She got up, walked forward, and pointed at the curving lines of a graph on the screen.
“But here in the second graph, it shows that when the nest was placed next to the cell phone tower, the bees took longer and longer to get back, until the hive eventually died off.”
“I, for one, am intrigued by Mr. Oz’s theory,” Dr. Orlean said. “I think we may have our culprits—pollution from hydrocarbons and electromagnetic radiation from cell phones have coupled together, resulting in critical biosphere meltdown.”
There were nods all around. Harvey Saltonstall was visibly irritated. You could see the steam escaping from his ears.
“But that still doesn’t explain why these alleged hydrocarbon-morphed pheromones don’t affect human beings. Can you explain that, Mr. Oz?”
He gave the “Mr.” a very slight emphasis to remind everyone that I didn’t have a PhD.
I bit my lip again. But only to create my own dramatic pause. I did have an answer.
“Human beings lack the vomeronasal organ,” I said to Saltonstall. “The tissue at the base of the nasal cavity that causes response to airborne pheromones. Almost all mammals have it, but not humans. In fact, there are theories that the human VNO may have diminished as our relationship with dogs evolved. As it got bigger in dogs, it went away in humans. Many of the genes essential for the VNO are completely nonfunctional in humans.”
I looked around the room and realized I had won it.
Saltonstall sat there looking as though I’d yanked his pants down, so I assumed he knew what I was talking about. Dr. Orlean smiled at me.
“Bravo, Mr. Oz,” she said. “I don’t think anyone can deny that this is a breakthrough. I think we’ve finally hit the jackpot. For the first time I feel like we have a good chance of understanding what’s causing HAC.”
“Yes, but unfortunately that only leads us to the next question,” I said. “How do we stop it?”
Chapter 70
A BATTERED POLICE van emits a feeble, oscillating shriek as it weaves through the clogged, dust-choked streets of East Delhi, India.
Behind the van’s wheel, newly appointed sub-inspector Pardeep Sekhar nearly clips a fruit vendor as he wipes sweat off his face with the sleeve of his khaki shirt. The fruit vendor erupts into a torrent of curses, and Pardeep answers him with a dismissive wave.
“Clean the dirt out of your ears, bumpkin,” he halfheartedly grumbles out the window. “That sound from my van—that’s not a demon but a siren. It means, out of the way. Police coming through!”
Pardeep blames the television and Internet for the last decade’s influx of rural migrants into the city. All those channels luring illiterate fools into the bright lights and Bollywood lifestyle they will never achieve. When they can’t find work, they turn to petty crime—pickpocketing, purse snatching. That’s where he comes in.
At the next traffic-glutted intersection, he laughs to himself as he watches a guy trying to maneuver his cherry-red Lamborghini around a donkey cart. An Italian luxury car revving around a jackass is twenty-first-century India in a nutshell. Digital age, meet stone age.
If only I had a camera, he thinks. The men back at the station would love it.
Pardeep’s beat is Yamuna Pushta—the largest slum in Delhi, which puts it in the running for the largest slum in the world. In every direction lie blocks of jhuggis, makeshift huts made out of wood and cardboard tied together with string. The shantytown has no electricity or sewers. Today, people are flying kites and playing volleyball; naked children sit grinning as they play in the dirt.
Pardeep brings the van to a stop in front of a three-story concrete housing block beside a particularly fetid section of the Yamuna River. The Yamuna is a tributary of the Ganges. Bathing in its sacred water, according to the holy men, is supposed to free one from the torments of death.
Pardeep rolls up the window and through the dusty glass takes a look out across the smooth brown surface of the polluted cesspool. He sighs and shuts off the engine.
It would free one, all right. But not from death. From life.
He looks up at the grim three-story complex: River Meadow Apartments. They make it sound pleasant, don’t they? The calls that have been coming in from the building are confusing. People screaming about a break-in, a crazed killer stalking the hallways.
Pardeep shrugs his narrow shoulders. Looks quiet enough from the outside. Probably a prank.
Still, he lifts his newly issued weapon off the floor of the passenger-side footwell just in case. It’s one of the Indian-made INSAS submachine guns that have been handed out in the years since the Mumbai terrorist attacks. He casually shoulders the strap and heads for the building.
In the back of his mind, Pardeep idly hopes it isn’t a prank but a real-life terrorist. He would love nothing more than to blow some foreign-born radical scum to smithereens, maybe get promoted out of the city’s armpit in the bargain.
He’s trying to decide which plum district he would like to be assigned to when an old man runs screaming from the building.
“Raksasom! Rana! Atanka!” he warbles as he runs past the van.
Monsters. Horror. Run.
Monsters. Pardeep smiles to himself, amused. This is a prank. Probably kids playing tricks on some superstitious old fools.
“Hello? Police,” he says, entering the lobby. It’s deserted. “Police!”
The smell is awful. It smells like shit, garbage, death—which is to say, nothing unusual for this neighborhood.
There’s no response. He starts up the stairs.
At the top of the first-floor landing he sees something moving in the dimness down at the end of the hallway. It’s low to the ground, perhaps about waist level. In the windowless corridor, it looks to Pardeep like a woman with a blanket over her, crawling on all fours. He is confused. He reaches for his flashlight, takes a few steps closer.
Then there is something moving at him very fast down the dark hallway. He clicks on his flashlight and sees bright eyes flash jewel-green in the darkness. Then he is falling backward.
Pardeep doesn’t have time to scream as the leopard opens him from belly to chin.
Two more leopards arrive, skulking slyly in the hallway.
The leopard is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. The beautiful turquoise-eyed creature is sometimes called a leaping chain saw due to the fact that it uses both its rear claws and its razor-sharp front claws, as well as its teeth, when it strikes.
Before a dark mist falls over his eyes, one last word floats up from Pardeep’s mind.
Raksasom.
Monsters.
Chapter 71
I HAD A dream that night. I dreamed of a circle of ants. They chased each other in a spiral—a squirming black whirlpool. Turning around and around, each one blindly chasing the pheromone trail of the ant just in front of him. A closed circle. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Locked in their loop, the ants ran around and around in circles—desperate, stupid, doomed.
I didn’t know what time it was when I woke in the dark to the sound of what sounded like the world ending.
There was an alarm going EEHN EEHN EEHN. It sounded as though I were on a submarine that had just been torpedoed.
I clawed at the sheets and scrambled to sit up. Smoke detector? I thought. Some kind of military alarm?
Then I saw a light pulsing on the bedside table and realized the sound was coming from my iPhone. I vaguely remembered Eli playing with it the day before. Three-year-old kid knew more about the stupid thing than I did. I snatched it off the table and shut it off. Kid had set it to some crazy DEFCON 3 ringtone. Which was actually funny, in a morbid way, under the present quasi-apocalyptic circumstances. My heart started beating again, and I almost laughed. Then I answered it.
“Mr. Oz, sorry to bother you at this hour,” Lieutenant Durkin said. “I have a message for you from Mr. Leahy of the NSA. A high-level meeting is scheduled at the White House this morning. The president will be there, as
well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Leahy has requested that you be there in person to present the new theory you and the other scientists have developed.”
I wiped sleep gunk out of my eyes. What? Another meeting?
“Oh, okay. I guess,” I said, clicking on the bedside lamp. My brain was still woozy.
“Your wife and son are free to come with you, but since travel is becoming dangerous, it might be safer to leave them here in the Secure Zone. We can have you back up here by dinner.”
“That’s fine, Lieutenant. When am I leaving?” I said.
“Your flight out of Teterboro will be ready to go in about an hour. Can you be ready in, say, twenty minutes?”
Twenty minutes, I thought, inwardly groaning. The meeting last night had gone on until well past midnight. It felt like I’d gotten about twenty minutes of sleep.
“Of course. I’ll meet you in the lobby,” I said.
After I hung up, I immediately called Leahy.
“Why the face-to-face, Leahy? Why don’t we just teleconference?”
“It’s complicated, Mr. Oz,” Leahy said. “I know it’s a pain in the ass, but I really need you here. You’re a persuasive speaker.”
I blinked. What was Leahy talking about?
“Persuasive?” I said. “What does the president need to be persuaded about?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here,” Leahy said.
I smelled fish. For some reason the needle on my bullshit detector was jittering. The last thing I wanted to do with the world falling apart was leave my family, but it looked like I didn’t have much choice.
“Fine. See you later,” I said.
One of Chloe’s eyes peeled open as I was coming out of the shower.
“The president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House are having a meeting,” I said. “They want my input. Face-to-face in D.C.”
“Back to D.C. again?” Chloe said, opening her other eye and sitting up. “But you can’t. It’s too dangerous. Can’t they, I don’t know, use Skype or something?”
“That would make sense. This is the federal government we’re talking about. Sounds like they need some convincing on the pheromone angle. Until they’re on board, we won’t be able to make progress on tackling this insanity. Besides, I’ll have a military escort the whole way. They said I’ll be back before dinner.”
I was heading for the front door of our lavish government-assigned apartment when Eli poked his head out of the room we’d put him in.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said, kneeling down next to him. “Did you change my ringtone?”
“Um, maybe?” he said.
I messed his hair and gave him a hug.
“Listen, Monsieur Maybe. I’m going to Washington. I need you to stay here and take care of Mommy for me until I get back tonight.”
“No, Daddy,” Eli said, his face crumpling. I stood up. He hugged my leg. “I can’t take care of Mommy. Don’t go. You have to stay here. I don’t want you to go.”
By the time Chloe helped pry him off me, I felt like crying, too. Shutting that door was the hardest thing I’d done anytime lately.
I met Lieutenant Durkin in the lobby and we proceeded outside. Alongside the sandbagged gate strung up across Fifth Avenue, soldiers and cops were drinking coffee in Anthora cups beside a convoy of up-armored Hummers and police cars. The row of engines idled, quietly panting exhaust into the brisk white beams of the headlights.
“Are any of the other scientists coming with us?” I asked as Lieutenant Durkin and I climbed into one of the Hummers.
“My orders were just you, but if you want to bring some of the others, I can check.”
I waved off the idea. I was slightly surprised, but I actually liked it better that I was the only one they’d asked for. We rolled through half a dozen checkpoints on the way out to Teterboro. As we were coming up the ramp for the George Washington Bridge, I noticed a black column of smoke rising in the distance above the South Bronx.
Lieutenant Durkin looked at the smoke and then back at me.
“There have been problems with the evacs,” he said, looking away. “Some looting and such. We’re trying to keep a lid on it.”
Chapter 72
WHEN WE ARRIVED at Teterboro, Lieutenant Durkin drove us through a gate in a chain-link fence right onto the tarmac. Off to the right, beyond the doors of a nearby hangar, a sleek, cream-colored business jet began slowly taxiing toward us, its wing lights blinking.
I couldn’t help but notice that it was the top-of-the-line Gulfstream G650, a luxury aircraft that can hop the Atlantic and reach speeds near Mach 1.
If they thought they could impress me by rolling out a G650 to take me down to D.C., they’d succeeded.
Then I had another thought.
All this—for me?
What was up with the sudden VIP treatment? This definitely didn’t seem like your standard government travel itinerary. Was I being buttered up for some reason?
What the hell was this meeting about?
Lieutenant Durkin stayed behind on the tarmac. Another military guy waved me toward the airstair, and I boarded the plane with nothing but the suit on my back.
The Gulfstream had flat-screen displays over mirror-polished teak desks and leather executive chairs you could sink into as though they were pudding.
The interior was furnished in the manner of somebody’s corner office, I thought as I chose one of its eight empty seats and sat in it. A corner office that flew at fifty-one thousand feet and more than seven hundred miles an hour.
Not that I had much time to enjoy it. The flight attendant handed me a cup of coffee before we took off, and I was still sipping it when the Gulfstream’s wheels skidded with two soft shrieks against the tarmac at Reagan National an amazing twenty-five minutes later.
The jet’s engines whirred down as we taxied. I looked out the window. There was something strange about the airport. There were jumbo jets parked along the terminals, but they weren’t moving. No other planes were on the tarmac. Nothing was taking off or landing. It looked as if the airport were closed. It was eight in the morning on a Tuesday.
When we approached the terminal I saw that there was some activity here after all. Lined in two vast rows were dozens of military aircraft—Harriers, Warthogs. Marines were scampering around, loading and unloading tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters.
I slowly realized the airport had been commandeered by the military.
Chapter 73
I GOT A call from a number I didn’t recognize as I felt the plane jerk to a halt. I answered as the flight attendant unclipped a bracket and the door yawned open with a happy hum.
“Mr. Oz, it’s Dr. Valery. I have the test results.”
Dr. Mark Valery was a biochemist at NYU whom I had asked to do a chemical analysis on the muck on my clothes.
“What did you find?” I said.
“Your pheromone theory seems spot-on,” Valery said. “Your clothes were saturated with a chemically unique hydrocarbon similar to dodecyl acetate—a common ant pheromone. I say ‘similar’ because it’s like it, but isn’t quite the same. This stuff has properties we’ve never seen before.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The carbon chains are strange. Very strange. The substance has an extremely high molecular weight. Unlike dodecyl acetate, this stuff seems to dissolve quite slowly, which might help explain its unusually strong effect on larger animals. But that ain’t all, it turns out. The animals aren’t the only ones who seem to be secreting a pheromone. So are we.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Long story short, a human being’s scent is very complex,” Dr. Valery said. “We secrete materials from several different types of glands. There’s regular sweat, secreted by the eccrine glands, and then there’s sweat from the apocrine glands, in the hairier parts of our bodies. Then there’s sebum.”
“The substance that contains our smell,” I said.
“Right. Sebum is the s
tuff that bloodhounds home in on when tracking an individual person. Our olfactory fingerprint. The fragrance industry has been doing sebum experiments for years. I used to help run some of them. The thing about sebum is, like pheromones, it’s chock-full of hydrocarbons. That’s why, after hearing about your breakthrough, I decided to test some skin swabs from humans. I used myself and some of the other lab workers as subjects.”
“What did you find?” I said.
“It turns out that our sebum is chemically different from some samples I found in a similar study that was done back in 1994. I don’t know if it’s the air, our diet, seepage from plastics, or what, but initial tests seem to indicate that our sebum has a new compound in it. With pentanol and methyl butanoate. Not only that, but this new compound’s chemical structure seems to resemble several insect attack pheromones.”
I stared at the floor of the plane, trying to piece together what I was being told.
“So you’re saying the animals are attacking because of our smell?” I said. “It’s not just them. It’s us.”
“Think about it, Mr. Oz,” said Valery. “The olfactory system of most mammals is incredibly strong. A dog’s sense of smell is about a hundred thousand times more powerful than a human’s. The power of olfaction is primal. And it seems the critters don’t like what they’re smelling.”
Chapter 74
WITH THESE NEW and even more troubling implications playing a polka in my head, I exited the plane and was guided by a couple of soldiers toward a shiny black-and-chrome government motorcade thrumming by the hangar.
If our innate human odor was helping to cause this chaos, how were we supposed to fix that? How could we humans have changed what we smell like on a molecular level? How could it have happened so quickly? And why?