Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  In addition to his academic duties, Connor was a founding member of JASON, an academic think tank providing classified advice to the FBI, the CIA, and the military. Said John Rand, assistant secretary of state in the Nixon administration, “Connor was the one. He convinced Nixon to renounce offensive biological weapons in 1969.” He was also a major force behind the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Connor remained active on the issue, arguing vociferously against the buildup of the U.S. defensive bioweapons program over the last few years.

  At the same time, Connor was a tireless advocate for the constructive uses of biotechnology. He became a major supporter of the field of synthetic biology, writing opinion pieces and lobbying Congress. His book Merge, describing the coming symbiosis between cells and microelectronics, is considered a classic in the field.

  He is survived by a daughter, three grandchildren, and a great-grandson. He remained an active scientist to the end. Last year he was part of a team that won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge competition for autonomous microbots. Said his colleague on the project, Jake Sterling, “There’s no other way to say it. He was a pure genius.” In an interview three years ago, Connor was asked to name his biggest breakthrough. He replied, “I am still hoping to make it.”

  MAGGIE PUT THE PAPER DOWN, TEARS IN HER EYES. CINDY’S hand was on her shoulder. The breakfast table was quiet, just the two of them. Everyone else was still in bed.

  Maggie tapped the article. “It’s very respectful.”

  “Of course.”

  “Most of it was probably written years ago.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Maggie folded the paper carefully, laid it on the table. The front-page piece was less flattering, filled with speculation about why he had killed himself. The picture they’d used was an aerial shot of the Fall Creek Gorge, with literally thousands of people clustered around both ends of the suspension bridge.

  “Maggie? You all right?” Cindy asked.

  Maggie realized she was holding her head in her hands, staring down at the table. “I keep thinking of the video of Liam jumping.” She rubbed her hands across her face. “That woman that was on the bridge with him. She has to be the key. Liam wouldn’t jump without a reason. He wouldn’t do that to Dylan.”

  “Still no word on her?”

  “No. I called the police twenty minutes ago. Nothing.”

  Maggie was exhausted. She was up a half-dozen times the night before, struck with an irrational need to check on Dylan to make sure he was safe. She glanced toward the bedroom where her son was still sleeping. The last twenty-four hours had been tough on him—Dylan idolized his great-grandfather. Maggie had separated from Dylan’s biological father, Arthur Mix, six months after Dylan was born. A professor of operations research at Harvard, he had shown no real interest in staying in close contact, and Maggie had long ago given up trying to force it. They would see each other once or twice a year, but Dylan treated Arthur more like a distant uncle than a father.

  Dylan was a great kid, but this was way beyond what any nine-year-old should have to handle. Maggie had been devastated when her father had died of pancreatic cancer and her mother passed away later the same year. She was twenty when it happened. Dylan was half that age. And he was having panic attacks. She had to come get him in the middle of the day at school just last month. He said his chest hurt. He said that he was sure he was going to die.

  Dylan was seeing a child psychologist, a woman about Maggie’s age with children of her own, but it was slow going. If Dylan’s fears grew worse, she said drugs might be an option, but Maggie hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  A knock at the front door. “Who is that?” Cindy asked, surprised. Visitors had to call to get through the police guard at the top of the road. The press had been relentless.

  “I’ll get it,” Maggie said. “It’s probably Mel, Liam’s lawyer. He called a few minutes ago.”

  She opened the door to find Melvin Lorince waiting, a large collapsible file under his arm. She’d last seen Mel at his wife’s funeral four months ago. Nearly as old as Liam was, Mel was remarkably tall, even with his stoop, with hands like giant spiders.

  “Maggie, forgive me for intruding.”

  “You know you’re never intruding. Please. Come in.”

  “I won’t impose. I wouldn’t have bothered you, except I promised your grandfather.” He handed her the collapsible file.

  “What’s this?”

  “Papers to sign. Copies of his will. Deeds to the house. A few other things. Some of them might surprise you. Liam had made a few investments.”

  “What kind?”

  “Just take a look. There’s a ledger that gives a full accounting. There’s also a letter inside. Addressed to you.”

  “A letter.”

  He nodded.

  “When did he give this to you?”

  “Two weeks ago. He told me that as soon as possible after his demise, I should deliver this to you. Personally. Made me promise out loud.”

  She felt the tears starting again. “Two weeks ago? Are you serious? How did he seem?”

  “His normal self. Making jokes about it. I remember he said, ‘Only a precaution. In case I’m hit by a bus. I’ve no intention of going anywhere just yet.’ ”

  “Did he sound sincere?”

  “I thought so then. Now—I don’t know, Maggie. I can’t make any sense of this. He loved you and Dylan so much. He talked about you all the time. He was so proud of you.…” Mel paused. He was losing it, too.

  Maggie rubbed her eyes. She made herself say it. “You think he was… preparing for this?”

  Mel shook his head. “I truly don’t know. I’m pretty good at reading people, but your grandfather? I could never tell when he was having me on. He could tell me the moon was made of ice cream and I’d believe him.” He looked down, as if he’d find the answer in the baseboards of the floor. “He was a proud man. A gifted man. Age takes your gifts from you.” He shook his head again, touched his hands to his face. “Being old is… difficult. You slowly begin to fade. And at some point, there’s not enough left.”

  “So you believe it was suicide?”

  “Maggie, I’m sorry.” He put a hand out, touched her arm.

  SHE TOOK THE FILE TO HER BEDROOM, PLACED IT IN THE center of her unmade bed. She stepped back, gathering herself up. Pop-pop had prepared this for her. Before he died.

  He might have known he was going to die.

  She found the letter right away. The envelope was white, blank except for her name, MAGGIE CONNOR, written in her grandfather’s familiar scrawl.

  She ran her fingers across his handwriting, smearing the pencil strokes across the white paper. She could almost see him, hunched at his desk. He was a champion letter writer, practically wrapping himself around the words. He would go on for pages, including scientific ideas, snippets of words from anyone from Yeats to Beckett, little drawings. His letters were a wonder.

  She didn’t want to look inside. It was likely the last physical object she would ever receive from her grandfather. It marked a kind of peak, a divide separating a past where Pop-pop was alive from a future where he wasn’t. She didn’t want to cross that divide.

  She set the letter aside, just for a moment, and sorted through the rest of the folder. Inside was a stack of legal documents, nothing more personal than a property deed. She found the ledger Mel had mentioned. A spreadsheet on the opening pages listed Liam Connor’s stock holdings, including dates the stocks were purchased, the price, and annual tallies of liquidation value.

  Maggie was shocked. Liam was not just a brilliant scientist—he was a brilliant investor. Starting with twelve hundred dollars in 1950, he had slowly built his portfolio with purchases of IBM, Intel, Apple, right up through Google. If she understood the numbers, Liam Connor’s estate was worth millions.

  Maggie set the ledger on the bed. Is that what this was about? Money? She didn’t care about money. She didn’t want her
grandfather’s money.

  She didn’t care if he was worth ten billion dollars. She’d trade it all in a second to know why.

  Maggie flipped through the rest, but there was nothing else that mattered.

  Nothing but the letter.

  She carefully unsealed the flap, her hands shaking. She took a few deep breaths, trying to steady herself. She couldn’t believe how afraid she was to open it. How afraid she was to find out if he really had planned to jump.

  Calm down, Maggie. Buck up.

  She removed a stationery-sized sheet of thin yellow paper from the envelope.

  Maggie—

  Tell Dylan that it’s one last trip to the moors.

  Jake knows the territory.

  Ask him where the elephants perch.

  I love you so—

  Pop-pop

  12

  “MY BOSS IS UNDER TREMENDOUS PRESSURE TO BRING THIS case to a close,” Becraft said as he and Jake rode up the elevator in Weill Hall, the brand-new, two-hundred-sixty-thousand-square-foot behemoth in the heart of campus. “To declare it a suicide and move on. You saw the reporters camped outside his office. And the provost is calling him almost hourly. We’re all working double shifts, trying to put it to bed, but the chief is resisting. Said it doesn’t smell right.”

  Becraft was here to learn everything he could about the Crawlers in a Box project. He was talkative, his weariness opening him up. Jake decided to take advantage. “Does it smell right to you?” Jake asked.

  “It stinks. We can’t find the woman on the bridge. We can’t find the Crawlers. And now we’ve got people from Fort Detrick on the way, unwilling to tell us anything.”

  THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED TO THE THIRD FLOOR OF Weill Hall. They went past the atrium and down a corridor painted antiseptic white. Jake stopped at a door with a sign that said SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY—V. GLAZMAN above a series of standard yellow-and-black warning stickers about the dangers found inside. He pushed open the door. “Vlad?”

  The Russian appeared, chomping on a mouthful of gum. Since he’d quit smoking, Vlad was an inveterate gum chewer, stopping only when he was drinking.

  Jake did the introductions. Vlad pulled a box of Chiclets from his pocket, offered some to Becraft. He shook his head no. “You sure?” Vlad persisted. “Fruit flavor.” Rejected, Vlad tossed a handful in his mouth. “Come,” he said.

  They passed lab bench after lab bench, each set up with the necessary tools for DNA synthesis, gene sequencing, plasmid transfection, and genome design. They followed the squat Russian until he stopped at a long table in the corner.

  With great fanfare, he pulled a Plexiglas box from his pocket, the size of a pack of cigarettes. He held the plastic box up for Becraft to see. It was filled with computer circuitry and complex miniature piping, like a tiny factory. “Meet NEWTON,” he said. “It is acronym. Stands for Needle Electrowetting Technique for Oligonucleotide Nanogenotyping.”

  Becraft shook his head. “Come again?”

  “Have you ever seen BSL-4 diagnostic lab? Where they handle the most dangerous pathogens? They are monstrosities, with air locks and doors and pressure suits. It is like working at the bottom of ocean. There are maybe ten in the entire country. Even a small one costs tens of millions.

  “This,” he said as he tapped the box, “can replace them. Squeeze a BSL-4 lab down to a room six inches long, four inches wide, and two inches tall. Less than a thousand dollars, total cost.”

  Vlad picked up a glass slide. He handed it to Becraft. “Spit,” he said.

  “On the slide? Why?”

  “Humor me.”

  Becraft spit on the slide. Vlad took it and placed it under a microscope hooked up to a video monitor. “Let’s say I worry you have smallpox virus. What do I do? I have you spit on slide. Then I put NEWTON to work.”

  Vlad put the NEWTON box near the glass slide, then took out a laser pointer and his BlackBerry and started working the keys. As they watched, a little door opened on the front of the NEWTON box. A Crawler skittered out and ran across the table. Becraft took a half-step back.

  “It’s controlled by microwave signal,” Jake said. “Basically like a cellphone, but working at a different frequency.” Vlad aimed the laser pointer at the Crawler. A red dot appeared on the table. The Crawler sensed the beam, ran sideways toward it. It followed the red dot as Vlad moved the beam along the table.

  Becraft watched, amazed. “It’s following the light?”

  “The heat,” Jake said. “The Crawler has a bolometric heat sensor. It can even pick up the thermal signal given off by your hand.”

  Vlad led the Crawler across the Formica bench, up and onto the glass slide. Then he hit a key on his BlackBerry and the Crawler stopped.

  The Crawler’s image filled the monitor, enlarged fifty times. The Crawler was supping at Becraft’s spittle like a deer at a stream.

  “There you go,” Vlad said. “The Crawler has sample. Now we just send it home.” With his BlackBerry and the laser pointer, he led it back to the box. The door opened, and in it went. “If this were real threat, we could be doing this from the next room. Or next state.”

  Vlad picked up the box, placed it under the microscope. “Now it gets interesting.” They watched on the monitor as the Crawler walked in and regurgitated the droplet back up out of its proboscis, creating a cloudy spherical orb of liquid on a transparent piece of plastic. The Crawler retreated to the corner of the box.

  Vlad pushed a button, and the droplet was sucked in, down into a tiny tube, disappearing into an array of tiny channels. “Preprocessing,” Vlad said. “Separating DNA from drool.” A minute later, the droplet reappeared on what looked like a shiny field of silver grass, clearer now. Underneath the grass, the outlines of electronic circuitry were dimly visible.

  “Our test sample,” Vlad said, gesturing to the nearly perfect orb on the screen. “Droplet is sitting on special computer chip. The surface is array of tiny vertical needles etched in silicon. Each less than one hundred nanometers in diameter. The needles are hydrophobic—water hates them—so droplet floats on surface.”

  “It looks like it’s glowing,” Becraft said.

  “Fluorescence,” Vlad said. “Dye molecules are in droplet that stick to DNA. Make it glow.”

  Vlad adjusted the microscope, and the image zoomed out; the field of grass became a perfectly square miniature lawn. Next to the lawn was a label—fifteen letters etched in silicon: AAACGACTTACGTAT. Vlad zoomed out farther to reveal an array of square lawns, each labeled by a different set of fifteen letters but always a combination of A,C,T, and G, the letters of the genetic alphabet.

  Vlad worked his BlackBerry, and the droplet suddenly flattened, penetrating down into the field of needles. “With simple voltage pulse, I make the water droplet stick itself on needles.”

  “Vlad the Impaler,” Jake said.

  Vlad glanced at Becraft. “He thinks he is clever.” He hit a key on his BlackBerry. “Okay—up!” The droplet was once again a perfect sphere on top of the needles.

  “I don’t get it,” Becraft said. “What does this have to do with detecting a biopathogen?”

  “The droplet is like a tiny test tube,” Vlad said. “Each patch tests for different pathogen. I make the droplet sit.…” Vlad made the droplet move to the next patch and descend again, impaling itself on the needles. “The needles have oligos bound to it—short strands of single-stranded DNA. Each is a genetic sentence taken from different pathogen. If the DNA in droplet matches the DNA stuck to needles, they bind together. Two single strands of DNA link up to form double helix. If the sequences don’t match, they won’t.” He hit a key, and the droplet popped back up.

  The droplet suddenly took off, running along the grassy patches like a crazed mouse in a maze. The watery orb ran to another patch, descended, then popped back up. “We do it over and over, testing for each pathogen,” Vlad said as the droplet ran around on the chip, flattening and popping back up at a dizzying pace.

  Becraft
pointed to a square. “Wait. That spot is glowing.”

  “DNA found a match there. Its complementary strand. It bound to DNA on square like lover, staying behind when droplet went away.”

  “And so that square glows.”

  Vlad nodded. “It tells you the pathogen.” Vlad checked the sequence written on the chip next to the glowing patch: CACGTGACAGAGTTT. “Hmm. Human parainfluenza virus.”

  Becraft stepped back.

  Vlad put an arm on his shoulder. “Common cold.”

  Becraft said, “What was Connor’s part in all this?”

  Vlad nodded. “This chip works with viruses. They are easy—a virus is nothing but genetic material and a protein shell. A few reagents release DNA or RNA, then we run a few steps of PCR to amplify. But bacteria, fungi, they are different. Their genes are locked up inside nucleus, which is inside membrane, which is inside cell wall.”

  Jake said, “Connor was developing protocols. Using the Crawlers to collect the samples, slice open the cells, extract the DNA, all the preparatory steps. The gardens of decay were his testing ground. He was teaching Crawlers to conduct every kind of genetic test you might imagine. It was easy for him to adapt his work to this project.”

  “And provide advice,” Vlad said. “Say a topic, he’d tell you everything about it. What it linked to. Fungi, bacteria, viruses. The whole history of pandemics, their use as biological weapons.”

  Becraft looked to Jake. “I thought you told me Connor didn’t work with anything dangerous.”

  “He doesn’t. When you are developing the protocols, you can use anything. Liam worked with whatever benign fungi he happened to be growing in the gardens.”

  “So I ask you again. He didn’t work with any dangerous pathogens?”