Dicken’s heart sank.

“You walked around the San Diego Zoo with the two of them. Got him a badge into a closed Americol party. All very convivial. Did you introduce them, Christopher?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Dicken said, surprised at how miserable he felt.

“That wasn’t wise. Do you know his record?” Augustine asked pointedly. “The body snatcher from the Alps? He’s a nut case, Christopher.”

“I thought he might have something to contribute.”

“To support whose view in this mess?”

“A defensible view,” Dicken said vaguely, looking away. The morning was cool, pleasant, and there were quite a few* joggers on the mall, getting in a little outdoors activity before sealing themselves into their government offices.

“The whole thing smells. It looks like some kind of an end run to refocus the whole project, and that concerns me.”

“We had a point of view, Mark. A defensible point of view.”

“Marge Cross tells me there’s talk about evolution” Augustine said.

“Kaye has been putting together an explanation that involves evolution,” Dicken said. “It’s all predicted in her papers, Mark — and Mitch Rafelson has been doing some research along those lines, as well.”

“Marge thinks there will be severe fallout if this theory gets publicized,” Augustine said. He stopped windmilling his arms and performed neck-stretch exercises, grabbing each upper arm with the opposite hand, applying tension, sighting along the extended arm as he bent it back as far as it would go. “No reason for it to get that far. I’ll stop it right here and now. We got a preprint from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in Germany this morning that they’ve found mutated forms of SHEVA. Several of them. Diseases mutate, Christopher. We’ll have to withdraw the vaccine trials and start all over again. That pushes all our hopes onto a really bad option. My job might not survive that kind of upheaval.”

Dicken watched Augustine prance in place, pounding the ground with his feet. Augustine stopped and caught his breath. “There could be twenty or thirty thousand people demonstrating on the mall tomorrow. Somebody’s leaked a report from theTaskforce on the RU-486 results.”

Dicken felt something twist inside him, a small little pop, combined disappointment with Kaye and with all the work he had done. All the time he had wasted. He could not see a way around the problem of a messenger that mutated, changing its message. No biological system would ever give a messenger that kind of control.

He had been wrong. Kaye Lang had been wrong.

The agent tapped his watch, but Augustine screwed up his face and shook his head in annoyance.

“Tell me all about it, Christopher,” Augustine said, “and then I’ll decide whether I’m going to let you keep your goddamned job.”

54

Baltimore

Kaye walked with steady confidence from her building to Americol, looking up at the Bromo-Seltzer Tower — so named because it had once carried a huge blue antacid bottle on its peak. Now it carried just the name; the bottle had been removed decades ago.

Kaye could not shake Mitch from her thoughts, but oddly, he was not a distraction. Her thoughts were focused; she had a much clearer idea of what to look for. The play of sun and shadow pleased her as she walked past the alleys between the buildings. The day was so pretty she could almost ignore the presence of Benson. As always, he accompanied her to the lab floor, then stood by the elevators and the stairs, where everyone would have to pass his inspection.

She entered her lab and hung her purse and coat on a glassware drying rack. Five of her six assistants were in the next room, checking the results of last night’s electrophoresis analysis. She was glad to have some privacy.

She sat at her small desk and pulled up the Americol intranet on the computer. It was just a few seconds from the first screen to AmericoFs proprietary Human Genome Project site. The database was beautifully designed and easy to poke through, with key genes identified and functions highlighted and explained in detail.

Kaye plugged in her password. In her original work, she had tracked down seven potential candidates for the expression and reassembly of complete and infectious HERV particles. The candidate genes she had thought most likely to be viable had turned out — luckily, she would have thought — to be associated with SHEVA. In her months at Americol, she had begun to study the six other candidates in detail, and had planned to move on to a list of thousands of possibly related genes.

Kaye was considered an expert, but what she was an expert in, compared to the huge world of human DNA, was a series of broken-down and seemingly abandoned shacks in a number of small and almost forgotten towns. The HERV genes were supposed to be fossils, fragments scattered through stretches of DNA less than a million base pairs long. Within such small distances, however, genes could recombine — jump from position to position — with some ease. The DNA was constantly in ferment — genes switching locations, forming little knots or fistulas of DNA, and replicating, a series of churning and twisting chains constantly being rearranged, for reasons no one could yet completely fathom. And yet SHEVA had remained remarkably stable over millions of years. The changes she was looking for would be both slight and very significant.

If she was right, she was about to overturn a major scientific paradigm, injure a lot of reputations, cause the scientific fight of the twenty-first century, a war actually, and she did not want to be an early casualty because she had come to the battlefield in half a suit of armor. Speculation about the cause was not sufficient. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence.

Patiently, hoping it would be at least an hour before anyone else entered the lab, she once again compared the sequences found in SHEVA with the six other candidates. This time she looked closely at the transcription factors that triggered expression of the large protein complex. She rechecked the sequences several times before she spotted what she had known since yesterday must be there. Four of the candidates carried several such factors, all subtly different.

She sucked in her breath. For a moment she felt as if she stood on the brink of a tall cliff. The transcription factors would have to be specific for different varieties of LPC. That meant there would be more than one gene coding for the large protein complex.

More than one station on Darwin’s radio.

Last week Kaye had asked for the most accurate available sequences of over a hundred genes on several chromosomes. The manager of the genome group had told her they would be available this morning. And he had done his work well. Even scanning by eye, she was seeing interesting similarities. With so much data, however, the eye was not good enough. Using an in-house software package called METABLAST, she searched for sequences roughly homologous with the known LPC gene on chromosome 21. She requested and was authorized to use most of the computing power of the building’s mainframe for over three minutes.

When the search was completed, Kaye had the matches she had hoped for — and hundreds more besides, all buried in so-called junk DNA, each subtly different, offering a different set of instructions, a different set of strategies.

LPC genes were common throughout the twenty-two human autosomes, the chromosomes that did not code for sex.

“Backups,” Kaye whispered, as if she might be overheard, “alternates,” and then she felt a chill. She pushed back from the desk and paced around the lab. “Oh, my God. What in hell am I thinking here?”

SHEVA in its present form was not working properly. The new babies were dying. The experiment — the creation of a new subspecies — was being thwarted by outside enemies, other viruses, not tame, not co-opted ages ago and made part of the human tool kit.