In Pearl Harbor, the two modified submarines searched for the fleet, but returned to the main channel without a target. Then they locked onto the only ship they could find in (…)
CHAPTER 10: THE PRESENT
Turcotte sat perfectly still in the shadow of a boulder, watching a rattlesnake slither across the sand ten feet away. He estimated he was eight miles from Area 51. He felt better than he had in a long time. Free of responsibility. His concern over Lisa Duncan’s kidnapping was somewhat offset by the fact that he had no real idea who she was. Of course, she didn’t either, he realized, as he continued to watch the snake move away. He viewed the abandonment of the underground base at Area 51 as a potential blessing, meaning he might be free of the responsibilities he had assumed since arriving there in an undercover role. Turcotte had always been a loner and he felt at ease by himself in the desert. His father had been killed in a logging accident when Mike was eight and the next summer he had gone to the same camp to work, doing odd jobs. He did that for the next few years until he was large enough to heft a chain saw and wield an ax. The toughest schools the Army put him through years later — Ranger, Special Forces, Scuba — were nothing compared to his time in the forest. It was rough work among even rougher men and Turcotte brought his check home each month to his mother.
The snake was gone, slithering between two rocks. Turcotte felt his SATPhone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the small screen. It displayed Quinn’s SATPhone number.
Duty.
It was a word beaten into him as a child and reinforced as an adult. He almost laughed out loud as his mind slid to the words he’d been forced to memorize as part of his officer training — the speech MacArthur had made at West Point upon accepting the Thayer Award in 1962: “Duty, honor, country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith where there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn”
The damn West Point graduate tactical officer at his college had made all the ROTC cadets memorize it, just like cadets at the Academy were forced to. Turcotte flipped the phone open. “What?”
“Do you know why humans die?”
Lisa Duncan was startled by the question. Garlin had been drawing blood, for the seventeenth time, according to her calculations and the number of needle marks in her arms. What was fascinating was that the first needle puncture wound, made just an hour earlier, was gone, all healing at a remarkable rate. She worried about the IV. What was he putting into her? How had they knocked her out? What did they know that she didn’t?
“Old age?”
“What is old age?” Garlin went to the door and passed the tube outside, before coming back to sit on a stool in front of her.
“Cells get old,” Duncan said. “They stop reproducing.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.” She gave him a cold smile. “Remember? My past is not real. So maybe my medical knowledge is bogus too.”
“Do you know what a telomere is?”
Duncan shook her head. There were no lingering aftereffects of whatever drug they gave her, she realized. She felt fine, better than she could ever remember. “At the end of each chromosome in every cell in your body are small bits of DNA called telomeres. These bits serve a very important purpose. The telomere acts as a protective cap to keep the chromosome from unraveling at the ends with each cell division. After approximately a hundred divisions a cell runs out of telomeres. After that, the chromosomes begin to degenerate with every cell division. Eventually, the cell dies as the chromosome damage accumulates.”
Garlin paused, looking down at his hands. Duncan could almost see him testifying before a congressional committee. Then she had to think for a moment — had she truly testified in such a manner as she had envisioned?
Garlin continued. “You age because as you lose telomeres in your cells, your body is like a clock winding down. Eventually you will not have enough good cells to perform some essential task somewhere in your body and one of your vital systems will fail.
“We first became aware of this about fifty years ago when the geneticists Paul Hermann Muller and Barbara McClintock discovered that the telomeres keep chromosomes from fusing end to end, which could lead to chromosome breakage and loss as cells divide. But not only do they keep cells from fusing, they maintain the integrity of the cell itself. This is vital when you start considering the basic gene structure of the human.”
Duncan rubbed her arm over the puncture marks, noting that even the latest one was fading. “Why do we run out of telomeres? If they’re so important, it seems that the body would make them in order to protect itself.”
“Good question,” Garlin said. “And it brings up an interesting paradox. To make telomeres, you need an enzyme called telomerase. Normal cells, however, for some reason after birth, don’t make telomerase. In fact, the only time we’ve managed to discover telomerase synthesis inside the human body after birth is in cancer cells. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to kill cancer.”
Duncan frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. The enzyme we need for longer life is only produced by cancer, which kills us?”
“This is still a relatively new field,” Garlin said. “We have started at the very basics. In the seventies we first studied telomeres in protozoan ciliates, single-celled organisms that propel themselves with hairlike projections called cilia, rather than in mammalian cells. At that time, ciliates were much easier to work with because they have many more telomeres per cell than do mammalian cells. These organisms have two nuclei, and during the formation of the larger of these, the so-called macronucleus, the chromosomes break up into fragments that then replicate, producing from twenty thousand to as many as ten million pieces of DNA, each of which becomes capped at both ends by telomeres. In contrast, a human cell has only ninety-two telomeres, two for each of the forty- six chromosomes.”
“But we’ve mapped human DNA,” Duncan noted. Something about what Garlin had just said bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it exactly and she forgot about it as he continued.
“Only very recently,” Garlin said. “Bear with me. I want you to understand this. As study in this field progressed, some surprising things were learned. Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, in the early seventies discovered something quite strange about the molecular regions around the telomere. She found that the sequence for telomeres was very short and repeated numerous times, around sixty. This was surprising because at that time the only DNA that had been examined closely — in bacteria and viruses — did not have repeated sequences.
“Expanding to other organisms, other researchers found the same thing — a repeating code in the telomeres. Yeast for example. This led researchers to believe all telomeres were like this. When we finally isolated the first human telomere at Los Alamos, we found a repeating sequence TTAGGG — where the T stands for thymine, the A for adenine, and the G for guanine. What was strange was that all other telomeres — the ciliates, yeast, etc., only had thymine and guanine.” “Why are we different?” Duncan asked. She wondered why he was giving her so much information — first about the new Majestic, and now about this. It was as if he felt she had some information that he expected her to give in return. She realized it was a subtle interrogation technique, one Mike Turcotte might have used.