Ancestor Page 5

  It wasn’t what Magnus said, but the way he said it. Danté blinked a few times. “That’s not funny.”

  “Odd,” Magnus said. “I’m so well known for my sense of humor.”

  Danté shook his head. Surely Magnus couldn’t seriously suggest such a thing. “This is different. These people are loyal to us, so don’t mention it again.”

  “Are you sure? Colding and Feely, they’re both ex-USAMRIID, same department Fischer works for.”

  “We wouldn’t even have a company if it wasn’t for Colding.”

  Magnus shrugged. “And Feely? How do you know Fischer doesn’t have him on a string?”

  Danté rubbed his temples. “What choice do we have? Colding tells me Feely is the only reason Jian and Erika can work together at all.”

  “I think we should just end it.”

  “And then what? Do you want to tell the Chinese that Jian is gone? That their money is gone?”

  Magnus looked at the da Vinci sketches. “Speaking of money, the Chinese cut us off even before the Novozyme incident. No more spendy-spendy for you, round-eye. The whole company is in the red because of Rhumkorrf’s project, and now we’re adding costs with Purinam and the plane? How are we going to pay for this?”

  “I have an investor presentation scheduled. Five extremely rich individuals. I just have to ask for more than I originally planned.”

  Magnus turned back to look at Danté. Magnus rarely showed emotion, but Danté knew how to spot telltale signs of things like anger, frustration. Magnus had another tell, one he only seemed to express for Danté—the half-raised eyebrows of admiration.

  “Five?” Magnus said. “Think you can get them all?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  Magnus smiled again, a genuine one this time. Magnus possessed many skills Danté did not, but what Magnus couldn’t do was charm billionaires out of their precious money. Danté could. Every time.

  “This project is too important to stop now,” Danté said. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of lives.”

  “Hundreds of thousands? Being a little grandiose, don’t you think? Maybe you’re really talking about one life, in particular.”

  Danté’s face flushed red. “That’s not what this is about,” he said, although he knew full well that when you got down to brass tacks, when you got down to the real nitty-gritty, that one life—his life—was exactly what it was all about. “We’re pushing forward, Magnus. This benefits all of humanity. I don’t care if we go into the red. This project puts Genada on top, that’s what Dad would have wanted.”

  Magnus stared, but then his eyes softened, just a little, and he nodded.

  “Magnus, these are trying times, but the hardest steel is forged in the hottest fires. Do you have my back, or not?”

  Magnus drew a deep breath, then sighed and relaxed. “Of course I do. Always. You know you don’t have to ask. I’m just not going to rubber-stamp everything you say is all.”

  “We wouldn’t be much of a team if you did. Please get Purinam and her crew ready, and you go with them. Load up one of the local backup herds before you take off. The move will be faster if we don’t have to load the Baffin Island cattle. When you’re thirty minutes out, call Colding and tell him to gather the staff for an emergency evac. Even if Fischer does pick off those signals, I don’t think he’ll have time to react.”

  Magnus stood and walked out of the office. Danté would have to watch him. His brother got things done, no question about that, but in stressful times like these he could make bad decisions.

  Like the one he’d made about Galina Poriskova.

  NOVEMBER 8: RUNNING SUCKS

  “I HATE RUNNING,” Harold Miller said between big breaths.

  “Yeah,” said Matt “Cappy” Capistrano, “I fucking hate running.”

  Sara Purinam shook her head, then wiped sweat out of her eyes. “Three more laps to go, let’s dig.”

  Outside the hangar, winter winds swept across the snowy plains of Manitoba. Inside, however, she kept the temperature nice and warm. The huge plane took up most of the space, but she made sure all equipment was at least six feet away from the hangar walls. That left a nice running track all the way around. Civilians or not, her boys were going to stay in shape.

  “Running sucks,” Harold said.

  “Yeah,” Cappy said. “Running sucks.”

  The Twins, as Harold and Cappy were known, had elevated looking pitiful to an art form. Both jogged along, heads lolling a little bit, hands swinging loosely more than pumping. They ran the same, wore the same facial expressions, and repeated each other like sycophant parrots. They might have actually passed for twins save for the fact that Cappy was as black as an old Al Jolson caricature and if Miller were any whiter, his skin would have been transparent.

  Sara looked up at the far wall. Alonzo Barella, the last member of their crew, had a half-lap lead. “Come on, guys, let’s catch ’Zo.”

  “You catch him,” Harold said as his already pathetic pace slowed to a walk.

  “Yeah,” Cappy said. “You catch him and shit.”

  It was one thing to piss and moan, another thing entirely to quit. Sara felt an automatic diatribe of discipline build up in her head, but she stopped it—they weren’t in the military anymore and she wasn’t their superior officer. They were all partners. Friends.

  Instead of yelling, she doubled her pace, leaving the Twins behind. She reached the corner and turned left, keeping the hangar wall always on her right. Maybe this time, she would catch him.

  Unlike the Twins, Alonzo Barella loved to run. The skinny man could go all day. Sara pushed her pace even more, cutting his lead in half, then slowed instantly as her cell phone rang. Not with the normal ring, but with Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars—the special ringtone she’d set up for Magnus Paglione.

  “’Zo! Hold up!”

  Up ahead, Alonzo stopped and turned. Jogging in place. He wasn’t even sweating.

  Sara answered. Within seconds she had her orders. After a year and a half of getting paid to do nothing but maintenance, it was time to bust out “Fred” and earn their keep.

  And, she had to wonder, if she’d finally see that piece of shit P. J. Colding again.

  NOVEMBER 8: NOT WIRED THAT WAY

  INSIDE THE VETERINARY medicine lab, Erika Hoel cursed under her breath. Sixteen straight failures of the immune response test. Claus had been mad before, but this time his face had turned so red Erika wondered if her former lover might have a stroke.

  Claus. That asshole. Erika hated the scientific failure, but couldn’t help feeling some satisfaction at seeing Claus so angry. So … frustrated.

  She’d loved him once, back when they worked together on the quagga project. Claus wanted what he couldn’t have, and what he’d wanted was for Erika to love only him. But she wasn’t wired that way. She had needs, baseline drives and desires that couldn’t be ignored and didn’t need to be corrected. There was nothing wrong with her. She liked men. She also liked women. If Claus had been right for her, he would have understood that, accepted it. But no, for all his brilliance, for all his righteous ego and accomplishments, deep down inside he was a small-souled man who needed to control people. A man who needed to be the only one.

  She still loved Claus.

  She still loved Galina.

  And she had neither. Heartbreak is bad enough by itself, but a double dose is exponential agony.

  Galina had been a far better assistant than Tim Feely. Not that Tim was stupid, not at all, but some people just operate on a different level. Tim was competent enough, and he also served … other purposes, true, but Galina he was not.

  Erika had already been in love with Claus when Danté hired Galina. A second love had followed. Erika should have told Claus, but she’d known full well what he would say. So she’d kept it secret, and it had ended as badly as it could: when Claus caught them in the act.

  Claus forced Danté to kick Galina out of the project. And the
n Galina had asked Erika to leave as well, so they could be together. And what had Erika chosen? The project. At the time she told herself the project was far more important than romantic dalliances. Oh, that conversation with Galina, that last conversation—how it had shattered the young girl’s heart.

  Galina hadn’t taken it lying down. She’d been willing to fight for Erika. Or so she’d said. Galina threatened to blow the whistle on Genada’s human line of experimentation, but after a few weeks, Danté and Magnus had bought the girl off. They gave her millions in hush money and sent her back to Russia. Love, it seems, like everything else, has a price.

  I chose the project. That’s what Erika had told herself at the time. In the past year, however, she gradually realized the real reason she’d stayed. For Claus. To be near him. But he never forgave her. She had begged him for another chance. He would not cave. He never mentioned the incident, never changed the way he acted around Erika in the lab. In many ways that was even worse—now he treated her like a colleague, and a subordinate one at that, as if their hundreds of nights of passion had never existed at all.

  She had chosen the project, and now the project was all she had.

  Standard cloning projects had a fairly predictable pattern. First, select a cell from the animal you wanted to clone—usually a stem cell—and enucleate it by removing the single cell’s nucleus. Second, take an egg from the surrogate mother and enucleate that as well. Third, put the stem cell nucleus into the now-empty egg cell, provide an electrical shock to fuse the two, then wait for the single cell to start dividing in a process called mitosis. If that happened, insert the hybrid egg into the surrogate mother and let it develop normally.

  The method had originated in the legendary cloning of Dolly, the Scottish sheep. Later came the avalanche of cloned species: fish, birds, goats, cattle, even dogs and cats. The process had become so formulated that elements were taught as early as high school.

  The key to all cloning methods revolved around using the same or similar species for both the egg and the creature to be cloned. For the ancestor project, however, the last close relative died out some 260 million years earlier. Jian’s computer program, the thing they all called the “God Machine,” had provided a genome that actually produced a viable embryo, splitting on its own, undergoing several rounds of mitosis. In a petri dish, that part, the impossible part, had already been solved. But you couldn’t grow a whole animal in a petri dish—until they could trick the cow’s immune system to accept the embryo as self, the embryo could not grow into a fetus, and the project was at a standstill.

  With the quagga, the answer had been comparatively easy. The animal was closely related to zebras. Once they had cultivated a quagga chromosome out of DNA recovered from hair and other remains, they injected it into the enucleated zebra egg, then put the egg back into a surrogate zebra mother.

  It hadn’t worked at first. The zebra’s immune system rejected the embryo. Erika had found a way around the problem by isolating the gene sequence that produced the antigens—the offending proteins—then replaced the sequence with the corresponding segment from the zebra’s DNA. It had been a small section of DNA, and they still weren’t sure exactly what it coded for, but the method worked. With the offending antigenic proteins eliminated, the zebra’s body handled the pregnancy normally, resulting in the first baby quagga to set foot on the planet in more than a century.

  But zebra and quagga DNA were over 99 percent identical. Now, however, they didn’t have a mother that was a close genetic match. They had a computer-designed genome and a cow.

  Jian’s God Machine assigned a “viability rating” to estimate the chances of the hybrid egg passing the immune response test, then developing through surrogate pregnancy all the way to birth. It measured the products of known DNA sequences against those that were lesser known, or even unknown. So far, 65 percent was the highest rate they’d hit. Somewhere in that remaining 35 percent were the proteins that triggered the bovine immune system. That 35 percent amounted to billions of nucleotides, millions of sequences—far too many to eliminate by trial and error. No one knew exactly what genes coded for what traits. She and Jian kept changing these unknown sequences, but couldn’t say for sure what the changes would affect—they might be swapping out a protein that affected the color of the animal’s eyes, or a protein that was a critical component of brain development. And they couldn’t know until the animal grew beyond a ball of undifferentiated cells. For the immune system experiment to work, they’d have to reach an 80 percent viability rating, possibly higher.

  When they’d started the project with mammal genomes available online, in the public domain, the viability rating had been low. The first thousand genomes generated an 11 percent rating. The thousand after that took them to 20 percent. After they had processed four thousand mammalian genomes, they’d cracked 45 percent viability. From there, Genada’s bottomless resources started sequencing uncommon mammals, even extinct species, and with each one the rating ticked a little bit higher.

  Would Bobby Valentine’s four new specimens be enough to get over 80 percent? And if not, what could she change? Perhaps a new approach and the additional genomes together would get them over the hump. Part of Erika hoped for success, but a stronger part hoped for failure. The last thing she wanted to see was Dr. Claus Rhumkorrf rewarded for being a heartbreaking, small-minded prick.

  NOVEMBER 8: EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

  MAGNUS FOLDED HIS cell phone and put it in his left jacket pocket. He took a sip from a glass of Yukon Jack. The ice cubes clinked a little. He set the drink down and put both hands on the desktop. He breathed slowly. In and out. In and out.

  In contrast to his brother’s da Vinci sketches and priceless works of art, Magnus decorated his office with personal items: dozens of photos, and a single, wall-mounted display case.

  Several of the photos showed a smiling, postmission Magnus in various uniforms, some tan and brown, some green, one in a thick wet suit. In all of those, he was posing with other dirty, smiling, dangerous-looking men. Four faces showed up repeatedly: Andy Crosthwaite, Gunther Jones, Brady Giovanni and Bobby Valentine. Those pictures came from Magnus’s years in Joint Task Force 2, the counterterrorist division of the Canadian Special Forces. He smiled a lot in those pictures. Things had made sense back then.

  The largest photo was from Magnus’s days as a tight end for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League—dressed in the red-and-white uniform, stretching high and long to catch a football just before landing in the end zone. A simpler time, a time between leaving the service and joining Danté at Genada.

  The pictures weren’t all from the CFL or JTF2. One of them showed Magnus and Andy Crosthwaite holding hunting rifles, kneeling in front of an old well made of black stone, a bloody line of nine severed deer heads spread out before them. Danté kept asking him to take that picture down, said the office wasn’t the place for it, but Magnus liked it, so it stayed. There were also postcardish shots, of course: pictures of Magnus and Danté fly-fishing in Montana, at a business meeting in Brussels, together on a yacht in the south of France. Those photos with his brother were true treasures—nothing mattered more than family. Danté was the only family Magnus had left.

  Danté had also asked Magnus to remove the wooden display case, but that simply wasn’t going to happen. On the left, the case showed Magnus’s unit insignia and rank pins. Stretching out to the right, a dozen Ka-Bar knives mounted point-down, sharp edge facing right. Each of the knives had a story. Five of the knives showed the blackened discolorations of metal heated in a fire. There was enough space for three or four more on the case’s right-hand side. Some tales are never finished.

  Magnus took one last deep breath, focused, let it out slow, then turned to his computer and called up a spreadsheet.

  A lot of red.

  His brother was running Genada into the ground because of some altruistic vision. And for what? A replacement organ bought you what, ten years? Maybe twen
ty? The universe was at least thirteen billion years old—were there even enough decimal places to measure twenty years against that?

  Everyone dies.

  Some sooner than others.

  Danté had smarts, cleverness, business instincts. That was why Dad had left the company to Danté, not to Magnus. A smart decision, the right decision. But one thing that Danté didn’t have was a real backbone. That was okay, though—that’s what brothers are for. When it came time for the hard decisions, Magnus would protect his brother.

  Magnus would make sure things got done.

  NOVEMBER 8: THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

  COLDING KNOCKED ON the door to Tim Feely’s apartment.

  “Enter,” Tim called from inside.

  Colding tried the handle and found it locked. “It’s locked, dumb-ass.”

  “You know the code.”

  “I don’t know the code to your door, Tim.”

  “You know my computer password? Same thing, chief.”

  Colding sighed. He did know that password, as did everyone else. 6969. The high-security practices of their resident computer expert. Colding punched the numbers into the keypad mounted on the wall next to the door.

  Tim sat on the couch of his tiny living room, laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Also on the coffee table, a half-empty bottle of Talisker scotch. Tim loved his scotch.

  His apartment looked exactly like Jian’s, and every other apartment in the facility: about six hundred square feet of cozy space divided into a living room, a kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom.

  “Come on, Tim. Why are you working in here instead of with Jian?”

  “Because Tiny Overlord Rhumkorrf wants us to think differently.”

  “Immune response test failed again?”

  Tim nodded. Colding walked up to the couch and peeked at Tim’s laptop screen.

  “Dude,” Colding said. “Is scotch and Tetris really part of thinking different?”