The Mother Code Read online

  His voice shaking, he added a second thought. “If you don’t hear from me in two days, call Mr. Wheelan.” Silently, he prayed that his message would go through.

  3

  RICK BLEVINS POWERED on his computer and settled into his chair. As he waited for his secure link to boot up, he ran the palm of his hand down the length of his thigh, massaging the place just above the knee where the prosthesis joined what remained of his right leg. He winced. The adjustment to this new device was proving difficult.

  Like his old one, the bulk of the new prosthesis was covered with a synthetic mesh that stiffened and softened as he moved, mirroring the softness or stiffness of the tissues in his upper thigh. Its bionic muscles were controlled via the same electrodes, connected to his own nerve tissue. But this new appendage, built for better mobility, seemed to have a mind of its own. When he snapped it into place each morning, tiny pinpricks of energy surged upward toward his spine, a force like something alien. Worst of all, the new leg seemed to be waging war on his neurostimulator, the device they’d implanted in his lower back to dull the pain. The old phantom signals, pulsing and burning, were inching back.

  He stared out the window. The weather wasn’t helping. The previous night’s freezing rain had painted the concrete facade of the Pentagon with a thin layer of frost. Running his hand over his scalp, he felt the stiff growth of his thick brown hair. He needed a cut . . .

  He was startled by the buzz of the intercom at his lapel. “We need you down here,” came a clipped male voice.

  “Down here” was General Blankenship’s basement office. Rick gulped coffee from his thermocup and straightened his tie. He was pretty sure he knew what this was about.

  A month prior, he’d been summoned for comment on a biowarfare project at Fort Detrick. He was no longer subject to the immediate threats that had dogged his life in special ops, but in his desk job as an analyst at the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, he’d found plenty of use for the same keen instincts that had served him so well in the field. With growing concern he’d pored over the feasibility report, acquainting himself with difficult scientific terms like “apoptosis,” “programmed cell death,” “caspase,” and “nucleic acid nanostructure.” He’d heard of the DNA nanostructures, nicknamed “NANs,” before; it was his job to oversee approval of their use in domestic research labs. But this was different.

  The project was called Tabula Rasa, a moniker that was frightening enough. But as he’d rescanned the section labeled “Expected Impact,” he’d felt his heart skip a beat. The basis of the bioagent was a specific type of nucleic acid nanostructure called IC-NAN. When a victim inhaled this particular sequence of nanoparticulate DNA, his infected lung cells would begin to outlive their “use by” date: Rather than dying off to make way for fresh new cells as they were supposed to do, the old, infected cells would replicate to produce more defective cells. These mutated cells would overgrow good tissue, impeding proper lung function and eventually invading the body, robbing other organs of nutrients. The desired result was akin to an aggressive lung cancer—a slow but inexorable death.

  Rather than offering the expected rubber stamp on the program, he’d fired off a salvo advising its cancellation. Sending uncharacterized bioweapons out into the world, even to the most remote parts of the world, was crazy. The mass poisonings, the devastation of innocent populations in an effort to rout out the few . . . weren’t they past all that?

  But now, he was sure the vehemence of his response hadn’t gone unnoticed. No doubt Blankenship had been dissatisfied. As he caught the elevator and traveled the three floors down, he steeled himself for the inevitable reprimand.

  The elevator door buzzed open, and he headed down the dim corridor. A first lieutenant was waiting for him near the door to the general’s office. As the man came to attention, Rick caught sight of the glimmer of a rifle. An armed guard. A cold sweat dampened his shirt.

  “Sir.” The younger man saluted him. Stopping short, Rick saluted back. “Sir, you’ll need to repeat your oath.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. Strict orders.”

  The hairs at the back of his neck prickling in the close air, Rick repeated the oath he knew so well. “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . . I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same . . .” As he spoke the words, his pulse kept double time in his ears. “. . . so help me God.”

  The young officer latched his hand around the doorknob, waiting for the decisive click that signaled acceptance. The door swung open, and Rick slipped inside.

  “Have a seat,” Blankenship said. It was an order. Rick lowered himself onto an old wooden desk chair, then looked up to take in the two others in the room with them. With a jolt, he realized that one was Henrietta Forbes, the president’s secretary of defense. The other was a short, balding man in a faded brown suit.

  Blankenship coughed—an unproductive cough, more of a grumble. “Rick,” he said, “we have a situation.”

  Rick glanced at his boss, General Joseph Blankenship—hero of two wars, winner of the Purple Heart, now director of the CIA. The general, normally sanguine, sat gripping his leather armrests, his mouth set in a tight grimace.

  “Dr. Rudy Garza has been so kind as to come down from Fort Detrick. I’ll let him explain.” Turning, Blankenship nodded to the balding man, who promptly shuffled a thin tablet up from his lap.

  “Thank you, General.” Dr. Garza’s voice was low, lost in the rumpled collar of his white shirt. “I understand that you are all aware of Tabula Rasa?”

  “The project you people started a few years back? The initiator caspase–specific NAN?” Rick edged forward, his gaze still focused on the general. “I recommended it be canceled.”

  The doctor looked up from his notes, his eyes surprisingly blue above a pair of old wire-framed reading glasses. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Garza,” Blankenship said, returning Rick’s gaze with his own steely glare. “Please go on.”

  “The IC-NAN was deployed on June 5, a little over six months ago now, in a remote region of southern Afghanistan,” Dr. Garza said.

  “Deployed? But—” Rick felt his heart picking up speed, his leg throbbing in response as he struggled to stay seated. He’d been wasting his time. By the time his opinion on Tabula Rasa had been solicited, IC-NAN had already been deployed.

  It was Secretary Forbes’s turn to intercede. “Despite the truce, the region west of Kandahar still wasn’t under control. Enemy combatants were entrenched in caves, sniping at our peacekeeping troops . . . We were losing as many as five men a day. We needed a targeted weapon that wouldn’t leave a mark. No trace of itself, no trace of its origin. Just kill, then disappear.”

  “As you know,” Dr. Garza said, “IC-NAN was designed for this purpose. A synthetic nucleic acid nanostructure, or NAN, mimics the activity of a virus, but it cannot be replicated by the contaminated individual. So it is not contagious. In addition, this NAN was engineered so that if it was not inhaled within a few hours, it would degrade.”

  “Degrade . . .” Rick repeated. He remembered this feature, a significant one.

  “Yes. Once released into the air, the infectious nanoparticulate form, which is synthesized to take on the shape of a tiny sphere, will eventually denature, or degrade, to its linear form. This linear form cannot enter human cells. After intensive study, our IC-NAN was deemed safe to release as an aerosol, via drone.”

  Rick closed his eyes. He remembered Garza’s name on the reports he’d read—a chemist, a doctoral graduate of the molecular biology program at the Instituto Politécnico in Mexico City. His trained ear picked up a slight Spanish accent, almost musical in tone. It was difficult to be angry at this meek purveyor of bad news. But was it his anger or his confusion that had set the room spinning? “So, did the NAN do what it was supposed
to do?” he asked, his own voice sounding faint in his ears.

  Dr. Garza adjusted his glasses with one nervous forefinger. “Normally, the cells on the human lung’s surface are replaced every two to three weeks with fresh cells. But within five weeks of our attack, all of the targeted individuals were found dead. Their lung biopsies showed no evidence of uninfected, normally functioning lung surface cells. So yes, the NAN appeared to have behaved as expected.”

  Rick felt a catch at the base of his throat. From Blankenship’s immaculate desk, a tiny snowman smiled at him, trapped there in the stagnant atmosphere of his own small globe. They wouldn’t have called him down here if all had gone according to plan. “And the residual? The material that wasn’t inhaled?”

  Dr. Garza swallowed hard, and Rick detected a slight tremor in his voice as he continued. “As you seem to have surmised, this is the issue. Those who did reconnaissance—the GeoBot team who located the bodies—some of them suffered . . . sequelae. And they found more individuals dead at the scene, and over a wider area, than had been expected based on aerial photos taken before deployment of the spray.”

  “The NAN didn’t degrade?”

  “It did degrade, in the sense that it reverted to the noninfectious linear form. But . . .”

  “But?”

  Looking up from his notes, Dr. Garza confronted the room. “But that form, while not able to infect human cells, was taken up by a receptive species of archaebacterium present in the desert sands. It inserted itself into that genome. And it appears that these microbes were capable of replicating it each time they divided.”

  Rick found himself clutching the arms of his chair. “These things made more copies of the NAN DNA? How do you know this?”

  “We analyzed samples taken from the victims’ clothing. The NAN DNA sequence was present in the archaebacterial DNA. But . . . the problem is worse than this. We discovered that some of these microbes were packed with reconstituted spherical NANs.”

  “Particles that they made themselves?”

  “Yes. And once these new NANs were synthesized, they caused the archaebacterium to . . . explode, for lack of a better term.”

  “Releasing the spherical NANs back to the environment . . .”

  The doctor nodded slowly. “It would appear so. Restarting the cycle with fresh IC-NAN.”

  Rick leaned forward. “So let me get this straight. The spherical NAN that you sprayed from the drone can infect human cells. The degraded linear form, to which it reverts in the environment, cannot. That was supposed to be your safety feature.”

  “Correct.”

  “But these archaebacteria are capable of taking in the linear form, making more copies of it, and manufacturing more spherical NANs from that DNA?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Garza replied, staring fixedly down again at his notes.

  Rick drew a deep breath. “And these spherical NANs can then get back out of the archaebacteria and infect more humans?”

  Dr. Garza looked up, his expression stony. “Yes. There appear to be two mechanisms for this.” He turned his tablet around to face the group. The diagram on the display showed a green, rod-shaped organism, the archaebacterium, packed full with small clumps of DNA labeled as IC-NANs. As if to enhance their ominous nature, the NANs were drawn in red. The archaebacterium was just starting to split open along one end. And scattered around the outside of its ruptured cell wall were more NANs, some still clumped in their spherical infectious form, some degraded to wormlike linear structures. “In one scenario,” Garza said, “the newly synthesized spherical NAN is excreted by the archaebacterium directly into the environment. Given a few hours, this NAN might degrade to the linear form—which as we now know is capable of infecting a new archaebacterium, though not of infecting a human. Or, if there is a human close by, the NAN might infect that human before it has a chance to degrade.” He swiped forward to a second diagram, showing a cutaway cartoon of a human subject from the side, his airways open to admit hosts of tiny green and red dots. “As I said, a human might breathe in this new NAN. But in another scenario, the archaebacterium is breathed in by the victim and then releases its NAN within the body.” He looked away from his screen. “We have evidence that all of these mechanisms can and have occurred.”

  Rick sat back, gripping the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “So, this thing is out of control,” he said. “Now these soil organisms are replicating this IC-NAN DNA sequence and excreting active NANs back out into the biosphere. Now they can act as agents of a new sort of archaebacterial infection, one that might turn on anyone. On us.”

  Garza turned off his tablet, holding it now to his chest. “Yes.”

  Rick turned to Blankenship. “I warned you about the unpredictability—” He caught himself. Of course, no one had asked his opinion before storming ahead. Exasperated, he turned back to Garza. “The human victims can’t transmit the NAN to other humans, can they?”

  “No,” Dr. Garza said. “This part of the plan was effective. The victims are not infectious. Only the infected microbes are—”

  “And animals and plants will not be affected?”

  “The effects of this DNA are specific to humans.”

  “So let’s get back to these archaebacteria. Do we know how many of these are infected? Or how many different species of such might be infected? They could be anywhere . . .”

  “We are assessing the degree of spread. So far we have only isolated the DNA from one archaebacterial species. We are not sure if different species of microbes will be capable of exchanging this genetic material with one another in the wild. But we are currently testing that hypothesis in the laboratory.”

  Rick clenched his jaw, his accusing gaze drifting toward Henrietta Forbes.

  “It’s all hands on deck,” said Blankenship, sparing the secretary the need of a response. “But right now, you’re the only agent we have with complete knowledge of the project.”

  “Complete knowledge?” Rick asked, making sure his gaze met Blankenship’s. “Have you really told me everything?”

  “Everything we know at present,” Dr. Garza said evenly. “Although the story is constantly evolving.”

  Rick felt the beginnings of a rude laugh bubbling in his throat. Of course, everything he’d thought might happen was now happening—and worse. Nature always held the cards—it didn’t take a Ph.D. to understand that. “Evolving,” he said. “Like these little bugs that have picked up the ability to synthesize NANs.”

  Rudy Garza was looking straight at him now, his blue eyes gone steel gray. “Yes. Like the archaebacteria.”

  “Rick, you’ll be reinstated into active duty at your former rank—colonel,” Blankenship said. “You’ll oversee the joint investigation, including DOD personnel, the science team at Fort Detrick, and any ancillary science personnel we may call in.”

  “But . . . sir . . .” Rick looked around the room, at the expectant faces turned toward him. “I’m not a scientist,” he protested. “A career in special ops and a minor in biology from West Point hardly qualify me . . . They’ll never listen . . .”

  Blankenship shook his head. “You’re on the security side,” he said. “They have to listen to you. If they don’t, we’ll block ’em out.”

  “Fine,” Rick muttered. “Fine. In any event, I suppose I have no choice.” He settled back, the wooden slats of his seat digging into his spine. Why else had they brought him down here, confessed their sins to him? Though it would have been his choice to halt its inception in the first place, it was he who would be charged with cleaning up this mess.

  There was an awkward pause as Blankenship fumbled with a tablet on his desk. “Now, we’ve identified another scientist we’ll need on the team. Someone at Emory. He’ll need to be brought up to speed,” the general mumbled.

  “Emory? Who?”

  Blankenship put his hand to his forehead, k
neading his brow. “You know of him. Said. Dr. James Said.”

  Once again, Rick was startled. Said. The difficult clearance he’d worked on, just last year. “James Said . . . Emory . . . Do you mean the Pakistani? But you’ve already got the team at Fort Detrick . . .”

  Blankenship glared over the top of his tablet. “Dr. Garza’s team knows all about the NANs we’ve released—how to synthesize them, their structure, how they’re supposed to work. But if we’re going to protect people against this thing, we’re going to need more expertise on the human physiology side. In . . . what was it, Garza?”

  “Cell biology,” murmured Dr. Garza.

  “Yes,” said Blankenship. “It was Dr. Garza who suggested Dr. Said.”

  “Dr. Said is not Pakistani—he’s an American, born in Bakersfield, California,” Dr. Garza said. “He’s a well-known authority on recombinant DNA therapy, and well regarded at the Center for Gene Therapy—I have heard that he is being groomed as its next head. And he has extensive experience with the activity of NANs in human tissues.”

  Rick leaned forward once again, determined to make his point. “As you know, I was responsible for Said’s background check when he applied to work with NANs,” he said. “I warned he might be a liability. We all know who his uncle was, even if it appears that he doesn’t.”

  Blankenship didn’t bother looking up. “In the end, you decided to grant him access, correct?” he said.

  Rick stared at his boss. “But we’ve had to keep a watchful eye on him. Are we really sure we want him to know—”

  “He’s clean,” said the general. “He knows nothing about his extended family.”

  “You’re absolutely sure of that?”

  “His parents have been model citizens since resettlement. They’ve kept him in the dark,” replied the general. “I can show you the surveillance files, if that’s what you need.”

  Rick sat back, all energy draining from his limbs. Files. When it came to Farooq Said, James Said’s notorious uncle, he’d seen all the files he needed to see. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Where is he now?”