Paul McEuen - Spiral

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—

“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.”