Page 82 of Mastermind

Theo can read the expression on my face. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s a good news/bad news situation. The good news is I think I found what Weir was hiding. The bad news is it took a trip through a paper shredder.”

“Strips or confetti?” asks Theo.

“Strips, from what it feels like. Thin ones.”

“Then it’s all good news,” he replies.

“Okay . . . explain.”

“First, we need to take these someplace safe to examine them.”

Obviously we can’t take them back to FBI headquarters or Quantico, because there are too many eyes there. Even Gerald was paranoid. “Will a hotel room work?”

“Yes. Ideally one with a walk-in shower,” says Theo.

“You don’t smell that bad.”

“What? No. I’m going to show you how to make a dinosaur,” he says with a straight face.

CHAPTER FORTY

THEOSAURUS REX

Weir’s shredded documents are sitting on the hotel room table like a pile of twisted paper ribbons. An airplane flies overhead, rattling the windows as it comes in for a landing at the nearby Richmond airport. Theo is seated, looking at a single shred from the pile.

“If that’s your plan, I’m going to get another room and take a thirty-day nap,” I tell him from my position sitting on the bed.

“What? Oh no. Just checking them and doing some math,” he replies.

“Okay. But you promised me a dinosaur,” I remind him.

“I promised to tell you how to build a dinosaur. There’s a difference. So, there’s the relevant part to what we’re doing and the irrelevant part. I’ll just give you the thumbnail version of that. DNA degrades over time. There’s a kind of half-life we use to determine how long a strand of DNA will last before it loses fifty percent of its information from the molecular bonds breaking down. But unlike the half-life of a radioactive element, this isn’t a law of physics. DNA’s half-life has more to do with the environment DNA is preserved in and how it deteriorates over time.

“I can put uranium in a freezer and come back in a thousand years and it will have lost just as much radioactivity as if it had sat on a counter, more or less. That DNA in that same freezer—okay, maybe not the same freezer next to the radioactive uranium—won’t have degraded at all if kept in the right solution and temperature. The problem is, with nature, you never get those kinds of ideal conditions, except when an animal gets frozen after getting stuck in the mud or a snowdrift. Even then, its own body chemistry can break down and cause the DNA to deteriorate. That’s why we don’t have museum refrigerators filled with dinosaur DNA. And if a mosquito trapped in amber were to have a stomach full of dinosaur DNA, the stomach acids and breakdown of the insect’s body would lead to the DNA deteriorating.”

“So Jurassic Park is a lie. Got it.”

“Actually, not quite. When I was a kid reading that book, it got me to thinking about how you could restore dinosaur DNA from small fragments without having to insert segments from other animals. Also, about how you could know what was dino DNA and what wasn’t.

“The hard part is to find that DNA, because it’s not meant as a long-term storage solution. Well, technically it is, in that DNA replicates and carries genes through time. Some for over a billion years, so it’s actually highly efficient for small bits of information. Not so much for whole animals. But that’s another discussion.”

“Oh, this is a discussion? I thought it was a TED talk,” I reply.

“Sorry. I guess I’m way off on a tangent here.” Theo picks up a handful of shredded paper. “Let me go work on this.”

“Finish your point about dinosaurs. You can’t leave a girl who dreamed about having a pet velociraptor in suspense.”

“Velociraptors? Even the small ones were terrifying. Why would you ever have wanted one of those?”

“Revenge.”

“Ah. Good point. So, anyway, the idea of getting dinosaur DNA, let alone resurrecting one, was considered a lost cause. And probably still is for right now, but not from an informational point of view. A velociraptor’s whole genome might be more useful than a living velociraptor.”

“You clearly never had your heart broken in the eighth grade,” I reply.

“Tenth-grade science camp, actually,” says Theo.