by Graham Brown
Hawker wondered about that. The thugs who’d hit them in Dubai were far more professional than the group in Paris. They were Caucasian men, not locals. And they were armed to the teeth and using a stolen helicopter. It was such a different mode of operation that Hawker wondered whether these were core members of the cult or another player. Like everything else in this mess, he could only ask the question. There were no answers.
And Danielle was faring no better. He’d received a text saying she’d lost out on the scroll but had their old friend Professor McCarter examining photos of it. She doubted it mattered much and Hawker felt the same.
Moments later a second message had come in from her. It read: Have you figured it out yet?
Hell no, he hadn’t figured it out. It seemed like a bunch of puzzle pieces lying at his feet, but instead of a coherent whole it was like the pieces all came from different boxes with different pictures on the top. Not only did nothing fit, but even if you smashed them together and forced them to fit the result was a disjointed mess.
And so it went. As he waited for Sonia to finish, Hawker shared a cup of tea with Savi and Nadia, which the little girl proudly prepared and served. With teatime over, he wandered about, watching for trouble. Shortly after nightfall, he found himself in Savi’s library.
He studied the selection.
A huge tome titled History of the Middle East rested side by side with various medical journals. Next to them were several works on the archaeology of the region, and then textbooks on genetic sequencing, two of which Ranga had written himself.
Hawker found little order to the arrangement. Not alphabetic or by type of book. Not even by subject.
A book on the Sumerian horse culture stood one space from a thick hardback called Atrocities of the Crusades.
“Haven’t you guys heard of the Dewey Decimal System?” he wondered aloud.
The next book held a familiar title: Paradise Lost, the very book the cult had quoted from in their threat. He pulled the tattered copy from the shelf. Several pages were dog-eared. He turned to one of them. Underlined in red ink was a verse from the epic poem.
The first sort by their own suggestions fell,
Self-tempted, self-depraved.
He knew the verse was a reference to Satan’s fall. By his own choice Satan had challenged God and been cast out. Hawker wondered if this was how Ranga felt. For a man who claimed not to believe in God, Ranga had talked about Him an awful lot. Had Ranga’s own search, his own belief that he could change the code of life, caused him to fall?
Hawker flipped the pages and found another underlined verse. As he read a voice spoke it from behind him at almost the same time.
“The more I see pleasures about me, so much more I feel torment within me.”
Hawker turned to see Sonia.
They stared in quiet stillness for a moment.
“Are you a fan of Milton?” she asked.
The more appropriate question, he thought, was whether she and her father were fans of Milton.
“I tried to read it once,” he said, closing the book. “Too close to home. So I put it away.”
“It’s brilliant,” she said. “It explains many things about the state of man.”
“The verse you quoted,” he asked. “Did you underline it?”
Sonia shook her head. “Those were Father’s marks, but that one’s my favorite.”
“What does it mean?”
“I take it as the pain of reality,” she said. “Knowing what you cannot have is infinitely worse than not being able to have it in the first place. The pleasure of wanting causing the pain of lacking that very thing.”
He nodded. That’s what he remembered. Too close to home.
“You know, the cult that your father got mixed up in seem to be fans of Milton as well.”
“I know,” she said.
Of course she did. “You know more than you’re telling me,” Hawker said bluntly.
Tears filled her eyes; she turned away.
“Sonia.”
She looked back at him, dabbing at the drops of liquid running down her face. “How far did you get in Paradise Lost?” she asked.
“Not far enough to take a test,” he said.
“Do you know who Urial was?”
He shook his head.
“Urial was the brightest of all God’s angels. The Angel of the Sun and the very eyes of God. But in his reverence for what God had created, Urial stared too long at the Garden of Eden. He meant no harm by it, but through this fault, he accidentally revealed the location of the Garden to Satan. And thus the story begins.”
“You led your father to these men,” he guessed.
“The other way around,” she said. “I led them to him.”
The thought shocked Hawker. “How?” she asked.
“Before I realized what we could do with Paradox, we’d reached a point of desperation. Everything was tapped out. There was nowhere left to turn. A man came to me interested in genetics. He was odd but he said he had money. He wanted someone to work on a genetic problem the rest of the world was ignoring. It sounded perfect. I told him about my father. If anyone could help him, it was my father. I was proud. I was desperate. Father needed another hand, and by the time I’d realized the danger, Father was tangled up in it as deep as ever.”
“They wanted a weapon,” he said. “Like the generals in the Congo.”
She nodded. “And just like in Africa I couldn’t get Father to break away. This time until it was too late.”
He sensed her drowning in guilt. He’d lived that way himself after certain failures.
“I understand what you’re feeling,” he said. “I can only imagine how much it hurts. But there is a bigger issue here.”
“Yes, there is,” she said. “My sister will die if we don’t do something soon. That’s bigger to me. I need to find the Garden, Hawker. I need to finish this.”
“You don’t understand, Sonia. These people want to finish something, too. They have your carrier virus; they sent it to the UN to scare the hell out of the world, but it doesn’t do much, not without your payload. Your father rigged his lab to explode to keep them from getting 951. He suffered at their hands but he didn’t give it up, because he knew what would happen if they got ahold of it. He gave his life. He destroyed his life’s work to prevent something far worse from happening.”
“Worse to some,” she said.
He stared at her and wondered if she could really mean what she was saying.
“To see my sister die after knowing my father threw his life and half of mine away trying to save her is as bad as any plague.”
“You don’t mean that. You don’t want to see a billion children suffering like she is.”
She hesitated, choking up and fighting it off again. “No,” she said finally, “but I wish I did. I want to feel that way, to care more about Nadia than anything else, or what good am I?”
He could sense Sonia on the point of breaking. She felt as if the answer was out there, just around the corner. Exactly as Ranga had felt through ten years of searching.
The more I see pleasures about me, so much more I feel torment within me.
She looked up at him. “Besides,” she said, “he didn’t destroy 951. He sent it to me.”
“The truth at last,” he said. “And the cult knows that, or at least they suspect.”
She remained quiet. Maybe she was beginning to understand.
“They came after you for a reason,” he said. “I have to take you where they can’t get to you. Stick you in the president’s bunker or Fort Knox or somewhere like that, where they’d need an army to even get close to you.”
“They got into the UN,” she noted.
She was right about that. Despite intense efforts, no one knew how the cult had pulled that one off. It suggested someone with infiltration skills, someone well acquainted with government systems and a background in the type of spycraft that it would take to break into such a place. That se
emed a little beyond a cult of the lunatic fringe but it had happened. Another puzzle piece from a different box.
“You’re right,” he said. “But I promise this will be different.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Why save me?”
From a personal perspective, because the idea of her being harmed by these thugs was too agonizing to think about, but as he kept saying, there were bigger reasons.
“With your father gone and his lab destroyed, you’re the only link to 951. Without you they can do nothing. But with you, if they get 951 from you, they can murder half the world.”
She gulped at a lump in her throat. “Then why not just kill me?”
“Because I’m going to kill them instead.”
Silence hung over the room.
Sonia sat and buried her face in her hands as if she might burst into tears. He could only imagine the strain. He was asking her to hide until he could make the world safe for her. It might take months or years or it might never happen, and in the meantime, Nadia would wither and die. And her father’s life and half of hers would be in vain.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “They don’t need 951. They don’t even really want 951. They want the seeds from the Garden. The fruit of the Tree of Life.”
This didn’t make any sense to him. “Why?” he asked. “You can’t kill with the Tree of Life.”
She looked at him sadly. “They’re devils, Hawker. They don’t want to just kill, they want to destroy. Even in the Garden, Satan didn’t kill Adam and Eve, he just tricked them into bringing death onto themselves.”
“Meaning what? What are you getting at?”
She sighed and a weight seemed to come off her shoulders, as if she’d finally decided to put down the burden of holding in what she feared most.
“A virus that kills millions or even billions won’t destroy the world,” she said. “It would be a horrendous tragedy and we might not recover for centuries, but in the long run it might even help the world. And in any event, we could fight it, just like we fight every other disease and condition. Theoretically we could even create a counter-virus or use gene therapy to patch the DNA their plague destroyed. This is not what they want.”
“So what do they want?”
“They want to take the virus from the Tree of Life,” she said. “They want to mate it with the carrier virus that they already have and then spread it around the planet.”
Hawker could hardly follow. He had to be missing something.
“The virus from the Tree of Life?” he asked. “The same one you want? You’re telling me their big threat is to infect us with a plague that makes us live forever?” Hawker’s tone had become incredulous, but it sounded like being threatened with cake and money and good looks all at the same time. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Not to you,” she said. “Not at first. But as time goes by and the virus spreads, and virtually all human life spans are doubled, tripled, or quintupled, what do you think will happen? When the old don’t die and the young don’t grow old and child-bearing age lasts a century, instead of a decade or two, the population will utterly explode. And in very short order, this planet will die under the weight of humanity.”
Suddenly Hawker began to understand.
“Seven billion now,” she said. “Fifteen billion in twenty years. Thirty billion people on this rock by the middle of the century. There will be nothing but war and misery and starvation. It will no longer matter if there’s a heaven, because earth will become hell itself and the immortal humans will be consigned to it for all eternity.”
As the words rang in his ears, Hawker felt as if he’d been blindsided. Rarely could he remember being so stunned and shocked or feeling so simple and ignorant and blind. At this moment he was the fool he’d claimed to be in Lavril’s office. In fact, he was worse.
“They could come up with an antidote,” he stammered. “Fight it like you said.”
“And who’s going to take it?” she asked. “If everyone else will, that would be awfully nice, but are you? Am I? Most people are going to refuse to take a suicide pill just for the greater good of the world.”
“It wouldn’t be a suicide pill,” he said, realizing he was wrong even as he spoke the words.
“Of course it would. It would be exactly that. A pill that makes you live a far shorter life. What else would you call it?”
Hawker went quiet. It was the same argument Ranga had made as a young man. There were too many people in the world. And it was the same response: fine, but someone else can decrease the population, not me.
“If the carrier virus can spread the plague, another version can spread the antidote,” he said. “Something to cause the telomeres to shorten. We can use 951 to offset it.”
“Yes,” she said. “Sounds like a great idea. In fact it’s exactly what you thought my father’s murderers were about to do. Now you’re suggesting it as if it sounds rational.”
“It’s different,” he said.
She shook her head. “Only your perspective has changed.”
He knew she was right.
“A worldwide genocide. Is that what we need? A final solution? My father was derided for suggesting something similar years ago. He was called a fascist and a fanatic. But it doesn’t sound so fanatical to you anymore, does it?”
It still sounded fanatical and fascist and evil to him. He was just grasping at straws. But what else could the world do? Forced sterilization? You might have to sterilize 90 percent of humanity just to keep the population stable.
And who decided which 10 percent got to reproduce? A lottery? An even division among all races, creeds, and colors? A scientific board choosing which traits would survive and which would die? Once again they were right back to the master race.
More than likely, the rich and powerful would get eternal life and the chance to pass on their genes, while the poor would be sterilized without their consent.
And if they did nothing, the whole world would be covered in humanity with no space to breathe or good food or clean water. Exactly what Ranga had always fought against and now he might be the cause of it.
Unforgivable. Hawker now understood what he’d meant.
“Once this genie is out of the bottle, it can never be put back in. It cannot be treated. It cannot be cured any more than ‘life’ can be cured.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a fool who should have kept his mouth shut. I now understand what you’re afraid of. Why you fear it so deeply.”
“I don’t want to be the cause of that, any more than my father did,” she said. “But I don’t want to give up on the only chance I have to save Nadia. I want to give her and others like her a life.”
“And they want to destroy,” he said. “They think if they succeed in spreading this virus there will be no hope. No reason for hope. From their point of view, they will have destroyed God’s creation. Paradise will be lost forever.”
Hawker thought about the situation. The world was staring down the barrel of a gun, but a gun has no power without a bullet inside it.
“We have to find the Garden,” he said. “If it exists, we have to find it before they do.”
She nodded.
It seemed an absurd quest. But Sonia and her father were trained scientists, not spiritualists or religious fanatics. If they believed the Garden existed and believed it could be found, then he had to give them the benefit of the doubt. And that meant great danger still hung over the world.
“I have to make a call,” he said. He stood, walked out of the library, and found his way back to the balcony, the phone to his ear.
Danielle answered.
“I haven’t figured it all out,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have thought you had,” she replied, sounding oddly surprised by his statement.
“But I know what we have to do next,” he said. “I know where we have to go.”
“If you say the Garden of Eden I’m going to throw
up.”
“That’s their next target.”
“Hawker, it’s a dead end,” she said, sounding exasperated. “These people are fanatics. We need to focus on the virus, not chasing them all over the world.”
“I know what it means,” he said, thinking of the original threat. “We mete out your portion of suffering, we bring you down with us. They want the whole world to suffer, like the poor already suffer. Ranga said they would turn this place into hell on earth and he’s right, that’s exactly what they’re going to do, by granting everyone eternal life or something close to it.”
He explained what he knew and the conversation he’d just had with Sonia. Slowly, like him, Danielle came to realize the consequences.
“Well, believe it or not,” she said, “I think I know where to look.”
“Iraq,” he guessed, thinking that most scholars he’d heard of placed the Garden of Eden somewhere near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
“That would be too easy,” she said. “McCarter has it located in western Iran.”
“Can you get us in?”
“No one will authorize us to go across the border,” she said.
“That never stopped us before.”
“And it won’t stop us now,” she said. “But we’re on our own. Can you meet me in Al Qurnah, north of Basra?”
“I need a place to stash a few people in Kuwait,” he said.
“Have you been picking up strays again?”
“Good people,” he said. “Sonia’s sister and aunt. I can’t leave them out in the open.”
“I’ll talk to Moore, find you a safe house,” she said. “See you in Al Qurnah.”
CHAPTER 35
Given the choice, Hawker would have connected up with Danielle, hired a few gunslingers, and made the run into Iran without Sonia along for the ride. But despite his insistence, Sonia would not give up the information she held. Whatever the final secret of the Tree of Life was, she kept it to herself. He was forced to take her along.
After stashing Savi and Nadia in an NRI safe house of sorts, Hawker and Sonia made the journey into Iraq by car. After a quick stop at the border they traveled northward, headed for the city of Al Qurnah.
