I repeated the instructions to make sure I had them straight. The kid nodded and his helmet nearly fell off, sliding forward over his eyes.
The directions turned out to be meaningless. With the financial district closed to public access, a major part of the city's road system had been effectively amputated. Beyond the guard's control point, the traffic became a snarling tangle of flashing lights, patrol cars, detours, and gridlock.
The detours funneled the traffic through the retail part of town, where Santa Claus reigned like a South American dictator. Posters and plastic models of the fat guy were everywhere, along with tinsel, lights, and the usual Christmas paraphernalia.
Santa Claus. Seeing him reminded me of Al Cooke, the cook aboard the Natusima, the man who accused Sean Boyle of throwing his research partner, Dr. Tanaka, into the waiting mouth of a hungry great white shark. I reminded myself not to be so dramatic. The shark wasn't exactly waiting. And weren't the damn things always hungry?
I crawled past a group of people taking down the display of a sleigh pulled by reindeer. The bombing had stripped everyone of their Christmas cheer.
It took three hours to reach the 101, where things began to move quicker. The highway wound its way in a southeasterly direction through passing showers and tendrils of shredded cloud. Off to the left, San Francisco Bay hid behind a wall of solid rain. Meanwhile, the highway ran through a sea of fast-food joints, tire stores, and car dealerships.
An overhead sign said the turnoff I was looking for was coming up in two miles. Boyle was a geneticist. His “Playing God” speech had discussed the science involved in creating what he termed “designer life”—life created by genetically reengineering existing life forms to do specific tasks. I hadn't understood his speech completely, but the gist was easy to follow. Basically, according to Boyle, it was now possible to genetically engineer organisms and then patent them. Companies could own a new life form and demand royalty payments for its use year after year. There were examples of drugs being produced in this way, as well as various seeds used in agriculture. Theoretically, it was even possible to produce human-animal hybrids that, despite looking and acting the same as human beings, had a slightly different genome that was patented, meaning these human beings weren't technically human at all and therefore had no constitutional protection, no rights. They could thus be owned, a euphemism for enslaved. Nice.
In his speech, Boyle said that while this sounded like science fiction, a lot of it was technically feasible right now, with the balance theoretically possible in the not-too-distant future. For example, tomatoes could be reengineered with a gene from sole — the fish — that resisted freezing, allowing the fruit to be kept in freezers so that it could be stored longer. It was now possible to reengineer salmon to grow to forty times their normal size. The speech gave numerous examples of how this technology was pervading all our lives.
Boyle's specific area of interest was in the genetic reengineering of bacteria to produce new medicines.
It all sounded scary, and yet, in the way Boyle couched it, noble. This research was being done not for corporate profits, but for the betterment of humankind. Except that, according to the information obtained by Arlen, Boyle was in fact working on a new type of organism that was so secret there was no documented outline of exactly what it was. But there were clues. Boyle's partnership with Tanaka was unique. Both men were renowned experts in their respective, seemingly unrelated, fields. Tanaka was a marine biologist specializing in deep-sea life, specifically the search for previously undiscovered organisms that lived in the ultrahostile environments provided by hy-drothermal vents. So Tanaka came up with new life, the genes of which Boyle manipulated to produce … what? Something the DoD was prepared to pay big money for.
I reached the turnoff. The road brought me out at the gates of an area of light industrial compounds. Signs pointed the way to Moreton Genetics. I followed them until I saw the distinctive double-helix building raised above the plain on its man-made hill. A high electrified fence surrounded the complex. There were plenty of surveillance cameras. I took a left turn into the security checkpoint, a brick bunker with a heavy steel gate across the access road. More cameras. A fit young woman accompanied by a body-builder type complete with roid acne came out to check on my reasons for being here.
“Good morning, sir,” said the woman in a perky way, taking the lead, all teeth and blond hair, leaning into my open window. She wore a short-sleeved white shirt stretched across a lean, athletic torso. The double-helix symbol was embroidered on a breast pocket. The name tag pinned below it informed me her name was “Jacki.” Jacki and partner — I immediately named him Jill — wore the ubiquitous security earpiece. A Taser stun gun was clipped to her belt. Jill, similarly dressed and blond, the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirt looking like tourniquets around his pumped upper arms, was likewise packing. Were they expecting trouble here at MG?
“Morning,” I replied to Jacki.
“So, how can I help you today, sir?” she asked, beaming bright enough to give me a tan.
“Special Agent Vin Cooper, Department of Defense. I have an appointment with Dr. Freddie Spears.” I gave her a good look at my DoD credentials. So far, so good. I rarely called ahead when I wanted to interview someone, particularly when that someone might not want to be interviewed. Still, I had made sure Dr. Spears would be out at MG by making an appointment and using the name of a TIME journalist lifted from the magazine's editorial credits. Dr. Spears would be crazy not to stick around for an interview with the respected magazine read by thousands of potential MG stock buyers, wouldn't he? So I could assume the guy was in; I just had to get to him, and that meant getting past Jacki and Jill.
Jill extracted a personalized digital assistant from a pocket and began stabbing at it with a pencil-like implement. After a few moments, he shook his head and showed Jacki the screen.
“That's Cooper with a C,” I said helpfully.
The guy shook his head again.
Jacki's smile switched to a look of concern. “I'm sorry, sir, but you're not on our list of today's visitors.”
“Gee,” I said, matching her concern with some of my own. “Freddie's expecting me. We're old friends. He'll be real disappointed if I don't show up.”
I must have said something wrong because Jacki's expression become instantly suspicious. “Can I ask what this is in regard to, sir?”
Time to come out swinging. “Sure, you can ask, but it's none of your business, so I probably wouldn't tell you,” I said, confusing her with my sweetest smile. “But what you can do is tell Freddie that Special Agent Vin Cooper from the DoD is here to see him. You can also tell him I'm filling in for Steve Liu from TIME, and that I don't seem to appreciate being kept waiting. And then let's just see if my name doesn't miraculously appear on that PDA of yours.”
I wasn't sure what it was about these two that stuck in my craw. It could have been the fact that they looked like a couple of dummies in a gym-equipment store window. But it could also have been the Tasers, those nasty little antipersonnel devices on their hips, that set me off. I'd trained with this so-called nonlethal weapon. It fired a pair of probes attached to the “gun” by small wires. An electric current designed to disable the human nervous system surged down those wires and through the probes, curling the target into a helpless quivering ball on the ground. Trouble was, far too often those electrical impulses had the same effect on the heart, stopping it permanently.