The Eden Prophecy

by Graham Brown

  Citizens claimed police brutality on a regular basis, and the police, having been attacked and ambushed so often in La Courneuve, considered it a red zone, where entry was not recommended without heavy support.

  Whatever the normal course of action might have been, the police were out in force now. As Marko watched, a small convoy of two cars and an armored SUV cruised slowly down the street. The bodies of the slain policemen had been discovered here and the French police were intent on doling out a reprisal and perhaps even making arrests.

  The convoy passed the youth, who did not look up. He knew better than to eye the cops. He continued on, finally joining Marko on the scarred and weathered bench.

  “You did as I asked,” Marko noted. “I am pleased. The Master is pleased.”

  “The police have found the bodies.”

  “Yes,” Marko said. “It was planned.”

  The young man, whose name was Yousef, seemed sick at the notion.

  “Why did we want them to be found?”

  Marko ignored the question. “Do you feel sorry for them?”

  “I hate what they do to us,” Yousef said.

  “Then they got what they deserved,” Marko offered.

  Yousef seemed to agree, though Marko could feel some reluctance. “Do I join you now?”

  “Are you ready to give up everything?”

  “What do I have left?”

  “What do you have left?” Marko asked.

  Yousef shook his head. “I have no father, no brother. I am French but the French call me ‘dirty Arab.’ I am not one of them.”

  “You are a Muslim,” Marko noted.

  “I no longer pray.”

  “Why?”

  Yousef seemed confused.

  “Why do you not pray, Yousef?”

  The young man gazed at the ground. “Allah does not answer me,” he said.

  “You are on the right path,” Marko assured him.

  A brief pause followed, as if Yousef were contemplating his next words.

  “What about the others?” he asked.

  Yousef had recruited several friends for the attack. Young men disgruntled like he was. But they did not have the zeal that he had. Marko shook his head. “The others are not worthy as you are. They will be paid and you will leave them behind. Or you will stay.”

  If Marko judged the young man correctly, this part was harder. It was one thing to give up a country that did not want you, or to reject a god that did not favor you, but to leave friends behind, friends that were the only family a youth from the street had ever known, that was more difficult.

  It had been the hardest part for Marko a year before, but like Yousef’s friends, Marko’s comrades did not really understand where their tyranny originated. They railed against government, the wealthy, and other perceived oppressors. They did not want their lot in life but they wanted others to change it for them.

  The Master had opened Marko’s eyes to the truth, given him the chance to be free from the lies, and now Marko offered that same chance to Yousef.

  “Then I will leave them,” Yousef said, staring at the ground. “They will be better off without me.”

  “No,” Marko said coarsely. “It is you who will be better off. But first, there is one more task.”

  Yousef looked up.

  “There is a house on rue des Jardins-St.-Paul. It was the scientist’s laboratory. Go there. Bring everything you can find to us. And if anyone interferes, be ready to kill them.”

  He handed the youth a folded card. On it was the address.

  Yousef took it and hid it away.

  Marko sensed hesitation. For a moment he wondered if the boy would follow through.

  Yousef stood and almost turned to face Marko before catching himself. He checked himself and gazed out along the littered street once again. His body went still.

  “You have a question,” Marko guessed. “Ask it.”

  “What will you name me?” Yousef said finally.

  “The Master will name you.”

  “You’re the Master,” Yousef said, guessing incorrectly.

  “No,” Marko said. “The Master found me. You will see him one day.”

  Yousef nodded. “What will he name me?”

  Marko smiled. Yousef was ready to give up the past, to let go of his given name and self and take up the destiny that waited before him.

  “He will call you Scindo,” Marko said. “You are the one who divides.”

  Even now the young man did not turn to him—he well understood not to look Marko in the eye—but he stood taller and the air filled his lungs. Scindo would carry a sense of pride and purpose that no name he’d been given ever had.

  “Go now,” Marko said, sending the boy forth. “Do as I command.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Hawker and Danielle touched down at Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport just before noon. Thirty minutes later they were humming along the motorway from the airport into Paris, driving a rented Peugeot.

  A conversation via satellite with Arnold Moore, the NRI’s director of operations, had confirmed how little anyone knew about the situation. No leads, evidence, or even “chatter” had been discovered to link any known terrorist group to either the situation in Paris or the letter sent to the UN.

  They were dealing with either an entirely new group or one that had managed to keep itself hidden from the world. Or the threat was so deadly that even groups that would normally boast about such things were remaining quiet for fear of reprisals.

  Understandably, the French had been whipped into a frenzy by the deaths of four police officers, but after rounding up and questioning hundreds of possible suspects they had no new information. At least nothing they wanted to share.

  About the only lead they had came from the CIA. Since the Iranian, Ahmad Bashir, was a prominent member of the Green Revolution, the CIA had been keeping track of him, perhaps looking for ways to support him. With Iran it was always tricky. Open U.S. support for a candidate there could often cost more votes than it earned them, if it didn’t get them killed outright. So far they’d done nothing but watch and listen. In the process they’d intercepted a call to him the night before he and Ranga disappeared. It had come from a house in central Paris, and the voice on the phone had since been matched to Ranga Milan.

  “This address is a block from the Seine,” Danielle said, studying the GPS map on her phone.

  “Any idea what we’re going to find there?” Hawker asked, navigating a bend in the highway.

  Danielle was studying the satellite photo from Google Maps. “Aside from a group of Baroque townhomes and a highly recommended bistro, not a clue.”

  Hawker had expected a darker neck of the woods, industrial or commercial. Apparently whatever backing Ranga had secured in Paris included enough funding to live well.

  “Life on the run, mad scientist style,” Hawker joked. “Who needs a spider hole when you can rent out riverfront property?”

  Danielle laughed lightly, then turned to him. “I’ve been reading about your friend Ranga,” she said. “Do you have any idea how brilliant he was?”

  “Can’t have been that brilliant,” Hawker said. “Or he wouldn’t have ended up dead.”

  Hawker recognized the edge in his own voice. The words had come out oddly, but the truth was, it felt as if his old acquaintance had betrayed him somehow. Never one to be great at understanding his own feelings, Hawker struggled to put his finger on the reasons.

  Maybe he felt that way because the situation had brought back just enough of his past to remind him he hadn’t always been on the right side of things. Maybe it was because Ranga had gone and got himself killed some horrible way—so what the hell was the point of saving him in the first place? After all that he and Keegan had been through to drag Ranga and Sonia over the mountains of western Congo, it almost felt like Ranga owed it to them to stay out of trouble.

  The thought was ludicrous—Ranga didn’t owe him a damn thing. But as Hawker struggled to
get a handle on his feelings, he had the sense of firing at a target and hitting all around it but never right on.

  He blocked it out and focused on the task ahead. Hopefully they would find something in this town house that would tell them more about whom Ranga was working for and what he’d been doing.

  Danielle continued. “Did you know he was one of the first to prove that genetic splicing in the lab is markedly inferior to the way viruses and bacteria have been doing it to their hosts for millennia?”

  Her voice was kind. That helped.

  “Didn’t know that,” Hawker said. “Don’t even really know what that means.”

  “What it means is that half the DNA in our genome is now believed to have come from viruses and bacteria, deposited there during infections and now part of what we consider to be human DNA.”

  “So we’re part virus?” Hawker asked.

  “In a way,” she said.

  Little could have sounded odder to him than that. “Gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘going viral.’ ”

  She laughed. “Your friend also helped decipher the main strands of human DNA and developed three different techniques for gene sequencing that were considered giant leaps in the field.”

  Hawker hadn’t known any of this; it didn’t matter to him at the time. But even back then he’d found it strange that a man like Ranga would be living the way he was.

  “So why did he throw away a life of privilege, prestige, and what must have been pretty decent money to hang out in the gutters of the world?”

  Danielle shook her head. And Hawker guessed that solving the riddle of who killed Ranga and why might require them to answer that question as well.

  He thought about Ranga’s message on the flash drive.

  I hope this is you, my friend. Do you remember my question? Does Divine retribution exist? I am near to the answer. I fear retribution is coming to me. Not from God but from man. I have done terrible things to keep my hope from dying. But now things have turned. They have everything. They have what they need to deliver a plague, they have everything except the payload. You must help me find it before they do. I’m so close. So close to finishing but they will stop me.

  I can pay you if you come to Paris. I can think of no one to trust but you. I need eyes and ears to watch for them. They are everywhere and they are nowhere. They hound me like dogs. They will find me if I stay and they will snare me if I flee. I cannot keep ahead of them much longer. You owe me nothing, but I ask you anyway, for who else can I ask? Who else would come?

  The message left much to interpretation. It included an email address for Hawker to respond to. Something that hadn’t happened. It never had a chance to. It had taken Keegan two weeks to find Hawker and catch up with him in Croatia. And Ranga had been killed the very next day.

  Somehow that made it worse. Hawker guessed that Ranga had died thinking he was alone. Abandoned. Somehow it tore at Hawker’s heart that his friend would think he’d been left to the dogs by the one person he’d reached out to.

  There was little else in the message. No details as to whom he was running from. No information as to what he was close to finishing.

  That was to be expected. If Hawker came, Ranga could have told him, and if he didn’t the secrets would remain hidden.

  “Next right,” Danielle said.

  As Hawker followed her directions and maneuvered through the crooked streets of Paris, he considered Ranga’s life. At each stage of action, Ranga made choices that led him through doorways and onto different, darker paths. Hawker had been on a similar course once. By luck, or grace, or some miraculous combination of both, he’d been given a reprieve from his own, self-inflicted damnation.

  He tried to remind himself of that. He had to focus on finding the people who’d tortured and killed his friend because it was his job, not for some personal act of vengeance. Allowing that to become his motivation might endanger all that he’d found in this new life.

  He glanced over at Danielle. She was one of the things he valued most now. Over the past few years they had grown close in fits and starts. Had the information about Ranga surfaced, he might have hoped they’d be driving around the French countryside in his new Jaguar, promising to turn it in to the CIA when they were done and looking for a hotel to disappear into for a week or so.

  Some other time, perhaps.

  They pulled onto the street containing the address Moore had given them. Just a normal street in suburban Paris. The town house at the end of the row looked no different than any of the others. And yet as Hawker studied it, he had a sinking feeling about what they might find inside.

  CHAPTER 9

  Parked across the street from the house at rue des Jardins-St.-Paul, Danielle aimed a cameralike device at the property.

  The “camera” was actually an eavesdropping mechanism, able to listen to conversations inside a building by bouncing a laser off the glass and picking up on the minute vibrations caused by voices and sounds. Special types of glass could block or dampen the vibrations, and jamming devices that shook the windows could be attached to glass in an effort to overload the signal, much like jamming a radar by putting out masses of electromagnetic energy, but those things left a specific signature. If they were present Danielle would find them easily.

  The readout flatlined. No vibrations, no dampening equipment, no TV left playing to itself. The house was quiet.

  She flicked a switch on the scanner, changing it to infrared mode.

  Slowly panning back and forth along the walls, she picked up no heat sources.

  “No one home,” she said.

  “Good,” Hawker said. “Let’s go.”

  She scanned the street around them. The road was fairly vacant. On a Wednesday at 2 P.M., it seemed most residents were working.

  Hawker opened the door.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Inside.”

  “Let me go,” she said.

  He stared at her.

  “What do you know about genetics?” she asked.

  “Apparently we’re all related to viruses.”

  “Very funny,” she said “What about encryption, hacking computers, and bypassing alarms? What about breaking and entering without actually breaking anything?”

  It took a moment, but Hawker smiled. “I do like to break things.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “Let me go in. I can do it quietly and you can watch my back.”

  He hesitated and then nodded. “Keep your line open. You go silent I’m coming in.”

  She nodded, opened the door, and stepped out.

  Striding casually across the street, Danielle secured the speaker of her headphone to her right ear. She climbed the steps and made her way to the front door. Holding out a small handheld device, she checked for any alarms. None present, she went to pick the lock. It took a moment, as it was not her most often used skill.

  She heard Hawker’s voice over the line. “Sure you don’t want me to come up and break the door down?”

  “I got it,” she whispered.

  The lock popped. She slipped inside.

  Her footsteps echoed on hardwood floors. The large open room in front of her was all but empty. A single overstuffed chair sat in one corner, draped in a dust cover beside a bookshelf devoid of titles.

  She went through this room to the kitchen and then a den or bedroom. Little to see, as if someone had recently moved out.

  Finally, she entered what might have been a living room. There she found a desk and chair, a large throw rug on the floor, and stacks of high-tech equipment, including a bank of computers and a wall lined with incubators as well as industrial refrigerators whose clear doors were now covered with frost and condensation. To the left of all that was a Plexiglas-enclosed workstation. It looked to be hermetically sealed, complete with a set of powerful microscopes and the armholes with long rubber gloves attached for manipulating things inside it.

  The living room was a makeshift lab.
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br />   She stepped over toward the incubators. The first two were warm but appeared to be empty. She could see no sample trays or glass slides inside, only what looked like irrigated soil and wet, muddy clay. A second incubator had a layer of water two inches deep on top of the soil but nothing growing inside. Not even mold.

  The refrigerators were next. Condensation on the Plexiglas made it impossible to see inside. She wiped the glass.

  Empty.

  Each one of them.

  A smaller incubator had something moving inside. She looked closer. Rats, some dead, others looking withered and aged, shaking as they tried to move around. The containment habitat was sealed and a thick length of tape covered the seal as if to remind someone not to break it.

  “What the hell is all this?” she whispered.

  She wondered if Ranga had cleaned the place out or if someone had beaten them to it. Most likely he would have given up the address while being tortured.

  She moved to the enclosed workstation and realized the main scope was a scanning electron microscope, an extremely expensive medical device.

  She turned it on and looked through. Nothing to see. But the device had an electronic readout and a small keypad. She pressed the power switch and then found a menu to cycle through the most recent images.

  Genetic material in the midst of some examination. There was no way for her to tell what it was. She looked around. The computer was her best bet.

  She moved to the desk, sat down at the computer, and hit enter.

  An encryption screen came up. Not the standard operating software that could easily be breached but a heavy-duty, industrial-grade system. Whatever the computer held, it was well protected.

  She pulled a specialized USB drive out of her pocket. It had a program that could auto-launch through most encryption firewalls.

  She plugged it in; the green LED lit up and it went to work. If that didn’t work, there was the possibility of opening the computer and stealing the hard drive itself. She located the tower under the desk and turned it her way. It didn’t move easily. The normal bundle of wires connected to the back of the box was a bad enough tangle, but it seemed to have been augmented by something.