Monster (28 page)

“Okay,” she came back. “You’re number 6, on-screen, loud and clear.”

Jimmy greeted the four armed forest rangers who had just arrived, then called via his earpiece, “Reed? Pete? We’re ready down here.”

Reed hurried up the hill through thick woods, homing in on his waypoint, eyes and ears wary. Under the circumstances, he was glad to hear Jimmy’s voice.

Pete radioed, “Let’s fill in the circle, guys, quick as you can. I think we can work within a quarter-mile radius; we’re that close.”

With all the grimness of a platoon leader leading his men into combat, Jimmy divided his hunters into three teams headed by himself, Steve Thorne, and Sam Marlowe. “Sam, you and your guys fill in around Pete’s position; Steve, spread your guys along that west side and help Max. My team’ll take the south end and do what we can to help Reed. We don’t have GPS units for everybody, so the rest of you stay within earshot of your team leader. Let’s go.” As they dispersed into the woods, he radioed, “Sing, we’re moving.”

Beck tried moving once, just raising her head enough to peer out of the thicket, but Rachel held her back with a firm hand, clamping her like a child against her bosom and holding her still. Beck settled—for the moment—and became like Rachel, Leah, and Reuben: a shadow, a dark, indistinct area within the elderberry thicket, obscured by a web of stalks, branches, limbs, and leaves. This was hiding as Beck had never experienced it—as an animal: motionless, silent, part of the darkness. Like ogres in a dim, odorous underworld, they’d become as dead things while the forest lived, stirred, and chattered above them.

I heard shots.

Moving only her eyes, Beck tried to meet theirs. None would look back, but she could tell they knew what was happening: something terrible, something frightening—to them.

And hopeful—for her.

Maybe Jacob was in the middle of another grisly killing when he encountered something he wasn’t expecting: Hunters. Humans. Big burly guys in camouflage, looking for a lost woman of her description, toting rifles and ready to blow away any hairy monsters that gave them guff.

Maybe someone found her footprints and made some sense of Reed’s cell phone number. Maybe Reed was still alive and leading the search. Maybe, at long last, the rules were changing in her favor!

She had to know.

Fighting back a rising quiver of excitement, she tried to be still, like her captors, and hear what they might be hearing. The forest above was still speaking in its everyday way, in a language she didn’t know. Were the birds concerned about something, or just gossiping? Was that quiet rustling a passing creature, the wind in the branches, or a hunter?

Then she noticed—and felt—something, only because it changed. Rachel’s heart and the slow, steamy flow of air through her nostrils had quickened. For the first time, Rachel’s head turned. The other heads turned. Beck turned her head.

The birds took flight, sounding alarms. Footfalls approached through the undergrowth—two feet, not four. There was a soft, rumbling grunt as they passed by and continued on.

Abruptly, and so typically, Rachel rose to her feet without warning and burst out of the thicket, heaving Beck over her shoulder. Leah, with Reuben on her back, followed directly behind. Beck hooked an arm around Rachel’s neck and swung down into a manageable straddle, but she was looking back, to the sides, anywhere else she could catch a view of the forest.
Were
there hunters out there?

Rachel and Leah ran south in a nearly straight line as if they knew exactly where they were going, and then, so quickly Beck missed when it happened, Jacob was with them, leading the way. His gait was hurried and cautious, his hair bristling. His fear scent trailed behind him like smoke from an old locomotive, and he kept glancing over his shoulder, not at all the haughty kingpin he’d been before.

Beck was afraid to assume too much, to hope too much, but from all appearances, they were being chased. Jacob was leading a getaway.

Cap knew he wouldn’t have much time and wasted none of it getting down a flight of steel stairs and into the subterranean world under Bioscience. The main hallway was narrow, its ceiling cluttered with conduit, plumbing, and ductwork. The walls were a monotonous gray, undecorated except for frequent red signs on imposing doors that shouted, Danger: High Voltage, This Door to Remain Closed at All Times, and Authorized Personnel Only. He came to a sign that read Blue Clearance Only Beyond This Point. He kept going, his shoes clicking on the bare concrete. He’d been stripped of his blue clearance badge along with everything else, but maybe no one would notice—if he even encountered anyone. So far, the whole floor seemed strangely deserted.

He did feel a pang of conscience, as if he were a spy or even a burglar, but he kept telling himself he was down here because (a) he was a scientist, (b) he had a theory, and (c) a scientist tested his theories through experimentation and observation.

Following up on Baumgartner’s “question” and that second trip to the Internet, he’d used a fluorescent tagging method to check the human DNA in the samples for adenovirus sequences, and bingo! Knowing what to look for, he’d found them everywhere.

Adenovirus was a tool commonly used in gene splicing because, being a virus, it naturally spliced its own DNA into the DNA of a cell it infected, making it an ideal delivery system. It was a matter of using an enzyme to cut a DNA sequence from a donor cell, splicing that sequence into the virus, and then infecting the recipient cell with the virus. Once in the recipient cell, the virus spliced the donor DNA into the recipient’s DNA along with its own, making the desired addition but also leaving its own detectable sequence.

In the case of the DNA from the stool and the saliva, meticulous rearranging of base pairs through site-directed mutagenesis— SDM—was clearly evident but, predictably, too slow for the genetic engineer’s schedule. Whoever it was resorted to viral transfer, using adenovirus to transfer, splice, and mix human with chimpanzee DNA whole sequences at a time, a much faster process but haphazard. In SDM, the genetic engineer controlled what base pairs were being changed, switched, and moved. In viral transfer, the
virus
decided, potentially doing more harm than good.

So Cap had a theory to explain the strange sequences the Judy Lab had revealed: chimpanzee, human, and hybrid all in the same animal, laced with sequences from the adenovirus that did most of the splicing. It was no accident, and there was no contamination. The presence of human DNA was intentional.

But of course, it was still a theory, and incomplete at that. He had the
what
and the
how
; but he needed to confirm the
who
, and while the possible answer was a no-brainer as far as he was concerned, it was necessary to test that answer through observation.

That observation was going to begin on the other side of a plain door marked with nothing but a number: 102.

He pulled a small cedar box from his jacket pocket, a nice keepsake Merrill had received from the American Geographic Society in recognition of his contribution to the field of evolutionary biology. It bore his name and the society’s logo, laser-etched on the lid. Cap flipped it open and took out Merrill’s master keys to the department’s labs and classrooms.

The third key Cap tried opened the door. With a quick glance up and down the hall—so far, he was still the only one here—he slipped inside, closing the door behind him.

He knew where to find the light switch because he knew this place well. This was the lab of Dr. Adam Burkhardt, the unsung and secretive pioneer—
poster child
, Cap had often thought derisively— of molecular anthropology. In Cap’s early years at the university, and at the very strong suggestion of Merrill, Baumgartner, and other department colleagues, Cap had spent many hours in this room working side by side with Burkhardt, supposedly to restore Cap’s faith in beneficial mutations and keep him on the right path as a professor of biology. If anyone could prove that mutations really worked as the mechanism for evolving new species, it had to be Burkhardt. He’d spent his whole life trying—and as Cap kept pointing out, failing. That, of course, wasn’t the conclusion Cap was supposed to reach. After two years of working together, their respective positions became so polarized that they parted company, Burkhardt to his secretive, high-priority research, and Cap to his role as the outspoken, question-asking department pariah.

But Cap had no time to dwell on unpleasant memories. Right now he had to deal with the fact that he was carrying stolen keys, would soon be caught if he didn’t move quickly, and was standing in a lab that was, by all appearances, vacant. The workbenches, once cluttered with a dozen different projects in various stages, were now clear and unused except for a few cardboard boxes that were lined up near the door. The biology posters were gone from the walls, the specimen jars were gone from the shelves, the lab mice were gone from the cages.

Burkhardt’s old desk was bare. Cap set down the box of keys and pulled out the drawers; they were all empty. The bulletin board above the desk carried a calendar still flipped to January even though it was July, announcements of events that had long passed, and a few snapshots held in place with pushpins: a pretty grad student holding a lab rat as she injected it; rats with mottled colors in their fur; four male students grinning as they held a trophy they’d won at a regional collegiate science fair. Burkhardt’s PhD diploma had been removed from the wall, but the square of unfaded paint still marked where it once hung. A “Teacher of the Year” plaque remained, dusty and forgotten. Cap remembered Burkhardt losing interest in teaching over the years, and now it seemed Burkhardt didn’t care much for the memories either, nor for the young lives he’d influenced, considering he’d left their pictures behind.

Cap went to the cardboard boxes and folded back the top flaps of the first. Ah, here was at least one vestige of Burkhardt’s presence. Inside, wrapped in several layers of newspaper to protect from breakage, were some of Burkhardt’s glass specimen jars. Burkhardt always prided himself on his vast collection of evolutionary icons in formaldehyde, a display that once took up several shelves along the front of the room and caught the eye of anyone who dropped in. He’d bought, borrowed, and swapped with other biologists around the world to collect Galapagos finches with different-sized beaks, peppered moths both white and gray, coelacanths that were regarded as living fossils, bats whose wing bones bore a homologous similarity to the human hand, lizards that had supposedly evolved from snakes, and a boa constrictor that had supposedly evolved from lizards, all part of Burkhardt’s sideshow of the dead. These remaining jars must have been the last ones packed, still waiting to make the move, wherever it was they were going.

Cap pulled out one of the jars and carefully removed the newspaper wrapping. He’d no doubt seen this specimen before—

No. He hadn’t. This one was new, and from its appearance, Cap decided, Burkhardt hadn’t bought or traded for it— Burkhardt had
produced
this one.

It was a lab rat floating in amber preservative, a pitiful animal with a twisted spine and—Cap counted them twice to be sure— six legs.

He pulled out and unwrapped the second jar. It was another lab rat, this one with mottled fur and no eyes.

The third jar contained a rat with no legs at all.

Cap felt his face flush and his stomach grow queasy. He rewrapped and placed the jars back in their box, not looking at the contents, trying to sell himself a foolish, vain hope that Burkhardt had gotten the message and stopped with rats—or at the very worst, chimpanzees. Burkhardt
was
a scientist, after all. Surely he knew how to read the indications of the data, especially at such a high level—

At the far end of the room, a solitary animal cage caught Cap’s attention. He paused in wrapping the last jar and stared at the cage a moment, frozen in time, one hand on the jar and the other holding the box lid open.

He couldn’t be seeing what he thought he was seeing. He wasn’t ready for things to get worse.

He lowered the last jar into the box, then hurried down the aisle between the workbenches for a closer look.

The cage was similar to a large pet carrier, a rectangular box of tough plastic with a swinging, barred gate at one end. It had come on tough times. The opening all around the gate had been chewed as if by an enormous rat trying to escape. The slot for the latch was nearly gouged out. The gate was tooth marked and bulged outward as if pushed with incredible strength from the inside.

Whatever Burkhardt had kept in this cage, it was bigger than a rat; apparently—
hopefully
—Burkhardt had found a bigger, tougher cage.

“Dr. Capella!”

He’d stayed too long. Turning, he saw Merrill come into the room, flanked by two campus police in gray uniforms, the university’s best and biggest.

Merrill was strong and confident between his two-man army. He extended his palm. “My keys?”

Cap nodded toward Burkhardt’s empty desk. “They’re on the desk.”

Merrill retrieved them. “Cap, you have a choice: leave this campus immediately and do not come back,
ever
, or be placed under arrest right here, right now.”

Cap walked slowly forward, hands half-raised in surrender. “Hi, Tim.”

The first cop, lanky and bespectacled, said, “Hi.”

“Kenny, how’s it going?”

The second cop, arms crossed over his barrel chest, nodded and replied, “It’s going all right.”

Cap addressed Merrill. “Looks like more than a sabbatical. Looks like Burkhardt’s pulled up and moved altogether.”

“Which is no concern of yours.”

Cap nodded at the damaged cage. “What happened? Did things get a little tough to contain?”

Merrill smirked. “A word to the
wise,
Dr. Capella—if that term means anything to you: we are all scientists here, and that means we deal in facts. You are a
creationist
, and now have the added liability of being a trespasser and a burglar. Before you say anything to anyone, please give careful regard to which of us has the credibility—and the power to destroy the other.”