“There is no need to be rude, sir,” she replied.
“Jacki, this is not me being rude. This is me being obstinate and determined. But I can do rude if it would make you feel more comfortable. Although, trust me, it wouldn't.”
Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and her partner was speaking into a handset while giving me his best glare. Jacki touched a finger to her ear and then disappeared briefly inside the bunker. Maybe she was feeling the cold, after all. Or perhaps it was to activate the gate, which swung outward.
“Have a nice day,” I called to them as I drove through. One of the cameras followed me — like the eyes in those paintings, the ones in old horror movies. I'd been to sensitive military establishments with less security. Again I wondered why a nice, friendly company like MG would need to arm its gate guards with Tasers.
The access road meandered through the reeds, birds, and, no doubt, the rare endangered species of frogs and pond slime featured on the Web site. The drive gave me time to think about how I was going to play this interview. Chip Schaeffer had given me the green light to pay MG a visit. His tone had shifted from the earlier stay-the-hell-away mode to the maybe-go-have-a-snoop-around one. Frankly, his change of heart made me nervous. Something was going on at the DoD, and I'd had enough experience with this feeling to be wary of it.
As I drew nearer, I glanced up at the MG complex crowning the top of the man-made hill. The structure was a lot bigger than it appeared to be on the Web. It was also an extraordinary feat of both architecture and engineering. A movement out to the right caught my attention. It was a golf buggy, a couple of security personnel on board. I was either being shadowed or we all happened to be heading to the next tee.
A heavy rain shower crashed down, reminding me of a descending curtain. I hit the button to wind up the window, but the electric motor chose that moment to expire with the window stuck two thirds of the way up. The smell of burnt wires filled my nostrils. I swore as the rain began to slant in through the opening, soaking my sleeve and pants. I turned in toward the complex and pulled into a covered foyer. Through the condensation covering the windscreen, I saw I had a reception committee waiting.
I climbed out of the Crown Vic, a suspicious-looking wet patch stretching from groin to knee. “Shit,” I said, pulling the soaked, freezing fabric away from my skin.
“Special Agent Cooper,” said a woman's voice. “I'm Dr. Spears.”
I looked up. What? Freddie was a woman? Freddie's expecting me. We're old friends. He'll be real disappointed if I don't show up. No wonder Jacki and Jill at the front gate had lost their happy faces. When I'd surfed the Moreton Genetics Web site, Dr. Spears's picture hadn't been posted. And when I'd called to see if the doc was in, I hadn't thought to check the male/female angle. I'd just put “Doctor,” “CEO,” and “Freddie” together and come up with a bald guy in his mid-fifties wearing thick glasses and a lab coat. “Frederique?” I asked.
Dr. Spears nodded and even added a smile. “You're not the first to make the mistake and I'm sure you won't be the last. And I gather, along with being Special Agent Cooper, you're also Steve Liu, TIME journalist?”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said.
She shrugged and gave me her public-relations smile, not overly perturbed by the ruse. “It worked, didn't it? Got you in. But I assume you do have the appropriate credentials — this is a high-security facility.”
“I noticed.”
“Do you mind?” She held out her hand and I gave her my badge. She examined it in detail for several seconds before returning it.
Satisfied, she said, “So, Special Agent Cooper. Pleased to meet you.” She held out her hand to shake. I obliged. The grip was firm but still womanly, businesslike. I figured she'd had plenty of opportunities to get the pressure just right. “Come inside. I'll get you a towel.”
She gave the MG security personnel — both carrying Tasers — a nod. They drifted away.
I guessed Dr. Freddie Spears was in her late forties, though she looked a little younger. She was a naturally large-boned woman who, I surmised, had an eternal struggle with weight. Currently, she was winning the battle. Rightly or wrongly, I had the impression that this close to Hollywood you had to look younger than your age if you had any hope of trampling over your contemporaries on the way up the corporate ladder. She wore a gray silk skirt with a hemline below her knees, and matching jacket. Her hair was black, dyed, worn in a bob, and her earlobes featured diamonds that were too big to be real, only I guessed I was wrong on that score. There was a matching diamond on a thin gold chain at the base of her throat. Her wedding finger was bare. Including her shoes I guessed she was wearing about a hundred grand. If Mattel ever got around to making an executive power doll for the daughters of corporate-conscious parents to play with, I could see it modeled on Doc Spears.
I walked beside her across the black slate floor. A vast glass wall slid soundlessly to one side as we approached. Inside was a cavern of glass and triangulated steel that formed intricate patterns high overhead. A big LCD screen monitor, tuned to the mess going on in the city, held a large group of people enthralled. “Are you involved with the tragic business down at the Four Winds?” Spears asked.
“No. Not directly.”
“It's terrible about Professor Boyle being caught up in that.”
“Terrible,” I agreed, although if he'd done what I thought he'd done to Dr. Tanaka, dying quickly over a bowl of breakfast cereal like so many of his fellow residents at the Four Winds was probably not terrible enough. “Moreton Genetics has had a bit of bad luck lately.”
“You mean with what happened to Dr. Tanaka too? Yes, awful.”
Awful, terrible, tragic. If we kept going along this line too much longer, we'd be reaching for the thesaurus. A young male sat behind a glass desk, a slim stainless-steel laptop the only object on it, answering phone inquiries through a headset while his eyes were locked on the news report. Dr. Spears had a quick word with him. I scoped the place while I waited. The waiting room for corporate visitors was up a set of stairs like thin steel blades leading to a Perspex floor suspended from the roof on cables. Visitors could sit there on blocks covered in dark chocolate-colored leather. The hard, impersonal nature was softened only by a collection of very large and brightly colored beanbags on the main floor.
“Just organized a towel for you.”
“Thanks.”
“They're supposed to represent living cells,” said Spears, anticipating my question about the beanbags. “Can't see it myself.”
I couldn't, either.
“Do you get the symbolism of this place?” she asked as she entered a glass box I suddenly realized was an elevator, holding open the door for me.
“The double helix? The molecule of life?”
“Very good. Two right-handed polynucleotide chains coiled around the same axis. The colored steel arms you can see represent the proteins adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The white bars are the hydrogen bonds.”
If my answer was “very good,” then why did I suddenly feel like a thumb-sucking three-year-old talking to a grown-up?
“The double helix — we sometimes call it a Slinky,” she added.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “You'd lost me there for a second.”
“The truth is, a lot of it is still beyond us. For example, we can see why each tiny change in the combination of those proteins leads to a radical change in the organism, but we just don't get how this bunch of chemicals… well, comes alive.”
“And then sits down to watch a game of football with a six-pack of Budweiser on its belly?”
Dr. Spears laughed. “Actually, yes. Exactly. The team that consulted with the architects who designed this building played an expensive joke on our stockholders. Like I said, small changes in the protein sequences lead to radical changes in the organism. So we thought we were getting a representation of a mouse, the animal that has been used so extensively by science to uncover the mysteries of life. But when we actually checked, we discovered we were working within the gene for the plague.”