The boy had an athlete’s slouch. His body was still and relaxed, every betraying tic leached out of it by the same iron discipline that every Mossad katsalearned. His face was schooled into a calmly attentive, completely unreadable expression. And the green eyes were cold and alert and moved constantly around the room, taking in everything but never appearing to stare too hard at any one thing. The boy was Arik’s opposite number; and only a novice could fail to recognize him for the superlatively trained professional that he was.
“So who’s the bright young thing?” Cohen asked. He had a niggling feeling that he’d seen that face before, yet he could match it to none of his stored spinfeed databases. Unsettling. “Could he be Safik’s? Safik always liked the pretty ones.” Cohen cut a sideways glance at Didi. “So did you for that matter.”
“You’re right about his being Safik’s,” Didi said, “though not in the way you think you mean. Look again. Ring any bells?”
Cohen looked again, and suddenly bells were ringing all over the place. The slim, neat build; the intelligent, humorous face; the extraordinary eyes.
“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said. “The only son of Walid Safik, head of the Palestinian Security Service’s counterintelligence department.”
“So Safik didhave a set of eyes at the auction,” Li said with grim satisfaction.
But Cohen wasn’t thinking about the auction. He was thinking about Gavi. If the boy was Safik’s son, then that made him…what? Leila’s first cousin once removed? That explained the eyes. And the family resemblance to Leila was unmistakable once you looked for it. He wondered if Gavi and Leila’s Joseph—obviously both boys had been named after some common ancestor—would have looked like Yusuf if he’d survived the war. And then he thought about that other lifetime before the war in which they’d all danced at Gavi and Leila’s wedding.
Cohen’s better-than-human memory called up a detail-perfect image of the day, as accurate and unfaded as remastered spinfeed. Gavi slim and handsome in his uniform, and so achingly young that he looked like a boy just playing at being a soldier. Leila all business—and to everyone’s ill-concealed delight already visibly pregnant. Didi had been Gavi’s commanding officer. Cohen had been…well, what he’d always been. And Gavi Shehadeh and Walid Safik had been just two more bright young men who might or might not amount to anything. It had been Leila—the intense young doctor with the startling eyes and the even more startling opinions—who everyone thought would change the world.
Well, the world had changed all right. And Leila had been among the first casualties. It was still hard to believe that such an extraordinary person had been killed by something as wastefully impersonal as a stray bomb.
Cohen looked up to find Didi’s eyes searching his face. The memory of Gavi hung between them. Unasked questions rose and drifted and shredded themselves in the backwash of the ceiling fan.
Didi turned off the monitor and sat down heavily. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the tail of his shirt, put them back on and peered fretfully around the room. He seemed disappointed with the result, as if he’d expected the world to look better through clean lenses. Then, with a mournful little shrug, he got down to business.
He described Arkady’s appearance at Maris Station; his approach to Maris consulate junior intelligence staff; his disappearance and subsequent resurfacing in Moshe’s hands; GolaniTech’s agreement with Korchow, insofar as they understood it; the cautious back-channel contacts with the bidding parties.
Cohen didn’t even try to calibrate Didi’s version of events against his own information and look for discrepancies. You might as well try to catch a bird in flight as catch Didi Halevy in a lie. You just trusted him to tell you what he thought you needed to know. Or you didn’t trust him at all. There was no middle ground.
“The big questions are two,” Didi said when he’d come to the end of his tale. “One, what is Arkady selling? And two, why should we care?”
“You read my report?” Cohen asked doubtfully.
“Yes, yes. And I’m sure you thought it was perfectly comprehensible. But I’m not Gavi. And even if I were, I’d still need to get it into terms the prime minister can understand.”
“Does the interest in this case go that high?”
“This is a country of population one million and dropping. Everything goes that high.”
“Well,” Cohen began. “First of all, let’s talk about so-called weapons’ infection vector. It’s a retrovirus, and as far as I can see a relatively straightforward one. So the real question isn’t what the virus is. The real question is: What’s the transgenic payload it’s inserting into the target organism’s cells?”
Cohen stopped to collect his thoughts—a task that was both difficult and necessary because he and the half dozen or so of his aggregated Emergents who had worked on this problem had not reached anything even remotely approaching a consensus on what the payload of Arkady’s mystery virus actually was.
“Let me guess,” Didi said wryly. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”
“On the contrary. It’s exactly like something I’ve seen before. Or rather something Hy Cohen saw, and actually messed around with a bit before he invented me. Ever heard of Turing Soup?”
“I don’t cook.”
“Oh my, aren’t we funny? Turing Soup was a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century idea, child of the era of networks…just like me. People had networks on the brain back then. The way Enlightenment thinkers had clockwork on the brain. Or the way people in Darwin’s day had steam engines on the brain. Or the way we’ve got spin on the brain. Actually some associates and I are working on a paper about…right, okay, never mind. Turing Soup was the brainchild of a guy named Walter Fontana. The same Walter Fontana who invented AlChemy, more prosaically known as Algorithmic Chemistry. One thing you have to say about the guy, he had a gift for names. He also happened to be at MIT toward the end of his career, and to take under his wing a bright young French postdoc in theoretical computer science called Hyacinthe Cohen. Which is why I might just be the only person still alive who remembers Turing Soup.
“The idea behind Turing Soup was to look at the evolution of algorithms as a model for the evolution of organic life. A Turing machine is a universal computer—in fact, the paradigmatic universal computer. It has a reading head that can ‘read’ any tape run through it. It has an execution apparatus that carries out whatever instructions the reading head reads. Turing couldn’t know it back in 1950, but he was essentially describing RNA: a ‘reading’ mechanism that zips itself to the unraveled DNA strand in order to reproduce its folded protein sequences. Fontana’s idea was to throw a bunch of molecular Turing machines together and let them ‘read’ each other’s programs and see if they could construct new programs from the components of the existing ones. It didn’t work, mainly because Turing machines have a problem that RNA and DNA either don’t have or figured out how to solve a long time ago: they hang, like just about every other computer ever invented. So the machines in Turing Soup would just lock up with each other, start reading each other’s tape, slip onto a positive feedback loop, and hang.
“So that was Turing Soup: wrong tool for the right job. Fontana moved on to lambda-calculus and AlChem. And everyone filed Turing Soup away as an idea whose time had come and gone. But if I had to describe this sample Moshe’s flogging around, that’s what I’d say it was: Turing Soup made out of DNA. Or more accurately, a virus that takes its host’s DNA and turns it into Turing Soup.” Cohen grinned. “Which—if you’ll forgive a joke that about eighteen of my associates have already made at some point in the last few weeks—gives a whole new meaning to parasitic computation.”