Mutant Read online

  “Pardon?” said the environmentalist.

  “What kind of shape were the plants in, Steve. Dead? Dying? Turning purple with pink spots?”

  Patton bristled. “Of course not,” he snapped.

  “ ‘Of course not’ what? No pink spots, or no evidence of any harm to the plants at all?”

  “Evidence of genetic damage takes years, generations to appear—”

  “Oh, yeah, we’re back to the ‘It’s too early to tell’ argument you guys keep spouting. Let’s see, trees can live three hundred years. Are you suggesting we shut down the bioengineering industry until then, just to be safe?”

  “You know I didn’t mean that—”

  “Because what really matters is whether these bits of DNA do any injury to anyone or anything,” Aimes continued. “And until you provide proof of that, you’ve no right to be mouthing off—”

  “I’m calling for a vote on Dr. Steele’s motion right now,” Patton cut in, paying no attention to the furious protests and wild gesticulations coming from Aimes.

  It passed, but barely, reflecting the breakdown between traders and scientists in the room.

  Aimes came up to Steele once Sullivan adjourned the meeting and the media had moved elsewhere. “You fucking creep,” he said. “You just put a hundred-billion-a-year industry at risk. That’s a lot of Americans who could lose their jobs, and most of them, when they see you on the news tonight, will now consider you their worst enemy.”

  “I think I was reasonable,” Steele told him quietly. “You can’t ignore health risks in any business.”

  “This issue is about trade, asshole, not medicine. So butt out!”

  Sullivan, who’d been standing nearby, walked over after Aimes had stormed off and slipped her arm through Steele’s. “I couldn’t help but overhear. He’s a jerk, but unfortunately the jerks have the upper hand on this matter, at least in this part of the planet.” She started to stroll with him toward one of the conference hall’s exits.

  “You’re kidding! How can they ignore those studies?”

  “With the money and power that they’ve got behind them? Easily! Steve’s right, even though he infuriated me the way he rubbed it in. Until I can get proof of direct damage to humans, idiots like Aimes will block us every step of the way—until there’s finally a disaster that even he and his fat-assed cronies won’t be able to sit on. By the way, you did well with the media today. You’re going to be a bit of a star, at least for tonight, once the networks get hold of the feed. I can have my office in New York call your home if you like, to let anyone there know when they can see you on TV.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary, thanks,” he replied, figuring he’d call Chet and Martha himself. He wasn’t going to pass up a chance to inform them that he’d done something worthwhile for a change, instead of being the usual jerk they’d had to put up with for almost two years now. As an afterthought to Sullivan’s offer, he suddenly wondered if she’d just subtly probed his marital status.

  “Can I buy you a drink, then?” she offered, the pitch of her voice slipping up a notch.

  He had other plans. “I’m sorry, but I can’t right now. Could I take a rain check?”

  “Sure,” she said, smiling up at him as she disengaged her arm.

  At that moment Steve Patton came through the door up ahead and spotted them. His step hesitated ever so slightly, and the hint of a frown appeared on his face. In an instant it vanished, and he called out, “There you are,” continuing toward them. “Jesus, Kathleen, don’t get mad at me for saying this again, but your expounding that theory about genetic vectors and bird flu without proof is making us look like idiots. Aimes is out in the lobby talking up a storm with the press, claiming that by showing up here with nothing to offer but speculation, to quote the son of a bitch, ‘The famous Kathleen Sullivan herself admits she can’t produce a single shred of proof linking genetically modified foods with bird flu or any other human illness.’ ”

  Steele thought he saw a hint of red appear in her cheeks, but it disappeared as fast as it came. She nevertheless slipped her arm back in his before quietly replying, “He’s a crock.”

  Patton seemed taken aback, whether by her soft tone of voice or her apparent claim to another man’s company, Steele couldn’t tell. “Yes, of course, he is,” the environmentalist curtly agreed after a few seconds, “but by discrediting you, he’s also undermining our study. Already he’s insisting we’re blowing smoke over nonexistent risks with it as well. ‘Making too big a deal about a few strands of naked DNA turning up in otherwise perfectly healthy plants,’ was how he put it. Kathleen, I’m telling you, if his bottom line remains unassailed—‘No evidence exists that any human has ever been harmed by genetically modified foods,’ ” he mimicked, this time catching Aimes’s bombast perfectly, “and if we don’t deliver hard evidence to the contrary soon, I’m afraid he’ll successfully block the UN from adopting any new regulations regarding vectors.”

  “But the vote,” said Steele. “Our motion passed.”

  The two looked at him as if he were an idiot.

  “Kathleen, I know you,” Patton resumed. “Whenever you do go out on a limb with your speculations, you usually have a study or experiment in mind to prove or disprove your hypothesis. If you’ve got anything up your sleeve that could even possibly link vectors with the spread of bird flu to humans, now’s the time to bring it out.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” she answered.

  Once more he seemed staggered by the quietness of her reply. “Yes, I’m sure you will,” he said. “Well, if you’ll excuse me.” He nodded to them both, turned, and rushed back out the way he’d come in.

  “You think you can get such proof?” Steele asked, intrigued by what he’d heard, but wanting to keep their conversation within the safe bounds of professional matters. He’d no intention of becoming a pawn in whatever existed between her and Patton.

  “Possibly.”

  “But where?”

  “Not far from here, actually.” She disengaged her arm from his for a second time. “See you tomorrow,” she added, and exited by the door leading to the street without looking back.

  Through the glass he saw Patton waiting outside for her. The man tried to take her by the elbow, but she pulled away. His face reddened, and he went on talking with her, making imploring gestures with his hands the whole time. She gave him a withering look, then left him standing on the steps.

  Christ, thought Steele, watching her go, this whole day’s been the scientific equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show.

  Chapter 8

  In the grove of trees where she hid, the trade winds buffeted the palms high over her head, whipping them back and forth and filling the air with a continuous rushing sound loud as a passing train. Looking up, she thought of tall brooms trying to sweep stars off the belly of the night, then shifted her focus to the silver-tipped clouds racing in from the sea, their leaden bottoms scudding over the mountain ridge behind her. I’ll have to keep up with their shadows, she decided, readying herself for a sprint into the open. Once more she surveyed the moonlit farmhouse in the distance, trying to spot signs of movement. Apart from the occasional flap of shingles lifting up from the roof and threatening to fly off, nothing stirred. Neither could she see a trace of light. If she hadn’t known Hacket lived there, she would have thought the place abandoned. It had the gray, dried appearance of a thing sloughed off, like a husk some insect might shed and discard in the dirt. Crouching low, she stepped into a field of waist-high grass and started running toward it.

  Half an hour ago, just before midnight, she’d parked her car a quarter-mile up the road, then crossed the fields to the back of Hacket’s property where the foliage and trees provided better cover. But now, making a two-hundred-yard beeline to the fence where the chicken coop would be, she felt exposed. Trying to keep up with the pools of shadows racing her along the ground, she kept her eyes on the house, imagining Hacket standing in the blackness behind one of those
windows and watching her while she approached. From the way the curtains hung listless, ghostly white sentinels at the sides of the frames, she figured the place must be shut tight against the wind. It’ll be hotter than Hades in there, she thought, the night air still warm despite the breezes. Surely no one could sleep in that kind of heat. Hell, maybe he’s not even at home.

  The barn loomed large as she crossed the final hundred yards of the field, obscuring her view of the house beyond. Drawing closer, she heard it issue up loud creaks and groans, until it sounded like a massive wooden ship straining against the wind. No sooner did she reach the fence and was running along behind it than a loud bang, deafening as a gunshot, pulled her up short, sending her pulse racing. Ducking down, she peered through the slats, only to see a wide wooden door set in the side of the building swing open and repeatedly slam into the wall behind it.

  Seeing no one, she got to her feet, scampered over the rickety barricade she’d been hiding behind, making it sway beneath her weight, and dropped to the ground in the farmyard.

  Seconds later, on her knees in front of the coop, she hurriedly began to scoop bits of soil, tufts of grass, and clumps of weeds into her sample cases. If I could just find traces of genetic vectors in these, she thought as she worked, then at least I’ll have shown them to be in the vicinity of the infected birds. Not a smoking gun, but the first link in a chain of circumstantial evidence.

  Next she pulled up a handful of dried corn kernels. Probably left over from chicken feed, she figured, filing them away. Another loud wham ! from the wooden door at her back set her heart pounding again. “Christ!” she muttered, steadying her nerve and regretting that her relationship with Steve had soured to the point that she balked at asking him to accompany her.

  When she’d first stopped sleeping with him it had become difficult for them to do anything together. She thought he would be more sophisticated about it, but he initially couldn’t seem to accept her decision, pressuring her to remain his lover until she no longer felt comfortable whenever he came around. The very thing she wanted to avoid, their friendship falling into tatters, seemed inevitable, until, a few weeks later, he began to pull himself together, eventually apologized, and slowly became his old debonair self. “Forgive a middle-aged man his foolishness, Kathleen,” he said over a cup of coffee in the students’ lounge of her building one afternoon. “Please put it down to the profound effect you had on an aging roué. And I can assure you I’m not so stupid as to let emotions fracture our working relationship. You were absolutely right—it’s too important.”

  Their continuing collaboration, however, had proved difficult, particularly on the vector study. Too often their debates over legitimate scientific differences became so charged with emotion that neither one of them seemed capable of being objective in the other’s presence. But in the end the bickering lessened, and they succeeded in seeing the project to completion, appearing to have taken the first difficult steps in putting their affair behind them. She’d even allowed herself to hope that, with time, they might possibly become an effective team again. That’s why his I-told-you-so attitude had infuriated her today. It felt like a slap in the face after all their hard-fought efforts to remain colleagues, if not actual friends. What a mess, she thought, regretting ever having allowed him to seduce her in the first place.

  Richard Steele, on the other hand, interested her. The night before, as she’d briefed him about the conference, his quick grasp of everything they discussed had impressed her immensely. “You’re a quick study,” she complimented him when they were through.

  “You’re a good teacher,” he’d replied, shedding the overly serious expression he’d worn up to that point and surprising her with a sudden smile.

  Wow! You should do that more often, she’d nearly blurted out, startled by how much more attractive he became with the change. “Why, thank you,” she said instead.

  They’d made professional small talk after that, about New York, university politics, and in particular the impact of her field on his practice of medicine, until he pleaded jet lag and excused himself. But by then she’d sized him up as a man who could match her own quick intellect stride for stride. Since her divorce six years ago she’d had affairs, yet each relationship had ultimately foundered upon a single shoal—the difficulty some male egos had in dealing with her being both intelligent and successful. Except for Steve Patton. Ironically, he’d always delighted in her intellect, seeming genuinely pleased whenever she beat him to the punch solving scientific problems, which was why she found their arrangement so refreshingly appealing at the beginning. Obviously with him, however, compatibility in “smarts,” as he’d put it, did not a relationship make.

  But Steele’s prowess in that regard she nevertheless found attractive. Not that she wanted to do anything about it just now. She’d offered to buy him a drink only to learn more about him, in addition to asking for his help. But once he’d said that he had other plans, she felt too embarrassed to press him about a midnight skulk in a farmer’s field.

  Later she’d spotted him with Sandra Arness at the hotel bar and understood what those “plans” of his entailed. God, that woman’s got haunted eyes, she observed at the time. Then she took a closer look at Steele and thought she caught a hint of a similar darkness in his gaze. Perhaps the man has a few ghosts of his own to contend with, she mused.

  Resuming the business of grabbing more specimens, she admitted to feeling more than a twinge of jealousy watching the two of them. “Hell, why is it sad people always seem to seek each other out?” she muttered, expressing her frustration at being overlooked, even if only for a one-night stand that she probably wouldn’t have agreed to anyway. Yanking extra hard at some larger weeds from an untrampled area near the end of the coop, she pulled them up along with a stunted corn stalk that had evidently grown from kernels in the feed. I’ll label these later, she decided, wanting to get away from the place as quickly as possible, and stuffed them unceremoniously into her handbag. But she also needed samples of straw and feed from the relatively sheltered roosts inside the pen. These might contain dried bird droppings, and if she could demonstrate evidence of vectors in excrement, she’d have proven another necessary link in the chain of events she’d postulated—that these genetic carriers designed to promote mutations were actually present in the infected birds and could have been transmitted along with the virus to the child. Best of all, she knew, would be to find remnants of the bird flu virus itself in the excrement and analyze it for vectors, but that would be unlikely after all this time. Unfortunately the original viral specimens taken from the boy no longer existed. The CDC in Atlanta, once the scare of an outbreak was over, had disposed of the samples Dr. Carr had sent them.

  Retrieving the latex gloves that she’d brought in her kit and pulling them on in case something infectious had survived, she found a dilapidated gate leading into the cage. When she slid it open, the rusty hinge protested with a shriek so loud that she feared Hacket might wake up. Nonsense, she reassured herself. Even if he were home and did hear anything, surely he’d put it down to the sound of the wind. Nevertheless, running swiftly to the corner of the barn, she peeked around it, looking up to see if a light had snapped on behind one of the windows.

  At first they seemed as black and empty as before. Then, just as she was about to turn away, she saw the pale blurred contours of a face emerge from the darkness behind one of the smudged panes upstairs and stare right at her. Through the grime and in the half light, the features were impossible to make out, but the eyes appeared to be hollow shadows, like those of a death mask, and the entire visage seemed suspended in midair. In a flash, the floating apparition twisted sharply to one side and disappeared.

  Oh, my God, she thought, and started to run back toward the coop. Throwing open the gate again, she raced inside, reached in to the partially sheltered roosts along the back, and grabbed a handful of old straw. Whether it had a good coating of dung she’d neither the time nor light to see. Cra
mming it into her purse with everything else, she fled the enclosure and headed for the fence. The moon overhead suddenly emerged from behind the clouds, and the field became bathed in silver, every foot of the two-hundred-yard trek as visible as day. The trail through the tall grass she’d left coming in formed a dark telltale path that would easily give her away should she follow it. Over the sound of the wind she heard a slam from the direction of the house, then someone shouting.

  She couldn’t even be sure it had been Hacket she’d seen, but his words—“I got a shotgun for trespassers”— echoed through her head. Could he be crazy enough to actually shoot at someone? If he did come after her, she’d never make it to the woods and cover before he got her in his sights. She turned, scanning the barn for a hiding place, and sprinted for the door still noisily bashing against its frame. Ducking inside she pulled it closed behind her and held it in place, until she realized he might notice it wasn’t making noise anymore. She let it open a crack, enough to peer outside, intending to let it swing free again if Hacket hadn’t appeared yet. To her dismay two figures ran into view, both wearing hoods and carrying handguns. They held the muzzles straight up, and at the ends of the barrels she could see the outlines of stubby round cylinders. Their weapons had silencers!

  From the pit of her stomach to the back of her throat she felt as if a fist had clamped off her breathing. Her head started to reel, and she struggled to keep her knees from buckling. Yet a corner of her mind remained rational enough to ask, Why would Hacket have men here with silencers?

  They spoke to each other in quick bursts of a language she didn’t understand. She could make out that their hands were dark-skinned, and thought at first they might be native Hawaiians speaking a Polynesian dialect. But the harshness of what they were saying didn’t sound at all like the soft words she’d heard a smattering of on the island. The two men then passed from her line of sight, leaving her desperately wanting to know where they were.