“Fantastic. So in two day’s time Danielle could be pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s something to drink to! Now, show me where you keep that Claret...I’m thirsty…and hungry!”
Quite clearly, as far as the President was concerned, the lesson was over.
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They returned to the lab later that evening after a superb three-course meal, which was accompanied by an excellent choice of wines from the centre’s very own wine cellar. The CBWI had its own world class chefs. As in a submarine, or warship at sea for a long period of time, it was well recognised that an essential factor in keeping morale high in the large underground bunker was excellent food, and good entertainment facilities. The complex had two of its own cinemas, a fantastically equipped gym, a thirty metre swimming pool, and several saunas and steam rooms, as well as a library, bowling alley, table tennis and pool/snooker facilities.
Before returning to the lab the President had an extensive tour of the facilities and decided that later that night he wanted to return to the cinema and catch one of the latest new films.
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The Professors had gone ahead of them to the lab, leaving it to Colonel Smart to act as the tour-guide. By the time the President and Tim walked back into the clean lab, everything was ready. Danielle’s cells were already prepared, and several fresh artificial nuclei had been inserted into micro-pipettes, with everything placed safely inside the hood of the new temperature regulated incubator they had attached to the Smithsonian.
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In the end it was Professor Stuart who was given the honour of starting the process, simply because he was nearest the machine at the time. Professor Calvert directed their attention to the overhead plasma screen on which they would be able to follow the proceedings.
“…okay...so now Jim is picking up one of the pipettes with the robotic arms and is attempting to pierce the outer membrane of the egg cell with the sharp end of the pipette…right, we’re in…and now, very carefully he will remotely squeeze on the end of the pipette and one of the artificial nuclei will be dropped into the centre of the egg cell...you can see for yourselves just now that the egg cell is in fact empty, because earlier on the real nucleus of the egg cell was removed to make way for this one...right, that’s it…that white thing which has just popped out of the pipette is the nucleus …now Jim has to very carefully withdraw the pipette…Excellent…Next, we will irradiate the cell with neutron radiation for about two minutes...this is the dose that we’ve found should deliver the result we want and effectively seal the cell for long enough for the process of cell division to begin. In about five minutes Jim will send an electromagnetic pulse across the cell, which mimics the chemical process normal sperm would initiate upon conception...then in about an hour, we will put the cell in the Super Genetic Nutrient, which will allow it to absorb the nutrients it needs through the natural pores of the cell membrane. By that time the cell replication process will have begun and there should be little danger of the cell expelling the nucleus...”
“Is that it?” the President asked, a little disappointed there wasn’t more to see.
“Yes...except in a moment, if Jim will let me…I’ll repeat the process twice, so that we will end up with three potential embryos. The tricky part happens sometime during the next seven hours. When we come in after breakfast tomorrow morning, if we’re lucky at least one of the cells will have divided.”
“And what happens if more than one cell has divided?” the President asked, turning to Prof. Calvert.
“We wait and see if any or all of them actually make it through to the stage where we have enough cells to constitute what we would deem a stable embryo, one that we could implant into a host mother.”
“You mean, when it gets to the 128 cell stage…?” The President replied, proving he had at least learned something during the session that afternoon.
“Exactly. I suppose if they all get to that stage, then we have to look at the possibility of implanting Danielle with more than one embryo, which would enhance the chances of at least one surviving successfully through to term...How do you feel about twins or triplets Mr President?” Professor Calvert asked.
Inside his bunny suit it was just possible to make out that the President had turned a little white.
“Of course, the difficulty would be if they all survived. You would then have three living clones of Jesus Christ! That would certainly pose a few problems...” Professor Stuart added.
Even Tim hadn’t thought about that one. No one spoke. The implications of what Prof. Calvert had just suggested were quiet profound.
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, ok? “ Tim interrupted them all. “We don’t even know if we’ll even get a single embryo from this.”
Something on the screen captured Tim’s attention. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the magical and serene 'Angel Lights' that had so entranced him the first time he had seen it, had stopped. Gone were the colours of the rainbow which were being radiated from the nucleus so beautifully before. In its place, the nucleus at the centre of the cell was glowing a deep red.
“Have you guys noticed that?” Tim asked, pointing to the glowing nucleus. “Its red....”
“Yes...we noticed...” Professor Stuart replied.
“Why did it change?”
“We don’t know.” Professor Calvert answered rather sheepishly.
As Tim stared at the nucleus sitting so peacefully at the centre of the cell he started to have the bad feeling again. A very bad feeling indeed. If he hadn’t known better, Tim would have called it ‘fear’.
“Is there any danger that we’ve damaged the nucleus, or that the radiation has changed the cell structure somehow?” Tim asked quickly.
“Yes, it’s possible, but we can’t tell yet.”
Tim felt very uncomfortable. It was almost as if a sixth sense was telling him that something had gone badly wrong.
“I’ve got a very bad feeling about this gentlemen. I can’t explain it, but my gut feeling says that we can’t simply ignore the fact that the Angel Lights has changed from a vivid spectrum of light to a simple deep red. I think we should abandon these cells and try and again…repeat it until we get one where the Angel Light stays multicoloured, like the rainbow effect you can see before it enters the cell.”
The two professors looked at each other.
“We’ve done this procedure many times, with cells from another lady, and each time we do it I’m afraid the light has changed colour. Each time…
“How many times have you done it?”
“About twenty?”
“Perhaps that’s not enough!” Tim replied sharply.
The two professor’s looked at each other again, then Jim Stuart spoke.
“The fact is, we’re running out of material. Apart from the other two we have ready now, we’ve only enough material left to make another two nuclei, and that would take another three days...”
Until then the President had been sitting quietly without saying a word, but now his impatience came out in a torrent.
“Enough! I’ve heard enough. If you think I’m going to hang around in this underground cave for one second longer than is absolutely necessary then you’re all sadly mistaken. I see no reason why we can’t go with what the good gentlemen are doing here...if they say it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me!”
Tim started to argue but the President lifted his gloved hand up to silence him and turned to the Professors for an answer. For a second they looked at each other, both embarrassed by the situation they found themselves in.
“Mr President, Tim may have a point, but we have no way of knowing…and yet, we really have no choice....even if we do try making and using another two nuclei it may not work any differently....of course, we could start completely from scratch and generate more material to make more nuclei, but that would take even longer, maybe ano
ther two weeks…and then there is no guarantee...and we only have a very limited supply of...”
The Professors had begun to stumble. Like Tim they were scared too, but for a different reason: they were scared for their own safety if they failed to deliver what the President wanted.
“So, I’m going to make an executive decision for you gentlemen.” The President interrupted and spoke over them. “We go with what we’ve got here…If none of the three embryos from tonight divide, then you give it another go. But either way, I’m leaving here tomorrow morning, and I want, and listen to me when I say this, I want Danielle to be pregnant with this stuff before she leaves here in a month...Get my drift?”
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Yes, they got his drift.
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Chapter Sixty Nine
35 Huntingdon Road
Oxford, England
Wednesday 21st Dec 7am
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Angela Marsh stirred in her bed, her hand subconsciously slipping down to the bottom of her stomach and stroking herself on the outside of where she thought her womb was. She knew that she wasn't showing, and that the child within her was less than a month old, but the novelty of being pregnant hadn't worn off yet. Each morning she awoke excited, and happy. Happier than she had been in years.
Angela turned over in her bed and stared at her husband James. Throughout all the IVF trials, in spite of their spectacular failures, he had stuck by her. In the end, it was his idea to talk to the agency about finally joining the programme being run by the I.G.E.G.G.M, and now that the baby was growing healthily within her, she couldn't wait for the 22nd August, her due date.
She sat on the edge of the bed, slipping her feet into her slippers and standing up to walk over to the curtains. It was only 7am and it was still dark, but flashing lights in the street outside had woken her. As she pulled back the curtains she was surprised to see two police cars and a large black van sitting outside her house. Two police officers were standing on the pavement outside her front garden, beginning to unroll some yellow luminescent tape. It looked like they were going to cordon of the street in front of her garden.
As she stared incredulously at the commotion outside, the back door of the big black van suddenly burst open and six large soldiers dressed in black uniforms, with black helmets and dark visors which covered their faces, jumped out and started running up the path towards her door. Four of them carried large automatic repeating rifles, and they all wore thick body armour which matched their black clothing. As she watched, two of the men paused at the edge of her garden, while the others rushed at her front door. The two at the front were carrying what looked like a large, black, tree-stump between them.
There was a loud, crashing sound downstairs and the door at the front of her house splintered and burst inwards.
Angela screamed and her husband James sat bolt upright in bed, woken awkwardly from his deep sleep.
"What was that? What's the matter? What…" he asked, immediately scared.
Before he could finish the sentence, three of the soldiers burst through the doorway into the bedroom, making straight for Angela standing beside the window. Two of them grabbed her forcibly by the shoulders as a third injected her in the arm with a syringe. She immediately stopped screaming and went limp in their arms.
Her husband James lurched towards them, but as he did a fourth man in a dark suit stepped from the shadows of the hallway, raising a silenced gun towards him and fired once. The bullet made a single entry hole in James forehead, and he fell back silently onto the bed.
"Take her downstairs, and get her back to base as soon as possible. I'll sort things out here."
As the soldiers carried the sleeping body of the woman downstairs, and out into the back of the van, Patrick looked around the room. For no reason in particular he picked up the photograph on the bedside cabinet and looked at the picture of a happily married couple standing on the front steps of a church. He looked at it, smiled, and then threw it casually on top of the limp body of the man in the picture.
He reached inside his pocket, and took out the bag containing the gun, taking out the weapon inside. Using his gloved hands he positioned it carefully in the hands of the dead man, then turned and walked out of the house.
Outside on the street, he called across to the police sergeant, who had just finished securing the police perimeter.
"Thanks for your help, Sergeant. It's incredible. You would never think you'd find terrorists living right in your own midst…not here in the middle of quiet suburbia..."
The sergeant nodded back. He too found it hard to believe that international terrorists were living only a few blocks from his house.
"Unfortunately, the husband tried to resist...we'll leave it to your guys to clean up the body, and search the house. Listen...if you need to contact us, you can reach us on this number."
The MI5 agent pulled out a card, and handed it to the policeman.
A car drove up beside them, the door opened and Patrick got in. As he drove of, trying to catch up with the van in front, he turned to the agent beside him and said.
"That puts us a step ahead of the Americans. I wonder why Jason called it an A-clone anyway?"
" I thought you read the report you found in that guy's house! It's because Jesus Christ had A-type blood...at least, that's what the Haissem team found on the Crown of Thorns." Agent Black replied, glancing quickly at his partner as he drove the car.
"Whatever..." Patrick replied. "Listen, let's stop for a coffee on the way back to the office. I'm thirsty."
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Chapter Seventy
Vale, Colorado, America
Wednesday 21st Dec 7am
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Tim had hardly slept all night. He had been troubled by nightmares full of vague images he couldn’t understand. Twice he woke in the midst of the dreams, sweating and very scared, but unable to remember why. He knew it had something to do with the experiment, but he didn’t know what.
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As he showered and shaved, the plasma monitors on the wall projected the image of the sun rising across the wave of hills that formed the horizon behind the city of Vale. Drinking only a glass of fresh orange juice he set off for the lab, only to find that both the Professors were already there.
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“Well?” Tim asked impatiently as they looked up from the Smithsonian.
“I think you’d better see for yourself.” Dave replied, his voice shaking excitedly as he spoke. He stood up from his seat and offered it to Tim.
Tim sat down, and peered into the sights of the microscope. The Smithsonian was focussed on two cells, which were suspended in the Super Genetic Nutrient. The cell had divided. Where previously there had been a single cell, there were now two.
“What about the other two experiments?” Tim asked without bothering to look up.
“The same. They’ve both split.” Jim replied excitedly.
“Let me see...” Tim requested, looking up at Jim. “Show me.”
In the next few minutes Tim confirmed what both Jim and David had seen. Both of the other two cells that they had implanted with nuclei had successfully divided.
“I don’t like it gentleman. I don’t like it at all. All of them are showing deep red Angel Light. I’m convinced it shows that we’ve done damage to the cells…Who knows what it will mean to the developing child if the embryo grows.”
“We’ll take that chance, Tim. We will proceed as planned!” The voice of the President boomed across the lab. Tim and the two Professors had been so engrossed in looking at the cells that they hadn’t noticed the President entering through the airlock. Obviously, the President hadn’t been able to sleep either.
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In fact, contrary to how it may have seemed, the President had slept excellently. He had slept deeply, but his sleep had also been interwoven with vivid dreams.
Excellent dreams. Dreams of a time when America once more led the w
orld, in which he was once more a powerful leader, feared and respected across the planet, and rich and powerful beyond his wildest dreams.
He dreamt he was the leader of a fantastic army, an army which ruled the planet, a unified army made up of armies from all the nations of the earth, all dressed like the Military Council Protection Elite. In one dream he had stood on the edge of a cliff and as far as the eye could see his armies had passed by underneath him, led by the leaders of the world who had marched before him and paid him tribute.
And at his side throughout all these dreams had been his son and heir. His son, who the dreams had revealed to him would take his place at the head of the mightiest nation on Earth, and become the next President in the years after his own death. His son would lead America forward to an even greater age, and in time would become the first leader of a united planet.
He had dreamt it all. His dreams had shown him the future, and he knew without doubt that one day his son would lead the peoples of the earth...and no one was going to deny that to them. No one.
When he awoke he had showered quickly, and made his way to the lab as fast as he could. If his dream was to become reality, the cells had to have divided. And they had.
Tim stood up and let the President take his seat.
“You guys have done a great job here. Incredible! How long before they should divide again? I want to watch it for myself…”
“In about four-and-a-half hours.” Prof. Calvert replied.
“Great, make sure I’m here to see it.”
“So what are we going to do now? If all three cells survive to the one hundred-and-twenty-eight cell stage, do we make three clones? Do we implant them all into Danielle and hope for triplets?” Tim asked.
“There will be only one Christ. We will impregnate Danielle with one embryo only. Which one is for you gentleman to decide,” the President ended the discussion.
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 129
