Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [147]
“Who told you that? Marge knew last February. Her niece called her and told her.”
Clarice turned to DiMaggio. “You told us—”
“Shut up!” Smoothing the front of her blouse with her palms, DiMaggio maintained perfect posture, unflappable. “Hush now, Clarice. I’ll handle this.”
But Clarice hadn’t resolved herself for any moral ambiguity, didn’t want to be in the wrong ethically, even if she might be legally. Her thin eyebrows bobbing to her words like broken windshield wipers, she appealed to me. “This is no different than when an airline carrier has a plane go down. People in business do their best, but despite their best, they have accidents. People die. It’s not because somebody wants them to die. It’s just the way the world is.”
“Shut up, Clarice,” DiMaggio said, not unkindly.
“No. Go ahead,” I said. “Talk to me. I’m on day seven. It’s Sunday by now. I get arrested, the earliest I’d get bail would be Monday morning when the courts open. By that time I’ll be in a big white diaper. In fact, I think I can feel my mind slipping even as we speak.” I rather liked the effect this last sentiment had on them, particularly on Clarice, who hunched her shoulders and tried to make herself smaller.
Even though I’d warned them to keep away from it, the man turned his back on me and looked out the window. Maybe he was too embarrassed to face me. Or maybe he was trying to signal the cops outside. Then, like a strutting bird of prey, DiMaggio stepped forward, defiant and, even at her age, still striking.
“You don’t understand what’s going on. This is groundbreaking. For some time now we’ve been working on a way to encode DNA into liquid metal. I don’t expect a layman to understand why we’re doing this or what it will accomplish, but I’ll tell you anyway. We’ve been working with positively charged metal complexes that are known to liquefy substances. Because DNA has an innate capacity for recognizing complementary sequences of itself, it’s the perfect tool for making electronic circuits. I won’t bore you with the details. I will tell you we’re not the only ones working on it, although we were the first. As you might suppose, one of the problems in a new field is that you end up handling chemical compounds nobody’s used before. You take precautions, you do everything you can to ensure the safety of your workers and of the general public, but accidents happen. To say that we meant for them to happen, that we provoked them, is just plain myopic. If there was anything we could do, we would have done it.”
I wanted to tell her I knew about the antidote, that I had a dose of it in my ass. But I needed to give Stephanie time to get away. “My brain turns to mush, and all you do is turn up the volume on your doublespeak.”
“Mr. Swope, we’ve been running on a shoestring since the day my husband died.”
“I can see that,” I said, glancing around the redecorated office.
“Philip was the one we counted on to bring in funding, and after he was gone it began to dry up. Any lawsuit against Canyon View would have bankrupted the company—probably before we even got to court—stopped the project cold, forever ended any hope of those people recovering. You see, we’re not only working on practical DNA applications for microelectronic circuitry and genetic engineering, but even though there was no profit in it, we’ve been working on an antidote for D number fifty-six.”
“You admit it was your company caused those brain deaths?”
“I’m assuming Achara told you about D number fifty-six.”
“I found it in your vault over there.”
“You do persist, don’t you?”
“A character flaw.”
DiMaggio said, “Tananger Bryers is all set to buy our company. They will be in a position to make sure this never occurs again. They have the funding to—”
“Bribe and corrupt all over the world. They were the ones responsible for that chemical spill in Pakistan where twenty-eight hundred people died. Tanager Bryers won’t make sure this never happens again. You should have done