Bio-Strike

“ ‘S’okay, chere.” He patted her shoulder. “You my favorite gal.”

She checked the rearview and passed.

“Those thoughts,” she said. “You feel like sharing them?”

He turned to look at her.

“Guess I better.” He hesitated. “Came to me what happened to the president-elect in Brazil last month. Colon. I was recollectin’ how he took sick, died so sudden. His symptoms… ones we know about… ones his government didn’t cover up…”

He didn’t have to say any more than that.

His symptoms, Megan thought, had been strikingly similar to Gord’s.

She felt her heart clamp in her chest.

“Rollie, UpLink was about to cut a development deal with his administration. Our advance team met with him weeks before he died. You remember us talking about it on the Pomona?”

He made an affirmative sound.

“There’s my thoughts,” he said. “All wrapped in a bundle.”

Megan nodded and jammed down on the Beemer’s gas pedal, shredding over the road like the devil’s black stallion.

* * *

“Megan phoned,” Nimec said. “She’s with Ashley and Rollie at the hospital.”

Ricci’s shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly.

“The boss…?”

“He’s hanging on.”

“Oh.” Ricci breathed. “I didn’t know my arch nemesis was heading over there.”

Nimec was silent a moment. They were in his office. Just the two of them, by his choice. He’d wanted a chance to toss things around with Ricci before calling Vince Scull.

“Megan grabbed him, hustled off.” Nimec paused. “Tom, the docs and lab coats have turned something up. And I’ve got to tell you, it blew me away.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Long and short?” he said.

“Looks like the virus that’s affecting Gord was bioengineered. We’re not talking about something cultured in some Iraqi or Sudanese ‘baby milk factory.’ The bug’s some kind of mutant created with black bag technology.”

“How sure a thing is this?”

“Sure enough for us to run with it,” Nimec said. “I asked Meg to give me a dumbed-down explanation of their testing processes. From what I understood, there are confirmed techniques for scanning plant and animal genes for evidence of modification. Before UpLink sold off its biotech division to Richard Sobel, we were doing it for the ag department and other clients. You take a cucumber that has some superficial difference to all the rest at the green grocer, bring it to the lab, and they do a PCR exam, same as they would on a crime suspect’s genetic material. The DNA doesn’t compare with that variety of cuke, they move on to another level of testing. There are places on the gene string where scientists know to look for… I guess they’re the equivalent of splices.”

Ricci rubbed his neck. “A cucumber isn’t a virus,” he said.

“But the scientific principles behind the tests are identical. Or close to identical. Meg could give you a fuller rundown. All I can tell you is that these are confirmed procedures,” Nimec said. “They’ve only had, what, a day or two to do the lab work, so I don’t know whether the findings meet a standard of proof that would satisfy the scientific establishment. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s writing any articles for the New England Journal of Medicine. We’ve been given an inside line, and that’s how it stays for now.”

Ricci was still and quiet in his chair.

“Ever miss the twentieth century?” he said after a minute.

“More and more.”

“But here we are in the future.”

“That’s right.”

“If we have to put up with this bullshit, where are the flying cars? And the robots that pop hot food and drinks out of slots in their chests?”

Nimec managed a half smile. “I always looked forward to the jet packs,” he said.

There was a brief silence.

“Where do we go with this, Pete?”

“I was hoping you’d have some ideas. Obviously we’ve got to learn who developed the virus. And how Gord was exposed.”

“The forensics on Palardy might help steer us in the right direction. We’ve also got to know whether there’s anything to his E-mail,” Ricci said. He scratched behind his ear. “You hear from our code-breaking whiz?”

Nimec shook his head. “Not for a while. He stopped picking up his phone.”

“Booted me right out of his office,” Ricci said. “You think we should go knock on his—?”

Nimec’s phone broke in with a twitter. He picked up, grunted, nodded, grunted again, replaced the receiver, and abruptly rose from behind his desk. “Timing,” he said.

Ricci looked at him. “Carmichael?”

Nimec nodded, tapped Ricci on his shoulder as he hastened around his desk. “Let’s move,” he said. “He’s got something big for us.”

“It’s quirky but clever, when you take into account that Palardy may have been on his way out when he devised it,” Carmichael was explaining virtually as they reached his door. “Sort of a cross between a polyalphabetic and geometric cipher.”

What Ricci and Nimec saw on the flat-panel wall monitor facing them was a large graphic:

ROUGH CIRCLE (CLOCK) TABLE

“Palardy did have a thing for clocks, Ricci, and it’s obvious he used one to work out his substitutions,” Carmichael went on. “Sooner or later, the computers would have solved this thing mathematically, even without your having made the observation. Just as they would have if some of those letter combinations hadn’t jumped out at my eye. The GW in particular… How many people don’t immediately think ‘George Washington’ when they look at that letter pair? Once I let my nose follow that clue, I started noticing other bigrams also corresponded to presidential initials. Jefferson, Jackson, and Teddy Roosevelt’s especially popped out at me.”

He paused, motioned them into the office. A trim, blonde woman of about thirty-five was standing near the middle of the room.

“Michelle Franks,” she said, putting out her hand.

Nimec and Ricci quickly introduced themselves.

She said, “We won’t waste precious time with a long explanation…”

Good, Ricci and Nimec both thought at once.

“… but want you to understand how we got this figured, and whipped together the chart in front of you.”

“What Palardy did was take a circle and divide it into sixty equal parts by drawing lines across its diameter,” Carmichael said.

“Sixty parts, as in sixty minutes on the clock, ” Michelle said.

Carmichael nodded. “It was obvious to me in Palardy’s office that each of his character groups were substitutions. But my first guess was that they stood for letters or syllables, when in fact they stood for numerals.”

Right, Ricci thought. Get on with it.

“When Jimmy got his hunch about the groups representing the initials of United States presidents—” Michelle began.

“Every one of them early presidents,” Carmichael cut in. “There were no RRs, as in