The Zen Gene (9 page)

“What makes you think I was sort of right about the amino acids?”

Tyler didn’t take his eyes off the television or hesitate when he said “I mean you were right then but the formulation data has changed, now you are wrong,” he said.

He smiled at Andi and winked and said, “Tyler do they teach advanced genetics in grade eight science class?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ty spends a lot of time on the computer. He likes to read about science. Don’t ya, Ty?”

He never responded to her because he was busy channel surfing while a commercial was on. The kid seemed to be watching three different shows at the same time. He was intrigued by the way Tyler answered his questions without any hesitation. At the very least it seemed to indicate some basic knowledge of genetics. He decided to ask a few specific questions that no high school science class would teach.

“Tyler can you tell me what the LAMC gene does?” he said. Again without any hesitation the boy answered.

“It codes for brain convolutions in some mammals.”

“What is PCR?” he said.

“Polymerase chain reaction.”

“What does it do?” he said.

“It reproduces segments of DNA.”

“Have you done PCR?” he said.

“Yes but only for single strand mRNA.”

He was watching television and not paying him any real attention beyond what minimal politeness required.

“Tyler is there a genetic basis for aggression in mammals?” he said.

“Obviously.”

“Is it possible to alter aggression using discreet gene manipulation?” he said.

“Obviously.”

He stopped asking Tyler questions when he noticed the look of alarm on Andi’s face. Andi grabbed his hand and drew him up off the couch and into the kitchen.

“What was all that?” she said.

She looked concerned, confused, and a little pissed off. He thought about how to answer her question then grinned and said “I think I can safely say that Tyler is not like Robin.”

“Are you saying his answers made sense?” she said.

“Obviously,” he said, mimicking Tyler’s deadpan delivery and smiling. “That’s one smart kid at least where genetics are concerned.”

“Well if he’s so damn smart why is he flunking all his classes?” she said whispering thinking Tyler was in the house but he left almost the same moment they did. He considered her question, he could hear the frustration in her voice.

“Has he had an IQ test? It is possible that regular school is meaningless to him. He might only be attending school because it is required,” he said.

Andi did not look at all happy when he said that.

“I suppose I should be thankful he is not intellectually challenged,” she said.

He noticed that, at the moment, she did not look or sound thankful at all.

“Sometimes bright people have difficulty fitting into the typical world. Ordinary people often don’t make sense to someone who is intellectually gifted. I don’t know exactly how intelligent Ty is but he definitely knows something about genetics. It is difficult to gauge how deep his knowledge runs and it is often the case that clever people can acquire enough jargon and basic information to fake their way through a casual conversation on a complex subject without having any real depth of understanding. Exactly how much a boy like Tyler can teach himself by surfing the internet is unknown but, with the wide range of open lectures from major universities and the right kind of mind, the potential could be unlimited,” he said.

“Do you think his knowledge is shallow?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What does your gut tell you?” she pressed.

She was asking him for his assessment of Tyler and he felt like he was entering dangerous territory.

“We didn’t talk long enough for me to accurately judge the depth of his knowledge, but based on how quickly he responded to my questions, he does appear to have a good grasp of the concepts. His lack of hesitation when answering my questions is what makes me think that,” he said.

“I don’t know whether I should feel relieved or not. You don’t make being gifted or intelligent sound very attractive,” she said.

He looked into her eyes and said, “I don’t know whether you want me to tell you what else I noticed but there is more.”

“Tell me what? ” she said.

“I noticed that Tyler does not express emotions. For one thing he calls you Andrea and not mom and when he answered my questions about the article he did not try to spare my feelings or soften it when he told me I was wrong. It was simply a fact like the atomic weight of plutonium,” he said.

He paused to gauge how well Andi was taking this information. Her eyes were bright with understanding and emotion but thankfully not tears or anger. He saw the inward-looking cast of her eyes and knew she was thinking about Tyler.

*

She always wondered why he never called her mom. She told herself the reason was to punish her for her mistakes. She tried unsuccessfully to clear the emotion from her voice.

“It bothered me that he never called me mom but I got over it. And I know what you mean about the emotion thing. A doctor called it ‘low affect’ but I knew it was more than that. There was something that happened that worried me. When Tyler turned fourteen he asked me to buy him a pet iguana for his birthday. He never showed any interest in pets or his birthday for that matter so I bought it for him.

I know this sounds weird but the next day, while I was at work, I think he killed it. I never saw it again and he refused to talk to me about it. It scared me that he could be that cold. I did some reading about child development and one book said a lack of emotion combined with the killing of family pets is a precursor to other behaviours. Worse behaviours,” she said.

Babysitting

September 20

10:10 am

Sergeant Daniel Nichol was dripping with sweat from the heat rising off the tarmac at Victoria International Airport. He was waiting for the grey military issue 737-100 to come to a stop. The petroleum smell of jet fuel was overwhelming and with not a hope of a breeze he would soon be soaking wet in his winter-weight tunic. He wondered if he would make it through the day without a change of clothes. He watched the ground crew push the stairway up to the aircraft and the passengers begin to dis-embarked. Lieutenant Patricia Hunter was the last one off the aircraft. She was arriving on a direct flight from Thunder Bay and because he did not recognize her from Naden he assumed that was where she was stationed.

She has a good name for a spook he thought when he saw her spot the cardboard sign he was holding with her name on it. He checked her out as she walked towards him and decided if she didn’t turn out to be a muddy-stick this could be a decent assignment.

“Sergeant Nichol?” she said.

She needed to shout over the sound of a nearby aircraft. He nodded and they shook hands. He almost saluted but she was in civvies and he was not sure what the protocol was for lady Intelligence Officers like maybe it would blow her cover or something. Luckily she stuck her hand out before he needed to make the decision. Her only luggage was a military issue backpack that a crewman handed to him. Nichol shouldered the bag and lead the way to the parking area.

“Tell me Sergeant, how did you get stuck with this babysitting job?” she asked.

They were in the line-up of cars to exit the airbase. She was a smallish woman, maybe 5’4”, and she wore tight jeans and an Expo’s baseball jersey. She was maybe twenty-five, wore her hair short and efficient, and seemed to be friendly enough. She out ranked him which called for some caution on his part. He knew nothing about the assignment other than he was to pick up a Lieutenant named Hunter at the airport and assist as required.

When she said babysitting his first thought was she was referring to herself, as in maybe she was an army brat with a pretend rank, but that seemed unlikely. She was younger than him but not by much and she could have easily earned her rank. He was chewing on an answer when she said

“You don’t know what our assignment is, do you?”

“No, Ma’am. My orders were to pick up an officer named Hunter and cater to her every whim. I was told it was strictly on a ‘need to know’ basis,” he said smiling.

She turned her head away from him and smiled. The Sergeant was kind of cute for a grunt.

“People call me Trish,” she said.

This was the way superior officers set the protocols for their interactions for the duration of the assignment.

“I’m Dan,” he said.

“Well Dan let me fill you in. Do you have any experience in covert operations?” she said.

“No. I was Military Police for five years with a few courses on anti-terrorism tactics but nothing undercover,” he said.

Good, she thought. His answer was honest and not the balls swinging GI Joe crap she usually got from career soldiers. It looked like Western had picked a good man for the job.

“We’ve been assigned to do surveillance on a sixteen-year-old underachiever named Tyler Worthy. How does that sound?” she said.

He glanced at her to see if she was serious.

“Working for the Canadian Armed Forces I accept there is no assignment too menial or operational directive too insane for the elite higher-ups, in their finite wisdom, to request of the junior ranks,” he said. He was treading dangerously close to the acceptable limit of disrespect but when she laughed he knew she worked her way up through the ranks and earned her commission. He relaxed now that he knew they shared common ground. It was obvious she retained the innate distrust the lower ranks held for command.

“The boy is intellectually challenged which is pc for retarded these days. My boss believes he may be in cahoots with his father a French national named Julian Froste. Froste is an immediate apprehend for visa violations,” she said.

She held up a photo for him to look at and Nichol glanced at it.

“He looks too young to be the father of a sixteen-year-old,” he said.

“It’s an old photo. He is thirty-eight and heavily involved in bio-terrorism. He went underground and no one has laid eyes on him since the late nineties. Basically our job is to sit on this kid for a week or longer to see if Froste turns up. The kid’s photo is from school and is believed to be accurate,” she said and held up Tyler’s grade five class photo.

“Handsome kid, he doesn’t look retarded,” he said as they drove towards the city, “where do you want to start?”

“We will find our baby but first I need some coffee,” she said.

Nichol signaled a left and turned onto Weston Avenue and drove up to Tim Horton’s and got in line at the drive-thru.

“Dan I thought we were going to get along,” she said.

“What? You don’t like Timmy’s,” he said genuinely surprised.

“I said I need coffee Sergeant. I know you can do better and don’t try to foist Starbucks on me either it could result in a reduction in rank,” she said.

A woman who knows what she likes, he thought, this might be fun after all.

The Factory

All the seams around the door into laboratory four were sealed with shiny grey duct tape. Sergeant Nichol aimed his flashlight playing the light along the seam whistling softly.

”They must have used a whole roll. They obviously don’t want anyone to get inside,” he said.

Hunter was standing behind him when he reached out to try the door handle.

“Wait Sergeant,” she said. “There might be another reason it’s sealed like that, maybe they don’t want something to get out?”

Nichol reflexively yanked his hand away from the door handle.

”Let’s keep looking,” she said, “it’s obviously not in daily use so we can come back to it later if we need to.”

He was happy to keep moving. He was not particularly freaked out by germs but he knew nothing about biological weapons except for what he saw in combat training films from the Vietnam era. One memorable scene showed a naked Vietnamese girl writhing in the dirt with her skin bubbling and boiling off her face and body. There was no sound track to that part of the film but you did not need sound to hear her screams. Horrific sights like that early in his military career made a lasting impression. He dedicated his time in the military to avoiding unnecessary risks especially when it involved things he knew nothing about. Chemical and biological warfare were two of those things and so far that policy had worked well.

He was happy to follow Hunter’s lead as they continued to explore the ruined factory. they followed a rough pathway through the debris past a row of labs. None of the lab doors were locked and when they looked inside they saw dusty empty rooms until they came to number eight. The first thing he noticed was the floor in front of the door to lab eight was clean down to the bare concrete and a pathway had been cleared to a doorway marked basement.

She nodded and he reached out and gingerly tried the door knob and was relieved to find it locked. He ran the beam of his light all along the seam of the door but there was no duct tape. He noticed the male and female ends of an electrical cord jutting out from under the door. They looked newer than anything else they saw inside the factory.

“I’ll bet this is where they… do... whatever it is…they do,” he finished lamely.

She gave him a look and almost rolled her eyes but smiled instead and gently nudged him out of the way. She was trying to kick the eye-rolling habit it was fine at thirteen but did not play well as an adult.

He watched her kneel down before the door handle. It took her less than a minute to efficiently pick the lock. Her ‘cred’ rose considerably in his mind along with the unhappy realization she was way out of his league. When he heard the lock release he moved forward to open the door.

She held up a hand to stop him as she removed a P232 Sig Sauer pistol from a waist holster and chambered a round. He watched her walking ahead of him for the last half hour and did not realize she had a weapon stowed on board. She clicked the safety off and looked at him and nodded for him to open the door. He held his breath reached out and pushed it open. There was a bit of resistance from the snug rubber seals around the door. There was no one in the room and he resumed breathing when he realized the door was not booby trapped.

They entered and he held the light for her as she checked out the lab. He was not in a hurry to discover any deadly bugs he was happy to let her do the exploring. She was leaning over and looking through a stack of boxes with her mini flashlight in her mouth when he remembered the plug that was sticking out from under the door. She did not need his light for the moment and he stepped back outside the lab to examine it. Someone had neatly cut the seal away from the doorway just enough to let the cord ends through. Without thinking he plugged the two ends together. They both jumped when the large fan in the corner of the lab roared to life.

“That’s interesting, a positive airflow set up,” she said giving him a long look to see if he had done it on purpose. “Please don’t touch anything else Sergeant Nichol,” she said. The tone of her voice and the use of his last name made it abundantly clear it was not simply a request.

She wasn’t a scientist but she was thinking a lab this complex could not be set up by a mentally challenged sixteen-year-old. Someone, presumably the kid’s father, had the knowledge necessary to build a biology laboratory. Neither she nor Nichol had much beyond basic high school science but they agreed this looked like an active working lab.

That knowledge did not make her feel any better about what they might find in the lab with the duct-taped door. She took a small camera from her jacket pocket and shot photos of everything while touching nothing. She glanced at her watch and decided they were there long enough. She did not want the boy or his father to catch them inside the building. They were about to leave and relock the door when she spotted a video cable plugged into the computer and wondered where the camera was located. She found a power bar under the countertop and clicked it on.

Some dim low voltage lighting came on immediately and the monitor began to flicker. She had not planned to boot the computer in case it was checked to see when it was last used but this was too tempting. She hit the power button on the old IBM desktop computer and waited while it booted. It took a long time but it came to life and requested a password. She took the key-shaped thumb drive from her pocket and inserted it into a USB port.

The computer rebooted but this time without a password request. She found the icon for the video camera and clicked it. When the video feed came online they both stared at the mostly dark screen trying to figure out what they were looking at. Then she got an idea. She told Nichol to go back to lab four and shine his flashlight at the frosted window on the door. When he did she saw flashes of light on the screen.

“Stop moving,” she yelled to him through the open door. “Okay now move slowly to your right.”

He complied. “Now down a little,” she said.

He complied and the dim image on the screen brightened and inky shapes became clearer and she watched as something on the lab floor congealed into a meaningful shape.

“Oh oh what’s this,” she said.