“I’m sorry, but that’s asking too much! It’ll be far too difficult to hypnotise Louisa to get that information for me, or even for the bloody CIA!”
Mike knew that it was in actual fact totally possible to programme Louisa to do anything he wished, but he was trying to protect her.
“Don’t give me that Mike. I don’t want any ‘no’s or ‘can't’s’. Just do it. Understand?”
Mike hesitated, wanting to argue, wanting to protest...
“I repeat, do you understand?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“Good, then get on with your work. Speak to you next week.”
Mike hung up, and turned towards Louisa. For a few quiet moments he watched her lying peacefully asleep in his bed. Before the phone rang he had been on the verge of deprogramming her. To setting her free. Now he had to go back in there and ask her to betray her friends even more. How could he do it?
Mike sat on the edge of the bed beside her, and stroked an almost invisible hair out of the corner of Louisa’s eyes. His throat was tight, and he found it difficult to speak. But somehow the cold professionalism that had been installed in him from years of clandestine operations resurfaced and buried once again the human emotions that Mike had begun to enjoy over the past couple of months. He hated himself. He was nothing. Just a little cog in a big machine. With no personal feelings.
“Louisa, I am so jealous of the knowledge that you have…of the fun you have in your group with your colleagues…I love you so much that I really want to understand everything about you. Especially about your work, which I know means so much to you. I would love to know and understand what the process is that Jason has developed to break down the DNA, and just how he can reconstitute and create a complete set of chromosomes of the person from which the cloned blood cell came. Next Saturday night, at 3 o’clock in the morning, just like last week, I want you to slip down from the lab and give me a complete set of Jason’s notes on how to do this. Can you do this for me?”
Louisa was listening with horror to everything that Mike was suggesting. This was all the confirmation she needed that the bastard was abusing her in a way she could never have imagined. Instinctively she knew that the absolutely wrong thing to do just now would be to show any sign that she was conscious. She had to pretend that she was still hypnotised, for it was clear to her now that that was exactly the state she was in before the ringing telephone had disturbed them. Mike had hypnotised her!
“Yes Mike. I can do this for you.”
“Good...good...that’s very good...now after you have given me the papers on Saturday I will drive you home and drop you off at your apartment, so make sure you have switched everything off in the lab before you leave it. When you get home you will go to bed normally, and fall asleep. When you wake up the next day, you will remember nothing from the night before. But you will miss me and your desire for me will be stronger than before …Louisa, I want you always to know exactly how much I love you...”
The last part caught her off guard. She hadn’t been expecting that.
“Right, now I’m going to count back from three to one, and when I reach one I want you to feel very happy, and wake up feeling as if you had just been asleep. A long good sleep. …three...two...one...”
Louisa pretended to wake up.. She fluttered her eyelids a few times, and yawned.
“Oh...Mike, sorry I must have fallen asleep...hey,.I feel GRRREEEEAAAATTT!! I don’t know what you do when you make love to me…but it certainly makes me feel good!” she said.
That was on the outside. On the inside the first seeds of hate germinated within her and she made herself a solemn promise.
“How could you have done this to me? Made me betray my friends and my country? Made me let you rape me? Made me think I loved you. I’ll get you back for this you bastard…if it’s the last thing I do.!”
.
Chapter Thirty Six
.
She left Mike’s flat about thirty minutes later, making some excuse that she had to sleep at her house that night, because she was expecting her mother to call her first thing in the morning.
When she got home she poured herself a large brandy, and took it with her into the shower, where she tried to wash and scrub the lies and filth and betrayal from her body, to cleanse her skin, and her mind.
She banged her head against the wall of the shower and pulled at her hair, and cried uncontrollably while the water poured over her and washed away her tears.
When standing seemed too much of an effort, she sat on the floor of the shower, coiling her legs up into her chest in the foetal position and wrapping her arms around her legs, hugging them as tight as possible. She began to rock back and forward, all the time the tears flowing from deep within her and the hot water pouring down on her head and washing away her sorrow.
She must have been in the shower for almost half an hour before the tears stopped and she realised the water had become cold. She was shivering. Slowly, she stood up and towelled herself down. She knew she had to call the Professor immediately.
.
---------------------
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It was five forty nine in the morning when the phone rang. He had just got into bed about thirty minutes before and after the hectic evenings activities he had only just been able to doze off. The Professor tried to ignore the ringing phone, hoping it would go away. But it didn’t. For a few moments he thought about simply unplugging the phone but he knew that anyone calling at this time of the night would have a good reason to do so. The call had to be important.
“Hullo? Whoever you are do you know what time of the morning it is?”
“Hi Mathew… I’m sorry to disturb you…but I have to speak to you...now...”
The Professor sat up, pulling the pillows up behind his back in the bed. It was Louisa on the phone, and the Professor could hear that she was crying.
“Calm down girl. Can’t it wait until daytime?” He was puzzled. What did she have to tell him? How could she have found out so quickly that he was on to her?”
“No. It can’t. I need to speak to you now...face to face...I’m sitting outside your house in my car.”
“Okay, okay. Give me five minutes to pull on some clothes and I’ll let you in.”
A wave of emotions swept over the Professor as he searched for some trousers, and a shirt and jumper. How could he face the girl now, knowing what she had done? The anger started to boil beneath the surface of his skin, threatening to explode at any second. On the other hand, when he had heard her crying on the phone, he had felt sorry for her, and he had fought hard to prevent himself for trying to console her as they spoke.
He switched the lights on in the hall, and walked slowly down the old curving stone staircase while fighting with a thick woollen jumper. As he threw back the latch and opened the door Louisa poured her way into the hall and was inside his house and at the bottom of his staircase before he'd had a chance to say "Come In."
He looked her up and down. Her hair was a mess, and she made a pathetic figure standing there. She looked like a lost child, her hands hidden in the arms of her long, purple jumper, which clashed violently with her black track-suit trousers. Her training shoes had seen better days, and as the Professor looked at her she erupted into a mountain of tears.
“Oh Professor...I’ve done something terrible...something unbelievable...”
“Hush now child. Perhaps we’d better go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea. You can tell me all about it in there!”
Unable to fight the nice, old man syndrome that welled up within him, the Professor put his arm around her shoulders and walked her through the back of the house into the kitchen. It was obvious that the woman had come here to confess her crime, and before he passed any further judgement on her, he was going to listen to every word she had to say. He sat her down at the big old oak table in his large kitchen and while he made a fresh pot of Earl Grey, she wrapped her arms around herself inside the big jumper
and rocked herself back and forward on the edge of the chair, an obvious sign that the woman was in terrible mental distress. She wasn’t acting.
He filled the pot with hot water, and brought it to the table with the cups, fetching some milk and some digestive biscuits and placing them on the table beside her. He poured the milk into the cup and then filled it up with tea. Louisa wrapped her both hands round the cup, took a sip and slowly started to tell the Professor what had happened.
“I’ve been such a fool. Such a fool ...I thought I was in love…I thought it was real…”
“Louisa, start at the beginning, and tell me slowly and clearly what's happened.”
It was thirty minutes before Louisa had finished telling the Professor everything. She told him all about her love affair, and the events of the evening, and the realisation that she must have stolen the Crown of Thorns and handed it over to Mike and the Americans. And how only two hours before Mike had asked her for details of the process that Jason had discovered. The Professor listened carefully, and by the end of it he was both pleased and ashamed. Pleased that Louisa was really just an innocent bystander in the whole thing and that she had come to him to confess immediately she had found out what she had done. Ashamed because he had believed that she'd had a part in it. Ashamed, because he hadn’t trusted her.
When she was finished, he comforted her in the best way he could, gave her a hug and took her up to the spare bedroom where he left her to find some sleep.
Closing the bedroom door quietly behind him, he returned to the kitchen to make himself another cup of tea. He had some more thinking to do.
The Haissem project had now become an international affair, a power play which superpowers would play against a backdrop of national security and international politics. From the outset this was exactly what he’d wanted to avoid! From here on in it could get very ugly.
Regrettably, the time had come to tell the British government the full details about the Haissem project. He couldn’t hide it much longer. He would have to tell them soon.
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Chapter Thirty Seven
CIA Biological Warfare Institute
Vale, Colorado
America
.
The team now stationed at the CIA Biological Warfare Institute (CBWI) in Vale was headed up by Jim Stuart, head of the government's Genetics Research Core. David Calvert had agreed to act as his second in command.
Each man was equally as clever as the other, but Jim was senior in terms of years spent on the planet, and was a good stabilising influence on the younger more adventurous David.
Together they had assembled a truly impressive group of the intellectual elite of American biologists and geneticists. It would be fair to say, that the last time such a well respected team of scientists had been pulled together for delivering a key project would have been for the Manhattan project during World War Two in the Twentieth Century. The result, the atomic bomb, has shown that such think tanks could and did work.
The only difference was in the way the team was formed. In America the group had been forced together under unspoken threats from the CIA. The threats such as they were, had been obsolete and unnecessary, since to a man, the whole team would have volunteered for such a project anyway.
In the past month the progress they had made had been incredible. They believed that they had already caught up with the work that the graduate student Jason had theorised, and were eager to start experimentation as soon as possible. One of the team had requested that their intelligence should try to get hold of the theoretical papers from Jason in Oxford, just to check they were on the right track and had not missed anything. The CIA had agreed and instructed their London branch to deal with the request.
The amount of resources allocated to the project allowed the team to be split into two different groups. Each group comprised of ten lead scientists, and both teams were instructed to proceed independently of the other.
The idea was to not to put all the eggs in the same basket. This strategy encouraged different approaches to the same problem, which should double their chances of taking the lead away from the English. If either team came to an obstacle that they could not overcome they were allowed as a last resort to consult with the other team to see if they had already encountered and overcome the same problem.
Jim Stuart headed one team, the ‘J’ team, and David Calvert the other, the ‘D’ team. Each knew that the likelihood of one asking the other for help would be minimal.
The only time the two teams would be working together was at the very beginning, when blood samples would be taken from the Crown and sufficient quantity of the genetic material would be recreated and reproduced for both teams to be able to proceed alone with all the material they needed.
They had awaited the arrival of ‘the shipment’ expectantly, and when it finally came they all gathered in the main laboratory to witness its almost ceremonial unpacking and placement into a new sterile, secure, super clean and regulated environment. Afterwards, they all stood around the Crown of Thorns in its new transparent, cylindrical, fire-proof, temperature and humidity controlled casing and looked on at it in awe.
The team was made up of a mixture of Jews, Christians, and a couple of complete agnostics, but to a man the presence of the Crown had a strange and calming effect on them. The Crown affected each man in a different way. With the Crown physically now in their presence, the project suddenly crystallised and became real, and overnight the attitudes of the teams changed. Whereas the team under Jim Stuart became very serious and almost religious in their commitment to success, the team under David Calvert became more lively and happy, full of excitement and jovial banter. Both teams were committed to success, but their commitment materialised in different ways.
.
The Crown had been there for seven days before the first rumours began to spread of the Crown's ability to heal. Apparently, there had been two reported incidents of miraculous healings in the team led by Jim Stuart.
The first had been a simple acid burn, where one of the ‘J’ team had burned himself very badly by accidentally spilling acid on his wrist. The careless scientist had the wound chemically treated, and wrapped in surgical gauze and bandages, but the pain had been excruciating. His skin had been scarred for life, and the doctors had warned him that a skin graft would be advisable in the months or years to come. The scientist in question was a practising Christian, and one evening he had entered the lab where the Crown was being kept and had paused for prayer in front of the glass security case where the Crown had been housed. He had prayed for peace from the pain, and had reached out his left hand to touch the glass casing of the Crown. As he touched the glass he had felt a warmth spreading up through his finger tips to his hand and wrist, and the pain had vanished. In the morning when the doctor had removed the bandages to dress the burn, the skin was found to be intact and whole, the burnt skin having vanished without a trace.
The second healing was more significant, and one which had both scared and impressed all those in the ‘J’ team. The ‘D’ team had denounced it as a trick, and as a subversive tactic to throw their group off focus. But secretly they were also scared and several of the team had started to read their holy books in the evening during their relaxation periods.
The ‘miracle’ as it had come to be known, was performed on an unsuspecting younger member of the team, who had been wheelchair bound since being involved in a car accident eight years before. During the accident his spinal column had been damaged and nerve signals no longer got through to his legs and feet. As well as confining him to a wheelchair, the accident had removed him of his ability to perform as a man, and there had been no signs of life in that department since the day he had come out of the coma. It was two months before he had opened his eyes, and the doctors had said it was a miracle that he had regained consciousness.
The ‘miracle’ had left Ronny Witterstand both angry and suicidal, and he had sworn often and publicly that h
e would rather have died than become the shell of the man he now was. His mother had nursed him for over a year, and it was only after his former employer, the Institute for Genetic Research at Irvine in California, had offered him his old job back that Ronny had regained some of his self respect. Since then he had lost himself in the world of genetics, and had spent years determined to find a way to re-grow the damaged nerve cells so that he would be able to help himself and people like himself regain the use of their limbs.
During all this time his mother had prayed for him daily, praying that one day the miracle would be completed and her son would walk through the door of her house unaided and cured.
The ‘miracle’ itself had manifested itself in a strange way, and had led one of the more cynical members of the team to quote the saying ‘ God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform”. The rumour went that Ronny had been working with the Crown to prepare it for the extraction of some residue samples. Wearing suitably padded gloves he had held it momentarily in his hands, as it was transferred from one special padded container to another. Although he'd reported nothing untoward at the time, about an hour later he had been pushing his wheelchair down the hallway and had passed the entrance to the women’s changing room.
As one of his female colleagues had come out of the door he had momentarily been able to see inside the women’s toilet area and had seen one of the other female scientists adjusting the stocking top on one of her legs.
The simple sight of her long exposed thigh had caused a reaction within Ronny’s trousers that he hadn’t experienced in years. A full-blown erection had appeared which to his eternal embarrassment had refused to go away. After three hours he had tried to encourage its rapid departure by taking a cold shower. However as he had pushed himself into the shower of cold water, erection and all, he found he had misjudged the temperature of the water and with a sharp intake of breath and a loud scream he had jumped to his feet and sprung quickly away from his wheelchair.
The Messiah Conspiracy - A gripping page-turning Medical Thriller - [Omnibus Edition containing Book 1 & Book 2] Page 18
