6
After driving in a meandering loop that brought them to a construction site, Levy parked on a dead-end street in the growing development. Apparently the workers had the weekend off.
"Well," Jack said, peering around. "This is intimate."
"I work for suspicious people. Now, tell me where you heard about—"
"Uh-uh. You first, remember?"
Levy sighed. "Very well…"
Very well? Who said very well?
"One of the fallouts of the human genome project has been the realization of how much—ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent—of our DNA is noncod-ing. In other words, junk. Or at least seems like junk. Since we can't find any useful purpose it serves, we call it that. But that doesn't mean it was never useful. Most of us think it's mainly leftovers from viruses and the evolutionary process."
Jack was disappointed. He'd heard of junk DNA. But Levy seemed too interested in oDNA for it to be junk.
"I don't buy oDNA as just junk."
"It is and it isn't. Some junk DNA is oDNA, but not all oDNA is junk."
"Thanks for clearing that up."
"I know it's confusing. Let me go back to the beginning. Back in the eighties I began working on an NIH-funded project that was looking to identify genetic markers for 'antisocial' behavior. This was all very hush-hush because of the controversial nature of the work."
"What's so controversial about that?"
"Politics, my boy. Politics. A number of NIH conferences on the subject were canceled because of protests. They're all afraid that if these markers are identified and confirmed beyond doubt, how will the information be used? Specters of the eugenics movement and the holocaust get invoked and everyone shrinks away. And then come the religious fanatics: it's original sin, not God-given DNA that causes mankind to break the Commandments."
"The good old creationists, sabotaging knowledge wherever it rears its ugly head."
"Recently they've tarted up creationism with some pseudoscientific gob-bledygook and are trying to slip it into schools as 'intelligent design,' but it's still creationism." He snorted. "Intelligent design! It's laughable. Look at the cetaceans—creatures that must live, feed, and mate in a medium they can't breathe."
Jack nodded. "Yeah. If that's intelligent design, God must be a blond."
Levy laughed. "Exactly. And has anyone who pushes intelligent design ever looked at the human genome? It's a mess—an absolute mess."
"But it somehow gets the job done."
"That it does, using only one or two percent of what's there. Back in those days, we hadn't yet mapped out the genome. The Human Genome Project was just a dream. But I did find consistent markers in certain violent criminals. Not all of them, but in enough to keep the funding going. Adapting a fluorescent antibody test developed by Julia Vecca allowed me to stain nuclei to show the presence of this DNA variant.
"Once we had that, we needed a criminal population to test. We collected samples from all the federal prisons, and the ones who scored highest were moved to Creighton, which became dedicated to researching the variant."
"Were they all violent?"
"The top scorers, yes, though some white-collar criminals were up there too. But just because they were locked up for nonviolent crimes didn't mean they weren't violent. We could only go on their convictions. We didn't know how they treated their wives or kids or the family dog."
"The closet sadists."
"Right. But with the explosion of knowledge and investigational techniques in the late nineties and early aughts, we found a subset of pseudogenes among the junk."
"Fakes?"
"How do I put this? They're ancient ancestors of functioning genes, but they have no coding ability. They fall under the junk umbrella. But these particular pseudogenes are so unique that you could almost say they indicate a variant strain of humanity… another evolutionary line… another human race that got pushed aside."
Jack held up a hand. "Just a sec. I don't know a lot about evolution but I do know the evolutionary tree has a lot of dead branches."
"Yes. But this is different. These genes are so distinct that it almost looks as if they were—I hesitate to say this—manipulated."
Jack had two hands up now. He'd heard this kind of talk at the SESOUP convention last year. It had sounded crazy then, and it sounded crazy now.
"Whoa there! You don't happen to be into UFOs, do you? You're not going to start telling me one of those nut-job theories about aliens playing with our DNA."
"Of course not. But I can make a circumstantial case that somewhere along our evolutionary line something happened to it. I mean, this stuff's that different. So the big question is—where did this DNA come from? It's not found in chimps or any of the apes. It's not found in daffodils or butterflies, or sharks—humans share DNA with all of those, believe it or not—or even bacteria or viruses—and we have tons of viral DNA in our junk. How did it skip every other species since the dawn of time and land in ours and ours alone? If I were an intelligent design dolt I might say it's proof of God's guiding hand in evolution, but it was more likely the devil's. It's completely other. That's why I named it oDNA—other-DNA."
There it was, right out in the open: other.
Had the Otherness stirred something of itself into the human gene pool way back when—back in the First Age, when the Compendium was supposedly written? Or was this unrelated?
No… too much of a coincidence. And there'd be no more coincidences for him.
But to what purpose? A cosmic time bomb, set to explode… when?
Damn, he wished he still had that book. It might be able to tell him something.
"Why did you pick 'other' rather than 'alien' or something like that?"
"Because when you say 'alien,' people think of flying saucers and little gray men with big black eyes. We've got apes in our genome because we have a common ancestor. The Cro-Magnons live on in our genes, and there's recent evidence that Neanderthals do too. I suspect something happened in our ho-minid past to split off a subspecies from the main line. It developed this 'other' genome, and then was reabsorbed back into the main line, either by crossbreeding or some sort of introgression. I'm guessing about the how, but I'm sure of the what: We've all got a little oDNA in us."
A tingle ran over Jack's skin.
"All?"
Levy nodded. "To widely varying degrees, but yes. All. Summing up: At some time in the past another human race with altered DNA merged with ours. The DNA of the other race—the 'loser' race—joined the junk pile of the present human genome. You've heard of 'gone but not forgotten'? This oDNA is forgotten but not gone—and not necessarily junk."
The Otherness… part of the human gene pool… the implications staggered him.
He wondered if he should tell Levy what he suspected. But that would mean going into all the background he had gleaned over the past year about the ageless, ceaseless cosmic shadow war between two unimaginably huge and unknowable forces—one indifferent, and one, the Otherness, decidedly inimical—waging around them with Earth as one of the many marbles in play.
Yeah, that would go over well. Levy would stamp NUT across Jack's forehead.
So instead he said, "Why hasn't anyone heard of this? It's tailor-made for the tabloids."
"Other people have stumbled upon it, as I did, but the news has been suppressed. All I did was send out a few e-mails on some preliminary findings and suddenly a member of a government agency which I may not name was knocking on my door. And no, they weren't dressed in black suits and fedoras."
"That's good." Jack had dealt with the real men in black and knew they didn't work for any government. "What did they want?"
"My silence. I could A: come work for them; B: keep my mouth shut and direct my research to another area; or C: stay on my present path and find my reputation trashed to the point where the only place I'd ever get published was Fortean Times, if there."
"You chose A."
Levy nodded. "Just like a lot of others. It was a win-win offer. I got automatic funding to do the kind of groundbreaking work most researchers only dream of. No filling out reams of application forms or going around begging—just research."
Scary and fascinating, but a connection was missing.
"What's all this got to do with Bolton?"
"Jeremy Bolton is loaded with oDNA—the highest score on record."
"Where'd he get it all?"
Levy shrugged. "Who can say? He was born in Louisiana to Elizabeth Bolton. The father is listed as Jonah Stevens but there was no marriage and Elizabeth raised Jeremy alone."
"Could Jonah Stevens be the source of his mystery money?"
Levy shook his head. "He's dead. We traced him because we wanted to see if he was the source of his son's oDNA, but he died in a weird elevator accident."
"Weird how?"
"The police suspected foul play, but nothing was ever proven. Unfortunately for us, his body was cremated, so we never got to check his remains for oDNA."
"What about the mother?"
"Dead too. Cancer. We managed to get an order of exhumation to check her DNA. Elizabeth Bolton carried a significant amount of the o variant, but nowhere near her son's."
"So this Jonah Stevens, whoever he was, must have been a gold mine of the stuff."
Levy nodded. "He was most likely a human monster, because he was also a carrier of the trigger gene."
"What the hell is that?"
"As I said, the oDNA is a cluster of pseudogenes amid the other junk, but unlike most pseudogenes, these are fairly complete. Just dormant. And they remain dormant unless a certain mutation is present on one of the X chromosomes. In times of stress, this gene can awaken the oDNA and transform it from noncoding to coding."
"I don't understand what you mean by coding."
"Genes carry codes—templates, if you will—that the cell uses for making specific proteins. When the oDNA is stimulated from pseudogene status to an active gene, its codes start producing unique proteins that alter neurotransmit-ter levels in the brain, triggering violent impulses. We haven't worked out the exact mechanism yet, but we're pretty sure that's what happens."
"So you're saying these oDN A types can't help it if they're violent."
"I didn't say oDNA triggered violent behavior, I said violent impulses. There's a world of difference. One is the act itself, the other is a tendency toward the act. Other genetic and environmental factors that affect an individual's impulse control come into play here.
"The upshot is that all of us have some of oDNA in us, but the amount varies, so some are more 'other' than the rest. But the amount of oDNA has no effect on an individual unless he or she has the mutation that acts as a trigger.
"But take a large amount of oDNA, add the trigger mutation, mix with poor impulse control—or anything like alcohol or drugs which lower the impulse threshold—and you have a potentially lethal combination."
"Like Jeremy Bolton."
Levy nodded. "Jeremy Bolton is a perfect example."
"And that's why you need him for this clinical trial."
"Exactly. We don't know how to remove his oDNA—although someday we might be able to do just that—so we've targeted the mutated trigger gene. If we can suppress that, the oDNA will remain dormant, and Jeremy Bolton will be just like you and me."
"Speak for yourself, doc." Jack rubbed his eyes. "Your agency can't keep this oDNA a secret forever."
"It knows that. And when the news does hit, it will have devastating effects. Look at the problems caused by differences in pigmentation. Imagine what's going to happen when it's leaked that there are people among us with large amounts of alien DNA—and believe me, the o in oDNA will be quickly replaced by alien in the popular press. Not to mention what it will do to the criminal justice system. Chaos. Everyone behind bars or in court will be claiming their genes made them do it and will want to be declared not guillv hy reason of defective DNA."
Jack hadn't thought of that. Jeez.
He said, "And since we no longer believe in personal responsibility in this country, the lawyers will have a field day."
Levy shook his head. "We're talking genetics here, not—"
"It always comes down to personal responsibility," Jack said. "Like you said, the oDNA triggers violent impulses. But there's one more step before the violence: You still have to decide whether or not to act on the impulse. And even if you're drunk or coked up at the time, you're responsible for deciding to drink or snort. So even though you have an impulse to drop a cinder block off an overpass, you don't cross the line until you release it."
Levy gave him a funny look. "Cinder block…?"
"Forget it." Jack had a flash of a gray mass crashing through a windshield, smashing into… "Just an example that came to mind."
"All that aside, the government wants to be ready to offer a remedy. That's why the urgency to find a way to suppress the trigger. But there's a more practical use. We'll be able to formulate this into injections that will last three months. A condition of parole for oDNA positives will be the therapy. Imagine the reduction in recidivism."
Jack stared at Levy. Something in his voice didn't ring true…
"Is that the real reason?"
"Of course. What other reason could there be?"
Yeah. Definitely lying. But Jack figured it would be a waste of time to ask. Besides, he had a much more pressing question.
"Why are you telling me all this?"
Levy blinked. "Why… because we agreed to trade information: I'd tell you about oDNA and you'd tell me where you heard of it."
Jack didn't buy that. Levy had told him way too much. Could be he'd got carried away with his story, but that didn't wash. He hadn't prodded Jack once for his source on oDNA.
And then he knew.
"You want Bolton back in Creighton, don't you. And you want me to put him there."
Levy looked flustered. "I want nothing of the sort. I told you, this clinical trial is of momentous importance. Nothing must jeopardize it."
"Yeah, but you think it should be tried first on someone less volatile. You've got a wife and a daughter. Bolton knows you, knows where you live, and you know he's a Tate-LaBianca waiting to happen. Admit it: Bolton on the outside scares the crap out of you."
"1 admit to nothing of the sort. As I told you—"
Jack waved him off. "Save it. You're looking for a patsy. You're hoping I'll do something to tip off the cops that Bolton's out—like maybe getting myself offed by him—and that'll solve your problem and leave your hands clean. Or at least looking clean."
Levy stared out through the windshield and said nothing.
"Okay," Jack said. "Let's do it."
Levy turned to him, looking puzzled. "Do what?"
"Out Jerry Bethlehem as Jeremy Bolton. But we do it so that neither of us is downwind when the shit hits the fan."
"How?"
Jack thought about that. Dawn was too gaga to be useful, and he couldn't use Christy to drop the dime because the agency overseeing all this would assume the source of the info was the guy she'd hired. Jack didn't want to be on their hit list.
He needed someone with no connection to him or Levy. The only other person Bolton would know on the outside was Hank Thompson.
Now there's a thought.
High-profile guy… low-profile guy… put them together…
And hadn't Thompson said the Dormentalists and Scientologists were after him because so many of their members were becoming Kickers? What if they had him under surveillance? And what if Thompson and Bolton were meeting on the outside? Maybe the rivals would want to know who he was meeting with. And when they investigated Bethlehem they'd find… Jeremy Bolton.
"Get me all you know about Hank Thompson."
Levy shook his head. "That's privileged—"
"You want this fixed or not?"
Levy hesitated, then shrugged. "I'll dig out whatever I've got."
"Do it tonight. I'll be doing a little digging myself."
"Where?"
"I'll let you know if I find anything."
Levy hesitated, then said, "There's something you should know about Jeremy Bolton."
"I'm sure there's plenty I should know about Jeremy Bolton. What've you got?"
"Don't underestimate him. He comes on as a laid-back, shit-kicking good ol' boy, but he tests high on all the intelligence scales, and he's done a lot of reading in the past twenty years. His major shortcoming is his impulsiveness. If you can keep him off balance, he'll act before he thinks. But give him time to think…"
"So I'm dealing with a smart but explosive sociopath." Levy nodded. "With a lot of native cunning. Watch out." Jack had every intention of doing just that. He'd handle Bolton from a distance.
"Thanks for the heads up. Now, how about driving me back to my car?" Conditions permitting, Jack would be paying a visit to the Jerry Bethlehem crib tonight.