Page 83 of Mastermind

“What happened?”

“She fell for another kid in my cabin who was into physics. That’s what motivated me to learn computer science as well as biology. I was tired of those hard-science guys getting all the girls.”

“Every time,” I reply, shaking my head. “So, dinosaur DNA . . .”

“Biologists, like other scientists, tend to like hard rules. We want to know exactly the parameters to work within, because otherwise it can drive you crazy. This kind of thinking was why you’d hear the term junk DNA when we encountered a sequence we didn’t think was a gene. Or that DNA is the only way information is inherited. We now know things are much more complicated. Proteins on the surface of DNA contain information. Your mother’s body can activate certain genes while you’re in the womb. Even the bacteria in our stomach helps determine how our genes express themselves.”

Theo picks up a handful of paper shreds, walks into the bathroom, and wets them briefly in the sink. I follow him to the doorway to watch.

“Anyway, we had some pretty specific ideas about how DNA degrades and just accepted the idea of a DNA half-life, which dictated that we’d never recover any DNA that was more than a few hundred thousand years old. That was until scientists started discovering that DNA might leave fossils, too. When scientists started cracking open the bones of sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaurs—something that had been ingrained in them not to do—they started to make interesting discoveries: fossilized cells, collagen, and in some cases, tiny balls of iron that appeared to be bound to a molecule . . . DNA. Not long strands. Only tiny pieces. By themselves, not very useful.” Theo holds up a wet strip of paper and shows me the print. “But you can make out certain parts, like letters and parts of words.” He places the strand on the glass of the shower door, where it sticks, then places another next to it. “These two sequences aren’t immediately related to each other, but they might be from the same document. Or they might deal with the same topic.”

He starts putting more strands on the shower glass, some upside down. He doesn’t examine them individually, he simply flattens them on the glass like linguine noodles.

“All the information is here, but it’s scrambled. With the dinosaur DNA, the problem is that little ball of DNA probably only has a fraction of the whole genome. Unlike our shredded documents, which we can assume contain everything. However, unlike our pile of shredded documents, inside the dinosaur bone that we grind down to look for balls of DNA, there could be millions and millions of copies, each one broken at a different place. It’d be like a thousand boxes of the same jigsaw puzzle, each one randomly missing different pieces. Mathematically, I can tell you how many boxes we need before we can fill in the rest. It would be a lot. Nobody has figured out how to extract enough remnant DNA. It might be there aren’t enough bones on the planet to make that happen. But I don’t think that’s the case. Too many people were saying none of it could be done while others slowly chipped away at the problem.

“Here it’s a different problem. We don’t have two different strands with the same sentence split in different places telling us how to overlap them. We only have one copy, but presumably the whole copy.”

Theo has covered the upper half of the shower door with strands. I can’t see any rhyme or reason to them. It just looks like he pasted a bunch of shredded paper to the glass.

“We could try to match each piece to another. That’s what the Iranian government did with all the shredded documents from the US embassy when it fell. But that took thousands of people working nonstop forever.”

“We don’t have that much time.”

“Correct.” Theo takes out his phone. “What we do have is computers and the same AI tools I’ve been playing around with for the dinosaur problem.”

“Wait? You were trying to build a dinosaur?”

“Not quite. I was trying to tackle the problem to see what solutions I could come up with. I play with the problem every now and then to develop better tools. When I started, nobody knew you could find bits of DNA in tiny balls inside of fossils. And admittedly, there’s some question that that’s really what it is. But from a mental-exercise point of view, imagining that one impossible idea is no longer impossible can help you imagine several other things that are possible.”

Theo takes a photo with his phone and uploads it via his browser. A moment later, he shows me the screen. There’s an image of several of the strands from the glass window now next to each other, forming words. It’s at best ten percent of one document. But that’s one hundred percent more than we had before.

Theo points to the shreds of paper in the sink. “It’s all there. We just have to take photos and let the computer do the rest, matching sections to each other.”

“And the velociraptor you promised me?”

“Let’s find out what Weir wanted to hide. Then you can help me break into a few museums to steal bones and we might just get somewhere.”

Nothing about his body language or tone of voice indicates that he’s lying or joking. Either he’s not as crazy as I think, or it’s contagious.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

PAPER TRAIL

While Theo pasted the shredded documents to the shower and started assembling them back together using whatever black-magic computer program he has hidden away in the cloud, I went to the office supply store across the street and got a printer and a ream of paper so we could print out all the documents Weir thought had been destroyed.

I only have a handful of them so far, and no smoking gun, but a curious picture is beginning to emerge. Most of the documents he destroyed are financial statements relating to stock holdings in about six different companies.

When I looked them up, having never heard of any of them, I learned that they were either technology or biotech companies. The total value of the stocks is approximately six million dollars. It’s not a small sum, but what’s interesting is that most of the companies are penny stocks with wildly fluctuating values.

Theo walks into the room and grabs another pizza crust from the box lying open on the bed next to me and my spread of papers. He sits on the opposite bed. “What have you got so far?” he asks, reaching for my leftover crust on the plate by the nightstand.

I glance at the half pizza still sitting in the box. “Don’t you like pizza?”

“I love it,” he replies between bites of the crust.

“Then why don’t you try eating some?”

Theo glances down at the two crusts in his hands. “Oh. I didn’t realize . . . When I was after N2—Angelica Covel, the serial killer nurse—I spent some time on the streets.” He looks at me for a moment, perhaps realizing that I don’t know most of that story. “Living on the streets, I kind of adapted.”