While Justice Sleeps(81)
However, every report found a home somewhere. She simply had to find this one’s. Reaching for her phone, she summoned her assistant.
“Boss?” he said, poking his head in the door. “You look like crap. Sleep here last night?”
“As a matter of fact,” Betty grumbled. “Mike, who is the biggest nerd in DHS? The one who’d be at a Trekkie convention if there was one in town.”
Mike laughed. “Seriously? In this place? It’s easier to name the ones who wouldn’t be.” He propped his shoulder against the doorjamb. “What are you looking for?”
“A government-employed conspiracy theorist who actually keeps copies of the reports they send over here.”
His grin split his face. “Oh, that’s easy. Me.”
Betty frowned. “You?”
“I’m a male secretary who used to work at the Defense Department. I happen to know they are watching us, and I liked having ammunition.” He sauntered inside. “What are you looking for?”
“Any report that mentions biogenetic research in India or China. Preferably in the last three years. Got anything like that?”
“What you’re looking for is the Dooley Commission Report on the Potential Threat of Bioweapons in Asia.”
Betty’s mouth fell open. “Are you serious?”
“Pat Dooley, congresswoman from Alabama, had a sub-subcommittee a couple of years ago, and she appointed a task force. My friend over in the House got assigned to do research. Found some crazy stuff, I’ll tell you.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.” He left her doorway and returned several minutes later bearing a bound report. “Called in a favor from my friend. He’s emailing me his research notes too.”
“Did you tell him who was asking?”
Mike looked annoyed. “No.”
“Sorry,” she apologized with a smile. “I’m on edge.”
He walked over and set the stack on her desk. “Then this stuff will give you nightmares.”
Two hours later, Betty agreed. The more she read, though, the more nervous she became. Hygeia, it seemed, did more than search for ways to monetize the human genome. They’d taken on the lucrative side project of military research as well. According to the report, they’d begun testing the accuracy of genetic therapies on groups based on haplogroups.
Betty leaned her elbow on the desk, fingers worrying lips chewed free of lipstick. Her training in chemistry gave her the ability to sift through scientific data, but genetics was out of her league. What she needed was a third party. Someone who’d know about chromosomal research and could take a look at the data.
“Okay. If I can’t get government information from the government, I’ll try the next best thing,” she mused aloud. Government databases were designed to take information in, not share it. The Internet was far superior for actual research, if you didn’t mind the crazies and whack jobs you stumbled over on your way to the truth.
Smirking to herself, she switched windows and opened a web browser. The familiar search box appeared. The first query yielded only cursory information. Hygeia was a small genetics company in Mumbai, India, run by a wunderkind trained in America’s own intellectual laboratories. He’d returned to his native India and founded the biotech, whose venture capital–funded purpose was the exploration of how to monetize the human genome.
The brief corporate bio, accompanied by hundreds of articles, told the same press-released story again and again. Pages listed as cached led to broken links and missing websites. After working her way through nearly a hundred deleted mentions, she hit upon a business magazine announcing Hygeia’s acquisition by Advar.
She tracked the article, but nothing popped. Deciding to take a different tack, she typed in the words Hygeia and Advar and Haplogroups and hit enter.
Her computer screen went black.
“What the hell?” She wiggled her mouse, to no avail. Even the cursor had disappeared.
Grumbling, she rebooted the machine and waited for it to whir to life. After running for nearly two days straight, she supposed, a shutdown was inevitable. When the system finally returned to functional, she scanned her desktop as she moved to open the browser. Her finger paused over the mouse.
An unfamiliar icon had appeared on her desktop. The icon was shaped like a question mark, but it had eyes that seemed to dance.
Betty thought about every computer seminar that senior management in DHS had been forced to sit through. Protocols about breaches, viruses, and worms had been emblazoned into her memory. But the genial question mark implored her to ignore that training and go with instinct.
She clicked.
* * *
—
In the Atlanta airport, Jared hunched over his laptop, scanning every few minutes for signs of trouble. Avery sat in the seat beside him, tense, pretending to read. Their narrow escape had bought them time, and no one had followed them to the airport. When the chirp sounded on his monitor, he glanced over to the corner of the screen. And froze.
Someone had tripped his Internet alarm and gone hunting for their search terms. “Avery?”
She glanced up from her book. “What’s up?”
“Someone has gone fishing. In a famous river,” Jared said cryptically.