Lopez blanched, staring wide-eyed at Willis. Ethan, trying not to smirk, stepped forward.
‘We’re here on Lieutenant Zamora’s behalf.’
Willis’s smile faded and his shoulders seemed to sag. He nodded, and gestured ahead to the open door of his office. Ethan led the way inside, followed by Lopez who was tentatively touching her face. Willis closed the door behind them and slumped into a swivel chair behind a small desk, upon which sat a computer and several paper trays. The office had a small window that looked out over a parking lot, the distant green hills tinged with blue in the hazy sunlight beyond.
‘I suppose this is about what happened at Glorietta Pass,’ Willis said sulkily. ‘I’ve told the police everything I know.’
‘Maybe you have,’ Ethan said, ‘but then again maybe you haven’t.’
Willis opened his mouth to protest but Lopez cut across him.
‘We don’t have time to mess around, Tyler. This man, Hiram Conley, shot you after an argument in which you were every bit as involved as he was. We have a dozen witnesses and all of their statements correlate. You knew this guy and you know why he shot you. Speak up, and this will all be a lot easier.’
Willis’s feeble defiance crumbled, but he shook his head. ‘It’s not that easy. You don’t know what’s been happening here.’
‘Then maybe you should fill us in,’ Ethan suggested. ‘This isn’t about local law enforcement anymore, Tyler. The government is taking an interest in what happened down here, and what you tell us will get back to them. If they think that you’re lying…’
Ethan let the loaded statement hang in the air between them. Willis digested its meaning, and set his coffee cup down on the desk before him.
‘I’m not lying about anything,’ he said. ‘The government wouldn’t have any interest in me at all if it weren’t for what Hiram Conley showed me.’
‘Go on,’ Lopez encouraged.
‘What happened to Hiram Conley’s corpse?’
‘We were hoping you could tell us,’ Lopez said, folding her arms and gesturing out of the small office window. ‘Theft of state-controlled corpses is a federal offense. If you’re charged, you can get used to a view of the outside world just like that one but with bars.’
‘I never saw what happened to Conley after the ranger shot him, I swear!’ Willis yelped.
‘Take an educated guess,’ Ethan said, picking up on Lopez’s attempts to entrap Willis into revealing whatever it was he was trying to hide.
‘It’s too dangerous!’ Willis snapped.
‘Tell us what you safely can,’ Ethan suggested, ‘at least then we’ll be able to see where it might take our investigation.’
Willis sighed and rubbed his forehead.
‘It started a few weeks ago, when I was coming to the end of a two-year study into an illness known as Werner syndrome.’
‘What’s that?’ Lopez asked, already scribbling notes.
‘It’s a very rare disorder characterized by premature aging, more so than any other segmental progeria. The disease is caused by a mutation in a gene that causes excessive telomere attrition.’
‘So, people with this disorder die prematurely?’ Ethan hazarded.
‘They normally develop without symptoms until they reach puberty,’ Willis said, ‘upon which they age rapidly, often appearing decades older. Other symptoms include loss of and graying of hair, thickening of the skin and cataracts in both eyes.’
‘Is it curable?’ Lopez asked.
‘That’s what I was working on,’ Willis said. ‘A recent study found that mice which were genetically modified to express the genes thought to cause Werner syndrome in humans were restored to normal health and lifespan when vitamin C was put in their drinking water. The work was incomplete but the potential for study was immense. I’d also been studying cellular defense proteins in humans called sirtuins. Drugs that boost these proteins have already been shown to extend the lifespan of mice by about fifteen percent.’
Ethan thought for a moment.
‘So how does Hiram Conley tie into all this?’
‘I was working on a number of cellular senescence papers,’ Willis said, ‘trying to understand how Werner syndrome worked and whether it could be reversed in order to slow aging. I’d published a few when Hiram Conley showed up here, real quiet like. He said he had something to show me, and handed me a vial with what he claimed was spinal fluid in it, from a lumbar puncture. It’s not every day that somebody wanders into your lab with spinal fluid, so I agreed to culture it to see what emerged. A few days later I looked at the fluid under a microscope and realized that it was filled with microscopic fauna that I recognized.’
‘From where?’ Lopez asked.
Willis gestured to a small photograph tacked to the wall of his office that appeared to show tiny bacterial cells suspended in solution, imaged with a powerful microscope.
‘Back in 1999, scientists working in a cave complex extracted bacterial samples from sodium-chloride crystals formed from prehistoric sea salt. The microscopic organisms were revived in a laboratory after being in suspended animation within the crystals. They couldn’t identify the species and referred to it as strain 2-9-3, or Bacillus permians. What was special about it was that the organisms were two hundred fifty million years old.’
Ethan blinked.
‘The dinosaurs were still around then.’
‘The dinosaurs had only just got started back then,’ Willis corrected him. ‘Bacillus permians represents the oldest living organism known to man. In May 1995, forty-million-year-old Bacillus sphaericus were found in the stomach of a bee encased in amber. They were also in a state of suspended animation and were revived in a laboratory.’
‘How did Hiram Conley get these bacteria, and from whom?’ Ethan inquired.
‘I don’t know. He refused to tell me, except to say that the spinal fluid was his own.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ Lopez said. ‘You need to tell us everything, Tyler.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?’ Willis burst out. ‘This is far bigger than any of us. It isn’t about Hiram Conley or any of the others.’
Willis stared at them for a moment, and then realized his mistake.
Ethan pushed himself off the wall, his arms folded across his chest.
‘What others?’
9
‘You cover the reception area, I’ll get through the back and break down the doors.’
The battered old 1968 Dodge Camper in which Saffron sat smelled of axle grease, mould and unwashed upholstery. The vehicle was a wreck they’d found abandoned in a farmer’s yard in Silver City two days before. Colin ‘Hugger’ Manx, a lanky, curly-haired geek whom she swore had never washed in his life, had managed to get it running after a day of swearing and wrench throwing, and had driven them to Los Alamos that morning. In the back of the camper sat two furtive-looking teenagers, the self-named Ruby Lily, a wisp of a girl with blonde dreadlocks, and an anemic-looking boy who called himself Bobby, all greasy black hair and white skin, his narrow chin flecked with spots.
‘What are you going to do?’ Manx demanded of her. ‘You can’t just stroll in there and expect them to let you into the labs.’
Saffron shook her head.
‘They’ll have a set of doors that contain a mid-pressure area that people have to pass through. They have them so that contaminants from the laboratories can’t flow out of the building, like a HazMat facility. We’ll use the gun on those.’