“Since no clean-up can be guaranteed perfect, another aspect of the process is to provide plausible deniability for the high-ups should the dogs come sniffing their way. That means removing the weak or the too-visible links in the chain. You, unfortunately, fall into both those categories.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We were. But this goes beyond friendship. It’s not like I have a choice, so don’t make this harder than it already is. You botched a number of crucial ops and, worse, made a spectacle of yourself at that hospital this morning.”
Darryl watched him bristle at this, but Portero said nothing. Couldn’t blame him. Why talk? Nothing he said would change anything.
“And because I brought you in, it falls to me to usher you out.”
Darryl checked the pistol to make sure the chamber was empty, then wiped it and the clip clean with a handkerchief. He handed both to Portero.
“So…it’s time. After all we’ve been through, I feel it’s only fair to offer you a chance to do the right thing.”
Portero took a deep breath, then nodded and accepted the weapon.
“I’d like to do it alone.”
“I think we’d all prefer that.” Darryl gestured to the trees. “Do it in the woods.” That was where Darryl had planned to leave the body anyway. It might be months before anyone found it, if ever. “But don’t try anything cute, Portero. Stay in sight. I’m giving you the option to go out like a man. Try to run and we’ll hunt you down like a dog.”
Another nod from Portero as he stared at the pistol and the clip in his hands, then he turned and walked into the trees.
“Spread out,” Darryl told Venisi and Markham in a low voice. “Triangulate on him. Keep him in sight. He starts to run, take him down.”
But Portero acted the good soldier. He walked about a hundred feet along a path into the trees, stopped beside a big oak. He faced them and raised the pistol to the side of his head.
Jesus, he’s looking right at us.
Darryl’s instinct was to turn away, but he forced himself to watch.
The shotcracked through the chill air, Portero’s head jerked to the left, and his body collapsed into the brush.
Darryl let out a breath. Done. Clean and neat.
He gestured to Venisi and Markham. “Check him out. If he’s still breathing, finish him.”
He’d heard of people surviving some outrageous head wounds. And with the way things had been going for Portero lately, who knew? He might have botched this too.
33
FAR HILLS, NJ
“When I returned after six months away in France,” Ellis told his audience of three, “refreshed, renewed, ready to work, I discovered that Mercer had made a staggering leap in our research. He presented me with six surrogate mothers, all recently implanted with human-chimp hybrid embryos. We hired obstetricians to watch them carefully through their pregnancies, but to our dismay, one after another miscarried until only one was left. But her fetus was a tough cookie. It held on, and in her thirty-eighth week she delivered a living hybrid infant: Sim Zero.”
Patrick said, “By any chance was her name Alice Fredericks?”
“Why, yes,” Ellis said, startled to hear that name after so many years. “I believe it was. How on earth—?”
“We’ve met.” He turned to Zero. “We’ve spoken to your mother, Zero.”
“She’s not my mother,” he snapped without looking up. “I don’thave a mother.”
“He’s right, Patrick,” Ellis said. “Zero was grown by cloning techniques from a recombinantly hybridized nucleus. But when Mercer saw Zero he said that he’d overdone it: He’d swapped in too much human genetic material.
“He explained to me how, among many other changes, he’d deleted the two chimp chromosomes that millions of years ago fused to form human chromosome 2, and replaced them with a human chromosome 2. He’d also ‘cleaned up’ the hybrid genome by removing loads of junk DNA—deleting AT-rich regions, shortening CpG islands—along with codons and minisatellites; he even managed to remove an entire chromosome that may have performed some useful function in the past but was now just taking up space.
“So Zero wound up with a largely junk-free twenty-two-pair genome—one shorter than human, two shorter than the chimp’s. Mercer told me he did it to make the splicing easier, but I later learned he had a more sinister reason.
“However we both agreed that Zero was too human. The public would never accept the merchandising of something that looked so much like themselves. To make a commercially viable laborer, we’d have to swap back some of the chimp genes he’d removed.”
He noticed Romy’s hate-filled look. “I fully deserve your opprobrium, Ms. Cadman. But please understand, I was a different person then: young, drunk with the egomaniacal power to shape and create, never looking beyond the next splice. That was why I went blindly along with Mercer’s solution to work backward from Zero: Use his cells as a starting point and swap back some of the chimp genes he’d removed. I was ablaze with excitement at the possibilities opening before me. And because I trusted my younger brother, I didn’t ask the questions I should have.
“So we worked back from Zero with great success. Seeing that success, and realizing that its own future was tied to SimGen’s, SIRG started gathering information on any public official who might have a say in the legalization of sims. When we introduced the species, SIRG contacted those who voiced opposition. When blackmail wasn’t an option, SIRG’s field operatives went to work using intimidation and violence. It was SIRG’s behind-the-scenes manipulations that resulted in the classification of sims as neither humans nor animals but property—SimGen’s property.
“And I confess that I knew all this—not all the details, but the general plan—and I approved, thinking, Why should we allow these small minds to block the road to the future? Mercer and I were like gods, leading the way to a new world. To hell with anyone who dared stand in our way.”
Ellis stopped, took a breath. “I believe I was crazy then, suffering from some sort of monomaniacal mental derangement. But eventually I sobered. When all the legal hurdles had been cleared and the labor markets across the globe were clamoring for sims, sims, and more sims, when my personal net worth exceeded that of some small nations, when I finally had time to look back and reflect on how I arrived at my position, I became suspicious.
“Something was gnawing at my subconscious and wouldn’t let up. So I went back to the source, to Zero, who was still alive; the basic research center’s only permanent resident. I took an oral scraping of his cells and started checking his DNA. Mercer’s ‘cleaning up’ of Zero’s genome may have made the splicing easier, but I realized then that it also removed links back to the source DNA. After exhaustive efforts, working in secret, I eventually traced Zero’s DNA back to its origin.”
Ellis looked around at the three faces fixed on his. Yes, even Zero had lifted his head for this.
Could he say it? Could he push these words past his lips? He had to. He’d come too far to turn back.
“That source DNA didn’t belong to a chimpanzee. It belonged to me.”
Romy’s voice was barely audible. “Oh…dear…God!”
Patrick was speechless, staring in slack-jawed shock.
And Zero had closed his eyes.
Ellis spoke past the lump in his throat. “I confronted Mercer and, after strident initial denials, he reluctantly confirmed it: Zero had been fashioned from one of my cells. My brother had lied to me about adding too many human genes to a chimp genome to make Zero; the truth was he’d swapped chimp genes intomy genome. And from there I unwittingly helped him in further devolving Zero’s genome to create the sims.”
“You’re telling me,” Patrick said, sputtering, “tellingus …that…that a sim is not a recombinantly evolved chimp…it’s a recombinantlyde volved human being? Tome is a human being who’s been genetically adulterated and then farmed out as a slave? I…I…” He raised his hands, then let them drop.