Fifty Degrees Below (24 page)

But a part of him wanted to see her again anyway. All these women he was thinking about—mainly Caroline, the thought of whom made his heart pulse, and also perhaps spread a certain feeling over thoughts of Diane and her clever calmness, or even Francesca, whom he didn’t want to think about at all—all these thoughts often led in the end back to Marta, a woman he had lived with for years, someone he really knew and had had a relationship with, even if it had imploded. She would still be mad at him. But he had to see her.

From Atlanta’s airport he took a shuttle to a hotel downtown. The area around Georgia Tech featured wide avenues running up and down waves of low hills, between huge glossy skyscrapers, copper and blue and dragonfly green. The school’s football stadium appeared below street level to his right as the shuttle inched along, reminding him with a brief pang of Khembalung.

After checking into the hotel Frank showered, then dressed with more care than usual. Uneasy glances in the mirror. Pierzinski had a little touch of Asperger’s, not uncommon in mathematicians; over the phone he had agreed to Frank’s request for a meeting with innocent delight, saying, “I’ll bring Marta along, she’ll love to see you.”

Frank had recalled his last encounter with Marta in San Diego, and held his tongue. It was enough to make him wonder just how close Yann and Marta were. Maybe she was not in the habit of talking to Yann about her past. Frank hoped not.

Anyway, she would be there. Her unavoidable connection to Yann still surprised Frank a little; Marta and Yann did not seem to him a likely couple; but then again what couple did?

Yann had suggested a restaurant nearby as a place to meet. Frank remained stuck before his hotel bathroom mirror. He found he really didn’t want to go. He was almost afraid to go. He looked neon pink in the mirror, somewhat boiled by the shower. He looked like he was wearing a costume signifying “academic at lunch.” Best give up on appearances. Marta knew what he looked like.

As did whoever was spying on him. And spying on Yann and Marta as well! This would be a red-blink situation, presumably: three of that market’s commodities getting together.

He left the hotel and walked to the restaurant Yann had suggested, called Manuel’s. It was a sultry night, a wet wind pouring like syrup through the streets. Marta had sent him directions in an e-mail that had no personal touches whatsoever. Not a good sign.

Manuel’s turned out to be an old-fashioned saloon, thick with the smell of old cigar smoke and machine politics. Wooden beams crossed the ceiling in Tudor style, dividing the space into small rooms. Sports paraphernalia, TVs overhead. A perfect place to spy on someone. The walls of the entryway were covered with black-and-white photos of groups sitting at the biggest tables, men in vests. Campaign buttons surrounded the photos. It was hard for Frank to imagine Marta even entering such a place.

But she was there already, it turned out, seated in a booth at the back with Yann. “Hi Yann, hi Marta.”

Yann rose and shook his hand; Marta didn’t. After one charged look Frank avoided her gaze and sat down, trying not to cringe. He thought of Caroline, brought her deliberately to mind; the look in her eye; then by accident thought of Diane too. Francesca. Caroline’s touch. He knew some powerful women. Too many one might say. He met Marta’s eye again, held his ground.
Ooooop! Oooooop!

They made small talk of the how-have-you-been variety, ordered drinks. It was early, and Frank and Marta declined food, while Yann ordered French fries. When they arrived Yann downed them like popcorn, bang bang bang.

Silence inevitably fell, Yann being so busy. “So what brings you here?” Marta said.

“Well, I’m still at NSF.”

Frank knew that Marta thought he had gone to NSF to escape her, back when they were breaking up. So this also might be construed as saying he had had other reasons for going there.

She wasn’t buying it. “Why would you do that?”

“Well, I’ve gotten interested in things NSF can do that UCSD can’t. National policy, and some big new programs. I was offered the chance to help with some of them, so I decided to give it a try.”

“Uh huh,” Marta said. “So what are you doing?”

“Well, a number of things. But one of them is looking into trying to start up some institutes, like the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, that would focus on particular problems. And, you know, one of the obvious things to look at would be the stuff you guys were doing out in San Diego. You know, trying to do a really robust proteomics, with the idea that if we got that going properly, it might lead to some really important advances. So I came down to see, well, you know—to see if you’d have any interest in joining something like that.”

Well, if spies were listening in, then they knew all. Frank shuddered at the idea that he had ever tried to rig this game with his Thornton-in-the-panel.

Headhunting, however, was standard practice.

“It’s going fine,” Marta said curtly. “Small Delivery is part of Bizet.” One of the Big Pharms, as Edgardo put it. “We’ve got a budget bigger than anything NSF could offer.”

This was not true, and Frank longed to say
I’ve got two billion dollars to spend, does Bizet have two billion dollars?
He clamped his jaw shut; his jaw muscles would be bunching in a way she knew to notice. She knew him. He tried to relax. “Well . . . so, you’re still working on the same stuff you were in San Diego?”

The French fries were gone, and Yann nodded. “The algorithm is working better on plant genomes? So some of the algae work is getting really predictable.”

Marta frowned. She didn’t like Yann saying even this much.

Frank felt his stomach shrinking. He and Marta had been together for four very intense years, and their breakup had been so terrible . . . the dread and remorse from that time were like a vise inside him still, ready to clamp down any time he thought about it. A lot of what had happened between them had been his fault. He had known that for most of the last year, but now it was all falling on him again. Anger vibed across the table at him in waves, and he couldn’t meet her gaze.

Yann appeared oblivious to all this. It was kind of hard to believe. It was also hard to imagine these two together. Yann was describing some of the tweaking he had done to his algorithm, and Frank did his best to follow, and to ask the questions he had come down to ask. How did that work? How would that work? Would more research funds speed the work on it? It was important to concentrate. It was important to get a better fix on how Pierzinski’s work was progressing. Frank still had ideas about where it could go, and he wanted to talk about that.

But it became clear Yann had changed emphasis during his time at Small Delivery. At first Frank didn’t follow the significance of the changes. “So you’re engineering changes in lichen?” he asked, feeling that Marta’s glare was making him stupid.

Marta answered for Yann. “It’s not about human health anymore,” she said, sharply. “We’re interested in engineering a tree lichen that will incorporate carbon into the host trees much faster than they do naturally.”

Frank sat back. “So, a kind of carbon sink thing?”

“Yes. A kind of carbon sink thing.”

Frank thought it over. “Why?” he said finally.

Yann said, “The problems with gene uptake in humans were getting too complicated, we just couldn’t. . . .”

“We couldn’t make it work,” Marta said flatly. “No one can. It may be the showstopper for the whole idea of gene therapy. They can’t get altered genes into cells without infecting them with a virus, and a lot of times that’s a really bad idea. That’s what it comes down to.”

“Well, but these nanobits look promising,” Yann said enthusiastically. “We’re making little bits of metal? They hold DNA on one side, and then when the metal bits imbed in cell walls, the DNA leaves the nanobits and crosses inside and is taken up.”

“In vivo?”

“No, in vitro, but they’re about ready for phase ones.”

“We,” Marta corrected him.

“Yeah, but the other lab. And we’re working on some Venter viruses too, you can build some pretty harmless viruses that alter the bacteria they jump into. The algorithms there are about the same as the lichen augmenters.” Suddenly he looked at his watch. “Hey, I’m sorry Frank, but I have to go. I had a previous appointment I can’t let down.”

Abruptly he stood and extended a greasy hand to Frank, shook hands briefly, and with a quick wave to Marta was out the door.

Frank stared at the space Yann had vacated. What was Yann thinking, this was an appointment they had made, Frank had flown down for it! And now here he was alone with Marta. It was like the things that tended to happen in his nightmares, and quickly fear began to fill him.

“Well,” he said experimentally.

Marta continued to alternate between staring and glaring. Unbidden, and indeed squirting out with the sudden force characteristic of the return of the repressed, he recalled her on the beach at Cardiff Reef, shouting
leave me alone
.

“Look,” he said abruptly, as if cutting her off in the middle of a rant, “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m
sorry
.”

“Hey. You don’t
sound
sorry.”

“I
am
sorry.”

“Sorry for
what
?”

Frank pursed his lips, tried to achieve a level tone. It was a fair enough question after all.

“I’m sorry I borrowed money on the house without telling you about it. I owe you some money because of that.”

“You owe me more than that.”

Frank shrugged. “Maybe so. But I figure I owe you about $18,400 on the house deal.” He was surprised how readily the figure came to mind. “I can at least pay you back the money. What you put into the place.”

While they had been together, their financial arrangement had been informal; a mess, in fact. And so when they broke up, which had come as a surprise to Frank, the money situation had caused big trouble. It had not been entirely Frank’s fault, or so he told himself. At the time they bought a house together in Cardiff, Marta had been in some sort of bankruptcy snarl with her soon-to-be ex-husband. She had married an ex-professor of hers, very foolishly as it had always seemed to Frank, and after the first year they had lived apart, but Marta had not bothered to get an official divorce until it became necessary. All this should have told Frank something, but it hadn’t. Marta was therefore bogged in her ex’s financial disasters, which had gone on for years—making her extra-intolerant of any funny business, as Frank only realized later, when his own affairs had gotten snarled in their turn. His had not been as bad as her ex’s, but on the other hand, there were aspects that were maybe worse, as her ex had gotten into his trouble mostly after he and Marta had split up, whereas Frank had deliberately concealed from her a third mortgage on their house, a mortgage he had taken to give him money to invest in a biotech start-up coming out of UCSD. This start-up had sparked his interest but unfortunately no one else’s, and soon the money from the third mortgage was gone, sucking all the equity they had accrued out of the place with it. So it was a really bad time for Marta to move out and demand that they sell the place and split the proceeds. He had had no time to put back the money, and when he confessed to her that there were no proceeds to split—that the money she had paid into the place, a matter of many thousands, was not there—she had freaked out. First she screamed at him, indeed threw a lamp at him; then she had refused to speak to him, or, later, to negotiate a payment schedule by which he could pay her back. At that point, it seemed to Frank, she actually wanted him to have ripped her off, the better to feel angry at him. Which no doubt helped her to avoid admitting to herself, or anyone else, that it was her wildness—specifically her sexual escapades, always “a part of the deal” of being with her, as she claimed, but increasingly upsetting—that had caused him to demand a different basis to the relationship, which had then started the whole breakup in the first place. In other words it had actually been all her fault, but with the money situation she didn’t have to admit it.

He could only hope she knew this. She had to know it; and probably she felt some guilt or responsibility, which helped to make her so abrasive and hostile. She had cheated on him, and he had cheated her. Love and money. Ah well. The pointless wars of the heart.

“Why did you do it?” she burst out.

“Do what?”

“Why did you take out a third on
our house
without
telling me
? Why didn’t you just
talk
about it? I would have been up for it.”

Well, he owed her an explanation for this. “I don’t know. I didn’t think you would be up for it.”

“Well either I would or I wouldn’t, but since you lost it all, because it was a bad idea, maybe if I hadn’t gone for it, it would have been for a good reason! I’m not
stupid
you know.”

“I know.”

“You
don’t
know! You think I’m just a lab tech. You think I’m the surfer slut who kills the mice and makes the coffee—”

“I do not! No way!”

“Fucking right no way.” She glowered viciously. She hated killing lab mice. “I’ve got my own lab here, and the stuff we’re doing with Yann is really interesting. You’d be amazed.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Yes you would! You have no idea.”

“You’re making a carbon sink organism. You told me. A way to sequester carbon quickly by biotechnical means.”

“Yes.”

“That’s great. But you know,” Frank said carefully, “much as we need a quick carbon capture these days, your customers are going to have to be governments. Corporations aren’t going to pay for it, or be able to get the permits. It’s the U.S. government or the UN or something like that who will.”

She glowered less viciously. “So?”

“So, you’ll need to get government approvals, government funding—”

“It’s no different than the drug stuff.”

“Except for the customer. It won’t be individuals, if I understand you right. It can’t be. So it’s not like drugs at all.”

“Not that part. We know that.”