Spiral

He led them down the hall, past a door that opened to the bathroom, then on to another room, what Jake surmised had once been the master bedroom. The door had been taken off the hinges. In its place was a series of plastic transparent curtains. “Keeps the dust down,” he said as he pulled them back. “Here it is. My manufacturing facility.”

Jake was taken aback. He had expected a few beakers and gels, but nothing like this. The onetime master bedroom was a full-fledged biotech lab. Along the wall were black-topped lab benches with overhead cabinets, all of it new and shiny. On the countertops were the standard fare of a modern biology lab: centrifuges, pipettes, shakers, and row upon row of reagents. Except for a few odd-looking pieces that were clearly homemade, Jake could have been in any of a hundred research labs at Cornell. It was as if a crane had plucked a room from the Life Science Technology Building and plopped it down on Buffalo Road.

“How much did all this cost you?”

“Not more than forty K. I got most of it on DoveBid-it’s an industrial equipment online auctioneer. Wait for a biotech firm to go belly-up, you can get deals. Not like the deals I did a few years back during the telecom bust, but not bad. The rest I made myself. This stuff ain’t rocket science. What’s a PCR cycler but a fancy Crock Pot?” He turned to face Vlad. “Okay, you Russian piece of shit, I’m assuming you didn’t bring Captain Robot Bug here so I could bring his prose to life.”

“You ready for challenge?” Vlad held up the tiny vial with the DNA from Liam’s glowing fungus inside. “We need sequence.”

“Concentration?”

“Unknown.”

“How homogeneous?”

“Don’t know.”

“How long is the strand?”

“Don’t know.”

“But you have the primer sequence?”

Vlad nodded.

“And when do you want it?”

“Now.”

Harpo took the vial. He turned to Jake. “Here’s the deal, sport. Two hundred bucks an hour, plus supplies. And I keep the time sheet in my head. Cash only. No checks. No Visa, no MasterCard. And no American Express.”

23

THE FIRST ENTRY MAGGIE FOUND ABOUT THE UZUMAKI WAS in Liam’s journal from 1953. She sat on the concrete floor in the back of the herbarium, her grandfather’s notebooks scattered around her. She’d retrieved them from a storage room where the notebooks of many of Cornell’s most famous mycologists were kept. The cardboard boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, the air awash in the aromatic compounds created during the slow, steady breakdown of the pages. She’d found her grandfather’s, dragged them out of the storage room, and dug through them, looking for trips to South America and Brazil, her nerves on edge. The notebooks were out of sequence-she had to go through them one by one.

Surrounding her as she worked were the rows and rows of seven-foot-high metal cabinets filled with fungal specimens. The smell of mothballs was strong, the naphthalene a poison to the cigarette beetles that were the archivist’s bane. Her grandfather loved rummaging through those cabinets, had worked among them for half a century. All of his finds, the hundreds of species he had discovered and classified, were there. He had traveled across the globe in search of new species. In almost any corner of the world, he befriended the local experts on fungi, whether they were academics or farmers. But he had made a particularly large number of trips to Brazil. Maggie had traveled with him once, when she was seventeen. She was amazed at the people he knew. He had friends all over the country, in almost every province, it seemed, people who knew everything about the local fungal populations.

And there was something else about Brazil that she remembered. São Paolo had more than a million residents of Japanese descent. She remembered especially one neighborhood, called Liberdade, where she suddenly felt as though she had been transported to the Far East. Liam had explained why: the Japanese and Brazilians had signed a treaty in 1907 to encourage the immigration of poor Japanese peasants to Brazil to work the coffee crops. These were the descendants of those workers, the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan.

The entry that had grabbed Maggie’s attention was on page thirty-two of Liam’s 1953 field notebook. Her grandfather’s handwriting was controlled and confident, showing none of the shakiness that would come to him in later years. She felt a knot growing in her stomach as she read the description of her grandfather’s find:

8/28/53

Swirl-like morphology, attacks during Oct./Nov., taking root on the corn stubble left in the field after harvest. Farmers fear it. Say it causes spirits to come inside. “Spirits?” I ask. They explain: hallucinations, madness.

This must be it. Tentative name: Fusarium spiralis.

She read on, skimming her grandfather’s careful phenotype description and attempt at taxonomy, placing it in the proper place in the fungal kingdom. Then came a section of text that tied it all together.