Jennifer took a chair at the side of the room, sitting with downcast eyes. This had been the result of negotiation, carried on through Will. The Berbers, shrewd businessmen in their unforgiving environment for three millennia, had adapted easily to being brokers for the international underground. They were less willing to adapt to female entrepreneurs. Had Jennifer been any other woman in the world, she would not have been allowed in the room at all.
Any other woman but one. Miranda, who had betrayed her people and made this interaction with Sleeper scum necessary in the first place.
Will and the Berbers sat at the polished teak table. Gunnar remained standing, back to the wall, between Jennifer and the elevator, so that he could survey everything.
“Coffee?” Karim asked.
“Yes, please,” Will said. “Where is Dr. Strukov?”
“He will join us in just a few minutes. We are a bit early.”
The coffee looked dark, rich, bitter. Jennifer’s mouth watered. She made the saliva stop. The three Berbers drank leisurely, not talking, seemingly completely at ease. But even Karim stiffened slightly when a door opened and Serge Mikhailovich Strukov entered.
The legendary Russian genius was huge, clearly genemod for size. His skin had the characteristic glowing health of the Changed. The syringes had, of course, been dropped in Ukraine as well as everywhere else on Earth, but how widely they were used wasn’t known; not only had Ukraine closed all its borders tight, but the weird antitechnology cults that had flourished there since the Limited Nuclear Wars had greatly slowed any use of the Net. What wasn’t on the Net couldn’t be dipped. Much of eastern Europe and western Asia was unknown even to Sanctuary.
But not Strukov. He was known everywhere, seen nowhere.
He had escaped from Ukraine at seventeen, ignorant of microbiology but, somehow, genemod for IQ. He never spoke of his parents, his background, his adolescence, or how he came to speak not only Russian but idiomatic Chinese and fluent, although accented, French. By twenty-two he had a Ph.D. in microbiology from the Centre d’Étude du Polymorphisme Humain in Paris. At thirty-one he won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on genetically modified excitotoxins in neural mitochondria. He never showed up in Stockholm to accept the prize. Three months later he walked out of his lab in Paris and disappeared.
Over the next decade, odd reports of Strukov surfaced on the underground Net: hints that he was working for the Chinese, for Egypt, for Brazil, always on biological warfare, always on genemod projects that never quite surfaced on the world newsgrids. Or never quite went away. A microbiologist in the San Francisco Bay Enclave declared that he recognized Strukov’s hand in a nasty piece of genemod sent him from a doctor in the Chilean conflict: a deadly retrovirus that destroyed memory formation in the hippocampus. A week later the microbiologist drowned in the Bay.
Strukov sat at the head of the table. Then, pointedly ignoring Will, he swiveled his chair to look directly at Jennifer. She didn’t raise her eyes to his, but he went on looking anyway: five seconds, ten. Fifteen seconds. She could feel the tension in the room shoot upward.
Finally Strukov turned back to the men at the table. He was smiling faintly. “What is it that Sanctuary desires next of me?” His English carried a heavy Russian accent, but the sentence structure was not Russian. Mentally translated from French, Jennifer guessed.
Will looked less composed than Strukov. “You’ve already been informed what we want.”
“I wish to hear your words.”
“We want,” Will said, a little too sharply, “for you to modify the genemod virus you’ve already developed. The trials we received aren’t satisfactory.”
“And why is it that Sanctuary, in possession of the most fine laboratories of the science in the solar system, yourself cannot modify this virus?”
“There are reasons,” Will said, “that we prefer not to.”
“I am able to guess. Sanctuary is run by the communal decision, isn’t it? And many of your people must be opposed to whatever it is you plan. Many more must be in ignorance of your plans. Also, your labs on Sanctuary are arranged for the genetic modifying of the embryos, and for the research into that area. You are not arranged for the creation and the delivery of the deadly viruses.”
Will said nothing. Strukov threw back his head and laughed, a great open laugh that filled the room. Karim smiled. Jennifer Sharifi and Will Sandaleros had gone to prison for trying to hold five American cities ransom with a deadly genemod virus.
Strukov said, “Twenty-eight years changes much, isn’t it? And not only in the microbiology. And yet, even so, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. You wish to try again this assault on the American government?”
“No,” Will said. “But what we do with the virus is our business. Yours, as we initially agreed, is to deliver it.”
“Piece of the cake,” Strukov said, clearly savoring the cliché. Karim laughed.
“Maybe not.” Will said. “You don’t yet know everything our modification requires.”
“Permit me, then, to show to you the modifications I already have created,” Strukov said. “Angelique, commencez. Le programme de démontrer.”
“Oui,” said the system. The holostage came to life. A three-dimensional model of the human brain, in light gray, surrounded by a ghostly outline of skull. Two almond-shaped areas the size of a baby’s thumbnail, located just behind the ears, suddenly glowed red.
“The right and left amygdalae,” Strukov said. “They rest themselves on the interior underside of the temporal lobes. Both amygdalae are in essentials identical. Angelique, ça va.”
The left amygdala suddenly expanded, filling the whole deck and replacing the brain. It became a complicatedly elaborated tangle of neurons, densely packed, with input and output nerves branching outward.
Strukov said, “The neurotransmitter of dominance in the amygdalae is glutamate. It is an interesting amino acid. Subtle metabolic changes can turn glutamate into an excitotoxin that kills neurons in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain one uses in memory formation. Poor transport of glutamate can kill neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Overstimulation of glutamate production leads to many chronic diseases of degeneration.”
Jennifer’s expression did not change. This was basic, common information. Strukov was overestimating her ignorance. Error? Or insult?
Will said, “But any metabolic changes that created a toxin would be dealt with by the Cell Cleaner. It would destroy toxins as fast as they were created. And overproduction is the result of faulty DNA coding that would be corrected by the Cell Cleaner as soon as it was detected.”
“True,” Strukov said. “This is why the diseases such as Huntington’s and ASL have disappeared themselves. Also the accidental poisoning. But the amygdala does more. Angelique, ça va.”
The holomodel changed to a cluster of a dozen magnified cells, long axons and dendrites curling close to each other. Structures in and on the cell membranes glowed yellow and orange.
“The yellow receptor sites are called AMPA receptors. The orange ones are NMDA receptors. AMPA receptors activate themselves in response to glutamate and cause the startle reaction.”
Suddenly the cell holo disappeared. In its place a laser cannon appeared, swiveled, and fired directly at Will. A blast of noise deafened everybody. Gunnar reacted instantly, throwing a Y-shield around Will and Jennifer, drawing his own gun. The laser cannon was only a holo. Strukov threw back his head and bellowed his huge laugh.