Zoo(33)

"Secreting and sniffing pheromones," Chloe said.

"Life, at its most basic level, is chemistry," I said. "Right?"

"Hmm."

"Groups of molecular compounds reacting to other groups of molecular compounds. When an animal sniffs a rival or a predator, it receives information that changes its behavior. That's what's occurring here. In some way. Except the animal signals are getting crossed somehow. The signals they're getting are making them act against their instincts. There's something new, something wrong-either with the pheromones themselves or the way the animals are processing them."

"It might make sense," Chloe said, getting into it now. "The mutations we found in the animals were in the amygdala, which usually governs the sense of smell."

I paced back and forth across the kitchen in my underwear, still holding the sagging trash bag full of my reeking clothes.

"I think it may even have something to do with that bizarre stuff that went on with Attila," I said. "A chimp's sense of smell isn't that great. But I rescued him from a perfume lab where they were doing chemical experiments on him. I think the pheromone or whatever it is in the environment somehow made him go crazy."

"Like a steroid or something," Chloe said. "Are the animals exhibiting a kind of chemically triggered rage?"

"Could be."

"But why all of a sudden?" Chloe said. "What's changing the way they perceive pheromones?"

"I don't know. But I do know that we need to find some pheromone experts and put them in a room, yesterday. More like five years ago. I'll call the lab, you call that government guy, Leahy. I think we finally caught a break on this thing."</ol>
 
 

 





Chapter 67



THE REST OF my morning consisted of a Silkwood shower and a Jerry Lewis telethon's worth of phone calls.

By midafternoon Chloe, Eli, and I were sitting around the kitchen table with our bags packed and ready to go. I guessed our ride was out front when my phone went bzvvvvt bzvvvvt on the table and UNKNOWN NUMBER popped up on the screen. I went to the window and looked down.

When the NSA chief, Mike Leahy, said he was sending a car to take us to a secure location, I thought he had meant, well, a car.

On the sidewalk in front of our building was a camo-colored up-armored combat Humvee, with a soldier manning a machine gun in the steel-plated turret. For traveling with a low profile, I guess.

A young kid with orange hair and freckles, straight out of Archie Comics, met us in the lobby downstairs. He saluted.

"Lieutenant Durkin, US Army Third Infantry," he said in that military cadence, a forward tumble of barks rising in pitch.

"Jesus, is it getting this bad out there, Lieutenant?" I said, gesturing at the war machine we were apparently about to enter. Durkin hoisted our bags as though he were a valet and led us toward the Humvee.

"Manhattan below Ninety-Sixth Street is in the process of being evacuated," he said. "We're starting with the hospitals and hospice facilities."

"What? Why?"

"Rats."

As we rolled north through Manhattan we saw barricades, checkpoints. The city was swarming with men and women in camo. The only vehicles that passed us going in the opposite direction were government evacuation buses and more army Hummers.

Times Square was empty. I glanced at the darkened marquee as we passed the Ed Sullivan Theater, where they tape Late Show with David Letterman. No stupid pet tricks tonight.

When we turned west on Fifty-Seventh Street we heard the whoosh of fire, and looked out the window to see two soldiers in silver suits kneeling in front of an open manhole, aiming flame throwers beneath the street.

We stopped on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-First Street. A chain-link fence braced with sandbags had been strung across the avenue in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Upper East Side was occupied now? When had all this happened? And why hadn't I heard about it? The world had flipped from normal to bizarre in what? Hours? Things had seemed fine to me that morning.

"These two blocks are HQ for the time being," Durkin said as a guard waved us through the makeshift fence. "This kinda reminds me of the Green Zone in Baghdad."

"Or Ground Zero after nine-eleven," I said.

We rolled past sandbagged trailers and stacked crates of bottled water and came to a stop in front of a stately granite prewar building directly across from the Met. The building's interior was all gilded ornaments and Corinthian columns, glass, brass, marble, potted ferns. Durkin led us into the grand lobby, where an NYPD sergeant checked our IDs and, for no discernible reason, wanded us with a metal detector-including Eli, just to make sure our three-year-old boy wasn't packing heat.

"Who's in charge?" I asked Durkin.

"Colonel Walters, but he's in the field."

"The field?"

"Well, the city. I think some of the other scientists are here. Let me show you to your quarters first."

They were nice quarters. The apartment we were led into was a multimillion-dollar duplex with massive fireplaces and twelve-foot coffered ceilings. The living room was cluttered with marble sculptures and African masks. There was a Chagall on the dining room wall.

"Fancy digs. How'd the army sublet Xanadu?" I said to Durkin.

He shrugged.

"Ours is not to reason why," he said. "You guys settle in. The meeting's on the first floor at sixteen hundred hours. Enjoy your vacation at the end of the world."





Chapter 68



WE LEFT ELI in a makeshift day-care center that had been set up for the scientists' children on the building's fifth floor and went downstairs to help prepare for the meeting. I was surprised at how quickly Chloe and I adapted to all this doomsday scenario stuff. One day, you drop your kid off at pre-K, the next you take him to a government evacuation center's day-care facility. What else could we do?

In a large alcove off the sweeping marble lobby, we worked with camo-clad army techs to convert a dining room into a conference room, complete with an interactive whiteboard. The table was a sleek, oblong, blood-colored mahogany, its surface so glossy it reflected light as sharply as a mirror. The room was huge, the ceilings fifteen feet high, with marble cornice moldings in the corners and dark oil paintings of robber barons set in the walls. A chandelier dangled like a bunch of crystal grapes above the table.</ol>
 
 

 

Over the next hour, Chloe and I greeted the other scientists whom the government had shuttled in via Hummer and helicopter. In addition to my colleague Dr. Quinn, they had recruited most of the rest of the lab staff from Columbia as well as more than a dozen top-drawer entomologists, environmentalists, and other scientists.

"Ah, look who it is," I said to Chloe behind my hand. "Dr. Harvey Blowhard."

Chloe rolled her eyes.

Dr. Harvey Saltonstall, the Henry Wentworth Wallace chair in biology at Harvard, shook my hand and gave me a cold, curt hello. Being proved right before your enemies is a pretty good feeling, and I couldn't help but smirk a little. I did not like this man. Last time I'd seen him he was on the other side of a split screen on MSNBC, with Rachel Maddow moderating. That was more than a year ago. As usual, he'd made me look like a wing-nut bozo with his whole aristocratic persona-this handsome devil in tweed, occasionally swiping back his elegant shock of silver hair.

Harvey Saltonstall's prominent public opposition to HAC had delayed progress for years. Now, why wasn't I surprised that the officious, elitist asswipe was front and center in the government team assembled to solve the problem?

Soon I was standing at the head of a conference table ringed with the country's best and brightest. I hoped all the expertise gathered in this room would be enough. And that we weren't too late.

I started out by quickly going over what I had seen that morning under Bryant Park.

"At first, I thought HAC had a viral origin," I said, looking around the table from face to face. Everyone nodded back at me. "But after seeing the animals up close today, acting in such a bizarre way, I think it's time to take a new approach. I think this has to do with pheromones. The dogs I saw today were displaying textbook pheromonal aggregation behavior. It's my belief that some new kind of morphed pheromone has entered the environment, and it's probably our doing, because we seem to be one of the only mammals whose behavior isn't affected by it."

"We came here for this?" Harvey Saltonstall took a long, fastidious sip from the cup of coffee in front of him while everyone waited for his next words. "The environment? Please. This theory is infantile. A pheromone is a chemical that's very specific to communication within species. I've never heard of the same pheromone affecting multiple species. Are you suggesting there's some invisible crazy gas affecting all mammals except humans? Why should it not affect us?"

Irritating as he was, I knew Saltonstall had an excellent point. He'd immediately stuck his finger in the biggest hole in my theory. I bit my lip and thought.





Chapter 69



HARVEY SALTONSTALL MADE a prim cage of his fingertips and began to accordion them in and out, readying himself to redouble his attack. And then Chloe jumped in to save me.

"What about pollution?" she blurted.

"Yes, well, what about it?" Saltonstall said.

"Pollution in the environment sometimes causes mutational changes in animals. Take nylonase, for example. In a wastewater pond beside a nylon factory in Japan, they found a species of bacteria that only eats nylon. The presence of the pollution genetically altered the bacteria that were already there."