“A G-clone? What are you talking about? This is all Greek to me. Someone please explain in plain old English what’s happening!” Maria’s begged.
“Let me try…” Jason offered. “So far we have tried to clone Jesus Christ by isolating a blood cell from the residue we found on the Crown of Thorns, and taking from it the genetic information we need to create a clone. To do that we need a complete set of all the chromosomes that Christ would have had in his body. Unfortunately, normal blood cells don’t contain all the chromosomes of the donor, so we had cheated a bit by stealing a tiny piece of the DNA taken from the blood cell, and extracting from the DNA the information that should give us the blueprint on how to build the complete chromosome set…”
“… We thought we'd succeeded but for some reason, the process wasn’t working. Normally we would take a set of the chromosomes and make a little bag of them called a nucleus. We would then insert the nucleus into a specially prepared cell which was taken from a target egg. If everything went well, the egg cell would accept the donated chromosomes set and start reproducing multiple copies of itself...and grow into a little human being...”
“...Unfortunately when we do this with the material we get from Christ’s blood cells, each time we attempt to insert the nucleus of the chromosomes into the egg cell, the nucleus is physically ejected from the egg as soon as it is inserted. We don’t know why…”
“Either there is something else going on, maybe even something supernatural that we don’t know about, or we are missing some part of the cell…maybe there are some extra chromosomes missing…special chromosomes which would signal to the egg cell to accept the nucleus and not reject it...chromosomes that only Jesus Christ would have, without which the process would not work.” Don added. “The first thing we got wrong was that we were just using egg cells from a normal woman. It didn’t dawn on us that we would have to use special egg cells...very special ones. In fact ‘yours’...egg cells from a virgin.”
“But if we now have real, complete skin cells from Jesus Christ himself," Louisa interrupted, "we won’t need to guess at what a complete set of chromosomes would look like. We may actually have all of them already! And all we would have to do then is to copy them genetically and insert them into an egg cell taken from yourself, and we will be able to make a G-clone.” Louisa finished the impromptu lesson.
“But what is a G-clone?” Maria asked again.
“It’s our code name for a clone of Jesus Christ…a God-clone.”
“Thank you. That last bit I understand…now if you would just repeat the rest of what you said from the very beginning, then maybe I’ll have a clue what you’re all talking about!”
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Chapter Fifty Six
Mount Vernon Hospital
Washington D.C.
Friday 9th December 1 p.m.
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For the 2nd time in the space of a week, Tim and his wife Regina were sitting in the waiting room at the Mount Vernon waiting to see Doctor Dubovecka. They had been there since very early that morning.
Earlier on that day, Tim had called the hospital and told the Doctor there had been a serious change in Tina's condition and Doctor Dubovecka had been waiting in reception with two nurses to personally assist them into the hospital when their Cadillac had pulled up in front of the entrance. The Doctor had been expecting to receive a child whose condition had seriously deteriorated, perhaps close to death.
The look of confusion that had spread across the Doctor's face as Tina had jumped out of the back of the Cadillac and run up the hospital stairs to meet him had been priceless. Tim would never forget it.
Even though Tina was jumping about, and refusing to sit still for even a second, energy coursing through her body like electricity, the Doctor had insisted on admitting her and running another complete battery of tests. Then when the results had come back, the Doctor had ordered them all to be repeated.
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The door opened and the nurse beckoned them into the Doctor's surgery. Tina was sitting on a chair in the corner of the office, and Doctor Dubovecka was standing by the window, leaning with one hand against the window frame and the other hidden in the pocket of his long white coat. As if in a trance, he stood watching the patients in the gardens outside walking and talking with their visitors. He didn't seem to notice as Tim and Regina took their seats and Tina jumped on to her father's lap. Tim and his wife waited expectantly.
After a few seconds, the Doctor turned, walked across to the desk and nervously fingered the blue file that was lying in front of him. He picked it up and pushed it casually over to Tim's side of the table.
"It's all there Mr Curts. I've never seen anything like it in my life before. Spontaneous remission... It's gone...Almost as if it was never there in the first place. We can't find a thing wrong with her…"
The Doctor hesitated and looked up at the parents sitting across from him, a smile fighting the confusion and bewilderment written clearly on his face.
"Mr and Mrs Curts, your daughter has been cured. I'm afraid I can't really explain it...I'm a scientific man, and I don't believe in miracles, but..."
Tim smiled and squeezed his wife's hand, and together they wrapped their daughter into a group hug. As the three of them rocked back and forward on the edge of their chairs, a wave of happiness and relief swept over them and tears flowed freely down their faces.
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Later that evening Tim lay in bed with his wife, his arms wrapped around her as she slept soundly, her head resting on his chest.
The past few hours had seen Tim swept along on a roller coaster of emotions. He'd cried like a baby with the initial euphoria and overwhelming feelings of relief which came from knowing that his daughter had been cured.
Then later, while he watched her as she slept, he thought about the miracle which had been granted to him and his family.
There was a God. Definitely. Without question.
Tim had prayed to his God for a miracle, and in the quiet of his own home God had visited his child and cured her. Tim would never doubt again. In return, he promised himself that he would live the life of a good man, and dedicate it to the family which God had spared.
But now as he lay awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, Tim realised the paradox and the complexity of the situation he now found himself in.
He, in his appointed position within the Government, was directly responsible for many actions which, although necessary for the survival of his country, were in stark contradiction to the way he should now live his life.
That would have to change.
Until now Tim had been loyal beyond all else to his country. He was a servant to his nation. But as he had once heard in Sunday school and now knew deep inside himself, ‘no man can serve two masters’. He couldn’t carry out the duties to his country as well as follow the new course that he had chosen in his life. He would have to leave his job and sacrifice his career.
Yet to do so now would be foolhardy and dangerous, and would threaten the lives of those around him. A battle raged within him: He knew he had a duty to the God who had saved his daughter, but the love he felt for his family meant he could not do anything that would threaten them.
Perhaps, if he prayed again, the God who had cured his daughter would help him find a solution which would allow him to leave his job and abdicate his responsibilities to his nation, without threatening the lives of his family?
Then in the midst of this train of thought he remembered the phone conversation he had made the day before. He had signed the death warrant of twenty seven people. Yet, even as he thought about it, he knew there was nothing he could do to save them.
Nothing.
His contact in the CIA was a deep operator, a mole who went underground until the mission was over. He had never met him, although he had used his services several times over the past five years. Each time the procedure was the same. Now he had been g
iven the contact list, Tim knew that he would not hear from the 'Mole' again until the mission was complete.
He would not be able to contact him again until the job was done.
Tim could only wait and watch as one by one the people who had been on the list were reported missing or were found dead.
One by one, they would all die.
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“Something is wrong!” Tim realised. He came awake with a start. With his left hand he stretched out and picked up his watch from the bedside cabinet.
It was four thirty.
He gently moved his wife’s head from his chest to the pillow, then slid out of the bed and made his way down to his study. He lit the fire in the great stone fireplace and immediately the room was filled by its bright, warm, orange glow. Standing on a small ladder, he searched along the bookcase until he found a copy of an old bible. He pulled it down, poured himself a whisky, and relaxed into one of the big, red, leather bound armchairs beside the roaring fire.
“Something is wrong.” Tim thought to himself again. He couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was, but he hoped that the bible would somehow show him.
He sat quietly in the chair, the 'tick-tock' of the clock on the mantelpiece the only sound in the room apart from the crackling of the fire.
As the flames leapt upwards from the logs, the light sparkled in Tim's unseeing eyes and he emptied his mind, searching his subconscious for the source of the problem.
And then suddenly it was there.
The Crown of Thorns project was wrong. It had to be. How could the God to whom he had prayed for mercy, the God who through ‘love’ had saved his daughter, be party to all the death and destruction that the project was going to wreak. ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ Yet, the death knell had just been rung for twenty seven innocent people! Surely the Messiah who they were trying to clone would never allow that to happen?
Yet, undoubtedly the Crown of Thorns contained remnants of Christ's blood and already there had been a number of recorded miracles amongst those working on the project, in addition to the life given back to his own daughter Tina.
So if it was wrong, if the project was misconceived, why would God grant the miracles to take place?
On the one hand, the cloning process was not working as it was meant to be doing. There were problems. Problems, which perhaps indicated that God didn’t intend to allow them to clone his Son, Jesus Christ.
Yet, on the other hand, the scientists believed they could make the process work…were they forcing the hand of God, or merely using their God given initiative?
The hours slipped slowly by as Tim sat there in front of the fire wrestling with the rights and wrongs of what was happening. He was still there when the fire began to dim and the dawn came, sunlight creeping slowly through the curtains and lighting the room around him.
Yet for all his thinking, Tim did not have any answers. He could not understand what he should do next. Should he cancel the project or continue to back it? And if he wanted to cancel it...could he?
The President of America was getting married. He was expecting a son, and Tim was the stork that would deliver the child.
Chapter Fifty Seven
Justice, Texas
Friday 9th Dec 11.00pm
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It had been a good night. Not fantastic, but certainly better than last Friday when Debbie had only made $200. Tonight, not only had she earned $400 but she had also got the early shift, which meant that in thirty minutes she would be out of there, on her way home. With any luck, she would get home in time to catch the late movie, and she could put her feet up and settle down in front of the television with a few cold beers.
Stripping was exhausting work, and even though she was still quite young compared to the older girls who danced at Cassandra’s, she didn’t seem to have the stamina of the others.
But still, tonight had been a good night.
On second thoughts, she might even stay on at the bar and have a drink with her last customer. He was actually quite good looking. Much better than the average Joe who came into the bar to while away a few hours and ogle at some young flesh. After she’d danced for him, she’d sat and talked to him for a while. He was from out of town. Quite quiet. Didn’t say much. He was probably from Baltimore.
When she was dressed, she squared up with the management, $50 to them. $350 to her. Stuffing the money down the sides of her long boots, she walked back into the club. Unfortunately the stranger had left and his seat was now occupied by someone else. Cassandra’s was always busy, and tonight it was packed to the limit. The girls who had the late shift would make some good money.
As she walked across the room she noticed the owner and some of his friends playing poker in the corner. Debbie hadn’t been dancing at Cassandra’s for long, but rumour had it that the old man had been in the business since he was a kid. Old Pete Williamson was a good man and looked after the women who worked for him. He never forgot any of their names. He was proud of 'his girls'. Proud.
Debbie waved at him, and headed towards the exit.
Just as she was passing the seat where the stranger had been sitting earlier that evening, she noticed a large brown hold-all bag underneath the table. Recognising the white stripe that ran along the side, she realised that the stranger had left his bag behind.
Smiling, she wondered if the stranger had left his name or address in the bag. Perhaps she would be able to find his phone number, and she could meet him to hand his bag back?
Debbie excused herself to the people sitting at the table and reached underneath to pull the bag towards her. On her first tug, the bag didn't budge. It was much heavier than it looked. She leaned forward and gave it a bigger pull, yanking the bag harder with all her might.
.
The explosion ripped through the lap-dancing club, blasting off the roof and blowing out the walls like a pack of playing cards.
Those not blown apart by the initial explosion were engulfed a fraction of a second later by the wall of fire which swept through the building, burning the flesh and melting the fat on the carbonised corpses left behind.
The fire which raged afterwards was the most intense the local fire brigade had ever seen. An official death toll for the evening was never given, but of the estimated one hundred and fifty people who were in the club that night, only twenty people survived, all with horrific injuries and burns. Most of the bodies of those killed in the blast were never found, the fire being so intense that no body parts remained. Sadly, Old Pete Williamson was amongst the dead. The police were able to identify his jaw bone from his melted mercury amalgam fillings, one of the few people to still have the old style fillings in Justice.
The fire-investigators never found the exact cause of the fire, but believed it was the result of an advanced form of compact explosive device designed to cause maximum damage and destruction. Quite why anyone would want to attack Old Pete’s lap-dancing club, no one could figure out.
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The following Monday, a small white envelope arrived at the home address of Tim Curts. When Tim opened it over breakfast, he found a newspaper cutting cut from the local Gazette of a town called Justice in Texas, stapled to a typewritten list of five names. The cutting announced the destruction of a local nightspot, Cassandra’s, and the death of its owner, Old Pete Williamson, along with approximately one hundred and thirty of his guests.
When Tim read the news, he excused himself from the dinner table, and went for a long walk through the cold winter streets of his Belgravian suburb. Tim felt physically sick. He knew the clipping had been sent to him by his CIA contact. The killing had begun. Old Pete had been the owner of the club where Clara had danced before the President had started to hire her services on a more personal and exclusive basis. Five of the other people who had obviously died in the explosion had been on the list too. Six names on a long list. Six names a
nd almost one hundred and thirty people had died. How many other people would die to protect the President’s reputation?
Over the next few days, other envelopes arrived, some containing several clippings at a time. A fire here, a mugging or unexplained death there, a suicide, or occasionally a plain old murder, but one by one the names disappeared from the list. And with each name that was erased, the guilt piled upon Tim's conscience, driving him closer to the edge of despair.
After the news paper article reporting the suicide of a twenty-one year old girl who jumped from her bedroom window on the thirtieth floor of a large tenement block in Chicago, Tim decided he couldn’t take much more. But then again, there was nothing he could do. Except wait. Soon, it would all be over.
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Chapter Fifty Eight
Oxford, England
Saturday 10th Dec 10am
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The team had worked hard for the past two days. On the Thursday evening, after a long day's work, Jason treated everyone to a meal at the King's Arms. The next day they all worked till 10pm, and this time it was the turn of the Professor to organise a slap up meal in Browns.
With a renewed sense of excitement and purpose, work had progressed faster than expected. Already they had extracted ten separate skin cells from the slice of skin found buried in the resin of the Crown. From observing the characteristic MVWLE light, and sampling the DNA from the cells, they had identified it as coming from the owner of the G-type blood.
They had extracted the nuclei from the cells and were hoping that if each of the projects the individual team members had been assigned went well over the next few days, the preparatory work would be complete by the Monday afternoon.
Now they were able to extract a complete nucleus from the skin cells, it wasn’t necessary for them to guess what the complete chromosome set would be; they had the real thing. As such, they wouldn’t be following the J-W cloning process any longer, but Don had decided that for the sake of scientific interest, he would start the process of identifying all the chromosomes that were in the nucleus.
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