers said.

  This time it was clearly different. The conference table had a towel laid across part of its mahogany surface, on top of which had been placed a tray of Danish pastries, a couple basic Krispy Kremes, and a coffee urn. It was 7:45 a.m. now, and other employees had already begun shuffling past the slightly open door on the way to their own offices. Only I, Jeffers, a detective named Schimmer, and a sullen Kevin Connolly remained in the room. We served ourselves with the aid of paper napkins. Were we waiting for Winsdon? I dreaded asking, and so remained silent until Jeffers answered my question by shutting the door on the hallway.

  We all sat. Jeffers took Winsdon’s usual seat at the head of the table. Schimmer took out his note pad, and clicked his pen to the ready. Connolly cocked his head as though detecting the high pitched sound of a dog whistle. Then Jeffers frowned and looked at me steadily, a peculiar light in his eyes. “Who knew about this on the outside, Alan?”

  I found that a perplexed agitation had gripped me. I glanced from side to side, then down at my Danish in disbelief. I picked it up, wondering whether to eat it or throw it at some hidden target. “Well . . . no one, sir,” I muttered. “I did write an article, as you know, but it was short on specifics, and only hinted at what we might be doing. In the future, I mean.” I took an experimental bite of the roll, then followed it with a sip of strong, acidic coffee.

  I met Jeffers’ frozen gaze, and Schimmer’s. The detective’s pen hovered over his pad. Glances were exchanged between Connolly and Schimmer. Finally Jeffers lifted and then lowered his own cup. “Industrial espionage from a spy in our ranks, is that what you’re saying?”

  I chewed and swallowed, ignorant of taste but thankful for the cover of food as an interrogation aid. I tried to remain calm. “I’m not . . . saying anything, sir. But it is possible, isn’t it?”

  The others stared at me. They looked dubious.

  Then Jeffers nodded with thoughtful deliberation. “Point of entry was made with a glass cutter. Alarm bypassed, because we’re talking the second floor. No prints, though. And the guard somehow missed it all, too. So you think it didn’t happen that way?”

  I shrugged and swallowed nervously. “Unless someone talked. Doesn’t seem likely to me someone would bring a ladder here in the middle of the night. Did you check to see if the glass was cut from the inside or not?”

  Schimmer straightened. “It was made from the outside,” the detective declared. “But the other window could have been opened to do it.”

  Jeffers confirmed his assent with a nod. “So it’s possible someone was planning to change jobs, Alan. Someone covering himself by stealing the data files on your gene research, and destroying all the computer backup. We know it’s not Jim Baxter, now.” He paused, and leaned forward. His eyes narrowed painfully, as if he were undergoing a prostate exam. “Who else would do that, do you think?”

  I grinned in shocked reflex. “Not me, if that’s what you mean.” I tilted up my coffee cup slightly, my sip sounding like a slurp in the silence that followed.

  After a moment, Jeffers finally leaned back, and picked up his own cup. “Help us to understand why you’re not involved in this, would you, Alan?”

  “Well, it’s crazy, that’s why,” I told him. “What would I gain?”

  “How about an up front bonus?” Connolly suggested. “Preliminary patent process hadn’t even begun.”

  I set down my cup a little too hard, letting out what must have seemed to them like a cackle. “I can’t believe this. You’re accusing me? I couldn’t get away with something like this.”

  Connolly was unfazed. “Maybe you just sold the process to the highest bidder,” he postulated. “Eli Lilly or Warner-Lambert?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “What? I thought the project was a failure.”

  “We’re not accusing you of anything, Alan,” Jeffers conceded, then examined his manicured nails. “It’s all rather academic at this point, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Slowly, the three men exchanged glances, as if trying to decide who should break the news to me. The thing I’d obviously missed. Jeffers, as boss, was unanimously nominated by default. “There’s been an . . . accident.”

  I stared at them each in turn, in dumbfounded incomprehension. I felt as if I’d never known these men. Any of them. Like I’d just been ushered into an airport conference room, where these FBI agents and FAA investigators suspected I am the one who had checked six pounds of C4 shaped like a Grecian urn onto a plane that would carry their children across the ocean. “Accident?”

  At lunchtime I drove Darryl out of the plant parking lot toward a restaurant downtown, so we could talk. On the way I was expecting Darryl to complain about having to ask his wife to drive him to work that morning. But he didn’t. Instead, he wanted to know why all the secrecy about the cops leaving the plant when he arrived. I didn’t reply at first,
taking the turn roughly onto the public road fronting the Tactar plant. Then, when he persisted in asking me what was wrong, and what I knew, I finally said, “It’s all for nothing. A year’s work, down the tubes. And what do I get for it? A reassignment to Hepker’s division. But hell—maybe the world needs a better headache remedy. I know I do.”

  Darryl stared at me dumbly. “How’s that?”

  “They call it pain management. Should be a blast. Hepker’s division is researching a less expensive non-opiate to ease the suffering of cancer patients, who might not be dying at all if the FDA wasn’t twiddling its thumbs and diddling its—”

  “You’re serious?” Darryl interjected. “You’ve been reassigned?”

  “That’s a big ten-four, good buddy.”

  “But why, for God’s sake?” He paused, then his eyes widened with the terrible light of connection. “The police . . . you. . .”

  “It wasn’t me. But whoever it was, they had great timing.” I explained the theft, fumbling my way to the bitter end, although I left out the twisting climax.

  “But why the reassignment, then?” Darryl wanted to know. “Don’t you have notes on your gene research? Can’t you reassemble the work you’ve done?”

  I thought about what I might have at home, against strict company regulations. Something I hadn’t mentioned to Jeffers and his detective. “Possibly,” I confessed, “but I doubt it. In any event, I shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “Never stopped you before.”

  I glared at him in a returning flash of frustration, taking Van Buren street without slowing down. “There’s been an accident, okay? An ‘incident.’ Let’s leave it at that.”

  “You mean involving the theft?”

  “No, no, no, I mean involving my canceled project. Seems one of my lab techs heard about our cancellation, and apparently injected himself with the formulation. Last night, in fact.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t talk about it.” I roared around another corner, this time running a red light to do it. The car’s left wheels spun, making the Cavalier’s frame shudder.

  Darryl put one hand on the dash to brace himself. “Hey, hey, you wanna have a real accident, right here and now? Or will it be labeled an ‘incident?’”

  I stepped on the gas to straighten out. “Look,” I said, “last night I went out.”

  “You did?” Darryl seemed surprised.

  “Yeah, a big night out. So no alibi, unless you count fifteen minutes talking to a resident of Tatooine in a coffee bar. And I think I was being followed, too.”

  “Followed? You? By who?”

  “Who knows? But I think somebody’s been watching me. They must have been. And now my project has been canceled for sure because the FDA would certainly succumb to pressure, after this incident. I doubt that they’ll even allow me to find out exactly what caused this, or if it’s a fluke. What do you think?”

  “Hey, don’t ask me—I’m just a computer programmer. Plus I don’t know what the hell you’re blabbing about.”

  “Blabbing?”

  At the next turn we narrowly missed locking bumpers with a bus, and this time Darryl shouted: “Holy shit, man! Talk to me. Come on—get whatever it is off your chest before my heart stops beating.”

  I gripped the steering wheel tightly, coming to my senses just as a lady, pushing a baby stroller ahead, crossed the street opposite the Olive Garden restaurant. I swerved to the side of the road, hit the brake, and we slid to a stop. The engine coughed in protest at the abuse as I cut off the ignition, and for a moment Darryl studied me in silence like one might a wounded animal.

  “Sorry,” I apologized.

  “You in trouble?” he asked me.

  “We all are,” I replied.

  “The company?”

  “Them too. Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “On who stole the research data, and why. My assistant . . . he had such high hopes for what we were both doing. And he could have used the bonus, if we’d succeeded, that’s true. But was that a reason to do this? If he did what they say he did, it was reckless, not like him at all. Jim, Jim, Jim . . .”

  “Jim what? And when exactly did this happen?”

  “Just before the break-in took place. He injected himself, or somebody injected him.”

  “And he’s not a suspect on the theft?”

  “No, he’s dead.”

  Darryl touched his forehead, his hand hovering there as if taking his own temperature. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, but if you can’t talk about it . . .”

  I looked over at the small city park where the woman wearing a blue jumpsuit now wheeled her baby. The span of green grass and oak trees was scarcely a hundred yards long, like an oasis amid the commercial traffic and pace of downtown Alexandria. The woman took the right fork on the circling sidewalk, toward the fountain and away from a homeless man asleep on the bench to the left.

  “Did I tell you much about the bristlecone pine gene?” I asked.

  “What? No, you didn’t. Not . . . specifically.”

  “Well, we were searching for a delivery mechanism to test it on a unique worm that has at least half of the genes humans carry. This worm is used in a lot of research projects—and even by NASA—for this reason. Anyway, the longevity effects of this tree needed to be tested, and while my partner worked on finding a virus to carry the gene into other plant species, I got lucky in finding the perfect medium that could efficiently carry the gene into the cells of an animal species.”

  “And what was that?” Darryl wondered aloud, despite himself.

  “Can’t tell you unless you promise to keep it secret.”

  “Cross my heart, hope I don’t die too.”

  “Meaning we never talked, right?”

  “When do we ever talk? I mean, really.”

  I sighed. “Okay. But I could lose my job, what there’s left of it, if you let it slip.” I paused, studying his blank expression. Then I said it, letting it slip myself, like I’d let almost everything slip. “It was HIV.”

  “What?”

  “The AIDS virus. Only genetically modified to make it harmless.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “And a lab tech shot himself up with that? What happened to him?”

  “It was . . . kinda violent.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “Suicide,” I said, then, “but you mean the underlying cause. That’s part speculation, at this point. From what I’ve heard, I’d guess inflammation of the brain, linked to a severe interferon reaction to the altered virus. Apparently the bristlecone gene and the virus affected each other in a way I didn’t anticipate. Like A and B equaling C, and the sum being more than the parts. All the time I was thinking of the virus merely as a transport device for the gene, and had no idea it would co-opt something by way of symbiosis from it. After today, though, I can see that the way they fit together so perfectly should have alerted me. But I had no idea Jim Baxter would do what he did, with human trials still unimaginably distant. He was working on his own parallel project. A plant virus, the tobacco etch. While trying to make either of our viruses survive in solution, for ingestion without need of injection.”

  “So he killed himself because . . .”

  “Because of the pressure in his head, and the psychotic hallucinations that may have induced.”

  “What you’re saying is that it’s an overnight AIDS death? Not a decade? And all because you attached a tree gene to it?”

  “That’s a rough way of putting it. A modified virus acquired a longevity gene that it attempted to use as a defense mechanism to make up for being neutered.”

  “You’re. . . kidding.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding? Jim’s body tried using its own natural defense mechanism, but was quickly overwhelmed after the virus didn’t die on its own. Of course I’m just theorizing. We may never know what really
happened, now.”

  “I’ll tell you what happened. Your Methuselah gene went to bed with the Devil, and got itself a new lease on life. Namely, death.”

  “How did you know I was calling it Methuselah?”

  Darryl huffed surprise. “You were? Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Anyway, it sounds like you created a monster, and then it screwed you in more ways than one.” He stared out the window at a large oak tree rising beside the path in front of us. “How is the news going to cover this story?”

  “With as little information as possible. Tactar is hoping to keep the FDA and the FBI out of the investigation.”

  “So do you think whoever took your stole your research knows the truth? And how do you know Jim didn’t just dispose of everything while under the influence?”

  “I don’t know. I’m told it’s being investigated, including the possibility of murder. They’re saying murder’s unlikely, though, and they won’t tell me why.”

  “Which is why they reassigned you, hoping it all blows over?”

  I nodded once, then stopped myself. “Only thing, our project was canceled before Jim died, which is curious to me.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s just something about the timing. Who knew what, and when. Industrial espionage is big in our industry, as you might know. But then again, the results for our project just weren’t panning out, either. Instead of prolonging life in the worms we tested, if anything it decreased their life spans.”

  Darryl tapped his chin, still staring up at the oak tree. “Well, ya know, if you could figure out how to stop this death wish your gene’s now whispering, and just keep the shortened lifespan, you’d have more than just a Satan bug.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Think about it. A virus that doesn’t kill you or affect you in any other way except to shorten your lifespan by ten or twenty years. Bingo, population problems solved.”

  “But that’s the exact opposite of what I was trying to do.”