Spiral

Why had she sent Jake away? The feelings he aroused disturbed her, kept her off-balance. He was great with Dylan, but still she was nervous around him. She needed to keep her distance. She hoped she’d be strong enough.

She tried to calm herself, tried to think it through. On the table before her was the folder Mel Lorince had left. Beside it were the directions to the letterbox. And next to that the disk with the glowing, pulsing fungus shapes: the mushroom, the arrowhead, and the Crawler.

He hadn’t committed suicide, she knew that for sure now. He had jumped, but it was to get away from the woman. At least that made sense. Horrifying as it was, at least that made sense. But what about the letterbox, the glowing fungi-what were they about? It couldn’t be a coincidence that he had left this trail for them to follow right before he died. They must have missed something. Liam had left something else behind for them to find.

But what? She went back through the materials in the envelope that Liam’s lawyer had left. Nothing unusual besides the note about the letterbox. Then what? Logic, Ms. Connor. Think it through. If Liam had left them something else, reason said it would have been something at the end of the trail they’d already followed.

The end of the trail was the piece of wood with the glowing fungi.

She held the piece of wood up to the light. Her grandfather had drilled holes in the side of the piece and inserted three glass lyophil straws, each containing cultures of the fungus in case the stuff on the outside died. That was odd, now that she thought about it. Why was he so interested in making sure she had a living batch of the fungus?

The three symbols glowed, pulsing. She studied them closely, looking for watermarks, secret writing, she didn’t know what. He must have worked very hard to get them to turn on and off like that. It was a biological feedback loop, she knew. Express the green fluorescent protein pathway from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish, then have that expression induce the creation of a suppressor that would turn it off. Similar for the red and yellow fungi, using different proteins. Liam had played these games before. He was a master at genetic modification.

She stared at the green arrowhead. Her son’s letterboxing symbol. It pulsed, one long, one short. The pattern was irregular. Something must have gone wrong in Liam’s genetic circuit.

No. Not irregular. A pattern.

A repeating pattern.

A memory came to her, when she was a little girl. She and Liam played a game called telegraph. They tapped out messages using Morse code. She’d played the same game with Dylan, teaching him to spell out his name.

The red. A long pulse, then two shorter.

The green one. A long pulse, then short.

The yellow. A short pulse, followed by a longer one.

Oh my God.

The Morse code symbols were all letters in Dylan’s name-was that it? Then the series of dots and dashes became clear to her:

– • • = D

– • = N

• – = A

She picked up Liam’s fungus disk. DNA. The idea hit her like a lightning bolt. She grabbed the instructions:

The hollow hides a footpath, follow it you must,

to the settler’s creek that dances across the land held in trust.

The first letter of each line throughout the entire message was an A, C, or T. Written altogether, they spelled out: TTATATATCT. The last letters were all G’s and T’s: TTGGTTTTGG.

The first and last letters spelled out two short genetic sequences.

Primers. They were primers. The beginning and end of a genetic string.

She stared at the glowing fungi, her skin electric. She was as certain as she’d ever been of anything. Liam had hidden his message inside the fungus. He had written it into its genome.

JAKE WOKE ON THE COUCH, FULLY DRESSED, HIS CELL RINGING. His sleep had been black, devoid of dreams. He fished the phone from the coffee table. It was six-thirty a.m. He didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was 202-Washington, D.C.

“Yes?”

A woman’s voice was on the line. “Professor Sterling? Can you hold? The deputy national security adviser will be with you in a moment.” Then she was off the line.

Lawrence Dunne?

Dunne was a foreign-policy wunderkind, one of the few to predict both the spectacular fall of the Soviet Union and the equally spectacular rise of China. Jake had met Dunne once, at a Defense Science Board reception, before Dunne was promoted to deputy national security adviser. Dunne knew how to work a room, had struck Jake as fiercely intelligent, but that didn’t mean Jake liked him. He didn’t. Jake’s general experience was that those on the civilian side of the national security establishment were dangerously untempered, playing games with knives when they had never been cut. Dunne was no exception.

“Professor Sterling?”

“I’m here.”