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Nadine drove around the back of the low-rise building and pulled through the service entrance to the elevators. She parked behind an armored vehicle, where four bio-SWAT officers had their gear spread out on the concrete, making last-minute weapons checks for what would hopefully be a predawn raid based on the intel we were about to extract from Soren.

I helped our suspect out of the back of the car, and the three of us rode up to the third floor.

Once inside the interview room, I cut off the zip ties and sat Soren down at a metal table with a D-bolt welded into the surface for less compliant suspects.

Nadine went for coffee.

I took a seat across from him.

“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something?” he asked.

“Under the Gene Protection Act, we can hold you for seventy-two hours just because.”

“Fascists.”

I shrugged. He wasn’t exactly wrong.

I placed Soren’s book on the table, hoping for a reaction.

“Big Camus fan?” I asked.

“Yeah. I collect rare editions of his work.”

It was an old hardback copy of The Stranger. I thumbed carefully through the pages.

“It’s clean,” Soren said.

I was looking for rigidity in the pages, signs they’d been wet at some point, infinitesimal circular stains. Vast amounts of DNA, or plasmids, could be hidden on the pages of a normal book—dropped in microliter increments and left to dry on the pages, only to be rehydrated and used elsewhere. Even a short novel like The Stranger could hold a near-infinite amount of genetic information, with each page hiding the genome sequence for a different mammal, a terrifying disease, or a synthetic species, any of which could be activated in a well-equipped dark gene lab.

“We’re going to put every page under a black-light lamp,” I said.

“Great.”

“They’re bringing your luggage here too. You understand, we’re going to tear it apart.”

“Go nuts.”

“Because you already made the delivery?”

Soren said nothing.

“What was it?” I asked. “Modified embryos?”

He looked at me with thinly veiled disgust. “Do you have any idea how many flights I’ve missed because of nights like this? Some G-man showing up at my gate, hauling me in for questioning? It’s happened with the European Genomic Safety Authority. In France. Brazil. Now I’ve got you assholes wrecking my travel. In spite of all this harassment, I’ve never been charged with a single crime.”

“That’s not quite true,” I said. “From what I hear, the Chinese government would very much like a word with you.”

Soren grew very still.

The door behind me opened. I smelled the acrid, burned aroma of yesterday’s coffee. Nadine swept in, kicking the door shut behind her. She sat down next to me and placed two coffees on the table. Soren reached for one of them, but she smacked his hand.

“Coffee is for good boys.”

The black liquid smelled about as appetizing as Satan’s piss, but it was late and there was no sleep in my immediate future. I took a wincing sip.

“I’ll get right to it,” I said. “We know you drove into town yesterday in a rented Lexus Z Class SUV.”

Soren’s head tilted involuntarily, but he kept his mouth shut.

I answered the unvoiced question: “The GPA has full access to the DOJ’s facial-recognition AI. It scrapes all CCTV and other surveillance databases. A camera caught your face through the windshield on the off-ramp at I-25 and Alameda Avenue at 9:17 A.M. yesterday. We took the loop out here from D.C. this afternoon. Where were you coming from?”

“I’m sure you already know I rented that car in Albuquerque.”

He was right. We did know.

“What were you doing in Albuquerque?” Nadine asked.

“Just visiting.”

Nadine rolled her eyes. “No one just visits Albuquerque.”

I took a pen and pad out of my pocket and placed it on the table. “Write down the names and addresses of everyone you saw. Every place you stayed.”

Soren just smiled.

“What are you doing in Denver, Henrik?” Nadine asked.

“Catching a flight to Tokyo. Trying to catch a flight to Tokyo.”

I said, “We’ve been hearing chatter about a gene lab in Denver. Sophisticated operation engineering ransom bioware. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you happen to be in town.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Nadine said, “We know, everyone knows, that you traffic in high-end genetic elements. Gene networks and sequences. Scythe.”

Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay. It had been a seismic leap forward that left the previous generations of technologies—ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR-Cas9—gasping in the dust. Scythe had ushered in a new era of gene editing and delivery, one that brought about catastrophic results. Which was why getting caught using or selling it for germline modification—the making of a new organism—came with a mandatory thirty-year prison sentence.

“I think I’d like to call my lawyer now,” Soren said. “I still have that right in America, don’t I?”