The Lucifer Genome: A Conspiracy Thriller

by Glen Craney

  “What about his cattle insemination techniques?” Marly asked. “We heard that he—”

  The door flew open, and two local lawmen walked in.

  The waitress hurried off to tend the register. “You boys are in early today.”

  “On business,” one of the sheriff’s deputies said. “Looking for the owner of a Jeep Cherokee parked in front of the courthouse.”

  Cas waved to the officers. “That’d probably be ours. Is there a problem?”

  “On weekdays, that spot’s reserved for the pro-tem judge.”

  Marly came up aside Cas to protest. “There wasn’t any sign out there.”

  The nastier looking of the two deputies pulled out his citation book and began writing up a violation. “City ordinance.” He pointed to a bulletin board behind the cash register. “It’s posted in here.”

  Cas knew better than to challenge the shakedown. “How much?”

  “Two twenty-five.”

  Marly was outraged. “That’s unconstitutional!”

  Shaking his head at the futility of her protest, Cas extracted the cash from his wallet and handed it over to the deputy writing the ticket. “I don’t want you boys to take this as a bribe, but seeing as how me and the missus”—he nodded at Marly with a wink—“won’t be around for the trial and Supreme Court appeal, how about we just pay the fine now?” He handed the bills to the ham-handed officer. “While we’re at it, mind telling us if you got any other special parking spots that we should know about?”

  The deputy doing the talking stuffed the bills into his pocket and scribbled a ‘paid’ notation on the citation. “None that immediately come to mind. But just to be on the safe side, you might want to head on down the road.”

  “Have we got time to sample Margie here’s apple cobbler?” Cas asked.

  The two deputies walked out, their silence serving as answer enough.

  Cas ordered their sandwiches to go. He paid, grabbed the bag, and quickly walked out with Marly. Blasted again by the heat, they hurried toward the Jeep, careful to stay on the sidewalk to avoid a fine for trampling city grass, although they had yet to see anything green for ten miles in any direction.

  Safely inside the cab, he inserted the key and turned the ignition. He saw the two deputies parked on the curb a block away, watching them like hawks.

  “What do we do now?” Marly asked.

  Cas slowly pulled from the space and, flicking on his turn signal, headed out of town, making sure he stayed ten miles under the speed limit. “Looks like Cohanim’s got too much juice around here. Nobody’s going to talk.”

  Marly flung her head back onto the headrest. Conceding defeat, she grabbed a sandwich and began chowing it down.

  “Is that the one with mustard?”

  Marly mumbled with a full mouth, “Oops.”

  “I should take you back to Andy and Barney and press charges.”

  A mile outside of town, Marly sniffed something foul. She opened the two slices of bread on her sandwich and looked for blue streaks in the ham. She rolled down the window and spat out a mouthful. “Damn, I think that diner hag may have pawned off some bad meat on us.”

  Cas’s nostrils flared from the stench. “Did you take a shower this morning?”

  Marly sniffed the sandwich and realized that it wasn’t the culprit. The stench became so intense that she had to hold her nose. “God, that’s awful.”

  Cas stopped the Jeep. “I think it’s coming from the back.”

  They got out and stalked the rear door, not certain if they wanted to open it. Finally, Cas forced himself to release the latch. A calf’s foreleg, singed at its burnt edges, lay on the floor of the cargo bay. Tied to its hoof was a note written on a torn piece of lined notepaper. With his sleeve pressed to his mouth, he brought the paper closer and saw a single word written on it: Slaughterhouse. What the hell did that mean?

  Marly picked up the shriveled leg with her thumb and forefinger and sniffed an aroma that smelled like formaldehyde. She brought the carcass part closer to examine, and did a double take. “Do you see that?”

  Cas’s eyes rounded. “Damn, the hide is …”

  Marly was already running to the other side of the highway to flag down an approaching truck.

  The driver slowed to a stop. “You folks got car trouble, ma’am?”

  “Just need some directions. Is there a slaughterhouse around here?”

  “Yeah, Seth Cohanim’s stockyards,” the driver said. “Two miles up west there, on the railroad tracks. But they ain’t likely to sell quarterflanks to folks just in off the highway.”

  “Thanks anyway. I guess we’ll just have to find another meat locker.”

  The driver tipped his cap to her and drove off.

  CAS WAITED UNTIL DUSK FELL before starting up the Jeep again. Driving with the headlights off, he crept along the hardpan road toward a cluster of whitewashed pavilions surrounded by mazes of cattle pens and loading ramps, all empty.

  “What if those deputies back there set us up?” Marly asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed, exasperated at his naiveté. “For a former spy, you can be awfully dense at times. Ten bucks says those redneck gunslingers are watching us right now so they can haul us in for trespassing. All they’d have to do is just happen to come up on us right now. I would bet they’ve got cattle prods with our name on them.”

  Cas searched the corrals for movement. “Why would they go to the trouble of incinerating a perfectly good calf and loading it into our vehicle just to bait us down here?”

  A sharp report cracked overhead—they ducked.

  “Was that gunfire?” Marly whispered from under the dash.

  Another crack split the sky above them again.

  Keeping his head low, Cas whispered, “Those cowboys brought us out here for target practice!”

  Two more bullets zinged through the air.

  Livid, Cas kicked at the floorboard. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit here all night and get peppered like some clay pigeon!” “Okay, so, what do you—”

  He yanked his door open and dived out. He sprawled across the ground on all fours. When the shooting seemed to have stopped, he risked a glance up. Standing over him was a teenage girl armed with a walnut-handled Colt Single Action Army revolver.

  Eyes pinched under her broad-brimmed hat, the girl stuffed the pistol into her belt. “You took your time, mister.”

  Cas slowly rose to his knees, unable to comprehend how such a pint-sized female could pack such big heat. “Lemme see that thing, you little pest.”

  She debated giving the pistol up. “Don’t think I won’t shoot you, mister.”

  “Hand it over, Annie Oakley.”

  The girl finally flipped the gun and turned the handle toward him.

  Cas took the pistol and examined it. “They don’t call it a Peacemaker for nothing. This is some fine hardware you got here. Do you always use passing tourists for bullseyes?”

  Before the girl could answer, Marly jumped out of the Jeep and skidded to a stop within a few inches from them. “Hey! You were in the diner.”

  Cas suddenly made the connection. “Yeah, with that cranky rancher. Is that why were you shooting at us? Did your old man send you out here to give us a scare?”

  The girl shook her head with a grimace of disgust, as if trying to imagine how somebody could be so stupid. “My pa don’t know nothin’ about me coming to talk to you. I was tryin’ to get your attention, short of bangin’ on your window and alertin’ the whole county.”

  “What’s your name?” Cas asked.

  “Jennie.”

  Cas choked back another cough from the peppery stink of putrefied leg in the Jeep. “You think leaving rotten animal parts in out-of-state vehicles is amusing?”

  The girl started walking toward the shadows of the slaughterhouse. At a loss about what she intended for them, Cas and Marly reluctantly followed her into the back of a lot. From behind a post, the girl brought ou
t a shovel and dug up several scoops of earth, until she hit something with a thunk. She brought up a large plastic gas can that held some kind of liquid. Unscrewing the cap, Jennie motioned them over and held the can’s neck to their noses.

  Marly took a whiff. More formaldehyde. She looked again and saw something floating inside the can. “What is that?”

  The girl stabbed at the plastic with the shovel’s tip, opening a gash that allowed the preserving solvent to flood out. She ripped open the sides of the can and revealed the charred remains of a calf—with one of its flank legs missing.

  Marly and Cas stood frozen, glaring in horror at the carcass. The calf’s hide—or what little remained of it—was as red as blood.

  “I heard you asking at the diner about strange cattle,” the girl whispered.

  Cas waved away a couple of flies. “Where did you get this?”

  The girl’s voice became shaky. “My pa works for Mr. Cohanim.”

  All of that shooting, Marly realized, had just been a way to get their attention. She pressed the frightened girl for more details, “Yeah … and?”

  “I was with Pa the night he birthed this one,” the girl said. “It rattled him somethin’ fierce when he seen it come out.”

  Cas found a stick and poked at the incinerated hide. “Did he burn it like this?”

  The girl shook her head. “He called Mr. Cohanim. I was supposed to leave for home, but I circled back on my horse.” Her face pinched from the memory of that day. “I wanted the calf to raise. Then I saw …” She caught her breath, as if the words were going to choke her.

  Marly kept digging at her for clues. “What did you see?”

  “Mr. Cohanim and another man in strange black clothes come down from his ranch in a helicopter. They cut the calf’s throat and burned it on a grill.”

  Cas took a step back. “You mean, a grill like one your daddy would use for ribs?” Receiving a teary nod from the girl, he swore. “Damn, barbecuing a newborn?”

  The girl’s glances darted nervously around the stockyards. “I don’t know for sure what they was doing. they was doin’. I’m just tellin’ you what I saw.” She looked at Marly, as if for approval, and Marly nodded for her to go on. “Then, Mr. Cohanim and the man in black just gathered up the ashes and took them in a container.” She pointed to the carcass that she had preserved in formaldehyde. “All that was left of it was the head, bones, and legs. I saved them when they wasn’t lookin’.”

  Marly tried to comfort the girl. “It’s okay, hon. Listen, does your Pa’s boss do that with all the new calves at his ranch?”

  The girl shook her head. “Just this one.”

  Cas studied the carcass, trying to come up with a reason why anyone would do anything like that. “What was so different about this one?”

  “It was red,” the girl said. “Red all over.”

  Cas shrugged. “Calves with red hides are unusual, but they happen from time to time.”

  “Not like this one, they don’t, least not like I’ve seen in my whole life,” the girl said. “This calf had eyes as red as blood, too. I got the shivers when it looked at me.”

  Marly knelt in front of the distraught girl and asked her softly, “Why do you think Mr. Cohanim did this?”

  Jennie shook her head. Either she didn’t know, or didn’t want to say.

  Marly looked at Cas and wondered what sort of backcountry Twilight Zone they had stumbled into here.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Beirut, Lebanon

  UNDER THE CONSTANT GAZE OF suspicious men, Zaynah hurried down a garbage-littered street looking for any discarded food that might be edible. Above these burned-out refugee tenements all around her, a thick layer of gray smog hung as heavy as the abaya that she had discarded for the loose-fitting Western garb she now wore.

  Allah will provide.

  God, praised be He, had gotten her this far. She had to trust in His intercession. She had fled from her village three nights ago, panicking after that grimy Alawite coward who had sworn to marry her disappeared without leaving even a note of explanation. Still, no one believed her insistence that she had escaped foreign kidnappers who had somehow raped her more than eight months ago, apparently while she was unconscious. Dishonored beyond redemption, she knew that if her father and brothers ever found her, they would drag her back and mete out Sharia justice.

  In her desperation to avoid being recognized on her escape across the border, she had failed to plan for the fact that the clothing switch would dangerously reveal her advanced pregnancy. She feared the child could be born any day now, and she would be left here to die among strangers. During these past horrid weeks, she had suffered through long nights of nausea, all without help, not even from her own mother. And now, as the heat of the approaching dusk sucked into her throat, she began to feel sick again. Her eyes were glazed red, and her nose ran from the traffic fumes and clouds of reddish soot rising from the busted sidewalks.

  Was that black car following her? Hadn’t she seen it an hour ago?

  She tried to shake the blood to her brain, no longer trusting her own thoughts. What had those filthy Westerners wanted with her, anyway? She just knew—perhaps because she had lived under the thumb of cruel men—that the stocky one with the big hat had paid the concrete-pouring cretin to save her from the stoning. She had seen him peeling off the foreign bills in the alley that day she was saved. But why? None of it made any sense.

  She was about to give up her search for food and collapse when a pink taxi came to a stop aside the curb. With a great effort, she raised her head and saw that the driver was a woman. Was she hallucinating from the hunger?

  The woman behind the wheel got out of the cab and helped her to her feet. “Were you left here?”

  Before Zaynah could answer, the black car sped by the stopped cab and slowed, as if to see what was happening. She couldn’t make out the faces of the men inside. Were they her brothers? Before she could rub the blear from her eyes to get a better look in the dim light, the car sped off.

  “Can you hear me?” the female cab driver asked. “Were you left here?”

  “Left?”

  “By a man?”

  Zaynah was too weak to explain.

  “Get in.” The driver helped her into the back seat. “Where can I take you?”

  Grateful for the offer of service, Zaynah muttered, “Haret Hreik.” The driver seemed surprised, but Zaynah nodded to confirm her wish, for she had been told that the southern part of the city was less frequented by Westerners.

  The driver shrugged and pulled off. “Your first time here?”

  Zaynah slowly felt her strength return. “It is that obvious?”

  The driver smiled ruefully. “Those blocks you were walking back there were bombed by the Israelis in 2006. Those Hezbollah lunatics bring nothing but trouble upon us! There is only rubble in Haret now.”

  Uninterested in politics, Zaynah closed her eyes, grateful for the first safe minutes of rest she had enjoyed in three days.

  The driver studied her through the rear-view mirror. “Your first?”

  Zaynah nodded, the corners of her dropped eyelids moist.

  “You were raped.”

  Zaynah opened eyes suddenly—was this woman clairvoyant?

  “Happens all the time here,” the driver said. “Tell me your story.”

  For some reason, Zaynah sensed that she could trust this woman. With fractured explosions of emotion, she explained how she had run away after secretly pilfering a few coins from her father’s change bowl. With that money long gone, she had begged for shelter at a home for orphans. But she had been turned away, told that the religious enforcers would make life miserable for any charity that gave sustenance to a woman living in sin.

  The driver listened in silence.

  After finishing her explanation, Zaynah studied the skeletal remains of Hezbollah’s de facto capital in the falling darkness. As they sped through several burned-out neighborho
ods, tower after apartment tower stood crumbling and stripped. Bombs had ripped the windows, balconies and facades from the buildings as if they were peeled fruit. All that remained were empty cells where squatters now slept.

  “You should have gone to Jerusalem,” the driver said. “Somewhere safer than here.”

  That warning snatched Zaynah from her morbid fascination with the exterior devastation that seemed to mirror her own predicament. “Jerusalem is for those with money.”

  Minutes later, the taxi pulled up in front of a cluster of concrete apartment buildings. The door of one of the offices at the base of the edifice featured a Christian cross that had been spray-painted above the peephole.

  Zaynah saw a sign for Karantina, an eastern suburb of Beirut. Only then did she realize that the driver had taken her to the Christian sector of the city. “What is this place?”

  “Maronites live here. I cannot promise, but try them. They may be willing to help you.”

  Zaynah could not imagine asking for the help of Christians.

  The driver reached inside the glove compartment, pulled out a pad and pen, and scribbled a note. “Third floor up. Michel Halifi is a good man. Tell him the lady with the pink taxi sent you.”

  Zaynah hesitated to leave. “I have nothing to give you.”

  “Allah will bless me. Perhaps you will name your baby Adara.”

  Zaynah was taken aback, for the name meant ‘virgin’ in Arabic. “Why do you suggest such a thing?”

  The driver smiled sadly. “That is my name, but my family stopped using it for me after a man forced himself on me when I was about your age. And I, too, had a child in shame. But I will always be Adara in my heart. And you must think of yourself always as a virgin.”

  Zaynah embraced her rescuer, then slid out of the cab.

  ZAYNAH AWOKE IN TOTAL DARKNESS. Sore and battered, she rose slowly from the foul dust of the street. Feeling a dried welt over her left eye, she wobbled onto her feet, woozy from the pain and hunger. She looked around for a clock, but found none. Unsteadily, she moved toward the faint light of a main thoroughfare, realizing that she must have fallen unconscious after the taxi dropped her off.