elevator. Gray glanced over his shoulder.
“After getting Painter’s permission,” Kat explained, “I asked the director of the BTO—Dr. Lucius Raffee—to join us here to help troubleshoot the situation.”
As the new party drew closer, their voices expressed tension at this midnight summons.
Two men appeared at the entrance to the communication hub. The first man was a stranger, a distinguished black man dressed in a knee-length coat over an Armani suit. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat goatee.
“Dr. Raffee,” Kat said, stepping forward and shaking his hand. “Thank you for coming.”
“It was not like your man offered me much choice. I was just leaving a performance of La Bohème at the Kennedy Center when I was accosted.”
The doctor’s escort, Monk Kokkalis, pushed into the room. He was a bulldog of a man with a shaved head and the muscular build of a linebacker. The man cocked an eyebrow toward Gray as if to say catch a load of this guy . He then stepped over and lightly kissed his wife’s cheek.
Monk whispered faintly to Kat. “Honey, I’m home.”
Dr. Raffee glanced between the two, trying to comprehend them as a couple. Gray understood the man’s confusion. They made a striking, if odd, pair.
“I assume my husband filled you in on the situation in California,” Kat said.
“He did.” Dr. Raffee sighed heavily. “But I’m afraid there’s little concrete information I can offer you concerning what went wrong . . . or even the exact nature of the work that might have resulted in such drastic countermeasures at that base. I’ve telephoned several of my key people to follow up. Hopefully, we’ll hear from them shortly. All I know at the moment is that the head researcher was Dr. Kendall Hess, a specialist in astrobiology with an emphasis on investigating shadow biospheres.”
Kat frowned. “Shadow biospheres?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “He was searching for radically different forms of life, specifically those that employed unusual biochemical or molecular processes to function.”
Gray had some familiarity on the subject. “Like organisms that use RNA instead of DNA.”
“Indeed. But shadow biospheres could even be more esoteric than that. Hess proposed that there might be some hidden suite of life that uses an entirely different set of amino acids than what is commonly known. It was why he set up the research station near Mono Lake.”
“Why’s that?” Gray asked.
“Back in 2010, a group of NASA scientists were able to take a microbe native to that highly alkaline lake and force it to switch from using phosphorus in its biochemical processes to arsenic.”
“Why is that significant?” Monk asked.
“As an astrobiologist, Hess was familiar with the NASA team’s work. He believed such a discovery proved that early life on earth was likely arsenic-based. He also hypothesized that a thriving biosphere of arsenic-based organisms might exist somewhere on earth.”
Gray understood Hess’s fervor. Such a discovery would turn biology on its ear and open up an entire new chapter of life on earth.
Raffee frowned. “But he was also investigating many other possible shadow biospheres. Like desert varnish.” From their confused expressions, he explained in more detail. “Desert varnish is that rust to black coating found on exposed rock surfaces. Native people in the past used to scrape it away to create their petroglyphs.”
Gray pictured the ancient stick-figure drawings of people and animals found around the world.
“But the odd thing about desert varnish,” Raffee continued, “is that it still remains unresolved how it forms. Is it a chemical reaction? The by-product of some unknown microbial process? No one knows. In fact, the status of varnish as living or nonliving has been argued all the way back to the time of Darwin.”
Monk grumbled his irritation. “But how does researching some grime on rocks end up triggering
Shauna Rice-Schober[thriller]