Davila and Peter slept in the business-class cabin of a direct flight from Oslo, Norway to Seattle, USA. Each had been treated by Commander Avram's medics. Peter's concussion was minor, they said, nothing a bit of weapons-grade ibuprofen could not fix. Davila's broken finger had been reset and splinted properly, the cuts to her lip and ear cleaned and bandaged. They had been given showers, food and clean clothing. And in their pockets were forged passports, credits cards and plenty of cashâall courtesy of the State of Israel.
Back on the Estonian fishing boat, Davila had struck a deal. The Mossad, through their monitoring of Davila's phone, had learned most of what she and Peter had discovered about the Mustard Seeds. But not all of it. Missing was everything Gryphus had revealed after he threw Davila's phone into the fire: his motives, his employer and his next target, Saul Gordon, keeper of the Mustard Seeds.
In exchange for this information, Commander Avram promised to get Peter and Davila back to the U.S. by the fastest means available. Operatives friendly to Israel would be waiting on Steens Mountain to capture Gryphus, or kill him. Davila and Peter were free to pursue the Mustard Seeds, but their personal safety could not be guaranteed.
They landed in Seattle in the early morning hours and rented a compact SUV. Driving east through the pale dawn, they followed Interstate 90 over the Cascade Mountains, a reprise of Peter's fishing trip nearly two weeks earlier. They even stopped at the lonely park along the Columbia River commemorating Celilo Falls, Wy-am, long ago dammed and buried beneath the slack water of a hydroelectric damâthe same spot where Peter received his father's final words, semina sinapis.
But it seemed a different place. Cars and pickup trucks crammed the parking lot. Hundreds of people milled about, a festival of sorts. Tents and booths lined the parched field all the way down to the water's edge. A light breeze off the river bore up the murmur of voices, the cozy smell of fried food and wood smoke.
Low clouds were moving in from the east, dark and fraught, shadowing the tawny hills on the far side of the river. In the channel, nearly a mile out, gulls circled a tugboat as it pushed an empty barge against the languid current. But far below, Peter knew, the ancient falls of Wy-am remained, churning the depths, roiling in the dark.
It was then Peter realized that most of the festival's attendees were Native Americans. Aunties and grandmas in flower-print dresses sat beneath the locust trees, while little children buzzed about. Girls in brightly colored fancy dress gathered near a broad tent. A pack of boys prowled nearby. And out in the field, a dozen men sat around a huge drum beating a steady rhythm, their clarion voices rising with the breeze.
***
Saul Gordon handed Brisling his mug, now refilled with coffee. Then he settled into his armchair.
Brisling nursed the mug with both hands as he sidled down the couch, closer to the wood stove. "So, did Jason Dayan ever hint that the Ice Man might have been dangerous in some way? Did he ask you to take precautions when you handled the body?"
"No. He didn't say anything of the kind. But he was here, with me and the tribal elders, when the agents handed over the Old One's remains. But now that I think about it, he did ask the elders if he could spend a little time alone with the body, for his own spiritual needs."
"What do you mean, spiritual needs?"
Gordon shook his head. "As I recall, he said kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the dead. Then the elders took the Old One's body and buried it according to their customs."
"I don't suppose you'll tell me where."
The attorney shook his head. "Even if I knew."
Brisling let it go. The Feds would force the Jew to speak soon enough. "What about the research material you received, the data?"
"Jason Dayan asked me to burn it all."
"Shit."
"I said he asked me to."
"Wait. You still have it?"
Gordon pulled himself up and stood. "Let me go out to the garage and see what I can find. In the meantime, you keep that stove nice and hot."
Fifteen minutes later, Gordon stomped up the front porch steps, pausing at the door to remove his boots. With gust of cold air, he stepped into the entryway, his wavy white hair glittering with melting snowflakes. Under his arm he carried a battered cardboard file box, which he set on the coffee table in front of Brisling.
The box contained a stack of musty folders bound with rubber bands so brittle they snapped as soon as Brisling touched them. He set the folders on the coffee table, amazed by how well the dry mountain air had preserved them. Adjusting his glasses, he began to read.
The first folder contained the Carbon-14 dating results. The Ice Man was indeed ancient, somewhere between 9,700 and 10,500 years old, just as Gordon said. That settled that.
The next folder held shipping manifests and formal correspondence. Apparently, bits and pieces of the Ice Man had been shipped all over the country for analysis, a lock of hair to the University of Las Vegas, a skin biopsy to Yale, and yes, stomach contents to a contract lab in Oregon, the same lab where John Carl Lundquist, patient zero, had been infected with JCAV.
Brisling tossed the folder aside and picked up another, but it contained nothing but receipts and administrative garbage. Then he found the pages he was after. They were folded in half and held together with a paper clip. It left a rusty stamp as he pulled it loose. There were three pages in all, each with its own carbon copy, each bearing the same date in 1992, and the same set of initials, J.C.L. These were the missing pages from John Carl Lundquist's lab notebook.
The first two pages offered nothing more than descriptions of routine lab work, the preparation of buffers and reagents. But on the third page, near the bottom, Lundquist had written the following:
Accession #: 09-3549
Sample description: stomach contents, OSP John Doe #21234
Gross Description: approximately 10 cc dark green, fibro-gelatinous substance encasing 4 spherules: hard, dark-brown, smooth surface, each approx. 1.5 mm in diameter. Appear to be seeds.
Brisling looked up. "Seeds?"
Gordon nodded.
"Where are they?"
"In the box."
There, in the corner, along with the rubber band fragments and desiccated remains of a doodlebug, lay a small glass cylinder, a vial with a black screw-top cap. Brisling held it up to the light. Three tiny round seeds gathered at the bottom. He tapped the vial gently in an attempt to dislodge the fourth seed from inside the cap. Then he rapped the vial against the coffee table. But there were only three. "There's a seed missing. What happened to it?"
"Look behind you."
Brisling twisted around and found himself face-to-face with that weird plant on the windowsill, its dark green leaves rimmed with blue, tiny white blossoms littering the sill and the floor behind the couch. He whipped back. "You planted one?"
Gordon nodded. "A few years back, right before my wife passed."
"Why?"
"Curiosity, I suppose."
"Curiosity? And you had the gall to condemn the scientists for studying the Ice Man? What do you think science is but institutionalized curiosity?"
"Doctor, there's an ocean of difference between a person and a handful of seeds."
A handful of seeds. Adrenaline surged through Brisling's chest. He jumped to his feet, turned to face the plant and took two steps back, nearly tripping over the coffee table. "Fuck! That's how he got infected."
"Who got infected."
"The lab tech, patient zero. That son of bitch! He found five seeds, not four. He must have caught wind that the Feds were going to take his specimens, so he stole a seed, forged his lab book to cover it all up. Then he planted it, right in his lab. It's been growing there since 1992. I saw it with my own eyes." He jabbed a finger at the strange plant on Gordon's windowsill. "They're the same."
"I'm not following you, doctor. What does any of this have to do with him getting infected?"
"Don't you see? The plants. They're the source, genetically engineered to produce and shed virus, probably through the leaves or all those petals." Again, he jabbed his finger at the plant. "That thing's a goddamned virus factory. And the one in Lundquist's lab, up in Portland, it's been churning out virus for a quarter century."
Gordon gripped the armrests of his chair and pulled himself forward. "So, we're infected, my granddaughter and I."
Brisling scoffed. "Of course you are. But like I said, you two have nothing to worry about."
"Because we're Jewish, and she's Native too."
"That's right."
The old man let himself fall back against the chair's cushion. "Do you still think Jason Dayan did this?"
"I'm sure of it now. He was the only person back in 1992 with the means, the motive and the opportunity. You of all people should be able to see that. Your friend genetically engineered those seeds and had them inserted into the Ice Man's body, like a booby trap."
"But why?"
"I was really hoping you could answer that."
Gordon shook his head silently. Then he met Brisling's gaze. "There's something you don't know about that body."
"What?"
"The tribe claimed the Old One, the Ice Man, was their ancestor from long ago, and all logic and reason would say that's true. And that's what I argued in court. But there was some evidence we withheld."
Brisling tensed. "What evidence?"
Gordon indicated a folder that Brisling had not yet examined. "Keep reading, doctor."
Brisling snatched it up. Inside was a typed report, the staccato phrases of a coroner's dictation. . . . body of an adult male . . . partially decomposed . . . shrouded in finely woven blue textile of unknown origin . . . approximately 2.0 meters tall . . . early twenties . . . long black hair . . .
"They buried him in the clothes he wore," said Gordon. "I've never seen anything quite like it, so blue, like the summer sky."
A gust of wind rattled the windows, and the fire in the wood stove crackled bright.
Brisling read on, each phrase an electric shock.
Radiographs reveal a well-developed skeleton with evidence of multiple acute fractures to ribs, pelvis, and left femur . . . 32 teeth, all in expected positions . . . no cavities or enamel loss . . . this appears to be due to clear sealant applied to premolars and molars . . .
Attached with staples to the final page was a glossy black-and-white photograph. It showed what appeared to be an old rope against a black background. But it was no rope. The image had been taken with a scanning electron microscope, and the rope was a fiber one thousand times thinner than a human hair. The caption read
Note: Plain light microscopy reveals extremely tight plain weave of unknown blue fiber; color appears to be intrinsic; no evidence of dying agent.
Electron microscopy: Weave composed of threads of seven to ten bundles; bundles comprised of seven unbroken one-micron diameter monofilaments; pattern has no match in reference bank of over fifteen thousand modern and antique textiles; fiber size and structure most consistent with spider silk of genus Nephilia (orb weaver).
"Spider silk? What the hell is this?" said Brisling.
Another gust of wind buffeted the house. This time, the front door flew inward and slammed against the partial wall, rattling sheepherder's implements hanging above the wood stove.
Gordon got up to close it. He was just about there when he stopped cold, his head cocked to the side, face frozen with recognition.
__________________
Author's note:
Thank you for reading Chapter 39!
All lines are converging on Steens Mountain, Oregon.
-Frode
Image: scanning electron microscopic image of spider silk strands. https://sciencephotogallery.com/featured/4-spider-multi-stranded-silk-dennis-kunkel-microscopyscience-photo-library.html