The institute still showed decades of neglect. In most of the labs, shiny thick white or pale green enamel had peeled to show cracked plaster. Plumbing dated from the 1960s, at the latest; much of it was from the twenties and thirties. The brilliant white plastic and stainless steel of new equipment only made more obvious the Bakelite and black enamel, or the brass and wood of antique microscopes and other instruments. There were two electron microscopes enshrined in one building – great hulking brutes on massive vibration isolation platforms. Saul had promised them three new top-of-the-line scanning tunneling microscopes by the end of the year – if EcoBacter was chosen as one of their partners. Aventis or Bristol Myers Squibb could no doubt do better than that.
Kaye walked between the lab benches, peering through the glass doors of incubators at stacks of petri dishes within, their bottoms filled with a film of agar swept and clouded by bacterial colonies, sometimes marked by clear circular regions, called placques, where phage had killed all the bacteria. Day after day, year after year, the researchers in the institute analyzed and catalogued naturally occurring bacteria and their phage. For every strain of bacteria there was at least one and often hundreds of specific phage, and as the bacteria mutated to throw off these unwanted intruders, the phage mutated to match them, a never-ending chase. The Eliava Institute for Phage Research kept one of the largest libraries of phage in the world, and they could respond to bacterial samples by producing phage within days.
On the wall over the new lab equipment, posters showed the bizarre spaceship-like geometric head and tail structures of the ubiquitous T-even phage – T-4, T-6, and T-8, so designated in the nineteen twenties – hovering over the comparatively huge surfaces of Escherichia coli bacteria. Old photographs, old conceptions – that phage simply preyed upon bacteria, hijacking their DNA merely to produce new phage. Many phage did in fact do just that, keeping bacterial populations in check. Others, known as lysogenic phage, became genetic stowaways hiding within the bacteria and inserting their genetic messages into the host DNA. Retroviruses did something very similar in larger plants and animals.
Lysogenic phage suppressed their own expression and assembly and were perpetuated within the bacterial DNA, carried down through the generations. They would jump ship when their host showed clear signs of stress, creating hundreds or even thousands of phage offspring per cell, bursting from the host to escape.
Lysogenic phage were almost useless in phage therapy. They were far more than mere predators. Often these viral invaders gave their hosts resistance to other phage, even to antibiotics. Sometimes they carried genes from one cell to the next, genes that could transform the cell. Lysogenic phage had been known to take relatively harmless bacteria – benign strains of Vibrio, for example – and transform them into virulent Vibrio cholerae. Outbreaks of deadly strains of E. coli in beef had been attributed to transfers of toxin-producing genes by phage. The institute worked hard to identify and eliminate these phage from their preparations.
Kaye, however, was fascinated by them. She had spent much of her career studying lysogenic phage in bacteria and retroviruses in apes and humans.
Hollowed-out retroviruses were commonly used in gene therapy and genetic research as delivery systems for corrective genes, but Kaye’s interest was less practical. Many metazoans – non-bacterial life forms – carried the dormant remains of ancient retroviruses in their genomes. As much as one third of the human genome was made up of these so-called endogenous retroviruses.
She had written three papers about human endogenous retroviruses, or HERV, suggesting they might contribute to novelty in the genome – and much more. Saul agreed with her. ‘Everyone knows they carry little secrets,’ he had once told her, when they were courting.
Their courtship had been odd and lovely. Saul himself was odd and sometimes quite lovely and kind; she just never knew when those times would be.
Kaye paused for a moment by a metal lab stool and rested her hand on its Masonite seat. Saul had always been interested in the bigger picture; she, on the other hand, had been content with smaller successes, tidier chunks of knowledge. So much hunger had led to many disappointments. He had quietly watched his younger wife achieve so much more. She knew it hurt him. Not to have immense success, not to be a genius, was for Saul a major failing.
Kaye lifted her head and inhaled the air: bleach, steam heat, a waft of fresh paint and carpentry from the adjacent library. She liked this old lab with its antiques and humility and decades-old story of hardship and success. The days she had spent here, and on the mountain, had been among the most pleasant of her recent life. Tamara and Zamphyra and Lado had not only made her feel welcome, they had seemed to open up instantly and generously to become family to a wandering foreign woman.
Saul might have a very big success here. A double success, perhaps. What he needed to feel important and useful.
She turned and through the open doorway saw Tengiz, the stooped old lab caretaker, talking to a short, plump young man in gray slacks and a sweatshirt. They stood in the corridor between the lab and the library. The young man looked at her and smiled. Tengiz smiled as well, nodded vigorously, and pointed to Kaye. The man sauntered into the lab as if he owned it.
‘Are you Kaye Lang?’ he asked in American English with a distinct Southern drawl. He was shorter than her by several inches, about her age or a little older, with a thin black beard and curly black hair. His eyes, also black, were small and intelligent.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Pleasure to meet you. My name is Christopher Dicken. I’m from the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta – another Georgia, a long way from here.’ He spoke with a lilting southern accent.
Kaye smiled and shook his hand. ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here,’ she said. ‘What’s the NCID, the CDC –’
‘You went out to a site near Gordi, two days ago,’ Dicken interrupted her.
‘They chased us away,’ Kaye said.
‘I know. I spoke with Colonel Beck yesterday.’
‘Why would you be interested?’
‘Could be for no good reason.’ He thinned his lips and lifted his eyebrows, then smiled again, shrugging this off. ‘Beck says the UN and all Russian peacekeepers have pulled out of the area and returned to Tbilisi, at the vigorous request of the parliament and President Shevardnadze. Odd, don’t you think?’
‘Embarrassing for business,’ Kaye murmured. Tengiz listened from the hall. She frowned at him, more in puzzlement than in warning. He wandered away.
‘Yeah,’ Dicken said. ‘Old troubles. How old, would you say?’
‘What – the grave?’
Dicken nodded.
‘Five years. Maybe less.’
‘The women were pregnant?’
‘Yesss …’ She dragged her answer out, trying to riddle why this would interest a man from the Centers for Disease Control. ‘The two I saw.’
‘No chance of a misidentification? Full-term infants impacted in the grave?’
‘None,’ she said. ‘They were about six or seven months along.’
‘Thanks.’ Dicken held out his hand again and shook hers politely. He turned to leave. Tengiz was crossing the hall outside the door and hustled aside as Dicken passed through. The EIS investigator glanced back at Kaye and tossed a quick salute.
Tengiz