for the George Washington Bridge, I noticed a black column of smoke rising in the distance above the South Bronx.
Lieutenant Durkin looked at the smoke and then back at me.
“There have been problems with the evacs,” he said, looking away. “Some looting and such. We’re trying to keep a lid on it.”
Chapter 72
WHEN WE ARRIVED at Teterboro, Lieutenant Durkin drove us through a gate in a chain-link fence right onto the tarmac. Off to the right, beyond the doors of a nearby hangar, a sleek, cream-colored business jet began slowly taxiing toward us, its wing lights blinking.
I couldn’t help but notice that it was the top-of-the-line Gulfstream G650, a luxury aircraft that can hop the Atlantic and reach speeds near Mach 1.
If they thought they could impress me by rolling out a G650 to take me down to D.C., they’d succeeded.
Then I had another thought.
All this—for
What was up with the sudden VIP treatment? This definitely didn’t seem like your standard government travel itinerary. Was I being buttered up for some reason?
What the hell was this meeting about?
Lieutenant Durkin stayed behind on the tarmac. Another military guy waved me toward the airstair, and I boarded the plane with nothing but the suit on my back.
The Gulfstream had flat-screen displays over mirror-polished teak desks and leather executive chairs you could sink into as though they were pudding.
The interior was furnished in the manner of somebody’s corner office, I thought as I chose one of its eight empty seats and sat in it. A corner office that flew at fifty-one thousand feet and more than seven hundred miles an hour.
Not that I had much time to enjoy it. The flight attendant handed me a cup of coffee before we took off, and I was still sipping it when the Gulfstream’s wheels skidded with two soft shrieks against the tarmac at Reagan National an amazing twenty-five minutes later.
The jet’s engines whirred down as we taxied. I looked out the window. There was something strange about the airport. There were jumbo jets parked along the terminals, but they weren’t moving. No other planes were on the tarmac. Nothing was taking off or landing. It looked as if the airport were closed. It was eight in the morning on a Tuesday.
When we approached the terminal I saw that there was some activity here after all. Lined in two vast rows were dozens of military aircraft—Harriers, Warthogs. Marines were scampering around, loading and unloading tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters.
I slowly realized the airport had been commandeered by the military.
Chapter 73
I GOT A call from a number I didn’t recognize as I felt the plane jerk to a halt. I answered as the flight attendant unclipped a bracket and the door yawned open with a happy hum.
“Mr. Oz, it’s Dr. Valery. I have the test results.”
Dr. Mark Valery was a biochemist at NYU whom I had asked to do a chemical analysis on the muck on my clothes.
“What did you find?” I said.
“Your pheromone theory seems spot-on,” Valery said. “Your clothes were saturated with a chemically unique hydrocarbon similar to dodecyl acetate—a common ant pheromone. I say ‘similar’ because it’s like it, but isn’t quite the same. This stuff has properties we’ve never seen before.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The carbon chains are strange. Very strange. The substance has an extremely high molecular weight. Unlike dodecyl acetate, this stuff seems to dissolve quite slowly, which might help explain its unusually strong effect on larger animals. But that ain’t all, it turns out. The animals aren’t the only ones who seem to be secreting a pheromone. So are we.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Long story short, a human being’s scent is very complex,” Dr. Valery said. “We secrete materials from several different types of glands. There’s regular sweat, secreted by the eccrine glands, and then there’s sweat from the apocrine glands, in the hairier parts of our bodies. Then there’s sebum.”
“The substance that contains our smell,” I said.
“Right. Sebum is the stuff that bloodhounds home in on when tracking an individual person. Our olfactory fingerprint. The fragrance industry has been doing sebum experiments for years. I used to help run some of them. The thing about sebum is, like pheromones, it’s chock-full of hydrocarbons. That’s why, after hearing about your breakthrough, I decided to test some skin swabs from humans. I used myself and some of the other lab workers as subjects.”
“What did you find?” I said.
“It turns out that our sebum is chemically different from some samples I found in a similar study that was done back in 1994. I don’t know if it’s the air, our diet, seepage from plastics, or what, but initial tests seem to indicate that our sebum has a new compound in it. With pentanol and methyl butanoate. Not only that, but this new compound’s chemical structure seems to resemble several insect attack pheromones.”
I stared at the floor of the plane, trying to piece together what I was being told.
“So you’re saying the animals are attacking because of
“Think about it, Mr. Oz,” said Valery. “The olfactory system of most mammals is incredibly strong. A dog’s sense of smell is about a hundred thousand times more powerful than a human’s. The power of olfaction is primal. And it seems the critters don’t like what they’re smelling.”
Chapter 74
WITH THESE NEW and even more troubling implications playing a polka in my head, I exited the plane and was guided by a couple of soldiers toward a shiny black-and-chrome government motorcade thrumming by the hangar.
If our innate human odor was helping to cause this chaos, how were we supposed to fix that? How could we humans have changed what we smell like on a molecular level? How could it have happened so quickly? And why?
I approached the vehicles: a marked D.C. police car, a black Suburban, and another military Humvee.
A stocky marine in full camo shook my hand. He was Hispanic and his spiky high-and-tight made him look like he was wearing a hedgehog as a yarmulke.
“Mr. Oz?” he said with a slightly cockeyed grin. “You’re that animal scientist guy, right? I saw you on
“No beakers this time,” I said distractedly as he opened the door of the SUV for me.
“So what are you down here for?” he said, getting behind the wheel. “Lemme guess. Tour the cherry trees, a
