Oaths and miracles, p.10
Oaths and Miracles, page 10
“Biological science …” Victoria Queen muttered. She turned to her computer. “Not much there … now if you wanted physics or astronomy … Let’s see …” She stared at her terminal screen. Cavanaugh waited.
“Item 16-42-0563, postcard, July 14, claims the president is an alien from Arcturus genetically altered to resemble a human being. Unsigned.
“Item 16-42-3473, letter, August 3, claims the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is part of a feminist plot to secretly poison the nation’s water supply to attack only cells with Y chromosomes. Unsigned.
“Item 17-23-8503, letter, August 7, claims AIDS virus is biological warfare against this country’s artistic community by a jealous Japan. Signed, Christopher J. Walker, Seattle. That’s about it, Robert … and, oh, this just came in today. Molly brought it to me because she thought I’d get a kick out of it.”
She handed Cavanaugh a postcard of a grinning baboon, addressed to the Attorney General, although not by specific name. It was unsigned.
* * *
Dear Attorney General, You should know there’s a Soldiers of the Divine Covenant Camp in Cadillac, New York, It practices animal sacrifice. I think it practices human sacrifice too. You should look into this because there are kids there including mine. Isn’t there a law? This sacrifice is true even if I can’t prove it YET.
* * *
“Isn’t that a trip?” Victoria said. “I love the baboon.”
“What’s it got to do with microbiology?”
“Nothing. It would get d-based under ‘animals,’ ‘religion,’ and ‘murders.’”
“Oh,” Cavanaugh said, studying the postcard. It depressed him. God, the lost people wandering around out there.
“You’re certainly in a bad mood, Robert. I just thought this might amuse you.”
We are not amused, Cavanaugh thought of saying, but he knew better. He looked at the postcard again. Human sacrifice. Kids in the camp. God, what a world. And who would name a town after a car that was manufactured someplace else?
“Thanks, Vicky,” he said. “Will you keep me posted if you do get anything else concerning microbiology or genetic research? No matter who it’s addressed to.”
“Will do,” Victoria Queen said. “I’ll put a flag in the program.” Which at least wasn’t anything a nineteenth-century monarch would say. Thereby removing temptation.
Cavanaugh sneezed, blew his nose on purloined toilet paper, and left the Nut Dump.
Ten
Dr. Julia Garvey’s laboratory swarmed with sick rats.
Cavanaugh hadn’t expected that. Actually, he had driven out to Bethesda, five days after Kozinski’s murder, not knowing what to expect, but visualizing something vaguely like a cross between a hospital and the war room at NORAD: computers, medicinal smells, quiet antiseptic efficiency. But Dr. Garvey’s lab, once he’d been led to it through a huge labyrinthine building, looked more like his high-school biology lab. The computers were there, but half-buried under fantastic jumbles of boxes, notebooks, vials, syringes, racks of glassware, small machines he couldn’t begin to guess the uses of. And rats. Cages and cages of them, smelling like the sewers of hell. Cavanaugh forced himself not to gag. Dr. Garvey didn’t even seem to notice the smell. She looked around sixty, a trim brisk woman in a white lab coat. Her manner was formal. She led Cavanaugh past counters and shelves and sinks and high-tech machinery to the back of the lab, where two stools flanked a white table. Behind the table were stacks of rat cages.
“Sit down, please,” Dr. Garvey said.
Cavanaugh sat. He was now at eye level with several cages of white rats, some of whom stared at him from flat pink eyes that seemed to him full of rage. The back of the closest rat was covered with oozing purple sores. The rat in the next cage had pulpy lumps all over its head. The smell was overpowering, the sweet-sickly odor of rotting flesh.
“I’ve gone through Dr. Kozinski’s records, and I’ve spoken at length with his research assistant, Dr. Caroline Lampert,” Dr. Garvey said. “She was reasonably cooperative.”
“That’s good,” Cavanaugh managed, although Dr. Lampert wouldn’t have had any real choice. Kozinski’s work had been done on a government grant, which included the provision that all files be opened to any Justice Department investigation. The rat with oozing sores moved in its cage, twitching its tail. In the next tier down a rat crept to the front of the cage, twitching its nose. Its eyes were filmed with purplish growths.
“Now tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, just exactly what you want to know. Dr. Kozinski’s work was complex, but I can try to summarize it if I know specifically what you’re looking for.”
Cavanaugh felt a sneeze coming on. He caught his breath and held it, forcing the sneeze back up his nose until his eyes watered. The deep breath smelled so foul that once more his gorge rose.
“We’re not … not exactly sure what we’re looking for. Could you summarize the main thrust of Dr. Kozinski’s work, and then maybe I’ll know what questions to ask.”
Dr. Garvey pursed her lips. She looked like a strict nanny about to render judgment on some misbehavior. Cavanaugh seized gratefully on this image; it had nothing to do with rats.
She said, “Dr. Kozinski was working with the envelope coating of retroviruses. Do you know what retroviruses are?”
“You inject them into the body,” Cavanaugh said, grateful for the New York Times. “They carry altered genes. Then the new genes start multiplying like mad, making proteins that cure disease.”
“Well … not ‘like mad,’” Dr. Garvey said, pursing more, “and curing diseases isn’t quite that simple. But you’re essentially correct. Do you know about the coding regions of the retroviral RNA?”
“Nothing.”
More pursing. “All right. Then let’s start at the beginning.” She took a piece of paper from the cluttered table and drew a circle studded with knobby projections. It reminded Cavanaugh of a snow tire he’d had for his first car, a ’76 Chevy. Inside the circle she drew a long curvy snake, divided into six sections of varying widths:
“This is a virus. These knobs are the envelope proteins. Inside is the RNA, which will become DNA when the virus enters a human body cell and starts dividing there. This shows RNA genes that perform six different functions”—she tapped each of the curvy sections with her pencil—“long terminal repeat, which influence the activity of the viral genes and facilitate the insertion of viral DNA into cellular DNA. Next is a coding region, e-n-v, which specifies the proteins of the viral coat—that’s the knobs. The next two sections specify proteins of the enzyme reverse transcriptase and of the viral core. This fifth section, psi, is crucial to the inclusion of RNA in viral particles. In gene therapy, the psi is deleted, which means the virus can’t reproduce itself, only the altered DNA. Then the last section is another noncoding long terminal repeat. Is this clear so far?”
“Yes,” Cavanaugh said. It wasn’t, not all of it, but he could ask specific questions later. After he knew what Kozinski had actually been trying to do. And after his stomach stopped fluttering. A rat stared at him through its bars.
“Good,” Dr. Garvey said. “Ben was working with the e-n-v coding region. He was interested in the exact mechanisms by which viruses inject themselves into healthy cells inside the human body. See …” She drew next to the snow-tire-with-snake:
“This is the wall of a human cell that’s about to be infected. All these are various structures embedded in the cell wall. The virus binds onto a receptor site, breaches the cell wall, and invades the cell. Ben was studying exactly how that happens: what proteins are released as signals, what genes regulate their production, how the receptor sites recognize which—Mr. Cavanaugh, are you all right?”
Cavanaugh was not all right. A young man with his hair in a ponytail squeezed past Cavanaugh with an apologetic smile and opened a cage door. He reached in for a rat, pulling it out by its tail. Simultaneously, Cavanaugh felt another sneeze coming on.
“F-f-fine!”
Dr. Garvey looked dubious. “Well, then, the specific proteins Dr. Kozinski was working with are called—”
The pulled-out rat twisted and squealed at the ends of the pony-tailed researcher’s fingers. Soft pulpy sores covered its hind quarters. It smelled of rot. Cavanaugh’s sneeze—a monstrous sneeze, the granddaddy of all sneezes—exploded. It was followed by a second, and a third. His nose ran. His throat closed up like a valve.
“Oh!” The research assistant looked appalled.
“I’m sorry,” Cavanaugh gasped. “Just a cold. The wood shavings—”
Both researchers stared at him in horror. Finally Dr. Garvey said, “You have a cold? Don’t you realize you could infect the rats?”
“Infect—”
“The rats, yes. Colds are viruses, Mr. Cavanaugh. These are experimental rats—”
“They’re already infected!” Cavanaugh said, and broke into another round of sneezing. Dimly he felt Julia Garvey take his arm and pull him away from the rats, but he shook her off and fumbled blindly—his eyes were watering like faucets—for a tissue in his pocket.
The pony-tailed research assistant said icily, “But they’re not infected with your virus. All viruses are different, and you’re contaminating—”
“Contaminating the contaminated,” Cavanaugh tried to say, as a joke, to show he was being a good sport about the looks on both their faces. But before he could get the words out, the rat dangling from the researcher’s hand gave a mighty twist and its flailing body brushed Cavanaugh’s fingers. At the same moment his vision cleared and he noticed, half-buried under papers on the table, the remains of somebody’s lunch. A ham sandwich, oozing mayo. Lipstick on the bite marks. His gorge finally rose and he vomited. While sneezing.
Then he was being led firmly by Dr. Garvey. Out of the lab, into the hall. Pushed into the men’s room door. He leaned against a urinal, praying for death.
When he finally emerged, washed and sheepish, Dr. Garvey waited. Her lips were no longer pursed, but neither was she smiling. He guessed that she was unwilling to be his particular nanny any longer.
But he’d underestimated her. “In here, Mr. Cavanaugh.”
It was a conference room with a long polished table, ridiculously large for two people. It was also dark. “Unfortunately, the lights are temporarily broken, which is why I didn’t suggest this in the first place. Also, I assumed …”
She’d assumed a special agent for the FBI would have a stronger stomach. Cavanaugh smiled and sneezed.
“I’m sorry about the rats, Doctor. I didn’t realize I could … could …” Another sneeze.
“I really think you should be at home in bed with that cold,” she said, proving him wrong yet again. Nannyness was deeply embedded. “We can reschedule this briefing session.”
Rescheduling sounded wonderful. Anything that got him away from here sounded wonderful. But that wasn’t the way it worked. Not for him. “Just a few more questions. …You said Kozinski was working on how viruses alter the proteins in their coats in order to invade cells. In your expert opinion, could this work, even remotely, be applied to biological weapons?”
Dr. Garvey frowned. “I don’t see how. Oh, of course, biological warfare could use viruses as well as bacteria to infect people. But you don’t need to understand genetic mechanisms in order to do that. You just use them. And if you were working on some new virus, something really deadly …” She paused. He could see that she didn’t like this line of thought; she preferred to think of gene work as dealing in life, not death. “Well, then you’d concentrate on the viral core proteins, the toxins a virus makes when it’s not genetically altered. The proteins of the coat wouldn’t be of great interest.”
“And there’s no way Dr. Kozinski could have been working on something really bizarre?”
“Like what?” The pursed lips were back.
He felt a fit of coughing coming on. In the gloom of the unlit conference room, her face and lab coat were pale slabs.
He said desperately, “Cloned rats carrying disease. Cloned dinosaurs. Cloned soldiers.”
She looked at him distastefully. “The National Institutes of Health are not comic books, Mr. Cavanaugh. And neither was Benjamin Kozinski’s work at Whitehead.”
“No, I just wondered—”
“Please call when you’re feeling better so we can reschedule the briefing session.”
A door opened in the hall, and the smell of sick rats again overtook him. He thought longingly of escaping from the Institutes of Health. “No, let’s finish this now, Dr. Garvey. There are still things I don’t understand. I’m staying here until I do.”
* * *
By the time he got back to the Hoover Building, everyone was leaving for the day. The usual traffic choked the streets around the Federal Triangle. Cavanaugh fought his way through, parked, and sneezed his way to his office, where he checked his messages. Nothing from Neymeier. Well, the kid had said the data search would take a while. He sat at his desk, opened the case of tissues he’d bought, and put a fresh box on his desk. The other twenty-three boxes he stacked neatly beside his file cabinet. Then he pulled out a clean sheet of paper.
On the drive back from Bethesda, he’d thought hard about everything Julia Garvey had told him, boiling it down into manageable, possibly relevant bites. Now he listed those bites on the paper, numbering them neatly:
* * *
K. was working on proteins that are on the outside of viruses.
Those proteins do things—release chemicals that cause other changes—when the virus is getting ready to enter a healthy cell, while it enters a healthy cell, and after it enters a healthy cell.
The reason K. was doing this was that gene therapy makes altered genes enter healthy cells, to cure disease, and scientists aren’t happy unless they know not only that something works, but how it works.
* * *
Cavanaugh considered this point. On the whole, he approved. It was true it took a lot of government money to understand something that apparently would work just as well even if you didn’t understand it. On the other hand, scientists wanted all the facts, arranged into a coherent model that made sense. Just like intelligence analysts.
* * *
K. had identified various molecules that are key to a virus entering cells. He had also identified the whole chain of reactions that this causes, and he could make them happen.
Some of his work related to why virus cells prefer to enter some kinds of cells rather than other kinds. This has to do with how viruses bind onto “receptor sites,” which are sort of receiving docks on the outside of cells. Some receiving docks apparently have less security than other docks. The viruses have an easier time with the break-in.
* * *
Cavanaugh tapped the pencil on that point. Dr. Garvey hadn’t liked that analogy: receptor sites, she’d said, were not “receiving docks.” They were far more molecule-specific than that. And a viral infection was not a crime, as “break-in” seemed to imply. Cavanaugh let the wording stand. He knew what he meant, and these were his notes, not part of a case report.
* * *
K’s work was important. Dr. Garvey was excited about it (for her). Her excitement seemed to be mostly because the work explained how things happened that everybody already knew were happening.
Dr. Garvey saw no way K’s work could lead to criminal activity that couldn’t proceed just as well without it.
Dr. Garvey has read the few articles published by two scientists at Verico, including Eric Stevens. She said they were both mediocre work, and completely unrelated to anything K. was working on, even by wild stretches of the imagination.
* * *
Another inconclusive end—like the crime-scene report, the interviews with Judy Kozinski and Caroline Lampert, the attempts to link Verico financially to the Relatives. He still had nothing that would justify classifying this case as an REI, with resources allocated to “discerning the composition, structure, and activities of racketeering enterprises.”
Cavanaugh filed his notes alongside Julia Garvey’s drawing of DNA snakes inside cellular snow tires. He took a box of tissues from the neat pile alongside his filing cabinets, to keep in his car. On the way out of the building he noticed that the section fax had been fixed and was whirling away, receiving dailies for genuine cases in which something might actually be happening.
Outside it was a perfect late-summer evening. Washington’s usual mugginess was gone, leaving air so sweet and clear and limpid it was like a caress. Long cool shadows slanted down Constitution Avenue. The waning sunlight was pale gold and the evening smelled, mysteriously, of invisible flowers. Even through Cavanaugh’s cold.
He stood on the shallow broad steps and briefly closed his eyes.
He went back inside. The fax had stopped receiving. He wrote on a piece of memo paper in his clear, small hand:
* * *
In such a night,
Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night
* * *
He looked at this for a long time. The debit of having once been an English major.
Then he tore up the paper. On a second paper he printed FISH TALK ABOUT WATER:
Old joke: You can wonder what fish talk about, but you can bet it ain’t water.
* * *
ISTIOPHORUS: There’s something out there.
HYPSYPOPS: Out where?
ISTIOPHORUS: There.
HYPSYPOPS: Out where? Where’s there?
ISTIOPHORUS: Everywhere.
HYPSYPOPS: What the hell are you talking about?
ISTIOPHORUS: Look, just take a breath.
HYPSYPOPS: A breath of what?
ISTIOPHORUS: Of what’s there!
HYPSYPOPS: What?
