Spiral (20 page)

23

THE FIRST ENTRY MAGGIE FOUND ABOUT THE UZUMAKI WAS
in Liam’s journal from 1953. She sat on the concrete floor in the back of the herbarium, her grandfather’s notebooks scattered around her. She’d retrieved them from a storage room where the notebooks of many of Cornell’s most famous mycologists were kept. The cardboard boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, the air awash in the aromatic compounds created during the slow, steady breakdown of the pages. She’d found her grandfather’s, dragged them out of the storage room, and dug through them, looking for trips to South America and Brazil, her nerves on edge. The notebooks were out of sequence—she had to go through them one by one.

Surrounding her as she worked were the rows and rows of seven-foot-high metal cabinets filled with fungal specimens. The smell of mothballs was strong, the naphthalene a poison to the cigarette beetles that were the archivist’s bane. Her grandfather loved rummaging through those cabinets, had worked among them for half a century. All of his finds, the hundreds of species he had discovered and classified, were there. He had traveled across the globe in search of new species. In almost any corner of the world, he befriended the local experts on fungi, whether they were academics or farmers. But he had made a particularly large number of trips to Brazil. Maggie had traveled with him once, when she was seventeen. She was amazed at the people he knew. He had friends all over the country, in almost every province, it seemed, people who knew everything about the local fungal populations.

And there was something else about Brazil that she remembered. São Paolo had more than a million residents of Japanese descent. She remembered especially one neighborhood, called Liberdade, where she suddenly felt as though she had been transported to the Far East. Liam had explained why: the Japanese and Brazilians had signed a treaty in 1907 to encourage the immigration of poor Japanese peasants to Brazil to work the coffee crops. These were the descendants of those workers, the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan.

The entry that had grabbed Maggie’s attention was on page thirty-two of Liam’s 1953 field notebook. Her grandfather’s handwriting was controlled and confident, showing none of the shakiness that would come to him in later years. She felt a knot growing in her stomach as she read the description of her grandfather’s find:

8/28/53

Swirl-like morphology, attacks during Oct./Nov., taking root on the corn stubble left in the field after harvest. Farmers fear it. Say it causes spirits to come inside. “Spirits?” I ask. They explain: hallucinations, madness.
   This must be it. Tentative name:
Fusarium spiralis
.

She read on, skimming her grandfather’s careful phenotype description and attempt at taxonomy, placing it in the proper place in the fungal kingdom. Then came a section of text that tied it all together.

I asked about Japanese. Had they been here? An old man from a small village outside Porto Alegre said that a small Japanese contingent had come there in 1939. They circulated among the Japanese migrant community, offered money for unusual or dangerous organisms, particularly crop pests. They claimed to be from the Japanese agricultural ministry, but no one believed them. The villager said the Japanese knew nothing about maize or farming. Nor were they interested in techniques for growing. Only in whether people got sick.

The rumor was they were military. I asked, “Did they take samples of the fungus?” He nodded. They left with an enormous chest full of samples. Hundreds of species. They seemed pleased. He said, “I hated them. They were cruel, heartless men.”

Maggie was completely immersed, her universe reduced to the page of the notebook before her. She nearly jumped out of her skin when her cell rang.

It was Jake.

She told him what she found. He said that Harpo and Vlad were working on the sequence and should have it in about an hour. He said he’d check back in later.

MAGGIE TURNED TO THE FUNGAL REGISTRY DATABASE, TYPING
the specimen name,
Fusarium spiralis
, into the computer in the prep room. She found nothing: the database had no record of a species by that name. Liam always said that one of his greatest joys was the discovery of an interesting new species, the fun of sharing it with the rest of the fungus community.

But he’d kept this one a secret.

She took a different tack, looking to see if it had been listed by anyone else. It didn’t take long. She found it listed under
Fusarium spirale
. The fungus was registered in 2002 by a Brazilian scientist, Dr. Alberto Chagas of the University of São Paolo, along with Dr. Sadie Toloff of the USDA.

Sadie Toloff?

Maggie wouldn’t call Sadie a close friend, but the two women knew and respected each other. They had consulted each other on both scientific and bureaucratic issues that had arisen over the years. Toloff had never gone in for species chasing, an obsession among some mycologists. So what was she doing in Brazil searching out obscure fungi?

The answer was obvious. She was looking for the same thing Liam had been looking for.

She heard a sound, practically jumped out of her skin, then realized it was the heater starting up. She didn’t know if it was the adrenaline or the fear, but she was sure someone was watching her. She picked up Vlad’s gun, then set it back down.

Come on, girl. You’ve got work to do
.

Maggie read the descriptor for
Fusarium spirale
. It was native to northern Brazil and infected corn and cereal substrates. It produced a pair of nasty mycotoxins, a common fumonisin called B1, a nephrotoxin that affected kidneys, and another one similar to the LSA compound found in
Claviceps
, aka ergot. If ingested, these mycotoxins caused symptoms ranging from mania and hallucinations to constricted blood flow in exterior appendages that led to gangrene. From what she read, all the local farmers had a mantra: stay away from the spiral.

It was a nasty fungus but no worse than dozens of other mycotoxin-producing species. What was special about this one? According to what Jake had told her a few hours before, Liam maintained that the Uzumaki was the most dangerous biological pathogen he’d ever seen. So how did it get that way? How had the Japanese changed it when they knew next to nothing about genetics at that time?

A few more clicks gave her the first clue.
Fusarium spirale
was an unusual bugger: it was dimorphic. Dimorphic fungi could exist in two completely different morphological states, with utterly different phenotypes—like a caterpillar and a butterfly. You’d never know by looking at them that they were the same species.

Depending on its environment,
Fusarium spirale
could be the spiral that attacked and devoured corn in the fields. This form produced toxins discouraging predators and reproduced sexually, sending billions of spores skyward to be spread by the wind and rain.

The second form was much simpler, a single-celled yeastlike organism. It grew in hot, moist conditions, such as inside the bodies of warm-blooded mammals. It would take up residence in the digestive tract of either humans or birds, reproducing asexually, by simple division. It would grow quickly but was relatively harmless, producing none of the poisonous toxins that were present in the spiral form. Its goal was simple—to ride along with the mammal, not causing it too much discomfort, until it dropped out in the fecal matter of the host and would begin life again in its spiral form.

Maggie struggled to piece it all together. She stared down at the pictures of the little spiral growths. So how had the Japanese turned fungus into a weapon?

Dimorph. Two forms. One kills you, the other doesn’t
. She was beginning to get an inkling about how it would go. How you could turn this fungus into a killing machine.

Maggie decided to take a risk and call Sadie Toloff. She looked up the number in the old, beaten address book she still kept. She hadn’t talked to Sadie in a couple of years, since a conference in Toronto. But she thought she could trust her.

Maggie opened her cellphone and dialed the number. It rang once, then went dead.

She hung up, tried again. The result was the same. What was wrong with the damn lines? Maybe the circuits were overloaded because of the events at Bellevue.

She decided to try the landline in the reception area. She dialed Toloff’s cell. This time it rang four times, then clicked to voice mail.

Maggie kept it short. “It’s Maggie Connor. I’m okay. In shock about Liam. I need to talk to you about
Fusarium spirale
. Give a call and I’ll explain everything.”

She hung up the phone.

The heater chugged, turned itself off. The room was deathly quiet.

All of a sudden, she felt very alone. She wished to hell Jake would get back.

24

HARPO’S NEAT AND ORDERLY LAB WAS A WRECK. USED PIPETTE
tips littered the countertops, and gels were everywhere. Vlad and Harpo had finished the PCR, and now they were running a Sanger gel, counting off bands. They were doing it retro, using two-decade-old technology. Jake knew the basics of what they were doing, but it was another thing to watch them going at it. Like sitting in the corner of an old-time editing room in Hollywood, bits of film taped to the walls, the director and his assistant trying to piece together the story hidden in the images.

Vlad dropped a cuvette, cursed in Russian.

Jake watched them, outwardly calm but inside twisted up with worry. “What’s the problem?”

“Something went wrong,” Harpo said. “All we got was a fragment. But I think I know what the problem is. We just have to lower the cycling temperature.”

“How long?”

“Another hour. At least.”

FRUSTRATED, JAKE PACED THE HOUSE. HE STOPPED AT THE
back window, looking out at the forest that picked up right behind Harpo’s yard. A dog loitered, a handsome old hound with huge ears and black eyes. He stood in front of a fancy doghouse with the name
DUKE
over the door, his tail raised and watching Jake. He started barking, then thought better of it, sat down, and scratched his ear.

Jake wondered whether the NSA people were looking for him. They had made reservations for him on a flight out of Ithaca that had left hours ago. Jake guessed that if he called his voice mail at home, there would be messages asking what the hell had happened. He decided to leave those messages unchecked. At least a little while longer.

To his right, behind a glass case, was Harpo’s collection of guns. Mostly hunting rifles but with a few military pieces thrown in. Jake recognized the sleek lines of the M16 and, below it, an M9 pistol in a black holster. It was the civilian version of the sidearm Jake had carried when he was in the service. He still had it, tucked away on a high shelf in the closet of his apartment. He took it down, cleaned and oiled it, every few months, not because he thought he’d ever use it but out of a sense of respect. The special burdens of soldiers.

Three days.

Three days ago, life had been normal. Three days ago, he would’ve been grading papers, looking for an hour to sneak away to the gym. He might’ve gone over to Liam’s lab. Maybe Dylan would have been there, and Jake and the boy would have tried to teach the Crawlers some new trick. Now Liam was dead, tortured by those very same Crawlers. Jake was in a backyard bio lab, waiting for a guy named Harpo with fright-wig hair to decipher Liam’s final message. A message Liam had left hidden inside the genome of a fungus under a pile of rocks in a forest.

He pulled out his phone and called Maggie. Six rings, then voicemail. He left a message and tried again. Same result.
What the hell?
He’d talked to her a half-hour before—she said she was making progress, had found an entry in Liam’s field notebooks that was almost certainly about the Uzumaki. So where was she now?

He called information, got the number for her work. It rang four times, then clicked to voice mail: a woman’s voice, not Maggie’s, saying he’d reached the Cornell University herbarium, offering a phone tree of options. Jake chose “0” and left another message, telling Maggie to call him right away.

Damn it
. Where was she? And if she had left the herbarium, why didn’t she call? The only thing he could think of was that something had happened, maybe something back at home.

He called Rivendell.

The phone rang and rang and rang. No answering machine. No voice mail.

What the hell was going on? Maggie’s roommate Cindy was supposed to be there, watching Dylan.

He thought about calling the police, then glanced again at Harpo’s gun collection, to the Beretta M9. Jake could be at the herbarium in fifteen minutes. He took down the M9 and unholstered it. Range of maybe fifty meters. History of slide problems but a good weapon. Checked the magazine. Full. Fifteen rounds.

He sought out Vlad and Harpo, the M9 in hand. “Harpo, I need to borrow this.”

“You plan on committing a felony?”

“No jokes. I can’t get Maggie on the phone.”

“Did something happen?” Vlad asked.

“I don’t know. Call my cell the minute you have the rest of the sequence. And if you don’t hear from me in the next half-hour, call the cops.”

ONCE OUTSIDE, JAKE CALLED LIEUTENANT BECRAFT AT THE
Cornell police department. Becraft sounded surprised to hear from him. “Professor Sterling? Where are you? The Detrick people—”

“Can you do something for me? Can you send someone out to Maggie Connor’s place? No one’s answering the phone. A woman named Cindy Sharp is supposed to be there. Watching over Dylan. Maggie’s son.”

“Jake. Where are you? Is there some kind of problem?”

“I’ll be in touch. Send a car out to Maggie’s.”

“What’s going—”

Jake hung up.