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10am
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Apart from revealing to him his destiny, and the part his son would share in it, the dreams had left the President with a small problem. Tim Curts.
In his dreams Tim had appeared several times, but for reasons which the dreams had not clearly shown him, in his dreams Tim had not played the part of a friend or ally.
On the contrary, as he had stood at the top of the cliff with his son, surveying the battalions of his warriors marching before him, in the distance high in the sky, surrounded by mist and swirling clouds, there had been a group of people standing in white robes and glowing white in the light of the sun. As the President had watched them he had seen Tim standing at the forefront in their midst.
For the life of him the President could not understand or interpret that part of the dream. But as he had stood standing at the top of the cliff, looking at Tim and the others, he’d had a bad feeling about them.
They represented something that he couldn’t touch or understand, and in the waking moments when he opened his eyes the President realised that in a very strange way it was almost as if the dreams had given him a message: Tim Curts had to go.
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The President was confused. Tim was the voice of reason and the ‘rock’ upon whom the President relied. There were few people the President felt any degree of warmth to, but Tim was one of them. Over the years he had been careful not to let Tim see any sign of the regard he held for him, and he doubted if Tim had the faintest inkling that he even liked the man. He knew that Tim was loyal above all else, and he had proven himself time and time again. The man was the salt of the earth. How then, could his dream be telling him otherwise? So, in his dream, why was he not standing side by side with him at the top of the cliff where he belonged, instead of far off in the distance in the clouds?
Although he fought with what the dream was trying to tell him, the dream had been so real, that the feeling it had left him with continued throughout the day. The message, if you could call it that, was clear. He had to get rid of Tim. If it had been anyone else, the President would have made him disappear without a trace but in spite of himself the President couldn’t bring himself to pass judgement on the man without knowing what the whole thing was about! What was he to do?
The answer came to him in a flash when he returned to his room and called and spoke to his assistants in the White House. The problem started by the failed mission to assassinate the Oxford team in England was deepening. The Ambassador in London had made the situation worse by being overheard speaking too loudly in a party, voicing his opinions on the British monarchy. His comments had been published the next day in the British tabloids, and a wave of anti-American sentiment was sweeping the country. The Ambassador was a fool! Did he not realise how important it was to improve the diplomatic ties between America and Europe? Now more than ever they needed a good man over there to resolve the situation and turn around ten years of deteriorating relationships.
The solution was simple...as soon as the project had been concluded in Vale, the President would remove the Ambassador from England, -probably sending him to South Africa as a punishment-, and then offer his job to Tim. That way he could reward Tim for his years of service and simultaneously remove him from America, so that he could no longer be a danger to him and his son.
The Ambassadorship in London was the jewel in the political crown to which many aspired. The President felt sure Tim would view it as a reward for his loyalty over the years. The best part was that while being far removed from White House politics and sufficiently far out of the way, Tim was a genius who could be relied upon to resolve the European issue and restore the bond between their two countries. And, from time to time, he would still be able to avail himself of Tim’s wisdom if required.
“Well done Charles!”, the President congratulated himself. “I’ll give Tim the good news when he gets back to Washington...when he’s completed the project here.”
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12am
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Later that morning the four of them gathered once again around the Smithsonian, watching the cells on the overhead plasma screen. For twenty minutes the group simultaneously monitored the three sets of double cells on the screen above. Then as if by magic and within thirty seconds of each other, all three pairs divided. From two cells to four cells. The second cell division had taken place on schedule and the President was overjoyed. Tim escorted him to the airfield and stood stoically on the tarmac as Air Force One rolled down the runway and took off.
The President had left Tim with the specific command that within twenty-four hours, the President’s fiancée ‘had to get pregnant’. Tim would do his best to comply.
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7pm
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As if on cue the cells divided again early in the evening. There were now eight cells in each Petri dish, and they would soon have to choose which embryo they would use for the implantation scheduled for the next day.
Yet before they were forced to make the selection, an accident in the laboratory simplified the choice. There was no physical explanation that they could attribute to what happened, and if they had not witnessed it for themselves, they would never have believed it.
The two Professors and two other lab assistants were watching and filming the three cells, examining them on high magnification so that what was happening inside the cells could be recorded clearly using the latest high speed digital cameras. Hopefully they would capture the action on film of the ribosomes unzipping and replicating the chromosomes. Tim was standing in the background listening casually to the conversation and trying to understand what they were talking about.
Suddenly, in front of their eyes, two of the three Petri dishes containing the cells burst into flames and within a few seconds the contents of the dishes had been incinerated. All that was left was a skin of charred residue coating the glass.
The three dishes had been arranged in a line under the hood of the Smithsonian. Although no one could attribute any credible scientific reason for it, two shoots of flame had seemed to leap out from the middle dish, landing in the Petri dishes on either side of it. The SGN fluid in both the dishes had ignited, burning fiercely. Only the Petri dish in the centre had remained intact, and the choice of which embryo to use had been made for them.
Tim had seen the whole thing. He had never seen anything like it before. It was almost as if, supernaturally, one of the embryos had taken the other two out of the equation.
Over dinner that night Tim had argued once again with the members of his team about the risk in continuing with the experiment. It was a difficult situation. Since the President had personally ordered the project to continue unchecked, Tim had no authority to instruct the team otherwise, but through the course of intelligent reasoning he appealed to their scientific minds and knowledge in the hope that somehow they would agree to progressing only with cloned egg cells which continued to exhibit the ‘normal’ 'Angel Light' effect. Yet, try as he might, they could not see the danger that Tim could almost now taste in his mouth, such was the growing strength of his convictions that they were making a mistake and entering dangerous scientific territory.
That night Tim found it difficult to sleep again. He lay in his bed, his eyes staring at the plasma monitor on the wall which continuously relayed images of the world outside, and as he watched the lights of the city twinkle in the distance he started to pray.
For the second time during a visit to the lab in Vale he prayed for help. Whereas last time he had found himself begging for the life of his daughter, this time he prayed for guidance.
He'd had enough. He wanted out.
But Tim knew he needed to find a way of getting out of his job which didn’t threaten the lives of his family. Unfortunately, there was no simple way out, and as Tim’s eyes grew heavy and he finally fell asleep, it seemed
to him that it would take nothing short of a miracle to get him out of the situation he was now in.
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Chapter Seventy One
Vale, Colorado, America
22nd Dec 10pm
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The next evening at 10pm everyone was assembled in the small operating theatre, which over the past few months had been specially constructed in one of the rooms attached to the main cloning laboratory. The entire floor on which the lab was situated was deathly quiet. Outside the usual scientists hurrying past in the corridors were conspicuous in their absence, and the microscopes and lab benches stood unusually idle. In its place there was a strange silence.
As agreed with the President, everyone except the essential few were forbidden to access that floor that evening. The President’s fiancée was able to come and go from the theatre without being seen.
Danielle was dressed in a white robe, almost virginal in her appearance, an observation which Tim found strangely ironic. Few knew the truth as Tim did: Danielle was a strip artist and a whore, and it was many years since she had been a virgin. Tim smiled to himself when the thought occurred to him that, in the space of a few good years, Danielle had gone from being ‘anybody's lady’ to ‘first lady’.
As Tim entered the theatre she was lying on the operating table nervously, waiting for the tranquilliser to take effect, with two nurses in white uniforms standing stoically on either side of her. The room was quiet, and smelt of antiseptic and disinfectant, clean and sterile. The floor was white, the walls were covered in white tiles, the ceiling was white. Everything was white.
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Just fifteen minutes before Danielle had arrived, the cells had divided again, and with one hundred and twenty eight cells now in the embryo, they felt comfortable for the implantation to go ahead. Tim had very mixed feelings as he watched the doctor carry the embryo through to the theatre. On the one hand he felt some professional pride that the project had come this far. They had come a long way in such a short time.
But for Tim, the moment was marred by the totally unscientific and inexplicable feeling of fear and dread that raged throughout his body. Something about the whole procedure was terribly, terribly wrong, but in spite of his misgivings he knew that there was nothing he could do to halt the process.
As he watched, the embryo was taken from the Super Genetic Nutrient, in which it had lived contentedly for the past few days, and was placed carefully within the womb of Danielle.
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The moment passed without any great pomp or ceremony. There were no fanfares on trumpets or angelic hosts to herald the moment the baby was placed in the womb. There were no outward signs to proclaim the event, and yet, as history would show in the years to come, this moment signified one of the most major events in the history of mankind.
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And Tim had been unable to stop it.
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Chapter Seventy Two
Banbury Gardens Cemetery
Near Oxford, England
23rd Dec 1pm
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The snow fell slowly but surely, dancing in the sky as the wind caught the soft, large flakes and blew them into intriguing patterns that came and went, as it continued on its downward journey to the ground, covering the headstones and graves with a blanket of white.
It was a dull day, the heavy falling snow masking the sounds of the everyday world around and filtering the natural light so that everything seemed either grey, white or black. It was freezing cold, and the small group of people huddled around the dark hole in the ground, were slowly beginning to merge into the background as the snow began to settle on their shoulders, and long, dark coats.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust..."
Don heard the words being spoken, but he still couldn't take it all in. It all seemed so unreal. Almost surreal. He felt detached from these strange, bizarre goings-on. He looked up from the coffin lying at the bottom of the hole, and turned to watch the faces of those around him, Jason's former friends and colleagues.
The Professor stood at the end of the grave, his arm firmly round Lydia's shoulders, who until a few minutes ago had managed to put such a brave face on it all. Now she was weeping uncontrollably, and the sight of her sadness was too much for Don. He looked away quickly, the feeling of guilt returning swiftly and eating away at him from within. "If only he had got to Jason's house sooner...maybe he would have been able to save him…"
He knew it was ridiculous, that Jason had been dead for hours when he had found his body, but he couldn't stop feeling that somehow it was all his fault.
Louisa stood with Maria, beside the Professor, the other nine people around the grave being a mixture of school friends and people Jason had known in Oxford.
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As one by one they shuffled forward to pick up a handful of earth and scatter it onto the coffin below, Don saw a movement in the corner of his eye, a moving dark blur amongst the grey headstones.
Instinctively Don left the group and moved towards the man standing underneath a tree, sheltering from the snow. It was Patrick from MI5.
"What are you doing here?" Don asked, anger bubbling beneath the sadness in his voice.
"We just came to pay our respects."
"What have you done with her? Where is she? And why did you have to kill her husband?" Don asked, trying to keep a grip of the rage that Don felt sure would engulf him at any moment. First Jason, then the family who had become the surrogate parents to the A-clone. Where would it all end?
The MI5 agent stared back at him. Don could see the thoughts racing through the agent's mind, and he noticed the movement inside Patrick's coat, as he tightened his grip on the gun in his pocket.
"You guys have done your part, and now it's our turn. We'll make sure the Haissem project delivers its full potential. Something your team could never do..."
Don took a step closer to the man in front of him. Immediately a second man stepped out from behind a tree on his right, another emerging from between the gravestones on his left.
"Don, go back to your world. And forget the Haissem project! Jason and your team did a brilliant job, but it's over now. Forget it. For all your sakes."
The threat was clear.
For a second, he stared at the MI5 agent, feeling weak, and helpless. Then he turned, and tramped heavily through the snow back to the edge of the grave, where Maria was waiting for him.
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Chapter Seventy Three
Chicago, America
24th Dec 7.30pm
Christmas Eve
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The impromptu party at Jessie’s Bar was beginning to break up and people were beginning to spill out onto the street to find their way home to their families, laden down with bags of last minute presents. The first wave of the evening was coming to an end, and would soon be replaced by the Saturday night crowd out for the evening to celebrate Christmas Eve. The atmosphere in the bar had been brilliant, with people cheering and shouting as they watched their local Chicago team, the Chicago Slammers beat the visiting Boston Bears at Ice Hockey on national television. In fact, when the whistle went at the end of the last minute and the Slammers had beaten the Bears for the first time in three years, Jessie had been so carried away with the moment that she found herself standing on the bar shouting “Drinks are on the House!” Her husband, who didn’t follow the hockey, almost had a heart attack. Still it was Christmas Eve, ‘Goodwill to all men’ and all that.
Seamus O’Hallohan waved goodbye and shouted Merry Christmas for the hundredth time that evening, and staggered out the door. The cold chilled wind caught him by surprise and for a second he stopped, carefully putting his bags of presents on the ground, before lifting the hood of his jacket over his head. He pulled on his gloves and bent down to pick up his bags. The ground was thick with snow, great mounds of it piled high on the edges of the sidewalks, but it hadn’t snowed since the morning, and it looked like they were getting a break in the weather. The skies above were crystal cl
ear now, and the stars sparkled like little diamonds in the sky. As he picked up his bags Seamus looked up at the stars with awe, noticing how his breath almost froze in the air above him as he breathed out.
“Wow! What’s that?” Seamus exclaimed aloud.
His shout was taken up by others in the busy street around him, as one by one heads turned skyward to see what the others were looking at.
The sky was alive with colour. From nowhere a line of bright, multicoloured light had appeared in the sky, a path of glowing fire which stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, blotted out at either end by the edges of the tall buildings around them.
“It’s the comet!”, a voice shouted from behind him.
“Yeah…the one Father O’Brian told us to look out for!” another cried.
Behind him other people were pouring out of the pub, all faces turned upwards and staring towards the heavens in wonder, as the trail of the comet glowed and shimmered and danced before their eyes. For a good two minutes the trail was clearly visible, and the Christmas revellers on the ground watched the stunning display in amazement.
“Mommy, is that the nativity star?” One little boy squealed, pulling on his mother’s hand.
Around him the crowd took up the little boy’s question, pointing excitedly to the star and shouting to each other that it was the Star of Bethlehem…
“Rubbish man...it’s the Star of Chicago!” a young reveller shouted back.
That night on the ten o’clock news, the lead item started with the little boy’s question:
“Did we see the nativity star tonight? …Was it ‘the Star of Chicago’? Just what was that comet in the sky?”
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BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 130
