The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away, but started no fire. Later, I discovered that it had shown up on a seismograph at Macquarie University, fixing the time precisely: 3:52 AM. Residents woken by the blast phoned emergency services within minutes, and our night shift operator called me just after four, but there was no point rushing to the scene when I'd only be in the way. I sat at the terminal in my study for almost an hour, assembling background data and monitoring the radio traffic on headphones, drinking coffee and trying not to type too loudly.
By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors had departed, having certified that there was no risk of further explosions, but our forensic people were still poring over the wreckage, the electric hum of their equipment all but drowned out by birdsong. Lane Cove was a quiet, leafy suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegetation of corporate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the adjacent national park, which straddled the Lane Cove River. The map of the area on my car terminal had identified suppliers of laboratory reagents and pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of precision instruments for scientific and aerospace applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotechnology firms--including Life Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building now reduced to a collection of white powdery blocks clustered around twisted reinforcement rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light, disconcertingly pristine; the building was only three years old. I could understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at their first glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done anything remotely like this. Nothing legally stored in a residential zone could reduce a modern building to rubble in a matter of seconds.
I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying the ruins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself. Mild shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a PhD in molecular biology from Cambridge, and an MBA from an equally reputable Japanese virtual university. I'd had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from assorted databases before I'd left home.
I approached her and said, "James Glass, Nexus Investigations." She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the technicians trawling their gas chromatographs and holography equipment around the perimeter of the ruins.
"They're yours, I suppose?"
"Yes. They've been here since four."
She smirked slightly. "What happens if I give the job to someone else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?"
"If you hire another company, we'll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we've collected."
She nodded distractedly. "I'll hire you, of course. Since four? I'm impressed. You've even arrived before the insurance people." As it happened, LEI's "insurance people" owned 49 percent of Nexus, and would stay out of the way until we were finished, but I didn't see any reason to mention that. Lansing added sourly, "Our so-called security firm only worked up the courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fiber-optic junction box was sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. They're supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipment failure, but apparently they didn't bother."
I grimaced sympathetically. "What exactly were you people making here?"
"Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R & D."
In fact, I'd already established that LEI's factories were all in Thailand and Indonesia, with head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There's a fine line, though, between demonstrating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client. A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at least one misguided question. I always do.
"So what were you researching and developing?"
"That's commercially sensitive information."
I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then had her own computer scrutinize the document. Conversing in modulated infrared, the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing's did the same, then they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.
Lansing said, "Our main project here was engineering improved syncytiotrophoblastic cells." I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. "Strengthening the barrier between the maternal and fetal blood supplies. Mother and fetus don't share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier cells didn't evolve to cope with HIV, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the next thalidomide-like disaster. We're aiming for a single intravenous injection of a gene-tailoring vector, which would trigger the formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the placenta, specifically designed to shield the fetal blood supply from contaminants in the maternal blood."
"A thicker barrier?"
"Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets through. We know exactly what the developing fetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for transporting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through."
"Very impressive." A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded like exactly the kind of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I'd heard that HIV most often infected children during birth itself, not pregnancy--but presumably there were other viruses which crossed the placental barrier more frequently. And I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out en masse and have gene-tailored fetal barriers installed--but I could picture a strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and pollutants. In the long term--if the system actually worked, and wasn't prohibitively expensive--it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.
Beneficent, and lucrative.
In any case--whether or not there were biological, economic and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete success ... it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the thing.
I said, "Were you working with animals?"
Lansing scowled. "Only early calf embryos, and disembodied bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group, they would have been better off bombing an abattoir."
"Mmm." In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal Equality--the only group known to use such extreme methods--had concentrated on primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were still plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if they were disposable test tubes--many of them quite close by. "What about competitors?"
"No one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far as I know. There's no race being run; we've already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components--the membrane channels, the transporter molecules--so any competitor would have to pay us license fees, regardless."
"What if someone simply wanted to damage you, financially?"
"Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead. Cutting off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this laboratory wasn't earning a cent."
"Your share price will still take a dive, won't it? Nothing makes investors nervous quite so much as terrorism."
Lansing agreed, reluctantly. "But then, whoever took advantage of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint, themselves. I don't deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry, now and then ... but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle business. Bombs are for fanatics."
Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology ... but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of abortifacient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safeguarding the unborn child.
Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. Elaine said, "It was a very professional job. If you'd hired demolition experts, they wouldn't have done a single thing differently. But then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing and placement of the charges." She held up her notepad, and displayed a stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like the actual mess behind us.
She continued, "Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint every batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the residue. We've linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Singapore five years ago."
I added, "Which may not be a great help though, I'm afraid. After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen times."
Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, "I'd like to talk to you again, later--but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible."
She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring the list to mine. She said, "Nothing's been lost, really. We had off-site backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milson's Point."
Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the records stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the world--heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said, "You'd better let the vault's operators know what's happened."
"I've already done that; I phoned them on my way here." She gazed at the wreckage. "The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In six months' time, we'll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting their time. The work will go on."
I said, "Who would want to stop it in the first place?"
Lansing's faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasn't remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadn't knocked her slightly out of kilter.
She said, "You tell me. That's your job, isn't it?"
)
