When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [79]
I picked up a drawing from the pile before me. It showed a little boy, an infant, with a heart growing outside its chest cavity, a huge heart. I studied it carefully. It illustrated why tissue engineering was so problematic. No one knew how to reliably stop the cellular growth once the process had begun.
But even if that major problem had been solved, it was a hell of a leap from growing organs on lab animals to growing wings on a human child. And with Max it wasn’t just that she had wings. Her entire cardiopulmonary system was avian, and that led me to conclude that she’d been created out of whole cloth.
My mind was churning at about a million miles an hour. I felt I could go stark raving mad at the blink of an eye. The whole world was being turned upside down. Someone had challenged everything we had learned to believe in and accept.
Assume nothing. Question everything. That’s what this was about, wasn’t it? To evolve life, as man chose to evolve it.
I was considering outrageous possibilities I hadn’t dared to imagine before. One winged child could have been a biological accident, but now that I’d seen the other four, I had to accept that there had been a definite intent to create a new kind of being. And, by God or despite Him, someone had actually done it. Someone had succeeded at playing God here.
What had they created?
Chapter 83
KIT CONTINUED TO WORK furiously at the desktop. Like many of the younger agents in the Bureau, he was good at it. He liked computers most of the time, and was comfortable around them. He brought up Netscape, then opened it. In the location field, he typed—about:global.
Up came all the sites the previous user of the desktop had visited in the past few months. Kit quickly scanned the list. He’d been doing similar detective work on the case before he left Boston.
He honed in on www.ncbi.nbm.n.h.gov. It was Genebank, the government-run repository for all known genetic sequences.
He looked for key words in red, indicating a previous user had clicked on them. There were several. He went to “taxonomy.” Under “Taxonomy browser,” he clicked “tree.” Then he typed in “aves” in the search field.
Apodidae (swifts), Laridae (gulls), Columbidae (doves), and Hirundinidae (swallows) had all been searched.
The plot thickened.
Kit closed the site and returned to the list about:global. Next, he went into the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory site. He futzed around with a few entries, then tried DSHL publications—Genome Research.
He went into the September 1997 issue, where he became puzzled again. The previous user had called up a paper on Double-Muscle Belgian Blue and Piedmontese Cattle.
Cattle? He stopped typing and thought about the curious entry.
“Frannie. Come here for a second,” Kit said without looking away from the screen.
He showed her what he’d been doing, then the last article he found. “What’s all this stuff about cattle somebody from here was checking out? You understand it?”
“Some,” Frannie said. She read the rest of the article, then reread key parts of it. She thought about what she had just absorbed. “Son of a—” she finally said. “I think I understand. I’ll give you a wild theory, anyway.”
Kit nodded and listened.
“The article is about a mutated cow gene. The study actually began twelve years ago. Somebody produced double muscling in the chest of these cows. So here’s a theory. Kit, I think this is how they could have made Max’s chest muscles large enough to support wings and also carry her weight. This is part of how they made her.”
Chapter 84
WE SEARCHED THE COMPUTER files for a few more minutes, but found nothing else of interest. So Kit and I continued our tour of the School. The arrogance and amorality of the scientists working here affronted everything I believed in. I wanted to find one of “them” and strangle