Cold Silence (27 page)

I waited. He stood, and I thought,
He's not going to tell me.
He walked to the nearest barrel and bent over it and I saw his hand do something at the top. Had he checked a connection? Or flicked a switch? If he'd flicked a switch, would I hear ticking? Or was the timer the silent kind?

Harlan walked back and settled into the chair and sighed. What had he just done?

“We found the
cure
here,” he said. “Well, Tahir Khan helped. The illness? That happened some years ago. I just never let it out until now.”

“Harlan, what did you just do at the barrel?”

“I was a grad student working with leprosy,” he said. “I wanted to
cure it more easily. So many people get it in the third world. It's a terrible disease, Dr. Rush. We tried to grow it in a lab. But you can't do that. It's hard to work with a disease if you need fresh animals all the time.”

“Armadillos,” I said, glancing at the cages, telling myself that from his casual attitude, he'd just checked wires, he hadn't set the timer. Everyone up top was preparing for a party. They would have the party first. I thought,
Why prepare for a party if you weren't going to have it?
But then again, logic didn't seem to be the paramount value here.

Harlan said, “Back then, at SUNY, I needed samples that could survive in labs. So I made chimeras. Dog and human DNA. Tuberculosis and leprosy. The diseases are close, you know. TB, over four million base pairs of genes and four thousand proteins. It's one of the best known pathogens on Earth, after E. coli.”

“Easy to work with,” I said.

“Exactly!” Then he frowned. “But
Mycobacterium leprae
? Huge chains of unknown material! Uncoded chains. Pieces, just fragments of long dead genes, mutated beyond recognition. What did they do originally? No one knows!”

“TB was the doorway! Leprosy the locked gate!” I said.

He nodded. “Leprosy has
lost
thousands of genes since it first came into existence. Whole swaths of purpose, gone. But the TB didn't work. So I tried riskier combinations. My thesis adviser warned me not to. But at night . . . when no one was there . . .”

“Fasciitis,” I said. “You mixed fasciitis with leprosy.”

“Flesh-eating bacteria.”

“The last two organisms you'd think to put together.” I tried to remember what I'd learned in Nevada. I pulled snippets of information from memory. “Counterintuitive. Fasciitis doesn't come from soil, like leprosy. It's gram positive. Different cell wall structure altogether.”

“And drug resistant.” He nodded, glancing at the barrels. “But sometimes you risk making something worse to make it better. I was trying everything. It was a shot in the dark.”

“And the third piece you added? The norovirus?”

Something like pain flickered on his face. He was back at least for a second, reliving a time when he wasn't a prophet. Maybe he was reliving the moment when his mind snapped and he
became
a prophet. The pained look worsened. And then I thought I understood.

“You had an accident,” I said.

He didn't answer.

“You were sick. Or sloppy. You were tired and you infected a sample. Broke a slide maybe. Or sneezed. You were working in a home lab. You were doing something the wrong way. A damn accident.”

The vulnerable look cleared away. The eyes sharpened. Whatever edge I'd had with him was gone.

“What is it with you?” he said. “You're not scared. You don't care about yourself. You're just trying to keep me talking here.”

And trying to figure out how to make you open the cage.

I shrugged. “I care what happens to
them
.” He knew who I meant. I meant Eddie and the admiral. Chris and Aya. I meant the people who had ridden with me north in the coal car, the gang members in Washington. I meant the scientists in Somalia, Eddie's family, the worshippers at the National Cathedral, strangers even, I guess.

It's funny how some people who don't have families or intimate love can care more for strangers. But that doesn't make the caring less real. Maybe it means you have more caring to spread around. Who am I to judge? I'm a bad judge, but an honest one, and Harlan saw it, and nodded.

“I care about them, too,” he said. He seemed sad. Maybe he was thinking about the tens of millions of people he cared about that he planned to kill with a disease he'd created.

When he opened the lab door to go, leaving me in the cage, I heard choral music from up top, coming over a speaker system. I was hearing the same song that I'd heard in Somalia, sung by two men in a tent. But now eighty people were singing it.

And the Lord sent his prophet . . .

To walk among the people

And the prophet smote all evil

On that great and fearful day . . .

I tried to stop him with a question. “How did Tahir Khan come up with the cure?”

When the door shut behind him, the music stopped. All I heard was the scraping of animals against steel mesh. There was no sound from the barrels. No ticking. I could not see the red digits on a timer. I wondered if Harlan Maas would come back at all.

—

I was pulling at the bars uselessly when Harlan returned.

He walked over to a red phone on a table. It was an old scratched-up plastic model, heavy, 1950s style, but had no wires attached. The phone could not possibly work. But he picked up the receiver anyway and put it to his ear. He listened intently. He said something I could not hear. He hung up as if someone had been on the other end. He said, nodding at me, “I can answer your question now.”

“You do know, don't you, that phone's not connected to anything?”

He smiled. Fine. We wouldn't discuss that part, if that's what he wanted.

“Tahir Khan,” I said.

“Tahir found the cure. Yes. He went back to my old notes and re-created the strain step by step, but with one difference that
allowed us to control it. He added a new technique for controlling gene expression—activation—in transgenic organisms. That means modified ones.”

“What new technique?”

“Well! People think that to make a new organism, all you have to do is combine a few genes, little snipping, little splicing, make the pie. Bingo, they express themselves!”

“That isn't how it works, though,” I said, thinking that he did not seem so mad when he talked about science. What he
did
with it was insane. But the man knew of what he spoke.

He said, with some eagerness, “You need a third part. You need something called a
promoter
. A trigger. A small genetic element, could be only a few dozen nucleotides . . . or a thousand. You splice it into the hybrid before the new organism can work. Think of the whole thing like a train, Colonel. The chain of cars is the DNA, but railroad cars—the links—can't move by themselves.”

“The promoter is the engine, you mean.”

“Yes!” he said, and smiled. “Some are designed to be active all the time. You can't turn them off. But others only drive the train under specific conditions.”

“Like what?”

“An example? Say you want to try out a new gene in a mouse. But you only want the gene to work in the mouse's brain cells, its neurons. Well, there's a promoter that limits your new gene to working in that specific area. Or take recent research on fireflies.”

“Fireflies?”

“Do you want examples or not?” he snapped.

“Sorry.” The Sixth Prophet could be riled, I saw.

“Fireflies glow with a yellow-green light. Anyone who has been near them on a summer night knows what I'm talking about. That light comes from the insect's
luciferase,
a protein. Well, a couple years back, researchers wanted to see if they could make tobacco plants glow, too.”

“Why?”

“They just
did
,” he said. “They wanted the plant to glow when under stress if it was thirsty.”

“This really happened?” I wanted to scream. I couldn't care less, at the moment, about fireflies.

“Too little rain, the glow would be a cry for help! Imagine a thousand plants in the field, calling to their farmer for water.”

“Doesn't he know if there's too little rain anyway?”

Harlan shook his head impatiently. “That's not the point. The point is, researchers came up with a promoter to enable tobacco plants to glow!”

Harlan had apparently forgotten about all the people who might appreciate glowing plants and would—within weeks—expire from his outbreak. I didn't remind him. He was talking eagerly and I wanted to keep him that way. I said, “You're saying that Tahir Khan killed your leprosy by going after the promoter that turned it on, not the bacteria itself.”

“Yes! The promoter. He created a tet-on, tet-off system against it.”

“And what is tet-on, tet-off?”

—

Harlan explained that tet-on, tet-off had been invented recently to control potentially dangerous genetically modified life. “Tet” was the antibiotic tetracycline, or its stronger relative, doxycycline. Scientists at a biotech company created genes that could be turned on or off based on the presence of doxycycline.
Tet-off
activated genes when doxycycline was missing.
Tet-on
was the opposite.

I said, “You're saying that Tahir rendered your hybrid inactive with doxycycline? But we tried that drug!”

“No! Same principle, but different drugs. Tahir found a combination therapy to shut the promoter off.”

What he was saying sank in. I grew excited. “Existing drugs?
You mean, all we have to do is find the right combination that already exists that will stop this whole thing?”

He sighed and looked at his watch and went to the barrel across the lab. He bent over the top and I saw his hand move. He straightened and regarded me with a look approximating affection.

“Yes. But it took Tahir years to find it.”

“But the combination cures it, you're saying.”

“Maybe someone else will find it someday. I have it. I have the cure to give. But nobody came, Joe Rush. That truck stop was empty. I can see that my time has not yet come on Earth.”

How many minutes were left? I remembered the photos of the Jones cult in Guyana, the aerial shots of bodies lying in the open, birds pecking at the eyes. Nine hundred people had poisoned themselves. I remembered the shots we'd seen at Quantico of the Heaven's Gate cult, forty followers of Marshall Applewaite, who'd dressed in the same style clothes, same colors, same brand of sneakers, and lain down beside each other, feet all facing the same direction. They'd cheerfully consumed poison believing their souls were about to go into outer space and be transformed into something else.

Jokes. Fools. Gullible but harmless to everyone but themselves.

Harlan Maas said, opening the door to leave, “Just so you know, we have twenty more minutes. Good-bye, Colonel Rush. Do you pray to anything or anybody? You should. Now.”

—

I needed a lie. I needed a really great lie. I needed a stopper, this second, something so good that it would make him hesitate, delay, stop the count, have my cuffs taken off. Not that I knew what to do if that happened. Just that it was the best place to try to start.

I called out, “Do you know why I really came? I'm sick.”

“Oh, Dr. Rush. Up until now you've been honest.”

I held out my hands stubbornly and Harlan Maas hesitated and
turned back toward my cage. He stopped at the chair again, a safe distance. He leaned forward, ever the researcher interested in manifestations of his disease.

I pushed my hands out between a bar. I rotated my palms as much as possible. It was clear where the dead spot lay on my fingers. It was now a white patch.

“When did you get this?” he asked, like a doctor with a patient. As if he had not just checked a timer on a ticking fertilizer bomb, fifteen feet away.

“When did it become visible, Harlan? Or when did the dead feeling start?” I asked.

“Either one.”

He was turning away, seeking something in the lab. And then he saw it. He retreated and came back with one of those long, probing needles, used usually for pinning some sample down. Thin as a sewing needle, it was three times as long.

“Go ahead,” I said, as if he needed permission to stick me.

The needle went into my finger and I felt no pain at all.

He tried again, watching my face. I didn't wince. He stuck all the discolored patches. I felt nothing.

“When?” he asked again.

Hide the lie. Bury the lie. Bury it in the middle of an explanation. It's the only chance.

“The numbness? Actually, back in Africa. I didn't tell anyone, though. Kept it to myself.”

He started. And stared at me. Then his eyes narrowed. I knew his thought process. He was thinking that if I'd caught this in Africa, then blood tests should have shown me infected before I even got back to the United States, whether I hid symptoms or not.

I said, “I know! I figured when the tests showed nothing that I was imagining it. And the tests never came back positive. Even now. So I hid it when it got worse. I didn't want to be locked up.”

He asked in a smaller voice, “The blood tests didn't work?”

“That's what I said, isn't it? Anyway, I tried to figure out how
come
they didn't show infection in me but did on everyone else? I went back and tested samples from Africa and confirmed it, see? Most sick people there tested positive. But a few, three or four, again, negative. Even people in bad shape. Like the two guys you sent, the ones singing your song in their tent. So I figured—”

Harlan broke in, anxious, “What do you mean, my people were sick?”

“Well, almost everyone was sick, so I—”

He interrupted again. “They couldn't have been sick,” he said stubbornly. “They got the cure.”