The Extinction Gene

By Robert Gross

A Nobel Prize winning scientist discovers that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a DNA sequence triggered by global warming sixty million years ago. He now finds that the identical gene in recently extinct and endangered species is becoming active in human beings. He theorizes that current changes in the earth's environment have again triggered the DNA sequence to activity, but is murdered before he can present his findings. While trying to salvage the scientist's research; his assistant and his best friend are hunted across the mountains of western Mongolia by men willing to trade humanity's future for power and money.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 29, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440138669

Book preview

PROLOGUE

WALTER PERRIMAN’S JOINTS CREAKED IN DISHARMONY as he moved through his laboratory.

He wondered idly what the next species that passed itself off as intelligent would be like. At first, he couldn’t remember the word he wanted. Then it came to him in faint, patina-colored memories of Sundays with his grandmother, smells of baking from her kitchen, and long, lazy naps after church in her worn chair.

Meek, he mumbled, That’s right, they’ll be meek.

With a bony, blue-veined hand that trembled with advanced age, he turned off the lamps that illuminated the eclectic clutter of prehistoric artifacts and ultra-modern equipment. One of his graduate students once remarked it looked like the Flintstones and the Jetsons had moved in together.

He moved slowly today, slower than usual, his thoughts an anchor around his body.

He wondered dejectedly about a life wasted.

Sixty years. Sixty years of digging in dirt and caves in every third-world corner of the earth, he thought bitterly.

For what? To better set the date for humanity’s funeral?

Walter fought the bitterness and the fear. Maybe he was wrong. There’s always that possibility. Maybe if he gave back his Nobel Prize? Would that help? Would that allow him to be wrong?

Walter closed his eyes tightly and then reopened them.

Control yourself, old boy; you’re losing it, he whispered.

He needed to see what Allen thought.

He calmed himself, shuffled down the hallway, and shifted the large orange and blue envelope from the crook of his arm. He checked Dr. Allen Trevathan’s address one more time.

Making sure it was marked for overnight delivery, he dropped it in the FedEx box by the front door.

Walter stood outside on the steps. The sun of early spring warmed his back, bent from the years.

He listened to life pass by as it had for the last century outside the American Museum of Natural History. The individual sounds changed through the decades, the composite symphony grew louder and more complex, but the theme remained constant—life.

Business people on self-important missions interspersed with cyclists and joggers, all moving with the beautiful precision of an impromptu street ballet that kept them from tumbling into one another.

He absorbed the vibrations of sound and light and …

Life, he thought suddenly, beautiful and bitter, futile and fulfilling.

A great wave of emotion filled the dark pit, the edge upon which his spirit teetered. For a blinding moment, the radiant cosmic strands of creation, out of which all was made, by which all were bound, became real to him.

Overwhelmed, he felt strangely at peace. He recalled Scrooge drinking the milk of human kindness in a long-ago movie, and smiled to himself.

Thank you, Walter said aloud.

He still felt the warmth of that split second as he straightened perceptibly and headed down the steps.

He moved to the edge of the curb to wait for his car, the one perk he allowed the museum to grant him.

Walter noticed a transit bus moving fast down the lane nearest the curb.

Just before the bus passed the museum, he glimpsed a jogger veer through the foot traffic and accelerate. A well-timed shove that didn’t cause the man to vary the movement of his arms from their rhythmic pumping sent Walter into the street.

A split second before being crushed, Walter noticed how panic-stricken the heavyset driver looked through the windshield. He saw beads of sweat on the wide, pale forehead below the bill of the transit authority cap.

Soon, Walter knew, the driver would feel the effects of an adrenaline rush from driving a vehicle that killed a man.

Poor fellow, Walter thought as he died, he’s a prime candidate for a heart attack.

•

The jogger rounded the corner and continued his unhurried stride. He glanced back casually. No one followed, and no one around him seemed aware that he was a murderer. He slowed to a walk, as though winded, and pulled a satellite phone from its small case clipped to the waistband of his jogging shorts.

He entered an international number that was answered immediately.

Yes? The one spoken word resonated warmly, as though the person was taking a call from a dear friend instead of a hired assassin.

Tell your Russian friends the old man is dead.

Thank you. I will share that information with them.

The jogger sneered at the oily self assurance that radiated from the voice. He could change that.

Be sure to tell the Warlord. The jogger heard a choked sound from the receiver a moment before the phone went silent.

CHAPTER 1

A RUN IN THE DESERT USUALLY purged Allen’s mind. The brain-boiling Arizona heat rippled through his body in hazy synchronization with his stride and cleared away thoughts.

Not today.

It was spring. Peak temperatures were a month off, but it was still 108 degrees.

He liked to run without a shirt. He stayed cooler if he exposed as much body surface as possible to the humidity-starved air.

Allen glanced down to check a tricky stretch of terrain and noticed wild strands of gray hair on his chest, mixed in with the dark brown.

When the hell did they pop up? They weren’t there yesterday.

He felt the first twinges of pain in his once-tireless legs.

Pretty early in the run for that, stud, he thought.

Shit. He had gray hair, his legs hurt, and his first pair of glasses lay on his desk, the ultimate insult to an ex-combat marksman.

Things change, he knew, but this fast?

He decided that mortality sucks and kept running, determined not to ruin a perfectly good run by contemplating anything deeper than the prairie-dog holes he dodged.

Allen, something is changing out here.

This isn’t the same desert.

Something is out of balance.

Despite his efforts, the words of his dad’s last letter rolled up in his consciousness and interrupted his zen-like focus.

Was his dad perplexed, haunted? He had been dying when he wrote it.

The air did feel different today, and even looked odd. It seemed to shimmer at a strange frequency, and the hawks overhead circled in a different direction than normal.

They say when a man loses one of his senses, the other senses become more perceptive. Maybe when a man’s time is up, he starts noticing other things, other sensations that the living world overpowers and drowns out.

There are too many strange feelings in the air.

Maybe they’ve been there my whole life—maybe I’m just now noticing, but the world is changing, and I don’t think we’re going to be part of it much longer.

Allen preferred to remember his dad as the robust soldier and scholar who hunted and walked in the desert every day with him—teaching, always teaching. His mind’s inner eye winced at the image of the frail, introspective invalid that his father became, staring out the window at the desert he loved, but whose heart no longer allowed him to explore.

Allen shook his head to clear his mind.

Jet lag, he thought to himself, jet lag, gray chest hairs, and too many Brazilian beers.

The muscles around the faded scars in his legs began to ache more, a signal it was time to finish. Much farther and the still-buried shrapnel would begin to burn like heating elements.

As he neared his home at the base of a saguaro-spiked plateau, he heard the phone ring through the open window. He loped up the low steps into the back door just in time to hear his mother’s voice on the answering machine.

… I didn’t know you were back from Rio until I talked to your secretary. I hope you haven’t gone for a run. It’s too hot even for a Trevathan. Call me when you can. Love you.

Allen smiled sadly. He’d called her before he boarded his plane, and she didn’t remember.

He’d have to get her back to the doctors. They said no Alzheimer’s, just a little age-related decrease in mental function along with what they called moderate situational depression. Loneliness and boredom is what Allen called it. He swore to himself—again—to spend more time with her.

Her apartment was on his way from the university to the research site. He’d stop by in the morning.

Allen opened the refrigerator door and dug for a beer. He knew there had to be at least one, maybe behind the insect specimen rack.

Gotcha, he said out loud.

The incandescence of the explosion on the TV he’d forgotten to turn off flooded his small den and lit up the doorway into the kitchen. He walked in and flopped down in the beat-up leather chair his dad had left him. Turning up the sound with one hand on the remote, he expertly popped the top of his trophy with the other.

… no bomb, the voice of the narrator intoned, at least, no intentional bomb. It is the accidental explosion of a ship being loaded with liquefied natural gas in the Russian port city of Dudinka two years ago. Over eighteen hundred people were killed. At the time, the Russian government denied the occurrence. Now, two years later, in an effort to garner international support for immense pipeline projects planned from its gas fields through other countries, this film has been released.

The picture returned in ultra-slow motion. It showed the water in the harbor compress and then spring outward a beat slower than the fireball that reached into the sky.

The shockwave slowed as it neared shore, its energy translated into a growing mass of sea water. By the time it hit the docks and warehouses, slightly more than a second after the explosion, the man-made tsunami was twenty feet high and moved at just under the speed of sound.

The banner running beneath the picture quoted experts as saying the potential for such incidents exists, but no other events have ever occurred. The experts affirmed that the shipment, by sea, of natural gas in its pressurized, liquid state has a proven safety record.

Maybe so, Allen thought, but I damn sure wouldn’t want any beachfront property around where they were loading the stuff.

The narrator’s voice continued, Scientists are concerned about the impact construction on such a large scale could have on world ecology. They cite as an example the largest of the pipeline projects, planned to pass through an unspoiled wilderness between Russia and China in the Altai Mountains.

Allen pulled the beer away from his mouth and set it on the arm of the chair. It made a new moist ring among other matching stains.

That’s where Walter’s been working, he thought.

He held a sip of beer in his mouth, savoring the taste, and listened closer.

Russian authorities disagree, saying pipelines around the world will afford a higher degree of safety and consistency with, above all else, less risk to the earth’s fragile environment.

Allen choked on the beer. It spewed between his lips and down his chest.

He’d have to remember to tell his research team the good news, the Russians have gone green.

He laughed out loud and took another draw.

Walter arrived home in New York yesterday. He’d call and tell him about this.

Allen heard a truck’s engine. Through the window, he saw the white-paneled FedEx van. The driver bounced the door open. With a large orange and blue envelope tucked under his arm, he headed for the front door.

Allen was halfway across the room before the doorbell rang.

CHAPTER 2

ALLEN STRETCHED HIS LEGS AS FAR as he could in the confines of the cramped seat. He grimaced at the spasm of muscles.

He glowered at the business class passengers as they boarded. They balanced champagne glasses in their hands as they settled into their wide seats, with extra leg room and real food, not to mention easy access to a restroom. He could see it all, ten feet in front of him, until they pulled the curtain.

I wouldn’t do this for anyone but Walter, he decided.

Immediately after Walter’s package arrived at Allen’s home about five hours earlier, Allen had tried to contact him, but Walter didn’t carry a phone, no one was home, and his office was closed.

Allen had been on a dead run since, having time only to read the cover letter in the package, sprinting aboard just before the hatch of the 757 slid shut.

I should be pulling core samples of thousand-year-old saguaro cactus instead of worrying about what toilet to use. Coach class. Damn, Walter, what’re you thinking? Allen grumped, … shit, and I didn’t stop and see my mother.

Fretting that he had forgotten something else, he stood to check his equipment case in the overhead bin.

Allen’s bladder reminded him of the extra-large coffee he killed while he raced to the airport. He looked to the back of the plane. Between him and the coach cabin toilet, four people stood in the aisle trying to stuff bags where they wouldn’t fit.

He rolled his eyes, sat down, and wedged the little airline pillow into the small of his back, wondering about Walter.

Allen met Walter for the first time eight years ago at a conference titled New Approaches to Ecologic Event Dating. Allen had been the keynote speaker. The great Dr. Walter Perriman, Nobel Laureate, sat in the back, unannounced and unrecognized. He didn’t make himself known until the conference ended.

Afterward Perriman cornered him, grilling him on every word and fact. By the time the encounter was over, Allen remembered feeling like he had gone through the defense of his dissertation all over again, with the brains of the entire review committee rolled up into one old man.

He recalled how their relationship grew from mutual respect to genuine friendship. They talked on the phone regularly, traded e-mails, and saw each other every two or three months.

Allen noticed that Walter ravenously devoured information about ecologic event dating. At times when they talked, it seemed to Allen a battle went on in the old man’s mind about how much information to share. He knew Walter trusted him totally. It seemed more that he didn’t trust himself or rather didn’t trust the conclusions he reached.

Now, as the plane took off, Allen worked his arm under the narrow seat and pulled out the file holder that he used as a briefcase, taking out a sheaf of papers, the contents of Walter’s package.

All right, Walter, Allen thought, let’s see what’s so important you don’t trust it going out in cyberspace.

On the front was the handwritten note in Perriman’s meticulous script:

Allen,

Enclosed is a round-trip ticket to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The departure date is today, the return is open ended, and the seat, due to airline bookings, I’m afraid, is coach. I know you will complain the entire flight and never let me forget I took advantage of our friendship to this extent.

Circumstances of which you will later become aware dictate that you arrive in Ulaanbaatar at the soonest possible time, and that, my dear friend, requires you to depart now, regardless of personal comfort or convenience. As you well know, I am not the dramatic type. If I were, I would tell you that the next week may be the most desperately important of your life.

As it is, I trust only that you will indulge an old man in one more favor.

Walter

P.S. Upon your return, it will be my treat at