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Part 1

There came another knock at the door.

Greg Kawakita glanced up irritably from rabbit serum he was purifying. The knocking sounded again, hesitant and rapid. Kawakita slipped his shoes back on and hurried over. He wasn’t expecting any of his regular buyers, but that didn’t mean this might not be a new client. At the door, he paused and checked loaded a clip into the small handgun he kept nearby. Just in case.

For a moment Kawakita didn’t recognize the man on the doorstep, shifting his weight from side to side and glancing around apprehensively at the surrounding darkness of the docks. He was no cop, though, nor some drug lord’s thug looking to get rid of competition.

Kawakita replaced the handgun in its hiding place and opened the door, smiling. “You made it! I’m so pleased.”

The visitor stepped inside hurriedly, then froze, looking surprised at his own impudence. It had been almost a month since he’d seen August Strindberg, but the man was as irritatingly shy as ever.

“Thank you for having me over. I was worried about you. You left so abruptly... I was afraid... you know. That it was personal. My fault.”

“Not at all,” Kawakita said smoothly, taking him by the elbow and guiding him in. “I thought you might have assumed that, and I am sorry. I know I come off as kind of acidic and abrupt—”

“Oh, no, Greg.” Strindberg stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor, squinting into the gloom and twisting his baseball cap in his bony, long-fingered hands.

“I do,” he said emphatically. “And I got so caught up with my idea, I just put everything else on the backburner. Even you. That’s why I invited you here tonight. I don’t know if I can make it up to you, but I’d like to try.”

Strindberg glanced up obliquely, still the whipped puppy ever-eager to forgive. “Thank you, Greg. It‘s an honor. It really is.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, none of this would have happened.”

Kawakita thumbed the potentiometer controlling the light level, bringing it up just enough so that Strindberg could see the banks of softly bubbling aquaria, the massive filtration machinery nested in intertwined piping, the array of tinted, filtered lamps that bathed the warehouse’s work area in a subtle, subaqueous glow.

He was staring hard at the aquaria. “But what is all of this, then?”

Kawakita grinned. “Remember that little theory you had?”



Five weeks ago.

Kawakita leaned hard on the buzzer, the only connection between the Biohazard Level Four necropsy room and the outside world.

Through the surveillance camera, he saw the figure of the pathologist working on the remains of the creature that had been dubbed “the Museum Beast”, among other colorful monikers. The man wore a bright orange space suit inflated by an air hose that made him look ridiculously like a toddler in an overstuffed snowsuit. He was rooting around in the viscera and vital organs, removing bits and pieces and sealing them into jars of preservatives, so deeply absorbed in his work that he didn‘t hear the buzzer.

Kawakita rang it again, and the pathologist, Strindberg, looked up. He glanced from the creature on the table to the door a few times as if making a difficult decision.

Strindberg carefully dunked his instruments in a pan of disinfectant. The pale green chemical turned dark and cloudy with the creature's blood. He washed his hands in another pan, until the gloves were free of any residue. Then he unplugged the air hose that kept his suit inflated and his oxygen supply refreshed, and stepped into the air lock, slamming the vault-type door behind himself.

Kawakita waited impatiently as the decontamination cycle began. It took seven minutes in all, repeated jets of water, EnviroChem disinfectant, and being bathed in intense ultraviolet light to completely sterilize the suit of any harmful microorganisms.

Eventually, Strindberg emerged, looking as if he'd been through a shower himself. His dark, lank hair straggled down into his face, and the acne on his cheeks and chin stood out like beacons against his flushed skin. Christ, thirty-odd years old and he still had acne. He swept his bangs up under his X-Files baseball cap, which he’d put on backwards. Gangly, gawky and socially maladroit — if you were trying to cast a science geek, you couldn't do better then August Strindberg.

“You, ah, wanted to see me, Mr. Kawakita?”

“Come here.”

Strindberg shuffled over, hunching his shoulders in a habitual gesture. It was irritating, to be sure, looked as if he were apologizing for being taller than his superior. But Kawakita found he didn’t mind the man’s cringing deference. It was a refreshing change being on the top of the dog pile, and Strindberg‘s flagrant servility only enhanced it.

Kawakita threw the copies of the RFLP autoradiographs down on the table, stabbing at them with his finger. “Look at this.”

“I don’t know much about DNA stuff,” Strindberg temporized.

“Come on, just look at it and tell me what you think. Tell me, for example, if both these look like they came from the same individual.”

Strindberg, like a dog expecting to be kicked, could not make himself meet Kawakita’s eyes. Instead, he frowned studiously at the alternating bands of light and dark on the autorad.

Kawakita snatched up the prints and threw them against the wall, getting a nasty little satisfaction watching the pathologist flinch. “You fucked up. Contaminated it somehow. That’s almost 70 hours of runtime wasted.”

“S-sorry.” Strindberg rubbed his hands, then, palms pressed together, raised them and touched his thumbs to his lip. The gesture reminded Kawakita irresistibly of an enormous housefly. Disgusting. The whole of the pathologist’s job, grubbing around in the putrefying remains of the creature, was totally repellant. He longed to get back to his computers, away from the necropsy room and the endless jars of sliced-up beast.

“Well, look at this, though.” Strindberg was gesturing at a microscope on the bench. “I’ve prepared some slides. You might find them rather interesting.”

Kawakita obligingly bent over the eyepiece, and let out a whistle of surprise. The cells were studded with inclusion bodies, thick accretions of replicating viruses. It was a good thing they'd decided to dissect the museum mystery monster in a Level 4 area — it was massively infected with an unknown virus.

“It's got a heavy viral load,” Kawakita said. “I'm just not sure which virus. Nothing I can identify by the naked eye. We‘d have to run it through the electron microscope.”

“It‘s almost as if the cells are in the process of mutating, and some are more mutated than other. Is it a reovirus, maybe? That would explain the discrepancies in the DNA. Some of the tissue isn't as heavily affected.”

Kawakita looked at Strindberg with new respect. He has been thinking exactly the same thing. A reovirus acted like nature's genetic engineer, clipping DNA from one host and inserting it into another. These “jumping genes” were not uncommon (even the common house cat proved to have DNA sequences in common with rats and baboons) and some scientists suspected they might be a hidden, driving force in evolution.

“We may never get a pure DNA sample, then, Greg,” Strindberg said sadly.

Kawakita slowly forced his fist open. The stifling, oppressively muggy heat, the horrible clinging stench, the long hours cooped up in the claustrophobia-inducing space suit or trapped in the lab with Strindberg. It was making him crazy. Normally he wasn’t this aggressive, or when he did get the urge to beat someone to a pulp, he kept it under exquisite control. It wasn't Strindberg's fault he was so exasperating.

He took out a handkerchief and swabbed his face and neck. The whole place stank of the creature, its musky personal reek added to the putrid perfume of decomposition. It didn’t help matters any that the temperatures had soared the last week, unseasonably warm for early spring in New York.

“Smells like two pigs fucking on top of a manure pile in here,” he opined, then eyed Strindberg, who was shifting around, looking more wretched and nervous than usual. “What is it?”

“Menzies called again a few hours ago.”

“God dammit, what does he want this time,” Kawakita exploded.

“He just wants to know, ah, if we found anything in the creature that might have... you know... medicinal properties. Something... some, some link, you know... why the Kothoga might have... kept...” Strindberg trailed off, miserable.

Kawakita felt drained, suddenly. He didn’t enjoy dealing with people, especially those like Menzies. Outward politeness concealing a fierce, incisive inquisitiveness. He preferred superiors who gave him more of a free reign, as Frock had. So much more got done that way.

Not that Menzies was a superior, lord knows. He’d been hired by the government, same as Kawakita and Strindberg and the others on the team, but his role was a bit nebulous. Frock had insisted that the creature was vitally important to the vanished Kothoga culture, and Menzies had been an associate of Whittlesey in some capacity. He’d been given curatorial possession over the expedition notes, and was calling almost every day trying to pry details of the creature’s physiology from the necropsy workers. Claimed it was important to understanding the creature’s origin, whether it might have been deliberately hybridized and bred by the tribes people.

Why this made any sort of difference, Kawakita had no idea. His self control cramped and oppressed him, like a permanent suit of rusty armor. He’d left off answering the phone, let the spineless Strindberg, who couldn’t stand to hear it ring more than three times in a row, pick up and deal with Menzies and all the others who called.

“God, he’s persistent, isn‘t he? You told him there was no news, and we‘d call him back if there was any, right? Good, good. I’m so sick of him.” Kawakita sat down in Strindberg’s chair and leaning back until it creaked loudly. “He's almost as obnoxious as Pendergast.”

“Pendergast?” Strindberg leaned forward. “You actually met him?”

“Briefly, yes. That was long enough. He was one of the ones who helped me get this job. Why, you know him?”

“I know of him.”

“Brother. What a character. Looks like a cross between David Bowie and Sherlock Holmes, dipped in whitewash.”

Strindberg cocked his head, politely inquiring.

“He’s an albino. Either the grey-eyed type, or he’s wearing colored contacts. Goes around dressed like he’s on a Caraceni photo shoot, as if he doesn’t stand out enough already, and he’s got an accent out of a bad production of a Tennessee Williams play.”

“I’ve heard that about him, yeah.” Strindberg covered his mouth, trying ineffectually to muffle a laugh. “Um, so he recommended you for this?”

“Let’s just say, he didn’t have much choice. My services are pretty unique.” Kawakita smiled wickedly. When it came to connecting to people in high places, he was a positive genius. Pendergast was trouble, that was clear from the people he’d talked to. He was the classic nail that stuck out to far and was just tempting the hammer. However — and this was where Greg’s skill at manipulating people came into play — the FBI agent was highly regarded by some extremely important, well-placed people. A few judiciously chosen hints, a little glossing over of their exact relationship in the museum beast incident, and plenty of plain old relentless pestering and pouring honey had landed Kawakita his position on the team.

Kawakita glanced at the mess of Strindberg’s desk. How did the pathologist find anything here? On top of his computer was a Museum Beast action figure, a cheap plastic thing. It looked like someone had welded the top half of a gorilla to the bottom half of a carnivorous dinosaur. Probably exactly what the toymaker had done, a rush job to capitalize on a passing sensation.

And yet, it wasn’t entirely inaccurate. The creature, against all reason, seemed to possess characteristics of both primates and theropod dinosaurs, the group that included famous creatures such as Tyrannosaurus rex and, at some time in the early Jurassic, gave rise to birds.

“So how's it going on your end, Augie? Find anything in that carcass to prove what it is? Or are we going with Menzies’s theory that the Kothoga persuaded a crocodile to rape a baboon?”

“It can’t be anything. It’s an impossible combination, a total chimera!” Strindberg still avoided meeting his eyes, concentrating on playing with the action figure. He pressed a button on its back, and the upraised arms swung down, the plastic trident claws miming a disemboweling strike. How cute.

“Convergent evolution?” Kawakita suggested. This was the theory that form followed function, so two animals of dissimilar ancestry would evolve to look similar if they occupied the same environmental niches, because the niches demanded a certain ideal bodily form. For example, dolphins, ichthyosaurs and sharks had similar shapes because they were all fast-swimming, backboned marine predators, even though one was a mammal, one was a reptile, and one was a cartilaginous fish.

Strindberg looked pained. “That can only take you so far. And the resemblances break down on closer inspection. Octopi and vertebrates evolved camera-type eyes independently, but I can still tell the difference between them when I start dissecting. This thing is so bizarre, it’s almost artificial.”

Kawakita took off his glasses and mopped his brow. “Artificial? You’re not going to lay some sort of X-files crap on me, are you, Strindberg? Genetic engineering can’t do that. At least, not yet.”

Much to his amusement, Strindberg seemed to be doubting his own sanity at what the examination showed.

“I don’t know how else it could occur. For it to have both reptile and mammal features, its closest ancestor would have to be something like Gorgonops or Thrinaxodon. Leaving aside the astronomical odds against it evolving features only found in apes, protomammals went extinct at the same time the dinosaurs were grabbing all the large land animal niches. Over two hundred million years ago! Hiding in a jungle for a few million years is one thing... or in the ocean, maybe, like a coelacanth. But what we consider an ancient jungle is just a blip in history. In the time since the therapsids, entire continents have appeared and disappeared. Plus, we’re talking about a large predator here. Predator species, especially large-bodied ones like this, usually don’t last very long. About five million years or so, give or take, before the next improved version comes along.”

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