The Eden Prophecy (16 page)

“Good,” Moore said. “Let’s keep it that way. Turn the gun back in to security, forget what I said about shooting people, and tell me what you’ve discovered on the data Ms. Laidlaw provided.”

Yang looked disappointed for a second, then brightened. “First off,” he said, “the data are incomplete.”

“I was in kind of a hurry,” Danielle said, realizing that Yang would know nothing about where the data came from or how it was collected.

“Sure,” he said. “Well, the good thing is we have enough here to reconstruct the gist of this clinical trial: several years of work on a long list of deliberately mutated viruses. Things don’t go straight-line, of course, but in general each new Series seemed to improve on the last.”

“Can you see a connection with the UN virus?” Moore asked.

“I can’t speak to their genetic similarities, because the data contains only trial results, not the actual genetic coding, but based on the range of infected cells claimed in the trials, the UN virus and trial 951 are likely highly related but not the same. Given some modifications, both could probably be used in genetic therapy.”

“Ah,” Danielle said. Onscreen, Yang grinned and nodded.

“Someone want to enlighten the old man?” Moore asked.

Danielle took a shot. “Genetic therapy has been talked about for years. The first moves from the lab to the medical profession are just starting to take place, from what I understand. Basically, patients with genetic disorders, mutations, or certain cancers can’t be treated with normal drugs because the issue isn’t sickness, it’s defective coding. No matter what drug you use to treat the symptoms, each time the defective cell divides and the DNA replicates, it copies the mistake into the new cell.”

“Like cheating off a kid who doesn’t know the answers,” Yang added.

Moore turned to the screen, his eyebrows up.

“Not that I ever did that,” Yang said.

“The only way to break the cycle,” Danielle said, “is to patch the DNA so the newly replicated cells carry the correct code and not the defective gene. Best way to do this is to design a virus that can be released into the body carrying a DNA ‘patch’ that corrects the genetic code. From then on, when the cell divides, it makes a nondefective copy of itself.”

“Like cheating off a kid who actually knows his stuff,” Moore said, reusing the analogy.

Danielle smiled and looked at the screen. “If we take Dr. Yang’s computer analogy, it’s like downloading software
to your hard drive. If that software contains a bad virus, you’re in trouble; if it contains a patch to fix a flaw in the original programming, your computer now runs like it was supposed to.”

Yang took over. “The problem is the average human body contains a billion cells. Can’t exactly reset the codes one by one. So one way to reach the defective cells is with what we call a carrier virus. We modify the virus to carry the updated human DNA and then inject it into the defective area of the patient. The virus then does what it’s designed to do, spreading across the cells, implanting its new DNA into the cells, and reproducing by the billions. Those copies do the same thing, and so on and so on, like that shampoo commercial from the seventies.

“The end result is a regeneration of sorts in the specific organ or system that was defective. It’s not a hundred percent, but you end up with far more healthy cells than unhealthy ones, and over time the healthy cells crowd out the weak and the dying.”

From an academic perspective, Danielle understood Yang’s excitement. But knowing Ranga’s radical position on population and his work on telomeres, she grew more worried. Used malevolently, Ranga’s trial 951 might age every cell in the human body, radically reducing life spans just as he suggested the world might need to do.

“Can it be weaponized?” Moore asked.

Yang nodded. “Both the UN virus and 951 can survive outside the host, both can be carried by air or other vectors such as birds or insects. Aerosolized dispersal from crop dusters or via airburst from missiles or artillery shells would create a very effective biological spread.”

“So how did they go from the inert UN virus to this trial 951?” Moore asked.

“It might be as simple as changing payloads,” Yang said.

“Payloads?”

“Those blank spaces I told you about,” Yang said. “As it stands right now, the UN virus is an empty carrier, but it has been designed with a space holder for whatever the user might want to put inside. That’s the payload. Designing the virus itself is the hard part, like designing a ballistic missile. In comparison, putting a DNA patch in the leftover spaces would be relatively easy. Like loading the warhead onto the missile. You can go conventional, you can go nuclear. In this case, they could put a corrective gene in those blank spaces or they could put something devastating. That might be what they did with 951.”

Danielle thought about what would happen if the code from trial 951 were placed inside the UN virus. Pretty soon the whole human race might look like the aged and dying rats she’d seen in Ranga’s lab.

Danielle was thirty-seven, in the prime of her life. In the world Ranga envisioned, the world he might have been trying to bring about, she would be in her last days, an old woman feeling infirmity and facing death. In fact, her life might already have been over.

“Anything else?” Moore asked.

“Not yet,” Yang said.

“All right,” Moore said. “Turn in your gun. I’ll touch base with you in twelve hours.”

Yang signed off. Moore turned to Danielle. “So the UN virus does nothing,” he noted. “Then why send it?”

“Could be a message, like Ranga’s well-staged death,” she said. “If the goal is extortion, making your point without killing anyone at first is a pretty good start.”

“No one’s called with any demands,” Moore said.

“Maybe they’re not done making the point,” she said.

Moore looked as if he agreed. “We’re pessimists,” he noted. “Anything you can think of that might make the future seem a little bit brighter?”

“Only the obvious,” she said.

“Which is?”

“They don’t have anything to put inside. They don’t have a payload yet.”

“Ranga gave them a blank virus,” Moore said, following her line of thought.

She nodded. “Why else would they need him back? Why else would they go to his lab?”

Moore’s face brightened. It was all speculation but it made sense. “Ranga breaks away without giving them the crucial payload, they hunt him down and catch him, but instead of killing him outright they grab him and torture him.”

“And he gives up the address on rue des Jardins,” she said.

“And he’s willing to give it up, because he’s got the place wired to blow,” Moore finished. “Score one for Hawker’s friend if that’s the case. So what would they do next?”

Danielle tried to put herself in their place. It didn’t take much. “They’d find someone to finish the job.”

“Ranga’s daughter.”

It didn’t have to be her; there could be others. The evidence showed Ranga and Sonia hadn’t worked together in years, but that hadn’t stopped the NRI from sending Hawker to Dubai. Which was exactly where Danielle felt she should be.

“What the hell am I doing here chasing after stolen art?”

“Whatever’s about to be sold here, it was important to Ranga and Bashir,” Moore reminded her.

“But how?” she asked. “How could
this
possibly have anything to do with
that
?”

“That’s what you’re here to find out,” Moore said. “You have an invite to a private auction tonight courtesy of a friend of mine, Mr. Faisal Najir. He’ll expect you to come dressed for the occasion.”

Danielle looked at Moore suspiciously. “Where?”

“Center city,” Moore said.

Danielle recalled Beirut’s city center as a bombed-out wasteland. “That’s no-man’s-land.”

“Up on the surface it is,” Moore said. “But don’t worry, you’ll be underground.”

A
s Hawker watched, a pair of huge plasma screens descended slowly from the ceiling at each end of the ballroom. All eyes turned toward one or the other, causing the crowd to part in the middle like the Red Sea. He could see one screen from where he was, so he held his ground and kept his back to the wall.

“Welcome to the city of the future,”
a voice said, mixing with the music.
“Here you will see your future, a future without sickness, a future without infirmity, a future without dying.”

He leaned forward to get a better view of the screen. It showed a man stepping off a yacht with a beautiful young woman on his arm. He was silver-haired and obviously in his midsixties; the woman—of course—might have been twenty-five. But as they walked toward the camera, the image changed. The gray in his hair disappeared, the lines on his face faded and vanished, his shoulders straightened, his chest filled, his gut shrank to nothing.

“With Paradox you will see yourselves at age one hundred, living more vitally than you do today at forty, fifty, or sixty,”
the voice promised.

By the time the yachtsman passed the camera, he looked to be thirty-five or so, a paragon of health and virility. The woman on his arm no longer looked out of place.

“Aging is nothing more than the dying of cells. But
reversing this process at the cellular level will reverse the effects that you feel.”

On the screen a CGI animation showed cells dividing; it zoomed in on the DNA strand as the double helix split and reconnected. Tiny links at the end of the chain fell off, drifting from the screen. Those were the telomeres, as Danielle had explained it to him. Like the tips on your shoelaces. When the telomeres were gone the rest of the lace began to fray.

“This is not a resurfacing project designed to hide the damage of age. Nor is it an attempt to make you look younger, or even feel younger—this is a revolution. When you join us you will be remade, younger, stronger, more virile. Youth will no longer be wasted on the young.”

A cheer went up from the audience and Hawker stood amazed. Not because a raft of the wealthy were interested in turning back the hands of time, but because the graphics on the screen showed cellular activity, with labels and subtitles.

These were the very subjects of Ranga’s notes, according to Danielle. More shocking to Hawker was a graphic in the lower corner. It indicated a trial number: Series 951. It might have meant nothing to the others, but Danielle had recalled the lists of experiments ending with Series 951.

The same number Danielle had recounted as the last entry in the notes. Sonia’s presentation was promising to extend life, using the very same data and a virus with the very same trial number that Ranga’s notes had indicated would destroy life.

A seed of anger returned to Hawker’s heart.

The best-case scenario had Sonia as just another snake-oil salesman, promising the rich what they wanted to hear, but Hawker didn’t believe in the best-case scenario.

And the worst: that Sonia’s company and all of this were part of Ranga’s plan, part of the cult’s plan. What
better or more ironic way could there be to spread a disease than to get rich people to pay millions for the privilege of being infected. Come here for the serum of life, only don’t expect to live much after you take it.

And if that was the case, it meant something far more sinister was going on.

A
s the video presentation wound down, Hawker found himself needing space to think. He moved from the window and began examining the service passages of the hotel. He could still hear the spa music in the ballroom, although the voice-over had been replaced by a dozen individual speakers and models who were milling around in the crowd, talking in person to the wealthy men and women.

He paid attention to it only sporadically. Instead he studied the back halls of the hotel and the unmarked doors that led to prep rooms, kitchens, and fire escapes. If trouble came, it would be one of these areas that proved to be the weak link in the chain. At the same time, these back-of-the-house areas would allow the greatest chance to escape and evade it; but first, one had to know one’s way around.

He came out of a staging room filled with audiovisual equipment and moved down the hall to an unmarked stairwell. It led up to the heliport that lay above them and down as a type of fire escape.

Down the hall a door to the right was locked; to the left he found a dead end. He turned back and saw two people walking toward him: Sonia and the gray-haired man.

They exchanged glances.

“I’ve got this,” he heard Sonia say.

“Are you sure?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

He kissed her on the cheek and took the stairwell up to the heliport.

“Can I help you find something?” she said to Hawker, sounding very official.

That was a hell of a question. She came closer, moving forward with confidence.

“What makes you think I’m looking for something?” he asked.

She slowed, glancing up the stairs. The sound of footsteps climbing was still audible.

“You were always looking for something when I knew you.”

She didn’t sound so official anymore.

Up close she was even more beautiful than she had been from a distance. Her soulful hazel eyes, her smooth, tan skin glowing against the white hue of the cocktail dress.

“Maybe we all were,” he said.

“Searching for answers together?”

“Better than searching alone,” he added.

As she spoke he noticed a different look in her eyes, a weary sadness she’d hidden behind the smiles and the salesman’s confidence. Truthfully he wondered how she maintained it at all, considering what was going on.

“Did my father send you?” she asked.

The question struck Hawker oddly. Obviously Ranga had tried to contact him, but the way Sonia asked the question, she sounded more upset or aggravated than concerned. The reason hit him suddenly: No wonder she was able to star at this reception, no wonder she was able to hold it together—she didn’t know that her father was gone.

“When did you last speak with him?” he asked.