Genesis Plague (6 page)

“T
his way,” said Levino.

He brought us into a
long white building with a low, flat roof. Cool air greeted us and there was a
collective sigh as we pulled our sticky shirts away from our bodies.

The central room just
beyond the small foyer contained multiple workstations with various
environmental apparatus scattered about. A young technician wearing an orange
I.D. badge studied a map on the wall. The map highlighted the newly-opened
crack on the north side of Mauna Loa. A woman at a nearby desk spoke hurriedly
into her phone and took notes on a yellow legal pad. She looked as if she
hadn’t slept in days.

“Most of our staff are already
down at base camp,” Levino said. He guided us into one of the several
conference rooms surrounding the main hub of activity, then sat on the far side
of a round table topped with scattered papers and empty coffee cups. “Gather
around, please, gather around. We don’t have much time.”

Cassidy, Flint, and I
filed into the room and took seats at the table. Mike stood in the doorway with
his arms crossed, looking bored.

“The NOAA was kind
enough to loan us the use of their facility for a short time,” said Levino,
nodding toward the main room. “However, after your arrival, we will now be
based solely near the volcano, for obvious reasons.”

The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Division did the bulk of
their work from the Mauna Loa Observatory. They were primarily invested in
long-term studies of a few key elements, such as methane, hydrocarbons, and
aerosols, and on their impact and interactions with humans. It was the only
facility close enough to Mauna Loa for the university’s purposes, explained
Levino, and so he had to call in every favor owed to him in order to set up
shop at the volcano’s doorstep.

“Why don’t we just go
there now?” I asked.

“Because we need to get
a few things out of the way first,” Levino said. “I need to be very clear about
one thing, and I need you all to listen to me very carefully.”

He looked around the
table.

“The benefit to science
aside, this is about money. This is about continued funding for the programs at
the university that you have all been working on for years. What I am about to
tell you is private knowledge.” He paused for emphasis, then said, “The lab
will be shut down at the end of this term unless we can secure private
revenue.”

“What do you mean, shut
down?” asked Flint. “
Permanently
?”

“That is exactly what I
mean,” Levino said. “Palo Alto’s new lab has ten times the cash behind it, and
their equipment reflects the investment. Since they opened their doors two
years ago, our benefactors have been jumping ship left and right. We only have
one left, and he’s informed me he will cut his donations at the end of this
term.”

“So why are we even
here?” asked Cassidy. “What’s the point?”

“The point, my dear, is
that what we have discovered on Mauna Loa will be enough to swing the tide back
in our favor. If we can stake our claim before anyone else, we’ll get enough
funds to buy Palo Alto’s lab a hundred times over.”

I leaned forward in my
chair. “What did you find, Roger?”

He smiled. “
Life
.”

G
etting Levino to say anything more about what they had
discovered near the volcano had proven impossible. He diverted our constant
questions and herded us back out to the parking lot, where we all climbed into
the Jeep for the ride to base camp, which, as Levino had explained, was a
temporary meeting place for any scientific expedition headed up Mauna Loa.

The road leading away
from the observatory took us down a long, sloping hill. I rode in the back seat
of the Jeep behind my good friend Mike Pahalo, who hadn’t said a word since
Levino called him an asshole. Levino rode next to Mike and hummed to himself.
Flint and Cass were next to me in the back seat, bouncing along, staring at the
volcano ahead.

Mauna Loa stretched up
before us to a blunted peak at an elevation of nearly fourteen thousand feet.
If Flint or even Cass were telling the story, they would have pointed out that
Mauna Loa was the largest active volcano on the planet. If you counted her
massive submarine flanks that descended below the surface to the ocean floor,
she stood more than a thousand feet taller than Mount Everest.

Except that Mauna Loa
tended to spit fire every now and then, and Everest didn’t.

“We had to set up camp
several hundred yards from the main trail leading up the mountain,” Levino said
over his shoulder. “The microquakes have been increasing in frequency and we
didn’t want to risk…well, you know.” He shrugged.

Flint leaned forward.
“How strong are the quakes?”

“Less than
one-point-seven.”

“And how often?”

Levino was more
hesitant answering that question. “The USGS station reports there has been a
steady flurry since yesterday afternoon.”

Flint frowned and sat
back, thoughtful. The U.S. Geological Survey station in Hawaii would have known
better than our lab back in San Francisco what was going on at their own
doorstep, so I wondered why Flint was disturbed.

“But they assure me
that everything is fine,” said Levino quickly. “These microquakes happen all
the time. And besides, if she
were
to erupt, we would get a hell of a
lot more warning than a handful of minor tremors.”

Flint’s frown deepened.

“Is that true?” I asked.

“Generally, yes,” Flint
said. “But there have been eruptions without warning.”

“Such as?”

“There was Tongariro in
New Zealand just a couple years ago. And Eldfell in Iceland back in ’73. They
almost evacuated the island permanently after that one.”

“And it happened
without warning,” I said.

“They only saw what
Levino says the USGS is reporting now.” Flint stared up at the volcano.

The Jeep hit a pothole
and bounced back out. Levino grunted loudly and Mike smiled as he turned onto a
dirt road that curved around the base of the volcano. In the distance, the
glowing fissure was clearly visible on the volcano’s north side.

Mike drove us around a
large bend and parked next to a cluster of off-road SUVs that were fully
equipped for almost any rugged eventuality. Their tires were oversized, with
chunky treads. They had elevated chassis for rock crawling, gas and water tanks
strapped to the back doors, and engine snorkels.

Fifty feet away,
half-a-dozen large, white tents encircled a wide patch of low grass, trampled
down by foot passage. I recognized Phil Riley from my lab and his two
assistants near one of the tents, but the majority of researchers buzzing
around were new.

“Who are these people,
Roger?” I asked as I hopped down from the Jeep. Cass put her hands on my
shoulders and jumped down next to me.

“Vultures,” he sniffed
distastefully, “circling our kill.”

He stomped off to a
tent to yell at one of Riley’s assistants about moving a delicate piece of lab
equipment.

“He’s taking this
rather seriously, don’t you think?” said Cassidy as she surveyed the camp. A
thin sheet of sweat stood out on her bronzed skin, and strands of hair clung to
the side of her face as she squinted against the powerful sun.

“Well, he did say the
lab would be shut down without fresh funding,” I said. “Bureaucratic types tend
to take that kind of thing to heart.”

At least a dozen people
moved about the camp, either carrying paper printouts from one tent to another,
or setting up satellite communication hardware.

“Since Levino won’t
tell us,” I said, “we should try to figure out what we’re doing here in the
first place.”

“Oh my
God
,”
said Cass, looking to the other end of the camp. She shielded her eyes to block
the sun. “Is that King?”

I followed her gaze to
see Levino, now at the far end of camp, who looked as if he was trying to
explain something very delicate to a person who didn’t care. That person was Alexander
King, whose pearl-white teeth gleamed out of his tanned face when he smiled,
even at a distance. He was dressed in white chinos and a cotton long-sleeved
shirt. A white, short-brimmed hat sat tilted back atop his shining, hairless
scalp.

He slowly looked over
at Cass and me while Levino continued his lecture.

Cass shuddered. “He
really creeps me out,” she said quietly. “What do you think he’s doing here?”

Alexander King, or
Xander, as he preferred to be called, had a reputation in our scientific
community as being something of an entrepreneurial poacher. He tended to crawl
out of the woodwork whenever a new discovery was made to see if there was any
way to make a profit by either selling the information to the highest bidder,
or by stealing the discovery outright for his own portfolio. He seemingly had
no single area of expertise. According to his own testimony, remaining
indiscriminate about his acquisitions allowed for the greatest profit margin.

Where Xander had
recently been making his mark was in pharmaceuticals. He was a high-paid
consultant for at least two major pharmatech companies that I was aware of, and
probably a half-dozen that I was not. His globe-trotting took him from
rainforests to ice lakes, searching for organisms and chemical compounds that
could be exploited for pharmaceutical testing.

“If I had to guess,” I
said to Cass, “he wants to take whatever Levino thinks he’s found and sell it
to the highest bidder.”

“Like the world needs another
pill for headaches,” said Cass.

While I understood her
point, researchers were constantly trying to find organisms with medicinal
qualities. A substance in bee venom called mellitin, for example, was used to
lessen inflammation in patients suffering from Rheumatoid arthritis. Centipedes
were used to treat seizures and convulsions in parts of China.

Likewise, the list of
plant species that offered even a faint medicinal benefit was substantial.
Atropine, a highly-toxic chemical extracted from deadly nightshade, was used to
combat muscular spasms and to relax eye muscles for surgery. Foxglove was used
in combination with other compounds to help treat heart disease. The bark of
the willow tree gave us aspirin.

There was an untold
fortune to be made as a headhunter of newly-discovered organisms for large
pharmaceutical companies, and Alexander King was the most successful of the few
who were blazing that morally gray trail.

We had run into each
other in the past, and the last such meeting ended with both of us on the
floor, bleeding.

Levino finished his
speech and walked away from King, who stared evenly across the camp at me and
Cass. He grinned slowly, his dark eyes unblinking.

“Come on,” I said.
“Let’s go find out why we’re here.”