“Someone want to enlighten the old man?” Moore asked.
Danielle took a shot. “Genetic therapy has been talked about for years. The first moves from the lab to the medical profession are just starting to take place, from what I understand. Basically, patients with genetic disorders, mutations, or certain cancers can’t be treated with normal drugs because the issue isn’t sickness, it’s defective coding. No matter what drug you use to treat the symptoms, each time the defective cell divides and the DNA replicates, it copies the mistake into the new cell.”
“Like cheating off a kid who doesn’t know the answers,” Yang added.
Moore turned to the screen, his eyebrows up.
“Not that I ever did that,” Yang said.
“The only way to break the cycle,” Danielle said, “is to patch the DNA so the newly replicated cells carry the correct code and not the defective gene. Best way to do this is to design a virus that can be released into the body carrying a DNA ‘patch’ that corrects the genetic code. From then on, when the cell divides, it makes a nondefective copy of itself.”
“Like cheating off a kid who actually knows his stuff,” Moore said, reusing the analogy.
Danielle smiled and looked at the screen. “If we take Dr. Yang’s computer analogy, it’s like downloading software to your hard drive. If that software contains a bad virus, you’re in trouble; if it contains a patch to fix a flaw in the original programming, your computer now runs like it was supposed to.”
Yang took over. “The problem is the average human body contains a billion cells. Can’t exactly reset the codes one by one. So one way to reach the defective cells is with what we call a carrier virus. We modify the virus to carry the updated human DNA and then inject it into the defective area of the patient. The virus then does what it’s designed to do, spreading across the cells, implanting its new DNA into the cells, and reproducing by the billions. Those copies do the same thing, and so on and so on, like that shampoo commercial from the seventies.
“The end result is a regeneration of sorts in the specific organ or system that was defective. It’s not a hundred percent, but you end up with far more healthy cells than unhealthy ones, and over time the healthy cells crowd out the weak and the dying.”
From an academic perspective, Danielle understood Yang’s excitement. But knowing Ranga’s radical position on population and his work on telomeres, she grew more worried. Used malevolently, Ranga’s trial 951 might age every cell in the human body, radically reducing life spans just as he suggested the world might need to do.
“Can it be weaponized?” Moore asked.
Yang nodded. “Both the UN virus and 951 can survive outside the host, both can be carried by air or other vectors such as birds or insects. Aerosolized dispersal from crop dusters or via airburst from missiles or artillery shells would create a very effective biological spread.”
“So how did they go from the inert UN virus to this trial 951?” Moore asked.
“It might be as simple as changing payloads,” Yang said.
“Payloads?”
“Those blank spaces I told you about,” Yang said. “As it stands right now, the UN virus is an empty carrier, but it has been designed with a space holder for whatever the user might want to put inside. That’s the payload. Designing the virus itself is the hard part, like designing a ballistic missile. In comparison, putting a DNA patch in the leftover spaces would be relatively easy. Like loading the warhead onto the missile. You can go conventional, you can go nuclear. In this case, they could put a corrective gene in those blank spaces or they could put something devastating. That might be what they did with 951.”
Danielle thought about what would happen if the code from trial 951 were placed inside the UN virus. Pretty soon the whole human race might look like the aged and dying rats she’d seen in Ranga’s lab.
Danielle was thirty-seven, in the prime of her life. In the world Ranga envisioned, the world he might have been trying to bring about, she would be in her last days, an old woman feeling infirmity and facing death. In fact, her life might already have been over.
“Anything else?” Moore asked.
“Not yet,” Yang said.
“All right,” Moore said. “Turn in your gun. I’ll touch base with you in twelve hours.”
Yang signed off. Moore turned to Danielle. “So the UN virus does nothing,” he noted. “Then why send it?”
“Could be a message, like Ranga’s well-staged death,” she said. “If the goal is extortion, making your point without killing anyone at first is a pretty good start.”
“No one’s called with any demands,” Moore said.
“Maybe they’re not done making the point,” she said.
Moore looked as if he agreed. “We’re pessimists,” he noted. “Anything you can think of that might make the future seem a little bit brighter?”
“Only the obvious,” she said.
“Which is?”
“They don’t have anything to put inside. They don’t have a payload yet.”
“Ranga gave them a blank virus,” Moore said, following her line of thought.
She nodded. “Why else would they need him back? Why else would they go to his lab?”
Moore’s face brightened. It was all speculation but it made sense. “Ranga breaks away without giving them the crucial payload, they hunt him down and catch him, but instead of killing him outright they grab him and torture him.”
“And he gives up the address on rue des Jardins,” she said.
“And he’s willing to give it up, because he’s got the place wired to blow,” Moore finished. “Score one for Hawker’s friend if that’s the case. So what would they do next?”
Danielle tried to put herself in their place. It didn’t take much. “They’d find someone to finish the job.”
“Ranga’s daughter.”
It didn’t have to be her; there could be others. The evidence showed Ranga and Sonia hadn’t worked together in years, but that hadn’t stopped the NRI from sending Hawker to Dubai. Which was exactly where Danielle felt she should be.
“What the hell am I doing here chasing after stolen art?”
“Whatever’s about to be sold here, it was important to Ranga and Bashir,” Moore reminded her.
“But how?” she asked. “How could this possibly have anything to do with that?”
“That’s what you’re here to find out,” Moore said. “You have an invite to a private auction tonight courtesy of a friend of mine, Mr. Faisal Najir. He’ll expect you to come dressed for the occasion.”
Danielle looked at Moore suspiciously. “Where?”
“Center city,” Moore said.
Danielle recalled Beirut’s city center as a bombed-out wasteland. “That’s no-man’s-land.”
“Up on the surface it is,” Moore said. “But don’t worry, you’ll be underground.”
CHAPTER 20
As Hawker watched, a pair of huge plasma screens descended slowly from the ceiling at each end of the ballroom. All eyes turned toward one or the other, causing the crowd to part in the middle like the Red Sea. He could see one screen from where he was, so he held his ground and kept his back to the wall.
“Welcome to the city of the future,” a voice said, mixing with the music. “Here you will see your future, a future without sickness, a future without infirmity, a future without dying.”
He leaned forward to get a better view of the screen. It showed a man stepping off a yacht with a beautiful young woman on his arm. He was silver-haired and obviously in his midsixties; the woman — of course — might have been twenty-five. But as they walked toward the camera, the image changed. The gray in his hair disappeared, the lines on his face faded and vanished, his shoulders straightened, his chest filled, his gut shrank to nothing.