The Genesis Key

by James Barney

  The BMW braked hard as it reached Gateway Drive, spun ninety degrees to the left, and accelerated again with another loud squeal of tires. By now, Wills had picked himself off the ground and jumped into the blue Crown Vic. He threw the car in reverse and whipped the wheel around, spinning the car 180 degrees. “Stay here!” he shouted to Kathleen through the opening in the driver’s side of the car. Then he punched the accelerator and peeled out of the parking lot. Kathleen watched incredulously as the Crown Vic veered sharply onto Gateway Drive and sped north after the fleeing BMW.

  For a few moments, she remained prone on the wet asphalt, stunned, her heart racing wildly. Until just a few minutes ago, she’d never even seen a handgun up close, let alone had one pressed to her head. Haltingly, she stood and scanned the parking lot behind her, vaguely worried that someone else might be lurking in the woods.

  Then she remembered the sample container. Quickly, she scanned the pavement where she’d seen it a few moments ago, but it was gone.

  Then she noticed the storm drain.

  “Oh no!” she cried, sprinting toward the metal grate.

  She reached the gutter and immediately dropped to her knees and peered inside. A small river of rainwater was pouring in, making a soft gurgling sound at the surface and a deeper, splashing sound somewhere far below, presumably in the sewer. A thick, muddy tangle of leaves, twigs, and construction debris clogged the gutter, forming a dam that forced the rainwater to snake its way over.

  Flattening herself on the asphalt, she stuck her face directly into the gutter, scanning its dark, mucky interior. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she spotted something gray and yellow wedged between a pair of twigs. The sample container was perched precariously above the chute that led down into the sewer.

  Kathleen held her breath and extended her hand carefully into the storm drain, stretching until her shoulder was pressed tightly against the cast iron lip that lined its opening. Ignoring the pain, she pushed her arm in as far as it would go, extending her fingertips toward the sample bottle. Almost there . . . almost . . . She felt the plastic container brush momentarily against the tip of her middle finger and gasped in horror as it tipped away and fell downward, out of sight.

  Grimacing, she shoved her arm even farther into the storm drain, stretching every tendon as she maneuvered her hand down the chute where the container had just fallen. With one last effort, she plunged her hand downward and grasped a huge handful of slithery leaves and twigs. Then slowly, carefully, she extracted the fistful of muck from the sewer.

  With her arm now free, she opened her clenched fist. There, amongst the tangle of debris in her palm, was the sample bottle—dirty and wet, but with its yellow Teflon seal still intact. Breathing a sigh of relief, she plucked it out of the muck, carefully wiped off the grime and dirt, and slipped it back into the pocket of her soaking-wet jeans.

  She was just gaining her feet when she heard someone shout behind her, “Dr. Sainsbury!” Her nerves twitched; the last time someone said that, she’d wound up with a gun to her head.

  She spun and saw the Channel 7 reporter trotting toward her from Gateway Drive, an umbrella in one hand, a microphone in the other. A cameraman and a small crowd of people followed close behind. “Dr. Sainsbury!” he shouted again, quickly approaching her. Seconds later, the microphone was in her face. “Can you tell us what just happened?” he asked breathlessly.

  “Uh . . .”

  More people were now entering the parking lot, pressing all around her.

  “Are you okay?” someone in the crowd asked. “We heard shots!”

  “Step aside, folks!” shouted a security guard who’d just arrived on the scene. He was trying, unsuccessfully, to push his way through the growing crowd.

  A woman screamed at Kathleen in a shrill, grating voice, “This is what happens when you try to steal God’s divine powers!”

  Kathleen wanted them all to leave. Why wouldn’t they just leave her alone? Her business was burning down, for God’s sake!

  “Do you know who fired the shots?” asked the reporter, still jostling for a position at the front of the crowd. He shoved the microphone close to her mouth. “Who was in those cars?”

  Kathleen’s head was spinning. “Uh . . .”

  Still more people were joining the crowd, pressing closer, elbowing for position. The security guard bellowed for everyone to back up, but the crowd ignored him, pressing ever closer to Kathleen. The lady with the shrill voice shouted again—something about “sin.” To which a male voice in the crowd replied, “Shut the hell up, lady!”

  Kathleen was starting to feel claustrophobic and panicky. Suddenly, above the crowd noise, she heard the rumble of an automobile engine coming closer, growing louder.

  “Look out!” someone in the crowd shouted. “He’s not stopping!” The crowd began to disperse.

  It was not the BMW as Kathleen had feared, but instead, a white Chevy Suburban driving toward her, allowing just enough time for the crowd to part as it approached. Kathleen could see the driver but did not recognize him. The man in the front passenger’s seat, however . . .

  “Watch it!” someone yelled as the white Suburban pressed forward, revving its engine in warning. Kathleen held her breath and stood in frozen amazement as the vehicle approached.

  At the last second, the Suburban swerved left and pulled up alongside Kathleen, stopping abruptly. Kathleen watched anxiously as the tinted, passenger-side window descended with a soft, motorized whirring sound. As the man in the passenger’s seat came into view, she gasped in disbelief. “Bill?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” replied Bill McCreary. “Get in the back . . . hurry!”

  “But . . . where are we going?” Kathleen was still trying to get over the shock of seeing Bill McCreary . . . here . . . after all this time.

  “I’ll explain on the way. Hurry! Before these people eat you alive!” McCreary nodded at the crowd that was now inching back toward her.

  Confused and bewildered, Kathleen opened the rear door and climbed into the Suburban, the crowd quickly converging behind her. “What about my wife?” someone screamed. “It’s Satan!” shrieked the woman with the shrill voice, pointing at the Suburban. “It’s Satan in there!”

  Kathleen shut the door, and the Suburban immediately lurched forward, honking and revving its engine as it pushed through the crowd once again. Seconds later, the driver made an abrupt right turn and drove up and over the grassy median strip, bouncing down onto Gateway Drive on the other side. He then straightened the wheel and accelerated smoothly away.

  Once they’d cleared the Gateway Office Park and made a right turn onto Enterprise Drive, McCreary looked back from the front seat and flashed Kathleen a quick smile. “Bet you’re surprised to see me,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Agent Wills spotted the black BMW several hundred yards ahead, making a sharp left turn onto Middleton Road and cutting across two lanes of oncoming traffic in the process. Wills gunned the Crown Vic’s 235-horsepower engine and squinted as cold wind and rain blew through the hole in the side of the car, pelting his face and making it nearly impossible to see. As the Crown Vic topped 60 miles per hour, it became obvious he couldn’t continue the pursuit any longer.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he hit the brakes and pulled the damaged sedan to the side of the road. He picked up the radio and selected Channel One for the Montgomery County police dispatcher. “Montgomery County Base One, this is FBI unit seven frank nine, in pursuit of a code twenty-six, northbound Middleton Road at Route Three fifty-five. Suspect is armed. Request APB, code three.”

  A crackly female voice responded. “Roger seven frank nine. What’s the vehicle description?”

  “Black late-model BMW,” Wills responded. “Virginia tags . . . zebra . . . victor . . . mary . . . five . . . five . . . two.”

  “Roger, seven frank nine.”

  Seconds later, Wills listened as the dispatcher passed the same message to a Rockville police
patrol unit in the area.

  A crackly male voice responded: “Base One, one five six, we’re on our way.”

  Satisfied with the response, Wills switched to the FBI frequency and called in his situation, requesting vehicle assistance. Then he dialed Agent Hendricks on his cell phone.

  Hendricks answered on the first ring. “Hey,” she protested, “you left without me!”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I couldn’t find you.”

  “Well, did you check the ladies’ room?”

  “Oops,” said Wills with a hint of sarcasm. “I must’ve missed that one.”

  “What do you want, anyway?” said Hendricks, obviously not amused.

  “I need you to run down a set of Virginia tags for me. Zebra victor mary five five two.”

  “Who do those belong to?”

  “That’s what I want you to find out.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Kathleen Sainsbury was feeling anxious, to say the least. She was sitting in the backseat of a Chevy Suburban traveling east on I–270. She didn’t know where she was going. And, more perplexingly, she didn’t know why Bill McCreary, her former NIH colleague and research partner—a man she hadn’t seen for more than two years—was sitting in the front passenger’s seat. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?” she asked finally.

  “It’s complicated,” said McCreary over his shoulder.

  “Complicated?” Kathleen laughed bitterly. “Ten minutes ago, someone was holding a gun to my head. My employees have been shot at . . . my building’s been torched, my research sabotaged. Bill, trust me, complicated doesn’t even come close!”

  “Okay, fair enough. But it’s . . . well, it’s hard to know where to start.”

  “Start from the beginning.”

  “Right.” McCreary paused and then pointed to the man driving the Suburban. “First of all, this is my assistant, Steve Goodwin.”

  Goodwin raised an arm and waved backward, glancing at Kathleen in the rearview mirror.

  A half minute passed in silence as McCreary stared out the window at the road, apparently gathering his thoughts. Finally, he turned to Kathleen and met her eyes. “How long’s it been since we’ve seen each other?”

  Kathleen ran a quick calculation in her head. “A little over two years. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was exactly two years ago this past Saturday that we both got fired . . . uh, sorry . . . the day our program was terminated . . . without cause.” Kathleen was still bitter that their research project at NIH had ended so abruptly, seemingly without explanation or warning. To her, it had always seemed like they’d been summarily fired—and unfairly at that.

  “Yeah . . .” said McCreary sheepishly. “I guess that would be the beginning.”

  Kathleen shifted in her seat.

  McCreary lowered his voice and cast his eyes downward. “Kathleen, the reason our project was terminated . . . is that I recommended it be terminated.”

  “You what?”

  “Now, hear me out on this—”

  “You recommended—” The word got caught in her throat. Her thoughts were suddenly a jumble of anger, resentment, and disbelief. “What do you mean you recommended it be terminated?”

  “Okay, now, remember we were working on a tiny offshoot of the Human Genome Project. Hardly anyone even knew what we were doing.”

  “Of course I remember, Bill. I was there. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a skunk works project. Tiny budget. Small staff. Barely any oversight. That’s the way we wanted it, right? I mean, even if no one else was paying attention, we knew the significance of it.”

  “Right,” McCreary interjected. “We knew the significance of what we were working on. We were searching for the secret to aging . . . the secret to life.”

  Kathleen said nothing. Where’s he going with this?

  “We were trying to pinpoint exactly where aging is programmed into the human genome and, more important, how to reprogram it. That was our goal, right? Team Methuselah.”

  Kathleen rolled her eyes at the stupid moniker. It was a slang term McCreary had coined early in the project, and she’d always hated it. “That’s right,” she said. “And we were close to finding it, too.”

  “Actually,” said McCreary, arching his eyebrows high above his glasses, “we were closer than you think.”

  His words lingered in the air as Kathleen pondered their import. She cocked her head back and shot him a suspicious look. “What are you talking about?”

  McCreary drew a deep breath. “Remember when you took a couple weeks off in March, just before our project was, uh . . . terminated?”

  “Sure, I took my grandfather down to Sarasota. But why—” Then it suddenly hit her. “Oh, don’t tell me.”

  McCreary nodded affirmatively.

  “You found it?”

  McCreary continued nodding. “I found its location. A couple of days after you left.”

  Kathleen was stunned. “I . . . I . . . don’t believe it.” She was still shaking her head slowly from side to side.”

  “Middle of chromosome fourteen. About eighty-thousand base pairs, retroviral in nature. Sound about right?”

  Unbelievable, Kathleen thought to herself. McCreary had found the location of the INDY gene more than two years ago. “But how?” she asked.

  “Dumb luck. I stumbled across it one afternoon just doing a routine screening for extinct viral fragments. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was something odd about that sequence, something really unique. It was heavily degraded but still distinguishable from the rest of the junk around it. I did a bit of reverse engineering and figured out what the original virus probably looked like, a retrovirus almost entirely unique to the Cercopithecinae subfamily of Old World monkeys. After a few days of research, I knew it had to be . . . it just had to be the INDY gene.” He paused. “You know, it’s weird. We always thought the INDY gene would be something elegant and special. Turns out, the brass ring we’d been looking for all that time was just a random clump of viral DNA on chromosome fourteen, hidden among a bunch of other junk DNA. Right there in plain sight.”

  Kathleen nodded clumsily. She knew everything he was saying was true. Her research had confirmed the exact same thing.

  “Of course, the INDY sequence is heavily degraded in the human genome. That’s why it was so hard to find and why it’s no longer functional. But, with enough research, I knew we could eventually reverse-engineer the original sequence.”

  “But . . . why didn’t you tell me? I was your research partner.”

  “I wanted to, Kathleen. I swear. I almost called you that week. But I just kept thinking . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “You kept thinking what?”

  “I kept thinking about the consequences.”

  “What consequences? The INDY gene was exactly what we were looking for. It was the whole goal of our project! What was the problem?”

  “Kathleen, no offense, but my concerns were much bigger than you and me. These were national security concerns . . . human race concerns. I needed to bring them to a higher level.”

  “Who, Brinard?” Kathleen was referring to Jean Brinard, the head of their research group at NIH at the time, whom neither she nor McCreary respected very much.

  “No, not Brinard. Higher.”

  “Dr. D’Angelo?”

  “Higher.”

  “Higher than the director of NIH?”

  “Yeah,” said McCreary, arching his eyebrows. “I called Peter Stonewell.”

  “Secretary Stonewell? You went straight to HHS?”

  “Kathleen, I needed someone with the appropriate perspective. Not Jean, not D’Angelo. I needed someone who could look past the scientific thrill of it all and see the bigger picture. I figured Stonewell was the right guy. And I was right.”

  Kathleen was still shaking her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’ve known about chromosome fourteen for two years and haven’t published a single paper or breathed a word about it to anyo
ne, including me. That’s not how science works, Bill, and you know it.” Kathleen could barely control her anger. It wasn’t right to sit on this type of discovery. Not something this important—a technology that could potentially save millions of lives, a technology that people needed now. She pictured her grandfather, sitting alone at Garrison Manor, lost in the dark and terrifying world of Alzheimer’s disease, while McCreary—Mr. Big Picture—pondered “concerns.”

  “So what were these concerns you had about our research?” said Kathleen coldly.

  “Hold that thought,” said McCreary, raising his index finger. “We’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?”

  “DARPA. It’s where I work now.”

  Kathleen knew the acronym but couldn’t remember exactly what it stood for. She gave it her best shot: “Defense . . . Acquisition . . . Readiness . . . ?”

  “No,” McCreary corrected her. “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I’m a program manager there now.”

  Kathleen detected a ring of pride in McCreary’s voice. And now she was starting to understand. McCreary had scuttled their research for a promotion. He’d sacrificed all their work for a sexy job title! She could really feel the heat rising in her face now.

  Five minutes later, the three of them were walking up the sidewalk to the glass-enclosed headquarters of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There were a few minutes of administrative protocol—mainly involving McCreary vouching for Kathleen—then they headed back to his office.

  Kathleen was amazed by the phalanx of security measures, which seemed to get more intense as they approached McCreary’s area, OSNS. “Jeez, what do you do back here?” she asked half jokingly.