He had said he would check out the hangar, hadn’t he? “Get a gofer up to Platform 3, then. I have an Assassin bird for the freezer. Evidence. Then I’ll go see.” Maybe it was the same Chickadee. If so…
“Thanks.” The dispatcher’s voice sounded relieved. “Everybody else is busy.”
“Ten-four.” Two-way radios might be more like phones now, but some things never changed.
The airport that had housed the Chickadee was an antique. Once, surrounded by fields, it had served crop dusters. Later, suburbs had grown up around it, the worn, brown grass of the runways had been paved, and it had been a base for commuter airlines and air freight services. Now grass struggled to reclaim the cracked and rutted pavement. The arch-roofed metal hangars were streaked with rust. A few small private planes, lifeless and mechanical, gathered rust on the parking apron near a dilapidated terminal building. Even fewer modern bird-planes were visible, though their lost feathers and other litter testified that more must wait in the sun-baked hangars or be off on flights.
The airport manager was short, round, and bald, except for a thin fringe just above his ears. The hair that tufted above his eyes and in his ears and nose seemed much more plentiful. His name was Frederick Conal, and in between wide-eyed glances at Bernie’s Hawk, he was complaining: “Yah, sure, it kept getting away from here, and he kept calling, telling me to come get it. And we did. Twice. But now—Look! Look at it, Officer! He says an Assassin bird did it, but I think…”
“He’s right,” said Bernie. His Hawk stood next to a snow-white Dove. A twisted-wire cable bound the Dove’s neck to a ring set in the concrete of the apron. Its interior—white leather and velvet, with black accents—looked very comfortable, but that was not what appealed to the Hawk. Bernie wondered if his predatory vehicle would try to take a bite. So did the Dove, apparently, for it sidled a few steps to one side, getting as far as its tether would allow from the Hawk’s hooked beak.
Bernie did not choose to put the Hawk into dormancy. Conal was anxious for some reason, far more anxious than a dead Chickadee would seem to warrant. The detective wondered whether he might not play upon that anxiety. Scare him, he thought, and he might reveal something useful. And he wouldn’t even have to try hard. Conal was a rabbit. And he, Bernie, was an official predator. He was, he thought, a Hawk himself. He liked the image.
“A beak this long,” he added deliberately, using both hands to show how long he meant. “It was trying to kill a woman, but the Chickadee grabbed it.”
“That’s what he said.” Conal shook his head as if amazed at the heroism of a mere Chickadee, or at the fact that someone could tell the truth.
Bernie pretended to ignore the man as Conal gave the Hawk one more terrified glance. The Chickadee’s carcass, one wing splayed, eyes already glazed, lay on the pavement not far from where they stood. No one had bothered to rig a tarp to shade it from the sun, and already the flies were gathering. Happily, so far there was no stink. He squatted beside the dead bird’s neck and used a ballpoint pen to probe the wound. It was not the full depth of the Assassin bird’s beak, he found. Nor did it seem to sever any major blood vessels. He looked closely. The edges of the wound were discolored in a way that did not seem due to mere drying. He sniffed. The odor was off as well.
He stood again, dusting his palms over his uniform knees. “Where’s its hangar?”
Conal’s eyes flicked left while his right hand flapped at the air. “What do you want…? What’s that got to do with…?” His voice squeaked. “Do you have a warrant?”
Bernie stared at the man. Conal’s eyes had gone to the nearest hangar, so close that the Chickadee must have been trying to reach it when it died. Why had his panic suddenly increased? “I don’t need one,” he said. “You called me in, remember? And I want to know how this Chickadee could keep getting loose.”
“But…!” The day was hot, but the humidity was mercifully low. Bernie had not noticed any great accumulation of moisture on his own body. Now, he noted with interest, Conal’s bald head bore noticeable beads of sweat.
“You have the right…” Conal shut up as Bernie read him his rights. Then the detective turned toward the hangar. The door was held by a simple padlock-and-chain arrangement. He shook it. The door was solidly fastened.
“Unlock it.”
When Conal refused, he drew his .357 magnum, held the muzzle close to the padlock, and pulled the trigger. The padlock shattered, and the Dove and other small planes parked nearby, startled by the report, spread their wings reflexively. Only his Hawk failed to respond. He pulled the door open.
“Lights?” Bernie kept the gun in his hand as Conal pushed past him, one arm extended to the right. There was a click, and a bank of overhead fluorescents came on.
The hangar was not much larger than the Chickadee itself. The floor was dirt, though a drain received the overflow from a metal sink whose single tap ran constantly, if slowly. Bernie supposed any bird confined to such a sweatbox would need plenty of water.
There was room in the hangar for the plane, a wheelbarrow, a food trough crusted with the remains of the Chickadee’s recent meals, and a table. The jet’s engine and pod hung from the ceiling. Maintenance tools decorated the walls. A few chairs were scattered around the periphery. A dungheap marked the Chickadee’s customary parking position, and Bernie wondered why. At the Aerie, at the city’s main airport, litter was never allowed to accumulate. Then he recalled the mess outside, and its revelation that what picking up was done here—which clearly wasn’t much—had to be done by human hands.
“Don’t you have litterbugs?”
Conal twitched, satisfyingly rabbitlike. “They cost too much. We’re just a small operation.”
The hangar’s corrugated metal walls concentrated the sun’s heat pitilessly. Bernie thought that that alone, even with the water, might be enough to drive a plane to run away during the day. So might the stink the heat cooked out of the dungheap. He scowled at signs of spilled jet fuel, and Conal said, “We do put ‘em outside during the day, you know. On the line, out there. The hangars are for foul weather, and night, and winter.”
With an abrupt wave of one hand, Bernie cut him off. Sweating now, and still scowling, he stalked through the hangar. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but there was a faint touch of something strange to the stink in the hangar’s air.
In the back, under the small wooden table and close by the dungheap, the dirt floor looked disturbed, as if someone had been digging. He scanned the hangar’s walls. There was a shovel, its blade marked by ordinary soil, not the litter one might expect, or wish.
When he moved the table and reached for the shovel, Conal began to back toward the door. “Uh-uh,” said Bernie. He raised the gun in his other hand as a reminder of the strength of his position. “Stay here.” He whistled, and the Hawk’s shadow moved to block the hangar’s doorway.
He put the gun away and began to dig. Moments later, he had the answer spread out on the tabletop: two wooden boxes, each one twice the size of a shoebox. Each one was full of small vials. Each vial contained a gelatin capsule that might once have held vitamins. There were no labels, though the capsules were of various colors that might encode some meaning.
Bernie’s voice was disgusted. “Hedonic parasites,” he said aloud. He bent over the table to sniff the vials. He sensed nothing but the odor of freshly turned earth, and then he realized what the strange scent had been. It was not the smell of contraband, but—in a hangar that normally reeked of litter, jet fuel, and old bird food—that very scent of dirt.
Smugglers, he thought. Coming in at night to bury the goods, or dig them up while money changed hands. Though the quantities of money could not be great. It was too easy to get the parasite eggs from another addict. Or might this be something new? He held a vial to the light. Through the translucent wall of the gelatin capsule he could see a small round dot that looked more like a seed. He knew about the nettles that had come on the market in just the last few months
. Was that what these were? Whatever, the smugglers had been here, and they presumably had let the Chickadee out to give themselves more room in which to work.
The airport manager was huddled against one wall of the hangar, his body folded in upon itself as if he were cold. But he was sweating too, and even more than could be credited to the hangar’s saunalike atmosphere. Bernie ignored him as he threw the shovel down and went to the Hawk. There he used the radio to call the dispatcher and request a warrant and a crew. They would search the terminal and the other hangars, collect the evidence, arrest Conal, and stake out the cache in hope of catching the smugglers that night, or the next. The hope was slim, he knew, for surely there was another of the gang watching the hangar now, noting his presence, and warning off the rest. But they would try.
The necessary reports had taken time, but it was still morning when Bernie set his Hawk down in the Neoform parking lot and toggled it to sleep. He grinned when he noticed the Gilman family Tortoise not far from the slot he had chosen. He had some information for her, perhaps he could learn something more about gengineering, and maybe…
The Gray Lady at the reception desk kept him waiting just long enough to let him know that everyone called her Miss Carol, that it was an awful shame what happened on the expressway just the other day, and she hoped he, as a policeman, would see to it that it never happened again, and Dr. Gilman was such a nice woman, didn’t he think? When Emily showed up on the other side of the turnstile, he could just barely restrain an effusive “Thank you!” until they were out of sight.
“She has that effect on everyone,” said Emily. “I’ve heard Security took a year to find her.”
He stopped dead in the hallway and swung to face her. “You mean it’s an act?”
“Oh, no!” Her wide mouth parted in a laugh, and he noticed the way the floral print of her dress swayed as if in a breeze and her pens bounced in the pocket on her bosom. She touched his arm to push him into motion again. “Oh, no! They wanted a genuine yenta. I’m told the idea is that she can keep any intruder talking—or listening—until the guards arrive.”
“As long as she’s on duty.”
“Oh, well. There’s someone else on the desk, but we lock the doors at night.” He supposed the company’s armed guards were on more visible patrol then, as well. “There’s the lab.” She pointed. As they began to slow down for the turn into her lab, a man emerged from a door on the other side of the hall, and a little farther from them. He was slight, short, and brown-skinned, and when he saw them, he scowled viciously. Bernie thought he recognized the man, but he had to grope for the name.
Only when they were in the lab could he say, “What’s Chowdhury mad about today?”
“Probably the same thing as yesterday. He holds grudges.” She gestured toward a young black man seated before a complicated array of control pads, glass tubing, and test tubes. “You met Alan. He’s putting together an artificial virus for a gene transplant.”
“How does that work?” he asked.
“Wild viruses can plug genes into DNA, but they put them anyplace. The ones we use can be designed to insert a ‘cargo’ gene wherever we wish in a genome. They can also be targeted to any type of cell in an animal’s body. We have viruses for plants too.”
When he said nothing, she added, “The key is simple. DNA is built as a sequence of simpler chemicals, or nucleotides. And it can bind to matching sequences. Since the virus is also DNA, all we have to do is tailor the appropriate piece of it to match the target area we want, and the virus will do the rest.”
Now Bernie looked confused. Alan grinned up at them. “We use them the way mechanics use pliers,” he said, ignoring her little lecture. “You shouldn’t have scared Chowdhury’s Armadon for him.”
“You heard, huh?”
“We all did, though it didn’t help that you were with her at the time.”
When Bernie looked puzzled, Emily explained, “There’s a certain amount of rivalry between us. He wants those Armadons of his to be the next big product for the company. I want…” She told him about the Bioblimp.
“And the chowderhead hates everyone anyway,” said Alan. “His parents were South African.”
“Alan!”
He grinned sheepishly. “You know I can’t resist.”
Bernie admitted to himself that the epithet seemed inevitable. He knew just enough history to feel that Alan’s description made sense, though he could not, at the moment, spell out that sense. He shrugged, smiled, waved a hand, and followed Emily to her office corner. “What’s that gadget?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“A DNA splicer,” she said. “Have you found out something about that bird already?”
He shook his head, let his gaze drop to her ankles, and scratched one temple. “Not really. Though we know it’s a government genimal, and the beak was poisoned.”
“That stain!”
He nodded, watching her face, the wide eyes, the parted lips that let the words escape so quietly, almost in a whisper. “It stabbed the Chickadee.” She nodded. “This deep.” He showed her with his fingers. “And that was enough to kill it. I had the call even before I made it back to the office.” He told her what else he had found in the hangar.
“Then Nick was right. It must have been in the way, and…”
“They were letting it out.”
She stood up and said, “Coffee?” The coffee maker was on the windowsill. She had to step behind him to reach it, and as she did so, her belly brushed the back of his head. Was it deliberate? He let his head lean into her, and she said nothing. But when she had poured the two cups and handed him his, she retraced her path without touching him.
Shrugging mentally, he said, “The Assassin bird—you saw the band on its ankle? That carries the bird’s serial number. Unfortunately, the number wasn’t readable. Whoever sicced the bird on you defaced it.”
She sipped her coffee. “Why didn’t they just take the band off?”
He shook his head. “They tried. But the band is fiber-reinforced metal.” He meant, she knew, the same material that was used to strengthen the skeletons of jets and other genimals against the consequences of the square-cube law. “All they could do was gouge a few of the digits badly enough to make them unreadable.”
He then began to explain how an Assassin worked: Its handler showed it two photos, one of the intended victim, one of some landmark near which that person could be found, and released it not far from the landmark. The bird would then locate the landmark and lie in wait until the target appeared. Often, as in this case, the beak would be poisoned, although the beak alone was quite sufficient if the bird hit a vital spot.
She let him get about halfway into his explanation before she stopped him with a chopping gesture of one hand. “I know,” she said. “I looked them up this morning, when I got here. Neoform designed them for some government agency—I don’t know which—years ago, when I was still in school. We still breed them, though that’s a different operation from this.” She pointed her chin toward the rest of her lab. Her expression said that she didn’t like the idea of clandestine assassinations, whether directed at her or not.
He hadn’t known, he told himself, that Neoform was responsible for the Assassins. That bit of information hadn’t been in the data base he had been able to tap that morning once he had established his “need to know” as a law-enforcement officer. He supposed that she had been able to consult company files more easily.
But all he said was: “I’m getting hungry. Lunch?”
When lunchtime came to the police department, its clerks, administrators, and officers streamed steadily from the building’s main entrance, slowing only when too many people tried to get through the door at once. At Neoform, Bernie therefore thought the rush of employees through the halls toward the main entrance entirely normal, at least until the traffic flow slowed and halted not far from the turnstile.
Emily had just introduced him to one of her coworkers, Frank Janifer. Wh
en everyone stopped, he asked the man what was going on.
“Miss Carol,” he said. “The dragon at the gate making sure that everyone signs out properly.”
“Security,” said Emily. “They tried electronic cards once, until the day a summer intern showed up with six of them. She said she was supposed to put them all through the scanner. Their owners were in a rush.”
Yet the technology of signing out was not obsolete. Electronic cards may not have worked, but no one had felt that meant a return to pen and paper was necessary. As each person came to the turnstile, they bent and worked an electronic wand over a plastic-coated surface connected by a cable to the company’s main computer. Their signature was instantly compared with a template in memory, and the machine kept the essential records of who came in and went out, and when. The process took no one long. Soon Bernie and Emily were outside and walking toward a nearby restaurant. “I don’t know much about gengineering,” he said.
Emily sidestepped as a girl, perhaps ten years old, sped past them on a bicycle. “It began almost a century ago,” she said. “Biologists first learned how to snip genes apart in the 1970s. The key was chemicals—protein enzymes—that cut DNA only at certain points. Very quickly then, they learned how to add genes taken from one organism to the genome of another. They used everything from microscopic shotgun pellets—coated with DNA copies of genes—to viruses, which would carry a gene into a cell and plug it into the cell’s DNA.”
The restaurant featured a broad flagstoned patio overshadowed by a trellis supporting a heavy growth of vines. Most of the patio’s tables were occupied, but they found a small one for themselves. Menus were already on it. When it was obvious that the waiter would be a while in getting to them, Bernie said, “And now you use those artificial viruses.”
“Like the one you saw Alan assembling.” She took a moment then to scan the headlines on a newspaper spread across a chair at the next table. They concerned a demonstration against bioforms in another city; the demonstrators had built a bonfire and roasted a litterbug. Done with that, she glanced at the menu and raised a hand to attract the waiter’s attention. He nodded distractedly, as if to say, “Soon! Soon!”
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