by Layton Green
“I would say you’re correct that it’s Egyptian. The liquid beneath the figure likely represents embalming fluid, which implies preservation of the body, and relates to mummification. Gold is the ancient symbol of immortality. A palm frond signifies long life. A fitting corporate logo for a company involved with aging research, though wearing a golden medallion engraved with the image is hardly corporate behavior.”
Grey stood and walked to the window, staring at the river of yellow taxis far below. “Anything else?”
“Just that if this technology is as important as Al-Miri claims, then the cult of money is involved, and I don’t think you need an education on what that implies.”
• • •
The next morning dawned foggy and cool. Grey went for a morning jog as the sun burned holes in the city’s hazy morning womb. After his run he showered, then slipped on a pair of dress slacks he hadn’t worn since he’d tossed his badge at the feet of his former boss, the United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe. The Ambassador had forbidden Grey to investigate Nya’s disappearance without Zimbabwean Ministry approval and, well, Grey had told the Ambassador to go to hell.
He slipped his badge from his first posting, Bogotá, into his pocket. He’d left that posting under strained circumstances as well, and his supervisor had never collected his ID. The strained circumstances consisted of saving a local Colombian woman from bleeding to death after a carjacking, despite strict orders not to leave his post. Great employee handbook, assholes.
He didn’t really know why he’d kept that badge. We cling to odd reminders of the past, he mused, sometimes even unpleasant ones, as a preservation of identity.
And what was that identity? He supposed he was one of those unlucky few whose identity had gotten lost in the cosmic shuffle. The surface traits were easy: a tall but underweight Jujitsu expert with long quick limbs, unruly dark hair, a slightly crooked nose and a fine-boned face. A guy with a dead mother and a shit father he hadn’t spoken to since running away at sixteen. A nomad who, besides a seven-year stint in Japan, had never spent more than three of his thirty-five years in the same country.
And he was self-aware enough to get his conflicting internal traits: a realist and an idealist, a gifted fighter who abhorred violence, a loner who craved community, someone who wanted to make the world right because he couldn’t make himself right. Yeah, he got all that. But those were labels, things.
Who was he, really?
Maybe he wasn’t unlucky. Maybe no one knew who he or she really was. Maybe everyone else cowered behind that strange and shifting cloak of subatomic particles called self, trying to work the jigsaw of body, mind, heart and soul. Trying to turn the illusion into reality.
He pulled on a black dress shirt, another Embassy holdover, over the tattoos and scars that covered his back. The largest tattoo, a collection of Japanese symbols, he got with his first black belt. The others he got mainly to remove attention from his scars. Some were battle scars, but most were from various implements used by his father to indulge his passion for sadistic familial violence. Except for a few random cigarette burn scars on his arms and legs, Grey was relieved his father had been concerned enough about public opinion to concentrate on Grey’s back.
A pair of black boots, his notepad, and he was done. Although certain situations required them, Grey didn’t feel the same obsessive need to carry a firearm he had seen with many ex-Special Forces members.
Maybe it was because Grey had his own weapons.
He grabbed a bagel and a coffee, and was on the New Jersey Transit by eight. His thoughts surprised him by bringing a smile to his face, the first one in a long while. Right now, his identity lay in working with Viktor. With helping whoever needed them. Helping others in trouble was the one thing he’d found that made him feel good about himself, and he planned to continue doing it.
He fingered the diplomatic security badge. He was new to this private investigator thing, and was waiting for those clever plans he’d imagined private investigators have to start rolling in.
Impersonating a federal agent was a serious crime, but Grey had performed routine neighborhood security sweeps in advance of visiting dignitaries hundreds of times, and could talk the talk. If they took a closer look, well, he’d done a little doctoring to his badge. Besides, you couldn’t exactly look up contact information on Diplomatic Security Agents on the Internet. If anything went down he’d leave, threaten to return with a pissed-off superior and a federal warrant, and never come back.
Grey had his own moral code, some of which he supposed was innate, some of which he learned by positive example from his mother and negative example from his father, some of which he had adopted in the years after leaving home. To survive on the street, Grey had turned to underground fighting in the murky recesses of Japanese cities. Sometimes he earned enough to stay in hotels or cheap rentals, sometimes he didn’t. Being homeless had given Grey a fierce survival instinct and, to his own surprise, an even fiercer ethos. He took a vow that no matter how bad it got, he would never steal, would never act dishonorably. Looking back, he understood why. When a man has nothing but his principles left, those principles become his world. To lose that meant losing oneself.
So he would put off the tedium of researching biomedical gerontology and corporate greed, and visit one of the players. Gauge the atmosphere and the security measures. Stir the pot and see what slithered to the surface.
• • •
Grey stepped off the train a few stops into New Jersey, somewhere between the Orwellian smear of factories and the bucolic hinterlands. He set off at a brisk pace to warm himself for the mile walk to BioGorden Laboratories. He enjoyed cool mornings, but the wind burrowed its way inside his coat.
He trod through the badlands of commercial suburbia, the anaesthetized result of the quest for affordable office space. He felt lost, adrift in a sea of block-long white buildings, acres of perfect grass and hedges, giant signs at the entrances to office complexes that sucked you in and spit you out ten hours later.
Halfway to his destination Grey heard a faint crescendo of shouting voices. He changed direction twice, following the printed map, and the shouting increased in volume.
He turned a final corner and the bland serenity of the office parks evaporated. He saw a mass of people congregated on a driveway and the grassy lawn surrounding it. They were picketing in front of a ten-foot wall at the end of the drive. The wall extended a hundred yards in both directions, and then continued back. The crowd was blocking a gate where the driveway met the wall.
He checked the map again. He’d found his biotech.
It was an ugly crowd of a few hundred people, arms raised and shouting. Grey saw someone lob a bottle over the gate. Grey glanced at some of the signs lofted by the crowd, scrawled in angry red lettering.
“Take the GOD out of BioGorden!”
“No more monsters!”
A woman with a “Destroy the Minotaur” sign climbed onto someone’s back and started pumping the sign up and down.
Grey walked to the rear of the group and stood, arms folded. He made a wry face. At least no one would question the need for a security sweep.
He had read that BioGorden had recently announced it had created an embryo by implanting human DNA into a cow egg. He supposed the minotaur epithet spoke for itself.
He rounded the corner and realized that must have been the back door, because there was an even larger crowd on this side, along with a phalanx of cops. The cops had the crowd cordoned off to the sides of a wide driveway. Grey caught a flash of silver beyond the gate.
Grey walked straight to the nearest cop, a pot-bellied behemoth. The cop had his hand up towards Grey, but Grey was already flashing his badge. “I’m with Diplomatic Security. I need to get through.”
The cop eyed Grey’s badge. “What’s going on?”
“Some important people are coming to check out the lab this week.”
“Who’s that?”
Grey smiled, lips
tight.
The cop grunted, shrugged, and motioned for Grey to follow. A pale, beefy man in a security uniform opened the gate after a quick word from the cop. A woman in a business suit pressed against the closed gate, screaming to be let inside. Grey hopped forward as a bottle shattered at his feet. Why was this crowd so insane?
He followed the guard towards a silver, pod-shaped building at the end of a manicured walkway, then to a door outlined in the pod. The guard ran a card through a slot, and the door slid sideways.
The silver door swooshed behind them.
– 4 –
Nomti listened to Al-Miri’s instructions, then removed the oversized suit jacket from the absurdities of his abbreviated torso: shoulders that filled doorways, a chest as thick as two cinder blocks, and the protrusion on his back, the dirty secret on constant display that had defined his life.
Nomti opened the door to the third bedroom in the suite. Siti rose as Nomti entered. Siti backed towards the rear of the room with his hands up, and Nomti inhaled the soiled odor of fear. A cruel, rapt expression splayed across Nomti’s face.
Nomti struck the man three times, twice in the face and once in the solar plexus. Siti fell to his knees and sobbed. He no longer tried to cover himself. The first time he resisted, Nomti had beaten him unconscious. The second time, Nomti had sliced his thigh and closed the wound with a cigarette lighter. The third time, which could have been termed resistance only by a vast stretch of the definition, Nomti had removed one of Siti’s fingers with his knife.
There had been no more resistance.
Nomti was many things, but he was not stupid. This man, Siti, was stupid. After what he had done, he still thought he could escape to some hidden place.
Nomti shook his head. For Siti, the entire earth had become death’s antechamber.
Nomti then mused, is death’s antechamber not what the world was anyway, everyone waiting for the same unseen adventure? That might be true, but it was the length of the wait that mattered. And the brevity of life, that bitter myopic quaff and its attendant self-awareness: it invited supreme selfishness.
Nomti enjoyed his thoughts as Siti waited before him, servile with apprehension. If life had treated Nomti differently, perhaps he would have been a philosopher. But after a childhood marked by prejudice and ignorance, he’d chosen the path of least resistance. One that suited his other talents.
Nomti took Siti’s neck in one of his oversized hands and led him to the living room of the suite. He kept his hand on Siti’s neck as he stood before Al-Miri.
Al-Miri had never once looked at Nomti with pity, and for that he had gained Nomti’s loyalty. Al-Miri watched at first, hands clasped in front of his robe, eyes sad. Al-Miri had treated Siti as part of his family, as he did all of his employees.
Siti squirmed in Nomti’s grasp, but didn’t try to escape. Al-Miri approached and touched Siti’s arm. He spoke in his native tongue.
“I’m sorry it has come to this.”
“I know,” Siti said. “I’m sorry too.”
“You have forced me to this place.”
“Yes.”
“I will ask you one final time: where is it?”
“I don’t know. I swear it. Dorian gave it to that man in the City of the Dead. I can recognize him. I can—”
“And who did that man sell it to?”
“I told you, I didn’t ask. I would never lie to you.”
Al-Miri smiled.
“I have four children. I did this for them. I’ll make this right.”
“I’ll see to your children. I won’t tell them of your betrayal.”
Siti quivered. “Why do you say this? I swear to you—I’ll help you find him.”
Al-Miri’s eyes turned towards a closed door in the far corner of the suite. “Perhaps you will speak in there?”
Siti moaned. “No. I swear to you I swear to you I know nothing more. I betrayed you. It’s unacceptable. But please, my children.”
“They are better off without one such as you. Perhaps they’ll return honor to your name.”
“Please, no.”
Al-Miri motioned to Nomti, and Nomti moved towards the door in the far corner. Siti let his weight collapse, and then dug in his heels. Nomti dragged him to the door as he would a child.
Al-Miri spoke again. “You have broken the only unbreakable rule. The man I hired will lead me to what you’ve stolen. I will return to Egypt, and the only thing that will have changed will be that you are dead. Why have you done this? For money? What is money compared to that which I have? That which you were promised?”
“Please.”
Al-Miri motioned again, and Nomti opened the door. Siti screamed and clawed at Nomti. Nomti dragged him through the door into a small room.
Siti gurgled and sobbed as he beat his fists against Nomti. Nomti delivered another blow to Siti’s midsection, crumpling him. Nomti glanced at the sole object in the room: an ornate sarcophagus, standing eldritch and mute against the far wall.
Nomti thrust him forward, and Siti stumbled against the sarcophagus. He recoiled as if touched by a gang of lepers.
“No,” Siti whispered.
Nomti grinned, and Siti lunged for the door.
Nomti slammed the door and turned the lock.
– 5 –
The guard inspected Grey’s badge. “I don’t know anything about this.”
“Of course you don’t.”
The guard’s face reddened. “You could’ve at least made an appointment.”
“You’re missing the point. The initial security sweep is supposed to be a surprise. I’ll need to tour the facilities and then speak with your head of security, and someone in management.”
Grey’s tone told the guard there would be no more questions. The head of security wasn’t in, and Grey told the guard he would suffice for now.
The guard took him around the outside first. Grey took notes and made comments as if he were actually doing a sweep, which he in effect was. He wanted to evaluate the security level; a corporation with stolen technology would go to extra lengths to preserve its secrets.
They moved inside, and the guard led him through a series of sleek, rounded hallways divided by sliding partitions. Through open doorways Grey caught glimpses of lab coats, computer banks, medical equipment. The employees he saw looked unconcerned with the protests outside, lost in their own worlds as scientists can be.
They arrived at a large office at the end of a line of empty cubicles and futuristic coffee makers. A plaque on the door read “Dr. Graham East, President.” The office, sparse and neat like the cubicles, made Grey think it was an afterthought, that the real work took place in the laboratories.
A man in an unbuttoned lab coat turned as they entered. A shy smile spread across boyish features, although as Grey drew closer he noticed creased eyes and veins of grey running through his shrub of brown hair. A stained tie was draped haphazardly over a wrinkled blue dress shirt. The scientist met Grey’s eyes with an open, almost childlike gaze.
There was also a woman in the room. Grey guessed her about his age, mid-thirties. She was striking: tall and thin and self-assured. Straight blond hair brushed a camera case slung around her neck.
The guard and Dr. East spoke off to the side, then Dr. East approached Grey. He eyed Grey’s badge as if it were a pit viper. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“You’ll hear soon enough. After the sweep.”
Dr. East shrugged in deference to Grey’s badge, as Grey knew he would. “I was just about to give Veronica a tour of the lab,” Dr. East said. “Give me a minute to wrap up with her, and I’ll show you around.”
“How about if I tag along? It’d save everyone some time, and I can break off when I need.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s fine.” He waved his hand at the woman. “Veronica Brown, Mike Hood. Veronica’s a reporter with the UN.”
Veronica swayed her hips as she stepped forward and took Grey’s hand. A fitted red sweater and b
lack pencil skirt hugged her slinky figure. “Investigative journalist,” she corrected. “Freelance.”
That’s just lovely, Grey thought. Veronica looked at Grey as if expecting a further introduction, but Grey nodded towards Dr. East. Veronica looked at him askance. Her face matched the rest of her: thin and classy, a petite pointed chin and intelligent blue eyes. Her mouth exuded mischief, and the possibility of a wide range of emotion. It evened out her other features and made her more accessible.
Dr. East led them out of the room. On the way down the hallway Veronica said, “Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. We understand the importance of your work and its implications for stem cell research.”
His eyes brightened. “You understand—they’re calling us monsters, and we’re on the side of humanity. If they had any idea of the possibilities…”
“I’m fully aware of the possibilities. It’s why I’m here.” She hesitated. “Is it true? You have an interspecies embryo?”
“We have more than that. We have a blastocyst.”
“My God,” Veronica whispered. “That wasn’t reported.”
Dr. East grinned like a schoolboy. “I think the public is still wrapping its mind around the—the embryo. That’s been done before, you know, with rabbit eggs. It wasn’t in the journals because the experiment was stopped after an embryo formed and started dividing.”
They seemed to have forgotten Grey’s presence, which was fine with him. Grey followed them into a sleek elevator and down to a bottom floor comprised of an enormous laboratory and a swarm of people in white frocks. The scientists moved with purposeful flair between the tables, nodding and chatting quietly. The room smelled faintly of formaldehyde. Grey’s eyes swept the room, searching the faces of the scientists for a telltale nervous twitch, a gesture of unease. He had already concluded that the probability that Dr. East had traveled to Egypt to steal corporate secrets, or ordered someone to do so, was close to nil.