5
"Are you on a cell phone?" Levy said when he came on the line.
Jack leaned against the side of an open booth on Queens Boulevard. It had taken him a long time to find a public phone. They used to be everywhere. Now…
"I'm in one of the last telephone booths in Queens. Just listen. You know the fellow we're interested in—the one dating the young girl?"
Levy's tone was cautious. "Yes."
"Well, she's pregnant, and our friend is the father."
A pause, then a gasp. "Dear God, if she inherited her mother's…" He seemed to be searching for a code word, a neutral term, anything but oDNA. "Her mother's…"
"Special sauce?"
"We're not talking about a hamburger!"
"In a way, we are."
An exasperated sigh. "I don't believe this. Very well. If she inherited her mother's special sauce, and that combines with our friend's special sauce, then—"
"Then we wind up with one hell of a Big Mac."
"Yes… yes, we do."
"That's got to be what he's been looking to do all along: create a super sauce."
"You think this is intentional?"
"He went looking for this particular girl. What else can I think? This is kind of scary."
"Yes and no. Here's the thing: The girl might not have inherited her mother's special sauce. You don't inherit a carbon copy of your mother's genome; only half. The other half comes from your father. So there's always a chance the girl is sauce free."
"Unless, of course, the girl's father was heavy on the sauce."
"Yes. In that case the odds of inheriting a large portion of the sauce increase dramatically. Dramatically. You must learn who the father was and where we can find him."
"And if I do?"
"Then you obtain a sample of his, um, sauce and we find out what we're dealing with."
"And if I can't?"
"Then get a sample of the girl's so we can see how much she's carrying. If she missed out, then the experiment was a failure—thank God."
Something in Levy's tone bothered Jack.
"You sound upset."
"I am. There's genetic manipulation going on here—it's old-fashioned, barnyard-style breeding, but genetic manipulation nonetheless—and I want to know why. Someone has a purpose here, and I want to know what it is. Because that special sauce is potentially explosive. It's TNT, which is dangerous enough. But this makes me start to think that someone has spent generations trying to make an atom bomb."
To blow up what? Jack wondered. Who or what was the target?