Harlan Maas said, “I don’t take pleasure in hurting people. Or even animals.”
“I see that.”
“I’m funny?”
“After what I’ve seen, far from funny.”
“How did you get here, Joe Rush?”
“The train,” I said, as if the trip had been easy. Buy a ticket. Take a seat. Doze on the way. Buy food.
His brows neither rose nor fell. The man’s gaze never changed. Maas said, “How did you know to come here at all? Why did you go to that cathedral?”
“Divine guidance?”
He smiled thinly. “People have made fun of that for two thousand years.”
“Harlan, you said it. You put an invitation on the Internet. I saw it. What’s so hard about that? By the way, the soldiers will be here soon. Why don’t we meet them together? Let me go. Your people stay safe. You announce the cure. You’re a hero.”
“No soldiers are coming or I’d know. And we both know it wouldn’t happen like that. Because it’s not just the cure we came up with.”
Once again, here was God, choice and consequence. Harlan had told the assembled at the truck stop, You don’t have to believe me. Make up your own mind. A lot has changed in the last two thousand years, but one thing is the same and it is the yearning for better.
God, he’d said, over the centuries, had sent to Earth six great prophets, who were actually all versions of the same entity. Harlan happened to be the last in the line. He’d been Jesus and Mohammed and Joseph Smith, too.
If it wasn’t so awful, and so horribly real, if the consequences had been milder, I would have had sympathy for the deluded guy.
And now Harlan Maas draped his long, thin legs outward and leaned over the top of the chair, stretching. He coughed. He was definitely getting sick. But I think it was just a cold. He only caught the easy stuff.
“If you’re sure no one is coming,” I asked, “why are your guys working on those barrels?”
No answer.
“Are you planning on doing something with the barrels?”
“Believe me, I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want anyone to suffer, Colonel Rush.”
Considering my question, this was a very bad answer. He didn’t look evasive as much as he looked resigned.
And in a way, if gods could really change appearances, then Harlan’s was no different than the one who had ordered Aztecs to cut the hearts from human sacrifices; told men with skullcaps to behead hostages in Pakistan; sent thousands of Europeans to Jerusalem to plunge swords into Jews and Muslims. That god changed names regularly, talked peace at your front door, asking for entry, and then, once you provided it, whispered ugly suggestions in your ears.
You’ve got a bad attitude about God, the admiral had told me one Sunday when he, Cindy, and Eddie had gone off to church, and I’d stayed in the house, reading the Washington Post Sports Section.
“Tell me you’re not going to blow this place up,” I said.
He said nothing.
“I don’t understand. You created a disease. You created a cure. You’re going to destroy it? That makes no sense.”
“To you, no,” he admitted.
I was in a madhouse, except I was the one in the cage, and everyone else was outside, stringing lights up top. Strumming guitars. No different, I supposed, from the Heaven’s Gate cult members who dressed in their finest clothes and enjoyed a tasty dinner before killing themselves. They’d looked happy afterward, in photos, dead by their own hands.
“Do your people know what you’re going to do, Harlan?”
“They know who I am.”
“They’re going along with it?”
He looked surprised. “Of course.”
He leaned closer, but still three arm lengths away. Anyway, the cuffs prevented free movement, especially through the bars. Harlan seemed curious, interested. “Or do you think I’m a false prophet?”
I wasn’t buying his placid surface and I didn’t know if he was working himself up, but beyond a certain point, if you are in a cage, taunting the person who put you there is not the wisest thing to do.
Keep him talking.
“Not at all,” I said. “But I’d rather talk about the leprosy, if you don’t mind. How did you design the bug?”
He sighed. “I didn’t.”
I waited. He stood, and I thought, He’s not going to tell me. He walked to the nearest barrel and bent over it and I saw his hand do something at the top. Had he checked a connection? Or flicked a switch? If he’d flicked a switch, would I hear ticking? Or was the timer the silent kind?
Harlan walked back and settled into the chair and sighed. What had he just done?
“We found the cure here,” he said. “Well, Tahir Khan helped. The illness? That happened some years ago. I just never let it out until now.”
“Harlan, what did you just do at the barrel?”
“I was a grad student working with leprosy,” he said. “I wanted to cure it more easily. So many people get it in the third world. It’s a terrible disease, Dr. Rush. We tried to grow it in a lab. But you can’t do that. It’s hard to work with a disease if you need fresh animals all the time.”
“Armadillos,” I said, glancing at the cages, telling myself that from his casual attitude, he’d just checked wires, he hadn’t set the timer. Everyone up top was preparing for a party. They would have the party first. I thought, Why prepare for a party if you weren’t going to have it? But then again, logic didn’t seem to be the paramount value here.
Harlan said, “Back then, at SUNY, I needed samples that could survive in labs. So I made chimeras. Dog and human DNA. Tuberculosis and leprosy. The diseases are close, you know. TB, over four million base pairs of genes and four thousand proteins. It’s one of the best known pathogens on Earth, after E. coli.”
“Easy to work with,” I said.
“Exactly!” Then he frowned. “But Mycobacterium leprae? Huge chains of unknown material! Uncoded chains. Pieces, just fragments of long dead genes, mutated beyond recognition. What did they do originally? No one knows!”
“TB was the doorway! Leprosy the locked gate!” I said.
He nodded. “Leprosy has lost thousands of genes since it first came into existence. Whole swaths of purpose, gone. But the TB didn’t work. So I tried riskier combinations. My thesis adviser warned me not to. But at night… when no one was there…”
“Fasciitis,” I said. “You mixed fasciitis with leprosy.”
“Flesh-eating bacteria.”
“The last two organisms you’d think to put together.” I tried to remember what I’d learned in Nevada. I pulled snippets of information from memory. “Counterintuitive. Fasciitis doesn’t come from soil, like leprosy. It’s gram positive. Different cell wall structure altogether.”
“And drug resistant.” He nodded, glancing at the barrels. “But sometimes you risk making something worse to make it better. I was trying everything. It was a shot in the dark.”
“And the third piece you added? The norovirus?”
Something like pain flickered on his face. He was back at least for a second, reliving a time when he wasn’t a prophet. Maybe he was reliving the moment when his mind snapped and he became a prophet. The pained look worsened. And then I thought I understood.
“You had an accident,” I said.