Darwin's Radio Page 6

  Lysogenic phages suppressed their own expression and assembly and were perpetuated within the bacterial DNA, carried down through the generations. They would jump ship when their host showed clear signs of stress, creating hundreds or even thousands of phage offspring per cell, bursting from the host to escape.

  Lysogenic phages were almost useless in phage therapy. They were far more than mere predators. Often these viral invaders gave their hosts resistance to other phages. Sometimes they carried genes from one cell to the next, genes that could transform the cell. Lysogenic phages had been known to take relatively harmless bacteria—benign strains of Vibrio, for example—and transform them into virulent Vibrio cholerae. Outbreaks of deadly strains of E. coli in beef had been attributed to transfers of toxin-producing genes by phages. The institute worked hard to identify and eliminate these phages from their preparations.

  Kaye, however, was fascinated by them. She had spent much of her career studying lysogenic phages in bacteria and retroviruses in apes and humans. Hollowed-out retroviruses were commonly used in gene therapy and genetic research as delivery systems for corrective genes, but Kaye’s interest was less practical.

  Many metazoans—nonbacterial life-forms—carried the dormant remains of ancient retroviruses in their genes. As much as one third of the human genome, our complete genetic record, was made up of these so-called endogenous retroviruses.

  She had written three papers about human endogenous retrovirus, or HERV, suggesting they might contribute to novelty in the genome—and much more. Saul agreed with her. “Everyone knows they carry little secrets,” he had once told her, when they were courting. Their courtship had been odd and lovely. Saul himself was odd and sometimes quite lovely and kind; she just never knew when those times would be.

  Kaye paused for a moment by a metal lab stool and rested her hand on its Masonite seat. Saul had always been interested in the bigger picture; she, on the other hand, had been content with smaller successes, tidier chunks of knowledge. So much hunger had led to many disappointments. He had quietly watched his younger wife achieve so much more. She knew it hurt him. Not to have immense success, not to be a genius, was for Saul a major failing.

  Kaye lifted her head and inhaled the air: bleach, steam heat, a waft of fresh paint and carpentry from the adjacent library. She liked this old lab with its antiques and humility and decades-old story of hardship and success. The days she had spent here, and on the mountain, had been among the most pleasant of her recent life. Tamara and Zamphyra and Lado had not only made her feel welcome, they had seemed to open up instantly and generously to become family to a wandering foreign woman.

  Saul might have a very big success here. A double success, perhaps. What he needed to feel important and useful.

  She turned and through the open doorway saw Tengiz, the stooped old lab caretaker, talking to a short, plump young man in gray slacks and a sweatshirt. They stood in the corridor between the lab and the library. The young man looked at her and smiled. Tengiz smiled as well, nodded vigorously, and pointed to Kaye. The man sauntered into the lab as if he owned it.

  “Are you Kaye Lang?” he asked in American English with a distinct Southern drawl. He was shorter than her by several inches, about her age or a little older, with a thin black beard and curly black hair. His eyes, also black, were small and intelligent.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Pleasure to meet you. My name is Christopher Dicken. I’m from the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta—another Georgia, a long way from here.”

  Kaye smiled and shook his hand. “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” she said. “What’s the NCID, the CDC—”

  “You went out to a site near Gordi, two days ago,” Dicken interrupted her.

  “They chased us away,” Kaye said.

  “I know. I spoke with Colonel Beck yesterday.”

  “Why would you be interested?”

  “Could be for no good reason.” He thinned his lips and lifted his eyebrows, then smiled again, shrugging this off. “Beck says the UN and all Russian peacekeepers have pulled out of the area and returned to Tbilisi, at the vigorous request of the parliament and President Shevardnadze. Odd, don’t you think?”

  “Embarrassing for business,” Kaye murmured. Tengiz listened from the hall. She frowned at him, more in puzzlement than in warning. He wandered away.

  “Yeah,” Dicken said. “Old troubles. How old, would you say?”

  “What—the grave?”

  Dicken nodded.

  “Five years. Maybe less.”

  “The women were pregnant.”

  “Yesss . . .” She dragged her answer out, trying to riddle why this would interest a man from the Centers for Disease Control. “The two I saw.”

  “No chance of a misidentification? Full-term infants impacted in the grave?”

  “None,” she said. “They were about six or seven months along.”

  “Thanks.” Dicken held out his hand again and shook hers politely. He turned to leave. Tengiz was crossing the hall outside the door and hustled aside as Dicken passed through. The EIS investigator glanced back at Kaye and tossed a quick salute.

  Tengiz leaned his head to one side and grinned toothlessly. He looked guilty as hell.

  Kaye sprinted for the door and caught up with Dicken in the courtyard. He was climbing into a small rental Nissan.

  “Excuse me!” she called out.

  “Sorry. Gotta go.” Dicken slammed the door and turned on the engine.

  “Christ, you sure know how to arouse suspicions!” Kaye said loudly enough for him to hear through the closed window.

  Dicken rolled the window down and grimaced amiably. “Suspicions about what?”

  “What in hell are you doing here?”

  “Rumors,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see if the way was clear. “That’s all I can say.”

  He spun the car around in the gravel and drove off, maneuvering between the main building and the second lab. Kaye folded her arms and frowned after him.

  Lado called from the main building, poking out of a window. “Kaye! We are done. You are ready?”

  “Yes!” Kaye answered, walking toward the window. “Did you see him?”

  “Who?” Lado asked, face blank.

  “A man from the Centers for Disease Control. He said his name was Dicken.”

  “I saw no one. They have an office on Abasheli Street. You could call.”

  She shook her head. There wasn’t time, and it was none of her business anyway. “Never mind,” she said.

  Lado was unusually somber as he drove her to the airport.

  “Is it good news, or bad?” she asked.

  “I am not allowed to say,” he replied. “We should, as you say, keep our options open? We are like babes in the woods.”

  Kaye nodded and stared straight ahead as they entered the parking area. Lado helped her take her bags to the new international terminal, past lines of taxis with sharp-eyed drivers waiting impatiently. The check-in desk at British Mediterranean Airlines had a short line. Already Kaye felt she was in the middle zone between worlds, closer to New York than to Lado’s Georgia or the Gergeti church or Mount Kazbeg.

  As she reached the front of the line and pulled out her passport and tickets, Lado stood with arms folded, squinting at the watery sunlight through the terminal windows.

  The clerk, a young blond woman with ghostly pale skin, slowly worked through the tickets and papers. She finally looked up to say, “No off going. No taking.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  The woman lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if this would give her strength or cleverness and tried again. “No Baku. No Heathrow. No JFK. No Vienna.”

  “What, they’re gone?” Kaye asked in exasperation. She looked helplessly at Lado, who stepped over the vinyl-covered ropes and addressed the woman in stern and reproving tones, then pointed to Kaye and lifted his bushy brows, as if to say, Very Impo
rtant Person!

  The pale young woman’s cheeks acquired some color. With infinite patience, she looked at Kaye and began speaking, in rapid Georgian, something about the weather, hail moving in, unusual storm. Lado translated in spaced single words: hail, unusual, soon.

  “When can I get out?” she asked the woman.

  Lado listened to the clerk’s explanation with a stern expression, then lifted his shoulders and turned his face toward Kaye. “Next week, next flight. Or flight to Vienna, Tuesday. Day after tomorrow.”

  Kaye decided to rebook through Vienna. There were now four people in line behind Kaye, and they were showing signs of both amusement and impatience. By their dress and language, they were probably not going to New York or London.

  Lado walked with her up the stairs and sat across from her in the echoing waiting area. She needed to think, to sort out her plans. A few old women sold Western cigarettes and perfume and Japanese watches from small booths around the perimeter. Nearby, two young men slept on opposite benches, snoring in tandem. The walls were covered with posters in Russian, the lovely curling Georgian script, and in German and French. Castles, tea plantations, bottles of wine, the suddenly small and distant mountains whose pure colors survived even the fluorescent lights.

  “I know, you need to call your husband, he will miss you,” Lado said. “We can return to the institute—you are welcome, always!”

  “No, thank you,” Kaye said, suddenly feeling a little sick. Premonition had nothing to do with it: she could read Lado like a book. What had they done wrong? Had a larger firm made an even sweeter offer?

  What would Saul do when he found out? All their planning had been based on his optimism about being able to convert friendship and charity into a solid business relationship . . .

  They were so close.

  “There is the Metechi Palace,” Lado said. “Best hotel in Tbilisi . . . best in Georgia. I take you to the Metechi! You can be a real tourist, like in the guide books! Maybe you have time to take a hot spring bath . . . relax before you go home.”

  Kaye nodded and smiled but it was obvious her heart was not in it. Suddenly, impetuously, Lado leaned forward and clutched her hand in his dry, cracked fingers, roughened by so many washings and immersions. He pounded his hand and hers lightly on her knee. “It is no end! It is a beginning! We must all be strong and resourceful!”

  This brought tears to Kaye’s eyes. She looked at the posters again—Elbrus and Kazbeg draped with clouds, the Gergeti church, vineyards and high tilled fields.

  Lado threw his hands up in the air, swore eloquently in Georgian, and leaped to his feet. “I tell them it is not best!” he insisted. “I tell the bureaucrats in the government, we have worked with you, with Saul, for three years, and it is not to be overturned in one night! Who needs an exclusive, no? I will take you to Metechi.”

  Kaye smiled her thanks and Lado sat down again, bending over, shaking his head glumly and folding his hands. “It is an outrage,” he said, “what we have to do in today’s world.”

  The young men continued snoring.

  7

  New York

  Christopher Dicken arrived at JFK, by coincidence, on the same evening as Kaye Lang, and saw her waiting to go through customs. She was transferring her luggage to a cart and did not notice him.

  She looked dragged out, wan. Dicken had been in the air himself for thirty-six hours, returning from Turkey with two locked metal cases and a duffel bag. He certainly did not want to run into Lang under the present circumstances.

  Dicken was not sure why he had gone to see Lang at Eliava. Perhaps because they had separately experienced the same horror outside Gordi. Perhaps to discover if she knew what was happening in the United States, the reason he had been recalled; perhaps just to meet the attractive and intelligent woman whose picture he had seen on the EcoBacter web site.

  He showed his CDC identification and NCID import pass to a customs supervisor, filled out the requisite five forms, and slouched through a side door into an empty hall. Coffee nerves gave everything an extra sour edge. He had not slept a wink on the entire flight and had slugged back five cups in the hour before landing. He had wanted time to research and think and be prepared for the meeting with Mark Augustine, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  Augustine was in Manhattan now, giving a talk at a conference on new AIDS treatments.

  Dicken carried the cases to the parking garage. He had lost all track of time on the plane and in the airport; he was a little surprised to discover dusk falling over New York.

  He made his way through a labyrinth of stairs and elevators and drove his government Dodge out of long-term parking and faced the bleak gray skies above Jamaica Bay. Traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway was dense. With a solicitous hand, he steadied the sealed cases on the passenger seat. The first case held dry ice to preserve a few vials of blood and urine from a patient in Turkey, and tissue samples from her rejected fetus. The second contained two sealed plastic pouches of mummified epidermal and muscle tissue, courtesy of the officer in charge of the United Nations extended peacekeeping mission in the Republic of Georgia, Colonel Nicholas Beck.

  The tissue from the graves near Gordi was a long shot, but there was a pattern emerging in Dicken’s mind—a very intriguing and disturbing pattern. He had spent three years tracking down the viral equivalent of a boojum: a sexually transmitted disease that struck only pregnant women and invariably caused miscarriages. It was a potential bombshell, just what Augustine had tasked Dicken to find: something so horrible, so provocative, that funding for the CDC would be guaranteed to rise.

  During those years, Dicken had gone time and again to Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey, hoping to gather samples and put together an epidemiological map. Time and again, public health officials in each of the three nations had stonewalled him. They had their reasons. Dicken had heard of no fewer than three and as many as seven mass graves containing the bodies of men and women who had supposedly been killed to prevent the spread of this disease. Getting samples from local hospitals had proven extremely difficult, even when the countries had made formal agreements with the CDC and the World Health Organization. He had been allowed to visit only the grave in Gordi, and that one because it was under UN investigation. He had taken his samples from the victims an hour after Kaye Lang had left.

  Dicken had never before dealt with a conspiracy to hide the existence of a disease.

  All his work could have been important, just what Augustine needed, but it was about to be overshadowed, if not blown wide open. While Dicken had been in Europe, the quarry had broken cover on the CDC’s home turf. A young researcher at UCLA Medical Center, looking for a common element in seven rejected fetuses, had found an unknown virus. He had shipped the samples to CDC-funded epidemiologists in San Francisco. The researchers had copied and sequenced the virus’s genetic material. They had reported their findings immediately to Mark Augustine.

  Augustine had called Dicken home.

  Rumors were spreading already about the discovery of the first infectious human endogenous retrovirus, or HERV. As well, there were a few scattered news stories about a virus that caused miscarriages. So far, no one outside the CDC had yet put the two together. On the plane from London, Dicken had spent an expensive half hour on the Internet, visiting key professional sites and news groups, finding nowhere a detailed description of the discovery, but everywhere a slam-dunk predictable curiosity. No wonder. Someone could end up getting a Nobel—and Dicken was ready to lay odds that that someone would be Kaye Lang.

  As a professional virus hunter, Dicken had long had a fascination with HERV, the genetic fossils of ancient diseases. Lang had first come to Dicken’s attention two years ago when she published three papers describing sites in the human genome, on chromosomes 14 and 17, where parts of potentially complete and infectious HERV could be found. Her most detailed paper had appeared in Virology: “A Model for Expression, Assembly, and Lateral Transmission of Chr
omosomally Scattered env, pol, and gag Genes: Viable Ancient Retroviral Elements in Humans and Simians.”

  The nature of the outbreak and its possible extent was a closely guarded secret for the time being, but a few insiders at the CDC knew this much: The retroviruses found in the fetuses were genetically identical with HERV that had been part of the human genome since the evolutionary branching of Old World and New World monkeys. Every human on Earth carried them, but they were no longer simply genetic garbage or abandoned fragments. Something had stimulated scattered segments of HERV to express, then assemble the proteins and RNA they encoded into a particle capable of leaving the body and infecting another individual.

  All seven of the rejected fetuses had been severely malformed.

  These particles were causing disease, probably the very disease that Dicken had been tracking for the past three years. The disease had already received an in-house name at the CDC: Herod’s flu.

  With the mix of brilliance and luck that characterized most great scientific careers, Lang had precisely pegged the locations of the genes that were apparently causing Herod’s flu. But she did not yet have a clue what had happened; he could tell that in her eyes in Tbilisi.

  Something more besides had drawn Dicken to Kaye Lang’s work. With her husband, she had written papers on the evolutionary significance of transposable genetic elements, so-called jumping genes: transposons, retrotransposons, and even HERV. Transposable elements could change when, where, and how often genes expressed, causing mutations, ultimately altering the physical nature of an organism.