Mount Dragon (30 page)

Checking out with the perimeter guard, he set off down the dirt road that wound northeastward toward Mount Dragon. Reaching the base, he began the climb toward the summit, leaving the road in favor of a steep, narrow trail. The instrument felt heavy on his back, and the cinders slid under his feet as he climbed. Half an hour of hard work brought him to the top.

It was a classic cinder cone, its center scooped out by the ancient eruption. A few mesquite bushes grew along the rim. On the far side, Carson could see a cluster of microwave and radio towers, and a small white shed surrounded by a chain-link fence.

He turned around, breathing hard, ready to enjoy the view he'd worked hard for. The desert floor, at the precise instant of dawn, was like a pool of light, shimmering and swirling as if there were no surface at all, but merely a play of light and color. As the sun climbed fully over the horizon and flung a sheet of golden light across the ground, each solitary mesquite and creosotebush attached itself to shadows that ran endlessly toward the horizon. Carson could see the edge of light race across the desert, from east to west, etching the hills in light and the washes in darkness, until it rushed away over the curve of the earth, leaving a blanket of light in its wake.

Several miles away, he could see the wrecked outline of the old Anasazi pueblo—he now knew it was called Kin Klizhini—throwing shadows like black slashes across the dusty plain. Still farther away, the desert floor became black and mottled: the
Malpaís
lava flow.

He chose a comfortable spot behind a large block of tufa. Putting the banjo beside him, he stretched out and shut his eyes, enjoying the delicious solitude.

“Shit,” came a familiar voice several minutes later.

Startled, Carson looked up and saw de Vaca standing over him, hands on her hips.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

Carson grabbed the handle of his banjo case. His day was already ruined. “What does it look like?” he asked.

“You're in my spot,” she said. “I always come up here on Sundays.”

Without another word, Carson heaved himself to his feet and started to walk away. This was one day he was going to avoid an argument with his lab assistant. He'd take Roscoe out a good ten miles, do his playing out there.

He halted when he saw the expression on her face.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Why shouldn't I be?”

Carson looked at her. His instincts told him not to strike up a conversation, not to ask, just to get the hell out of there.

“You look a little upset,” he said.

“Why should I trust you?” de Vaca asked abruptly.

“Trust me about what?”

“You're one of them,” she said. “A
company
man.” Beneath the accusatory tones, Carson sensed genuine fright.

“What is it?” he asked.

De Vaca remained silent for a long time. “Teece disappeared,” she said at last.

Carson relaxed. “Of course he did. I talked to him the night before last. He was taking a Hummer to Radium Springs. He'll be back tomorrow.”

She shook her head angrily. “You don't understand. After the storm, his Hummer was found out in the desert. Empty.”

Shit. Not Teece
. “He must have gotten lost in the sandstorm.”

“That's what they're saying.”

He turned toward her sharply. “What's that supposed to mean?”

De Vaca wouldn't look at him. “I overheard Nye. He was talking to Singer, saying that Teece was still missing. They were arguing.”

Carson was silent.
Nye…
A vision came into his head: a vision of a man emerging from the sandstorm, encased in dust, his horse nearly dead from exhaustion.

“What, you think he was murdered?” he asked.

De Vaca did not reply.

“How far from Mount Dragon was the Hummer?”

“I don't know. Why?”

“Because I saw Nye return with his horse after the dust storm. He'd probably been out searching for Teece.” He told her the story of what he'd seen in the stables two evenings before.

De Vaca listened intently. “You think he'd be out
searching
in a dust storm? Returning from burying the body, more likely. He and that asshole, Mike Marr.”

Carson scoffed. “That's ludicrous. Nye may be a son of a bitch, but he's not a murderer.”

“Marr
is
a murderer.”

“Marr? He's as dumb as a lump of busted sod. He doesn't have the brains to commit murder.”

“Yeah? Mike Marr was an intelligence officer in Vietnam. A tunnel rat. He worked in the Iron Triangle, probing all those hundreds of miles of secret tunnels, looking for Vietcong and their weapons caches and frying anybody they found down there. That's where he got his limp. He was down a hole, following a sniper. He triggered a booby trap and the tunnel collapsed on his legs.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told me.”

Carson laughed. “So you're friends, are you? Was this before or after he planted the butt of his shotgun in your gut?”

De Vaca frowned. “I told you, the scumbag tried to pick me up when I first got here. He cornered me in the gym and told me his life story, trying to impress me with what a bad dude he was. When that didn't work, he grabbed my ass. He thought I was just some kind of easy
Hispana
whore.”

“He did? What happened?”

“I told him he was asking for a swift kick in the
huevos
.”

Carson laughed again. “Guess it took that slap at the picnic to cool his ardor. Anyway, why would he or anybody else want to murder an OSHA inspector? That's insane. Mount Dragon would be shut down in an instant.”

“Not it if looked like an accident,” De Vaca returned. “The storm provided a perfect opportunity. Why did Nye take a
horse
out into the storm, anyway? And why haven't we been told about Teece's disappearance? Maybe Teece found out something that he wasn't supposed to know.”

“Like what? For all we know, you could have misinterpreted what you heard. After all—”

“—I heard it, all right. Were you born yesterday,
cabrón?
There are billions at stake here. You think this is about saving lives, but it isn't. It's about money. And if that money is jeopardized…” She looked at him, eyes blazing.

“But why kill Teece? We had a terrible accident on Level-5, but the virus didn't escape. Only one person died. There's been no cover-up. Just the opposite.”

“‘Only one person died,'” de Vaca echoed. “You ought to hear yourself. Look, something else is going on around here. I don't know what it is, but people are acting strange. Haven't you noticed? I think the pressure is driving people over the edge. If Scopes is so interested in saving lives, why this impossible timetable? We're working with the most dangerous virus ever created. One misstep, and
adiós muchachos
. Already, people's lives have been ruined by this project. Burt, Vanderwagon, Fillson the zookeeper, Czerny the guard. Not to mention Brandon-Smith. How many more lives?”

“Susana, you obviously don't belong in this industry,” Carson replied wearily. “All great advances in human progress have been accompanied by pain and suffering. We're going to
save
millions of lives, remember?” Even as he spoke the words, they sounded hollow and clichéd in his ears.

“Oh, it all sounds noble enough. But is this really an advance? What gives us the right to alter the human genome? The longer I'm here, the more I see of what goes on, the more I believe what we're doing is fundamentally wrong.
Nobody
has the right to remake the human race.”

“You're not talking like a scientist. We're not remaking the human race, we're curing people of the flu.”

De Vaca was digging a trench in the cinders with short, angry movements of her heel. “We're altering human germ cells. We've crossed the line.”

“We're getting rid of one small defect in our genetic code.”

“
Defect
. What the hell is a defect exactly, Carson? Is having the gene for male pattern baldness a defect? Is being short a defect? Being the wrong skin color? Having kinky hair? What about being a little too shy? After we eradicate the flu, what comes next? Do you
really
think science is going to refrain from making people smarter, longer-lived, taller, handsomer,
nicer?
Particularly when there's billions of dollars to be made?”

“Obviously, it would be a highly regulated situation,” Carson said.

“Regulation! And who is going to decide what's better? You? Me? The government? Brent Scopes? No big deal, let's just get rid of the unattractive genes, the ones nobody wants. Genes for fatness and ugliness and obnoxiousness. Genes that code for unpleasant personality traits. Take off your blinders for a moment, and tell me what this means for the integrity of the human race.”

“We're a long way from being able to do all that,” Carson muttered.

“Bullshit. We're doing it right now, with X-FLU. The mapping of the human genome is almost complete. The changes may start small, but they'll grow. The difference in DNA between humans and chimps is less than two percent, and look at the vast difference. It won't take big changes in the genome to remake the human race into something that we'd never even
recognize
.”

Carson was silent. It was the same argument he had heard countless times before. Only now—despite his best efforts to resist—it was starting to make sense. Perhaps he was just tired, and didn't have the energy to spar with de Vaca. Or perhaps it was the look on Teece's face when he'd said,
What I've got to do can't wait
.

They sat silently in the shadow of the volcanic rock, looking down toward the beautiful cluster of white buildings that were Mount Dragon, trembling and insubstantial in the rising heat. Even as he fought against it, Carson could feel something crumbling inside him. It was the same feeling he'd had when, as a teenager, he had watched from a flatbed truck while the ranch was being auctioned off piece by piece. He had always believed, more firmly than he believed anything else, that the best hopes for mankind's future lay in science. And now, for whatever reason, that belief was threatening to dissolve in the heat waves rising from the desert floor.

He cleared his throat and shook his head, as if to dislodge the train of thought. “If your mind is made up, what do you plan to do about it?”

“Get the hell out of here and let people know what's going on.”

Carson shook his head. “What's going on is one-hundred-percent legal, FDA-regulated genetic research. You can't stop it.”

“I can if somebody was murdered. Something's not right here. Teece found out what it was.”

Carson looked at her as she sat with her back against the rock, her arms wrapped around her knees, the wind whipping her raven hair away from her forehead.
Fuck it
, he thought.
Here goes
.

“I'm not sure what Teece knew,” he said slowly. “But I know what he was looking for.”

De Vaca's eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Teece thinks Franklin Burt was keeping a private notebook. That's what he told me the night he left. He also said that Vanderwagon and Burt had elevated levels of dopamine and serotonin in their bloodstreams. So did Brandon-Smith, to a lesser extent.”

De Vaca was silent.

“He thought that this journal of Burt's could shed light on whatever might be causing these symptoms,” Carson added. “Teece was going to look for it when he got back.”

De Vaca stood up. “So. Are you going to help me?”

“Help you what?”

“Find Burt's notebook. Learn the secret of Mount Dragon.”

Charles Levine had taken to arriving at Greenough Hall very early, locking his office door, and leaving instructions for Ray that he was taking no calls and seeing no visitors. He had temporarily passed on his course load to two junior instructors, and he'd canceled his planned lecture schedule for the coming months. Those had been the last pieces of advice from Toni Wheeler before she resigned as the foundation's public-relations adviser. For once, Levine had decided to follow her suggestions. The internal pressure from the college trustees was growing, and the telephone messages left for him by the dean of faculty were becoming increasingly strident. Levine sensed danger, and—against his nature—had decided to lay low for a while.

So he was surprised to find a man waiting patiently in front of his locked office door at seven o'clock in the morning. Instinctively, Levine held out his hand, but the man only looked back at him.

“What can I do for you?” Levine said, unlocking the door and showing him in. The man sat down stiffly, gripping his briefcase across his lap. He had bushy gray hair and high cheekbones, and looked about seventy.