The Bug Hunter: A Novel Read online

  Chechen separatists had been in a decades-long battle with Russia over control of the Caucasus region. And though technically the Chechens and ISIS were fighting different battles, they shared a common goal of creating an Islamic caliphate. For the past several years, al-Baghdadi had been the guest of Aslan Basayev’s Caucuses Province one of Chechnya’s larger separatist forces. Basayev and al-Baghdadi had found common cause in bringing jihad to the West.

  And now he was ready to strike back. As his finger hovered over the Submit button, al-Baghdadi said to himself in Arabic, “In the name of God, most merciful and most compassionate,” and pressed his dirty index finger on the screen.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Russian River Valley, California

  Gabriel Marx’s dreams that night came fast and loose. They bounced from his boyhood home in rural Michigan to Fallujah to the poppy fields of Afghanistan to upstate New York, of all places. He’d never actually been anywhere in New York outside of Manhattan and had never met the grizzled old woman who told him that his father was in jail for murder. “Bullshit,” he said to the woman. It wasn’t that he thought his father incapable of such an act, only that he didn’t think he’d be the kind to get taken alive. Gabriel’s dad was a murder-suicide kind of guy.

  Gabriel was about to ask the woman where the jail was when he awoke with a start; the clock beamed 5:15 a.m. in red numbers, and he realized it was morning. Or close enough. More sleep would mean more dreams and more images of things he’d rather not see. He had a good eighteen hours awake time ahead of him, in which life was often dull but didn’t terrorize him.

  That was something to be thankful for.

  He carefully rolled out of bed so not to wake his sleeping wife, a beautiful woman named Claire who deserved better than him. He didn’t know why she stayed, and he didn’t ask; not knowing was better than hearing her reasons for loving him. He’d never be able to accept the reasons, and not knowing meant he could make up whatever he wanted. Maybe she was a sucker for veterans suffering from PTSD, or she had a savior complex, or she liked the way he sang in the shower. Whatever. She was there, and Gabriel had made a pact with himself that he wouldn’t question her motives.

  Pulling on his jeans, Gabriel moved quietly into the bathroom. The dim light from the small window cast a shadow across his face, making his beard look even darker than it was. He looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t particularly like what he saw; his hair was too long and too gray, his eyes too puffy, and his teeth had taken on a faint reddish hue from all the wine he was drinking. “Red-wine smile,” those in the industry called it, a common occupational hazard for those who made a living smelling, swishing, and spitting copious amounts of red wine. On the positive side, his body was still taut, his stomach flat, and his shoulders muscular. He looked like a thirty-eight-year-old former football player who was aging fast but still had a few yards left in him. He splashed water on his face, pulled his beard down to wring it out, and ran his fingers through his hair.

  Satisfied that it was the best he could do at that hour without waking Claire, he slipped a sweatshirt on and headed for the kitchen, where the coffeemaker, a superautomatic machine from Italy that did everything but wash used coffee cups, stood on the counter, its Brew button blinking, beckoning him. As he passed by to open the kitchen door for his dog, Frankie, to go out and do his business, the machine’s motion detector sensed Gabriel’s presence and turned itself on. Frankie was a sweet old black dog with a white face, a lab that didn’t fetch or swim but was always wagging his tail. Gabriel had gotten him from a shelter while in grad school. To the extent a human could own another living thing, he was one of Gabriel’s oldest possession.

  Coffee in hand, Gabriel walked outside into the chill to watch the sun rise in the east; the morning light cast shadows along hills filled with rows and rows of grapevines. His house sat at the top of a rise, a small plot of land owned by the winery he worked for. It was the assistant vintner’s house, set aside for the second-in-command responsible for the growing operation of Landmark Estates. The house for the head vintner was up the road a mile, a large stone structure with a fire pit, a pool, and a hundred-bottle wine cellar. Ed Collier, the Landmark head vintner, had been there for twenty years and wasn’t going anywhere. That house might just as well be on Mars, Gabriel had told Claire when he took the job.

  Gabriel’s own house stood adjacent to the plot of Pinot, and he and Frankie liked to walk it in the morning before the winery staff arrived. The dark earth crunched under his boots as he walked up and down the rows, looking at the leaves and grapes as he went. The Pinot grapes were Gabriel’s primary responsibility; they were notoriously temperamental and difficult to grow and harvest. It took all of Gabriel’s viticulture knowledge to ensure a healthy harvest of grapes for Landmark’s Pinot Noir, its flagship product that had been rated ninety-eighth the year before in Wine Spectator’s Top 100.

  For the first time in his life, Gabriel felt a sense of contentment. His life with Claire was as close to having a family as he’d ever had; his job was what he had long dreamed of. Even their house, which wasn’t really theirs, felt like a home. And while he hadn’t fully escaped the clutches of the government and still served as a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security in their Agroterrorism Division, for the most part, he’d been able to live his own life since returning from Afghanistan. And his job with the winery was perfect for him; it allowed him to pursue his passion for viticulture, and it gave him the tools and technology to do cutting-edge fieldwork on the vines they grew. And best of all, the winery’s owners pretty much left him alone.

  “You’re up,” he said as he came in through the back door. Claire was sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee, reading the morning news on her tablet.

  She smiled and blew on her coffee to cool it down. “You didn’t sleep well,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

  He rarely slept well. But it had gotten worse since he’d dumped the sleeping pills the Veterans Affairs doctor had prescribed him. He hated the fog they put his mind in. “Yep,” he said simply.

  “The dreams again?”

  “Yep,” he said again.

  “Same ones?”

  “Mostly. Except this time some woman told me that my dad was in jail for murder.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I know, right? Not sure what that’s all about.”

  Gabriel had a troubled relationship with his father, who ran a family farm in western Michigan. It was a tough life, and he was a tough man; he rose early and worked late. Gabriel and his brother had worked the farm from the time they could walk; they had learned a lot, and it had imbued a work ethic in Gabriel that defined him to this day.

  But farming was a boom-and-bust kind of business, and when it busted, as it invariably did, so did Gabriel’s dad. Debt and pressure had a corrosive effect on him, one that caused him to drink too much and yell too much and fight too much. When Gabriel and his brother were little, his mom had taken the brunt of it. Later, when Gabriel grew up, he and his dad would face off on a regular basis. It taught Gabriel how to fight. But it also made him hate his father. Clearly, in Gabriel’s subconscious, his father was capable of murder.

  “Do you want to talk about it? Or anything else for that matter?” she asked.

  He smiled at her. “No thanks, babe.” He knew it wasn’t the answer she wanted, but it was the answer she expected.

  She nodded. “What’s on for today?”

  “I’m headed into the lab in a bit,” he said as he poured a bowl of cereal and sat down beside her. “What’s going on in the news?”

  “God, don’t ask. Let me read you a few of the headlines. ‘US Now in Third Year of Recession.’ ‘Banks Worried about Cash Reserves.’ ‘Economic Pain Likely to Continue.’ It’s a nightmare.”

  Gabriel just grunted. He was living the headlines. Decades of profligate government spending had
lead to an unsustainable national debt and crushing interest payments. Meanwhile a booming China was exerting its muscle all over Asia at the same time the Eurozone economy had been paralyzed by the breakdown of the Euro. The US was increasingly reliant on itself for everything from electronics manufacturing to food production.

  When combined with climate change, this was a double gut punch for the wine industry. Not only were exports of American wines in the toilet, but also years of drought and intense heat in California, Oregon, and Washington had weakened the Vitis labrusca grapevines that were the backbone of the wine industry, making the vines more and more susceptible to disease. Just a year prior, a rare form of grape lice had reappeared for the first time since the late 1800s. The entire wine industry was running scared.

  This was the real reason that Landmark had hired Gabriel. His background had hardly been textbook. Though Oregon State had an excellent viticulture program and Gabriel had scored at the top of his class, he had a past that made him an outlier in the moneyed world of wine. And it wasn’t just his service in the Marine Corps, though that certainly made him an oddity. Gabriel had been a difficult teen and had run into his share of trouble. From the time he was a little boy, school had bored him. He was preternaturally bright and often knew more about the subjects he was learning about than the teachers who were teaching them. He left home at seventeen after one too many fights with his dad and promptly fell in with to the wrong crowd. There were few ways of making a living in rural Michigan if you didn’t want to be a farmer or work the counter at the ampm. It was a small-town economy where he lived, with a few corner stores and a Walmart at the edge of town. You had to be creative to put money in your pocket.

  And Gabriel was nothing if not creative. He learned to survive by dealing small amounts of marijuana. He eventually earned enough to rent a room in a small apartment and buy a car. But he was always on the make, always looking, always dealing.

  Ultimately, he dealt one too many hands, this time to an undercover cop, who busted him. But Gabriel got lucky. The cop had come from the same kind of hard background and could see himself in the undisciplined, bright kid he’d arrested. He decided to give Gabriel a break and charge him with possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor, rather than intent to distribute, which was a felony. The cop knew that a felony conviction would sink Gabriel’s chances any kind of real future. So Gabriel did his community service and paid a small fine, avoiding jail time and a record that would have followed him for the rest of his life.

  From the outside, the small metal building adjacent to Landmark’s wine-pressing operation looked like any old storage shed; in fact, it was a state-of-the-art lab with a genomic sequencer and a large climate-controlled storage area that housed hundreds of bug samples collected from vineyards all over the United States. It was the kind of lab that any university would be proud to have and showed Landmark’s commitment to using technology to protect its wine business.

  Gabriel had been working for the past six months on a solution to the threat of grape lice—Phylloxera vitifoliae. The bug had a complicated history. It had once been the scourge of the global wine industry, destroying more than six million acres of vineyards in France alone in the late 1800s. It had eventually spread all over Europe and even to California, Australia, and New Zealand. It fed on European vines called Vitis vinifera, ultimately destroying them completely. Ironically, phylloxera had originated in America and infested Europe after stowing away on American vines bound for the Continent. These Vitis labrusca vines were naturally resistant to phylloxera but proved to be outstanding carriers that infected nonresistant European vines once they arrived. The result was a wine-industry bloodbath.

  In the end, wineries were forced to pull up all the plants and start over at a cost of billions of dollars. And when they did, they used Vitis labrusca roots and grafted various varieties of Vitis vinifera on to them, creating a whole industry based on hybrid American-European grapevines that were phylloxera resistant.

  It was a simple solution that had worked for more than a hundred years. But now phylloxera was back, with a new strain that was proving to be effective at damaging American vine roots that had previously been resistant. With Landmark’s support, Gabriel was bringing twenty-first-century technology to bear on the problem.

  Gabriel entered the lab to find his assistant, Meg Brown, hunched over a microscope.

  “How did the test come out?” asked Gabriel.

  “Looks good to me. Take a look.”

  Gabriel peered into the microscope. Minute larvae of phylloxera that had been genetically altered swam in a pool of tetracycline-laced solution. They were alive and active.

  “Awesome! We can start the process of growing these now,” said Gabriel.

  The lab had created a climate-controlled hatchery to rear thousands of phylloxeras that had been genetically altered in a complex process that involved modifying the genome to carry a dominant lethal gene. This lethal gene was designed to kill young insects in the pupa or larva stage. Because it was a dominant gene, all offspring of the altered phylloxera would inherit it—meaning when released into the wild, the altered phylloxera would mate with other phylloxera, and their offspring would die.

  The genius of the plan was the molecular On/Off switch—tetracycline turned off the lethal gene so the phylloxera could reproduce safely in the lab. Once outside of the lab, however, the absence of tetracycline would turn the gene back on, and they would become deadly sexual partners. The result would be a crash in the insect population and, over time, the certain eradication of the insect.

  The plan wasn’t without risk. But so great was the threat of phylloxera that Landmark and the other vintners wanted to be ready should grape lice attack the Landmark Vineyard. It was like having a silver bullet ready in the event the unthinkable happened.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fairfax, Virginia

  Speculation began almost immediately after he arrived on campus. There was something off about the man, something rogue and vaguely threatening. The irises of his eyes were as black as night, emanating no light and no warmth. His face, while partly covered by a thick beard, was pockmarked as if peppered by shrapnel—a possibility that, over time, his students began to think wasn’t out of the question. His attitude, particularly toward women, was as rough as his appearance and bordered on misogyny, leading more than one female student to file a complaint against him. Theories raged that he was a Palestinian refugee angry at his treatment by the Israelis (most popular), that he was an Iranian scientist who had been turned by the US but was unhappy about it, or that he was an Islamic fundamentalist here to start a terror cell (least popular). Guessing his true identity had become one of the most popular drinking games on campus.

  Professor Abdul-Azim Bashera knew that he was the subject of gossip, but he didn’t care. By the time any disciplinary action was taken by the university, he’d be long gone, and he knew that the American academy was loath to prosecute any complaints against a tenured professor who also happened to be a very devout Muslim. The faculty at George Mason University were so concerned about Islamophobia that they’d go out of their way to protect him. Praise be to God, he often thought. The Americans are so dumb!

  Bashera arrived at his office that morning after a brisk walk across campus in the cool weather of early spring in Washington; even after many years in America, he was still not used to the weather and wore so many layers that his shirt was soaked through with sweat under the tunic he was wearing. The feel of sweat down his back reminded him of his days as a young man in Iraq, where he and his family had lived without air conditioning and had seen the heat and discomfort as signs they were doing Allah’s work. Sitting down at his desk, he put on his Amazon Echo Glass, which projected his computer screen in a heads-up display. Moving his fingers in the air, he briskly swiped through his email.

  “Alexa, appointments, please,” said Bashera casually in Arabic.

&
nbsp; “As-salamu ‘alaykum,” said his cheery digital assistant in British-accented Arabic. He’d been able to program Alexa to communicate in his native language but couldn’t get rid of the accent, which was a continual source of irritation for him. He hated the British, whom he regarded as the original infidels to have occupied the Middle East. “You have an appointment with Dean Kroger at 1:00 p.m. in the administration building. Following that you have a meeting with the Islamic Students against Mideast Oppression at the Islamic Center of Washington. Shall I order you a car?”

  “Yes.”

  The light on the Echo digital assistant flashed blue and then turned off. There’d be a self-driving car downstairs at precisely 3:00 p.m., and he’d be whisked away to sit in Washington, DC, traffic for ninety minutes. The Americans were amazing at technology, but the city was still gridlocked with cars.

  Seeing no urgent emails, Bashera quickly moved his fingers to access a virtual private network on his computer. With a few swipes, he was into his Tor browser and on the dark web. He then quickly accessed a blockchain of his own design, one that offered the highest level of security by distributing pieces of information between users. While it wasn’t impossible for the spooks at the NSA to access the information, the system made piecing together the bits of data into a cohesive picture that much more difficult.