Antenna Syndrome (15 page)

“Any idea why?”

“There’s a copy of the Dean’s letter in his file.
It’s pretty vague, says Dr. Globik contravened basic principles of
professional conduct the university held sacrosanct. They paid out
his full contract but asked him to vacate his office
immediately.”

“Anyone take over his contract?”

“Dr. Yamazaki.”

“One of yours, or an outsider?”

“Ours. He runs the Marine Biology lab, but he’s a
specialist in crustaceans, so maybe there’s some sort of connection
with insects. I mean, crabs and lobsters are sort of like giant
insects of the sea, aren’t they?”

“Please. I used to like going to Red Lobster.”

“I owed you one.”

“Now we’re square. Got a number for Yamazaki?”

She gave it to me and I called Yamazaki right away.
I was transparent with him, more or less, said I was doing a
background check on Dr. Globik, and wanted to meet him face to face
to discuss what he knew. He seemed eager to assist and said his
schedule was free all morning. I said I’d be there within the
hour.

Chapter 25

I drove downtown to NYU and the Silverman Building.
In the Biology Department, I asked the department secretary where
to find Dr. Yamazaki. She directed me to Fish Lab #1 in the
basement.

When I entered, a man was feeding some fish. He wore
a white lab coat over brown slacks and crepe-soled white shoes. A
bald spot the size of a child’s hand shone copper-toned at the back
of his head. The fish were a dull green color but there was nothing
dull about their movements. They lunged from one side of the tank
to the other, as fast as a boxer’s hands, to snatch the morsels of
meat as soon as they hit the water. Piranha.

“
Dr. Yamazaki?”

He turned with a frown. His eyes were black beads
within puffy lids. Yamazaki was tall, maybe six-foot-two, and
bulky. If he were as athletic as he was academic, he might have
made the sumo wrestling team.

“
Close the door, please. The draft
is bad for the tropical fish.”

“My name’s Keith Savage. We spoke on the phone
earlier this morning.” I gave him my card. “I wanted to ask you a
few questions about Dr. Globik.”

Yamazaki squinted at my card and stuck it in the
breast pocket of his lab coat. He dipped his hand into a plastic
bag and tossed a few more pieces of chopped liver to the piranha.
“Why?”

Generally I like to tell the truth. But in this
case, my telling him I was trying to find a paraplegic runaway who
might seek treatment at the Avatar Clinic would raise more
questions than I could answer. So I said, “I’m making discreet
inquiries on behalf of an employer.”

“Globik is seeking employment? You know he runs a
clinic in Tribeca that specializes in prosthetic implants?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“Who’s the employer?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, except that it’s a
government agency which exercises great due diligence in matters of
personnel.”

“DARPA?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, remember?”

“Never mind, I can put two and three together. What
do you want to know about Globik?”

“His contract with NYU was terminated in 2020. Do
you know why?”

Yamazaki chewed his tongue for a moment. “Let’s say,
he exceeded the boundaries of his research mandate.”

“Which was...?”

“To create an electronic interface that would allow
an operator to control the movements of insects.”

“Any bugs in particular?”

“Cockroaches were his initial subjects.”

“Was he successful?”

“Yes. He published a paper on it.”

“Can you describe his work in language I could
understand?”

“Sure. I’m not an entomologist, so I can’t get too
technical anyway. Globik attached a miniaturized radio receiver to
the head of a cockroach, thus allowing a remote operator to control
its movements.”

“That’s it?”

Yamazaki looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Yes,
that’s it. All it required was the brain mapping of a cockroach, an
intimate understanding of insect neurology, and a three-hour
session of micro-surgery to attach the implant.”

“I guess Dr. Globik was good at his work.”

“The man was a genius. He hadn’t been on staff six
months before everyone in the faculty was referring to him as the
Einstein of entomology.”

“Did you work with him?”

“No.”

“Then why were you assigned to take over his project
when he left?”

“I wasn’t assigned to
continue
his research.
I was assigned to destroy everything he’d done here.” Yamazaki
shook his head. “Sorry, that’s not strictly true. I was assigned
only to destroy the experimental aspects of his research that went
too far beyond the scope of his original contract.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Yamazaki nodded toward a camera in a corner near the
door. “Let’s go for a walk.”

He led me down a corridor and into some sort of
utility room full of water pumps, dehumidifiers and heat
exchangers. It was warm and humid, with dozens of pumps thrumming
away and a huge fan sucking noisily like some little kid with a
straw at the bottom of his milkshake.

Yamazaki took a pack of cigarettes from his lab coat
and offered me one. Eagle Clouds again. We lit up and blew some
smoke overhead. The fan yanked it away in a hasty swirl.

“Best place in the building to sneak a puff,” he
winked at me.

“What did you destroy?”

“His hornet colony. His insect-mammalian hybrids.
All of his research files pertaining to hybrid cloning.”

“Whoa. Hornets?”

“After he’d achieved remote control of cockroaches,
he set his sights on Asian giant hornets. It was a quantum leap in
remote motor control.”

“How so?”

“It’s one thing to control a stable six-legged
creature on a two-dimensional plane, quite another to control the
in-flight stability of a four-winged insect in three dimensions.
But he failed to establish adequate environmental controls...”

“What happened?”

“Individually, he’d attached radio implants to
almost a dozen hornets.
Der Schwarm
, he called them.
Unfortunately, they escaped from their enclosure one day and
attacked a whole class of graduate students. Several were stung
multiple times. One student died of anaphylactic shock and the
family sued the university.”

“You mentioned something about hybrids...?”

“The university didn’t even know about these until I
started shutting down his research. Would you believe, he’d used
university funds to rent an off-site facility just to keep it a
secret? We’d never have known about it if I hadn’t found reference
to it in his files.”

“Why were
you
made responsible for shutting
down his research?”

“Primarily, because I wasn’t an entomologist and
therefore wouldn’t be tempted to over-value and protect the
research he’d done. Secondly, I hated his guts, and was glad to
play a part in his removal. The man’s a genius, but a mad
scientist.”

“Why did you hate him?”

“He had no sense of boundaries and was arrogant
beyond compare. He had no tenure but he lorded it over us as if he
were the president of the university. Plus which, there was
something personal between us that I’d rather not go into.”

“What sort of hybrids?”

“He was experimenting with grafts. Leading edge
stuff that required three PhDs just to understand all the
neurology, physiology and micro-surgery required. He’d transplanted
compound insect eyes onto sparrows. Tarantula legs onto mice. He
had plans for so much more which he’d sketched in his research
notes. As a scientist I was in awe of his brilliance, but as a
human, I was disgusted with how he proposed to bastardize God’s
creatures. I was happy to incinerate it all.”

“What sort of plans?”

“As an entomologist, he was naturally fascinated
with insects. But as a trail-blazing neurosurgeon of organ and
prosthetic transplants, some of his ideas were practically science
fiction.”

“Such as...?”

“He wanted to make insects much larger than normal.
Although it’s a complex undertaking, it comes down to three steps.
The first was to map the insect’s entire structure through an MRI
scan, thus creating a blueprint of the species. The second step
involved the deconstruction of hundreds of samples of that same
insect to create a cell bank.”

“By deconstruction, you mean...?”

“Shredding them, and separating the results into a
palette of cells – brain, optic, muscle, cartilage, exoskeleton
cells. In the third step, he’d create a new insect, perhaps ten
times larger, by using the MRI scan as a template and a 3-D printer
to build it in layers, drawing the necessary cells for each
component from the palettes he’d filled in step two.”

“Did you ever see such an insect?”

“No...”

“You sound uncertain.”

“I never saw anything like that, but when we
dismantled his off-site lab, there were empty cages and enclosures
with signs of excrement, which led me to believe perhaps something
had existed, however briefly. It’d be no surprise, in the early
phases of such an undertaking, that many, if not most, of his
creations would have died. Globik might be clever, but he wasn’t
God.”

“Yet he was playing at it...”

“Just beginning to play. In some of his research
notes, he’d sketched out some incredible prototypes – athletes with
grasshopper legs to jump fifty feet, spies with moth-like antennae
for super-sensitive hearing, fighter pilots with compound eyes for
360-degree vision.”

“You really think that’s feasible?”

“Six years ago, it probably wasn’t. But given the
necessary financial resources and qualified staff trained to carry
out his work, I shudder to think of where he might be today.
There’s a new 3-D printer available now called the BioClone with
which he could have built insect parts on a human scale. With his
surgical skills and radiation treatment, he might have grafted
insect components onto human bodies. Once he had a few fully
functional hybrids, he could have then repeated the entire process
on a production scale: taken an MRI scan of the hybrid to capture
the template, built the appropriate palette of cells, than used a
BioClone to clone the prototypes. He could have created a world of
monsters.”

“Could have...?” I said. “You might have destroyed
his lab, but you didn’t destroy his vision.”

“Please.” Yamazaki put his hands over his ears. “I
have nightmares already.”

Chapter 26

I left the Silverman building and returned to my car
on a block watched over by the Urban Angels, a volunteer group
of unarmed citizens. The
Urban Angels
were descendants of the Guardian Angels,
operating on the same principle of commitment to public safety,
albeit with more technology at their disposal.

Each wore a helmet with a rotating camera, and they
patrolled their territories on bike or on foot. Subscribers tapped
into the UA feed to get a sense of what was happening in their
‘hood or on a particular block patrolled by an Angel. They’d first
become popular in student areas as a way to combat mugging and
rape, but their range and utility had since expanded to many other
parts of the city.

I gave one of them some money and slipped behind the
wheel just as my phone rang.

“Mr. Savage, it’s Vivien Randall.”

“What’s up?”

“I just received a phone call from a man with a
thick Russian accent. He has Marielle, but will release her if I do
what he asks. He wants money. He’ll call again later with further
instructions, but if I tell the police, I’ll never see Marielle
alive again.”

“How much did he ask for?”

She told me. It was a lot, but not as much as I’d
have thought, given her father was practically a millionaire.

“
That’s a bargain basement price.”
This was either an amateur who didn’t know the value of a
politician’s daughter, or a serious player for whom this was just
an ante to a bigger pot. I assumed the latter.

“What should I do?”

“Did you get a number?”

“There was nothing displayed.”

“Where’s Jack?”

“He went out earlier to run some errands.”

“Secure the house. Don’t let anyone in until I
arrive. Do you have a gun? Do you know how to use one?”

“I know where Jack keeps them. What about the money?
Should I go and get it?”

“Sit tight. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“When?” I heard the anxiety in her voice.

I calculated the distance and likely traffic.
“Within the hour.”

I hung up and started the car, heading for the
Williamsburg Bridge. I’d only got to 4th and Delancey when another
call came in.

“Savage? It’s Ron LeVeen. You asked me to let you
know if anything ever showed up here for Crabner. So, funny thing –
a first for Eddie, in fact – USPS just delivered a package for
him.”

“What is it?” I pulled over to the curb, not wanting
to cross the bridge in case I needed to swing over to LeVeen’s
sooner than later.

“A small padded envelope.”

“Don’t open it.” For all I knew, this could be
another spider intended to kill anyone who knew Marielle.

“Maybe it’s money. He owes me rent, remember?”

“Tampering with the mail’s a felony.”

“What are you, a lawyer? And who gives a shit about
a law that only serves the interests of the government, not the
people? The NSA’s been tapping our phones and reading our emails
for over 40 years.”

I heard a ripping sound of adhesive being pulled
apart. I gritted my teeth and waited for the scream of a man bitten
by a spider.

“It’s a little flash drive the size of a
fingernail,” LeVeen said, “Plus something wadded into a baggie.” A
moment of silence. “What the fuck? A snotty tissue. Is this a
joke?”