by James Barney
“Well hello, Ms. Sainsbury!” boomed a middle-aged woman behind the front desk. She was cheerful, overweight, and loud. Her dark hair was pulled back tightly in a bun, and she wore purple nurse’s scrubs over a white, wide-collared blouse.
“Hi Ellie,” Kathleen replied. “Happy Easter.”
“Same to you! Oh, your grandfather will be so glad to see you. He asked about you the other day.”
“He did?” Kathleen was surprised to hear that.
“Well . . . sort of. He asked when that girl with the Oreo cookies was coming back.” Ellie McDougal let out a boisterous laugh, obviously finding the comment utterly hilarious.
Kathleen, on the other hand, managed only a melancholy smile. She turned to Whittaker to explain. “Sometimes, I bring him Oreo cookies. He likes them.”
Whittaker nodded.
“Okay,” said Nurse McDougal, several decibels too loud, “I’ve got you all checked in. You can go on back now. Dinner starts at two.”
Kathleen made her way around the front desk and through a set of double doors that led to the north wing. Whittaker followed behind and quickly caught up with her in the corridor. “How long’s your grandfather had Alzheimer’s?” he asked as they walked.
“First signs were about six years ago. Forgetfulness, trouble concentrating. I thought it was just a passing thing, but it kept getting worse and worse. Pretty soon, he was getting lost coming back from the store or the library, even from the neighbors’. Then he starting forgetting simple words, like ‘toothbrush’ and ‘dishwasher.’ That’s when I realized he needed full-time care.”
They stepped into an elevator, and Kathleen pushed the button for the third floor.
“So that’s why you’re working on a cure for Alzheimer’s, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s certainly part of it.” Kathleen turned to face him. “Bryce, it’s an awful disease. It robs people of some of the best years of their lives. I mean, you should have seen my grandfather before—” She stopped short, feeling herself getting choked up. No need for that right now, she reminded herself.
“You okay?” Whittaker asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
A monotonal voice announced, “Third floor,” and the elevator doors slid open. Kathleen and Whittaker exited, turned left, and made their way to Room 308.
“Here it is,” said Kathleen nervously. She rang the doorbell and gave Whittaker a wilting smile.
More than thirty seconds passed in silence with no apparent activity inside.
Finally, Kathleen unlocked the door with her own key and poked her head inside. “Grandpa?” she said. “It’s me, Kathleen.” She swung the door fully open and walked in.
Whittaker followed.
The most prominent piece of furniture in the small room was an adjustable bed opposite the door. It sat lengthwise beneath a large picture window overlooking the lawn. The bed was neatly made up with a floral-pattern bedspread and a slipcover over the pillow, but it was still, unmistakably, a hospital bed, with its collapsible side rails and painted footboard. The room was carpeted with a light taupe Berber, and the walls were painted nearly the identical color. A framed print of the 1983 America’s Cup champion—Dennis Connor’s Stars and Strips—adorned the wall above the bed.
John Sainsbury—Kathleen’s grandfather—sat in an upholstered armchair, watching TV. He looked at Kathleen and Whittaker with demonstrable surprise as they walked in.
“Hi, Grandpa,” said Kathleen sweetly.
“Oh, hello . . .” replied the elder Sainsbury without the slightest sign of recognition. He could just as easily have been speaking to a nurse or a janitor.
Kathleen pointed to Whittaker. “This is my friend, Bryce. He’s a newspaper reporter.”
“Uh-huh,” said her grandfather shakily, obviously still confused as to why these two people were entering his room in the middle of Family Feud.
John Sainsbury was eighty-five years old and looked every day of it. His face was deeply creased and craggy. Across his forehead were four deep parallel lines, like two sets of railroad tracks running temple to temple. The wrinkles around his eyes extended halfway down his face and blended into the wrinkles around his mouth. His white hair was neatly combed, yet swept awkwardly to one side, as if someone else had combed it. He had a gentle, almost bemused expression on his face that somehow conveyed both intelligence and an utter absence of recognition or command of the events around him. His light blue eyes were hazy and distant.
“You look nice, Grandpa,” Kathleen said. “Are you dressed for dinner?”
The elder Sainsbury was dressed in a sky blue checkered shirt, a navy blue button-down sweater, and tan corduroy pants. “Is it time for dinner?” he asked uncertainly.
“Not yet,” Kathleen replied. “We thought we’d visit with you for a while before dinner. Is that okay?”
“Okay.”
Kathleen walked over and gave her grandfather a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. He smiled and nodded.
Does he recognize me? Kathleen wondered. “Grandpa, I brought you something.”
“Huh?”
Kathleen reached into her purse and pulled out a small package of cookies. “Oreo cookies—your favorite.” She smiled and whispered, “Don’t tell the nurses I gave these to you, okay?”
Mr. Sainsbury took the package of cookies and slipped them, fumblingly, into his sweater pocket. “Is it time for dinner?” he asked again.
“Not yet, Grandpa.” Kathleen stepped in front of him and bent down so that her face was directly in front of his. “Grandpa, do you know who I am?” Kathleen hated asking this question, and she hated even more the response she usually got. But she forced herself to do it each time she saw him because she had to keep track of the progression of the disease.
Mr. Sainsbury studied her face for several seconds, clearly trying to remember—struggling to make a connection. He grimaced for a moment and then replied in a shaky, confused voice. “Becky?”
Kathleen closed her eyes and turned her head away. “My mother,” she whispered to Whittaker in a choked-up voice. Then, despite her best effort, she began to cry.
Dinner was pleasant enough. Yet, for Kathleen, it was just one more heartbreaking episode in a long string of heartaches involving her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease. She watched in dismay as he pushed food around his plate, barely eating anything. “You need to eat, Grandpa,” she admonished several times. Yet, he barely ate five bites. He was wasting away before her eyes, and it was agonizing for her to watch.
For Kathleen, the only bright spot at dinner was Whittaker’s valiant, albeit clumsy, efforts to engage her grandfather in conversation. Whittaker talked to him endlessly about sailboats, about how much he liked Virginia, and, after Kathleen explained to him that her grandfather had been an engineer for NASA, about airplanes and spaceships and the moon landing. For the most part, Mr. Sainsbury responded with a series of indistinct grunts, offering nothing in the way of return conversation. At one point, though, when Whittaker asked about his experience with the space program in the 1960s, Mr. Sainsbury started to say something that sounded meaningful. “Yeah,” he began, “we were working on . . . uh . . . the Apollo . . . that, uh . . . Apollo . . .”
Kathleen leaned in expectantly. “Go ahead, Grandpa,” she said encouragingly, “You were working on the Apollo project?”
But the moment had passed. Whatever thought John Sainsbury had managed to seize upon had already slipped away.
“Sometimes, he remembers things from way back then,” Kathleen explained quietly to Whittaker. “That’s one of the strange things about Alzheimer’s. It leaves some memories intact but erases others.”
“It must be very frustrating,” Whittaker said.
“Very frightening is more like it.”
After dinner, they walked with Grandpa Sainsbury around the grounds of Garrison Manor. It was a cool spring afternoon with almost no wind at all. The giant pin oaks and sycamores that dotted the manicured grounds
were still bare from the cold Maryland winter. But the crocuses and tulips in the raised flower beds were already beginning to bloom, providing a cheerful, if sparse, backdrop of lavender and yellow.
Easter—a time of loss and renewal.
They returned Mr. Sainsbury to his room around 4:00 P.M. and said good-bye. Kathleen watched with lingering sadness as an orderly helped her grandfather into bed and administered his medication. He was asleep in less than a minute.
“Bye, Grandpa,” she said quietly as they left his room.
Leaving the nursing home after a visit like this was always difficult for Kathleen. She walked slowly down the hall, lost in her thoughts, wondering, as she always did, if she’d see him again.
Whittaker walked silently beside her.
They reached the main entry hall without saying a word, and Kathleen signed them both out. Then, willing herself into a better mood, she said to Whittaker, “How about a tour of Annapolis?”
“Sure,” said Whittaker with a smile. “I think we still have a little daylight left.”
They parked near the old market square at the Annapolis harbor, which was nearly deserted. Only a handful of people were strolling about.
They spent an hour touring the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy, making it as far as Bancroft Hall—the massive dormitory that housed the entire Brigade of Midshipmen—before finally turning back. It was nearly dark, and noticeably colder, when they returned to the market square. After some searching, they found an open pub—McGarvey’s. They entered and ordered drinks at the bar.
“Here’s to my first visit to Annapolis,” Whittaker said, hoisting a mug of Aviator Lager, McGarvey’s specialty.
“Cheers,” Kathleen said, touching her glass to his.
Whittaker took a long swig of his beer. “You know, your grandfather seems like a really nice guy.”
Kathleen smiled. She knew he was just being polite. “I wish you could have met him before. He really was a wonderful man. Even in his seventies, he was energetic and full of life.” Kathleen sipped her beer and thought about how lively her grandfather had been just five years ago. “We used to go sailing together.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. We’d come here to Annapolis, or go up to Delaware, and rent out a thirty or thirty-five-foot boat. Take it out for the day. He was a really great sailor.”
“You guys were close, then, huh?”
“He basically raised me. And after my grandmother died, he raised me by himself.”
“Must have been tough.”
“Yeah, but you know what? In a way it was nice. All my friends’ dads were lawyers or doctors or businessmen. Always traveling, always working. They never had time for their kids. But Grandpa . . . he was always home. Always there . . . for me.”
Whittaker nodded.
“And now, I intend to be there for him.”
Whittaker was about to say something when Kathleen’s cell phone rang. She fished it out of her purse. “Hello?”
“Dr. S, it’s me, Jeremy.”
“Jeremy, where are you?”
“At work.”
“At work? I thought I told you not to come in today. It’s a holiday, remember?”
“Actually, I didn’t come in today . . . I came in yesterday.”
Kathleen mulled that fact for a second. “You’ve been there since yesterday?”
“Yeah, I’ve been working on that mummy tooth you gave me.”
“Jeremy—”
“And you’re not going believe what I found!”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Vienna, Virginia.
Bill McCreary sat alone in the study of his modest suburban home, deep in thought, a bound collection of Einstein’s essays open in his lap. He flinched when his secure phone line rang unexpectedly. That could be one of only a handful of people. “McCreary,” he said quietly, answering on the first ring.
“It’s me,” said Steve Goodwin. “I’m sending you an audio file you should listen to. The guy speaking is Jeremy Fisher, a QLS scientist. The woman is Dr. Sainsbury.”
At that moment, an encrypted e-mail popped onto McCreary’s computer screen, with the subject line, “HERE IT IS.”
“Okay, I see it,” McCreary said. “I’ll call you back.”
McCreary sat down at his desk, opened the e-mail, and double-clicked on the attached audio file. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as a crackly, intercepted phone conversation played over his speakers:
“Jeremy, where are you?”
“At work.”
“At work? I thought I told you not to come in today. It’s a holiday, remember?”
“Actually, I didn’t come in today . . . I came in yesterday.”
“You’ve been there since yesterday?”
“Yeah, I’ve been working on that mummy tooth you gave me.”
“Jeremy—”
“And you’re not going believe what I found!”
There was a pause. “I’m listening . . .”
“Well, first of all, I extracted the dental pulp from the tooth. I was surprised there was any left, but there was.”
“Okay.”
“Dissolved the extract in a CTAB buffer solution, let it sit at room temperature for about six hours, then centrifuged it to separate the DNA. I extracted with isoamyl alcohol and chloroform.
“Not phenol?”
“Nope. I used a new workup protocol from a friend of mine at the SFPD. Really cutting-edge stuff.”
“Okay . . .”
“Anyway, I wasn’t expecting much because the sample was so degraded. I did the workup protocol that my friend sent me. Removed the PCR inhibitors using a Qiagen spin column . . .”
“Wow, you’ve been a busy beaver.”
“Like I said, I really wasn’t expecting much, but . . . Dr. S, I got a clean sample.”
There was an audible gasp. “Intact?”
“Yep. I just did a quick sequence, and it hit, like, ninety-eight percent of the base pairs. It’s totally intact.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. It’s weird. I didn’t want to use the whole sample at once, so I split it into eight aliquots. The first few I tested were absolute garbage—nothing identifying at all. Then on four, five, and six, I got bacterial DNA.”
“Totally contaminated, huh?”
“Yep. I figured it was a lost cause, so I just kept going. Seven was a bust. And then, bam, on number eight—the last aliquot I had—I pulled this perfect strand of human DNA—like it was the last one remaining. I mean, a complete strand from that thing. Who would’ve figured?”
McCreary shifted in his chair and frowned as the recorded conversation continued over his speakers:
“Jeremy, that’s wonderful! I mean, truly . . . truly amazing. You’ve really outdone yourself.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t believe it myself.”
“Now, go home.”
“Yeah, yeah, I will.”
“No, I mean it. Go home. You need sleep. I know you. You must be completely exhausted.”
“I am pretty tired.”
“Julie will be in tomorrow morning to finish the sequencing. Go home and get some rest.”
“All right, I will.”
“And Jeremy?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really proud of you.”
“Thanks, Dr. S.”
As the audio file ended, McCreary leaned forward in his chair and ruminated over the conversation he’d just heard. “Damn it,” he whispered under his breath, shaking his head. Things were getting out of control. He hated when things got out of his control.
And what was this “mummy tooth” they were talking about? His thoughts immediately turned to Kathleen’s parents. Archeologists.
He slid his wireless mouse around on the mouse pad and began navigating through a series of screens on the computer. On a hunch, he logged on to a special DARPA search engine that retrieved academic papers from all around the world. He typed in the na
me of Kathleen’s father, “Daniel Talbot,” and waited impatiently. Fifteen seconds later, a list of several dozen titles appeared on the screen. He scanned the list quickly, focusing on one almost immediately:
Talbot, Daniel J., The Ruins at Tell-Fara—Ziggurat or Not?, Ph.D. Diss., U. Chicago, Defended June 12, 1968. Hardcopy only—Near East Studies Lib., U. Chicago.
He clucked his tongue, perturbed that an online copy wasn’t available.
Next, he typed in “Rebecca Talbot” and pressed enter. “0 Records Found” was the result several seconds later. Dismayed, he leaned back in his chair and thought for a while, hands behind his head, eyes closed. Then, in a burst of energy, he quickly typed in a new search term: “Rebecca Sainsbury.”
Five seconds later, a half dozen results popped onto the screen. McCreary arched his eyebrows as he quickly skimmed the list and found one in particular that caught his interest. “What’s this?” he said quietly.
Sainsbury, Rebecca A., An Anthropological Study of the Origins of the Nephilim in Sumerian Mythology, Ph. D. Diss, Harvard U., Defended May 12, 1971. Available online.
He clicked the hyperlink for the online version, entered his DARPA user name and password, and began printing out Rebecca Sainsbury’s 1971 dissertation on the Nephilim.
An hour later, McCreary put down Rebecca Sainsbury’s dissertation, immediately picked up the secure phone and punched in ten digits.
“Yeah?” answered Secretary Stonewell in a raspy voice.
“Sorry to bother you at home, sir. It’s Bill McCreary.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I need authorization for a special operation.”
“Military or—?”
“Military.”