Paul McEuen - Spiral

But what? She went back through the materials in the envelope that Liam’s lawyer had left. Nothing unusual besides the note about the letterbox. Then what? Logic, Ms. Connor. Think it through . If Liam had left them something else, reason said it would have been something at the end of the trail they’d already followed.

The end of the trail was the piece of wood with the glowing fungi.

She held the piece of wood up to the light. Her grandfather had drilled holes in the side of the piece and inserted three glass lyophil straws, each containing cultures of the fungus in case the stuff on the outside died. That was odd, now that she thought about it. Why was he so interested in making sure she had a living batch of the fungus?

The three symbols glowed, pulsing. She studied them closely, looking for watermarks, secret writing, she didn’t know what. He must have worked very hard to get them to turn on and off like that. It was a biological feedback loop, she knew. Express the green fluorescent protein pathway from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish, then have that expression induce the creation of a suppressor that would turn it off. Similar for the red and yellow fungi, using different proteins. Liam had played these games before. He was a master at genetic modification.

She stared at the green arrowhead. Her son’s letterboxing symbol. It pulsed, one long, one short. The pattern was irregular. Something must have gone wrong in Liam’s genetic circuit.

No. Not irregular. A pattern .

A repeating pattern .

A memory came to her, when she was a little girl. She and Liam played a game called telegraph. They tapped out messages using Morse code. She’d played the same game with Dylan, teaching him to spell out his name.

The red. A long pulse, then two shorter.

The green one. A long pulse, then short.

The yellow. A short pulse, followed by a longer one.

Oh my God .

The Morse code symbols were all letters in Dylan’s name—was that it? Then the series of dots and dashes became clear to her:

— • • = D

— • = N

• — = A

She picked up Liam’s fungus disk. DNA . The idea hit her like a lightning bolt. She grabbed the instructions:

The first letter of each line throughout the entire message was an A, C, or T. Written altogether, they spelled out: TTATATATCT. The last letters were all G’s and T’s: TTGGTTTTGG.

The first and last letters spelled out two short genetic sequences.

Primers. They were primers. The beginning and end of a genetic string.

She stared at the glowing fungi, her skin electric. She was as certain as she’d ever been of anything. Liam had hidden his message inside the fungus. He had written it into its genome.

JAKE WOKE ON THE COUCH, FULLY DRESSED, HIS CELL RINGING. His sleep had been black, devoid of dreams. He fished the phone from the coffee table. It was six-thirty a.m. He didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was 202—Washington, D.C.

“Yes?”

A woman’s voice was on the line. “Professor Sterling? Can you hold? The deputy national security adviser will be with you in a moment.” Then she was off the line.

Lawrence Dunne?

Dunne was a foreign-policy wunderkind, one of the few to predict both the spectacular fall of the Soviet Union and the equally spectacular rise of China. Jake had met Dunne once, at a Defense Science Board reception, before Dunne was promoted to deputy national security adviser. Dunne knew how to work a room, had struck Jake as fiercely intelligent, but that didn’t mean Jake liked him. He didn’t. Jake’s general experience was that those on the civilian side of the national security establishment were dangerously untempered, playing games with knives when they had never been cut. Dunne was no exception.

“Professor Sterling?”

“I’m here.”

“Lawrence Dunne. I’ve a lot on my plate right now, so I’m going to get right to it. You worked closely with Liam Connor, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever mention a man named Hitoshi Kitano?”

“The billionaire? No. Why?”

Silence. “We need you to come in. To Fort Detrick. Right away.”

“Why?”

“I’ve no time for explanations right now. One of our staff will call and arrange transport.”

“All right. But what is this—”

“Professor Sterling. I must go, but I personally wanted to stress something to you. At this point, any conversation you may have had with Liam Connor is classified information and should only be discussed with someone in an official capacity. Do you understand?”

Jake heard a knocking at his door.

He started toward it, phone still to his ear.

“No, I’m not entirely sure that I do. Why do you—”

Dunne said, “Please, Professor. Save the talk for later, when we meet.”

The phone went dead.

Jake opened the door.

Maggie was there, the glowing fungus and the letterbox instructions in her hands. She looked exhausted, cold, and scared.

“I need your help,” she said.

LAWRENCE DUNNE NODDED TO THE NYPD OFFICER ON THE line as he passed, flanked by his Secret Service detail and a small cluster of aides. The police had set up a multiblock perimeter around Bellevue Hospital, east to west from Second Avenue to the East River and north and south from Twenty-fifth to Thirtieth streets. He checked the time on his BlackBerry: six-forty-nine a.m. The first morning sunlight was just starting to hit the upper floors of the Midtown skyscrapers. Dunne had just arrived from City Hall. The mayor, his staff, and the Office of Emergency Management were doing their best to keep the panic under control and set contingency plans in the event of the worst. Dunne had gotten away as soon as he could.

He’d made the call to Sterling on the trip over. On Dunne’s recommendation, the FBI had kept tabs on Connor after their confrontation two years previously, checking to see if the old man was talking out of school about the Uzumaki. They found no evidence, but the profilers said one of the most likely conduits would be Jake Sterling. They’d get the truth later, he thought, once Sterling was at Detrick. Now if they could just find the other likely conduit, Maggie Connor.

A tighter, tougher cordon awaited him a block in, this one controlled by the Army. The spotlights had everything lit up like noon. The Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF) worked it by the book, sealed off the ward, made it airtight, and then placed the entire hospital under quarantine. Operational procedures were in place to handle an Uzumaki outbreak, thanks in large part to Dunne. Before he’d taken his position at the NSC six years before, the government had taken a hands-off approach to the Uzumaki. The fungus had been locked up, the spores sealed away in 1972 after Nixon renounced the offensive use of biological weapons. In 1979, Jimmy Carter put it further out of sight, in the hands of that woman Latterell, buried in the chain of command of the USDA, an agency with no military mission. The spores were kept in a sealed, cooled vault for the next twenty years.