Armitage laughed. "Are you fucking nuts?"

Crandall folded his hands. "There is someone beyond this place who may shelter me."

"You'd infect the outside world."

He didn't say anything. But his eyes flicked sideways.

There it was. Fresh information. Information that I knew couldn't be finessed out of him.

Good. I was going to enjoy this.

I let my brow go smooth suddenly. "Fuck." I stood and rolled down my sleeves.

Armitage said, "What?"

"We wasted our time."

Crandall's arrogance faltered. "What? You don't-"

"He's playing us. He's got nothing we need. It's all bullshit."

"I'm-now wait a minute-"

I went into the hall and then returned with a two-meter polyethylene bag stamped "City Morgue." I dropped the pouch at the man's feet.

"Use his body bag," I said to Armitage.

Armitage rose, sneering. I tossed him a roll of duct tape. He caught it and tore a strip free, nice and slow. The rending sound was awful in the room.

"Tape the feet, hands and face," I said. "Put him in the bag, take him to the swamp around LaGuardia. Cut notches in his belly so he doesn't rise when he bloats."

Crandall's composure exploded like the face of Bart's building.

"I do-I have information-"

I stared my contempt at him. What he was worth to me. Armitage stepped forward with the tape. Crandall's stink filled the room. He rattled in his wheelchair. Racking gasps hitched from his chest, staccato bursts of terror. "No, no! Anything! Anything!"

Easier than I'd thought. "We'll give you a minute to compose yourself."

In the hall, Maggie stared at me, her eyes a little too wide.

"He's ready," I said.

"You cracked him open like a pinata," said Armitage.

I looked at Jonathan. "Have a novice clean him up."

He nodded. "Terrence. He needs to work on his humility."

Jonathan and Maggie came back in with us. Crandall looked tiny and pathetic in his fresh jammies. Good. I didn't want to lose momentum.

"Alright, Doctor. How did Surazal cause the Shift?"

Everyone in the room gave a little noise of astonishment.

I ticked the points off. Index finger. "Forty years ago, Surazal conducts illegal genetic experiments on humans." Second finger. "My wife, a federal regulator, is killed to prevent an investigation." Third finger. "The Shift occurs. Supposedly an act of bio-terrorism, but no culprit ever identified. The Shift works by modifying and reviving dead human DNA." Fourth finger. "Surazal just happens to be the company that identifies the retroviral carrier of the mutated DNA." Fifth finger, contracting into a fist. "Surazal exploits this to become the power in Necropolis."

"You think the Shift was caused by some accident of ours? That I'm part of some elaborate, forty-year cover up?"

"Surazal was conducting genetic experiments."

Crandall looked skyward, asking the heavens for patience. "As were hundreds of New York companies in the early 21st century. Any one of them could have been responsible. Genetics was the next trillion-dollar medical frontier. By the 1980s, we'd already sequenced and cloned human genes. Once viruses had been trained to-"

"Trained viruses?" I sighed and turned to Maggie for help. "Okay. Talk to me like a child."

"Retroviruses are the perfect vehicles for genetic modification," she said, "because when they attack the host cell, they introduce their own genetic material into not only the cell but its genome-its DNA. When the cell replicates, it continues making the new DNA. So the desired effect-the manufacture of a necessary protein, for instance-continues for life. The technique originally treated diseases caused by single-gene defects, like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia. Retroviruses could replace the defective gene with a functional one and cure the patient."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," replied Maggie. "As long as geneticists followed established protocols."

"So what was Surazal doing that was illegal?" I asked Crandall.

He examined his fingers. "Germline therapy."

"Which means what?" asked Armitage, exasperated.

"Human germline therapy is banned," said Maggie. "Unlike the somatic cells of the body, when you modify germline cells-sperm cells, ova, or their stem cell precursors-the genetic changes not only become permanent, they become inheritable."

"Isn't that good?" Armitage asked. "A hemophiliac knowing that his son won't have the disease?"

"Creating an inheritable change is genetic engineering, not gene therapy," said Maggie. "It opens a huge ethical can of worms. Forget the debate about whether we should tamper with God's blueprint. What if we accidentally created some mutation that could wipe out humanity?"

Crandall laughed derisively. "That old saw?"

"Genetic manipulation is difficult and risky," Maggie retorted. "It's hard to prevent undesirable effects. You have to get the virus to infect the correct target cells and ensure the newly inserted gene doesn't disrupt any vital ones already in the genome."

"Sounds like Russian Roulette," I said.

"More like cooking when you don't know how ingredients will interact," said Maggie. "You could produce the tastiest chili in existence or poison sludge."

"Is that what the Shift is?" Armitage said.

"No!" barked Crandall. "Look, the Shift is carried by a retrovirus, I won't deny that. But it's a mutation of a bioweapon, not some experiment that got loose from our lab."

"So you say."

"I don't deny we've capitalized on the event, but Surazal did not cause the Shift!"

I looked at Maggie. At her polygraph eyes. "He's telling the truth," she said. "As he knows it."

"Nicole could've kept him in the dark," said Armitage.

"Okay," I said, "Go back to Surazal in my time. Why would they risk running illegal experiments in the first place?"

"Sheer competitive impatience, probably. Marketable products were at least a decade away. That's ten to fifteen years of very expensive R&D before the first big product comes to market. And faster is not only cheaper: whoever gets there first, well... We're talking about products as world-transforming as the telephone, the light bulb, the personal computer. Remember how long Microsoft had the market cornered?"

"What kind of 'world-transforming' products are we talking about?"

"A gene-therapy drug that produces more intelligent children? More attractive children? Disease-resistant children?"

I'd forgotten Jonathan was here until he spoke. "A world where ignorance, disease and disparity are banished. Where every child is a genius and an athlete. Think of how much we could accomplish."

I shook my head. How could anyone retain that kind of optimism? Was it faith or denial? From wherever it sprang, I'd never feel it. I was built different-I'd come out of my mother wanting to slap the doctor back.

"Drug companies don't just give away billion dollar treatments, Jonathan," said Armitage.

"Neither do insurance companies," said Maggie. "Only the rich would be able to afford them."

"The beginning of a true genetic underclass," I breathed. "The rich could actually become physically and mentally superior to the poor."

"What about longer-lived?" asked Jonathan, getting us back on point.

"Surazal could have been exploring anti-aging," said Crandall. "A bit early for significant research, but... perhaps."

"Logical. Except for the fact that Nicole Struldbrug hasn't aged a day in forty years."

Crandall reeled like I'd struck him. "What are you talking about?"

Could he really not know? I thought back to that cement room. Nicole had sent him away before admitting it to me in the cement room. "How long have you known Nicole, doctor?"

"Sixteen years."

"Who ran the company before her brother, Adam?"

"Isodor, their father. It's been family-held since the 1800s."

"Then how did you know I'd been killed?"

"Nicole told me."

"She told you she killed someone?"

"I balked at first when I learned that our team was to use human test subjects. So, as incentive, she told me a story about encountering a resistant investigator and what happened to the woman and her husband. She didn't tell me it had happened forty years ago. Then, to make sure I really understood, she brought in McDermott. I took one look at his scarred face and realized I didn't have a choice anymore."

A glacier crept over the surface of my thoughts. "McDermott's dead."

"No, he revived during the Dark Eighteen down in Ecuador or somewhere."

"Bolivia," I hissed.

"When he was shipped to Necropolis, she made him Director of Security."

Yet another lie from Lady Nicole. Alvarez's tattered newspaper clipping rushed back at me. The close-cropped platinum blonde hair, the dead blue eyes... The man who'd blackmailed Hector Alvarez into killing two people...

When I came back a minute later, everyone was looking at me in alarm. Maggie placed her hand on my arm.

"Donner," she said.

My mouth was bone-dry. "I'm okay." I swallowed. "When did Adam become CEO?"

"About fifteen years ago, after Izzy retired." Crandall clicked his tongue. "Tell me why you think Nicole hasn't aged in forty years."

So I gave it to him, the whole thing. Nicole in that hallway forty years ago. The murders. What she said in the cement room. Instead of looking shocked, Crandall quietly nodded to himself. "You don't seem surprised."

"It... explains a few things."

"Like what?"

Crandall's eyes fired in scientific passion. "Nicole provided us with human tissue samples to reverse-engineer. Tissue samples with remarkable properties."

"From where?"

"She wouldn't say. But the cells were resistant to free radicals. Very long telomere chains. And they had a Hayflick limit which was greater than normal by a factor of three."

"Someone translate that, please?" asked Armitage.

"They're factors in aging," I said.

"We assumed it was gen-enged material, stolen from another company. We never dreamed it could be from a real person. Because that would mean that the person could be-"

"Hundreds of years old," whispered Maggie.

Maggie, Armitage, Max and I stood with Jonathan in his office at the rear of the sanctuary. It had been a storeroom for Maury's Deli, but now it housed a couple of gray filing cabinets and a desk salvaged from a defunct insurance company. Since the Shift, life insurance wasn't what it used to be.

Max tossed his smartscreen onto the wall. A graphic flashed up, bathing us in blue sheen. "Surazal began as a chemical manufacturing company in 1879 in Germany. The founder, Abel Struldbrug, was a German Jew. The factory was destroyed during Dresden's firebombing in World War II. Abel's son Abraham got out of Germany and restarted the business in New York in 1946. He retired in '83, passing the reigns to son Isodor-Izzy to his friends. By 2005, the company had become a diversified conglomerate. One of the nation's largest drug companies, it had its fingers in a lot of pies. They had subsidiaries that manufactured weapons and provided private security for contractors in the Gulf wars. Combined with their scientific and pharmaceutical divisions, they were perfectly situated to step in when things went to hell."

Max punched a couple keys and the image changed. "Adam Struldbrug took over as CEO from Izzy in 2038. Nicole is Adam's twin. She's been a thorn in his side since day one."

"Oh yeah?"

Max smiled. "Even with their tight control of information, stories leak out."