“I can’t answer that, Jon,” Domenika said. “What I know is what I believe. It’s in the book of Matthew.”
“What’s it say?”
Domenika closed her eyes again. “Matthew twenty-four, verse thirty-seven. ‘As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.’ ”
Domenika watched Bondurant close his own eyes when she finished, as if to avoid the consequences of what she’d said. Meanwhile, their giant aircraft had slowed as if to prepare for more of a wild ride ahead.
“So if it’s possible to clone Jesus . . .” Bondurant said. He opened his eyes once more.
“So that he truly comes before us?” Domenika asked.
“Yes, and he’s the Son of Man, as you’ve said.”
“Then according to biblical prophecy—” Domenika stopped herself short, unable to imagine the thought.
“It’s possible the world could be saved, Domenika,” Bondurant mused.
“Yes, or half the world will be dead.”
Chapter 19
Paris
Dr. François Laurent’s face grew red. He knew it had been a mistake to agree to see an unknown emergency patient with no referral who’d called him on the phone on a weekend. He’d been trying to slowly rebuild his failing obstetrician’s practice in Paris amid the controversy surrounding his claims about human cloning. He’d taken on cases he would never have considered before. And now, despite his good intentions, he had a large and powerful hand gripped brutally tight around his throat.
Laurent had no idea who the intruder was or why he found himself in the man’s choke hold. He’d been shoved from the waiting area of his office all the way to the very end of the hall, where he was slammed onto the examination table in the last open room. At first, Laurent assumed it was one of Meyer’s stooges. Some had been sent before to intimidate him and ensure his continued silence over his work to birth the child of the Shroud. But once he caught a glimpse of Domenika standing behind the man, he knew whom he was dealing with. The day he’d feared had finally come.
“Up on the table and feet in the stirrups, Dr. Lawrence,” Domenika flatly demanded. It was the false name he had used with her in India the year before.
“You have to be joking,” Laurent protested as he gasped for breath. Bondurant had driven him into a prone position against the inclined table. All that was left to obey Domenika’s command was for Laurent to elevate his legs a few more inches toward the footrests raised high.
“You heard her,” Bondurant commanded. “In the stirrups.”
Laurent knew he was completely overpowered. He gave up any notion of escape. He slowly spread his legs and rested both ankles in the horseshoe-shaped leather pads stretched out before him.
“L-L-Look,” he stammered as he glanced toward Domenika. “I know why you’re angry. I can explain. I—”
“Do it, Jon! Castrate him,” Domenika said as she pulled a large kitchen knife from her purse and pressed the handle into Bondurant’s hand.
“Wait, wait, wait! Let’s talk this out,” Laurent pleaded. Several beads of sweat had begun to rise on his forehead. “At least hear me out before you do something insane.”
“Insane?” Domenika said. “You mean as insane as what you did to me?”
“I owed a debt to Meyer. I know it was wrong. But it’s Sehgal you have to blame for choosing you. I gave you a living miracle, madame,” Laurent protested.
“I was unconscious, and not by choice!” Domenika screamed. “You raped me! The child wasn’t mine. And then you deceived me for eight full months to carry it to term? Cut them off, Jon!”
Laurent watched as she reached down and gripped Bondurant’s wrist in both her hands. She shoved the knife to within an inch of Laurent’s crotch.
“I wasn’t aware at the start that you were unwilling, Domenika. You have to believe me,” Laurent pleaded as he watched the blade begin to slice easily through the thin fabric of his pants. He watched in terror as she leaned against the blade handle with all her weight. “It was only later that Ravi let on that you were involuntary. It was too late. By then I had no choice.”
“Too late?” Domenika cried.
She struggled repeatedly to plunge the knife forward against the resistance of Bondurant’s powerful arm.
“I sat trapped in that bed for months carrying that child to term, and all the while you knew. You knew! You had me in a prison, you monster.”
Laurent cringed again as Domenika shoved Bondurant’s wrist farther forward with all her might. As he began to feel the knife blade puncture the flesh of his upper thigh, he cried out in pain. He closed his eyes and struggled to inch backward away from the blade but had precious little room to move.
“Domenika, I know this is of no solace to you now, but you have given the world a gift,” Laurent pleaded as he squirmed sideways to buy an inch of space. He tried to reason with her. “You nurtured the living Christ. We have made history! And the world may never be the same.”
“I’m afraid you’re right about one thing, Doctor,” Bondurant said as he wrested his hand free from Domenika’s grip. “The world may never be the same.”
Laurent watched in relief as Bondurant withdrew the blade from his pant leg and tossed the knife onto the counter beside him. He could tell Domenika was disappointed that Bondurant had found a way to keep his cool. She took a seat in a chair next to the exam table but continued to eye the knife. Laurent pressed his back against the apparatus and looked on as Bondurant turned, locked the door behind him, and took a seat on the stool directly opposite his outstretched legs. Bondurant reached for the knife he’d just discarded and held it aloft to examine it closely. Laurent braced himself once more.
“Whose DNA do you think we might find on this?” Bondurant asked as he watched a tiny droplet of Laurent’s blood work its way down the sharp edge of the blade.
“Mine, of course,” Laurent said. He gripped his groin area in pain.
“And whose DNA do you believe you cloned from the Shroud with Ravi Sehgal?” Bondurant asked.
“That of Christ,” Laurent responded. “I watched your announcement myself on the news just yesterday.”
“The trouble with that theory,” Bondurant replied as he buried the knife with a loud thud an inch into the exam table, “is that while the Shroud may have belonged to someone named Jesus Christ, the DNA from the blood you used to clone the child did not.”
“That’s impossible,” Laurent replied.
“The child, the one Domenika gave birth to—do you know where he is?”
“That’s not something I can reveal. I’m on call in the event there’s an emergency with the clone. But I have no interest in giving Meyer and his cult another reason to hunt me down until I’m dead.”
Laurent watched anxiously as Bondurant yanked the knife from the table and turned the handle over and over in his palm. The tip of the blade pointed in his direction again.
“Let us spare you the trouble, Doctor,” Domenika interrupted. “Would it be Kolkata?”
Laurent stared at her. “I’ve been told the child’s been moved because—because of, you know, the deaths,” he said.
“Do you believe in hell?” Bondurant asked.
“Of a sort, yes,” Laurent replied.
“Hell is what you and Meyer and Sehgal have unleashed on this earth,” Bondurant said. “The countless who have died so far, from Kolkata to Saigon? They’re just the beginning. This plague is now creeping across four continents. And there’s no force in this world that can possibly stop what you’ve done.”
In what little time remained of the morning, Bondurant recounted for Laurent what he knew to be the true source
of Laurent’s child of the Shroud. He described for him the extraordinary powers that the cloned offspring—a Watcher—even in a childlike state, could possess as prophesied in the Bible and other religious texts.
Laurent sat in stunned disbelief. “This is why you believed the child could be found in Kolkata?” he asked. “Because it’s the birthplace of this plague they say has no earthly origin?”
“Yes,” Domenika responded. “And no earthly cure.”
Laurent gathered himself and bowed his head. His body went limp. “Spare me, please. What can I do to help you?” he asked.
“Plenty,” Bondurant said. “Domenika and I talked it over on our way here.” Bondurant turned to look at Domenika, but she only turned away. “There’s something we need from you urgently that, as fate and science would have it, only you apparently have the power to perform.”
“And what is that?” Laurent asked.
“I possess the DNA of the man purported to be Jesus Christ, Doctor,” Bondurant said. “I’ve pulled it from another relic, a piece of fabric from almost two thousand years ago found in the Basilica of the Holy Blood in Bruges,” Bondurant said. “This DNA matches with the blood of Jesus Christ on the Shroud. And Sehgal’s techniques to rescue a usable amount of that DNA from ancient blood are now nearly commonplace for those insane enough to attempt cloning. So I’m asking you, how many eggs are required, and how long will this take?”
“Required for what?” Laurent said. He was incredulous. “For cloning? To perform it again?”
“How many?” Bondurant pressed.
“At least a thousand.”
“How many do you have access to?”
“Twice that in frozen storage,” Laurent replied. “They’ve not yet been returned to Meyer.”
“Then ready them, Doctor,” Bondurant said. “Ready them as though your life depends on it.”
“What could you possibly mean?” Laurent said.
“There is a beast, in the form of a child you’ve delivered, that has somehow let loose a virus on this earth. It’s supernatural. It’s going to devour millions. My hunch is we’re going to need miracle blood to stop it.”
“And it’s a child savior as well who will slay this Watcher, rescue Christianity, and save us all?” Laurent asked.
“A savior shed his blood to save us all once before,” Domenika said. “It may be there is no other way.”
“And this savior’s blood. You’re certain it will stop this plague?”
“No, but we have no choice but to try. It may be that a child’s blood is all we have,” Bondurant said. “Like it or not, I share some responsibility for all this. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“And who will serve as surrogate this time, Doctor? Who shall be the mother of God?” Laurent asked. His mock piousness was clear.
Bondurant had no response. He looked at Laurent with dread for the predicament they were in.
Domenika got up from her chair and unlocked the door as she readied to leave. “I was chosen before without my knowledge,” she said. She turned toward Laurent with a cold stare. “I nurtured this Watcher, this beast, and gave it life. If I am ever to see redemption, it must be me.”
Chapter 20
East of New Delhi
Khan did a double take.
Very few things in her world came as a shock, but the sight before her was definitely one. A petite and pretty young girl with large brown eyes and a white bow in her hair pushed a rickety shopping cart directly into the path of Khan’s truck. The cart she pushed held a young boy, one Khan figured to be about eight years old. At first glance, he looked to be asleep, half-naked, dressed in only a T-shirt and underwear. He lay comfortably curled up in a ball as the girl, about ten years old, shoved him forward on half-broken wheels. On second look, however, Khan could tell the boy had likely been dead for a day.
For almost a week, Khan’s solo fact-finding quest in the relentless heat of India had taken its toll. She’d been on the move from one deserted or lifeless village to the next east of New Delhi, the once-bustling capital city. She’d seen countless other dead bodies along the way on her nightmarish journey. The corpses spilled forth from every space imaginable—windows, balconies, shop doorways, or cars strewn along the roadside from Dasna to Masuri to Hapur. Why Khan would take notice of the plight of this single lost soul and the dead boy in her derelict cart she didn’t know.
She gripped the steering wheel hard as she screeched to a halt in the road in front of the girl. Her mind wandered in the swelter of the blazing sun. Perhaps the girl’s predicament was symbolic of Khan’s own life journey. The girl pressed forward, expressionless but with steely determination.
No doubt, seeing death by plague on massive scales had hardened Khan over the years. Her job as a disease hunter came with a strange gift, it seemed. Death had forged an ironlike resolve inside, one that allowed her to take on any sight, any circumstance, in a calm and collected way, detached from the ordinary emotions that afflicted so many. Feelings and sentiments were fine for others but useless, even dangerous, to Khan. They served only to sabotage her ability to quickly and efficiently determine where an answer might lie or a cure might be found, one critical to the saving of lives.
Khan kept her foot on the brake as she watched the girl, eyes vacant but now fixed searingly on her own. She had come to a full halt with the boy to block Khan’s path. The girl, probably the dead boy’s sister, was a living miracle in Khan’s mind. She was the only sign of life Khan had seen in more than a day. She had traveled from one ghost town to the next in search of where rumors, some of them wild, had placed the plague’s first but hopefully most revealing deaths.
Khan had seen the destruction wrought by plagues many times before. But this was different. When morbidity and mortality rates for a disease reached 100 percent, as pandemics rarely did, life simply stopped. With millions of lives now spent near the epicenter of the plague’s very birth, the world around her was apocalyptic. Khan had never seen anything like it before. She had read scientific texts on the aftermath of the explosion of a neutron bomb. There was no picture of the imagination any closer in her own mind to describe what she’d seen. Designed to maximize death by radiation while minimizing physical destruction, such weapons would leave in their wake a surreal world, one that Khan had come to know as the terrible reality of the Devil’s Sweat.
“ ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,’ ” Khan quoted like a mantra.
They were words from the Bhagavad Gita, spoken by Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. They’d been famously evoked by Robert Oppenheimer when describing his experience at Trinity, the site of the first successful test of an atomic bomb. And nothing could come closer to describing what Khan had seen. A world at halt, not at rest or peace. A world of black and white. Color, like life, had been wrung from the world. Buildings, now only skeletons, still stood in place but everywhere were barren. Stores and shops were long ago looted or burned. They littered the background as wasteland, dark and empty. Abandoned cars and cycles and carts of every kind sat discarded and deserted where they’d stalled or fallen. They formed massive piles and clogged streets one intersection to the next. Incessantly blinking or shattered, broken lights were everywhere, as far as the eye could see.
And there was the silence. Never before had Khan experienced anything like it. She would sometimes clap her hands together to produce a sound, any sound, to assure herself she hadn’t gone deaf. Beyond the hum of her Land Rover’s motor when she was on the move, noise had vanished.
Khan reached for the handle to open her driver’s-side door. Millions had died, and many millions more would pass. Why this one young life had come to matter she didn’t know.
She knew of a medical college that operated a girls’ hostel in Hapur, thirty miles to the south behind her. It was completely overwhelmed with orphans of the plague. But she would befriend the young girl. She would attend to her immediate needs. She would have the boy cremated, as was the cus
tom and need. She would backtrack to the hostel in Hapur as quickly as she could. This little girl was not going to die. This little girl was going to live.
Chapter 21
St. Moritz, Switzerland
Galerkin sweated profusely from the midday heat. He trudged down the marble steps that led from the mansion toward the pool house of Hans Meyer’s summer residence. He walked right past Meyer and didn’t even recognize him.
Meyer couldn’t blame him. Gone was his electrolarynx machine, once his constant companion and the eerie replacement for his larynx that allowed him to speak. Gone was the grotesque stoma, the hole in the center of his windpipe that allowed him to breathe and smoke. His throat was now smooth and perfectly healed. Gone were the horrendous acne and the resultant pockmarks that had once riddled Meyer’s face. His complexion was clear. And gone were the thin wisps of hair protruding from the back of his head that had futilely attempted to hide his massive bald spot for years. Now he sported a thick mane of sandy-blond hair. Hans Meyer had been transformed.
Once Meyer had persuaded Galerkin to sit down in the lounge chair beside him, it took nearly five minutes more to convince the hulking Russian that he was the man he claimed to be. Meyer was amused at Galerkin’s astonishment over his makeover, one that also made him look at least ten years younger.
“What you do? Super vitamins? Growth hormone?” Galerkin asked. “You used to look like head of dead fish.”
Meyer blanched at the backhanded compliment, but let it pass.
“I’ll tell you how it happened in just in a minute. Soon it will be obvious,” Meyer said as he filled a glass with iced tea. He offered one to Galerkin, who gulped it down quickly and held his glass out for more. “But first, some business.”
As Meyer and Galerkin talked, they looked over an Olympic-sized pool adorned by a dozen massive Roman sculptures that stood sentry at the water’s edge. A light breeze that blew in from the west stole the sky’s reflection off the water as countless ripples shimmered on the pool in the reflection of the sun. Beyond the pool was a wide, verdant lawn that stretched down a hillside that afforded a magnificent view of Lake St. Moritz and the Piz Bernina, the highest summit in the Eastern Alps. At the far end of the pool in the distance was a small child pedaling a red tricycle in a wide circle as he enjoyed the glorious day.
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