Packer thought this over, brow deeply wrinkled, trying to put together a complete picture. “You think you stumbled onto a little bit of punctuated equilibrium. In the Alps.”
A short woman with a round pretty face brought their food and laid chopsticks beside their plates. When she left, Packer continued, “You think they’ve done a tissue match in Innsbruck and just won’t release the results?”
Mitch nodded. “It’s so far out there, as an idea, that nobody is saying a thing. It’s an incredible long shot. Look, I don’t want to belabor…I don’t want to drag you down with all the details. Just give me a chance to find out whether I’m right or wrong. I’m probably so wrong I should start a new career in asphalt management. But…1was there, Wendell.”
Packer looked around the restaurant, pushed aside the chopsticks, ladled a few spoons of hot pepper sauce onto his plate, and stuck a fork into his curried pork and rice. Around a mouthful, he said, “If I let you audit some classes, will you sit way in the back?”
“I’ll stand outside the door,” Mitch said.
“I was joking,” Packer said. “I think.”
“I know you were,” Mitch said, smiling. “Now I’m going to ask just one more favor.”
Packer lifted his eyebrows. “You’re pushing it, Mitch.”
“Do you have any postdocs working on SHEVA?”
“You bet,” Packer said. “The CDC has a research coordination program and we’ve signed on. You see all the women wearing gauze masks on campus? We’d like to help shine a little reason on this whole thing. You know…Reason ?” He stared pointedly at Mitch.
Mitch pulled out his two glass vials. “These are very precious to me,” he said. “I do not want to lose them.” He held them out in his palm. They clinked softly together, their contents like two little snips of beef jerky.
Packer put down his fork. “What are they?”
“Neandertal tissue. One from the male, one from the female.”
Packer stopped chewing.
“How much of them would you need?” Mitch asked.
“Not much,” Packer said around his mouthful of rice. “If I was going to do anything.”
Mitch waggled his hand and the vials slowly back and forth.
“If I were to trust you,” Packer added.
“I have to trust your Mitch said.
Packer squinted at the fogged windows, the kids still milling outside, laughing and smoking their cigarettes.
“Test them for what…SHEVA?”
“Or something like SHEVA.”
“Why? What has SHEVA got to do with evolution?”
Mitch tapped the newspaper articles. “It would explain all this talk about the devil’s children. Something very unusual is happening. I think it’s happened before, and I found the evidence.”
Packer wiped his mouth thoughtfully. “I absolutely do not believe this.” He lifted the vials from Mitch’s hand, stared at them closely. “They’re so damned old. Three years ago, two of my postdocs did a research project on mitochondrial DNA sequences from Neandertal bone tissue. All that remained were fragments.”
“Then you can confirm these are the real thing,” Mitch said. “Dried out, degraded, but probably complete.”
Packer gently set the vials on the table. “Why should I do this? Just because we’re friends?”
“Because if I’m right, it’s going to be the biggest scientific discovery of our time. We may finally learn how evolution works.”
Packer removed his wallet and took out a twenty. “I’m paying,” he said. “Big discoveries make me very nervous.”
Mitch looked at him in dismay.
“Oh, I’ll do it,” Packer said grimly. “But only because I’m an idiot and a sucker. No more favors, please, Mitch.”
31
The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda
Cross and Dicken sat opposite each other at the broad table in a small executive conference room in the Matcher Building, and Kaye sat beside Cross. Dicken fiddled with a pen, staring down at the table like a nervous little boy.
“When’s Mark going to make his grand entrance?” Cross asked.
Dicken looked up and grinned. “I’d give him five minutes. Maybe less. He’s not very happy about this.”
Cross picked her teeth with a long chipped fingernail.
“The only thing you don’t have lots of is time, right?” Dicken asked.
Cross smiled politely.
“It doesn’t seem that long since Georgia,” Kaye said, just to make conversation.
“Not long at all,” Dicken said.
“You met in Georgia?” Cross asked.
“Just briefly,” Dicken said. Before the conversation could go any further, Augustine entered. He wore an expensive gray suit that was showing a little wrinkling at the back and around the knees. He had been in a good many conferences today, Kaye guessed.
Augustine shook hands with Cross and sat. He clasped his hands loosely in front of him. “So, Marge, this is a done deal? You’ve got Kaye and we have to share?”
“Nothing’s final yet,” Cross said cheerfully. “I wanted to talk to you first.”
Augustine was not convinced. “What do we get out of it?”
“Nothing you probably wouldn’t have gotten anyway, Mark,” Cross said. “We can work out the larger features of the picture now, and pencil in the details later.”
Augustine colored a little, clamped his jaw for a moment, then said, “I do love bargaining. What do we actually need from Americol?”
“This evening I’ll be having dinner with three Republican senators,” Cross said. “Bible Belt types. They don’t much care what I do, so long as I attend their little fund-raisers. I’ll explain to them why I think the Taskforce and the whole research establishment should get even more money, and why we should set up an intranet connection between Americol, Euricol, and selected researchers in the Taskforce and the CDC. Then I’ll explain the facts of life to them. About Herod’s, that is.”
“They’re going to shout ‘Act of God,’ “Augustine said.
“I don’t think so, actually,” Cross said. “They may be smarter than you think.”
“I’ve already explained this to every senator and most of the House of Representatives,” Augustine said.
“Then we’ll make a good tag team. I’ll make them feel sophisticated and in the loop, something I know you’re not good at, Mark. And what we share…will lead to a treatment, possibly even a cure, within a year. I guarantee it.”
“How can you guarantee anything like that?” Augustine asked.
“As I told Kaye on the flight down here, I took her papers seriously years ago. I set some of my key people in San Diego looking into the possibility. When the news about activation of SHEVA came down, and then Herod’s, I was ready. I handed it over to the good folks in our Sentinel program. They kind of parallel what you do, Christopher, but on a corporate level. We already know the structure of SHEVA’s capsid coat, how SHEVA crawls into human cells, which receptors it attaches to. The CDC and the Taskforce can take half the credit eventually, and we’ll take on the business of getting the treatment to everybody. We’ll do it for little or nothing, of course, maybe not even break even.”
Augustine looked at her with genuine surprise. Cross chuckled. She leaned over the table as if to throw a punch at him and said, “Gotcha, Mark.”
“I don’t believe it,” Augustine said.
“Mr. Dicken says he wants to work directly with Kaye. That’s fine,” Cross allowed.
Augustine folded his arms.
“But that intranet will really be something. Direct, fast, best we can put together. We’ll chart every damned HERV in the genome to make sure SHEVA is not duplicated somewhere, to catch us by surprise. Kaye can lead that project. The pharmaceutical applications could be wondrous, absolutely wondrous.” Her voice broke with enthusiasm.
Kaye found herself buzzing with her own enthusiasm. Cross was something else.
“What do your people tell you about these HERV, Mark?” Cross asked.
“A lot,” Augustine said. “We’ve concentrated on Herod’s, of course.”