Besides, if you’re going to burden someone with a painful truth, there needs to be some upside to it. And Brodie couldn’t see one. Better to keep that one to himself.
His phone rang. It was McKinnon, coming in just under the wire at nine minutes.
Brodie answered. “What have you got?”
“You have the sample on you now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. There’s a place called Hyperion Lab, Eighty-two Kürfürstendamm. You need me to spell that?”
Kürfürstendam, colloquially known as the Ku’damm, was one of the most famous streets in the city, and the former commercial and cultural heart of old West Berlin. “I can spell it with my eyes closed.”
“Okay. The guy who runs the lab is an American. David Katz. I met him at a conference in London. Brilliant guy. As a favor to me, he’ll help you. The lab isn’t contracted with us, but they are highly regarded, cutting-edge, and, if we need to move this into official channels, easy enough to explain, given the urgency of your request.”
In other words, “I’m buying your bullshit, Scott, but you own this.” Should he tell McKinnon that he was no longer employed by the Army? Might be bad timing. He said, “I’m heading there now.”
“Good luck.”
Brodie hung up, then found a cab and gave the driver the address. They headed west, through the Tiergarten and then south into the old heart of West Berlin. They drove down the Ku’damm, which was lined with trees and stately older buildings featuring high-end shops, cafés, and hotels.
The cab pulled up to a modern-looking office tower sandwiched between an old hotel and a nineteenth-century apartment building. Brodie paid the guy, hopped out, and entered a small lobby. There was no security, but he spotted a directory and found Hyperion Labs on the fourth floor and took the elevator up.
The doors opened into a small, carpeted anteroom leading to frosted glass double doors. He entered and announced himself to the receptionist, a middle-aged German woman, and in a minute a lanky man in his early thirties wearing a white lab coat emerged to greet him. The man extended a hand.
They shook, and Brodie said, “I appreciate you taking a look.”
Katz nodded and held out his hand. “The slide.”
Brodie took out the small manila envelope containing the slide and handed it to Katz, who pulled out the slide and held it to the light. “Okay… follow me.”
Brodie followed Katz down a long hallway and into a large windowless lab room filled with equipment, and a few researchers hard at work. As Brodie walked through the room his eyes caught a machine that was holding about four dozen droppers on a motorized arm that were being rapidly dipped into tubes and then dropping their contents onto a large grid of what looked like brass-colored microchips. He asked, “What kind of work do you do here?”
“Mostly gene synthesis. Research and therapeutics. Where’d you get this?”
“That’s classified.”
“Hm.”
“What is that machine doing?”
Katz eyed the large machine as the robotic arm rapidly moved over the grid of brass chips. “Oligonucleotide synthesizer.”
“I thought it looked familiar.”
“The oligonucleotide components will be assembled into fully synthetic genes.”
“Does that mean you can create completely synthetic organisms?”
Katz looked at him, deadpan. “That’s classified.”
Funny. They approached a cluttered desk with a standard light microscope. Katz sat down, put the slide under the lens, and had a look. He worked the knobs for a moment, then said, “On a first look, it appears to be Yersinia pestis.” Katz looked up at Brodie. “The bacterium that causes plague.”
Brodie did not respond to that.
“I was told you wanted it sequenced.”
“Yes.”
