Mount Dragon

Carson watched as Singer replaced the egg on the coffee table, adjusting its position carefully. Then the director’s hands slowly passed over each item on the table, unconsciously adjusting them, lining and squaring them up.

“Carson?” Nye spoke again, more sharply.

The director looked up at Carson as if he had forgotten he was there. His eyes were watering.

In an instant, other images forced their way into Carson’s consciousness. Brandon-Smith’s mannerism of rubbing her hands along her thighs time and again. The way the knick-knacks on her desk were so carefully arranged. The way Vanderwagon had carefully polished and lined up the tableware at dinner that night, just before putting out his own eye.

His eye. That was another thing: They all had bloodshot eyes.

Suddenly, everything became perfectly, terribly clear.

“It can wait,” Carson said, backing out the door.

Nye watched him closely as he left. Then, without a word, he stepped forward and shut the door.

In the darkness of his suite at the institute, Scopes washed his hands meticulously. Then he paced restlessly, awaiting the helicopter that would return him to Boston. His front room boasted a spectacular view of the stormy Atlantic, but the heavy curtains were closed.

Abruptly, Scopes paused in his pacing. Then he moved quickly toward his PowerBook, plugging its thin cable into a wall jack. He knew the institute had a dedicated link into Flashnet, and from there, with his access key, he could enter the GeneDyne network.

There was something that had been tugging at the back of his mind for days; something his discussion with the Globe reporter had at last made clear. It had been obvious from the start, given the quality of Levine’s data on Brandon-Smith and X-FLU, that the information had come from within GeneDyne, rather than from sources in the FDA or OSHA. But what had escaped Scopes’s attention was the timing of Levine’s information.

Levine had known details about X-FLU that even the nosy bastard Teece, the investigator, couldn’t have learned until arriving at Mount Dragon. Levine had aired his dirt on the Sammy Sanchez show while Teece was still nosing around in New Mexico. And there were no standard long-distance lines out of Mount Dragon. Scopes knew that the only communications out of Mount Dragon were across the GeneDyne net. He knew it, because he had seen to it himself.

That meant Levine must not only have obtained his information from a source within GeneDyne—he must have obtained it from a source within Mount Dragon. And that meant Levine had gained unprecedented access to GeneDyne cyberspace.

Once inside the GeneDyne net, Scopes worked silently and intently. Within minutes, he was within a region that he and he alone had access to. Here, his finger was on the pulse of the entire organization: terabytes of data covering every word of every project, e-mail, program file, and on-line chat generated by GeneDyne employees over the last twenty-four hours. With the click of a few more keys, Scopes moved through his personal region of the network to a dedicated server containing a single massive application, which he had called, whimsically, Cypherspace.

Slowly, a strange landscape materialized on his small computer screen. It was like no landscape on earth, and too complex and symmetrical to have been conceived solely by a human mind. This was the virtual landscape of GeneDyne cyberspace. The Cypherspace application used direct links into the GeneDyne operating system to transform datastreams, memory contents, and all active processes into shapes, surfaces, shadows, and sounds. A strange sighing sound, like sustained musical notes, vibrated from the laptop’s speaker. To a layman such a landscape would appear surreal and bizarre, but to Scopes, who loved to wander through this strange junglescape late at night, it was as familiar as the backyard of his childhood.

Scopes wandered through the landscape, looking, listening, watching. For a moment, he was tempted to go to a special place in this landscape—a secret among secrets—but he realized there was no time.

Suddenly Scopes sat up and breathed out. In the landscape, there was something that was not right. It was a thread, invisible of itself, manifest only by what it obscured. As Scopes crossed the invisible thread, the strange music dropped to silence. It was a tunnel of nothing, an absence of data, a black hole in cyberspace. Scopes knew what it must be: a hidden data channel, visible only because it had been hidden a little too well. Whoever had programmed this back channel was transcendentally clever. It couldn’t have been Levine. Levine was brilliant, but Scopes knew that Levine’s computer abilities had always been his weakest suit.

Levine had help.

Accessing his bag of digital tricks, Scopes selected a transparent relay, readying it for insertion in the channel. Then, slowly, with infinite care, he began to follow the thread, twisting and turning in its mazy path, losing it, picking it up again, working methodically back toward its hidden target.

Carson found de Vaca at work in Lab C. She had a small flask of PurBlood, still smoking from the deep freeze, sitting on the bioprophylaxis table.

“You’ve been gone for eight hours,” came her voice over the private channel. “What, did they fly you to Boston for your awards ceremony?”

Carson moved toward his stool and sat down numbly. “I was in the library archives,” he replied.

De Vaca swiveled her computer screen toward him. “Take a look at this.”

Carson sat still for a long moment. Finally, he turned toward the screen. More than anything, he did not want to know what de Vaca might have discovered.

On her screen were two images of phospholipid capsules, side by side. One was smooth and perfect. The other was ragged, full of ugly holes and tears where molecules had obviously been displaced from their normal order.

“The first image shows an unfiltered PurBlood ‘cell.’ This second image shows what happens to PurBlood after it passes through the GEF filtration.” The excitement in de Vaca’s voice was clear even through the speaker in Carson’s headset. Mistaking his silence for disbelief, she continued. “Listen. You remember how PurBlood is made. Once the hemoglobin has been encapsulated, it has to be purified of all manufacturing by-products and any toxins produced by the bacteria. So they used Burt’s GEF filtration on the hemoglobin to—”

De Vaca stopped, looking at Carson. He had positioned himself between her and the lab’s video camera, blocking its view. He was moving his gloved hands downward in a suppressing motion. Through the visor, she could see him shaking his head and silently mouthing the word stop.

De Vaca frowned. “What’s up?” she asked. “Been chewing peyote buttons, cabron?”

Carson brusquely motioned her to wait. Then he looked around the lab as if searching for something. Suddenly he reached for a cabinet, pulled out a large vial of disinfectant powder, and sprinkled a light dusting of it on the glass surface of the bioprophylaxis table. Shielding his actions from the camera, he formed letters in the white dust with a gloved finger:

Don’t use intercom.

De Vaca stared at the words for a moment. Then, extending a gloved finger, she formed a large question mark in the powder.

Tell me the rest HERE, Carson wrote.

De Vaca paused, looking narrowly at Carson. Then she wrote out the message: PurBlood contaminated by GEF filtration. Burt used himself as alpha tester. That’s what’s wrong with him.

Carson quickly smoothed out the message and sprinkled a little more disinfectant on the surface. He quickly wrote: THINK. If Burt was alpha tester, who were the beta testers?

He saw a look of fear spread slowly across her face. She was mouthing words but he could not hear them.

He wrote: Library. Half hour. After waiting for her to nod agreement, he erased the tracings with a sweep of his glove.

The Mount Dragon library was an oasis of rusticity in a high-tech desert: its yellow, gingham-checked curtains, rough-hewn roof beams, and coarse floorboards were designed to resemble an oversized Western lodge.