but we got pushed out. Hardly anybody cares about physical specimens anymore. It’s all about genomics.”
Jake got out and scanned the area as Maggie unlocked the front door. The building was set along a gravel road, surrounded by fields on three sides and woods behind. The isolation made him nervous. The soldier in him said that this would be a hell of a place to launch an ambush.
Vlad rolled out of the backseat. He lifted the cuff of his left pants leg and pulled out a snub-nosed pistol. “I’ll wait out here,” he said. “Put an eye out.”
THE RECEPTION AREA WAS BRIGHT AND FRIENDLY, WITH chairs and couches for visitors.
“Through here,” Maggie said, leading Jake to a door at the back. It opened into a large space, maybe forty feet wide and a hundred deep, filled with rows of dull brown metal cabinets. The place had a cold, industrial feel, with concrete floors and an odd smell.
“Homey,” Jake said.
“It wasn’t designed for this,” Maggie said. “They used to raise raptors in here. Last year, workmen came in and cleared out the cages, sandblasted the floors, and moved us in.” She knocked her knuckles against one of the cabinets, the sound echoing in the large space. “Each one of these contains thousands of fungal specimens, categorized by type. We’ve got over four hundred thousand overall.”
“A fungal mausoleum,” Jake said.
“That’s one way to see it, I suppose.”
Maggie led the way to a small lab equipped with microscopes and equipment for sample preparation and inspection. On a piece of white filter paper, she scraped off a few flecks of the luminescent fungus.
“You know how this goes? Do any molecular biology yourself?”
“Not really. I’m a silicon man.”
“It’s pretty straightforward. This is a commercial kit for extracting DNA. First I grind the fungus up in some buffer,” she said, using a mortar and pestle, “to break down the cells. Then I treat it with a series of chemicals that will strip off the proteins and release the DNA.
“We’re going fishing for what we call the GOM, or genetic owner’s manual, of the fungus,” Maggie said. “It’s an artificial stretch of DNA inserted into the genome. Liam always used GOMs when he tinkered with an organism-to tell you what genetic modifications were made, what they might do, and who made them. If you are going to mess with the molecular programming of an organism-”
“-you better be willing to sign your work,” Jake finished.
“So he told you about GOMs.”
“Only the basics.”
“Well, here’s the advanced course. All you need to recover the information are the short genetic sequences at the beginning and the end of the GOM, called primers. Which Liam hid in the letterbox instructions, the first and last letters. Once you have those, it’s easy,” she said. “Even a physicist could do it.”
Jake watched as she worked her way steadily through the extraction process. Her movements were spare and precise, nothing wasted. Jake got a strange feeling watching her, a kind of echo. Liam had worked exactly the same way.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This Uzumaki fungus that the Japanese weaponized. It had to come from somewhere.”
“Meaning?”
“The Japanese didn’t just whip it up from scratch. They must’ve found it somewhere.”
“Maybe it was regional?” Jake said. “Endemic to Japan.”
“Not likely. Hosts and parasites evolve together. Liam said this was a corn fungus, correct? So if you want to find a corn fungus, you go to where corn came from-Mexico, South America. Now, here’s something interesting. My grandfather spent a lot of time in those areas. He was studying whether fungal spores could be spread by bird or butterfly migration-for example, monarchs fly thousands of miles from the U.S. to as far south as Mexico every year. But he never published anything on this. It always struck me as quixotic, all those trips. But maybe he was looking for something he wasn’t telling me about, something related to the Uzumaki.”
“So if he found something, you think he might have left the information about what it was encoded in the DNA here.”
“It’s possible.” Maggie held up a small microcentrifuge tube full of transparent liquid. “Done,” she said. “Ready for sequencing.”
MOMENTS LATER, THEY WERE BACK OUTSIDE. VLAD WAS WAITING by the car, gun in hand. “Anything?” Jake asked.
“A pheasant attacked, but I fought him off.”
Maggie handed Jake the tube with the DNA. “You two go. You don’t need me. I’m staying here.”
“What? Why?”
“I want to check the USDA APHIS alerts, to see if anything matches the description of the Uzumaki. If they’re worried about a pathogen, they’ll put out a notice. I also have all of Liam’s field notebooks in the back of the herbarium, the notes he took on his trips. I want to check the ones that cover his trips to South America. Especially Brazil.”
“I’m not leaving you here alone,” Jake said.
“The woman who hurt Liam is long gone. New York City, Bellevue.”
“I don’t care. You’re not-”
“Stay with me if you want. Help me look. Vlad can take the DNA.”
Vlad shook his head. “
Jake said, “He can barely take riding in a car. Won’t go near a plane. Come with us.”
“Jake, this place is like a fortress. There are only two doors, and they’re both steel-reinforced.”
Jake didn’t like it, but he could see Liam in her eyes, that unwavering determination. If Jake wasn’t willing to throw her bodily into the car and sit on her the whole ride, he was going to lose this one.
“Give her your gun,” Jake said.
Vlad handed his pistol to Maggie.
“Are you kidding? I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
“Don’t worry,” Vlad said. “It is like camera. Just point and shoot.”
21
THE HELICOPTER CARRYING THE POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC payload flew at three thousand feet over the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland. Through the Huey’s window, Dunne watched the rows of houses and crisscrossing streets jammed with morning traffic pass underneath them. He checked his watch: eight a.m.-rush hour. Dunne couldn’t help think about the madness of Fort Detrick’s location. Ground zero for biowarfare-the place that kept the most dangerous agents ever devised by man or nature-should be off the map, housed somewhere in the desert or the badlands of South Dakota. Instead it was in the middle of the second-largest city in Maryland, a mere fifty miles from Washington, D.C. If the Uzumaki got out, Detrick would be the command center for the fight to stop it.
The Huey banked as they crossed the north entrance guard shack. Dunne watched the Eight Ball, the four-story steel globe used during the fifties and sixties to test the efficacy of bioweapon dispersion and aerosolization, pass beneath them. Since the forties, Detrick had been the focal point for U.S. chemical and biological weapons efforts, but had fallen on hard times after biological weapons were banned in 1972. Now she was in the middle of a new growth spurt, due in no small part to his efforts. The one-two punch of September 11 and the anthrax attacks had put bioterrorism back at the center of the national security agenda. Buildings were going up as fast as they could be slapped together on the twelve-hundred-acre site, creating the largest concentration of class-3 and class-4 biohazard facilities in the United States. This included Toloff’s dedicated and highly secret facility for Uzumaki research and countermeasure development.
Toloff was up front, making arrangements with the ground crews for their arrival. The copilot unstrapped himself and came back to Dunne’s seat. He knelt next to Dunne, yelling to be heard over the noise of the rotors. “Sir, I’ve been told to deliver you a message from the national security adviser’s office. I quote: ‘Get your ass to the White House.’ ”
