Powder Burn Page 11

  I lay on the sofa, in the dark, with the amber light from Riverside Drive filtering through the open balcony. We had eaten a pre-prepared, microwaved meal as the sun went down, and talked, in a desultory way, about her childhood in California, her parents and her ambitions. I had listened in silence and she had accused me of not sharing. I had told her that what I had, she would not want to share.

  We had ignored the elephant in the room until ten, then she’d switched on the TV and we had watched the news for an hour. One minor item had caught my attention: there was to be a conference at Columbia, where Troyes, Fokker, and Secretary of State O’Brien were to discuss the future of DNA research. I asked her about it, but she said she was too tired to talk.

  After that, she’d gone and brushed her teeth and I had brushed mine with a toothbrush that she lent me. After that, we had stood in awkward silence outside her bedroom door. Finally, I had said, “Goodnight, Lucia.”

  “I’ll get you some bedding.”

  She had disappeared and I had gone to the sofa to remove my shoes and my socks. She’d returned ten minutes later in a small, lilac satin nightgown that left just enough to the imagination, and an armful of blankets, sheets and pillows. She’d handed them to me and smiled and said, “Goodnight, Lacklan.” Then she’d gone into her room and closed the door.

  Now I lay, unable to sleep, staring at the amber glow making tall, narrow shadows out of the drapes. Somewhere in the city, a bell rang midnight. An owl called out for a mate. Nobody answered. A car pulled up outside, doors slammed, and people laughed and called goodnight as the car accelerated away again.

  I heard the handle move and the door open. A small voice said, “Are you still awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  She came around and sat on the edge of the sofa, peering at me in the gloom. There was a sheen on her nightdress. Her shoulders were tanned and very smooth.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said. “I guess you can’t either.”

  “No.”

  “I’m scared.” I thought I could make out a small smile. “I bet you’re not scared.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Did you really kill those guys?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very hard, aren’t you? Ruthless, I mean.”

  I gave a lopsided smile I wasn’t sure if she could see. “I can be. I prefer not to be.”

  She looked down at her hands on her knees. I tried not to look at the smooth skin of her thighs. “I’m not…” she started, then stopped. “I know you’re married. I’m not asking you to do anything… but would you sleep next to me, in my bed, so I can feel safe? I think, if you’re next to me, I could feel safe…”

  I knew I was on the slippery slope to perdition. I knew I should say no. But I didn’t. I believed I was strong enough to draw the line, or at least I told myself I believed that.

  As Dirty Harry was fond of saying, a man should know his limitations.

  At two AM, she lay asleep with her head on my shoulder. I don’t waste time on guilt. I might feel remorse, but never guilt. Guilt is a waste of time. So I lay, still unable to sleep, watching the drapes move in the cool breeze that was coming in off the river. There had been a deep silence for the last half hour, practically undisturbed by river traffic, cars or voices. Even the owl had fallen silent. Perhaps he’d finally found a mate.

  Eyes and ears work together. We hear more sharply when we can see, and often what we hear in the dark seems to us to be almost a hallucination. So the first time I heard it, I wondered if it had been a trick of the acoustics, or my fatigued mind. But when I heard it the second time, I knew that somebody was picking the lock.

  I tried to slip my arm from under Lucia’s neck. She smiled with her eyes closed and said sleepily, “You want to go again?”

  I whispered in her ear. “When I get back. I need to go to the John.”

  She rolled over and slipped into sleep. I pulled on my pants and moved to the bedroom door. I opened it silently and stood listening. The door to the entrance hall was open. There was a soft click, then a thin slice of brillance that split the darkness. He waited. He knew the landing light was on a timer and would soon cut out, then he would open the door.

  I kept my breathing shallow and slow and waited with him, wondering if it was Charlie or, more probably, Martin Sykes or one of his men.

  The timer ended and the thin slice of luminescence vanished. I knew he was moving, coming in, approaching, but there was absolute silence. I had no point of reference, nothing I could see or hear to judge my next move by. And then the darkness in front of me grew darker, denser.

  I didn’t think. I rammed my fist hard at belly height and made contact with something soft. I heard a grunt and kicked savagely in the direction of the noise. I made contact and heard a heavy body stumble back. The sofa moved and I charged.

  We collided sooner than I expected. He was coming back at me. I felt hands claw at my face. I ignored the pain and drove my fists into where I calculated his floating ribs were. More grunts and he quit clawing my face, but a powerful arm encircled my neck and a foot kicked at my heel. Next thing, I was staggering, being dragged down.

  We landed in a noisy, ugly tangle on the floor. He was on top of me, pounding my face open-handed. My face has gotten used to being pounded over the years. I took the blows, slipped my open right hand into his crotch and squeezed hard. He gave a muffled shriek and staggered to his feet. As he did, I grabbed his leg and twisted and he crashed to the floor. I went after him and took a kick to the head which left me dazed, then two solid punches to my ribs and a right cross that narrowly missed taking my head off. I weathered two more punches to my head, which I half blocked, took two more to my floating ribs, which winded me, and then a kick to my ankle sent me crashing to the floor.

  I was alarmed. Not many people can do that to me. His knee was on my chest and I heard a metallic click. A bright light blinded me for a second. I shielded my eyes and felt the sharp prick of steel against my throat. He shifted his flashlight and said, “Move and I’ll sever your carotid. You understand me, pendejo?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Wrong. I ask, you answer. Are you Lacklan?”

  “Yeah… and you are Charlie.”

  “I ought to kill you.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “Why, for crying out loud? You asked me to come here! I came to help you, you ungrateful son of a bitch! What the hell are you doing?”

  He leaned real close and I felt the blade bite. “Quit asking questions, gringo. You arrived late. Now you get the hell out of Dodge, comprendes? You leave me alone and you leave my sister alone.” He snarled, “And you leave the doctor the hell alone!”

  I squinted. His face was covered in a ski mask, but I could make out the rage in his dark eyes. “Is that what this is about? You’ve got to be kidding! There is nothing between me and the doctor.”

  “Stay out of it.”

  He stood and moved toward the bedroom.

  I got to my feet. “Charlie, what are you doing?”

  I made to go after him, but the door opened and the bedroom light came on, spilling into the living room. Lucia was there, wrapped in a robe and looking very scared.

  “Charlie, what the hell are you doing? For God’s sake…”

  “You betrayed me.”

  “You know that’s not true. You’re out of control. What have you done?”

  His voice was shrill. “What have I done?”

  “Why didn’t you come to me for help? You know I was always there for you.”

  His voice twisted like a hissing snake. “You betrayed me! You dropped me when I needed you most! You turned your back on me and then you tried to play me!”

  “That’s not true, Charlie,” She stepped toward him, reaching for his face. “That’s not true. You have to know that…”

  He snatched her wrist. I took a step. He pulled her toward him, his face less than an inch from hers. “I know that when I needed you, you told me to ge
t lost. And when you needed me, you came running back. I know you’re always playing your games. But let me tell you something, Olga Lucia. I came here tonight to kill you.” His left hand reached out to point his blade at me. “I owe this guy for my sister, that’s why you are alive, ’cause if I kill you, I’m going to have to kill him. But he won’t always be here, and you are going to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, waiting.” He paused, then his voice became a harsh rasp. “Tell me, how long you think that life is going to be?”

  He turned to me. “Now we are even, gringo. Stay away from me.”

  He made toward the door.

  I said, “Wait!”

  He turned.

  “We need to talk, Charlie. I need to know what the hell is going on here. This is bigger than you and your wounded pride.”

  “You don’t need shit. Go back to Boston. Stay out of my way.”

  He stepped out and the door closed behind him. She rushed to me, held onto me, sobbing, with her small hands gripping my back. I gave her a moment, then asked her, “What was that about, Lucia?”

  I pushed her gently back and looked down into her face. Her perfect, classical beauty was gone, replaced by swollen eyes, a red nose, sodden cheeks and a wet, swollen mouth, twisted with grief. She tried to talk between gasped breaths, but couldn’t. I sighed, pulled her close and held her for a minute, until her breathing had steadied. Then I guided her to the sofa and sat her down, switched on the light and went to search for whiskey or brandy. I found a bottle of Scotch in a dresser in the dining area, poured two generous measures, and brought them back to the sofa, where she was drying her eyes with a small, pink handkerchief. I handed her a glass and she took it with both hands.

  I sat and waited. After a second swig, she shuddered and drew breath.

  “I had no idea, Lacklan. You have to believe me. I swear I thought he had taken it in his stride. He was…” She shrugged, giving her head small, quick shakes of disbelief. “He was blasé! Like, he’d moved on before I even spoke to him! I was wounded! By his indifference! And now…” Her face flushed and tears spilled from her eyes again, “…he’s killing people!”

  “Lucia, I need you to focus. There are some things you need to address. One, are you going to call the cops?”

  “No!” She shook her head. “We cannot call the cops! I would be finished by morning. I can’t do that!”

  I nodded. After a moment, I said, “How long has Charlie been practicing martial arts?”

  She frowned. “Uh… I don’t know. Um… three months? Something like that. Why?”

  “Because that guy who claims to be Charlie Vazquez is a seasoned expert with at least ten years experience.”

  She kept balling the handkerchief in her hands, then opening it up and scrunching it into a ball again. Her face was telling me she couldn’t take much more. She was fighting back the tears, frowning incomprehension. “No… No, that was Charlie. It was him, his voice. I know Charlie! That was Charlie. What is happening, Lacklan?”

  I sat and studied her while she dried her face and blew her nose. It all looked genuine. I sighed. “I want to believe you, Lucia, but it is too much of a coincidence.”

  She sagged. “Please, Lacklan, I can’t take any more. What are you talking about?”

  “What am I talking about? I am talking about five young people, untraceable people, adrift in New York, with nobody, on some distant continent, waiting for them to come home; nobody asking awkward questions about where they were or what has happened to them. I am talking about two ambitious, visionary scientists desperately in need of experimental subjects on whom to test the most cutting edge procedures in genetics and nano-technology. And I am talking about how those five people were transformed into the most gifted geniuses in a few months, after one of them met you. You, Olga Lucia, who happen to be a lecturer at the Nano-Tek department funded and chaired by those very visionaries. After one of them met you and fell in love with you. It is too much of a coincidence.”

  She didn’t answer. She just sat, blinking, occasionally sobbing, bunching and un-bunching her pink handkerchief. I went on.

  “I kept seeing, on his calendar and in his diary, this symbol, a red ‘O’. I couldn’t work out what it meant. Then I heard him tonight: He calls you Olga Lucia. It wasn’t a symbol, it was a letter ‘O’, for Olga. Because he was seeing you on a regular basis, every Sunday, not for dates, but because you were handling him.”

  “Don’t say it like that. You make it sound cheap. It wasn’t like that.”

  “No, I’m betting it was anything but cheap. If I look into the ownership of this apartment at the Land Records, who will I find owns it, Lucia? Olga Lucia Salcedo, by inheritance from her dad, or the Ceres Corporation?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You seduced Charlie, you used him to recruit other volunteers, you manipulated him with promises of what he could become, and how you could be together, then you dumped him and destroyed his life, and, in a more literal sense, the lives of his friends. Their blood is on your hands, Lucia, as surely as though you had shot them, poisoned them and run them down yourself.”

  Her face was weary, pale, drained of life. “And isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?” she said. “You think if I had known how this was going to play out I would have gone along with it? Don’t get fucking sanctimonious with me, Lacklan! For your information, I never intended to seduce Charlie. Tell me one woman on Earth who does not use her femininity to get what she wants from time to time! But when I spoke to Charlie there was a spark. We had something. He responded to me and I responded to him! I didn’t make him fall in love with me. We fell in love with each other!” She sat forward, weeping again, her bottom lip curling, pointing her finger at me. “And you can get off your fucking high horse, because I believed—I still believe—in this research. In this program.”

  She flopped back on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. “Oh God help me, please help me, what have I got myself into?”

  “You believe in the program?”

  She dropped her hands. After a moment, she shifted her eyes to look at me, like there had been a delay in my question reaching her. Then she nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “What is it? The program. What is the program?”

  She spread her hands, shaking her head, then let them fall by her side. “It’s hard to explain even to a scientist.”

  “In layman’s terms, Lucia. What is its purpose?”

  She was quiet for a while, staring at her glass, practically untouched on the coffee table. “OK, a gene is a piece of DNA that encodes individual, functional proteins. Double-stranded DNA is constantly being unzipped and transcribed into single-stranded RNA, that is used as a template to assemble the proteins that make us what we are.”

  “Lucia… in layman’s terms?”

  She sighed. “We all carry genes from countless generations of people who have contributed to our, particular, personal genetic code. Some of those people had blue eyes, others green, others brown. Some were blonde, others red, black, brown. Some were strong, powerfully built, others were slight, or sickly…”

  “I get it.”

  “The point is all of those genes are there. We thought for a long time that there must be one gene for each characteristic, but it isn’t so. Genes are just one percent of our DNA. We have only twenty thousand genes. That is too few for all the characteristics that human beings display.”

  I scratched my head “OK...”

  “Genes do different things depending on all kinds of stimuli, they can be spliced, and different bits of genes can be encoded into different proteins…”

  “Wait a minute, you’re losing me. So, are you saying that bits of different genes can combine to make different characteristics?”

  “Exactly. So, the potential contained within the human genome is immense, uncharted. It could, potentially, be unlimited.” She paused. “There is a relatively new science, an emerging science, called epigenetics. We are find
ing that DNA responds to a variety of stresses and stimuli, including stress and diet, and a whole range of other things. In other words, it can learn and evolve, and some genes can be switched on and others switched off.” She hesitated, like it was exhausting trying to explain it to someone who was not an initiate in the arcana. “What defines us, genetically, is as much what is switched off as what is switched on.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She gestured at me with her open hand. “You have dark blue eyes. That is for two reasons: one, your dark blue eyes DNA is activated, or ‘switched on’, and two: all the other eye-color gene combinations are deactivated, or ‘switched off’. And that is true of a million other aspects of who and what you are.” She sat forward with her elbows on her knees, the grief and anxiety draining from her face. “The work that Francoise and Wolfgang are doing is something geneticists have been struggling with for decades. One of the great mysteries of life, Lacklan, was what is it that makes certain genes, or combinations of genes, switch on, but leaves others dormant? What is it, a priori to the genes, that defines who a person is? What is informing the genes that they have to awaken, or remain switched off? Understand that, master it, and you can not only control things like aging, you can optimize any human to be the very best that they can be.”

  “And Troyes and Fokker are finding out…”

  “Wolfgang was not exaggerating when he said that we were on the threshold of becoming like gods. With the technology that we are developing, we can switch off aging, just like that! Flip a switch and turn off the process. We can switch off whatever limitations we like, and switch on and optimize systems in the brain and the body that are extraordinary. If you had seen Hans and Hattie when they first came to us…” She shook her head. “Lacklan, they were sad, lonely, abandoned by a world that did not care. They were nice people who just could not hold their own against a cruel, ruthless world. We transformed them in a week! They were alive, they had purpose, they belonged to our group, our family…”

  I cut across her. “A family that executed them.”