of them seemingly benign, protected by their very…how do you say?…banality. Puppies and kittens, hamsters…all killers. All capable of wiping out whole pop-ulations of endemic species. Like the goats on Espanola with my masked boobies…eating the eggs, the chicks…' He sighed heavily. 'All dead. I received a report from a friend at the Darwin Station telling me not to bother coming back.' He tapped his hand against the corner of a nearby gravestone, his wedding band making a soft clicking noise. 'There's so much we've lost.' He looked away, his eyes growing moist.
Tank dug something out of his teeth with a finger.
'We really should get back,' Rex said.
Cameron reached out and touched Juan gently on the sleeve. 'I'm sorry,' she said.
Juan's smile was a faint, dying thing. He looked back up at the hillside. 'Those graves up there, those are the graves of the poor.' Evidently, the families of the dead buried on the hills couldn't afford marble; the gravesites were decorated with bright fabrics and flowers. A number of these plots were recent additions, with dark, freshly turned soil. 'So much death, so quickly.'
'Let's be honest,' Rex said. 'This is nothing new. Life has always been cheap here. Children succumbing to preventable diseases, poison-ous snakes in the Oriente, buses colliding on windy pueblo roads. Death happens here.'
Juan shook his head, studying the fresh graves in the hills. 'Not like this.'
A church bell tolled somewhere in the distance, and Rex glanced down at his watch. 'I need to get back and check in with Donald.' He shoved a slip of paper with the flight time and survey procedures into Juan's hand. 'See you tomorrow.'
Juan nodded and walked off a short ways, sitting on the ledge of a particularly broad mausoleum. Cameron found Rex's abruptness in the face of Juan's grief to be offensive. 'Tank'll escort you back,' she said. 'I'll be along in a minute.'
Tank followed Rex into the darkness. Cameron walked over and pulled herself up on the ledge beside Juan. The echo of the church bells lingered in the darkness. The air was thick, humid, foreign. It smelled sharply of bark, burning wood, and stale food.
'I come here often at night,' Juan said softly.
Cameron gave him the silence, listening to the rush of cars beyond the high cemetery wall.
Juan pulled off his wedding band and set it on his knee. He regarded it for a few moments. 'I lost my wife,' he finally said. 'And my baby girl. I was teaching at Universidad when the apartment building collapsed. That was…that was almost three years ago, but still I feel it sharply on quiet nights like this.' He picked up the ring, tilted it so that he could catch the blur of his reflection in the gold, then slid it back on his finger.
When she realized that he was crying, Cameron wasn't sure what to do. She popped a stick of gum in her mouth and worked it over, waiting uncomfortably through the silence. Juan finally wiped his cheeks and raised his head.
'I am sorry. You do not need this. There's just something in your eyes, some softness that lets me talk where I haven't before. That's unusual for Americans. They often come down here and see our ways and the vio-lence, and think us primitive.' He shook his head. 'Death is part of our culture. During the conquest, half our population was killed by disease, civil war. But no country can endure this kind of disruption, this kind of…' With a sweeping gesture, he indicated the cemetery before them. 'Loss.'
A man stumbled by, his head lowered, carrying an armful of flowers. When he passed Cameron and Juan, he paused and looked up at them. Cameron couldn't make out his face, because he was wearing a hat pulled low over his eyes. 'No, gracias,' she said, waving him away.
The man spoke back to her in a soft but angry voice. He gestured at her several times, and she felt for the pistol, just to make sure it was still there.
'What did he say?' she asked Juan when the man finished speaking.
Juan slid off the ledge onto his feet. 'He asked that we get off his family's mausoleum, that he can lay the flowers there for them.'
He nodded an apology at the man and headed back toward the foot-bridge.
Chapter 13
Rex leaned over the hotel phone as Tank stretched out on the bed. He had to dial three times before the call went through. Donald picked up on the first ring. 'How is it?'
'Lovely as always,' Rex said. 'Puts Paris to shame.'
'Some interesting news. Remember that seawater that Frank sent back?'
'Of course.' Rex pulled off his shirt and turned so that he could see his back in the mirror. He pressed his hand to the back of his neck, and the white imprint of his fingers lingered a few moments before fading.
'I finally got it under a microscope. The sample from Sangre de Dios was highly unusual. Most of the plankton were dead. Clumped together. Mostly unicellular phytoplankton-dinoflagellates were most prevalent, but a lot of them I didn't recognize.'
'Really?' Rex said. 'Species you didn't recognize?'
'My guess is that they were nonviable mutations. Remember, plank-ton are extraordinarily sensitive to UV- B.'
'Yes,' Rex said, pulling a Natural History magazine from his bag and perusing the back cover, 'but they live at depths that screen out most radiation.'
'Ah,' Donald said. 'But this was a surface sample. So my thought was, seismically motivated shifting currents pushed them upward, and their composition was altered by UV exposure. But the range of the mutations was staggering-they couldn't be based on radiation alone.'
'So?' The phone line cut out. Rex looked over at his sat phone, still charging at the outlet, cursed, and dialed again. This time, the call went through on the first try.
'So,' Donald said, picking up right where they'd left off. 'I did a gas chromatography mass spec to check for DDT, but that came back negative, so I isolated some dinoflagellate DNA, and ran a gel.'
Donald checked his watch. His linen shirt was creased and wrinkled across the front, dotted with sweat. He'd spent the entire morning in the lab. The work required a precision that had quickly become tedious. First, he'd centrifuged the water samples, placing them in a rapidly spinning test tube so that the denser dinoflagellates would settle at one end of the tube. Then, he'd made genomic preps to isolate the DNA strands, cut specific segments, and ran those segments through ethidium bromide-soaked agar to see how they'd settle. When they did, their banding patterns were visible under UV light, and ready to be compared to the control.
From past studies, Donald was familiar with the banding pattern of dinoflagellate DNA from around Galapagos; generally it banded from three to five kilobases down to ten base pairs. The DNA from the island of Santa Cruz matched this banding pattern. However, the sample from Sangre de Dios was irregular, with several of the DNA segments remaining at the top of the agar, barely traveling downward.
When Rex heard the results, he sat down on the bed. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'What are you thinking?'
'Those segments are swollen with something to be moving that slow,' Donald said. 'I'm guessing a virus got ahold of them, finding its way through the UV-weakened cell walls and inserting its own DNA into their structures.'
Rex whistled. 'Well, viruses are phenomenally bountiful in H2O.'
'That was my understanding. But this is well out of our field. I'd like you to take plenty of water samples on Sangre de Dios. In the meantime, I've sent the sample off to Everett at Fort Detrick.'
'Samantha Everett?' Rex rubbed his forehead. 'Are you sure that's such a good idea? I've heard she's a little… ' The line cut out. 'Unpre-dictable.'
Former Chief of Viral Special Pathogens Branch at the Centers for Dis-ease Control in Atlanta and current Chief of the Disease Assessment Division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Dis-eases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Samantha Everett was decked out in a blue full-body space suit, complete with neoprene gloves taped to her sleeves. The droning air circulation unit inside the space suit was mes-merizing, forming a low- pitched symphony with the other sounds of the Biosafety Level Four lab-the constant one-way airflow, the blowers
