"Jesus, Maggie," he said aloud. "Don't be mad at me."
He hit the play button. "
You have ... three ... messages
," it said. "
Message one, Monday, one-thirty-two, a.m.
" Damn, she'd be spitting nails. He heard a few clicks and the sound of someone breathing before putting down the receiver. The second message threw him completely, though. At first he didn't recognise the voice that followed the robotic time-check. "
Monday, ten-fifteen, a.m. Mr Kinnery ... this is Ian. Call me back.
" Then the third message – terse, upset, urgent – tipped him into another heart-pounding moment of panic. "
Wednesday, eleven-thirty-five a.m.
It's Ian. You need to call me back. Gran's dead. I know what you've done. You have to call me
."
It was now Saturday. Shit, shit,
shit.
Kinnery found himself reaching for his car key even before he tried returning the call. It would take him at least seven hours to drive down to Athel Ridge. Dear God, Maggie was
dead
. Ian was there on his own. What was he doing? The boy couldn't possibly cope.
He unlocked his desk and took out the second-hand pre-paid cell he kept for calls that needed to be untraceable. His life had become one of a paranoia that had bleached every scrap of normality from his existence – every job, every relationship, and every moment of quiet contentment. He knew he deserved it. Sometimes he wondered if he'd embraced it as his penance. How often did he think about Ian these days? Sometimes he could almost forget the problem existed for months at a time, but it was always going to land on his doorstep one day. And he still didn't have a solution for it after eighteen years.
He keyed the number, shaking. It rang for a long time but nobody answered.
The number was another unregistered cell. Maggie usually left it in the house or switched it off and took out the battery in case someone was using it to track her. She had more security drills than the goddamn CIA. Maybe Ian had gone out to feed the animals. Kinnery decided to keep ringing until he got an answer, and if he didn't get one in a couple of hours, he'd drive down there and collect the kid.
If someone hasn't beaten me to it. Maggie's dead. No answer from the ranch. Conspiracy theory hacks suddenly calling me about the project after nearly twenty years. It's all blown up. Why now? How's all this connected?
Ian was a string of decisions escalating from bad to catastrophic that Kinnery couldn't go back and put right. He'd had plenty of chances to stop, each one successively harder until everything became irrevocable.
I knew what I was doing, or at least I knew it was wrong. I don't understand why he turned out the way he did, though. Not even with all the advances we've made since then.
And what the hell am I going to do without Maggie?
It was hard to think of her being gone. Kinnery hoped his shock was partly grief and that he still had some semblance of human decency left, but he knew his own capacity to lie to himself. Maggie had been the only person he could turn to when he needed to hide Ian. She ran that ranch like a survivalist camp. It had an independent water supply, enough food stored to wait out a disaster, solar power and biogas, and shotguns she knew how to use. She was the paramilitary wing of the crazy cat ladies. Nobody noticed her and Ian in an invisible society of off-gridders and eccentrics that had swallowed them like quicksand.
Kinnery couldn't recall her being any other way. When everyone else in their college class outgrew idealism and took jobs with big pharmaceutical corporations, Maggie had stayed firmly stuck in her save-the-whale mind-set, unbuyable, uncompromising, and – inevitably – unemployable in her area of expertise.
And now she was gone.
He found it impossible to sit down and wait. He couldn't concentrate enough to check the rest of his mail. If Ringer had finally surfaced to bite him in the ass – and if he was getting chest pains – then disposing of the paperwork was long overdue. There was nobody to put his affairs in order if he died now.
But I did it. I made Ian. I had a transgenic embryo implanted in a girl who needed the money by a doctor who didn't.
He opened the safe set in the study wall. The internal bolt slid back with a
chonk
and the small door swung open, releasing a musty chemical scent of old paper and plastic. The top shelf was packed with notebooks and discs, all that remained of his Ringer data, jammed in so tightly that he scraped his knuckles trying to pull them out.
It had been easy to keep two sets of records. As far as the team was concerned, the embryos were all destroyed by the fourteen-day limit, and the failure rate had been high, averaging only four transgenic embryos out of 28 blastocysts per batch. But there was always someone ready to break the law when it came to trading in children; marginal fertility clinics, persuadable physicians, shady adoption agencies, and desperate would-be parents. There were always women willing to be paid surrogates, too. Kinnery thought he recalled what his motives were at the time, but there was only one that rang true today.
Because I could.
And where does it all start? An infertile couple wants a child. A government wants agents who can instantly blend into the group they're infiltrating. A scientist wants to be the first, the best, the groundbreaker. And the intersection of those desires is Ian.
Kinnery spread the stack of folders on his desk. Paper was a wonderful thing. If you kept a single copy, then one copy was all there would ever be, unless you let it out of your sight or were stupid enough to make copies – and he wasn't. Paper didn't reproduce itself across servers. It didn't get backed up automatically onto mainframes or portable drives, or attached to e-mails and carelessly released into the wild like a pathogen. After paper burned, the secrets written upon it only existed in the memories of those who'd seen it.
And memories, like people, all died eventually.
It was time to burn it all. He'd never work in human-animal chimera research again. He'd certainly never be able to publish his papers, not unless he wanted to spend his remaining years hiding in some third world hell-hole with no US extradition treaty.
Quite a few people spliced genes that they shouldn't have. They still do.
But nobody made it work like I did. And I still don't know how I did it. Ian. Proof of concept, and then some.
Kinnery thumbed through the papers, wondering if a solution would finally leap out at him, but if he hadn't had a breakthrough in eighteen years, then he wouldn't suddenly have one today. Gene expression was far more complex than anyone had known back then. He hadn't even been able to carry out tests on Ian. Maggie made damn sure of that. She never left him alone with the boy.
Burn it.
The few files he thought he might need in an emergency one day – medical reports on Ian's surrogate mother, handwritten information from the clinic that was very obliging with off-the-books work, the few details he had about the donors who might have been anonymous but were probably back-trackable – were scanned to an encrypted USB stick. He dithered: should he destroy that now as well? No, that might be the only route to finding a solution for Ian one day. He'd give it a temporary reprieve.
He rummaged around in the pantry for some disposable carriers and tried not to think too hard about what he was about to incinerate. His life's most brilliant work could fit in two grocery bags.
At the bottom of the garden there was an old garbage can he'd punched with holes and set on legs to make an impromptu barbecue, another hybrid thing he'd created and that now seemed a reminder of his reckless curiosity. He could burn the papers in that. This was a fire that needed feeding a few sheets at a time. He didn't want half-burned papers drifting on the wind and exposing his crimes.
How much of it will I recall? Names, addresses, the paths I took?
For a moment, he almost lost his nerve.
I did it. I made it work. I just need to understand how.
But he pulled out one of the thinner folders, slim enough to burn easily, and laid it on the barbecue.
The step to striking a match and watching it flare took an eternity. Holding the wavering flame under the corner of the cover to see the smoke curl up took a heartbeat, though, no more. The funeral pyre of Project Ringer was now an unstoppable blaze. It was cathartic. It didn't erase what he'd done, but at least the data couldn't fall into the wrong hands, either to recreate what he'd achieved or to incriminate him.
Kinnery fed in a few more folders, paper fanned out to let the air circulate. Gradually he found an unthinking rhythm like a stoker in an engine room, timing the surge and fall of the flames to decide when to add more paper.
The neighbours might complain about the smoke. Okay, a barbecue that got out of hand. Sorry, folks. Won't happen again.
He watched the last of the paper burn and fade to grey ash, then broke it up with the barbecue tongs to make sure that only dust was left. Now he needed a Scotch. But if he had a long drive ahead of him, he'd have to settle for a coffee. He brewed a pot and sat down at his desk, working out when to call Maggie's number again.
Shape-shifting – dynamic mimicry – was a goddamn stupid idea anyway. It was all about going grey, as the intelligence community called it, making yourself inconspicuous and melting into the background. Some people could do it with clothing and the right body language, but if you were the wrong ethnicity or age for the task in hand, it was a trick that might cost you your life. So a dumb what-if conversation over a beer one day solidified into a crazy project. KWA was cavalier enough to try it.
The money wasn't crazy at all, though. The prospect of exploiting animal genes to cure human defects made it worth swallowing the lunacy to get the funding. The techniques that Kinnery developed during the project were worth a fortune to KWA. And damn it, without him there'd never have been a KWA to start with. Shaun just wasn't good enough to build the company without him.
Kinnery had even thought he might get a Nobel one day. But now he could never go public about what he'd really achieved.
And here I am, teaching college. Lying low. Haven't done any research that important since the day I quit KWA. That's the true meaning of nemesis.
He thought he'd covered his tracks. There was nobody to object, not even that senator who'd been such a pain in the ass about it all. The embryo donors had been anonymi
zed and the record of the original clinic had been erased. The woman who'd been paid as a gestational surrogate was long gone, and neither she nor the doctor who'd carried out the implantation had any idea what the embryo was, or that Kinnery hadn't been a frustrated father with an infertile partner.
Nobody checked. People rarely did. Marginal doctors who bent the rules didn't want to. It was disappointingly easy. Kinnery had no idea if the scraps of almost-life that he'd worked on were the fruits of musicians, truck drivers, storekeepers, or accountants, with lives and identities that would otherwise have been shaped by knowing those origins. They were simply surplus to requirements. He was always surprised how far some couples would go to produce children in the face of Nature's advice not to.
And who wants to know they were just spares
?
He checked his watch. Everything that could identify Ian and link his existence to Project Ringer had ceased to exist except for the encrypted thumb drive.
So when was I supposed to dispose of Ian? Before he turned into a recognisable human, or before I gave him a name? What's the difference? I don't know any more.
Kinnery had reached the conclusion that science's price for answering questions was to pose ever more complex ones, an endlessly expanding list of ethical dilemmas. He checked his watch. It was time to try the number again.
This time, someone picked up.
"Ian? Ian, it's Charles Kinnery. I've been away. I just got back." He paused for breath. "Jesus, I'm so sorry. What happened?"
All he could hear was someone swallowing for a moment.
"Gran collapsed." Yes, it was Ian. "The doctor said she probably died right away. We cremated her."
"We?"
"Joe. Our neighbour. She left instructions. I did exactly what she told me."
"Look, don't worry. Stay where you are and I'll drive down. I can be there by two, three in the morning at the latest."
"No. Don't. It's too late."
"You shouldn't be on your own, Ian."
You need supervision. You need a keeper.
"Not at a time like this."
"Stay away. I know what you did. I know she wasn't my gran."
The room suddenly turned cold. Kinnery couldn't distinguish between the slowly-growing acceptance that Maggie was actually gone and the dread of what was unfolding.
"Ian," he said carefully, "whatever Maggie did, she did it to protect you. She loved you. Look, I know you're angry. And upset." He had to coax more information out of him. "What did she tell you? Did she explain?"
Ian took a few seconds to answer. "She left me a lot of notes. She kept a folder and told me to open it if anything happened to her. So I did."
This was almost as bad as playing the how-much-do-you-know game with a journalist. Maybe Ian
didn't
know every detail. One more misplaced revelation might tip him over the edge. If he panicked and went to ground, Kinnery might never find him.