Invasive (13 page)

“Military applications for genetically modified insects.”

The ants. That's what they are, aren't they? He all but said it. They're a military project.
Her palms go cold with a slick sheen of sweat. “That doesn't seem like you. Goes against your ethos.”

The man smiles, a lean, tilting smirk, as if he's pleased she knows him that way. “As you well know, I co-lease this island with the United States government. Our last president extended American territory to these islands, and so the deal I made that allows Arca Labs to work here, isolated, is that I was also to create a division to study and potentially design insects that could be used by the military.”

“You're creating weapons.”

“Ah.” He thrusts his finger up in the air. “That is what you would assume and that, I hope, is what the government assumes as well.” He leans in now, and with a conspiratorial whisper says, “But that would be an incorrect assumption.”

“I don't understand.”

“Military application. It's an ambiguous term, isn't it? The government wanted weapons from me—their first example and stated desire was that Arca create for them a weaponized mosquito, a sterile insect who is a carrier of genetic disease. But that isn't really how it works, and I said as much. I did note you could create a mosquito which, upon biting, passes along new genes to the bite recipient—genes that would make the victim more susceptible to disease.”

“Something like what happened with Japan and China in World War Two.”

Einar seems pleased by her knowledge. “Yes. Unit 731.”

Unit 731: a Japanese biowarfare unit that used disease-infected insects (fleas and flies, primarily) to deliver pathogens to unsuspecting Chinese. Hannah read that they reportedly planned to attack the West Coast of the United States with plague-infested fleas, but the war ended before that attack.

“Regardless,” Einar continues, “when I began to research the mosquitoes, what I found more interesting was a different mechanism: mosquitoes who
can
breed, but who pass along terminator genes. Genes that carry to the offspring and ensure that only one more generation can persist. The modified
Aedes aegypti
mosquito.”

“Not exactly a military application.”

He shrugs. “I would disagree. Studies show that populations driven by certain environmental miseries—famine, disease, water shortages—are more susceptible to violence. Sometimes this violence is random, like when a heat wave strikes a city and the crime rate spikes. Sometimes this violence is controlled: A dictator takes power under the auspices of repairing whatever misery governs the
people's lives. And inevitably, that dictator leads his people into deeper misery and worse, war. Modifying a mosquito—”

“Means getting rid of mosquito-borne diseases and, ideally, taking one war-driving factor off the table.”

“Correct.”

“It's pretty brilliant. Are your other projects here so suspiciously benign?”

He laughs. “They are. We have not yet made a weapon. We have spiders and silkworms spinning thread whose tensile strength and overall toughness is higher than steel, higher than most polyaramid filaments, and is totally organic. Most people don't know that spiders spin several different kinds of silk: for predatory capture, for nest construction, for parachuting. We've only just begun to map what can be done with them. Structures. Armor. Surgical applications on the battlefield. But it doesn't end there. What about honeybees who can detect bombs or other hazardous materials? Or insects genetically designed to have susceptible, controllable nervous systems—making cybernetic enhancement all the easier to perform?”

“Like creating remote-controlled bugs. I've read about flies, caterpillars, cockroaches that are designed accordingly.”

“Right. Right! This,
this
is where the future of animal-machine hybrids begins. So much potential. So much promise.”

“All under the pretense of military application.”

He pouts. “No pretense about it. Remember, the Internet was a military application. And now look at how it's changed our culture.”

“And the ants?” she asks.

“The murderous ants? The ones that purportedly left a body behind? Are you asking if they are a product of Arca Labs?”

She tenses.
Is he toying with me?
“Don't play coy. Of course I'm asking that. It's why I'm here.”

“No, Hannah. We have not created ants for military applications, nor have we created those specific creatures. Despite the presence of our genetic markers, they are not ours.”

“How do you explain the presence of your indicator genes?”

He sighs, furrows his brow, and seems to consider his answer. “We're looking into that. My best guess? They were stolen. We have a rotating team of scientists, many of them young, fresh with advanced degrees. They sign legal paperwork and we check those leaving the island for contraband, but no barrier is truly impermeable. One of my rivals would pay well for my secrets. Even better for something so marked as one of our indicator genes.”

“You're saying this is corporate espionage. By a rival.”

“Not necessarily. But it may have begun there.”

“Your enemies hate you that badly? To engineer some sort of demon ant? With stolen indicator genes? I can believe all manner of corporate sabotage, but this seems to be on a whole other level.”

Einar puts his hands behind his back. “Hatred is quite a powerful thing. It rarely begins as hatred. It starts as something else. Something smaller, more intimate: jealousy or greed or self-doubt. In biology, one thing can evolve into many. But in this case, the reverse is true: all those negative emotions evolve into one thing and one thing only—hatred.”

The two sit quietly for a time, each regarding the other. Over his shoulder, she spies the last set of doors—ones that remain closed, beyond which she expects are the unseen experiments of Special Projects. She's about to ask if he'll open them when—

Bang.
She startles.

“Our dinner has arrived,” Einar says. Above them, chefs and waiters have entered, bringing with them the tantalizing smell of island food.

Dinner is elaborate. Drinks and food. Sweet and sour. Salt and spice. He opens a bottle of wine, a Château de Beaucastel, and offers her an Icelandic spirit—Brennivín—that tastes of caraway and anise.
(Einar says it is sometimes called the “black death,” not because of its taste but because Iceland once tried to dissuade its drinkers during a period of temperance, putting a skull-and-crossbones logo on all the bottles.)

Soon she's heady—everything soft and buzzy, her lips gone numb while her teeth feel oddly electric. She feels distracted by him. Or worse, seduced. Like a magician's misdirect—look over here at the shiny thing while the trick happens plain but unseen in the other hand. Just the same, she falls into it as Einar tells her his story. He talks about growing up wealthy in Iceland, but then leaving his parents behind and traveling the world—young and dumb, seeing everything with bright eyes and empty pockets. He worked on a South African fishing boat (and once fought off pirates). He was a janitor in a Russian orphanage. He helped run a Malaysian dodol factory—“Dodol is a chewy candy,” he explains. “Sticks to your teeth and gums like glue.” He says that's where he developed a taste for the durian fruit, a fruit that (by his estimation) smells like a dead man's mouth and tastes like onion custard. She wants to enjoy his stories, and she does. But she also worries—
What am I missing? What am I not seeing?

Einar tells her: “I saw a man die on the streets of Paris. An Ethiopian man—by some reports a male prostitute, but the law found evidence only that he worked in a local warehouse. Two skinheads came up to him. One grabbed him by the back of his head and neck. The other plunged a broken bottle into his throat. They ran off, cackling like crows. I raced over and he died in my arms. It was that moment that turned it around for me. I decided I had to make the world better, not worse.”

“My father killed a man,” she says. It is a story of public record—if he truly has investigated her fully, it would've come up. She tells herself that she tells him to help secure his trust—or, alternately, to make herself seem vulnerable to him. Some men become more brazen when they sense vulnerability in a woman. It leads them to make mistakes. Suddenly she worries that's why
he told her about the Ethiopian man—has he been herding her toward this conversation? Is he manipulating her, or is she manipulating him? Doesn't matter. Too late now. Einar watches her, waiting.

“A local man. A vagrant, you'd say, but that's not really accurate. He was a farmhand, lived in the area. Alcoholic. Drank too much and ate too little, and one day his sodium went out of whack. His liver was already in bad shape and the man lost a bit of his mind and memory and never really got it back.

“We lived way on the edge of town. Maybe even past it. Not even a town where we were—just a zip code for mail.”
And one day, after Mom ripped out the mailbox, it wasn't even for mail.
“We had fences and cattle gates. A long driveway and a distant house. Animals. Gardens and greenhouses. A backstop for shooting practice. It was isolated enough and mysterious enough that I guess some locals developed legends about what was up there—a cult or a conspiracy or, at the least, a passel of gun nuts waiting to bring down the government. Most folks probably knew those were just stories, but not Roy. That was his name: Roy Peffer. One day he decided to cut through our fence and . . .” The words wither in her mouth as the rest of the story plays out silently behind her closed eyelids.

“The man attacked you,” Einar says.

“He did.”

“And your father shot him?”

“He did.”

“So you saw a man die, too.”

“I did.”

“That must've been hard for you. You were young?”

Not yet a teenager,
she thinks. But she says, “I want to see what's past the doors.”

A stiff smile. “Of course, Hannah. I'll open the doors. Feel free to explore. I will make us coffee? A bit of a pick-me-up?”

She nods and takes the deal. They walk to the door, and he
opens it to reveal a hallway with multiple doors off it. He explains nothing, and leaves her to it.

Tipsy but not properly drunk, Hannah steps forward. The doors slide closed behind her. She's alone. For a moment, that gives her relief.

But then, a septic dread. The hallway is lit only by emergency lighting. Anyone could be waiting. Anything. The hairs on her arms stand at attention as she imagines ants moving behind the walls, underneath the grates, above her head . . .

She moves forward, the pain in her ankle dampened by the alcohol. She peers into the first room. As soon as she steps in, the lights flicker on. Bright, bold fluorescents. She blinks, lets her eyes adjust—

She sees a white room with a steel table in the middle and three Plexiglas walls—cages—that at first blush seem empty. But then she notices the little black shapes forming a small mist—a faint gray cloud that shimmers and shifts like a specter shuddering in the cold.

Mosquitoes.
The
Aedes aegypti
.

The Plexiglas walls end before the ceiling—a fine mesh, like mosquito netting, finishes the distance. On the table is a smaller clear plastic box with a rubber fontanel on the side. Through which, Hannah thinks, you could thrust an arm. To determine bites? To test some kind of insect repellent?

She continues down the hall. Another door is a bathroom. The next door is a supply closet.

Then—a smell. Strong. Pungent. A whiff of soap and citronella. The odor crawls up her nose like a pair of hungry worms.

The next two doors lead into the same lab. She steps in and lights cascade on. This room is as big as the main Arca lab, and at first glance empty. A lab at the end of the world.

Then she spies, there on another steel table, a container. Styrofoam. A rim of black rubber separating the two halves. Like the one they found in the lake.

Hannah dry-swallows. She steps deeper into the room, her footsteps echoing. Over at the box, her fingers find the edges, tracing along the dark rubber. She starts to lift up, and it resists, so she urges it harder, and the lid pops—

“There you are.”

“Jesus,” she says.

“Apologies,” Einar says, holding up both hands in a beseeching gesture. “You were gone awhile, and the coffee is done.”

She looks down at the box and sees smaller containers tucked away between plastic dividers. These are cylindrical, not hexagonal. This isn't the same as the one in the lake. This is generic. Like all the others. Like the ones Ez uses.

Relief moves over her like the touch of a ghost, and she shudders in spite of it—or because of it.

“Find anything?” Einar asks.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she reports.