Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

“Oh, right.”

“Well, there’s this spot where you’re supposed to list the causes of death for close relatives. You know, after all these boxes you have to tick off. Your grandfather died of x marks the box. All I could write was ‘Germans.’ They didn’t have a box for it.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t.”

“I mean, my parents are still alive, and as I’m filling it out, I’m thinking of my great-aunts and great-uncles and grandparents, all the ones who have actually died, and I’ve really got nothing to go on, you know?”

Paul nodded.

“I mean, that’s what family history is for. Your grandfather drops dead of a coronary at sixty, then you shouldn’t eat cheese, right?”

“Sounds logical.”

“But I don’t have anything like that. I mean, for all I know, I might come from a family of immortals. Our one Achilles’ heel: fucking Germans.”

“Plausible.”

“If I get hit by a car and killed in the street, you watch, it’ll be a German car. I’m Alan, by the way.”

“Alan,” Paul said, “about the analysis.”

“Right.” The computer guy held up a finger while he took a huge last bite of pizza. “The analysis,” he muffled.

“Are you sure you can do this?”

“It’s the apartment, right? A shit hole, I know. Doesn’t exactly give off the vibe I’m the kind of guy you’re looking for. I can understand that. People have expectations. But trust me, I’m the guy. I’m just a little short of apartment fundage right now. Besides, you’re just flushing money when you rent, so the shit holes are always the smart places to stay until you can afford to buy.” He paused, seeming to think about it. “Unless you get mugged or shot or something. That changes the cost-benefit analysis somewhat.”

He cleared a space on the coffee table and plopped down an old, beat-up laptop, a Half-Life 3 sticker pasted across the lid.

“Let’s see it,” he said.

Paul handed him the flash drive.

“This your only copy?”

“No, I made a duplicate.”

“Good man. Never give out your only copy.”

The guy plugged the drive into his computer. “What have we here? Let’s see.” He took another bite of pizza while he waited for the system to load. “Two files?” he asked.

“The first sample is the proband, the second is the reference.”

“Doesn’t matter which is which,” Alan said. “The analysis will just provide a statistical correlation.”

“You’ve worked with DNA before?”

“A sequence is a sequence,” he said. “It’s just data. So who do these belong to?”

“Better I don’t tell you.”

“Ah, some paternity blackmail case. I hear you.”

“Nothing like that. The reference sequence is human. I’m not sure what the other one is. That’s what I need you to tell me.”

“I’m assuming the files are compressed.”

“Yeah, is that a problem?”

“No, it’s just a matter of finding the decompression algorithm.”

“And how do you do that?”

“For biological systems, there are only six in common use. I’ll just plug them in to see which one works. So you just want a comparison?”

“I need to know how divergent the two samples are. Are they the same species or different?”

“Divergence will be easy enough to test for, but where the species line falls isn’t my area. After decompression, a simple comparison analysis will tell you the percentage difference. Will that work?”

Paul nodded. “That’ll tell me what I need to know. If the samples are close enough, can you calculate time to most recent common ancestor?”

“The percentage difference is all I can promise, but there might be existing programs I can run to get you the other result. I’ll have to do some research on it. This isn’t something I do every day, you see, but it shouldn’t be that complicated. The main problem will be the size of the data set being compared. Even with compression, these files are huge.”

“That computer can handle it?”

“What, this one? Shit, no. This is just my gaming rig. I have access to a computer at work that’ll have the balls for this, though.”

“Work.”

“Don’t sweat it. It’s at a private company, and I know how to delete project history. Nobody will know.”

“How long will it take?”

“Ah, well, that depends. How long do you want it to take?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Then maybe a week.”

Paul opened his wallet and pulled out five crisp hundred-dollar bills.

The guy took the money. “Two days, maybe three.”

“I need it faster.”

Alan shook his head. “It’ll be two days no matter how many hundreds you’ve got in that wallet. It’ll take me a day to track down the right programs, then another day to run the analysis, double-check, and generate the report.”

“Okay, then that will have to do.” Paul stood.

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

“I’ll see you in a few days,” Paul said and took the stairs back down to his car.

Paul was in the lab when they came for him.

A security guard knocked on the door.

“Paul Carlsson?”

Paul looked up from his work. “Yeah.”

“If you’ll come with me.” It was a guard Paul hadn’t ever seen before. And Paul had seen all the guards.

“Why do you want him?” Janus asked. Janus was standing on the other side of the lab counter, mixing fixative.

“We have some questions we need to ask,” the guard said.

Paul looked at Janus. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Janus said, though the look on his face said that he wasn’t particularly hopeful.

Paul followed the security guard down the hall to the elevator. A thick finger stabbed the button for the sixth floor. This explained why he hadn’t seen the guard before. Paul had never been to the sixth floor. Except for the little round number in the elevator, he might not have known there was a sixth floor. What could be above heaven?

The door dinged open and they stepped onto matte black tile. There was no grand, beautiful entrance here. No glass wall. This floor had no pretenses to keep up. At a steel door, the guard swiped a security pass and led Paul down a narrow hall. At the end of the hall was another door.

“What’s this about?” Paul asked.

“You’ll have to take it up with them.”

The guard opened the door and motioned Paul inside.

Three men sat at a table waiting for him. Two of them were strangers, but the third had a face he remembered well. A face etched in his memory. The guard closed the door and stood next to the wall.

“Please sit,” the first man said.

He was middle-aged and bland, wearing a suit that probably cost as much as Paul made in a month. The man next to him was older, round-faced, unsmiling. At the other end sat the face he remembered. The lawyer from the island.

Paul pulled the chair out and took a seat.

He felt an involuntary response to the lawyer’s presence. He resisted the urge to reach up and scratch at his eye patch. He made a point not to look at him and instead looked at the man sitting directly across from him. As if to prevent this, the lawyer spoke.

“Hello, Paul.”

“Hello.”

“It’s nice to see you in circumstances better than when we last met.”

“Yeah.”

“Though, actually, when you think about it”—here the lawyer made a point to look at his two colleagues—“maybe these circumstances aren’t any better, after all.”

The other two men didn’t so much as blink. They just stared across the table at Paul.

“In fact,” the lawyer continued, “maybe it’s worse.”