Frameshift (30 page)

Pierre, meanwhile, picked up the crowbar and, using it as a short cane, keeping all weight off his destroyed left knee, hobbled over to the north edge, the pain almost unbearable, fighting nausea and dizziness with every step. When he got to the meter-high lip around the roof, he collapsed against it and brought both hands to his knee. He could hear the pounding of the helicopter blades, out of sight below him, next to the building.

“This is the police,” said a female voice from a bullhorn on the second copter; the voice was all but lost in the noise from the dueling rotors. “You are ordered to land.”

Pierre forced himself to his feet, using the lip to support himself. He almost blacked out from the pain; his body shook with agony and chorea.

Looking down was dizzying: forty stories of sheer glass, leading straight to the asphalt parking lot. Five SFPD squad cars were pulling up outside the building, sirens blaring. A few meters to Pierre’s right, and about ten meters below, was the silver copter with Marchenko and Sousa in it.

Marchenko could probably see directly into Craig Bullen’s office, with its redwood paneling and priceless paintings.

The cockpit was only a short distance away from the side of the tower.

The SFPD copter had moved alongside it now, as if trying to get a bead for a shoot-out. Pierre could clearly see the female pilot and her male companion, both uniformed, in the bubblelike cockpit. They seemed to be arguing with each other, and then the police copter started moving away, whichever one of them who felt flying this close to the building was dangerous having won the fight.

The rotor on Sousa’s copter was a circular blur below Pierre. The noise was deafening, but it would be only a matter of seconds before Sousa would head away from the building. He could make a beeline out into the Pacific, out over international waters, beyond the SFPD’s — or even the DOJ’s — jurisdiction, perhaps landing on a boat and sailing down to Mexico or beyond; surely there was more to Marchenko’s escape plan than just the helicopter.

Pierre hefted the crowbar, gauging its weight. It probably wouldn’t work — probably would just be deflected away. But he wasn’t about to stand by and do nothing —

Pierre closed his eyes, summoning all the control and all the strength he had left. And then he threw the crowbar as hard as he could, spinning it vertically end over end, down into the helicopter’s twirling blades, aiming for the outer edge of the rotor disk.

He was prepared to stagger back, in case the crowbar was sent flying up toward him.

It hit with a horrible clanging sound. The helicopter began vibrating, tipping toward the building, and—

—the blades touched glass, sending a shower of sparkling shards down toward the ground below—

—and then the blades began slicing through the metal frame of the curtain wall between two windows, dicing the metal into small fragments, sparks flying everywhere as each successive pass brought the blades into contact at a slightly different angle.

The copter was traveling forward now, and the rotor disk hit the wall between adjacent offices, the tips of the blades splintering the redwood paneling with a buzz-saw sound, then digging into the concrete firewall behind. The tips of the rotor were immediately ground off, and more and more of them sheared away with each revolution, the blades shortening, metal bits flying like confetti.

Then the jagged edge of the rotor dug into the concrete, sending powdery chunks of it airborne until, with a shriek of tortured metal, the rotor came to a dead halt.

The copter tipped forward again, the bird itself now rotating slowly clockwise, its tail rotor swinging into the side of the building, more windows shattering and office furniture splintering.

The copter’s turbines were screaming; smoke poured from the engine compartment and flames shot from the exhausts. The cockpit tipped forward, and the whole vehicle began to drop, story after story after story.

Pierre could see people far below scattering, trying to get out of its way.

Pierre heard footfalls, all but drowned out by the thunder of the police copter. Avi was running across the rooftop.

Sousa’s chopper continued to fall, almost as if in slow motion, its foreshortened blades now revolving lamely, providing a small amount of lift. It passed floor after floor, diminishing in apparent size, until—

Hitting the pavement like an egg, metal and glass splashing everywhere —

—and then, like a flower opening, flames expanding outward from the crash as the copter’s fuel exploded. Soon a pillar of black smoke rose up to the fortieth floor and beyond.

The SFPD copter circled around, surveying the scene, then descended for a landing in the far parking lot.

Pierre looked down at the inferno below, ringed by spectators, illuminated by low, red sunlight and roaring flames reflecting off the windows, and by revolving lights on the police cars. At long, long last, Ivan Grozny was dead.

Pierre staggered back a step, turned around, and collapsed in agony against the short wall around the roof’s edge.

“Are you okay?” asked Avi, leaning in to look at him after seeing his fill of the carnage below.

Pierre’s hands were on his shattered knee again. The pain was incredible, like daggers being jackhammered into his leg. Wincing, he shook his head.

Avi flipped open his cellular phone. “Meyer here. We need medics on the roof right away.”

Another OSI agent appeared from the stairwell — but this one wasn’t out of breath. He jogged over to Avi and Pierre. “We’ve got one of the elevators working again,” he said. “They were all locked off on the fortieth floor, but with the fireman’s key we were able to reactivate one of them once we pried its door open.”

“What happened?” asked Avi.

The agent glanced briefly at Pierre, then looked back at Avi. “It seems a crowbar was dropped from up here into the blades of the helicopter. It caused it to crash.”

Avi nodded and then waved the agent away. When they were alone, he leaned in to Pierre, holding Pierre’s shoulders with his arms. “Did you drop the crowbar?”

Pierre said nothing.

Avi exhaled. “Damn it, Pierre — we don’t cut corners in the OSI. Not anymore. Danielson hadn’t even been charged yet.”

Pierre shrugged slightly. ‘“Justice,”’ he said, his breath coming out raggedly as he quoted another Nobel laureate — at that precise moment, he couldn’t remember which one — ‘“is always delayed and finally done only by mistake.’” He took his right hand off his knee and held it up in the air.

Although they were sheltered from the wind here by the low wall, his arm moved back and forth as if blown by a breeze only it could feel. “Blame it,” said Pierre, “on my Huntington’s.”

Avi’s eyes narrowed and then he nodded, turned, and leaned back against the wall, exhausted not just by the climb but also by years of chasing Ivans and Adolphs and Heinrichs. He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, waiting for the medics to arrive.

As soon as visiting hours began, Molly came into Pierre’s room at San Francisco General Hospital. Pierre looked up at her from the bed. The left side of his face was bandaged, and his legs were in traction.

“Hi, honey,” said Molly.

“Hi, sweetheart,” said Pierre. He gestured at all the equipment hooked up to him. “After you left yesterday, somebody said my total hospital bill is going to be in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars.” He managed a grin. “I’m sure glad Tiffany talked me into the Gold Plan.”

“I brought you a newspaper,” said Molly, pulling a copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
out of the canvas bag she was carrying.

“Thanks, but I don’t feel much like reading.”

Molly said, “Then let me read it to you. There’s a front-page story by that man we met, Barnaby Lincoln.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Officials from the California State Insurance Board, escorted by eight state troopers, today seized control of Condor Health Insurance, Inc., of San Francisco, in the wake of startling revelations made last week. ”Condor is out of business, as of today,“ said Clark Finchurst, State Insurance Commissioner. ”The industry’s emergency fund, which was established to handle such things, will take care of current claims until Condor’s policies can be handed over in an orderly fashion to other insurers.“ ’ ”

“All right!” said Pierre.

“It says there’s going to be a full inquiry. Craig Bullen is cooperating with the authorities.”

“Good for him.”

“Oh, and I picked up that printout you wanted.” She took a two-inch-thick pile of fanfold computer paper out of her bag and placed it on the table beside his bed.

“Thanks,” said Pierre.

Molly sat down on the edge of the bed and took one of Pierre’s dancing hands in hers. “I love you,” she said.

“And I love you, too,” said Pierre, squeezing her hand. “I love you more than words can say.”

Pierre lay in his hospital bed that night. His six minutes of CPU time on LBNL’s Cray supercomputer had at last become available, and the simulation he and Shari had coded had finally been run. Pierre started wading through the 384 pages of printout.

When he was done, he operated the hand control that lowered the motorized back of his bed. He stared at the ceiling.

It made sense. It all fit.

The existence of codon synonyms did indeed allow additional information to be superimposed on the standard A, C, G, T genetic code.

Yes, AAA and AAG both made lysine, but the AAA form also coded a zero into what Shari had already dubbed, in a note jotted in the margin, “the gatekeeper function,” which governed the correction or invocation of frameshift mutations. Meanwhile, the AAG version coded a one.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were four valid codons that made proline: CCA, CCC, CCG, and CCT. For these, the final letter indicated a base-sixteen order of magnitude shift of the splicing cursor, which marked the position where a nucleotide would be added or deleted from the DNA, causing a frameshift. The CCT form moved the cursor sixteen nucleotides; the CCC form moved it 16, or 256 nucleotides; the 2

CCA form 16, or 4,096 nucleotides; and the CCG form moved it l6, or 3 4

65,536 nucleotides.

Other synonyms performed different jobs: GAA and GAG both made glutamine, but they also set the direction of the splicing cursor’s movement. GAG set it moving to the “left” (in the direction leading from the three-prime carbon to the five-prime carbon in each deoxyribose), and GAA set it moving to the “right” (the five-prime to three-prime direction).

Meanwhile, TTT, which made phenylalanine, coded for a nucleotide insertion, while its synonym TTC was the instruction for a nucleotide deletion. And the four codons that made threonine — ACA, ACC, ACG, and ACT — indicated by their final letter which nucleotide would be inserted at the splicing cursor.

The coding based on synonyms moved the cursor, but the timing of when frameshifts would be invoked was governed by certain of the seemingly endless stuttering sequences in the junk DNA. On the smaller scale of the individual, it had already been demonstrated that the number of CAG stutters set the age at which Huntington’s would first manifest itself, and, as Pierre had pointed out to Molly, the number of repeats does change from generation to generation in a phenomenon called “anticipation” — an ironically prophetic name given what Pierre and Shari’s model showed.

Indeed, the computer simulation suggested promising lines of research into manipulating genetic timers — research that ultimately might cure Huntington’s and related ailments. Certainly, no sudden breakthrough was likely, but, at a guess, inside a decade, controlling individual aberrant genetic timers might be possible. It had come full circle: by deliberately choosing not to pursue Huntington’s research, Pierre might have, in fact, made the discovery that would eventually lead to a cure for the disease.

If that had been all that his research suggested, he might have been pleased intellectually, but still profoundly sad, crushed by the cruel irony: after all, anything but an immediate cure would be too late to help Pierre Jacques Tardivel.

But Pierre didn’t feel sadness. On the contrary, he was elated, for the genetic timers pointed to something beyond his personal problems, beyond the problems — however real, however poignant — of the one in ten thousand people who had Huntington’s. The timers pointed to a truth, a fundamental revelation, that affected every one of the five billion human beings now alive, every one of the billions who had come before, and every one of all the untold trillions of humans yet to be born.

According to the simulation, the DNA timers, incrementing generation by generation through genetic anticipation, could go off across whole populations almost simultaneously. The multiregionalists were more right than they’d ever guessed: Pierre’s research proved that preprogrammed evolutionary steps could take place across vast groups of beings all at once.

A quote came to Pierre, from — of course — a Nobel laureate. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had written in his 1907 work
Creative Evolution
that “the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.” The junk DNA
was
a language, just as that article Shari had found had suggested: the language in which the master plan for life had been written by its designer. Pierre’s heart was pounding with excitement, and adrenaline was coursing through his system, but finally he drifted off to sleep, the printout still resting on his chest, dreaming of the hand of God.

Molly pushed the office door open and barged in. “Dr. Klimus, I—”

“Molly, I’m very busy—”

“Too busy to talk about Myra Tottenham?”

Klimus looked up. Somebody else was passing by in the corridor. “Close the door.”

Molly did so and sat down. “Shari Cohen and I have just spent a day at Stanford going through Myra’s papers; they’ve got stacks of them in their archives.”

Klimus managed a weak grin. “Universities love paper.”

“Indeed they do. Myra Tottenham was working on ways to speed up nucleotide sequencing when she died.”

“Was she?” said Klimus. “I really don’t know what this has to do—”

“It has everything to do with you, Burian. Her technique — involving specialized restriction enzymes — was years ahead of what others were doing.”

“What does a psychologist possibly know about DNA research?”

“Not much. But Shari tells me that what she was doing was close to what we now call the Klimus Technique — the very same technique for which you won the Nobel Prize. We looked through your old papers at Stanford, too. You were flailing about in completely the wrong direction, trying to use direct ion-charging of nucleotides as a sorting technique—”

“It would have worked—”

“Would have worked in a universe where free hydrogen didn’t bond to everything in sight. But here it was a blind alley — a blind alley you didn’t abandon until just after Myra Tottenham died.”

There was a long, long pause. Finally: “The Nobel committee is very reluctant to award prizes posthumously,” said Klimus, as if that justified everything.

Molly crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I want your notebooks on Amanda. And I want your word that you will never try to see her again.”

“Ms. Bond—”

“Amanda is my daughter — mine and Pierre’s. In every way that matters, that’s the whole and complete truth. You will never bother us again.”

“But—”

“No buts. Give me the notebooks now.”

“I — I need some time to get them all together.”

“Time to photocopy them, you mean. Not on your life. I’ll go with you wherever you want in order to get them, but I’m not letting you out of my sight until I’ve found and burned them all.”

Klimus sat still for several seconds, thinking. The only sound was the soft whir of an electric clock. “You are one hard bitch,” he said at last, opening his lower-left desk drawer and pulling out a dozen small spiral-bound notebooks.

“No, I’m not,” said Molly, gathering them up. “I’m simply my daughter’s mother.”

Four months had passed. As she walked slowly across the lab, Shari Cohen looked like she’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Pierre was sitting on a lab stool. “Pierre,” she said, “I — I don’t know how to tell you this, but your most recent test results are…” She looked away. “I’m sorry, Pierre, but they’re wrong.”

Pierre lifted a shaking arm. “Wrong?”

“You botched the fractionation. I’m afraid I’m going to have to redo it.”

Pierre nodded. “I’m sorry. I — I get confused sometimes.”

Shari nodded as well. Her upper lip was trembling. “I know.” She was quiet for a long, long time. Then: “Maybe it’s time, Pierre, for you—”

“No.” He said it as firmly as he could. He held his trembling hands out in front of him, as if to ward off her words. “No, don’t ask me to stop coming into the lab.” He exhaled in a long, shuddery sigh. “Maybe you’re right — maybe I can’t do the complex stuff anymore. But you have to let me help.”

“I can carry on our work,” Shari said. “I can finish our paper.” She smiled. Their paper would blow people’s socks off. “They’ll remember you,

Pierre — not just in the same breath as Crick and Watson, but as Darwin, too. He told us where we came from, and you’ve told us where we’re going.”

She paused, contemplating. Pierre’s most recent discovery — probably, it was sad to say, his
final
discovery — was the DNA sequence that apparently governed the lowering of the hyoid bone in the throat, a sequence that was shifted out in Hapless Hannah’s DNA, but shifted in within that of
Homo sapiens sapiens
. And he’d shown Shari a DNA sample with the telepathic frameshift shifted in, although she didn’t know to whom it belonged, and only half believed Pierre’s assertions about what it was for.

Pierre looked around the lab helplessly. “There must be something I can do. Wash beakers, sort files — something.”

Shari looked over at the garbage pail, where the broken glass from a flask Pierre had dropped earlier in the day was resting. “You’ve given so much time to the project,” she said. “But — well, I know you’re the one who is supposed to quote the Nobel laureates, but didn’t Woodrow Wilson say, ‘I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.’ You can borrow mine; I’ll carry on for both of us. It’s time for you to relax. Spend some time with your wife and daughter.”

Pierre felt his eyes stinging. He’d known this day would come, but this was too soon — much too soon.

There was an awkward moment between them, and Pierre was reminded of that afternoon three and a half years earlier when he’d ended up holding Shari as she cried over the breakup of her engagement. She perhaps recognized the similarity, too, for, with a small smile, she moved closer and lightly wrapped her arms around him, not squeezing tightly, not constricting his body’s rhythmic dance.

“You
will
be remembered, Pierre,” she said. “You know that. You’ll be remembered forever for what you discovered here.”

Pierre nodded, trying to take comfort in the words, but soon tears were rolling down his cheeks.

“Don’t cry,” said Shari softly. “Don’t cry.”

He looked up at her and shook his head. “I know we did good work here,” he said, “but…”

She brushed his hair off his forehead. “But what?”

“Bits and pieces,” he said. “I can understand bits and pieces of it. But the big picture — the nucleotides, the enzymes, the reactions, the gene sequences…” He reached up with a trembling hand and wiped his cheek.

“I don’t remember it all, and what I do remember, I don’t understand anymore.”

Shari stroked his shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You did the work. You made the discoveries. I can finish it up from here.”

Pierre looked up at her. “But what am I going to do now? I — I don’t know how to do anything except be a geneticist.”

Shari spoke softly. “There was another phone message for you from Barnaby Lincoln at the
Chronicle
. Why not give him a call?”