And where would he go? He had never really ever given it a proper thought before, even though he had sent hundreds, maybe even thousands to their deaths in various conflicts around the world. Even though he had personally pulled the trigger and shot many people dead himself, as the colour had drained from their faces and their blood had run on the ground in front of his eyes, even then he had never wondered where it was that he was sending them to. But now he did. Suddenly it had become all so much more personal.
Death had come to knock at his door, even though he had not been at home. But when would the Grim Reaper pay him another visit?
It was this recent thought of death, and the questions he had begun to ask himself about where he would go when death did come for him again, that had started him to search for his soul.
“Was there a heaven? Shit, if there is, I’ll never get in. How did it go?… ‘thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal... That shall not covet thy neighbor's wife’…thou shall not do this or that… I’ve done them all!” he thought to himself as he drank some twenty year old Scotch and stared out at the sun finally dipping behind the distant hills that marked the boundary of his expansive ranch.
He didn’t regret how he had lived his life, but he knew that if any of the stuff he had heard from the Sunday School preachers and ministers when he was a kid was actually true, then he wouldn’t have a chance of sneaking past those pearly gates into that great big Las Vegas in the sky. Not unless he had a friend on the inside. Not unless he was part of the organising committee. Not unless he had a personal invitation from the Big President himself.
He knew instinctively what he had to do. Once the team in Vale had successfully cloned a new baby Jesus, he would bring up the little Christ himself, as his own son. He congratulated himself on his plan. It was an excellent one. As the kid's adopted father he would surely get automatic forgiveness and exemption from judgement of any of the bad things that he had done in the past or was to do in the future. Even better was that as his son, he would ensure that the Christ child would have automatic right of succession to the Presidency. With all his experience and knowledge he would bring up his son to rule America wisely and strongly, with a view to expanding the country’s sphere of influence so that it once more ruled the world. With Christ on their side America would once more be strong. That day was coming soon.
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Washington D.C.
America
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Tim Curts was excited. The news from the underground research centre in Colorado was good. Everything was ready. The group there had added a few more experts to the team: using the Presidential backing for the project, they had sent out invitations to some of America's leading geneticists all over the country, asking for them and their families to come and join them in Vale.
Not surprisingly, nobody had turned down the invitation. Probably because the invitation that was sent out was done in such a way that rejecting the offer was not an option. Not if the invitees had a family to worry about, or if they didn’t want to be sent a subsequent presidential posting to a research unit in north Alaska.
Since the dedicated team had come together over the past few weeks, the progress had been good. Before the team members had arrived they had known nothing about the true nature of the project, only learning what the challenge was when they were on site and under close security. Scientists all of them, the incredible challenge and opportunity that lay before them excited them all, and within a few days they became enthusiastic and eager to get on with the work they had been chosen to do. In fact, within forty-eight hours of them arriving, it would have been difficult to get them to leave even if Tim Curts had wanted them off the project. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, an opportunity no scientist in his or her right mind would miss!
They were a few days into the project and already the team had come up with some breakthroughs in how they would approach the challenge, and only today they had announced in a video call with the rest of the core group that they had an idea how to emulate the work and progress being made by the Oxford team, led by the graduate called Jason. Tim had also just got off the phone with Colonel Smart who had proudly told him that the duplicate Crown of Thorns was complete.
“You should see it...I’ve got it in front of me, with the holographic one floating beside it. They’re identical! Damn, our guys are good…they can forge anything. Give them whatever you want, a brand new banknote, a Faberge egg, or an oil painting by Monet, and they’ll copy it within twenty-four hours. All I can say is thank goodness they’re on our side. We’ve got the best crooks in the world working for us.”
“Okay, so let's go to the next stage now. I’ll meet you and your boys at Dover Air Force base tomorrow afternoon and we’ll fly to England tomorrow night. As far as I know, the latest news from our man in Oxford is that the switch is happening next week. I want the whole team in there a week in advance. That’ll give us all the time we need to map out the area, familiarise ourselves with the territory, the layout of the lab, and the streets around it, and to prepare your backup plans just in case anything goes wrong.”
“Don’t worry Tim, I’ve already made the arrangements. Your car will pick you up at 11am tomorrow morning. The only thing you have to bring is your umbrella. It’s always raining in England.”
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Chapter Twenty Five
Banbury Church
Oxfordshire, England
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The last time Don had been in Church was at his best friend’s wedding two years before. He couldn’t remember anything about the service, except that when they arrived at the wedding ceremony in the quiet country church, he and several of the other people who had been on the Stag night were still drunk or nursing thunderous hangovers from the night before.
He'd never felt the urge to explore the spiritual side of life, so he was as amazed as anyone else to find himself walking up the leaf strewn autumn path into the twelfth century Saxon church at 10.45 am that autumn morning.
Was this not the best time of the day still to be in bed on a Sunday? What was happening to him?
It was like there was something struggling within himself to come out, or maybe it was just the other way round…maybe there was something outside of himself that was struggling to get in. Whatever it was, his mind had suddenly become open to another side of existence that he had never noticed before.
Belief. Faith. Even Spirituality.
The past year had been a good year for Don. He had been very happy. Content. No major problems. No major stress. Yet this thing with the Crown of Thorns had got him spooked. But not in a way that he found uncomfortable or unpleasant. It was something that he couldn’t touch or see, and whatever it was, it fascinated him. Whenever he was in the lab with it he felt something…something powerful...something wonderful...yet beyond his touch and understanding. The others hadn’t felt it. It was only him that had been affected so profoundly. Even before he had discovered the G-type blood he had known it was special, and now he was convinced.
Don had been dreaming strange dreams. He dreamt he was going on a journey to find something, looking for someone …or something…but whenever he got close to whatever it was he was looking for, he would wake up. The dream didn’t scare him, but it annoyed him more and more each time it happened, and he always woke up just before he could see what it was that he was chasing after. He had even started to read the bible, the New Testament and the Old Testament, in an effort to try and understand more about the guy called Jesus Christ. Of course, he had heard the Christmas story, and the basics of the crucifixion, but he was hungry to learn more about the man behind the legend, to understand what it was that made this man die wearing a wreath of thorns wrapped around his skull. To understand the man they were trying to clone.
He felt he was being led to something, led to draw a conclusion, led to find something out. Just like in the lab. At first he had felt nervous working on the Haissem project,
but increasingly he was coming to believe that they were meant to be doing this work. Yes, ‘meant to’, as in ‘this was his fate’.
“So, what the hell is going on?” he had sworn at himself in the mirror the night before as he reasoned with himself whether or not he should go to the service the next day.
.
He sat in the church pew that Sunday morning riveted by the sermon the vicar preached to them. He told the story of Lazarus and how Jesus had brought him back from the dead, and Don spent the rest of the day wondering if what they were just about to do was also so miraculous. Jesus was dead, and they were planning to bring him back from the dead. Or was He dead? What was the resurrection thing all about anyway?
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.
It was Sunday afternoon and Don was back in the lab.
The rain was pouring down outside, and the windows were beginning to steam up on the inside. He could hear the sound of thunder in the far distance, and as he watched a gap opened up in the clouds and a shaft of sunshine burst through into the children’s play-park below. A multicoloured rainbow cascaded down through the thin mist rain, and Don stood in awe of the beauty.
.
He turned back to the microscope he had spent the past two hours preparing and setting up. He had already worked on the first strain of blood to be found on the thorns, and now it was time to look in detail at the makeup of the G-type blood from the second sample.
He put his notebook down beside the base of the Smithsonian 250, the newest and most powerful microscope the lab had, and bent over the eyepiece trying to focus on the object below. The Smithsonian 250 was an amazing piece of engineering. With it they could see right down to the level of intact, complete DNA stings: on the highest magnification it was even possible to see the molecules which made them up.
Over the next couple of days Don was hoping to map out the DNA from the blood cells taken from the Crown. Then he would begin the process of dissecting the strings and extracting the genetic information which would enable them to create and reproduce each one of the twenty three different chromosomes that would have been present in the nucleus of any cell taken from Jesus Christ’s body.
Over the past few days Jason had been working on isolating the blood residue samples into its DNA constituents. If Jason had succeeded, Don should now be able to examine the actual DNA constituents of the G-type blood under the microscope.
With his eyes peering into the double sight he flicked a switch on the desk and the lights in the lab dimmed. As Don peered through the sights of the Smithsonian he discovered Jason had succeeded. Brilliantly. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust before the first DNA string from the G-type blood sample came into view in the sights of the microscope, ‘suspended’ in a special protective molecular solution which allowed Don to view each individual string in isolation from the others. As the microscope focussed on the helical chain, Don felt his heart constrict with shock and simultaneous awe. Awe because what he was just witnessing for the first time was truly amazing.
Amazing and beautiful.
The large DNA string he was looking at swept round itself in a magical helical dance, the myriads of molecules that made it up baffling the viewer with their complexity. But as he watched it, the DNA string shimmered before his eyes, and a wave of multicoloured light swept up and around the helical string from one end to the other. Then just as the light wave reached the other end of the string, it started again at the beginning, another wave of magical light sweeping up and round and following the previous one in its path.
As Don watched the magical rainbow of light dance along the helical chain of DNA, it reminded him of a string of Christmas tree lights, or the wave of phosphorescence he had once seen passing through transparent plankton floating in the sea at night, which had been filmed and shown on a sea-life documentary on television.
The minute light displays started off with a little flash of red, followed by the next molecules in the string emitting a subtle orange glow, before they too were outshone by a sequence of neighbouring molecules letting out little flashes of yellow, green, blue, and violet. It was both beautiful and totally mesmeric.
Don knew that normal blood didn’t do this. He knew that this was impossible! Yet, something in his subconscious told him this was what he was meant to see. This was real. This was how Jesus Christ's blood looked like under a microscope!
Just how the blood samples were still emitting energy in wave after wave of magical light, two thousand years after the blood was spilled during the owner’s death, was a mystery he knew he would never solve. Where did the energy come from? Why were the DNA strings emitting light? How was the light emitted and what was emitting it?
Did he really care? Perhaps it was just better to accept that it was so.
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.
At four o’clock the phone in the lab rang, and Don finally managed to pull himself away from the microscope. He had been watching the multicoloured molecular light show for over two hours. Just staring, observing, watching...He had never seen anything so beautiful. So peaceful.
He made his way through the airlock and picked up.
“Hi! Is that you Don?”
It was Jason on the phone.
“Yeah…I’m just doing a bit of work on the blood sample...”
“Don. It’s Sunday afternoon. You should be at home, or out, or something. You’re working too hard mate. Time to get some R&R!”
“So what are you doing calling me then? You must have been thinking about work as well.”
“No…Lydia and I were just driving past on our way back from town, and we could see the lights on in the lab from the street. Just wondered what’s going on!”
“What’s going on? …I think you’d better come up and have a look...”
“Why? Have you got something?”
“Jason, ...I THINK you should come and see this for yourself!” And Don hung up.
About ten minutes later Jason and Lydia walked hurriedly into the entry lab, Jason throwing his jacket at the coat stand on the way in, missing it and ignoring it as it fell to the floor. Lydia came up behind him, scooping it up and hanging it properly on the stand.
It was another ten minutes before they had donned their bunny suits and decontaminated and passed through the airlocks into the high level clean lab.
“So what have you got then?”
“See for yourself. I’m looking at a single DNA string. See if you can spot anything unusual.” Don stepped aside and let Jason and Lydia step up to the eyepiece of the microscope. Jason leaned forward and peered into the eyepiece. After two seconds he looked up and stared at Don, then glanced swiftly at Lydia before gazing back into the eyepiece of the Smithsonian.
“Good grief…” his voice trailed off into nothing.
“What is it? What are you looking at?” Lydia leant on his arm, giving him a gentle nudge to move out the way.
“Here. Just look down through here...”Jason stood up making way for Lydia. As she peered into the microscope sights, Jason turned to Don. “I think we’d better call the Prof. and Louisa. They should be here to share this and see it for themselves. If it were to suddenly stop, whatever it is… they would never believe us.”
“I’ll call them. You take another look.”
Don called the Professor first, then Louisa, instructing them both to come as soon as possible. Forty minutes later they joined the others in the lab, each taking a turn to look at the DNA of Jesus Christ.
“Wow…, or rather, I think the technical term is ‘EUREKA!.’...” The Professor chuckled as he looked at the blood specimen on the slide below. “ We’re on to something big here…something way beyond our understanding. Something...miraculous.”
Lydia’s reaction was more scientific.
“It’s beautiful. Almost serene...” She paused for a second. “Don, you prepared the sample, is there any way you could have somehow
affected it…some accidental radiation dose, or perhaps some phosphorescent effect caused by passing the sample under a UV bulb or something. Any simple explanation that we shouldn’t overlook?”
“Good question…but while we were waiting for you to arrive we’ve been through all the possibilities. We can’t think of anything we can attribute this to, apart from the obvious. If it’s the blood of Christ, we would expect it to look slightly different wouldn’t we...and perhaps this is just what it looks like.”
“Slightly? ‘Slightly’ my boy is the Nobel-prize winning understatement of the year. Do you realise what you are looking at? The atoms themselves must be emitting light. Over and over again. What we’re seeing here isn’t really possible. It’s impossible to make a molecule repeatedly sing with light like that…it’s supernatural...beautiful, almost hypnotic.” The Professor spoke in broken sentences, still looking through the lens of the Smithsonian, his eyes following the patterns of light and trying to take it all in.
For the next couple of hours the team stood around the microscope discussing what they were seeing. The air was thick with excitement, and several times the group burst into simultaneous laughter, with each of them returning over and over again to the microscope to see if what they had seen was real, and to check that it was still happening.
They were experts in this field and they knew the significance of what they were seeing. The team were standing on the edge of something so vast that whatever it was they were discovering would change the world for ever. First G-type blood, now DNA strings that sang with the light of Life. What would the rest of the programme have in store for them? Where was the Haissem project taking them all?
The Messiah Conspiracy - A gripping page-turning Medical Thriller - [Omnibus Edition containing Book 1 & Book 2] Page 12
