Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

“There it is,” Singer said proudly, slowing. “Mount Dragon. Your home for the next six months.”

Soon a distant chain-link fence came into view, topped by thick rolls of concertina wire. A guard tower rose above the complex, motionless against the sky, wavering slightly in the heat.

“There’s nobody in it at the moment,” Singer said with a chuckle. “Oh, there’s a security staff, all right. You’ll meet them soon enough. And they’re very efficient when they want to be. But our real security’s the desert.”

As they approached, the buildings slowly took form. Carson had expected an ugly set of cement buildings and Quonset huts; instead, the complex seemed almost beautiful, white and cool and clean against the sky.

Singer slowed further, drove around a concrete crash barrier and stopped at an enclosed guardhouse. A man—civilian clothes, no uniform of any kind—opened the door and came strolling over. Carson noticed that he walked with a stiff leg.

Singer lowered the window, and the man placed two muscled forearms on the doorframe and poked his crew-cut head inside. He grinned, his jaw muscles working on a piece of gum. Two brilliant green eyes were set deeply into a tanned, almost leathery face.

“Howdy, John,” he said, his eyes slowly moving around the interior and finally coming to rest on Carson. “Who’ve we got here?”

“It’s our new scientist. Guy Carson. Guy, this is Mike Marr, security.”

The man nodded, eyes sliding around the car again. He handed Singer back his ID.

“Documents?” he spoke in Carson’s direction, almost dreamily. Carson passed over the documents he had been told to bring: his passport, birth certificate, and GeneDyne ID.

Marr flicked through them nonchalantly. “Wallet, please?”

“You want my driver’s license?” Carson frowned.

“The whole wallet, if you don’t mind.” Marr grinned very briefly, and Carson saw that the man wasn’t chewing gum after all, but a large red rubber band. He handed over his wallet with irritation.

“They’ll be taking your bags, as well,” Singer said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get everything back before dinner. Except your passport, of course. That will be returned at the end of your six-month tour.”

Marr heaved himself off the window and walked back into his air-conditioned blockhouse with Carson’s belongings. He had a strange walk, hitching his right leg along as if it were in danger of becoming dislocated. A few moments later, he raised the bar and waved them through. Carson could see him through the thick blue-tinted glass, fanning out the contents of his wallet.

“There are no secrets here, I’m afraid, except the ones you keep inside your head,” Singer said with a smile, easing the Hummer forward. “And watch out for those, as well.”

“Why is all this necessary?” asked Carson.

Singer shrugged. “The price of working in a high-security environment. Industrial espionage, scurrilous publicity, and so forth. It’s what you’ve been used to at GeneDyne Edison, really, just magnified tenfold.”

Singer pulled into the motor pool and killed the engine. As Carson stepped out, a blast of desert air rolled over him and he inhaled deeply. It felt wonderful. Looking up, he could see the bulk of Mount Dragon rising a quarter mile beyond the compound. A newly graded gravel road switchbacked up its side, ending at the microwave towers.

“First,” said Singer, “the grand tour. Then we’ll head back to my office for a cold drink and a chat.” He moved forward.

“This project ...?” Carson began.

Singer stopped, turned.

“Scopes wasn’t exaggerating?” Carson asked. “It’s really that important?”

Singer squinted, looked off into the empty desert. “Beyond your wildest dreams,” he said.

Percival Lecture Hall at Harvard University was filled to capacity. Two hundred students sat in the descending rows of chairs, some bent over notebooks, others looking attentively forward. Dr. Charles Levine paced before the class, a small wiry figure with a fringe of hair surrounding his prematurely balding dome. There were chalk marks on his sleeves and his brogues still had salt stains from the previous winter. Nothing in his appearance, however, reduced the intensity that radiated from his quick movements and expression. As he lectured, he gestured with a stub of chalk at complex biochemical formulae and nucleotide sequences scattered across the huge sliding chalkboards, indecipherable as cuneiform.

In the rear of the hall sat a small group of people armed with microcassette recorders and handheld video cameras. They were not dressed like students, and press cards were prominently displayed on lapels and belts. But media presence was routine; lectures by Levine, professor of genetics and head of the Foundation for Genetic Policy, often became controversial without notice. And Genetic Policy , the foundation’s journal, had made sure this lecture was given plenty of advance notice.

Levine stopped his pacing and moved to the podium. “That wraps up our discussion on Tuitt’s constant, as it applies to disease mortality in western Europe,” he said. “But I have more to discuss with you today.” He cleared this throat.

“May I have the screen, please?” The lights dimmed and a white rectangle descended from the ceiling, obscuring the chalkboards.

“In sixty seconds, I am going to display a photograph on this screen,” Levine said. “I am not authorized to show you this photograph. In fact, by doing so, I’ll be technically guilty of breaking several laws under the Official Secrets Act. By staying, you’ll be doing the same. I’m used to this kind of thing. If you’ve ever read Genetic Policy , you’ll know what I mean. This is information that must be made public, no matter what the cost. But it goes beyond the scope of today’s lecture, and I can’t ask you to stay. Anyone who wishes to go may do so now.”

In the dimly lit room, there were whispers, the turning of notebook pages. But nobody stood up.

Levine looked around, pleased. Then he nodded to the projectionist. A black-and-white image filled the screen.

Levine looked up at the image, the top of his head shining in the light of the projector like a monk’s tonsure. Then he turned to face his audience.

“This is a picture taken on July 1, 1985, by the image-gathering satellite TB-17 from a sun-synchronous orbit of about one hundred and seventy miles,” he began. “Technically, it has not yet been declassified. But it deserves to be.” He smiled. Nervous laughter briefly filled the hall.

“You’re looking at the town of Novo-Druzhina, in western Siberia. As you can see by the length of the shadows, this was taken in the early morning, the preferred time for image analysis. Note the position of the two parked cars, here, and the ripening fields of wheat.”

A new slide appeared.

“Thanks to the surveillance technique of comparative coverage, this slide shows the exact same location three months later. Notice anything strange?”

There was a silence.

“The cars are parked in exactly the same spot. And the field of grain is apparently very ripe, ready to be harvested.”

Another slide appeared.

“Here’s the same place in April of the following year. Note the two cars are still there. The field has obviously gone fallow, the grain unharvested. It was images like these that suddenly made this area very interesting to certain photo-grammetrists in the CIA.”

He paused, looking out over the classroom.

“The United States military learned that all of Restricted Area Fourteen—a half-dozen towns, in an eighty-square-mile area surrounding Novo-Druzhina—were affected in a similar way. All human activity had ceased. So they took a closer look.”