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And what would those people care, really, if she stayed, as long as Darius was stopped? That’s all they cared about. Dani was just a problem for them, a person out of time. If she stopped Darius and saved the world from a mega-terrorist, she should be free to return to her life.
She’d forgotten all about Darius, about the reason she’d been sent back. She still needed to figure out how to find him. But before she could do that, she’d need a place to stay, somewhere they took cash and didn’t ask any questions. As a cop, she was familiar with places like that. She’d also need a change of clothes and a phone. Fortunately, money was not an issue. Her hand went instinctively to the pouch containing the roll of hundreds. Worthless in the twenty-third century, but invaluable to somebody traveling into the past.
Like me, she said to herself, tentatively acknowledging her identity as a time traveler. Unless she woke up soon, she would have no choice but to believe it.
Chapter Nine
Whatever Dani had hoped she would see when she opened her eyes in the morning became rapidly irrelevant as she took in the dim, dingy details of a third-floor room of a long-neglected hotel in the Mission District. The first thing she saw on the opposite wall was a painting in muted browns and reds of a crowd in a street, fleeing for their lives. A huge bull, nostrils blazing, chased after them. The bull seemed larger than life. The people were screaming, mouths agape, and at least one man was on the ground, trampled, not by the bull, but by the heedless mob. Others were scaling walls on either side of the narrow lane, and one of them had clearly been gored through the torso, dying while clinging with both arms to the top of the wall. It was a terrifying and horrific scene. If the artist had been trying to capture the spirit of Pamplona, he or she had fallen well short and had delivered Armageddon instead. Who would hang up a painting like that?
She sat on the edge of the bed and took in the rest of her new home. The wallpaper, something from the forties, she guessed, was stained and peeling. The bathroom was a tiny box crowded with a pedestal sink and a toilet you had to practically step over to get to the shower. The floor was covered in warped linoleum, and the room smelled of mold. The pipes rattled so hard when she turned on the faucet, it seemed they would shake themselves apart.
She brushed her teeth, then ripped open a new package of underwear and changed out of her new royal purple pajamas and into her uniform. The uniform was conspicuous, but it would allow her some freedom of movement.
Swenson’s group had given her two pieces of equipment, the transporter beacon and a DNA detector. The latter was to be worn like a wristwatch and had a small screen displaying a faint grid. She didn’t understand what they had told her about how it worked. She did understand that it could detect an individual in range by his unique DNA signature. It was programmed to detect Leo Darius. She had seen one of these before, on Frank Bryan’s wrist. It made sense. He’d been going after Darius just like she was. That solved the mystery of how Bryan had located the suspect all by himself.
Dani put it on her wrist and turned it on. It flashed to life and displayed a blue dot in the center of a grid. That blue dot represented her. If Darius were near, they had explained, he would show up as a green dot, but he had to be within five hundred feet. No sign of him yet. No surprise. He could be anywhere in the city. He could be anywhere in the world, actually, and she had no idea where to start looking.
She grabbed a bagel with a cream cheese smear at the corner coffee shop and ate it on the walk to the BART station. A long-faced man sat on a stool and played a guitar near the ticket machines, appropriately “Ticket to Ride” by the Beatles. Dani wondered if Swenson and her colleagues knew the Beatles. Did they even have pop music, and if so, what was it like? Leaping two hundred years into the future might be really interesting, though she wasn’t crazy about the food, not what she’d seen of it so far anyway. She had a sneaking suspicion they’d all gone vegetarian in the future. That alone was enough to make her want to stay here.
She got on the Daly City train and ignored the stares. What was a city cop doing riding BART, the commuters had to be thinking. Maybe I need to get a car, she thought. Problem was, she wouldn’t be able to rent or lease one. When they ran a DMV or credit check on her, everything would come up blank. She’d have to pay cash. Not that big of a problem, as it happened. She had counted the money last night. She had fifteen thousand. She couldn’t buy a new car, but a decent used car should be no problem.
She got off at the end of the line, Millbrae station, then went out to the street and hired a taxi to take her to Genepac.
“You lose your cruiser?” asked the driver, grinning like he’d made a smart joke. He was a wiry older man with a few tufts of white hair on the sides of his blotchy bald head.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
It wasn’t far to the site. She had the driver let her out a block away, then she walked over to the burned-out building. It was surrounded by crime scene tape and investigators. She glanced at her DNA detector watch. No green dot. Too bad. A lot of these terrorists liked to watch the aftermath of their attacks. It made them feel like a big man. She looked around the buildings surrounding the site. He could be watching from one of them, just too distantly for the device to register, watching them while he chowed down on a chicken shawarma wrap. Man, that sounded good! she thought, thinking about her favorite menu item at the Mediterranean deli in the Financial District. You practically had to eat the thing over a bowl; it was that juicy.
Surveying the activity around the building, Dani saw Sergeant Tyler heading across the street and away from the team. Smoke break, she guessed. She was glad to see Tyler. She won’t know me from Lady Gaga, Dani realized, but I know her, and maybe that’s enough to get her to talk. Tyler cupped her hand to shelter her cigarette as she lit it. Dani walked over to her position, a good vantage point from which to survey the team at work on the ruins of Genepac.
“Hey, Sarge,” she said, “could I bum a smoke?”
Tyler regarded Dani briefly, glanced at her name tag, then put her cigarette pack in her hand. “Sure,” she said. After she’d taken one, Tyler lit it for her and she took a long drag to get it started. She sucked the smoke into her lungs, savoring the sensation, the smell and the taste.
Wow, this brings back memories! she thought. She used to smoke. She gave it up for Gemma. She was almost positive that two hundred years from now, nobody would smoke cigarettes, so there wasn’t much danger of starting up again based on this one butt. Even today, smokers were becoming an endangered tribe, at least in California. Smoking used to be cool. Now it was the opposite, and Dani knew the kind of loyalty that sprung up between individuals in an outcast minority. So this cigarette was her way of softening Tyler up and getting the job done.
“Thanks,” she said. “Left mine back at the station. It was a hectic morning.”
“I don’t know you, do I, Barsetti?”
“No. I’m on loan from the twenty-third. Unfortunately, I also missed the morning briefing.”
Tyler took a drag from her cigarette. When she exhaled, this time she didn’t make any attempt to blow her smoke in the other direction. Now they were smoke sisters.
“What’s the D stand for?” Tyler asked, vaguely pointing toward Dani’s name tag.
“Dani.”
“What’s Dani stand for?”
“Can’t it just be Dani?”
Tyler gave her one of those sideways glances she did so well.
“Daniella,” Dani replied, trying not to sound resentful about it.
Tyler took another puff, then said, “What do you know about this case?”
“I know about the bombing and that the main suspect is Leo Darius. I know FBI Agent Bryan was killed going after him yesterday.”
“Agent Bryan, yes.” She sounded doubtful.
“Something strange about Bryan?”
“The FBI says they never heard of him. And we haven’t been able to ID him. He’s in the deep freeze waiting for something to turn up. Nothing on his prints. I’m not sure I believe the feds on this one. But if they sent in a ghost agent to catch Darius, why? Why’s it such a big deal? An eco-terrorist blows up a research lab. Nobody was even killed.”
“Bryan knew when it would happen.”
“Right. He knew a lot more than we did. The FBI’s got a finger on the guy. They know what he’s going to do and when. But now they’re saying nothing. Not only have they never heard of Bryan, but they’re telling the same story about Darius. Never heard of him.” She took a leisurely drag on her cigarette.
That made sense, Dani reflected, if she’d been told the truth. This was not an FBI case. She smoked, observing Tyler’s freckled face. You could almost see the gears turning. She wanted to figure this out. There’s no way, Sarge, Dani thought sympathetically. Whatever you can think up, it’s wrong.
“Do we have anything new on Darius?” she asked.
Tyler shook her head. “No. Nothing new and not much to begin with. Don’t know what he looks like beyond the vague description Bryan gave us. He’s the only one who actually put eyes on him. By the time Perkins got there, Bryan wasn’t talking and Darius was gone. We had people all over that building, but there was a catwalk kind of a thing between that one and the one behind. We think he might have gone that way, got into the next building and got clear of it before we sent people in to search it. Anyway, I might have passed him on the street this morning and I would never know it.”
I know what he looks like, Dani thought. She’d been shown a dozen images by Swenson. Leo Darius was forty-two, medium height, slightly built with a bit of a stoop to his shoulders. He had a full head of chestnut brown hair and, at least in the photos, a mustache. He looked non-threatening, more like a college professor than a terrorist. There was no way Dani could explain her knowledge to Tyler, so she kept it to herself.
“Leo Darius doesn’t exist,” Tyler said. “Obviously an alias. We’ve got nothing but spooks in this case.”
“Nobody claimed responsibility?”
She shook her head again. “Nothing.”
“That’s strange.”
“Right. What kind of terrorist doesn’t want credit?” She stamped her butt out under her boot. “Why don’t you help Stanecek inside? He’s with Dr. Ruben, one of the scientists. They’re trying to get a catalog of what was destroyed. Second floor, west side.”
Dani nodded and put out her cigarette underfoot, observing the damage to the location Tyler mentioned. Blackened walls and blown-out windows.
“Hey, Barsetti,” Tyler said, “don’t take the elevator.” She laughed at her joke.
Inside the main entrance of the building, the smell of smoke and dampness hit her. But the lobby looked otherwise undamaged. She found a staircase and went up to the second floor. The damage was much worse there. Walls were charred, and glass and other debris littered the floors. Dani found Dr. Ruben in a large open room with minimal damage, seated at a table with a clipboard and a scattering of papers. There was no electricity in the building, so the table was pushed close to a bank of windows for light. The rest of the room was choked with boxes and plastic containers on tables and on the floor, stacked atop one another. Dr. Ruben, a bald, clean-shaven, middle-aged man, wore a white coat and glasses and looked undeniably glum. His expression did not change at the sight of Dani.
“Officer Barsetti,” she announced, approaching his table. “How’s it going?”
“Tragically, Officer Barsetti, tragically. The losses are insurmountable. Our freezers were destroyed, for one thing. Thousands of DNA samples were lost. Seventy percent of our seeds were lost. Some of these can never be replaced. Others…it would take decades to reassemble this collection of plant biodiversity, if it’s even possible.”
“At least nobody was hurt. Thanks to Agent Bryan, we got the building evacuated in time.”
Ruben sighed melodramatically. “I’m glad nobody was hurt, but in my opinion, the loss was much greater than the value of any member of the staff. I include myself in that assessment. We can be replaced.”
“But your data…you’ve got to have backups. Why can’t you just re-create the experiments? Splice some genes together and make whatever GMO thingy you made before?”
He stared, looking perplexed. “Do you have any idea what we do here?”
“Yeah, sure. You genetically engineer crops to make them disease resistant, hardier, better, bigger.” She laughed. “Monster tomatoes, that sort of thing.”
Ruben remained somber. “That may be what this Darius fellow thought. Otherwise, why would he have done this? I can’t see what quibble anybody would have with us, especially not an environmental activist.”
Dani thought back to what Bryan had told her about Genepac. Maybe she had misunderstood him. “What are you saying? You don’t do genetic engineering?”
He shook his head. “No. We do genetic sequencing. We’re here to preserve genetic biodiversity. A very important part of our work is sequencing the genome of extinct or nearly extinct plants. If we can’t preserve the plant itself, at least we can save its genetic code and maybe, some day, find a way to resurrect it. If it turns out to be worth the effort.”
“What do you mean, worth the effort?”
He stood and stretched, looking pained and clearly tired. “Officer, plants are essential to life on this planet. They provide food and shelter and clothing to all the animals, directly or indirectly. We don’t know the half of it yet. Do you know there’s a tree in the Amazon basin that may hold the cure for COPD? That tree is going the way of so much of the flora of the Amazon. It’s disappearing at an alarming rate, disappearing before we even know what’s there. So many of our most effective medicines come from nature, from plants, animals, bacterium. Penicillin, for instance. Bread mold. You’ve heard of it, I assume.”
He walked away, his hands clasped behind his back. Dani felt like she was at a lecture.
“You collect those plants here?” she asked.
“Yes. We save their seeds and their DNA. Not monster tomatoes, but heirloom tomatoes. One of the most popular tomatoes today was nearly obliterated from the planet until we found it growing in a few family gardens in Kansas. We collected the seeds and grew the tomatoes on our farms, then collected those seeds, and so on. With the resurgence of heirloom varieties, these tomatoes are growing all over the country now.”
“Your farms?” Dani asked.
“That’s right. We partner with farmers, sometimes even restaurants with a kitchen garden. They grow the endangered crops and give us the seeds. That way, we keep our supply viable. So, you see, we aren’t engineering new crop plants. We’re resurrecting our ancestral crops, the primitive cultivars that are on the verge of disappearing.” He shook his head. “This Darius is an idiot. He’s certainly not very concerned about being precise, if his message is to protest genetically modified food.”
“Maybe he’s just nuts,” she suggested.
Ruben shrugged.
A man in a hazmat suit wheeled a cart through the clear plastic sheets covering the doorway, then pulled off his respirator. It was Stanecek, his earnest face and deep-set eyes well known to Dani. “You here to help?” he asked her.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Barsetti.”
“Okay, Barsetti, suit up. The bomb ripped up a bunch of old flooring and kicked up some asbestos, so we’re stuck with this gear. Besides, the critters in all the doc’s test tubes were set free in the explosion. Who knows what kind of mutants are in there waiting to squirm their way into your body and lay eggs in your brain.”
Dr. Ruben rolled his eyes, clearly exasperated. “They’re plants!” he protested.
“Hey,” Stanecek replied, “I’ve seen Little Shop of Horrors.” He picked up a box from the cart and found a spot for it among the others.
Dani helped him unload the cart, then put on a suit and went into what used to be a laboratory and storage rooms. Pieces of wood, glass, metal, plastic, ceiling tiles and broken ceramic floor tiles covered the space. Their job was to sift through it, looking for evidence, any remnants of the bomb or anything that might link the location to the suspect. In the process, they turned over any intact containers to Ruben, trying to placate him, as he wasn’t allowed into this section of the building and was frantic to know what could be salvaged.
The work proceeded slowly and methodically over the next two hours. The freezer, acting like a vault, had protected its contents well. Most of the samples inside were undamaged. At least the containers were undamaged, but the freezer had been powered off since the explosion, so everything had thawed and, according to Ruben, been destroyed. He was overjoyed whenever they turned over a box containing seeds, as these were salvageable, but there weren’t many still intact. The entire lab had been destroyed, all of the equipment melted. The rest of the building, including another lab downstairs, had suffered only minimal damage. Obviously, Darius had targeted this suite of rooms specifically.
Dani was no expert on bombs or terrorists, but she knew this case didn’t fit the usual profile. It seemed less about a political statement and more about taking out this one lab, or maybe the storerooms, the mutant critters, as Stanecek called them. If they were just heirloom tomato seeds, why would anybody care? Maybe Dr. Ruben wasn’t being straight with her. Maybe there were secret experiments going on here, and why would Ruben tell her, just another cop, about it? Maybe Darius knew the score and he’d hit exactly what he had intended to hit.
