Mount Dragon

“I told him he was asking for a swift kick in the huevos.”

Carson laughed again. “Guess it took that slap at the picnic to cool his ardor. Anyway, why would he or anybody else want to murder an OSHA inspector? That’s insane. Mount Dragon would be shut down in an instant.”

“Not if it looked like an accident,” De Vaca returned. “The storm provided a perfect opportunity. Why did Nye take a horse out into the storm, anyway? And why haven’t we been told about Teece’s disappearance? Maybe Teece found out something that he wasn’t supposed to know.”

“Like what? For all we know, you could have misinterpreted what you heard. After all—”

“—I heard it, all right. Were you born yesterday, cabron? There are billions at stake here. You think this is about saving lives, but it isn’t. It’s about money. And if that money is jeopardized ...” She looked at him, eyes blazing.

“But why kill Teece? We had a terrible accident on Level-5, but the virus didn’t escape. Only one person died. There’s been no cover-up. Just the opposite.”

“ ‘Only one person died,’ ” de Vaca echoed. “You ought to hear yourself. Look, something else is going on around here. I don’t know what it is, but people are acting strange. Haven’t you noticed? I think the pressure is driving people over the edge. If Scopes is so interested in saving lives, why this impossible timetable? We’re working with the most dangerous virus ever created. One misstep, and adios muchachos. Already, people’s lives have been ruined by this project. Burt, Vanderwagon, Fillson the zookeeper, Czerny the guard. Not to mention Brandon-Smith. How many more lives?”

“Susana, you obviously don’t belong in this industry,” Carson replied wearily. “All great advances in human progress have been accompanied by pain and suffering. We’re going to save millions of lives, remember?” Even as he spoke the words, they sounded hollow and cliched in his ears.

“Oh, it all sounds noble enough. But is this really an advance? What gives us the right to alter the human genome? The longer I’m here, the more I see of what goes on, the more I believe what we’re doing is fundamentally wrong. Nobody has the right to remake the human race.”

“You’re not talking like a scientist. We’re not remaking the human race, we’re curing people of the flu.”

De Vaca was digging a trench in the cinders with short, angry movements of her heel. “We’re altering human germ cells. We’ve crossed the line.”

“We’re getting rid of one small defect in our genetic code.”

“Defect. What the hell is a defect exactly, Carson? Is having the gene for male pattern baldness a defect? Is being short a defect? Being the wrong skin color? Having kinky hair? What about being a little too shy? After we eradicate the flu, what comes next? Do you really think science is going to refrain from making people smarter, longer-lived, taller, handsomer, nicer? Particularly when there’s billions of dollars to be made?”

“Obviously, it would be a highly regulated situation,” Carson said.

“Regulation! And who is going to decide what’s better? You? Me? The government? Brent Scopes? No big deal, let’s just get rid of the unattractive genes, the ones nobody wants. Genes for fatness and ugliness and obnoxiousness. Genes that code for unpleasant personality traits. Take off your blinders for a moment, and tell me what this means for the integrity of the human race.”

“We’re a long way from being able to do all that,” Carson muttered.

“Bullshit. We’re doing it right now, with X-FLU. The mapping of the human genome is almost complete. The changes may start small, but they’ll grow. The difference in DNA between humans and chimps is less than two percent, and look at the vast difference. It won’t take big changes in the genome to remake the human race into something that we’d never even recognize.”

Carson was silent. It was the same argument he had heard countless times before. Only now—despite his best efforts to resist—it was starting to make sense. Perhaps he was just tired, and didn’t have the energy to spar with de Vaca. Or perhaps it was the look on Teece’s face when he’d said, What I’ve got to do can’t wait.

They sat silently in the shadow of the volcanic rock, looking down toward the beautiful cluster of white buildings that were Mount Dragon, trembling and insubstantial in the rising heat. Even as he fought against it, Carson could feel something crumbling inside him. It was the same feeling he’d had when, as a teenager, he had watched from a flatbed truck while the ranch was being auctioned off piece by piece. He had always believed, more firmly than he believed anything else, that the best hopes for mankind’s future lay in science. And now, for whatever reason, that belief was threatening to dissolve in the heat waves rising from the desert floor.

He cleared his throat and shook his head, as if to dislodge the train of thought. “If your mind is made up, what do you plan to do about it?”

“Get the hell out of here and let people know what’s going on.”

Carson shook his head. “What’s going on is one-hundred-percent legal, FDA-regulated genetic research. You can’t stop it.”

“I can if somebody was murdered. Something’s not right here. Teece found out what it was.”

Carson looked at her as she sat with her back against the rock, her arms wrapped around her knees, the wind whipping her raven hair away from her forehead. Fuck it, he thought. Here goes.

“I’m not sure what Teece knew,” he said slowly. “But I know what he was looking for.”

De Vaca’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Teece thinks Franklin Burt was keeping a private notebook. That’s what he told me the night he left. He also said that Vanderwagon and Burt had elevated levels of dopamine and serotonin in their bloodstreams. So did Brandon-Smith, to a lesser extent.”

De Vaca was silent.

“He thought that this journal of Hurt’s could shed light on whatever might be causing these symptoms,” Carson added. “Teece was going to look for it when he got back.”

De Vaca stood up. “So. Are you going to help me?”

“Help you what?”

“Find Burt’s notebook. Learn the secret of Mount Dragon.”

Charles Levine had taken to arriving at Greenough Hall very early, locking his office door, and leaving instructions for Ray that he was taking no calls and seeing no visitors. He had temporarily passed on his course load to two junior instructors, and he’d canceled his planned lecture schedule for the coming months. Those had been the last pieces of advice from Toni Wheeler before she resigned as the foundation’s public-relations adviser. For once, Levine had decided to follow her suggestions. The internal pressure from the college trustees was growing, and the telephone messages left for him by the dean of faculty were becoming increasingly strident. Levine sensed danger, and—against his nature—had decided to lay low for a while.

So he was surprised to find a man waiting patiently in front of his locked office door at seven o’clock in the morning. Instinctively, Levine held out his hand, but the man only looked back at him.

“What can I do for you?” Levine said, unlocking the door and showing him in. The man sat down stiffly, gripping his briefcase across his lap. He had bushy gray hair and high cheekbones, and looked about seventy.

“My name is Jacob Perlstein,” he said. “I am a historian with the Holocaust Research Foundation in Washington.”

“Ah, yes. I know your work well. Your reputation is without peer.” Perlstein was known around the world for the unflagging zeal with which he brought to light old records from Nazi death camps and the Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe. Levine settled into his chair, puzzled by the man’s hostile air.

“I will come to the point,” the man said, his black eyes peering at Levine through contracted eyebrows.

Levine nodded.

“You have claimed that your Jewish father saved Jewish lives in Poland. He was caught by the Nazis and murdered by Mengele at Auschwitz.”

Levine did not like the wording of the question, but he said nothing.

“Murdered through medical experimentation. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” said Levine.

“And how do you know this?” the man asked.