Bloodline (19 page)

Jack pulled into the A&P parking lot half an hour early and set up watch from a shaded corner.

Around a quarter after he saw Levy's Infiniti enter, followed by a battered and dirty old Jetta. They parked in adjoining spaces, then Levy got out and spoke to the driver of the Jetta, a middle-aged woman. After a brief conversation, Levy returned to his car and the Jetta moved two lanes away where the driver had a clear view of the Infiniti.

A little research had revealed that Levy occupied the number two spot at Creighton, right below medical director Julia Vecca. Could the driver be Vecca? Seemed like a long shot. Hard to believe the medical director of a federal facility would drive around in a heap like that.

Whoever she was, what was she doing here?

Jack could think of a couple of ways to find out, but settled on the most direct.

He pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves, stepped out of his car, and walked the perimeter of the lot until he was behind the Jetta. Then he beelined for it.

She jumped and let out a short, sharp screech when he yanked open her door.

"You won't be able to hear a thing from here. Come and join the meeting. I don't want you to miss a word."

She stared up at him through thick lenses. Her gray-streaked brown hair managed to be simultaneously mousy and ratty. Her suit was wrinkled and her white blouse showed ring around the collar. She grabbed for her phone.

"I'm calling the police!"

He took her arm and gently pulled her from the car.

"No need, lady. We're just taking a short walk to your pal Levy's car over there, where we'll sit and get to know each other."

The fear in her eyes turned to annoyance as she allowed herself to be led across the lot.

Levy's eyes fairly bulged through the windshield when he saw Jack and his companion. He jumped out of the car and stepped toward them.

"Julia, I—"

Julia, ay? Thanks for the ID.

Jack waved him back inside. "Nothing's changed, doc. We've got a table for three now, that's all."

Jack opened the front passenger door and ushered Vecca into the seat, then climbed into the rear.

"Comfy," he said as he settled on the soft cushions. He shoved a gloved hand toward Levy. "Now, as they say at the Oscars: the envelope, please."

Without a word, Levy slapped it into his palm. Jack opened it and pretended to count, then stuffed it into a pocket.

"Okay. Now that that's out of the way, why are you here, Doctor Vecca?"

She jumped at the sound of her name, then turned in her seat and focused suspicious eyes on him.

"You know who I am? How? Have I been under surveillance?"

He winked at her. "I'll never tell. But you might consider washing your underwear between wearings."

That had been a guess but, considering her appearance, an easy one. She glared at him.

"I came here to get a look at the man who is blackmailing us. I must say, I'm not impressed."

"Then why didn't you simply arrive with the doc here?" When she didn't answer, he added, "Oh, I get it. You didn't want me to know you were involved. You need deniabilty so you can leave Levy in the lurch should this whole situation head south, right?"

Vecca reddened while Levy's neutral expression said he'd already figured that.

"And as for blackmail," Jack went on, "I didn't ask for this. I was offered."

"That's immaterial. Just make sure you do what you're being paid for—which is nothing."

"Or what? You'll sic Bolton on me like you sicced him on Gerhard?"

He was probing here, looking for a reaction.

"I've heard enough of this." She opened the car door. "Remember what I told you."

She slammed the door and stormed back to her car.

"I do believe I've upset her."

Levy cleared his throat. "The only way to truly upset Doctor Vecca is to threaten her protocol. She's got a lot invested in this clinical trial.'"

"Enough to want Gerhard dead?"

"She did not 'sic' Bolton on Gerhard. I told you—he was with us the night you say Gerhard was murdered." He cleared his throat. "You mentioned oDNA last night. Tell me honestly: Where did you hear of that?"

"The stuff that doesn't exist?"

"It's obvious that you know it does, so I see no point in denying it. But where—?"

"Let's trade. You tell me about it and I'll tell you where I heard about it."

"You heard about it from Gerhard, didn't you."

"First time I ever laid eyes on him he was dead." Jack wasn't giving anything away. "You first."

Levy looked around the half-full parking lot. Vecca had putt-putted off in her junker.

"Let's move the car."

"Where?"

"I'll show you."

Jack leaned forward for a look over the backrest and saw Levy's RF detector resting on the console.

"Afraid somebody's listening?"

"No, of course not. I'd just like a change of scenery."

The RF detector was reading only background, but Levy could be worried about a laser eavesdropper—bounce a beam off a window and hear everything inside. Then again, he could have something arranged…

Jack reached back and pulled out his Glock. He held it low and racked the slide. The cartridge in the chamber popped out and bounced off the rear of the front seat. All for show, but the sound effect brought the desired result.

Levy said, "You brought a
gun
?"

"Of course." He pocketed the ejected cartridge. "Didn't you?"

"No! I don't even own one."

"Probably should. Okay, take us where you want to go."

Julia watched Aaron's car pull out of the lot with that private investigator, John Robertson, still in the rear seat.

She'd made a circuit and come back to the A&P to talk to Aaron after the detective left, but apparently they'd made other plans. She wondered where they were going and what they could possibly be talking about. She was tempted to follow but had a better idea.

Before, as she'd driven away, she'd realized she'd seen the investigator get out of his car shortly after she'd pulled into the lot. She hadn't paid it much mind at the time, just a man getting out of a big black car. But that man had turned out to be Robertson.

He was gone but his car remained.

Julia pulled up before it and wrote down the license plate number.

Probably thought he was smart. Aaron had told her about his assuming the identity of a dead investigator. She'd noticed he wore gloves so as not to leave any prints. Probably thought he had all bases covered, that he'd fully insulated his identity.

Well, he'd better think again. He wasn't dealing with the hoi polloi here. He was dealing with another kind of investigator—a scientific investigator used to probing the secrets of life itself. Probing the secrets of one man's miserable life would be a cakewalk.

That remark about her underwear still rankled. How embarrassing. Had he been spying on her? Well, turnabout was fair play.

She'd give the plate number over to the agency and let them run with it. In a matter of hours they'd know everything there was to know about this man. His life would be an open book.

Smiling, she pulled away.

John Robertson, or whoever he really was, had made his last snide remark. He'd rue the day he dared to cross swords with Julia Vecca.

After driving in a meandering loop that brought them to a construction site, Levy parked on a dead-end street in the growing development. Apparently the workers had the weekend off.

"Well," Jack said, peering around. "This is intimate."

"I work for suspicious people. Now, tell me where you heard about—"

"Uh-uh. You first, remember?"

Levy sighed. "Very well…"

Very well? Who said very well?

"One of the fallouts of the human genome project has been the realization of how much—ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent—of our DNA is noncod-ing. In other words, junk. Or at least seems like junk. Since we can't find any useful purpose it serves, we call it that. But that doesn't mean it was never useful. Most of us think it's mainly leftovers from viruses and the evolutionary process."

Jack was disappointed. He'd heard of junk DNA. But Levy seemed too interested in oDNA for it to be junk.

"I don't buy oDNA as just junk."

"It is and it isn't. Some junk DNA is oDNA, but not all oDNA is junk."

"Thanks for clearing that up."

"I know it's confusing. Let me go back to the beginning. Back in the eighties I began working on an NIH-funded project that was looking to identify genetic markers for 'antisocial' behavior. This was all very hush-hush because of the controversial nature of the work."

"What's so controversial about that?"

"Politics, my boy. Politics. A number of NIH conferences on the subject were canceled because of protests. They're all afraid that if these markers are identified and confirmed beyond doubt, how will the information be used? Specters of the eugenics movement and the holocaust get invoked and everyone shrinks away. And then come the religious fanatics: it's original sin, not God-given DNA that causes mankind to break the Commandments."

"The good old creationists, sabotaging knowledge wherever it rears its ugly head."

"Recently they've tarted up creationism with some pseudoscientific gobbledygook and are trying to slip it into schools as 'intelligent design,' but it's still creationism." He snorted. "Intelligent design! It's laughable. Look at the cetaceans—creatures that must live, feed, and mate in a medium they can't breathe."

Jack nodded. "Yeah. If that's intelligent design, God must be a blond."

Levy laughed. "Exactly. And has anyone who pushes intelligent design ever looked at the human genome? It's a mess—an absolute mess."

"But it somehow gets the job done."

"That it does, using only one or two percent of what's there. Back in those days, we hadn't yet mapped out the genome. The Human Genome Project was just a dream. But I did find consistent markers in certain violent criminals. Not all of them, but in enough to keep the funding going. Adapting a fluorescent antibody test developed by Julia Vecca allowed me to stain nuclei to show the presence of this DNA variant.

"Once we had that, we needed a criminal population to test. We collected samples from all the federal prisons, and the ones who scored highest
were
moved to Creighton, which became dedicated to researching the variant."

"Were they all violent?"

"The top scorers, yes, though some white-collar criminals were up there too. But just because they were locked up for nonviolent crimes didn't mean they weren't violent. We could only go on their convictions. We didn't know how they treated their wives or kids or the family dog."

"The closet sadists."

"Right. But with the explosion of knowledge and investigational techniques in the late nineties and early aughts, we found a subset of pseudogenes among the junk."

"Fakes?"

"How do I put this? They're ancient ancestors of functioning genes, but they have no coding ability. They fall under the junk umbrella. But these particular pseudogenes are so unique that you could almost say they indicate a variant strain of humanity… another evolutionary line… another human race that got pushed aside."

Jack held up a hand. "Just a sec. I don't know a lot about evolution but I do know the evolutionary tree has a lot of dead branches."

"Yes. But this is different. These genes are so distinct that it almost looks as if they were—I hesitate to say this—manipulated."

Jack had two hands up now. He'd heard this kind of talk at the SESOUP convention last year. It had sounded crazy then, and it sounded crazy now.

"Whoa there! You don't happen to be into UFOs, do you? You're not going to start telling me one of those nut-job theories about aliens playing with our DNA."

"Of course not. But I can make a circumstantial case that somewhere along our evolutionary line
something
happened to it. I mean, this stuff's
that different
. So the big question is—where did this DNA come from? It's not found in chimps or any of the apes. It's not found in daffodils or butterflies, or sharks—humans share DNA with all of those, believe it or not—or even bacteria or viruses—and we have tons of viral DNA in our junk. How did it skip every other species since the dawn of time and land in ours and ours alone? If I were an intelligent design dolt I might say it's proof of God's guiding hand in evolution, but it was more likely the devil's. It's completely other. That's why I named it oDNA—other-DNA."

There it was, right out in the open:
other
.

Had the Otherness stirred something of itself into the human gene pool way back when—back in the First Age, when the
Compendium
was supposedly written? Or was this unrelated?

No… too much of a coincidence. And there'd be no more coincidences for him.

But to what purpose? A cosmic time bomb, set to explode… when?

Damn, he wished he still had that book. It might be able to tell him something.

"Why did you pick 'other' rather than 'alien' or something like that?"

"Because when you say 'alien,' people think of flying saucers and little gray men with big black eyes. We've got apes in our genome because we have a common ancestor. The Cro-Magnons live on in our genes, and there's recent evidence that Neanderthals do too. I suspect something happened in our hominid past to split off a subspecies from the main line. It developed this 'other' genome, and then was reabsorbed back into the main line, either by crossbreeding or some sort of introgression. I'm guessing about the
how
, but I'm sure of the
what
: We've all got a little oDNA in us."

A tingle ran over Jack's skin.

"All?"

Levy nodded. "To widely varying degrees, but yes. All. Summing up: At some time in the past another human race with altered DNA merged with ours. The DNA of the other race—the 'loser' race—joined the junk pile of the present human genome. You've heard of 'gone but not forgotten'? This oDNA is forgotten but not gone—and not necessarily junk."

The Otherness… part of the human gene pool… the implications staggered him.

He wondered if he should tell Levy what he suspected. But that would mean going into all the background he had gleaned over the past year about the ageless, ceaseless cosmic shadow war between two unimaginably huge and unknowable forces—one indifferent, and one, the Otherness, decidedly inimical—waging around them with Earth as one of the many marbles in play.

Yeah, that would go over well. Levy would stamp NUT across Jack's forehead.

So instead he said, "Why hasn't anyone heard of this? It's tailor-made for the tabloids."

"Other people have stumbled upon it, as I did, but the news has been suppressed. All I did was send out a few e-mails on some preliminary findings and suddenly a member of a government agency which I may not name was knocking on my door. And no, they weren't dressed in black suits and fedoras."

"That's good." Jack had dealt with the real men in black and knew they didn't work for any government. "What did they want?"

"My silence. I could A: come work for them; B: keep my mouth shut and direct my research to another area; or C: stay on my present path and find my reputation trashed to the point where the only place I'd ever get published was
Fortean Times
, if there."

"You chose A."

Levy nodded. "Just like a lot of others. It was a win-win offer. I got automatic funding to do the kind of groundbreaking work most researchers only dream of. No filling out reams of application forms or going around begging—just research."

Scary and fascinating, but a connection was missing.

"What's all this got to do with Bolton?"

"Jeremy Bolton is
loaded
with oDNA—the highest score on record."

"Where'd he get it all?"

Levy shrugged. "Who can say? He was born in Louisiana to Elizabeth Bolton. The father is listed as Jonah Stevens but there was no marriage and Elizabeth raised Jeremy alone."

"Could Jonah Stevens be the source of his mystery money?"

Levy shook his head. "He's dead. We traced him because we wanted to see if he was the source of his son's oDNA, but he died in a weird elevator accident."

"Weird how?"

"The police suspected foul play, but nothing was ever proven. Unfortunately for us, his body was cremated, so we never got to check his remains for oDNA."

"What about the mother?"

"Dead too. Cancer. We managed to get an order of exhumation to check her DNA. Elizabeth Bolton carried a significant amount of the o variant, but nowhere near her son's."

"So this Jonah Stevens, whoever he was, must have been a gold mine of the stuff."

Levy nodded. "He was most likely a human monster, because he was also a carrier of the trigger gene."

"What the hell is that?"

"As I said, the oDNA is a cluster of pseudogenes amid the other junk, but unlike most pseudogenes, these are fairly complete. Just dormant. And they remain dormant unless a certain mutation is present on one of the X chromosomes. In times of stress, this gene can awaken the oDNA and transform it from noncoding to coding."

"I don't understand what you mean by coding."

"Genes carry codes—templates, if you will—that the cell uses for making specific proteins. When the oDNA is stimulated from pseudogene status to an active gene, its codes start producing unique proteins that alter neurotransmitter levels in the brain, triggering violent impulses. We haven't worked out the exact mechanism yet, but we're pretty sure that's what happens."

"So you're saying these oDNA types can't help it if they're violent."

"I didn't say oDNA triggered violent
behavior
, I said violent
impulses
. There's a world of difference. One is the act itself, the other is a tendency toward the act. Other genetic and environmental factors that affect an individual's impulse control come into play here.

"The upshot is that all of us have some of oDNA in us, but the amount varies, so some are more 'other' than the rest. But the amount of oDNA has no effect on an individual unless he or she has the mutation that acts as a trigger.

"But take a large amount of oDNA, add the trigger mutation, mix with poor impulse control—or anything like alcohol or drugs which lower the impulse threshold—and you have a potentially lethal combination."

"Like Jeremy Bolton."

Levy nodded. "Jeremy Bolton is a perfect example."

"And that's why you need him for this clinical trial."

"Exactly. We don't know how to remove his oDNA—although someday we might be able to do just that—so we've targeted the mutated trigger gene. If we can suppress that, the oDNA will remain dormant, and Jeremy Bolton will be just like you and me."

"Speak for yourself, doc." Jack rubbed his eyes. "Your agency can't keep this oDNA a secret forever."

"It knows that. And when the news does hit, it will have devastating effects. Look at the problems caused by differences in pigmentation. Imagine what's going to happen when it's leaked that there are people among us with large amounts of alien DNA—and believe me, the
o
in oDNA will be quickly replaced by
alien
in the popular press. Not to mention what it will do to the criminal justice system. Chaos. Everyone behind bars or in court will be claiming their genes made them do it and will want to be declared not guilty
by
reason of defective DNA."

Jack hadn't thought of that. Jeez.

He said, "And since we no longer believe in personal responsibility in this country, the lawyers will have a field day."

Levy shook his head. "We're talking genetics here, not—"

"It always comes down to personal responsibility," Jack said. "Like you said, the oDNA triggers violent
impulses
. But there's one more step before the violence: You still have to decide whether or not to act on the impulse. And even if you're drunk or coked up at the time, you're responsible for deciding to drink or snort. So even though you have an impulse to drop a cinder block off an overpass, you don't cross the line until you release it."