Forty-Eight X (14 page)

While they waited for their lecturer to set up his presentation, Shell laid out McGraw’s new mission.

“Link, your troops have done a superb job in annihilating small hamlets that we’ve targeted as terrorist camps. But we’ve started them off easy. Your missions have been in relatively open areas, easy to reconnoiter, well suited for quick attack and retreat. But we both know that most of our enemies are not hiding in little villages. They’re hiding under rocks. And that’s where the battle has to go.”

Shell described McGraw’s next target, a vast Al-Queda military base called Zwahar Kezar Al-Badr, or the “Worm Hole,” an area of deep lattice caves inside the walls of a steep gorge in the Sodyaki Ghar Mountains, part of the Hindu Kush mountain chain that stretched from Eastern Afghanistan to the border of Pakistan.

“Intelligence from captured Al-Queda indicates that some of these caves are as deep as a hundred meters. Of course we’ve tried to bomb them. But not even bunker-busting smart bombs can fly down a narrow gorge and turn ninety degrees into the mouth of a cave. All we’ve managed to do is temporarily block the openings to a few caves. We’ve sent teams in to probe these hideouts, but it’s virtually impossible for heavily armed troops to sneak up on a mountain site without the enemy knowing well in advance they’re coming. And when they get there, all they find are booby traps. The enemy has plenty of time to run and plenty of other places to hide. I’m hoping you and your team can do better.”

“I’m familiar with the terrain,” Link told his general. “I’ve been there before.”

“During the Tora Bora campaign?” Shell asked.

“No, sir. Two thousand years ago.”

Shell smiled. “You want to give me a history lesson here?”

“I was there, sir.”

“All right. All right.” Shell waved him on, moving past being bemused. “What about the terrain?”

“Well, sir, Afghanistan has an arid climate. Its rivers are often dry for months. But during the rainy season, the caves in their mountains become natural cisterns. So, farmers dug down to the water table in the caves and built tunnels called
karez
to move the water from the mountains to their farms to irrigate their crops. Over centuries, the mountain caves became interconnected with thousands of these man-made tunnels. That cave and tunnel system was already in place in 328 BC. The natives fought from those caves then, too.”

“They did?”

“Yes, sir. And when we marched into Afghanistan in 328 BC—it was part of the Persian Empire then—the natives fought us from those caves. But the history is written, sir. Alexander and I prevailed then. And I will this time, too.”

Mack Shell was pleased to have a determined and optimistic commander, no matter where he found his conviction. His job was to give him the tools to succeed.

The current presentation was by a researcher from the University of California at Davis School of Engineering and Applied Science. He was a young man in his early thirties with a doctorate in microelectronic engineering. He had a full beard, wore sandals, and had a T-shirt with the Rolling Stones big lips logo. He looked more ready to toss a Frisbee than present a proposal to a colonel, a general, and an assortment of PhD’s. But he had an infectious exuberance for a project he had spent a decade researching.

“Magnometers,” the engineer began simply, “detect the presence of metal. Metal distorts the earth’s magnetic field and magnometers detect those changes. We all know that military equipment—guns, and tanks, and missiles—are all made of metal. Now, I know a soldier doesn’t need a magnometer to tell him if somebody standing right in front of him in broad daylight is pointing a gun at him, but what if that gun is under a caftan? And what about whether there’s a guy with a gun hiding in a concrete bunker or—”

“Or,” McGraw piped in, “a hundred meters underground in some tiny tunnel?”

“Exactly. Or a hundred meters underground in a tiny tunnel.”

Tired of being lectured like some simpleton, Link pressed the young man. “You can get to the point!”

“Yes, sir. Well, we’ve been able to detect metals deep underground for a while now—but the magnometers you need are big. They need a lot of power. And they’re not practical for a soldier to lug around on a battlefield.”

The engineer pulled a small, thin round disc from his pocket—thinner and smaller than a dime with several tiny wires protruding from it.

“This is a micro-magnometer. It can focus and detect the presence of metal—think military equipment like a tank, truck, or even a soldier holding a rifle—from a hundred feet away. And it is not meant to be powered by any outside source. It’s designed to be powered by the normal acid-base chemical interactions in the brain. I’ve implanted it in pigs and monkeys. If you put it in the temporal regions, the animal gets auditory stimuli when any metal is detected. If you implant it the olfactory area, there’s a taste or smell reaction.”

“And how do you shut it off?” McGraw asked.

“A magnet. You wave a magnet over it and it shuts off. Another magnet, back on.”

“Any problems?” General Shell asked.

“Seizures. Some of the animals have had seizures. There has, of course, been no human testing. But if the military has volunteers…”

McGraw stayed after the main lecture was over to watch the movies. The professor had filmed the procedure required to implant the magnometers. The animals underwent craniotomies—surgical drills cut through skulls to remove a flap of bone to access the brain. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

The advantage of working on the Lemuria Project, however, was whatever questions one had, there were always experts to answer them and they were never far off. Minutes after the presentation, McGraw simply walked from the conference room to the third-floor offices of Marty White. Dr. White, formerly chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at USC Medical Center, was now Lemuria’s chief of neurosurgery. Just two years before, the forty-five-year-old handsome, athletic, egotistical surgeon had been at the top of his field, with a Ferrari F-430 Spider in his garage and starlets in his bed. And then, in just a few months, his career was over. He developed Parkinson’s disease and a fine tremor. Although medications suppressed most of his symptoms, the results were not sufficient to allow him to perform the most delicate surgeries. Then he underwent his own brain surgery. Marty had a DBS, a deep brain stimulator, implanted in his brain. The device emitted high-frequency electrical impulses to block the signals that caused his tremors. It was like a “pacemaker for the brain” and completely relieved his symptoms. Unfortunately, patients were still hesitant to allow a surgeon with a history of Parkinsonian tremors and electrodes in his brain to operate on theirs.

“Marty, are you gonna waste away in this office reading journals?” Julius Wagner had personally confronted the surgeon. And then he teased his ego. “Or, will you let me put your golden hands to work on a project that will change history?”

Dr. White had indeed been kept busy by Lemuria. Mack Shell and Julius Wagner had put him into their business of genetic engineering. But most of what he did was postmortem work, measuring brain weight, examining pathology specimens, and accessing anomalies and cancers. When McGraw showed up with questions about micro-magnometers, Marty White listened enthusiastically.

“I like the idea, Marty,” Link admitted, “but I don’t like the idea of cracking the skulls on my soldiers or having them flopping around with seizures in the field.”

“No problem,” Marty replied. “I’ll go through the nose.” The advantage of a military research project with almost unlimited funds and the security of a Manhattan Project was that ideas could reach fruition quickly. The next morning, Marty White had performed the first successful transphenoidal implantation of a micro-magnometer. His transphenoidal approach allowed him to reach the brain through the patient’s nose rather than by cracking open a skull. And a week after the Davis engineer had first presented his idea, he was back at his UC campus actually tossing Frisbees. Within that same week, McGraw’s troops had attacked two terrorist strongholds in the caves of the Hindu Kush Mountains of Northern Pakistan. There were several survivors—women, children, and a few old men—but no one carrying a weapon. And fortunately, Link thought, none of his troops had a seizure.

N
ate Stumpf lived in pretty nice digs considering that most years his salary fell below the poverty line. But that was his declared salary. He made most of his money off the books. His was a cash business. He didn’t take checks. And that’s what made his living arrangement sweet. Some people were bicoastal. Stumpf was intrastate-al. He spent half his time in Northern California, and the rest in Southern California, splitting his business between spying on the peccadilloes of the nouveau riche in Silicon Valley and the Hollywood elite in LA. He had his place in the Haight and, in the summer, he lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica, right on the beach. Summers at the seashore was a prize he was given by an old television producer he’d done some shady favors for in the past, shady meaning illegal, like wiretapping. His neighbors at the beach made millions, and yet he had the same view as they—the Pacific, a broad white sandy beach, and lots of buxom bikini-clad babes on roller skates.

Most of his jobs involved the sorry chore of tailing and photographing some harlot of a wife or playboy husband. He’d sit in his car and stare at a house for hours waiting for someone to come in or go out. Then, if they left, he’d sit some more, following behind in his car. Sometimes his libido would get stirred by one of his “vics” dry humping behind some restaurant or getting a blow job. But most of the time his gigs were simply ass callusing. Now, he thought, he finally had a job worthy of his talents. If he could catch the murderer of a Nobel Prize winner, he would not only have lots of bucks but the fame he deserved as well. He fantasized how he might get the girl, too.

He had to narrow down the suspects first. What was the big deal about what Professor Wagner did that earned him a Nobel Prize? And what was it about that research that would make anyone go through the machinations of faking a bizarre murder-suicide? Julius Wagner had worked in a field that could boost products worth billions for high-tech pharmaceutical companies. Stumpf suspected the obvious—money. It was the most common of motives in his experience. Stumpf first had to convince his client, the victim’s daughter, about his theory, and she didn’t look like anybody’s fool. He wouldn’t get paid unless he was right and proved himself right. Stumpf knew he would have to work for any reward, and so he read. He went to the UCLA libraries to bone up on Dr. Julius Wagner and his life’s work. It was a tedious process for a fellow who was twelve units short of his AA degree but, after two days, he fancied himself an expert on genetics.

Dr. Wagner, he learned, chose his academic major, genetics, in 1955, the same year that another geneticist working in a lab in Bar Harbor, Maine, discovered that one of his experimental mice was limping in its cage. Examining it, he discovered a Ping-Pong ball–sized tumor in its scrotum. It was a testicular tumor, a cancer, a teratoma to be exact, and in it were an assortment of mouse parts, muscle, bone, teeth, and skin. He then transplanted pieces of the tumor into other mice. In some of the mice, the tumor tissue grew bone, in others muscle, or skin, or other specialized cells. These were embryonic or stem cells, the same kind of cells that were part of a primitive embryo and that eventually turned into the specialized cells of the body. The Bar Harbor geneticist had merely encountered them at the most propitious moment when some unknown stimulus was ready to turn them into a particular cell. Other scientists then worked for decades to learn what variety of stimuli would turn these primordial or stem cells into different functioning cells, such as nerve cells, which transmitted chemical and electrical stimuli, or heart cells, which beat. At first, the cells they used were from cancerous tissue. But the cancers, with abnormal chromosomes, could be expected to react abnormally. To grow normal tissue, they needed normal embryos. For another decade, stem cell research involved normal mouse embryos. But research on mice couldn’t be transposed to human research. Existing human stem cell lines were aging. Using the leftover embryos from fertility clinics or therapeutic abortions posed ethical quandaries. Even when human embryonic research was not constrained by politics and moral debates, applying that research to human disease and using human volunteers continued to be a thorny issue. Dr. Wagner had taken a different approach. As had other researchers, he worked with primates. But while most had chosen the smaller rhesus monkeys, Wagner elected to work with chimpanzees, a larger animal but more genetically similar to humans. He had not only helped map the genetic code, or genome sequence, for chimpanzees, he’d developed methods to grow chimp stem cells, and had discovered several essential triggers that caused them to develop into particular tissue types.

Stumpf was convinced that Dr. Wagner’s murder had something to do with big business. Maybe Professor Wagner had discovered a cure for something, maybe AIDS, maybe cancer. There was big money to be made in providing new treatments, and big money to be lost if old treatments went by the wayside. Pharmaceutical companies stood to make or lose billions and—well, people were killed for a lot less.

Nate Stumpf’s second meeting with Maggie was at Denny’s on Wilshire Boulevard. He thought about taking her someplace nicer, but he wasn’t on any expense account and Denny’s had a twofer. He was meeting to lay out his plan of attack and impress her with his research on her father and his scientific smarts. It wasn’t long after he opened his mouth that he knew he had stepped in it—deep shit. He had made one grave mistake. He had failed to learn anything about his client.

“You see, Maggie,” Stumpf began, “your father was this world-famous geneticist who worked with chimp genes. You know, chimps are a lot like humans, and he could manipulate chimp genes. I think he probably knew how to do the same with human genes. And with pharmaceutical companies in the game to make billions on human genetic research, well…”