She still loved Claus.
She still loved Galina.
And she had neither. Heartbreak is bad enough by itself, but a double dose is exponential agony.
Galina had been a far better assistant than Tim Feely. Not that Tim was stupid, not at all, but some people just operate on a different level. Tim was competent enough, and he also served… other purposes, true, but Galina he was not.
Erika had already been in love with Claus when Danté hired Galina. A second love had followed. Erika should have told Claus, but she’d known full well what he would say. So she’d kept it secret, and it had ended as badly as it could: when Claus caught them in the act.
Claus forced Danté to kick Galina out of the project. And then Galina had asked Erika to leave as well, so they could be together. And what had Erika chosen? The project. At the time she told herself the project was far more important than romantic dalliances. Oh, that conversation with Galina, that last conversation—how it had shattered the young girl’s heart.
Galina hadn’t taken it lying down. She’d been willing to fight for Erika. Or so she’d said. Galina threatened to blow the whistle on Genada’s human line of experimentation, but after a few weeks, Danté and Magnus had bought the girl off. They gave her millions in hush money and sent her back to Russia. Love, it seems, like everything else, has a price.
I chose the project. That’s what Erika had told herself at the time. In the past year, however, she gradually realized the real reason she’d stayed. For Claus. To be near him. But he never forgave her. She had begged him for another chance. He would not cave. He never mentioned the incident, never changed the way he acted around Erika in the lab. In many ways that was even worse—now he treated her like a colleague, and a subordinate one at that, as if their hundreds of nights of passion had never existed at all.
She had chosen the project, and now the project was all she had.
Standard cloning projects had a fairly predictable pattern. First, select a cell from the animal you wanted to clone—usually a stem cell—and enucleate it by removing the single cell’s nucleus. Second, take an egg from the surrogate mother and enucleate that as well. Third, put the stem cell nucleus into the now-empty egg cell, provide an electrical shock to fuse the two, then wait for the single cell to start dividing in a process called mitosis. If that happened, insert the hybrid egg into the surrogate mother and let it develop normally.
The method had originated in the legendary cloning of Dolly, the Scottish sheep. Later came the avalanche of cloned species: fish, birds, goats, cattle, even dogs and cats. The process had become so formulated that elements were taught as early as high school.
The key to all cloning methods revolved around using the same or similar species for both the egg and the creature to be cloned. For the ancestor project, however, the last close relative died out some 260 million years earlier. Jian’s computer program, the thing they all called the “God Machine,” had provided a genome that actually produced a viable embryo, splitting on its own, undergoing several rounds of mitosis. In a petri dish, that part, the impossible part, had already been solved. But you couldn’t grow a whole animal in a petri dish—until they could trick the cow’s immune system to accept the embryo as self, the embryo could not grow into a fetus, and the project was at a standstill.
With the quagga, the answer had been comparatively easy. The animal was closely related to zebras. Once they had cultivated a quagga chromosome out of DNA recovered from hair and other remains, they injected it into the enucleated zebra egg, then put the egg back into a surrogate zebra mother.
It hadn’t worked at first. The zebra’s immune system rejected the embryo. Erika had found a way around the problem by isolating the gene sequence that produced the antigens—the offending proteins—then replaced the sequence with the corresponding segment from the zebra’s DNA. It had been a small section of DNA, and they still weren’t sure exactly what it coded for, but the method worked. With the offending antigenic proteins eliminated, the zebra’s body handled the pregnancy normally, resulting in the first baby quagga to set foot on the planet in more than a century.
But zebra and quagga DNA were over 99 percent identical. Now, however, they didn’t have a mother that was a close genetic match. They had a computer-designed genome and a cow.
Jian’s God Machine assigned a “viability rating” to estimate the chances of the hybrid egg passing the immune response test, then developing through surrogate pregnancy all the way to birth. It measured the products of known DNA sequences against those that were lesser known, or even unknown. So far, 65 percent was the highest rate they’d hit. Somewhere in that remaining 35 percent were the proteins that triggered the bovine immune system. That 35 percent amounted to billions of nucleotides, millions of sequences—far too many to eliminate by trial and error. No one knew exactly what genes coded for what traits. She and Jian kept changing these unknown sequences, but couldn’t say for sure what the changes would affect—they might be swapping out a protein that affected the color of the animal’s eyes, or a protein that was a critical component of brain development. And they couldn’t know until the animal grew beyond a ball of undifferentiated cells. For the immune system experiment to work, they’d have to reach an 80 percent viability rating, possibly higher.
When they’d started the project with mammal genomes available online, in the public domain, the viability rating had been low. The first thousand genomes generated an 11 percent rating. The thousand after that took them to 20 percent. After they had processed four thousand mammalian genomes, they’d cracked 45 percent viability. From there, Genada’s bottomless resources started sequencing uncommon mammals, even extinct species, and with each one the rating ticked a little bit higher.
Would Bobby Valentine’s four new specimens be enough to get over 80 percent? And if not, what could she change? Perhaps a new approach and the additional genomes together would get them over the hump. Part of Erika hoped for success, but a stronger part hoped for failure. The last thing she wanted to see was Dr. Claus Rhumkorrf rewarded for being a heartbreaking, small-minded prick.
NOVEMBER 8: EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY
MAGNUS FOLDED HIS cell phone and put it in his left jacket pocket. He took a sip from a glass of Yukon Jack. The ice cubes clinked a little. He set the drink down and put both hands on the desktop. He breathed slowly. In and out. In and out.
In contrast to his brother’s da Vinci sketches and priceless works of art, Magnus decorated his office with personal items: dozens of photos, and a single, wall-mounted display case.
Several of the photos showed a smiling, postmission Magnus in various uniforms, some tan and brown, some green, one in a thick wet suit. In all of those, he was posing with other dirty, smiling, dangerous-looking men. Four faces showed up repeatedly: Andy Crosthwaite, Gunther Jones, Brady Giovanni and Bobby Valentine. Those pictures came from Magnus’s years in Joint Task Force 2, the counterterrorist division of the Canadian Special Forces. He smiled a lot in those pictures. Things had made sense back then.
The largest photo was from Magnus’s days as a tight end for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League—dressed in the red-and-white uniform, stretching high and long to catch a football just before landing in the end zone. A simpler time, a time between leaving the service and joining Danté at Genada.