Soren said nothing.
“What was it?” I asked. “Modified embryos?”
He looked at me with thinly veiled disgust. “Do you have any idea how many flights I’ve missed because of nights like this? Some G-man showing up at my gate, hauling me in for questioning? It’s happened with the European Genomic Safety Authority. In France. Brazil. Now I’ve got you assholes wrecking my travel. In spite of all this harassment, I’ve never been charged with a single crime.”
“That’s not quite true,” I said. “From what I hear, the Chinese government would very much like a word with you.”
Soren grew very still.
The door behind me opened. I smelled the acrid, burned aroma of yesterday’s coffee. Nadine swept in, kicking the door shut behind her. She sat down next to me and placed two coffees on the table. Soren reached for one of them, but she smacked his hand.
“Coffee is for good boys.”
The black liquid smelled about as appetizing as Satan’s piss, but it was late and there was no sleep in my immediate future. I took a wincing sip.
“I’ll get right to it,” I said. “We know you drove into town yesterday in a rented Lexus Z Class SUV.”
Soren’s head tilted involuntarily, but he kept his mouth shut.
I answered the unvoiced question: “The GPA has full access to the DOJ’s facial-recognition AI. It scrapes all CCTV and other surveillance databases. A camera caught your face through the windshield on the off-ramp at I-25 and Alameda Avenue at 9:17 A.M. yesterday. We took the loop out here from D.C. this afternoon. Where were you coming from?”
“I’m sure you already know I rented that car in Albuquerque.”
He was right. We did know.
“What were you doing in Albuquerque?” Nadine asked.
“Just visiting.”
Nadine rolled her eyes. “No one just visits Albuquerque.”
I took a pen and pad out of my pocket and placed it on the table. “Write down the names and addresses of everyone you saw. Every place you stayed.”
Soren just smiled.
“What are you doing in Denver, Henrik?” Nadine asked.
“Catching a flight to Tokyo. Trying to catch a flight to Tokyo.”
I said, “We’ve been hearing chatter about a gene lab in Denver. Sophisticated operation engineering ransom bioware. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you happen to be in town.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nadine said, “We know, everyone knows, that you traffic in high-end genetic elements. Gene networks and sequences. Scythe.”
Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay. It had been a seismic leap forward that left the previous generations of technologies—ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR-Cas9—gasping in the dust. Scythe had ushered in a new era of gene editing and delivery, one that brought about catastrophic results. Which was why getting caught using or selling it for germline modification—the making of a new organism—came with a mandatory thirty-year prison sentence.
“I think I’d like to call my lawyer now,” Soren said. “I still have that right in America, don’t I?”
We were expecting this. Frankly, I was surprised it had taken this long.
“You can absolutely call your lawyer,” I said. “But first you should know what will happen if you go down this path.”
Nadine said, “We’re prepared to turn you over to China’s Gene Bureau.”
“America doesn’t have an extradition treaty with China,” Soren said.
Nadine leaned forward, her elbows on the table, the black coffee steaming into her face.
“For you,” she said, “we’re going to make an exception. The papers are being drawn up as we speak.”
“They don’t have anything on me.”
“I don’t think evidence and due process mean quite the same thing over there,” she said.
“You know I have dual Norwegian and American citizenship.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I looked at Nadine. “Do you care?”
She pretended to think about it. “No. I don’t think I do.”
Actually, I did care. We would never extradite an American citizen to China, but bluffing criminals is part of the gig.
Soren slouched back in his chair. “Can we have a hypothetical conversation?”
“We love hypothetical conversations,” I said.
“What if I were to write down an address on this notepad?”
“An address for what?”
“For a place where a hypothetical delivery might have been made earlier today.”
“What was delivered? Hypothetically.”
“Mining bacteria.”
Nadine and I exchanged a glance.
I asked, “You made the delivery to the lab itself? Not a random drop location?”
“I didn’t make any delivery,” Soren said. “This is all hypothetical.”
“Of course.”
“But if I had, and if I were to share that address with you, what would happen?”
“Depends on what we hypothetically find at this address.”
“If, hypothetically, you found this gene lab you’ve been hearing about, what would happen to me?”
Nadine said, “You’d be on the next flight to Tokyo.”
“And the China Gene Bureau?”
“As you pointed out,” I said, “we don’t have an extradition treaty with China.”
Soren pulled the pen and pad to his side of the table.
* * *
—
We followed the stealth SWAT vehicle in blackout mode through deserted streets. The address Soren had scribbled down was on the edge of Denver’s gentrified Five Points neighborhood, where at this hour of the night the only things open were a few weed bars.
I rolled down the window.
The October air streaming into my face was more revitalizing than the coffee we’d downed back at the station.
It was late fall in the Rockies.
The air smelled of dead leaves and overripe fruit.
A harvest moon perched above the serrated skyline of the Front Range—yellow and huge.
There should’ve been snow on the highest peaks by now, but it was all dry, moonlit rock above the timberline.
And I was struck again with the awareness that I was alive in strange times. There was a palpable sense of things in decline.
Africa alone had four billion people, most of whom were food insecure and worse. Even here in America, we were still crippled by rolling food shortages, supply-chain disruptions, and labor scarcity. With the cost of meat having skyrocketed, most restaurants that had closed during the Great Starvation never reopened.
We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.
Every passing year, more jobs were lost to automation and artificial intelligence.
Parts of New York City and most of Miami were underwater, and an island of plastic the size of Iceland was floating in the Indian Ocean.
But it wasn’t just humans who’d been affected. There were no more northern white rhinos or South China tigers. The red wolves were gone, along with countless other species.