When the lift hit bottom, Eldon turned the wheel that opened the air-lock door and walked into the primate lab. No one driving on the surface streets above could have guessed that such a facility existed beneath them. An obsessive-compulsive with a cleanliness fetish could happily eat dinner off of any surface in the lab; Judah cleaned it daily with ritualistic attention to detail. Sterility was essential when one considered the opportunities for cross-contamination in a lab like this. Dr. Robert Gallo had learned as much in his AIDS lab; and only two years ago, half the nation's flu vaccine had to be destroyed because of such a mistake.

The west wall of the lab held the primate cages, luxurious custom-built affairs designed by Dr. Tarver and welded together by Judah. At the moment, they held four chimpanzees, two dozen macaques, four marmosets, two baboons, and a cottontop tamarin. All the primates, even those suffering from terminal diseases, rested in obvious comfort. Dr. Tarver provided round-the-clock climate control and music to keep the social animals happy. Even now, Mozart's Seventh Symphony was rising to a crescendo in the background.

The mouse cages-prefab plastic things-were stacked against the north wall. Near the east wall hung breeding bubbles for the fruit flies: Drosophila melanogaster. Beneath these stood three stacks of aquariums that seemed to contain nothing but foliage. But close inspection would reveal the scaled bodies of some of Dr. Tarver's prize serpents.

Most of the floor space was occupied by massive refrigerators used for storing cell cultures, and testing machines built by the Beckman Coulter company. Two were newer models of analyzers in the oncology and genetics departments at UMC. Dr. Tarver had initially tried to carry on his experiments at the medical school, under cover of his legitimate work, but budget constraints had resulted in a level of oversight that made this impossible. On occasion he ferried samples from this lab to the medical school to view them under the biochemistry department's electron microscope, but for the most part he'd had to construct a virtual mirror of the UMC labs right here. He could do PCR amplification on the spot, and with remote connections to the computers in the commercial pathology lab he operated in north Jackson, he could use Sequence software to do genetic analysis. To date, he had spent more than $6 million on the facility. Some of the money had come from his wife, an early believer in his talent, but after her death he'd been forced to find more creative sources of financing.

Like Andrew Rusk.

There were other sources happy to provide him with funds, of course, but all were foreign-usually foreign governments-and Dr. Tarver would have no truck with them. Not that he wasn't tempted. The United States had adopted an almost suicidal policy regarding medical research-nearly as bad as the Brits, though not quite. In Britain you couldn't experiment on chimps at all, which pretty much guaranteed that Britain would not be a player in the pharmaceutical field in future. But it was bad enough in America. Chimpanzees were on the endangered species list, but they had been "split-listed" by the government, which allowed them to be used for medical research. Still, fewer than sixteen hundred chimps were being used for research at any moment in the United States. Most had been bred domestically, at highly regulated breeding centers. One of those centers was only 250 miles away, at New Iberia, Louisiana. But Dr. Tarver couldn't use those animals, not for what he was doing. Wherever those primates went, government inspectors would follow.

Your Chinese, on the other hand, didn't give one goddamn how many chimps were left in the wild. They would send an army of biologists to strip every tree in Africa if they decided it was necessary. The animal rights fanatics could go straight to hell, for all they cared. Dr. Tarver shared this view. In his experience, the moral convictions of animal rights activists lasted about as long as it took them to get a fatal disease that could be cured by receiving a valve from a pig's heart. Suddenly that pig didn't seem so goddamned sacred after all. Your animal rights fanatics weren't like Jehovah's Witnesses, who would lie there and die within ten feet of a bag of blood that could save them. They were liberal arts pussies raised by Summer of Love hippies; they'd never gone without a life-essential since the day they were born. Jehovah's Witnesses had been some of the toughest resisters to Nazi tyranny, Eldon knew, especially in the death camps. He figured the average animal rights activist would have lasted about three days at Auschwitz.

Animal experimentation had a long and venerable history. Aristotle and Erasistratus had experimented on live animals, and Galen had dissected countless pigs and goats in Rome. Edward Jenner had used cows to develop the smallpox vaccine, and Pasteur had cured anthrax by purposefully infecting sheep. How the hell anyone expected scientists to cure cancer or AIDS without using animals to set up testable models was beyond him. But Dr. Tarver didn't stop there. Because the truth was, animal models only took you so far. When you got into neurological diseases or viral studies, it wasn't enough to experiment on a similar metabolism. You had to use the real thing. And the real thing meant Homo sapiens.

Any serious medical researcher could tell you that. Only most of them wouldn't. Because research dollars were often controlled by foggy-minded liberals who hadn't a clue to what science really was, and no one wanted to risk his research budget for something so politically dangerous as the truth. The conservatives could be just as bad. Some of them didn't even believe in evolution! It staggered the mind.

Dr. Tarver walked across the lab and watched Judah bathe a sedated chimp. It gratified him to see his adoptive brother carefully scrubbing the chimp's snotty cheeks. After patting Judah on the shoulder, he walked over to the metal table he used as a desk in here. On the right side of the big table lay a stack of thick file folders. Each folder held a unique compilation of documents and photographs that added up to a person's life. Each had been delivered to Eldon by Andrew Rusk, who had ordered them compiled by various clients over the past two years. The files held daily schedules; medical histories; keys labeled for what they opened, which included cars, houses, offices, and even vacation homes; lists of important numbers, such as Social Security numbers, passport numbers, phone numbers, PINs, and credit card numbers; and of course there were photographs. Eldon didn't spend much time looking at the photos until right before an operation. He spent most of his time poring over the medical records, searching for anything that might negatively affect his research, or something that might make someone a candidate for a particular approach. Dr. Tarver was as meticulous in this work as he was in all things.

Everyone was in such a hurry. Everyone wanted it done yesterday. Everyone believed that his case justified special consideration. But that was the twenty-first-century man for you. No notion of patience or deferred gratification. When Eldon had faced a similar situation, he'd handled it himself. He was uniquely qualified to do so, of course. But he had never let unfamiliarity stop him before. When a mechanic tried to gouge him on the price of repairing an engine, Dr. Tarver had ordered a maintenance manual from the Ford company, studied it for four days, then disassembled the engine, repaired it, and reassembled it himself in perfect working order. This kind of thing was beyond most Americans now. And because of that, the day was coming when conventional war would not be an option against any major power. Only a special weapon would suffice.