The Eden Prophecy

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.

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.

A thin locking cable and a plain red wire held it in place. The cable could be breached easily, but the red wire was suspicious. It terminated in some kind of magnetic switch attached to the back of the computer.

She followed the wire through a hastily drilled hole into one of the desk drawers. There it connected to a brick of what looked like C-4.

Who needs an alarm, she thought, when you can just blow the whole place to hell.

A second length of wire ran from the C-4. It led out behind the desk, under the rug, and across the room. Other wires ran to the incubators and refrigeration units.

She followed one to a credenza against the far wall.

Cautiously she opened the drawer. A stash of binders lay inside. She eased one out. The red wire ran through its binding, but there seemed to be enough slack.

She opened the binder to find handwritten notes. If they were Ranga’s notes — and they did look like a sample of his handwriting that she’d seen — it seemed unlikely they’d be left here unless they were no longer needed. Perhaps whatever samples he had created were enough.

She studied the writing. Tabular entries recording test results. She leafed through the pages, careful not to pull on the wire.

Page after page of numbered experiments, all with failed results. She understood that too.

Despite the incredible things that modern genetic science was capable of, somewhere around 99 percent of experiments were failures. At the big pharmaceutical labs around the world, incredibly gifted men and women often toiled for years with nothing to show for it. One study she recalled stated that a geneticist at a top biotech lab had a fifty-fifty chance of working his or her entire career without ever producing a usable drug.

Part of it was the safety precautions and protocols that purposefully slowed the work to a crawl, but for the most part it was just an incredibly difficult task. Nature had spent five billion years coming up with life in its myriad forms. Five billion years of trial and error. Genetic engineers were desperately trying to take a shortcut in that process.

Outside, half a block down on rue des Jardins-St.-Paul, Hawker sat in the rented Peugeot, watching for trouble. So far the quiet streets of this Paris neighborhood had remained just that, quiet.

A few cars had rolled by. A white Isuzu delivery truck had come down the road and gone around the block and a few pedestrians had strolled by, but none of them had stopped or lingered near the building.

The street was quiet, the neighborhood was quiet, and Danielle had also been quiet for several minutes.

He grabbed the phone and clicked the push-to-talk button. “You finding anything?”

It took a few seconds before the reply came.

“Some kind of lab in here,” she said. “Computers, incubators, microscopes. Everything rigged to explosives.”

“Wonderful,” he said, thinking maybe they should get the French police and the bomb squad involved.

“Any trouble out there?”

“The coast seems clear for now, but …”

Hawker’s voice trailed off. The Isuzu truck had returned. It pulled up in front of the town house and stopped.

When was he going to learn to keep his mouth shut?

“Hold on a second,” he said. “You might have company.”

“From where?”

“Front door,” Hawker said.

“How many?”

The Isuzu had parked directly in front of the town house, blocking Hawker’s view of the entrance. Three men jumped out, dressed like movers. One guy milled around near the back of the van and the other two moved toward the front and the entrance to the town home.

“Two at least,” he said. “A third out here.”

“I need to know if they’re coming in,” she said.

Hawker could hear the frustration in Danielle’s voice. He knew she would wait until the last second, maybe even push it too far. That was her way. He thought of telling her the men were headed in now, just to get her moving.

“They seem to be bumbling around,” he said. “But you might want to look for a back way out.”

“I need more time,” she said.

“It’s not exactly up to me.”

Hawker stared at the truck, trying to think of some way to distract the men at the front door, when a shadow caught the corner of his eye. It crossed from behind.

He ducked instinctively just as the side window shattered and the pop, pop of a suppressor-equipped handgun sounded.

No time to look back; he scrambled across the car as a third shot was fired. A long finger of padding exploded from one of the seats, marking the bullet’s track to his left.

He grabbed the door handle, pushed the passenger’s door open, and tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Pulling his gun as he hit the cement, he twisted and fired blindly back into the car and all around it.

Inside the townhome, Danielle heard the shots. She knew the sound of Hawker’s .45.

She needed to go, but she felt the answer was close. She flipped through the pages of the notebook, skipping toward the end until she found a page that was only half-full. The last entry was dated one month prior.

She rang her finger down the list.

Another gunshot rang out. Danielle glanced that way and then back at the notes.

That was the last entry.

Danielle stared at the words as if in a trance. Telomeres shortened … life span reduced.

Telomeres were molecular chains at the end of the DNA strand. They were known to be connected with cellular reproduction, cellular life span, and even human life span.

What the hell were these people messing around with?

Another shot boomed outside the door and Danielle knew she’d run out of time.

She ripped the page from the notebook and turned toward the back of the home. Then, realizing the flash drive was still attached to the computer, she ran to it.

A loud crashing noise told her the front door had been breached. She yanked the drive free, turned, and raced to the back of the house.

Hawker lay pressed against the ground, near the rear wheel of the vehicle. The gunman who’d missed him was on the other side of the car, crouched down near the front of the vehicle, no more than ten feet away.

Hawker stared under the car, watching for the man’s feet. Then he raised his gun and fired through the car. Two shots, glass shattering everywhere, but the bastard didn’t flinch.

The problems as Hawker saw them were threefold. First, he was outnumbered and sooner or later they would come at him from two directions. Second, Danielle was stuck in the building, unless she’d busted out the back as he hoped. Third, the man trying to kill him was up front, protected by the engine block, while Hawker crouched a mere fourteen inches from the half-filled gas tank.

He glanced at the big Isuzu: no one there. He guessed they’d gone inside.

A bullet hit the wall behind him. High and wide.

Time to move. Hawker scrambled backward, scooting on his backside, aiming the gun at the rear of the Peugeot. He fired repeatedly. One shot after another.

Finally there was an explosion. Not the conflagration seen in Hollywood movies, but a bang that blew the trunk off and shattered the rear window. In an instant the flames were licking around the car.

The gunman on the other side was thrown back. Looking under the car, Hawker saw the man’s feet as he stood and ran.

Hawker fired, low and flat, skipping the bullets under the car and off the pavement. With his third shot, the man’s ankle exploded and he tumbled down face-first into the street, screaming in agony.

Inside, Danielle had made it through the kitchen to a frosted glass door with a dead bolt. White light poured in through it and freedom beckoned.

She heard footsteps behind her, men shouting to each other. She hastily checked the door for red wires. Finding none, she turned the lock, threw the door open, and raced outside into the rear yard.

Halfway across a man tackled her and pinned her to the ground. She tried to throw him off, but he held a knife beside her face and she went still.

He snatched the papers from her hand, along with the Beretta 9 mm that sat uselessly in a shoulder holster.

“Get up!” the man shouted.

As his weight came off her, she complied. Two other men were with him.

“Take her to the boat,” one of them said. The two men dragged her off as the third made his way inside.

Hawker saw the man in the street writhing in pain. He thought of racing past him to the house, but the other thugs had just gone in. And at any rate, if Danielle was smart, she’d gone out the back.

He turned, examining the houses along the street. Spotting an alleyway between two of the old homes, he ran for it.

Sliding through the narrow chasm, he came out behind the row of houses.

Across the backyards he saw Danielle with two men marching her toward the river. He stepped forward and raised his weapon.

A thundering explosion knocked him sideways.

A flash of heat singed his face. Shrapnel of wood, plaster, and glass blasted him from the side.

He hit the ground hard, rolled over in case he was on fire, and then got to his hands and knees. His head was foggy, his ears ringing. He had no idea what had happened.

As dark smoke billowed around him, he glanced over his shoulder. The townhome had been obliterated from within. Three walls blown out, the roof collapsing, the building was nothing more than a shell now. Flames rose up from inside, chasing the dark smoke as the last wall of brick bulged and collapsed in a sliding pile.

Out in the yard, Danielle and the two men were down. She seemed to have fared better than they had, as if their bodies behind her had acted as a shield.

Hawker climbed to his feet and ran to her, arriving just as she pushed one of the men off. The guy had to be dead, a jagged length of pipe sticking through him.

The other assailant rolled groggily. Hawker dropped down beside him, pulling an old revolver from his hand and tossing it away. The man didn’t resist but just stared, glassy-eyed.

“And you think I like to break things,” he said, helping Danielle up.

She found her Beretta and put it back in her holster.

“What the hell happened?” Hawker asked.

Danielle looked around, appearing disoriented. “Guess somebody checked out the wrong book.”

Ash rained down around them now. Fragments of burning paper falling from the heavens left trails of glowing cinders and smoke as whatever knowledge had been hidden in that building burned itself to dust.

Danielle rubbed her temple, looking down at the dead man.

“Could have been you,” Hawker said.

She nodded, and then her mind seemed to clear. She turned toward the river.

“They were taking me to a boat.”

Hawker looked that way as Danielle began to walk. The lawn led to a fence with gate, beyond which lay a road and an imposing wall made of stone. A flight of steps cut into the wall had to lead to the Seine.

The sound of a motorboat starting ripped through the air. And Hawker watched as Danielle took off running.