The Eden Prophecy

CHAPTER 29

Hawker stood near the aft end of a forty-foot cabin cruiser as Savi piloted the boat away from one of Dubai’s marinas. Behind them the lights of the city blazed into the night, obscured in places by the smoke rising from the base of the Burj Al Arab. The glare made it impossible to see anything else. No stars, no features on the water beyond fifty feet or so. Looking ahead it seemed as if they were sailing into a void.

In some ways, that matched the feelings Hawker fought to silence. The situation reminded him of the past, the dash across the Republic of the Congo and into Algeria he’d guided Ranga and Sonia on in a desperate attempt to escape dangerous men. But the facts were plain then, or at least he’d thought they were. He didn’t know the facts here, not enough of them anyway.

He needed to press Sonia about her father, the people he’d been mixed up with and the work he’d been doing. That was all that really mattered, but the sudden turn of events — the revelation that Sonia had a sister and the young girl’s odd condition — had stunned him, blinding him in a sense to what was up ahead.

Sonia had taken her sister into the forward cabin, bringing with her some medications and hoping to put her back to bed. She did not seem to be in pain, nor did she seem undeveloped mentally. To keep her calm as they drove to the boat in the middle of the night, Sonia had practiced spelling and math with her. Then the little girl had picked up a book and begun reading on her own.

At first he’d guessed that maybe her aged appearance was just cosmetic, and then she struggled climbing into the boat, because of a knee that Sonia said was arthritic. And the thick glasses suggested vision problems like many older people had.

He suddenly remembered Ranga’s questions about retribution and divine punishment and his speech about humanity living too long, a speech given before Hawker had even met Ranga, before he had even become a renegade. If Hawker had the dates right, it was the year before Nadia was born. Since then she must have been hidden with Savi: Ranga’s sister, Sonia’s aunt. Certainly the little child hadn’t been with them in Africa.

Crazy thoughts ran through Hawker’s mind. Thoughts he wanted to banish but couldn’t. Could Ranga have done something to Nadia? Could he have administered some drug or experimented with some type of genetic therapy on his own child? Could Ranga have created a prototype of his life-shortening drug and given it first to his own child? Aging her, like the rats Danielle had seen in his lab?

He prayed it was something less evil, but he couldn’t say it was impossible.

For one thing, that might explain why Ranga wondered about divine retribution even as he claimed not to believe in any God. The scientist messing with the code of life, an act previously reserved for the Almighty alone. It reminded him of Pharaoh determining the last of God’s plagues by threatening to kill the son of Moses, destroying his own child and all the firstborn of Egypt in the process.

The door to the front cabin opened and Sonia came up from below. She reached out to Hawker, took his hands, and squeezed them in a gesture of thanks. He gazed at her face. The exhaustion showed through.

“I need to ask,” he said. “What do you know about the men your father was mixed up with?”

Sonia looked away, let go of his hands.

“I don’t know much about them,” she said. “After we left Africa, Father and I went different ways. We had contact at times but …”

She looked back at him. “I told you, ten fallings-out, and at least nine reconciliations.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted a different life.”

“So why go back to working with him then? I know you’ve had more contact than you’re admitting,” he said.

She looked away again.

“Why?” Hawker asked.

“For Nadia,” she said plainly.

Somehow the child’s condition played in this, but what mattered most was the cult, the danger.

“Why would your father work with a cult?” he asked.

“He had nowhere legitimate to turn, so he always ended up with these kinds of people.”

“How long had he been working with them?”

“A year or so?” she said, her gaze falling away. “Did they hurt him?”

It was an odd question. “They killed him, Sonia.”

“I know,” she said. “Dying is one thing, but I just … I always feared that someone would hurt him. Make him suffer. There are worse fates than dying. In Africa they threatened such horrible things.”

Hawker understood that thought. He didn’t know how to answer.

“Please tell me he didn’t suffer,” she said.

He didn’t want to lie to her, but she didn’t need the details. “People like these don’t let someone go easily.”

She looked out into the blackness of the night, her body tensing as if fighting back tears. Hawker decided to change subjects.

“What’s wrong with Nadia?” he asked. “What happened to her?”

Sonia sat down on the padded bench and studied Hawker.

“You mean, what’s happening to her.”

“Happening?” Hawker said. “As in still happening?”

Sonia nodded. “Yes. And unfortunately what’s happening to her is happening to all of us.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawker said. “I don’t understand.”

Sonia brushed a strand of hair back over her ear and motioned to the seat across from her.

Hawker sat, guessing it would be a long story.

“She’s aging,” Sonia said. “Only far more rapidly than the rest of us are.”

“You mean it’s not just her appearance?”

“Nadia is only eleven,” she said. “Nineteen years younger than me. Yet she has advanced osteoporosis. Her eyes are filling with cataracts; her skin is so brittle that if you grab her, she’ll bruise or bleed. And soon, hopefully not too soon, she’ll need dialysis because her kidneys are failing.”

Hawker looked away, finding it hard to believe such a thing was even possible. If Ranga had done this …

“How did it happen?”

“It’s a genetic disease,” Sonia said. “They call it progeria, or Werner syndrome. It’s caused by a defect in the way her DNA repairs itself.”

“It’s naturally occurring?” he asked.

“If you call that natural,” she said.

Hawker took a deep breath. He was damn glad to hear that Ranga hadn’t caused it, at least not directly. “What I mean is, no one did this to her?”

She looked away. “Only God, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

Hawker believed in God. He’d seen enough horror in the world to make him angry at God and wonder where He was, but he’d also seen what he considered miracles.

“Is there any way to stop it?”

Sonia smiled a half smile as tears welled up in her eyes again. She seemed lost like him, looking for answers that were not there.

“We’re trying,” was all she could say, wiping away the tears.

“We,” Hawker noted. “You and your father?”

She nodded.

“Is this what you were working on in Africa? Is that what this has all been about?”

She took a deep breath. Hawker guessed he was right, but he wanted to hear it from Sonia, he wanted to understand finally what had been hidden all this time.

“My mother died giving birth to Nadia and a year later we detected the disease in her. Father tried to convince the company he was working for to fund some research, or to allow him to use their equipment to do his own research on his own time. But no one wanted to help.”

“He worked on it anyway,” Hawker said.

“He did it without their knowledge. Maybe that was foolish, but what else could he do? When they found out, they were furious. He took the data, the samples, and what money he could and he ran. I had just finished my sophomore year at Princeton. I wanted to help. I forced him to take me with him.”

She looked to the woman piloting the boat. “Nadia went with Savi. I went with Father, first to Costa Rica and then Africa. We thought that in the right place, a place with no restrictions, we might find the answer in a year or two.”

She laughed sadly. “Didn’t exactly turn out that way.”

“That’s why he stalled in the Congo,” Hawker guessed. “He thought you were close.”

“Father always thought we were close.”

Hawker was beginning to understand Ranga’s fanaticism. He’d always wondered how a man could seem kind and good and yet knowingly endanger his daughter the way he’d endangered Sonia. But he was trying to save the more helpless of his children.

He glanced toward the forward cabin where the young girl was sleeping. “So what causes it?”

“There are different types,” she said. “In Nadia’s case, structures in her DNA that we call telomeres are rapidly shortening. We all have them. Every time our cells divide, the telomeres shorten. It happens in all of us, but in her case, they shorten far too much with each regeneration.

“Some progeria patients are affected in a different way — they don’t get cataracts or all the signs of aging — but Nadia has a form in which virtually all her cells are affected. Her telomeres are all but used up.”

“Used up?”

“Without a breakthrough, she’ll die of old age before she turns twelve,” Sonia said.

The words hit Hawker like a ton of bricks. They reminded him of another child he’d met who never had the chance to live.

“So all this,” he said. “The money, the research, the lies to people who wanted other things from him: All of that was for her?”

Sonia nodded. “Would you do any less?”

Hawker grew silent, hoping he would do as much.

With a better understanding of Ranga’s obsession and even his odd dealings with those who’d acted as benefactors, Hawker considered the current situation. Ranga had been working on something in secret. His lab in Paris proved it. But if the data Danielle found was correct and the information in Ranga’s notes was true, it sure didn’t seem like he was headed in the right direction.

Sonia’s company, Paradox, seemed to be closer, although glossy ads and a slick sales presentation didn’t mean they’d discovered the fountain of youth. And then there was the matter of trial 951.

“What about Paradox?” Hawker asked. “Your father is listed as one of the founders. Is that why he started it?”

A look of disdain came across Sonia’s face. “Father started Paradox to move money about,” she said. “I was the one who realized we could do more.”

Sonia’s aunt joined the conversation. “And he never agreed with it,” Savi said. “He told you it was too public. He said something like this would happen.”

“To him,” Sonia clarified. “There were people looking for him, not me.”

He’d obviously stumbled on some long-simmering argument. Something he didn’t have time for. “Does your company have a solution for Nadia?”

She hesitated. “Not yet,” Sonia said. “But we’re working on it.”

“So the big shindig at the top of the hotel …”

“We need funding,” she said. “No one wants to cure progeria. At least not businesspeople.”

“I would have thought—”

“Progeria is extremely rare. It would cost ten thousand times more to develop a treatment than you could ever make selling it. Even if you sold it for a million dollars per dose.”

“Can’t you get grants?” Hawker asked.

“Not with my family name,” she said. “Besides, dribs and drabs of money won’t save Nadia.”

Hawker understood. As in many other things, economics drove the bus. “So you sell the idea of eternal youth to those who might spend ten million.”

Sonia nodded back toward Dubai. “There are people in this world with money to burn. People with millions and billions that are just sitting in the bank doing nothing — even in these times. If Father taught me anything, he taught me that.”

She shrugged. It was just a fact.

“With that kind of wealth the only downside to life is that it ends.”

“This was your idea.”

“Father kept looking for someone to take pity on him,” she said. “I chose to find people who would beg us to take their money. With Paradox we’d have unlimited funding and we wouldn’t have to run or hide or lie about what we’re working on like Father always did.”

There was a new sense of pride in Sonia’s voice as she spoke. Paradox was her creation, not just another step following in her father’s footsteps. Hawker had to admit it was a brilliant move. And by basing Paradox in a nation without stringent standards or an entrenched bureaucracy like the American FDA, she and her fellow researchers could do almost anything they wanted.

“Long life equals big money,” Savi noted with some disdain. “But if it’s just for the rich, how does it make this world a better place?”

“I don’t care about the world,” Sonia said. “I care about Nadia. And Father. Paradox was their way out. It would have worked, for both of them. But now …”

Her voice trailed off as if she realized that that particular dream was shattered beyond repair.

Savi shook her head. “Your father wanted to keep the research secret. That’s why he did the things he did. Why he went through all he went through.”

“I went through it with him,” Sonia reminded her.

Savi nodded. “I’m sorry, Sonia,” she said. “He didn’t want people to live forever.”

“I heard a speech he gave once,” Hawker said. “He talked about forced sterilization, culling the herd. Was he really that radical?”

Sonia looked embarrassed at this revelation. “Father didn’t really believe in those things. He was just trying to make a point. What he wanted was birth control and responsibility and family planning.”

Savi spoke up. “When Ranga and I were children, Mr. Hawker, we traveled with our mother. She was a nurse. She went on missions to the poorest parts of the world. Slums like Dharavi, outside Mumbai, or Kibera near Nairobi. The poor live there among filth you couldn’t imagine, crawling all over one another like ants. They survive just long enough to have more children and increase the population and suffering. Medicines and food are delivered by those who wish to help. People like our mother. And so fewer die in childbirth, fewer die in childhood, and ever more are confined to utter misery.”

Hawker remained quiet.

Savi turned toward him. “Have you ever been to a place where parents burn their children with scalding water, Mr. Hawker? Or poke their eyes out with a stick so they will be more pitiful when they go and beg? Or kill them because they cannot afford to have one more mouth to feed?”

“You’d be surprised where I’ve been,” he said, coldly.

“Then you understand why my brother spoke as he did,” she replied.

As Hawker listened he got the feeling that Savi and Sonia had practiced defending Ranga for a long time. And in a way, Hawker did understand. In the poorest, most overpopulated parts of the world, Western help in the form of medicines and food had wreaked havoc. In lands where large numbers of children were the norm because so few survived to adulthood, Western efforts had changed the equation drastically.

Where once a family had ten children and counted on two or three to become adults, now nine or ten did. Five generations used to take the population from four to twenty; now it took them to a hundred or more. There was simply not enough food or jobs or water or land for such growth.

But to pretend that only evil and misery came from such places was a conceit of the rich and a lie. He’d seen great love and affection and joy in some of the poorest places he’d ever been to.

“I’m not judging him,” Hawker said. “I’m only trying to understand. And to figure out who took his life and stop them from harming anyone else, including the three of you.”

For a second Savi looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, it’s just …”

“It’s okay,” he said, then turned to Sonia. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to your father in time. But he mentioned a breakthrough. Said he was near the answer. I think the people who killed him were after that. Do you know what it was?”

Sonia’s face brightened. Her eyes found Hawker and appeared both tremendously innocent and somehow prideful and strong and wise all at the same time.

“After years of pure research, Father decided to take a different route,” she said. “He studied animals blessed with long life spans, tortoises and parrots and things like that. And then he worked with stem cells, and compounds that could affect those stem cells.”

She glanced toward the forward cabin.

“Some of mine have been given to Nadia. They’re a part of her now. It seems to be helping.”

“And the breakthrough?”

“Father became convinced that if a genetic defect that destroyed telomeres existed in nature, then the opposite must already exist somewhere as well. He began to research stories of long life and even legends of immortality. It seemed so very odd, but he felt there would be some truth to whatever stories existed.

“He became friends with a man named Bashir, an Iranian archaeologist. They were quite a pair. Two bitter old madmen, it seemed. Father looking for immortality and Bashir chasing a dream he said he’d once lost in the desert sands.”

“What dream are we talking about here?” Hawker asked, recognizing Bashir’s name.

“Bashir’s great obsession,” she said. “Every equal of my father’s. He claimed he’d once found the grave of Adam. And clutched in Adam’s hand was a scroll of copper, which Bashir had become certain would lead him to the Garden of Eden.”

Hawker felt as if he were treading water, reaching for the bottom with his feet only to find each time that there was no ground beneath him.

“The Garden of Eden?”

“I know how it sounds,” Sonia said. “But Bashir believed they could find it, and Father believed he could save Nadia with what he would discover there.”

Hawker fought to contain his skepticism. “And what would that be?”

“A miracle from God, to some. A miracle of science, to my father,” she said. “The hope of immortality.”

He looked at her. “Immortality?”

She nodded. “In the book of Genesis, it was called the Tree of Life.”