His selection of Amy for this project had been one of the more extensive and arduous headhunting tasks EES had ever performed — and the Quantitative Behavioral Analysis tests on her had proven most interesting. EES was in the business of failure analysis as a means of preventing failure — and her QBA had indicated that, during this mission, she would fail. Yet ironically, the failure would be vital to the mission’s success.
But that failure was not supposed to take place this early, or take such a form. Curious — and most disturbing. For the time being, however, Glinn realized he would simply have to take her report on faith.
His thoughts were interrupted by the low chiming of the telephone. Glinn glanced at the clock: five thirty AM. He pirouetted the wheelchair, reached for the phone.
“Yes?” he said.
“Weaver. I wonder if you could get down here. As soon as possible.” The technician’s voice was tight with anxiety — or, perhaps, fear.
“What is it?”
“It would be easier to show you in person, Mr. Glinn.”
“I’ll be right there.” Hanging up the telephone, Glinn aimed his wheelchair at the elevator and whirred slowly over the expanse of polished slate.
36
Garza arrived in the lab at a quarter to six, bone-tired and sick to death of dramatic, early-morning confabulations.
Weaver, the tech, looked weary and drawn. But on top of that, he looked tense, unsettled. Brock was standing in a far corner, hands crossed over his chest, equally put out. Glinn sat beside him, motionless, his face betraying nothing.
“The DNA test on the two follicles is complete,” Weaver said, and then seemed to falter.
“Go on, man,” Garza said.
“Remember how I told you my belief that the vellum on this page might be made from human skin?”
Garza nodded.
“It turns out I was wrong.”
“Exactly what I predicted,” said Brock, primly.
“And right.”
Garza said, “Just get to the point.”
The tech took a deep breath. “According to our analysis, the DNA sequences of these hair follicles match up with human DNA about ninety-seven percent. Yet there are significant sequences that do not match up with the human genome.” He looked around the room. “That’s why I say I’m both right and wrong. It’s humanoid. It’s almost human. I mean, it’s one percent less than a chimp-and-human match, but two percent more than, say, orangutan-and-human.” Weaver swallowed, plucked at his collar. He seemed to be downright frightened by the results.
“What rot!” Brock cried. “You’ve had the greasy fingers of unwashed monks turning that page over for a thousand years — no wonder it’s permeated with human DNA.”
“We were very, very careful. And we got the same results from both samples. We took the sample from the binding edge of the page, which presumably was handled less. And we ran controls for contamination. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Brock retorted. “It’s been bound and rebound many times! There’s human DNA all over it.” He turned to Glinn. “Human skin simply wasn’t used for making vellum. It’s nothing more than animal skin — I would guess pig — that’s been badly contaminated.”
Ignoring Brock, Glinn came forward slightly in his wheelchair. “You say you obtained similar results from both follicles?”
Weaver nodded.
“Almost human.” Garza had to make an effort to keep the skepticism out of his voice. “Weaver, this makes no sense. I’m with Brock. It’s contamination.”
“No hasty conclusions, Mr. Garza,” Glinn said quietly, then turned back to Weaver. “How, exactly, do you check for contamination?”
“We use a standard technique called BLAST — Basic Local Alignment Search Tool.”
“How certain is it?”
“It’s not one hundred percent.”
“There it is,” Garza said, with a wave of his hand, his irritation beginning to crest — especially at Glinn’s solicitous reception of this nonsense.
“Are there other ways to check for contamination?” Glinn asked.
“Well…there’s a new technique we developed for our Swiss client last year, a hybrid version of the BWA-SW algorithm. We could run the sequences through that. Unfortunately, it’s much slower than BLAST.”
“How does it work?” Garza asked.
“The Burrows-Wheeler Aligner. Basically, it’s an algorithm for aligning nucleotide sequences against a referent, with the intent of uncovering any sequence contaminants. The variation we developed can work with longer query sequences, and with a higher toleration for error, than the original.”
“Get started,” Glinn said.
Weaver nodded.
Garza spoke. “While you’re at it, do another run or two on those samples. Let’s see if you get the same results.” This all seemed unnecessary to him — but he knew they’d make no further progress until Glinn himself was satisfied.
“I’d also like to know,” Glinn said quietly, “assuming there is no contamination — what that three percent difference represents.”
“We could try to match it up with the genomes of any other species.”
“Exactly. And see if you can extrapolate from that to see what sorts of anatomical differences those genes might represent. I want to know precisely what kind of creature we’re talking about. What it looks like, what its capabilities are — if we’re indeed dealing with a new hominid species.”
Weaver’s face — already pale — turned a shade paler. No doubt, Garza thought, he was mentally counting up the additional hours of sleep he was about to lose.
37
Twenty-four hours later, Amy and Gideon had managed to get all of five miles northward. It had been anything but a “walk on the beach.” Gideon was soaked and sore from wading and crawling through the endless mangrove swamps and lagoons that punctuated the coast, each one humming with noxious, bloodsucking insects and quaking with expanses of stinking mud. There was no way to go around them: they had to slog, wade, and swim across, one after the other.
The sun was beginning to set over the endless jungle when they decided to halt. Gideon walked into the ocean to wash the muck from his clothes, feeling like some time-traveling Robinson Crusoe, fetched up on a prehistoric shore. They had seen no signs of human life: no footprints or tracks on the beach, and no boats offshore. Glancing back, he saw that Amy was busy cleaning her handgun, so he quickly stripped to the buff, rinsed his clothes, wrung them out, and then put them back on.
He came back to camp. Amy was just putting her .45 back together.
“Make a fire, please. I’m going to get us some protein.” She slapped the loaded magazine into place and disappeared into the twilit jungle.
Gideon found a level area among the palms and began gathering dead leaves, twigs, and driftwood. He doubted Amy would be able to shoot anything with that .45 and resigned himself to another granola bar dinner. The sky was clear, but the sea was still a continuous roar, the march of rollers unceasing.
He heard a couple of shots, and ten minutes later Amy emerged from the jungle, holding a dead armadillo by the tail. In her other hand she carried a bunch of plantains.
“Armadillo? Is that the best you could do?”