He didn’t answer.
“You were sick. Or sloppy. You were tired and you infected a sample. Broke a slide maybe. Or sneezed. You were working in a home lab. You were doing something the wrong way. A damn accident.”
The vulnerable look cleared away. The eyes sharpened. Whatever edge I’d had with him was gone.
“What is it with you?” he said. “You’re not scared. You don’t care about yourself. You’re just trying to keep me talking here.”
And trying to figure out how to make you open the cage.
I shrugged. “I care what happens to them.” He knew who I meant. I meant Eddie and the admiral. Chris and Aya. I meant the people who had ridden with me north in the coal car, the gang members in Washington. I meant the scientists in Somalia, Eddie’s family, the worshippers at the National Cathedral, strangers even, I guess.
It’s funny how some people who don’t have families or intimate love can care more for strangers. But that doesn’t make the caring less real. Maybe it means you have more caring to spread around. Who am I to judge? I’m a bad judge, but an honest one, and Harlan saw it, and nodded.
“I care about them, too,” he said. He seemed sad. Maybe he was thinking about the tens of millions of people he cared about that he planned to kill with a disease he’d created.
When he opened the lab door to go, leaving me in the cage, I heard choral music from up top, coming over a speaker system. I was hearing the same song that I’d heard in Somalia, sung by two men in a tent. But now eighty people were singing it.
I tried to stop him with a question. “How did Tahir Khan come up with the cure?”
When the door shut behind him, the music stopped. All I heard was the scraping of animals against steel mesh. There was no sound from the barrels. No ticking. I could not see the red digits on a timer. I wondered if Harlan Maas would come back at all.
I was pulling at the bars uselessly when Harlan returned.
He walked over to a red phone on a table. It was an old scratched-up plastic model, heavy, 1950s style, but had no wires attached. The phone could not possibly work. But he picked up the receiver anyway and put it to his ear. He listened intently. He said something I could not hear. He hung up as if someone had been on the other end. He said, nodding at me, “I can answer your question now.”
“You do know, don’t you, that phone’s not connected to anything?”
He smiled. Fine. We wouldn’t discuss that part, if that’s what he wanted.
“Tahir Khan,” I said.
“Tahir found the cure. Yes. He went back to my old notes and re-created the strain step by step, but with one difference that allowed us to control it. He added a new technique for controlling gene expression — activation — in transgenic organisms. That means modified ones.”
“What new technique?”
“Well! People think that to make a new organism, all you have to do is combine a few genes, little snipping, little splicing, make the pie. Bingo, they express themselves!”
“That isn’t how it works, though,” I said, thinking that he did not seem so mad when he talked about science. What he did with it was insane. But the man knew of what he spoke.
He said, with some eagerness, “You need a third part. You need something called a promoter. A trigger. A small genetic element, could be only a few dozen nucleotides… or a thousand. You splice it into the hybrid before the new organism can work. Think of the whole thing like a train, Colonel. The chain of cars is the DNA, but railroad cars — the links — can’t move by themselves.”
“The promoter is the engine, you mean.”
“Yes!” he said, and smiled. “Some are designed to be active all the time. You can’t turn them off. But others only drive the train under specific conditions.”
“Like what?”
“An example? Say you want to try out a new gene in a mouse. But you only want the gene to work in the mouse’s brain cells, its neurons. Well, there’s a promoter that limits your new gene to working in that specific area. Or take recent research on fireflies.”
“Fireflies?”
“Do you want examples or not?” he snapped.
“Sorry.” The Sixth Prophet could be riled, I saw.
“Fireflies glow with a yellow-green light. Anyone who has been near them on a summer night knows what I’m talking about. That light comes from the insect’s luciferase, a protein. Well, a couple years back, researchers wanted to see if they could make tobacco plants glow, too.”
“Why?”
“They just did,” he said. “They wanted the plant to glow when under stress if it was thirsty.”
“This really happened?” I wanted to scream. I couldn’t care less, at the moment, about fireflies.
“Too little rain, the glow would be a cry for help! Imagine a thousand plants in the field, calling to their farmer for water.”
“Doesn’t he know if there’s too little rain anyway?”
Harlan shook his head impatiently. “That’s not the point. The point is, researchers came up with a promoter to enable tobacco plants to glow!”
Harlan had apparently forgotten about all the people who might appreciate glowing plants and would — within weeks — expire from his outbreak. I didn’t remind him. He was talking eagerly and I wanted to keep him that way. I said, “You’re saying that Tahir Khan killed your leprosy by going after the promoter that turned it on, not the bacteria itself.”
“Yes! The promoter. He created a tet-on, tet-off system against it.”
“And what is tet-on, tet-off?”
Harlan explained that tet-on, tet-off had been invented recently to control potentially dangerous genetically modified life. “Tet” was the antibiotic tetracycline, or its stronger relative, doxycycline. Scientists at a biotech company created genes that could be turned on or off based on the presence of doxycycline. Tet-off activated genes when doxycycline was missing. Tet-on was the opposite.
I said, “You’re saying that Tahir rendered your hybrid inactive with doxycycline? But we tried that drug!”
“No! Same principle, but different drugs. Tahir found a combination therapy to shut the promoter off.”
What he was saying sank in. I grew excited. “Existing drugs? You mean, all we have to do is find the right combination that already exists that will stop this whole thing?”
He sighed and looked at his watch and went to the barrel across the lab. He bent over the top and I saw his hand move. He straightened and regarded me with a look approximating affection.
“Yes. But it took Tahir years to find it.”
“But the combination cures it, you’re saying.”
“Maybe someone else will find it someday. I have it. I have the cure to give. But nobody came, Joe Rush. That truck stop was empty. I can see that my time has not yet come on Earth.”
How many minutes were left? I remembered the photos of the Jones cult in Guyana, the aerial shots of bodies lying in the open, birds pecking at the eyes. Nine hundred people had poisoned themselves. I remembered the shots we’d seen at Quantico of the Heaven’s Gate cult, forty followers of Marshall Applewaite, who’d dressed in the same style clothes, same colors, same brand of sneakers, and lain down beside each other, feet all facing the same direction. They’d cheerfully consumed poison believing their souls were about to go into outer space and be transformed into something else.