by Greg Bear
“She’s having some problems,” Augustine said.
“What kind of problems?” she asked.
“Her husband is missing, probably a suicide,” Augustine said.
“That was over a month ago,” Dicken said.
“There seems to be more trouble in store. Before he disappeared, her husband sold their company out from under her, to pay off an investment of venture capital she apparently did not know about.”
Dicken had not heard about this. Obviously, Augustine had been conducting his own probe on Kaye Lang.
“Jesus,” Shawbeck said. “So, she’s what, a wreck, we leave her alone until she heals?”
“If we need her, we need her,” Kirby said. “Gentlemen, I don’t like the feel of this one. Call it a woman’s intuition, having to do with ovaries and such. I want all the expert advice we can get. Mark?”
“I’ll call her,” Augustine said, giving in with uncharacteristic speed. He had read the breeze, saw the windsock swinging; Dicken had won a point.
“Do that,” Kirby said, and swiveled in her chair to face Dicken dead on. “Christopher, for the life of me, I still think you’re hiding something. What is it?”
Dicken smiled and shook his head. “Nothing solid.”
“Oh?” Kirby raised her eyebrows. “The best virus man in the NCID? Mark says he relies on your nose.”
“Sometimes Mark is too damned candid,” Augustine said.
“Yeah,” Kirby said. “Christopher should be candid, too. What’s your nose say?”
Dicken was a little dismayed by the surgeon general’s question, and reluctant to show his cards while his hand was still weak. “SHEVA is very, very old,” he reiterated.
“And?”
“I’m not sure it’s a disease.”
Shawbeck released a quiet snort of dubiety.
“Go on,” Kirby encouraged.
“It’s an old part of human biology. It’s been in our DNA since long before humans existed. Maybe it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.”
“Kill babies?” Shawbeck suggested tartly.
“Regulate some larger, species-level function.”
“Let’s go with what’s solid,” Augustine suggested quickly. “SHEVA is Herod’s. It causes gross birth defects and miscarriages.”
“The connection is strong enough for me,” Kirby said. “I think I can sell the president and Congress.”
“I agree,” Shawbeck said. “With some deep concerns, however. I wonder if all this mystery could catch up to us down the road a ways and bite us in the butt.”
Dicken felt some relief. He had almost blown the game but had managed to hold back an ace to play later; traces of SHEVA from the corpses in Georgia. The results had just come back from Maria Konig at the University of Washington.
“I’m seeing the president tomorrow,” the surgeon general said. “I have ten minutes with him. Get me the domestic stats on paper, ten copies, full color.”
SHEVA would soon become an official crisis. In the politics of health, a crisis tended to be resolved using familiar science and bureaucratically tried and true routines. Until the situation showed its true strangeness, Dicken did not think anybody would believe his conclusions. He could hardly believe them himself.
Outside, under felt-colored skies, a dull November afternoon, Augustine opened the door to the government Lincoln and said, over the roof, “Whenever anyone asks you what you really think, what do you do?”
“Go with the flow,” Dicken said.
“You got it, boy genius.”
Augustine drove. Despite Dicken’s near fumble, Augustine seemed happy enough with the meeting. “She’s only got six weeks left before she retires. She’s taking my name in to the White House chief of staff as a suggested replacement.”
“Congratulations,” Dicken said.
“With Shawbeck as a very close backup,” Augustine added. “But this could do it, Christopher. This could be the ticket.”
22
New York City
Kaye sat in a dark brown leather chair in the richly paneled office and wondered why highly paid East Coast lawyers chose such elegantly somber trappings. Her fingers pressed the brass heads of the upholstery nails on the arm.
The lawyer for AKS Industries, Daniel Munsey, stood beside the desk of J. Robert Orbison, her family’s lawyer for thirty years.
Her father and mother had died five years before, and Kaye had not paid Orbison’s retainer. With Saul’s disappearance and the all-too-stunning news from AKS and the corporate attorney for EcoBacter, now sucking up to AKS, she had gone to Orbison in a state of shock. She had found him to be a decent and caring fellow, who said he would charge no more than he had ever charged Mr. and Mrs. Lang in their thirty years of business.
Orbison was thin as a rail, hook-nosed, bald, with age spots all over his head and down his cheeks, whiskers on his moles, loose wet lips, bleary blue eyes, but he dressed in a beautiful custom-fitted pinstripe suit with wide lapels and a tie that almost filled the V of his vest.
Munsey was in his early thirties, darkly handsome, soft-spoken. He wore a smooth tobacco-colored wool suit and knew biotech almost as well as she did; in some ways, better.
“AKS may not be responsible for the failures of Mr. Mad-sen,” Orbison said in a strong, gentle voice, “but under the circumstances, we believe your company owes Ms. Lang due consideration.”
“Monetary consideration?” Munsey lifted his hands in puzzlement. “Saul Madsen could not convince his investors to keep funding him. Apparently, he had focused on a deal with a research group in the Republic of Georgia.” Munsey shook his head sadly. “My clients bought out the investors. Then- price was more than fair, considering what’s happened since.”
“Kaye put a lot of work into the company. Compensation for intellectual property—”
“She has contributed greatly to science, not to any product a potential purchaser could possibly market.”
“Then surely, fair compensation for contributing to the value of EcoBacter as a name.”
“Ms. Lang was not a legal co-owner. Saul Madsen apparently never regarded his wife as more than a managerial employee.”
“It is a regrettable lapse that Ms. Lang did not inquire,” Orbison admitted. “She trusted her husband.”
“We believe she’s entitled to whatever assets remain in the estate. EcoBacter is simply no longer one of those assets.”
Kaye looked away.
Orbison looked down at the glass-covered desktop. “Ms. Lang is a famous biological scientist, Mr. Munsey.”
“Mr. Orbison, Ms. Lang, AKS Industries buys and sells going concerns. With Saul Madsen’s death, EcoBacter is no longer a going concern. There are no valuable patents in its name, no relationships with other companies or institutions that can’t be renegotiated outside our control. The one product that could be marketable, a treatment for cholera, is actually owned by a so-called employee. Mr. Madsen was remarkably generous with his contracts. We’ll be lucky if the physical assets recoup ten percent of our costs. Ms. Lang, we can’t even make payroll for this month. Nobody’s buying.”
“We believe that given five months, using her reputation, Ms. Lang could assemble a team of solid financial backers and restart EcoBacter. Employee loyalty is very high. Many have signed letters of intent to stay with Kaye and help rebuild.”
Munsey raised his hands again: no go. “My clients follow their instincts. Perhaps Mr. Madsen should have chosen another kind of firm to sell his company to. With all respect to Ms. Lang, and nobody holds her in higher esteem than I do, she has performed no work of immediate commercial interest. Biotech is a highly competitive business, Ms. Lang, as you know.”
“The future lies in what we can create, Mr. Munsey,” Kaye said.
Munsey shook his head sadly. “You’d have my own investment in a flash, Ms. Lang. But I’m a softy. The rest of the companies…” He let his words trail off.
“Thank you, Mr. Munsey,” Orbison said, and ma
de a tent with his hands, on which he rested his long nose.
Munsey seemed nonplussed by this dismissal. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Lang. We’re still having difficulty with our completion bond and insurance negotiations because of the way Mr. Madsen vanished.”
“He’s not coming back, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Kaye said, her voice breaking. “They found him, Mr. Munsey. He’s not going to come back and have a good laugh with us and tell me how to get on with my life.”
Munsey stared at her.
She could not stop. The words poured out. “They found him on the rocks in Long Island Sound. He was in terrible shape. I had to identify him from our wedding ring.”
“I’m deeply sorry. I hadn’t heard,” Munsey said.
“The final identification was made this morning,” Orbison told him quietly.
“I’m so very sorry, Ms. Lang.”
Munsey backed out and closed the door behind him.
Orbison watched her silently.
Kaye wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I had no idea how much he meant to me, how much we had become one brain, working together. I thought I had my own mind and my own life…and now, I find out different. I feel less than half a human being. He’s dead.”
Orbison nodded.
“This afternoon I’m going back to EcoBacter and I’m going to hold a little wake with all the people there. I’m going to tell them it’s time to find work, and that I’ll be there right alongside them.”
“You’re smart and young. You’ll make it, Kaye.”
“I know I’ll make it!” she said fiercely. She hit her knee with her fist. “Goddamn him. The…bastard. The creep. He had no goddamn right!”
“No goddamn right at all,” Orbison said. “It was a cheap and dirty trick to pull on someone like you.” His eyes brightened with the kind of anger and sympathy he might have carried into a courtroom, firing up his emotions like a rusty Coleman lantern.
“Yeah,” she said, staring wildly around the room. “Oh, God, it is going to be so hard . You know what the worst part is?”
“What, dear?” Orbison asked.
“Part of me is glad ” Kaye said, and she began to weep.
“Now, now,” Orbison said, an old and weary man once more.
23
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta
Neandertal mummies,” Augustine said. He strode across Dicken’s small office and shoved a folded paper onto Dicken’s desk. “Time marches on. And Newsweek, too.”
Dicken pushed aside a set of copies of infant and fetal postmortems for the last two months from Northside Hospital in Atlanta and picked up the paper. It was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the headline read “Ice Couple Confirmed Prehistoric.”
He skimmed the article with little interest, just to be polite, and looked up at Augustine.
“It’s getting hot in Washington,” the director said. “They’ve asked me to assemble a taskforce.”
“You’re in charge?”
Augustine nodded.
“Good news, then,” Dicken said warily, sensing storms.
Augustine looked at him, deadpan. “We used the statistics you put together and it scared the hell out of the president. The surgeon general showed him one of the miscarriages. A picture, of course. She says she’s never seen him so upset over a national health issue. He wants us to go public right away with the full details. ‘Babies are dying,’ he says. ‘If we can fix it, go fix it, and now.’ “
Dicken waited patiently.
“Dr. Kirby thinks this could be a full-time operation. Could bring in additional appropriations, even more funds for international efforts.”
Dicken prepared to appear sympathetic.
“They don’t want to distract me by appointing me to fill her shoes.” Augustine’s eyes became beady, hard.
“Shawbeck?”
“Got the nod. But the president can make his own pick. They’ll hold a press conference on Herod’s flu tomorrow. ‘All-out war on an international killer.’ Better than polio, and politically it’s a slam dunk, unlike AIDS.”
“Kiss the babies and make them well?”
Augustine did not find that funny. “Cynicism doesn’t become you, Christopher. You’re the idealistic type, remember?”
“I blame the charged atmosphere,” Dicken said.
“Yeah. I’ve been told to put together my team for Kirby’s and Shawbeck’s approval by noon tomorrow. You’re my first choice, of course. I’ll be conferring with some folks at NIH and some scientific headhunters from New York this evening. Every agency director will want a piece of this. It’s my job in part to feed them things they can do before they try to take over the whole problem. Can you get in touch with Kaye Lang and tell her she’s going to be drafted?”
“Yes,” Dicken said. His heart felt funny. He was short of breath. “I’d like to have a few picks of my own.”
“Not a whole army, I hope.”
“Not at first,” Dicken said.
“I need a team” Augustine said, “not a loose bunch of fief-doms. No prima donnas.”
Dicken smiled. “A few divas?”
“If they sing in key. ‘Star Spangled Banner’ time. I want a background check for any sort of bad smell. Martha and Karen in human resources can arrange that for us. No flag burners, no hotheads. No fringies.”
“Of course,” Dicken said. “But that would leave me out.”
“Boy genius.” Augustine wet his finger and made a mark in the air. “I’m allowed just one. Government issue. Be in my office at six. Bring some Pepsi and Dixie cups and a tub of ice from the labs, clean ice, okay?”
24
Long Island, New York
Three moving vans stood outside the front entrance of EcoBacter as Kaye parked her car. She walked past two men dollying a stainless-steel lab refrigerator past the reception desk. Another hefted a microplate counter, and behind him, a fourth carried the body of a PC. EcoBacter was being nibbled to death by ants.
Not that it mattered. It had no blood left anyway.
She went to her office, which had not been touched yet, and closed the door forcefully behind her. Sitting in the blue office chair — worth about two hundred bucks, very comfortable — she switched on her desktop computer and logged in to her account on the International Association of Biotech Firms job board. What her agent in Boston had told her was true. At least fourteen universities and seven companies were interested in her services. She scrolled through the offers. Tenure track, start and ran a small virology research lab in New Hampshire…professor of biological science at a private college in California, a Christian school, Southern Baptist…
She smiled. An offer from UCLA School of Medicine to work with an established professor of genetics — unnamed — in a research group focusing on inherited diseases and their connection with provirus activation. She marked that one.
After fifteen minutes, she leaned back and rubbed her forehead dramatically. She had always hated looking for work. But she could not let her momentum be diverted; she had not won any prizes yet, might not for years to come. It was time to take charge of her life and move out of the shallows.
She had marked three of the twenty-one offers as worth looking into, and already she was exhausted, her armpits wet with sweat.
With a sense of foreboding, she checked her e-mail. It was there that she found a curt message from Christopher Dicken at the NCID. His name sounded familiar; then she remembered, and swore at the monitor, the message it bore, the way her life was going, the whole ugly ball of wax.
Debra Kirn knocked on the transparent glass of the door to her office. Kaye swore again, very loudly, and Kim peeked in, eyebrows arched.
“You yelling at me?” she asked innocently.
“I’ve been asked to join a team at the CDC,” Kaye said, and slammed her hand on the desk.
“Government work. Great health plan. Freedom to do your own research on your own schedule.”
>
“Saul hated working in a government lab.”
“Saul was a rugged individualist,” Kim said, and sat on the edge of Kaye’s desk. “They’re cleaning out my equipment now. I figure there’s nothing left forme to do here. I’ve got my photos and disks and…Christ, Kaye.”
Kaye stood up and hugged her as Kim broke into sobs. “I don’t know what I’ll do with the mice. Ten thousand dollars worth of mice!”
“We’ll find a lab that will hold them for you.”
“How can we transport them? They’re full of Vibrio I’ll have to sacrifice them here before they take away the sterilization equipment and the incinerator.”
“What do the AKS people say?”
“They’re going to leave them in the containment room. They won’t do anything.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“They say they’re my patents, they’re my problem.”
Kaye sat again, then thumbed through her Rolodex, hoping for inspiration, but it was a futile gesture. Kim had no doubt she would find work in a month or two, even be able to carry on with her research using SCID mice. But they would have to be new mice, and she might lose six months or a year of her time.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Kaye said, her voice cracking. She held up her hands, helpless.
Kim thanked Kaye — though for what, Kaye hardly knew. They hugged again, and Kim left.
There was little or nothing she could do for Debra Kim or any of the other ex-employees of EcoBacter. Kaye knew she had been as much a part of this disaster as Saul, as responsible for it through her own ignorance. She hated fund-raising, hated finances, hated looking for jobs. Was there anything practical in this world that she did like to do?
She reread Dicken’s message. She had to find some way to get her wind back, get on her feet, join the race again. A short-term government job might be just what she needed. She could not imagine why Christopher Dicken would want her; she barely remembered the short, plumpish man in Georgia.
Using her cell phone — the lab phone lines had been disconnected — Kaye called Dicken’s number in Atlanta.