"The Transgenic Falcon"

For the next couple of hours I had short interviews with all kinds of support staff for Cho’s lab. If you want the definition of working hard to get nowhere, try asking a bunch of office drones the same questions over and over again, and getting the same answers. Did you know anyone who had a problem with Dr. Cho? Answer A) sure, nut cases. Answer B) well he had a bit of a reputation for being a hard-ass, but I never had a problem with him. Answer B)-sub a) well he liked to date a lot of women, but I can’t think of anyone who would want to kill him. Wash, rinse, repeat, style.

I’d sent Lynn Delfore back down to the personnel office to pull all the sexual harassment complaints against Cho. She could have accessed them from any terminal but I wanted her to go get the hard-copy files that are required by law. It might have been petty of me, sure, but some part of me didn’t want the electronic foot prints that a search like that would leave. Plus it got her out of Belinda’s sight. Yeah, the Angel had been the one who pulled Delfore on to our team, but that didn’t mean the conditions Lynn had set didn’t get up her nose. Out of sight meant out of mind, at least a little. It’s always a good rule of thumb to have two justifications for any action. It doesn’t get you out of trouble, but it lets you muddy the waters if you need to.

“So what did we learn from all these interviews?” Belinda asked, from her perch at the side of the desk. Oh, joy, she was back in process management mode.

“What do you think we learned?” I asked, pulling the Socratic defense.

“Well, I learned that detectives ask the same question in only about six different ways.” I gave her a shadow of a smile, but refused to rise to the bait. Who said I’m not a man of iron control? She continued when it was clear I wasn’t going to speak. “Fine, we learned that no one knew anything specific and everyone knew something general. Better?”

“Yeah, much. We also now know the motive wasn’t in plain enough sight for casual observers to notice. It was a long shot, but worth taking.”

“Why? Shouldn’t we be chasing the low hanging fruit?”

“Not really, right now we are waiting as fast as we can. In a police investigation we’d be getting a baseline on people’s behavior, then watch for changes. Short of a sociopath, killing someone changes people, it makes them behave in ways they wouldn’t normally. The time frame on this knocks that option off the table, so checking a few low percentage shots is not a waste of time.”

“So what do we do while we wait? Do you want to review the crime scene reports?”

I rubbed my eyes. It was hard to believe it was only six o’clock. It seemed like this day had been going on forever already. “No, I’d don’t want to do that. My brain is full right now, it feels like its sloshing. I need some time to process it all.”

“How do we facilitate that?”

“Well for one thing, can we drop the corporate trainer speak? Just for an hour or so?” I asked a little more harshly than I had planned. Belinda looked shocked and a little hurt by my tone. The twenty-five year old who had been madly in love with her kicked me in the guilt/shame center, so of course I dove in to make it better.

“Sorry, I know you’ve a lot ridding on this and are trying to help. But what I really need is not to talk about the case for a while, let some of the pieces settle, you know?”

“Incubation time; got it. So do you want some alone time or what?”

“Can we just talk? Like real people maybe? I know it was never our best suit, but we could give it a shot; for novelty if nothing else.”

“Let our hair down and girl-talk?” Belinda said arching an eyebrow and wearing a challenging smile.

“If you can get of over the traditional gender-roles implied in that question, yeah,” I said giving a answering smile. She nodded her acceptance of our truce. “So, how did you wind up with Gen-Tech? Last I knew you were off to NYC and a job at a data brokerage, right?”

“Yeah, after graduation I went to the Big Apple, working for Apple as it turned out.” A part of me noticed she didn’t say after our explosive break-up, but graduation. Maybe everyone can grow in a decade.

Brokering data was an out-growth of the idea of Big Data. Analyzing large amounts of data for business targeting was only the start. The original push had been fueled by the internet, where giving away a service allowed you to track a users habits; the old saying was; if you got something for free on-line, you were the product. It was a sound business model until the kids who never knew a time without the Internet put their foot down. That data was valuable, and getting free access to a webpage or some loyalty points was not even close to equitable. A series of laws required consent to collect; putting the consumer in a better position to extract value from their data, but there was a catch to doing so. Any single users habits and data was nearly valueless, it was only when they grouped into statistically significant numbers that a business gains real value.

The likes of Apple, Samsung and Microsoft were facing down a serious hole in their revenue streams. Apple being the traditional early adopter flipped the equation. If they were unable to collect data simply by having people use their products and software, it was time to bring all those loyal customers into the tent, so to speak. Instead of Hovering up all their data, they offered to be the agent who sells it, for a percentage, of course.

These days’ people in various demographics sign up with one data company or another and get a small but not insignificant income from data on their buying, watching and political habits. Companies actively compete for certain data from certain slices of the populace. This turn of events put the idea that information should be free in its grave. The fact was, if even if information is free, it costs money to utilize it, and the American public went from being a passive cash cow to something more like a partner, in a very minor way. Hell, you can’t even get someone to cough up their political opinion for free these days. You want to know what people think, you’re going to have to pay ’em. Belinda’s first job had been a negotiator setting fees for blocks of data.

“I did that for three years, but it’s a burn-out job,” she explained. “You travel all the time, and have to be on top of the market, who needs what and where. And of course its easy to go from hero to failure, by missing an opportunity. There were just too many brokers all jostling for the same piece of the pie.”

“So you jumped ship?”

She nodded, “It was a considered decision. You know how I feel about working up in a company. Apple is just too top heavy with people waiting for a slot up one rung.”

“And Gen-Tech looked better?”

Her face lit in one of those devastating smiles of hers. It was a glimpse of the girl I’d known, peaking out from under the weight of being a junior master of the universe. “It wasn’t even on my alternates list, actually. I was recruited by them, aggressively. I turned down two unsolicited offers.”

“Really? Please don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s not what I expected from you.”

“Well, I’d learned a thing or three since college. With the first offer I wasn’t interested, genetic engineering is amazingly powerful, but that’s the problem. It scares the crap out of a lot of people and if they ever elect enough of the right kinds of politicians we could find ourselves out of business in the US, which really puts a damper on the career trajectory.”

“And the after the second offer? What changed?”

“What changed was the amount of time, effort and money G-T was spending in the attempt to get me to work for them. It gave me leverage in terms of where in the org chart I started, and what kind of compensation package I could command. The upside was finally enough to counter the downside, so I made the leap.”

“Otho wanted you that badly?” I asked. I found it hard to believe that someone like Johnson would put himself in a position of anything other than absolute power over an employee.

“Oh, no! Johnson probably wasn’t even in the loop. No, I was recruited by the political negotiation wing. Houston may have wanted Gen-Tech here, but the Texas Legislature was not at all pleased. They have a wider constituent base than the City, and a lot of them are still reactionary dead-enders. Gen-Tech needed negotiators who could drop into a situation and get it smoothed over in short order.”

It made a lot of sense; with the deep pockets Gen-Tech obviously had, the temptation to put the arm on the company was probably beyond the resistance of most politicians. Tax revenue was merely the start of what might be gained, if one was willing to threaten to hold up a massive project like the acrology.

“It must have been a hard grind,” I observed.

“Not as much as you might think,” Belinda said, “There are three types of politicians, and two of them are very easy to deal with. There are the ones who want to keep being an elected official. For them you need to provide campaign funds, some times opposition research.

“Then there are the ones who are actually invested in the idea of public service. They are little trickier, since they will sacrifice their position if it guarantees benefits for their constituents. The leverage with them is mostly economic development, sometimes you need to endow a facility like a hospital or a school if they are in an underserved part of the state. This being Texas, well, there are still a lot spots recovering from conservative economic policies. Still, nothing too hard to crack, it just takes some research.”

“So if those are the easy ones, what are the hard cases?” I asked, finding this insight interesting. I don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. It’s not amenable to the scientific method, so it doesn’t really hold my attention beyond making sure that I don’t vote for someone who’s obviously corrupt or an idiot, or both.

“The True Believers, they are the hardest to deal with.”

“You mean like the Warriors? God-bothers?”

“No. Well, yes, sometimes, but not only religious folks. You don’t have to have a church to be a fervent zealot. The True Believer is someone who is sure to the bottom of his being that he knows best and in very specific ways.”

“Wait, all politicians think they know what’s best. Its part and parcel of what makes them politicians.”

Belinda nodded, “I’ll admit they all have some aspect of that, sure, but a True Believer it’s first and foremost in all their decisions. It’s what makes them so hard to leverage. And it became what I specialized in.”

I could hear the pride in her voice, she wasn’t just blowing smoke. Not that I was surprised, really. One of the things that had always attracted me to Belinda was the way she would dive headfirst into a challenge.

“So, what do you do with True Believers, blackmail?”

“It could be,” Belinda said, nearly shocking me out of my socks. For Pete’s sake, I’d been kidding!

“Though blackmail is tricky, it tends to fall apart over time. Not the least, it is illegal. No, its better to find something your target places higher than their political ideology and make it possible for them.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Sure. There was this State Senator, lets call him Billy-Bob Bronski,” she said with a wicked smile. “Old B cubed was a dyed-in-the-wool redistributionist. One of those fellows who was unapologetic about keeping the distribution of wealth as flat as possible.”

I nodded, knowing the type. They had popped up in the twenty-teens and helped reshape the way things were done in the US. I had a Poli-Sci prof who insisted they were the only thing that staved off riots and armed resistance when the gap between the super wealthy and the poor had grown to French Revolution levels. Still, like all political movements, they never know when balance is actually achieved. As the movement aged it went from a net good to a net liability. No one likes to admit it much, but in a democracy the pendulum swings one way, then the other. That’s the real balance, not some hypothetical perfect mid-point.

“Triple B was dead set against the acrology. He claimed it concentrated the benefits far too much in Houston and being a city in its own right meant that there was very little chance of taxing it enough to spread the wealth. He had been in office since Moses was in kindergarten and had a lot of pull with committee chairs. It was a real mess, he had the potential to stop the whole project cold. He had been smart enough to wait until we had things nearly settled, before speaking up.”

“So how did you change his mind? A few projects in the poorer areas of the state?”

“Nope, it wouldn’t work. True Believer, remember? He wanted long term benefits for the whole state. A few projects with limited revenue potential was not going to cut it with him.”

“I give, what did you do?”

Belinda leaned back, enjoying being able to brag about this. “It took a lot of research but, we found out that he had a granddaughter with Goodnights Syndrome”

I grimaced, Goodnights was a very nasty disease. It was transmitted by a rhinovirus, you know, the type the common cold comes from? This little beast didn’t even have many symptoms when you contracted it. At worst you had the sniffles for a day or two then it went away. But the damage was already done.

Everyone knows that a virus spreads in the body by hijacking cellular replication. As a rule it inserts its sequence in the DNA and keeps pumping out new copies of itself until the infected cell explodes and floods the blood with the new viruses. Goodnight’s is a pretty crappy virus in that respect. It only successfully replicates itself less than fifty percent of the time. That’s why there are so few symptoms, a low number of invading viruses to fight off.

The problem is the virus likes to infect cells in the walls of veins and arteries. When it fails to replicate, the resulting genetic instructions of the cells are faulty. Over time the victims start to develop random micro aneurisms. Depending on where they are, they can cause everything from a bad bruise to stroke. An aneurism can be fixed, in most cases; if it is found in time. But with Goodnights an aneurism can be anywhere in the body, tend to be small, and fixing one buys some time, but it is not a cure. Sooner or later the victim dies.

No one really knows how many victims of Goodnights there are. Once the disease was identified vaccines were developed and distributed, so it is effectively wiped out, but there are still millions who are time-bombs waiting to go off. Once they started having the symptoms of aneurisms, it was all over but the tears. Victims averaged less than three years after onset.

“So, Gen-Tech has a cure for Goodnights? Why haven’t you been shouting it from the rooftops?” I asked. Belinda gave me a cool look.

“We have a cure, yes, but the method of delivery is a problem” she said obliquely. I got it right away.

“You mean it’s virus delivered?” I whispered. She nodded. Holy Crap! Using a virus to alter a living organisms genetics was an very old idea. It was also the bright red line that every government in the world insisted would not be crossed. It was the grand compromise that had been made in 2020. Genetic engineering could happen, genetically produced cures could be made, but no one was allowed to do research on or develop virus based treatments.

It was just too freaking dangerous. Look at it this way. When the US invented nuclear weapons in the 1940’s it took the peak science and industrial capability of a major world power to build the things. Ninety years later, it was merely a production and logistics problem. If you could source the fissile materials and had a good machine shop, you could build your own low yield bomb in a very short time.

With the advent of Cas-9 technology, engineering living things became a programming problem, not a cutting edge technical one. If the experience and knowledge it took to build a viable virus that could re-write genes in a living being, particularly humans, became common place, we’d all only as safe as the least stable person who could do this. The potential for world wide pandemic and maybe even extinction was too much. As a result the penalties for doing this kind of research ranged from twenty-five years in prison to execution, depending on how your local government feels about capital punishment.

“Gods greater and lesser, Belinda! You can’t be serious?” I asked aghast.

“I don’t confirm or deny it, but let me point out that Triple B’s granddaughter is alive, well, and without Goodnights. And Gen-Tech is here in Houston.”

“Tell me this is a one off; that it was tightly controlled and you’re not doing more research on this kind of thing” I demanded.

“Of course, Eamon, do you think we are idiots? The team that created it was only three people, including Cho. All three agreed to lifetime employment with G-T. We keep them close and make sure this does not leak. But don’t worry too much about it. We’re the world leaders in genetic technology and it’s not as easy as it sounds to change the DNA of living human and keep them living. No one else has the technology and without our research they won’t for a very long time.”

In the back of my head I heard the dry laugh of Robert Oppenheimer. I’m confident he had heard something like that sentence himself, more than once. Belinda was wrong, it was going to leak, too many people knew it was possible, and that is all it takes.

I took a breath to calm down. It was shocking to hear, but really this was going to happen no matter what. The idea existed, genetic engineering existed and as Belinda’s story showed, humans have a vast and almost inexhaustible ability to rationalize. Yea humans!

I was saved from having to talk about it by the arrival of Johnny Round. His look was stormy. It couldn’t be good news. But it sure as hell couldn’t be as scary as what I’d just learned.

“Taylors gone,” he said as he walked through the door.

“What?!? How did that happen, I though you had God’s own surveillance here?” I said as I stood.

Round ground his teeth and shook his head slowly for a second. “Well, its not as good as we thought. He had coded into his office, so we were confident he was there. His biometrics and key card haven’t been used anywhere in the acrology in hours, but when I stopped by to check on him, he wasn’t in his office. We ran the main area’s security take and saw him moving around shortly after you left his office. We think he slid out through one of the loading bays. He probably hitched a ride with a truck leaving the grounds. We’ve called all our drivers back and we’ll see if he went with them, but who knows where he is now?”

“So, Taylors the killer?” Belinda asked.

“Looks that way,” Round agreed.

“I’m not so sure,” I told them both. “It looks bad, but I’m not ready to say it was him.”

“C’mon Eamon, innocent people don’t avoid surveillance and run,” Round insisted.

“No, they don’t, but just because Taylor feels like he’s in trouble doesn’t mean the trouble is Cho’s murder.”

“Yeah, give me one reason why that might be true, just one,” Round countered. He was pissed that Taylor had slipped through his fingers and was ready to pin the murder on him.

“Well, how did he know how to avoid surveillance? It’s not the kind of thing you work out in a panic, is it?”

That brought Round up short, and engaged his brain. “No, it isn’t, but if he’s the murder he could have worked it out in advance.”

“Maybe or maybe he’s been using it for a while. We don’t know where his money has been going, but we know he hasn’t been spending it inside G-T. Could be he’s has a drug habit or something like that, and didn’t want it found out.”

“He’s still the best suspect we’ve have, and now he’s in the wind. I’m going to call HPD and have them find him.”

I looked over at Belinda and shook my head meaningfully. She, sharp as ever, picked up on what I wanted.

“Chief Round,” she began, “I’m not sure that is the best idea. As Mr. Hunt has noted we don’t know if Taylor is running because he is the killer or for some other reason. If we go to the Houston police with this, and it turns out that he is innocent, then we create the same problem we are trying so hard to avoid.”

“And if it is Taylor and he gets away because we didn’t move on this, what then, Belinda?” Round demanded.

“If we can show that he was the murderer, it hardly matters.” Belinda said calmly. Damn that woman had good control; I’d have been nose to nose with Round if he yelled at me like that.

“Hardly matters? How can you say that?”

“Easily. The object here is to show who killed Dr. Cho, so that there is no doubt that it was a planned act by a specific person and not, I remind you, an accident or unplanned consequence of our work. It is a tragedy that Dr. Cho is dead, yes, but we are trying to avoid a catastrophe for Gen-Tech as a whole.”

She had him on the ropes, so now I could step in. “Johnny, we have a couple of days left. What we should do is work on proving it was Taylor or finding who actually did it. It would be easier if we could put our hands on him, but you and I both know its not a requirement to firming up the case. Right?”

Round grudgingly nodded his acceptance.

“Why don’t we do it this way? You and your teams work on nailing down Taylor and I’ll keep working from the other end. That way we won’t lose ground if it turns out Mick is not the killer.”

I had some sympathy for Round; he had his huevos in a vice. Otho Johnson was not going to be happy that his hand picked top-cop managed to let a science nerd slip away unnoticed; especially when the nerd in question was the lead suspect for the murder of their top genius. Things would only get worse for him if we confirmed it was Taylor. But he couldn’t do what his cop instincts told him to do, which was get a ton more cops involved. At least, he couldn’t do that without bringing this whole house of cards down on his boss. Nope, I wouldn’t be happy to switch places with him, not one bit.

It took Round a moment or two to think it all through, but he came to the same place I did. There was only one way forward, and it didn’t involve the Houston PD, at least not yet.

“Alright,” Round finally admitted, “We’ll let the clock run, but I’m telling you both right now if the shit hits the fan on this, I’m going to make sure everyone knows it was you who wanted to play it this way.”

“Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, then, shall we?” Belinda asked. We all agreed.