The Lucifer Genome: A Conspiracy Thriller

by Glen Craney

  Cas glared at the snooty headwaiter. “Hey, there’s no cause for the attitude.”

  “Actually,” Marly told the maitre d’, “I’m already impressed with your judgment. How much is the steak?”

  “Six hundred dirham.”

  “How much is that in American dollars?”

  “Approximately two hundred, madam.”

  “Make mine medium rare,” Marly said. “With a side order of onion rings. And load me up on the bread sticks. There’s a big tip in it for you if they have sesame seeds.”

  The maitre d’ nodded with a conspiratorial smile and glided off.

  Cas was nearly choking. “What the hell?”

  Marly turned on her stool and fluttered her eyes at the comely mixologist in the red vest. When the barkeep sauntered over, she asked him, “Where can a girl find a good time around here?”

  Cas’s jaw nearly hit his knee. “Didn’t you hear what I just—”

  “Well,” the bartender said, returning the seductive glance. “If you’re looking for high-end shopping, there’s Hermès at the Eithad Towers.”

  “Great. Oh, and charge my dinner to the room of my assistant here. He goes under Ass H. Fielding” She flirted a bit more with the bartender, then turned and found Cas, speechless, still hovering behind her. “Run along, cabana boy. You’re cramping my style.”

  STILL STEAMED ABOUT MARLY'S SPENDING spree at the lounge, Cas got out of a cab just off Hamdan Street and stood outside an eight-story gray building that looked like a crumbling Russian apartment block. He nearly retched from the cesspool smells of urine and rotting garbage as he hurried through the graffiti-covered hallways into a maze of apartments where Filipino, Bangladeshi and Thai men slept in heaps.

  Turning blue from the lack of breathable air, he finally made it to the basement and found his old Arab friend and CIA subcontractor, Roz the Clipper, a nickname bestowed to honor his skill at shaving off edges of silver and gold coins without detection and selling the harvest for a tidy profit. The handy lowlife kept a meth lab here, along with printing machinery and an office the size of a three-car garage. No cop in the world could stand the smell enough to get anywhere near the place, and besides, the UAE police couldn’t have cared any less for the scum who lived around here.

  Grinning, the Clipper handed over a packet of documents ordered by phone from New York. “Just like the old days, eh Casuist?”

  Cas hadn’t heard his spook nickname spoken in years. He nodded quickly, anxious to get back to the hotel before someone from the Dark Years spotted him. After paying the Clipper with a fresh wad of American hundred-dollar bills, he backtracked outside and hailed another cab, gulping draughts of air, as if he had just surfaced from the sulfuric depths of Hades.

  AT THE HOTEL BAR, MARLY kept looking at her watch. No telling what the Fielding of Nightmares was up to on his mysterious errand. Bored and feeling more than a little out of place, she ordered another Cosmopolitan while waiting for her Kobe steak to be served.

  The nice young British bartender slid the drink down to her.

  She took a satisfying sip and wondered again what this city of Abu Dhabi—more than a thousand miles across the Arabian Peninsula from Mecca—could possibly have to do with the Black Stone and meteorites. Fighting off the questions pounding her brain, she sighed and leaned back on her cushioned bar chair, dogged tired. Forget about it, Marly, just forget it. Go along for the ride. Then take the money and run. She started toying with a souvenir book of matches and a handful of those nifty plastic swords used to impale olives. As she sipped her cranberry-and-citrus martini, the weight of the previous seventy sleep-deprived hours began slipping away. A hot bath would be next, and—

  She felt a hard jab in her right kidney.

  Behind her, a man with a three-day beard and greasy hair pressed something sharp deeper into her flank. “I tell you when to move.”

  She looked down and saw a pistol, covered by the overhang of the bar.

  The man aborted her brewing protest with another jab. “Do what I say,” he whispered into her ear. “And only what I say.”

  She couldn’t make out his features in the dim lighting. Exhausted, she found just enough energy to clench her jaws. With her brain now as hazy as the smog-cloaked twilight sky outside, she took another sip from her frosty Cosmopolitan, trying to steady her nerves. Despite her terror, instinct told her to act unfazed. She turned on him with as fierce a glare as she could manage. “You know what, mister?” She raised her voice, hoping the bartender would overhear and come over. “You are really pretty annoying. And that poking hurts, too.”

  But the bartender had his back turned at the far end of the bar.

  The man with the gun arched her back by driving the barrel deeper into her flesh. “Pull that little trick again, and you will regret it. You are an American. Nobody here would mind if you were found to have committed suicide in the restroom. Except, of course, the one who must clean up your blood.”

  A rush of adrenaline sponged her fear. “I could just yell ‘gun’ and—”

  He stabbed his weapon so hard into her ribs that she sucked in her breath.

  Wincing, she turned on him with raw fury and clenched her fingernails to claw at his face, but the man grabbed her by the forearm. She tried to jerk away, looking toward the bartender in a silent plea for help.

  Her abductor tossed a wad of bills on the bar. His silenced purchased, the bartender just shrugged as Marly was hustled toward the exit.

  CAS DASHED THROUGH THE OCEANS hotel lobby and made fast for the restaurant bar. He’d been gone thirty minutes, tops. Not bad, not bad at all. His throat was parched, and his head felt like it was about to explode for lack of sleep. But his long-neglected internal alarm, which had saved his ass countless times, was fully recharged and now blasting warning bells everywhere in his body.

  Something was wrong.

  As his ears burned from the cheesy American music blasting over the speakers, he scanned the well-dressed tourists and seedy expats in the lounge. Nothing immediately looked out of the ordinary—except that Marly’s bar chair was empty. Maybe she’d just gone to refresh herself after so many hours in an airplane. He took the stool next to hers and waited, tapping his fingers on the bar with growing impatience. As the seconds spun into minutes, his anxiety started spinning, too. He wanted scream in Marly’s face: What part of “Somebody will kill you!” don’t you understand?

  Instead, he waved over the bartender, who was busy folding napkins.

  “Yes, sir!” the bartender said. “So sorry. Didn’t see you there.”

  “Vesper martini.” Cas cased the joint again, wondering if Marly had really made good on her threat to go shopping. “Make it fast. I don’t want the ice cubes to even think about melting.”

  The bartender smirked. “Glad to have you back, Mr. Bond.”

  Cas remembered that surly tone from their earlier encounter. “Everybody seems to find my cocktail of choice entertaining.”

  “We don’t get many orders for it, except when the cruise ships come in.”

  Cas drained the glass and slapped a handful of dirham on the bar. “Listen, pal. I gotta ask you something. Damn fine stir, by the way.”

  “Cheers,” the bartender said, clearly not giving a damn.

  “What happened to that hot-looking sort-of-blond chick sitting here?”

  The bartender shrugged. “We get many female customers in here.”

  “The one with the steam coming out of her ears.”

  The bartender enjoyed a tight smile. “She left about fifteen minutes ago with another man.”

  “Voluntarily?”

  The bartender kept polishing the inside of a shot glass, his diffidence way too studied. “She wasn’t wearing handcuffs or being dragged by the hair.”

  Cas reluctantly pulled out more baksheesh from his pocket and slid the bills down the bar. “This man with her … he didn’t happen to look like, I dunno, a youngish guy with black hair and a pasty face?”

>   This time, the bartender couldn’t even dredge up a shrug as he picked up the cash and pocketed it. “Maybe. To be quite honest, I didn’t notice.”

  Cas chewed through his plastic swizzle in anger. He had no time for chasing after a ditzy dame. The clock was ticking. Only three days left until the Hajj, and no Stone meant no money, no Farid, and no telling what else. He definitely wasn’t in the mood now for a reunion go-round with Avram Isserle. That wiry little bastard and his Mossad toadies had likely been tailing them from the moment they had landed. As he licked the last drop from the martini glass, he announced—to himself—that the outrageous tip he had just plucked down for absolutely no information was coming out of Dr. Rockhead’s fee.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dallas, Texas

  BORED AND TIRED, BRIDGET WHELAN sighed as she leaned over the microscope for what seemed like the gazillionth time that morning. This boss of hers, Seth Cohanim, was one piece of messed-up work, constantly bursting into the lab and ordering her to recheck the vectors and base pairs on the DNA extracts to make sure her calculations were correct. Anal-retentive buttinski. What had she gotten herself into here? All of this money and time, just to breed a cow that would add a quarter-inch thickness to a Porterhouse steak? She didn’t even touch red meat. No way would she risk coming back in the next life as a bovine to be stuffed with genetically altered corn and prodded by electrical jolts into a slaughterhouse.

  She adjusted the scope’s focus and typed the sequence into her laptop:

  Letters and strands … strands and letters.

  For the love of Artemis!

  She was even dreaming about binaries at night now. She was about to take a break and walk down the creepy dark hall for a cup of coffee when she heard her boss’s footsteps on the gray carpet.

  Hexation.

  The lab door flew open. “Whelan! You got those DNA printouts from that tooth yet?”

  “Should be finished in an hour, Mr. Cohanim.”

  The Stetson-crowned éminence grease scraped his boot heel across the gleaming white linoleum floor like a bull pawing before a charge. “That’s what you told me two hours ago!”

  “You can’t rush Mother Nature.”

  Cohanim took a menacing step closer and came hovering over her. “You’re not pricking frog’s legs for the freshman lab class! This is a business. Time is money.”

  “Extracting a specimen from that molar pulp was a real bitch,” she said, fishing for a raise.

  “That’s what you get paid to do.”

  She didn’t know the first thing about veterinary dentistry, but this tooth she was examining seemed unusually small, even for a young calf’s mouth. “What are you feeding those poor things? That thing looked like it had been soaked in Dr Pepper for a month.”

  He ignored her complaint. “How degraded was the DNA?”

  “Worst I’ve ever seen,” she said, not exaggerating. “But I did finally manage to scrape out just enough periodontal tissue to do the trick. We got lucky. Usually, it’s a hundred-to-one shot to find any surviving protein in a tooth from an animal that’s been dead for a while. You must have kept it in a climate-controlled environment, huh?”

  “We’re not amateurs here.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m going to be out of town for a few days. I won’t be around to clean up your screw-ups, so let’s go over the cloning protocol again.”

  “I’ve got it memorized."

  Cohanim’s face reddened. “I don’t care if you wrote it in lipstick on that fat backside of yours! I want to hear you repeat it.”

  Bridget silently conjured up a nasty curse, imagining what her boss would look like with a massive goiter hanging under that yapping jaw of his. If the rent weren’t due this weekend, she would walk right out and slam the door behind her. But she vowed to hang on just long enough to get a few more bucks stashed away. Then, she’d show him her ass, all right.

  “When you finally have the readout from the tooth DNA in hand,” he quizzed her, “what are you going to do next?”

  “I’ll run it through the database of DNA sequences on the mainframe.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll do a comparative analysis and isolate the one DNA donor that most closely matches the genome from the tooth extraction.”

  “How many sequences do we have filed?”

  She wanted to scream, but resisted the urge. She had known that factoid once upon a time, but now she wasn’t sure. Burned by his expectant glare, she finally offered a guess, “Forty million.”

  Cohanim’s eyes flinted with anger. “Four hundred and forty million! There are four hundred-and-forty million individual readings collected by the Institute of Genome Study from around the world. Do I have to write it on a Post-it and stick it to your forehead?”

  She perked up on her lab stool. “You know, I was wondering about that. Why would a nonprofit want to collect the DNA profiles of so many cattle?”

  Cohanim circled her, taking a moment as if trying to recover his composure. “You’re just full of questions, aren’t you?”

  She flipped her head sideways, cute-like. “That’s why I went into science.”

  “That’s why I went into science, too,” he growled. “But the business of animal husbandry is all about asking the right questions and avoiding the wrong ones. What do you think would be the right question right about now?”

  Her feelings bruised, she forced herself to submit to his browbeating, if only to get him out of her face quicker. “Would you like me to proceed with the protocol, sir?”

  “Good choice,” he said. “Now, what are you going to do with the ideal candidate drawn from the Institute’s genome database?”

  “I’m supposed to fax the specs to the number that you gave me, with instructions to send us the donor egg most closely matching the DNA of the molar.”

  “Transport method?”

  “Medevac jet. Container kept below twenty-two degrees with dry ice only.”

  Cohanim nodded. “And when the egg gets here?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was going to ask you about—” She stopped in time, but she simply couldn’t hold back her curiosity. “Why are you trying to create recombinant DNA with the tooth pulp and mineral extracts from that stone we tapped with the needle last week?”

  Cohanim stared at her. “What kind of nonsense did they teach you at that football mill down in Lubbock? Every high schooler knows you can’t create DNA from an inanimate object.”

  “I’m confused, then. Why all of this work?”

  Cohanim rubbed his fist into his palm, his tic of impatience. “I’m testing a new theory. Some strains of cows have a genetic deficiency in iron. For some reason, this phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the Middle East. It may have something to do with the excess Vitamin D from sun exposure, or the lack of certain nutrients in the grass—or whatever scrub they’re getting there. The cattle become anemic and don’t thrive.”

  “So you think injecting minerals into their DNA culture will change that?”

  He turned uncharacteristically avuncular, adopting a solicitous tone. “To be perfectly honest, darlin’, I don’t know. But then, almost all of the important discoveries down through history have resulted because someone was willing to try something outlandish. It may be that the cow genome can be altered by the mere proximity in the genetic soup of the trace minerals that would be deficient when the person—”

  “You mean ‘cow,’” she corrected him.

  Cohanim’s face pinched, as if he had made a gross mistake, but he quickly masked it with a forced smile. “Of course. Sorry. I read these sci-fi novels on human cloning, and sometimes I dream of the future.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, it would be smokin’ rad if we could do with people what they did with Dolly the sheep some day, huh?” She noticed that he had turned inward, probably captivated by some deep thought. “So, it kinda sounds like you’re doing homeopathy for stem cells.”

  Cohani
m roused from a deep contemplation, and smiled at her.

  She felt a shudder. First time she’d ever seen that.

  “Yes, it’s exactly like that,” he said. “You’re cleverer than I gave you credit for, Miss Whelan. I think you may have a very bright future here at Lightgiver Technologies.”

  Stunned by the rare compliment, she glanced at him sideways, wondering if he was being sarcastic. He looked dead serious.

  “Tell you what. As soon as we get that test embryo cloned, I’m taking it over to Israel to implant it in our client’s test heifer at the Kibbutz Gizan. How would you like to come along? I could use some help in case we get some genetic issues.”

  She glowed like a firefly, and began to wonder if maybe she had misjudged the guy. She batted her Goth lashes at him again. “That would be radder than rad, Mr. Cohanim.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  MARLY'S ABDUCTOR—THE THIRD IN as many days, if you counted Agent Speedo, and she was coming around to doing just that—walked her briskly out of the hotel. In less than a minute, a taxi was rushing them down a broad boulevard bordered by dwarf palm trees. Fighting the brute’s grip on her arm, she tried to take in every detail of her surroundings so that she could tell Cas as soon as she escaped.

  Fifteen minutes later, the yellow Corolla lurched into overdrive and zipped the few blocks toward the broad avenue that ran along Abu Dhabi’s waterfront. They came to a stop in front of what appeared to be a Middle Eastern version of an American strip mall. Tall, latticed windows crowned in sharp arches fronted its facade. The place reminded her of a miniature, cheesy knockoff of a caliph’s palace.

  Would they really murder her in a place like this?

  The kidnapper tossed a few dirham at the cabbie and yanked her out of the backseat. He shoved her into a bar that looked like a garden-variety sports dive dropped into a Pizza Hut. The moment she stepped foot inside, the men—mostly Western corporate types, with a few dopey-looking Arabs—stopped talking and stared at her. She felt like Dorothy landing in a hut of overheated, smoke-puffing Munchkins.