A: He’s good-looking, though.
D: No way!
A: D—I think we got something out of those meetings. I was thinking—it happens every now and then—and wondering why M asked me to join the group. I think he picked a crew with different abilities. Like he picked a band. Know what I mean?
D: What did he pick M-M for? She’s a bitch!
A: You get the feeling that inside that little head all kinds of gears are turning?
D: No. Just stink bombs going off.
A: What I came away with was somebody saying—was it you? That we needed to figure out why everybody is interested in us.
D: Because we’re cute?
A: Well, that’s the main reason, but why else? Just because we’re Americans?
D: You think C-8 is thinking about letting something big jump off in the States?
A: They wouldn’t dare. There’s not that much testosterone in the world.
D: You said they were true believers. They don’t have to have the balls if they believe hard enough. Anyway, I wouldn’t put it past them.
A: The thing is that they can find some little scraps of “right” in their arguments—you know, progress or something like that—and they take that and run with it as if it’s the Holy Grail.
D: I don’t know. Hey, got another text message coming in. From Javier. I’ll ghost it to your phone.
A: You going to tell him I’m listening in?
D: No. No way it’s personal from Javier.
J: Dahlia. Javier here. I got a message from an old friend. We used to be pretty close. She’s a technician, and the stuff she’s saying is pretty complex. Michael thinks you might be able to understand it.
A: Michael got Javier to text? Dahlia—isn’t that strange?
D: Javier. Good to hear from you. I’m okay with most science stuff. What is your friend saying?
J: She’s depressed over what she calls some pretty serious shit. But she was always a little weepy. If you don’t want to deal with it, we can let it drop. She called in the early AM. I don’t know if her line was secure or not.
D: I can deal with it.
A: D—ask him who’s she a technician for?
D: Javier, who does she work for?
J: CT Industrial, C-8’s medical arm. She’s a lab techie.
A: Dahlia, we’re onto something!
J: She might be losing it. I don’t know. Michael thinks … I don’t know.…
D: You want me to call her?
J: It might be better. We need to figure a way to establish contact without compromising her.
D: Especially if she’s your friend.
J: That’s not the issue, Dahlia.
D: Okay. Okay.
A: D—ask him if she’s willing to talk to you.
D: She probably just needs to talk to somebody, Javier. You get me the details and I’ll check her out. No problem.
J: I’ll clear it with Michael—see what he wants to do. Talk to you later.
D: Okay.
D: Anja, he’s off the circuit. What did you make of that? Wait, I’m getting another text. It’s from Michael.
M: Dahlia, this is Michael—something has come up. Javier will call or text you—probably within the next hour or so. There’s somebody in Minnesota who we might want to contact. I don’t know a lot about it yet, but I know Javier’s a little nuts. It sounds like an old girlfriend or something. Don’t get mad if it starts to get frustrating. I’ve never seen Javier this upset before.
D: Yeah. Okay. Michael, I just talked to Javier. I think he needs me to talk to this girl. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’ll get on it.
M: Good. I don’t know how big a deal it is either. But what I do know is that we have a direct link to a C-8 company, so we have to see if there’s a change in the rhythm. Maybe you can analyze how it connects together. I think we need to get people focused on different groups. Maybe you can home in on Javier’s contact in Minnesota.
D: Michael, it’s Javier’s contact. Why doesn’t he deal with it?
M: He’s close to weirding out on me now. I can’t afford to lose him. We can’t afford to lose him. I’m having him and Mei-Mei keep an eye on Sayeed’s group.
D: Why Mei-Mei?
M: She speaks Arabic. Dahlia, you’re the one for this. Later.
D: Anja, Michael’s off. What’s going on?
A: If Javier is upset, there must be a reason. If Michael is reaching out to you, there must be a reason too. And this technician works for a C-8 company, right?
D: Yeah?
A: So … yeah. But is there something that they’re not telling us?
D: Javier said that M told him to run it by me. And he ran it by me even before M thought he would. Were you ever suspicious that Michael was holding back on us?
A: Not really. The group is so diverse. What did Lincoln say—you can’t fool anybody—something like that?
D: Then it’s Javier who knows more than his prayers.
A: What does that mean?
D: It means that we’re getting pieces of a puzzle to put together, and we don’t know what the finished picture looks like. But if we get enough pieces, we’ll be able to figure it out.
A: Oh, that sounds so smart. Give yourself a pat on the back. Especially that bit about Michael wanting to reach out through you. He must think the modeling is working.
D: I didn’t say that.
A: You were probably going to.
D: I need to go find some more to eat.
A: Dahlia, don’t underestimate yourself on this.
D: Can you imagine M-M speaking Arabic? That really pisses me off.
A: Can you imagine how pissed you’d be if you were edgy? My, my! Later, Dahlia darling.
As I shut off the cell, I remembered a box of crackers I had in my closet. I found them. They were stale, but mucho delicious.
14
“Dahlia, you are not being dissed!” Anja said.
“Then why are we on the plane coming into St. Paul to have a talk with a girl who Javier could have had on the phone,” I said. “Meanwhile Mei-Mei is busy tracking down Sayeed in North Africa!”
“And you’re mad because she speaks Arabic!”
“I just don’t get the picture,” I said.
“There’s something more to Javier’s embarrassment when he talks about this girl,” Anja said. “I don’t get it either, but I guess we’ll find out. I hope you’re never mad at me!”
I mumbled something about being sorry and told myself to get my mind back to work. Anja was on the money when she said that I was letting Mei-Mei get on my nerves.
On the ground, in a taxi, and checking in at the Crowne Plaza, St. Paul, Minnesota. The guards in the lobby were all white. Big, beefy guys who might have played football. Anja’s FoneTrac 8 was really too big to carry around, but I still watched over her shoulder as she scrolled through an animated history of the city. She read to me that Minnesota had the largest white urban community in the United States.
“I thought the clerk was giving me funny looks when we checked in,” I said when we got to the room.
“You’re a little brown-skinned girl checking into a luxury hotel,” Anja said. “And you have a car in their lot waiting for you, so you must be somebody. I think he was waiting for you to announce your title or something.”
I caught a glimpse of myself in the hotel mirror. Not bad, but I needed a comb.
“You want to get something to eat?” Anja asked. “You drive, I’ll eat.”
“I don’t drive,” I said. “You didn’t say anything when Michael said he would arrange for a car to be at the hotel for us, so I thought you drove.”
“You didn’t say anything, so I thought you drove!”
We were laughing and it felt really good
“You think it’s one of those cars that drive themselves?” I asked.
Anja checked the itinerary that Michael had given us and found that the car was an automatic with GPS guidance. The café we were supp
osed to meet Ellen Chaikin, Javier’s contact, was only two miles from the hotel, but we decided to cab it.
“You’re going to the Pig’s Eye Café in Rondoville?” The cabdriver squinted through his clear left lens. “That’s where you’re going?”
“Yeah.” Anja. “You know where it is?”
“Get in.”
Four over-the-speed-limit minutes into the ride, we arrived at a barbed-wire gate with armed guards. They were either Sturmers or Sturmer wannabes. A short, roundish dude with a baby face looked at the driver and then back at me and Anja.
“More working girls?”
“Could be.” The cab driver.
They rolled aside the barbed-wire gate and let us through. Anja asked for the driver’s number. He said he didn’t give it out. Abrupt. To the point.
“There’s a long way here,” he said. “Around the lake road and through the new development. It’ll cost you twice as much and you’ll have to pay both ways for a cab to pick you up. If one will come out here. Twelve minutes at the most.”
It was what the world had come to, gates and “safe routes” and cars sliding through the night. It was what C-8 had built and was trying to keep going. And Michael and me and Anja and our little crew trying hard to be more than road bumps in their path.
Inside the Pig’s Eye Café. The gaudy decor wasn’t as bad as the stupid music, and the stupid music wasn’t as bad as the stickiness of the floor. We found a booth near a window and sat down.
“I’ll take grilled cheese on wheat, and tea,” Anja said to the waitress when she came to us.
“Sounds good to me;” I said, handing her the stained menu.
“You want cups or glasses?” The woman’s wig was slightly off center and her skin was pale white. She looked down at us with a half sneer that said “I’m looking down on you two.”
“American on mine.” Anja.
“You too?”
“Yeah.”
The woman mean mugged me, and I threw her my best up-yours smile.
“Michael had this place on the itinerary and I assumed it had been Ellen’s idea to meet here,” Anja says, looking around after the woman strode away. “I’m not sure now.”
“It’s deliberately out of the way,” I said. “She might be afraid of being seen with us.”
“This place stinks.”
It did. I had smelled something like it before, stale beer and urine settling into weeks-old dirt, vomit and ammonia on weekend mornings, something vile on the stove that needed to be taken off hours ago. There were fifteen other customers, nine guys and six girls. The guys could have been Sturmers, but they didn’t have the whole costume. While real Sturmers had retro biker outfits, these guys had only some of the gear, a leather jacket here, a few studs there. Some customers left, another drifted in. It was not a place for a medical technician.
Javier had said he would send Ellen our pictures. It made me feel uncomfortable to know that Javier had my picture to send to anyone.
The place wasn’t exactly dark, but the deep-red paint gave it the feel of a funeral home. I wanted to ask Anja how her people cremated their dead, but I didn’t want to spook her out.
The grilled cheese sandwiches came, along with glasses of tea.
“We should have ordered wine,” I say. “You like wine?”
“I don’t know,” Anja says. “Never drank any. But my father used to drink a lot. When my parents broke up, he used to take me to bars and get plastered. I thought he was hoping I’d get kidnapped or something.”
A nervous-looking woman came in, looked around, and then walked over to the woman who had served us. Nervous Girl was, tall, young, and kind of pretty. She wore a short flared skirt and carried a square black-and-silver purse. When the waitress pointed in our direction, I figured Ellen had arrived.
“Here comes our contact,” I said to Anja.
She came over, smiled, and took the seat that Anja left as she slid over.
“You must be Dahlia,” Ellen said. “I have a friend from the Dominican Republic. She’s even darker than you.”
What the hell did that mean?
“And I’m Anja,” Anja said. “Nice to meet you.”
Ellen looked about twenty-two, twenty-three, with a pleasant face. Her hair was combed to one side, and I wondered if that was the way she usually wore it.
“How was your trip?” Ellen asked. Nice voice.
“Uneventful,” I said.
“I really don’t like flying anymore,” Ellen said. “I had some work done on my shoulder and they moved my chip or something. It doesn’t register right, and I keep having to go through a body search.”
“The weather is nice in Minnesota,” Anja said. “I thought it would be cooler.”
“There’s no humidity to speak of, even though we’re near the lake,” Ellen said. “Will you be in St. Paul long?”
The waitress came over with her pad and asked Ellen if she wanted anything. She took her order for a white wine and walked away without saying anything.
“I don’t think so,” I answer. “Are you from here?”
“More or less,” she answered. “I was in New Jersey briefly after Javier’s … accident. Then I came back here.”
“I got the idea that you were important to him,” I said.
“We met at Stanford. We were among a group of Wunderkinder they took right out of tenth grade. I was fifteen and he was a little younger, I thought. He was into law and I liked science. I also liked Javier. A lot. We dreamed a lot of good stuff. Marriage and forever and ever and that kind of thing. It meant everything to me. Not just a lot. Everything.
“Then one day he went out with some frat guys. They went off campus and they all started drinking. They started horsing around, and one of them picked him up and threw him across a table. He felt something go …”
She stopped talking, and Anja put her hand on her arm.
“You don’t have to go on, Ellen,” Anja said.
“He felt something go wrong with his back, but he didn’t want to look as if he couldn’t hang out with the other guys, so he didn’t say anything. He tried driving home alone even though he was in a lot of pain.”
“And that’s when he had the accident?”
“He was so bitter.”
She was crying.
“To me it didn’t matter—it mattered, but I still loved him,” Ellen said. “You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“He didn’t want to see me again after he got out of the hospital.” Ellen took a small sip of her drink. “It was as if I represented all his dreams, and none of them could come true anymore.”
“You’ve stayed in touch?”
“He makes sure to keep me away,” Ellen said. “I can’t talk about us anymore. When he hooked up with Michael, I was so proud of him. He still wanted to make a difference in the world. When I got the job with CTI, it was like we were touching through a glass wall. It wasn’t much, but it was something. We were both trying to make a difference.”
“What do you do for CTI?” Anja asked.
“Blood work, mostly,” Ellen said. “I was involved in the Jack-2 project.”
“Which is?”
“We did a lot of work on prostaglandin anomalies,” Ellen said. “We started with J-2 and figured a way to alter the composition of the prostaglandin to—Are you into biology?”
“Not at all,” Anja said. She seemed a lot more relaxed, even though I hadn’t particularly noticed her being uptight before.
“Well, the theory is that things go wrong in the body because the prostaglandins don’t work as well as they should,” Ellen said. “We were working on the J-2 prostaglandin progressions. They go through these progressions and then, for some reason, the patterns alter, and they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do. We were working on one progression, the one that alters platelet production, when one of our researchers found the link between the transmitters—the proteins that carry the prostaglandin from one cell to the
other—and a bunch of diseases. The two most promising—”
Ellen stopped and looked around the bar. Somebody had changed the music. Too loud, but it wasn’t bad.
“Cell growth regulation and cell repair,” Ellen said. “We all got excited. I’m excited now, just talking about it. Our people showed the results of the initial tests to some new execs who came in from somewhere. They stopped everything. They just moved the funding back to bacteria analysis, which isn’t all that interesting.”
“What’s the point?” I asked. “You think they just didn’t get … whatever you were getting?”
Ellen leaned forward until she was less than a foot from my face. “The key is the rate of cell growth. How many platelets are being produced, or how many white blood cells? If you control cell growth and keep it consistent, you can stop most cancers, and you can slow down the aging process until you wouldn’t be able to notice it in most people until they reached a hundred and ten or so.”
“So why did they stop it?” Anja.
“Because the correction—adjusting the way the cells developed—was a process, not a drug. You don’t make money on processes. You make money on drugs. If we found a way to convert the process so that it would work through pills—even fifty percent as effectively—CTI stood to make trillions of dollars!”