Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

He looked out of his open door, past the boxes and moving crates, into the empty outer office. Just a week before, Ray had been sitting there, calmly fielding calls and turning away the zealots. Ray had been loyal to the end, unlike so many of his other colleagues and foundation members. How could his life’s work be compromised so utterly, eclipsed in such a short space of time?

He sat down in his chair, gazing with vacant eyes at the single unpacked item on his desk: his notebook computer, still powered up and connected to the campus network. Not so many days before, he’d cast his line into the deep, cold waters of that network, fishing for help in his crusade. Instead, he’d hooked a leviathan; a murderous kraken that had devastated everything he cared about.

His biggest mistake had been underestimating Brent Scopes. Or, perhaps, overestimating him. The Scopes he knew would not have fought him in this way. Perhaps, Levine thought, he himself had been guilty—guilty of hyperbole, of leaping to conclusions, perhaps even unethical conduct, breaking into the GeneDyne net as he had. He had provoked Scopes. But for Scopes to calculatingly sully the memory of his murdered father—it was inexcusable, sociopathic. Always, in the back of his mind, Levine had kept the memory of their friendship—a friendship of profound, intellectual intensity that he could never replace. He had never gotten over the loss, and somehow he believed Scopes felt the same way.

But it was now obvious that he must have been wrong.

Levine’s eyes wandered over the empty shelves, the open filing cabinets, the gray clouds of disturbed dust settling sluggishly through the still air. Losing his foundation, his reputation, and his tenure changed everything. It had made his choices very simple; it had, in fact, narrowed them to one. And out of that choice, the outline of a plan began to take shape in his mind.

After dark, Mount Dragon became home to a thousand shadows. The covered walkways and stark multifaceted buildings glowed a pale blue in the light of a setting crescent moon. The rare footfall, the crunch of gravel, served only to magnify the silence and utter loneliness. Beyond the thin necklace of lights that illuminated the perimeter fence, a vast darkness took over, flowing on for a hundred miles in all directions, unvexed by light or campfire.

Carson moved through the shadows toward the radiology lab. Nobody was outside, and the residency compound was quiet, but the silence only increased his nervousness. He had chosen the radiology lab because it had been supplanted by new facilities inside the Fever Tank and was hardly ever used, and because it was the only low-security lab with full network access. But now he wasn’t so sure his choice had been a good one. The lab was off the normal track, behind the machine shop, and if he ran into anyone he’d have a difficult time explaining his presence.

He cracked open the door to the lab, then paused. A pale light glowed from inside the room, and he heard the rustle of movement.

“Jesus, Carson, you scared the shit out of me.” It was de Vaca, a pallid phantom silhouetted in the glow of the computer screen. She motioned him inside.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, slipping into a seat next to her.

“I got here early. Listen, I thought of a way we could check all this out. See if we’re really right about PurBlood.” She was whispering fast as she typed. “We get weekly physicals, right?”

“Don’t remind me.”

De Vaca looked at him. “Well? Don’t you get it? We can check the taps.”

Comprehension dawned on Carson. The physicals included spinal taps. They could check the cerebrospinal fluid for elevated levels of dopamine and serotonin.

“But we can’t access those records,” he objected.

“ Cabrón , you’re miles behind. I already have. I worked in Medical my first week here, remember? My network privileges for the medical file servers were never revoked.” In the reflected light of the terminal, her cheekbones were two sharp ridges of blue against black. “I began by checking a few records, but there’s just too much data to poke around in. So I ran an SQL query against the medical database.”

”What does it do? List the amount of dopamine and serotonin in everyone’s system?”

De Vaca shook her head. “Neurotransmitters wouldn’t show up in a spinal tap. But their breakdown products—their major metabolites—would. Homovanillic acid is the break-down product of dopamine, and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid is the breakdown product of serotonin. So I told the program to look for those. And, just as a control, I told the program to tabulate MHPG and VMA, which are the breakdown products of another neurotransmitter, norepinephrine. That way, we’ll have something to measure the results against.”

“And?” Carson prompted.

“Don’t know yet. Here it comes now.”

The screen filled.

MHPG

HVA

VMA

5-HIAA

Aaron

1

6

1

5

Alberts

1

9

1

10

Bowman

1

12

1

9

Bunoz

1

7

1

6

Carson

1

1

1

1

Cristoferi

1

8

1

5

Davidoff

1

8

1

8

De Vaca

1

1

1

1

Donergan

1

10

1

8

Ducely

1

7

1

9

Engies

1

7

1

6

MORE SCREENS AVAILABLE

“My God,” Carson muttered.

De Vaca nodded grimly. “Look at the HVA and 5-HIAA counts. In every case, levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain are many times above normal.”

Carson paged down through the rest of the list. “Look at Nye!” he said suddenly, pointing to the screen. “Dopamine metabolites, fourteen times normal. Serotonin metabolites, twelve times normal.”

“With levels like that, dangerously paranoid, perhaps presenting as schizophrenia,” de Vaca said. “I’ll bet he perceived Teece as a threat to Mount Dragon—or perhaps to himself—and set a trap for him out in the desert. I wonder if that bastard Marr was in on it. You were right when you said killing Teece was crazy.”

Carson glanced at her. “How come these abnormal readings weren’t flagged before?”

“Because you wouldn’t be checking levels of neurotransmitters in a place like Mount Dragon. They look for antibodies, viral contamination, stuff like that. Besides, we’re talking about nanograms per milliliter. Unless you’re specifically looking for these, metabolites, you aren’t going to find them.”

Carson shook his head in disbelief. “Isn’t there anything we could do to counteract the adverse effects?”

“Hard to say. You could try a dopamine receptor antagonist, like chlorpromazine. Or imipramine, which blocks the transport of serotonin. But with levels this high, I doubt you’d see much improvement. We don’t even know if the process can be reversed. And that’s assuming there were sufficient stocks of both drugs on hand, and we found a way to administer it to every person on-site.”

Carson continued to stare at the screen in horrified fascination. Then, suddenly, his hands moved onto the keyboard, copying the data to a file on the terminal’s local drive. Then he cleared the screen and quit the program.

De Vaca turned. “What the hell are you doing?” she hissed.

“We’ve seen enough,” Carson replied. “Scopes was a beta-tester too, remember? If he sees us at this, we’re cooked.” He logged de Vaca off the terminal and entered his own password at the GeneDyne security screen. As he waited for the logon messages to scroll past, he fished two writeable compact discs from his pocket.