“It’s all in there,” said Otto mildly. “In the after-session notes. Both Hastings and Stenner remarked on Horst’s increased levels of stress, frequent headaches, nervousness, lack of direct eye contact. Plenty of signs of depression and diminished self-esteem. He was also a late-night regular at the staff bar every night. Classic stuff.”
“We missed it,” said Cyrus.
“We didn’t see it,” corrected Otto. “We’ve been otherwise occupied.”
“It’s my fault. I’m weeks behind in reading the staff evaluations.”
“Neither of us saw it for the same reason. We need to delegate more, Mr. Cyrus. We’re spreading ourselves too thin. If we try to do everything, then we’ll get sloppy.” He paused. “We need to process more of the SAMs into the Family. We need to put them to work.”
“I wish Eighty-two…” Cyrus let it hang.
“He’s not ready.”
“The others are?”
“Some are. Enough to take some pressure off of us.”
Cyrus shrugged. “Horst’s death could be trouble.”
“No. The cleaning woman who found him reported directly to the security shift supervisor, and he contacted me. I quarantined the cleaner. She’ll be on the next flight to the Hive. The security supervisor is one of the Haeckels, so there’s no problem with him keeping his mouth shut.”
“Good, good,” Cyrus said distractedly. “Do we have a cover story for Horst being missing?”
“He was needed at the Hive. A rumor can be started that he got a juicy promotion and went to the Hive to head up a new division. A component of the rumor will be that his apparent stress was him sweating whether he’d get the promotion or not. It’s worked before and the rumor does some good for morale and overall team efficiency.”
Cyrus nodded. Staff sent to the Hive were never allowed to return to the Deck. Except for a special few — Otto and Cyrus, the SAMs, several of the Haeckels, and one or two key scientists — no one else was allowed to travel between the two facilities. No one outside that circle even knew where the other facility was. Disinformation was frequently seeded into the rumor mill. There was even an abiding belief that there was a Laboratory A somewhere in Mexico and a new facility set to open in Australia, though neither was true. It was useful to sustain the belief when it became necessary for staff members to disappear.
This latest suicide was troubling. Suicides among the virology and epidemiology staff was very high. Drug addiction and alcoholism was even higher, though the recent increases in random urine and blood testing had decreased the risk of technicians staggering into a clean room while high. That had been a lesson they’d learned the hard way.
“What was Horst working on?”
“Tay-Sachs.”
“Why the stress? Surely you vetted him for—”
“We did. He’s not a Jew; he never had any significant Jewish friends, never dated a Jewish woman. His distrust of Jews was marked in his initial evaluations and recruitment interviews. He even scored in the high sevens for resentment against Jews for jobs and grants in his field.”
“Then why was he depressed?”
“Why do most of the suicide cases go soft on us? It’s always the same thing. Conscience. No matter what we do to prevent it, they reach a point where their vision and trust in the New Order is overmatched by fear.”
“Fear of what?” Cyrus snapped.
“Damnation, probably. In one form or another.”
“Bullshit. We screen for atheism in every single member of the science staff.”
“Most atheists are closet agnostics or disappointed believers.”
“So?”
“As you point out in so many of your staff speeches, Mr. Cyrus, we’re at war. The saying that there are no atheists in foxholes is more often true than not. Even if the belief is momentary and conditional.”
“So… you’re saying that this is my fault?”
“Not at all, Mr. Cyrus. I’m saying that this is evidence of the kind of inherent weakness that the Extinction Wave will wash away.”
Cyrus cinched the robe more tightly around his waist and walked to the window. The view was that of the production tanks and the white-suited technicians who milled around them.
“We should have tried harder to find the gene that controlled the conscience,” said Otto.
“What I don’t understand — and I should understand, Otto — is why and how this happens when we systematically and exhaustively treated every person on the science team to deactivate VMAT2.”
VMAT2—Vesicular Monoamine Transporter 2—was a membrane protein that transports monoamines like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine from cellular cytosol into synaptic vesicles. Geneticist Gene Hamer had pioneered the belief that the gene was more active in persons who held strong religious beliefs and less so in those who held little or no beliefs. Cyrus accepted this as likely and subscribed to several similar neurotheological views. He had spent years exploring the links between N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland and spiritual beliefs.
“None of the team should be capable of religious beliefs of any kind,” Cyrus said gruffly.
“We’ve had this discussion before, Mr. Cyrus. You told me that you did not totally accept the ‘God gene’ theory.”
“That’s not what I said, dammit,” Cyrus barked. He leaned close and shouted at Otto. “I said that I don’t believe it accounts for all faith. It doesn’t account for true faith. False faith may be controlled by genetics. Faith in ideals and deities that are clearly unrelated to the divine path of racial development. No one with a pure genetic line, no one who believes in the right and only way, requires a gene for faith. That’s a fundamental truth to faith itself. It’s the so-called mystery of faith that those Catholic swine have been beating themselves up over for two thousand years.”
Otto wiped Cyrus’s spittle from his shirtfront.
“As you say.”
Cyrus leaned back, his eyes still hot and his face flushed.
“The gene therapy must be flawed.”
“Of course, sir,” said Otto neutrally. “That must be it.”
“We’ll run the sequence again. We’ll do a new round of gene therapy.”
“Naturally.”
“I don’t want any more inconvenient attacks of conscience.”
“God forbid,” said Otto with a smile. He left before Cyrus began throwing things.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Top and Bunny met me as I got off the jet. They were dressed in black BDUs and wearing shoulder rigs but had no other obvious weapons. Neither of them looked very happy. There was a lot of that going around.
Hanler shook hands all around but stayed with his plane as we headed to a small hangar at the edge of the field. There was a Mister Softee truck parked inside; however, the man who leaned against the rear corner didn’t look like he sold ice-cream cones for a living. He looked like the actor Ving Rhames, except for the artificial leg and the shrapnel scars on his face.
“Cap’n,” said Top, “this is Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, head of field support for the Denver office.”
Brick fit his name and he had a handshake that could crush half-inch pipe.
“Good to meet you, Cap,” said Brick. “I’ve heard stories.”
“You look like you could tell a few stories of your own, Gunny,” I said. “How’d you slip the NSA?” I asked.
“They heard I was a cripple. Only sent two guys to pick me up.” He shrugged. “Didn’t go like they planned.”