15
"Carb loading again?" Jack said as he sat down.
He'd arrived at the diner and found Levy's car in the lot, but no Levy. He checked inside and found him chowing down at a table for two along an inner wall.
Levy looked up from his platter of latkes and applesauce. "These are fabulous."
"Have I got a friend for you."
Jack hid his annoyance. He'd wanted to meet outside, give him the hairbrush, and be off. Now there'd be chit-chat and exhortations to join in on the eating. Jack wasn't hungry and in less of a chit-chatty mood than usual, which meant approaching zero.
A waitress showed up, older and not as pretty or perky as the last one, and asked what Jack was having.
"The latkes," Levy said. "I'm not kidding. They're loaded with little bits of onion and fried to perfection. You've got to try them."
Jack looked at the oily lumps of potato and decided to pass. He ordered coffee.
He slipped the brush out of his pocket and, touching only the bristles, slid it toward Levy along the rear edge of the table.
"This belongs to Dawn."
Levy's mouth was too full for speech so he simply nodded and shoved it into a side pocket of his suit jacket.
"When can I expect results? I promised tomorrow."
He swallowed. "Promised? Who did you promise? I hope you didn't—"
"Don't worry. Didn't mention Creighton. But I needed Christy's help to get the sample. I implied I had an in with a commercial lab."
"Tomorrow might be pushing it. We have a queue for DNA analysis."
"So, pull rank."
"Already did that with the last sample. Too often might attract attention. I'd like to keep this to myself for the time being."
Jack watched him. "Planning a palace coup?"
"Not at all. But I don't want a certain camel sticking her nose into this particular tent. You know how that story goes."
Jack hadn't the vaguest.
"Enlighten me."
"It's an old Arabian tale about a desert traveler who beds down in his tent on a cold night. His camel asks if it can stick its nose in the tent to keep it warm. The guy says yes. Later the camel asks if it can put its head inside. The guy says yes. Then come the front legs, then the hind legs. Soon the Arab is out on the sand and the camel has the tent all to itself."
Jack had to smile. "Are you telling me Doctor Vecca's got a hump on her back?"
"No, but she's a camel nonetheless."
"What do you think you'll find, gene-wise?"
He shrugged. "We know Christy's chock full of oDNA. If Dawn's father had a fair amount, that could mean Dawn is loaded. If she is, and she mates with Bolton—also packed with oDNA—that baby could be off the map."
"If… could… you don't sound very sure."
Levy looked annoyed. "If I knew, I wouldn't have to run tests, would I? Look, if Dawn's father is a regular Joe like you or me, he probably didn't pass on much oDNA. That said, if he fertilized an ovum from Christy that carried very little of her oDN A—don't forget: Only half of a parent's genes wind up in any given ovum or spermatozoon—Dawn would be relatively oDNA free. And thus her child, even with Bolton as a father, could have no more oDNA than Bolton contributed."
"So these generations of barnyard breeding, as you called it, could be for nothing."
"Absolutely. It has a hit-or-miss aspect to it. Let's just hope we're dealing with a series of misses."
"Why?"
Jack knew why he didn't want Jonah Stevens's plan to succeed. Any scheme that involved the Otherness had to mean bad news for the world as he and Gia and Vicky knew it. But what did Levy care? He knew nothing of the Otherness, and Jack would have thought he'd be fascinated by the outcome.
Levy looked uncomfortable. "It's hard to say. Jonah Stevens… what could he have known of his genome? No one knew about oDNA thirty-odd years ago. So how could he know he carried something different?"
Jack shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. "Maybe he didn't. Maybe he just sensed he was 'special' and wanted to preserve his bloodline."
"Concentrate his bloodline is more like it. There's a certain primitiveness about this, a certain sense of cunning purpose that makes my skin crawl." A
fleeting smile. "INot very scientific sounding, is it. But this isn't a rational deduction. It's a gut reaction."
Jack regarded Levy. Here sat a guy who dealt in chemicals and proteins, dissecting how they were structured and interacted, and oDNA should have been just another of those proteins. Yet his primitive hindbrain, the ghost of reptiles past, sensed something wrong, something threatening, something other.
"Never hurts to listen to your gut now and then, I al—"
Jack's phone rang. Gia? He checked the readout. No… Christy.
"Yeah?"
"Jack, I've got to talk to you."
"What's up?"
"Not on the phone. Can you meet me at the same place as this afternoon?"
"I guess so. Tomorrow morning?"
"No! It's got to be tonight!"
Back to Forest Hills? Tonight? No way.
"What's the emergency?"
"Everything has gone to hell. That man is the devil himself." She sobbed. "Please, Jack. I may have lost Dawn for good. This can't wait till tomorrow. Please?"
He sighed. He'd been looking forward to kicking back at Gia's, putting his feet up, cracking a brew…
"All right, but I'm north of the city. Let's make it someplace midway. Do you know where Van Cortlandt Park is?"
"Sure."
"Good…"